JanyaAggarwal B.Arch 2026 — Cornell AAP

My work sits at the intersection of two things that seem opposite but share a common architecture: the luxury storefront and the ecological festival site. Both are fundamentally about the construction of experience — how a body moves through a space, what it notices, what it remembers, and what it feels it has entered. The difference is mostly in what they are made of.

At Peter Marino Architect, where I have interned across two summers in New York, I worked directly on storefronts for international luxury fashion houses across locations including New York and Japan. Producing detailed collages and renders to communicate design intent, developing Design Development sets, and coordinating Niche plan sets taught me how much precision goes into the engineering of desire. Luxury retail is storytelling at 1:1 scale: every material decision, every threshold, every sightline is an editorial choice about what the brand is and who the visitor becomes by entering it.

My B.Arch thesis approaches experience creation from the opposite end of the material spectrum. Set on Terschelling, a barrier island in the Dutch Wadden Sea, and working within the framework of the Oerol Festival, it argues for architecture that performs in time rather than persists as object — adapting to tidal cycles, dune morphodynamics, and seasonal change. Drawing on local island folklore as a spatial narrative, three site-specific interventions translate folk stories into built form that works with the island's ecological systems rather than against them.

The thesis is, at its core, about the same question as the storefront work: how do you build something that makes a person feel they have entered a different world, without destroying the world that was already there? I am particularly drawn to projects where the stakes of experience are high — commercial interiors, cultural venues, festival and performance environments, and hybrid programs that ask what a building is actually for when it stops pretending to be neutral.