Cornell Architecture

“Metallic Elevation” by Raihaan Bose (B.Arch ‘26) — For Core Studio ARCH 3102: Exquisite Corpse (Spring 2023) Professor: Val Warke — 10 trusses leave the ground plane to encounter 10 cubes flying above. Slipping through solids where giant steel elements puncture out into the light, the cubes remain in a delicate stasis, like anchored balloons.

“Richard Rogers Drawing Gallery” by Natasha Becker (B.Arch ‘26) and Raihaan Bose (B.Arch ‘26) — For ARCH 2613: Structural Systems (Fall 2022) Professor: Mark Cruvellier — The model hopes to distill the simple form of the gallery and highlight its exo-skeletal structure. Relying on just two pinned connections and eight tension rods to anchor it, the remaining entirety of the structure is left to hover over the grounds of Château La Coste. The trusswork constituting the secondary structure echoes the slope of the site and emphasizes the volume's departure from it. In both its attachment to the earth and to the gallery space proper, the Richard Rogers Drawing Gallery performs dramatics with its modest prefabricated elements.

"Continuum” by Edwin Flores (B.Arch ‘27) — For Core Studio: Architectures of Tourism (Spring 2025) Professor: Katharina Kral — At its greatest extent, The Erie Canal lasted for 100 years, before becoming obsolete and fragmenting into artifacts of its former self. Despite this, the nostalgia and memory of the canal persisted, and currently exists as an imagined patchwork that drives local tourism. Romanticism of the canal glosses over the material conditions of current communities, particularly the challenges of living in what has become the Rust Belt. As an exercise of literally and metaphorically stitching together community with tourism, a site between the Mohawk River and Canal Place Street in Little Falls, NY is chosen, whereby three existing buildings are intervened at varying degrees to reflect the Erie Canal’s history of impermanence by embracing temporality in its material framework. Impermanent materials, reconfigurable structural systems, and spaces designated for temporary exhibitions enable the site to undergo continual reinvention.

“Tableau’s Curriculum” by Zachary Stephens (B.Arch ‘27) — For Rome Studio Professors: Luben Dimcheff, Maria Claudia Clemente, and Francesco Isidori — Situated within the historic ruins of the Baths of Caracalla is a series of scaffolding holes from the original construction. The concept of this project was to reinvent these openings as spaces for user-generated architecture, using the site as a kind of playground for creation. Paired with the studio’s assigned program, an architecture school, this approach generated a school that was constructed incrementally by students over the course of the semester. The project is primarily represented through line drawings and models. This approach was used to experiment with construction techniques as well as the possibilities generated by the implied spaces of a self-made school. Rather than presenting the architecture as a finalized design, the work frames it as an infinite series of possibilities, questioning what studio space within an architecture school can be.

“The Roof The Ground” by Yue-Linda Lin (B.Arch ‘25) — For Option Studio: Desert Studio (Fall 2024) Professors: Margaret Kirk, Christiana Moss — This project is an educational convention center in Tres Rios, Phoenix that combines offices, exhibition spaces, classrooms, FEMA disaster relief, and short-term housing. Positioned between the Tres Rios Wetland and a restricted water treatment facility, it makes these typically inaccessible systems visible and legible to the public. The building is organized around a central square that establishes a clear spatial core, with circulation moving diagonally to structure the exhibition sequence and guide visitors through the space. These paths draw from the logic of water flow, linking movement, form, and program. By integrating indoor and outdoor spaces, the project frames water infrastructure as both operational and educational while situating the architecture within its environmental context.

“RE: CURRENT” by Osiel Aldaba (B.Arch ‘26) — For Option Studio: Alterations (Fall 2025) Professor: Nicole Bouchard — RE: CURRENT proposes a public bath house that operates as a sewage and water treatment system for the SouthWorks development site in Ithaca, NY. While the main SouthWorks site remains to be developed, there are no current plans to address sewage usage on the 500,000 square feet of retail, office, and residential. Public understanding of our “public works” has decreased over the last millennia, and this project proposes a merging of the bath house and sewage infrastructures. Wastewater is collected, processed, and returned through a sequence of large concrete tubes that contain both infrastructure and water experiences. Filtration, settling, biological treatment, and thermal exchange are spatially exposed and architecturally legible. Within these same tubes, visitors encounter steam rooms, baths, and running water shaped by heat, flow, and gravity generated by the system itself. The act of bathing is continuously contrasted with the infrastructure that shapes our daily lives.

“Ghost in the Shell” by Tracy Qiu (B.Arch ‘26) — For Option Studio: Carnival / Opera: Investigations in Genre and Architecture (Fall 2025) Professor: Val Warke — Developed from a study of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” this theater in New Orleans translates themes of ambiguity, visibility, and ghostly presence into architectural form. Responding to the site’s billboards, the design reinterprets them as elevated, linear circulation along the east and west edges. These inhabitable facades organize audience, performer, and service movement through layers of reflection, opacity, and distortion, creating fragmented perceptions of bodies in motion. Program spaces, including an outdoor theater, a main auditorium, and an experiential theater using Pepper’s Ghost, are embedded between the two circulation bands, with projecting arms inserting audiences at multiple levels. During Mardi Gras, the outdoor theater activates the site through a reversed, backstage entry sequence. The experiential theater extends performance into the street, merging architecture, spectacle, and public space into a continuous theatrical environment.

“Onion Stop” by Ben Pahucki (B.Arch ‘26) and Yimiao Sun (MS.AAD ‘26) — For Building Technology Seminar: Surplus Assemblies (Fall 2025) Professor: Catherine Chen — Due to the absence of a domestic futures trade market, the onion is the most volatile agricultural commodity that is publicly traded within the United States. This pavilion hacks the resultant cycle of onion surpluses in Ithaca, NY by revealing fermentation as an embodied ritual that links communal intervention with microbial preservation. In the form of a bus stop adjacent to Cornell University’s campus, this new civic infrastructure processes local onions in a circuit of acid-battery cells, powering a bulb for occupants. When harvests are light, pickle jars remain as community reserves shared or sold through local cooperatives. By reappropriating materials from local demolition sites, the structure itself embodies a chronicle of the city’s agricultural and social climates as a living monument to transformation, landscape, and collective nourishment

“Minimum Footprint” by Leonor Robalino (B.Arch ‘26) and Roxana Mora (B.Arch ‘26); “Land: House: Farmer” by Leonor Robalino (B.Arch ‘26) — For Option Studio: Edible Homes (Fall 2025) Professors: Claire Weisz and Marcos Escamilla-Guerrero — A two-part exploration of architecture as a framework for living, growing, and sustaining. “Minimum Footprint” is situated on an imagined site, and analyzes square footage across housing types to develop a vertical four-story farmworker tower. The project is elevated on stilts to concentrate essential domestic spaces while prioritizing crop cultivation and farmland preservation. “Land: House: Farmer” expands this work with a modular two-bedroom unit for the Chester Agriculture Center in Chester, NY. Housing is organized around a central service core with open living space and perimeter bedrooms, arranged into four sections that collectively frame a shared open courtyard which supports community, efficient construction methods, and repeatable housing strategies.

“Anatomical Theatre of Thebes” by Jose Ortega (B.Arch ‘26) — For Option Studio: Carnival / Opera: Investigations in Genre and Architecture (Fall 2025) Professor: Val Warke — The project reimagines Oedipus, the tragic figure from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, as an urban opera house in New Orleans. The procession begins in the outdoor piazza, where the entrance is framed by Oedipus’s feet, an etymological reference to his name, meaning “swollen foot.” From here, a network of labyrinthine catwalks then leads either to the balconies of the main theatre or to a series of crossroads within the terraced heterotopic gardens. The climax is the experimental theatre: a courtyard of anatomical artifacts recalling Palazzo Mattei, where balconies extrude from Oedipus’s eyes. This experience of disorientation, informed by precedents such as Aymonino’s Il Colosso, Hejduk’s Watchtowers of Cannaregio, and the Borromeo statue in Milan, reenacts Oedipus’s wandering between Thebes, Delphi, and Corinth, in search of his own circumstances. As such, the opera becomes a mythological arrival, in which his monumentalized body is rediscovered by the city’s own culture of carnivalization.

“Braga Stadium Model” by Brian Cocero (B.Arch ‘29) William Day (B.Arch ‘29), and Lucas Leeds (B.Arch ‘29) — For ARCH 2601: Structural Systems II (Fall 2025) Professor: Mark Cruvellier TA’s: Lily Rose Mager and Miller Huang — Braga Stadium feels almost unreal, carved into the landscape yet defined by precision. Massive concrete meets a delicate suspended roof, creating a tension between weight and lightness. This 62 × 12 inch sectional model captures that balance, revealing the stadium’s asymmetrical organization and the systems beneath the pitch. Flared capital columns rise with clarity, while roof cables stretch outward and anchor into the earth. By exposing what is usually hidden, the model makes the full structural logic visible, turning complexity into something legible, intentional, and striking.

“House of Possibility” by Fah Vangtook (MS.AAD ‘26) — For Option Studio: Informal Futures: Housing in Mathare, Kenya (Fall 2025) Professor: Felix Heisel — In the currently overcrowded Mathare, communities have formed, and one natural factor influences another in onsite design and solutions. There is a sincere expression through facades, spaces, and the beauty of emerging material combinations. In forced efficiency within boundaries, design reveals itself. Home and life are inseparable and extend beyond the boundary of what is defined as a private house and the outdoors. The space in between becomes important. While nothing is certain and everything changes over time, these spaces allow informal activities and liveliness to thrive. In this project, a house is made of possibilities, yet holds identity and belonging, a community within a network of communities. This project aims to elevate quality of life by providing options to build spaces beyond current basic conditions, while maintaining identity and a sense of belonging for individuals. The idea of the setting also integrates an urban plan to activate connections to the river and future possibilities.