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January 3, 2025Recipe for a Room: Places for the Displaced
Recipe for a Room is a model-making contest about building spatial, sculptural, miniature rooms while fostering fun, creativity, and professional mentorship. For the 2024 edition, two-person teams, each comprised of a student and architect mentor, designed small-scale places for the displaced. We challenged teams to create one-person shelters which can be folded up into suitcase-size, portable packs.
Over 180,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022. Many did not choose this city as their destination, but all are travelers who left a previous home behind. In September 2023, Mayor Eric Adams stated, “New York is one of the few states where you have the right to shelter… however, while our compassion is limitless, our resources are not.” Shelter is only guaranteed for 30 days for single individuals and 60 days for families.
Recipe for a Room asked student competitors to create a safe, temporary, portable Room for two displaced persons (one parent and one child), constructed of items one might take when leaving a previous life: a bag, a coat, favorite shirt, shoes, family photos, etc.
Learn more about this past event and see the winners >
Interiors
Interiors hold special value for architects in New York. America’s largest city is also its most dense, a built up urbanism of infrastructure and a vast array of buildings, from small neighborhood infills, to Manhattan skyscrapers and more. Architects in the city build in between structures and often inside them. It is the nature of our practice here to bring the idea of site and urbanism and the life of the city indoors. And architects in New York tend to approach designing interiors in a more architectonic way than in most other cities. The AIANY Interiors Committee is naturally inclusive, recognizing the wide array of professionals, interests, efforts and ideas which contribute to interior architecture in New York. We welcome the participation of New York professionals to contribute to the committee work and encourage members to attend our monthly planning meetings and events. The AIANY Interiors Committee usually meets the 3rd Monday of every month at the Center for Architecture. Please email the co-chairs to confirm or if you have any questions.