Identity Crisis explores new approaches to architectural elements by surveying Ithaca’s built environment and proposing a series of eight artifacts derived from photographic documentation. Discrete components such as doors, windows, gutters, vents, and chimneys were analyzed, disassembled, and reassembled to produce novel building components. These hybrids begin to speculate on the possibility of new cultural and technical functions.

In his essay “Betwixt and Between,” anthropologist Victor Turner has shown that various indigenous societies used a method of “componential exaggeration” to estrange everyday objects and employ them as didactic tools for the young to learn from. He argued that the deformed statues and objects that certain indigenous societies used, like the American Omaha, were made to have their youth question fundamental notions of beauty, courage, danger, and leadership.

Similarly, the eight designs shown here, along with the student work of the seminars “Translating Elements of Architecture” from fall 2022 and “Mixed Mannerisms” from fall 2023 aspire to be didactic tools for students of architecture to question our aesthetic assumptions when it comes to assembling building elements. The artifacts are understood less as end products than processes of collective questioning using methods of photographic, formal, scalar, programmatic, and semantic manipulation.

The anti-perspective model is a three-dimensional study of perspectival dislocation. It is an experiment gathering several techniques of perceptual distortion such as reverse, flat, and fishbone perspectives. It uses Marcel Breuer’s Pirelli Tire Building as its source material. The model investigates continuity and discontinuity in three-dimensional reading using a set of projection and mapping methods. It questions our habitual understanding of reciprocity between images and space and argues that a new understanding of space can be generated from images and different perspectival techniques.

This project is a homage to one of the most revolutionary architectural thinkers of the 20th century- Paul Virilio, who died in 2018. For us, the writings he produced are complex, idiosyncratic, and crucial to understanding contemporary society. Virilio’s lifelong work theorized technology in relation to speed and its consequential correspondence to architecture. We are invested in his ideas related to the radical architecture of the oblique and his studies of WWII bunkers. 

Architectural images do not simply record buildings—they construct ways of seeing, reinforcing particular narratives while obscuring others. Montage—derived from the French verb monter, meaning "to assemble" or "to put together"—first emerged in film as a method of sequencing images to construct meaning. It has since expanded to broadly describe techniques of selecting, editing, and piecing together fragments to form a new whole. In the context of architecture and photography, montage functions as both a representational device and a critical method that advances a body of work.

Photography, in particular, has the capacity to do more than depict architecture—through techniques of montage, it manipulates, fragments, and reconstructs it. Acts of selection, framing, and composition generate new spatial and conceptual relationships, collapsing distinctions between past and present, fact and fiction, visibility and erasure. This extends beyond photography to other image-making technologies, such as AI-generated imagery, which, while capable of producing novel compositions, remains fundamentally reliant on existing architectural references, drawing from and recombining visual precedents.

This symposium examines the mutability of the architectural image through photography, emphasizing how acts of appropriation and recomposition shape architectural discourse. Montage techniques—whether analog, digital, or AI-assisted—can disrupt linear histories, fracture singular viewpoints, and expose underlying power structures embedded in architectural representation. What happens when architecture is not only represented through images but constructed by them?

SIGHTLINES brings together four panelists—James Casebere, David Hartt, Karel Klein, and Olivia Vien—whose practices and research operate at the intersection of architecture and photography to critically engage how acts of alteration and recomposition participate in the formation of architecture itself. Through a series of short presentations followed by a moderated discussion, the event will explore how photographic and montage-based practices not only document architecture but actively produce its meaning and futures.

This proposal introduces a school prototype: a rail-integrated kindergarten model designed to expand access to early childhood education for approximately 15,000 children aged 3–6 across a 25-square-mile area in the Chicago region. Learning on the Line establishes a networked system of educational facilities that operate in tandem with underutilized train infrastructure, incorporating movable components such as rail-based teaching units, self-learning carrel units, and faculty support cars. Rather than treating the school as a standalone building, the proposal embeds education within the city’s mobility infrastructure—responding to a landscape marked by widespread school closures and disinvestment. Located in South Side Chicago, the project repositions the kindergarten as a civic and infrastructural intervention embedded within the broader urban landscape.

The project repurposes an existing, underused train line to establish a mobile network of educational access points across the city and beyond. This kindergarten is anchored by a fixed facility on a site adjacent to an abandoned school lot, with train tracks running directly alongside the building. Specially outfitted learning cars allow students to continue classroom activities while traveling between schools, cultural institutions, libraries, and community centers. This system supports sustained peer cohort learning, maintains continuity in the educational experience, and enables students to access a wide range of resources beyond their immediate neighborhood.

Material & Method

The invention of cross-laminated thin wood plies with adhesive—plywood—is an engineering solution to the long-desired goal of straight, flat wood panels. However, this technological promise often fails due to seemingly trivial but omnipresent factors: humidity, imbalanced loads, the anisotropic nature of wood fiber, and others. This design starts from the premise that this “failed promise” of technology is not a failure but rather a design opportunity.

Playwood is constructed entirely from warped plywood sheets—material deemed unusable and discarded by conventional building practice. Instead of forcing the panels flat or concealing their deformation, the project builds with it, treating warp as a formal and structural condition. What industry calls waste becomes a means of producing structure and shade through low-energy, high-sensitivity construction.

The structure is sewn and assembled through simple, hand-tensioned joints. The primary frame uses power tools only where necessary; the rest relies on holes, cords, and knots. The system privileges touch over torque. Each connection can be read, adjusted, and repaired without specialized equipment. Rather than enforcing precision, the process accepts variation as evidence of labor and care.

Use & Form

The wedge tent is a typology that persists across forms of festival infrastructure—canopies, enclosures, and tensile assemblies. We’re interested in how this form circulates—not only in what it looks like, but in how it performs across states of deployment, collapse, and reuse.

Conceived as a resting place for music festival goers, Playwood reinterprets this typology through tensioned plywood surfaces that lift and open to form shaded alcoves and seating. The structure’s geometry arises directly from the behavior of the material: curves follow stress, shade follows form, and joints reveal how load is carried.

Playwood proposes a construction model that is materially responsive and inherently repairable. Its parts are small, repeatable, and transportable. When disassembled, the components return to flatness and can be reconfigured in new contexts. The result is not a fixed pavilion but an adaptable method—one that endures through reuse, teaching, and repetition rather than permanence.

Deep within the Nevada desert, a few kilometers away from Las Vegas, the first test center of Hyperloop- a proposed passenger and freight train that will unite cities and nations at a much-higher speed than planes- has been created.

This project proposes bringing together the scientists of Hyperloop to the public domain by displaying the process of creation to the public.  Laboratories and the testing center are sunken below grade and are encased by glazing, allowing visual access to observers above. A spokeless  Ferris wheel composed of trams is a major component of the design that allows passengers to travel up into a viewing deck where they can observe the facility and its vast, desert landscape. The interior and exterior are blurred through layers of interiority. Spaces within the ground level are covered, but only some are conditioned allowing for different modes of activity.

The architecture mimics and responds to the sandy context and offers a formal harmony with the surrounding dunes. Punctures on the building allow daylight to penetrate the interiors and expose desert views. These voids offer multi-level balconies at their perimeters. The majority of the program is elevated 70 meters above grade in the tower portion, while both glazed edges of the building are flanked by vertical walking gardens that act both as a strategy for air quality improvement and a place to enjoy nature for visitors and residents alike. The circulation is sensitive to the development of the technology and the researchers by physically separating visitor tours, but allowing visual access to the components of production.

The design proposes a new tower typology that acts as a blend between the horizontal and vertical  building elements through its peeling facade that functions also as a roof. The main elevations of the building’s facade are opaque, an unusual materiality for towers, but are interrupted with negative spaces, assuring that daylighting will fill the interiors. 

Our societies are saturated with imagery. This imagery often is our form of visually engaging individuals, as well as a method of communication. This immersion in visual stimulation is seemingly constant and is inarguably shaping and reshaping our understanding of our world. When these images are generated in unfamiliar ways and apparatuses of seeing, new realities begin to emerge. This begins to allow the promotion of a progressively homogenized understanding of our environments. There is a multiplicity of strategies for seeing, both in reality as well as artificially constructed.

The task of the studio is not necessarily to perform a trick of the eyes, but to instead make people aware of their environment in a new way. People often make assumptions of how space behaves and is visually organized. The intention of these following projects is to develop schemes of representation that radicalize the perception of space, achieved through the exploration of various strategies of visual culture throughout history. This marries references from the past and speculates on the constructs and potentials of the future.

Study 01 exhibits the reverse perspective. The confusion of the view is realized by integrating in with normal conditions. There are moments when the object appears to be going away from the gaze, when it is actually coming towards the spectator, vice versa.

Study 02 specifically examined anamorphic precedents and the way this technique could be applied to misalign reality and image. This exercise displays different portions of the facade in shifting locations. In one facade shadows protrude forward, in another everything is completely flat, etc. They do, however, all appear the same in elevation.

Study 03 analyzes disguising depth and quantity through the study of WW1 warship camouflage called Razzle Dazzle. Depending on the vantage point, it can be read as  flat, frontal, homogeneous, and non-hierarchical. The legibility can also display a distorted pattern projection with geometry now as separate parts.

Study 04 implements the excessiveness of a familiar component, the window. Through variations in offsets, scales, alignments, and elongations, this strategy is executed in 2D and 3D. This produces an unclear depth and reference in size for the adjacencies.

Text coming soon.

In 1822, an audience of Parisian spectators arrived at a theater to view what would become known as the precursor to cinema. The diorama, positioned in a pitch-black auditorium, showcased two large-format paintings illuminated from both the front and the back, with its defining characteristic being its distinct double-sidedness. The term "diorama" finds its etymological roots in Greek, combining "di-" meaning 'through' with "orama," meaning 'that which is seen, a sight.' The diorama's legacy, encapsulated in its literal meaning of 'through that which is seen,' guides our inquiry into examining double-sidedness, a characteristic not inherently present in photography. 

The work shown consists of two parts: the first examines modalities of photography, and the second scrutinizes the role and composition of the wall. The course began with a type of photo reportage, where students captured existing, albeit highly staged, interior spaces informed by historical painting references. These photographs aim to translate the historical themes of their paintings into a contemporary context, capturing everyday scenes that provoke plausible narratives and idealize the relationship between the spectator, the camera, and the depicted space.

A photograph—a two-dimensional image created by capturing light on a light-sensitive surface—serves as a visual medium that represents and translates narratives related to capitalism, culture, memory, politics, and sciences. According to Walter Benjamin in A Short History of Photography, photographs fall into two categories: the creative and the constructed. Benjamin writes:

"The situation is complicated by the fact that less than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about these institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has actually to be constructed, something artificial, something set up."

This seminar focuses on the "invented realities" that generate photographic content, with students creating visual narratives that explore the relationship between humans and our built spaces. These photographs, akin to cinematic stills, hint at broader stories beyond what is immediately visible. By thoughtfully using lighting, color, framing, and gaze, and by tracing objects and their inherent functions, students craft narratives that reimagine the "back" of the image by interrogating the role of a common architectural element—the wall. Using the diorama as a conceptual framework, students examine how walls, typically visible from only one side, transcend their conventional roles as flat, vertical partitions. Through physical model-building and digital montage techniques, they propose innovative wall configurations that expand the spatial and narrative potential of their photographs, transforming the back wall into an active, three-dimensional design intervention.

When we think of buildings — whether that be a hospital, a house, a church, or a school — there is an expectation of what elements will compose our architectural spaces. The list is long but standard. Each of these elements (a door, a window, a wall, a column, a roof, etc.) has its own inherent function and strategic placement in the sequence of space. Although the aesthetic characteristics vary, the independence of these objects remains. This reduction often compartmentalizes elements into discrete pieces of a larger architectural body. It suggests a visual culture where artifacts accumulate independently, with limited functional and formal interplay. The persistence within society to reuse this same architectural narrative, only with slight cosmetic variations, has a multi-origin history rooted in culture, code requirements, politics, and technology.

The process by which an architectural element is transformed can broadly be called one of translation. The term, understood commonly to describe a conversion between languages, has an essential history for architects who primarily deal with other types of translations: drawing to building, diagram to project, sketch to model. 

Mixed Mannerisms investigates the notion of translation through the production of cross-pollinating two existing architectural components from Ithaca, New York. Students use modes of parafiction and counterfactual history to develop narratives and functions for these elements, employing estrangement to generate novel ideas for conceptualizing the built environment.

Our constructed environment is often conceived as the composed sum of architectural elements such as walls, doors, floors, windows, balconies, etc. Even though various cultures approach and build them differently, these elements are almost always thought of as detached, separate entities. The result of this often compartmentalizes elements as discrete pieces that are only part of a larger architectural body, applied on and in the building. This reduction creates a type of visual culture full of artifacts that have a limited functional and formal interplay between them. This persistence within society to reuse the same architectural narrative, only with slight cosmetic variations, has a messy, multi-origin history rooted in culture, code requirements, politics, and technology.

An element can become a project, like John Hejduk’s Wall House. An element can also be cross-pollinated with another one. An element can be exaggerated, rendered grotesque, dislocated, or estranged. The process by which an element is transformed can broadly be called one of translation. The term, understood commonly today to describe a conversion between languages, has an important history for architects who primarily deal with other types of translations: from drawing to building, from diagram to project, from sketch to model, and so forth. Can using translation as a mode of operating on architectural elements open up novel ideas of intersection.

This seminar utilized a range of composite representation techniques to capture new hybrids of existing architectural elements. Through elevational field photography, students selected pieces (a door, a turret, a window, a balcony, etc.) and analyzed the geometry, tectonics, ornamentation, and various nuances of these generic architectural conditions. Students found new modes of combining and shifting pieces using these analyses while also considering the associated materials and textures. The production held onto parts of the familiar, creating estranged objects that propose new legibilities. The class used multiple forms of media, with a focus on drawing, montaging, and model-making at a variety of scales.

Architects generally rely on descriptive sets of projections and models in which there is no ambiguity on the expected outcome of the building. The course aim is to challenge and blur these assumptions and develop composite representation strategies. Students were asked to develop analytical visualization techniques and critical thinking skills with the intention of negotiating that information into an iterative design process using a variety of media. This seminar also emphasized the importance of understanding the relationship between architecture and narrative.