In this course, students will critically interrogate majority aesthetic norms by studying a multiplicity of spaces occupied by immigrants in New York City. Students will be invited to critique the colonial heritage of spatial aesthetics in the West, placed in opposition to various immigrant experiences, considering immigration and immigrant groups in their varied historical, socio-economic, and political contexts. Students will take on individual research projects around specific New York City immigrant groups, beginning with the group’s context and ultimately observing the group’s aesthetics as projected internally and externally. Through reading, discussion, and workshops, students will become immersed in a chosen immigrant group’s spaces in New York City and will use this knowledge to challenge majority spatial aesthetic norms. While ostensibly relevant to both art and architecture students, this course has much deeper appeal across the college regardless of discipline. We are living and studying in this city of immigrants, including TNS students, many of whom are themselves first- or second- generation. The work raises personal cultural questions such as how one’s own immigrant group perhaps influenced her/his/their path of study, how different such groups value art, architecture, and engineering, if critical perspectives on imperialism can alter the perception of one’s own work, and so on – all this lending to a richer debate over cultural norms in the West.