2017 Archives

Symbiotic Infrastructure

Aiysha Alsane (MLA I ’19), Danica Liongson (MLA I ’20), Yifan Wang (MLA I ’20)

Symbiotic Infrastructure is a working landscape where people can engage with the water process. This project reacts to the existing model for urban living where the production, treatment, and distribution of water is separate from daily life. The separation is often because of great distance, for the water footprint of cities extends over a large area.

In Boston, the water is collected in the LANDSCAPE of Quabbin Reservoir and travels 65 miles to the CITY, where the PEOPLE use it. The used water is collected and piped out to Deer Island where machines TREAT the water and RETURN it to the water table via a 10-mile outfall tunnel on the seafloor.

Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant only has a lifespan of 75 years. At the end of this, MWRA needs to decide whether to double down on the plant or look at new ways of treating water. This is where symbiotic infrastructure comes in.`

Symbiotic Infrastructure proposes a new model for urban living, where the interaction with water is more direct. Landform, vegetation, and buildings work together to collect, convey, and treat water. On a daily basis, at a human scale, the water infrastructure is revealed.

Living Lighting

Pamela Cabrera (MDes EE ’19), Aurora Jensen (MDes EE ’19), Adam Kratch (MIT) and Peter Osborne (MDes EE ’19)

In this work, our team explores the intersection between biology and technology – specifically within the context of light phenomena. At the current time, there are no scalable and generic platforms for the creation and transportation of bioluminescent light deep into interior spaces. We see this technological gap as an opportunity to develop a system that can seamlessly integrate into existing and new buildings in order to produce natural light during the night time. The goal of this system is to replace the use of artificial lights in interior spaces by extending existing fiber optic daylighting technology to also work during the night. Our proposed system leverages bioluminescent organisms, hydrogel actuated mirrors, fiber optics, and lenses in order to evolve existing tech into a diurnal solution.

8Twist

Kevin Chong (MArch I ’20), Elissavet Pertigkiozoglou (MDes Tech ’18), Carla Saad (MDE ’19), Anne Stack (MArch I ’20)

Taken together, advances in the use of origami and inflatable, multi-material devices offer a new design paradigm for rapidly deployable structures. The critical next step is to bring these techniques up to the architectural scale.

The “8Twist” is a structural, inflatable, and modular system inspired by the origami Kresling pattern. It is designed to be compact and expandable while being efficiently and easily deployable. The module went through a series of interventions in order to progress from a vertical structure into an arching form. “Soft” zones were introduced by slicing the octagonal module at a specific angle, then mirroring it along its axis in order to induce the curvature.

8Twist

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An Island as a Planet

Daniel Berdichevsky (MLA ’18)

“The world is an island”

-Buckminster Fuller

Becomes

“The Island is a Planet”

Vision

This investigation looks at Mount Desert Island as a Planet, constantly reshaping, an endless surface, a place of discovery.

A Geological body that is alive, more than 2.5 billion years old and historically filled with Tectonic shifts, mountain range formations, magmatic intrusions, glaciations, floods and droughts.

This Anatomical inquiry is looking not only at Geological change of this body but also and more importantly, at the changing nature of our understanding of that very change. As seen by Hutton, Playfair, Lyell and Thoreau, the creation and destruction of landscapes and its geological understanding did not came merely from an enclosed laboratory setting but from fieldwork, from looking at the site and from making connections from many fields of knowledge, history, poetry chemistry, economics and so on. Understanding the fact that our own collective knowledge shifts like tectonic plates is also important, such as in the late 18th century Neptunism and Plutonism debate on mineral formation in where, while the first group advocated for its formation by chemical water precipitation for all minerals, the latter proposed magmatic intrusions as it’s source. Eventually this evolved to become our current understanding of geology but does puts in question how our understanding of this continues to change.

Trip & Panorama

Back to Mount Desert Island and fieldwork, a similar notion of looking at the site, it’s geology and many connections was made by the late 19th century surveyors of the USGS as we can see in this maps and analytical drawings by the USGS and then by the Champlain boys in which a set of journals looking at specific conditions of the island took part on the construction of MDI’s knowledge and eventually of acadia as a national park.

As a studio we embarked on a trip to the island, following these steps and looking at the site. Here I focused on collecting geological artifacts, soil samples, stones, images and to look at parts within the geological body that signify the forces which erode and remake its composition.

Interventions

A set of 3 geological observatories, each looking at a different agent of erosion were designed on the site. The first one looking at the Geology by the shore, where a rectangular pool is inserted on a granite head formation shaped by wave action. This makes the visitors feel the force that shaped this by bathing.

The second one looking at the Geology by the Ice where a observation platform shaped as a disk is built on the a granite hillside which has been shaped by the receding of the last glacier thousands of years ago and cracked the ground, This makes the visitors look and walk on the cracks to reach the viewing platform.

The third one looking the Geology by the Man where an abandoned Granite Quarry is drained further excavated to reveal the layers of the ground and then utilizing a crane (like the ones that existed on the site) to bring down visitors to look and experience the deep quarry.

This is a set of collections and dissections of this geological body.

Remesys: Reanimating Emotional System

Saif Haobsh (MDE ’19) and Erin McLean (MDE ’19)

Aging in place requires distinct kinds of tools and provisions for mobility, many of which have ergonomic constraints or implications. For this project, design a prosthetic, broadly considered, that enhances mobility.

We looked specifically at the case of people affected by Bell’s palsy, a temporary unilateral facial paralysis disease that has a high recovery rate within six to nine months. We designed a conceptual subdermal/wearable hybrid device that could reanimate the paralyzed side of a face based on muscle data from the nominal side. Our goal is for this device to be used to enable better emotional communication, as well as physical therapy treatment to prevent muscle degradation.

Remesys_ Reanimating Emotional System

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“286 South” and the Essential Role of Architects

Benjamin Halpern (MArch I ’17)

This project is not about universal housing or good-for-society housing—the types that typically win such awards as the Clifford Wong Prize. This project is about super-luxury housing.

Yet this project is also about “the essential role of architects”—to design with creative agency for housing of any type. And thus, this project should be judged not only by what it does for the specific inhabitant, but also by what it does for the discipline of architecture.

Context

Over the past decade in New York City, aggressive and creative real estate developers have seen a window for profit in very tall, very slender residential buildings that offer spaciousness, exclusivity, amenities, and, above all, spectacular views. This new typology of pencil towers induces in me equal parts amusement, enticement, and distress, as architects have been reduced to brand-name service providers.

We as architects—and I mean critical architects, especially in the academy—have two options: turn our backs to the entire practice, or accept it as a superlative reality of late capitalism and design within it. The challenge is how to recover a sense of criticality when all resistance seems to be futile.

Critique without action is not enough. The tools of design are used to inject an agenda within an industry that has marginalized this essential role of architects.

Select spreads from “286 South” sales book

Agenda

To sell real estate in this new typology, developers are directing their marketing psychology towards a distinct clientele predicated on the views. Owning a condo in the sky is owning that panoramic view of the city, and the materials created by marketing companies claim to offer the entire unobstructed panorama.

Through the design of “286 South,” a multi-family residential tower in lower Manhattan, this project explores the contemporary idea of panorama — split between an easily accessible, static view for sale and an embodied, dynamic form of vision. For the developer, I must glorify the uninterrupted widescreen view. But as an architect, I must redefine the panorama through embodied discovery. Thus I operate like a wolf in sheep’s clothing — it would seem I am designing for views, but my agenda is to design for vision.

Through the design of housing, it is the architect’s duty to elevate the living environment beyond the basic necessities of providing shelter. Working with the unique conditions and contexts afforded by this typology, the design has the potential to affect a more complete sensory experience for the inhabitant. By privileging an embodied practice of vision, this project forms a deep link between the way we see and the way we live. After all, seeing mediates the exchange between us and our surroundings. In these terms, “286 South” expands the possibilities within a contemporary housing type rarely afforded a critical eye.

WE ALL

Francisco Alarcon (MDes ’18), Rudy Weissenberg (MDes ’18), and Carla Ferrer Llorca (MDes ’17)

WE ALL is a public art installation in the Grove, a site at the intersection of North Harvard Street and Western Avenue that serves as an entry point from Cambridge into Allston. It presents a communal open space framed by a segmented, vibrantly colored wall, comprising hundreds of PVC and plexi-glass tubes that illuminate at night to create a lively and dynamic atmosphere. Amarillo-yellow ground paint and a series of benches activate the corner as a gathering space.

"WE ALL" opens in Allston. Photo by Justin Knight.

Kandor Architecture

“Architecture is always the exhibition of a myth,” as a certain critic put it in 1989, and the myth in this case is Kandor—the city that Superman kept shrunken in a jar. Preserved in ethereal suspense, Kandor was obsessively rendered by the sculptor Mike Kelley at the end of his life as colorful casts of glass, resin, plastic, and wax that represented the endless figurations of the mythical city in Kelley’s imagination. Our project relates Kelley’s “Kandors” to an earlier work, “The Educational Complex,” in which Kelley drew and modeled from memory the buildings of every school he had every attended. Just as Superman carried Kandor with him in a jar, so too did Kelley carry a city of educational buildings in his memory—his educational complex. The Kandor narrative was here applied to a specific project situated in Brooklyn: a campus for 2,250 kindergarten through high school students. The buildings were distinct, each representing a comprehensive school program with housing, playing fields, and auditorium, but combine to transform the city into the colorful exhibition of ‘Kandor Architecture.’”

This project was designed collectively by the studio: Esther Mira Bang, Andres Camacho, Chieh Chih Chiang, Feijiao Huo, Haram Hyunjin Kim, Hyojin Kwon, Kai Liao, Shao Lun Gary Lin, Meric Ozgen, Alexander Searle Porter, Noam Saragosti, Cheng Zeng

Client ID : NSyuO-fJxYI4DTUf7zWa-osilclb5E7-qmEzyjuu

Tanuja Mishra (MDes ’17)

In this installation, I have alienated myself from my work and looked at it from the eyes of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The resultant artwork has been developed in collaboration with the algorithm, where I’ve allowed it to generate insights on my work. In turn, I’ve used those insights to further re-interpret the work. My relationship with AI has developed over time, starting from a place of fear and paranoia and growing into an alliance of conditional acceptance, negotiation and occasional empathy.

I’ve chosen four artifacts from my body of work; a photograph taken from a pinhole camera, an abstract ceramic sculpture, a fragment of a process-based sculpture and pieces of electronics and related components from my prototyping tool-kit. The artifacts have been chosen to highlight the inadequacies in the predictive models inbuilt within AI. These discrepancies bring forth a dissonance between what is perceived directly by looking at the artifact versus what is perceived through the mediation of AI.

A fragment of a process-based sculpture

The viewer is instructed to access the installation through the interface of the smartphone. The voice of the algorithm is coupled with animated visual expressions to convey AI’s understanding of the artifact. The visual expression incorporates fragments of a woman’s body to reflect not only my own frame as a woman artist but also the experiences of AI that is learning from an internet replete with images of women’s bodies.