Archinect - Features

Fellow Fellows: Ranitri Weerasuriya, the 2018 Goodman Fellow at GSAPP

2019-10-25T13:00:00-04:00

Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the increasingly important role fellowships play in architecture academia today. These prestigious academic positions can bring forth a fantastic blend of practice, research, and pedagogical cross-pollination, often within a tight time frame. They also, by definition, represent temporary, open-ended, and ultimately precarious employment for aspiring young designers and academics. Fellow Fellows aims to understand what these positions offer for both the fellows themselves and the discipline at large by presenting their work and experiences through an in-depth interview. Fellow Fellows is about bringing attention and inquiry to the otherwise maddening pace of academia, while also presenting a broad view of the exceptional and breakthrough work being done by people navigating the early parts of their careers.

This week, we talk to Ranitri Weerasuriya, the 2018-2019 Percival and Naomi Goodman Fellow from Columbia University Graduate School of ...

Columbia University GSAPP Fast Forward

2012-01-25T13:19:00-05:00

The evolution of digital visualization over the last decade has enabled designers to articulate powerful visions of space, manipulate components, isolate significant moments and generate provocative renderings of a given space at a given time. Often, the generative process of digital modeling remains exclusively in the hands of the creator with the potential of these virtual environments frozen in the presentation of a static image or a scripted animation. In this way, there has been an inherent disconnect between the intelligence embedded within the dynamic process of generating 3D virtual environments and the presentation of static CGI images which are meant to represent them. However, what if the audience had a window into the designer’s world, where we could interactively reshape the environment as we choose and instantaneously see the cascading results updated in real time? How would this effect the manner in which designers can effectively communicate ideas to their audience...

Op-Ed: The Neglected Public Bathroom

2011-06-09T18:55:00-04:00

According to the New York Post, the National 9/11 Memorial will open this year with no bathrooms. The $508 million project will draw legions of visitors and is characterized by gushing water, but anyone seeking a toilet will have to leave the site for a nearby department store.

This omission of public bathrooms resonates with a personal architectural experience. Over the past six months, I participated in a collaboration of art and architecture students to design a pavilion at Columbia University. It is located in a courtyard behind the architecture school and will be up for most of the summer. A temporary structure, a pavilion is often the architect’s opportunity to build without the inconvenience of plumbing or other practicalities.