Testbeds

How might the materials of architectural design and production be refashioned for alternative futures? The Testbeds project repurposes architectural mockups built to test the visual and performance qualities of a building assembly as sheds, casitas, and greenhouses in public community gardens.

By relocating mockups to local community gardens, project creators New Affiliates (a New York-based studio led by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb, Lecturer in the MIT Department of Architecture) and architectural historian Samuel Stewart-Halevy imagined a new form of Manhattan transfer. The mockup becomes a vehicle carrying the surplus value of New York’s high rise architecture into neighborhoods that have been historically disinvested.

At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a multimedia and interactive presentation of Testbeds is featured in New York: New Publics, an exhibition of recent innovative public design projects.

More about the project: Testbeds
More about the exhibition: New York: New Publics

Ivi Diamantopoulou, architect and co-principal of New Affiliates, is a registered architect in New York and Greece, with over a decade of experience in designing and realizing built work. Alongside practice, she directs Syracuse Architecture’s New York City Program.

MIT Lecturer of Architecture and co-principal of the design firm New Affiliates Jaffer Kolb’s work explores how architecture is shaped by, and shapes, local economies and political systems through its practice and its form. 

Biography: MIT Architecture Department

Samuel Stewart-Halevy, doctoral candidate in architectural history at Columbia University, works toward a theory of practice by uncovering the essential assumptions underlying the routines of architectural design and culture.

Biography: Columbia University

Testbeds is a collaboration between New Affiliates and Samuel Stewart-Halevy, along with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation’s GreenThumb community gardening program.

Fabrication and installation by Think Construction

Fiscal sponsorship by the Architectural League

Structural engineering consulting by Silman

Supported by a Fay Chandler Creativity Grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST).

The New York Times: Destined for the Dump, Construction Waste Gets New Life in the Garden, 2022

dezeen: New Affiliates’ Testbeds project to build community buildings from discarded architecture models, 2020

The Architect’s Newspaper: New Affiliates wants to turn discarded mockups into garden shelters, 2020

Fast Company: Architects spend upward of $200K on facades they never use. Here’s a creative way to repurpose them, 2020