YEAR:

2026


TYPE:

CFA Lab residency and exhibition
May 7 — September 2, 2026
Center for Architecture

Design Team:
Friends Making Work

Assistance:
Tanvi Ashok, Elise Cloutier, Arissara Reed, Esther Su + Jonathan Liboyi

Photos:
Asya Gorovits

link

PROGRAMMING:


DEPAVE: The Ground as a Site of Design and Repair
May 29, 2026
AIANY Center for Architecture

This DEPAVE roundtable asks how incremental and intergenerational acts of subtraction, however small, can be drivers of infrastructural, ecological and social repair. What would it take to depave a portion of sidewalk, a parking lot, a freeway, an entire city?

Speakers:Tricia Martin, Studio Manager, Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Urban Design Team
Sam Robinson, Landscape Architect and Co-Principal, Field Form
Matthew Shore, Director of Planning and Development, South Bronx Unite 

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. Asphalt, concrete, and compacted urban soil covers parking lots, playgrounds, industrial edges, and floodplains; a “carbon form” that must be addressed in a green transition. In NYC, the long-range need for resilient urban surfaces is apparent, and, we believe, begins with reframing ground conditions.

This exhibition examines depaving as an act of social and ecological repair. DEPAVE prompts us to imagine new regenerative futures and collective participation, in the construction of a shared ground that extends beyond private property lines. What would it take to depave a portion of sidewalk, a parking lot, a freeway, an entire city?