Studio Site: Van Dyke Houses, Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York

Institution: Cornell University School of Architecture NYC Campus

Date: Fall 2019

Role: Visiting Professor

Partner: Peter Robinson

About:

Housing lies at the intersection of life, work and play and is a critical starting point for community transformation. This was the premise of our studio, “Housing + Community: Made in Brownsville.” The studio focused on the Brownsville community in Brooklyn, New York. We utilized existing, modernist, housing, typologies as a catalyst to imagine new possibilities for the Brownsville community. Students engaged residents in ways that encouraged knowledge exchange and transformed thinking.

Brownsville is an historically African-American residential neighborhood located in eastern Brooklyn. Although Brownsville’s story has been plagued by high rates of poverty and crime, the community is also home to a rich heritage of entrepreneurship, creativity and dynamism. This is demonstrated by the neighborhood’s motto, “Brownsville Moving Forward,” exemplifying inherent community resilience.

Made in Brownsville (MIB), “is a youth based creative agency” in Brownsville. MIB has an encompassing mission centered on “place- based community revitalization.” Cornell students worked collaboratively with MIB alumni, Brownsville residents, stakeholders and government agencies to radically reconsider housing through the lens of the community. It was critical to provide students with tools to participate in this unique context. We centered the studio’s design pedagogy on the “BlackSpace Manifesto” – a set of principles for designers working in Black communities. BlackSpace Urbanist Collective, an interdisciplinary group with a vision that “demands a present and future where Black people, Black spaces and Black culture matter and thrive,” created this manifesto. The uniqueness of the “BlackSpace Manifesto” is its ability to be articulated at diverse scales, programs and sites. Its potential, as spatiality, oscillates among locales, bodies, tactility, and is an edict for action.

We focused on living in Brownsville. This community has one of the largest collections of public housing properties in NYC, under the stewardship of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). It encompasses varying scales of buildings that span a seventy-year legacy of iterative approaches to housing. Rather than considering new housing typologies, we relied on more sustainable design practices to “(re)use”, “(re)occupy” and “(re)define” Brownsville housing.

Our site, Van Dyke Houses Development, presented students with the realities, opportunities and challenges of public housing in New York City. Van Dyke Houses is a four-block radius at the heart of Brownsville surrounded by historically significant community assets, yet is also challenged by a neighborhood with limited resources. Design and program was born out of a response to the boundaries of the site, integration of existing buildings, diversity of community needs and the culture of Brownsville.

This folio reflects the deliberate, inventive and creative efforts of the students. They were exposed to social practices, economic realities, and occupation strategies seemingly at odds with the typical NYC pastiche. We asked that the students be thoughtful and respectful. The resulting proposals are a series of integrative weaves that meshed embedded community resiliencies – revealed during in-depth community engagement – with aspirational design agendas that prioritized living in Brownsville.

Student Project Film

Studio Site: Pioneer Homes, Syracuse, New York

Institution: Syracuse University School of Architecture

Date: Fall 2020

Role: Visiting Professor

Partner: Brooklyn based artist/architect Nathan Williams

About:

Presentation of Student work at Syracuse Architecture Public Lecture and Forum on Housing and the Black Community

Architecture is capable of telling stories about past and present while design is by definition telling a story about the future and its construction. Narratives embedded in American urban infrastructure and policy have served to both segregate communities of color and engender within them an identity of invisibility. That the legacies of racism continue to structure and inform the built environment of American cities is a gaping wound that can only be healed through urban alchemy—the reparation or reconstruction of the intentional, codified ways in which the urban landscape has been used to promote the subjugation of people based on their race.

Using Pioneer homes, a public housing development in Ward 15 in Syracuse, as the site of inquiry students explored visual exercises using photography, collage and film as tools for revealing hidden narratives of place. The intention behind the visual exercises was for students to begin to develop both a historical and projected narrative for the site. Reading and discussion was used to ground students in an understanding of design justice as a foundational concept for exploring the social and historical dynamics of the site. Students engaged with community as client in an exchange of remembrances and to cocreate a reimagined and more just future.

The BlackSpace Manifesto was used as a lens for analyzing historical narratives of place and reimagining projected narratives for the future. The final product is a reflection and projection of the story of the place into a narrative concept. Multi-media was used to create interactive stories and spatial experiences of past, present and future. Spatial mapping with artistic collage to capture the soul and essence of place as a palimpsest of histories, injustices, trauma, deconstructed and reconstructed narratives.

Student Project Film

Studio Sites: Harlem River & Three Bridges

Institution: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation

Date: Fall 2020

Role: Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning & Preservation

Partners: Nans Voron, Austin Sakong, Noah Chasin:, Sagi Golan, Tami Banh, Candelaria Mas Pohmajevic, German Eduardo Bahamon Lopez

About:

In this first, Urban Design studio, students were immersed in an intensive city-making laboratory where they developed the tools needed for designing resilient, equitable, vibrant and healthy urban environments within the New York City metropolitan area. Lectures, desk crits, design charrettes, and design reviews formed the structure of the studio and in all formats, students were asked to combine research and speculation, the core of Urban Design.

Students explored cities as territories and as systems, and groups of systems, that can be addressed by Urban Design as an iterative process, where, for instance, site and program are not a given but are treated as principal variables of design thinking. In addition, students worked in multiple scales and across different time frames in order to show how design interventions emerge, grow and change.

Studio Site: Edgemere, Queens

Institution: Syracuse University School of Architecture NYC Campus

Co-Instructors: Jeff Shumaker, Lida Aljabar

Date: Spring 2022

Role: Urban Design Professor

About:

This Syracuse NYC Spring Studio with third year architecture students explored issues at the intersection of community design, resilience and climate justice in Edgemere, Queens, a vital coastal community in NYC which has suffered the intersecting impacts of environmental hazards, economic disinvestment, and racial discrimination. This has been made most notable through the devastation wrought by the recent shocks and stresses of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, as well as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

The studio addressed multiple crises simultaneously - climate change and rapidly increasing severe storm and flood risk, historic and persistent racial and environmental injustice, acute lack of affordable housing and housing choice, deficient neighborhood amenities including retail and public parks, insufficient connectivity within and beyond the community, and extreme ecological degradation. While Edgemere faces numerous challenges, as do most NYC communities, this moment presented an unprecedented opportunity to leverage the diverse and rich assets of this community to create a just and resilient community, physically, racially and socioeconomically.

Studio Site: Edgemere, Queens

Institution: University of Virginia, School of Architecture

Date: Fall 2022

Role: Visiting Professor

Partner: Hannah Brown (Landscape Architect)

About:The UVA Fall Studio explored issues at the intersection of community and social resilience, climate and environmental justice in Edgemere, Queens, a vital coastal community in NYC which has suffered the intersecting impacts of environmental hazards, economic disinvestment, and racial discrimination.

The studio addressed multiple crises simultaneously - climate change and rapidly increasing severe storm and flood risk, historic and persistent racial and environmental injustice, deficient neighborhood amenities including retail and public parks, insufficient connectivity within and beyond the community, and extreme ecological degradation.

In the studio, architecture and landscape architecture students worked with each other through a participatory design process. Externally, students engaged with Edgemere Community Advocates who shared their lived experience and provided guidance on design strategies. The studio also used the community driven Vision Plan for Vacant Lots, spearheaded by the RISE Community Center, as their design studio prompt. Their design schemes served to provide a series of landscape design and architectural solutions to providing quality amenities and public open space for Edgemere residents.

Studio Site: New York City

Institution: Syracuse University School of Architecture NYC Campus

Date: Spring 2020

Role: Lecturer in Architecture & Urbanism

About:

This seminar focused on the critical analysis of the architecture and urbanism of New York City through the lens of values and principles for Design Justice. The course began with a collective understanding of the BlackSpace Manifesto - its historical underpinnings rooted in an ideology of Black empowerment and its connection to the history of injustice in the New York City built environment. Through a series of exercises in design charrette, film making, collage, students explored how the BlackSpace Manifesto can be used as a tool for creating new possibilities in the New York City urban landscape. The course continued with an exploration of the Just City Index (by the Harvard GSD Just City Lab) attempting to understand its values, metrics and indicators for understanding visions - or lack there of - of a Just NYC urban landscape. Case studies in NYC were tested and evaluated to uncover their contributions to or retractions from a Just New York City.

Studio Site: New York City

Institution: Syracuse University School of Architecture NYC Campus

Date: Spring / Fall 2021

Role: Lecturer in Architecture & Urbanism

About:

This seminar focused on the critical analysis of the architecture and urbanism of New York City through the lens of values and principles for Design Justice. Design Justice advances collective liberation by challenging the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression. This work takes place through critical understandings of historical contexts, the development of new forms of knowledge and practice in our present, and speculating on future radical efforts of racial, social, and cultural reparation, through the process and outcomes of design. Students were introduced to the practice of Design Justice by building a shared foundation of anti-racist forms of communal knowledge and spatial practices, grounded in lived experiences. The course began with a collective understanding of the concept and principles of Design Justice - its historical underpinnings rooted in an ideology of Black empowerment and its connection to the history of injustice in the New York City built environment.

Throughout six themes, students participated in weekly discussions, listened to guest lecturers and contributed reading reflections, module projects, organized neighborhood tours and a final Design Justice Student Film Festival. Topics included design justice principles, community work and power building, infrastructure and neighborhood systems, the social and political dimensions of housing, environmental justice and spatial activism.

There is incredible diversity in the ways we experience and use spaces and places. However, historically the urban landscape has been used as a tool to establish inequitable power/social relationships resulting in an exclusive and disempowering spatial experience for some. As architects and designers, how can we ensure that we are creating equitable spaces and infrastructure that are inclusive to all? This seminar will explore various principles and practice of using design to address equitable access, and environments of safety and well-being particularly for communities of color. This work takes place through critical understandings of historical contexts, the development of new forms of knowledge and practice in our present, and speculating on future radical efforts of racial, social, and cultural reparation, through the process and outcomes of design. Students will be introduced to the practice of Design and Spatial Justice by building a shared foundation of anti-racist forms of communal knowledge and spatial practices, grounded in lived experiences. The course will begin with a collective understanding of the concept and principles of Design/Spatial Justice - its historical underpinnings rooted in an ideology of environmental justice and its connection to the history of injustice in the New York City built environment.

Studio Site: Flatbush African Burial Ground, Brooklyn, New York

Institution: City College of New York, Spitzer School of Architecture

Date: Fall 2024

Role: Assistant Professor

Studio Co Instructor: Lama Hasan

About:This Landscape Architecture + Architecture design studio dove into the interplay between artificial and ancestral intelligence within the unique context of the Flatbush African Burial Ground.

Students explored the rich historical and cultural significance of this site, weaving together traditional landscape design principles (hardscape, softscape, infrastructure) with cutting-edge technological approaches. The studio emphasized a holistic design process that honored the ancestral legacy of the burial ground while integrating contemporary tools such as AI and digital mapping.

Throughout the course, students engaged in in-depth research, site analysis, and community engagement to understand the multifaceted narratives of the burial ground. They developed skills in digital fabrication, AI-driven landscape modeling, and sustainable design practices. Collaborative projects challenged students to create innovative, respectful, and contextually sensitive designs that celebrated the ancestral heritage and future potential of the Flatbush African Burial Ground.

Studio Publication