Ceci n’est pas un livre
DATE
JUL 2025
CONTACT
brv2105@columbia.edu
BARKOW LEIBINGER
SUBMITTED TO TYPEFACES
UNDISCLOSED
COLLABORATORS
DANA MOR [HOUSING, FA 23] BRANDON GIL [ CIVIC:SACRED , SP 25]
NOTE
THE FOLLOWING IS AN ABRDIGED PORTFOLIO ONLY MEANT AS A SAMPLING.
ELABORATION AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.
[collab w/ Dana Mor] [collab w/ Brandon Gil]
project symbol [all pp]
Adv IV: Contested Territories
Prof. Esteban de Backer
Spring 2024
LINEAR MONUMENT is a connective bike and pedestrian infrastructure for Staten Island.
Drawing a 3-mile-long line across the landscape of Freshkills Park, it connects communities around the park physically, visually, and socially.
A continuous 50’-tall advertising billboard occupies the north side of the structure — carrying images across the landscape like the ancient aqueducts of Rome carried water.
[1] “landscape signals”
[2] “transmission towers”
[3] “billboard bridge”
[1] “oppressive interiority” [2] “stereotypes” vs. “reality”
Adv VI: Civic-Sacred
Prof. Karla Rothstein
Collaborator: Brandon Gil
Spring 2025
As New Yorkers, we are handed down all the layers of physical infrastructure built by previous generations of citydwellers.
One such common inheritance is the subway system — belonging to both no one and everyone.
This liminal status informs our perception that the subway is something to be passed through, skipped over, a means to an end, Rarely allowing for a chance to pause.
But in a system and city that belongs to us all arises a growing need for a new type of reflection. A dignified, visible procession of mortality woven into the everyday, where the frenetic energy of the city collides with moments of stillness as an urgent reminder that we are all mortal.
Core III: Housing
Prof. Galia Solomonoff
Collaborator: Dana Mor Fall 2023
Element is a simultaneous housingand-rainwater-retention-infrastructure hybrid.
Seeking to tap into the communal and therapeutic aspects of water bodies, it collects, funnels, and re-circulates water throughout the site.
Trickling through open courtyards that puncture each of three buildings, the water also supports plant life, cools and cleans the air, and informs users’ site circulation through a series of motes at the street level.
Also serving as public infrastructure, the complex would retain millions of gallons of water during major rain events, relieving this load from NYC’s combined sewer system.
[1] Roofline // Massing Diagram
[2] Outdoor Core Diagram
[3] Air + Water Concept Diagram
[1] close-ups — unit-on-core model
[2] overall — unit-on-core model
Adv V: Oral Infrastructures
Prof. Joseph Zeal-Henry Fall 2024
DARK_UNDERBELLY speculates four possible cultural uses for the underbelly of the BQE in Brooklyn, a stretch that otherwise decimates the landscape for human use. Permanent interventions include excavation for a skate half-pipe and movie theater to raise the low 12.5’ ceiling of the highway to feel more expansive and cathedral-like.
Alternatively, a long ADA ramp leads users up to a highly-compressed nightclub space, in which the regular rhythm of cars 2 feet overhead join the club’s soundscape, making for an ecstatic celebration of the music’s direct return to its machine origins. A fourth space is a fashion runway, painted with car traffic markings dictating models’ movement through space.
[1] physical process diary, 100 p, spiral-bound [2] diary spreads
Make
Profs Ada Tolla + Giuseppe Lignano Fall 2024
MAKE is about MAKING and DOING before THINKING and allowing this to be the starting point of an unraveling creative process.
I found various discarded objects common to New York City’s streets — a hi-vis jersey barrier, a steel NYPD barricade, construction netting, etc. — and performed simple operations expressive of these objects’ basic materiality.
How can highly-recognizable objects be warped, cut, re-contextualized, etc. to create simultaneous awareness of their former identity and their openness to wholly new forms and functions?
MEDIA MANIPULATIONS + URBAN EXTRACTIONS
Core II: Damage Control
Prof. Regina Teng Spring 2023
No one is regulating new media’s communicative power. We receive the images all around us fluidly and without interruption.
POSTER LOGICS intervenes on this seamless transmission of meaning. Through a series of physical experiments with wheatpaste posters — compared to screens, a tangibly material medium — it exposes cycles of image generation, destruction, and re-appropriation within high fashion advertising.
An array of speculative architectural fragments suggests an expanded application and spatialization of the affects discovered in the physical material manipulations.
[1] decay logic speculative fragment [2] material research studies
Ford Lake, Michigan
UG2: Boathouse
Prof Neal Robinson Spring 2020
The various corrugated bays and halfarches projecting from the ground to form this high school boathouse split off in strategic ways to define paths and suggest usage.
While initially spectator and competitor are separated, various openings and interstices allow for interaction between the two that engenders a healthy sense of competition.
[1] parti plan + section
[2] circulation + massing studies
Here at the dock, at the extremity of the site, rowers are isolated from spectators and a sense of competition is heightened in the moments leading up to their race...
Framework for Transition
Bisbee, AZ
UG3: Electrify America
Prof Christian Unverzagt Fall 2020
Metabolic, adaptive architecture in a former desert coal mine town as a means of transitioning to a fully renewable-electric-powered-future.
This WPA 2.0-style campus features LIVE, LEARN, and BUILD programs to continually re-skill its company town workforce to manufacture and distribute solar power broadly across the sunny Sonoran desert.
These representations show only the first phase of this ever-changing base camp in Bisbee, Arizona...
Moon Canyon, Bisbee, AZ, 85603
Altitude: 5,538 ft
Sight Slope: 13°
Soil Composition: Sandy Clay Loam
Solar Power Generation Potential:
6.59 Kwh/m/d
July High: 89° F - Sun High Altitude: 80°
January Low: 32° F - Sun High Altitude: 35°
[1] rammed earth plinth BUILD space + LEARN tower above
[2] Level 03 Plan - auditorium, basketball court, classroom
[3] Level 00 Plan - plinth BUILD space
