University Design Research Fellows
Andrew Fu
Aaron Goldstein
Aleksandr Mergold
Brooklyn, New York
Berkeley, California
Ithaca, New York
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Hillier College of Architecture and Design
Andrew Fu
Andrew Fu is a licensed architect, photographer, and educator in New York. In the past ten years, he has designed a range of spaces for art and living. Most recently he has worked with Johnston Marklee to create a new home for the Whitney Independent Study Program at Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein’s former home and studio. Andrew holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and teaches architecture at NJIT.
Aaron Goldstein
Aaron Goldstein is a licensed architect in California, an architectural historian, and the founder of the East Bay Urban Tank House Map, an organization dedicated to mapping, documenting, and researching Northern California’s nineteenth-century domestic wooden water towers. He leads regular public walking tours and is currently compiling his research into a book. Aaron holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University.
Aleksandr Mergold
Aleksandr Mergold (Team Lead) is an Associate Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology and a practicing architect who re-imagines existing structures, materials, and systems. He is a partner at Austin+Mergold, an architecture, landscape, and design platform, and operates Mergold Architecture PLLC (+M). These practices are the testing ground for Mergold’s research agenda focused on the contemporary interpretation of spolia, by re-imagining all that is mundane, common, available, and disposable in today’s built environment—objects, infrastructure, images, technology, resources, and ideas. Aleksandr taught architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca and Rome and Parsons School of Design and worked at Pentagram. He holds degrees in architecture from Cornell and Princeton.
Previous Work
Oculi is a winning project of the annual City of Dreams competition is hosted by FIGMENT, the Emerging New York Architects Committee (ENYA) of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY), and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY) on Governors Island in NYC. The field of elevated oculi, made from 40-year-old metal grain bins procured from a farm in Delphos, Ohio, frames unobstructed view of the sky while tracking the path of the sun with a range of shadow patterns. Artifacts of American agro-industrial age, these bins have been repurposed in ways not unlike how medieval inhabitants of Rome reoccupied the remains of the Ancient Empire. The grain bin is our contemporary spolia—at once a resource for the future, a contemplation on the past, and a connection between urban and rural life.
Design Team: Aleksandr Mergold (project director), Christopher Earls, Cornell CEE, Scott Hughes, Silman, Jason Austin, Austin + Mergold. Collaborator: Maria Park, Cornell AAP.
Construction: Glenn Miller & Ben Malone, Miller-Tilling, Bill Haines, Haines Construction
Cornell University student assistants: Curtis Ho, Kate Huffman, Eric Lee, Libby Rosa, Anna Warfield, Emma Boudreau, Sarah Bujnowski, Isabel Branas, Vaharan Elavia, Ami Kurosaki, Jason Lin, Xiaoxue Ma, Hafsa Muhammad, Sasson Rafailov, Jiacheng Xu, Edward Aguilera-Pérez, Molly Ma, Cait McCarthy, Michael Paraszak, Reuben Posada, Lawson Spencer, Jordan Young, Jeniffer Carmona, Adriana Contarino, Freddo Daneshvaran, Allexxus Farley-Thomas, Jahoon Kwon, Riana Tan, George Tsourounakis, Hyun-Ji Yang
Organizations & Companies: FIGMENT, Trust for Governors Island, AIA New York Chapter, ENYA, SEAoNY, ArtOmi, Cornell University (Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Department of Art, Department of Architecture, College of Engineering, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering), Atkore International / Unistrut, Silman
Photography: Zachary Tyler Newton (ZTN), Anton Kisselgoff (AK), Aleksandr Mergold (AM).
Oculi
Noah’s Ark, after it landed on Mount Ararat, became perhaps the first architectural folly—an imposing fanciful, yet purposeless structure: a boat with no water around, a house with no inhabitants, a simple hulking mass of a conflicted typology. Chosen from over 170 entries, SuralArk is an American vernacular interpretation of the original. Made of 2x6 lumber and vinyl siding, the SuralArk has its material origins in the American suburbia that is surprisingly close to NYC (incidentally, there is a vinyl sided house just across the street from the Socrates Park entrance) and its formal roots as a (discarded) upturned ship cast ashore. Whether this was once a house in Levittown now on its way to becoming a boat, or a new hybrid house-boat under construction on the shore of East River in anticipation of the next hurricane flood is not entirely clear. The visitor is invited inside, under the siding canopy, to contemplate the present horizon of Socrates Sculpture Park and NYC, the past, and perhaps, the forthcoming great floods.
Sural / Rurban™
Traditionally, the vast majority of non-urban building in the US happens both without architects and without clear continuation of the vernacular tradition; and this territory has remained outside of any architectural discourse. The attributes and amenities of urbanity are spreading further into suburbs, and rural living finds its way into cities. We wonder what shapes this architecture. The clarity of traversing a city, suburb and countryside is now being replaced by a gradient—a hybrid condition of all three territorial designations. This resultant—the in-between—which manifests itself in multiple scales, media and cultural experiences—is bizarre, almost surreal, liminal condition sculpted by both local and global metrics. Since the old designations—rural, suburban, urban no longer apply here—we call for a new classification: SURAL™ and RURBAN™ as the extreme end of the same gradient range.
Design Team: Aleksandr Mergold (A+M), Jason Austin (A+M), Marc Krawitz (A+M).
Construction: Boris Ravvin, Billy Haines, Yuri Mergold, Daniel Marino, Spencer Lapp and Andrew Fu
Thanks to Organizations & Companies: Cornell University Department of Architecture, Drexel University Department of Architecture and Interiors, Saint-Gobain, Simpson Strong-Tie
Photography: Nikole Bouchard, Austin + Mergold
Sural Ark
Crossing the Line
Crossing the Line (CTL) touches upon a history of the foundation of the United States that is hidden in plain sight: at the end of the Revolutionary War the newly-formed cash-poor US needed to pay its soldiers, so it was decided to pay with land. In 1792 two million acres in upstate New York was cut up into a grid of 600-acre plots to be given away to the Continental Army soldiers and officers. A neat grid of 28 townships did not take into account the complicated terrain of the Finger Lakes nor the presence of the ingenious Haudenosaunee population which was brutally dispossessed of its land. To this day, the land deeds refer to the original Military Tract lot numbers and we walk and drive on the grid of roads that was defined by the map of 1792. And only presently the history of dispossession is starting to be publicly acknowledged and discussed. Shortly after this project, the President of Cornell University for the first time publicly acknowledged that the university stands on the Native Cayuga lands.
Installation Design: Aleksandr Mergold, Sasson Rafailov, Aaron Goldstein, Andrew Fu.
Supported by: Cornell Council for the Arts
Special thanks to: Andrew T. Wong, Lindy Foltz, Anamika Goyal, Alex Jopek, Sophie Nichols, Daniel Toretsky, Cameron Neuhoff
Landscape Architecture Students: Teresa Ruswick, Alice Sturm, Nicolas Grefenstette, Wenjun Xu and Ahmed Khan
Architecture Design Studio: Zeyu Cai, Yoonseo Cha, Xiaoyan Dong, Alexandra Foster, Heesun Han, Ji Eun Lee, Timothy Ryan, Erin Soygenis, Cassidy Viser, Andrew Wong, II-Sang Yoon