Nanjing
GSD 1315, Spring 2007

This GSD studio runs 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 takes a short trip to Hong Kong and Nanjing to be paid by sponsors. The Hong Kong studio travels to Cambridge for a joint, two day final review in May.

The studio investigates techniques through which architecture can alter or redirect the intended consequences of a master plan. In particular, it explores 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 is 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, makes an additional assumption. In addition to designing buildings within the parameters already defined by phase two of the master plan, the studio also leaps forward and apply its techniques within a fictional "phase 4". The program for phase 4 be to increase the density of phases one and two by means of strategic interventions. As such, this hypothetical final phase of growth is 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—initially studies 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 investigates 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 experiments 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 invites 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 organization,position in the master plan, or their relationship to infrastructure, but also as a result of their geometry, structure, proportionality, materiality, and details. In short, the studio seeks to understand the degree to which a wide range of architectural scales can be determinative for an urban scale of campus development.

The Context for the Project

The planning of "new campus of Nanjing University in Xianlin" is being developed by Atelier Zhanglei, Architecture Design Institute, NJU. Atelier Zhanglei has undertaken the conceptual planning for the entire International Colleges and Universities Park, the lot area of which is 512 ha. The master plan for the first phase, a new campus for Nanjing University in Xianlin, has been fixed and the design for each of its buildings is complete. Construction is under way. The Nanjing Sports College is completed. The second and third phases fall under the auspices of the Jiangsu Educational Bureau and will be developed in the future.

Despite its relative autonomy, from the beginning, the Xianlin New Urban Area including ten universities and also called Xianlin University Town, was not considered to be a new town. It was not slated to include residential, commercial and cultural buildings. Universities were required to build new campuses there due to space constraints in the central city. In a strategy to legitimize the displacement, it was thought that the educational program could be designed in such a way that the students would spend their first three years in the countryside, and their advanced studies in the city to which most would be expected to return after their education.

Later, the government became interested in developing other programs in the area, primarily as a result of the residential areas that followed the university, and also because of other important projects, such as a commercial center, and a hospital. Presently, the government plans to build JiangSu International Colleges and Universities Park, which is just east of the ten originally planned local universities. The plan is for each college and university in the Park to develop its educational program in cooperation with campuses located elsewhere. As such, the entire university town is relegated to the status of an annex.

Offset Ceilings
GSD 1314, Spring 2006

Despite dominating the visual field of architectural space and offering the greatest possibility of continuous reinvention, the ceiling often remains astonishingly underdesigned. After considering the consequences of this oversight, this studio explores the ceiling as a primary means of developing highly integrative architectural systems for exterior and interior urban spaces and buildings. The investigation is conducted according to three programs located in relation to pre-existing structures in the Boston area, each with ceilings to varying degrees integrated and disassociated from their roofs. Increasingly, the programs require the integration of geometry with structure, natural light, drainage, sprinklers, acoustics, artificial lighting.

The first program is a canopy spanning between large buildings over an unenclosed, linear, directional downtown space. In this case, the roof and the ceiling behave as if offset from one another. The ceiling or roof are the manifestation of thickening a single surface, the conditions above and below being thermally the most similar of the three examples to be examined. The second program is an interior, centralized, centrifugal space. Here the ceiling is independent of the roof, though both play a similar architectural role in their mutually exclusive atmospheres. The two are designed to elaborate upon the panoptic plan of existing granite walls surrounding a former prison, walls soon to contain a hotel. The final program is a temporary museum for the Fogg Museum. In this case, the plan is neither directional nor centralized. Instead, it must accommodate a flexible, changeable plan while providing a consistent light source. The investigation of various scales of porosity leads to the development of an irreducible duality in which ceiling and roof, though accepting different demands from above and below, are nevertheless simultaneously dedicated to the transmission of light and its trajectories of reflectivity.

The studio focuses on the development of techniques that simultaneously account for the students' individual architectural sensibilities and the rational behaviour of the geometries that define the overall synthetic form of the ceilings in their specific contexts. In order to shed light on individual approaches and signatures, thus producing critical criteria, the studio establishes a shared geometric language primarily founded on rigorous techniques for translating continuous curved surfaces into modulated fields. For the first few weeks, the studio researches these methods, before turning to the task of application to the programmatically specific conditions. Ultimately, our goal is to test the limits of this geometry, its behaviour under particular material and programmatic constraints, and its effects in certain lighting conditions. The critical assessment of its capacity to yield or preclude ever higher levels of systemic integration may also lead to alternatives and counter proposals.

Indefinitely Extendable Museum, Ueno Park, Tokyo
GSD 1320, Spring 2005

The studio and study tour focuses on two dialectics that characterize Japanese Modern architecture and recent transformations in the present-day digital age. First, the distinction between two tectonic conventions: delicacy and lightness, on the one hand and bulky heftiness on the other. Second, the spatial properties that arise from the two tectonics; namely, the opposition between the consequences of materials for the perception of space versus the formal—i.e. plastic—manipulations of the space.

The tour provides the basis for a case study: a restoration and addition to the National Museum of Western Art by Le Corbusier at Ueno Park in Tokyo. The building has suffered several destructive alterations. The original plan was conceived to satisfy the need for future expansions. Today, however, the method of expansion would need to develop according to unanticipated logics of planning that would be informed by the architectural tectonics that this tour investigates.

The study concludes with analyses in text and drawings, and re-synthesis in design proposals for the museum and Ueno Park.

Tectonics of Modern and contemporary Japanese architecture
Among the aims of the tour is to analyze the role of Le Corbusier, who established the two dialectics according to theories and practices of construction in a way that indirectly related to many of the most defining features of the Japanese architectural tradition. Put another way, we study the principles of Le Corbusier that, retrospectively, appear to have created a modern architecture that was essentially indigenous to Japanese culture despite the fact that it introduced an unprecedented monumental tectonic language rendered in concrete partly in response to the threat of earthquakes and partly as an outgrowth of his own thesis of architecture.

After cursorily tracing this correlation, we study the ways in which this period of monumental concrete architecture provided the basis for recent developments which seek a return to lightness, a re-visitation that links tradition and modernity by means of material innovations that simultaneously introduce another unprecedented architectural aesthetic: polychromatic light and materiality, luminosity and translucency that define a new type of ‘phenomenal opacity’.

One of the key questions of our inquiry is the following: how does Le Corbusier’s particular synthesis of Japanese and modern principles of spatial ordering and construction inform the late twentieth and early twenty-first century effort to re-synthesize and re-thematize antique and contemporary tectonic languages?

Our goal is to trace the ways in which the concrete Le Corbusian modern monumentality established both a model for relating to and rebelling against tradition that informs the newfound ties back to methods and forms of lightweight construction inherited from antique Japanese sources.

As Robin Boyd wrote in New Directions in Japanese Architecture, Japanese traditional and international modern architecture resemble one another, not in terms of style but rather, principle. For example, the expression of raw material, the demand for open interior space without partition, the expression of supportive and spanning functions of structure, modulation as the primary means for ordering space and its constructive components are each defining features of both. In a traditional case, for example, it was the proportion and size of titami floor mats—and with it, a mode of living—that prescribed the metrical underpinnings of the space defining elements; in modern architecture, the conformity to industrial standards of production, economy, statics and strengths of materials altogether reflecting an imperative for rationality, as opposed to any adherence to ritual. Yet, it is also true that the claim of functionality as catalyst for building design established another loose affinity between past and modern traditions.

Beyond these ties, however, the modern departed from the traditional. The traditional was simple, slender and light while the modern, despite its stripped bare rational and concrete expression, is burdened by complexity, mass and weight. Lucidity and subtleness are replaced by toughness and aggression. The precise sticks of wood, rhythmic frames of timber, paper, pebbles and thatch that had once given definition to the artificial world with reference to nature now give way to concrete that traces a process of construction that requires taking steps away from the source, by means of casting and the shedding of form work, leaving behind none of the sense of smell or tactility that had once recalled the sources of materials.

Monochromatic and polychromatic opacity
If traditional Japanese architecture could be understood to represent a universal and classless expression of the people, its modern counterpart is undoubtedly the product of the individual architect’s genius or of academic contrivance. In contrast, the elements, textures and assemblages of traditional Japanese buildings can be recognized as a vocabulary rather than a method of design to be manipulated at will. This distinction leads us to recognize how the high/low divisions of modern architecture, unlike the more cumulative traditional forms, have created an urban phenomenon in which esoteric monuments contrast with un-aesthetic buildings, the grey masses of which appear to be unremarkable, expedient and functional even if occasionally adorned with stylistic attributes or signs that superficially recollect tradition.

The color gray provides the most convincing evidence of synonymy between the modern vernacular and the monumental, concrete, Le Corbusian modern architecture. This observation brings us to the most interesting inversion under way in Japan nowadays. If for the mid-century modernist, the massiveness of concrete construction was the salient means of differentiation, today light construction restores tectonic continuity with the past while its new materials and technologies of lighting distinguish it as architecture as opposed to the totality of the gray urban scene.

Students are asked to account for the tectonic shifts of the recent past relative to the black and white to color shift in the present tense, and to speculate on future chapters in the development of the two ongoing architectural narratives that began with Le Corbusier and end for now with Sejima and Ito.

2CC
GSD 1314, Spring 2004

The focus of this studio is twofold. On the one hand, to study museum typologies in combination or singly parallel to an investigation of geometric configurations that are inherently related. Among the types to be studied are the palatial residence, the linear picture gallery, rooms enfilade linearly arranged and around atria and the spiraling ramp. Among the geometries: projective geometry, spirals, helicoids, and minimal surfaces. On the other hand, there are tasks and problems at the institutional and architectural levels that are specific to the modification of the existing building, the former Gallery of Modern Art in New York designed by Edward Durell Stone, which is presently vacant and slated for a controversial face lift.

Because the actuality of the original institution has long sense disappeared, we can infuse the building with our own interests and imagine other scenarios. Admittedly, this can be done with any cultural artifact. But, the Stone edifice is an extreme case due to a peculiar combination of factors: the size and shape of its constrained site, the non-communicative opacity of its facades, the retardataire character of its language and the fact of its persistence in an undeniably prominent urban position. The latter confers an inconcongruous monumentality on a building whose language is conspicuously dated.

The gallery of Modern Art was a fusion of two institutional categories: the private collection and the public museum. It’s founder, Huntington Hartford, was a wealthy executive with a pronounced hostility to all forms of the avant garde. What is anomalous about his museum is that its program consists of a reactionary critique of another obviously more prominent museum, the Museum of Modern Art and its self consciously progressive program. The Hartford museum occupied a culturally rear-guard position based on a dogmatic adherence to figurative canons that were in his view sufficiently up to date. Paradoxically, this is exactly what makes his museum worthy of note today; it is singular not in spite of but rather because of its regression and the obsolescence of its critique. It is significant moreover that this critique was accompanied by the figurative, historicist idiom of a particular phase of Edward Durell Stone’s architecture after his design for the MoMA building.

Viewed in terms both of its superannuated character and the fact that no durable function has been assigned to it over the years, it is surprising that it has not been demolished and that lately it has managed to attract expressions of sympathy and affection. Yet, it is also possible that stylistic marginality is not its most negative attribute: marginal works quite often reveal the assumptions of an epoch more effectively than canonized works. Poised between modernism, kitsch and naïve historicism the building is irreducible to any one of these tendencies. The most disparate idioms -- Venetian Gothic, decorative abstraction, and mid century corporate modernism -- secure a specificity for this building that cannot be easily subsumed under the category of the Post Modernism.

One of the central aims of the studio is to develop alternatives to the usual renovation strategies by excluding the customary tactics of reactive renovation or out and out demolition. To this end, the studio begins by bracketing out the whole Hartford/Stone affair in order to focus on the most active part of the problem, the development of an internal organization. The problem is to establish a sufficiently continuous sequence by means of deftly arranged circulatory apparatuses and or circulatory exhibition spaces within the constraints of the site, a whole block so small as to illicit a rare single building solution.

Among the most anomalous in Manhattan, this block is the result of the confluence of three basic configurations: the grid, the beaux arts circle at the corner of Olmstead and Vaux’s plan for Central Park and the refracted diagonal vector of Broadway. There is one sense in which it is the inverse of the Flatiron building block at 23rd Street; although its sides converge toward a curved edge, it is concave rather than convex.

The program for the studio project, a new branch for the Guggenheim, is particularly fitting for a site that suggests another answer to the spiraling promenade. Our assumption is that Guggenheim is interested in extending its facilities to a number of sites around the city, rather than concentrating on a single mega-plex by Gehry on the East river.

Holdout Architecture (Case Study : Upper Manhattan)
GSD 1316, Spring 2002

This studio investigates the architectural consequences of obstacles to the complete redevelopment of urban sites. Holdouts are buildings or parcels of land owned or leased by parties unwilling to relinquish them to a developer who has amassed a significantly greater sum total of adjacent or surrounding parcels. Clearly, there is a bias suggested by the term. The holdout is first and foremost subordinate to a dominant entity. A holdout is typically disproportionately diminutive relative to an otherwise uncontested assemblage of properties that would be available for a totalizing, consistent, or coherent redevelopment if it were not for the holdout.

The aim of the studio is to find an alternative way to enter the "magic circle" of architectural form: the dialectic of norm and exception, convention and invention that traditionally has been initiated as a game willfully concocted by the architect. The presumption is that the architect as catalyst is supplanted by the holdout. Yet, the holdout as a general category is insufficient for our purposes. It does not always serve to stimulate a dialectic of architecture which, as intended in this case, originates in discord and leads to innovation. In other words, it may or may not result in peculiar or distorted building configurations. In the undistorted cases, both the building occupying the larger area and the holdout remain consistent with whatever building types or conventions that are assumed to be unfettered in situations that are similar but without holdouts.

The operative assumption of the studio is that the architectural dialectic is manifest by witnessing and giving form to an architecture that is distinctively interpretable as evidence of tension or conflict. Thus, we have to disregard the cases in which the holdout has required no convolutedness or has no apparent or discernable impact on building forms. Any builder who manages to avoid adapting a building to a holdout is too good or too evasive for us. If it does not lead to any evidence of adaptation, the holdout is not particularly architectural.

Holdouts are not synonymous with holdout architecture. There are two types of holdout architecture. The first involves a building modified in order to conform to the presence of a holdout. These buildings represent deviations from normative type, pattern, or geometry—unusual structural, functional, circulatory or tectonic architectural elements. The exceptional configuration is allegedly caused by the intrusive presence of the holdout. The second type is a decidedly anomalous building that occupies the peculiar site left after a holdout has disappeared. Here, anomalous holdout architecture replaces the holdout.

The semester is divided roughly into four parts. First, we investigate a language analogous to holdout architecture: spatial, formal, structural, and functional bases for mutual exclusions, circumvention, cantilever, displacement, and interpenetration. In the second part, we take a trip to New York. Students work individually within specifically assigned study areas. Upon return, each student nominates and makes a case for three sites with hypothetical holdouts. After the final selection of sites, teams establish constraints and scenarios for multi-use redevelopment to include a boutique hotel or bed and breakfast, condominiums, heath club, retail, parking and, optionally, a theatre. During the third and fourth parts of the semester, each student undertakes two projects: the two types of holdout architecture in succession.