studioAPT

Custom design solution for Christmas. The issue, Bagel’s love of chewing (books) means that the bottom shelves have been covered with a makeshift protective layer of mylar and duct tape for years. The solution “Hinged” a system of fabricated plexiglass operable barriers that keep one voracious consumer of books at bay, while allowing the other to see the goods. Another in a series of “apt-plications” by @juliamcmorrough of @studioapt_design

MORE ROOM at the table: A Shared Digital Pedagogy. Pop-up Exhibition: March 22, 2024, at the University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, TVLab. The space of teaching architecture is changing, as is the teaching of architectural space. As the digital melds with the spatial, the question of how to learn amidst these conflicting paradigms of the corporeal and the cognitive has only been partially addressed, understood, or even acknowledged. MORE ROOM develops a pedagogy articulating the means and ends of making space through configuration and representation. This course of study includes guided instruction and individual exploration. One trajectory of context is a chronological presentation of depth creation across various mediums (architecture, painting, film, and digital) organized around historical transitions - surfaces to spaces, spaces to screens, screens to virtualities, and virtualities to spaces. Another set of instruction materials revolves around in-depth case studies embodying course thematics in developing conceptual and haptic understandings of how three-dimensional space has been represented in the past and will expand in the future. As a collection of digital and physical objects, the MORE ROOM coursework is organized around the interaction of difference upon a shared conceptual plane, a tabula inscripta for constructing MORE ROOM. Project Team: @ana_morcillo_pallares , @jonrule , @juliamcmorrough , @john_mcmorrough , and Ann Borek, Qilmeg Doudatcz, Ella Edelstein, Axel Olson. This project was made possible by a grant from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, generously supported by the Alan and Cynthia Fund for Prototyping Tomorrows.

Through play and interaction, "Access the Game: Get Together” (@studioapt_design ) facilitates an understanding of difference in the ways that people move through and interact with the world. The objective is simple: to bring everybody together into one shared space. Every turn brings an opportunity to move, but obstacles will abound, requiring re-calibrations of movement. How do you know if a person can move into a space? The forms will let you know right away if a wheelchair can have access, or where an ambulatory figure can stand. You'll figure out quickly what kinds of spaces make an environment available to all users. Playing the game sets up opportunities for cooperation, accommodation, and celebration of differences, toward increased understanding of barrier-free design. Seed funding for this project was made possible by a Taubman College Prototyping Tomorrow grant (2019). Come play the real thing as part of the @taubmancollege 'ON AIR: Faculty Work 2020-2022' exhibition! #accessibility #funandgames #gettogether

“The Harold Chicago Foundation for Improvisational Urbanism” – Proposal for The Available City, 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennale While in a constant state of change, the city, its infrastructures, and its buildings seem to the casual observer to be permanent. Why, then compare the city and its relative permanence to improvisation, a form that appears to exist without script or setting, which seems wholly based on impermanence? As a model for understanding Chicago's urbanity as one of improvisation and collaboration, we propose the Harold Chicago Foundation for Improvisational Urbanism. Named for an individual who does not exist, the project envisions a new kind of institution, theater, and workshop for the collaborative work of imagining the city. The design of the foundation, which is constantly changing, begins with a series of collaborative drawings that incorporate histories and images from the city. The structure features two primary spaces: an Urban Improv Study Center, where one can read, research, and watch recordings about Chicago and improvisation, and the City Stage, where those so emboldened can try their hands at performing the city. The Harold Chicago Foundation is not a planning agency, but it could be understood as a model for urbanists, both in its practices of inclusion and collaboration and in its products—performances that elucidate the manners and mores of contemporary life. In proposing a foundation for improvisational urbanism, we argue that the most pressing and ongoing issue of urban development is the creation of models by which to understand the city not as a static, known entity but rather as an evolving set of practices that accommodate difference and change. #chicago # improv #harold

City Cabin - In the need to densify and diversify existing urban fabrics, many cities are exploring the idea of Accessory Dwelling Units. Many of these ADUs will respond to the same basic needs and wants: affordability, accessibility, and sustainability; what this new kind of dwelling becomes will differ in each place. This proposal is an ADU that responds to essential needs, to the specific conditions of the city, but also to the imagination of being connected to living with, and in, nature. The City Cabin provides for several functional requirements. The scale and simplicity of its construction make it affordable, while the specification of resilient materials makes it sustainable. In its space planning of the interior, two “rooms” (a great room and a bedroom) with two other areas of smaller scale uses (the entry and the bathroom) make for an open, accessible plan. At the same time, the strategically placed opening allows for cross-ventilation, with the combination of chimney & skylight contributing to its energy efficiency. In the urban context, the City Cabin’s distinct silhouette and considered placement of doors and windows allow for expansion of typical boundaries. Instead of a “front” and a “back,” the City Cabin contributes to a layered frontage, with a close and far address visible from the street. As a form, it is an entity in its own right emphatically legible as a discrete object. Still, in fragmented viewing, from the road, from the neighbors’ lawn, its profile contributes to the urban assemblage.

“Remote Audience: Makin’ It – a sitcom pilot by StudioAPT,” from “Architecture Performance Live” by Joseph Altshuler and Zack Morrison of Could Be Architecture (@couldbearchitecture ); as published in MAS Context (@mascontext ) Issue 33: VIGILANTISM, guest-edited by Germane Barnes (@gmane16 ) and Shawhin Roudbari (@shawhin.roudbari ).

Excited for "Channel TWO (Taubman Workshop Online)" to be incorporated into "Source Material" (//sourcematerial.online/) a new website launched by the Academic Initiatives team of @taubmancollege . Channel TWO, envisioned as "a distributed framework for the creation of student-generated design experience content," was sponsored in the summer of 2020 by the Spatializing Digital Pedagogies grant program of the Academic Initiatives Team. In the new context, Channel Two videos are now part of the larger Source Material project to "offer an evolving, curated online archive of resources germane to curricula across programs." Thanks to the channel TWO production team responsible for the creation of these videos: Megan Clevenger (@mcclevenger ), Alan Escareño (@escareno.arch ), Nick Garcia (@_nickandres ), Tejashrii Shankarraman (@tejaview ), and Danrui Xiang (@danrui_x ), with studioAPT (@juliamcmorrough & @john_mcmorrough ) as content and concept coordination. Congratulations to the Taubman Academic Initiatives Team (@miakimiak , @jacobcomerci , @p_almaari ) on initiating and continuing such efforts. #SourceMaterial #channelTWO #SpatializingDigitalPedagogies #ArchitectureInstructionMedia #TaubmanCollege

Playing House (XOXO @one_house_per_day ): Plans from our week of being featured guests on @one_house_per_day , an ongoing collection of architectural conceptions illustrating the continuing possibility of configuration. Taken as a sequence, these houses are a series of options (gambits for realization), taken as a set; they are a study of variables (hugs and kisses for the discipline), taken as a field (in the nine-square implied by the seven positions of a week in the ongoing Instagram feed grid), they are an arrangement in a game of noughts and crosses. Architecture has taken to various developmental exercises over the course of its practice and scrimmages with the possibility provide a chance to play at design. The house is one such playground. Multiple thanks to the generosity of @andy_draws_buildings . For starting the @one_house_per_day feed, for sharing his own inspiring designs (all drawn by hand, all in plan, section, and axonometric only), and for opening it up the possibilities of guest contributors.

Teaching architecture fundamentals, one video at a time for @arcstart (virtual) high school summer camp. Video creation team: @anmol.11o1 @mytreyic @parti_party @tm_mcc @torri_x_design @john_mcmorrough and @juliamcmorrough . . #taubmancollege #arcstart #studioapt

“ACCESS Chess” now global! Last summer’s research into accessible design as part of a Taubman College Prototyping Tomorrow Grant culminated into the redesign of a series of games, including chess, the pieces of which now describe a range of abilities the goal of getting EVERYONE to the other side! Photo by project team member @danrui_x playing her travel version in Shenzhen, China.

studioAPT is honored to have been invited by Artistic Director David Brown to contribute to the forthcoming 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial (@chicagoarchitecturebiennial ). This year’s topic, The Available City, aspires to create “a critical global conversation that asks how design can foster collective engagement and agency to identify new forms of shared space in urban areas.” studioAPT (aka Julia & John) is excited for this opportunity to expand on our research into Chicago’s particular brand of long-form improvisation and urbanism, as well as to be among such an inspiring list of other contributors, including: Ana Miljački (@criticalbroadcast , @anamiljacki ), Ania Jaworska (@jaworskaania ), Atelier Bow-Wow (@tsukamotoyoshiharu ), Borderless Studio (@borderless_studio ), Central Park Theater Restoration Committee, Christophe Hutin Architecture, Departamento del Distrito (@deldistrito ), Drawing Architecture Studio (@drawingarchitecturestudio ), El Cielo (@elcielo_mx ), Englewood Nature Trail, Enlace Arquitectura + Ciudad Laboratorio, fala (@fala.atelier ), Gensler (Stone Soup Group), Hood Design Studio (@hooddesignstudio ), in care of Black women, Jill Desimini (@fromfallow ), Matri-Archi(tecture),Open Architecture + Under the Grid, The Open Workshop (@theopenworkshop ) Port (@porturbanism ), Outpost Office (@outpostoffice ), ProjectHOOD, Riff Studio, Soil Lab, Barnes with Shawhin Roudbari and MAS Context (@gmane16 @mascontext ), Studio Ossidiana, The Bittertang Farm (@bittertangfarm ) + Island Center, and Urban American City.

5:00 Minute Video, Commissioned for the opening of the @bairballiet exhibition "No More Room" at the @sciarc Gallery, 9 April 2021. Drawing on the conceptual model of Albert Brooks' "Comedy Minus One" (1973), and archival footage from @practice_architecture_talks this video speaks to the occasion of the exhibition's opening by restaging its architectural themes of incompleteness and multiplicity into the mediums of broadcast and conversation. For more information about the exhibition - https://www.sciarc.edu/events/exhibitions/bairballiet-no-more-room