Brian McGrath: Innovating Global Architecture, Building Student Networks

New York’s East Village in the 1980s is typically pigeonholed as either an incubator of punk rock and street art or a badlands of squatter-occupied tenements. But Parsons’ Brian McGrath describes the neighborhood, which was then his home, in a more conceptual, human-centered way, calling it a “social design laboratory.” His thoughtful approach to architecture, influenced by his years living downtown, led to a recent School of Constructed Environments (SCE) course offering his students a unique learning opportunity.

Blockology: A Homegrown Idea with Global Applications

McGrath describes the 1980s as “a period of both great art production and private owners’ abandoning properties” in the East Village. The neighborhood was home to punk rockers, street artists, and squatters who established community gardens and rooftop sites accessible to all and used local nightspots and galleries as spaces for organizing and creative collaboration. Their imaginative reshaping of the neighborhood led McGrath to view them as ad hoc architects and urban designers.

East Village residents’ urban interventions were influenced by the historical context. The economic and demographic conditions of the United States in the 1970s—stagflation, the decline of manufacturing, white flight to the suburbs—caused many property owners in the East Village and throughout New York City to neglect and abandon their buildings. They also resulted in a decline in municipal tax revenue, which, in combination with a surge in demand for public services, pushed the city to the brink of bankruptcy by 1975. The falloff in investment and deterioration of public services led East Villagers to adopt a frugal lifestyle and focus on pursuits like making music and art. Abandoned lots became community gardens, providing affordable food; bars and arts venues were transformed into grassroots community centers.

“Instead of thinking of the block as just a section of land to fill with real estate, I became fascinated with the block as a social unit,” McGrath says. Whereas many observers viewed the East Village as a troubled area declining into lawlessness, he saw it as a vital neighborhood undergoing positive evolution. Community members were simply adapting their physical environment, albeit outside of traditional redevelopment channels, in accordance with the economic and political dynamics of the period. McGrath dubbed his design framework “blockology.”

McGrath’s observations of the East Village and his daily life in the neighborhood shaped his multifaceted creative practice, which brings together architecture, video and film, and urban design. His love of the neighborhood’s community gardens led him to conduct groundbreaking research in urban ecology. His appreciation for cinema made him aware of the potential of film as a means of documenting space and lived experience and inspired him to develop cinemetrics, a method integrating video ethnography and filmmaking that makes architectural drawings and models more engaging and understandable.

McGrath’s blockology concept also continued to percolate through his approaches to interpreting public space; he began using it as a framework for capturing and illuminating the informal, authentic evolution of his environs. And he came to realize that blockology was more than a means of bearing witness. McGrath felt that architects and urban planners could incorporate community-led interventions into their own work to ensure its long-term viability. Blockology could be used to transform vernacular expression into formal design strategy.

McGrath’s blockology mindset has made him a particularly keen observer of Tainan, Taiwan, where, since 2007, he has taught weeklong cinemetrics workshops at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU). Tainan, Taiwan’s first capital, has experienced waves of colonization since 1624, when it was settled by the Dutch East India Company. Informal community responses to these political and cultural shifts are woven into the physical fabric of the city. 

For those wishing to see blockology in action in Tainan, McGrath recommends examining the 450-foot-square grid that Japanese city planners imposed on Tainan between 1895 and 1945. This plan required removing Qing Dynasty–era buildings that impeded the construction of thoroughfares, to create a neatly organized, arcaded metropolis. But the five-acre blocks contain alleys lined with buildings, temples, and banyan trees predating Japanese colonization. Perhaps more important, Tainan’s present-day citizens have adapted both the public-facing city and its inner realms for contemporary life, turning ancient clan houses into creative studios and streetfront hair salons into busy public living rooms.

McGrath’s NCKU workshops have been hosted and co-taught by his former student Cheng-Luen Hsueh, who now oversees the school’s Architecture department. After concluding their class last spring, Hsueh enlisted his Parsons counterpart in brainstorming ideas for the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. McGrath, who had consulted with Hsueh on past proposals for the Taiwan Pavilion, learned that just a few days earlier, the biennale’s chief curator, Carlo Ratti, had announced his plan to showcase urban resilience strategies based on collective intelligence. Ratti’s vision sounded uncannily like blockology, and McGrath suggested to Hsueh that they incorporate the concept in a pitch for this year’s Taiwan Pavilion.

Discovering Sweet Potato Hill

So began an extended collaboration between the colleagues that would also draw in McGrath’s fall 2024 undergraduate class in Parsons’ SCE and four NCKU students. McGrath imagined modeling one of Tainan’s blocks to illustrate its formal and informal evolution and inviting his and Hsueh’s students “to use empty lots, empty buildings, tops of buildings, and the spaces in between buildings to develop programs and forms that could bridge the interior and exterior block.” The students’ goal was to produce a 1:200 model by employing blockology as a means of engaging sensitively with cities and to continue developing blockology in real-world projects. The class offered an ideal opportunity to demonstrate the potential of blockology as a tool for both observation and intervention.

For a project site McGrath and Hsueh chose the Sweet Potato Hill neighborhood, a location exemplifying Tainan’s urban layering that had served as a subject of the professors’ most recent spring workshop. Sweet Potato Hill is bound by the arcaded buildings of the Japanese 450-footsquare block; here one can find tourist spots such as A-Mei Restaurant and the Xiao-nan-tian Earth God Temple, along with places more likely to be frequented by locals, such as a tutoring center (known as a cram school) and a hair salon. Sweet Potato Hill also holds lodging and historic temples as well as long-occupied converted clan houses, all crowding the hilly alleys, punctuated by banyan trees.

Although this kind of multilayered setting is typical of Tainan, it is little discussed in the academy. In most undergraduate architecture classes, each student is assigned a client, a program, and a clearly demarcated property, whose context plays only a minor role in shaping the student’s design. Parsons professor emeritus Emily Moss—who headed SCE’s undergraduate architectural design program from 2015 to 2021 and served on the panel for McGrath’s final course review—puts it this way: “We still tend to treat the building as the principal object.” In contrast, the richly layered neighborhood described in McGrath’s open-ended brief “pulls urban design thinking into the architectural space.”

McGrath’s expansive challenge is exactly what attracted Jana Al-Sarraj, a BFA Architectural Design senior, to the course last September. “The studio was completely different from the projects we’re used to,” she says. For her contribution to the scale model Al-Sarraj reimagined a public house—a kind of multipurpose communal space common in the region. In a series of rooftop rooms bridging the exterior and interior of Sweet Potato Hill near the A-Mei Restaurant, Al-Sarraj provided living, dining, and recreation spaces where residents could find relief from their cramped apartments—a professionally designed alternative to the neighborhood’s multipurpose salon around the corner.

“This class allowed us to understand how complex architecture can get and how buildings create communities,” says Al-Sarraj.

Building to foster community requires profound empathy, and McGrath knew that his Parsons students would need to be acquainted with Tainan and its residents before designing structures for Sweet Potato Hill. To help students walk in the shoes of locals, four of Hsueh’s NCKU students—Ricky Tzu-Chi Chiu, Richard Yi-Chi Fu, Joyce Ching-Yuan Kao, and Josh Tzu-Chin Huang—created ethnographic videos aimed at showing dayto- day life in the neighborhood in a nuanced and impressionistic way.

“It was an interesting way to address my students’ inability to visit the site they’re working in,” McGrath says. “Cinema helps us understand what we perceive of places, and it can guide our architectural work.” The NCKU students also made themselves available to McGrath’s students to answer questions, shoot additional content, and critique their initial proposals.

BFA Architectural Design senior Daisy Chen confirms that the help the NCKU students offered was immense. “Seeing video shot through the entire block captured interactions between people and the intimacy of the scale of the buildings,” she says. Chen designed a shadow puppet theater, which she placed next to Xiao-nan-tian in the scale model constructed by the class. Chen’s classmate Valentina Aguerrevere Jiménez credits her NCKU peers with inspiring her to reconceive the walls of clan houses and a crumbling fortress as the backdrop of an outdoor concert venue. “I wanted to design something that felt like a community living room,” she says. When Fu told her about Tainan’s underground music scene, she quickly reimagined the site as a stage for aspiring performers.

“I’ve never been to Asia, and, without fully understanding the culture, I was nervous I would make an insensitive project,” Aguerrevere Jiménez notes. “The Tainan students’ videos helped us understand how spaces work and why they are important. Their feedback was reassuring.”

BFA Architectural Design student Ema Capilla says that the video content coming from Tainan helped her embrace “an attitude of how to build. In Tainan, buildings are continuously growing off of one another— people aren’t knocking down and starting fresh—so the videos were key to understanding the layering. In program and design, our projects aimed to preserve and bring something new to Sweet Potato Hill.” Capilla’s addition to the scale model is a rooftop community laundry whose water is supplied by an integrated rain cistern; the project fulfills a local need while responding to climate change.

After his students completed their work on the model, McGrath transported it to Tainan for further interventions. NCKU’s Chiu, Fu, Kao, and Huang added their own architectural overlays to Sweet Potato Hill, ranging from a kind of High Line connecting rooftops to an outdoor lounge space for cram school students.

The View from Venice

In the studio course with McGrath, the SCE undergraduates were readying themselves for rewarding careers. According to Moss, the students have a leg up on graduates of other schools because of their exposure to the broad perspective central to blockology—a sharp contrast to the narrow approach of more traditional courses of study, with their lack of attention to context. She also notes that McGrath’s students are positioned to become innovators in their workplaces because they have used video ethnography as a tool for collaboration with their peers at NCKU. A cinematic method of knowledge exchange engenders unique sensitivity to culture in addition to awareness of physical surroundings, she says, “because you’re getting knowledge from people on the ground.” Moss adds, “Getting serious about carbon consumption minimizes architects’ travel to project sites, so this kind of local feedback is crucial to a commission’s success.”

The students, meanwhile, believe their collaboration sets a professional standard for shaping the built environment and the process of carrying out such work.  

Last October, Hsueh received word from the Venice Biennale of Architecture that the organizers had accepted his proposal for the Taiwan Pavilion. After learning that their proposed improvements for Sweet Potato Hill would have this prominent stage, Aguerrevere Jiménez and her classmates began deliberating over the message they wanted to share with a global audience.

The aspiring architects couldn’t help but examine their work in light of today’s threats to Tainan’s urban fabric. In Taiwan, the growth of the microchip industry is leading the younger occupants of Sweet Potato Hill’s clan houses to seek opportunities closer to chip production sites. The microchip economy is also spurring the development of large, car-centric houses elsewhere, which is attracting Sweet Potato Hill’s wealthier residents and further hollowing out historic neighborhoods. The local economy, in turn, is shifting to tourism, which draws visitors to the ancient temples and architecture. In response, investment groups are purchasing multiple Sweet Potato Hill properties—knocking down multiple exterior-facing and interior buildings, for example, to erect a hotel with ample parking in their place. According to the Parsons students, their blockology project yields a kind of urban revitalization that commands the attention of younger and wealthier Taiwanese while providing spaces that serve all residents— in a way that doesn’t erase history. As Al-Sarraj puts it, “How can we activate spaces for all, adding dynamism without creating the chaos or disrespect of tearing down existing buildings?” 

McGrath notes that the forces acting on Sweet Potato Hill are symptomatic of larger problems endangering cities around the world. And while current conditions—wealth inequality, lack of affordable housing, populism, climate change, even the growth of the AI sector—differ dramatically from the 1970s-era phenomena that gutted the East Village, they also threaten these neighborhoods and the people who call them home. McGrath’s collaboration with NCKU represents a way of training a new generation of designers to contend with change and help partners grappling with community integration, wealth inequality, and other issues to do so as well. 

“Whether it was after the Depression or during the 1980s, in times of emergency, people realize that collectivizing resources is a means of survival,” McGrath says. He believes that student practitioners employing blockology will lead the way in transforming that insight into action. “This isn’t capital-A architecture. Our spatial realignment work is based on engaging with your neighbors, getting to know where you live and work, and making community out of it.”