UNDISCIPLINED CMU

UNDISCIPLINED CMU is the second iteration of a second year undergraduate studio project at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in which a construction is developed as part of a masonry studio. Material is investigated as a given condition and turned into an unexpected object after intense exploration. The resultant object is a concrete construction that, as an education device, opened the possibilities of reimagining and reconsidering the banality of the most typical, and less valued material in the construction industry, by literally cutting it; aiming for an expanded consideration of disciplinary knowledge and industry in the academic setting.

Students: Mariza Antonio, Spoorthi Bhatta, Rawad El-Aawar, Monica Girgis, Freddy Martínez, Brian Mourato, Chit Yee Ng, Joel Nuñez, Pier Paolo Pala, Eliott Pérez, Lauren Rose, María Silva, Roman Schorniy, Chau Tran, Yuliya Veligurskaya, Jeffrey Youmans.
Studio Instructor, 2015.

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SPATIAL CONSTRUCTIONS

Spatial Construction: Occupying a Grid is an exercise for the Introduction to Architecture and Visual Culture studio for non-majors at Barnard and Columbia. It is focused on the better understanding of space within a set of given parameters. First, it will work around a virtual cubic structure (12″x12″)that will contain a formal grid. This will define one “spatial” and “formal” boundary to be enhanced, explored, challenged or disrupted. Second, following your home-to-studio-trip record and experience, you will elaborate a spatial construction based –but not limited to– your trip.

Studio Instructor, 2015-16.

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THE DAY AFTER THE CARNIVAL

The Day After the Carnival: The Hangover of Work (in Late Capitalism) was a graduate studio taught at Penn Design in the University of Pennsylvania, inquiring the intersection of work-production as a mode of carnivalesque action in the form of hangover. Students researched and draw existing program-buildings near Northern Liberties, analyzed their local-global logics, composed programmatic drawings, developed strategies and formulated and architectural assembly combining them all, including a large cultural programming.

Studio Instructor, 2016.

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CMU I

A complement to the 2nd year studios at the New Jersey Institute of Technology students work on a masonry build-mock-up, a competition based project in which students create a masonry construction with the help of masons, typical solid CMU blocks were cut in order to create the space of “staged interactions” within the school environment. The inquiry of the concrete masonry unit, the most typical construction element, offered the opportunity to reconsider a usually overlooked material and its capacities. First prize.

Studio Instructor, 2014.

SYSTEMS AND TECTONICS

The core 2nd year studio at the New Jersey Institute of Technology aim to discuss and develop design strategies for the concepts of tectonics and buildings’ systems. The studio was given with an emphasis in experimenting with the tools of geometric and ordering systems and their networked capacity.

Studio Instructor, 2014.

URBAN INTERVENTIONS I

Barnard + Columbia Introduction to Architecture and Visual Culture studio for non-majors in architecture. Students were asked to develop a Urban Intervention based on active verbs that they first enacted in person. Verbs were interpreted and informed by the students’ body through conceptual drawings, then translated into site-specific interventions.

Studio Instructor, 2014.

CIUDADLAB: BRAZIL, THE FORM OF DESIRE

After researching the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and São Paulo in Brazil we identified leisure, void, security, industry, body, tourism and monumentality as drivers of the forms of desire. With and ever expanding economy, Brazil has become the world’s eighth economy and the destination for countless local and international events. The research was organized through three analytical lenses -the Imagined City, the Ideological City and the Informal City- and worked with the hypothesis that in Brazil the imaginary of desire is employed to promulgate the worshipping of the body, the architectural object and the staging of both within the diverse urban and natural contexts of the country. This destination of great social and cultural contrasts like emptiness and monumentality in Brasilia, the geographical fragmentation of Rio de Janeiro as well as the self governance model that occurs in its favelas, or the congestion and cultural typological hybridity in São Paulo- proved to be a great challenge in order to investigate Brazil as container and producer of a Form of Desire.

Exhibition held at the Old Armory of the Spanish Navy of Puerto Rico’s National Gallery
Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2010.

Instructor, Researcher, Exhibition Curator-Designer, San Juan, 2010.

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For more information you can download a complete pamphlet here: ciudadlab-pamphlet-web

CIUDADLAB: UTOPIA IN MOSCOW

As with every CIUDADLAB research and exhibition project, we pick a different destination in an attempt to broaden the frame of reference from which we imagine the city. During the year 2008, choosing Moscow seemed to sense Russia’s renewed presence in the geopolitical game as we experienced the beginning of a renewed “Cold War.” Beyond Moscow’s exoticism with respect to a Western minded group, three theoretical frameworks established possible lines of comparison and analysis: Imagined City, Ideological City and Unfinished City. Through site visits, documentation and interviews, we looked to a heavily ideological city, and the traces of an unfinished imaginary world. The clash of the individual body against the collective was evident in the construction of the new capitalist Russia.

Instructor, Researcher, Exhibition Curator-Designer, San Juan, 2008.

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For more information you can download a complete pamphlet here: ciudadlab-pamphlet-web

PLACE AND CONTEXT STUDIO

For the initial part of the course, first year undergraduate students where confronted to notions of place and context. An analytical city study was developed through the layering of cartographic drawings including a vast variety of the city’s visible and invisible infrastructure. Mixed media, hand drawn.

Studio Instructor, 2007.