In Process: Alternative Methods in Reading Evolving Buildings
September 12-December 15
Slocum Hall Marble Room
Group Collective: Ayesha Ghosh, Edgar Rodríguez, Laura Salazar, Lauren Scott, Magdalena Valdevenito, Pablo Sequero and Rocio Crosetto Brizzio.
The Gere Block, a 150-year-old industrial building in West Syracuse, is taken as a case study for documenting, interpreting, and reimagining existing structures in post-industrial cities.
Drawing from an ongoing adaptive reuse project, the exhibition highlights alternative strategies for engaging with the built environment, which are grounded in observation, historical layering, and collective memory.
The exhibition presents a range of materials that investigate this phenomenon at multiple scales through images, models, analytical drawings, catalogs, and photographs. These elements trace the building’s transformations and uncover what the group calls “composite conditions”—intersections of disjointed additions that narrate the building’s piecemeal history. A central component of the exhibition is the project Animals, a series of mobile spatial installations designed to activate underused spaces, which are presented through the photography of Anna Morgowicz.
Organized by seven architects and designers affiliated with Syracuse University’s School of Architecture, the exhibition responds to growing calls within the discipline for adaptive reuse over new construction.
In Process: Alternative Methods in Reading Evolving Buildings contributes to this discourse by offering an accessible, visual, and critical language for reading the city’s decaying building stock. Ultimately, the exhibition invites all “readers” of architecture and the city to reconsider how ordinary buildings might be experienced, understood, and transformed.
This exhibition is made possible with support from the Architectural League of New York and the New York State Council on the Arts, through the 2024 Independent Projects Grant.
