THE OPEN WORKSHOP

Columbia GSAPP is pleased to announce the appointment of Neeraj Bhatia as Director of the M.S. in Architecture and Urban Design program and Associate Professor, effective July 2026. “GSAPP’s Urban Design program has pioneered an ecological approach to the urban, and serves as a critical arena for testing and anticipating how the world operates,” highlights Dean Andrés Jaque. “Neeraj brings a rare ability to articulate design experimentation with climate, housing, spatial justice, governance, and the politics that organize collective life, while also ensuring that these investigations percolate beyond exhibitions and academic discourse into built realities, policy, and decision-making.” Bhatia is one of the world’s leading voices in urban design today, particularly at the intersection of climate and housing urgencies. This appointment marks a significant moment for the program and reaffirms the School’s continued commitment to engaging territorial realities and infrastructural ecologies at the intersection of architecture and urbanism. Bhatia succeeds Kate Orff following her transformative tenure as Director of the M.S. in Architecture and Urban Design program since 2015. A globally leading voice in landscape architecture and climate urbanism, Orff will continue to focus on the GSAPP Earth Studio and her strategic role in bridging the School's design strategy and action-oriented impulse with the scientific strengths of the Columbia Climate School. We are thrilled to welcome Neeraj Bhatia to Columbia GSAPP.

Humbled and grateful to have been awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture by the @amacademyrome 🇮🇹 While in Rome this fall, I will look three key periods where housing was scaled through typological frameworks: the Roman insulae, prewar, and postwar social housing developed through the Istituto Autonomo per le Case Popolari by architects such as Innocenzo Sabbatini, Ludovico Quaroni , and Mario Fiorentino. Tracing the relationship between formal organization, permanence, and social appropriation across time, the project asks how typology can address questions of scaling while remaining situated within a specific social and environmental context. Many thanks to those that supported this application including Sarah Whiting, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Ersela Kripa, Keith Krumwiede, Dan Spiegel, Megumi Aihara, and John Cary. @ww.architecture @dogma.name @ersela_kripa @keithkrumwiede @dan.spiegel @saw.inc @johncaryjr ❤️ Hope to touch base with friends in Europe this fall! 📷 Nico Zurcher

⚡️YAY! ⚡️Super excited to launch the 2nd printing/ edition of ’New Investigations in Collective Form’. Published by @ardpublishing and #ccaarchitecturebooks, the expanded edition contains three additional projects and five additional writing pieces. The book features projects and research by The Open Workshop with written contributions by: Pier Vittorio Aureli (foreword); Charles Waldheim (Introduction); Peggy Deamer (Afterword), Clare Lyster, Keith Krumwiede, Jenny Odell, Albert Pope, Rafi Segal and curators Lucía Sanromán and Martin Stickland. #newinvestigationsincollectiveform #theopenworkshop #catalog #piervittorioaureli #charleswaldheim #peggydeamer #clarelyster #keithkrumwiede #jennyodell #albertpope #rafisegal #ybca #yerbabuenacenterforthearts #collectiveform #architecture #urbanism @dogma.name @charleswaldheim @jennitaur @clarelyster @peggydeamer @keithkrumwiede @pope_70198 @segal_rafi @rafisegal_au @lucia.sanroman.1 @martinjaystrickland @cca_arch_div @oro_editions @ardpublishing

TO LIVE AND BUY IN L.A. A collaboration between @saw.inc @theopenworkshop 2025- While ADUs are just one small tool to address the housing shortfall in California, they have garnered disproportionate attention due to their quaint and seemingly innocuous presence. While ADUs are often framed as “naturally affordable” due to their smaller footprint, their affordability is not guaranteed nor subsidized and is often even improbable due to the difficulty of achieving economies of scale in construction. The ADU is torn, typologically, between full-functioning autonomous living and the ability to be reintegrated within the primary dwelling. As ADUs become smaller and smaller, they often compress communal domestic activities (kitchen, living, and dining spaces) in lieu of a functioning bedroom and bathroom. By attempting to maintain autonomy—or in other words, typological completeness—they sacrifice functionality for privacy. Often, they are reabsorbed into the primary dwelling to adapt to growing needs, producing a wasteful redundancy of programs—two kitchens, extra living rooms, etc. This proposal is grounded in a redistribution of the ADUs communal programs into a larger collective center, fostering increased flexibility, adaptability, and community. We do this by reducing the ADU down to a minimal footprint and pulling out (non-functioning) communal programs that are then aggregated, enlarged, and shared between units. Critically, this is not only more efficient but provides a higher quality and diversity of shared amenities that allows ADU residents to live luxuriously and more communally. Design Team: OWS: Neeraj Bhatia @neerajbhatia_ Jared Clifton @j__clifton Hannah Leathers @hannahhleathers SAW: Dan Spiegel @dan.spiegel Dustin Stephens, Shinji Miyajima, Jeremy Ferguson, Mischelle Abusada

Please join us February 12th at 5:30pm at CCA for a conversation connected to the launch of JAE 79:1, Architecture Beyond Extraction, which examines how architecture has long been entangled with extractive logics that draw out land, labor, and value, and asks what it might mean to design otherwise. Taking extraction not only as a material process but as a cultural and political condition shaped by colonialism and global capitalism, the issue reframes architecture’s role across scales—from the brick to the mine, from construction to institutions and pedagogy. It probes how extractive regimes permeate space, form, and inhabitation, while foregrounding alternative models rooted in care, reciprocity, mutualism, and solidarity. This launch brings together Melanie Louterbach @mel_louterbach Danielle Zoe Rivera @danielle.z.rivera and Tonia Sing Chi @peripheraloffice introduced and moderated by Zannah Matson @zannah.mae and Neeraj Bhatia @theopenworkshop for a discussion on how architectural practices, economies, and imaginaries might move beyond extraction toward more equitable and regenerative systems @cca_arch_div @urbanworksagency Architecture Beyond Extraction was produced by Theme Editors: Neeraj Bhatia, Jane Mah Hutton, Brittany Utting and Zannah Matson Executive Editor: McLain Clutter @mclainclutter Design Editor: Ozayr Saloojee @o.saloojee and the (now resigned) JAE Editorial Board. Cover Graphic by Andrea Vela Alarcón @its.allegra

LIFE AFTER PROPERTY opens @cudenvercap next week! Big thank you to @hearnesarah @li__leyuan for bringing this to life! About the exhibition: The lines drawn on land to claim ownership and demarcate property have had widespread ramifications on forming divisions — between race, class, ecologies, and social groups, amongst others. In the United States, the commodification of land is now so deeply entrenched with economic and social policies that it often is used as a form of economic support in the wake of dwindling forms of social security. Not only does this amplify divisions between classes, these policies reify in formal decisions that reaffirm this status quo. Despite the pervasiveness of commodified private property models, these are relatively nascent when compared to the history of the city and how humans have lived. Life After Property examines how the territory, neighborhood, block, and home can be reclaimed for more collectivized ways of living and being. The five projects presented consider techniques such as resistance, decommodification, commoning, re-graining, and framing, to offer more equitable ways of distributing resources—forming solidarity, community control, and forms of care to combat precarity. OWS Exhibition Team Neeraj Bhatia, Duy Nguyen, Caleb Bentley, Hannah Leathers @neerajbhatia_ @duy.sf @calebbentley @hannahhleathers Exhibition Commissioners Sarah Hearne and Leyuan Li Installation Team Emmett Booth and Catherine Nguyen LIFE AFTER PROPERTY was originally commissioned by The Knowlton School at The Ohio State University (Curated by Sandhya Kochar @follofello ) and has since been re-exhibited at Kent State University (Coordinated by Paul Mosley @paulmosley ) Photos here are taken from the Kent State Exhibition.

Some glimpses of the incredible work produced in the New Grammar for Collective Housing studio @columbiagsapp @gsapp_aad this summer. Congratulations to this amazing group of students: Sofia Paniagua (@sofiipaniagua ) and Julio Viejo Romero-Mazariegos (@refrigerator_old ), Hyunyoung Kim (@hyunyoungkimo_o ) and Yeonjoon Kang (@yeonjoon_4232 ), Natalia Riba Arevalo (@natribare ) and Valentina Lizcano (@vale.lizcano11 ), Eric Yucheng (@ericlniu ) and Abhishek Patel (@abhishekpatel7737 ), Sungjik Kim (@sungjik_kim_0 ) and Shiyu Wang (@w_sysharon ), and Violeta Mastronardi (@vio.le ) and George Koltiris (@george.koltiris ). This studio would not be possible without the support of our wonderful Teaching Associate, Khushi Saraiya (@khushi_saraiya )! Thank you to @lydiakallipoliti @andres_jaque @xiaoxi_projecting for the invitation to teach at GSAPP. A New Grammar for Collective Housing builds on the legacy of tenement housing in New York as well as Steven Holl’s analysis in the Alphabetical City to ask how buildings can produce reciprocal relationships across property lines. We were very lucky to have guest talks by @jcoescharff @petedyi and Laura Wainer. Lastly, thank you all of our guest reviewers Lasse Rau, David Moon, Marc Norman, Connor Gravelle, Alessandro Orsini, Uriel Fogue, Jack Murphy, Karen Kubey, Jonah Coe-Scharff, Katharina Sauermann, Adam Frampton, Laura Wainer, Daisy Ames, and Eric Bunge. Happy summer all!

Depth of Fields House, Edersee, Germany Part of the Ways of Life Cohousing Campus, ongoing Design Team: @j__clifton @neerajbhatia_ Model: @hannahhleathers @j__clifton Photographs and Stop Motion: @hannahhleathers

Excited to be the Jury Chair for the 2026 Steedman Fellowship! The $100,000 Fellowship is open to anyone, anywhere in the world, who has received an accredited degree in architecture within the last eight years. This years theme will be on “Collective Form/ Forums” (See link in comments). So honored to be on the jury with Jack Self @j_self , Nahyun Hwang @nahyun.hwang , Patty Heyda @heyphda , and Peter Tao! Please share widely - proposals are due Nov 1st.

Excited to announce that our Sawtooth House project recently received planning approval from the City of San Francisco and will go into construction this summer! Design Team: @j__clifton @neerajbhatia_ #theopenworkshop #sawtoothhouse

Regional Globalism opens today @utkcoad ! Come check out our project, This Land is Your Land, as well as fantastic work by @smoutallen @rvtrarchitecture @postborders @buckminister_mueller @starkmanly @avigailsachs and many others. This Land is Your Land 2022-2023 OWS team: @neerajbhatia_ @duy.sf @me_au @hannahhleathers

Excited to join the Harvard GSD Faculty as a Visiting Professor in Architecture this semester. My option studio is entitled The Territorial City, and will look at how the ongoing construction of the High-speed rail in California will connect and collapse the background and foreground landscapes of California. The territorial city is comprised of extreme density and diffusion; of only network and nodes; of both rural and urban. Most importantly, it is a city made up of networked building complexes that can leverage architecture’s capacity to impact territorial issues. This studio will focus on collective housing complexes in the Central Valley to address the growing needs of the state and ongoing struggles with housing affordability. Specifically, the studio will examine how to expand the domestic commons into a networked urban commons to produce decentralized models of care. Leveraging the network of the HSR, new forms of sharing physical and non-physical resources as well as engaging the benefits of scale can offer new forms of support that were not previously tenable in hinterland environments like the Central Valley. Thank you to Grace La and Sarah Whiting for the invitation! @harvardgsd