Climate Justice

Recent discourse around climate change—including debates about the Anthropocene, Green New Deal legislation, the plight of climate refugees, the dire warnings of the IPCC 1.5°C report, to name a few—increasingly make evident that climate change is much more than a technological problem of carbon mitigation. Taking recent geological and climatic changes as symptoms of deeper structural challenges, this class will address climate change as fundamentally a problem of social and environmental justice. The class will therefore combine study of theories of justice, inequality, and structural violence with a deep dive into climate science, policy, and international diplomacy. In our search for climate justice, the class will trace various forms of climate activism within the history of environmental movements, explore non-Western forms of knowledge as key critiques and logics of action, and evaluate concrete suggestions for radical reform. We will discuss how climate justice as a framework of concern is both universal and specific, and we will critically engage ideas of justice at different scales, from the local to the global, with careful attention to context. We will ultimately ask what new kinds of practices, knowledges, and collaborations are necessary to build more just and responsible relationships between people and the nonhuman world, and with each other.  

Pre- and Post-

Pre- and Post– is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods in digital design, with a focus on the processes of translation between digital media and artifacts. Beyond an exploration of novel form and its reading, this course is a critical inquiry into how digital tools can extend beyond visualization and fabrication to change the way we view architectural projects from the past, present, and future.
 
Today, digital representation and fabrication methods are primarily used in the production of new projects, rarely finding application in the analysis of historical precedents. Restriction of contemporary tools almost exclusively to contemporary architecture limits the knowledge these methods can help us glean from projects built before the digital era. By analyzing pre-digital precedents through a post-digital lens, we can begin to reconceptualize these precedents and situate the new tools within architectural history at large.
 
Within this context, the course focuses on digital image as a speculative medium and its epistemic and communicational implications. Beyond typical end-process output used in everyday practice, this research conceives digital image as instruments for conceiving and perceiving architecture. The course is organized into three sequential areas of inquiry and each explores new possibilities of feedback between image and architecture, revolving around processes of design and representation.
 
 In the first phase, each student researches architectural precedents, considering how new digital tools could allow us to reconsider the project’s design and representation. We will reconstruct analyzed information in the form of digital data, drawing, and imagery.
 
During the second phase, each student develops a critical stance towards the precedent’s forms and suggests a radical modification/manipulation of it. The information from the first phase will be sourced and re-assembled into three-dimensional architectural form-making through a series of methodologies introduced in the course. This inquiry speculates on new form-generating processes by deploying images as a generative instrument. The reciprocal processes of manipulation between image and formal artifacts investigate the latent design opportunities embedded in each one with a focus on the capacities and limitations of select computational processes. 
 
In the third phase, we speculate on the capacity of digital technologies to assign new or alternative readings to form. Through a series of imaging, processing, and rendering techniques, this phase explores how time-based modes of two-dimensional representation can activate and manipulate three-dimensional form. This process will speculate new possibilities for perceiving and conceiving architecture, challenging established conventions of representation. 

This framework allows the conception of a variable architecture, capable of representing not only static forms but the very conditions of formalization and the embodiment of dynamic variables. In this series of design exercises, the course explores how new processes of manipulation—namely, techniques in digital design and representation—can facilitate new ways of thinking about architecture, both pre-digital and post-digital.

Course Format – Offered as weekly three-hour sessions of lectures, discussions, and technical workshops, the course will be broken down into two classes. Typically, the course will meet synchronously on Friday, while content for the Wednesday session will be available for asynchronous viewing. Instructor-led workshops will include a rigorous introduction to Rhino/ Grasshopper (pre-modeling tools) for analyzing and form-finding and Processing (post-modeling tools) for the advanced representation of projects.

 

 

Prerequisites – None.

?Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez. 

Freakish Grounds: An Urban Botanical Collection for a Hotter LA

Karissa Campos (MLA I AP ’20), Hannah Chako (MLA I ’20), and Zoë Holland (MLA I ’20)

“Freakish Grounds” is a botanical collection for a hotter LA. It is not a conventional urban green space or a tabula rasa on which we will superimpose a design object. Its unity is not derived from a master plan, but from a method of preparing the ground. The new SMO park does not adhere to the formulas and funding structures that have dotted Los Angeles’s urban fabric with patches of delusive green. The southern California heat produced leisureland, but the old paradigm must go the way of Santa Monica’s elderly palms. Aridity and urban heat demand a landscape that is as tactical and savvy as the desert ecosystem. SMO park will demonstrate how Santa Monica can live well with less.

SMO park is a place where Los Angeles abandons the bucolic aspirations of the past, embraces the freakish reality of the present, and the prepares for the urban ecology of the future. The cosmopolitan urban landscape is presented as an outcome of technological advancement in dialogue with natural process. Here, Angelinos encounter the hyper-artificial environment stripped bare. In this park, contradictions are not resolved, but emphasized. Cloistered native remnants are invaded. Here, ornamental species facilitate ecological process, native species are displayed as botanical specimens, and volunteer plants of many origins are welcomed as guests. The urban park of the future must offer an alternative to the narrative of loss. It cannot placate the public with a stage set of a lost landscape, or one that never existed. It must embrace the identity of the urban desert, assembled ad hoc.

Vitrines for Living

Stephanie Lloyd (MArch I ’22) and Diandra Rendradjaja (MArch I ’22)

Contemporary housing practices promote density by means of enormity and uniformity. As an economic model, unit sizes and unit types have been standardized, predicated on outdated conventions of family units that create a clear distinction between us, our stuff, and our space. With the pursuit of maximizing leasable square footage, little attention is typically paid to the quality of the interior condition, and instead, the interiors have become increasingly agnostic, despite the fact that our lives are now, more than ever, defined by the stuff that we collect. Our tendencies for hoarding, accumulating, collecting, and curating are met with an architectural refusal to engage; there is no architectural compromise in the state of contemporary housing and living.

Instead, we are interested in the granular, interior, and intimate qualities of collective living, and how these atomized components might ultimately affect the urban condition. By questioning the criteria for selecting units in the context of contemporary housing practices, this project proposes the reconsideration of conventional unit sizes and unit types, and proposes that living might take place among, within, and around vitrines. Unit types and unit sizes are no longer defined by the conventions of a family unit. Rather, the size and character of a resident’s possessions define the number of vitrines required to satisfy the needs of domestic collectivity. Unit types are not described by bed count. Units are defined, instead, by vitrine count.

Vitrines are the granular components that house objects and programs for domestic living. Comprised of steel frames, glass, and modulated concrete blocks, the vitrines are at once architecture and a ready-made furniture. Acknowledging that contemporary residents might travel light, bringing with them only the collections that enable domestic living, the vitrines become an interior infrastructure that delineates space, curates possessions, and produces by-products of collectivity. By taking seriously the variation in contemporary collections of residents in the Jamaica Plain and Roxbury neighborhoods, specific vitrine types have emerged in order to compartmentalize the variations of domestic living. These vitrines—top-down, in the round, platform, and elevational—anticipate and choreograph unique spatial relationships to one’s collections.

While the project appears at first to be both enormous and uniform, the bottom-up deployment of granular infrastructural components produces by-products of collectivity at both an intimate and urban scale. This new infrastructure challenges both the identity and economic motivations of contemporary housing by proposing a system for the curation of collectivity—vitrines for living.

Embracing Dichotomy

Xijia Zhang (MLA I AP ’20), Shunfan Zheng (MAUD ’20), and Sungchan Kim (MArch II ’22)

In China’s countryside, agricultural production is a critical part of a villager’s cultural identity, defining the activities of everyday life. However, this custom is often ignored in the redevelopment of the countryside, and even sometimes transformed to increase productivity. Rather than taking this totalitarian stance, we propose a framework that practices everyday life as a catalyst to revitalize the rural society.

Taishan’s cultural identity could be understood by two dominant, yet very different, agricultural landscapes (traditional rice farming and eel farms). By utilizing these two landscapes as main drivers, the project seeks to calibrate the primary agricultural industries and redistribute its growth towards secondary industries and tertiary tourism within the next 20 years.

In the first phase, the framework suggests a hybridized landscape which is a combination of rice paddies and fish farms. According to the approximation of water resources in different sites, the new hybridized landscape will be different per site by its ratio of water and farmland. This new form of agriculture will operate as an economic driver that provides jobs to villagers and facilitates the village to attract new inhabitants. In the next phase, due to this initial economic growth, the villages would transform to meet the needs for expansion. Some villages would create more housing, while others will need to construct factories that transform agricultural production into commercial products. The project suggests two architectural interventions, both reinterpreted from traditional courtyard houses, to accommodate change and preserve traditional buildings.

In sum, “Embracing Dichotomy“ does not promote temporary development. Instead, by understanding and appreciating everyday life, it suggests a sustainable vision for the countryside that extends into both the past and future.

Constructing Heterogeneity

Contemporary buildings are inherently heterogeneous; more often than not they are assemblages of different materials, programs, and subjects. Although homogenous finish layers construct an image of purity, anyone that has looked closely at a contemporary wall section can attest to its many parallel technical layers. Similarly, the easy partitioning of space, or the siloing of functions, obscures – and often confounds – the potential intermingling of the building’s heterogeneous uses and subjects. The twin tendencies within contemporary architecture towards both a functional and aesthetic purism subverts the potency of difference as the basis of architectural production. 

While elaborations of both formal and programmatic heterogeneity – by Venturi and Koolhaas, respectively – are now well established, material heterogeneity is less theorized. Building codes, specification systems, the division of labor, materials science, and structural theories and pedagogies, are bodies of knowledge that privilege and reinforce the classification of material systems into discrete categories. We think of wood, concrete, steel, or masonry buildings, for example. While there are advantages to understanding each material system in isolation, there is an alternative methodology that considers materials in strategic combination. Reinforced concrete is but one example of a powerful composite system that has become commonplace; yet there are many other underexplored combinations that bring together apparently oppositional materials and elements. Going further, a framework based in heterogeneity may be seen as a means to address the multiple pressures on contemporary buildings, and the need for new forms of structural, social, or environmental performance. 

This seminar will look closely at theories and methods of heterogeneity through four lenses – representational, material, formal, and social – to expose and expand upon their architectural potential. Combining discussions on episodes of heterogeneity within architectural history with experimental design work, the aim of the seminar will be to develop new frameworks for constructing difference in a contemporary architectural context.

Method of Evaluation: Course work includes weekly readings, participation in seminar discussions and presentations, and a creative project.

Prerequisites: None

Course structure: This seminar will meet via Zoom two hours per week for synchronous presentations, workshops, and discussions. One hour per week will be reserved for flexible meetings and asynchronous content.

?Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez. 

Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment

The aim of the class is to learn how to depict and express the presence and appearance of people in natural and built environments.

This class objective will be achieved through three projects:

• First: focusing on people presence in natural environment
• Second: on people populating urban environment
• Third: on one or two people in the foreground

Each of the assigned projects will be realized in a different, specifically selected technique:

• The first project will use a technique called a Subtractive Tone.
• The second will use a technique of a Multiple Lines/Marks.
• The third one will use a technique called Using Projected Images for Gesture.
   

Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture

Current tendencies in the discipline suggest a split between two opposing architectural projects: the easy project versus the difficult project[1].  Primarily related to architecture’s form, this positioning of the divide might also be used to identify recent developments in representation: Cheap and fast one-point perspectives with minimal material changes as opposed to laborious photo-realistic renderings oozing tactile interiors. Compounded by the hourly “swipe,” up/down and left/right, or how the architectural image is posted, pinned, shared, and liked moments after it is created, places a further immediacy on the making of representation and naming an agenda. Rather than question the easy over the difficult, might we readjust our focus towards the conceptualization of representation first, as a way of conceiving of architecture? This seminar engages the following thought-polemic: “Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture.” 

The aim of this course is to develop techniques and methodologies around a series of representational experiments. All content will be framed by contemporary issues in representation, not a historical overview, and will include directed studies on materiality, color, digital tooling, animations, scale figures, and media. Formatted into a list of six curated references, with the majority of sources located in art practice and popular culture, each weekly lecture will attempt to construct a theory on representation.  

Over the course of the semester, participants will conduct biweekly exercises, culminating in the delivery of a twenty minute lecture to the class around your own theory on representation, potentially setting up a future architectural project for oneself.  Part lecture, part performance, and part production, “Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture” is a search for original representational agendas. 

[1] Somol, R.E. "Green Dots 101." Hunch 11 (2007): 28-37 

FRINGE CITIES: The legacies and future of renewal in the small American city

Across the nation, small, post-industrial cities today occupy a critical boundary between our polarized metropolitan hubs and vast rural landscapes. These are the Fringe Cities. Fringe Cities exemplify a latent national crisis of failed urban infrastructure, bearing visible scars of radical mid-century transformation, followed by dramatic neglect. Between 1949-1974, the federal government invested billions in urban development through a series of programs known as “urban renewal.” While packaged through housing initiatives, the programs’ effect instead functioned to reinforce segregation, carving highways through downtowns and destroying older neighborhoods. When urban renewal ended in 1975, market forces gained exclusive control over how and where development could occur, leaving many of these once over-invested locales to fend for themselves. And yet, in our recent presidential election, these same zipcodes played dramatic, outsized importance as battlegrounds. Similarly, in our new pandemic rush to the exurbs, those market forces may be finally arriving, making these urban geographies more central to our American dilemma than the ‘dying city’ narrative of the last decades may have previously imagined.  

The spatial and design fields too are shaped by this last great public investment in infrastructure—whose aftermath drove the disciplinary divergence of architecture and urban planning that we see today. As designers of the built world, we have often been blamed for these disastrous effects on cities. Are there lessons in understanding the motives of the past? Are there strategies that proved successful we have overlooked? Which mistakes will we repeat in the next great federal investment in infrastructure? 

This studio will endeavour to broaden and deepen our collective understanding of Fringe Cities by approaching their urban forms as tangible, material tapestries of social and cultural values at critical moments of development, and as powerful drivers of political frustration today. We will set out in search of an ethical design practice in which our buildings and public spaces provide inclusive environments that enable shared prosperity. We will design urban networks that are shaped by and function in service of community needs.

The semester will be structured around three assignments. In the first two weeks, we will explore local implementation of the urban renewal playbook. Through research, mapping, and drawing, students will identify how three cities pursued public funds, solicited design and planning expertise, and executed projects within their context and region. Students will next investigate one city in detail, imaging its narratives from urban renewal to today and locating key activist-based models of community design practice that have shaped its history and present. Finally, students’ will pilot a design at an urban scale that anticipates future evolutions and pressures. 

Michael Murphy, Executive Director and Co-founder of MASS Design Group, will lead the studio with lectures by colleagues at MASS Design who have spearheaded the Fringe City Design Lab in Poughkeepsie, New York and whose exhibit at the Center For Architecture in Fall 2019 and forthcoming publication will provide foundational data. Guest Lectures by Brent Ryan, Lizabeth Cohen, Iwan Baan, and others will shape the semester’s investigation. 

Notes on irregular schedule: This studio has an irregular schedule. The studio will meet on Mondays from 11 AM-3 PM, and on Thursdays from 2-6 PM.

GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Option Studio Presentations
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions

SAO PAULO REACTION: TAMANDUATEÍ RIVER MOUTH

The city of São Paulo grew dramatically during the 20th century. However, the transformation of the small village into the largest South American metropolis in less than 100 years contributed to blur the relationship of its residents with the surrounding geography.

The studio proposes a reflection on the urban structure of the city, which sits on a site that once featured watercourses and small hills; and contrast it with the current situation, in which water is seldom present in everyday life, often playing a background role and almost never coming to the fore.

We will direct our gaze towards the Tamanduateí River, the historic watercourse where the city first emerged. Infrastructural works have changed the course of the river and narrowed its valley, creating paved areas, turning its margins into heavy traffic corridors, polluting its waters, causing constant flooding, killing the vegetation.

In view of those reflections, we propose WATER SQUARES, a renewed acknowledgment of the geography around the city, a new relationship with urban water resources, an understanding of the available socio-spatial means, and a new, environmentally responsible type of organization.

In order to interpret this place carefully and recognize that the city needs another urban-natural pact, we have called upon the writer Ailton Krenak, who recalls the importance of "gently treading the earth", of making the city more porous, more permeable, and of once again paying attention to the streams, the clouds, the birds, the trees.

Goals
– To study the role of urban water resources in the central area of São Paulo, the surroundings of the Tamanduateí River and its relationship with the metropolis at different scales: metropolitan, neighborhood, location
– To produce a graphic synthesis of the reflections around water, growth and the structuring of the city
– To develop an urban project for a specific sector along the river

Assessment
The assessment will be process-based and the work will be carried out in pairs. Classes will be organized as Collective Instruction sessions and there will be presentations in every meeting. The course lectures will be prepared to provide support to the projects and to introduce information about São Paulo. Intermediate pin-ups submissions will be organized throughout the semester and there will be a final presentation.

GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Option Studio Presentations
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions