What happens if you combine the processes of design, research, and fabrication in one organization? The potential of this multi-professional collaboration is convincingly demonstrated in the diverse accomplishments of SITU, a firm located on the appropriately experimental terrain of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This extensive former military installation, reclaimed for light manufacturing and tech-oriented activities, was able to accommodate SITU’s offices and its fabrication workshop, just a short walk apart.
The three current partners of SITU β Basar Girit, Aleksey Lukyanov-Cherny, and Brad Samuels β met as architecture classmates at The Cooper Union in Manhattan. They credit the curriculum there rooted in spatial analysis, making, and prototyping for contributing to the perspective and skills they bring to their work today. Their staff is diverse, with degrees in computer science, furniture design, art history, urban design, social policy, and more.
SITU is composed of three divisions β each headed by one of those partners, although their individual contributions often cross those divides. SITU Studio deals with design, as we normally define it, ranging in scale from small projects to entire buildings and, in a few instances, marketable products or broader urban interventions. SITU Research applies design thinking to a variety of investigations, some extending well beyond what architecture firms generally deal with. SITU Fabrication takes on the challenge of physically creating innovative architectural features, furnishings, and materials β whatever may be needed in the built world, in manufacturing, or in research.
SITU designs and fabricates custom components for the spaces they create, or prototypes them for projects at a larger scale as a way of verifying design intent. The collaborating divisions are also quite open to incorporating off-the-shelf items, sometimes modifying them for specific situations.
Each of their design commissions includes a distinct “discovery phase,” lasting two weeks to more, depending on the demands of the project. And SITU is intent on post-occupancy evaluation, as well, urging clients to include that phase in their commissions.
The “sweet spot” for SITU, in winning and carrying out commissions, is the potential of all three divisions to collaborate on solutions that might not otherwise be foreseeable. A few of their many completed commissions illustrate that remarkable synergy.
Design Lab at the New York Hall of Science
Reclaiming a 10,000 square foot space in the exhibition center designed by Harrison & Abramovitz for the New York World’s Fair of 1964, SITU conceived and executed an innovative destination for STEM and project-based learning activities. Dedicated to supporting “the different ways in which kids learn,” the lab comprises five distinct learning places: Sandbox, Backstage, Studio, Treehouse and Maker Space.
In all of these settings the spatial organization, materials, methods of construction β even the hardware β are made visible to visiting children, parents and teachers, encouraging them to understand design and construction of the environment. Throughout the Design Lab, the work of previous students is on display, providing ample inspiration to subsequent visitors.
Completed in 2014, the Design Lab has hosted thousands of visitors, trained teachers from schools across the city, and led STEM-based classes for students of all ages.
And it served as a model for a much smaller, but similarly conceived making space completed in 2016 at the independent Whitby School in Greenwich, CT.
Making Space for the Brooklyn Public Library
The need to adapt Brooklyn’s century-old libraries to evolving current uses is being addressed with a kit-of-parts system known as Making Space. While the number of visitors and programs in the central library and its 58 neighborhood branches has increased over the past decade, their facilities called for system-wide updating. And the realities of library operations and funding called for a solution readily achievable with a minimum of building renovation.
The project emerged from a design study organized by the Center for Urban Future and the Architectural League of New York, made possible by the support of the Charles Revson Foundation. SITU professionals launched an analysis of needs by meeting with library staff at selected branches. Together they conducted an audit of space and equipment needs for programs ranging from children’s art classes to citizenship prep for immigrants to robotics programs for teens and fitness classes for older adults. Identifying each program’s requirements β for seating, work surfaces, power and projector demands β SITU then grouped activities according to their needs for space and equipment.
The resulting kit-of-parts can be assembled in myriad combinations for different activities throughout the day. A ceiling grid provides an entire room with power distribution and support of lighting, acoustic panels, and curtains. Mobile furnishings below include stackable chairs, collapsible tables and multi-use cabinets that provide storage, seating, and support for media walls, and can be grouped to create a performance stage. SITU’s fabrication facility at the Navy Yard was used to develop prototypes and test the functionality, durability and affordability of all components, including customized lighting fixtures and thermoformed acoustical panels.
Chosen for the pilot Making Space project was the community room at the Flatbush Branch, housed in a 1905 neighborhood landmark. Installed in 2018, the new “set of tools” has reportedly had an immediate and welcome impact of the branch’s operations, sometimes simultaneously hosting programs for visitors of different age groups. Based on lessons learned there, SITU developed a Making Space manual for other branches, allowing for choices in layouts, capabilities, materials, and finishes in line with that branch’s size, programs and building stock.
New York Tech Office
For this client’s Manhattan headquarters, a 40,000-square-foot space on two floors, SITU’s mission was to support the innovative, multi-disciplinary, collaborative work taking place there. Prior to design, the SITU team spent five weeks embedded with the intended users to observe, talk, participate in activities, document and analyze workflows and their implications for space, developing concept drawings and principles to guide the actual design.
The result is a modular, adaptable, materially rich environment that can create a sense of place for an unpredictable variety of activities. Within the first week in their new space, the staff had rearranged desks, walls and pods to support diverse needs. The conference room had become a virtual-reality lounge, and the “War-Hallβ β a corridor of huddle spaces β had been transformed to accommodate a team-wide potluck dinner. The space will continue to be reshaped as projects develop and team members continue making it their own.
Since this project was completed in 2017, the client has commissioned SITU to design another workplace an order of magnitude larger.
Solar Canopy
Not all of SITU’s projects are realized inside existing buildings. In this case, the firm’s expertise in architecture, engineering, and fabrication yielded a distinctive system to be placed on the roofs of existing buildings. This commission from Brooklyn SolarWorks focused on the challenges to installing solar panels on the row houses that extend over much of New York’s five boroughs.
The barriers to solar power installations on such houses range from fire code regulations to rooftop obstructions, shadows of trees and adjacent structures, roof surface penetrations, and wind load requirements. The product of these design studies is a modular rooftop structure with PV solar panels affixed to a lightweight, adjustable aluminum frame, readily customized to meet the specifics of the site.
Compared to surface-mounted panels, the canopy typically doubles the solar generating power. Its advantages have resulted in the installation of nearly 100 in Brooklyn and Queens since they became available in 2016. With the capacity to reduce utility costs, the Solar Canopy has the potential to extend solar power to other residents of New York and beyond.
SITU Research Projects
While not products of the design process as usually understood, some of the firm’s research efforts illustrate the effect of design thinking on studies of urban policies, for instance, or even human rights violations.
Section 581 study
New York City’s luxury housing market is characterized by legal loopholes, anonymous shell companies, and absentee residents. It also benefits from Section 581, an arcane property tax code that yields undue advantage for high-end coops and condos. SITU’s contribution to a 2016 exhibition at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture shed light on the inequalities emerging from this tax code, making them more visible through a series of drawings and a physical model. The exhibition organizers assigned SITU a slice of Manhattan that included properties facing Central Park and along Park Avenue.
Section 581 requires that property tax assessments for a residential building cannot exceed “the assessment which would be placed upon such parcel were the parcel not owned or leased by a cooperative corporation or on a condominium basis.” The result is to assess these buildings as if they contained rental units, which are on the whole much less valuable properties.
The extent of the tax inequities possible under this tax code was illustrated by the sale of $33,000,000 for a coop unit in a 111-unit building on Central Park West. The city assessed the entire property β all 111 units β at $60,722,000, less than twice the market value of that one luxurious portion.
Uneven Growth Study
SITU’s contribution to the 2014 exhibition Uneven Growth at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) addressed the “hidden density” within the city’s housing by “taking a deep dive into informal housing arrangements” such as illegal conversions, cellar dwellings, shared spaces and single-room occupancies.
Other studies had shown that the 2010 census may have undercounted the city’s population by 200,000 people or more. Besides raising questions about census accuracy, such an undercount would affect city policies and funding in areas such as affordable housing and transportation.
The object was not to move the “hidden” populations to other areas, but to accommodate them adequately in the same neighborhoods. Proposals yielded through the study included improved methods for transferring unused allowable floor areas to nearby properties and the addition of living spaces on rooftops, in backyards, in industrial buildings, and in other potential expansion spaces.
This research was carried out in collaboration with Cohabitation Strategies, Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council, and Jesse Keenan of the Center for Urban Real Estate.
Euromaidan Event Reconstruction
This research project extends the study of the built world into unprecedented territory. Leveraging their architectural took kit in a new way, SITU produced a detailed event reconstruction relating to deaths resulting from police response to protesters in Kiev’s historic Maidan Square in February of 2014. Advocating for Ukraine’s integration into the European Union, the protesters had occupied the square for nearly four months.
To accomplish the research, SITU worked with Ukrainian attorneys, activists and computer scientists to reconstruct three protester deaths from archives of eye-witness videos. Drawing on spatial analysis, 3D modeling, animation and interactive visualization, the researchers developed procedures to establish the sources and trajectories of the ammunition that caused these deaths. They then devised tools to make the highly complex evidence comprehensible within the procedural and time constraints of presentation in Ukrainian courts.
For this study SITU/Research collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Human Rights Science. The analysis and presentation tools developed were designed for broader application in the presentation of citizen video documentation of other complex events. In 2017, a video presentation of this research was included in the exhibition, Before the Event/After the Fact: Contemporary Perspectives on War at the Yale University Art Gallery, accompanied by a lecture on the project by SITU partner Brad Samuels. The work was also featured in The New York Times Magazine in May 2018.
More information on SITU and its numerous other projects can be found at situ.nyc/studio.