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.

GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
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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. 

GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
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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.

GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
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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.

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

Second semester core studio explores research and methods in the design of complex urban conditions: sites layered with multiple and uncoordinated interventions that present issues of fragmentation, ecological degradation, and the need for greater diversity of programs. Through several explorations in a public space of significant size and historical importance, this studio will extend the design methodologies of the previous semester (the overlay, the section, the complex edge) to include other concepts and criteria that are fundamental to landscape architecture such as typological continuity and invention, connectivity and accessibility, the relationship between space and social practices, and environmental comfort in the context of climate change. The studio will explore iterative design across scopes and scales, from the physiological body to the metropolitan fabric of the city.