The aim of the project was to experiment with a human centric approach towards the architecture of museums. We aimed to create an environment where the architecture itself, along with immersive site-specific art displays, can have a core focus on stimulating alertness, presence and awareness. To achieve this, we turned towards Neuroscience data to formulate an interdisciplinary outlook on program, circulation, scale and density, while considering New York City's environmental stressors such as air quality, sensory overload, high population density, noise pollution and lack of design for human scale as starting points.
We approached the programming in a way where we can respect these physiological, sub-perceptual needs of users, and work towards their optimal functioning. We created a space that provides cues, as opposed to definitive guides, that encourages free exploration, and sets engaging intersections in your path, between solitary journeys and more collective ones.

Project by:
Sarah Agill
Shpend Pashtriku

#Agora is a hybrid Art Complex, with a deep historic and social component, special-
lized in the Art of Protest. Through its physical propagation across the urban fabric,
it behaves as an Urban-Social Joint between two contrasting sides in the city of New
York. It performs an ideological role as an agent of social change, connecting differ-
ent neighborhoods like a stitch, treating the wounds of the past and present.
Just as the Greek Agora did, the project intends to become a center of attraction,
that would invite artists, community leaders and other personalities to rethink and
debate the topics that really matter to society. #Agora would propagate the message
into the collective consciousness through Art, and become a political statement by
itself.

Project by:
Kaveh Chehri
Ibrahim Dusmukamedov
Alejandro Estrella
Gaowei Zhou

Art is changing by way of both production and exhibition as technology evolves. The MET v2.0 re-imagines what an extension to the historic Metropolitan Art Museum in New York could be. Since the global pandemic, the limited access to museums, exhibitions and points of historic interest have dwindled significantly. By creating a digital repository, the museum can transcend geographic boundaries allowing people to still experience its rich catalogue of displays without limitation in both digital and virtual space. The MET v2.0 extension allows for the storage and eventual exhibition of digital art, artefacts and introduces a new way to experience the existing museum through the introduction of augmented, virtual reality and projection mapping by interacting with the existing museum.

Project by:
Jo Cook
Miriam Löscher
Zhiyi Zhang

Creating a museum project dedicated to politics and censorship in art, we examined various types of protest and anti-political actions of artists from all over the world. And concluded that such art needs a diverse and protected platform to represent itself. The project embodies in its image the principles inherent in the relationship between censorship and art in the real world. Also, the museum, located on Governors Island, interacts with one of the most powerful symbols of freedom in the Western world, the Statue of Liberty. The main parts of the museum are located in artificial hills, which act as a continuation of the existing park on the Island. The architecture of the hills is extensioned by the concrete exterior part of the museum, which includes viewing platforms and a stage for public perfomances. In the interaction of the upper concrete part and the architecture of the artificial hills, the principles of interdependence and opposition are expressed. The outer part, which symbolizes art strives for freedom, tries to "take off", while the static hills, symbolizing censorship, "keep" it from flying.

Project by:
Kyryll Dimtrenko
Alexandra Terekhova

Modern Museum of Audible Space is a network of installations, art galleries, and spaces for artists to create - proposed as an expansion of the public space around New York's shoreline. Using sound as the connective tissue of this network – it embodies the ambition of creating a languageless communication between the different components that compose the art world. Therefore, the project not only accommodates sound related installations, but it is in itself an instrument capable of producing sound and also manipulating it. Formally, the design is based upon sound visualisation methods derived from the research of physicist and musician Ernst Chladni. With cohabiting spaces for artists New York is kept available for a diverse population. The spaces open for social interactions, encouraging discourse and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Project by:
Emma Sanson
Patricia Tibu
Jingit Witchaya

The design is an exploration in the integration of cultural experiences in the daily routine of New York's citizens. The scheme revolves around the harnessing of cultural data and a subsequent mass customisation of art installations. To achieve this, the technology of web-based content filtering is turned upside down, in order to continuously provide users of the complex with personalised art stimulation specifically calibrated to provoke, learn and reflect.
In the final work, this logic is implemented on the north Brooklyn Bridge landing. The complex automotive nodal point is reworked into a more functional and humane pedestrian sphere. The new programme is combined with the existing site through a process of interweaving. The outcome aims to merge its physical framework with a virtual organisation, in order to create a dynamic cultural typology that embraces constant change and motion.

Project by:
Raffael Stegfellner
Simon Weishäupl
Qian Yu

To enhance an urban impact the project implies a parasitic-symbiotic strategy - it invades the spine (the Highline). Invasion plan: pavilion-bases placed in the key positions of the Highline interconnected by the smaller architectural elements such as kinetic walls, billboards that patrol-move between the key spots.
Street art is a controversial subculture that encourages different architectural perception. The movements introduce a provoking way to celebrate art where the city spaces become the canvas for documenting and expressing public stories, messages. Understanding the city trough the street art philosophy, as the open artistic canvas is the main functional idea. The pavilion is the legal place for celebrating art in public - based on kinetic flexible skin the structure should become a stage for developing new scenarios for both: freely expressing art ideas and more interactive observation experiences.

Project by:
Simonas Sutkus

New York is a city with an extensive history and one thing which characterises the city is that it has always been a metropole for multiculturalism and has always welcomed other new cultures. If we are looking at the city from above we see the beautiful rivers, streets and the landmark buildings. We can extend this with another neighbourhood which is situated in the river and is visible and can have an effect globally. Visible because the island is large, being located in the rivers of New York, and as a result of reusing old barges and scrap metal available in the area - manpower is multicultural. New York has established itself as an image for the whole world to see.
In literature a raft is often a symbol for survival and this island can be a rescuing centre in a sense which can move as a floating city in New York. This island can become an icon not just in New York but globally. It sheds light on global issues such as climate change and refugees, which flee distress and war. The island can turn these matters around to something positive and be an epicentre for multiculturalism with refugees and climate change as focus. The island is a power-centre for the city, world art, the environment, and refugees all in one.
Departing from a pier to the unknown, entering the melting men exhibitions on the barge and later seeing exhibitions about the heat of the sun creates awareness to climate change - moving from ice to fire.

Project by:
Olavur Egholm

The incentive is to juxtapose current theory, political and cultural discourse with the unintended and unexpected through a speculation of ideas and spaces. The instigating premise of the project is based on the ecological crisis we currently find ourselves in.
The project uses traces of global climate change, silt residue left after intense flooding, along with recycled and harvested materials. To rebuild Red Hook grain Silo, in NY, into an artisanal studio hub and material research institute.
The project explores the essence of how we as humans can inhabit and perceive the effects of climate change through architectural materiality and spatial qualities.
In an attempt to understand how to co-exist with an inevitable future and the sub-nature's it will create. Using ecological theory to ground a conceptual process driven approach to constructing space.

Project by:
Jade Bailey

Academia Anemos is a school based in New York City's neighbourhood with the highest asthma prevalence among children. The building provides clean air to reduce the children's exposure to air pollution. The architecture itself becomes a lung that breathes in the surrounding air and filters it before it gives it back to the users. While on the one side technical equipment helps the precise filtration of dangerous particulate matter, there are also various natural forces and physics that support the purification procedure and consequently influences the architectural language. Catching the wind using various aerodynamic effects, the building allows natural ventilation, filtration and balances the interior air temperature.

Project by:
Adriana Böck

Intersection with art is a hybrid building focusing on finding connection between institutionalize function of exhibition space and domestic function of living and working. Two different typologies have been taken and merged into one building, where other functions like library and office are working as buffer zones. By merging living, working and exhibition the resulted building is a hyper programmed spaces, where art zones work as the living room of the whole building. By taking museum and different kind of exhibition space and merging it with everyday functionality of domestic space, the museum is no longer and institution but part of everyday life.

Project by:
Monika Kalinowska