Tower for a Collector [M2]

This studio follows on from a teaching program called “City & Utopia” established 10 years ago in Paris with the aim of exploring the world of ideologies. Here, we enter a third phase of the program, this time focusing on our relationship to objects, a relationship that can often be irrational or magical.

More specifically, the exercise explores the themes of collection and fetishism. Every city could be seen as a collection. Not something frozen, as a collection of paintings in a museum might be. But rather as a neurotic act of accumulation – of things, buildings, and objects – which is a way for every inhabitant to manage the anxiety of aloneness. In the psychology of the collector, the objects collected are endowed with a soul and represent an extension of their personality that links them to the outside world. They are transitional objects and this need for transition often turns into madness. So one might therefore wonder, for every city, what psychological state led to the accumulation of so many things, buildings, crossings, cars, relationships and people. What neurosis presided over the births of different cities?

In order to explore these questions, the studio proposes to design a vertical, totemic city, following a sequence of chapters each corresponding to the gradual unfolding of a collection. The exercise consists in starting with a fetish object, and then successively designing a gallery in which to exhibit or conceal it, a house, a neighborhood, and finally a totem city. Through these different chapters and changes of scale, the aim will be to explore the obsessional and foundational dynamic that underpins our relationship to architecture and the evolution of many of today’s cities.

The goal is to engage the students in a plastic activity in which the essence of the work comprises models and photography, and to explore the generalized fetishization of our material world, as well as our own tendency as architects to seek in every built thing a potential object of desire, of knowledge, of collection, or of substitution.

The program will be conducted by Gilles Delalex in weekly sessions with guest critics by Yves Moreau.

Designing the In-Between; Transecting the Heart of Chinatown on a Forgotten Site [M2]

A curious “missing tooth” in the chaotic and dense urban fabric of Boston’s Chinatown reveals a vivisection of the neighborhood and provides an opportunity for a resilient urban intervention exploring the concept of Embedded Nature in a place devoid of nature and lacking a true center. Investigations into the interplay of landscape and building form will explore the tension created by In-Between spaces both intensely public and private, or fast and slow, to create new architectural possibilities. Can the spatial implications of the In-Between coupled with the performative aspects of nature reestablish the interrelationship between architecture, life, and culture in Chinatown through innovative built form?

Context:  Chinatown is a vibrant, self-contained cultural island that has existed through three centuries of Boston’s evolution and development; it is one of Boston’s oldest and most densely populated urban neighborhoods. Due to its density and cultural isolation, Chinatown lacks access to neighborhood-based healthcare, affordable housing, natural light, greenspace, and meaningful places to gather as a community.

Located along the seam of the original shoreline of the South Cove, the project site has existed as a surface parking lot for the past 90 years, fronting two streets and connecting one side of the neighborhood with the other. As gentrification has encroached upon the neighborhood, affordable housing for elders and restaurant workers has become less accessible.

Program:  Students define the program after a brief study of the neighborhood’s architectural conditions and its needs. Possibilities include a community center, health clinic, community kitchen, library, affordable/micro housing, community gardens, senior housing, and public greenspace. Programmatic elements should integrate landscape into design solutions, building upon Chinese traditions of courtyards and hanging gardens in new and inventive ways to explore the dichotomy between interiority and public space within the confines of historic Boston.

Methodology: The studio will employ an iterative process focused on the production of artifacts to study the spatial implications of the In-Between, utilizing drawing and digital fabrication techniques to explore potentialities. Fabrication will have a major role in the studio to enable iterative study and the role of making and fabrication in clarifying, exploring, and explaining complex architectural ideas.  
 
There will be a fabrication workshop at the PAYETTE FABLab to facilitate rapid prototyping with digital fabrication modalities. All base models will be provided by PAYETTE to expedite exploration.  

Do-It-Anyway: Place, Tectonics, and Time [M1]

In this studio, students will design and fabricate a project at one-to-one scale in the space of seven weeks. Why?

We are living in an unpredictable and volatile era. A seemingly unending series of natural disasters and anachronistic wars affect our daily lives. The places we inhabit may be unstable or mobile—a trend that will accelerate in the future—and we are expected to quickly adapt to a changing environment.

In this situation, we must question the traditional status of architecture as a stable occupant of real estate. Should we instead imagine ephemeral, temporary, or transient architectural artifacts? How could forms and techniques of building be adjusted flexibly and spontaneously to adapt to new situations? How do these tectonic strategies respond to the specificities of place? And can these architectural ideas be used to address pressing contemporary problems including housing instability, economic inequality, and climate change?

This studio will address these questions through a hands-on project with a clear outcome and goals defined by each student in conversation with the instructor. With these goals established, students will design and fabricate a space or assembly at full-scale to put into practice their own concepts. As the studio designs and builds, we will examine and experiment with materials considering the constraints of time, ease of assembly, and cost. Typical building materials will be re-examined in addition to waste materials and other atypical materials. We will study and invent architectural details that circumvent the conventions of permanent installation and bonding. Instead, we will experiment with reversible processes of assembly such as friction joints, rope, straps, wedges, notches, and more.

The outcome of these tectonic experiments will be a space or assembly that engages the body. This could be a shelter, partition, or structure which can accommodate various daily activities.

Throughout the studio, we will discuss our methods of working, and how adaptable spaces and details can and should be used. At the same time, we will also work quickly and intuitively to reach a tangible conclusion. We will start with the conviction that something must be made, hence the theme of the studio: do-it-anyway.

Swerves [M1]

Half a century ago, architecture became open-ended. Buildings would change and grow, architects argued, not unlike cities. Architects embraced impermanence, promoted flexibility, timed obsolescence, and welcomed uncertainty, just as Umberto Eco proclaimed the birth of the open work, and Roland Barthes pronounced the death of the author. Architects also questioned authorship. Many would no longer strive to prescribe outcomes, let alone inscribe meanings. Against the backdrop of modern masters and modern monuments, and as a result of cultural, social, political, and technological developments, buildings became systems. Paradoxically, architects would pioneer new building types in unprecedented ways by openly disregarding programs.

Design theories for open-ended buildings differed, but they all implied, almost invariably, free plans and modular units, as well as building components discriminated by their rate of renewal: frame versus clip-on, core versus capsule, structure versus envelope. By the mid-sixties, just a few years after speculation on openness had begun in earnest, several projects materialized. Over the following years, many changed: some according to plan, some according to no plan. Others did not. Some were demolished against the architect's will, and some were preserved against the building's principles. Today, some stand for the arguments they promoted, and some for the doctrines they attacked.

This studio will collectively address a building in the U.S. that intersected the debate on open-endedness, namely: Eduardo Catalano's Boston Public Library in Charlestown (1967-1970). The studio brief is straightforward. You will join a team and be asked to double the building area. Do you endorse openness and observe, refine, or swerve the original script? Do you argue against it and swerve the existing object? What is at stake is to design in conversation with, and take position on, a building and the arguments it advanced, and to tackle a longstanding question within the field, again, half a century later.

An Incomplete Performance [M1]

Our option studio will explore the double meaning of performance – working between the short-lived act of theatrical performance, and the environmental performance of long-lasting buildings.  

In the context of the accelerating climate crisis, the buildings we design are accountable to increasing performance standards to reduce their energy consumption during use. Yet, the demolition of our existing building stock for new energy efficient buildings, fails to acknowledge the huge amount of energy expended in the extraction of materials from the landscape and their construction.

If we consider that 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built, we must  value all our existing built environment as a heavily invested ‘carbon bank’ to be retained, reused and reinvented. This options studio will therefore explore the possibilities of extending the lifespan of everyday buildings for as long as possible, by transforming them with new uses.

To do this, we will learn from theatrical performance space architecture. Performance space is by its very nature, makeshift and provisional; and we are inspired by its capacity for constant reinvention to host new events and remain relevant. Through improvisation, artists, companies, and directors exploit overlooked and undervalued spaces and creatively transform them in unselfconscious and imaginative ways. We are interested in the “energy transfer” within these spaces that connects the energy of artists with audiences, and back out to the wider city. Our option studio will transform overlooked existing buildings in central Boston with short lifespan architecture for the performing arts.

We will focus on the ordinary and overlooked buildings of the city – those that do not have heritage or nostalgic status to protect their futures – and imagine ways in which these buildings can be transformed for new uses that were not originally intended, in order to extend their lifespan.

We will consider the urban fabric of Boston as a contemporary mine for rehabilitating structures, spaces, and materials.

We will see the process of architectural transformation as deliberately open-ended, extending the wider possibilities for continuity of city life and its energy, without the prospect of construction costing the earth.

The Last Free Space [M1]

What can public libraries do that other spaces –  schools, community centers, museums – cannot do? This studio will study and speculate on how a library, sited in Boston, could become a monument to the society we want to cultivate, to improve the communities in which we live, and to awaken the links that bind us inextricably to one another.

Libraries must contend with different timescales, acting as archives of public memory, engaging in the contemporary moment, and somehow anticipating unknown futures. How can a library honor the memory of its site and the community it serves, while acting as a platform, catalyst, and instigator of a hopeful and abundant future?

Modern libraries have evolved beyond depositories for books into “third spaces” for communities – offering an impressive wide range of services and resources (specific to the needs of the local residents). They are living spaces that evolve through use, marking the political, socio-economic and cultural shifts of a generation. Digitization and disinvestment have impacted how the role of libraries will be navigated in the future, but the public library remains indispensable. Providing free access and democratic space to anyone, libraries offer one of the last free spaces in the city.

Students will challenge the notion of what a library is and what their project can do. They will consider the context in which they operate and develop proposals for how the building will perform in service. Additionally, they will interrogate the provenance of the materials and processes they select and through a lens of how these choices reinforce the purpose of the project. Multiple forms of visualization will be leveraged as students develop a robust and persuasive narrative that communicates their intent and the rationale of their decisions. Each week students will advance their project narrative and concept design through pin-ups and desk-crits.

Reconstructions / Unearthing Traces (On History, Memory and Architecture for Life)

“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.”

      James A. Baldwin

The values that we embody in our social constructs become the values embedded in our physical constructs. The art and architecture of our built environment are inextricably linked to our social existence, yet the depths of this relationship sit on the periphery of our conversations about racism and oppression. As we engage in these conversations, we -historians, architects, teachers, designers, artists, activists and interested members of the community- find ourselves playing important roles in public discourses about history and memory, about justice, and about the democratic public space.

Throughout the country, and the world, significant initiatives -including endeavors that seek reparative justice and symbolic justice, marches and public demonstrations, community practices, the ongoing fight against present-day forms of slavery, mass incarceration and other forms of oppression, truth and reconciliation processes, removal of monuments- have been and are being discussed. Among these are the many universities engaging with their own past, including Harvard and its recently unveiled Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report.

The studio -understood as a design laboratory and collective environment- will dissect the Harvard report, and other readings, and assess the spatial, programmatic, and political implications, locally, nationally or globally. Architecture cannot and should not be seen, in isolation, as a solution to the issues we define in this studio but rather as one part of a combinatorial set of approaches that challenge the histories of violence embedded in our built environment. As we investigate, through our design work, the legacies of Enslavement, Slavery and the Trade and contend with conceptual, political, artistic, and architectural complexities, our Studio Mission will be based on the principle that the field of architectural operations should be expanded to include new forms of justice-centered design, institutional and community work. Students will work on various design projects, studies, and exercises to develop their own responses and positions. Our final design projects, which will include programmatic and site-specific proposals, are expected to achieve a high level of architectural resolution. The studio will invite both students and faculty to envision ourselves as architects and cultural activists committed to transforming the world around us in meaningful and life-affirming ways.

Barnes’ Barns in the Grid of Des Moines

This studio will explore the typology of the industrial shed – a 60,000 square foot building – developed from a kit-of-parts assembly to accommodate adaptable agricultural uses combined with multifunctional community spaces. Individual buildings will collectively form a mixed-use urban farming precinct in Des Moines Iowa, a small city in the heartland of America. Situated between the scales and uses of regional industrial agriculture and the bottom-up urbanism of local farmers markets, the building will unite educational spaces with small scale farming operations. Following the tradition of visionary planning in Des Moines, the projects will frame a functional new urban region within the city, while cultivating an expanded civic realm in buildings and open spaces that contribute to the city’s ongoing evolution.

In 1990, Mario Gandelsonas presented the Des Moines Vision Plan. This elastic and evolving plan for the transformation of Des Moines continues to guide urban decisions more than thirty years later. The Vision Plan includes some projects that have been executed and others that have not yet been realized. One of these projects was The Farming Corridor, which took shape in 2015 as an extension of the Downtown Farmer’s Market. Our studio will explore the foundational tenets of this plan programmatically and urbanistically, as a prelude to the development of individual studio projects that together will form a collective precinct: a mixed-use agricultural corridor integrating farming as an extension of informal local markets in combination with educational spaces, all connected by shared green pathways and open space along a rail corridor on the south side of the urban core.

Each building will encompass a range of climatic environments, diverse envelope conditions, and temporal use scenarios, in relation to program criteria. Students will develop their project at three scales: from the urban, to the architectural, to the detail. We will develop a considered framework and evaluative metrics, including social utilization, embodied carbon, architectural quality, etc., which will form the basis of collective planning strategies to be implemented by each student in their individual project.

Voices of Change

The tone of our voice is more important than the words that we use. When we speak, we use a common language that we share with the individuals we are communicating with. Moreover, we use gestures and facial expressions that are personal and that we cannot fully control.
 
In the studio Voices of Change, we will immerse ourselves in the voices of iconic cultural protagonists such as Marina Abramovic, Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson. We will experience each individual voice as a synthesis of the protagonists’ specific cultural, political, and artistic existence, and we will use the energy of these voices to work on new forms of collective housing.
 
In the studio, we will work with the students on the transformation of a warehouse in Los Angeles into cooperative housing. We will work on today’s most pressing questions. The idea is to give architectural form to a more sustainable and more just way of life. We believe that the answers should be rational and personal simultaneously, and that they can only be found by going through the unforeseeable messiness of the creative process. We will work on plans and physical models, and we will use model photography as a method of exploration and representation.
 
In its own mythology, Los Angeles is the city of eternal sunshine. The blandness of its endless grid is the perfect surface for the projection of both dreams and illusions. We will use this utopian idea of Los Angeles as a powerful tool to envision new ways of living.

Revitalizing Onomichi: Architecture, Community, Territory

Onomichi is a port city in Hiroshima Prefecture in the western part of Japan with a history of ship building. It was one of the locations in Ozu's 1953 film, Tokyo Story as well as the 2016 video game Yakuza 6: The Song of Life.

The studio will travel to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Onomichi to learn about Japanese architecture and culture and to select a series of individual project sites in Onomichi. Our aim will be to use architecture as a means for the transformation of the city through a series of multi-scalar interventions.

The studio will meet twice a week and will investigate the role of architecture outside the major metropolitan areas of Japan- and between nature and the sea.

The studio is open to all students with a background in architecture interested in design speculations. The project is part of the larger Japanstory research initiative and will result in a publication of the work of the studio.