Advanced Design Studio co-taught with Prof. Richard Joon Yoo

Our experience of the built environment is reframed with each encounter, much like a memory is reframed each time it is remembered. Memorials are unique in architecture insofar as their form is subservient to a story. The close examination of the components of the story –the people, the place, the time, the event – as well as a bold and strategic reframing of the story, directs the design process with respect to materiality, technology and the performance of making. Through the act of reframing the story, the frame being what we typically describe as architecture, memorials have the potential to heighten the sensation of the present to provoke change through the creation of a more equitable and just future. The studio examines memory + narrative as the central drivers of architectural design. We will study a set of radical precedents: monuments, memorials, and architecture that utilize our relationship to memory, history, and story to catalyze change. For the midterm we will study their formal and contextual strategies, reappropriating these strategies to Roosevelt Island’s Smallpox Hospital - the site of a potential NYC COVID-19 Memorial. Students will select a COVID-19 story and through a series of design iterations reframe that story culminating in a developed midterm project. The structure of the studio will fortify and reflect the process of degree project research and development. For the final the student’s will further their research and design on the COVID-19 Memorial on Roosevelt Island -or- apply their design strategies to reframe a story and/or site of their own choosing. In our studio, the act of framing our experience, our history and our collective narratives, is the most important thing. Architecture is the device we design to frame space, experience, and memory all at once. This reframing changes the potential of our collective future. Readings, workshops, field trips and precedent studies will prompt us to critically ask — what is the architecture of reframing? If a memory is reframed each time it is remembered, if our experience with the built environment is reframed with each encounter, how do the ephemeral and ever changing contents of memory relate to their material container of architecture? And importantly, how can we design to provoke impactful, meaningful and lasting change in the present and in the future?

Advanced seminar course providing students with foundational strategies to analyze public space and the built work it hosts: monuments, memorials, art, pop ups, follies et al, while challenging them to develop new approaches to designing narrative environments in the public sphere and beyond. Through taught lessons, participatory workshops, peer teaching and readings students will explore concepts focusing on site & context, prompting them to question the nature of the civic fabric that connects buildings to place: public space. The course will culminate in a project where students select a contested site of memory, proposing their own design response, shaping a Future Memory - in the form of a replacement, recontextualization or remix of the site.

Facilitation of a virtual iteration of ‘Memory Monument’ at the 2021 Memory Studies Association Annual Conference in Warsaw, Poland. A group of several dozen memory scholars explored themes such as mnemonics, ephemerality and strategies for equitable & diverse representation in public spaces leading to robust conversations and new imaginaries.

For more information visit: https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org/