Novi Sad ? The Agency of the Urban Ensemble: Community ? Action ? City
The main objective in this studio is to critically explore Novi Sad, Serbia, the European Capital of Culture 2021. In Novi Sad, we will research future spatial scenarios for upgrading a series of defunct factory complexes into“civic social districts.” These post-manufacturing districts have been in danger of becoming more victims to rampant commercialization and pressure to sell-out government’s property. Many of the defunct factories date from the time period between the two World Wars. They were nationalized by Socialist Yugoslavia and brought cultural programs to the workers. Today, decades after the collapse of socialism, the factories operate as loose, semi-legal, self-regulated, informal spaces for art and music, pop-up bars, clubs, and government organizations such as youth culture clubs and other administration. The challenge is to explore future civic design for these complexes via visionary urbanism, art, and design culture; finding a balance between government ownership and that of the private or informal sectors. The studio will be held in a lively “research architecture” manner, experimenting with typologies from small to large in synchronic ways.
Affordability Now!
The United States is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. Over the last two decades, rents have risen far faster than renters’ incomes, resulting in record-breaking numbers of families being unable to afford decent homes. The statistics are staggering: according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, in 2016, nearly one-third of all US households paid more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing (for renters, the cost-burdened share is 47 percent). In no US state can a full-time minimum wage worker afford to rent or own a one-bedroom dwelling. Fewer than four affordable and available rental homes exist for every 10 deeply poor renter households nationwide. To put the demand for affordable housing in perspective, consider that a recent development in Brooklyn received over 87,000 applications for 200 affordable units.
Despite apathy at the highest levels of government, this crisis has engendered a wave of activism and experimentation that has brought architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and urban designers together with tenants fearful of displacement, community-based groups organizing against gentrification, and local policymakers across the political spectrum. The resulting coalitions have resulted in some bold new affordable housing initiatives. From policies like universal rent control, to bottom-up initiatives for cooperative developments, community land trusts, and other communal environments that attempt to decommodify land, to architectural experiments with “tiny homes,” modular and prefab construction, and other types of low-cost housing, to a renewed push for municipally-constructed public housing, the present is an exciting time for bold new experiments in affordable housing production.
This interdisciplinary studio, offered in conjunction with Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, invites students from all departments to experiment with these—and many other—new weapons in the affordable housing arsenal. Our site is the Los Angeles region, where the affordability crisis is particularly dire (housing costs in Los Angeles eat up an average of 47 percent of residents’ income—more than any other major US city). After a field trip to the frontlines of Los Angeles’s most prominent affordability battlegrounds, students will work with tenants, community-based organizations, and city officials to imagine how we might creatively deploy cooperative developments, community land trusts, low-cost housing prototypes, and other weapons to help build a more equitable region. As there are a myriad of ways in which architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and urban designers can intervene here, studio projects are expected to be very diverse and range in scale from the individual building to the block to the neighborhood to the region.
Housing & Infrastructure in Yucatán: Beyond the Mayan Train
The Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico has been described as “one big flat slab of limestone gently slanting into the sea.” It is a place where urbanization and environmental preservation have always been in delicate balance due to its particular geological conditions: a medium to low tropical rainforest on water-soluble limestone. An underground water system produces sinkholes called cenotes, despite the lack of major rivers.
In the 1840’s John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, influenced by explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, traveled to the Yucatán Peninsula and documented some of the most important archeological sites in the region. Catherwood’s litographs and Stephen’s book, ‘Incidents of Travel in Yucatán’, were instrumental in sharing with the world the relevance, breadth, and impact of Mayan culture in the region
From Tulum and Bacalar in the east to Celestún and its mangroves to the west, from the archeological site of Calakmul in the middle of the rainforest to Rio Lagartos on the northern coast, and from centuries old cities such as Campeche and Mérida to recent tourist territories such as Cancún and the Mayan Rivera, the Yucatán Peninsula is a territory in constant flux.
In recent months, the new federal government in Mexico announced the construction of the Mayan Train, an ambitious work of infrastructure, which will connect an important number of cities and towns in the region including Campeche, Mérida, Chichén Itzá, Cancún, and Palenque. Highly polemical due to its environmental implications and its lack of clear objectives, the projects seek to address the historical infrastructural shortcomings in the region while also laying the groundwork for networked economic growth and new forms of housing and employment across the territory.
This studio will look at the region in its historical and contemporary shifts and develop more productive, sustainable, and inclusive models for territorial transformation. We will critically engage tools of environmental and hydrological restoration, cultural heritage preservation, housing, as well as infrastructure and tourism, as ways to think about connectivity, form, inhabitation, and development in the Peninsula at large.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Thursday and Friday Bi-Weekly: August 29-30; Sept 12-13; October 10-11, 24,25; November 7-8, 21-22; and for final reviews.
The instructor may arrange for skype sessions between visits.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Social Operative Infrastructure: Sustainable Water Models in Chile
According to the World Bank, countries need to invest 4.5 percent of their GDP in infrastructure to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2030. In order to do that, we need to start thinking about building new infrastructure and transforming the existing one. We must then question the actual operative infrastructure: How could we start recalibrating it to make them operate not solely as functional systems, but as a social and ecological tool for improving people’s quality of life? The scale of the infrastructure in cities is massive, making any change or improvement a profound impact at the metropolitan scale.
The studio seeks to explore operative water infrastructure in Chile as a way to start a discussion about networks beyond monofunctional operation, with the goal of bringing social, environmental, and functional upgrades to the city. The ubiquitous network built under the surface, with hundreds of nodes emerging in different parts of the city, will be the starting point for a contemporary discussion about infrastructure, including its obsolescence and the role it may play in improving people’s lives in the future.
Hundreds of operative sites throughout Santiago, historically isolated or in dispersed urban fabric conditions, are now surrounded by city growth. The infrastructure contained only utilize a small part of the surface, producing negative externalities in the surrounding area and having no positive relation with their context. The studio will work from the city to the site, objects and processes, opening up different approaches and scales of problems and solutions.
Starting from the urban scale of the water network, students will work specifically on one of multiple sites, looking for emergent processes of urban renewal in the most segregated and low-income areas of Santiago de Chile.
The Immeasurable Enclosure
This option studio explores the ability of a single enclosed space to be the spatial expression of that which is immeasurable.
The garden and the room can be considered the fundamental spatial expressions in the constitution of a culture and consequentially many consider them to be the essential spatial constituents of the designed environment. These single-space environments—outdoors, indoors, or in-between—are defined by enclosing and containing only a small part of the world and precisely because of this condition, they have traditionally been perceived as the means for designing coherent singular identities.
Due to their powerful but singular nature, the progression toward social plurality and cultural diversity seems to diminish the relevance of these fundamental spaces. As the inability of a single space to encompass and synthesize complexity becomes apparent, alternative spatial conceptions emerge as expressions and vehicles for multiple sensibilities and identities. Land mosaics, spatial fields, or network societies, just to name a few, have become the new spatial paradigms to accept and encourage plurality and diversity. Arguably, while these paradigms and the values that they represent have enabled the design of rich environments, their expansiveness has also enabled the appearance of multiple urban pockets, each of them behaving as nothing more than echo chambers of narrowly defined values and views.
As an alternative to these expansive spatial paradigms, this studio aims to reframe the discrete space as the mechanism for containing and expressing the world. Due to their confinement, single-space environments are places where one has to invariably acknowledge the other. Therefore, enclosures can contain the multiplicity which by its own sociocultural definition and value is apparently uncontainable. Through this paradoxical condition, these basic enclosures can transcend their fundamental nature to become comprehensive and holistic sociocultural expressions.
Through the design of a single-space environment, this studio proposes reframing the design technique of the enclosure and infusing landscape and architecture’s primordial roots with the ambition of holding the immeasurable. Students in this studio will work individually and each student will be responsible for selecting a physical and cultural context wherein to design an immeasurable enclosure.
Manifestos for Building the Utopia
The continuous ground movements that happen in Mexico City, specifically those that have occurred during the last 40 years, demonstrate the territory’s frailty due to its radical landscape transformation. The basin that originally held a 110,000 hectare lake is now home to the largest urban fabric in Latin America, where water occupies less than 5,000 hectare. The studio will focus on designing with such movements. Just as the Mexicas proved that inhabiting the lake was possible by constructing a utopian city, we believe in the potential of geological incidents as triggers for diverse forms of inhabiting a place.
Our focus will be ground-cracks, products of excessive water extraction, ground subsidence, and earthquakes. We are interested in their effects on the landscape and the urban fabric, and the possibilities they enable when considered as intrinsic elements that will shape the contemporary Mexico City.
Participants will express their positions toward these extreme conditions through a space manifesto. These statements will provide enough critical matter to define a sensitive vision for the site as well as its complex social and economic conditions, which will be expressed through drawings and physical models capable of showing divergent possibilities for inhabiting the current and distorted landscape of southern Mexico City, where memory and landscape come together.
Requirements:
– Modesty and openness when getting to know and understand a distant reality.
– High sensitivity and imagination to reframe the conditions in a specific territory permeated by culture and tradition.
– Compromise and passion to produce high-quality models, drawings, and texts that explain divergent visions of a specific land.
– Inquisitiveness to rethink the opportunities presented by a vulnerable territory.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Thursday and Friday Bi-Weekly: August 29-30; Sept 12-13; October 10-11,17-18,24,25; November 7-8, 21-22; and for final reviews.
The instructors will alternate weeks of instruction and may arrange for skype sessions between visits.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Geographical Reenchantment: Swiss Landscape Interventions between Atmosphere, Function + Experience
In tiny Switzerland, landscape is regarded as a resource that serves lobbies from agriculture and speculation, to infrastructure, ecology, tourism, and recreation, each with a voice of its own except one–the landscape itself. This studio explores the potential of these spaces to develop a strong landscape voice and experience of their own, to imbue them with what Alistair Bonnet refers to as “geographical reenchantment.” It is both a Swiss and global phenomenon. As designers, what means do we have to requalify landscape to express both archaic and contemporary contradictions and beauties?
Based on Studio Vulkan’s winning international competition entry for the Swiss national “Expo 2027,” which activates landscape at a territorial scale, we explore a vertical section from low lakes to high mountains on three sites: the Rhine River Delta, the Rhine Canal, and the River Valley, and archaic alpine peaks at mountain Säntis. We explore texts, reference projects, and artworks, sharpening our ability to perceive, articulate, and translate into concrete projects concepts such as identity of place, atmosphere, experience, contradiction, and the dialogue between the built world outside of us and the inner world of experience. The site visit to Switzerland includes studio work and critiques in our industrial hall in Zurich. We will explore the sites conceptually as well as via concrete issues of resources, uses, conflicts, potentials, poetics, and possible fantastical visions.
Each student will develop landscape interventions that offer a strong contribution to the voice, identity, and experience of the place—interventions that do not compete with the place but rather highlight its potential strengths.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Studio sessions will take place on Wednesdays and Thursdays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Robin Winogrond will be in residence: on August 29, 30; September 3, 4, 11, 12; October 9, 10, 15, 24; November 6, 7, 13, 14; December 4, 5; and for final reviews. Robin may also be available via Skype between visits.
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Adrift and Indeterminate: Designing for Perpetual Migration on Virginia’s Eastern Shore
Virginia’s Eastern Shore, which together with its northern Maryland counterpart forms and protects the massive Chesapeake Bay estuary, is confronting sea level rise at a rate 40 percent faster than the global average. Climate models declare the inevitable: this land mass will be lost. As it washes away, one of the richest ecological sanctuaries on the eastern seaboard will be vastly altered, and fishing and farming communities that have subsisted for centuries will disappear. What can design offer in the face of this calamity?
In addition to losing land to the sea, Northampton and Accomack Counties are losing people in significant proportion. Northampton comprises 795 square miles; currently 75 percent of that is water. The population in 1930 was 18,565; today, it is around 12,000. Accomack County is larger, with 1,310 square miles—65 percent water. Its population was almost 36,000 in 1930; today, it is 32,000. Based on per capita income, these are two of Virginia’s poorest counties.
As the ocean surrounds them with increasingly dramatic force, coastal communities everywhere fear the inevitability of physical retreat. In this studio, we will examine a migratory phenomenon rooted in perpetual adaptation, one that has been in motion for far longer than the recent arc of concern for climate instability. Farmers on the Eastern Shore have always altered their operations, rotated crops, abandoned homes and barns, and turned their backs on a changing shoreline. Those who fish for a living have responded to shifts in estuarine resources due to staggering impacts from pollution, regulatory limitations, changes in boating practices and technological upheavals, market shifts, and more. Adaptation is a way of life—though suddenly, we are aware that the rate of change is not.
How do we design a more urgent climate migration? This studio will pursue adaptive processes, land use strategies, and the design of landscapes and structures that extend the life of a challenged community. Design and impermanence are the watchwords in this pursuit.
Domestic Orbits
Brief: In December 2018, the Mexican Supreme Court recognized the right of domestic workers to be affiliated to social security putting an end to a long history of discrimination and invisibility. Under the present administration, the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS) launched an 18-month pilot program for voluntary affiliation. Once the trial period has passed, affiliation will be mandatory for all domestic workers. What will be the consequences of 2,4 million domestic workers progressively entering the formal economy? What solutions can be devised to organize access to healthcare, labor rights, decent working conditions, and leisure? How can architectural interventions help recognize, reduce, and redistribute the problems faced by domestic workers? In other terms, this studio inquires on the capacity of material spatial practices to realize the provisions made by laws. This studio proposes to visualize and understand how space is articulated according to specific gendered, classist, and racist configurations of the social. Our aim is to provide narratives of Mexico City that foreground the conflicts faced by the workforce onto which domestic labor is unloaded. Each student will be asked to identify the conditions that domestic workers face such as distance and time use, representation and appropriation, safety and wellbeing—among others.
This studio is a continuation of Frida Escobedo’s Domestic Orbits (Gato Negro Ediciones and iii, 2018), a publication in which we studied how the unequal distribution of reproductive labor within the Mexican household was mapped out onto the city. Our perspective was historical —what are the ways in which the housing unit has changed—, as well as spatial —how do relations of power expressed in terms of visibility/invisibility within the household come to articulate questions of access, transportation, and location when we look at the urban scale. Domestic Orbits is a collaborative research led by Frida Escobedo’s studio and the instituto de investigaciones independientes.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Frida Escobedo will be in residence Tuesdays and Wednesdays bi-weekly: August 29 and 30, September 10, 11, October 8,9, 22, 23 and 31, November 1, 5, 6, 19, and 20, and for final reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Reflective Nostalgia: Alternative Futures for Shanghai’s Shikumen Heritage
Nostalgia tends to be taken dismissively or negatively in both architecture and general culture, as Charles Maier aptly states: “Nostalgia is to longing as kitsch is to art.” This studio is based on the premise that nostalgia, rather than being reductive, offers a productive means to engage with issues of heritage, collective memory, displacement, and urban renewal. The studio will explore how reflective nostalgia may offer a new model for adaptive reuse in the context of China, where the erosion of cultural identity and local heritage have come as a consequence of rapid urbanization. Our test case for the studio will be looking specifically at Shanghai and the remnants of its historic housing typology—the shikumen lane houses. The site is located in the heart of Shanghai, encompassing the historic shikumen compound called Zhang Yuan (Zhang Garden) built by a British merchant in the late 1870s and later sold to a private businessman as a private garden. In its prime, the site was the most well-known place for entertainment and urban cultural diversions. Once a glamorous site that boasts of many monumental “firsts” for the city: the first electric lights, choice venue for foreign circuses, the first Western-style wedding, hosting the first public speech by a woman, the first nude painting exhibition in China, etc. Widely regarded as the city’s largest, best preserved compound, it still houses a lively community despite the adjacent encroachment of modern commercial developments. Today, after decades of social and economic changes, much of the compound is dilapidated and many of the residents who are migrant laborers and elderly citizens are struggling at the poverty line.
The project will be the design of a hotel integrated with hybrid programs to be developed by each student. Students will research the hotel typology and make bold propositions for alternative models for the hospitality industry. Students will explore tectonics, materiality, and how to translate concepts into built, tangible form across various scales. The studio is interested in articulating methods and techniques of adapting an existing collection of buildings, interior spaces, and urban voids to create meaningful dialogue between old and new.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Rossana Hu and Lyndon Neri will teach on Tuesdays and Wednesdays: August 29 and 30, September 3 and 4, October 15, 16, 22, 23, 29 and 30, November 19 and 20, and December 3 and 4, and for final reviews.
The instructors will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.