architecture — ryan karczewski

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karczewskiryan@gmail.com

architecture portfolio

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2024

theater as a well

The city of Venice is extremely permeable, allowing for an easy exploration of the occupant and extensive moments of interaction. Exploring the ideas of view, occupation, and the “layered edge”.

Through the development of a mapping of the Venetian Canals and Campi, this project began to speak primarily on borders and edge conditions between traditionally public spaces that exist on different horizontal planes. Through further research, the Venetian Well became prevalent as a historically significant focal point within the majority of the city’s campi, acting as a communal tool that celebrated moments of interaction and allowed for residents to access water even if not adjacent to the city’s canal.

Furthermore, the idea of the layered edge became increasingly prevalent, blurring boundaries between traditionally separated spaces. If pedestrians could occupy both the canal and campo, interaction between these spaces could be celebrated through light and shadow, view, and rising tides. The canal became a stage for pedestrians to witness and interact with primarily as an audience member.

Choosing to shift the Venetian Well to occupy the center of the theater space, allows for that focal point to shift to the canal and to emphasize view as the main source of interaction between the campo and the canal. The well, naturally, also provides a vertical connection between the stage and the water below. As the tides rise, the stage and the campo become swallowed, allowing for the water to create a horizontal, and physical, connection between the two otherwise separated spaces.

preturning: reclaiming collective infrastructures through bottom-up reappropriation

Master of Urban Design Thesis

The spatial condition of post-Soviet Lithuania is defined by a fundamental contradiction between inherited collectivist infrastructures and the privatized political economy that replaced them. Soviet urbanism produced an extensive system of collective architectures - housing estates, garages, cultural centers, courtyards, collective agricultural practices, workshop zones, and vast networks of in-between space - yet the “collectivity” embedded in these structures was never grounded in civic agency. Rather, it emerged from a regime of forced collectivization in which land, labor, and communal life were organized through state ownership. These spaces existed within a form of forced collectivity, prohibiting residents from possessing the power to shape them. As a result, meaningful personalization and community authorship occurred only through informal, incremental, and often impermanent appropriations: micro-gardens in residual soils, illicit garage markets, extensions built without permission, seasonal uses of open fields, and small acts of temporal modification. These practices were the only available means of recalibrating an imposed collective system into something that approached lived, everyday communal space.

With the political and economic transformations of the 1990s, the pendulum swung sharply away from this model. The rapid privatization of land and housing fractured the continuous landscapes of the Soviet period into individualized parcels, dissolving the tenuous collectivities that had existed under state ownership. In this transition, the infrastructures built to support collective life - garages, cultural centers, sports halls, gardens, worker clubs, children’s facilities, and microdistrict service nodes - were left in conditions of legal and economic ambiguity. No clear mechanisms for collective stewardship, shared responsibility, or adaptive reuse accompanied the shift to private property. The result is an abundance of spatial resources that remain structurally collective but institutionally unsupported, simultaneously under-maintained, under-legalized, and under-theorized within contemporary urban policy.

This creates a tension particular to the Lithuanian context. While both Soviet collectivization and post-Soviet privatization failed to cultivate spaces of genuine civic agency, Lithuanian cultural history contains long-standing traditions of voluntary, bottom-up communal labor; most notably, talkas, a practice of neighborly cooperation, shared maintenance, and collective work rooted in reciprocity rather than coercion. These forms of community-making predate socialism and persist in social memory, yet they are absent from the current frameworks that govern inherited Soviet spaces. The contemporary city inherits collective architectures without collective governance, and a cultural lineage of cooperation without spatial or legal structures that enable it. Thus, the problem is not simply one of decaying buildings or outdated infrastructures; it is a systemic misalignment between the forms of communal life that Lithuanian society has historically practiced and the spatial-political regimes that structure the post-Soviet urban environment.

In this context, the question becomes how to imagine an urban framework that neither reproduces the top-down collectivism of the Soviet period nor capitulates to the atomized privatization that followed. Lithuania’s inherited Soviet infrastructures constitute vast, flexible terrains for shared life, yet they remain locked in a political and legal vacuum that provides no support for incremental, community-led transformation.

unearthing distrust

The Flint River Watershed spans 1,358 square miles across seven Eastern Michigan counties, providing essential ecological, recreational, and economic benefits. However, it has faced severe pollution, industrial decline, and the Flint Water Crisis, highlighting the need to rebuild trust within its communities. Named “River of Stone and Fire” (Pewonigowink in Anishinaabemowin), the river originates in Columbiaville, where its North and South tributaries converge. Historically, the region featured hardwood forests and wetlands, home to Indigenous tribes. Colonists displaced these populations, exploiting the area for logging and later automotive industries. Dependence on these industries led to economic decline after production was outsourced. Flint’s challenges deepened with redlining, which displaced Black residents for urban renewal, and the Water Crisis, during which government failures disproportionately harmed marginalized communities. Today, efforts focus on restoring environmental balance and fostering sustainable practices that benefit both residents and natural systems.

We seek to utilize this room for reconsideration of the region’s environmental practices and work to expand the rights of nature within the watershed, allowing us to re-earth trust throughout the region. Our scope explores the watershed's boundaries, as opposed to those of municipal jurisdictions. Allowing us to understand the causes and effects associated with design interventions explored past and present. Moving away from zones of extractive processes, enables us to focus on interventions that exist throughout a watershed system, and act in tandem with one another to provide lasting benefits to communities and their natural environments.

Therefore, we must first begin to heal… Restoring the Flint River requires balancing natural processes with human habitation, and acknowledging the interconnectedness of ecological, hydrological, and social networks. The fragmented watershed, marked by residential developments, state-managed lands, and flood-prone areas, offers opportunities for collaborative restoration between humans and nature. Our proposed intervention begins with beaver dam analogs (BDAs), which are engineered structures that mimic natural dams, encouraging wetland expansion and inviting beavers back to the landscape. These BDAs slow water flow, capture nutrients and create conditions for natural regeneration across public, private, and state-owned lands. Over time, reestablished beaver colonies amplify these efforts, raising water tables, and reducing runoff. As wetlands and riparian habitats flourish, the Flint River becomes a resilient ecosystem shaped by collaboration, restoring balance and healing the headwaters.

We can then begin to reconnect… With a focus on community, we examine Flint’s neighborhoods near downtown, where industrial storage sites and vacant properties dominate the landscape. These sparsely populated areas house vibrant yet disconnected communities, with vacant lots serving as reminders of what once existed. However, these conditions offer opportunities to repurpose land for community land trusts (CLTs), environmental growth, and neighborhood hubs. By consolidating vacant lands and redeveloping abandoned properties, CLTs can foster stronger connections among residents. Additionally, integrating these spaces into an expanded wetland system linked to the Flint River can reconnect communities to their natural surroundings, offering direct access and fostering a deeper bond with the environment and the communities that exist within it.

Lastly, we must work to cooperate… The existing downtown area of Flint highlights a detached channelized river, and large impervious urban networks, that emerged due to fragmented jurisdictions, which has overshadowed the holistic existence of these fragmented habitats. Unearthing these zones for implementation of ecological regulations along the river's proximity fosters cooperation with natural features that detain and treat stormwater. The redesigning of parking lots and transforming urban surfaces emphasize opportunities for cooperation to support urban metabolism. Territorial cooperation as a culture portrays the social and cultural fabric. This vision emphasizes a cohesive downtown, built around shared stewardship and hydrological processes, particularly stormwater management at the source.

Healing The Flint River Watershed requires warping across scales of place and time, our efforts resist fragmentation, transforming crisis into opportunities for trust and cooperation. These actions create a generative, multi-generational shift toward a future where a collective exist, flourish, and evolve.

This project worked in partnership with David Vega + Aditi Verma.

midterm video

final video

as above, so below

Through a heavy analysis of Parisian architecture, artistic expression, and countercultural practices, this project sought to redesign Place de la Republique to support countercultural expression and protest, and simplify its busy metro station.

This project was heavily inspired by the works of Jean Dubuffet and his study of the metro and its ability to desegregate Parisian society while support “underground” countercultural pracitces.

It began by understanding Place de le Republique as a center for counterculture and protest, and analyzing the plaza’s recent redesign. Through this research it was clear that there exists a disconnect between the underground - both in a literal and figurative sense - and the above ground plaza.

To resolve this, the design maintains the overall integrity of the plaza while adding physical elements - columns, level changes, and glass viewports - that break down the space into more of a human scale and protest visitors from oncoming traffic. Further, it extended the monument below ground to act as the center of the resdesigned underground space, and allow for graffiti and countercultural expression to exist full time. It lastly, simplified the entrances to the metro stations by moving the ticket centers to just above each of the lines, and adjusts the grade to support further ease of travel for buses and bikes around the plaza.

presentation

grounded in detroit

The Choreography of Excavation proposes a transformative urban design for the District Detroit, where digging becomes an intentional act of spatial making, cultural repair, and climate resilience. Through a community-led process of excavation, the project carves a network of sunken public spaces - embedded commons that exist below the surface of the city and serve as hubs for gathering, learning, and grassroots material innovation.

Rather than treating excavation as waste, the project reclaims site material - soil, concrete rubble, asphalt, and discarded infrastructure - and reprocesses it into new construction aggregates. Uprooted concrete and masonry are crushed and blended with clay and subsoil to form stabilized earth mixes, used in rammed earth walls, compressed earth blocks, and hybrid plasters. This process forges a new vernacular from Detroit’s own post-industrial sediment, transforming debris into durable, low-carbon architecture.

This site-specific material strategy significantly reduces embodied carbon. By reusing 1,000 tons of excavated and demolished material in lieu of high-emission materials like concrete or fired brick, the project avoids approximately 900 tons of CO₂ emissions, while eliminating the need for off-site transport and disposal. In doing so, it weaves sustainability directly into the rituals of making and place-keeping.

Encircling each excavation site, new community-built structures provide space for fabrication, teaching, and shared research. Abandoned buildings across the district are reactivated as material labs and learning centers, creating a decentralized system of knowledge rooted in care, circularity, and experimentation.

Underground, the project taps into Detroit’s forgotten infrastructure - reconnecting steam tunnels and invoking the deeper presence of the salt mines that lie below. These subterranean layers are both metaphor and method, shaping a city that regenerates not by erasure, but by digging into its own layered histories to build anew.

This project worked in partnership with Prutvhi Shah.

concrete sequence

Interaction can exist between materials, structural elements, and between individuals and the designed project. This project explores the manipulation of concrete as a material and how these changes may affect experiential and acoustic conditions for the visitor.

Concrete inherently provides strong structural conditions and can exist as monolithic and heavy, or can develop a heavily layered structure out of thinner columns and beams. How might these different structural properties influence how the user may interact with the material and the designed spaces at large?

With a cinema space as the focus program and material as its main design driver, this project began with sketches and drawings to better understand how the user can interact with the material, and how material can influence the overall atmosphere of the project.

As an overall, the project investigates the dichotomy between the act of carving space out of a monolithic and large concrete element, and the act of forming a larger structure out of thinner assembled elements. Further, this project explores how these structural conditions might aid in the manipulation of light and create specific spatial conditions that are inherent of a traditional cinema and theater space.

In addition to the overall structure, this project also explores the articulation of the concrete material itself - at a much smaller scale - in order to inform program and aid in the experiential and acoustic qualities of specific spaces; the cinema space, concessions and ticketing, and circulation. This is explored through material tests and articulating concrete through bush hammering, chiseling, and the use of acid.

Exploring concrete at both a large and small scales makes space for different scales of interaction; view, touch, acoustics, and more.

presentation

the fourth corner

The Fourth Corner was created as a natural expansion to the largest community land trust and housing co-op in the country: the Beverly Laurel Community Land Trust, in Los Angeles, California. Upon visiting the BVCLT in early February, the studio was given a tour of their properties and were able to interview residents on what they envision as a beneficial expansion to the property within its undeveloped southeast corner.

Working within a group, with Makenna Karst and Caelin Johnson, we were inspired by the BVCLT’s heavy use of found objects as a form of design, construction, and renovation. Our project, the Fourth Corner, sought to create a set of prefabricated studio and two bedroom units surrounded by a light steel structure acting as the circulation; keeping overall costs low and maximizing sunlight and their relationship with nature.

Along with the units, the north corner of the project acts as a flexibile community space with a row of market and workshop booths that allow residents, many of which already make and sell goods fron their own apartments, to have a designated workshop and vending space.

This project worked in partnership with Makenna Karst and Caelin Johnson.

processional confessional

In large cities like Venice, interaction can occur among strangers or among friends, and is oftentimes influenced by the designed spaces that these interactions may occur in, and the personal background of the individual. The City of Venice maintains a specific duality between its heavy Catholic influence and the presence of its legendary Carnivale - a yearly festival that allows residents to “sin” under the disguise of masks and artificial characters. To emphasize this duality, this project uses a confessional booth as the basis of a modular structure and sought to make a physical connection between two churches bordering the Santa Maria Nova Campo.

Creating a raised and veiled walkway, this project further investigates interaction at a much more personal level, allowing visitors to confess their deepest secrets to passers by and strangers while under the protection of an architectural facade. Creating a much needed space for anonymous interactions to occur within a densely populated city.

This project worked in partnership with Emily Ryan.

three sisters tower

Harkening back to the development of layers and the presence of interconnecting horizontal planes, this project began with the study of New York City - specifically Park Avenue. Through further exploration of the city’s vertical layering techniques, we better understood how these techniques can cause social and economic changes between neighborhoods. As Park Avenue journeys north, the change of level of the rail line - from under to above ground - creates a physical barrier between the Upper East Side and East Harlem.

Following this initial research - the class was challenged in creating a multi-use tower just south of the Hudson Yards development. On the border of one of the most expensive housing developments in the nation’s history, and in the center of one of the city's most intense food deserts, my partner and I sought to address a need for more affordable housing as well as access to more affordable food and community resources.

The project, the “Three Sisters Tower”, aims to be a self-sufficient urban farm, market, residential, and research facility. It derives its name from the farming technique developed by the Native Americans of the region, which utilizes the nutrients and low growth height of beans and squash to support the vertical height of the cornstalk. Programmatically, this concept translates to the horizontal ground floor marketplace and horizontal research facility supporting the growth and sale of produce developed within the vertical farms located within each residential module. Each of these programs are centered around two specific cores, both of which are used to funnel, collect, and disperse rainwater.

The tower itself rises vertically through the development and addition of each residential and farming module. Each module contains four floors of apartment spaces that implement constructed shades, allowing for residents to adjust the amount of interaction they want with the outside world. Each module also contains a scientific research station and a “rooftop” glass greenhouse. The module allows water to enter the core itself - as well as the greenhouse - by requiring an open air cavity to be present between itself and the next module and a constructed drainage system to allow rainwater to collect and fall within the walls of the elevator core.

This project worked in partnership with Ann Nguyen.

separation of scale

To further investigate various forms of interaction, this next project focuses on threshold, the overall juxtaposition between barrier and access, and how architecture and structural elements may play a role in emphasizing these ideas.

By developing two parallel paths, this barrier becomes realized by the void that separates these two paths. The void is physically unsurpassable but can be crossed through view, light and shadow, and potentially smell and sound. Allowing for four out of the five senses to cross this threshold.

Scale is then further developed through the presence of both the elephant and human, allowing for the two parallel paths to develop varied structural qualities.