TAR CREEK REMADE

TAR CREEK REMADE: Environmental Legacy, Toxic Terrain and Re-Imagining the Future in the Tri-State Mining Area, Ottawa County, Oklahoma, USA.

TAR CREEK REMADE will explore technologies of toxic land reclamation and their agency in creating environmental and social equity within a critical practice of landscape architectural design and making. The studio site is the Tar Creek Superfund Site- the oldest, largest and most dangerous polluted land impacted by former mining activities in the United States. The intellectual question of the studio concerns – how does a tribal and non-tribal culture express itself through design in environmental form in a time of devastation and recovery?.

The studio will imagine alternative design futures working with the local Quapaw Nation as well as non-tribal communities living on and in the vicinity of Tar Creek as part of the Tri-State Mining Area of North-Eastern Oklahoma, USA. The site area of 40 square miles was formerly characterized as prairie and woodlands prior to mining activities that started in the 1900’s following the discovery of the largest subterranean deposits of lead and zinc in the world. A vast mining operation employing 11,000 workers in 250 mills was established that excluded the tribal communities and ran until the 1960’s when it closed down leaving a devastated landscape of polluted mining waste (chat), tailing ponds, sinkholes and tainted orange-yellow streams and riverways. The study area consists of the remaining principal towns of Quapaw, Commerce and North Miami. Two towns, Picher and Cardin have already been abandoned due to the extent of environmental hazards.

This area is contaminated by the residue of lead mining extraction resulting in an environmental legacy for the residents and the land and waterways of the region. Children under the age of six exhibit highly elevated levels of metals in their bodies causing neurological damage and serious health issues. The land and riparian ecology of the region has been devastated by acid mine drainage, land settlement of former mine shafts creates dangerous subsidence across the terrain affecting buildings, infrastructure and open space, waste ‘mountains’ of mining spoil and airborne lead dust pervade the area.
 
The studio will address how practices of landscape site design and environmental engineering can productively address the social, ecological and environmental realities of this toxic terrain. Class members working in groups and individually, and importantly through local tribal non-profit organizations and a range of experts will give spatial organization and advance detail design proposals for the remediation of, for example – the mining waste mountains and the intense pollution of local riverways including Tar Creek as well as reimagining the critical engineering of land subsidence and future form of the Superfund Site. Class members will be assisted by Rebecca Jim and Early Hately co-founders of Local Environmental Action Demanded, Inc. (LEAD), Quapaw Tribe in Miami, OK The studio is open to students in all GSD degree programs.

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Temporary and Ephemeral Structures [M1]

In light of recent global turbulence generated by a series of crises – environmental, economic, political, social, and medical – architecture is once again challenged with an increased need for flexibility and adaptability. These crises require architecture to nimbly respond to rapid change as its user-communities learn to do the same. Although we tend to think of crises as temporary, many have become chronic issues, requiring a reevaluation of traditional design solutions. Additionally, some building types are nearing obsolescence in the face of an increased desire for the built environment to accurately reflect contemporary understandings of intersectional identities, cultures, and lifestyles. Although such reevaluations have been needed for a long time, recent upheavals have brought them to the forefront of social conscience. Increased attention must be paid to designing strategic and tactically responsive ephemeral structures that work to combat the complex and highly mutable problems that we now face. As our world changes with increased rapidity, it will become necessary to contend with the element of time to create viable responses to large-scale issues. Instead of conceiving of architecture as obstinate and static, is there a way to invent a new model of resilient, flexible, and adaptable structures that can respond to unforeseen needs as they arise?  

Each student will be asked to select a site and program around which to design a flexible temporary structure, with consideration given to the logistics of its assembly and disassembly, materiality, fabrication method, and life cycle including possibilities for coexisting programs and combined usages. In addition to producing architectural solutions to ephemeral problems, the studio will study the effect of the resultant temporary structures on user experience and identity. Inevitably, the notion of lightness in terms of visual and physical weight as well as lessened ecological footprint will become a core advantage of these structures over traditional “slow-build” architecture. These ephemeral structures have the capacity to bridge traditional practice with contemporary innovation to become a new and more equitable hybrid architecture of the future.

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Small institutions

Inspired by Louis Kahn's passionate and enigmatic interest in institutions and their origins, the aim of this studio is to investigate the possibility of a primordial architecture. A search for a “small” but essential architecture able to define the character of an institution. What is substantial? What is really defining a theatre, a library, or a school? We are looking for a new approach that transcends the functionality of pre-established programs and discovers their hidden nature, the invisible condition that characterizes each type of space and institution.

We aim to redefine and rediscover the architecture of the institution, “an organism that carries out a function of public interest” (according to the dictionary), “a world within the world”, “a center around which existential space is organized” (according to Kahn).

The Studio will take place in a specific location in Barcelona:  a small plot between party walls, empty, with an irregular geometry, cohabitating with neighboring buildings that surround and condition it. 
Each student will be assigned one of these possible institutions:

Library – Museum – School – Temple – Town Hall – Market – Theatre – Hospital – Swimming pool – Courthouse

The chosen site is voluntarily small – smaller than could be expected. The lack of space must be a positive condition, forcing us to take radical decisions. Necessary steps to discover the essence of the space: what is a priority, far from inherited or pre-established solutions.

To design the primordial (what really defines the place and the institution) we will need to go back and free ourselves from a part of what we have learned. To re-investigate the genesis of human activities, the sources and origins of what has historically set architecture.

This research requires a critical positioning. A confrontation with the established form, what could be a convention or just a trend. A fight against the status quo to allow us to redefine our values and our priorities, to discover the indispensable that qualifies as architecture.

We propose to deconstruct the great institutions, extracting the insubstantial and unnecessary to find their most elemental definition, their substance.

In the design of a new "small" institution, as in a good poem, it will be necessary to synthesize, reconstruct and retain only the fundamental. To find what awakens the most emotional dimension of architecture. What is necessary and unnecessary. What supports its meaning, its form, and its character. How is it built. What is it made of. How it behaves. It will be a precision exercise: learn to prioritize.

The reduction to the essential does not mean giving up ambition. It is an opportunity to find the most decisive expression of architecture (where nothing is superfluous or missing). A unique architecture that remains convincing over the years. Architecture that transforms inert matter into something vivid and extraordinary.

We will look for architecture that activates these processes from a pragmatic and polyhedral approach. From thermodynamics and interactions with the environment to the structure and tectonics of construction techniques. From space composition to social behaviors. Everything necessary to design and calibrate exceptional spaces. Spaces of inspiration and precision. Pre-institutions (or small primordial institutions) that redefine our priorities. A soft but radical plot twist, that perhaps can show us a different understanding of the architectural space.

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Fudo/Umwelt. Devising Transformative Environments in Japan

This studio is concerned with speculations (formal, material, social, cultural) on the future relations between architecture (design), people, and the city. 

The site of the project and the focus of investigation will be the city of Tokyo. The studio will build on the frameworks established in the seminar, “The Project and the Territory: Japan Story,” and specifically its articulation of the concepts of risk, disruption and continuity as one way of imagining the architectural and urban potentials of a specific urban area. Familiarity with Tokyo or the seminar is not a prerequisite for participation in the studio, though the capacity to imagine difference is. The diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, experiences, and interests is also welcomed. In order to facilitate ideas and knowledge of the conditions, the studio will host a series of conversations between the members of the studio and with scholars and practitioners including, Atelier Bow-Wow, Inui Kumiko, Ito Toyo, and Ota Kayoko among others.

The premise of the studio is to question the replication of standard mixed-use formulas for the production of the city. Participants will be asked to devise alternative scenarios involving people and places—physical spaces and social relations both generic and specific- for the construction of transformative environments (umwelten). What role can design play in this process? How will it impact the life of the people?

The city is the site of repetitive and ever-changing scenarios and events, the accumulation of which constitutes the everyday. But how can the architecture and the landscape of the city- its buildings, streets, parks, and public spaces—make room for change, for the unexpected, and the temporal within the sites of permanence? How can the interrelations between the physical, social, and virtual worlds affect the way we not only experience our environments but also conceive and construct them in response to our contemporary conditions? How should the architecture and landscape of Tokyo and by analogy of other cities be different?

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BRIDGE WHERE YOU ARE: The Anamorphic Double

Uniquely called upon to embody purpose and beauty, bridges tend to be judged (more than any civic construction save the tower) on their singular object quality.  The resolution of physics becomes synonymous with image, superimposing internal logic, with external symbolic forces of collective memory.  This simultaneous condition, of rationality and iconicity, offers a double figuration: on the one hand, the instrumentalist objective to unify urban discontinuities, while on the other, the obligation to express the city’s identity.  Amplifying this duality, bridges are both linear and volumetric, behaving as anisotropic entities, understood quite differently from the sequence of approach, than from a raking view.  This bias could be said to lend itself to feeling (sensual experience) along the longitudinal axis, and knowing (shape recognition) in the transverse view. Or in Loos-ian terms, one might say that the interior experience is in the realm of culture, while the exterior countenance belongs to civilization.  The result is a kind of urban anamorphosis in which a bridge might be seen through a lens of competing intrinsic and extrinsic figurations, offering fertile ground to reconcile formal / structural considerations with cultural / civic inquiry.

The studio will test the resolution of these competing interests within the context of each student’s current geographic location: 10 students x 10 sites x 10 bridges.  Students will explore the creative tension and formal possibilities inherent in the resolution of the physics and aesthetics of the bridge typology, while confronting the idiosyncratic geometries and programmatic specificities inherent in their locale.  The studio will commence with an individual site assessment, capitalizing on each student’s remote working condition and opportunity for an immersive approach to site, context and climate.   This will be followed by collaborative precedent and preliminary spanning tests,  culminating in individual site-specific proposals.    

At a time of political and social discord, the studio will leverage the potency of civic force and the metaphor of connecting, through productive dialogues between the public realm (the haptic sphere of the individual vs the civic needs of the collective), tectonic assembly (dialogue between structure and skin, object and landscape), and iconic value (the intrinsically derived prosaic vs the extrinsically imposed poetic).  

The studio will meet according to the GSD’s option studio schedule. The studio will also hold occasional workshops with structural engineers, possibly meeting at irregular times TBD.

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Midtown, Midrise, Mid-door

The studio will consider three recent and significant shifts in the design of collective housing in London: the viability and desirability of working from home; the emphasis on low carbon construction; and the requirements for energy efficient dwellings. Our response will be framed by three interrelated themes at their respective operative scales. The first, Midtown, addresses the changing nature of workspace and their related amenities brought about by the pandemic. As work and home increasingly become a single space, this compels us to rethink the concept of the 15-min city to perhaps a 5-min city. It points to the challenge of how we integrate workspaces in, or close to dwelling spaces, alongside third spaces – urban resources and amenities – that bridge and support the other two. 

The second, Midrise deals with the potential for carbon neutral construction offered by cross laminated timber structures. The most effective scale for timber construction is in the midrise, between six to twelve storeys, and the structural spans afforded by the modularity of rooms. As CLT structures are often concealed by another external cladding material, making them mute to the tectonics of the city, we will explore the possibility of cultivating an architectural grammar of timber construction that is more conspicuous in its urban context, whilst maintaining the need for weather protection. 

Mid-door, the third theme, challenges the 'fabric first approach' of Passivhaus in housing design. This static temperature, airtight approach often produces thick and solid facades and leaves housing typologies unexamined. We will instead adopt an adaptive comfort approach and explore the potential of using in-between spaces – mid-doors – as environmental buffers that mediate different micro-climatic zones. Mid-doors, as spaces to dwell in rather than merely to pass through, allows us to conceive of work, common spaces, and landscape as rooms in their own right. In this way, housing and workspace typologies can evolve meaningfully in response to climate change and the shift in how we live and work while contributing to a new conception of Midtown.   

We will be working on a live site, at the centre of Hackney Wick, London. Located just west of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and part of the London Legacy Development Corporation masterplan zone. A formally industrial area on the edge of the Lea Valley, Hackney Wick has historically suffered from isolation and lies in one of London’s most socially deprived boroughs.The design task is to create a new mixed use neighbourhood centre here, comprising affordable housing, workspaces, artist studios and communal amenities.

Ian Lowrie, Associate at Serie Architects, will join the studio as Teaching Associate. We will be working with Dr. Wolfgang Kessling, a physicist, climate engineer and director of Transsolar on the principles of Adaptive Comfort. Peter Maxwell (Director of Design), Hannah Lambert (Design Principal,) of London Legacy Development Corporation, and Paul Karakusevic (Partner) of Karakusevic Carson will be our guide and critic as we approach the complex and challenging task of transforming Hackney Wick.

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Intuition and the Machine

This studio combines the experience of a multi-year design research agenda with the fresh outlook of a collaborative design experiment.  The purpose of the experiment is to examine, through projects, the role intuition –as well as rules and protocols– plays in design.  The difference between intuitive and machinic  is not as clear-cut as doing something ‘manually’ versus doing it ‘with the computer’. There are manual moves that are machinic in spirit, just as there are intuitive deployments of algorithmic design, which the designer cannot explain.

The studio offers an open environment where students can chose a given site, brief, and context, and develop a proposal with the approach of their choice, the only requirement being a willingness to ‘play a game’, i.e. to approach the problem with a game-like rigor that will eventually enable comparisons between outcomes.

What does a willingness to ‘play a game’ actually mean? Participants will have two options: they can either learn & use a wide array of bespoke computational design strategies introduced by the instructor, or they can approach the design independently.  The decision to proceed ‘mechanically’ versus ‘intuitively’ will be up to each individual and should take into account a particular combination of site, brief, and context, carefully curated by the instructor to fit either approach–and enable meaningful comparisons between projects. 

There will be five sites/briefs/contexts to choose from, variously located in New York, Montreal, Oslo/Helsinki and Reading UK. All these sites have a key thing in common: over the past 12 years they have hosted international design competitions for small, medium, or large cultural facilities linked to contemporary art (museums, foundations, galleries, art centers). Each site will therefore come with a real-world brief to adhere to. Art spaces is the core brief of this studio, and participants will have access to related research from previous years. The sites are small, medium or extra-large. From Tabula Rasa to historic preservation orders, they are subject to varying degrees of pressure from immediate context.

Participants will gain access to a substantial technical and conceptual resources. Relevant research from previous studios (2013, 2015, and 2020) in the following related key areas will be shared on a need-to-use basis: art spaces, industrial (pre) fabrication, urban sedimentation , and, of course, computational morphogenetics. 

Participants interested primarily in the machinic approach may opt to concurrently enroll in the instructor’s elective lecture course VIS-2227 Writing Form. 

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The American Brick in Arcadia

‘The architect is a bricklayer who has studied Latin.’ – Adolf Loos
‘Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together.’ – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
‘Even a brick wants to be something.’ – Louis Kahn

The studio will investigate typological variations of the campus building type that utilizes the brick as its primary tectonic and material expression through the design of a new Multicultural Center on the Rice University campus in Houston. 

The Arcadian model of the American campus, which began with the University of Virginia as the archetype, is being consistently challenged today. As the growth of cities encroaches upon the once remote campuses, along with the advancement in pedagogical approaches that promote active engagements with the city, the evolution of the isolated island campus as an ideal model for the city needs to be reexamined.

The Academic Building, the building block of the Arcadian campus, faces a similar challenge of fitting into an evolving master plan while accommodating for changing needs to foster collaboration and community. 

Brick has been the building block for the construction of the American campus and a symbol of its tradition and permanence since the University of Virginia. Rather than perpetuating the use of the brick simply as a unifying stylistic armature for a campus’ identity, the studio will study and investigate the role that brick plays as a contemporary building material. Research will aim to reconsider archetypal brick detailing techniques and relations between forms and taxonomies, techniques and construction, and structural opportunities: serving as resources for the brick as both a tectonic and cladding material for the design of Multicultural Center.

Originally planned in 1910 by Ralph Adams Cram in the lineage of the University of Virginia, the Rice University campus is known for its architecture, landscape and planning. Architecturally, the campus has maintained an overall coherence over different periods of expansion, while at the same time being a palimpsest of different architectural styles and convictions. Organized around various quads, the Arcadian campus is a microcosm of Houston, an urban island situated within a city of fragments without zoning.

The 100,000 sq. ft. Multicultural Center will serve as a center for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for high-level strategic leadership around diversity initiatives and will house multiple diversity offices across the campus. 

Research projects will be conducted in teams while the design projects will be developed individually.  The research on typology and tectonics will be treated as collective knowledge and used as an inventory for individual projects. We will commence with precedent studies and building design at the outset of the semester-long studio. There will be invited guest presentations over the course of the semester, and participation in weekly studio meetings, readings, and collective documentation will be the basis of evaluation. All deliverables in the studio will be drawing-based with no specific additional production costs anticipated to complete the course. Any special accommodations for Zoom sessions can be made prior to specific studio meetings.

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Collaborative Design Engineering Studio II

The spring studio builds upon theoretical and technical concepts already introduced in the MDE program with the emphasis on creative and critical thinking, observational and experimentation-based evaluation, and context-aware communication strategies essential for complex problem-solving activities.

The human mind excels in rapidly identifying patterns and establishing associations that simplify the complexity of the world and habituating thinking processes to minimize its own energy use. The term “creative and critical thinking” points to the need to consciously overcome our innate limitations to design solutions that are impactful and responsible.

In this studio, students are challenged to identify, propose, prototype, test, evaluate, and refine problems and solutions around the studio theme of waste.  The semester is organized around two projects that invite students to consider two achievement-oriented scenarios: a call for developing a research funding application and a call for a design award entry. We introduce this framework to heighten student awareness in connecting their own ideas to the “real-world” objectives, by facilitating the notion of objectivity, empathic analysis, multifaceted evaluation and professional communication. While the first project will be highly structured, the second will be self-guided full-blown design project in preparation for the IDEP.

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.