Nanjing

This GSD studio will run in tandem with a studio to be conducted at Hong Kong University in cooperation with Atelier Zhanglei and Nanjing University. Early in March, the GSD studio will take a short trip to Hong Kong and Nanjing to be paid by sponsors. The Hong Kong studio will travel to Cambridge for a joint, two day final review in May.The studio will investigate techniques through which architecture can alter or redirect the intended consequences of a master plan. In particular, it will explore the ways that architecture is capable of rearticulating a campus such that it is programmatically understood to be an annex, a new town, or a campus within a new town. The investigation will be applied according to a hypothesis within the context of a campus for Nanjing University in Xianlin, a new university town outside of Nanjing that is being planned by Atelier Zhanglei, Architecture Design Institute.In actuality, the new campus for Nanjing University is being staged in three phases, the first of which is under construction while designs for the buildings in the second and third continue to be developed. The studio, however, will make an additional assumption. In addition to designing buildings within the parameters already defined by phase two of the master plan, the studio will also leap forward and apply its techniques within a fictional \”phase 4\”. The program for phase 4 will be to increase the density of phases one and two by means of strategic interventions. As such, this hypothetical final phase of growth will be considered analogous to the process of a campus folding back on itself.In order to facilitate a disciplined response to the problem, the studio – operating under the assumption that there are important distinctions to be drawn between campus planning and urban planning -will initially study and transform precedents originating in two scales: the megastructural and the small scale intervention. The first model (mega-scale) is associated with twentieth century examples of total systems of architecture, while the second is fragmentary, composed of discrete, though collective programmatic elements arranged according the concept of a \”constellation\”, more akin to a Baroque technique of planning. Notwithstanding the disciplinary distinctions between large scale architecture and urban planning, in both cases it is the exceptional public elements that serve as catalysts for the organization of the overall urban scale plan. The architectural configuration of arcades, plazas, parking structures, and recreation spaces serve as the key references for stimulating the allocation and composition of buildings and spaces. Following the thematic study of systems of organization and constellation, the studio will investigate types of coherence and fragmentation. Normally, the building envelope guidelines of a master plan precede the development of specific architectural features and massing. The studio will experiment with the premise that the detailed architectural development of the public elements is capable of setting up the building envelope guidelines, thus recalibrating the more usual course of a master plan, in which parameters dominate a priori and architectural design follows in a more subservient role. The question is whether or not it is possible to maintain a plausible approach, with respect to the protocols of campus planning, while producing architectural conditions that are linked to a larger campus plan in a manner that, by definition, is more coherent than what normally results from a master plan. In terms of technique, this inquiry will invite the students to develop geometric models and parameters elaborated by means of parametric programs such as Generative Components, CATIA and Solid Works. The ultimate aim is to propose public elements and other buildings that affect the larger plan not only as a result of their programmatic significance, spatial orga