Speculative Thinking: AAP NYC Spring Studio Explorations

This semester at the Gensler Family AAP NYC Center, three studios open to collaborations across architectural and urban scales are exploring big questions and seeking non-traditional answers. What should the data centers that house so much of our collective lives look like? What new design and construction practices might better address complex urban development? How might design elevate educational experiences on campuses located in dense and diverse city landscapes? Faculty and students are together pushing their responses in innovative directions.

HI-RES LO-DEF: Data Centers and the Politics and Aesthetics of Infrastructure
Instructor: Architecture Associate Professor Jesse LeCavalier, Director of the Master of Science in Advanced Urban Design

The Brief: The growth of data centers follows the development of large technology corporations that increasingly dominate everyday life, especially in the US. Companies such as Amazon, Meta, Google, and Tesla are creating what some have described as "platform capitalism," in which participation is compulsory, rendering citizens as subscribers. This conflation of political identity with consumer behavior is consummated in the data center because it is in these facilities that our digital behavior is stored to be modeled and monetized. However, even if these buildings play a central role in contemporary life, they remain in their infancy as elements of design. Data center providers are not incentivized to do much beyond finding the cheapest site closest to the most power, which has partly allowed these sites to remain on the urban and theoretical margins. Functional requirements, intensifying public scrutiny, and diminishing power sources, among other factors, are putting pressure on this model, but there is not yet a robust architectural and urban response. While other essential infrastructure has had moments of collective civic expression, this is not yet the case for the data center. But what would an appropriate aesthetic be for this adolescent type? This studio claims that the data center offers opportunities for both new civic forms and new aesthetic expressions and explores the degree to which we might recuperate the transformative potential of infrastructural thinking without proposing one mega-infrastructural system in place of another.

QUEENS OF HEART IN STRAIGHT FLUSH: Uneven Development, Risk Management & Environmental Speculation in Willets Point, Flushing & Corona
Instructors: Jae Shin and Damon Rich, PP AICP, partners at HECTOR urban design

The Brief: This studio addresses how New York City builds new neighborhoods and retrofits existing ones. Because design is practiced in the context of other humans, urban designers must survive within conflicted, political, sometimes violent, sometimes democratic processes of group decision-making. Students are encouraged to learn from and speculate upon the current debate over proposed casino development in Eastern Queens, the most recent episode in 100 years of conflict over development, land use, design, and environmental justice in the neighborhoods of Willets Point, Flushing, and Corona. Drawing from their creative explorations and analyses of existing political, economic, and implementation systems in urban environments, students produce design proposals for alternative urban worlds and articulate theories of urban change. This focus invites students to consciously reject design solutions that mimic existing practices and approaches in favor of inventive scenarios, approaches, and modes of representation.

Learning Curves: Rethinking the Urban Educational Campus
Instructors: SO – IL founder and Architecture Professor of the Practice Florian Idenburg and Marlena Fauer, designer at SO – IL

The Brief: This studio delves into the evolving intersections of education, urbanism, and architectural design. It leverages the City of Yes zoning reform and the historical trajectory of Brooklyn's urbanization as critical frameworks to investigate how densification and adaptive reuse can redefine educational environments in urban contexts. Drawing inspiration from architectural paradigms such as Jefferson's Academical Village and Koolhaas's Delirious New York, the course bridges historical narratives and contemporary challenges to cultivate an understanding of urban campuses as dynamic components of their broader ecosystems. Centering on the Pratt Institute campus — a site steeped in architectural and urban significance — the studio invites students to engage with real-world complexities and propose transformative designs that elevate the educational experience in dense, diverse urban landscapes. By integrating urban history, policy, and forward-thinking design principles, the course fosters critical perspectives on shaping the future of educational and civic spaces.

The Gensler Family AAP NYC Center

Cornell AAP's programs at the Gensler Family AAP NYC Center provide students across the college's departments with a unique opportunity to live and study in New York City. A full roster of classes is further enriched by the city's unique artistic, historical, and cultural resources and by AAP's extensive alumni network of notable professionals who frequently teach and serve as guest critics and mentors.

Learn more about the program and the application process.

The Gensler Family AAP NYC Center