Edgar Papazian is an artist-architect who has practiced architecture with a license.
He believes in an Architecture that embraces people, and reflects care and empathy. An Architecture that has the capacity to heal and protect by providing personal space for privacy and thought, free from reductive and restrictive social class roles.
His is an Architecture of the maximum depth-of-field, puncturing through, and peripherally around the ever-dominant perspectivalist scopic regime as articulated by Martin Jay.
The many drawings herein are meant to be considered research, autonomous from any built analogues and not simply instruments of service.
Edgar is a graduate of Columbia and Yale Universities and is professor at the New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, USA, where he teaches architectural studios at the college level. He was president of American Institute of Architecture - Peconic chapter in 2024.
This website serves as a location for current research and creative projects (SET-A), and also as a repository of digitised hand-drawn works created between 1993 and 2024 both as a student and as a pracitising architect (SET-B).
“...when designing...I had in mind the human body with arms outstretched, as if embracing all who entered there, which body with outstretched arms is divided in five parts, that is, the breast in the middle, and both arms in two parts each…" – Francesco Borromini, Opus Architectonicum, 1725.
“...He apparently had no significant master and followed no specific architectural tradition. Like some other priest-architects from the major orders... he was first of all an intellectual - a mathematician and a philosopher - and for him architecture was a form of erudition.” -Richard Pommer (referring to the architect Guarino Guarini), Eighteenth-Century Architecture in Piedmont, 1961.
Edgar Birge Papazian e.papazian.73@gmail.com
2500.01
2025, Sag Harbor, USADrawing: protest entry, 2025 Daniel Rowen Design Awards, AIA Peconic. Color pencil on Strathmore board. 22”x14.5”
Submitted for AIA annual awards event as a protest against ‘business as usual.’ The housing crisis is affecting the east end of long island acutely, and the elevation of housing for the 1% is simply not ethical. This envisions a future scenario literally out of the ashes of climate change.
The decision to make a pencil drawing allowed me to not dither as much and craft a proposal in “one go.”
Project Narrative:
The desertion of so many of the region’s second homeowners after big burns of 2029 and 2035 gave us the political ability (an “HOV lane for housing” as it was put) to rezone the areas around our village centers for denser community housing, for what we might call volunteer-species dwellings, aka the Phoenix Houses.
After the fires, only the foundations of the mega-mansions from the Biden and Trump years -- which had gone up in smoke along with most of the oaks and all of the pines -- remained, and certain pioneering architect-developers and community advocates came up with ways to reuse the existing concrete foundations, with their embodied carbon intact, to create a denser, but no less rich type of housing for multiple families, some current displaced residents, some more recent transplants.
Using new steel dunnage to span the existing foundation depth, special prefabricated housing units were trucked over and dropped in. The housing featured efficient footprints similar to the traditional “shotgun” type from the Southern US and incorporated the desire to live mostly outdoors during the mild shoulder seasons. The houses were designed to avoid burning, with numerous tempered windows with shutters, fiber-cement siding, and featured on-site sewage treatment and solar energy generation. The grounds were given a defensible space of 100 feet and were shared among residents, who lived informally together in each pod-village that had once been the grounds of the former McMansion.
Competition
Hamptons Phoenix Houses
Communiy Housing
Pencil Drawings