Riley Hammond and Shan Tang's final project, "Comprehensive Design Studio"

Work by Riley Hammond and Shan Tang (both MArch '24)

*Completed for Winter 2023/Spring 2023 Comprehensive Design Studio (second-year MArch core), entitled "NEXT-CYCLE." This studio challenged students to develop a position in engaging an existing building/site and to imagine a highly specific and detailed project for its next cycle towards an alternative future. The measurable and undeniable realities of climate change, finite resources of building materials, environmentally detrimental building practices make us all pause and reconsider how we as architects, as a discipline, as individuals and as society should rethink the ways we responsibly reimagine and inhabit the future of our built environment. More than any other next generation of architects, this rising next generation of architects will be deeply engaged in the imagining the next cycle of existing building stock, sites, grounds, cities and territories. This paradigm of engaging the existing material accumulation on a site in a constructive and creative manner brings along a set of interesting challenges and potentials. As we contemplate architectural value for spaces that were made for other needs at other times, for materials that might not be directly conducive to present needs and meanings sought; as we decide what to salvage, what to reappropriate, what to reconfigure, what and how to add to; and as we try to make sensible new tectonics for a culture that evolves rapidly, our framing of the problem begins to shift from the territory of responsible environmental ethics towards the territory of potential emergent aesthetics.