Joseph Altshuler

Current Projects

Public Art as Urban Design

Public Art typically consists of sculptural work that beautifies the public realm, often fixed to a podium or elevated on a plinth that is removed from the inhabited surfaces of everyday life. In contrast, Joseph’s design research practice demonstrates how public art might be transformed from a decorative platform for beautification into a robust architectural framework for inhabitation, immersion, interaction, and intimacy. The design research demonstrates how architecture that operates through the “guise” of public art offers an expanded capacity to enact a built environment dedicated to community-building and civic engagement.

In 2023, Joseph was awarded a University Design Research Fellowship to contribute to the Exhibit Columbus architecture biennial by developing a creative placemaking project in downtown Columbus, Indiana. Joseph’s contribution, the Carousel for Companionship, features a rotating platform that is manually operated by community members to facilitate public programming, performances, and play. The platform’s shapely profiles, sampled and abstracted from the geometry of the city’s iconic architecture, operate in visual tandem with supergraphic murals that activate the existing exterior surfaces of an underutilized paved lot located behind the city’s main thoroughfare. The graphics sync into and out of optical alignment with the carousel as it spins in place or as visitors circulate around it. One-part public art, one-part play structure, and one-part open-air stage, the platform and graphics collectively create an animated civic space that engages with the adjacent streetscape. Carousel for Companionship won the Environmental Design Research Association’s 2024 Great Places Award honorable mention in the Place Design category, recognizing placemaking projects that enrich people and communities and address needs of a diversity of users.

Supergraphic Landscapes

Joseph is co-PI for the design research project Supergraphic Landscapes, which was awarded by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Injustice Research Program 2022–23. Supergraphic Landscapes is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of architecture, graphic design, and landscape architecture that explores the role of urban-scaled graphics and creative placemaking that amplify identity, access, and belonging in public spaces. Challenging the industry’s term “environmental graphics,” Supergraphic Landscapes pushes the power of graphics beyond information (wayfinding) and into realms of space, place, and community-building (worldmaking). In 2022, the city of Gary, Indiana commissioned Could Be Design to design and realize a set of new pedestrian crosswalks informed by this design research. The project, entitled Gary-goyles: Crosswalk Camaraderie addresses existing deficiencies and historic racism embedded in the city’s public transportation network, integrating strategically located pedestrian access with joyful placemaking tactics that enhance the urban streetscape.

Architecture Animacy & Companionship

This body of design research explores the formal, organizational, and social ways that architecture behaves like an animate “creature,” offering an expanded capacity to build identity, relationships, empathy, and companionship. In response to this research, the Siebel Center for Design commissioned Joseph’s team to design and build a series of installations that activate their new building’s public spaces with intimate pockets of personal programming. Each installation provides a specific “interior landmark” including a welcome desk, a gateway arch, a mobile amphitheater backdrop for lectures/performances, and a roving exhibition display kiosk that has wandered away from the pack. The creatures of the Animate Arcade embody animated characteristics like personality, posture, facial expressions, charisma, and attitude that collectively initiate companionship with you, their human visitors, in order to prompt interactive encounters. This way of seeing the world provides an opportunity to redefine our own human personhood, and to acknowledge all that we have in common with other creaturely companions of the built environment. The Architects’ Newspaper Best of Design Award program recognized the Animate Arcade with an honorable mention for the best temporary installation of 2023.