Site Location: Cherry Street, Ithaca, NY, USA

Within our Fall 2025 Engaged Practices studio, we examined the role of housing in today’s context, emphasizing the challenges of affordable housing insecurity, rising construction costs, and the limitations of current housing models. These models often fail to meet residents’ needs and lack the flexibility required for long-term adaptability and resilience.

Cherry Street began as an industrial site, shaped by hardscapes and contaminated soil left behind by former land uses. Today, it remains a desolate corridor in Ithaca, more a place to pass through than a destination with purpose. Recognizing this disconnect, we see soil remediation and urban agricultural practice as essential starting points for restoring both ecological integrity and community potential.

By grounding the area in agricultural intervention and earth-centered design, Cherry Street has the potential to support a resilient future for members of the community. Our scenario envisions a vibrant, diverse hub where working families, farm interns, Cherry Arts patrons, outdoor enthusiasts, and long-term Ithacans gather around farm-fresh foods, nature, and creative community life.

 

Site Location: Ridgewood, Queens, NY, USA

“The Heumann Community Campus of New York City,” named after disability activist and New Yorker, Judith Heumann. The Campus is reimagining urban planning in order to ease the daily struggles of the disabled population and provide new infrastructure for active disability organizations and existing neighborhood businesses to occupy.

Site Location: Market St. East, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Philadelphia stands as a cornerstone of American history, a city where the nation’s founding ideals were drafted and signed into being. Today, with a population exceeding 1.55 million (as of 2023) and a steady influx of tourists drawn to its historical landmarks, Philadelphia remains a vibrant and complex urban center. It’s a city defined not only by its past but by the rich tapestry of cultures, communities, and daily life that converge within its shared public spaces. 

This dynamic interplay of movement, memory, and identity shapes a uniquely layered urban experience. Our team chose Market Street East, a site located in the City Center in close proximity to some of Philadelphia’s most iconic and historically significant landmarks. Its strategic location and untapped potential made it a compelling foundation for architectural intervention.

    

“Not a Zoo” was derived through a three-part project series that emphasizes the process of exploring and communicating ideas through each stage of design. In this final project, we were tasked to recontextualized our structural systems to adapt into a rehabilitation space for an animal of choice, demonstrating how a rigorous design methodology can evolve to address new conditions, scales, and varied occupants. 

  

Site Location: Smokey House Center, Danby, VT, USA

 

Site Location: Chicago, IL, USA

   

Site Location: Governor’s Island, NY, USA

Based on Takatoku Nishi’s Ripple Installation
December 2020, University of Tokyo

Through this short exercise, each group was tasked with studying a species of their choice and using Grasshopper as a tool to generate transformations based on the evolution or traits studied. Our group focused on the Anguilla eel, which follows the lifecycle of (1) glass eel, (2) yellow eel, and (3) silver eel.

1. The eel’s life begins on land or at the surface of the water. At this early stage, it has the shape of a flat football, resembling more of a fish than an eel. The exoskeleton of the eel is prominent, as the skin takes on a more transparent quality.
   
2. As the eel grows, this transitional period allows it to become longer and develop more opaque skin. It now lives further submerged in the water. Slowly, its bones begin to be absorbed for nutrients.
3. The final stage of the eel is most notably recognized as a long, thin creature living within the deep sea floor. Its bones are almost completely absorbed, and it has a fully opaque outer layer that no longer reveals what is inside.

The type of lamp is directly related to the eel’s habitat during each stage of life, with the two extremes represented as a sconce (glass) and a floor lamp (silver).

Assigned Painting: Chambered Nautilus by Andrew Wyeth, 1956.