Gsapp Conversations

DK Osseo-Asare and Naeem Biviji in Conversation with Mpho Matsipa In this podcast episode, we continue the conversation around making culture in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra/Tema, and Johannesburg. Faculty Mpho Matsipa speaks with designers DK Osseo-Asare and Naeem Biviji about their making processes, which explore local craftsmanship and low-cost & small-scale architecture as alternatives to rapid industrialization and big infrastructure in Africa today. DK Osseo-Asare is co-founder and principal of architecture and integrated design studio Low Design Office (LOWDO), based in Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana. Naeem Biviji is the co-founder of Studio Propolis, a design workshop based in Nairobi, Kenya run with partner Bethan Rayner. They were both part of the GSAPP event Building Cultures: Making in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra/Tema, and Johannesburg held at the school on September 6, 2019.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello and Thabisa Mjo in Conversation with Mpho Matispa. In this podcast episode hosted by faculty Mpho Matsipa, makers Nifemi Marcus-Bello and Thabisa Mjo bring us on their journey to integrate cultural heritage and unique craftsmanship in local communities to create economic viability in Africa. Nifemi Marcus-Bello is the founder of nmbello Studio, an Industrial Design practice located in Lagos, Nigeria, with a focus on product, furniture, and experience design for both local and international clients. Thabisa Mjo is the founder of the Johannesburg-based Mash.T Design Studio, a studio focused on telling uniquely South African stories using the medium of design. They were both part of the GSAPP event Building Cultures: Making in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra/Tema, and Johannesburg held at the school on September 6, 2019.

MARCH student Lucy Navarro speaks with Annabelle Selldorf in advance of the Annual Paul S. Byard Memorial Lecture at the school on April 15, 2019. Annabelle Selldorf is founder and principal of Selldorf Architects, a New York City-based firm that is currently working on several expansions to existing cultural institutions, including the Frick Collection in New York City and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. They discuss designing for existing spaces and explore the connections between art and architecture. “When I think about space and art, I think about the person who is viewing it. Ultimately, I think there isn't such a thing as a neutral space. It is your own experience, evaluation, or judgment that contributes to the analysis of what works.” – Annabelle Selldorf

Daniel Bernal, a dual degree student in the MARCH and MSRED programs, speaks with Nina Baier-Bischofberger and Florian Baier in advance of their lecture at the school on April 8, 2019. The pair founded their firm Baier Bischofberger Architects in 2005 after meeting as students at Columbia GSAPP. They discuss the studio’s work and creative process, and reflect on their experiences at GSAPP and the realities of architectural practice which they encountered post graduation. “When I graduated, I went to visit a friend who was working at NASA. They said NASA actually quite liked hiring people with architecture degrees because they could look at lots of different things at the same time and understand the bigger picture... I think architectural education allows for so many new possibilities.” - Nina Baier-Bischofberger

CCCP student Paula Vilaplana speaks with Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo and Mecky Reuss, co-founders of Mexico City-based firm Pedro y Juana, following their lecture at the school on February 11, 2019. The duo is also teaching advanced studio VI at GSAPP during the Spring 2019 semester. Their work explores the capacity of objects to change their environment through typological transgressions, the indiscriminate use of material, texture, color, placement, or form. Recently, their installation Hórama Rama won the 2019 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. “We like to think that objects also have agency within their environments. How you place the object, or the amount of permission you give the user to change or fix it, actually creates different actions...We're very much interested in seeing what happens within spaces more than holding on to an idea of how they should be used.” - Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo

MARCH student Tim Battelino speaks with Anthony Acciavatti following the 5th Annual Detlef Mertins Lecture on the Histories of Modernity at the school on March 25, 2019. Anthony Acciavatti is a GSAPP faculty member, historian, cartographer, architect, and author of the award-winning book, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River, the first environmental and urban history of the world’s most densely populated river basin. "I'm trying to make almost a graphic biography of these [Ganges River Basin] regions and areas by pairing image and word… I’m always trying to couple what I see with ways to describe and narrate the work that I do, both empirically but also theoretically. Ganges Water Machine in that way was very much an experiment in how to narrate such a vast territory.” - Anthony Acciavatti

MSCCCP (M.S. Critical, Curatorial & Conceptual Practices) student Amelyn Ng speaks with Adrian Lahoud, Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art London. He is also the inaugural curator of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the first major platform for architecture and urbanism in the Middle East, North and East Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, which will be held in November 2019. During the conversation they discuss curation in architecture, the upcoming Triennial, and the thinking behind its theme, “Rights of Future Generations.” “The entire aim of the Triennial is to say that climate change is the colonization of a single perspective on what it means to relate to other beings, and that perspective is an extractive one. So the question is how do you decolonize that extractive perspective, how might you allow other kinds of modes of existence to reverberate and to register? I think ultimately if climate change is about anything, it's really about that.” – Adrian Lahoud

UP students Laura Postarini and Tyrene Calvesbert speak with Ananya Roy, Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare and Geography and inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, in advance of her lecture at the school on February 25, 2019. They discuss Ananya Roy’s current research around metropolitan segregation and racial banishment in Los Angeles, and decolonization of the urban planning discipline in the United States. “What might decolonial logics look like? In urban planning, it starts with thinking about the role of our discipline and profession in this colonial violence…I want to know what reparations urban planning is going to make for the tremendous colonial harm that we have inflicted. I want to know how our instruments of planning are deeply colonial or imperial, or rooted in the extermination of indigenous people in this country. What then do we do with those instruments? The moment of Trumpism ironically is an opportunity for us to have these conversations.”

Axelle Dechelette, a dual degree student in the MARCH and MSCCCP programs, speaks with Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe of Cooking Sections, a duo of spatial practitioners based in London. Cooking Sections are the designers behind Offsetted, the exhibition currently on view in the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at GSAPP. The exhibition features an immersive installation of matter collected from New York City trees — including bark, branches, trunks, leaves, and clippings — and assembles a constellation of narratives about the political and economic interests that have both protected and displaced the city’s trees under the pressures of urbanization. “We are trying to challenge the vision that you need to assign a monetary value to nature in order to protect it, which some decades ago, was kind of a first step towards changing the perception of the environment among decision makers. But today, we believe that we can take a step forward and start thinking of trees, not as service providers, but ju

MARCH student Luiza Furia speaks with Lola Sheppard, founding partner of Lateral Office, in advance of her lecture at the school on February 18, 2019. They discuss Lateral Office’s work in rural and remote environments, particularly in the Canadian North, and the role of research in rethinking design in such places. “In the Canadian North... architecture has been conceived of as the envelope to keep brutal elements out. While that is an inevitable responsibility of the building, we are interested in learning from indigenous practices to say, perhaps there are other ways to interface with the environment where the building, or structure, or infrastructure can be more porous.” - Lola Sheppard

Dean Amale Andraos speaks with faculty Andrés Jaque, director of GSAPP’s MSAAD program and founder of the Office for Political Innovation, an architectural practice based in New York and Madrid. They discuss Jaque’s current projects and the need for immediate action in pushing the boundaries of architecture and design to reinvent the way our spaces work. “When we look at newspapers, everything that’s on the front page has architecture in it. If we think of geopolitical tensions, environmental issues, projects like the Green New Deal, all of them are loaded with architecture and design. Immediately, it’s a discussion about housing…territory…fences…borders. It’s a discussion about architectural elements.” - Andrés Jaque

Daniel Bernal, a dual degree student in the MArch and Real Estate Development programs, speaks with Sandra Barclay and Jean Pierre Crousse, co-founders of Barclay & Crousse Architecture, in advance of their lecture at the school on February 4, 2019. Barclay & Crousse was founded in 1994 in Paris, and has been based in Lima since 2006. The studio manages a wide range of transcontinental programs that explore the relationships between landscape, climate, and architecture. “The future of architects, at least in our country, is not the traditional way of being an architect where you have your office and you wait for clients to come. You have to be aware. Nowadays, you have to propose your knowledge of being an architect in places where nobody expects that an architect can be useful.” - Jean Pierre Crousse

Christine Giorgio, a third year M.Arch student, speaks with Julia Burdova and Olga Aleksakova of Buromoscow in advance of their lecture at the school on January 28, 2019. Buromoscow is based in Moscow, and was founded in 2004. The duo is also teaching advanced studio VI at GSAPP during the Spring 2019 semester. Buromoscow’s work reflects urban change in post-soviet Russia, and is known for changing the face of prefabricated mass housing. “[In Russia], people have a very abstract idea about home and building...When people look for a place to live, there is no image of how it can be different. They buy sheer square meters and not a dream...it’s very mechanical. For architects, this is very attractive...the chance to work with a system, something mechanical, something that can be reproduced. It’s a challenge and we totally embraced it.” - Olga Aleksakova

Amelyn Ng, a second year MSCCCP student, speaks with Mark Wigley in advance of his lecture at the school on November 12, 2018. Mark Wigley is Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP and is the author of recently published Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation. The book examines the work of Gordon Matta-Clark through extensive interviews and a dossier of archival evidence. “Creating a stable reference point in an unstable world is the classical view of architecture. Life is weird, time is weird, but architecture just sort of stands there… Matta-Clark says what if it’s actually the other way around? What if architecture is the weird thing?” - Mark Wigley

Second year MArch student, Lucy Navarro, speaks with Helen Leung and Elizabeth Timme, co-founders of LA-Más, in advance of their lecture at the school on November 8, 2018. LA-Más is a non-profit urban design organization based in Los Angeles that helps underserved communities shape their future through policy and architecture. Their projects focus on communities in transition that are often underserved or overlooked by traditional service providers. “Architects get to be progressive when there is a multidisciplinary approach that’s meaningful… where an architect can share perspectives with a planner and vice versa.” - Helen Leung

MSAUD student Angela Crisostomo speaks with Kongjian Yu in advance of his Kenneth Frampton Endowed Lecture at the school on October 29, 2018. Dr. Yu is the founder and principal of Turenscape, a Beijing-based design firm conducting work in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, urban design, and ecological infrastructure. “Design means in our profession to create something with a beautiful form. But sometimes this form is fake or shallow. Design today should create deep form, which means the form should have an ecological base and relationship. Buildings should be energy saving, the landscape should be sustainable.” - Kongjian Yu

Columbia GSAPP MArch student Luiza Furia speaks with Gaetano Pesce, artist and multidisciplinary creator, in advance of his lecture at the school on October 15, 2018. Renowned for his use of color, innovative materials, and social-political commentary, Pesce is a pioneer of 20th-century design whose aesthetic influence is evident in today’s industrial design. "I tell my students, you have to express yourself, to say what you think personally. Your architecture has to be the language of yourself… Design is a very complex new language, and if you use it in the right way, it becomes an art - like architecture, by the way." - Gaetano Pesce

Dual-degree student Daniel Bernal speaks with Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, co-founders of Neri&Hu, in advance of their lecture on October 8, 2018. Their firm works internationally across multiple disciplines, including architecture, master planning, interior, graphic, and product design. Neri&Hu is composed of a multicultural team that reinforces a core vision for the practice: to respond to a global worldview incorporating overlapping design disciplines for a new paradigm in architecture. "By virtue of being interdisciplinary, you attract a number of people who have varying interests. A product designer thinks very differently from a master planner... It allows seemingly very different people within the design field to come together and work together, and they realize that they actually have more similarities than differences." - Lyndon Neri

Third-year MArch student Christine Giorgio speaks with Sheila Kennedy and J. Frano Violich, of Kennedy & Violich Architecture (KVA MATx) in advance of their lecture at the school on October 1, 2018. Their projects engage pressing climate change issues, emerging technology, and user agency. “In crisis situations we often get into a defense mode: build a wall, build a barricade, stop it from coming in. When one uses the imagination, you begin to think of ways to go outside of that direct, hard approach toward how to deal with these crises.” - J. Frano Violich

Dean Amale Andraos speaks with Anna Puigjaner, co-founder of the Barcelona-based architecture office MAIO. Puigjaner was recently appointed as Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia GSAPP, where she coordinates the Core I Architecture Studios. They discuss the relationship between research and design, the connections between academic and professional practice, and Puigjaner’s ongoing project of the “Kitchenless City.” “The kitchen has been used as a political tool during the 20th century and became the center of our so-called homes. To live without a kitchen is a provocation to start a conversation about how the idea of comfort can be redefined in a permanent manner and how architecture can be a tool to rearrange thought.” - Anna Puigjaner