First Semester Core: Introduction to Design and Visual Studies in Architecture
GSD 1101, Fall, with Paul Andersen, Eric Howeler, Mariana Ibanez, Daniel Lopez-Perez, Lluis Ortega, Ingeborg Rocker

Drawings and buildings are the two primary media by which architecture is made manifest. They are never identical and they always elude the other indispensable medium of architectural description: the word. Whether combined or separated, these media lack the descriptive range required to fully account for architecture. Architecture, as a symbolic construct that configures our perceptual and social spaces, always exceeds the depictions that make it physical.

During the first semester, projects concentrate on the complex relationship between particular built and drawn representations of architecture. What are the technical and conceptual problems that emerge when distinct manifestations of architecture are intended to approximate one another? The first project, "survey and analysis," requires students to capture and dissect the space and materials of existing buildings within the space and ephemerality of orthographic drawings. The requirement to create a likeness between three-dimensional space and its two-dimensional representation encourages acute awareness of fundamental tools and tasks of the architect's craft; in this case, intense observation and exacting formal definition become imperative.

The second project asks students to reverse the process of the first by interpreting a set of drawings of an existing building as a three-dimensional context for the intervention of an elevator. The building’s dynamic section was so tightly calibrated with alternating centralized and bifurcated plans that the intervention of a continuous vertical passage, no matter how well-integrated on any given level, would inevitably interrupt a room, stair or passage on another level. The problem is to absorb the elevator and to reestablish the rigorous formal coherence and connectivity of the existing configuration while attending to implicit customs of sequence and occupation. In the second stage of the project, the building is assumed to be re-situated 90 degrees with respect to the street it originally addressed. The problem, to readjust the plan, section, and elevations of the building to address a different front, requires the renegotiation and redeployment of compositional and combinatory rules uncovered during the elevator intervention.

Another second project given involves reversing the process of the first by providing two horizontal sections, a street level and an upper level plan, of several buildings presumed to exist. In each case, with the exception of their perimeters, the two plans appear to be incompatible with respect to geometry, location of vertical circulation, structure and probable programmatic distribution. The project, to determine the level of the upper plan within fixed vertical and horizontal dimensions, requires representing the building assumed to exist between the two plans. Inevitably, the building is characterized by various subdivided spaces and aggregated volumes interconnected by nuanced sequences of stairs and passages. Techniques and strategies for interpreting the plans, and the coordination or craft of the syntactical, tectonic and programmatic properties of the building from which they were cut, are the focus of this project.

The last project, a recreation center, introduces program as an explicit source of formal determination. In this case, basketball, squash, bowling, and batting become the progenitors of arrangements and residual spaces analogous to those of the previous projects. The challenge is to design a building that conglomerates the inherently determined sizes, proportions, axes of orientation, materials, fenestration, structural spans and other pressures of the various recreational volumes within the limiting boundaries of an urban site. During the development of the project, critical focus is given to the configurative and derivational logic of the programmatic constituents and the urban context as well as to their anticipated symbolic and experiential resonance.

Fourth Semester Architectural Design Studio:
Design of Housing
GSD 1202, Spring 2001

Among contemporary architectural scenarios, housing supports the consideration of issues including: the subjectivity of intimate values and interior space, conflicts arising from privatization and public access, and notions of "density" versus individuality. The design of housing requires the constant reexamination of the contested realities existing between physical and social space; a relationship modulated through individual rooms, grouped dwellings, and competing visions of urban life. As such, housing is unavoidably social, political, and critical. Its successful invention, unlike more autonomous types, foregrounds the aesthetic tension between self-reflection and objective determinants.

The study area for this design project is located in Boston along the road that provided original land access to the Shawmut peninsula. It includes parcels of land on either side of Washington Street near Martin Luther King Boulevard in the neighborhood of Roxbury. This area has an explicit, yet tenuous, connection with Boston’s city center. The urban "fabric" of the area is mixed, with various building types and streets creating a less than consistent morphological pattern. Predominantly composed of wood framed detached structures and various types of detached houses, the area also includes masonry party wall buildings and a mix of multifamily dwelling types. This urban situation is made all the more complex by a ground plane that produces radical changes in topography. The overall study area cannot be defined by distinct parcels of land. Scattered empty lots extend in all directions, and some lots have dilapidated or abandoned buildings. In its current state the study area represents a disparate "catalogue" of unresolved housing types and urban strategies. Interventions in Roxbury require, beforehand, the invention of strategies giving conceptual clarity to what appears to be chaotic.

Introduction to Design and Visual Studies in Architecture
GSD 1102, Spring 1999 

PREDICAMENTS OF IDENTITY IN ARCHITECTURE

When their desire is to articulate and elaborate disciplinary conventions, contemporary architects confront a number of dilemmas—and are offered unexpected opportunities—regarding the formative aspect of their work. At present—and in contrast to periods when architecture operated according to intelligible and shared principles (classicism or high modernism, for example)—few formal attributes of buildings are consistently confined to inviolate properties; unspoken consensus, if present at all, is provisional. On the one hand, the specific forms of buildings being cultivated by today's intellectual architects are rarely able to be attributed to constraints or imperatives brought to bear by the popular values of a wider society; it appears that the links between contemporary architectural culture and popular culture are usually tenuous at best. On the other hand, to the degree that contemporary reality demands typicality or normativity of architecture, its requirements are indifferent to specific architectural needs. In other words, the political and physical contexts for buildings—wide reaching, generalized assumptions concerning recurring building organizations, social mores, comfort and convenience, living arrangements, and constructional practices, combined with the economy, organization of urban and suburban infrastructure, land acquisition and development—do not readily coalesce into interrelated, mutually dependent formal causes.

Such a synthesis requires the will of the architect who introduces geometry, scale, proportional elasticity, tectonic expression, materials, and ordering and constructional systems to negotiate repetition and symmetry, for example. Paradoxically (given the aforementioned diffuseness of norms), in order for this synthesis to contribute to the dialectics between variability and invariability that are necessary to the sustenance of architectural conventions and typologies, today's architect is required to concoct topological formal techniques that are increasingly difficult to generalize. ¹

It would appear that two strategies predominate for carrying on thinking and practicing architecture as a self-conscious project today. One involves attempting to extract organizational or constructional cues out of the requirements received from contemporary reality, in a broad sense or as they effect the production of buildings. With this approach, the architect not only facilitates but also intensifies, undermines or estranges frameworks and effects of the necessary pragmatic preconditions of buildings; the resulting formal invention is a sort of critical representation of contemporary culture or the immediate conditions of a particular project. For example, an architect can extend a commonplace cladding material beyond the limits of a building's volume in order not only to reveal but also to accentuate its shallowness—which is an economic and constructional necessity—while elsewhere concealing its lack of depth by mitering the cladding panels at a corner (creating the illusion of load-bearing block construction).

The second approach involves qualifying the project from its inception by reorganizing the raw materials (requirements, givens) according to autonomously determined formal laws; here the architect volunteers to 'work on the language.' Formal laws organize parts, elements, or details relative to one another according to second-order principles—additional invented, "linguistic" or systematic, organizational "givens" to be contended with by the architect. For example, whereas the implication of mass from corner to corner may progressively evolve toward (or alternate with) the articulation of thinness, it might also serve to reinforce or contest the relative mass or volume of the whole building implied by cladding patterns and details on the walls that extend away from the corners. The whole to part or constellatory formal relationships may recapitulate or transform the building's configurations which issue more directly from its practical obligations. In both cases, the architect is attempting to render some aspect of the quotidian or inevitable into something new, distinctive or strange.

Two projects for the second semester studio ask the student to elaborate on the discrepancies between these two approaches and to make architectural propositions which are legible and intricate enough to be traced back to multiple practical, formal, and aesthetic impulses. The problem is to clarify formal patterns, attitudes about singularity and normativity, and to establish their interdependence and variability while situating them in hypothetically familiar social and physical contexts.

The problems posed by each project could be seen to be analogous to the kinds of predicaments in contemporary architectural culture described herein. As the student tackles the dilemma of identity implied by the immediate programmatic requirements, physical conditions and social context of each project, he or she should be simultaneously preoccupied with the broader disciplinary predicament of architectural identity described herein. Reflecting on the architect's responsibility and privilege as identity-maker on the one hand, and on the architect's role as choreographer and coordinator of disparate forces on the other, the charge is both to provide solutions for the circumstances of each project, and to use the project as a vehicle through which to elaborate and articulate disciplinary conventions through formal invention.

The first project, "Interior Displacements," considers the public and institutional identity of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston through an intervention which provides the museum with a new entrance and reception area, and associated elements such as a coat room, rest rooms, and a gift shop. The second project also entails an intervention, but at the scale of a whole new building, which ultimately involves the "exterior consequences" of its presence on the compromised identities of surrounding buildings in a landscape.

1. While typology in architecture involves taxonomic classification of characteristics common to groups of buildings including shape, organization of parts, construction, symbolic meaning, and use, topology refers more precisely to the metrical, geometrical constraints and variables of form. Typology more often suggests a distinction between the particular and the general. It is a manner of interpretation which is historically, theoretically and associationally determined. Topology in architecture, on the other hand, more exclusively involves measure and/or procedure of transformation of elements from one building to another.