MEISTERLIN
Work
Talks
news
about
SOME WORK
Envisioning Seneca Village
2024 - present | multiple publications
An ongoing collaborative project to imagine New York City’s Seneca Village, a 19th-Century African American community destroyed to build Central Park.
You and Me Both, Bucky
2026 | essay
A brief reflection on Information Fallout: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game, in Mark Wasiuta’s The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006-2016.
Population Density in 19th-Century American Urbanism
2024 | journal article
A coauthored study on population density (and its metrics) across forty US cities in 1880 and amongst different groups within those cities. Published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas
2019 - 2024 | web-based interactive map
A coauthored interactive visualization of New York City’s census records for 1850, 1880, 1910, and 1940.
210 Cities in San Diego
2019 | exhibition
A cartographic exploration of distance, difference, and discrepancy. Culled from an investigation of employment statistics, including over 430,000 unique commuters, the installation illustrates the variety of boundaries that delineate individual opportunity, set against the uneven landscape of combined experience.
Digital Urbanisms
2019 | organized conference
A one-day symposium bringing together urban researchers and practitioners—planners, architects, geographers, organizers, and entrepreneurs—to take stock of the digital processes and products shaping cities, their promises and problems, and alternatives and approaches for operating within and against the uneven spaces they characterize.
Cartographies of Distance
2019 | book chapter
An essay on geographic distance as an underexamined and underutilized element of spatial and cartographic analysis, with the potential to point to differences of experience in urban environments. Published in Ways of Knowing Cities (Eds L. Kurgan and D. Brawley).
Not Yet #AfterRikers: Looking for #Justice In Design
2018 | essay
A review of Justice In Design, a project and report sponsored and published by the Van Alen Institute with the Independent Commission for New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform. Published in The Avery Review n. 32.
Research Ransoms: On Expelling Undue Influence
2018 | interview
A conversation with Samantha Parsons from UnKoch My Campus, published in ARPA Journal Issue 5: Conflicts of Interest.
Density & Connectivity: Land Use in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York
2017 | exhibition
A four-panel installation of cartographic analysis on the relationships between populations, land use mixture and separation, and street connectivities shaping the lives of 19th-Century New Yorkers.
Cher
2016 | web app and exhibition
A year-long collaborative project on the sharing economy, including a browser-based web app for posting and “sharing” objects and spaces by the minute and an installation at the 2016 Oslo Architectural Triennial.
Zoning Before Zoning
2016 | journal article
A coauthored study on land use and density in mid-nineteenth-century New York, before comprehensive zoning was established in the city.
Campaign Mapping 2016
2015 - 2016 | digital project
A project about candidates and constituents in the months leading to the 2016 US presidential primaries—mapping the country we talk about when we talk about the country.
Old Maps, New Tricks: Digital Archaeology in the 19th-Century City
2015 | article
A coauthored article on learning about daily life in historical cities through redrawing their maps, published in Urban Omnibus.
Remapping Snow
2013; 2015 | map series
A series of maps revisiting John Snow’s map of deaths by cholera in Soho, London, 1854.
Re-envisioning New York’s Branch Libraries as One Networked System
2014 | design study
An interdisciplinary design study and proposal for branch libraries at multiple scales, for the Architectural League of New York and the Center for an Urban Future, with Marble Fairbanks Architects and James Lima Planning & Development.
Antipublic Urbanism
2014 | essay
A review of The Downtown Project in Las Vegas, Nevada, in The Avery Review n.3.
The City is Not a Lab
2014 | essay
An essay on the “experimental” in architectural and urban research, for the inaugural issue of ARPA Journal on Test Subjects.
Comments on Foreclosed
2013 | book and website
A record of what was said about Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, an architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, from April 2011 through August 2012.
on Foreclosed
2012 | essay
An assessment of the conversation around and reactions to Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, published in Metropolis.
Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream
2012 | exhibition and catalogue contributions
An exploration of new architectural possibilities for cities and suburbs in the aftermath of the 2008 foreclosure crisis at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organized and curated by Barry Bergdoll and Reinhold Martin.
The Buell Hypothesis: Rehousing the American Dream
2011 | co-authored book
A book (screenplay) positioning the American Dream as an all too familiar “film” which can only be sufficiently rethought by shifting the conversation toward a philosophical debate about its most entrenched underpinnings. It includes a series of case study sites that are representative of the challenges facing municipalities nationwide as well as an archive of evidence of the history of public discussion and debates about public housing since the New Deal.
Public Housing: A New Conversation
2009 | pamphlet
A synthesis of ideas, propositions, and assertions following a one-day policy and design workshop convened by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.
The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles
2008 | 23 maps
The book, edited by Kazys Varnelis, includes 23 maps which work to relate the collected essays and photo-essays, across the region’s landscape and history.
Architecture and Justice: Million Dollar Blocks
2006 - 2009 | multiple publications
A cartographic investigation of the public expenditure on incarceration in cities, at Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab (now the Center for Spatial Research).
Project Descriptions from the Center for Spatial Research
New New Orleans vN.x
2007 | cartographic essay
Co-authored speculative analysis and critique of attempts at rational planning in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, published in The Question of New Orleans (Columbia University).