This year’s installment features the works of Colin Cathcart, an associate professor of architecture; Joseph Lawton, an associate professor of photography; and Fordham artist-in-residence Casey Ruble.

Ruble’s collages are focused on historical race riots, including the Knoxville Riot of 1919 and the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. Through a set of eye-catching collages, which were created using handmade silver impregnated paper, Ruble explores how we process some of the most contentious events in American history.

Lawton had a similar idea. The 12 black-and-white photographs exhibited chronicles more than two decades of his work in 10 different countries, including Italy, Indonesia, Turkey, and Vietnam.

“I show pictures that are not just from last year, but many years, to inspire in students that you don’t just take photographs for a couple months, or one or two years,” he said. “If you’re interested in it, this is what you do throughout your life.”

However, The Lee, as it is known, has more in common with the nearby Hamilton Fish public housing project, as the LEED Gold building provides affordable housing for 264 formerly homeless adults and at-risk youths.

It is also the latest project from Colin Cathcart, M.Arch, an associate professor of architecture at Fordham. Cathcart’s firm, Kiss + Cathcart, designed The Lee, which boasts a rooftop garden and deck, super-efficient heating and cooling systems, and an interior layout conducive to socializing. Run by Common Ground Community, Inc., it is the kind of project whose challenges Cathcart shares with students in Fordham’s pre-architecture, environmental studies, and urban studies programs.

“In architecture, there is a three-dimensional puzzle-solving aspect, which a lot of people really don’t understand,” he said during an interview in his firm’s office, which is ensconced in a cupola atop a downtown Brooklyn skyscraper.

“There’s this completely different mode of thought, which is to get inside a problem and actually see it spatially. That’s really what I try to bring to my students, to make them approach problem-solving in that same way, although I assign the students problems that are much simpler, more academic and intended for skill-building.”

Cathcart started doing double duty in private practice and academia in 1988 at the City College of New York, and has been at Fordham since 1997. The University is a great fit for what he does, he said, because the open-ended nature of architecture makes the subject appealing to students from a wide array of disciplines.

“You can approach architecture as a purely visual discipline or from a problem-solving standpoint. You can approach it from the urban point of view, from the sustainable point of view, or from an engineering point of view,” he said.

“It’s actually a pretty nice fit for a Jesuit university, because you really do have to focus on the individual. You can’t just lecture the class; you have to understand and help every project in a different way, because the project on every desk is different.”

In addition to The Lee, Cathcart’s other most recent project is the Department of Environmental Protection’s Remsen Yard Maintenance Facility in Canarsie, Brooklyn. At 2.5 acres, the repair and supply facility for the fleet of trucks that maintain the city’s sewer system is so big that a street had to be eliminated to accommodate it when it was built in 2011. What makes the facility unique is a massive roof that harvests both solar energy and rainwater, the latter of which is used to wash the trucks at the end of the day. This saves potable water from being used for non-potable purposes.

Cathcart’s smaller projects include Solar 1, a solar-powered classroom alongside the East River which remained in operation after Hurricane Sandy; and a two-family house in Gravesend, Brooklyn that collects solar heat in the winter and rejects it in the summer.
For Yale University’s Coxe Cage, a track and field house built in 1928 that often becomes too hot inside to occupy in the summer, Kiss + Cathcart has designed an enormous new shading skylight and a new, substantially passive ventilation system.

Cathcart is also involved in the design and promotion of hydroponic gardens on school rooftops, which cut down on food transportation costs and educate students about healthy eating. Many of the technologies the firm embraces are cutting-edge, which in the past meant the firm had to venture outside of New York City for work. That, however, has changed.

“At first we found there was an awful lot more interest in our services in the Far East and the Middle East, California, and Europe. Now we’re doing the vast majority of our work in New York City, partly because it has become conscious of being an environmentally friendly city,” he said.

The challenge to architects is to make the qualities that society values in buildings visible and to express those values physically. Buildings can actually change people’s characters and lifestyles and force them to question their daily habits, he said.

“We’ve done museums before, and it’s actually not very hard to design a very good place for art, it’s really not,” he said.

“What’s hard is to design a really great workplace or a great residence for poor people. That’s a real challenge, and its something we really take pride in meeting.”

However, The Lee, as it is known, has more in common with the nearby Hamilton Fish public housing project, as the LEED Gold building provides affordable housing for 264 formerly homeless adults and at-risk youths.

It is also the latest project from Colin Cathcart, M.Arch, an associate professor of architecture at Fordham. Cathcart’s firm, Kiss + Cathcart, designed The Lee, which boasts a rooftop garden and deck, super-efficient heating and cooling systems, and an interior layout conducive to socializing. Run by Common Ground Community, Inc., it is the kind of project whose challenges Cathcart shares with students in Fordham’s pre-architecture, environmental studies, and urban studies programs.

“In architecture, there is a three-dimensional puzzle-solving aspect, which a lot of people really don’t understand,” he said during an interview in his firm’s office, which is ensconced in a cupola atop a downtown Brooklyn skyscraper.

“There’s this completely different mode of thought, which is to get inside a problem and actually see it spatially. That’s really what I try to bring to my students, to make them approach problem-solving in that same way, although I assign the students problems that are much simpler, more academic and intended for skill-building.”

Cathcart started doing double duty in private practice and academia in 1988 at the City College of New York, and has been at Fordham since 1997. The University is a great fit for what he does, he said, because the open-ended nature of architecture makes the subject appealing to students from a wide array of disciplines.

“You can approach architecture as a purely visual discipline or from a problem-solving standpoint. You can approach it from the urban point of view, from the sustainable point of view, or from an engineering point of view,” he said.

“It’s actually a pretty nice fit for a Jesuit university, because you really do have to focus on the individual. You can’t just lecture the class; you have to understand and help every project in a different way, because the project on every desk is different.”

In addition to The Lee, Cathcart’s other most recent project is the Department of Environmental Protection’s Remsen Yard Maintenance Facility in Canarsie, Brooklyn. At 2.5 acres, the repair and supply facility for the fleet of trucks that maintain the city’s sewer system is so big that a street had to be eliminated to accommodate it when it was built in 2011. What makes the facility unique is a massive roof that harvests both solar energy and rainwater, the latter of which is used to wash the trucks at the end of the day. This saves potable water from being used for non-potable purposes.

Cathcart’s smaller projects include Solar 1, a solar-powered classroom alongside the East River which remained in operation after Hurricane Sandy; and a two-family house in Gravesend, Brooklyn that collects solar heat in the winter and rejects it in the summer.
For Yale University’s Coxe Cage, a track and field house built in 1928 that often becomes too hot inside to occupy in the summer, Kiss + Cathcart has designed an enormous new shading skylight and a new, substantially passive ventilation system.

Cathcart is also involved in the design and promotion of hydroponic gardens on school rooftops, which cut down on food transportation costs and educate students about healthy eating. Many of the technologies the firm embraces are cutting-edge, which in the past meant the firm had to venture outside of New York City for work. That, however, has changed.

“At first we found there was an awful lot more interest in our services in the Far East and the Middle East, California, and Europe. Now we’re doing the vast majority of our work in New York City, partly because it has become conscious of being an environmentally friendly city,” he said.

The challenge to architects is to make the qualities that society values in buildings visible and to express those values physically. Buildings can actually change people’s characters and lifestyles and force them to question their daily habits, he said.

“We’ve done museums before, and it’s actually not very hard to design a very good place for art, it’s really not,” he said.

“What’s hard is to design a really great workplace or a great residence for poor people. That’s a real challenge, and its something we really take pride in meeting.”

The one month long summer session course, which Cathcart taught to nine Fordham undergraduates in June (one took it as an independent study in July), took place almost exclusively outside, with a particular focus on the Manhattan waterfront. Rather than talk about the concepts of green architecture and sustainability in a classroom, Cathcart and his class visited some of the most cutting edge “green” projects and innovations that New York City has to offer.

“Green architecture is dominated by architects and engineers, but architecture is really only one part of urban sustainability,” Cathcart said. “It’s very interesting to see how architecture fits into that larger piece and how cities can be made much more sustainable livable, enjoyable and pleasurable culturally by following these various figures doing crazy things all over the place.”

One of those projects is the Science Barge, a floating prototype of a sustainable urban farm that has also functioned as an environmental education center since it was launched by NY Sun Works in May 2007. The barge, which is completely off the power grid, was docked at Pier 48 in the Hudson River when Cathcart’s class descended upon it with a mission: Build a kitchen. Part of the barge’s mission, which it delivers from facilities around New York City, is to teach school children not only how fruits and vegetables are grown using re-circulating greenhouse hydroponics, but also to show how much waste is generated during food preparation.

“We’re in the kitchen all the time, every day, and it’s where we make a tremendous number of very, very costly environmental choices,” Cathcart said. “So how do you make that connection between levels as clear as possible to the kids coming to the kitchen to learn about food, waste and energy?”

So just as the barge, which draws power from photovoltaic cells and wind turbines, treats its own waste water with restorative wetlands and its solid waste with composting, so too is the kitchen an example of self-sufficiency. The materials come from the building material salvage non-profit group “Build It Green,” hot water and power for the solar food cooker are generated by solar power, and treated rainwater will replenish the tanks. The idea is that children who understand where food comes from and where garbage goes are less likely to adopt unhealthy eating habits.

It’s part of a larger plan of Cathcart’s Brooklyn-based architecture firm, Kiss Cathcart, to help the barge’s organizers convince schools, and eventually private residences, to install self-sufficient gardens on New York City rooftops.

“There’s a possibility of action after you have decided what kind of policies or what kinds of design solutions there are. You can take action, and then it becomes about people,” he said. “How do you talk to people about your ideas, how do you respond to people’s needs or biases or positions within the hierarchy, that becomes then the key. Design is not the answer; it’s getting it done.”