ARCH 311 | Bard Architecture | Spring 2026
This course surveys a growing body of research-based practices for whom architecture becomes both a medium of inquiry and a form of evidence. We will explore how spatial research can witness ecological and political relations; and how architecture registers traces of environmental violence, extractive infrastructures, and atmospheric transformations. The practices we will engage work with environmental flows—air, water, soil—extending beyond the limits of a single site to encompass invisible yet consequential fields of exposure. These flows, often weaponized or exploited, drift across borders and bodies, embedding themselves within living systems. Through these practices, we will ask how architecture might render such dispersed violence perceptible, transforming data, debris, and images into spatial testimony. In this seminar, students will rehearse how to translate architectural research into practice. Each will select a single flow—atmospheric, hydrological, or geological—as a lens through which to construct a small-scale installation. Drawing on precedents such as Mark Wasiuta’s Air Drift, and Samia Henni’s Colonial Toxicity, students will interrogate, examine, and expand conventional climate models not merely as predictive tools, but as spatial and political narratives. Together, we will situate design research as a mode of inquiry that traces, maps, and makes tangible the entanglements of contamination, extraction, and resistance, positioning architecture as an instrument of both research and testimony.

ARCH 221 | Bard Architecture | Spring 2026
Sites of post-militarization are shaped indelibly by both the devastation of war and the more invisible forms of toxicity embedded for decades after in the soil, water, and air. This design studio investigates how ecologies once devastated by militarization are reinstituted as sites of preservation. From Vieques, Puerto Rico, to Rocky Flats, Colorado, to Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, landscapes contaminated by decades of toxic warfare are nominally “cleaned” and transferred into the custody of agencies such as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife and National Park Service. Framed as wildlife refuges or ecological preserves, these territories remain restricted and surveilled, their access carefully choreographed through trails and signage. What appears as environmental stewardship often masks a continuity of occupation, leaving the soil and water contaminated while maintaining the possibility of future military use. This studio will examine these preserves as contested terrains where ecological protection and colonial violence intertwine. Students will research one such site and trace its transformations across militarism, remediation, and preservation. Through mapping, drawing, and speculative design, we will interrogate how nature itself becomes instrumentalized as a political and spatial tool, reinforcing occupation under the guise of conservation. The studio will culminate in a collective multi-media exhibition, combining analytical drawings, counter-maps, and architecture proposals.

ARCH 322 | Bard Architecture | Fall 2025
This studio course positions radical design as a speculative architectural practice that interrogates the present through the lens of the future: What is needed? Who is demanding it? How can architecture become an agent of transformation? Acknowledging our dependencies on colonial infrastructures, this approach resists technocratic solutions and instead proposes a technosocial model, one that understands design as deeply entangled with histories of dispossession, while calling for collective action toward alternative futures. Structured as an advanced design studio, students will engage with a specific site, and how it operates beyond its immediate boundaries, radically reimagining it through experimental materials, aesthetics, and spatial narratives. Students will collectivize and reimagine both the future and this site in a project set up in pieces. They will explore design as an active force, not a noun, but a verb in motion, shaping new modes of inhabitation, assembly, collectivity, and interaction. Concepts such as dwelling, commuting, composting, harvesting, digesting, petting, and assembling will serve as strategies for architectural speculation. Through specific workshops on radical representational techniques, including drawings, 3D models, mappings, video, and photography, students will push the boundaries of architectural storytelling, culminating in a collective exhibition that showcases speculative futures as a means to redesign the now.

ARCH 211 | Spring 25 | Bard Architecture
Sites of post-militarization are shaped indelibly by both the devastation of war, and the more invisible forms of toxicity embedded for decades after in the soil, water, and air. The design studio employed architectural representation to interrogate these ongoing “occupied ecologies,” exposing coordinated, often unseen spatial violence that had made many landscapes uninhabitable and foreclosed futures.

Students selected post-militarized sites and, through drawing, analysis, and mapping, traced them from supply chains and testing grounds to storage, deployment, and depletion. Their work rendered legible the entanglements of militarism and ecology, proliferating toxicity, post-conflict aesthetics, environmental diplomacy, and the residues of violence. Together, we examine the planetary reach of U.S. military infrastructure, grounding the design project in readings, workshops, and iterative reviews. The studio culminated in a multimedia exhibition.

ARCH 311 | Spring 25 | Bard Architecture
A seminar that surveyed research-based architectural practices centered on developing mediums of witnessing, formulating accountability, fostering solidarity, and imagining alternative futures. The course focused particularly on contexts overwhelmed by material extraction, militarism, and the exploitation of Indigenous lands. Students researched spatial design practices that centered on developing methods for activism and resistance against environmental and spatial violence. Through these research practices, we challenged the notion that research is neutral, recognizing that it was often shaped by biases and perspectives, which had the potential to either magnify or mute lived experiences. We asked: Could architecture act as a witness, bearing testimony to events, injustices, and transformations? This involved exploring how architectural spaces could document, reveal, and communicate experiences of violence and resistance. The course explored an understanding of architecture not just as a physical construct but as a medium capable of producing new forms of evidence and acting as a witness to societal and environmental violations. By engaging with methodologies such as field notes, listening, mapping and interviews, students probed the multifaceted modes of observation and analysis, culminating in a multi-medium research dossier.

ARCH 211 | Fall 2024 | Bard Architecture
Sites of post-militarization are shaped indelibly by both the devastation of war, and the more invisible forms of toxicity embedded for decades after in the soil, water, and air. The design studio employed architectural representation to interrogate these ongoing “occupied ecologies,” exposing coordinated, often unseen spatial violence that had made many landscapes uninhabitable and foreclosed futures.

Students selected post-militarized sites and, through drawing, analysis, and mapping, traced them from supply chains and testing grounds to storage, deployment, and depletion. Their work rendered legible the entanglements of militarism and ecology, proliferating toxicity, post-conflict aesthetics, environmental diplomacy, and the residues of violence. Together, we examine the planetary reach of U.S. military infrastructure, grounding the design project in readings, workshops, and iterative reviews. The studio culminated in a multimedia exhibition.

NJIT, Hillier College of Architecture and Design | Spring 2024
In the context of Eric Adams’s 2023 move to slash $36.2 million from New York’s library budget; this design studio used Roosevelt Island; once a carceral, quarantine, and urban-renewal testing ground, as a lens to examine libraries as vital social infrastructure. Confronting the island’s sanitized memorials and Four Freedoms rhetoric, students investigated incarceration, disease, ecology, renewal, borders, monuments, and geology. Through research seminars and design development, they re-imagined a 20,000-sq-ft multi-library complex: political, literature, music, and arts.

Columbia University, GSAPP | Fall 2023
Data Mourning, a clinic led by Marina Otero Verzier with Farah Alkhoury, analyzes Tuvalu's plans to become a fully virtual and digitized nation by transferring itself to the metaverse. The clinic critiqued the “cloud” metaphor, examining the vast network of data centers that accelerates the climate violence that threatens island nations. Through interdisciplinary student teams, it developed ethical, political, and ecological strategies through prototypes, archives, legal frameworks, and speculative fictions that cared for Tuvalu’s social, cultural, and environmental relations while imagining alternative futures for territories facing erasure. The project framed survival as collective care, protest, celebration, and mourning, not mere data storage.

MFA in Design | Publication and Display
is a studio survey of publication and display strategies for art and design practice. Students studied a wide range of models for presenting visual ideas, in print, on-screen, and in space, to understand the function, production, and aesthetic conventions for publication and display, addressing and challenging those conventions in creating their own exhibition. Reflecting on the infrastructure of cultural production, including museums, exhibitions, and biennials, this course challenge the conventional assumption that the cultural apparatus is confined within the bounds of its displays. Beyond what is readily observable, the politics and cultural dynamics of architectural spaces extend into the realms of intentionality and hidden complexities. By probing the act of placing artifacts on display, students inquire into the multifaceted modes of observation, the production of distinct perspectives, and the voices that are either magnified or muted.

Introduction to Architecture | Columbia University, GSAPP
This introductory architecture studio situates design within its entanglement with colonial violence, climate crisis, and environmental racism, insisting that built form always participates in geopolitical struggle. Focusing on West Harlem Piers Park, students traced how toxic infrastructures disproportionately follow BIPOC communities and how activist campaigns such as WE ACT’s 1997 gas-mask protest made that violence visible. Rather than asking the conventional “How do we create a sustainable building?”, the studio approached "Environment as a Medium", asking how architecture co-produces environmental transformations alongside animals, plants, fungi, minerals, bacteria, and entire ecosystems. Through research drawings, students mapped these agents and their entangled agencies, revealing hidden circulations of waste, energy, and breath. Each student then advanced a design argument; whether a space of protest, a parliament for negotiation, or a communicative installation.

MFA in Design | Publication and Display
is a studio survey of publication and display strategies for art and design practice. Students studied a wide range of models for presenting visual ideas, in print, on-screen, and in space, to understand the function, production, and aesthetic conventions for publication and display, addressing and challenging those conventions in creating their own exhibition. Reflecting on the infrastructure of cultural production, including museums, exhibitions, and biennials, this course challenge the conventional assumption that the cultural apparatus is confined within the bounds of its displays. Beyond what is readily observable, the politics and cultural dynamics of architectural spaces extend into the realms of intentionality and hidden complexities. By probing the act of placing artifacts on display, students inquire into the multifaceted modes of observation, the production of distinct perspectives, and the voices that are either magnified or muted.

Spring 22_Advanced Studio VI | Teaching Assistant for Professor Mark Wasiuta_Studio Title: Detox USA

Summer 22_Advanced Studio_Teaching Assistant for Professor Eric Bunge_Studio Title: Parallel UN