TECHNOLOGIES THAT DRAW NEW WORLDS
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. 2020 End of Year Show
For the past three decades Columbia GSAPP has concluded each academic year with its End of Year Show, an exhibition that celebrates and showcases student work from across the school’s degree programs: Architecture; Urban Design; Urban Planning; Historic Preservation; Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices; and Real Estate Development.
The unfolding global pandemic has upended the conventions of both student life and pedagogy at the school. Working under unimaginable constraints and through a spectrum of emotions, faculty and students have explored new forms of collaboration and tested new modes of communication—in the process, unwittingly overhauling preconceived ideas of what architectural education can do and what a school of architecture can be.
More broadly, the pandemic has unsettled our worldviews, fundamentally transforming how we understand our bodies, borders, and the entanglement of social, political, and economic networks.
Many students tackled these issues head-on in their academic work this Spring, engaging design and spatial thinking to scrutinize the infrastructures, inequities, and technologies that continuously reshape the world. The ethos that permeates student projects and the profound sense of community that energized this semester reveal an emerging generation of designers and thinkers—deeply empathetic and with a revised global outlook—who are poised to steer radical new directions for the built environment.
Focused primarily on work from the Spring, the 2020 End of Year Show documents this singular moment for GSAPP. Online for the first time, the exhibition departs from its traditional format of installations throughout Avery and Fayerweather Halls—cherished, communal spaces of the school that are instead invoked in the organization of this digital platform.
