
See all the winners of the 2020 Studio Prize.
Studio Brief | An in-depth—and hands-on—investigation into the properties and making of glass informed this studio’s approach to the design process. The initial material experiments were extrapolated to generate speculative design interventions to reanimate Buffalo, N.Y.’s famous grain silos, now dormant icons of post-industrial Brutalism.
Investigation | Visiting associate professor Naomi Frangos began this Spring 2020 studio at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning by asking: “How many of you are control obsessed when it comes to design?” Not surprisingly, every student raised their hand. Frangos’ studio was structured as a course in experiential learning where participants could discover unexpected results as creative invention. “They didn’t trust the process at the beginning,” she says.
Rudimentary experiments based on Frei Otto’s work had students using soap bubbles and weighted cloth to study surface behavior under dynamic forces of air and gravity. They then moved to the nearby Corning Museum of Glass, which sponsored workshops in which each student created their own glass objects. This facilitated error and chance in the making process.
The first-year M.Arch. studio had to transform itself mid-stream due to the remote learning requirements brought on by COVID-19, which limited further experience in hands-on glassmaking. But Frangos was able to use this to their benefit. “They couldn’t try to perfect their object,” she says. “They had to deal with imperfections and couldn’t idealize it.”
For the final project, which involved the reimagination of Buffalo’s iconic grain silos, the studio considered Reyner Banham’s appraisal of these structures in A Concrete Atlantis (The MIT Press, 1986). Although these icons gained international attention through Le Corbusier’s aesthetic consideration in the 1920s, “Banham was interested in the building as technologies and systems,” Frangos says. “He wasn’t about the metaphorical, but about the technology.”
Students used film and photography of their early, in-person studies to move forward in developing their designs. “They got to toggle between qualitative and quantitative data,” Frangos says. “It’s a lesson in paying attention to the subtleties and phenomena in front of you.”
“The projects demonstrate the effect of the early explorations of glasswork,” juror Weihan Vivian Lee said. “It is such a hands-on way of teaching materiality.” Similarly, Jonathan Tate appreciated “the energy that went into engaging a material that we all see in the abstract.”
Student Work |

Through the Looking Glass | Yueer Niu’s proposal enlivens Buffalo’s Perot Grain Elevator with a kaleidoscopic overlay to its concrete landscape. A grid of silo tower tops are remade using semi-cylindrical glass surfaces in various finishes, becoming an immersive field of light, while an interplay of convex and concave glass exaggerates reflected imagery and diffuses light, lending warm atmospheric glow to the iconic structure.



Sanctum of Light | Ami Mehta, on the other hand, envisions the Perot Elevator as a secret forest, with green glass vessels suspended from the silo tops acting as both skylights and an inverted treescape. Upturned metal hopper funnels set beneath each vessel create an interior topography, while a glass wall formed from smaller vessels admits even more green light to the dark interior.



Organic Hybrids | Michael Paraszczak’s proposal takes a subtractive approach to the grain silos, with oblong cut-away openings outfitted with skylights that both admit light and capture rainwater. Over time, Paraszczak envisions that the light and moisture collected by the skylights will lead to organic growth, with new flora and fauna transforming the dormant industrial landscape into a new and evolving ecosystem that is very much alive.


Studio Credits
Course: Weighted Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal
School: Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Ithaca, N.Y.
Level: B.Arch., M.Arch. vertical option studio
Duration: Spring 2020 semester
Instructor: Naomi Frangos (visiting associate professor)
Students: Ami Mehta, Yueer Niu, Michael Paraszczak (submitted work); Lang (Judy) Dong, Auri Ford, Caroline MacNeille, Maria Teresa Moreno Arriola, Max Piersol, Elizabeth Reeves