Archinect - Features

For Affordable Housing, The Revolution Will Be Modularized

2021-07-28T14:51:00-04:00

Across the globe, the design and construction of affordable housing is failing to meet demand, leaving both low and middle income dwellers with little choice but to accept high costs, substandard conditions, or a move away from urban centers. This reality not only presents dangerous environmental and social conditions, but also underpins a fundamental failure of our current processes to design and construct quality affordable housing. In the face of this crisis, architects are finding opportunities for change. In this article, we speak with architect David Wallance FAIA, whose new book The Future of Modular Architecture sets out a paradigm-shift vision for the future of affordable housing. Here, we discuss the details of Wallance’s industrial-scale system, derived from the standard dimensions of intermodal shipping units, as well as the major changes such a system would bring to cities, housing markets, the environment, architectural education, and the business structure of the arch...

Fellow Fellows: Galen Pardee

2020-10-27T13:17:00-04:00

In this latest installment of Fellow Fellows we connect with Galen Pardee, M.Arch graduate of Columbia University, where he received the Alpha Rho Chi Medal. Pardee chats with Archinect about his work and latest exhibition, "The Great Lakes Architectural Expedition." While academia transitions and shifts to better address and adhere towards fighting social and racial injustice with architecture, Pardee shares what he's learned in the process as 2019-2020 (now 2021) LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University.

Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the 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. By definition, they also represent temporary, open-ended, and ultimately precarious employment for aspiring young designers and academics. Fellow Fellows aims to understand what these positions off...

Columbia GSAPP MSAUD Students Tackle the Redundant Infrastructure of Retail

2020-07-24T09:00:00-04:00

Recent Masters in Science of Architecture and Urban Design (MSAUD) graduate students of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) aim to redefine the retail model with an emphasis on small businesses and community. A research project initiated by Einat Lubliner, Sushmita Shekar, Hatem Alkhathlan, and Chris Zheng titled Post Retail Apocalypse investigates a new approach for reusing big box stores by implementing design solutions that foster "social interaction and equity."

According to the group, "With the global transition from traditional shopping to e-commerce and the change in consumer trends, main street retail, Big Box stores, and malls, which were a de facto social space for American small towns, have transformed into redundant infrastructure. The repercussions of this have highly impacted social interaction, local economy, existing infrastructure, jobs and services." Their international world views and backgrounds add to the pro...

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 ...

Architecture in the Trump Era: A Report from Columbia GSAPP by A.L. Hu

2017-02-16T12:11:00-05:00

A week after taking to the streets for the Women’s March in New York City and two weeks into the spring semester, I felt restless and helpless as the barrage of outrageous news took its toll. It’s difficult to sit still in studio when it seems as if the world is beginning to morph into a reality that is at once unrecognizable in its incredulousness and intensely familiar—the beginnings of history repeating itself.

Deans List: Amale Andraos of Columbia University's GSAPP

2015-10-07T09:17:00-04:00

The Deans List is an interview series with the leaders of architecture schools, worldwide. The series profiles the school’s programming, as defined by the head honcho – giving an invaluable perspective into the institution’s unique curriculum, faculty and academic environment.

For this issue, we spoke with Amale Andraos, Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York City.