WORKSHOPS

Research from the 2010 Shanghai Summer Workshop is exhibited as part of the exhibition "Vertical Urban Factories: East Asia" at NYU, curated by Nina Rappaport.

Research from the 2011 Megablock Goes West Summer Workshop was exhibited at the 2011 Chengdu Biennale.

In the summer of 2011, four Columbia GSAPP students traveled to Chengdu and Xi'an to gather documentation of industrial restructuring and urban redevelopment, in collaboration with teams from Southwest Jiaotong University and the Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology.

Eco Plane, one of ten gardens designed as part of World University Park at the 2011 Xi'an World Horticultural Expo, was designed by a China Lab team during a week-long workshop held in Xi'an in the winter of 2010.

This summer, six GSAPP students participated in a joint international workshop with China Lab, The Central Academy of Fine Arts and Chinese University Hong Kong. The twenty-student workshop focused its research on South Beijing, historically an underdeveloped region of the city that will soon be rapidly transformed into a densely-urbanized link with the city of Tianjin. By using South Beijing as a case study, the workshop proposed critical alternatives to the current trend of peri-urban expansion in China.

How can industrial areas be integrated into new residential developments? Is it even possible for secondary industries and residential blocks to coexist?

As Jiading and other industrial sites around Shanghai are transformed into residential superblocks, a new model for higher-density, hybrid land use and sustainable urban development is needed. This summer, Columbia GSAPP/China Lab researchers have been invited by the Jiading district government to work on a strategy report for the interaction of existing and future industrial sites with a new large-scale residential development.

SUMMER 2009

Megablock to Metablock from China Lab on Vimeo.


Columbia + USC Joint Summer Workshop 2008, Beijing


The June 2008 workshop has concluded with the presentation of the Columbia team's proposal, 'Mega-Block to Meta-Block'. A publication documenting the site research and proposal is forthcoming.