Teaching
SPRING 2025 - ELECTIVE SEMINAR
Circular Economy: Science and Business of Construction Urban Mining Edition
To overcome the social, economic, and environmental problems of the current linear construction industry, a circular economy is defined as a “restorative and regenerative system by design that keeps products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, and regenerates nature.” This seminar will take a close look at the existing building stock in Upstate New York to evaluate the science and business of urban mining and deconstruction strategies. Interviews, oral histories, site visits and expert lectures with industry stakeholders will play an important role in the discovery of circular economy potentials in Ithaca, NY and New York State.
Spring 2025 - M.Arch. Studio IV - with Margaret Kirk
Building (for) Reuse
Studio IV is an Integrative Design Studio in which course work focuses on building systems and how they inform and support architectural concepts and form. Building upon skills of analysis, design process, and conceptual thinking developed in previous semesters, this studio asks students to consider how constraints of building services, structure, program, and life safety further reinforce and motivate architectural design. In addressing sustainability goals, tectonic resolution, and building systems requirements, a fundamental pedagogical objective of this studio is to convey design intent through the act of architectural resolution. Doing so positions material and performative systems as sites of conceptual motivation from which spatial innovation may occur while developing core competencies in building integration and design synthesis.
Fall 2024 - Design Option Studio
Informal Futures: Housing in Mathare, Kenya
The studio aims to explore innovative architectural and urban planning solutions that reimagine the future of housing within this complex urban, social, cultural, and historic fabric. Through the integration of residents, community stakeholders, and local and global experts in the design process, the studio aims to co-produce culturally appropriate, improved housing typologies both at the unit and neighborhood scale that respond to the environmental and ecological conditions of the site and its people. By integrating principles of circular construction, community engagement, and resilience, the studio seeks transformative proposals grounded in a productive collaboration of formal and informal strategies spanning the scales from material selection, construction detailing, scenario planning, and urban development. By addressing the dynamic challenges of informal housing in Mathare, participants may contribute to a broader conversation about the role of architecture in shaping resilient, equitable, and dignified living spaces for the future.
SPRING 2024 - ELECTIVE SEMINAR
The Circular Economy: Science and Business of Construction Stakeholder Edition
The elective partners with New York State stakeholders who have offered to participate in interviews and answer questions on their business models, finances and strategic setup. In groups, we will conduct interviews with these stakeholders, understand, map and graphically represent their answers, check references, codes and legislation, and – as a class – synthesize the answers, understand commonalities of the industry and geographic area as well as stakeholder-unique gaps and barriers. The final result is a graphic mapping of the reuse ecosystem across stakeholders, as well as written reports summarizing the specifics of each stakeholder within this framework.
Spring 2024 - M.Arch. Studio IV - with Margaret Kirk
A Welcome Center for Ithaca’s Learning Farm // Circular Bio-Economies and Building Decarbonization
Studio IV is an Integrative Design Studio in which course work focuses on building systems and how they inform and support architectural concepts and form. Building upon skills of analysis, design process, and conceptual thinking developed in previous semesters, this studio asks students to consider how constraints of building services, structure, program, and life safety further reinforce and motivate architectural design. In addressing sustainability goals, tectonic resolution, and building systems requirements, a fundamental pedagogical objective of this studio is to convey design intent through the act of architectural resolution. Doing so positions material and performative systems as sites of conceptual motivation from which spatial innovation may occur while developing core competencies in building integration and design synthesis.
Fall 2023 - Arch 1101: Design I
Traces of Extraction
This course is designed as an introduction to architecture, by constantly and fundamentally challenging our understanding of “what architecture is” or could be. Following the understanding that there is not one ‘right’ answer in architecture, the goals of the course are the building of technical, methodical, analytical and representational skills, as well as the training of critical minds and conceptual thinkers - aiming to equip our students with the necessary tools and knowledge to discover and validate their own personal answers to given questions and briefs of the discipline. Together, we aim to learn how to learn.
Spring 2023 - MArch Studio IV - with Margaret Kirk
SouthWorks Capacity Building: Adaptive Reuse, Decarbonization and the Ithaca Green New Deal
Studio IV is an Integrative Design Studio in which course work focuses on building systems and how they inform and support architectural concepts and form. Building upon skills of analysis, design process, and conceptual thinking developed in previous semesters, this studio asks students to consider how constraints of building services, structure, program, and life safety further reinforce and motivate architectural design. In addressing sustainability goals, tectonic resolution, and building systems requirements, a fundamental pedagogical objective of this studio is to convey design intent through the act of architectural resolution. Doing so positions material and performative systems as sites of conceptual motivation from which spatial innovation may occur while developing core competencies in building integration and design synthesis.
FALL 2022 - OPTION STUDIO
Scales of Reuse I Reuse at Scale
The Lahham Option Studio will first investigate scalable strategies for reuse in architecture relating both to the harvest of materials in the current built environment and the design for disassembly of future buildings. In a second phase, it will apply these strategies to the design of housing units for five families at the Quarter Acre for the People BIPOC Cooperative Farm Intentional Community of Khuba International – a project that seeks to alleviate land-based injustice through the provision of education, resources, networks and land governance, and to give People of Color the opportunity to have a foothold in the future of agriculture in Ithaca, NY.
Fall 2022 - ARCH 4619, ELECTIVE SEMINAR - with Barbara Lambec
The Circular Economy: Science and Business of Construction I Reuse Edition
Reuse offers social and ecological benefits in line with the circular economy definition: it reduces waste and landfill volumes, while avoiding energy-intensive and often toxic extraction, production and transport of new items, capturing feedstocks for emerging localized industries and providing economic development opportunities. As a distinctive local solution, reuse is harder to scale. Informed by stakeholders and community partners, the Reuse Edition of the seminar series The Circular Economy focuses on the science and business of building material reuse within the specific economic and legislative conditions of Ithaca, NY.
Fall 2021 - ARCH 7111, MS.AAD Design Studio - with Dan Bergsagel
Unbuild.Design
Beginning with selected building typologies as a material source, students are tasked to design a series of spatial follies that address the global resource and waste crises through the development of both systemic design for disassembly and site-specific architectural applications. Through the investigation, the studio aims to promote a new design paradigm that begins from material availability and specificity, and foresees future material and component reuse within industrialized re-construction.
Fall 2021 - ARCH 1101, B.Arch 1st Year Design Studio - with Dillon Pranger
Acts of Climate // Climatic Acts
This course questions the past, current and future relationship of architecture and climate by aiming to redefine the building’s role within its context as active and beneficial partic-ipant. Students are asked to contemplate (1) how we may re-strengthen the reciprocal influences of local conditions such as weather and climate through specificity in material, program, space and systems in an effort to develop a climate-positive and climate-just architecture; and (2) how architecture can have a positive influence on the local climate by understanding the built environment as both re-active and pro-active contributor to its social and physical context in times of planetary changes.
Spring 2021 - ARCH 4619, Elective Seminar - with Mark Milstein
The Circular Economy: Science and Business of Construction
Although there is much theory about the circular economy, implementation has only just started. The circular economy requires a fundamental paradigm shift in the way we design, construct and manage our built environment, but in the construction industry, there is limited data on material availability and specifications, new construction methods and technologies, and viable circular business models. This seminar aims to provide students the opportunity to address these gaps. Starting with local case study analyses, students will map material stocks and flows, stakeholder interests and economic conditions required to realize both the business and science of circular construction.
Spring 2021 - ARCH 1102, B.Arch 1st Year Design Studio - with Sasa Zivkovic
Re:Making // Cycles of Material, Fabrication, Construction, and Form
This studio re:thinks architecture and its cycles of design, construction, and inhabitation. The course engages in materials research and informed making as a critical means to challenge architectural conventions. The course introduces new technologies and means of fabrication to enable new forms of spatial assembly and construction. Equipped with these new tools and concepts, the studio aims to contribute to building better communities by designing a series of small and circular Neighborhood Library Bus Stops in Ithaca, NY.
Fall 2020 - ARCH 1101, B.Arch 1st Year Design Studio - With Sasa Zivkovic
On Paper // On the Reciprocity of Bodies and Spaces, the Intangible and the In-Between
The global climate and resource crises are calling for paradigm shifts in the way we design, build, and manage our physical environment. These shifts require us to develop a new understanding of the issues, elements and processes of both Intangibles (environment, climate, politics) and In-Betweens (materiality, connections) in connections to Body, Space and Architecture. They require a beneficial reciprocity of all these aspects, today and over time. The semester hopes to set the foundations for such a shift by encouraging curiosity, observation, criticism and the formulation of questions as architectural design tools.