Dezeen School Shows: an art gallery at the Magazzino Italian Art museum in New York, USA, designed to look like a satellite dish, is among the projects from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Also featured is a timber structural system built for a housing block and a proposal for a library that centres itself around the community.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Institution: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
School: School of Architecture
Courses: Final project (fifth-year thesis), Vertical Design Studio (third-fifth year), Architectural Design Studio 4 (second-year), Comprehensive Design Studio 1 (fourth-year), Architectural Design Studio 1 (first-year), Study Abroad Studio in Rome and Architectural Design Studio 3 (second-year)
Tutors: Christianna Bennett, Matt Burgermaster, Adam Dayem, Emily Gruendel, Ryosuke Imaeda, Miguel Matos, Ciro Najle, Kyle Troyer, Benjamin Vanmuysen and Caleb White

School statement:

"Situated within one of the premier technological research universities in the US, the School of Architecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute works in collaboration with leading scientists, engineers, technologists, artists and entrepreneurs.

"Together, we reimagine the future built environment as an ecologically responsive, energy-efficient, socially conscious and poetically charged constellation of buildings and infrastructures that reinvigorate and empower diverse communities around the world.

"We believe in the benevolent power of architecture to contribute to the environmental restoration of our planet, to establish a more productive, harmonious and symbiotic relationship with the natural world and to imbue our buildings with an awe-inspiring sense of wonder and delight."

Tectonic Encounters: Revealing Alternate Timelines Through Architectural Hybridisation by Christopher Elias

"Tectonic Encounters uses architecture to hold two divergent cultural and construction conditions together in speculative hybridised structures that suggest the existence of alternate timelines.

"It merges two discrete styles, reimagined as new hybridised formal and ornamental conditions, to reveal alternate timelines where divergent cultural and architectural exchanges generated new vernaculars in Japan and El Salvador.

"One alternate Japanese style unifies Shinto shrine aesthetics with industrial incinerators. The El Salvador example explores colonisation and cultural erasure in a timeline where Mayan architecture integrated, rather than was overtaken by, Spanish technologies and tectonics, evolving together over time.

"To explore these alternate timelines, the thesis is presented as a letter from a time-travelling historian who uncovers archival material from this alternate world and returns with his findings."

Student: Christopher Elias
Course: Final project (fifth-year thesis)
Tutor: Christianna Bennett
Email: eliasc[at]rpi.edu

Perennial Temporality by Rachel Raupp and Ethan Berbrick

"Created in an upper-level vertical studio called 'The Public Works', this project advances a circular approach to design and construction that embraces processes of change that do not come to an end.

"It explores the making of public architecture in the city and its entanglement with two planetary-scale realms – the biosphere and technosphere.

"The design focuses on a large public facility providing material recovery and reuse services in an urban park along the Hudson River.

"This building complex is designed as an open framework for processing urban material flows and features mass timber components designed for reconfiguration and relocation."

Students: Rachel Raupp and Ethan Berbrick
Course: Vertical Design Studio (third-fifth year)
Tutor: Matt Burgermaster
Email: rauppr[at]rpi.edu and berbre[at]rpi.edu

Heavy Timber Tectonics for Housing by Emma Tommell and Rosalie Curry

"In this second-year design studio, students were asked to develop heavy timber structural systems for a housing block.

"The premise of the studio was that the structural system could be as much about organising programmes and defining spaces within the housing block, as it was about resisting loads.

"Rather than assuming that the constraints of housing demand conventional arrangements of evenly spaced, vertical columns, students were asked to develop a tectonic system of variably spaced, oblique columns.

"Potentials of the tectonic system were investigated at a range of scales, from the overall disposition of the building in relation to its urban context, to the details of heavy timbers within individual apartments."

Students: Emma Tommell and Rosalie Curry
Course: Architectural Design Studio 4 (second-year)
Tutor: Adam Dayem
Email: tommee[at]rpi.edu and curryr3[at]rpi.edu

Chelsea Multimedia Library by Javier Torres

"This studio offers a speculative vision for a 21st-century library – one that extends beyond the storage of books.

"The first of a two-semester sequence, Comprehensive Design Studio I requires students to develop the schematic design for a site along the High Line in New York's Chelsea district, which addresses user needs, regulatory frameworks, site conditions, accessibility and environmental impact.

"The 'Chelsea Multimedia Library' by Javier Torres imagines a space for both library-focused work and community-oriented play.

"Its nested volumes explore the productive tension between these dual functions, redefining how libraries can serve as dynamic civic architecture."

Student: Javier Torres
Course: Comprehensive Design Studio 1 (fourth-year)
Tutor: Emily Gruendel
Email: torrej8[at]rpi.edu

A field for the passerby by Skye Nieves

"Architecture is typically designed to house and serve its participants, yet this project considers architecture that recedes from attention, noticed only in passing.

"It examines the passerby's indifferent view, where small misfits of scale, material and environment reveal oddities.

"Centred on red mud, a toxic byproduct near in Khuzestan, Iran, the work explores its purification into safe mortar behind a mosque.

"Though the process occurs beside daily worship, it remains unseen. Small doors, vents, weep holes hint at obscured activities, making architecture a background presence that gradually gains significance through culture, environment and the quiet act of passing by."

Student: Skye Nieves
Course: Final Project (Fifth-year thesis)
Tutor: Ryosuke Imaeda
Email: nieves[at]rpi.edu

Suspended Sanctuary by Michaela Pestano

"Suspended Sanctuary reimagines the vertical retreat as a structure where line, rhythm and growth converge.

"Informed by studies of Klee and Gego, the project translates abstract compositions into interlocking planes, hanging gardens and trellised voids.

"A central vertical garden threads through spaces of arrival, sanctuary and rest, binding light, structure and vegetation into a cohesive system.

"Through layered drawings, derived from a series of generative silhouettes, analytical order dissolves into atmosphere.

"The project becomes a meditation on coexistence – two inhabitants sharing a domain where geometry yields to softness and form nurtures life; a spatial proposition where dwelling and growing are inseparable."

Student: Michaela Pestano
Course: Architectural Design Studio 1 (first-year)
Tutor: Miguel Matos
Email: pestam[at]rpi.edu

Roma Intempestus Urbis, The City of the Global Populus by Study Abroad Studio in Rome students

"Double-central piazzas, dreamy courtyards and lethargic cloisters, cascading atriums, layered fields of naves, and embracing double-curvature bars: a series of canonical architectural projects from the High Renaissance and the Early Baroque.

"These are the materials to construct the variable models of the Roma Intempestus Urbis.

"Six sets of eighty models integrate the organisation of three case-study projects, opening the generality of the types into consistently differentiated building organisations arrayed and smashed together within the white-noise matrix of the multiplicity masterplan for the City of the Global Populus."

Students: Alexandra Abbott, Ethan Berbrick, Rachel Raupp, Eric Bliss, Shawn Putman, Alisa Choudrie, Sean Shannon, William Felcone, Olivia Mason, Abigail Lagana, Olivia Montolio, Cameron Yergeau, Danielle Strauf, Grace Noone, Keisha Martinez, Madalyn Warch, Kristin Greene and Giancarlo Nazario
Course: Study Abroad Studio in Rome
Tutor: Ciro Najle
Emails: abbota[at]rpi.edu, berbre[at]rpi.edu, rauppr[at]rpi.edu, blisse[at]rpi.edu, putmas[at]rpi.edu, chouda3[at]rpi.edu, shanns[at]rpi.edu, felcow[at]rpi.edu, masono[at]rpi.edu, lagana[at]rpi.edu, montoo[at]rpi.edu, yergec[at]rpi.edu, straud[at]rpi.edu, nooneg[at]rpi.edu, martik19[at]rpi.edu, warchm[at]rpi.edu, greenk6[at]rpi.edu and nazarg[at]rpi.edu

Bundle and Pinch by Corban Vogler

"This studio investigates how architecture emerges from negotiating rigidity and softness.

"Students began with loose assemblages of rigid, everyday materials – pipes, wooden blocks, duct-tape rolls – tested for their scalar and spatial capacities to generate early volumetric studies.

"Midway through the term, the focus shifted to soft envelope systems composed of stacked, pliable foam.

"The studio emphasised hybridisation, layering hard structures with responsive soft envelopes that sag, bend, peel, wrap and rest in unexpected ways.

"This project interrogates pinching as a binding agent between soft and rigid systems.

"Final proposals challenged architectural norms by foregrounding informality, looseness and material behaviour as active design agents."

Student: Corban Vogler
Course: Architectural Design Studio 1 (first-year)
Tutor: Kyle Troyer
Email: voglec[at]rpi.edu

Reframe Levittown by Helen Worden

"The Studio, entitled 'Elements', treats the components of architecture not merely as ingredients but as narrative and material constructs whose components, when interrogated, reveal unexpected agencies and mutant possibilities.

"Within this framework, 'Refreame Levittown' recasts the wood frame – America's most ubiquitous structural cliche – as a subversive instrument of egalitarian architecture.

"Typically relegated to the realm of the 'mere building,' the stick frame becomes here an engine of transformation.

"Through the Row, Stack and Duplex, Helen leverages this overlooked system to infiltrate suburban homogeneity, generate new densities, new collectivities and new futures for a forgotten urbanism."

Student: Helen Worden
Course: Final Project (fifth-year thesis)
Tutor: Caleb White
Email: wordeh[at]rpi.edu

Paradoxical Field by Felix Blanch

"The Magazzino Italian Art museum and research centre in Cold Spring, NY, specialises in postwar and contemporary Italian art.

"This studio project proposes to add a third satellite gallery displaying both rotating exhibitions and specific works from their permanent Arte Povera collection side by side.

"The addition is disassociated from the ground and suspended from bright red structural members.

"While the gallery contests its own gravity, echoing the Arte Povera doctrine, the structural masts reminisce about the antidote of the Italian postwar movement: the 1970s pop culture and British High-Tech.

"These structural armatures don't only support the gallery, but also create a field of operable cranes dispersed across the site, accommodating outdoor artworks and service functions.

"As the exhibitions change over time, so does the internal organisation of the gallery, as well as the postures and orientations of the structural field. This new gallery prioritises flexibility over permanence, tectonically expresses its adaptability and renounces a single fixed form."

Student: Felix Blanch
Course: Architectural Design Studio 3 (second-year)
Tutor: Benjamin Vanmuysen
Email: blancf[at]rpi.edu

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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