reCYCLO: Architectures of Waste
Human beings have traditionally built enclosures from close-to-hand materials: tents from animal hides in the desert, log cabins in forests, stone huts in rocky areas, and so on. But the advent of our disposable culture in the mid-twentieth century has brought with it a new set of ‘local’ materials, disregarded and mislabeled as ‘waste’.
While much emphasis has been placed on recycling (recycling rates in the US are steady at 34%), many materials sent to recycling facilities are never recycled, and are instead sent to landfills or incinerators. These materials are untapped resources, available for (re)use, in need only of appropriate design strategies to harness them.
The reCYCLO studio will begin by understanding global and local trends in waste: How much waste is produced, where does it go, how is it processed? Through this research and through visiting local waste and recycling plants, students will begin to understand the economy and ecology of the waste world, and find weak points in which to intervene. Students will choose specific materials and forms (rebar, coat-hangers, polystyrene, paper …). Through understanding the materials’ formal, physical, temporal, economic, ecological properties, students will begin to aggregate/reformulate the resource into 1:1 scale building elements and architectural mockups. Students will participate in a pavilion design competition that not only uses the waste material, but that aims to rehabilitate it, changing it enough so that it can finally be reused or recycled. In the last project, students will consider the industry/architecture scale consequences of their proposals.
In addition to building on O’Donnell’s work with unconventional materials, the reCYCLO studio will feature three experts. Felix Heisel is partner at 2hs architects and engineers and head of research at the Sustainable Construction Chair at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He is co-author of the books Cultivated Building Materials (2017, Birkhäuser with Dirk Hebel), and Building from Waste: Recovered Materials in Architecture and Construction (2014, Birkhäuser, with Dirk Hebel and Marta H. Wisniewska). Dillon Pranger is the director of DPA as well as a senior designer at Jenny Sabin Studio. He has previously taught a studio on waste and architecture at Cornell University and is currently co-writing the book CYCLO: Architectures of Waste with Caroline O’Donnell. Martin Miller is a Professor of Practice at Cornell University and founding partner at Antistatics Architecture. Under the banner of OMG, he has collaborated with CODA on several projects that deal with material innovation. He is an expert in efficient design, fabrication, and computational design.
An American Plan
This is the first of a series of studios focusing on American Architecture. The research will happen sideways. Not through analysis of local phenomena, or an accumulation of everything ‘American’, but rather through testing how different tools of architecture in general (its core instruments) could be used ‘with America in mind’ and thus as a critical tool for production.
Architecture, or at least ‘our’ architecture, is ultimately made with a very reduced set of tools: plans, sections, details and perspectives. These tools are all we have to make the project. For this first edition, we start with the plan. Since the 16th century, the simple plan has been forever in negotiation with the complexity of the building. The plans of Palladio, of which many surviving ones don’t ‘belong’ to a particular project, are case in point. A particular plan hints at a building but leaves a lot open for interpretation. The plan as such merely suggests a possible architecture; a snapshot amongst many hypotheses.
In this studio we would like to connect a fascination for the plan with a question for Harvard campus. Is it possible to make a project for a Harvard forum of one floor? If until recently the reckless occupation of place was considered at least provocative, current evolutions in ecological and technological insights might inspire one to think otherwise. Thus the straightforward question of this studio: Develop a building of one floor that houses all the above, a gigantic surface, one plan. What is its location? What are its goals? How do we use all of its perceived disadvantages to its own advantage? The problem is perhaps the solution.
The outcome of this studio should be one plan and many details. What does it mean when a building is reduced to one principal drawing? Perspectives and details become collateral, and should rather illustrate possible interpretations of the plan developed.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Kersten Geers will be in residence on August 30 and 31, September 27 and 28, October 11 and 12, November 8, 9, 29, and 30, and December 10, 11, or 12 for Final Reviews.
David van Severen will be in residence on September 13 and 14, October 11, 12, 25, and 26, November 29 and 30, and December 10, 11, or 12 for Final Reviews.
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Natural Monument
It would be deceiving to claim a return to nature since there has never been a real departure from it. Buildings complete nature as much as nature finishes buildings (and ultimately erodes and ruins them). Through a self-referential definition of architectonic format, by means of rather basic walls, floors, roofs and openings on them, the studio will explore this fundamental form of reciprocity: a series of cottages for remote locations will be understood as articulation devices to mediate from one nature to another, from a conditioned confinement for a voluntarily secluded couple to an emancipated and vulnerable wild domain.
By “format” we mean a spatial character without particular size, a field of action within a singular outline (in this case, the five formats derived from a rectangular volume, that is: the dice, the plate, the block, the strip and the tower). By “basic” we mean a primary level of complexity for discreet and ubiquitous elements (e.g. those 1:1, 1:2, 2:3 or 3:4 ratio fenestrations one might find in any unpretentious provincial settlement). By “remote” we mean the extreme edge of sublime settings along the Chilean National Park system (perhaps assuming that “every paradise is a lost one”). By “cottage” we mean more than a tent but less than a house (a domestic interior that certainly exceeds our physiological functions to a degree of inutility, irrationality and fantasy). By “couple” we mean the unprecedented current paradigm of a non-hierarchical, and rather intimate, productive relationship (far from Heidegger and his wife and closer to Gilbert & George). By “seclusion” we imply a physical detachment from the urban life without losing communication (therefore influence) with its culture.
All in all, after overcoming the myth of the idyllic garden, the heavenly countryside filled with fruits and flowers became the land for agricultural production overlapped with an original need for pure enjoyment, for the sheer pleasure of unpolluted nature. And perhaps between that labor and that leisure time there is another time, a loose one (lost and lax at once), a temporal space not only for procrastinating at work but also for serendipity and contemplation in solitude. Once more, the paradox is simple: nature is unintentional; artefacts are not.
Following our Naïve Intention program, the studio will speculate on the apparent contradiction between intentionality and chance, rationality and futility, prediction and circumstance. Based on given constrains, every student will elaborate an inventory of architectonic propositions. A selection of them will later be developed in pairs through handmade models, drawings and paintings.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen will be in residence on August 30 and 31, September 6, and 7, October 4, 5, 25, and 26, November 1, 2, 15, 16, 19, and 20, and December 10, 11, or 12 for Final Reviews.
The instructors will also be available throughout the weeks that they are on campus to make up for “off-week” missed time.
On Health II: Amsterdam Health Kitchen
The widespread emphasis on healthy living and the demand for creating environments, cities and buildings accordingly has aligned with the ongoing integration of technology into daily life as a means of measuring the performance of the world around us. But despite the abundance of self-monitoring sensor technology that digitally records and measures every move we make, where our built environments are concerned we seem to be unable to substantially change our attitudes towards embracing a healthier lifestyle. These environments have remained mostly unchanged for decades.
Today’s definitions of health are complex and far-reaching. Health influences, informs and conditions an increasingly broad spectrum of our lives. It has evolved as an industry, an aesthetic, an attitude and a mode of design. Health has shifted from the modern paradigm of a seemingly universal social right, to being the responsibility of the individual, meaning the motivation for creating healthy environments for life, work and play can now be both altruistic and opportunistic, and the environments themselves, both sensual and high-tech.
Inevitably, health as a value system and a commodity is being appropriated by a diverse set of players. The economy uses it as a means to attract talent, increase productivity and sell a lifestyle, while the rise of “smart” cities competing for attraction and visibility on a crowded global stage sustains the importance of health as a public service or policy. In the pursuit of creating healthier, more liveable cities, what is the shared responsibility between these sectors and how do they interface? Could a radical urban and architectural proposition balance the increasing deterioration of our wellbeing?
Within this discussion, urbanists and architects profess that one of their core competencies is to create environments that are attuned to the needs of their users; that go beyond areas of tension between public and private patronage, codes, rules and regulations.
This studio will explore the challenges and potentials for Healthy Life in dense metropolitan developments. Amsterdam enjoys a rich history of city development with an emphasis on social emancipation and has served as a laboratory – or as we view it – an “experimental kitchen” for continual interest in the topics of technology, sustainability, health and wellbeing.
The studio will take a position in the discourse in terms of the interaction between built physical and digital systems with respect to human behavior, private initiatives, and public policy through the architectural and urban design of a new city district in Amsterdam– the Sluisbuurt. A field trip to Amsterdam is part of the course.
This exploration into the expanding notions of what health means today brings the discussion to the foreground and frames it as an urgent architectural concern. In so doing, the proposals will necessarily divert from the standard models currently offered by and perpetuated through the building market and refocus towards a future of Healthy Living.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Ben van Berkel and Christian Veddeler will be in residence August 30 and 31, September 13 and 14, October 18 and 19, November 1, 2, 15, 16, 29, and 30, and December 10, 11, or 12 for Final Reviews.
The instructors will also be available via Skype to account for “off-week” missed time.
The House: The Waken Desire
“An old house, a shadowy porch, tiles, a crumbling Arab decoration, a man sitting against the Wall, a deserted Street, a Mediterranean tree: this old photograph touches me: it is a quite simply there that I should like to live.”
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
Architecture is frequently photographed, a way to describe the building. But photographs cannot neutrally translate space into two dimensions, the camera modifies the shape and proportions of the space around. The lens also isolates a small part of a complex environment that the creator manipulates in order to obtain an image that responds to the concept s/he wants to communicate. This studio will explore the relationship between architecture and photography, their relevance in its capacity to construct visual representations and imaginations focusing on one of the most important spaces: the house.
Photographs of Modern Architecture established their position as a “transparent” medium of representation and a powerful communication tool. However, architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe used to carefully selected the frame, avoid the use of human scales, and finally, to airbrush the photographs of their projects in order to show a more aesthetic image. They use to erase distracting elements such as ornamentation or cover surfaces in order to create more sharp geometries. The more striking modifications were the elimination of the context or references of the sites.
The actual image of architecture hasn’t changed from those of the beginning of last century. We have reached the point where we design through perfect Photoshop files. Our aesthetics values had changed focusing in the 2D image rather than the material and sensorial qualities of the space. The studio aim is to examine critically the statement of the contemporary architectural image, and the imaginary that mass media, social networks and advertisements have established about housing. Through photographs students will design the contemporary idea of housing, a space that should be habitable and not just appealing.
A field trip to Mexico City is tentatively planned to visit iconic buildings of Mexican architecture, such as constructions by Luis Barragan, Juan O’Gorman and Mario Pani.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Tatiana Bilbao will be in residence on August 30 and 31, September 13 and 14, November 1, 2, 29, and 30, and December 10, 11, or 12 for Final Reviews.
Iwan Baan will be in residence on August 30 and 31, September 13 and 14, October 4, 5, 11, and 12, November 1, 2, 15, 16, 29, and 30, and December 10, 11, or 12 for Final Reviews.
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Dwelling / Garden / Being, Suzhou
“Poetically man dwells on this earth”, the phrase by Hölderlin inspired Heidegger to write an essay entitled “Building Dwelling Thinking”, in which he reveals how the activity of building and cultivating the earth belongs to dwelling, and the meaning of dwelling goes far beyond a place to stay. By “dwelling” man signifies his own “Being”. This understanding coincides with the perception of “Being” for the intellectuals who envisioned and built their own gardens in the ancient city of Suzhou, centuries ago. The making of gardens represents their quest for the essence of dwelling. “Dwelling” was understood as the basic character of human existence.
Unfortunately, this understanding has long been lost. That man should build out of dwelling, and think for the sake of dwelling has been forgotten. Dwelling is threatened and harassed by the redundancy of housing as real-estate development and the fragmentation of old cities in China. Generations of people have been evicted from their access to earth, from their communities, their “dwelling”.
The mission of this studio, therefore, is not only to gain architectural inspirations through the study of the scholar’s Gardens in Suzhou, moreover, it will confront contemporary challenges of urban revitalization, community rebuilding, as well as the task of searching anew for the essence of dwelling in architecture and landscape.
The studio will focus on a series of real sites in the historical center of Suzhou, including the “Chàng Yuán Garden” and its adjacent courtyards, provided by the municipality of Suzhou. The aim is to transform the half evacuated courtyards into dwelling spaces and public spaces, to explore possibilities of creating prototypes of contemporary Suzhou Gardens not only for private use, but also as communal spaces that encourage social interactions.
Departing from research on selected Suzhou Gardens and analyzing problems and potentials of the given sites, students will make conceptual designs in the first 2-3 weeks, they will finalize their site selections and program proposals (ie, a community art centre, a tea house, or a garden hostel, etc.) during a planned sponsored field trip to Suzhou in the end of September.
Following the studio trip, students will revise and further develop their concepts and designs. Projects will be reviewed in small-scale conceptual models and later in large-scale material studies or detail mockups.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Zhang Ke will be in residence on August 30 and 31, September 6 and 7, October 4, 5, 18, and 19, November 1, 2 15, 16, 29, and 30, and December 10, 11, or 12 for Final Reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off-week” missed time.
UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA: Living Post-Work
Today, at an unprecedented rate, new technologies and global networks (underground, in space, in the cloud) are transforming the ways in which we understand and consume visible and invisible infrastructures that shape our societies. Seamless and technologically connected living has resulted in the collapse of distance and time and the rapid exchange of information which develop alongside buildings at an altogether different pace. The rich and productive friction generated from these syncopated lifespans is disrupted, however, by global and environmental crises, political conflicts, and a dire sense of collective anxiety. And so, in true utopian and dystopian architectural fashion, we take on these troubled times to project our hopes and fears into a fast-approaching future 30 years from now, in the year 2048.
This studio critically reimagines the organizational forces of the built environment in a future where the structures that define our lives today – labor, education, leisure, dwelling – may look radically different. As new technologies and automation continue to reshape our environments, various forms of labor become increasingly displaced and/or obsolete. This phenomenon could challenge current work ethics to produce a world with little to no work, a post-work era. By considering factors that inform architecture, from its embroilment in volatile political economy, to accelerating shifts in technological and cultural landscapes, we ask: what is the role of the constructed environment? How can we express a commitment to living and working together through architectural means?
Framingham, Massachusetts stands out as a site of investigation precisely because it doesn’t: an inconspicuous suburb in proximity to the city of Boston and a limited beneficiary of its urbanity. It is also the home of the Dennison Manufacturing Company building complex, a former manufacturer of consumer paper products, already a repurposed architecture of post-work and the site for our studio.
The semester will begin with an analysis and composite representations of the site conditions, current and projective. The students will then engage in an exercise in “world-making,” a research-based investigation where the student is expected to situate a specific narrative and outline a program based on the notion of post-work society within a utopic/dystopic architectural imaginary and specific to the given site(s). This will become the framework for the student’s architectural project throughout the course of the semester. The remainder of the semester will focus on synthesizing and digesting this aggregated information to further develop a complete design – of a building or system of buildings in a typology of their choice – that is both critical and tangible.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Annabelle Selldorf will be in residence on August 30 and 31, September 13, 14, 27, and 28, October 11, 12, 25, and 26, November 8, 9, 29, and 30, and December 10, 11, or 12 for Final Reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off-week” missed time.
Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)
The first year Collaborative Design Engineering Studio runs for two semesters, and this year will address the theme of “mobility”. The first semester focuses on concrete skill development, cross-disciplinary collaboration, problem identification and working at solution scales ranging from individual products to systems. During the second semester student teams will identify a problem that is socially consequential, yet amenable to tractable solutions. As with the food system and health in prior years, mobility was chosen as a theme for its systemic breadth and because it embraces both the idiosyncrasies of human behavior and the more predictable constraints and opportunities of engineering logic. Both semesters encourage students to bridge gaps between academic disciplines and the often messy realities faced by practical, real-world stakeholders. Our aim is to promote a design intelligence that engages quantitative and qualitative thinking and incorporates computational, visual, experimental, strategic and aesthetic methods. Defining the problem by asking the right questions is fundamental to our approach. We define design broadly as both a verb and a noun, an active verb that emphasizes cross-disciplinary, synthesizing process and a concrete noun that promotes aspirational, provocative well-researched and plausible solutions.
This first semester Studio will consist of three projects, each intended to develop key skills and methods for a specific subdomain of design engineering: Information Design, Object Design, and Spatial Design. Cumulatively, the projects are intended to give each student foundational design engineering skills and to promote a collaborative spirit among a cohort with diverse technical, experiential and cultural backgrounds. Each of the three projects will prepare students for the second semester, which will focus on an ambitious, semester long project focused on a compelling aspect of mobility.
The Studio will meet twice a week with Mondays primarily dedicated to project pinups and desk crits and Wednesdays primarily reserved for an eclectic mix of tool-based workshops and exercises and lectures from diverse theorists and practitioners with complementary and occasionally competing perspectives on mobility in particular and design more generally.
This Studio is limited to first year students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering Program, a collaborative degree associated withHarvard GSD and SEAS.
Elements of Urban Design
Elements of Urban Design is an advanced core studio for the post-professional Urban Design program. The studio introduces critical concepts, strategies, and technical skills associated with current thinking about Urban Design, and speculates on the designer’s roles in analyzing and shaping urban landscapes. More generally, the studio aims to develop the necessary literacies for architects and landscape architects to critically engage in the bridging practice of Urban Design – to understand and interrogate questions related to urban environments, and to produce compelling formal responses.
Today, cities are often parts of larger networks of communities within regions, with both overlapping and complementary roles. Urban growth and change now range over a wider landscape of both opportunities and constraints, often with faster growing areas located in peri-urban and even peripheral locations. This is certainly the case in several North American cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, European cities like Rome and Paris, and a host of settlements in East and Southeast Asia. Even within the thrall of global pressures local characteristics and identities require both attention and resolution.
For the fall of 2018, the Elements of Urban Design studio is organized around three design exercises, located at the ‘core,’ ‘periphery’ and an ‘in-between’ zones of the Greater Boston Region. As representative samples of a metropolitan urban gradient, they cover a range of pertinent issues in Urban Design today, particularly, although not solely, in a North American circumstance. As elsewhere, expansion and transformation of metropolitan regions have introduced different scales and types of urban form. The increased economic, social and environmental complexity further complicates Urban Design circumstances and makes them more challenging. The studio will expose students to this range of conditions and propel them to think systemically about how to intervene in these varied emergent urban formations.
Landscape Architecture III: Third Semester Core Studio
From Episode to Adaptation: Design for a Littoral Landscape
This studio explores climate change, adaptation, and risk as fundamental to the design of the built environment. Utilizing the Boston Harbor as a case study, the studio will investigate the broad spectrum of possibilities in conceptualizing the interface between water, climate patterns, land, and urbanization processes. Further, Boston Harbor exemplifies risk, as understood through a history of renegotiations between land and water. For instance, the transition from marsh to upland represents a semi-continuous condition that functions on a horizontal spectrum that is continuously intercepted by impervious development. Marshes have been repeatedly filled or drained in the Boston estuary and leaving terrestrial ecology inert. Yet forces such as longshore current, outflow, prevailing wind and overwash are agents of littoral transformation that offer a form of disturbance critical to a changing coastline.
In the current context of increased urbanization, unprecedented species mixing, explosive population statistics and an unpredictable climate, this studio attends to risk as a fundamental feature of the physical environment. The studio is therefore framed by a commitment to materialism. Thus conceived, this studio argues that the task of landscape architecture necessarily contributes to escalating risk by emphasizing research that highlights the connection between social contexts and their grounded, tangible contexts. Students will pursue this commitment both analytically and synthetically: analytically, they will explore how policy, and its associated paperwork, is ultimately grounded in physical interventions in the landscape. Synthetically, they will propose strategies using the core materials of our discipline: water dynamics, living organisms and the slow pace of geologic formation as expressed in land form and soils. Students will explore the frictions that emerge between abstract and grounded proposals, fixed and dynamic settlement, biotic and abiotic processes, entrenched and mobile territory. We will concern ourselves equally with the built and the living environment, as well as their inter-relationships and differences. We will study littoral risk as the most imminent threat to coastal cities in order to reveal what scales make design legible, meaningful, and desirable—and for whom. Together, we will reflect on how changes in both the human and non-human environment produce and are produced by risk, and we will frame this larger discourse through the lens of design theory and practice.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in MLA Program