This fall, Parsons third year architecture students had an unprecedented opportunity to directly participate in a highly significant post-Hurricane Sandy design research project via the first semester studio led by Bjarke Ingels, Daniel Kidd, and Jeremy Alain Siegel of BIG Bjarke Ingels Group. In response to Sandy’s devastating toll on the greater New York City area in late 2012, HUD and the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force initiated Rebuild By Design, a research-based competition dedicated to the analysis of both the structural and environmental vulnerabilities the storm revealed throughout the region, and to subsequently proposing financially viable solutions to protect residents from future damage caused by similar storms and climatic events. BIG Bjarke Ingels Group was one of the ten teams selected from the initial CFP to participate in Rebuild by Design’s Stage 2, a three-month period dedicated to research, analysis, and community outreach and resulting in the proposal of developed design opportunities. Ingels, Kidd and Siegel opted to structure their Parsons architecture studio around their concurrent Rebuild by Design research, charging the students to develop design responses to specific high-density urban areas vulnerable to climatic events. In his studio report published March 26 in the Urban Omnibus, Kidd describes the logic of dedicating the Parsons studio to RBD: “We realized that instead of inventing our own fictional brief around rezoning and floodproofing, we should use the brief we received from Rebuild by Design as the template. Responding to the RBD brief was a perfect primer for the M.Arch students’ upcoming thesis semester. I have never seen a closer real-world parallel to the framework of the academic thesis.”

For a closer look at some of the Parsons students’ studio proposals, see the gallery below. Each of the ten teams’ final Rebuild by Design proposals will be presented on April 3; for more information or to RSVP click here.