Please join us for a talk with Karen YunJin Seong and Sameena Sitabkhan, Director and Assistant Director of the Academy of Art University’s Architecture Department, about their recent work at the B.Lab. 

Academy of Art University Architecture Dept, B.lab:

At its core, the B.lab is a design build program promoting spatial justice for local communities and advocacy for future designers. Through radical listening and co-creation, we empower and hope to bring positive change to the built environment. 

The Stay Over Program Folding Beds

The Stayover program at the Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School in San Francisco is the first-of-its kind emergency family shelter in San Francisco. By using an active school gym to house 80 family shelter beds and support services, this model allows families a means to transition to stable housing. The program requires a complex partnership between the school, a non-profit shelter operator, SFUSD, and San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

The B.lab program came in to offer design as a tool to remove some of the pain points and to try to make the lives of the families residing in the shelter, easier. To do this, we operated at the scale of a micro intervention and leaned on a co-creation process.

Operationally, the dual use of the school gym is difficult - during the day the gym is used for PE classes and at night it is used as a shelter. The daily set up and break-down of beds is labor intensive. To remedy this, students fabricated 80 folding beds on wheels with storage compartments incorporating the suggestions of the families at an emergency shelter. Through extensive 1:1 prototyping, students held themselves accountable to the families and developed a shared purpose to guide the process.

Additional furniture was also built through a collaborative process to add storage, a reading book, screen and bookshelves to the dining area. 

Images:

https://springshow.academyart.edu/schools/architecture/projects/stay-over-program-mobile-folding-beds/

SPEAKERS:

Karen YunJin Seong
Undergraduate Director

School of Architecture

Karen Seong is the Undergraduate Director at the School of Architecture, Academy of Art University, where she advocates for under-represented students. She is a proponent of online education as a means to meaningfully diversify the architectural profession. Her pedagogy of examining identity formation in architectural spaces, published by Axel Menges, asks students to tell their personal stories through studio projects. Prior to teaching, she held leadership positions with Skidmore Owings and Merrill in New York and in San Francisco working collaboratively with large international teams on award-winning projects ranging from high-rises to institutional buildings in the US and in the Middle East. She has previously taught at UC Berkeley and has been a guest critic at various institutions in the US and in Korea. She holds a Master of Architecture with distinction from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture with high honors from UC Berkeley. She was born in South Korea and lived in Malaysia before immigrating to the US at age 19.

Sameena Sitabkhan
Undergraduate Assistant Director

School of Architecture

Sameena Sitabkhan is a California licensed architect deeply committed to empowering the next generation of architects through an emphasis on spatial justice. As the assistant undergraduate director at the Academy of Art SF,  she has served in the roles of Licensing Advisor, AIAS faculty advisor, and NOMAS faculty advisor. Since 2018, she has been directing and teaching at B.Lab, the undergraduate department’s community-based design initiative. The student-designed and constructed projects have won numerous awards using creativity, listening and empathy to meeting the needs of underserved communities in the Bay Area. The program relies on a robust participatory model with neighbors, local youth, city agencies, and nonprofits. In her own practice, she has designed and led projects spanning a range of public serving building typologies from schools and affordable housing to urban/art installations throughout the Bay Area since the early 2000s. She was previously an Associate at David Baker Architects, focused on housing for the formerly homeless and has completed ground-up charter and public school buildings throughout California. Sameena has a Masters degree in Architecture from SCI-Arc in Los Angeles and a BA in urban planning from UC San Diego. She is an honoree of the 2023 Community Alliance Awards // Sandra I. Vivanco Education Award and  a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Fellow.

ZOOM LINK:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85716871756?pwd=GwuGQan3MP0UAqaYFyNdfOSvnz9FOx.1

Meeting ID: 857 1687 1756

Passcode: 925501