SITU Studio lecture

Brooklyn-based SITU Studio was founded in 2005 by Basar Girit, Aleksey Lukyanov-Cherny, Wes Rozen, and Bradley Samuels, who were then completing architecture degrees at The Cooper Union. With a commitment “to interrogating design ideas through physical and material experimentation at a wide range of scales,” SITU Studio is organized into three divisions: design studio, fabrication, and research.

In their Emerging Voices lecture, the partners detail their interdisciplinary practice and the wide range of spatial issues they explore through process-driven driven. With their workspace split evenly between a design studio and fabrication shop, the firm engages in material and spatial experimentation through collaborations that “seek new territory for the designer’s role in politics, science, society, and the environment.”

These methods of working are demonstrated in two design projects presented, the Maker Space and Design Lab for the New York Hall of Science and the Heartwalk installation, first placed in Times Square.

Four research projects are also detailed:

• the Trezona Fossil Reconstruction, with Professor Adam Maloof of Princeton University’s geosciences department
• an inquiry into civilian causalities by drone strikes for the United Nations, conducted in collaboration with Professor Eyal Weizman of Goldsmiths, University of London
• Forensic Architecture, an analysis and visual study of the impact of Air Burst White Phosphorus munitions in urban environments, in collaboration with Forensic Architecture, and
• research into illegal housing conversions and the hidden density of New York City, with proposals for new modular apartment typologies. Commissioned for MoMA’s Uneven Growth exhibit, which opens this fall.