Karen Bausman, School of Architecture Adjunct Professor – CCE and d.r.a. member, and her ARCH 563A Research -Topics student research team, debuted Combinatorics and NYC Future Perfect, a series of first-edition prints in Higgins Hall North.
The prints, signed by Bausman and researchers Elle Qirui Fang, Shelbie Guo, Sharon Wang and Jeffrey Yang, explore the summation of the physical and psychological spaces of the present, past, and future through a hyper survey of infrastructure typologies and energy landscapes extending from New York Bay to the North Sea within the context of shared elements: the water, celestial bodies, navigational charts, and the “field”—the urban surface of New York City, London, Rotterdam, and Copenhagen.
Starting in Fall 2024, the team of researchers explored, through the combinatorial works presented in the exhibition, many of the most familiar underpinnings of architectural composition through ever-accelerating modes of drawing practice flexing toward sculpture together with the exploration of complex biological, planetary, and other natural structural systems as a means to dismantle preconceptions of architectural language and that push beyond the accepted limits of plan, section, and elevation for a reading of non-conventional space.
“As a collage of many scratches, incisions, voids, extrusions, extractions, and underpinnings, the hyper survey itself is a portrait of process. It is this thickened presence of experience and location that our survey most directly confronts,” Bausman remarked.
