Wild: Manhattanism Unhinged

Seok Min Yeo (MLA I ’18)

The Manhattan Grid and its ability to absorb manic heterogeneity emancipates each block into an island of its own identity and ideology, inspiring architectural ecstasy. Conceptual alternatives by the likes of Ferris, Hood,Superstudio,Koolhaas & Vriesendorp, and Tschumi contribute to the island as a cultural ideology and a theorem: Manhattanism

The podium – a straight extrusion of the existing formal logic of the grid – is the datum of reliability that act as a stage for expressions above. Here I posit, that the space in between the podiums, The Street – is the largest contiguous public realm of the island, and it has been neglected from this conversation.

This investigation begins from Ferriss’ “The Metropolis of Tomorrow,” a series of atmospheric charcoal renders produced in 1929, which Koolhaas dubs as the “womb” of Manhattanism. Ferriss’ renders were an imagination of the impact of 1916 Zoning Resolution, which introduced the Sky Exposure Plane and Height District to provide “light and air”to the streets as a public health concern in a growing metropolis. What if this moment played out differently, what if there was an alternative womb that conceived the street not as a constrained two dimensional infrastructure to let light into, but as a three dimensional public realm to be designed?

The three laboratories investigate the parameters built in the key zoning apparatus that govern the form of the buildings – 1916 Sky Exposure Plane in particular –  and started to unhinge them in order to expand and thicken the streets. The investigations posit the street and its composition as the catalyst, the public as the agent, and the built form and the expanded public realm as the bi-product. Through the experiments, I seek to challenge the normative understandings of the street as a linear two dimensional element, the horizontal and vertical delineation between the public and the private realm/ownership and the boundaries and negotiations between various stakeholders – the users, designers, and regulatory agencies. 

Future of the American City

The Future of the American City project is an urban study initiative aimed at helping cities tackle urgent challenges. Building on the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s unique, multi-disciplinary model, the effort will use architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design to come up with actionable, efficient solutions that take into account community needs.

Research on Miami will form the first phase of the project, a broader initiative intending to also examine the cities of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Boston. The school plans to host a summit to convene experts from each city to create a national discourse on the future of cities and urban life in America.

To engage Miami residents in creating new approaches to address pressing urban issues—including affordable housing, transportation and sea level rise—the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is providing $1 million in support to the Harvard GSD. With the funding, the school will embed urban researchers in Miami and Miami Beach to better understand the cities’ opportunities and challenges, and launch a multi-year study toward building solutions shaped by residents. Read the full press release.

Researchers at the GSD have been actively connected with the City of Miami and the City of Miami Beach for several years. Since 2012, the school has conducted six courses focused on Miami and held several major events in the city. Expanding on this work, the school will convene a range of experts, policy-makers, and members of the public to contribute to this new effort.

In its research, the school will focus on urban mobility, affordability, and climate change, themes that emerged from a series of previous discussions among its researchers and members of the Miami and Miami Beach communities. Following their analysis, students and faculty will offer toolkits, white papers, and other materials for review and use by city managers, mayors, and other civic leaders, many of whom will be directly involved throughout the study.

The research will be led by Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, as well as Harvard GSD professors Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture, and Jesse M. Keenan, Lecturer in Architecture. The study will include a three-part series of courses being led at the school. This fall, a course will focus on mobility and transit in Miami, particularly Brickell, with a site visit in October 2018. A second course in Fall 2019 will examine the roles of higher education and medical institutions in Miami’s economy, and a third in Fall 2020 will focus on the roles of Miami’s various ethnic neighborhoods in shaping the city’s cultural identity.

Each GSD course will involve 12 graduate-level Harvard students and a professor working in a “design studio,” which involves conducting independent research, then discussing plans with fellow researchers to modify and strengthen their proposals. Each team of students will spend at least one week in Miami to speak with local stakeholders, civic organizations, and political and administrative leaders. Representatives from Miami’s civic and political organizations will provide feedback throughout the study.

Harvard Graduate School of Design’s upcoming Miami research is the first phase of its Future of the American City project, a broader urban-study initiative intending to also examine the cities of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Boston. The school plans to host a summit to convene experts from each city to create a national discourse on the future of cities and urban life in America.

Knight Foundation supports informed and engaged communities by identifying and working with partners to help our cities attract and nurture talent, promote economic opportunity and foster civic engagement. This effort will advance Knight Foundation’s work in Miami focused on building the city’s innovation ecosystem, while fueling entrepreneurship and new ideas. It will also help drive a national conversation about how communities can be more engaged in designing their cities to face the challenges of the future.

For more information, please visit the Future of the American City website.

Kandor Architecture

“Architecture is always the exhibition of a myth,” as a certain critic put it in 1989, and the myth in this case is Kandor—the city that Superman kept shrunken in a jar.  Preserved in ethereal suspense, Kandor was obsessively rendered by the sculptor Mike Kelley at the end of his life as colorful casts of glass, resin, plastic, and wax that represented the endless figurations of the mythical city in Kelley’s imagination.   Our project relates Kelley’s “Kandors” to an earlier work, “The Educational Complex,” in which Kelley drew and modeled from memory the buildings of every school he had every attended.  Just as Superman carried Kandor with him in a jar, so too did Kelley carry a city of educational buildings in his memory—his educational complex.  The Kandor narrative was here applied to a specific project situated in Brooklyn: a campus for 2,250 kindergarten through high school students.  The buildings were distinct, each representing a comprehensive school program with housing, playing fields, and auditorium, but combine to transform the city into the colorful exhibition of ‘Kandor Architecture.’”

This project was designed collectively by the studio: Esther Mira Bang, Andres Camacho, Chieh Chih Chiang, Feijiao Huo, Haram Hyunjin Kim, Hyojin Kwon, Kai Liao, Shao Lun Gary Lin, Meric Ozgen, Alexander Searle Porter, Noam Saragosti, Cheng Zeng

Client ID : NSyuO-fJxYI4DTUf7zWa-osilclb5E7-qmEzyjuu

Tanuja Mishra (MDes ’17)

In this installation, I have alienated myself from my work and looked at it from the eyes of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The resultant artwork has been developed in collaboration with the algorithm, where I’ve allowed it to generate insights on my work. In turn, I’ve used those insights to further re-interpret the work. My relationship with AI has developed over time, starting from a place of fear and paranoia and growing into an alliance of conditional acceptance, negotiation and occasional empathy.

I’ve chosen four artifacts from my body of work; a photograph taken from a pinhole camera, an abstract ceramic sculpture, a fragment of a process-based sculpture and pieces of electronics and related components from my prototyping tool-kit. The artifacts have been chosen to highlight the inadequacies in the predictive models inbuilt within AI. These discrepancies bring forth a dissonance between what is perceived directly by looking at the artifact versus what is perceived through the mediation of AI.

Landscape Architecture IV

Michelle Benoit, Daniel Berdichevsky, Meredith Chavez, Ana Garcia, Mengting Ge, Yanick Lay, Charlotte Leib, Mengfan Sha, Marisa Villarreal

Urban Villa (Contemporary Triple Decker)

“Moving Things Around: Exploring Rossi’s Scientific Theater”

Jianwei Shi (MArch I ’17)

Heterogeneous Culture and Heterogeneous Archetypes of Public Buildings and Spaces

Mexico City is a city with very diverse culture and history. Different architecture and physical space from different period of history were still preserved on this land. The very ancient one is  Aztec culture, the pyramid is one of its classic memorable archetypes. For the Hispanic culture that conquered the Aztec people, it laid a solid foundation for the form of historical center of Mexico city – Grid structure + Courtyard residential + Public Plaza with church; During Porfirian Era, the government leads the  fusion of Amerindian, Hispanic and French Culture through improving urban environment by learning from Paris. The 20th century has witnessed a fast urban expansion and modernization. A lot of modern towers, public infrastructure and high-rise residential neighborhood took place during this period of time. The map shows heterogeneous archetypes of historical and modern buildings that are born out of the heterogenous culture.

Reference: Analysis on Archetypes and Elements of Alameda Central Park

For a building that is going to be located at the crossroad of these different urban environment and try to reflect upon these different culture physically, it will be very interesting to first look at how these different archetypes of buildings and spaces shape the public realm. Here, the Alameda central park area just beside the site is chosen as the reference.  The Alameda central park is the largest park in the historical center of Mexico city. From the analysis on the archetypes and elements of park area, we can see how these diverse elements work together to provide a variable and energetic public space. Trees and canopy providing shade, linear promenade providing sightseeing route connecting different public programs, smaller plazas for outdoor exhibition, churches for religious event, courtyard for shops, cafe, museums. All these different elements and archetypes not only internally provide variable spaces, but also externally collaborate together to shape a convivial urban area.

Archetypes Internally Designed for the Cultural Programs and Externally Hybridized for the Plaza Zarco

Learning from the previous analysis, when zoomed in at the Zarco plaza, the main idea is also try to use different archetypes and elements to internally provide spaces for different programs and externally interact with surrounding environment to shape the plaza. The internal organization is using the dome as a heart of building that function as the spacious lobby and temporary venues. All the other archetypes of objects are respectively connected to the lobby forming different openings in the dome shell. Different archetypes provides spaces of very distinct quality. It makes you feel like, from the lobby, the heart of the buildingJianwei Shi (MArch I ’17), you can enter diverse and different worlds. Externally, different objects are hybridized with other  archetypes to interact with surrounding environment. Dome distorted into a cone that form the entrance of the building and communicates with the church San Hipolito. The box turns into stairs with lattice cover to allow people sit and rest and see the plaza, etc. The building somehow is orchestration of multiple elements.

Ark, a Plural Whole

Konstantinos Chatzaras (MArch I ’17)

Accepting pluralism as a contemporary zeitgeist and the city as its inherent expression, a model that escapes from pure historical continuity should be studied. Athens therefore serves as the battleground where this pluralism is most evident; it is a polis that incubates substantial history filled with ruptures rather than continuities, conquerors rather than interchanging rulers, and a massive shock produced by modernity due to the lack of resistance as such that was employed in other historic cities. The tragedy of histories and styles sets the stage for a peculiar dance between Classical, Roman, Byzantine, Renaissance, Ottoman, Neoclassical, and modern cultures, all performing in the same play. This combination blurs the sense of time and space: periods that were once sequential have become simultaneous. Iconographies that have remained pure invade each other.

Zea Mays / Corn as Civilization, Commodity, Consumerism and Control

Alberto de Salvatierra (MDes ’17)

Maize (zea mays)—commonly known as corn—often evokes nostalgic visions of pastoral landscapes. It is a de facto symbol for farms and harvests, and it is widely appreciated as a quintessentially American staple. However, corn’s historical genealogy is much more insidious and furtively subversive than most people recognize. While corn might have had its genesis as a versatile crop, the last few centuries reveal a more influential agent. It was a powerful civilization maker—both contributing to Maya and Aztec ascendancy in Mesoamerica and the English colonies in America. It was a commodity that facilitated the slave trade and the engine behind modern consumerism. And today, corn is the primary vehicle by which a vast agrochemical-industrial complex dominates American life. Therefore, this project seeks to reframe corn and highlight its true role in contemporary society.

Unfolding the Western District Public Cargo Working Area in Hong Kong

Benni Yu-ling Pong (MDes ’17)

The Western District Public Cargo Working Area (WDPCWA) in Hong Kong is never planned and designed as a formal open space. Nonetheless, it is appropriated by the people as a public space. The Outstanding Public Space Awards 2013 in Hong Kong has triumphed the place with its degree of freedom and flexibility. Despite accessing the area for purposes other than logistic functions are technically unauthorized, the space, with its spectacular waterfront view, has received breadth of media coverage and attracts even regular crowds of people.

The institutional maps have portrayed the area as a plain and empty surface without representing the diverse human activities and interactions intertwined with political, economic, social and environmental nexuses that the space characterizes. Urban space terminologies, such as ‘terrain vague’, ‘insurgent space’, ‘loose space’ and ‘everyday urbanism’, have partially but not amply elucidate the essence of the space which is not uncommon in major cities. The space represents a different aesthetic appreciation, perception towards space and understanding of urbanism. This thesis aims to conceptualize and unravel the veiled folds embedded in the space, nuances which are often overlooked in design practice, through ethnographic methodology and visual representation. In response to the highly quantitative approaches commonly deployed, this project explores a more humanistic and meticulous approach to appreciate urban space.