Latency in the Second City
GSD 1300-03, Spring 2001

This option studio was taught jointly by an architect, Toshiko Mori of GSD and engineer, Mathias Schuler of Transsolar, Stuttgart, on the theme of sustainability, energy efficiency, environmental impact and performance of built environment. These subject matters are currently perceived as policy and engineering issues and there has been a chasm created between an enthusiastic interest on these issues in design community and architectural design itself.

In order to narrow this perceived gap and to have an in depth learning experience in terms of obtaining concrete information that underlies this subject, a collaborative studio structure with an architect and an engineer was conceived for this spring. Instead of an engineer joining the design studio as an additive component, he joined us from the very beginning as a necessary " quantifier " of the project.

Matthias Schuler is the foremost practicing engineer in Germany who has worked on major projects on sustainability and performance of built environment. His firm Transsoloar (see web site, Transsolar.com) has in house physicist who studies fundamental problematic phenomena of built environment in order to come up with solutions. Therefore these solutions are scientifically creative and original which often contradicts popular notions of how to design energy efficient buildings. There were a series of lectures of case studies of precedent buildings, and technical seminars that articulate specific methods to achieve the results. Toshiko Mori led the design component of the studio in terms of materiality, fabrication method and tectonics. In investigating the use of materials, new fabrication method for traditional materials, innovative use or misuse of materials, unconventional and new materials were explored in the studio. In addition, we reconsidered a conventional program to come up with an alternative spatial and architectural condition that may presage a new prototype for buildings.

This is a continuously discursive and active studio for two instructors and students in order to question preconceptions about issues of sustainability because at this time there are as many skeptics and believers alike and it is still an open-ended field of inquiry.

The program is a low-rise office building and the site is Chicago, USA. An office building is selected because it is where a human beings inhabit the longest in one space (therefore most consuming in terms of energy and requires constant controls for its environment) and the program and the configuration of work space is rapidly redefined yet architectural paradigm of an office building has not been challenged especially from inside out in nearly 100 years. We believe that it is time to reconsider workspace beyond series of cubicles to be packed into a building and reprogramming of an office building is the beginning of a new prototype for better performance. Chicago was selected as the city because it is the city with the most extreme climactic factor, that is, its winter temperature and summer temperature variant is the largest of any place in the world therefore it provides the most challenging prospect for the studio. Being also, the First City of Architecture in this country and having enormous historical precedents to study with provide us a rich background for the studio.

The studio was a highly calibrated and intense design studio that included technical and scientific understanding and a fair amount of engineering, therefore it is most appropriate for students with architectural background.

Bubbles and Weaving: House for the 21st Century
GSD 1300-04, Spring 1999

The studio focused on a series of research investigations and explorations of the materials and techniques of fabrication. In order to understand the properties of materials, the studio started with weekly assignments of making and representing materials and techniques through tectonic exercises. This part of the studio focused on understanding and representing materials and methods as semantics of design.

We started from 'air' (the bubble in the title) as a way to confront the issues of material versus immaterial, visible versus invisible, and tangible versus intangible. We explored traditional materials such as masonry, wood, metal, steel, and glass and ventured into plastics, composites, and smart materials that are reactive and responsive. We studied forces of nature against these materials, the limit and potential of each of them.

In architecture, we start from the void, the condition of absence to arrive at the presence of artifact with spatiality and atmosphere. We start from the air and end with the air. In between, as we breathe and struggle with our work, conscious weaving takes place in terms of mental process and physical creation, interweaving complex matrices of medium, utensil, and tool. Further weaving takes place when a program is introduced—in this case, that of a house. Historical, cultural, socio-economic and even political agendas enter into the design of a house.

Students were asked to either design a house for a specific location or to create a prototype that has permutative possibilities. By considering the design holistically, in terms of what it is made of and how it is made, it starts to portray and reflect the phenomenon of our civilization. From this standpoint, each student worked on the house as his or her own architectural manifesto for the next century.

Everyday Extra-Ordinary: Urban and Domestic Inhabitation in New York City through Exploration of Materials
GSD 1300-06, Spring 1998

This studio focuses on the exploration of elements and constructs that constitute daily and routine situations of the everyday life that we inhabit. The specific method of exploration is through materiality, fabrication and detailing of artifacts. The site is New York City.

As a resident in a city, one's domestic private and internal life intersect constantly with urban, public and external circumstances. If one of the most optimistic aims of architecture is to improve the quality of life, everyday routine circumstances become highly influential in our lives because of the sheer quantity of repetition and cumulative effect. They are the instances often ignored since they are not conscious acts that modify the course of our lives. Yet they constitute a significant part of the ritual fabric of our lives that without them one loses the sense of engagement to a specific environment.

Tactility is introduced as the starting point of the studio: tactility as the physical sensation of touch, the mental information of the texture of the spaces, and the complex series of socio-cultural references it might evoke to characterize and identify the artifacts. It is both personal and universal, intimate and distant, literal and figurative. Therefore "tangible" and "intangible," or "material" and "immaterial," or "visible" and "invisible" issues may exist in parallel to each other.

In order to start the project, we visit a Laboratory of Materials in New York City called Materials ConneZions that houses recently developed materials to study and research the property, history, fabrication process and application possibilities. Each student selects one material as a principal resource for research and development. The first phase of the studio involves design of the following urban artifacts, testing the results of research on materials.

-Phone booth in the West Village
-Newsstand in Union Square
-Bus stop in Soho

The second phase of the semester is devoted to the design of domestic artifacts and inhabitation in New York City. The primary focus is based on materiality, fabrication and details that is developed into spatial and tectonic possibilities.

One and a Half: Inside Out
GSD 1300, Spring 1997

This studio starts with development of details and joints from a philosophical, conceptual and theoretical point of view. Instead of arriving at details at the end of the design process as the determinant and resolution of all the issues, it starts by designing (true to its definition of drawing the essence of) details. Thus, details as generators are developed in full (1:1) size and half (1:2) size in both drawings and models/mock-ups. The isolation of details and joints focuses on constructional, structural and material language for what it is.

As in focusing on each letter in an alphabet, to build words then a vocabulary, the studio explores both the explicit nature of details in architectural fabrication and implicit references that they create beyond their own dimension. Details exist as fragments of a whole that generates other parts. They constitute focal points within otherwise diffused constructs or create physical, visual and intellectual continuity in these constructs.

The second issue is the scale relationship of abstract detail to physical construct. How small and how large can the detail as concept be tested? Its exponential enlargement and reduction in scale questions the definition of detail beyond architectural joinery. At the urban scale, a gate to a city can be a detail: a chapel can be a detail for an urban intersection. At the architectural scale, adjacencies between roof, wall, floor, column, beam, or any intersection of materials, can be a detail. In this phase the method of representation of details against the whole becomes a format for this argument. Thirdly in reversing the design process (Inside Out), we are essentially designing the inner structure of architecture both theoretically and physically before arriving at an overall construct. What if details are the determinant and there are many permutations to a final design?

A program and a site is selected by each student to test the details and to create prototypes to develop the details for the specific site and functionality. Through rigorous design methodology in the first part of the semester, roles of details and their functional, technological and philosophical properties will be studied through precedents and examples in the history of architecture. The studio's ambition is to engage the concrete clarity of details with conceptual and theoretical languagein order to regain the language of architecture for itself. It is an exploratory and research-oriented studio that emphasizes the cumulative study in architectural production and fabrication.

Education and Fabrication: Master Plan for Artisans' College
GSD 1300-06, Spring 1996

Artisans' College is located in Rockport, Maine, a picturesque small town on Penobscot Bay. The town has a library, art center, small concert hall and a photography workshop. Although a winter population exists, it is mainly a summer community when it becomes a busy cultural center for coastal Maine. Previously the college was called The Rockport Apprentice Shop that taught traditional and historical wood boat building techniques for ten years. In 1992, the mission was changed to focus its work on education that teaches students intellectual and manual skills simultaneously, to broaden the base for the education of fabricators. In 1994, it officially became a college. Currently it offers a two-year associates degree program for a dozen to 40 students.

Our studio analyzed and developed the mission, the program and the curriculum for the possible future of this college as a result of our meetings with trustees, students, faculty and administration. We were requested to take a proactive position as architects in the programming and planning phase in order to present and propose to them many possible alternative routes for its future. Although they have a comprehensive long-range plans, the physical configuration and relationship of functional elements of the college were not established. Each person in the studio analyzed and interpreted documents and came up with his or her programs, directions and propositions. These programs were juxtaposed against precedent campus plans such as U.V.A., Columbia, Cranbrook, Bauhaus, Art Center, Washington University, etc., in order to create this hybrid campus where "shops" and standard academic functions such as classrooms, library and administration need to be integrated together for a hands-on type of learning process (300 to 350 students).

Presently, the college occupies a site on the waterfront that we called "lower site," which consists of a rehabilitated boat shop, a storage shed and a garage. They also own another +-22 acre site 1/2 mile inland that is unoccupied: "upper site." Each person made a decision as to the division of programs for these two sites. The studio also attempted to interpret the college's larger philosophical dilemma: its future development into the highly technological area of fabrication and in what form will it make a reconciliation with its past, the historical and traditional craft of wood boat building. Issues we discussed were: mechanization vs. hand craft, machine made vs. hand made, archaic vs. industrial, original vs. reproduction, single vs. multiple, standard vs. one off, pyramidal production mode vs. lateral production mode, whole vs. parts, custom object vs. prototypes, generic vs. discursive, repetition and transformation, production process and division of labor, status of skill culture in industrial production, and auto fabrication.

Issues of focus were:

• Production process and division of labor
• Mechanization and craft mode
• Machine made vs. hand made
• Archaic vs. industrial
• Original vs. reproduction
• Single vs. multiple
• Standard vs. one off
• Pyramidal production mode vs. lateral production mode
• Whole vs. parts
• Assembly vs. aggregate
• Extrusion vs. stamping
• Casting and molding
• Custom object vs. prototype
• Generic vs. discursive
• Repetition and transformation

Industry as Indigenous Structure: Program for Bath, Maine
GSD 1300, Spring 1994

Throughout the history of cities, we can decipher the reasons why a certain industry has prospered on particular sites and in particular times, and how the presence of the industry dynamically balances the life of the city and its inhabitants: by supporting, opposing, creating, and undermining the fabric of the city.

Bath, Maine has been commonly known as a city of boats for more than a hundred years. Throughout its history it has survived strategic transitions from wooden schooner building to steamer ships, and finally becoming the largest fabricator of Aegis destroyer vessels. The fragile transition process demonstrates the cycle between the creation of values and the collapse of an industry. Bath Iron Works, being the sole survivor of this transition process and the largest employer in the State of Maine, dominates its cityscape with 400-foot-high cranes. It is currently undergoing a rigorous evaluation and examination process for alternatives and directions for its survival in the post-Cold War future.

Another constant conflict has been the coexistence of a picturesque 19th-century sea captains' town and this monstrous industrial facility with sophisticated technological capability. Civilization has not yet found reconciliation in this town.

This studio focused on the specificity of this particular city keeping in mind its universal applications for cities that depend on this similar intersection for evaluation of their future: making of things, making of ideas, and making places, i.e., fabrication, program, and location.

The first part of the studio involved analysis of the site in terms of various scales that are present in site: such as, nautical, automotive, geographical, historical, cultural, industrial, civic. Based on the initial analysis, one is asked to intervene on the existing fabric of the city to introduce an enterprising program.

This intervention is developed as a series of components that is expressed as fragments and details reflecting three frames: civic, domestic, and industrial. They can be combined as an assembly, aggregate, composites, extrusion, multiplication, addition, increment, or gradation in order to fabricate the intervention. It is also a potential that these components can be manufactured by Bath Iron Works.

A visit was planned for the tour of Bath Iron Works and the city of Bath. Various alternative and innovative fabrication methods were studied during the course of the studio.