COUNTRY MUSIC (2024)

Columbia GSAPP - Advanced Studio 4 - Contested Territories

“Landscape with Rainbow” by Robert Duncanson.

MASTER PLAN - GUILDERLAND, NY

THE FESTIVAL STAGE

RECORDING STUDIOS

HOSPITALITY

Re-imagining Blackness in the Hudson River Valley

Black musicians in the Hudson River Valley have played a significant role in music history, especially when 500,000 people descended upon the small farm town of Bethel, NY for the Woodstock Music & Art Festival in 1969. But since Jimi Hendrix exited the stage after closing out the iconic festival, spaces and platforms for black musicians have ceased to exist in the region. As we re-imagine the Hudson River Valley for black communities, I propose a sanctuary for black musicians to live and record music and a festival for black artists to be the voices of a changing cultural, political, and ecological landscape in upstate New York.

Located on 77 acres in Guilderland, NY, the Sanctuary for Black Musicians offers hospitality for black musicians to live and record music in a secluded natural landscape. 15 villas house up to 30 musicians and 6 recording studios of varying layouts are available for the musicians to use on site. Villas are made with a reclaimed wood facade and thatch roof, maintaining the use of local materials and historic building practices. Recording studios are constructed with black ceramic blocks that feature an extruded spike motif, linking references between ceramics of the African diaspora and acoustic foams found inside recording studios, bringing the language of interior activity to the exterior. The studios are designed to enable opportunities for collaboration across studios, artists, and practices. Courtyards offer spaces for reflection and connection, both critical in the production of music. A Sound Garden, adjacent to the artist hospitality and studios, fosters trans-species music creation. Bamboo, known for its acoustic properties of sound absorption, creates a plant-walled outdoor recording studio that allows for different sounds and frequencies to be explored, while maintaining the performance of an indoor recording studio.

28 acres of land are dedicated to performance venues and festival grounds. A 40,000 sq ft outdoor stage, built as a monolithic earth mound, offers a unique 360 degree outdoor concert experience for thousands of audience members. The stage mound is designed for the performer to ascend and descend, engaging with audiences that varying levels of intimacy. Acoustics are built into the stage so that the stage itself becomes a speaker system, while providing unobstructed views to audiences in all directions. The spike motif, seen as facades for recording studios, returns as vessels for stage lights that shoot up into the sky.

Music spawns change. Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, and Fela Kuti act as ancestral guides to inform and inspire the design of spaces for music creation, expression, and it’s impact. Pop music and mass culture rarely manifest outside of cities, yet the Woodstock Festival of 1969 was a display of how music can transform rural sites into emblems of liberation, protest, unity, and political innovation. COUNTRY MUSIC addresses and continues the 50+ year legacy of music’s pivotal role in transforming landscapes in rural New York.

Site Section

FILM - TREMORS IN THE EARTH

TREMORS IN THE EARTH is a collage of ground breaking, exceptional black expression in an era of violence and oppression in the 1960s and 1970s. The film is set to Jimi Hendrix's "This Is America", a song that resembled a changing national identity in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and a rampant Cold War nuclear testing program.

Text is from Nina Simone's performance of "Are You Ready?" from the Harlem Cultural Festival, a critical moment that displayed the power of an artist, on a stage, using music as a call to action to fight for rights and freedom.

ARCHIVE PHOTO ESSAY - BLACK IN WHITE

Black experience and expression at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair.

Bethel, NY - 1969

REFERENCES

Robert Duncanson - The Hudson River School - 19th Century

The Spike Motif - Art of the African Diaspora

Lobi Vessel - Burkina Faso | Theaster Gates Ceramic | 12 Inch Voices - Virgil Abloh | Acoustic Foam

Building, Structure, Material

Monks Mound - Cahokia, IL | Cupboard - Simone Leigh | Ground Rules (Black Line) - Theaster Gates

BETWEEN BUILDING AND MOUNTAIN (2023)

Columbia GSAPP - CORE 3 - States of Housing

What if there was no compromise between building and garden? If housing became 1OO% green space, then you must live in the green space... you must live inside a mountain.

Greens paces have therapeutic qualities. How can housing become a site of wellness and care? Wellness can be broken down into mental, physical, and nutritional components. Our housing addresses all three. An indoor hydroponic farm takes over an existing building, now sunken into the mountain. Produce grown is utilized at a plant-based cafe on site, which serves the residents and surrounding Harlem community. A gym offers physical well-being to residents and memberships are sold to external guests. A meditation space and library offer space for reflection and learning.

Interior spaces embed residents and visitors into the mountain. Thick, cavernous walls create narrow corridors and passageways to foster an exploratory experience of space. Residential units feature smooth, curved walls for a serene atmosphere at the mountain’s edge. Minimal interiors create a sense of calm.

71 units aggregate with varying layouts to support diverse spatial needs of residents: studio, 1 bedroom, and 2 bedroom.

Ground Floor Plan

Unit Models

Massing Study Models

Conceptual Graphics

Is there any distinction between the built environment and the natural environment?

REFERENCES

“HOW TO DOMESTICATE A MOUNTAIN” by Anna Neimark & Andrew Atwood | Perspecta 46 - Error

Eduardo Chillida

Göreme - Cappadocia, Turkey

Burial Site (2023)

Columbia GSAPP - CORE 2 - Damage Control

When something is buried, it becomes a capsule of time, a relic of the past.

In 2018, Montecito, California experienced catastrophic mudslides that left the town sunken under 15 feet of mud. Extreme climate events continue to occur across California, depositing natural materials in domestic spaces and rendering them as ‘damaged’. Natural materials and debris are then removed from domestic space and either taken to landfill, or deposited on the state’s coastline, infecting coastal ecosystems with foreign bacterias. I aim to re-contextualize damage, tragedy, and disaster response in a productive manner by proposing that natural materials are utilized in-situ at the site of damage to build and rebuild, leaving wealthy, isolated suburban housing and aesthetics sunken in the past.

The project re-activates a neighborhood that was completely destroyed by the mudslide in 2018. Burial Site excavates the sunken homes in the neighborhood, transforming the neighborhood into a cultural site where residents and visitors can view the archaic suburban architecture that was once there. 2 pavilions are to be built using guastavino tile bricks made out of the mud in-situ, fast-setting gypsum mortar, and full coverage of white lime plaster. The Mound Burial Pavilion acts as a damage gallery, where visitors can view various kinds of mudslide damage (beauty) through 3 open-air gallery spaces: a sunken home, a large boulder, and a stone and tree garden. The Porous Pavilion takes inspiration from indigenous hydrology and flood resilience, utilizing a pervious design to allow mud and liquid to flow through the structure. This pavilion is designed to be multi-functional for gatherings, performances, or collective action.

Visitors can experience the site via pathways that take viewers around larger archaeological excavations. 3 additional homes are framed by mud brick and lime plaster walls that isolate the damage zones for viewing.

Infrastructure - Sustaining The Site

During the 2018 mudslide, mud was carried into Montecito via 4 major creeks. However, a much wider creek system is present in the foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountain range, which was not activated during the climate event. This created centralized zones of damage along the 4 creeks. I designed a tunnel and debris basin system that would mitigate and decentralize the damage of future mudslides. The tunnels are designed to carry mud across the mountain range, utilizing natural slopes and forces of gravity to carry mud between major and minor creeks. Debris basins, which catch mud, boulders, and debris from mudslides before they enter domestic spaces are prevalent into Southern California, but not in Montecito. I designed 4 debris basins that are positioned on the final slopes of the mountain range to help mitigate the volume of natural materials entering domestic space.

Model - Santa Ynez Mountain Range

A model of the Santa Ynez Mountain range with tunnels implemented into the landscape. The model is made of recycled cob bricks from the Natural Materials Lab at Columbia GSAPP.

Research - “This is how the mud flows…”

Thomas Fire (Dec 2017) | Low Pressure System (Jan 2018) | Mudslide Map + Damage Zones | Satellite Images Before + After Mudslide

A Grasshopper fluid dynamics simulation of a mudslide running through the neighborhood of my site in Montecito, California.

Film - “Are You Washed In The Mud?”

…collaging the aesthetics of living in mud…

REFERENCES

Michael Heizer, City | Garden Valley, Nevada | 1970-2022 — Michael Heizer, North East South West | Beacon, New York | 1967 / 2002

Stupa | Buddhist burial mound containing relics and remains | 5th Century BCE - 5th Century CE

Francis Kéré Architecture | Gando, Burkina Faso

Pavilion For Black Lives Matter (2022)

Columbia GSAPP - CORE 1 - Broadway Stories

A pavilion designed for Black Lives Matter advocates, allies, and protestors is positioned on the Hudson River and emulates strategies of protest by occupying a critical artery to the city; disrupting commercial nautical traffic and the flow of capital through the river. As protestors voice their support for Congress to pass the BREATHE Act, they inhabit the waters of the Hudson via floating piers and establish operations outside of the inequitable systems enforced on Manhattan Island, creating a testbed for new forms of organization, expression, and care. Designed in a circular shape, the multi-functional structure is designed for performance, public forum, and resource distribution. The circle allows for inversion: performance and forum occur in traditional formats in the center, but also in decentralized formats around the perimeter, with viewers occupying the central area. This decentralized experience breaks down the hierarchies between performer, protestor, and viewer. The space is envisioned to be activated by exceptional performers such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company or Florida A&M’s Marching 100. The structure is veiled by white debris mesh netting, which broadcasts silhouettes of activity occurring within the space on the facade for external audiences. Through the construction of a 1:50 scale architectural model, I was able to test the material choices for my intervention and create speculative ambiances for activity to take place. By testing multiple lighting scenarios, I was able to confirm the the mesh’s ability to expand the scope of activity within the space, moving from interiority to exteriority. Translating this concept in a 1:1 model, a white organza hoodie broadcasts the body to viewers and puts pressure on societal and media-informed representations of black bodies. The hoodie becomes a uniform for performance and a symbol for protest.

Architectural Model (1:50 Scale)

laser cut matboard | 3D printed ramps + doors | aluminum scaffolding | white organza fabric | marble powder ground texture