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5 days later
Henry Ng / Isaiah Miller
the Open
On 27 August 2017, Hurricane Harvey hits Houston as the perfect
storm. For decades, an acute deregulatory climate in one of Amer-
ica’s fastest growing cities had led to sprawling high-risk settle-
ments and poor resiliency investment. Rampant development in
flood prone territories had been inflated by systematic underesti-
mation of risk by flood mapping and weather agencies. Harvey
was the third storm in three years with a supposedly 0.2%chance
to hit Houston. The result of this high-risk urbanism and a blissful-
ly ignorant approach toclimatechange and infrastructure isoneof
theworst urban disasters in a generation.
Atthemomentwhen urgentaction andconsensus ismost needed,
thecountry’s lethargicandcontentious politicalclimate hasmade
top-down approaches unreliable. Instead, agility, ingenuity, and
responsiveness on the ground are key to rebuilding and preparing
for the inevitable, nextcrisis. Five Days Later returns to theevents
of Hurricane Harvey through five allegorized days. On each day,
participants receive a new brief based on the successive failures
and crises as the storm progresses, from its nascent stage as a
wave off the coast of Africa to the aftermath of a city in ruins. The
goal of the workshop is to engage both temporal and spatial com-
plexities of hazard mitigation and to catalyze the speed at which
design generates response. The workshop aims to discover new
forms of emergency design, ingenious infrastructures, and urgent
techniques that can mobilize designers in an age of crisis.
—Henry Ng is a designer and researcher based in NYC. He has
worked forAMO, theBerlageInstitute in Rotterdam,andWorkAC in
NYC. His work has been published in Architectural Record, Volume,
Hunch, and Pidgin Magazine, and has been exhibited at the IABR
Rotterdam. Henry currently works at Fosterand Partners where he
is a lead designer on a large scale development in Brooklyn that
tacklespost-Sandywaterfrontregulationand isexpected tobethe
largest mass timber building in the country. Henry holds a BA and
MArch fromYale.
—Isaiah Miller is an architectural and urban designer. He has
worked fortheBoston RedevelopmentAuthority, KengoKuma,and
OMA NY. At OMA, Isaiah was a leading designer on a winning pro-
posal for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
titled Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge: A Comprehensive Strategy
for Hoboken. Isaiah is currently a senior designer at SOM NYand a
licensedcityplanner.Isaiah holdsanMUPfromHarvardandMArch
fromYale.
Together as co-founders of the Open, Henry and Isaiah have
worked with NYC Planning and the Office of Emergency Manage-
ment to develop the 2015 publication NYC’s Risk Landscape: A
guide to Hazard Mitigation, and on a proposal for a new Supreme
Court Building for the Philippines.
(Re)new cities
Susana Piquer
Colapso Studio
Renew: Tomake neworas if new.
Given the impossibility of making a restart to the space that sur-
rounds us, and the world we inhabit, it becomes necessary to de-
velop our capacity of creativity and adaptation, to create new
stimulating systems that evolve with the cities we live at. What if
we are able to generate visionary and innovative proposals that
coexist with the city, aswe currently understand it?
The workshopwill provide the students with conceptual tools that
will allow them have a multidisciplinary approach that will change
the way we look at the space that surrounds us and create new
standards of living. Creating a creative dynamism, the students
will examine the current space where we live at, question it and
propose new, innovative, sustainable and fresh solutions.
After an introduction to lateral thinking and the viewing of refer-
ences, brainstorming sessions and creative exercises will be
combined with the development of the projects. Participants will
work in teamstodevelopdifferent proposals; thiswill include both
the conceptual and the physical prototyping of its elements.
The students will be encouraged to think in a free-ranging,
open-minded manner, in order todevelop unusual ideas.
Pictures
1 Casa básica - Project: Casa básica by MartínAzua - Picture by Daniel Riera
2 Tricycle house - Project:Tricycle house by People’sArchitectureOffice +
People’sIndustrial Design Office - Picturecourtesyof People’sArchitecture
Office + People’sIndustrial Design Office
3 Insulation - Project:SelectiveInsulation by Davidson Rafailidis - Picture by
Steve Mayes Photography
—ColapsoStudio isa design practiceopen toall kind ofcreative pro-
jects, but mostly focused on the design of spaces, either perma-
nent or ephemeral, and objects. The studio has a team that mu-
tates depending on the needs of each project. We believe that a
multidisciplinary approach enriches the results; we understand
design as an experience and believe that the result should be nice
and simple.
Founded bySusana Piquer, shegraduated asaTechnical Architect
and complemented her studies with a Post Graduate Degree in In-
terior Design and a Master’s Degree in Art Direction. After working
with artists and creative agencies she founded Colapso Studio on
2014, and since then she combines projects with teaching in differ-
ent Design Schools.
