The Future of Work I: Awaji-Shima

This studio is the first of a series dedicated to the Future of Work in our rapidly changing eastern and western societies. The series as a whole will address societal developments in relation to the broader questions of employment, education, and work-life fulfilment. Specifically, it will address the many ways in which such societal developments challenge architecture, urbanism, the preservation of our environment, and the practice of sustainable growth.

The inaugural instalment of the series will focus on architectural design through the reprisal of our longstanding line of enquiry (2018-24) into the re-emergent phenomenon of OFFSITE MANUFACTURING or OSM, also known as Model as Building – Building as Model, whereby projects of any size or purpose are designed and built anywhere, anywhere (that is) except on site. This year, however, we will focus on the world of work and explore highly site-specific configurations located in a powerful geographic and cultural context.

This context is rural Japan.

With its stunning natural settings and steadily depopulating towns and fishing villages, Awaji-Shima, an island the size of Singapore located across the city of Kobe in the Seto Inland Sea, lies at the forefront of an ongoing effort to reverse the decline of communities living outside urban centers. This 15-year-long effort involves an original combination of social enterprise and business acumen centered on the provision of incentives for families to relocate in pursuit of a higher quality of life, and young, often underrepresented professionals to gain valuable employment and skills. Other key goals include the reintroduction of sustainable agricultural practices (the gradual recession of which has been threatening the food security of Japan). A combination of investment and patronage, this private effort is funded by strategic investments into cultural institutions and high-end hospitality.

The studio will explore this unique combination of social enterprise, hospitality, agriculture, and youth outreach on a beautiful terraced site located on the west coast of the island above the fishing village of Asano. We will look for ways in which off-site manufacturing in rural areas can contribute to the goal of sustainable development, while harnessing the power of this very unique context. Special attention will be lavished on the extensive use of timber, timeless building craft, effortless combination of tradition and modernity, and world-beating aesthetics of the Japanese.

OSM is not a technical theme, and this studio is not about construction. It is about reflecting on the nature of building, and the various ways in which the conceptual breakthroughs performed by unsuspecting actors of the design and manufacturing world enrich our disciplinary understanding of architecture and urbanity.
 

Material Embodiment: Logics for Post-Carbon Architectures

“So great are the changes required to alter humankind’s dealings with the physical world that only this sense of displacement and estrangement can drive the actual practices of change and reduce our consuming desires”- Richard Sennett

This studio explores biogenic and geogenic material strategies as catalysts that inspire us to reimagine our relationships with material culture and technology. We will investigate and seek to position frameworks toward robust architecture across scales–spanning material, building, and landscape to reveal the imaginative potential of post-carbon material practices.

Directing attention to one of the most fundamental yet complex architectural elements, the wall, the studio pursues materiality that informs a range of concerns from the performative to the expressive. We will develop durable material strategies in the context of architectural envelopes to understand their capacities as contingent and dissipative systems. In examining materials such as loam and hempcrete, the studio prioritizes wallness and solidity as performative necessities, spatial affordances, and atmospheres.

Situated along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood Green, the studio operates within a transforming post-industrial landscape that reveals the complicated reciprocities between historical landscapes of labor and local communities. A defining feature of Hazelwood Green is Mill-19, an existing quarter-mile long structure that serves as a striking reminder of prior industrialization. Partially deconstructed into an exoskeleton that envelops newly constructed labs, offices, and research institutes, the adaptively repurposed Mill-19 houses organizations that support the growth of regional advanced manufacturing and skilled workforce development.

We will develop material strategies through the design of a hybrid facility that condenses workforce training, research, and exhibition to merge efforts underway at Mill-19 with community-based workforce development endeavors across the city. Situated adjacent to Mill-19, a structure that exemplifies the carbon-intensive, trabeated logic of steel, the studio considers: What new logics and expressions might emerge from robust, harvested, and earthen materiality?

What are the cultural, environmental, and spatial opportunities of a thickened architectural boundary? In what ways can the layered histories of labor, industry, and environmental transformation at Hazelwood Green be revealed? Considering the labor-intensive nature of many bio- and geogenic techniques, how can technology enhance their scalability? How can notions of precision and control be reimagined to embrace the inherent variability of material resolutions? Given the natural weathering tendencies of these materials, how should we approach finishing, durability, and maintenance to align with their inherent characteristics?

Juney Lee, the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director, of the Regenerative Structures Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon Architecture will consult the studio. The studio will meet regularly on Thursdays and Fridays. Travel to Pittsburgh will include visits to industrial heritage sites, the Heinz Architectural Center, and design workshops.
 

Grafting the Aquarium

Oceans are heavily impacted by climate change. Rising temperatures, acidification, and deoxygenation caused by greenhouse gas emissions are damaging marine ecosystems at an alarming scale and rate. As these ecosystems are significantly threatened, human health and economic stability also grow more precarious. The fate of ocean life is intimately tied to our own.

In response to this crisis, aquariums have increasingly refocused their missions on conservation and education, attempting to outgrow their origins as menageries for human entertainment. To make this shift, common practices include partnering with scientific institutions to promote research, discontinuing breeding programs, and developing large mammal sanctuaries where former show animals can retire. Though these efforts are encouraging, aquariums are often forced to rely on entertainment and ticket sales to maintain their operations and facilities in addition to funding basic animal care. What will it take for aquariums to achieve their stated ambitions of becoming leaders in ecological stewardship and education rather than purely entertainment venues? And how can architecture, design, programming, economic, and urban considerations help evolve the aquarium and its role in our society?

To test these questions, the New England Aquarium, which overlooks Boston’s harbor, will serve as the project site. Like all of Boston’s waterfront, the site is vulnerable to sea level rise. Students will be asked to strategize for climate adaptation while researching Peter Chermayeff’s original Brutalist building from 1969 and its additions. The studio introduces complex themes involving climate-driven choices such as whether to protect, accommodate, or retreat from rising seas. We will consider embodied carbon, building adaptations, design for biodiversity, and regard for non-human species in the process of developing designs. In considering these complex scenarios and diverse actors, the studio positions architecture as a key agent in urban viability and transformation.
     
Day trips and tours in Boston and New England will be offered during the week of February 20-24. 

Conditions: Context and Climate

We will work on how to make architecture relevant to a specific place and context.

Our site is a former industrial site in the harbor of Copenhagen. The former shipyard was once considered the world’s leading producer of containerships and diesel motors. After 153 years, the shipyard was closed in 1996 due to bankruptcy, leaving 8,000 workers unemployed. Located on the last of several islands comprised largely of landfill, the site is connected to Copenhagen by a series of bridges. This limited access has made large scale development difficult, allowing for an alternative community of artists, galleries, restaurants, and startups to lease short term abandoned buildings of all scales. The municipality of Copenhagen recently decided to connect the island to the mainland via a Metro and a development plan is expected soon, allowing for potential architectural intervention.

We will understand our site by collecting and analyzing historic, climatic, cultural, social, and typological data. Using this collected knowledge as a shared point of departure, we will consider the project within the urgent global context of climate change. We are racing towards multiple global tipping points, one being temperature rising far beyond expected due to carbon emissions. Forty percent of global carbon emissions derive from the construction industry and, as architects, we have the opportunity to make a difference. We must radically reassess how to build with the goal of proactively minimizing carbon emissions. To do so, we are forced to develop new tools, a new library of references, without losing our aesthetic ambition.

Our focus will be on small-medium scale transformations, interventions, and additions to existing structures to create public or semi-public space that relate to the specificity of the site and utilize low carbon materials and processes.

Through individual exercises, we will explore tectonics and texture, understand the essential technical prerequisites of specific materials, investigate their aesthetic potential, and gain knowledge of the architectural use of up-cycled, waste based and, to some extent, bio-generic material.  Students will develop essential knowledge and be introduced to initial tools, allowing them to understand the general principles of assessing embedded carbon in both construction and operations.

The course is divided into 3 chapters.  

In the first chapter of the course, we will analyze the unique character of Refshaleøen, delving into its historical significance and the layered conditions of the site today. Through mapping and research, students will develop a comprehensive understanding of its physical, cultural, historical, and ecological contexts.
The second chapter introduces transformative architecture, the concept of upcycling and waste-based materials. Students will explore the intersection of material innovation and sustainability, examining the potential of unconventional and waste materials and their aesthetical value. A hands-on exercise will connect material properties and tectonics directly to the site, mapping available resources to inspire creative reuse.

In the final chapter, students will develop site-specific projects. Working with one of six provided water-connected programs. The students will identify a focus area, a site–whether an empty plot, urban void, or existing structure–during a study trip to the site, engaging deeply with its transformative potential.

Each chapter will be concluded with a formal crit. The result will be a series of interconnected architectural responses.
 

Collaborative Design Engineering Studio II

The second-semester studio builds upon theoretical and technical concepts already introduced in the MDE program, emphasizing problem assessment, creative and critical thinking, observational and experimentation-based evaluation, and context-aware communication strategies essential for complex problem-solving activities. Within the scope of the 2D, 3D, and 4D MDE studio pedagogy, the fourth dimension, time, will feature strongly in project considerations. Students will be challenged to prioritize deeper reflection and holistic connections across the entire ecology of their design-engineering project (i.e. systems design, experiential design, futuring, and large-scale thermodynamics).

This year, student teams will develop a semester-long project on “Water as a System of Care” through one of  three human-centric-scales: IN the body (i.e., medicine, nutrition, drinking, TOUCHING the body (i.e. fashion, beauty, recreation, thermal health), or AROUND the body ( i.e., infrastructure, transportation, construction). Student teams will develop product-based solutions leveraging an interdisciplinary approach that blends design thinking with insights from economics, sociology, technology, and public policy. Collaboration with experts across these fields, as well as with the communities that will be affected by these changes, will be vital in developing human-centric solutions that are truly desirable, feasible, and tangible.

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

Fourth Semester Architecture Core: RELATE

The fourth and final semester of the core sequence, this architecture studio tackles the complexity of the urban condition through the design of housing. From individual to collective, from spatial to infrastructural,  from units to systems, housing not only confronts the multiple scales of design but also exposes the values and ideals of its society. The semester will be an opportunity to imagine the possible futures of the city, recognizing the role of architecture at the intersection of the many interdependent as well as contradictory forces at play, and the negotiations that must necessarily take place. 

The semester will be organized in two overlapping phases. The first weeks will be an intense research and analysis phase through which the students will develop not only an understanding of historical precedents but also begin to formulate their narrative on urban living – a hypothesis that they will use to launch their design for the rest of the semester. While this hypothesis will be constantly revisited and revised, it will serve as a first speculative act.

The second phase of the semester will be devoted to the elaboration of an urban project with a focus on housing and will have as its objective the understanding of design as a series of relativities: between building and the city, between collective and individual, between civic and domestic. The architectural project is fundamentally optimistic. It goes beyond problem solving to imagining a better future. In no other typology is this more true than with collective housing which defines the core of how we live and function together as a society.

Pedagogically, working in groups and pairs will be a component of the semester, demanding dialogue, understanding, and negotiation of different points of view.

 

Please refer to the course syllabus for classroom information for the Wednesday afternoon Core Studio Colloquium. 

Second Semester Core Urban Planning Studio

The second semester core planning studio expands the topics and methodologies studied in the first semester core studio, GSD 1121, aiming to prepare students for the mix of analytical and creative problem-solving needed to be an effective planner. In this studio, students work on a real project in a real place (with a real client) that allows them to interact with the public; define a vision; collect, analyze, and represent data that supports that vision; develop a proposal that reflects public input; and present work in a sophisticated way that is relevant, legible, and useful to those who are not planners. By the end of the studio students will be familiar with a number of dimensions of community engagement, data analysis, plan making, and implementation.

Second Semester Architecture Core: SITUATE

The overarching pedagogical agenda for second semester is to expand upon the design methodologies developed in the first semester such that students acquire an understanding of the interwoven relationship between form, space, structure, and materiality. This semester extends the subject matter to include the fundamental parameters of site and program, considered foundational to the discipline of architecture. Through the design problems, students will also engage in multiple modes of analytical processes that inform and inspire the study of mass, proportion, and tactility.

Prerequisites: GSD 1101

Spatial Design Strategies for Climate- and Conflict-Induced Migration

Climate change presents an urgent global challenge with far-reaching implications for human societies and all other species inhabiting the planet. Over the next few decades, extreme climate zones and uninhabitable areas are projected to expand, driven by factors such as water stress, food insecurity, extreme heat, sea level rise, and weather-related disasters such as storms and wildfires. These challenges are already driving instability and increasing displacement, forcing individuals and communities to leave behind the spaces and cultures they have inhabited for generations.

As of 2024, an estimated 120 million people are displaced (UNHCR), with projections suggesting this number may rise significantly, disproportionally impacting individuals and communities historically the least responsible for the climate crisis.

This project-based seminar will examine migration induced by climate and conflict, which often intersect, in one of the most volatile hotspots in the world, the Sahel. The Sahel region has been grappling with the root causes and the multidimensional consequences of climate change for a long time; colonization, extensive resource extraction, conflict, and militarization. In the region, new trends in migration are observed, and local, national, and international policies and protocols for humanitarian contingency planning are currently being developed in response.

In the Sahel, traditional lifestyles such as nomadic pastoralism and transhumance have thrived for millennia in extreme weather conditions, offering valuable lessons in adaptability and perseverance in times of crisis and resource scarcity. 

In the seminar, the class will engage with diverse stakeholders and viewpoints from theory and practice. We will have conversations with representatives of United Nations agencies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which possess real-time data and field experience. Drawing on their data sets and engaging in dialogue with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community representatives, we will develop a case study focused on climate migration in the Sahel, with particular attention to the situation in Mauritania, where local and international organizations are working together to support the country’s open-door policy and its efforts to host refugees from the region (and keep them from reaching Europe).

Sessions will include meetings with diverse stakeholders, interaction with UN agencies, non-governmental organizations and representative of local communities, and in-class workshops for project development that include spatial analyses of migration trends and scenario exercises. To attend the class, students are required to have knowledge of spatial design (architecture, urban and landscape architecture) along with basic mapping skills.

The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change

Gentrification and the real and perceived impacts that neighborhood change has on longtime local residents as well as new dwellers, is complicated to unpack and define.  Many believe displacement is an inherent byproduct of gentrification, yet little research exists to quantify or even confirm if and how displacement occurs.  We are left to speculate about whether residents are being priced out of their rents; do owners chose to “cash out” and sell their properties; and/or do people of color choose to leave the neighborhood because the longstanding cultural character and amenities are eroding. Is displacement inevitable, is it voluntary or involuntary; and if so, is it economic or cultural?

So, what definition of gentrification are we to rely on to improve our understanding of neighborhood change.  The gentrification definition that relies on the statistics commonly measured by inflation in housing prices, increases in median household income, and changes in educational attainment, might confirm that neighborhood change through gentrification is real.   Or what about the definition of neighborhood change as presented in the 2014 “Lost in Place” report highlighting that only 100 out of 1,100 urban areas saw reductions in poverty levels between 1970-2010, a change that may be a function of backfilling four decades of neighborhood population decline rather than the upward mobility of long time low-income households.  This report is telling us we are obsessed with the wrong neighborhood change phenomenon– that instead of tracking the smaller percentage of urban areas that are truly “gentrifying”, we should instead be more focused on why the other 1,000 out of 1,100 urban areas and its residents are no better off than they were 40 years ago!

But what about the upside of new investment in historically disinvestment neighborhoods? The addition of new, and often better quality amenities should be a benefit to all residents, incoming and existing.  Long-time homeowners who have not seen increases in the value of their homes should now see increases in their long-term household wealth.  And areas of the city that have been steeped in income and racial divide can become places of mixed income and mixed-race, enabling a more productive social and economic ecosystem of community life.  Does this type of investment always have to be seen as disruptive?

This course will explore the debate about the causes and effects of gentrification and attempt to document the real and perceived impacts of such change on the physical, economic, social and cultural dynamics of community.  The course will use national and city-specific research on gentrification; neighborhood change measurement methodologies; examine the neighborhood change using data research, literature and media articles and guest lectures.  Students will prepare 1) an opinion-editorial essay, offering a definition of gentrification; 2) participate in a team debate arguing either the positive or negative impacts of gentrification; 3) assign indicators and metrics for measuring the presence of gentrification and 4) prepare a case study presentation on  effective strategies for addressing either the negative impacts or advancing positive impacts of gentrification.

 

Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Publics Domain students.