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Mack Scogin Professor in Practice Department of Architecture |
Studio Options
Everybody Loves Frank If the traditional role of the iconoclast is to attack cherished
beliefs and ridicule venerated institutions, why is it in today's
world architects are asked more and more to deliver the icon? Field Trip
In these first three paragraphs of As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner authors an encyclopedic insinuation of all those conditions essential to the shaping of an enduring architectural experience. Remarkably this includes:
Even more remarkably, this episodic moment involves only two characters, (one observing, one observed), experiencing a one room structure set in a singular landscape along a lone path. A brief transition extraordinarily infused with deep meaning, spatial complexity and contextual exactitude. The purpose of this studio will be to make an architecture of transition inscribed with great meaning and power where experiences of spatial sequence, procession, contrast, tactility and sectional difference are defined by and employed within a radical but singular form and space. "My Way" - A Trip to Gee's Bend America Irby, “Ma Willie” Abrams, Indiana Bendolph, Della Mae Bridges, Seebell Kennedy, Pearlie Pettway Hall, Jeesie T. “Bootnie” Pettway, Sue Willie Seltzer, Fannie T. Westbrook, Addie Pearl Nicholson, et al. have produced some of the most remarkable works of American Contemporary Art. Born out of necessity with seemingly limited means and methods, great rigor, patience, and expertise, these truly extraordinary pieces are paradoxically imbued with a refined and confident freedom of self-expression that only exists in the realm of creative integrity. An integrity achieved outside the influence of superficial critical positioning and institutional branding often seen in today’s world of cutting edge art and architecture. An integrity that can only come from artists and indeed architects where hearts and souls are intrinsically bound to the cultural condition of their work. These difficult works of beauty transcend issues of style, time, and technique to celebrate the spirit and touch the imagination. The studio looks at these works of art carefully, visits the place where they were made, and learns about their makers and the culture that produced them. We, as architects, attempt, at least in some way, to discover insights into our own confident freedom of self-expression. The object of the study is a repository for these works activated by a program of community relevance sited in Gee’s Bend, Alabama Symmetrical
Performance
Two symmetrical places of performance were examined in this studio—one interior and one exterior—for Harvard University and Allston, Massachusetts. "Empathy"
Empathy You are small Maybe you arrive in a wheelchair or you can't hear; what if you couldn't see? Challenged by stimulation and under the physical control of big people You can't go to the bathroom by yourself. Oxygen tanks, specially prepared meals, daily medicine, being catheterized, bathed or having your diaper changed at school Or what if you arrived the way you are For 10 years you could be surrounded by Many peers who arrive in a wheelchair or can't hear; someone who can't see? Challenged by stimulation and under the physical control of big people. can't go to the bathroom alone Oxygen tanks, specially prepared meals, daily medicine, being catheterized, bathed or having their diaper changed at school
Generative Program Small Schools Universal Design Sustainable and Green Design
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Arguably teenagers are rapidly becoming one of the most influential, powerful, and dynamic forces in the shaping of the American society, culture, and economy. Never before in the history of the world have the teenagers life experiences more closely resembled those of an adult. For many years, teenagers were, as a group, looked to for establishing trends in the most faddish strains of fashion, music, dance, and frivolous distractions. Now teenagers are leading determinates in such things as insurance rates, automobile design, media productions, sexual mores, business strategies, industrial and technological innovations, economic forecasts, which games we play, and which demons we battle. Ironically, it could also be argued that in recent history teens have never been more educated, physically unhealthy, and emotionally volatile. Recent data to support these arguments are impressive in magnitude and often reflective of disturbing trends in teens education and personal behavior. For example, while 31.3 million teens spent over $153 billion last year, only 72 percent of them know that credit cards are a form of borrowing and 40 percent were aware that banks charge interest on loans. Eighty-three percent of teens have utilized online services, making them the most computer-literate and computer-embracing of all American generations. Yet teens spent only 5 percent of their income on education, as opposed to 30 percent on transportation and entertainment. Even so, there is no doubt that teens and young adults are at the forefront of what many are calling a revolution of youth, in todays techno-world of big business. In their fearless, confident, and savvy ways, they are systematically reestablishing long-standing norms from dress codes to stock value analysis. If architecture is to be of its own time, infused with the culture and lifestyle of present-day society, then architects must in some way have an inherent understanding of this increasingly influential segment of our population. As a method to do so, this studio proposed the design of a high school; a high school whose programs intention was to question in every way the prevailing norms of a public education for the teenage years, to be more concerned with the process of learning and socialization that the mere manipulation and planning of classroom form. The site for this studio investigation was one of Americas most celebrated and troubled public spaces, the Boston City Hall plaza. Beige
Neon
"Public libraries may be the only truly public buildings in America today, and their librarians are quintessential optimists in a society of increasing privatization of public spaces and services, and increasing pessimism, depersonalization, and distrust. The public library and librarian are, more than any other institution, the stewards of open thought and potential. Given this unique position in our culture, and the architect's continuing dilemma of making civic architecture in the American landscape, the program for the public library is perhaps the richest and most challenging of our era. Given the need to be hospitable and friendly and simultaneously dignified and orderly, the character of the public library is often elusive. There is the impulse of the library to identify with the wealth of historical precedents. Yet, there is also the equally compelling impulse for the library to ground itself in its own community, condition, and time. It is all of these conflicting energies and aspects of the public library that have most fascinated and befuddled us in the search for an architecture of celebration and nurturing in a society sorely in need of both." - Merrill Elam, Library Builders, 1997 This studio explored the possibilities of the program of the public library in the world's most powerful democratic society at the turn of the millennium. In America today, the making of a public library, more than any other building type, stands as a defining moment of a community's commitment to the ideals of a collective diversity. As the designated repository of our society's recorded knowledge, dreams, and fantasies, the public library can only be truly public if it, at least in some way, serves to touch the imagination, lift the spirit and elevate the capabilities of its entire constituency. And, in turn, the architecture of the public library is burdened with these same daunting responsibilities toward person and place. The site of this studio investigation was be the Boston Public Library. Founded in 1848 the Boston Public Library was the first large free municipal library in the United States. Completed in 1895 the Boston Public Library's present home on Copley Square stands as the master work of McKim Mead & White. It was a major generative force of the American Renaissance, arguably the first great example of "civic art" in America. With the inscribed democratic declaration of "Built by the people and open to all," its classical façade stares down the Richardsonian Romanesque style of the Trinity Church across Copley Square, signaling a new era for American architecture at the dawn of the twentieth century. This studio proposed a new building on Copley Square for the Boston Public Library. Containing the library's general collection and public programs, it is intended to complement, or perhaps contrast with the facilities of the 1895 McKim Mead & White building that are now devoted exclusively to research. Doing
and Dancing: Rudolf Laban and the "Dance Farm"
In 1910 Rudolf Laban founded, for lack of a better term, a "dance farm" at Lago Maggiore, Switzerland. At the "dance farm," the whole community, after work, produced dances based on their occupational experiences. The "dance farm" idea came from Laban's desire to lead people back to a life in which art grows from their experiences. Laban believed the "aim of man was his festive existence, not the way of gluttony and uselessness, but as a means of developing his personality, as a chance to lift him into those spheres of life which distinguished man from animal." Through this experience of the "dance farm" Laban realized more and more that his "dramas, songs and movement - scenes, in spite of the occasional use of the spoken word, did not belong to drama or opera but to the world of dance." It can be argued that dance more than any other art form more closely resembles the fundamental characteristics of architecture. As in architecture, it:
More importantly, like architecture, dance as movement is a central feature of human existence, a medium through which inner attitudes are displaced, learning is achieved and by which experience is enlarged. Dance and architecture are performances. It was the aim of this studio to look to the subject of dance to inform an architecture which embodies the individual student's developed principles of a late twentieth-century performance. The more specific context of the study was defined by three basic considerations:
A Single-Family
House
The single-family house remains the definitive American architectural project. Nowhere else in the world is the reality of owning one'sown house so achievable or so valued. For the large majority of the American population it is the single clearest and most powerful realization of the great American Dream. Why is it then that, arguably, architects in America in more recent years have become so detached from the ubiquitous promise of this truly American archetype? One argument, my argument, is that we have simply ceased to produce innovative ideas that spark the imagination of the general public about new spaces for living — spaces that capture the spirit of the more dynamic aspects of the changing space of America. The public demands state-of-the-art performance and expects innovative, groundbreaking research from all the business and professional disciplines today. To survive in the business world today requires continuous innovation. I believe this to be true for architecture in general and should be even more true for residential architecture. It is time to remove the safety net of pre-modern ideas and processes our predecessors so aptly provided for us and that we have been so willing to engage. In this studio we attempted to create a tabula rasa, a new innocence, from which we will make serious speculative proposals for the future deployment of domestic space. The focus of the study was on each student's individual knowledge of and ability to imagine new spatial configurations for new ways of living. We started with the basics — the hearth, the bathroom, and the kitchen — and attempted to transform the programof the house and although we edged toward the fantastic, more traditional issues of materiality, construction, and function were not abandoned. Secondary to the studio's main objective was a simultaneous investigation into how young architects canbegin to understand how to close the distance between their speculations in architecture and the practical realities of producing built work. We looked closely at two houses presently under construction on nearby sites. We considered all aspects of theseprojects from client relations to the foundation details. The emphasis of this investigation was on what is involved, what to expect, what the process is, rather than on developing a how-to, formulaic approach to house design. Recognizing that the single-family house is often the first commission for young architects, this exercise aimed to provide insight and knowledge for an early and, hopefully, successful entry into the profession.
"A Studio"
Architecture is always theory, idea, fantasy, and intellect before it is material. Material becomes only what we can imagine it to be. Octavio Paz in the "Monkey Grammarian"* uses words as materials to build a literary architecture for his mind journey to the temple city of Galta, knowing full well that "meaning is not in the text but outside it. These words that I am writing are setting forth in search of their meaning, and that is the only meaning they have."
THEORETICAL MYTH-IMAGE CITY — "...a site for the city to present its cultural self...the real city made visible...two hundred people in fifteen minutes...a constant flow...it should havea temporary quality like the city itself...an urban stage...to see and be seen..."
(in the air rights above the rapid transit system, in the commerce-driven Tara-myth city of Atlanta) program from client to M.S., 8/94 "The whole was theatrical, more show. A double fiction: what those buildings represented (the illusions and nostalgia of a world that no longer existed) and what had been staged within their walls (ceremonies in which impotent princes celebrated the grandeur of a power on the point of ceasing to exist). An architecture in which to see oneself living, a substitution of the image for the act and of myth for reality. No, that is not precisely it."* Discovering Paz's mind journey, the theoretical houses and the theoretical myth-image city conspire to establish the value of fantasy(s)...the ability of the trained (tutored) mind to allow itself to wonder/wander: find/invent/reinvent a path — an architecture.
In Marietta, Georgia, in August 1993, the County Commission voted unanimously to defer all budgeted funding for public support of the arts to the Police Department for the purchase of attack dogs and video surveillance equipment. The reason given was that the money was being used by local arts organizations to promote immoral and indecent values within the community. As you might guess, at the center of the controversy prompting this literal circling of the moralistic wagons was the current offering at the Village Square Theatre by the Marietta Players that depicted certain "offensive" aspects of an "alternative lifestyle." The following week in an article in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution an editor used this and other equally sad and disturbing events, along with shocking statistics relating to crime, demographics, education, cultural resources, and racial and ethnic housing patterns, to define a new city form — The Doughnut. The Doughnut — with the intolerant, morally and culturally superior perimeter substance surrounding the voided center of corruption and perversion — is a distinctive new city form defined by the intolerance of difference between its inhabitants. For me, this new city form, The Doughnut, is for many reasons a rather frightening proposition — one that must be resisted if we are interested in restoring a sense of dignity to our urban environment. This studio proposed a place of production, a factory, as a realm of mediation between things of objective and subjective difference in the urban center of Atlanta.
The Gloucester Studios In response to a Special Resource Study of Gloucester, Massachusetts, begun in 1992 by the National Park Service (NPS), two collaborative graduate-level studios focused on the potential roles of Gloucester, an important fishing port on the Atlantic Ocean, within the National Park System.
The purpose of the NPS's undertaking is to identify and study the cultural and natural resources within the city and to develop alternative rnanagement plans for their preservation, interpretation, and development. The potential contribution of these cultural and natural resources to the quality of life and to the local economy, in particular via fishing and tourism, will be assessed. The significance of the historic central and waterfront area in Gloucester and its suitability and feasibility for inclusion in the National Park System will also be addressed by the study. The GSD studios developed specific programming and design ideas for potential projects including an aquarium, museum, ferry terminal, etc., as well as produced overall strategic plans that addressed questions similar to those of the NPS study. |
Mariano Molina
Iniesta 
Mahn
Kon Han MArch '01, Model View 
Gail
Peter Borden MArch 00, 
Luis
Boza MArch '99, Model View 
Margaret L. Fletcher MArch '97, Model
Jeff Kaeonil MArch '96,
The Unattainable Room and
M.A.R.T.A. Air Rights
