Begun in 1998, the Design Workshop is a unique studio in the Master of Architecture curriculum that helps students develop an aptitude for addressing today’s complex environmental challenges. It takes students through a deliberate process of working collaboratively to propose and test solutions that respond to the particular needs and input of that year’s partners, while also advancing innovation in sustaining the environment, especially as it affects disenfranchised communities. Currently, the Design Workshop builds upon a student-developed framework for sparking innovation and catalyzing public dialogue on the use of biogenic building materials. It is an intensive hands-on laboratory for testing programs, materials, and fabrication methods and engages students in designing and fabricating small projects that can be evaluated outdoors during the summer months. The Design Workshop exposes students to a spectrum of competencies required to address the triple planetary crisis, with deliverables that emphasize problem seeking, research, design, and community engagement, along with budgeting, full-scale prototyping, fabrication, and public relations. By rigorously evaluating small structures through both quantitative and qualitative measures, the Design Workshop provides critical steps for scaling biogenic buildings in future years.

Design Studio 4 Urban Architecture emphasizes the challenges and opportunities of creating a “New Forest Commons” through multi-scalar, social-ecological territorial research leading to the adaptive design of a residential compound dedicated to collective care. A geological accident over one billion years ago produced the Hudson Highlands, a large area of preserved lake and stream-filled forested mountain wilderness that is traversed by the Appalachian Trail. The Highlands once was an indigenous productive commons, then a colonial agricultural and grazing area until The New Deal created a public woodlands leisure state park network. The residents of the Highlands struggle to maintain various dreams of small town community life amidst suburban sprawl north and south of the forest preserves. Inland towns are confronting a shortage of affordable housing, poor public transit, and climate change risks. Meanwhile, the Hudson Highlands Land Trust and numerous civic organizations have emerged as agents in creating a New Forest Commons, preventing further residential subdivision. In this contest, the studio seeks a post-pandemic return to a new forest commons as an alternative to suburbanization and its religion of private property. The design program will entail restructuring clusters of private houses around shared natural resources and common care facilities such as kitchens, public baths and saunas, child and elderly care, and craft/making workshops.