Current MA Design Studies student Claudia Marina is published in Issue 20 of The Avery Review, a project of Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Her paper, “Checking in: David Adjaye’s Sugar Hill Project, Two Years Later,” is the result of a research project that began at the beginning of 2016 in Jilly Traganou’s “Research and Methods” course. The paper investigates the Sugar Hill Project, a collaboration between developer Broadway Housing Communities and architect David Adjaye, two years into the building’s architectural afterlife.

“As a journalist, I am comfortable writing these types of stories as I don’t see much of a diversion from investigative reporting, especially when you use interviews as a significant component of your research process. I felt it was important to ask the questions that weren’t being addressed in the initial wave of criticism and news stories that I was reading. That is, how are people actually going on with their lives, and does ‘starchitecture’ really affect its tenants and a neighborhood as much as critics said it would? My peers and I interviewed different actors in the building’s program. What resulted went beyond traditional journalism and considers design at various levels in the shaping of lives in Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood.”—Claudia Marina, MA Design Studies ’17

The full paper can be accessed for free at The Avery Review’s website.

 

Tags: architecture, Publications, student work