Adapting Miami – Housing on the Transect

Miami is on the front lines of climate change. Its famous beaches and waterfront condominiums are projected to suffer significantly with sea level rise in the next 50 years. How can designers address issues of resilience and adaptability at a range of scales, from the district and neighborhood down to the individual building proposal? This interdisciplinary studio will look at architecture, transportation, mobility and climate adaptability as critical issues facing the contemporary American City. Funded through the Knight Foundation and using Miami as an urban laboratory, the studio will address contemporary urban and architectural challenges facing many American cities.

The studio will focus on housing types along an urban transect, cutting from the high density coastline and following the primary commercial corridor of Calle Ocho (Eight Street)  through Little Havana and out to the Florida everglades. Calle Ocho, also known as Route 41, is a primary east-west corridor that historically marked the entrance to Miami as well as the route west to the Gulf side of the peninsula and beyond. Students will study sites along this corridor to develop a catalog of urban and architectural types, from the high-rise transit-oriented development in Downtown Miami to the mid-scaled developments along its axis, to the ex-urban developments around Sweetwater and Tiamiami. This urban transect cuts through different neighborhoods, and different ethnic and socio-economic groups. The section through Calle Ocho also cuts through different eco-systems and water bodies, from Biscayne Bay to the Everglades.

Students will be looking at housing through the lens of typology, density, access to transit and climate adaptability to develop a climate adaptation tool kit consisting of approaches for both new construction and adaptation through a study of building types and eco-systems.

Work from the studio will be published in a GSD-produced Studio Report and will be presented in Miami. The studio will conduct a week long site visit to meet local planners, community members and designers. The studio will run alongside Jesse Kennan’s course on Integrated Design & Planning for Climate Change, SES 5389, and will benefit from engagement with faculty from Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture.

Habitat Kashgar

Habitat is arguably the most primitive and, at the same time, most futuristic subject for architecture. The word “habitat” provokes at once multiple architectural imaginations: from Unités d’habitation to Habitat 67, from the remotest villages to the greatest metropolises, from ancient human settlements to SpaceX’s vision of the Mars Habitat.

Yet a discussion of habitat always brings us to the question of “dwelling on earth,” as habitat may be traced back to its Latin root habitare, meaning to dwell. If “dwelling” is the perception of “habitat” for mortals, then “habitat” is the perception of “dwelling” for the gods. The meaning of habitat has gone through fundamental evolutions—from the ecological and environmental domain in which humans existed to the physical environment humans created. 

Immediately, further questions are raised: Is it possible to envision new types of habitats—habitat micro, habitat macro; habitat horizontal, habitat vertical; habitat of a people, habitat of different people together; habitat with new infrastructure, habitat with new metabolism? Increasingly, habitats are becoming interlinked, overlapped, pushed against each other, and merged. Ultimately the questions are: How do we better share our habitats together? How do we make our habitats more inclusive, resilient, safe, and sustainable?

The studio will undertake the challenge of designing a series of projects related to the subject of habitat, either as a single-family house, multifamily housing, or as community service programs (a school, a library, or an art center) in Kashgar, the ancient oasis city situated in between the great desert of Taklimakan and snow mountains of the Pamirs. It is a trading center on the historical caravan routes—the old Silk Road—and a key city on the newly evolving Belt and Road.

Students may choose from a series of provided sites in the historical center of Kashgar or in the county of Tashkurghan on the plateau of Pamirs. Departing from research on precedents related to habitat and analyzing problems and potentials of the given sites, students will make conceptual designs in the first two to three weeks and finalize their site selections and program proposals during a field trip to Beijing and Kashgar at 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.

Note:

This course has an irregular meeting schedule.

Zhang Ke will be in residence Thursday and Friday bi-weekly: August 29 and 30; September 12, 13; October 3, 4, 17, 18, 31, November 1, 14, 15, 21, 22; and for final reviews.

The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.

Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.

Post-Shaker

Historic preservation breaks down into two categories. The first are projects that involve complete reconstruction and restoration with the goal to simulate the original historical structure. The second type applies to projects of adaptive reuse or repurposing for which preservation guidelines require a clear distinction to be made between the new and the original so as not to disturb or alter the identity of the original. For the second, subtle alterations or updates are regarded to contaminate the authenticity of the original.

Both types of preservation freeze the past rather than permit it to continue as a living tradition. To the extent that it converts architecture into unchanging artifacts, preservation turns buildings into works of art, stored in cities and landscapes as if they are in museums.

Our hypothesis will be that the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village in New York is to be converted into an art colony that reawakens the historic site as a living tradition in the present but one that extends and transforms many of the cultural and artistic practices of the Shakers. Already, a diverse group of contemporary artists have begun working and exhibiting there.

The architectural project will necessarily operate in a very complex middle ground that adheres simultaneously to both preservation practices. In order to enter into this conundrum, it is necessary to confront it at the architectural scale. We will focus on two ruins: a large timber frame barn that was built for carriages and a dairy barn, recognized to be the largest stone barn in the United States. The timber and stone tectonic languages each embody a distinctive syntax.

We will need to at once define and break from the rigid assumptions upon which the two preservation practices are based. Approached in different ways and taken to their logical conclusions and extremes, various artistic and exhibition strategies will be tested as means to give form to additions within, next to, or on top of the ruined artifacts.

Among the characteristics of the ruins that will be studied is the late 18th to early 20th-century Shaker architecture’s austerity and formal duality. Owing to its extreme abstraction and purity, this is one of the most modern of vernacular idioms. The Shaker’s renunciation of ornament, modern technology, and their artisanal and craft based production was admired by many pioneering architects, most notably Adolf Loos, and by many architects today who are interested in minimalism and new forms of tectonic expression.

The Shakers believed in and practiced pacifism, gender and racial equality, and celibacy. Their belief in separation from the world created a distinctive culture related to utopianism. Undoubtedly, this will interest us as we speculate on the establishment of a new art colony that emphasizes potentially analogous ideas but obviously under very different circumstances.

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 “waste.” 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, waste 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 three times a week with Mondays primarily dedicated to project pinups and desk crits, Wednesdays primarily reserved for an eclectic mix of exercises and lectures from diverse theorists and practitioners with complementary and occasionally competing perspectives on waste in particular, and design more generally, and Fridays reserved for tool-based workshops.

This studio is limited to first-year students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering program, a collaborative degree associated with the Harvard GSD and SEAS.

This course is scheduled on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at Maxwell Dworkin G123 and G135

Elements of Urban Design

“Elements of Urban Design” is the 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 spectrum of roles in analyzing and shaping urban environments. More generally, the studio aims to develop the necessary literacies for architects and landscape architects to critically engage in bridging the practice of urban design—to understand and interrogate questions related to urban environments, and to produce compelling formal responses. 

A fundamental difference between urban design and architecture and planning is its concern for the “thingness” (Heidegger) of urban settlement, which transcends the single building or complex and involves competing claims and other unreconciled constraints needing to be resolved through design. Today, cities are often parts of larger networks of communities and ecologies within regions, with both overlapping and complementary roles. Urban growth and change now range over a wider landscape, offering both opportunities and constraints, and often with faster growing areas located in peri-urban and peripheral locations. This is certainly the case in several North American cities like Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles, European cities like Rome and Paris, and a host of settlements across the globe. Even within the thrall of global pressures, local characteristics and identities require both attention and resolution. Globally, the expansion and transformation of metropolitan regions have introduced different scales and types of urban form. Increased economic, social, and environmental complexities further complicate urban design circumstances, making 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. 

In the fall semester of 2019, the “Elements of Urban Design” studio is organized around two six-week design exercises located at the core and periphery of the Greater Boston region, which together cover a range of pertinent issues in urban design today, particularly, although not solely, in a North American context. These are preceded by shorter introductory exercises focused on establishing familiarity with workflows and knowledge of case studies.

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 semicontinuous 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, 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 interrelationships 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 nonhuman 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.

First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio

The first semester core studio of the Master in Urban Planning program introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to create research, analyze, and implement plans and projects for the built environment. The studio operates in conjunction with VIS 2129, “Spatial Analysis and Representation,” which introduces students to the theoretical underpinnings and spatial analysis of representational techniques to speculate upon and communicate urban planning concepts. 

The studio will use the City of Boston as the students’ planning laboratory and students will be expected to understand the city through the lenses of planning elements such as demographics, economic attributes, market forces, character and built form, and public and private stakeholder interests, all of which shape the city and inform decisions about land use, development, and infrastructure. 

The studio is organized into four parts, representing fundamental stages of the urban planning process. 

Exercise 1. Ideas for Planning: Reading Influential Urban Plans:

This exercise considers a set of “classic” and influential urban plans as a way to engage and critique the fundamental ideas that inform contemporary planning. 

Exercise 2. Observe, Collect, Compile, Listen, and Convey:

Using Boston neighborhoods, this exercise introduces research skills used by urban planners to understand and analyze the built environment: reporting investigations for public audiences and generating graphic and written materials. 

Exercise 3. Make Plans:

Based on skills learned in the previous exercises, students conduct research to better understand planning issues in the Roxbury neighborhood. Students will analyze existing housing, economic, transportation and land use policies, and initiatives in the City of Boston that impact the Dudley Square neighborhood. Students will create an individual plan. Students will be exposed to lectures and workshops that support the effort. This section will provide the students with an opportunity to consider different aspects of a plan in more detail. 

Exercise 4. Communication + Representation:

In this final exercise, students will present their findings regarding the Dudley Square neighborhood based on knowledge obtained during the semester’s work. 

Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE

Integration is the agenda for the third-semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems, and processes into a synthetic whole. Structural systems, envelope design, and environmental and thermodynamic processes will be systematically addressed in the development of a single project during the course of the whole semester. 

The building type consists of a multiprogram urban building, requiring careful consideration of access and exchanges (circulatory, visual, and energy), between programs. During that time students will work in consultation with engineers and scientists. Design exercises will be addressed through team and individual study. 

Prerequisites: GSD 1101 and GSD 1102, or advanced standing in the MArch I program. 

Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio

This studio course problematizes issues of orientation and experience, scale and pattern, topographic form, climatic and vegetative influences, and varied ecological processes that help define urban public space. As the first of a four-term sequence of design studios, the course helps students develop spatial literacy and proficiency in diverse modes of inquiry in landscape architecture. The beginning studio exercises investigate a set of typological models rooted in historical and contemporary urban landscape precedents. These undergo sequential transformations aimed at devising hybrid solutions to common conceptual design problems: conditions of stasis and movement, material composition and expression, conditions of solidity and porosity, and change over time. Later in the semester, these studies advance to greater specificity on an urban waterfront site in Boston. A one-week workshop during the semester focuses on specialized analogue techniques of surface description. Students also participate in workshops built around focused interventions through the school’s Sensory Media Platform. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on the design studio as a performative venue for conceiving, interrogating, and elaborating concrete ideas about the role of the biophysical landscape in shaping urbanization and urban life.

First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT

PROJECT is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, PROJECT may refer to fundamental modes of architectural representation, the mapping of the subject in the larger objective context, or a conceptual foray into territory unknown. 

A series of focused and intense design exercises requires students to investigate fundamental disciplinary issues of architectural thought, practice, and representation. As the introductory studio in the first professional degree program, the curriculum addresses the varied educational backgrounds of incoming MArch I candidates. Specifically, students are encouraged to leverage their varied expertise in the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines to find provocative and perhaps unexpected motivations of architectural form. Techniques of representation and iterative development across various mediums will be required. 

Prerequisites: Enrollment in MArch I program.