Identity and Difference: Annuated Civic Typologies

This term we will revisit a theme we first explored in the option studios Block Blob Mat Slab Slat (2015) and—to a lesser extent— Intuition and the Machine (2020).  The theme is architectural typology, i.e. the nineteenth century conceit that spaces ought to be planned according to some common blueprint, or type.

Our working assumption this term will be that it is unwise to decry it as obsolete when demand for it outside the narrow premises of theoretical speculation continues unabated. 

A recent case in point is the challenge set out by Reimagining Railway Stations: Connecting Communities, an international architectural competition launched in 2020 by British Network Rail for the rebuilding of 2000 ‘small to medium’ stations set across a wide range of urban and rural contexts in the United Kingdom. Reimagining Railway Stations constitutes as direct an appeal to the classic understanding of the term as it is possible to (re)imagine in 2023.  This semester, we propose to revisit type from the ‘traditional’ angles set out in this competition, i.e. as a potential framework for the collection of individual buildings, as a vector of tectonic integration, and a symbol of civic life.

BRIEF AND SITES: Using the competition brief as a guide, we will focus on a collection of nine building interventions made possible by a shared framework, to be freely defined by each participant. We have curated a selection of nine sites with a footprint between 7m2 and 45m2, all of them functional rail hubs. Our selection includes a challenging variety of existing configurations, both architectural and topographic. Some sites have virtually no amenities other than an automated ticket machine, while others double up as heritage-listed rail museums, drawing thousands of British train enthusiasts every year.

Our key theoretical concern will be the problem of the Collection. We will interrogate it from a theoretical and practical point of view.

The design approach is completely open.

Grafting Adaptations onto Existing Buildings and into the City

Today’s architects have an urgent responsibility to address the climate crisis by radically reducing the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from our work. Reusing and adapting existing structures—which generally saves between 50 to 75 percent of embodied carbon emissions, compared to building new—is therefore an increasingly critical part of architectural practice.1  Yet many consider it merely a technical necessity rather than a design generator.

This studio aims to challenge that assumption by exploring the environmental and creative potential of Grafting, one particular method of adaptive reuse that is informed by natural processes of healing and repair. Performed by people since ancient times, horticultural grafting is the act of connecting two or more separate plant tissues to grow and function as one plant, while remaining genetically (and often visually) distinct. Motivated by the search for more resilient and fruitful plants, grafting is an innately experimental practice that has also been a potent cultural metaphor—regarded by some as the sensitive art of working with nature, and by others as the creation of something impure and even monstrous.

This studio will draw on these various aspects to test how the concept of grafting can inform architecture and its many scales, provoking the imagination while simultaneously lending know-how to tectonic, programmatic, formal, and regenerative adaptations. The concrete parking garage of Josep Lluis Sert’s Peabody Terrace (1964) in Cambridge, MA, will serve as the project site. Students will research the original building and the context of its construction, develop an understanding of embodied carbon and the environmental repercussions of varying degrees of intervention, and explore design solutions for its adaptation and renewed role in urban life.

Day trips and tours in Boston and New England will be offered during the week of February 20-24. The preliminary itinerary includes visiting buildings on Harvard’s campus, and daytrips to New Haven and UMASS Amherst. Class will be held on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and will be taught in person on alternating weeks.

1.Larry Strain, “Ten Steps to Reducing Embodied Carbon,” American Institute of Architects, https://www.aia.org/articles/70446-ten-steps-to-reducing-embodied-carbon.

Ruinophilia & Pentimenti – Chinatown Milan Case Study

Arguably, the conception of ruins has long shaped western architecture historians’ origins narrative dating back to antiquity. Largely shaped by a distinct visual culture and optics of the “ruin gaze”, the ruin has largely been associated with romantic imagery possessing its own metaphysical charm. This studio takes the notion of ruinophilia as a starting point for generating design interventions in Milan’s old Sarpi district, otherwise known as Quatiere Cinese. The studio takes on Svetlana Boym’s premise that nostalgia offers a productive means to engage with issues of collective memory, displacement, and urban renewal, embracing the contradictions of modernity. Boym also highlighted the link between contemporary ruinophilia and reflective nostalgia, remarking that ruins lead one to contemplate the past that could have been as well as the future that never took place. The studio will also borrow from the critical lens of Chinese art history which offers up an alternative representation of the past, readings of site, building and visual memory. The Chinese notion of ruins is deeply internalized and is less overtly tied to visual remnants, but evoked through absence, voids, and allusions. In the context of preserving Chinatown, and the stereotypes of cultural heritage often associated with visual signifiers, the studio seeks to challenge conventional attitudes towards adaptive re-use, heritage preservation, and cultural production. Originally selected as the prime location for Chinese settlement (dating back to 1929) due to the courtyard-tenement housing typology which was well adapted for the artisans/merchants in the garment industry, today’s Sarpi area’s spatial demographic changes are posing cultural tensions due to the commercial activities outgrowing the limitations of the urban fabric’s density. Referencing the concept of pentimenti, “defined in art history as a presence of traces of previous work”, students are encouraged to exploit a “different logic of the ruin, which is not romantic… but a form of toleration of disharmony.” Students are asked to design either housing or a hotel/hostel within a defined site in the Sarpi district. The class will tentatively travel to Milan as well as Bologna. Weekly assignments will be given ahead of desk crits and pin-ups and students will be evaluated based on conceptual clarity, experimental representation, and design execution that bridges the scales of urban design, architecture, and interiors. We strongly encourage the act of making and building physical models as a design methodology.

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, and futuring).

This year, student teams will develop a semester-long project on the topic of Sustainable Textile Ecologies. The projects will be informed through an initial textile ethnography intended to immerse students in a wide range of contemporary questions surrounding the textile industry to generate meaningful and empathetic design-engineering projects. Student teams will then spend most of the semester developing design-engineering projects addressing sustainable textile ecologies' global social, technical, and economic challenges and opportunities. Finally, teams will communicate their design-engineering project through a novel experiential media, a fashion parade.

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

Landscape Architecture IV

Near-Future City

Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

This is the fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence. It questions ways in which we can design urban assemblages for the city during moments of deep and rapid transformation. The assemblages are explored as a basic “DNA” of the city in which urban, landscape and ecological elements are intertwined to imagine new ways of habitation for both human and non-human constituencies. 

This is an opportunity to speculate on a ‘Near-Future City’ that considers the city as a thick ground condition, one that describes a set of complex systems characterized by gradients between the static and the dynamic. Students will develop an understanding of the city and how it can adapt to future conditions.

The semester is structured around three phases of work: 01. metabolic flows and material processes, 02. urban assemblages for the near-future city, and 03. deployment and disposition of the assemblages.  The semester will begin by interrogating a particular set of systems at play in the urban environment and identifying key constituencies to be addressed. From here, the development and encoding of an urban assemblage is rigorously explored as an intertwined agglomeration of urban elements. Finally, in the last phase, students negotiate the formation of their assemblages in a sector of Boston.

The work will be guided by workshops, lectures, readings, discussions, and presentations. It will operate as a design laboratory through which different models will be tested and iterated. The work over the semester will culminate into a final exhibition and conversation surrounding the immediate proposals and the directions necessary for the responsible and ethical making of the Near-Future City.

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.

 

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 II

The studio will explore how we might reimagine cemetery landscapes of the future in response to the challenges of the climate crisis, and the clear and present issues of social inequality. These issues are extensively shifting the ways we live, and, at the very least, are the uninvited corollary through which we might imagine new expressions of the cemetery.

As sites of remembrance, cemeteries may be considered as ‘places where memory crystalises and secretes itself as part of an ongoing construction of history’ (Pierre Nora 1989), whilst simultaneously acting as ‘settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience’ (Michael Rothberg 2010). They are spaces that are socially produced and made productive in social practice (Lefebvre 1974), whilst also being highly logistical practical settings created in the absent presence of the body (Ken Warpole).

Just as death is a necessary part of life, cemeteries are sites of contrast, yet it is perhaps through the very preservation of this tension of contradiction that they exist as some of the most enduring landscapes across cultures around the world.

Often perceived as a space ‘apart’ from the city as a consequence of their physical traits and phenomenal characteristics, cemeteries none the less play significant roles within the life of the metropolis as biodiversity hotspots offering ecosystem services in the form of thermal regulation, stormwater management, and carbon absorption. They provide significant social functions such as spaces for people to seek sanctuary, reflection and play, and healthy spaces for individuals to contemplate in the context of a natural landscape.

Cemeteries, capable and perhaps charged to carry multiple meanings, are paradoxical spaces described by Foucault (1967) as ‘heterotopias’, a no place that, nonetheless, is. The studio will be exploring what the urban and social significance of the cemetery of the future could be, and ask what are the forms and cultural expressions the urban cemetery might project? How might the articulation of the material and physical space reinterpret the temporal experience of the cemetery, and how might the increasingly rich cultural diversity of a progressive society be celebrated through ritual and mediated through disparate processes of burial and internment? How might the cemetery critique and address the extensive environmental and social issues that are before us by proposing alternative organisational patterns and expression, a place that celebrates diverse beliefs and rituals, and a space as an important contribution to the city’s natural systems?

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

Affordable and Mixed-Income Housing Development, Finance, and Management

Explores issues relating to the development, financing, and management of housing affordable to very low, low, and moderate income households. Examines community-based development corporations, public housing authorities, housing finance agencies, private developers, and financial intermediaries. Identifies, defines, and analyzes seven general public and private subsidy categories: development cost, financing, operating, rental assistance, tax credit, entitlement, and project-generated cross-income subsidies. Assesses alternative debt and equity funding sources for both rental and for-sale mixed-income housing and addresses how multiple subsidies are aggregated to create an economically feasible development. Reviews other aspects of the affordable housing development process, including assembling and managing the development team, preparing feasibility studies, negotiating site control, gaining community support, securing subsidies, establishing design objectives, coordinating the design and construction process, selecting residents or homeowners, providing supportive services, and managing the completed asset. All students in this course must participate in the Affordable Housing Development Competition (AHDC) sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston and others. As part of this competition, teams of multidisciplinary Boston-area graduate students primarily from Harvard and MIT prepare detailed affordable housing development proposals working with real sponsors on real sites in the Greater Boston area. These AHDC proposals serve as the final project for this course. The course includes lectures, cases, exercises, virtual site visits, guest lectures, and student presentations. No prior real estate development or finance experience is anticipated or required.

Also offered by Harvard Kennedy School as SUP-666

 

This course has an online information session on Thursday, January 19 at 10:30 AM. Please see course canvas site for Zoom link.