Peanut Farm Casino and Resort

Jonathan Lee (MArch II ’20)

Greetings. Sit back, lay-down, stand up, kneel, curl into a ball, handstand, find a comfortable position. We will be here for awhile. Relax and concentrate. Determine a site, any site, but just be sure that it is significant to you because you’re gonna be stuck with it for the rest of your time here. Got one? Great choice. Now let yourself ingest everything and anything your site has to offer. Be obsessed with your site. Meticulously divulge its history, gaze upon its externalities from afar, let it materialize in your dreams, carry it in your pockets, twirl it in your hands and clutch its texture. Completely entranced, you enter a deep plunge unearthing in an endless pit. Although now thoroughly acquainted with the site, you find yourself lost. You seek to encapsulate its totality in a single satisfying caption but you find each distinct strand uncovered is affixed to an expansive boscage. You also find that your routine approaches are incapable of discerning its sum. Perfectly lost and perplexed, forget all beyond doubt and embrace perplexity. In this moment, to uncover the unknown requires unknown methods. Respire genuinely and stretch to the farthest point. As you begin to formulate your caption, you discover a familiar propelling entrapment. You find your progressions to diminish in unfamiliarity and your caption to intensify in assemblage. You are left with a series of things and inklings. What you have exposed is not that of certainty and the measurable or quantifiable. You have found in uncertainty something of much more value; an inner individual authentic perception.

Site: Dawson Brothers Farm (Hawkinsville, GA)

Program: Vanessa Selbst and Doyle Brunson Casino and Resort

J. Edgar’s Mask

Yifan Wang (MLA I AP ’21)

When the hyperplastic organ of the Federal Bureau of Investigation started to grow outward/northward from the body of Department of Justice, crossing the diagonal Pennsylvania Avenue, our story began. Responding to the iterative reviews from various committees to establish a national profile flanking the procession marching all the way up to Capital Hill, the façade of this brutal building was constructed into an infinite wrap of concrete grating as part of D.C.’s national identity. What has been mysteriously masked behind as well is the titular institutional body of J. Edgar Hoover.

In the proposed future, a reopened D Street is peeled off of the pivotal front of the site along Pennsylvania Avenue, and the triangular residue will be re-sculpted into an exhibiting space. The original complex, from D to E, will be hollowed and lifted to restore the very first ideal of the modernism scheme: to involve and consolidate the public. Detached from its bygone face, the new block is in need of a fresh masking project. Taking advantage of the capacious setbacks designated to the dreary bunker, a new mask will be fabricated around in the geometry of Mickey Mouse’s anatomy (Read about Walt Disney’s link to the F.B.I. and J. Edgar Hoover in the New York Times). Its four elevations are no longer homogeneous, in order to genuinely reestablish the dialogue with its dynamic surroundings. The FBI rumor goes on with this project, and people will recognize the masqueraded character through the exposed concrete grids. But they will definitely be perplexed by the semi-pervious vizard, the camouflaged plaza, and the enigmatic persona beneath the mask.

Architectures of the New Silk Road

Sino-African Infrastructure-led Urbanization – Deficits and Potentials

China’s Belt and Road Initiative can be considered one of the largest and possibly most consequential territorial ventures currently underway on the planet.

Taking this thesis as the point of entry and going beyond pro-or-contra narratives associated with the initiative, the seminar will focus on its direct and indirect effects on socio-spatial constellations on the ground – namely, on the realities of lived space in specific locations affected by transnational cooperation.

In order to limit the investigation, projects along development corridors in Africa will serve as case studies to unravel the mechanisms at work in infrastructure-led urbanization. This world region is of particular interest because China has been active there long before the Belt and Road Initiative was officially announced in 2013 and remains intent on expanding its operations through more public- and private-sector contracts in the future. Though the pacts among Chinese and African actors have put a premium on building highways, bridges, ports, dams, railways, industrial zones as well as energy networks at breakneck speed, their significant influence on settlements has been too often overlooked in on-going debates regarding the initiative’s geo-political and geo-economic ramifications. It is in this respect that the research in this seminar intends to examine the physical and social impact of transnational undertakings as they are being implemented in situ, official rhetoric notwithstanding. 

Three research questions will orient the work: 
(a) What are the operative practices at work in Sino-African development projects? 
(b) What are the short- and long-term effects of the development projects on settlement systems?
(c) How can development protocols be reworked in order to attain more sustainable and equitable habitats?

The objective is to investigate not only the dynamics of Sino-African alliances in terms of what is really at stake and for whom in specific locations, but just as important, to explore feasible ways to make infrastructure-led development – usually perceived as a financial and technical issue alone – a true driver of beneficial economic, social and environmental change for all affected stakeholders.

Course structure: Fridays (lectures with the entire class / synchronous) and Tuesdays (asynchronous and flexible with small groups of students working on particular case studies, papers, and presentation). More will be explained in the syllabus.

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.

Creating Real Estate Ventures: a Legal Perspective

This course will examine, through the lens of the legal documentation involved at each step, how a complex commercial real estate deal is put together, from conception to completion.  We will review the major stages of commercial real estate development including (a) securing control of land, (b) sourcing and raising equity, (c) completing predevelopment steps including agreements for design and construction and obtaining governmental permits, (d) obtaining construction financing, (e) operating the project, and (f) realizing capital returns from refinance and/or sale.  We will also consider steps which may be taken in the legal arena when a deal goes sideways, such as bankruptcy, lease or loan modifications and litigation.   

We will analyze actual negotiated agreements used in each stage, including purchase and sale contracts, joint venture agreements, construction and design contracts, construction loan agreements, tenant leases, and permanent loan documentation. The course will include a mix of lectures, discussion of transaction documents and other course readings, participation in negotiation scenarios and individual exercises, guest appearances by experienced attorneys and real estate professionals involved in major projects in the greater Boston area, and “virtual” site visits to projects recently completed or under construction. 

The goal of the course is to enable students to get deep inside the series of transactions–and their legal documentation– that produce development projects, to understand key business and legal issues embedded in the legal documents and how they are often resolved, and to recognize how to manage legal risk and the risk/reward calculation. There is no prerequisite for taking the course or any need for prior legal experience. 

Lectures and in-class discussions and exercises, which will predominate, will be synchronous.  However, the course will include assignments and mock negotiation exercises in which the students will work in teams on a flexible synchronous basis to be scheduled by the student teams themselves.  Lectures and guest speakers may also be recorded for asynchronous viewing by students who are unable to participate during the scheduled times. 

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.

Hidden Figures: The City, Architecture and the Construction of Race and Gender

What hidden figures do our  buildings and urban environment conceal?  

There exists systematic erasure of the contributions of Women of Color – Queer, Black and Indigenous -in the design field. This course is experimental by nature; it attempts to dismantle White-Supremacy ideology and  the Western canon by not focusing on European, White and European American figures.  The seminar explores critical race and gender theory to provide a framework for understanding society's role and cultural influences to the commissioning of buildings and the planning of cities. It will engage questions of authorship and production as it relates to the construction of our built environment.  It will examine the hidden figures, often excluded from the canon of knowledge.  These significant figures have made meaningful contributions to the built environment in colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Through weekly readings and case studies of queer and mostly non-white architects and planners, the seminar will consider how non-white identities are often erased or excluded, and how those actions have become a contributing factors to the development of urban form.  The seminar will provide a knowledge base for students to become more familiar with past and contemporary contributions from Queer, Black, Indigenous and Women of Color.  The seminar is structured around two scale- that of the building  and the city.   To explore the intersection of design as it relates to the adverse effects of sexism, racism, colonization, and globalization, the seminar will cover four themes:

– The City, Architecture and the Construction of Race and Gender
– Race and Gender in the Colonial Context
– Race and Gender in the Postcolonial Context
– Sexuality and Queering of Spaces and Neighborhoods

By exploring these four themes throughout the semester, we will examine how culture, cities and history can shape a person's right to progress. 

Course structure:

Fixed synchronous  – 1 hour: Lecture (30 minutes), 5 minutes break, Student presentation (25 minutes)
Flexible synchronous – 1 hour: Group discussion on assigned readings (55 minutes, 5 minutes break) 
Flexible synchronous/Asynchronous – 1 hour: Attendance will not be required.  We will use this hour to archive group work through online discussion on Canvas (15 minutes) and break out group work online (40 minutes, 5 minutes break)

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. 

 

Non-Professional Practice

"I've never worked for a living. I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. I hope some day we'll be able to live without being obliged to work." Marcel Duchamp 

The course aims to study unconventional modes of creative practices and their underlying implications.  In a rapidly changing world that is facing unprecedented challenges, the hyperspecialization of the professional can backfire in its rigidity and the implied limitation, while also becoming a powerful tool of discrimination.  We will investigate collectively why it is important to look outside of the current framework of architectural practice, identify new possibilities and establish the role of design itself in this conversation. 

Topics that are brought up to debate with guest lecturers from various fields include the chance of changing times, the importance of production of culture, the permeability of disciplinary boundaries, the role of language and communication, the banality of kickstarting something, the urgency of (mis)use and interpretation, the Hacker and the Expert, the undercommons, the irrelevance of authorship, the beauty of failure and the social being as a practice.  

The class is based on a workshop format, centered on research, analysis and guest lecturers and requires above all your presence and participation in the dialogue.  

Course structure: 

The seminar has two parallel tracks: one conversational and one based on group work. The conversational part will take place every Wednesday between 12-2pm EST and will require your attendance. Weekly guests from various professional fields will share with us the stories of their  own practices, from failures to highs, from philosophical to practical. Students will have to introduce the guest as well as create a poster at the end of the semester that encapsulates the lessons from class. 
The parallel track is based on group work and is to be scheduled in coordination with each group. We will collectively identify issues and interests with regards to practice, articulate them into assignments and investigate them, with the end goal to debunked them and develop a set of tools or language to address them. The workload and ability to reasonable address it will be an integral part of the way we define the assignment.

The main requirement for the class is desire to be there. The seminar is relying on each individual in creating a collective, and assume responsibility in shaping the seminar through participating – by being there and by using your voice. It’s it mandatory to attend the first two seminars in order to stay enrolled.

For further information, please refer to: nonprofessional.org

?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. 

Acoustic Space: A Media Archaeology of Building Types

This is a seminar on the past and present relationship between architecture, information technologies, and mass media. More than ever before, we live in acoustic space. We live constantly plugged-in, travelling in our personal sonic bubbles bounded by headphones and other devices. We listen because we like it, but also to disconnect and avoid other noises. Our times are defined by an unprecedented and simultaneous coexistence of sounds and images disseminated at the speed of light, and yet there is little understanding of the architectural implications of this phenomenon. However, the construction of the media-saturated environments we inhabit began more than 100 years ago, when radio started to populate the ether, when television entered the domestic space, until the present day, when the internet seems to cover every single aspect of our daily lives. This seemingly invisible and immaterial phenomenon has been producing—and has been produced by—new building types throughout the past century, which have been widely overlooked by our discipline.
 
If media technologies such as radio, telephony, television, and the internet presume the construction of “space” without any material implications, this seminar proposes to look closely at select case studies that evidence the consequences of media in built space. We will focus on the intersection of buildings and electronic media technologies, with specific interest in sonicity, aiming to understand the material questions these media-populated spaces raise for the architect. In this context, the seminar will trace the genealogy of Broadcasting Houses, Television Studios, Cinemas, Acoustic Laboratories, Telephone Exchange Buildings, Educational Spaces, and Data Centers, among others.
 
The seminar is a multidisciplinary course, situated at the intersection of the history and theory of architecture, and the history and theory of media. It is open to architecture students, as well as to students enrolled in other programs and intellectual disciplines with interests in media and/or sound studies. Given the virtual learning environment, each session will be structured by both synchronous and a synchronous content. Beyond weekly assigned readings, and pre-recorded lectures by the instructor, each student will prerecord one 20-minute-long presentation on a case study of their choice. We will meet weekly to discuss the presentations and the readings in 90-minute synchronous sessions. In addition, we will be joined by guests in some of the sessions, introducing different perspectives from artists and intellectuals outside of the discipline.
 
Assignments
Participants in the seminar are expected to work throughout the semester on one case study of their choice selected in conversation with the instructor. Students will work on an illustrated paper in which drawings and writing will have equal relevance. In addition, participants in the seminar will submit a 1-minute-long sound or video composition made of found footage or sounds related to their case study. 
 
Grading Rubric
20% Class Presentation / 40% In-class Participation / 40% Final Presentation
 
Course structure
– 45-minute introduction to the topic of the session by the instructor (asynchronous and pre-recorded by instructor).
– 2 or 3 20-minute-long presentations by students on their case studies (asynchronous and pre-recorded).
– 90-minute reading discussion and debate about student presentations (synchronous).

??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. 

Below and Beyond: Imagining the future of underground infrastructure at Harvard Square

This studio aims to propose a near-future scenario for the Brattle Tunnel, a piece of decommissioned train infrastructure located under Harvard Square. As the oldest settlements in the US, Boston and its neighboring towns have various written and unwritten—yet intriguing—stories, centered on the existence of underground structures. Many of these stories remain merely mysterious rumors, including the alleged secret tunnels connecting the harbor and the bars during the Prohibition era. However, the structure underneath Harvard Square, Brattle Tunnel, which has been defunct since the Red Line extension between Harvard Sq. and Alewife began operating, presents infinite possibilities both to itself and the ground above. 

The Boston and Cambridge subway system is the oldest in the US, and its history is fundamentally related to urban growth and the shaping of the cities and their vicinities. Since the subway’s first test run between the Park St. Station and Harvard Sq. in 1910, “commutability” between Cambridge and its neighboring towns has increased, affecting the settlement patterns and housing regulations of the towns. Now, Brattle Tunnel lets us imagine how the future of the abandoned underground infrastructure could guide the near and far futures of the ground above and its adjacency. New imaginaries connecting the urban space of Harvard Square with what lies underneath also offer immense possibilities for the ways in which public space can be expanded across a range of uses and affiliations. 

During the first few weeks of the semester, the studio will examine the Square through multiple lenses. Although individual research will mainly refer to the data on the ground above, you must clearly aim to find the relation between “the below” and “the above.” The purpose of the research phase is eventually to decide where to open up the tunnel and how to connect it to the atmosphere ( both literal and metaphorical) so that the infrastructure can be repurposed to guide the future of the urban fabric. Lectures and workshops with guests, including MBTA engineers and real-estate experts, will help you to make speculative proposals that are also realistic. 

As the semester progresses, you will be urged to consider the role of the underground structure in tackling the impact of climate change. It is crucial to look at the tunnel as an element of a holistic physical context that consists of the web of open spaces, rivers, drainage systems, roads, groundwater, soil, subsoil, and air. 

The genuine charm of the empty tunnel and its spatial implications in relation to the Charles river and other surrounding landscapes will give you an opportunity to reimagine the way in which the public occupies and experiences the tight-knit fabric of Harvard Square. Asynchronous virtual site visits (e.g., walk-through videos and photos) will be prepared by the instructor at the start of the semester, and updated and more targeted versions as per students’ requests will also be provided after the mid-term review. 

This is an intense design studio. Your accumulated composite body of knowledge, not only from the studios but also from other classes and experience outside school, will need to be brought into the design process. The studio must collectively pursue a high level of specificity in its plans and sections.

The instructor will be available at all class times throughout the semester.

The studio is open to students in all GSD degree programs.

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

Quo Vadis, Addis? Manufacturing-led Urbanization in Ethiopia – Empower Design!

The studio ‘Quo Vadis, Addis?’ addresses the question of how to integrate existing manufacturing zones in the textile and garment sector within the socio-spatial fabric of Ethiopia’s capital city Addis Ababa, challenging the predominant tendency to treat these workplaces as monofunctional enclaves isolated from their context. Moreover, while the studio will be oriented toward the definition of design propositions, it will likewise foreground the ‘design’ of processes for empowering design as a platform to initiate socially equitable, environmentally sustainable, and spatially sensible habitats.

With new scrambles for Africa well underway, telltale tensions have arisen concerning which direction Ethiopia might take to resolve its many dilemmas: ethnic conflicts, widespread poverty, youth unemployment, foreign dependency, ecosystem deterioration, and lack of social and physical infrastructure, to mention just a few of the most daring problems facing the country. Ethiopia still finds itself torn between the desire for autonomy and the reality of dependence, between the desire for maintaining cultural identity and the reality of being ever tempted by mainstream values, between the desire for resistance and the tendency toward compliance with directives from abroad. 

Yet for Africa to really be ‘rising’, other more equitable modes of cooperation among all stakeholders must be devised if countries like Ethiopia can truly overcome their dependency syndrome – let alone never-ending debt entrapment, ever-widening disparities between rich and poor, and endlessly-proliferating environmental degradation.

Such tensions are nowhere more evident than in Addis Ababa, which has recently experienced an influx of foreign entities intent on using – if not exploiting – Ethiopia’s young and low-wage labor force to cost-effectively produce goods for the global market in manufacturing facilities on the city’s outskirts. These factories in turn have further accelerated ongoing urbanization processes, yet, unsurprisingly, with little regard for the quality of the urban environment. 

Aware of the situation, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is seeking to identify strategies for empowering his people via alternative, locally-embedded forms of economic development, providing socially stable working conditions in collectively-owned workshop neighborhoods based on local craft and integrated in Addis Ababa’s social and urban fabric. This is the task at hand!

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

DIVIDING BRIDGES & BRIDGING DIVIDES. A studio on infrastructures and their consequences

Cities fail their citizens if they adapt too slowly. The pace of adaptation is, in part, dependent on the capacity of spatial practitioners to reimagine the city and its urbanisation processes. The consequence of such a failure of imagination is either paralysis or perpetuation of outmoded forms of city production. A failure to adapt to new social needs and the perpetuation of the status quo can support the efforts of people who are protecting entrenched privileges. Where inequity and systemic racism are endemic to a society, the city becomes an instrument for the protection and production of privilege.

The studio will focus on the role that infrastructure can play in urbanisation. In the context of limited resources, it is crucial to consider where public funds should be spent and which parts of the urbanisation process cannot be achieved by citizens building the city for themselves. We will study the operation of various infrastructures, from highways to natural systems, from grazing land to legal rights, to understand how these devices can be used to expand the freedoms of citizens.

The site will be two adjacent golf courses in Cape Town. We will explore the appeal by activists that the land can be put to better use; instead of recreation for an elite minority, it could provide better access to the city’s marginalised people. 

Assignments will explore:
– rapid urbanisation and how design professionals can contribute positively to the process
– visualising urban inequities and the infrastructure that supports them
– design interventions for various champions; from a strong government to revolutionary forces

Heinrich Wolff will lead the studio discussions and will be available on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Hours of availability will be negotiated with students depending on their global locations.

Students will be working individually and collaborate on some of the assignments. Students in Architecture, Urban Design, Landscape Architecture and planning are all welcome to participate. The qualities of students’ work will be evaluated by the insights that they bring to the conversations and the strategic consequences of proposed interventions.

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