Melding design and urban study, Armborst paves the way

There was a courtyard last summer in Long Island City. It was open to the air, with a small forest of trees, a long row of mirrors, a rock climbing wall and chess boards. In October the park was dismantled, and its goods sent to local community members.

The park, entitled "Holding Pattern," is the winner of the annual Young Architects Program, a prestigious prize seen as the bellwether for the field of architecture. Assistant Professor of Art and Urban Studies Tobias Armborst, with his firm Interboro Partners, realized this project. Sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, the goal of the annual award is to conceive of and build a summer-long outdoor recreational space at MoMA PS1's space in Long Island City.

Entrants deliver detailed portfolios to a panel, and the chosen winner builds the installation, which is free and open to the public all summer. But at the end of each summer, the contents are typically removed and junked.

"The question of a temporary project always will be, with all this building afterwards, do you throw this all out? It's not very sustainable," Armborst said. "We thought to design a structure that you can entirely recycle in a really direct way." In turn, Interboro talked with about 100 different community organizations throughout Long Island City, asking them what they needed. Interboro fetched or made all these goods and placed them within their park. "[We] basically stored them in the courtyard over the summer."

The presence of these requested goods spurred residents that typically don't go to the site to visit, and so encouraged mingling among the community. Over the summer, many community members even put on events in the space. "That's what exciting to me," Armborst said. "How you can use architecture to set up these social relationships."

When the summer ended, and the park was dismantled, all the goods were sent to the community members who originally asked for them. The ballet school for children received its mirrors, the daycare center its rock climbing walls and the local Teamsters chapter its trees. Even the cab drivers for Checker Management now have a new ping-pong table and chess table. The project went very well, and its team included many current and former Vassar students.

"Designing and constructing an innovative project like this under a very tight schedule requires a motivated team," Armborst wrote in an emailed statement. "This collaboration is what I enjoyed most about the project."

Armborst founded Interboro Partners with three other classmates after graduating from urban design school. "We started out as a group of friends who enjoyed working together and discussing urbanism in grad school, and we wanted to continue that work and that discourse after graduation," Armborst stated.

"This is how we started, and this is also how we selected projects: just doing projects—design, writing, etc.—that [were] interesting to us. Our work is broadly about using design to visualize issues and to solve problems."

The group began to enter competitions, winning many of them and receiving commissions. It soon evolved into a professional practice, but retained the educative quality. "It's an unusual practice," Armborst said. Sometimes, Interboro simply designs and implements plans as its clientele requests, like making a master plan for the city of Newark or studying a garment center's architecture, but sometimes the firm also conducts research alone, from grant money or for its own interest. "It's right at the edge of professional architectural work and more academic research," Armborst explained.

Armborst has long been interested in urban design, and the potentially difficult navigation of urban space. "I was always fascinated by cities because in an architectural object you have a control of the design, the building environments, together with your client," Armborst said. "But once you look at the city there are some processes and phenomenas going on you don't have control over—so to design in that environment always takes an engagement."

The city by its very nature demands concessions and stirs conflict on its architectures. Space must contend with its neighbors and problems both large and small—from how to protect park-goers from the sun to preventing graffiti on buildings. This complexity, and the subsequent need to adapt, is what fascinates Armborst. "As long as I remember I wanted to be an architect," Armborst wrote.

Outside of PS1, the firm has recently been investigating the phenomena of naturally occurring retirement communities. Armborst explained the phenomena: Essentially, senior citizens move into a space and make it a de facto retirement community, by virtue of their presence alone. Given grant funding, Interboro interviewed one such de facto community's residents and organizers to understand its inception and nature, which, hopefully, will provide insight into future developments of retirement communities.

Armborst currently teaches both urban studies classes—which investigate issues of urban planning, its past and current practice, and other explorations of the city space—and art classes focusing on architectural design. "My goal is to foster a broad approach to design as a generally useful method of thinking about and engaging with the physical environment," Armborst wrote in an emailed statement. "In the context of a liberal arts education, the goal of an architecture course has to be broader than educating architects."

Armborst hopes students learn not only to think, communicate and shape spaces with diagrams and maps, but to truly go beyond design's potential boundaries.

Armborst elaborated, "I am convinced that architectural design in a liberal arts college—and specifically at Vassar—has the obligation and the opportunity to be more expansive and more interdisciplinary than in a professional or pre-professional architecture program."