First Semester Core: Introduction to Design and Visual Studies in Architecture
with: Preston Scott Cohen, Mariana Ibanez, Michael Meredith, Lluis Ortega, Ingeborg Rocker
GSD 1101, Fall

The first of a four-semester sequence of design studios introduces students to the practice of architectural design, discussing the theoretical principles on which such practice is based.

Second Semester Core: Introduction to Design and Visual Studies in Architecture
with: Ron Witte, Michael Meredith, Laura Miller, Maia Small, T. Kelly Wilson
GSD 1102, Spring 2005

10,000 & 100

The second semester Core studio focuses on the synthesis of program and form. There are two projects: one four-week urban project in downtown Boston and a second eight-week project on the Brandeis University campus.

10,000
The first project "10,000" is an addition to the Fleet Center that has two primary aims: forming movement and forming program. Your project provides a new entry to the Fleet Center that is capable of handling the arrival and departure of 10,000 people per hour; it also includes spaces for ticketing, a cafe/waiting area, the Hall of Victors, administrative offices for the Fleet Center and its home teams, and an exterior public space. The second role of your building is that of an identifier, a signal for what is currently an extraordinarily (and paradoxically) anonymous urban behemoth.

Situated among spaces and urban conditions that range from the highly public (the "T," the soon-to-be Central Artery area, North Station, and nearby streets) to the commercial/private (the Fleet Center), the design of the new entry building requires that you develop a clear concept about the movements/exigencies/potentials of a mass public ebbing and flowing between the unrestricted spaces of the city and the highly controlled interior of the Fleet Center. On one level, your project solves a purely organizational problem: how to efficiently move this populace from outside to inside and back again. From another point of view, your project is charged with possibilities that go far beyond problem solving. Your building holds forth the promise of creating a new urban public space, a new identity for the Fleet Center, and even a new sense of the city itself.

100
The second project of the semester "100" is a museum on the Brandeis University campus. Founded in 1948, Brandeis has embarked on an initiative to mark its first half-century with a living museum, a record of the world's events that have paralleled the University's own life. The museum houses a special collection of 100 objects, one from each year spanning 1948 through 2048. Fifty-five of these objects are known today. The remaining objects will be added, one per year, until the year 2048. As a consequence, you have to design the museum with a highly specific, but only partial, knowledge of its contents.

In addition to the display of these objects, the museum includes galleries for temporary exhibitions, an auditorium, archival areas, administrative areas, a cafe/reception area, classrooms, and necessary support spaces (restrooms, HVAC, storage, etc.).

The University is undertaking this endeavor with a double set of interests. The new building is both a historical repository and a sort of periscope aimed at the future. The University's Building Advisory Board is unequivocal in its ambition: the museum will not be a passive institution. Its holdings will be carefully curated to provoke a reading of events/histories that cannot help but ripple forward.

PROGRAM AND FORM

"Program" and "form" are implicated by several aspects of this semester's two design problems. Both projects are functionally explicit; their programmatic demands must be met in order to satisfy the requirements of the assignment. Both projects are serial in nature: the first project carries its seriality in its large number of occupants and the second in the series of objects it houses. Both have formal and programmatic dependencies: the first to its urban setting and the Fleet Center; the second to the fabric and institutional structure of the Brandeis campus. In short, both elicit a twin duty: performance and identity.

Program has come to mean many things in contemporary architecture. Here it is used as a descendant of function, albeit a more malleable iteration than that suggested by the sachlichkeit-laced Functionalism of canonical modernism. Activities, relations, and movements are a building's lifeblood-they course through the spaces, organizations, and materialities that comprise architecture. Program is no more, and no less, "objective" than any other part of Vitruvius's triumvirate (commodity, firmness, and delight, or, in their contemporary guises, program, technology, and form). Its subjectivity suggests that program is necessarily contingent. Within the context of this studio, that contingency are brought to bear on form. The long-standing notion of form as an index of function will be compounded (or even supplanted) by explorations in which programmatic idealization is realized as an affectation of form.

There is no architecture that is not formal. It has been argued that form comes after program, or that form is born of technology. This semester's aim is to recognize that program and form are in fact paired in an oscillating, ricocheting, mutually-accelerating relationship. The contingency of program and form is profoundly reciprocal and the immediacy of their relationship fosters a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Giving form (often treated as the most ephemeral of architectural subjectivities) a status equal to that of program and, beyond that, enticing form and program into a bi-lateral synthesis allows form to intimate entirely new programmatic possibilities.

Fourth Semester Core: Architectural Design
GSD 1202, Spring
with Kimberly Ackert, Robert Marino, Lluis Ortega, 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.