HOMEMAKING RESEARCH LAB / SPRING 2025 / SYRACUSE SoA
HOMEMAKING is a Research Lab led by Associate Professor Marcos Parga and Assistant Professor Omar Ali at Syracuse University School of Architecture.
The lab explores how architectural design can challenge social norms and shape more equitable, resilient, and sustainable futures.
Working at the intersection of research and practice, HOMEMAKING develops projects at architectural and urban scales that respond to urgent global issues through local interventions, engaging a wide network of interdisciplinary collaborators and scholars.
At the core of HOMEMAKING’s mission is a commitment to rethinking domestic space — the places where we dwell and the relationships they embody. Through lectures, design studios, seminars, and workshops, we empower students to become active agents of change, questioning how architecture can respond to shifting social dynamics. The lab critically examines evolving ideas of labor, care, ownership, and family, understanding the home as a site of negotiation where political, cultural, financial, and environmental forces take shape.
The work within the Lab is understood as a collective endeavor. In addition to their individual work, students will work as a group in assembling a web platform for the dissemination of their collective body of work. This interface will serve as an open-access repository of the lab’s research, projects, and collective discourse. More than just a documentation tool, it is a forum for ongoing inquiry into the relationship between architecture and social transformation.
By placing design in conversation with history, politics, and everyday life, HOMEMAKING seeks to inspire new ways of thinking about domesticity — and offer the possibility of alternative ways of living together.
Each proposal produced within the Lab, be that a building, a book, film, exhibition, or installation, must grow out of a process of conceptually rigorous investigation, attending closely to both the formal properties and the contextual nexus within which it participates. The final projects should be thus a proposition, a means to interrogate beliefs, procedures, behavioral, temporal, and material realities, and (re)consider what it means to be in the world and live together.
Visit HOMEMAKING WEBSITE here.
A Dissection of the Home (in 13 Acts)
Articulated around the 13 proposals developed within the lab this semester, the final exhibition has been conceived as a collective journey into the realm of DOMESTICITY.
Three interconnected spaces on the 1st floor of Slocum Hall become the stage for the Final Review, transforming its format into a collection of in-transit conversations that will unfold while visiting the installations.
This processional nature will allow the audience to wander around the 13 Stations set up by the students, following a choreographed itinerary carefully crafted as an invitation to redraw, reconceptualize, and unfold our understanding of what dwelling space should be; who is it meant for and responsive to; how it is owned and facilitated; and how, in our present moment, expanded notions of labor, agency, ownership, care, identity, and family are reshaping the way we live.
2025 Britton Memorial Awards. Syracuse University School of Architecture
Graduating students completing Directed Research are eligible for the James A. Britton Memorial Awards, which acknowledges the accomplishments of graduate and undergraduate students in their final year and recognize the best final projects.
Awards are determined by Invited Guest Jurors, Faculty, and members of the Advisory Board, who evaluate student projects and submitted ranked ballots.
This year, the 3 prizes have recognized 3 proposals developed within our Research Lab:
First Prize: ALMOST HOME, by Liqing Lao and Tairan Fang
Second Prize (ex aequo): (UN)CANNY HOME, by Huilin Wu and Jiwei Wang
Second Prize (ex aequo): SUMMER FRIENDS, by Matthew Gilbert