Center for Architecture Lab

Energies of Repair: Visualizing Community Power in NYC

Andrea Johnson and Ashley Dawson

New York’s energy landscape has grown increasingly turbulent, marked by stop-work orders, rate hikes, and a dizzying cycle of backtracking on both past proposals and recent climate goals. Federally, renewable energy subsidies faced paralyzing rollbacks, and fossil fuel corporations have posted record profits. Meanwhile, private renewable energy projects are stalling at alarming rates. Yet even amid these setbacks, grassroots campaigns are driving important local breakthroughs. The first peaker plant decommissionings have begun, the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal has broken ground as an offshore wind staging hub, and nearby construction is underway on the city’s largest community-owned solar array. These gains show that even as federal and state policy falters, community coalitions are pushing public institutions to organize around repair-addressing toxic emissions and high asthma rates in BIPOC neighborhoods, reclaiming long-inaccessible waterfronts, and challenging energy insecurity perpetuated by an energy system beholden to investors. Our project situates energy justice at the intersection of physical, ecological, and democratic renewal. It positions design, architecture, and visual art as critical lenses and organizing tools: drawing attention to the material and spatial qualities of energy infrastructure while also contributing to the imaginative work of envisioning future systems. At a moment when the Climate Act’s implementation is faltering, this project turns attention to New York’s industrial waterfronts—places where the energy system was built, refashioned and resisted—and where futures of repair are now being imagined and brought to fruition.

Andrea Johnson is a designer, AICP-certified planner, researcher, and educator with teaching experience at the Rhode Island School of Design, Barnard College, The City College of New York, and Brooklyn College. She works at the intersection of climate adaptation and urban landscape infrastructure, with a commitment to collaborating with communities to address complex socio-environmental challenges. With the support of an Architectural League/New York State Council on the Arts Independent Project Grant, Johnson published the Atlas of Public Power (2025), a project that maps New York State’s energy system. In 2021-2022, as a Regional Plan Association Kaplan Chair for Urban Design Fellow, she collaborated with the Renewable Rikers Coalition to envision the island free of jail use and repurposed as a renewable energy hub. This work led to her role coordinating the Renewable Rikers committee of the Independent Rikers Commission, which produced a policy framework for closing Rikers and transforming it into a green infrastructure site.

Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center / City University of New York, where he specializes in postcolonial studies and environmental humanities. Books of Dawson’s such as People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020) and Extreme Cities (Verso 2017) focus, respectively, on political struggles for publicly governed renewable energy and on fights for democratic and just climate adaptation in waterfront cities such as New York. Dawson has been an activist with the Public Power NY campaign since its inception in 2019, and in this capacity was involved in efforts to pass and implement the Build Public Renewables Act (2023), which many commentators see as the most consequential piece of Green New Deal legislation to pass in the US in recent years. In 2024-25, Dawson was the Climate Justice Fellow at the arts organization Culture Push. He is the founder of the Public Power Observatory.

DEPAVE: An Ecological Repair of the Ground

Friend Making Work (Christine Giorgio, Amelyn Ng, and Gabriel Vergara)

The built environment is in need of an ecological repair of the ground. Cities not only experience an overwhelming frequency of heatwaves, storm surges, and floods due to climate change—their hot, impervious surfaces also often compound these effects by design. The expansive crust of asphalt, concrete, and compacted urban soil across parking lots, playgrounds, industrial edges, and floodplains are a “carbon form” that must be addressed in a green transition. In New York City, the long-range need for resilient urban surfaces is apparent, and, we believe, begins with seeing the ground differently. Our proposal examines depaving practices as a way to reframe ground conditions. Depaving, on a large scale, introduces a new type of patchworked urban infrastructure, transitioning impermeable surfaces toward resilient ones, reducing heat islands, and slowing traffic. Even small-scale acts of depaving, such as clearing or widening tree pits, improve the urban sponge and introduce gardens where there was once concrete. Our proposal is interested in how targeted acts of subtraction can be a driver of infrastructural, ecological, and social repair. We will look at a range of existing depaving practices: from community-led DIY efforts to borough-wide projects undertaken by city agencies, to nation-wide depaving coalitions. What would it take to depave a portion of the sidewalk, a disused parking lot, an entire city? What organizations exist to inform, test and organize depaving practices? We propose to unearth the myriad sociopolitical, regulatory and economic concerns related to acts of designed subtraction and repair of the urban groundscape.

Friends Making Work is a design collective and practice of material interests based in NYC. With cumulative backgrounds in architecture, illustration, urban design, and film, the group’s material interventions span exhibitions, media, and transdisciplinary design. Past projects include D.E.P.O.T. I Gross Domestic Practices and Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time, both concerned with systems of material extraction, waste and re-use. Friends Making Work co-founders are Amelyn Ng, Gabriel Vergara, and Christine Giorgio.

Amelyn Ng is an architect, researcher, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. Working at the intersection of architecture, media studies, and visual culture, her creative practice contends with relationships between digital representation and physical matter, seeking alternate narratives to the status quo of building. Ng has previously taught at Rice University, Melbourne University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. A registered architect in the State of Victoria, Australia, Ng holds a Bachelor of Environments and Master of Architecture from the University of Melbourne, and a Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices at Columbia GSAPP. She also draws cartoons.

Gabriel Vergara is an Architect, Urban Designer, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Columbia GSAPP. He has previously taught landscape and urban design studios at the Rhode Island School of Design and Universidad Andres Bello in Chile. Vergara has collaborated with organizations in the U.S. and Latin America, including the Center for Justice Innovation in New York, the Art Museum of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, and AriztiaLAB in Santiago. He has contributed to architecture and urban design firms such as One Architecture & Urbanism in New York and 51-1 Arquitectos in Peru. Vergara was a co-founder of SUSUKA, an architecture studio based in Chile and the local branch of Supersudaca in Santiago, his work has been published internationally and featured in the Chilean Pavilion at the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2010. Vergara holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Universidad de Talca, Chile and Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design at Columbia GSAPP.

Before pivoting to architecture, Christine Giorgio was active in the NYC independent film scene as a director, producer and editor working across documentary and fiction formats. Her films have been recognized by international film festivals and nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Giorgio’s design practice synthesizes narrative concepts with spatial design, employing experimental approaches to excavate material truths. She is an AIA Associate and also works with clients on commercial and residential projects. Recent projects include a hemp-lime thermal retrofit in NYC and a ground-up residential construction on Long Island. Giorgio earned her M.Arch from Columbia University, where she was the recipient of the Lowenfish Memorial Prize.

The year 2026 marks the 250th Anniversary of America, an experiment still being made. Heritage sites associated with civil rights are struggling and urgently need our collective support. These buildings, sites, and landscapes represent triumphs in the pursuit of civil rights—and help us acknowledge and remember the traumas of systemic racism, the exclusion of groups, and the dismantling of possibilities.  

The 2026 Lab cohort will respond to the prompt of “Repair – Democracy and Urban Spaces.” Applicants are asked to address the urgent need to repair not only the physical infrastructure of our environments but also the political and social inequities embedded within them. This call invites architects, urban planners, designers, artists, cultural conservationists, and community activists to examine how the concept of repair can serve as a lens to reimagine democratic, equitable spaces.  

Applicants may consider repair through a range of lenses, including, but not limited to:   

-Physical Repair: Addressing infrastructure decay and creating adaptive, resilient designs for shared spaces.   

-Social Repair: Examining how architecture can heal inequities and foster inclusivity in underserved communities.  

-Ecological Repair: Highlighting design solutions that integrate sustainability and environmental restoration  

-Political/Civic Repair: Highlighting design solutions that highlight the spaces of protest, citizenship, belonging and Identity.  

Selected residents will have two months to refine their ideas prior to the beginning of the residency, with the support of the Center for Architecture.  

The 2026 call for entries ran July 23 through September 12 and is now closed.

Selected by the Center for Architecture Lab Advisory Committee, the residents are provided with the opportunity to intimately connect with leaders in the field of architecture, access to the Center for Architecture’s robust digital programming platforms and broad audience and shape the nature of the Center for Architecture Lab program going forward. Residents have access to the organization’s tools and pathways to engage students, peers, community groups, and professional practices. Residents will receive a stipend and the support of the Center for Architecture staff, who will work with recipients to facilitate programs, takeovers, and exhibitions.  

Barry Bergdoll, Hon. AIANY, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

Graham Clegg, AIA, Principal, Studios Architecture

Kholisile Dhliwayo, RA NY, DC & CT, NCARB, ARBV, NSWARB, Architect & Curator

Anjelica Gallegos, Co-Founder, Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning, and Design

Mark Gardner, AIA, NOMA, Principal, Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects; Assistant Professor of Architectural Practice and Society, Parsons The New School for Design

Christine Gaspar, Executive Director, Center for Urban Pedagogy

A.L. Hu, NOMA, AIA, NCARB, Architect & Curator

Karla Andrea Pérez, Co-Founder/Director Manhatitlan, Community Organizer & Curator

Monica Rhodes, President and Founder, Rhodes Heritage

Peter Robinson, Founder, WorkUrban; Assistant Professor, Cornell University Department of Architecture; Board Chair, Center for Architecture

Shawhin Roudbari, Dissent x Design, Assistant Professor, Program in Environmental Design, University of Colorado Boulder

Jennifer Sage, FAIA, President, Center for Architecture, Partner, Sage and Coombe

Tya Winn, Executive Director, Community Design Collaborative