Bulletin

In December, New York City’s Department of Design and Construction broke ground on ABA’s renovation and expansion of the Castle Hill Library in the Bronx, developed with DDC and the New York Public Library. The project reworks the 1981 branch into a modern civic building with clear ties to NYPL’s Carnegie-era traditions. The design establishes a more legible public entry and stronger street presence, anchored by a new central reading room animated by skylights and daylight.

Interior spaces are reorganized to better serve children, teens, and adults, with improved accessibility, updated building systems, expanded technology, and a mix of quiet study areas and flexible community spaces. Sustainability upgrades, including a green roof and energy-efficient systems, are integrated throughout. Construction is scheduled for completion in 2027.

Read more in The Architect’s Newspaper: “Abruzzo Bodziak Architects is modernizing the Bronx’s Castle Hill Public Library.”

Kelly Pau takes a detailed tour through the photos of ABA’s transformation of a landmarked corner townhouse in Prospect Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn for a young family. Approaching the historic building with a “low resolution” strategy that gestures to its tradition without ornamentation, ABA used a restrained material palette of white oak, plaster, terrazzo, and pre-existing parquet to unify spaces and create fluid, light-filled interiors. Storage, circulation, and functional elements are integrated with custom millwork, while new skylights and refined detailing bring clarity and warmth throughout. The result is a purposeful, bright, kid-friendly home that balances historical context with contemporary simplicity.

Abruzzo Bodziak Architects is the architect for the comprehensive renovation of The New York Public Library’s Castle Hill branch in the Bronx, a $17 million project led by the NYC Department of Design and Construction that broke ground in December 2025. The project will transform the existing 1981 building with a redesigned façade, inviting entrance, abundant natural light through new skylights, and fully ADA-compliant access and facilities. Inside, the renovated library will include dedicated spaces for children, teens, and adults, meeting and multi-purpose rooms, improved technology and Wi-Fi, and staff work areas that support service delivery. A green roof and upgraded environmental systems aim for LEED Silver certification. The design was informed by community input and seeks to deepen the branch’s role as a neighborhood hub for learning, connection, and opportunity, strengthening Castle Hill’s cultural infrastructure and expanding access to free educational resources and public space for local residents. Read DDC’s official press release here.

The New York Public Library has announced the exciting news that Castle Hill Library will be receiving a complete renovation—managed by New York City Department of Design and Construction—to support branch service for generations to come. Designed by ABA as a modern building with ties to NYPL’s Carnegie traditions, the project starts construction this fall. Visit NYPL’s website for more details, and stay tuned for updates!⁠

As described by District Architecture Center in Washington DC, “Fairy Tale Architecture presents designs for unbuilt structures that explore the relationship between fairy tales and speculative architecture, melding art, architecture, and literary critique. Initially begun as a series for the online public architecture, landscape, and urbanism journal Places, the exhibition presents work melding architecture, design, and literary critique. Architects and designers from all over the world were invited to select a favorite tale, contemplate the promise of a magical home, and design new realms and spaces that explore this inquiry within the world of the fairy tale. Originally presented at the Center for Architecture in New York City from November 11, 2022, to February 25, 2023, this exhibition has now been reimagined for the District Architecture Center space.” Curated by Kate and Andy Bernheimer, the exhibit includes ABA’s origami and photography project for the fairytale “Snowflake,” among many wonderful projects by our friends and colleagues.

When is historic also hygge? Working with historic properties has long been central to our practice, and each project asks for its own balance between preservation and reinvention. Our recent renovation of a landmark townhouse—featured in the September issue of Architectural Record—explores exactly this calibration. As Matthew Marani writes, “Abruzzo Bodziak Architects (ABA) … has established a particular expertise in surmounting varied obstacles while delivering pragmatic but refined renovations.” For this home, that meant drawing from original details and translating them into a simpler, more contemporary language that could support everyday life while keeping its historic character present. As we noted when speaking with AR, “One of the challenges was figuring out the scale of intervention needed and the degree to which the original detailing should be respected,” especially since our design-professional clients wanted something “that wasn’t too precious.”

When we design spaces for food, we’re engaging with more than kitchens and dining rooms—we’re engaging with the cultural systems that shape how people cook, gather, and share. Technical requirements—materials, workflow, storage, safety—must align with the cultural specificity and emotional resonance that cuisine carries. These environments influence our health, habits, and the rituals we inherit or reinvent, and they frame how communities express identity through preparation and celebration. In a global context, architecture becomes a mediator when food traditions, migration, and contemporary life intersect, asking how space can honor heritage while supporting new ways of living. In the latest issue of Yale School of Architecture’s Constructs, I explore these themes in conversation with Benedetta Tagliabue. Many thanks to AJ Artemel for initiating and facilitating the exchange.

ABA’s engagement in designing two dedicated music spaces underscores our commitment to integrating architectural practice with the nuanced requirements of auditory environments. We appreciated the opportunity to discuss these projects with David Eardley for his Wall Street Journal article on listening rooms.

Emily spoke with writer Maria Yagoda for New York Magazine’s “Best of New York” feature on window treatments. She recommended the custom fabricator Curtains for You in Long Island City, who collaborated with ABA on the textile elements for the maharishi project. Read more in New York Magazine.

Architect’s Newspaper has included ABA in its inaugural “Twenty to Watch” list of New York architects working on residential projects. Architecture and design industry professionals are invited to join us at the A&D Building in Manhattan on March 6 to celebrate AN’s inaugural Twenty to Watch list.

Consider Tasting Rooms, our adaptive reuse office and culinary space designed for OnTheMarc Events, now nominated for a 2025 ArchDaily Building of the Year award! We’re grateful to ArchDaily for highlighting this project and helping us share how a thoughtfully designed, inspiring environment can empower planners and chefs to create unforgettable dining experiences. Head over to ArchDaily, where the project is nominated in the Hospitality, Offices, Commercial Architecture, and Applied Products categories.

Stick House, Brick Garden—ABA’s reinvention of a wood-frame townhouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—has been featured as one of twelve selected projects in the Belden Brick 2025 calendar. Photographed by Michael Vahrenwald, the project reimagines how a rowhouse’s masonry base can peel outward to form outdoor rooms at both the front and rear yards, creating seating, planters, and flexible areas for daily use while also protecting the home from water infiltration. We are honored to collaborate with producers who value thoughtful material application, and we appreciate that our work with their products resonates beyond the project itself. See the project throughout the month of February as part of Belden Brick’s annual celebration of architectural craft.

ArchDaily featured our adaptive reuse project for OnTheMarc Events: a hybrid workplace that brings together office, hospitality, and food production in a single environment. We love that the article highlights the images showing chefs actively working in the kitchen, because the project is fundamentally about making the choreography of preparation visible. Our design transforms a former warehouse into a sequence of luminous tasting rooms adjacent to a state-of-the-art production zone, connected by 50-foot glazed walls and anchored by generous skylights. Warm wood, precise detailing, and flexible spatial arrangements support everything from everyday workflow to no-waste dinners and large-scale gatherings. The result is architecture that elevates ritual, celebrates craft, and creates a place where people can work, taste, learn, and come together.

In AN Interior, Paige Davidson dove into the space’s materials and colors, and how it is a transformative project literally and figuratively.

AIA Connecticut has recognized Tasting Rooms with a 2024 Merit Award in Interior Architecture for their 2024 Design Awards Program. The AIA Connecticut Design Awards recognize design excellence of built and unbuilt work in Connecticut or in other locations by Connecticut-based firms. ⁠We share this honor with our remarkable clients, who shared their vision and trust with us! See the full list of Design Awards Recipients here.

AIA Connecticut has recognized Stick House, Brick Garden with a 2024 Merit Award in Residential Architecture for their 2024 Design Awards Program. The AIA Connecticut Design Awards recognize design excellence of built and unbuilt work in Connecticut or in other locations by Connecticut-based firms. We share this honor with our remarkable clients, who shared their vision and trust with us! See the full list of Design Awards Recipients here.

Our Storefront Library project is featured in ArchDaily’s article, “Art Galleries Inserted into the Urban Fabric: 12 Examples of Art and Culture Introduced in Neighborhoods.” The piece examines how cultural spaces can operate at the scale of the street, becoming part of daily life rather than standing apart from it. Storefront Library approaches this by extending the gallery’s iconic rotating facade panels into bookshelves that pierce the public space of the sidewalk, setting the stage for an exhibition shaped by public participation and dialogue. We appreciate seeing the project in the context of others that integrate art and culture into neighborhoods in a practical, intentional, and civic-minded way.

The AD PRO Directory is the industry’s premier roster of design talent, curated by the editors of Architectural Digest. Comprised of interior designers, architects, landscape designers, builders, and contractors, the AD PRO Directory gives you unparalleled access to Architectural Digest’s readership—and potential clients. ABA was included in Digest’s recent roundup of New York firms.

Emily and Gerald had a wide-ranging conversation with the inimitable Aaron Prinz for Architectural Record’s DESIGN:ED Podcast, from using a systemic approach to design as a tool for collaboration, to focusing on light and form over complexity and excess, and connecting to people through buildings. The episode can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or by going to the show’s site.

Our Tasting Rooms project is featured in Architectural Record, highlighting how we worked with OnTheMarc Events & Catering to rethink the relationship between production, testing, and planning. The article focuses on how the design brings daylight deep into a previously opaque industrial space, while connecting chefs, staff, and clients through a sequence of calibrated rooms that merge hospitality and workflow. Instead of a generic office or a back-of-house kitchen, the project creates a shared environment where culinary experimentation, business development, and hosting overlap. Record notes how the material clarity, controlled lighting, and precise acoustics support both efficiency and experience—underscoring our approach to adaptive reuse that elevates the everyday.

The New York Public Library has announced the exciting news that Castle Hill Library will be receiving an extensive renovation to support branch service for generations to come. Designed by ABA as a modern building with ties to NYPL’s Carnegie traditions, the project starts construction in Spring 2025. To prepare, NYPL has launched a survey about future programming and services. Visit the branch’s website for more details, and stay tuned for updates!

ABA is delighted to be included in Architectural Digest’s Directory of editor-selected design professionals!

In her latest piece, design writer Cara Greenberg charts the transformation of a modest wooden row house and how our clients’ personal skills, aspirations, and vision shaped the design. At Abruzzo Bodziak Architects we collaborated closely with homeowners who brought their craft and character to the process — not passive recipients, but active participants. The result isn’t a cookie-cutter renovation, but a home that reflects their unique story, skillset, and desire for place. Greenberg’s narrative captures how material choices, spatial decisions and design dialogue converged to make something distinct — a residence that reads like a lived portrait of its occupants. Read the full article for the full story.

Emily Abruzzo recently gave a lecture at the Yale School of Architecture titled “Highest and Best,” focusing on how constraint can be a driver of invention rather than a limitation. She shared recent ABA projects in which inspired clients partnered with ABA to transform modest budgets, compact sites, and existing structures into spaces with clarity, generosity, and purpose. The talk framed how economy of materials, strategic structural interventions, and thoughtful daylighting can yield work that feels expansive without excess. The lecture underscored a core value of our practice: design that elevates the everyday through precision, collaboration, and a belief that visionary outcomes don’t require extravagant means.

Typology doesn’t define our work, people do. The GRAM 04 interview, and corresponsing “mono” series book by Editions QNDMC, highlights how our process isn’t about repeating a formula but uncovering the architectural expression within each client’s story, constraints, and ambitions. We involve clients as collaborators, which is why no two projects, even within the same category, look or behave alike. Our habit of saying “yes” is really about staying open long enough to find the right idea, not the obvious one. The piece explores how collecting influences, testing possibilities, and embracing difference leads to distinct results grounded in purpose rather than style. Read the full interview at the link.

We’re excited to announce that Stick House, Brick Garden, a townhouse project conceived with our clients and realized by Abruzzo Bodziak Architects, has been nominated for the ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. The design re-imagines a Brooklyn wood-frame row house with a masonry base, terraced garden rooms, generous daylighting, and resilient detailing including elevated electrical systems and drainage integrated into brickwork. With its blend of vernacular materials, future-proofing measures and layered indoor-outdoor spaces, the project exemplifies how a familiar typology can be transformed into something both rooted in tradition and forward-looking. We’re grateful to our clients for their vision and to the jury for considering our work in this global field.

Our project Stick House, Brick Garden, featured on ArchDaily, presents a reimagining of a Brooklyn wood-frame row house through careful calibration of structure, landscape, and everyday use. The design introduces a masonry base that unfolds into a series of planted garden rooms, bringing light, air, and seasonal change into the heart of the home. Utilities and thresholds are elevated to address future climate pressures, while the interior is organized around clear lines, adaptable social spaces, and crafted material transitions. The article notes how the house and garden work together with an economy of means—demonstrating our ongoing interest in making familiar typologies newly resilient, open, and connected to their context.

We’re grateful to Wallpaper* and Ellie Stathaki for an eloquent write-up of our project Stick House, Brick Garden. The feature captures how a modest Brooklyn row-house can evolve into a layered home with rich materiality, generous daylight, and a planted garden that threads indoor and outdoor life together. As Stathaki writes: “The house and garden are simultaneously lush and generous while defined by an economy of means in form and material.” We appreciate how the article articulates our belief that thoughtful design, modest budgets, and inspired clients can together generate work that feels both rooted in tradition and progressive.

We appreciated the chance to walk Architectural Record’s Joann Gonchar through Stick House, Brick Garden for her feature on the project. The article underscores how we used “typical materials in unexpected ways” to transform a Brooklyn row house into something both “surprising and familiar.” It highlights how a subtle forward shift of the façade, a brick base that extends into the garden, and calibrated daylighting work together to re-ground the house in its context while giving it renewed presence. The piece reflects our belief that precise decisions and material intelligence can yield meaningful change—and that clients’ needs and concerns can catalyze reinvention rather than limit it.

Sharing progress on the construction of the new headquarters for OnTheMarc Events in Norwalk, Connecticut. The project transforms a former storage warehouse through a reorganization of space that brings daylight deep into the interior, setting open work areas alongside more intimate offices. A commercial kitchen anchors the plan, while tasting rooms act as thresholds between production and hospitality. Warm materials, calibrated lighting, and carefully edited volumes give the workspace a sense of presence and purpose, reflecting the craft and culture of OnTheMarc’s chefs and planning professionals.

Our project Snowflake is featured in the Center for Architecture’s new exhibition, Fairy Tale Architecture, which brings together architects and designers exploring narrative, imagination, and the built world. The show looks at how stories shape spatial ideas—using myth, metaphor, and atmosphere to rethink how we inhabit and perceive space. Snowflake contributes a material and spatial interpretation of the Russian tale, reframing themes of creation, independence, and disappearance through layered paper forms and shifting light. The exhibition runs through the season and is open to the public at the Center for Architecture.

Our installation for the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Storefront Library, is featured on ArchDaily. The project reworks the gallery’s rotating-door facade into a reader-activated threshold lined with architecture books, custom shelving, and mirrored elements that frame shifting views between street and interior. As visitors add and remove volumes, the installation becomes a live index of changing architectural interests and debates, reinforcing our focus on how the discipline is collected, displayed, and interpreted.

Temporary Text

In this Living, Etc. feature, Emily Abruzzo re-frames hobby rooms as architectural gestures of focus and ritual. Emily explains that when homes encompass work, rest and leisure, carving out a dedicated space for listening to vinyl becomes more than a luxe side-project — it’s a thoughtful counterbalance to our distraction-filled lives. With ABA’s Brooklyn townhouse example—complete with dedicated acoustic insulation, a separate circuit and floor outlets—Abruzzo establishes that true luxury lies in the gift of focus.

ABA is a guest on Andrew Bruno’s One House Per Day series, using the platform to explore “Straight Skeletons,” an algorithm originally developed to resolve the convoluted roof geometries of “McMansion” subdivisions. By redirecting that logic, we generate volumetric landscapes from any foundation plan, producing forms that can be built with standard shop-fabricated trusses. Revisiting our 2009 research collaboration with Gehry Technologies, ABA presents seven distinct house plans and the enclosures they yield, demonstrating how triangular geometry can translate irregular outlines into clear, constructible architecture.

The Fairy Tale Architecture series curated by Kate and Andrew Bernheimer treats classic stories as frameworks for reimagining spatial experience. ORO Editions has published a book on the series, containing 19 of the series’ case studies, including ABA’s folded paper take on “Snowflake.”

The architect Andrew Bernheimer and fairy tale expert Kate Bernheimer, a brother and sister team, assigned design professionals to imagine the places where characters from children’s stories outwitted their enemies and usually lived happily ever after . . . the Bernheimers’ collection of ” [is] a welcome dose of deadpan escapism for a year otherwise so drained of joy. – The New York Times

Storefront Library was nominted for ArchDaily’s Building of the Year award, in the Small Scale & Installations categories. Read more on ArchDaily’s site.

Abruzzo Bodziak Architects participated in Storefront for Art & Architecture’s Re-Source exhibition with our project “BookMark.” Rooted in reuse and renewal, BookMark—alongside the other pieces in the collective show—examines how leftover materials, archival fragments, and overlooked architectural detritus can be transformed into new objects. By turning surplus wood, steel-stud offcuts, and discarded library shelving into a coherent spatial prototype, the exhibit pushes for a broader conversation about resourcefulness in architectural practice—especially relevant as Storefront reopens and reimagines its role in a post-lockdown city.

In her interview with Madame Architect, ABA partner Emily Abruzzo Reflects on personal milestones and the lessons shaping her practice—from early internships at architect-driven firms, to balancing theory and making, to leading a design studio rooted in empathy and partnership. She underscores how essential “good partners” are to architecture, how listening fuels design, and encourages young practitioners—especially women—not to wait: if you have an idea, pursue it. The interview reveals a commitment to civic work and equitable practice, and an acknowledgment that representation remains an unfinished project in the field.

ABA’s design for maharishi Tribeca is featured in the Hong Kong-based print publication Hinge, showcased in its “Folio” section. The piece highlights the project’s adaptive reuse, its balance of East–West references, and the transformative role of custom roll-up textile partitions that reconfigure the interior for display, gathering, and retail rituals.

In an interview with TONGUES, Emily Abruzzo and Gerald Bodziak of Abruzzo unpack how curiosity, risk-mitigation, and hands-on iteration fuel their practice. Rather than chase spectacle, they describe design more as deep craft, where models, mock-ups, and material tests form the bedrock of their approach. They emphasize research not as a buzzword, but as a quotidian act of questioning context, materials, precedent, and even the odds of what they’re building. Amid reflections on “what is American architecture?,” they suggest that bespoke, small-practice agility holds growing relevance as clients and cities demand more thoughtful design.

Organized by Design Advocates, Urban Design Forum, and Van Alen Institute, Neighborhoods Now brings together architects and community groups to develop reopening strategies for NYC neighborhoods hit hardest by the pandemic. ABA is participating in this collaborative effort, contributing design thinking, planning tactics, and practical frameworks to help local organizations adapt public spaces, support small businesses, and restore community life with clarity and care.

ABA’s Storefront Library project is featured in DETAIL magazine, which highlights how the installation transformed Storefront for Art and Architecture’s iconic rotating façade into a public-facing library of architectural thought. The article focuses on how ABA designed a system of MDF shelving and mirrored bookends that turns the hinging panels into active displays, allowing books to project onto the sidewalk and invite passersby into an unexpected encounter with architectural publishing. By treating the façade as both threshold and bookshelf, the project reinforces Storefront’s history of dissolving boundaries between inside and outside, public and institution. DETAIL frames the work as a precise yet playful example of material clarity, spatial ingenuity, and the power of small interventions to expand cultural access.

The renovation of a 3,620 sq ft townhouse in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill by Abruzzo Bodziak Architects is featured in The Architect’s Newspaper. The article showcases how the firm retained the building’s historic details while introducing bold, curving insertions—such as arched skylights and sculptural roof portals—that enhance light, space, and circulation. With finish materials like white oak millwork, bleached parquet flooring, and terrazzo, the project balances contemporary refinement with the original character of the 19th-century residence.

Emily is serving on the jury for New Practices New York 2020, AIA New York’s biennial platform recognizing emerging architectural firms advancing new models of practice and design in the city. The program’s theme, Pause, reflects on how young studios reassess assumptions, recalibrate priorities, and redefine what architectural practice can be. Emily’s participation underscores ABA’s ongoing engagement with the profession’s evolving culture and the importance of supporting the next generation of voices. More information about the award and this year’s theme is available through AIA New York.

ABA’s project for maharishi Tribeca has been featured in a print issue of the German magazine AIT – Architektur Innenarchitektur Technischer Ausbau. The coverage highlights how the design reinterprets retail experience through layered spatial strategies: the timber-framed structure, custom roll-up textile partitions, and the seamless integration of store, exhibition space, and brand archive become part of a continuous narrative.

We’re proud to share that our design for the maharishi Tribeca store received the 2019 Best of Design Award for Interior — Retail from The Architect’s Newspaper. The jury highlighted how the project transforms a landmarked Tribeca loft through a distinct architectural insertion: “a floating, olive-green cabinet grid that forms a building-within-a-building, creating display, circulation, and mezzanine vantage points while preserving the historic envelope.” The space pairs raw plywood, a camo-inflected palette, and meticulous detailing to produce an environment that feels both utilitarian and refined, aligning with the brand’s philosophy. The award recognizes the project as a benchmark for retail spaces that merge narrative, material clarity, and adaptive reuse.

The article on Dezeen explores how Abruzzo Bodziak Architects transformed the new U.S. flagship store of maharishi in New York’s Tribeca district into a “building-within-a-building.” Inside a landmark loft, the firm inserted an olive-green two-level timber module that floats within the historic shell, preserving original features while giving the brand a distinctive identity. Military-inspired shelving, mirrors, raw plywood, and rolling Japanese cotton curtains create a layered atmosphere that speaks to maharishi’s fusion of utility, camouflage, and refined materiality.

The Yale School of Architecture recently hosted the launch of Space for Restorative Justice, a publication emerging from the Fall 2018 studio led by Emily Abruzzo, Connecticut Community Justice Centers. The book examines how architecture can support new models of conflict resolution, replacing punitive environments with spaces for dialogue, shared meals, recreation, making, and learning. Featuring student projects, essays from field experts, and critiques from invited jurors, it proposes spatial frameworks that prioritize community support and collective agency over isolation. The work argues that justice environments can be civic, humane, and participatory rather than adversarial. The book is available through Yale..

Archinect profiles Abruzzo Bodziak Architects as a practice that treats its portfolio as one ongoing project, weaving together built work, research, and narrative to create architecture that “engenders belonging.” The article highlights how Emily Abruzzo and Gerald Bodziak embrace complexity with optimism—aiming not to scale for its own sake, but to deepen impact through projects that endure and serve broader communities. It underscores their belief that design attention should extend to the architecture of everyday systems—bathrooms, handrails, and other often-overlooked elements—because those details shape how people experience space and feel supported within it.

ABA’s maharishi Tribeca project is featured in Azure Magazine in the article, “In Tribeca, Maharishi’s First International Flagship Has an Appropriately Edgy Vibe.” The piece focuses on how the design inserts a timber grid “building-within-a-building” into a reused landmark loft, pairing the brand’s tactical influences with references to Japanese garden craft. Azure notes how the project preserves the character of the existing shell while introducing a modular display system that can adapt, conceal, or reveal—aligning with maharishi’s material intelligence, upcycling ethos, and utilitarian aesthetic.

ABA’s maharishi Tribeca project is featured in Domus, which highlights how a light, two-story timber grid sits inside the historic loft without competing with it. The olive-painted insert stands apart from the original shell, creating a clear dialogue between old and new. Custom woven cotton curtains act as flexible boundaries, allowing the space to shift easily between display, storage, and small gatherings. Instead of a renovation that erases what was there, the project adds a deliberate, temporary layer—one that respects the existing architecture while giving the brand a strong and memorable spatial identity.

ABA’s maharishi Tribeca project earns a feature in Interior Design, where the duo describes the design as a “building within a building.” Set inside a landmarked 1867 loft, the intervention incorporates a bold, olive-painted timber grid filled with plywood display bays and a new mezzanine with a perforated steel balustrade that channels the brand’s utilitarian ethos. Custom waxed Japanese cotton curtains roll down over each bay, morphing the space from gallery to storage to retail environment within moments. Rather than a simple renovation, the piece shows how ABA layered architecture and brand narrative to create a branching, responsive interior calibrated for movement, material presence, and strategic surprise.

Emily will be speaking about the importance of new types of civic spaces in fostering community in two Bay Area events this week.

Join her at Thursday, September 12 at 6:00pm at Impact Justice in Oakland for a round-table discussion of Space for Restorative Justice, an upcoming book about a ground-breaking studio at the Yale School of Architecture led by Emily that explored purpose-built community spaces for new forms of conflict resolution as well as communal activities such as recreation, making meals, and learning.

On Saturday, September 14 at the 2019 ACSA Conference “Less Talk | More Action” at Stanford University, she’ll present “Full Circle,” a related interactive workshop with Ashlee George, Associate Director of the Restorative Justice Project at Impact Justice.

ABA is included in the exhibition REJECTED: Architectural Drawings and Their Stories at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University. The show assembles work from a wide range of architects—well-known practices, emerging voices, and influential educators—to examine projects and proposals that never moved forward. Our contribution reflects an aspect of practice that is rarely displayed publicly: the ideas that pause, pivot, or stop, yet still shape how we work.

ABA’s design for the maharishi Tribeca flagship is featured in the FRAME article “From Tokyo to NYC: Here Are Eight Brand-New Must-See Shops and Cafés.” The piece highlights how our design inserts an olive green timber grid “building-within-a-building” into the landmark loft shell, drawing on references from military supply warehouses and Japanese garden structure. The layering of the old and the new, and the flexibility of display, storage and gathering zones, earned the store a spot among global retail openings to watch.

ABA’s design for the U.S. debut of maharishi is spotlighted in The Architect’s Newspaper. The article showcases how we inserted a two-level “building-within-a-building” grid of cabinetry into a landmarked Tribeca loft—floating within the original shell to preserve historical character while projecting the brand’s identity. The olive-toned framework, inspired by military supply, organizes the 1,280 sq ft space into rhythmic display bays, a mezzanine, and flexible storage zones. Curtains of custom woven cotton roll down to shift the interior between presentation and back-of-house—all as part of an architecture that is both functional and narratively coherent.

ABA’s work on the maharishi Tribeca flagship is featured in Hypebeast in the article “Staffsnaps: maharishi NYC.” The piece notes that the British brand’s first international flagship opened quietly in a renovated loft on Lispenard Street in Tribeca. Abruzzo Bodziak Architects helped transform the space into a two-story store by “floating” an insert within the existing structure, integrating references to army supply warehouses, Japanese gardens and classic New York storefronts. The story also highlights how the staff at the store brandish street-style sensibility while underscoring the brand’s sustainability commitments, including recycled nylon in its new collection.

Our Storefront Library project has been longlisted for this year’s Dezeen Awards, in the category of “Installation Design.” Read more at Dezeen!

Highsnobiety, the street-wear and sneaker blog focussed on fashion, culture, design, music and lifestyle, posted about the opening of maharishi Tribeca.

Emily and Gerald, who are Visiting Assistant Professors at the Syracuse University School of Architecture this spring, delivered a lecture titled “Survey,” presenting recent work by Abruzzo Bodziak Architects. They shared built projects and research investigations, discussing how the practice connects narrative, context, and material clarity. The talk offered students and faculty insight into how ABA approaches design at a range of scales, and how drawing, models, and prototypes shape the development of their work. See the video here.

ABA is excited to be listed in AN Interior among their top 50 architects and designers for 2019! Read more about on AN Interior’s site.

Abruzzo Bodziak Architects is honored to be included in AN Interior’s “Top 50 Interior Architects & Designers for 2019,” a curated list celebrating the United States’ most innovative and influential practitioners in interiors.

Emily and Gerald are thrilled to be Visiting Critics at Syracuse University School of Architecture for the Spring 2019 semester. Their advanced design studio, titled “In Effect,” will focus on the creation of a series of public reading rooms for the city of Syracuse.

ABA’s installation Storefront Library at Storefront for Art & Architecture was awarded Interior Design magazine’s 2018 Best of Year for Installation Projects. The project transformed the gallery’s iconic rotating façade into a public-facing series of bookshelves, inviting passersby into a curated dialogue around architectural publishing. By populating the shelves over time with iconic and emerging titles, ABA framed the installation as a live exhibition of ideas in process—rather than a static display—making room for books yet to be written.

ABA’s Storefront Library project, which transformed Storefront for Art and Architecture into a gallery of books yet to be written, has been awarded a Best of Year Award from Interior Design magazine!

Emily and Gerald will lecture at the School of Public Architecture, Michael Graves College at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, on November 28th, 2018. Join them at at 5pm in Kean’s Green Lane Academic Building for their lecture, “Nothing is Everything, or, Architecture is not an Object.”

Storefront for Art and Architecture’s 24 × 24 × 24 showed up in PIN–UP magazine (by Antwan Duncan) as a layered, high-low celebration of architecture, design and summer solstice revelry.

FRAME features our Storefront Library, a project that treats the façade of Storefront for Art and Architecture as a living threshold. The rotating-door wall becomes an apparatus for reading, where books, mirrors, and shifting planes fold public space into the act of looking and learning. Pages and walls move together, creating small moments of disorientation that open the familiar gallery to new readings. The installation works with minimal means but produces a layered spatial script: part library, part device, part collective memory.

METALOCUS features our installation for Storefront for Art and Architecture’s exhibition “Architecture Books: Yet to Be Written.” The piece uses the gallery’s rotating concrete façade as an active library wall, extending the sidewalk into a thin, shifting field of books, mirrors, and chronological markers. Selected volumes from the past 35 years sit alongside the “Book Props,” which register time through reflection rather than text. The article captures how the installation turns minimal components into a device for reading the past while implying the unwritten future, and how Storefront’s façade becomes both frame and participant in that conversation.

Our installation Storefront Library is featured in designboom, where the facade of Storefront for Art and Architecture becomes a rotating shelf system that reaches into the sidewalk, hosting architecture books from the past 35 years and gesturing toward those yet to be written. Designed to accompany the exhibition “Architecture Books – Yet To Be Written,” the project uses painted MDF shelving, mirrored “Book Props,” and a measured sparsity of volumes to stage reading as installation and public encounter. The article captures how the gallery’s street-facing wall becomes a mechanism for reflection—about books, architecture, and the space between.

Orignal Copy has edited a book about 5×5 Particapatory Provocations, the traveling exhibition curated by Kevin Erickson, Julia van den Haut, and Kyle May. ABA’s “I’m In” project is included along with twenty-four other architectural models by twenty-five young American architects. Five contemporary issues, each addressed by five firms.

The Architect’s Newspaper has published our Storefront Library installation for the exhibition Architecture Books: Yet to Be Written. The piece transforms Storefront for Art and Architecture’s rotating façade into a set of public-facing shelves that blur gallery and sidewalk.

Wallpaper* has just featured our installation Storefront Library at Storefront for Art and Architecture, where the gallery’s rotating façade becomes a sidewalk-facing shelf for architecture books chosen across three decades. Painted MDF shelving, bespoke “Book Marks” and mirrored “Book Props” shape the installation’s discreet logic, reframing the storefront into a vessel for public reading and participation.

Making the most of the longest day of the year, 24x24x24 brings together 24 designers to shape a day of programming and contribute a seat for a collective gathering during the summer solstice. At 9am on June 21st, engaging Storefront’s “Architecture Books” exhibit, ABA leads “On a Pedestal,” a debate on the role of books, or a canon, in architectural production and culture.

Abruzzo Bodziak Architects joined a curated group of designers and thinkers for 24×24×24, an exhibition and event organized by Studio Cadena, Leong Leong, Buro Koray Duman, Peterson Rich Office, and Kalos Eidos and held at Storefront for Art and Architecture on the summer solstice. A 24 hour long marathon of events, the program included 24 architects and designers who created 24 stools that provide an antidote to over polished, hyper refined, hyperbolic, and expensive design. An opportunity to connect, propose, and engage diverse architectural interests, designers hosted an hour of programming in conjunction with their stool during the longest day of the year. From dawn to dusk participants experimented in the collective production of thinking, design, and action.

ABA turns Storefront’s gallery into a library of the past, present, and future for “Architecture Books – Yet to be Written.” Join us Tuesday, June 19th at 7pm for the exhibit’s opening, or visit throughout the summer as the library populates.

Abruzzo Bodziak Architects was profiled in The Cut by Wendy Goodman in a story that captures the spirit of our Clinton Hill brownstone renovation. Goodman traces how the house moves between influences without settling into a single lineage, letting Nordic clarity, Japanese restraint, and Brooklyn texture meet in a way that feels lived rather than styled. The piece lingers on the custom steel stair, the softened palette, and the way light threads through the re-organized rooms, framing the project as a study in simplicity with depth.

David Schaengold and Nicolas Kemper review the Tempietto Exemplum exhibit at the Yale School of Architecture.

ABA contributed to the exhibit Tempietto Exemplum, curated by Amanda Iglesias and Spencer Fried, at the Yale School of Architecture’s Gallery. The exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture brought together nearly thirty architects and firms to reinterpret Tempietto by Donato Bramante through new drawings, all maintaining the square format that mirrors the building’s geometry. The work ranged from analytical diagrams and water-colors to holograms, tapestries and even a wedding-cake photograph, illustrating how contemporary practice engages both the “joys and burdens” of architectural history.

Abruzzo Bodziak has contributed work to “Souvenirs: New New York Icons” at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture. The exhibit, which opened as part of New Museum’s IdeasCity Festival, asks contributors to consider a specific area of the city, proposing a new icon for that community. ABA’s “Light and Air” project looks at the window as an icon for the right to housing for all.

Abruzzo Bodziak Architects was selected as a Curbed Groundbreaker, an annual recognition of architects and designers reshaping the discipline through ideas, public impact, and a willingness to work outside predictable paths. For us, the award marked a moment when our mix of civic projects, installations, and research-driven work was seen as part of a broader cultural shift toward more engaged, socially attuned architecture. Being named alongside emerging practitioners pushing similar boundaries underscored that design can be both precise and generous, rooted in real communities while open to experimentation.

Abruzzo Bodziak Architects was featured in Curbed’s “Groundbreakers 2017” series. Jenny Xie’s profile of our studio, “Abruzzo Bodziak Architects has an eye for detail and a heart for the city,” highlights ABA’s deep investment in civic-minded architecture and an approach that links historical reference to pared-down, contemporary expression. The piece traces how founders Emily and Gerald launched the studio in the wake of recession, and focused the practice on public projects and self-initiated work rather than waiting for clients. It underscores a commitment to “positive community engagement,” whether through a branch library renovation, a public monument competition, or interactive installations, showing how design can be a tool for urban and social innovation.

Emily, along with Leong Leong partner Chris Leong, co-organized the “New Local – Living: A/D/O Workshop” on October 27, 2017 for AIA New York. The half-day workshop explored evolving models of urban housing, shared resources, and neighbourhood identity in New York. The event brought architects, developers, sociologists, and policy makers together to challenge how we define “living” in a dense city. Hosted at A/D/O Brooklyn, it reframed housing typologies through equity, adaptability and community.

Emily & Gerald participated in a panel discussion, “5×5 Provocative Presentations” at AIA New York / Center for Architecture. We joined a group of young architectural teams selected from the “5×5 Participatory Provocations” exhibition to present physical models and bold responses to provocative, and very real, future scenarios: drone-based deliveries, high-end real-estate investment, lunar tourism, border infrastructure, and NSA community branches. The event highlighted how young practices imagine architecture’s role in shifting futures.

ABA is one of 25 offices invited to participate in 5×5 Participatory Provocations, a traveling exhibition that invited architecture teams to tackle five charged prompts about the near future. Our contribution examined how the hidden infrastructures that shape daily life—optics, data, and the thin spaces between devices and buildings—might become architectural material. The exhibition presented a series of physical models that reframed familiar systems as design territory, offering speculative but grounded takes on how architecture could respond to shifting cultural and technological conditions.

Emily is the 2017 recipient of The Yale School of Architecture’s Professor King-lui Wu Teaching Award. It is awarded each year to a faculty member who combines architectural practice with outstanding teaching. Recipients are selected by the vote of graduating students.

This TL Mag feature profiles a group of New York design studios, including ABA, that push back against the idea that architecture must be fast, specialized or narrowly transactional. Instead, the selected firms draw on deep traditions of representation and craft to expand what architectural practice can be, embracing slower, more deliberate modes of work. The piece argues that these studios redefine public communication, professional identity and the role of training by producing work that is inventive, rigorous, and culturally engaged. Their projects balance imagination with precision, echoing Vitruvius’s enduring triad of firmness, commodity and delight in a contemporary, forward-looking form.

In its feature “A Room with Sound – from NY,” Casa Brutus pictured ABA’ Clinton Hill client Devon Turnbull in his home listening room.

ABA’s Reflected Ceiling installation, created specifically for San Francisco Ballet’s Sensorium event, transformed the War Memorial Opera House with a suspended, shimmering field of aluminized mylar. Tied to the evening’s theme of “Reflection and Line,” curated and hosted by artist James Buckhouse, the piece echoed the building’s barrel-vaulted ceiling in a loose, draped form. The surface caught and bounced light, color, and movement, reflecting partygoers below and amplifying the atmosphere of the historic interior.

Emily joined AIA New York’s New Practice Committee panel on turning points in the profession. The event brought together six firms, from emerging studios to more established practices, each tracing a project or moment that shifted their trajectory. The conversation focused on what it actually took to move a practice forward, the choices and risks that mattered, and how those inflection points opened the next chapter of their work.

Emily pariticpated in a panel discussion on historical and contemporary precedents in collective form organized by California College of the Arts’ Urban Work Agency.

ABA is one of 25 offices invited to participate in 5×5 Participatory Provocations, a traveling exhibition that invited architecture teams to tackle five charged prompts about the near future. Our contribution examined how the hidden infrastructures that shape daily life—optics, data, and the thin spaces between devices and buildings—might become architectural material. The exhibition presented a series of physical models that reframed familiar systems as design territory, offering speculative but grounded takes on how architecture could respond to shifting cultural and technological conditions.

ABA was named a Design Vanguard by Architectural Record in 2016, joining a group the magazine has recognized annually since 2000 as emerging firms reshaping the discipline through built work, ideas, and approach. The award has a history of identifying practices early in their trajectory—many of whom have gone on to significant cultural, civic, and design impact. Being included placed Abruzzo Bodziak Architects among a selective international cohort noted for clarity of thought, rigor, and a distinct architectural voice, and acknowledged the firm’s commitment to work that engages communities, translates research into building, and treats design as both grounded and forward-looking.

The Architectural Record Design Vanguard profile presents ABA as a practice operating between research and making, where drawings, models, and material testing are not ancillary but central to how projects take shape. The article reads their work as a continuum across installations, interiors, and civic spaces—linked by a clarity of form, an economy of means, and an interest in how architecture frames everyday rituals. Rather than emphasizing scale or spectacle, the piece positions ABA’s work within subtler territories: adjacency, adaptation, and the calibrated relationships between bodies, surfaces, and context. It suggests a practice that is both disciplined and open—using architecture as a way to structure experience and invite new forms of engagement.

Emily participated in Storefront for Art & Architecture’s Manifesto Series: The Sharing Movement, a program that invited architects, theorists, and cultural commentators to examine how emerging models of shared resources are reshaping space, ownership, and civic life. Speaking alongside peers interrogating the political and spatial implications of “sharing,” she addressed how architecture both enables and constrains collective use—whether through policy, form, or the everyday mechanics of access.

ABA contributed a multimedia model of its Spaceframe project to the group exhibit “Tangible Place,” at the Dumbo Broklyn gallery of the New York Studio School, curated by sculptpor Jilaine Jones.

5×5: Participatory Provocations Exhibit opens at the Rhode Island School of Deisgn. The exhibit, curated by Original Copy, Kyle May, and Kevin Erickson, brings together architecture and design studios to respond to contemporary cultural and political questions through small but pointed objects or models. The show emphasizes architecture’s role as a civic instrument, asking how design can spark dialogue, reframe norms, or expose unseen systems. Rather than polished proposals, the work focuses on clear ideas, direct gestures, and accessible formats, inviting visitors to participate, question, and reflect.

5×5: Participatory Provocations Exhibit opens at the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative. The exhibit, curated by Original Copy, Kyle May, and Kevin Erickson, brings together architecture and design studios to respond to contemporary cultural and political questions through small but pointed objects or models. The show emphasizes architecture’s role as a civic instrument, asking how design can spark dialogue, reframe norms, or expose unseen systems. Rather than polished proposals, the work focuses on clear ideas, direct gestures, and accessible formats, inviting visitors to participate, question, and reflect.

As a member of the Architectural League Prize Committee, Gerald will present this year’s compettion theme and introduce the winners.

As part of the BKLYN Designs event lineup, Emily will join a panel with Architect’s Newspaper Matt Shaw, Wes Rozen of SITU Studio, and Michael Szivos of SOFTlab to talk about how interactive architecture gets designed and made.

Emily has been nominated for Inspiring Yale, a one-day symposium at the Yale School of Management that spotlights standout faculty across the university and celebrates cross-disciplinary thinking. The event recognizes teaching that reframes assumptions, invites debate, and connects ideas across fields. Emily’s courses and practice tie together civic space, everyday life, and material intelligence, showing how the built environment can be both practical and inventive. The nomination reflects the curiosity she cultivates in students and her conviction that architecture expands possibility while remaining grounded in real communities, real needs, and real places.

Emily Abruzzo and Gerald Bodziak, serving as Visiting Assistant Professors in the Architecture Department at the Rhode Island School of Design, presented a lecture on their in-progress and recent work as part of the Spring 2016 lecture series. The talk situated their practice within contemporary conversations about material intelligence, civic space, and the role of architecture in everyday life, offering students a view into how teaching and practice inform one another.

ABA designed and fabricated a new exhibition for Rhode Island School of Design’s Bayard Ewing Building Gallery, installing it with support from RISD faculty and students. Titled “Unmeasurability, or, the possibility of an immaterial object of design,” the show uses interactive models to explore architecture engineered for experience rather than performance. It looks at how a space can shift from one moment to the next, project different meanings to different viewers, and create realities that resist measurement.

5×5: Participatory Provocations Exhibit is covered by The Architect’s Newspaper: “Abruzzo Bodziak Architects’s NSA Community Branch invites guests to “spy” on the model through cellphone peepholes, the interior revealing and endless web of space.”

5×5: Participatory Provocations Exhibit opens at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The exhibit, curated by Original Copy, Kyle May, and Kevin Erickson, brings together architecture and design studios to respond to contemporary cultural and political questions through small but pointed objects or models. The show emphasizes architecture’s role as a civic instrument, asking how design can spark dialogue, reframe norms, or expose unseen systems. Rather than polished proposals, the work focuses on clear ideas, direct gestures, and accessible formats, inviting visitors to participate, question, and reflect.

Emily will speak at the California College of the Arts on new forms of collective housing in a mini-symposium organized by CCA Architecture and Urban Works Agency.

Gerald is on Architectural League’s YOUNG ARCHITECTS + DESIGNERS COMMITTEE for the 2016 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers. This year’s theme, (im)permanence, addresses the cultural proliferation of short-term projects, and asks how time plays a role in the definition of new architectural practice.

As a follow-up to ABA’s collaboration with AIA New York on the FitNation exhibit, Emily spoke at the AIA New York State Conference in Saratoga with Rick Bell. Their lecture, “Bicycles, Obesity, and Architecture,” examined how active design strategies can shape the built environment to support healthier outcomes. Read about the event in eOculus.

Emily will give a lecture tonight on current work and historical models at Queens College’s Godwin Ternbach Museum. The lecture is part of a series given in parallel with the exhibit “PERSUASIVE IMAGES: Architecture of the 1939–40 & 1964–65 New York World’s Fairs,” open through August 8, 2015.

ABA is honored to be named among four firms shortlisted for the Bronx Museum of the Arts Atrium Renovation, through New York City’s Department of Design and Construction Design and Construction Excellence program.

ABA hosted the Architectural League of New York’s season finale First Friday event on June 5 along with INABA, MESH Architectures, and Young Projects.

Today, Pidgin magazine launches its 19th Issue, Magic, with an article by Emily and Gerald titled “Magic is in the Setup.”

“Trade,” an exhibt that ABA designed for Architect’s Newspaper and AIA New Practices New York, has won “Best in Show” at BKLYN Designs

ABA is curator and designer of “New Brooklyn Architecture,” an exhibit produced for The Architect’s Newspaper and the AIA New Practices New York Committee at BKLYN DESIGNS. The exhibit will run May 8 – 10 at the Brooklyn Expo Center.

At 3:00PM on Sunday, May 10, The Architect’s Newspaper Executive Editor William Menking will lead a rapid-format panel with seven local architecture firms changing the Brooklyn landscape, including Emily Abruzzo, Partner, Abruzzo Bodziak Architects.

ABA has won a competitive RFP through New York City’s Department of Design and Construction Design Excellence Program for the design of new parking, landscaping, and pedestrian ways serving Queens Borough Hall.

ABA has won a competitive RFP through New York City’s Department of Design and Construction Design Excellence Program for the re-design of New York Public Library’s Castle Hill Branch in the Bronx.

Gaming, Surveillance, and the New, Optimized City: Gerald and Emily write “Winner Winner” for The Search Engine, the current volume of Columbia GSAPP’s Applied Research Practices in Architecture Journal. The essay looks at how surveillance-based data-mining systems originally built for intelligence and casino industries could be repurposed for urban planning, land use and architecture, yielding both new possibilities as well as risks. We use our “Grow A Lot” project to show how combining disparate data sets can identify under-utilized sites and catalyze adaptive urban strategies, while also highlighting the privacy and ethical trade-offs of such systems.

A recent site visit image: the renovation, and reinvention of a historic townhouse in the Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn.

eOculus’ssummary of the AIA New York event, “Branching Out: Next Steps for Universal Pre-Kindergarten Expansion in NYC Libraries,” calls out ABA’s presentation of its UPK Kit project: “Emily Abruzo shared the work [ABA] has done with DDC on demountable classroom prototypes that would allow libraries and other community spaces to assemble a pre-k classroom, with adequate storage, surface area, seating, etc., during school hours, and also have the option to disassemble it when not in session.”

As a follow-up to ABA’s collaboration with AIA New York on the FitNation exhibit, Emily spoke at the AIA New York State Conference in Saratoga with Rick Bell. Their lecture, “Bicycles, Obesity, and Architecture,” examined how active design strategies can shape the built environment to support healthier outcomes.

Emily and Gerald will present ideas for transforming existing community spaces around New York into engaging, temporary classrooms to accommodate the needs of the City’s growing Universal Pre-K program at the upcoming “Discovering Synergies Between Libraries and Universal Pre-K: Current Findings” event at AIA New York / The Center for Architecture.

ABA is excited to announce a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) America Commitment to Action: a formal pledge made by an organization, company, or team to launch a specific, measurable project that addresses a pressing economic or social challenge in the United States. Our project, “Grow A Lot: Urban Greenhouses Activate Vacant Land” is a research-driven urban tool that identifies overlooked, under-utilized parcels in cities by combining public data, mapping, and on-the-ground observation. The project proposes that small vacant lots—often too minor for traditional development—can be aggregated and activated for community uses such as micro-gardens, local food production, or small-scale public spaces. It demonstrates how clear visualizations and simple spatial strategies can turn scattered, neglected land into a collective resource.

ABA’s Grow a Lot project is featured by Cultured Magazine in this month’s Cultured 25 roundup.

ABA is excited to be producing a working prototype of their 4D Lightful Gardens Project as supported by the AIA Arnold W. Brunner Grant. A rethink of the vertical garden, the design blurs the line between architecture and nature by combining the structural concept of tensegrity with a hydroponic growing system.

Emily lectured at the AIA National Convention in Chicago. Her lecture, “FitNation: Changing Culture,” drew on the work of the FitNation exhibit, which origninated at AIA New York Center for Architecture. She was joined by AIANY Executive Director Rick Bell, FAIA and AIA Birmingham Executive Director Rhea Williams for a panel dicussion.

Emily served on the Sustainable Buildings Working Group at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in Denver. She contributed to the group’s solutions-focused workshops and presented ABA’s Grow A Lot project, which transforms vacant land into sites for healthy food production and local job creation.

Brienne Walsh from Artphaire writes on Top 10 Rising International Architects: “Calling themselves a “curiosity-driven” practice, Abruzzo Bodziak’s diverse work ranges from urban greenhouses to sculptural installations. Clients and critics alike are enraptured by the Brooklyn-based firm, which has already received multiple awards including the AIA New Practices New York 2012 and the 2010 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers.”

ABA is part of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s exhibition “Letters to the Mayor,” on view through May 24, 2014. Our letter to the Mayor of New York City questions why kite flying, a simple and joyful activity, is prohibited across the five boroughs unless explicitly allowed.

Landscape (Triptych) was recently featured by FRAME among other notable interventions that “evaluate private and public spheres.”

Pop-Up Farm was recently featured by Honest Buildings in their article, “A Pop-Up That’s Bringing Down the House.”

Original Article

How do you add value to land that remains vacant and under-utilized? Well, a pop-up farm is one idea…

Abruzzo Bodziak Architecture is responsible for designing the new pop-up farm concept for New York Sun Works’ “Greenhouse Project.” The architecture firm helped New York Sun Works choose a city-owned lot in East New York that had been slated for housing development, but lay vacant due to the low unit yield on developing small sites and the high cost of brownfield clean-up.

Located in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills, an area which suffers from low-income and high unemployment, it is considered a food desert due to a dearth of fresh and healthy produce. The greenhouse project “uses hydroponic farming technology to educate students and teachers in about the science of sustainability.”

Abruzzo Bodziak looked at 11 sites, but in the end chose one with the best visibility, foot traffic, and lighting. Partner Emily Abruzzo says that the greenhouse was designed as a “kit, so that it could be reconfigured and rebuilt on new lots.” The current lease is 5 years and fundraising for the project is taking place now. Grow WNY, an online publication that often writes about urban farming, sees urban growing as “a way to engage the residents and revitalize neighborhoods.” Thus, the farm will not only make the land more productive, but the surrounding community more invigorated as well.

Abruzzo says the project “is a group effort. There’s been a ton of excitement around it. We purposefully designed the greenhouse to stand out and be noticed. It gets people excited and involved.” Dependent on the project’s success, the greenhouse has the potential to not only positively affect Cypress Hills, but other areas around New York as well– a perfect way to breath new life into otherwise unproductive land.

Emily will present current and recent work in a lecture titled “Time Files,” this Friday at Woodbury School of Architecture in San Diego.

Landscape (Triptych) is featured in Mark and Frame.

FitNation is featured in Mark and Frame.

A recent site-visit image: an extensive renovation and addition to a pitched-roof, multi-volume cedar house in East Hampton reorganizes the plan for more generous living spaces and streamlines the overall massing. New floor-to-ceiling windows open the house to its lush surroundings, while lighter interior materials give the spaces a breezier, more modern character.

ABA is featured in Istanbul ‘74 Gazette’s end of year roundup.

Emily wrote for the most recent Kerb Journal about publishing and practice.

Now traveling to cities across the US, the FitNation exhibit we curated for AIA New York / The Center for Architecture is the inaugural exhibition for the new Center for Architecture in Birmingham, AL.

ABA participated in a panel at AIA New York Center for Architecture on working with the New York City Department of Design and Construcion.

Recent work of ours is included in AIA New York’s 2013 “Subway Show,” which uses the West 4th Street Subway, along with other locations citywide, to display the work of New York City’s architects.

The AIANY Design Awards exhibit, including our Landscape (Triptych) project, opens at the Buenos Aires International Biennial of Architecture today.

Our Pop-Up Farm is featured in an article on “greening America’s food deserts,” in this month’s issue of Architectural Record.

Read Richard Stub’s writeup of Landscape (Triptych) in eOculus.

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ABA has won a competitive RFP through New York City’s Department of Design and Construction Design Excellence Program for the re-design of Queens Library’s Peninsula Branch in Far Rockaway.

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Wallpaper* Magazine named ABRUZZO BODZIAK among twenty of “the world’s best young practices” in their Architects Directory 2013.

Our office was asked to curate and design FitNation, a traveling exhibition on active design efforts across the United States which initiated at the Center for Architecture / AIA NY this past week and runs through September 7th.

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ABRUZZO BODZIAK has received a Merit Award from AIA New York for Landscape (Triptych).

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Curated by Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Princeton’s 2012–13 lecture series “What I Did Next — Princeton’s Alternative Architectural Practices” assembled 85 distinguished alumni from the last 25 years whose work pushes architecture past its conventional boundaries. The conversations examined how younger practices are redefining the field through new geographies, formats, and technologies, treating architecture as a flexible platform rather than a fixed profession. Across sixteen sessions, the series mapped out the experimental ethos of the school and highlighted how its graduates are shaping alternative models of practice at a moment when the discipline is under global pressure to evolve. ABA presented recent work and partiicipated in a round-table discussion on February 20th, as part of the school’s year-long lecture series.

The Fairy Tale Architecture series curated by Kate and Andrew Bernheimer treats classic stories as frameworks for reimagining spatial experience. Instead of illustrating narratives, the project uses them as charged atmospheres—structures of desire, fear, transformation—that push architecture into more speculative territory. By pairing architects with specific tales, the series reveals how fiction can surface new logics for enclosure, sequence, and materiality. It shows architecture as an expanded field shaped by narrative intelligence, where form emerges from mood as much as function. Our paper forest inspired interpretation of Snowflake, a Russian fairy tale, is featured in Design Observer as part of the series.

ABA has been selected as one of 20 firms included in the latest round of New York City’s Design + Construction Excellence Program. The New York City Department of Design & Construction (DDC)’s Design and Construction Excellence program is a statement of the City’s commitment to elevate public architecture and infrastructure. It defines best-practice standards for quality, innovation, functionality, cost-efficiency, durability and public value in civic projects. It emphasizes collaboration, transparent processes, civic and community-oriented outcomes, resilience, sustainability, and responsible stewardship of public funds. Being included in this program is a significant honor, signaling that a firm’s work meets exceptionally high standards, has the capacity to deliver on complex civic mandates, and that it’s trusted to help shape the public realm at its best.

Matt Shoor’s eOculus piece on our recent AIA lecture underscores how we use light and color as primary building tools. He highlights how we treat illumination as structure rather than afterthought, whether in Landscape (Triptych)—where electroluminescent wire becomes a spatial field—or in Homeless Projection, where light on a façade reveals the social systems that typically stay unseen. He also points to our use of color as a way to shift context and clarify purpose, like the bright orange structural frame of the Pop-up Farm, which cuts through a muted urban backdrop to mark a new type of civic presence.

Transcript Below:

Over the course of millennia, light has been the one constant in the architect’s palette. If illumination defines space, then the nature and quality of that light are what generate powerful psychological associations. In addition, the physical properties of the visible light spectrum allow humans to see color, one of the most sensually pleasurable natural phenomena. In the era of electric illumination, color and light are even more intimately intertwined, since color can now be perceived under wholly unnatural circumstances.

Although ABRUZZO BODZIAK Architects’ body of work displays a dizzying breadth in terms of type, size, and budget, their projects share a keen sensitivity to light. Emily Abruzzo, AIA, LEED AP, and Gerald Bodziak, AIA, LEED AP, seem especially attracted to artificial light, and they utilize it to a significant degree in both constructed and conceptual work.

Among the most concrete examples of Abruzzo and Bodziak’s finely tuned understanding of light is one of their most recent projects. “Landscape (Triptych)” was installed at the Center for Architecture this past summer as part of the “New Practices New York 2012” exhibition. This temporary piece explored the potential of electroluminescent wire hung from a tensile armature. According to the architects, when the wire was illuminated at night, the striated pattern inadvertently took the form of stylized rolling hills. This happy accident recalled the initial title of the installation, and resulted in a striking billboard advertising the innovative work being done by young New York designers.

The primacy of artificial light has also infiltrated a number of other ABRUZZO BODZIAK projects. In “Homeless Projection,” the architects wanted to literally illuminate a perennial problem. According to the designers, homeless shelters are often nondescript buildings that serve a crucial social function, and yet they do not trumpet their presence in neighborhoods for fear of reducing property values. The designers chose to challenge this out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude by projecting the current occupancy of the shelter on the façade of the building in block numerals many feet tall. In this manner, there would be no mistaking how many individuals directly benefit from the work done within.

Color is another important facet of the firm’s work, especially as it relates to natural light. In “Pop-up Farm,” a hydroponic greenhouse on a disused lot in East New York, Brooklyn, the pair elected to paint the steel structure an orange hue in an effort to differentiate the building from the monotone urban fabric surrounding it. During daylight hours, the bright orange is visible through the translucent polycarbonate panels of the edifice. Thus, color is used to draw attention to the primary function of the structure, which is to provide fresh produce to a community lacking access to healthful food.

According to Bodziak, the firm uses light as a material to create a lot with a little. It is certainly true that the firm’s investigations have resulted in a handful of potent projects with formal and political heft, and one hopes that future explorations with light will result in a portfolio of structures with deep social significance. Who knew that illumination, a phenomenon without mass, could be such a weighty tool?

Emily and Gerald lecture about current work as part of the AIA New Practices New York award lecture series.

Past Futures, Present, Futures at Storefront for Art and Architecture gathered 101 unrealized visions for New York and asked contemporary artists, architects and thinkers to re-stage them for today. The show treated unbuilt proposals as a living archive of the city’s ambitions, anxieties and desires, arguing that moments of crisis open space for reimagining collective futures. Leong Leong’s installation turned the gallery into a layered timeline of ideas, pairing historical material with new interventions.” The exhibition reframed speculation as an essential civic tool and positioned New York as a continuous project shaped by imagination as much as construction. Among recreations of unrealized proposals for New York is our redux of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “Homeless Projection.” Opening 7pm, Friday, October 26th at Storefront for Art and Architecture.

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Linda Miller writes about ABA among the winners of this year’s AIA New Practices New York portfolio award. AIA New Practices New York is awarded to City-based architecture and design practices who offer a distinctive voice in engaging critical issues. In particular, it seeks portfolios with innovative design work and those that that use the agency of their voice to expand the role of the practitioner in crafting new approaches and models for working in architecture, to promote a spirit of experimentation in the design process, and to provoke creative and adaptive bodies of work.

Michael Lawlor writes about the AIA New Practices New York winners for Architect’s Newspaper. AIA New Practices New York is awarded to City-based architecture and design practices who offer a distinctive voice in engaging critical issues. In particular, it seeks portfolios with innovative design work and those that that use the agency of their voice to expand the role of the practitioner in crafting new approaches and models for working in architecture, to promote a spirit of experimentation in the design process, and to provoke creative and adaptive bodies of work.

Please join us tonight, July 16th, at 6pm for a discussion at the Center for Architecture with the winners of New Practices New York 2012, moderated by Troy Therrien and Dan Wood.

Matt Shoor writes about AIA New Practices New York for eOculus. AIA New Practices New York is awarded to City-based architecture and design practices who offer a distinctive voice in engaging critical issues. In particular, it seeks portfolios with innovative design work and those that that use the agency of their voice to expand the role of the practitioner in crafting new approaches and models for working in architecture, to promote a spirit of experimentation in the design process, and to provoke creative and adaptive bodies of work.

The Moment / Art Observed caught a late night photo of our Landscape (Triptych) installation at the Center for Archtiecture in New York City.

ABA was invited to contribute to Architecture for Humanity’s “I Love Architecture” charity auction. Writes Architect’s Newspaper: “The organization, which coordinates sustainable development projects, is dedicated to design that ‘creates lasting change in communities.’ Architecture for Humanity acknowledges that many are not able to afford the expertise of an architect yet the help of an architect could contribute greatly to their community. The organization aims to raise $150,000 auctioning sketches donated by notable architects.”

The AIA New Practices New York exhibit opens today at the Center for Architecture. Featuring the work of all of this year’s winners, see ABA’s Lanscape (Triptych) installation in the gallery’s double height space up front, and models and drawings in the main gallery.

ABA’s team is working night and day to complete the install for Landscape (Triptych). Made from technical rope and electroluminescent wire, it translates the idea of a mountainous landscape into a field of light-defined linear forms. Through changing light conditions, the installation’s volumetric lines invert and shift, transforming perception as one moves around the gallery or passes on the sidewalk

Emily will be presenting our office’s work and speaking at AIA New York / Center for Architecture on Saturday, April 21st as part of the Helsinki – New York Roundtable Discussion and NEWLY DRAWN Opening Reception.

For the upcoming AIA New Practices New York exhibit at the Center for Architecture, each winning firm was invited to propose an installation for the gallery’s double-height, street-facing space. ABA’s Landscape (Triptych) was selected, and we’re now developing the project with AIA. Stay tuned for installation updates.

DAMn Magazine covers the projects and people of the DesigNYC initiative. A New York City–based program that matches civic-minded design professionals with nonprofits and city agencies for pro bono projects, DesigNYC uses design resources to help nonprofits and strengthen public services through a multidisciplinary, community-centric approach, connecting designers with organizations for projects that range from graphic design to urban planning and architecture

Our Grow a Lot pop-up farm, developed with Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation and NY Sun Works to activate vacant land for local food production and job creation, was featured in this month’s Architectural Record.

We’re proud to share that Abruzzo Bodziak Architects contributed to the international exhibition How Did Architects Respond Immediately After 3/11 – The Great East Japan Earthquake. Hosted by The Japan Foundation and traveling globally, the show documents architectural responses to the March 11 disaster—spanning emergency relief, temporary housing, and long-term reconstruction. ABA’s Sanctuary Along the Coast proposal joined peers from around the world in exploring how architecture can operate in the immediate aftermath of crisis and in shaping more resilient futures.

ABA’s work is included in this evening event at the Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York, organized by Architizer.

The AIA New York New Practices New York award recognizes emerging firms that are redefining what an architectural practice can be. It looks beyond individual projects to evaluate a studio’s overall approach, its conceptual strength, and the ways it responds to contemporary pressures in the city. Winners are chosen for demonstrating a clear design voice, an inventive operational model, and a commitment to shaping New York’s built environment with intelligence and ambition. In 2012, Abruzzo Bodziak Architects was one of seven firms selected, placing the studio among a cohort seen as setting the direction for the next generation of architectural practice.

Making A Case, a 306090 volume co-edited by Emily Abruzzo, Gerald Bodziak, and Jonathan Solomon, is now available from Princeton Architectural Press. Bringing together newly commissioned designs and speculations, the book reconsiders the American house in light of today’s most pressing conditions, from climate and density to shifting patterns of work and family. The collection positions the house as a site of experimentation rather than nostalgia, offering models that challenge familiar assumptions and propose more adaptive, future-ready forms of living. Thanks to all of the contributors for their inventive work, and to Thumb for a clear, incisive design that reinforces the ambitions of the project.

Emily is on the Young Architects and Designers Committee for the 2012 Architectural League Prize. The Architectural League Prize is a biennial competition, lecture series, and exhibition for emerging architects, organized by The Architectural League together with its Young Architects and Designers Committee. The committee, composed of past honorees, sets the annual theme, assembles the jury, and participates in selecting the winners from the North-American portfolio competition.

Emily will be interviewed for Korean radio to talk about ABA’s Grow a Lot pop-up farm, developed with Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation and NY Sun Works to activate vacant land for local food production and job creation

Our East New York Pop-Up Farm project, “Grow a Lot,” was featured on Fast Company Design. ABA’s Grow A Lot project proposes a network of lightweight urban greenhouses designed to activate vacant city lots. The idea is simple and scalable: use modular, low-cost structures to turn underused parcels into productive community assets. The greenhouses support small-scale agriculture, education, and local stewardship, while their bright, open frames announce a temporary but meaningful claim on otherwise idle land. Rather than waiting for long-term development, the project shows how cities can generate environmental, social, and economic value right away by treating vacancy as an opportunity for cultivation and public engagement.

Our Sanctuary Along the Coast project was developed in response to the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and was commissioned by X-Knowledge Home No. 15 for its “Idea Donation” issue, edited by Hironori Watanabe and Akiko Shimizu. The piece explores how architecture might provide refuge, reflection, and reconnection in the wake of sudden loss—using the coastline itself as a setting for gathering, memorial, and calm. The publication brings together a thoughtful collection of proposals addressing the aftermath of the disaster, and, for those who read Japanese, it is a beautifully assembled volume. A portion of the proceeds from the issue supports the Japan earthquake and tsunami relief fund, aligning design speculation with direct aid.

Bill Millard writes in AIA’s Oculus about architects contributing pro bono work for the public good, including ABA’s collaboration with Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation and NY Sun Works on Grow A Lot, which activates vacant land for local food production and job creation.

Emily and Gerald were invited to speak at the New York Institute of Technology School of Architecture & Design about projects that have a presence in the urban fabric.

Emily will be speaking with Laetitia Wolff of desigNYC, Erika Doering of Erika Doering Design and Victor Lytvinenko of RALEIGHDENIM this Saturday, in a panel on “The Challenges of Sustainable Design in a Local Ecosystem” at Hello Etsy.

See our East New York “Pop Up Farm” at desigNYC’s 2011 Exhibition, on view from September 14 through October 1, 2011 at GD Cucine, 227 W 17th Street. desigNYC is a program that connects design firms with nonprofits and city agencies in need of pro bono services, showcasing how design expertise can be directed to public-sector and community work. projects range from community gardens to environmental groups, and underscored the belief that design is empowering rather than decorative. The initiative gathers socially-conscious firms, mobilizes their talent toward civic impact, and illustrates a model of design practice rooted in collaboration with the public realm.

Emily participated in a discussion with Florian Idenburg, Mark Kushner, Peter Macapia and Alexander Gutzmer for Baumeister Magazine, regarding the urbanistic and architectural legacy of 9-11. If you read German, pick up a copy.

Emily writes on the intangible qualities of models for the introduction to Megan Werner’s superb book on architectural model making by Princeton Architectural Press.

The Architectural League’s catalogue of the 29th Annual Young Architects / League Prize award is now available by Princeton Architectural Press, with a terrific foreword by Dan Wood.

PIN-UP #10 asks us the hard-hitting questions! We’re excited to be a part of their “Ten Questions Ten New York Architects” special feature.

Stylepark covers New York’s “Festival of Ideas for the New City,” where architects, writers, and urban thinkers explored future approaches to density, sustainability, mobility, and public space. As part of the event’s Audi Urban Future Initiative exhibition, five emerging firms were invited to imagine New York in 2030 through a large-scale urban model. Abruzzo Bodziak Architects contributed Adaptive Zoning, a proposal that reclaims unused rooftop airspace for photovoltaic fields within existing height limits, turning latent vertical territory into productive energy infrastructure. The article positions ABA as one of the forward-looking studios testing how design, policy, and environmental strategies can reshape the city’s future.

During New York’s Festival of Ideas for the New City, a symposium organized by Storefront for Art and Architecture and the Audi Urban Future Initiative brought together designers and thinkers to consider how mobility, light, and new technologies might reshape urban life. As part of the exhibition, we were invited—along with four other emerging New York practices—to speculate on Manhattan’s future. Our contribution focused on the overlooked rooftop and interstitial airspace created by zoning. Rather than treating these gaps as residual, we proposed turning them into sites for photovoltaic fields, greenhouses, and water-collection systems. The work reflects our interest in uncovering latent spatial potential and reimagining the city through more sustainable, productive frameworks. Read more in Domus: Contested Mobility, Future Cities, and Public Light, and see this video produced by Architizer about the project.

At the Audi Urban Future Initiative’s 2011 New York event, five emerging firms were invited to envision Manhattan in 2030. Our studio — Abruzzo Bodziak Architects — contributed a vision for the East Side / Turtle Bay that integrates clean-tech infrastructure and urban ecology. We proposed localized energy production through rooftop photovoltaics, wind turbines, and living roofs — transforming underutilized building envelopes into self-powered, sustainable architecture. The project challenged conventional zoning logic by treating latent urban volume as an opportunity rather than a constraint. Through this work we signaled our commitment to sustainable, future-oriented urban design grounded in real-world context. Read more on Wired

Air Rights of Way—our proposal rethinking how architecture and transportation intersect in Manhattan—will be on view in Project New York at Nolita’s Openhouse Gallery. Organized by Architizer and presented with the Audi Urban Future Initiative curated by Stylepark, the exhibition is part of the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for the New City. The show features our drawings and a large-scale urban model, with a public roundtable on May 9. Openhouse Gallery, 201 Mulberry Street, New York.

Our Air Rights of Way project is part of Project New York at Nolita’s Openhouse Gallery, organized by Architizer in conjunction with the Audi Urban Future Initiative curated by Stylepark, and part of the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas.

New York Daily News covered the Audi Urban Future Initiative’s Project New York, produced for the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas by Architizer and Stylepark. As part of the exhibition, ABA contributed a proposal that rethinks how New York could generate sustainable energy by transforming overlooked rooftop and airspace conditions. Our work explored how adaptive zoning could allow dormant urban volume to support photovoltaic fields, green roofs, and other clean-energy systems, turning residual space into productive infrastructure.

Bauwelt writes on our Audi Urban Future Initiative project Air Rights of Way. Translated from the original German text:

The most compelling proposal for Manhattan was East Side/Turtle Bay by Emily Abruzzo and Gerald Bodziak from Brooklyn. They take up an obvious concept—already implemented in very modest ways on a small scale—that is now meant to become a central theme of urban transformation: the repurposing of rooftops, with a wide spectrum of possibilities and on a far larger scale. They propose greenhouses, pergolas, large solar arrays, and integrated water reservoirs—an entirely practical approach, built on ideas that no longer feel foreign to the city.

What about individual mobility in the future? It plays an indirect role; for example, the solar power generated on the roofs is fed into the electric cars parked in front of the buildings. The fruit and vegetables harvested above, on the roof farm, are likewise meant to go straight down into the shop. Underlying all this is the idea of a local, resource-efficient supply system.

And one small observation fits nicely with these new, small-scale rooftop concepts: I stayed at a hotel whose roof was home to chickens—well-groomed birds with ample space to roam—that supplied eggs for the guests; tomatoes were harvested there, and even flowers for the lobby were grown.

Inhabitat covers the Audi Urban Future Initiative’s Project New York, produced for the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas by Architizer and Stylepark. As part of the exhibition, ABA contributed a proposal that rethinks how New York could generate sustainable energy by transforming overlooked rooftop and airspace conditions. Our work explored how adaptive zoning could allow dormant urban volume to support photovoltaic fields, green roofs, and other clean-energy systems, turning residual space into productive infrastructure.

Detail’s “5 Drafts for Manhattan, 2030” looks at how five young New York architecture studios were asked to imagine the city’s future. ABA’s contribution focused on something simple but often ignored: the leftover rooftop and airspace created by zoning. Instead of treating these gaps as wasted volume, we explored how they could support new forms of decentralized energy production and lightweight ecological infrastructure. Photovoltaics, planted surfaces, and other clean-energy systems become part of the everyday cityscape, stitched into what already exists.

ABA will partiicpate in a roundtable discussion on Audi Urban Future Initiative’s Project New York, produced for the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas by Architizer and Stylepark.

Our 4d Lightful Gardens project will soon be on view at the Virginia Center for Architecture, which will be host to Exit Art’s Vertical Gardens exhibit from April 14 to June 26, 2011.

Emily and Gerald play imaginary future archaeologists! Join us at Storefront for Art and Architecture for a Cabaret of Dreams, an event in which we and other architects will suggest alternative histories for iconic works of architecture, in conjunction with the release of Aude-Line Duliere and Clara Wong’s book, Monsterpieces.

Temporary Text

Our TASKSCAPE 01 project will be on view at “Constructed Territory,” an exhibit at the Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries in Dayton Ohio from October 31, 2010 to January 9, 2011.

Emily will moderate a panel discussion about technology use in architectural design with Antoine Picon, George Legendre and co-moderator Alessandra Ponte at the ACADIA Conference at Cooper Union.

Temporary Text

In A Daily Dose of Architecture, John Hill writes about the Architectural League Prize exhibit, “ReSource,” on view at Parsons The New School for Design.

Emily and Gerald will lecture at Parsons The School for Design as part of the Architectural League Prize 2010 lecture series. See the lecture here.

The Architectural League Prize exhibition is now open at Parsons The New School of Design. ABA’s installation brings together models, prototypes, and material studies alongside drawings, renderings, and diagrams that trace a range of recent projects. It offers a close look at how ideas move from concept to form, and how different scales of work connect across the practice.

The Architectural League Prize’s annual exhibition will open shortly. The series highlights early-career architects and designers across North America, with each edition organized around a central theme. Winners are selected for how their built or speculative work engages that prompt, making the Prize a key platform for emerging practices to gain visibility, define their positions, and enter broader architectural conversation. ABA is excited to be part of this year’s cohort.

We are happy to announce that we are recipients of the 2010 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects & Designers. Formerly known as the Young Architects Forum, an exhibition and lecture will take place in late June, with a publication to be released by Princeton Architectural Press later this year.

ABA was selected as the winner of Somerville, Massachusetts’ Arts Union Beacon competition. The project calls for a new civic-minded sculpture for the Union Square Firehouse, a historic building that now anchors much of the city’s arts programming. ABA’s proposal reimagines the light that once shone from the firehouse’s original cupola, translating it into a contemporary set of curved forms illuminated from within by full-spectrum LEDs. The piece reconnects the building to its past while giving the neighborhood a new, visible marker of its cultural activity.

Emily will join in a panel discussion on architecture, writing and the sharing of information, Thursday April 8th at Parsons the New School for Design.

Vertical Gardens (featuring our 4D Lightful Gardens project) is now on view at AIA San Francisco | Center for Architecture + Design Gallery.

ABA’s “100 Straight Skeletons” was selected as a winner of Gehry Technologies’ “What’s Your Problem?” competition. The recognition pairs ABA with GT’s team to develop custom software that leverages the algorithms used to generate trusses in conventional homebuilding. The goal is to push those everyday computational logics into innovative architectural form-making, opening up new possibilities for structure and geometry.

The catalogue for Exit Art’s “Vertical Gardens” exhibition, published by Chupacabra Press and edited by Lauren Rosati, is now available from Exit Art. It features ABA’s 4D Lightful Gardens alongside a wide range of forward-looking proposals and built work.

ABA has been shortlisted for the City of Somerville, Massachusetts’ Arts Union Beacon project. The project calls for a new civic-minded sculpture for the Union Square Firehouse, a historic building that now anchors much of the city’s arts programming.

Growing Urban Habitats, the new book from William Stout publishers on innovative multi-family housing solutions, features our Charlottesville Green / Packed House project. Edited by William R. Morrish, Susanne Schindler, and Katie Swenson, and based on the goals of “Urban Habitats,” a design competition held in 2005 by Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville and the Charlottesville Community Design Center for the redevelopment of a local trailer park, this book frames sixteen design opportunities for affordable, dense, compact, and sustainable housing.

The Past, Present and Future of Green Roofs & Vertical Gardens
A new exhibit looks at the exciting possibilities of growing food and vegetation in unlikely spaces, transforming cities into sustainable green oases. Also check out recycled green art and modular homes.

By Gloria Dawson

A new exhibit on vertical gardens, vertical farms and green roofs has opened at Exit Art in Midtown Manhattan in partnership with SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics). The exhibit incorporates photography, illustrations and information on various alternative garden and farming projects.

This exhibit explores this most basic desire for us to reconnect with nature even as the world is increasingly developed into urban spaces. The exhibit realizes this desire in pieces both simplistic and scientific – illustrations of vegetation-covered building, vertical gardens that add beauty and functionality to a cement landscape and urban farms that sustain us in our cities. Overall the aim of these gardens and farms is to reduce our carbon footprint, produce oxygen, clean toxins and produce food where we are actually living. Some projects in this exhibit are simply ideas that may never come into fruition, some have already been created and there’s even one you could have in your own home sometime soon.

“Vertical Gardens” at Exit Art brings together more than twenty architectural and artistic proposals that reimagine how greenery can occupy dense cities. The exhibition presents models, drawings, renderings, photographs and a living green wall, showing how vertical farms, rooftop landscapes and hydroponic systems can introduce plant life, food production and social space where land is scarce. It highlights global precedents and speculative concepts that position green walls and roofs as environmentally efficient, self-sustaining infrastructures for cities defined by concrete and high-rise development. ABA’s contribution, 4D Lightful Gardens, sits among this diverse group, offering one of the exhibit’s forward-looking visions for vertical urban ecologies and how they might reshape everyday urban experience.

Anya Bokov has edited Edge as Center: Envisioning the Post-Industrial Landscape, published by the City of Somerville and documenting the competition to redesign the Brickbottom District. ABA, working with Jonathan Solomon, is featured as one of the winning teams.

Brickbottom Artists Association & Gallery presents an exhibition on the Edge as Center competition, showcasing winning proposals for reimagining Somerville’s Brickbottom District. ABA, in collaboration with Jonathan Solomon, is among the winners of this international call for ideas. Their work responds to a brief that recasts Brickbottom’s rail and highway edges as catalysts for renewal, proposing new connections, transit corridors, public landscapes, and mixed-use development. The project treats outdated industrial boundaries as opportunities to anchor a more connected, sustainable urban future.

Temporary Text

Architect’s Newspaper covers the Edge as Center competition, highlighting ABA and Solomon’s proposal to redefine Brickbottom as a mixed-use, mixed-scale, transit-oriented community shaped by sustainable development principles.

The Boston Society of Architects presents an exhibition on the Edge as Center competition, showcasing winning proposals for reimagining Somerville’s Brickbottom District. ABA, in collaboration with Jonathan Solomon, is among the winners of this international call for ideas. Their work responds to a brief that recasts Brickbottom’s rail and highway edges as catalysts for renewal, proposing new connections, transit corridors, public landscapes, and mixed-use development. The project treats outdated industrial boundaries as opportunities to anchor a more connected, sustainable urban future.

The Boston Globe covers the Edge as Center competition, highlighting ABA and Solomon’s proposal to redefine Brickbottom as a mixed-use, mixed-scale, transit-oriented community shaped by sustainable development principles.

ABA, working with Jonathan Solomon, is a winner of Edge as Center: Envisioning the Post-Industrial Landscape, an international ideas competition reconsidering Somerville’s Brickbottom District. The district, long isolated by rail lines and highways, is reframed in the brief as a place where those same edges can become drivers of renewal. The competition calls for new connections, transit routes, public landscapes, and mixed-use development that transform outdated industrial boundaries into anchors for a more integrated urban future.