Within or Without

Scott Ruff’s studio, “Gullah/Geechee Institute,” investigated architecture’s role as a cultural signifier in the African-American Gullah–Geechee community off the South Carolina coast. It challenged students to translate cultural ideas into tectonic and spatial strategies for a monument, museum, and memorial that serves as a gateway to the Gullah–Geechee corridor, incorporating public interpretive and historical programs.

In Florencia Pita and Jackilin Bloom’s studio, “Easy Office,” students experimented with ways of generating new spatial, formal, material, and narrative ideas through the processes of collecting, collaging, and casting everyday objects. The studio considered notions of the creative office and the workplace based on the unexpected space, form, and materiality that emerged from these processes.

Students in Omar Gandhi’s studio, “Where the Wild Things Are” designed a campus of creatures for Rabbit Snare Gorge on the north coast of Cape Breton Island. They focused on a series of interventions that used vernacular approaches to produce specific functions, develop a process or ideology, and frame sensory experience. The students explored how Nova Scotia’s regional architecture takes advantage of phenomenological opportunities available on the site and inspires new responses to climate and geography.