Columbia Intervention — Mackenzie Smith Portfolio

Architecture

Colubia Business School Intervention

Location: New York, New York

Competed during the Columbia GSAPP Introduction to Architecture Summer Studio, 2025

Instructors: Thomas De Monchaux and Yaqoub Hasan

As a final culmination project, the Manhattanville campus of Columbia University was the site for an architectural installation. This installation needed to house and sponsor a specific artist for their work. The artist chosen was a photographer, inpsired by the previous GSAPP project which utilized a pinhole camera system. Specifically, the photographer Sally Mann and her silver gelatin print process was used as inspiration.

The internal anatomy of a film camera also served as architectural inpsiration, and shapes from the pentaprism can be seen, which in a camera is used to bounce light from the viewfinder to the interior mirros and onto the light-sensitvie paper or film. The internal experience of both the photographer and viewers of the photographers work is intended to mimic the way that the inside of a camera would be constructed.

However, the experience was also influenced by the site of the Columbia Business School, with small crevices at the edges of the building, something that I deemed to be “non-spaces.” I wanted to incorporate these “non-spaces” into the overall architecture of the installation, and give them new usage as the dark room spaces for the photographer. This space would be small, with the photographer working in short time frames, likes a day, to produce thier work and display it again in a gallery format. I also envisioned that the photographs taken would be of CBS students on their day-to-day studies, highlighting the mundane moments for these students, transforming it into moments worth capturing and taking note of.

This design is intended to be a metaphor for surveillance and a way to archive ephemerality.

This series of images served as inspiration for the concepts of surveillance, and non-spaces, as they were all taken at the Columbia business school campus. they harken back to the idea of archiving and ephemeral moments that are constantly happening on a campus in New York City. The image of a camera’s internal anatomy shows how the light can bounce and bend between careful geometry, creating a lasting image through the manipulation of light. This geometry led much of the physical design process with the pentaprism form being present in the central cavity of the installation.

Digital Collages for Columbia Business School Intervention

These photoshop collage iterations attempted to document the ideas of surveilance and sight-lines of the outer-reaches of the site our CBS intervention would be located on. The final iteration (top), and all of these collages, explore ideas of commodification, specifically of the Manhattanville campus of Columbia University and further regions of Harlem. The depictions of roots under the bridging highway system versus the roots under the Harlem Fairway Market that closed down in 2017, show how even though real estate might be “worth” less on paper, the cultural value and depth is much greater than a new innovation can bring. Lastly, the color orange was important for this design, as it was heavily present at the site this photo was taken, and was the primary color of the Harlem Fairway Market on the site. It just so happens that orange is a complimentary color to blue. Specifically the Columbia blue.