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Urban Research
Research is indispensable for planners and designers to understand contemporary urbanism. We conduct research across scales to organize information and data, drawing constructive conclusions communicate externally and to support decision-making internally. With strengths in analyzing socio-economic relations and with attentive lens of physical environment, the team brings a sophisticated perspective to urban research.
Surgical Acupuncture: A Case Study in Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo, Brazil
2017
Design: Helena Rong
Awards: Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Medal
Featured on Wall Paper Magazine
Archiprix International Award Nomination
Docomomo International Conference
São Paulo is characterized by continuous fluctuations and constant reconstruction, a polynucleated palimpsest where the new tirelessly overrides the old. This project expresses critical reflections regarding preservations and restorations involving the transformation of architectural and urban sites in downtown and proposes for a new city manifesto that employs adaptive reuse as an opportunity to initiate a bottom-up, participatory development of the urban context. Eight narratives, each with its theme extracted from existing cultural and infrastructural contexts, are sited in vacant buildings across downtown to form a constellation of surgical deployments that effectuates a new mobile network of connections rooted in a bottom-up urbanism.
Cayuga Lake Floating City
Tompkins County, New York, USA
2016
Design Lead: Helena Rong
This research explores an alternative model for urban growth through the study of site-less floating typologies. From existing provocations of floating urbanism and alternative modes of living, the design is a floating typology on Cayuga Lake in Ithaca. The city of Ithaca has numerous unique characteristics which have allowed us to hypothesize on the development of an alternative water community. Designed as a translation from Ithaca’s historic rooted interest in counter-culture and communes, the program speculates upon a research-centric community developed to provide year-round program to Cayuga Lake.
Asset Pricing Predictions Based on Design Features
New York, NY, USA
2019
Team: Helena Rong, Tony Yang
Presented at the 2019 AsRES Conference and MIT World Real Estate Forum
Does design contribute to real estate value? We propose to devise a set of design metrics
to provide reference and guidelines for both designers and developers. We identify a list of design elements as quantifiable features which we can collect and evaluate to construct correlations between design and real estate market value. We consider qualitative and tactile elements of architecture as our variables: materiality, geometry, daylight, views and spatial transformability. Including these variables in our model allows us to understand the extent to which the actual design and function of a building impact the market value of a property during individual real estate transactions, thereby diminishing the agency of design during negotiation
processes.
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