Studio work in the BFA in Architectural Design culminates with a Capstone Senior Project. In this final studio, students engage projects from a range of topics related to the body. Here, “body” refers to both the human corporeal body and the human social body (or bodies), as constructed and framed through the material conditions of architecture, urban fabric and interior space. A broad and deep study informed by research and analysis begins the semester and critically informs design. Topics range from urban scale interventions where designers are increasingly engaging the social, political and economic realities of the city as generative content for creating place, to the study of particular building types that provide students with tangible opportunities to engage the important issues that frame contemporary architecture.

This studio collectively designs proposals for a site on the East River with the intention of generating new urban models where human and planetary health are placed at the center of all design decisions. The studio explores urban development through the lens of social equity and uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to inform the projects. The program includes affordable housing, a wellness center, a grocery, and a library/learning space. 

Our project engages the individual and community bodies of the villagers met in field work in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Topics include village/landscape scale interventions where designers are increasingly engaging the social, political and economic realities of the city/rural interface as generative content for creating places for handicraft and making. Particular vernacular and indigenous building types provide students with tangible opportunities to engage the important issues that frame contemporary architecture and urbanism, such as local material sourcing, sustainability, adaptive reuse and upcycling. The project calls for a civic compound that incorporates handicraft and making, and is required to be a cluster of buildings around exterior courtyards that are protected from heat and monsoon rains.

Our goal is to develop a healthy, multisensorial, and sustainable system of small-space living in the modern urban city. We explore the adaptive reuse of an iconic structure, the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, for intergenerational and interspecies communities. Through actions of removal and addition, we are able to create contemporary architecture from a structure that was built in the 1970s, taking into account both its local ecology as well as its social dynamics.

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