Rethinking Metabolic Rift: Tokyo: Architecture Between Scales and Typologies

Can Tokyo be a cultural city, a city that is cognizant of the “metabolic rift”—the often-inevitable environmental degradation that accompanies urbanization—and yet committed to confronting and even repairing it? Can it seek and imagine an alternative strategy, an architecture, that is more attuned to the nuances of relations between the social and the natural worlds and between scales and typologies of construction?

The proliferation of large urban developments in Tokyo is symptomatic of the increasing privatization of the public domain. Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Midtown, Toranomon Hills, COREDO Muromachi, and Azabudai Hills are among the completed megaprojects by a handful of big developers that are rapidly and dramatically changing the urban landscape and public life of the city.

The consumerist culture embedded in these technically accomplished and often lavishly made developments can be alluring. But these privately owned public spaces can also be exclusionary and challenging for the public to occupy and use with the same degree of freedom as they would a city street. Despite their thermal comfort and irresistible charm, these megaprojects seem blatantly to defy Henri Lefebvre’s argument for “the right to the city” and its implied erasure of social and spatial inequity.

This option studio will explore an alternative strategy based on the simultaneous choreography of a multitude of architectural ideas and interventions—of different scales and typologies, hybrids—that represent the needs and desires of Tokyoites to live together. Our intention is to shift the emphasis in contemporary development from the economies of scale to the economies of scope, an approach characterized by variety rather than volume.

The location for the projects will be a series of urban sites close to Ueno and the public park that was established in the nineteenth century. The park contains several museums and cultural institutions, including the city’s zoo and the National Museum of Western Art, the only building by Le Corbusier in Japan. The area also encompasses two of Tokyo’s foremost academic institutions, the University of Tokyo and Tokyo University of the Arts.

The area of investigation by the studio will be the urban spine connecting these institutions to the nearby neighborhood of Yanesen. The framing of the programs will take into consideration a diversity of topics, including culture and the everyday, the changes in the demography of Tokyo, the needs of young and old, the future consequences of degrowth, as well as alternative conceptions of the relation between architecture and nature.

If Ueno Park represents the nineteenth-century vision of culture/nature, how can the phenomenon be reconceptualized today? How can architecture’s situatedness within a broader environmental agenda help structure our contemporary projects? To achieve this task, each student will choose their own site/s and program/s with the aim of designing an architectural intervention or ensemble that will reconsider and question the role of scale and typology as a means of enhancing the quality of life of the district.

The studio will meet regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays and will travel to Tokyo in February. During this period, we will meet with several architects and academics, and participate in tours and talks with scholars including Kumiko Kiuchi and Shunya Yoshimi, one of Japan’s foremost scholars on Tokyo. Tom Heneghan, Mits Kanada, Yusuke Obuchi and Kayoko Ota will guide us through parts of our area. As in previous years, Professor Mits Kanada, a structural engineer who has worked with Toyo Ito and other contemporary architects, will act as the technical advisor to the studio.

 

Urban Glitch

Urban Glitch is a studio designed to research the pressing issue of systems-linked architecture in relation to the complex and intertwined ecological and social imperatives of our time. We will embrace architecture as anti-autonomous, as an agent of urban change that is necessarily collaborative, connected, and contingent; as a mode of engaged cultural production that requires fresh operational positions to facilitate this agency.

As a way into a more radical approach to the often-codified middle scale of urban form, the studio will collectively imagine an alternative present — an urban glitch — in which our architectural imagination is contingent upon altered and re-imagined outcomes to an event or decision in recent history that shapes the current status quo mode of operation and consumption within the built environment. The goal of this counterfactual approach to design production is to explore the spaces where current and future decisions are not fixed, where a combination of design imagination and radical pragmatism can impact the deep DNA and embedded path dependencies that shape our built world, and that generate or dissolve design's capacity to make change.

In practical terms, the studio will address the intersection of transportation infrastructure and architecture. The program is a mixed-use transit hub in Boston that accommodates public and private mobility within a paradigm of infrastructural decarbonization. We will travel to Amsterdam to learn from a system of urban infrastructure that yields dynamic forms of personal and shared mobility and a diverse range of buildings to store, charge, and host it. We will collaborate with artists, policymakers, and engineers, among others, to consider the following questions within the context of the design process:

What is the role of the middle scale of architecture in re-programming patterns of urban mobility for an era of decarbonization? Who owns, rents, and maintains our urban infrastructure, and what happens to urban form if variables of use and ownership change? What urban mechanics are contingent or changeable, and what conditions are inevitable factors in the shaping of 21st-century architectural form? What are the opportunities presented by an architecture of dependence in which form must act in concert with the larger conditions and constructs that drive urban change? What is the disposition and agency of a public architecture in an era of private capital? How and when does architecture have the power to act up and down the scales of the built environment?

Kit House II

This studio has two objectives. The first is to revisit an icon of American vernacular.  The second, to reflect on the design process itself, on how –and why– we choose to do things.

Our theme is part of 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.

OSM is not a technical theme, and the 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.

The studio concludes a line of enquiry carried out in 2018-19 and 2022 with a renewed focus on the unique, all-American cultural phenomenon known as a the Modern Home –or Kit House. This quintessentially American experiment lasted from 1908 to the Great Depression (the last batch shipped around 1940).

The mail-order only Kit House was disseminated through Modern Homes Catalogues. Largely outdated by today’s social norms, this marketing literature did capture a moment of boundless American optimism, a can-do attitude, and a refreshing faith in everyone’s ability to build their own home. With its agnostic approach to architectural style and embrace of new technology, the Kit House set out some ground rules OSM still abides by today.

BRIEF:
Starting with a renewed appreciation of the economic, social and cultural ambitions of OSM Participants are invited to propose a contemporary concept of the Kit House. The brief is completely open, but we will pay special attention to the following design issues: Identity and Culture. Modularity. Assembly. Packaging. Shipping, Documentation and Nomenclature (Building by Numbers).

SITE:
OSM being first and foremost a matter of cultural geography, site is not a priority as such. In keeping with the American character of the concept and its broadly rural resonance, the studio will concentrate on a rural corridor off Everett Road in the town of Norfolk MA, where land is zoned for single-family dwellings. We will visit the site and devise on a strategy of collective occupation as a group.

DELIVERABLES:
The deliverables of the studio will consist in a flat-packed Kit House model, a brochure of guidelines and explanations, and a public performance.  

This course has an irregular schedule. Please see the course syllabus for details.

The Temporary Contemporary: Assembling a Public in Downtown Los Angeles

The contemporary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a nonlinear space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical.
                – Paul Rabinow, Marking Time

In a now well-known story, the decades since 1970 have seen a quiet “economization” of public space. Though diverse in its locational details and regional variables, in many cities the overall effect has been to render the concept of public space—historically an essential ingredient of democratic life—if not anachronistic, at least endangered. In a cruel irony, the “neo-liberalization” of urban space unfolds as a mostly unseen erasure of the spatial foundations of liberalism’s basic elements—enumerated by Wendy Brown as “vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries.”  

Today this condition raises basic questions: how can publics still be assembled? Where, if not in the old, familiar places—the city square, the free press, the candidate’s debate—can differences be publicly exercised?  

This studio argues that one possible site for contemporary political assembly is aesthetic life. This does not imply that the content of aesthetic work must become explicitly political, but rather that “art” (very broadly conceived) and the institutions where it is housed, can form spaces, arenas, and backgrounds for publics. These formations do not de facto result simply from the display of art, but depend upon commitments from directors, curators, etc., They also depend upon specific spatial and material conditions that can be called the architecture of art. In our work this semester, this phrase indicates more than (and is at times even critical of) “museum design.” It instead requires asking how an aesthetic institution can be made into a site for the reproduction of publics, which, by their very nature, are temporary and require constant revivification.

These theoretical concerns will be explored across two nearly adjacent sites in downtown Los Angeles. The first is the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Originally called “the Temporary Contemporary,” MOCA Geffen is housed in an existing building on the border between in LA’s Little Tokyo and Arts districts. We will work with MOCA’s curatorial staff to imagine possibilities for “The WAREHOUSE”—the only zone of the original building untouched by Frank Gehry’s 1982-83 adaptation of the building for use as galleries. Today, the WAREHOUSE serves as an empty space for staging events and public programs, but it has never benefitted from any cohesive architectural agenda.

A second site, less than a block away, will rework a lost opportunity: the recently completed Little Tokyo/Arts District Metro Station. Despite city incentives to densify housing at and near metro stations, however, only a single-story pavilion was constructed as an entry point to the underground station. We will reimagine this as the site of a new multistorey structure for housing MOCA’s new artists residency program, including live/work studios, administrative offices, and other functions.

Taken together, the two projects—one, an adaptive reuse design for MOCA’s public programming; the other a new home for the making of contemporary art—aim towards a single thesis: that formal, material, and programmatic speculation can result in the architectural production of an aesthetic site for public politics. The studio will travel to Los Angeles in February.

Translogic Studio: A Proto-Urban Vertical Monastery

For this Studio we will focus on typological transformation and archetypal hybridization, integration of design and technology, and the relationship between precedent, speculation, and invention in order to identify, produce, and develop a tectonically rich urban figure.  These assertions of focus will support a search for immanence in a place-specific atmospheric architecture,

In recent decades, new forms of monasticism have been developing, and can be generally characterized not only by reclusive reflection and prayer, but also by immersion in community life, social service, and ecological stewardship. Many of these new organizations have been locating in urban areas, but to date there has been no effort to typify a spatial organization for this emerging phenomenon. The studio provides the opportunity to develop an atypical urban monastic prototype, transforming the traditional rustic and horizontal monastery into a new form characterized by an urban location and formal and organizational verticality. This new monastic prototype is based in the writings and teachings of inter-spiritual modern-day monks, Brother Thomas Merton and Brother Wayne Teasdale.

Our monastic prototypes will be sited in Colonia Atlampa, a re-emerging neighborhood within a former industrial zone northwest of the historic center of Mexico City.  The monastery will contribute to the comprehensive regeneration of the Atlampa neighborhood, with human, social, economic, and cultural development.  We will travel to Mexico City for a week, visiting historical, cultural, architectural, and religious sites, including monasteries.  A master planning workshop for our site will be held in the offices of renowned Mexican architect Javier Sanchez, located in a renovated ice factory adjacent to our site.

Fundamentally, this studio aims to broaden our understanding of architectural space and typologies.  Through an examination of the fundamental values of architecture in space, light, and material, conceived as the setting for experiences, we will resist the limiting prejudices of a pictorial architecture manifested through overt transparency, shallowness, and structural legibility …the thin, fast and explicit.  The excessive transparency of modern architecture is so often saturated with light and overexposed. What is often far more inspiring are spaces where there is more darkness than light, more mystery than clarity – spaces that are thick, slow, and implicit. These tonal spaces unite the traditional and the modern through a preference for an emotive and sensual interiority where a relative absence of light invites us to linger, to experience the eternal, the atmospheric, the ambient.

Our ambition is to put forward a logic that opens the raw repressed power of architecture and the environment through a re-thinking and re-making of where we already are.  This translogic will function as the basis for your work, developed as a comprehensive, integrated system of inter-scalar relationships – sensual and sensible – with authenticity and integrity that do not rely on store-bought theories and conventional expectations.  Ultimately, we are motivated by the search for an architecture of use and beauty, deeply rooted to its place, sensitively responsive to its environment, constructed within a material culture with an emotive atmosphere and poetic qualities that affect us deeply…a SpiritForm Revival!

This course has an irregular schedule. Please see the course syllabus for details.

Mingei and its Future: Hida Takayama, Japan

The studio looks at the legacy of Mingei, the “Craft of the People.” Mingei is a philosophy developed in the 1920s in Japan by Soetsu Yanagi and his colleagues in an effort to counter newly imposed Western aesthetics and artistic values and to protect the significance of traditional art and craft in Japan. One hundred years later, this philosophy has a larger implication for contemporary global society, at a time when we are reassessing the overlooked contributions of marginalized communities and re-evaluating cultural production everywhere. Today, we are also questioning the role of museums and reexamining their programs as they continue to play a vital role as participants in the dynamic dialogue of our time.

The studio will study the philosophy of Mingei through the movement’s writing and artistic examples. The program of the studio will be the design of a contemporary Mingei museum on a site adjacent to the existing Kusakabe Mingei Kan in Takayama, Gifu. Takayama is situated in the middle of the Japan Alps and is often called “Little Kyoto” for its gridded urban formation. This area of Hida is known for its expert carpenters and the Kusakabe Traditional House, one of the most important examples of traditional building craft. Built in 1879 for a merchant family, it was converted into the Mingei Museum in 1966. We will interpret the ways in which Mingei philosophy can be integrated into the architecture of our time and look at the legacy of Mingei beyond any historical theory to engage larger global cultures. We will look at works of contemporary African American artists following Theaster Gates’ “Afro Mingei” practice, which blurs and brings together distinct cultural identities to form a new hybridity that retraces cultural roots.

We plan to travel to Tokyo and Takayama and will visit the pottery studio of Theaster Gates in Tokoname.

Architecture or the City

Today, it would be reasonable to argue that the architecture of urban morphology is more visibly autonomous than at any time since the advent of modernity. Contemporary housing and multi-use developments are either architectural archipelagos or islands, each composed of differently shaped, styled and scaled buildings.

This profusion of difference is not the manifestation of a radical project of architectural autonomy as, for example, theorized by Manfredo Tafuri in his analysis of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio. The renowned ichnographic project illustrates an urban district that is at once unified by a single language derived from Roman ruins and composed as a conflict of extremes between discrete, exceedingly monumental complexes and buildings.

Tafuri’s hypothesis is a prescient, allegorical narrative of the historical process of disenchantment that ensued from the multiplication of sacred icons repurposed again and again for secular functions, from the house to the bank and ultimately to the gas station. The city evoked by Camp Marzio is composed only of a monstrous or sublime collection of colossal symbols of power vying for supremacy and ultimately canceling one another out.

Aldo Rossi, a contemporary of Tafuri’s, characterized the city as transhistorical and analogical. His non-narrative drawings, akin to still lifes, depict everyday objects alongside numerous types of building fragments, ruinous or unfinished. If analogy promises to synthesize disparate, unrelated and incommensurately scaled objects, architecture and urban morphology are destined to be manifest only in fragments. Any dream of narrativity or coherence is consciously irretrievable.

The projects of the studio will originate in one or a hybrid of these two theorizations of wholes and fragments with the aim to transformatively distill or resist the archipelagic propensity of architecture. Students will either design large buildings that define a synecdoche – i.e., a “city within a building” – or design prototypical housing units and sets/systems thereof that aggregate to produce a legible, discrete fragment of urban morphology derived from singular or hybrid precedents.

The studio will invest considerable time exploring the anticipated experience of units and their arrangements with emphasis on contemporary modes of living as well as the multivalent interrelationships of the units with the building, street, block, and urban morphology.    

Though the primary intention of the studio project is theoretical, it will be embodied by economically viable and sustainable proposals for a 110 acre site in Alameda, CA, the best remaining development opportunity along the bay’s eastern waterfront.

Students working in pairs will develop urban designs for between 2.8 and 5.6 million ft2 of multi-use. Concurrently, students will work individually on concepts for housing. The urban and architectural will thus be theorized and composed simultaneously. The final individual projects will vary in scope depending on each student’s theoretical/architectural interests.

The studio will work in tandem with The Development Project, GSD’s Master in Real Estate course in which students will establish constraints for the projects of this studio. Together, we will travel to the San Francisco Bay area in mid-February.

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 the global “Future of Non-Work.” This lens asks what the future of non-work, play, leisure, and volunteerism is for members of society before a career starts, during a career, and in retirement. 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.

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.

Landscape Architecture IV

The Near Future City

The fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence responds to our most pressing urban agenda in the years to come to transition into climatically just and resilient cities where no-one is left behind. As a Landscape Architect your role in this urban climatic transition is fundamental. Core IV provides you with the tools and skills to translate the important values and actions embedded in this process, into individual design proposals that are specific and concrete for the City of Boston.

In the Spring of 2024 Core IV joins current efforts from the federal, municipal, and civil society to accomplish this needed task. Among others: President Biden´s administration realignment with the Paris Agreement followed by his American Jobs Plan[1] and the Roadmap for Nature-Based Solutions[2] at the COP 27; the commitment to swift from fossil fuels at COP 28; Mayor Michelle Wu’s Boston Green New Deal & Just Recovery [3] synthesizing many of the Boston Climate Action [4] initiatives toward climate resilience and decarbonization; or EPA5 and the Mystic River Watershed Association to reduce pollution. The semester opens with an immersive pre-term symposium to learn first-hand from state, city officials, and NGOs on their multiple Boston plans, initiatives, and policies while experts share important precedents and critically assess the encounters. As an academic exercise, we will have the freedom to move beyond the “status quo” of present possibilities, to more desirable outcomes toward climatic resilience in the Near Future. While enhancing your imagination in the creative process of design, this might be precisely where our collaboration becomes more nurturing and catalyzing.

After the opening, the semester is structured around three ACTIONS: 01. analyzing; 02. spatializing; 03. projecting. Each ACTION combines expert lectures, readings, skill building workshops, and exercises that built sequentially and iteratively upon each other during the semester. In closing, students assembled their work for a Near Future Charlestown Presentation to continue the engaging conversation that was started at the opening symposium.