Second Semester Core:
Introduction to Design and Visual Studies in Architecture
GSD 1102, Spring 2006, 2004, 2002, 2001

Instructors (Spring 2006): Laura Miller, Patricia Heyda, Michael Meredith, Ingeborg Rocker, T. Kelly Wilson

Description (Spring 2002):
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 the 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 is so tightly calibrated with alternating centralized and bifurcated plans that the intervention of a continuous vertical passage, no matter how well integrated on a given level, will 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. A second stage of the project requires the redesign of a secondary elevation.

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 logics of the programmatic constituents and the urban context as well as to their anticipated symbolic and experiential resonance.

Third Semester Core:
Tectonics and Urbanism: An Institutional Identity in Allston
GSD 1201, Fall 2005, 2004

Instructors (Fall 2005):
Toshiko Mori, Amale Andraos, Jonathan Levi, Joseph MacDonald, Robert Marino, Laura Miller, Peter Rose

The third of a four-semester sequence of design studios emphasizes the development of a building as a material construct. The focus is on investigation of the building fabric and the relationships among space, form, and technique. Design exercises are addressed through team and individual study.

Fourth Semester Core: Architectural Design
GSD 1202, Spring 2005, 2006

Instructors (Spring 2006):
Monica Ponce de Leon, Kimberly Ackert, Virginie Lefebvre, Joseph MacDonald, Thomas Schroepfer

Housing Architecture

What interests the architect about housing is the way in which it peculiarly straddles the categorical distinctions between architecture and urban design. Housing is a matrix that bridges a spectrum of urban conditions from the idiosyncrasies of the most interior of domestic spaces to the most rational systems of organization manifest at the scale of urban planning. But this is not the reason that housing can be deemed to represent the conjunction of architecture and urbanism. Rather, the potential intersection of the two fields lies in the degree to which the consistency of a project of housing, as a unified construct, differentiates it from aggregations of discrete building units organized according to a pre-established street/lot layout. The difference between the consistency (i.e. unity or control) of the single composite aggregate and the multiplicity of individually aggregated units establishes a total work of housing as conspicuous architectural production. Housing becomes architecture to the extent that it differentiates a discrete piece of the city rather than defines a system that organizes and distributes individual buildings.

If the grid is the city’s mediator between two systems and scales of organization - infrastructures and buildings, housing exemplifies a system of systems. It operates according to the parameters of both parent disciplines, separately and simultaneously. On the one hand, housing inevitably requires some kind of systematic aggregation and repetition. It creates a pattern that, if not a grid, may be likened conceptually to a grid that subdivides a ground plane. On the other hand, any such system as a whole produces a cohesiveness that is defined three-dimensionally by interior and exterior spaces. The coherence or organic totality may be counterbalanced or camouflaged by fragmentation or picturesqueness, but only to pictorial or theoretical effect. Ultimately, however, because housing is unlike the rest of the city, like architecture it is bracketed. It re-frames the city just as architecture reframes buildings.

Third Semester Core:
Courthouse: Tectonics and Urbanism
GSD 1201, Fall 2003, 2002

Instructors (Fall 2003):
Toshiko Mori, Darell Fields, Jonathan Levi, Joseph MacDonald, Michael Silver, Sarah Whiting

Tectonics, Urbanism and Civic Presence
District Court House in Allston

The Court House as a building type embodies one of the most powerful potentials for architecture to express meaning and symbol in our civic life. It demonstrates the ideal for a democratic process and its legal system to function in order to protect the public by balancing freedom and constraint, the visibility, openness and accessibility to this institution are balanced by necessary security separation and privacy through specific and intricate ritual and internal organization.

There is an enormous opportunity for the language of architecture to articulate and describe specific function, character and sequence of spaces. Conditions of light and accessibility to views can be manipulated to produce subtle narrative and metaphorical references. The recent burst of Court House building activity fueled by an initiative of the GSA coincides with a worldwide phenomena of rethinking about visual manifestations of democracy, redefinition of democratic space and finding a new meaning for the role of judicial systems in our society.

We are in the midst of one of the most active periods for the reconsideration of this building type. There are multiple examples and precedents, which offers a wide range of points of view, interpretation and architectural styles. It is up to each architect to reflect upon the role of this building type, to carefully construct a thesis and design through a deliberate and calibrated use of tectonic language where the message and meaning becomes clearly visible and legible to the public.

In this re-thinking of urban civic institutions that comes with the increase in complexity of our society, building types are produced that may not be easily characterized by simpler and singularly identifiable typologies. How do the parts relate to each other and to the whole? How can one, solely through the language of architecture, tectonics and structural expression, establish an identity and civic presence for such an entity?

Much discourse has taken place on this subject in the latter half of the 20th century. The Postmodern period has produced many unsuccessful buildings that borrow their appearance from historical periods, appealing to sentimental associations with the exterior identity of buildings and the traditional images of certain typologies that they evoke. In the more recent past, attempts to address these multiple identities have produced confusing collages of forms and facades thinly veiled with imagery, strategies that become uncritical reflections of aggregate programs or facetious nods to the context.

The selected site is located at the outer boundary of Allston, a terrain vague, waiting for an active future. New development fueled by Harvard's Campus expansion Plan and re-establishment of viable community is currently taking place. This new Court House will become one of the most visible symbols for the identity of this new community.

With this project, one is asked to develop a thesis (position) and an argument on the role and nature of identity in this Court House for this site.

Program and Site
The first phase involves the development of an intensive siting strategy for the building. The re-evaluation and re-combination of programmatic elements within the building envelope takes place in parallel with this analysis. In this phase the student develops an argument for the exterior and interior relationship of the project (which may be complementary or conflicting). A specific characterization of this public institution depends largely on each student's analysis of the site, the program, and the mission of this institution.

Program and Tectonics
This next phase is the tectonic development of the building. ARCHITECTONICS is the study and development of architectural language through the use of structure, space, technology, materials and the fabrication process of buildings. The presence of large span structures in the given program and implied materiality for some of the program components give definitive character and orientation to the project. The focus of the study deals specifically with the relationship of the structural elements of the building to the program in terms of their function, efficiency, and expression. As a result of size analysis, an important consideration should be given to the relationship of tectonic language, landscape, and infrastructure and site.

To properly address the tension and balance between tectonics, urbanism and programmatic study, a strong strategy and clear concept is required to the architect. These opposing and dialectical issues are negotiated by the interplay of various scale elements and their program and use on the site, particularly the allocation of open spaces and their planning, consideration of nature vs. artifice, private vs. public, processional vs. static spaces, and experiential vs. virtual.

This investigation of the Court House is developed throughout the semester as a cumulative series of studies. The course schedule is designed so that the project is developed discursively, with periodic evaluations at progress reviews, in an effort to encourage open-ended explorations. The schedule implies an inevitable linear sequence, but the work should embrace increasing breadth and depth of complex material resource that requires constant reference to many scales of events.