SITU was founded in 2005 in Brooklyn, New York while its four partners were studying architecture at the Cooper Union. The organization of SITU’s workspace, split evenly between a fabrication shop and a design studio, reflects a commitment to interrogating design ideas through physical and material experimentation at a wide range of scales. This approach seeks to place the virtual and physical components of the practice into a productive and non-linear relationship that creates space for the act of making to become a generative part of the design process. These ongoing engagements with the logics of assembly and manufacture have been inflected by the studio’s underlying social investment in the themes of participation and distributed agency in architecture. A deep engagement with the program and context of each project underpins an approach to design problems that favors the development of rule sets, processes and protocols over any particular stylistic or formal agenda. Central to all of SITU’s work is an effort to develop processes that leverage fabrication efficiencies, material re-use, flexible assemblies and community involvement to create spaces that engage in living relationships with the urban context of which they are a part. SITU maintains three divisions within its practice – [Studio](http://www.situstudio.com/), [Research](http://www.situresearch.com/) and [Fabrication](http://www.situfabrication.com/).
Governed by a unique “Right to Shelter” mandate, New York is distinct from other municipalities across the U.S. in its legal provisions for temporary housing assistance. While this constitutional right may provide some relief for homeless New Yorkers, the extra-legal reality is that the cost of shelter has forced far greater segments of the City’s…
