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A while back, we mentioned that Studio-X NYC would be closing its doors at the end of the semester. That day is nearly here, and we wanted to email you, our lovely friends, collaborators, and supporters, to invite you to come celebrate with us and to share our various next steps. Studio-X NYC was founded by Dean Mark Wigley in 2008. It was the test-site for what has become the Studio-X Global Network: an off-campus space in which GSAPP could experiment with what an urban futures laboratory that was outside the school could be, think, and do. Over the years, first coordinated by Gavin Browning and then directed by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, and thanks to an army of innovative collaborators, both from among the GSAPP faculty and student body and elsewhere, Studio-X NYC has prototyped a series of spatial and intellectual formats to promote productive exchange: exchange between the school and the city, interdisciplinary exchange, and, more recently, global exchange. The experiment succeeded: today, the Studio-X Global Network has expanded to include dynamic nodes in Rio, Istanbul, Mumbai, Johannesburg, and Beijing, as well as lab outposts in Tokyo, São Paolo, and Amman. Thanks to shared research and programs coordinated by Director of Studio-X Global Network Programming, Marina Otero, the network now offers a unique global platform from which consider the most pressing challenges and opportunities facing the world's cities—and one that is more and more integrated into the school's curriculum and training. Meanwhile, Studio-X NYC Director Nicola Twilley has used the network as a launching pad for an innovative new Regional Foodshed Resilience practicum, to be taught concurrently at GSAPP and in Mumbai starting in September 2014. Jeffrey Inaba’s C-Lab (Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting) has worked alongside us in the Studio-X NYC space for years, keeping us company as they examine HVAC in Volume magazine, launch LA Open Acres, and publish essays in 2014 Venice Biennale Elements of Architecture book. They’ll be continuing their activities from a new office on Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus. In May, Janette Kim, whose Urban Landscape Lab worked out of Studio-X NYC and whose work formed the basis of some of Studio-X NYC’s most engaging exhibitions and programs, launched a new quarterly journal, ARPA Journal (Applied Research Practices in Architecture). Issue One, titled Test Sites, is online now. Living Architecture Lab Director David Benjamin, who played a central role in setting Studio-X NYC up back in 2008, will be taking part in a new kind of off-campus experiment within the New Museum's New Inc incubator space. And Studio-X NYC will be closing its doors—but not without celebrating with a party to thank you all for making this crazy experiment such a success! Please save the date for our final summer party on June 26th at 6:30PM. We'll be going offline soon, but to stay in touch with the Studio-X Global Network and hear about its research programs and events, click here. To keep up-to-date with the school more generally, follow CCGSAPP. For those of you who follow us on Twitter andFacebook, we'll be using those channels to talk about Studio-X Global Network news and activities going forward. And, of course, the Studio-X NYC archive of workshops, discussions, exhibits, conferences, and talks will remain online here. With thanks and best wishes, Nicola Twilley, Director, Studio-X NYC Carlos-Solis-Keyser, Program Coordinator, Studio-X NYC

Please join us Tuesday, April 21 at 9AM for the Columbia University Epidemiology Symposium Conversations around Public Health, Architecture, and Cities, sponsored by GSAPP and the Mailman School of Public Health. See below for the full program.

Conversations around public health, architecture, and cities

This Thursday at Studio-X NYC, join us for Landscapes of Secrecy: Data and Reporting in the Drone Debate. In collaboration with Bard’s Center for the Study of the Drone, this event will look to open a discussion on the gathering/reconstructing of data regarding U.S. drone strikes, placing in conversation three researchers to discuss their attempts to understand and represent the nature and extent of U.S. targeted killing operations, the relationship between secrecy and forms of surveillance and violence, and the production of "evidence" at the intersections of legal and physical environments. This will be the second in the Studio-X Global Network series on Security Regimes, which critically examines global spaces of exception.

Excited to be hosting Interpretations: Critical Shifts tomorrow, April 5th at 1PM. This is the fourth annual symposium hosted by the Critical, Curatorial, & Conceptual Practices in Architecture class of 2015, GSAPP. Please see a schedule and list of speakers here. If you can't make it IRL, you will be able to stream online here.

Join us Wednesday, February 26 at 7PM for a conversation about the architecture and geography of women's health. Lori Brown, author of Contested Spaces: Abortion Clinics, Women's Shelters and Hospitals will discuss the intersections of politics, protest, and public space as they relate to access to care and the lives that are impacted by it. From her book:

Because protest has for decades been a part of the abortion debate, the way we understand and use public space is critical to rethinking access to reproductive healthcare. Citizen actors on both sides of the issue have been exerting political pressure. So much so that now anti-abortion groups have been successfully influencing state legislatures across the country creating ever more restrictive and unbalanced law. Although legal on paper, abortion is becoming more and more difficult to access for poor women of color. [Iris Marion] Young's ideas of civic action and even disobedience are critical to a thriving democracy, but what happens when one set of actors are so successful in curtailing women's legal rights to autonomy and control over their own body? What happens when the state intervenes too much? What needs to be done then?

A time-lapse of the opening of the Pop-Up Studio-X in Shenzhen, with contributions by Studio-X NYC.

OK, move over pigeons: it's time talk about squirrels and the city!

Penn historian Etienne Benson has just published a new paper titled "The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States," and it is a fascinating story indeed.

For starters, it turns out squirrels haven't simply stayed in place as we urbanized around them: instead, they were eradicated and then deliberately re-introduced. In a press release, Benson explains:

By the mid-19th century, squirrels had been eradicated from cities. In order to end up with squirrels in the middle of cities, you had to transform the urban landscape by planting trees and building parks and changing the way that people behave. People had to stop shooting squirrels and start feeding them.

Benson tracks down the first documented squirrel introduction, in Philadelphia's Franklin Square in 1847, and tracks their growing popularity as part of the Olmstead-era urban parks movement. At the height of their popularity, in the 1880s and 1890s, squirrels were not only seen as ornaments, adding natural beauty to the city, but also as a way to civilize the urban poor and immigrants: feeding squirrels would help tame their "native" cruelty, went the enlightened thinking of the day.

The article is open access and well worth a read, and Benson's other work also looks super interesting: he's currently studying how non-humans create their own infrastructural systems to live in human-dominated landscapes (inspired by zip-lining squirrels visible from his back porch), and in the past has written about wireless wildlife tracking and created an interactive map of applications to import polar bear trophies to the United States between 1997 and 2008.

Meanwhile, do not worry, we are already plotting a squirrel walk for the spring!

Somehow we missed the leaked design drawings from the Church of Scientology's $100 million "Super Power Building" when The Village Voice obtained and published them in January 2012.

The Gensler-designed building was dedicated last month, although it is not yet open. Nonetheless, The Guardian takes this opportunity to re-visit some of its more unique features, which include a super-powers suite, complete with a human gyroscope, spike-enhanced "pain station," and an "oiliness table" (?), an indoor running track, and a smell and taste wall whose flavors range from magnolia to fig.

We are stunned. This must have been the most amazing design brief ever! More drawings at The Village Voice. Insider and early visitor reports very welcome!

Via Jake Barton (Local Projects), who would have killed to be on the design team for this.

studiox-global

POP-UP Studio-X Shenzhen opens its doors soon!

Conceived for the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013,  POP-UP STUDIO-X SHENZHEN will generate new modes of thinking and sharing within the context of the Pearl River Delta. Visitors and participants will be invited to re-define the space, interface with collaborative tools both in workshop and experimental platforms. Studio-X directors will share research materials that reflect on the concept of “urban border” across national and international spaces, and a host of events will explore the value of cultural production of cities relevant to Hong Kong and Shenzhen’s urbanism.

POP-UP STUDIO-X SHENZHEN Opening Event Saturday, December 7th, at 15:30 Venue: Guangdong Float Glass Factory / Value Factory

Smell-walkers! We have two important pieces of information for you.

(1) Victoria Henshaw, leader of last fall's legendary Smellwalk NYC, has a new book out: Urban Smellscapes: Understanding and Designing City Smell Environments. From the blurb: "With case studies from factories, breweries, urban parks, and experimental smell environments in Manchester and Grasse, Urban Smellscapes identifies processes by which urban smell environments are managed and controlled, and gives designers and city managers tools to actively use smell in their work."

(2) Juniper Ridge, a self-described "wild" fragrance company based in Brooklyn, is leading smell foraging walks in Williamsburg — and distilling the results into perfume. Studio-X NYC's former co-director, Geoff Manaugh, joined one walk, which seems to have been equal parts hilarious hipster unintentional self-parody and genuinely fascinating environmental exploration. You can (and should) read about his adventures in full at Gizmodo, where you'll also find links to sign up for future perfume walks. Meanwhile, keep your eyes open for a lost grove of coastal redwoods in Brooklyn!

As you take to the skies for the Thanksgiving break, check out the history and future of U.S. airspace design. It's crowded up there, but, as Steve Kelley, a former air traffic controller who's in charge of the FAA's current redesign, explains: "The airspace is the airspace. No one's going to give us more of it. We just have to use it better."

The intense radiation still emitted by Chernobyl's ruined Reactor 4 is currently contained by a rusting, decaying shelter of concrete and metal panels called the sarcophagus, built quickly immediately after the accident.

Now, seven years after the sarcophagus' planned expiration date, suited and masked construction-workers are scrambling to finish its replacement: a gigantic metal igloo as tall as the Statue of Liberty and as wide as a football pitch. The BBC has an amazing story and images from the site, including a nifty explanation of how the two halves of the arch will be moved into place post-construction (the area around the reactor is too radioactive to allow on-site construction).

This isolation container is meant to last 100 years, which is still a drop in the bucket compared to the half-life of uranium. The hope, however, is that sometime during the next century, we'll figure out how to lift out the remains of the reactor and bury it safely.

Eventually, when the arch seals off the reactor, the plan is for giant cranes to lift out the remains of the reactor and what's left of the fuel, which melted and flowed like lava into chambers beneath it. But there are fears the cranes would quickly become so radioactive they could not be maintained, and would gradually stop working. There is also still no suitable nuclear waste dump in the country.

Philippe Casse acknowledges that getting rid of all this highly radioactive material will be far more difficult than building the arch.

"Disposal will be an even bigger project," he says.

"There is no money at the moment.

"It could be done in 50 years' time. Perhaps there will be the technology to solve the problem then."

In the meantime, this gigantic arch will stand as an epic monument to our helplessness in the face of nuclear radiation's duration and danger.

We've added architect Sean Lally's book to our Christmas wish list based on the title alone: The Air from Other Planets: A Brief History of Architecture to Come (Lars Müller Publishers, 2013).

The Graham Foundation, which supported its publication, describes the book as "a speculation into an architecture produced by designing the energy within our environment (electromagnetic, thermodynamic, acoustic, and chemical)." Sounds like our cup of tea. If you're in Chicago on December 5, you can RSVP to attend its launch party here.

The Bi-City Biennale of Architecture\Urbanism in Shenzhen doesn't open until December 6, but you can get a sneak peek today in this video of from our November 8 event with curators Jeffrey Johnson and Zoe Florence, and participants Leong Leong, Rafi Segal, Interboro Partners, and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss.

In this obviously biased but still quite interesting New Statesman article, the marketing team at Biamp, an audio engineering firm, collect examples of impact from experiments in conscious building- and urban-scale soundscape design, such as the 15 percent drop in reported crime in Lancaster, California, following the installation of a birdsong-based soundscape in the downtown area.

Meanwhile, if your Monday morning is proving particularly challenging (as they are wont to do), give this soothing soundtrack a try — just don't blame us if you get all your holiday shopping done, too!

What you’re listening to now is a generative sound installation that Glasgow Airport trialled in its departures terminal – the scheme was put in place to try to sooth passengers in a potentially stressful environment. In this case researchers found that travellers admitted to feeling more relaxed, even in cases where they hadn’t realised the soundscape was playing. And perhaps more surprisingly, retailers noticed an uplift in sales during the trial, with some periods seeing an increase of nearly 10 per cent in passenger spending.

Via @LondonSounds.

In today's Observer, architecture editor Rowan Moore explores Europe's largest infrastructure project: London's new Crossrail line. Moore adds that, in addition to the cost, miles, tons of dirt moved, and other construction superlatives, it also "it claims to be the largest archaeological site in Britain, an inadvertent probe through a plague pit, a Roman road, a madhouse cemetery, a Mesolithic 'tool-making factory.'"

In addition to a stunning slideshow, the piece is full of fascinating details: the construction workers, many of whom are former miners who lost their jobs when the pits closed in Yorkshire and Wales, wear metal tags, "which means they can be identified if incinerated." Moore adds:

Miners, I am also told, make the best gardeners, as they want to spend as much of their leisure time as possible in the fresh air.

Two of the more astonishing architectural achievements are offsite — outside of London altogether. In parenthesis, Moore refers to the fact that "in Sheffield, an entire station has been prefabricated for erection in London." Meanwhile, I have put Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy, or Tuca," on my itinerary for my visit: it's "a large hangar-like building in Ilford, Essex, the majority of whose cost has been paid for by Crossrail. Here, in a facility that 'doesn't exist anywhere else in the world', full-size mock-ups of tunnel building sites are created, where noise and hazards are simulated." They also have two of the amazing multistory concrete-spraying robots used to line the cavern walls.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the article is the way it reveals the incompatible timelines of major infrastructural investments and urban change. Crossrail's route seems slightly arbitrary in today's London, missing the opportunity to connect to Eurostar or Heathrow's Terminal 5, as well as the areas of the largest expansion around London, and that, Moore suggests, is because it was planned so long ago:

Versions of it were proposed in the 19th century and in the 1940s and the 1970s, before being put forward again in 1989. Parliament deemed it too expensive in 1994 and it was nearly frozen again in 2008, when the looming financial crisis made such huge expenditure look like a bad idea. It is rumoured that it only got through because the then transport minister, Andrew Adonis, also an enthusiast for HS2, slipped it under Gordon Brown's nose when the prime minister was distracted by thoughts of holding a snap election. According to Tony Travers, an expert in London planning at the London School of Economics, "putting the funding together took years and required valiant efforts by London First and the City of London Corporation. The government had to be lobbied for nearly two decades."

Travers adds: "Crossrail is an example of the odd way we plan projects. In brief, either you get this one big project or the money disappears. There is never an alternative use for the public resources. It is very hard to be sure about value for money. Having said that, major railways in London or the south-east are almost always going to give better cost-benefit figures than the same project anywhere else in the UK." In other words, Crossrail is being built not because it is definitely the best way of spending the money, but because it was so large and so persistently put forward that the government grew tired of saying no.

You should read the article in full for many other fascinating details of near-misses (an 80cm brush with the Northern line), property values, art commissions, and more...

Another of our past events lives on in video form: at the opening of his new exhibition, Very Large Organizations, architect Jordan Geiger and Studio-X NYC Director Nicola Twilley (a.k.a. me) discussed border control, the metric system, illegal drugs, and more. Watch it now, and then come by Studio-X NYC on Monday or Tuesday, November 25 and 26, to catch the exhibition during its final couple of days.

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