• This website includes dozens of videos, hundreds of essays, and thousands of drawings created over the past twenty years. Search to learn more about the history of buildings, places, prisons, Newark, New York City, and my PhD research on spatial inequality.

  • Or scroll down for the latest publications.

Exhibition Design for the Old Essex County Jail

Developed in collaboration with Newark Landmarks
and the master’s program in historic preservation at Columbia University

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Since 1971, the old Essex County Jail has sat abandoned and decaying in Newark’s University Heights neighborhood. Expanded in stages since 1837, this jail is among the oldest government structures in Newark and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The building needs investment and a vision for transforming decay into a symbol of urban regeneration. As a youth in Newark, I explored and painted this jail, and therefore feel a personal investment in the history of this place. Few structures in this city reflect the history of racial segregation, immigration, and demographic change as well as this jail.
In spring 2018, a graduate studio at Columbia University’s master’s in historic preservation program documented this structure. Eleven students and two architects recorded the jail’s condition, context, and history. Each student developed a reuse proposal for a museum, public park, housing, or prisoner re-entry and education center. By proposing eleven alternatives, the project transformed a narrative of confinement into a story of regeneration.
Inspired by this academic project and seeking to share it with a larger audience, I and Zemin Zhang proposed to transform the results of this studio into a larger dialogue about the purpose of incarceration. With $15,000 funding from Newark Landmarks, I translated Columbia’s work into an exhibition. I am grateful to Anne Englot and Liz Del Tufo for their help securing space and funding. Over spring 2019, I collaborated with Ellen Quinn and a team at New Jersey City University to design the exhibit panels and to create the corresponding texts and graphics. The opening was held in May 2019, and is recorded here.

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My curator work required translating an academic project into an exhibit with language, graphics, and content accessible to the public. Columbia examined the jail’s architecture and produced numerous measured drawings of the site, but they did not examine social history. As the curator, I shifted the exhibit’s focus from architecture to the jail’s social history – to use the jail as a tool through which to examine Newark’s history of incarceration. As a result, much of my work required supplementing Columbia’s content with additional primary sources – newspaper clippings, prison records, and an oral history project – that tell the human story behind these bars. I worked with local journalist Guy Sterling to interview former jail guards and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka about his father’s experience incarcerated here during the 1967 civil unrest. The exhibit allowed viewers to hear first-hand accounts of prison life and to view what the Essex County Jail looked like in its heyday from the 1920s to 1960s. Rutgers-Newark organized seminars connected to the jail exhibit on the topic of incarceration in America, and what practical steps can be taken to change the effects of the growth of incarceration.
The finished exhibit was on display from May 15 through September 27, 2019. The exhibit makes the case for preserving the buildings and integrating them into the redevelopment of the surrounding area. The hope is that, by presenting this jail’s history in a public space where several thousand people viewed it per week, historians can build support for the jail’s reuse. Over the next year, an architecture studio at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design is conducting further site studies. Before any work begins, the next immediate step is to remove all debris, trim destructive foliage, and secure the site from trespassers. These actions will buy time while the city government and the other stakeholders determine the logistics of a full-scale redevelopment effort.
My interest in prisons drew me to this project. This jail’s architect was John Haviland, who was a disciple of prison reformers John Howard and Jeremy Bentham. In my MPhil thesis research about Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, I developed my exhibit research by looking at the social and historical context of John Haviland and early prisons. As I describe, Eastern State began as a semi-utopian project in the 1830s but devolved by the 1960s into a tool of control social and a symbol of urban unrest.

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Launch Virtual Exhibit Website

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Related content

  1. Read my January 2021 article in The Newarker magazine.
  2. Read this July 2020 article from Jersey Digs
    about my exhibit and the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s proposal to reuse this jail site.
  3. Hear my September 2019 interview about this jail and exhibit from Pod & Market.
  4. Explore this jail as an interactive exhibit online.
  5. View this artwork as part of my short film from 2016 called Pictures of Newark.

24 Hours in the London Underground

Audio effect: Heartbeat from Freesound

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Through analyzing 25,440 data points collected from 265 stations, this animation visualizes commuting patterns in the London Underground over two weeks in 2010.
Each colored dot is one underground station. The dots pulsate larger and smaller in mathematical proportion to the number of riders passing through. Big dots for busy stations. Small dots for less busy stations.
Dot color represents the lines serving each station. White dots are for stations where three or more lines intersect. Each dot pulsates twice in a day: Once during the morning commute; and again during the evening commute.
By syncing the audio volume with the density of riders and the background color with the time of day, the animation becomes acoustically legible. The audio volume rises and falls to mirror the growth and contraction of each colored dot during the daily commute.

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The rhythmic pulsing of commuters is analogous to the breathing human body. The passage of red blood cells from the lungs to the organs is analogous to the movement of people to and from the city’s own heart: the downtown commercial district. This analogy of human form to city plan is a longstanding theme in urban studies.
See my film about commuting patterns in the NYC subway.

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The Data

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Method

No single data set could capture the complexity of a metropolis like London. This animation is based off of open-access data collected in November 2010. According to Transport for London: “Passenger counts collect information about passenger numbers entering and exiting London Underground stations, largely based on the Underground ticketing system gate data.” Excluding London Overground, the Docklands Light Railways, National Rail, and other transport providers, there are 265 London Underground stations surveyed. For data collection purposes, stations where two or more lines intersect are counted as a single data entry. This is to avoid double-counting a single passenger who is just transferring trains in one station en route to their final destination.

Every fifteen minutes, the numbers of passengers entering the system are tallied. This yields 96 time intervals per day (4 x 24). Multiplying the number of time intervals (96) by the number of stations (265), we get the number of data points represented in this animation: 25,440. Each station was assigned:

  • A location on the map of latitude and longitude
  • A color according to the lines extant in 2010: Bakerloo, Central, Circle, District, Hammersmith & City, Jubilee, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria, Waterloo & City.
  • A circle scaled to reflect the number of passengers moving through. Stations range in business from a few hundred passengers to over 100,000 per day.
  • A time of day: each 15-minute interval becomes one image in this film. Overlaying these 96 “snapshots” of commuter movement creates  a time-lapse animation. Thus, a single day with 25,440 data points is compressed into a mere 8 seconds.

Sources

Station Coordinates: Chris Bell. “London Stations.” doogal.co.uk (link)
Ridership Statistics: Transport for London. “Our Open Data.” (link)
Click on the section “Network Statistics” to view “London Underground passenger counts data.”

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Powered by TfL Open Data. Contains OS data© Crown copyright and database rights 2016.

Northeast Corridor railroad time-lapse

Audio effects from Freesound; music is Metamorphosis by Philip Glass

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The Northeast Corridor is the busiest passenger railroad in North America. This drone flight follows a high-speed Acela train making this 456 mile journey from Washington D.C. to Boston via Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, Newark, New York City, Stamford, New Haven, and Providence.
This animation was created from Google Earth satellite imagery. I traced the Northeast Corridor route onto the ground, and I then programmed the computer to follow this route. I then added the inset map, sound effects, and clock in post-production.
The above animation is condensed. View the full and uncut 28 minute flight here.

New York City Subway Ridership

Created with data from the MTA.
Published by Gothamist on 22 January 2019.
Related: my data visualization of London Underground commuting patterns.

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The visual language of data addresses a deeper need to humanize and soften the concrete jungle.

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Sounds of breathingheartbeat, and subway from Freesound

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In this animation based on subway ridership statistics by station:
● Dots are color-coded according to the subway lines they serve.
● White dots are for junctions between two or more lines of different color.
● Dot size corresponds to the number of riders entering each station within a 24 hour period.
● Larger dots are for busier stations. Smaller dots are for less busy stations.
Movements through the New York City subway are analogous to rhythmic breathing.
People often describe cities in relation to the human body. Major roads are called “arteries” in reference to blood flow. The sewers are the city’s “bowels” in reference to our own digestive systems. Central Park is the city’s “lungs.” At various times in history, key industries like garments and finance were described as the “backbone” of New York’s economy. Although cities are complex organisms, wordplay makes the giant metropolis somehow more human and familiar.
The 424 subway stations and 665 miles of track are analogous to the human circulatory system. Every weekday pre-coronavirus, the subway carried 5.4 million people, mostly commuters. This daily commute is ordered, structured, and rhythmic – as Manhattan’s population swells during the daily commute and then contracts by night. Each passenger symbolizes the movement of a single red blood cell. With each paycheck, the oxygen of capitalism flows from the heart of Manhattan to the cellular homes in the outer boroughs.
Commuting patterns mirror the rhythmic expansion and contraction of the human body while breathing. By contrasting weekday and weekend ridership patterns, we detect the city’s respiratory system.

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Interactive Map

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Research Method

In this video lecture, I walk you through how I manipulated MTA and NYC open data
to create this animation.

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The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) publishes statistics on weekday and weekend (Saturday + Sunday) ridership for all 424 stations. These statistics, updated yearly, are public and can be analyzed to track trends in urban growth. I downloaded the MTA data and assigned each station a geographical coordinate (latitude + longitude) so that the data points would appear at their corresponding map locations.

I have a love-hate relationship with the New York City subway. At rush hour, it is crowded, hot, and slow. From years of riding its squeaky trains, it’s given me a ringing tinnitus sound in my ear. Despite its flaws, the subway is one of the few urban spaces where all social classes and ethnicities mix, where their separate lives are momentarily shared. Rich or poor, everyone rides the subway. I hope this animation renews appreciation for this engineering and the people behind it.

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Sources

Where in the world is modernism?

What if the nationality of every artist represented in the Museum of Modern Art’s collections were mapped to illustrate the museum’s evolving geographic diversity through time? Watch the data visualization below of 121,823 works at MoMA.

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Introduction

“The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired its first artworks in 1929, the year it was established. Today, the Museum’s evolving collection contains almost 200,000 works from around the world spanning the last 150 years. The collection includes an ever-expanding range of visual expression, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, architecture, design, film, and media and performance art.
“MoMA is committed to helping everyone understand, enjoy, and use our collection. The Museum’s website features 79,870 artworks from 26,215 artists. This research dataset contains 135,804 records, representing all of the works that have been accessioned into MoMA’s collection and cataloged in our database. It includes basic metadata for each work, including title, artist, date made, medium, dimensions, and date acquired by the Museum. Some of these records have incomplete information and are noted as ‘not Curator Approved.’
“The Artists dataset contains 15,757 records, representing all the artists who have work in MoMA’s collection and have been cataloged in our database. It includes basic metadata for each artist, including name, nationality, gender, birth year, death year, Wiki QID, and Getty ULAN ID.” – from MoMA’s website.
I downloaded this dataset and dissected it with this question in mind:
What trends might this dataset reveal about the history of curating and the growth of a museum’s collections?
In the three interactive features below, hover over the graphs to explore the data in depth.

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1. Geographic and Gender Diversity

This map visualizes the nationalities of ~15,757 artists whose work is displayed at MoMA. There are 121,823 data entries displayed below. The data can be browsed by year or by department. This illustrates the evolving geographic breadth of collections. Beginning in the 1930s, over 80% of artworks were from the four key countries of the US, UK, France, and Germany. Beginning the 1960s, the museum acquired some of its first works from Latin America and Japan. Post-1991, the museum acquired the bulk of its collections from Russia and China. Recent years have also seen a slight growth in collections of African art
An important distinction: This map does not show where each artwork was made. Rather, it shows where each artist is from. Nationality and national identity are, depending on the artist, an important influence shaping the unique perspective artists bring to their work.

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The bar chart below shows the gender distribution of artworks by date. On the horizontal axis: the date acquired. On the vertical axis: the number of artworks acquired in this year. Each bar is divided into three colors: Blue for artwork by a male artist. Pink for art by a female artist. Grey for art where the gender of the artist is not known.
This data can be explored by year and by department. Across departments, male artists represent the clear majority. The departments with the greatest number of works by female artists: Photography and Drawings. The department with the least female representation: Prints & Illustrated Books. The department with greatest number of works where the artists’ gender is unknown: Architecture & Design. However, across departments, the representation of female artists has slightly increased over the past few decades from around zero to somewhere around 20%.

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2. Do newer acquisitions tend to be smaller?

The two graphs below plot the relationship between year produced, year acquired by MoMA, and the dimensions of each artwork (width in cm). I’ve plotted 12,250 points. They are color coded with the same blue, pink, and grey system as the previous chart.
In the first graph, we see that newly produced paintings are becoming progressively larger. In 1929, the year of MoMA’s founding, the width of the average painting being produced was less than 100cm. Today, the average width of newly produced paintings is around 400cm – and is steadily increasing.

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In the second graph, we see that MoMA’s new acquisitions are becoming progressively smaller, even though newly produced artworks are larger than before. In 1929, the average width of a new acquisition was over 300 cm. Today, the width is less than 150cm.

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In other words, while artists seem to be working in ever larger dimensions, MoMA seems to be acquiring ever smaller paintings from these artists. Have the growing costs of buying and storing art priced MoMA out of acquiring larger artworks? What is the relationship between size and the decision whether or not to acquire a work?

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3. Is the scope and definition of modernism expanding?

The challenge facing any museum dedicated to modern art is keeping up-to-date. Modern art is constantly being produced. Like any leading museum, MoMA is:
  • growing its collection of newly-produced contemporary works
  • while also enhancing its collection of older works
  • and expanding the geographic and national representations of artists and artworks
The graph below compares the relationship between production year and acquisition year for 7,797 data entires. Dot size indicates the size of the acquisition (i.e. number of pages or number of paintings from said artist). The red trend line indicates the linear relationship between when a work was produced (vertical axis) and when it was acquired by MoMA (horizontal axis). The vertical gap between the trend line and the upper reaches of the graph indicates the time elapsed between when the work was produced and when it was acquired. With time, the number of years elapsed between production and acquisition has grown.
In 1929, most new acquisitions were produced in the 1920s – modernism was a new movement and a new idea. Today, new acquisitions range in date from the early nineteenth century through present day. The temporal definition of modernism is growing, with origins that stretch ever further back in time.

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Modernism is not geographically restricted. With globalization and the march of capitalism, the world is becoming more modern and interconnected. As new regions adopt modern technology, materials, and ideas, the character of art and artists will change. Cultural institutions, particularly modern art museums, are positioned to curate these global trends through the kinds of works they acquire and display. However, the kinds of stories museums and curators can tell are limited by the size and diversity of the collections available.

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Related Data Projects

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Sources

Download MoMA’s data from GitHub. The analysis above reflects this dataset as of 17 October 2018. New entries after this date are not included as these infographics are not updated in real-time.

Download my analysis of this data and the infographics above from Tableau Public.

A History of Historic Preservation in New York City

Data analysis of NYC landmarks since 1965 reveals trends and biases in the landmarks preservation movement.

Developed with urban historian Kenneth Jackson at Columbia University’s Department of History

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A visual history of landmarks preservation in NYC. Data from NYC Open Data. Music from Freesound.

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Introduction

There is ongoing debate between in NYC between developers seeking to rebuild the city in the image of global capitalism and preservationists seeking to slow the rate of change and protect the appearance of the city’s many and distinct neighborhoods. Several factors drive historic preservation: fear of losing heritage; fear of change; historians, public servants, and well-intentioned activists in the spirit of Jane Jacobs. This debate has played out every year since 1965 through the hundreds of structures that are added to (or rejected from) the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s running list of landmarks (LPC). Once added, landmarked buildings cannot be modified without first seeking approval from the city. Landmarks preservation is contentious for developers because the protections of preservation law are permanent and affect all current and future owners. Preservation law further restricts significant rebuilding, even if demolition and rebuilding are lucrative for the property owner.
Historians decide the future of the city’s built environment. The sites they preserve will become the architectural lens through which future generations will appreciate the past. The sites they approve for demolition will be lost to history. Preservation is a response to larger historical questions: Which aspects of the past are worth preserving? How should the city balance the economic need for development with the cultural need for history?
This paper will assess the landscape of historic preservation through analysis of publicly-available landmark records from NYC Open Data. We identified two datasets, both containing ~130,000 spreadsheet entries for every single LPC listing from 1965 to 2019. The first dataset is titled “Individual Landmarks” 1 and includes the structure’s address, lot-size, and date landmarked. The second dataset is titled “LPC Individual Landmark and Historic District Building Database” 2  and includes the construction date, original use, style, and address of all structures. We downloaded both datasets as .csv files, imported them into a visualization software called Tableau, merged them into a single map, and then analyzed the data. The results of inform the conclusions presented here. This analysis is broken into four case studies:
  1. Distribution of Landmarks over the Five Boroughs
    Assesses where landmarks preservation is densest or least dense by neighborhood.
  2. Contextual Preservation?
    Analyzes how protecting a landmark limits redevelopment of neighboring properties of less aesthetic value
  3. How does the preservation movement reflect economic patterns?
    – Factor affecting the preservation of city-owned structures
    – Factors affecting the preservation of residential structures
    – Relationship between preservation and gentrification?
  4. Keeping up to pace?
    Questions the degree to which landmarks preservation succeeds in protecting recently-built landmarks
From this data, hidden trends and biases in historic preservation become visible. Firstly, we identify a higher-density of landmarks in certain (and usually higher income) neighborhoods. Secondly, we identify a marked preference among historians for protecting structures pre-1945. (Is there so little in the city’s recent architectural history that is worth preserving?) And thirdly, our analysis hints at the strength of market forces and developers in shaping the scope and definition of preservation.

Read More

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  1. “Individual Landmarks,” NYC Open Data, https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/Individual-Landmarks/ch5p-r223 (retrieved 5 November 2018).
  2. “LPC Individual Landmark and Historic District Building Database” NYC Open Data, https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/LPC-Individual-Landmark-and-Historic-District-Buil/7mgd-s57w (retrieved 5 November 2018).

The Geography of Art History

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Related: Data analysis and visualization of 120,000 works in the Museum of Modern Art

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In this film, each colored dot indicates one location represented by art in the Met’s online database. Dot location indicates artwork provenance. Dot size indicates the number of objects from this place. The time each dot appears corresponds to the year this work was created. This data is assumed to be an accurate sample size.

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Over the past few years, the Metropolitan Museum has catalogued over 25% of its holdings online. This represents ~590,000 objects, covering over 5,000 years of human history from 17 curatorial departments. The diversity of objects in a museum’s collection (and the amount of contextual information known about these objects) may reflect the kinds of narratives a museum can curate about artistic and global history. This visualization charts the provenance and year of production of every single object that is catalogued on the Metropolitan Museum website, whenever this information is known.
The geography of art history is uneven. Certain regions, particularly cities, are home to diverse and famous artistic output. Thomas Friedman similarly describes globalization as being spiky and concentrated in big cities. Other regions are comparatively less productive and less studied. Either this reflects museum curators’ historic bias against Africa, Latin America, and the “Global South” in favor of Europe. Or this might reflect a more fundamental historical reality: If geography guides artistic production and privileges regions with good geography, like areas surrounding the Mediterranean, then landlocked and inaccessible regions with poor geography will have less artistic output.

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Art objects from ancient cultures like China, Egypt, and Sumeria frequently have known provenance but unknown year of production. Unfortunately, they are therefore excluded from this visualization. There are many objects in the collections with known provenance but unknown production date. Figure one illustrates objects with known provenance and known year. Figure two shows objects with known provenance only.

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The original data was downloaded here from the Met Museum’s website.
This visualization and interactive map are free to view and download here.

Columbia University Artwork

Featured in:
The Columbia Daily Spectator in September 2016
The Columbia student newspaper in October 2016
The 2018-19 edition of the Asia Pacific Affairs Council journal
– And the Columbia College Today alumni magazine in winter 2019-20 (last page) and summer 2022 (pages 18-22)

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A map of campus

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This ink and watercolor drawing shows every building, window, and architectural detail on campus. The number of windows on each façade are faithful to reality. There are at least 2,000 windows. The perspective was formed from Google Earth satellite and street view images. The image measures 26 by 40 inches and is framed in my dorm room. I wanted to create a souvenir of my four years at Columbia. Years from now, I will look at this image and remember.
The scan below is suitable for viewing but not for large-format printing. Please request access to the full-size scan at ~300dpi
View more artwork like this about my experiences walking in New York City.

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Columbia Campus

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Ink sketches of campus

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Columbia in a Box

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Before my first year at Columbia University, I assembled this tiny model of the campus out of painted and folded paper. Each building was measured out on a flat sheet of paper, decorated, painted, cut out, and then folded. Each building is made with no more than one sheet of paper. This creation folds out of a vintage cigar-box. Dimensions: 5 inches wide, 9 inches long, and 3 inches deep.

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Music: Columbia University Fight Song

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Timelapses of Morningside

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This project features six time-lapse sequences of Columbia University’s campus. I mounted a camera above my desk as I drew and painted each watercolor.

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Music: Columbia University Fight Song performed by Justin Zhao

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Evolution of the English Country House

Developed with Paul Barnwell, historian at the University of Oxford

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Music: Piano Trio in E Flat, Op. 100 by Franz Schubert

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This animation traces changes to English country house design between 1660 and 1715. In 1660, the typical Elizabethan style country house was compact, fortified, and square. By 1715, the emerging Baroque and Palladian country house was spread out, less compact, and better integrated into the rural landscape. The gardens became an extension of the house. This animation illustrates the aesthetic and architectural changes during this era.

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