Apr 26, 2009

Iron Designer


This past Thursday, April 23, four teams made up of third-year Master’s of Architecture students from Columbia GSAPP, Parsons The New School, Pratt Institute, and City College of New York (CCNY - winners) competed against each other in an hour-long design competition to propose a sustainable design solution for the DUMBO archway. After several years of being used as a storage facility, the archway has re-opened for public use. The competition challenged the students to create a link between the archway and the adjacent lot in light of it’s re-birth as a public space. The event took place in Raumlabor’s Spacebuster, an inflatable and mobile dome which has been hosting events around New York City this past week.

Jurors include: Joseph Grima (Storefront for Art and Architecture), Raumlabor, Olivia Chen (Inhabitat), Kate Kerrigan (Dumbo Improvement District), Richard Plunz, Ben Prosky and Sarah Williams (Columbia GSAPP), Meredith Tenhoor and Deb Johnson (Pratt Institute), Joel Towers (Parsons), Rafael Magrou (architecture critic, Paris), Amale Andraos and Dan Wood (workAC), Victoria Marshall (Till Design), William Menking (The Architect's Newspaper).

Iron Designer is only part of a larger scheme of events that are part of ECOGRAM: The Sustainability Question. ECOGRAM is a series of events initiated at the Columbia GSAPP by Mitchell Joachim, Ph.D. and Ioanna Theocharopoulou, Ph.D., to examine the question of sustainability in architecture and architectural education. The first conference “Ecogram: The Sustainability Question” took place in October 2008. A second large-scale conference is planned for October 2009.
Studio- X
Storefront for Art and Architecture
Inhabitat
ECOGRAM