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

Instructors: Ron Witte, Joseph MacDonald, Julio Salcedo, Ashley Schafer, T. Kelly Wilson

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 is to provide a new entry to the Fleet Center that is capable of handling the arrival and departure of 10,000 people per hour; it should also include 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 as 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 is to solve 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 will house 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 will 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 is to include 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 to be 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 is not to 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 is to be brought to bear on form. The long-standing notion of form as an index of function is to 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 will be 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.

Introduction to Design and Visual Studies in Architecture
GSD 1102, Spring

The primary purpose of the second semester is to continue the introduction of basic architectural conceptsspace, structure, use, and contextbegun in the first semester, while working toward a more complex synthesis between them.

Two projects were assigned in order to develop methods for design and spatial analysis. The first project was a dormitory for the community-based City Year program in Boston and the second was a facility, located in Cambridge, for the design, production, and exhibition of furniture. The compressed site of the City Year project suggested an investigation of section while the furniture production facility foregrounded issues of site planning.

In both cases the containing structure of the city provoked students to address issues of context and site as integral to design proposals. Analysis began with careful study of the respective programs and sites, while an emphasis was placed on connections between spatial articulation and constructional clarity.

Studio explorations were enhanced by a strategic parallel with the sequence of topics introduced in the required technology course, Building Construction. The first design project stipulated wood-frame construction and the second project necessitated long span or point-load construction. This meant that case studies selected for analysis in the construction course had direct relevance to design studio, thereby promoting a synthesis between construction and design and between analysis and design.