Scripting Flushing Bay

A fifteen-minute opening statement for a panel on teaching in 2026, drawn from a joint graduate landscape architecture and advanced undergraduate architecture studio taught at a public, majority-minority college. Three points, each argued from the studio rather than from principle.

Positionality. The usual arrangement in a community-engaged studio is an outsider instructor and insider students. This one inverted it: I research Flushing as Chinese diasporic urbanism, on an Architectural League of New York grant, and most of the class did not know the neighborhood. I never told the students my immigration story—it operated as backdrop rather than narration. That is legibility, not disclosure, and it cuts both ways: the bilingual anti-casino posters are pitched to two audiences with different stakes, which is legible to me and was not to the class.

Go to hard places. Site selection is where equity quietly fails. Easy sites are documented, photogenic, walkable and already designed, and they return the generic answer. Two walks made the argument: Flushing Bay with Cody Herrmann, through the Willets Point auto-body district to a water’s edge reachable only by proximity earned over years—and downtown Flushing from the Bowne House of 1661 to the neon food courts of Tangram. One site is hard to reach; the other is hard to see.

Collaboration. Studio manufactures individual authorship, and then the profession wonders why graduates cannot work in coalition. A one-day strategic planning session required the whole class to converge on a single framework, and every student was then bound to design against it. A forced consensus makes power in a room visible—whose voice set the frame, who conceded, what the concession cost. The student work is the proof it was not coercion: one framework, divergent projects.