Lines in The Sand: Rethinking Private Property On Barrier Islands
Lines in The Sand: Rethinking Private Property On Barrier Islands
Maggie Tsang (MDes ’19) and Isaac Stein (MLA/MDes ’20)
This research examines the role of private property in transforming the landscape of barrier islands and proposes an alternative land trust as a redistributive approach to preemptive retreat. On barrier islands of the eastern seaboard, vacation homes occupy a majority of the land use, with properties held as financial assets rather than primary residences. With each successive storm as well as with the slow onset of sea level rise and accelerated sediment erosion, taxpayer dollars are disproportionally allocated towards the restabilization and reconstruction of damaged homes and infrastructure.
We argue that the resilience of barrier islands points not to an ecological capacity to withstand system shocks, but rather to the persistence and preservation of capital in the form of private property in predictably volatile environments. Our primary case study takes place on Hatteras Island, NC; more commonly known as the Outer Banks. Here, we test how to incentivize second homeowners to gradually yield ownership along the shoreline. Ultimately, we mobilize a vision for a nonprofit organization whose mission is to phase out development on barrier islands. Drawing from the economic model of a land trust, we offer a platform that informs decision-making around real estate donations based on erosion rates and climate risk. In addition, this project rehearses and speculates on the spatial and environmental effects of this alternative land trust by visualizing the resulting landscape and the process of unbuilding. By designing protocols and procedures that reverse prevailing development logics, this trust seeks to reduce public expenditure on privatized shorelines and ultimately to return the barrier island to its ecological function as a coastal defense line.
A Giant Among Us
A Giant Among Us
Son Vu (MArch I ’21) and Alex Yueyan Li (MArch I AP ’21)
It is hard to get in and out of Somerville, and true public spaces are few and far between. Though several nodes do exist, these piecemeal developments are often solely commercial enterprises. Furthermore, Somerville’s residential identity is tied to triples-deckers dotted among low-slung homogenous areas. Under existing conditions, the kind of dense and unpredictable urban quality—whether it be effects, experiences, or the buildings themselves—cannot be much lived. This project interprets the urban condition as a line strewn with points of interest. Our ‘line’ is quite literally operated on—by stretching, twisting, and rotating, at the building scale. We first began by thinking through ways to mitigate the ground level. We negotiate the understood existing boundaries by stretching elements out to touch on key edges of the site, continuing on the rhythm of existing buildings. Within this thickened at site’s edge- line are shops, restaurants, and cafes; and within the agglomeration of these shops and stalls, lobbies and unit entrances are camouflaged. As the ‘feet’ of our line touch ground, they are spread out enough to make the boundary porous—a dashed line which allows physical and visual connections through this giant.
The line leans in onto itself to create a mountainous form made of residential units. This process of residential self-formation carves out a cavernous space for the various mixing of events, resulting in spaces which may accommodate seasonal, sponsored, or informal activities such as Porchfest or perhaps an evening film projection. These events may be deeply rooted in Somerville’s social tradition, but rather generic ones can also be accommodated for. There are four unit types engendered by the angle of line’s lean. Corresponding units offer a selection of living types and styles that relates to density, vertical circulation, usable floor area, and opacity among neighbors in varying ways. From shallow to steep, the living arrangement shifts from public to private, communal to individual: live-work, artist commune, multi bedroom, and single bedroom. Different housing bars intersect, and housing types overlap, bleeding into each other as shared areas which reimagine collective living: communal cooking, dining, relaxing, creating, working, playing all arise from these bars’ agglomeration. From the outside, the project is a megastructure not unlike super-form; but as the building performs, key elements nurture flexibility above any specific program or use. Perhaps daunting at first glance, the form draws one in—a friendly giant.
Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization
“Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization” is an advanced research- and project-based course initiated by the Art, Design, and the Public Domain (ADPD) MDes concentration in collaboration with IdeasCity, the New Museum’s platform to explore art and culture beyond the walls of the museum.
In this seminar, “exhibit” is defined as the act of presenting an object, performance, or intervention in the public domain to trigger imagination and enact a response.
Situated at the intersection of (critical) theory and (visual) practice, and art, activism, and design, “Exhibit” explores how artistic practice can be critically engaged with its surroundings—built, social, and natural environments—by addressing local, global, and planetary concerns.
Models of cultural representation developed and deployed by institutions, like museums, foundations, or galleries, provide a unique opportunity to accumulate, generate, exchange, and disseminate knowledge over a short period of time. These institutions and their various models of representation, however, are centralized and co-opted by cultural and market forces that limit radical experimentation, inclusion, dialogue, collaboration, exchange, or long-term engagement.
How can artistic practices, activism, and design go beyond the framework of centralized institutions, challenge power, and offer agency to a broader set of actors such as local communities, political movements, and people from other disciplines?
“Exhibit” will examine the relationship between cultural production and resistance through various precedents, referring to movements and projects from the Battle of Seattle, Black Audio Film Collective, Decolonize This Place, Immigrant Movement International, and Occupy, to projects by groups such as Superflex, Critical Art Ensemble, Pink Bloque, Yes Men, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Wavelength Foundation, or the Arctic Cycle.
Through this advanced research seminar, which includes guest lecturers, workshops, and assignments, “Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization” will examine cases of art and design activism, diverse tactics of culture jamming, decentralization, and aesthetic interventions. The course will engage with artists, activists, curators, designers, and representatives of cultural and grassroots organizations to explore diverse modalities and designs of exhibits as catalysts for research and experimentation with public engagement.
Throughout the semester, students will produce curatorial research and design concepts, develop public engagement strategies, and install site-specific projects. Concluding the course, students’ work will be featured at the upcoming IdeasCity program in Singapore in February 2020.
Vere van Gool, Associate Director of IdeasCity at the New Museum and the curator of the upcoming IdeasCity programs in Singapore, will contribute to the course.
Goals of the course:
– Explore the agency of art and design to enact public engagement.
– Expose students to methods, techniques, and positions of representation, intervention, and culture jamming.
– Engage with cultural institutions, museums, foundations, and galleries.
– Gain experience in curatorial practice through collaboration with IdeasCity in Singapore.
Student evaluation is based on the participation in class and the final project.
Note regarding prioritized enrollment: 50% of enrollment is prioritized for second year MDes students who select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery.
Environmentalisms
Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: at the very moment that the idea of “environment” has been placed at the center of our political and cultural debates, the content of the concept is becoming less and less clear. Does it refer to “nature”—or to its very opposite? Or to the “factual” (scientific, technical, bureaucratic) division between nature and some imagined “other?” Is environment merely the residual notion of a so-called natural world that has now been “tamed” or “constructed” by technological systems?
This paradox is particularly evident within the fields of architecture and urbanism, which despite being increasingly saddled with the complex task of imagining more “environmentally sensitive” responses to our intensifying “environmental problems,” are nonetheless often unable to formulate any clear or coherent answers to the simple question that ought to precede any such strategies: What is an environment? . . . and so the term becomes a kind of chimera within the design disciplines, haunting our thought with the specter of emptiness.
This course situates the concept of environment at the historical-philosophical intersection of architecture, technology, and a field of intelligibility comprised of specific kinds of environmental reasoning; ways of thinking that presume or posit a comprehension of the term, but which in fact only comprehend its technical formation and deployment. We will examine a series of themes—milieu, life, totality, regulation, interactivity, immersion, visibility, and management, among others—that will provide a structure for the course. We will move in a loosely chronological manner, at times reaching back to the late 19th century, but generally focusing on the 20th century, during which certain forms of environ-mentalism were—in some cases by necessity, at other times opportunistically—pressed to the forefront of architectural reasoning.
Note:
This course is taught in parallel with Bruno Latour’s upcoming Critical Zones exhibition at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in May 2020, and Latour will join the seminar for a series of workshops in October.
Note regarding prioritized enrollment: 50% of enrollment is prioritized for second year MDes students who select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery.
It Starts with a Seed: Exploring Place-Based Socio-Ecological Care and Alternative Economies in Community Seed Saving Initiatives
It Starts with a Seed: Exploring Place-Based Socio-Ecological Care and Alternative Economies in Community Seed Saving Initiatives
Kathryn Gourley (MUP ’19)
Humans have sowed, saved, and shared seeds for millennia. Maintaining relationships with seeds allows food growers to influence yield, taste, nutrition, as well as adapt to uncertain and changing climatic conditions. However, the practice of saving seed from season to season is now the exception to the rule, seen as an anachronistic practice or merely a hobby, as the last half century has given rise to legal and policy regimes of biotechnology, intellectual property rights, and corporate consolidation which have threatened rights and freedoms to save seeds, and the knowledge of how to do so.
In turn, resistance efforts seeking to get seeds into the hands of the people and protect the ability to grow out and save open-pollinated, heirloom seeds through living conservation practices (in situ conservation) have sprouted up from the global to hyper-local scales. This thesis explores urban community seed saving to unpack and understand the significance of local grassroots efforts to get open-pollinated, heirloom seeds into the hands of the people. Applying the lens of feminist political ecology, which centers the study of care, everyday life, and practices which establish “diverse economies” (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006), this project examines particular trends in the seed sovereignty movement as they play out in North American seed libraries. Specifically, through a multisite case study in the Bay Area, it reads the act of seed saving as a practice of place-based socioecological care and public seed libraries as alternative economies which facilitate the translation of that care to the public sphere by a process of re-commoning. The stories presented here suggest that seed saving and sharing – within and across place-based communities – can stoke transformative imaginations, spur collective action, and nurture hope for dealing with the multiple crises and injustices perpetuated by the industrial agro-food system.
Rain Bridge
Rain Bridge
Aimilios Davlantis Lo (MArch II ’19)
Washington DC is a city, characterized by contradictions: defined by its imposing urban order and the untouched landscape, the carved memories and the malleable present; the city asks for a bridge that expresses the simultaneous condition of rationality and iconicity.
This project entitled, Rain Bridge, is a stress ribbon footbridge on the Potomac River, spanning from the Little Island (south of Roosevelt Island) to the Arlington Memorial Bridge where the new path passes through and under the center bascule of the existing bridge. The new pedestrian bridge terminates with a fan-shaped floating deck, a public space situated at the center of the river.
Inspired by Christo and Jean Claude’s floating piers in Italy, and Jurg Conzett’s punt da Suransuns in Switzerland, the project aims to bring people in close proximity with the water and the landscape. The bridge is a mechanical instrument which amplifies the forces of the river’s current to pull itself taut. It utilizes the double luff tackle mechanism, and it is strung with cables to create a lift that is in constant oscillation. As the daily tides shift and the water discharge fluctuates between seasons, the floating concrete deck, which extends beyond the Arlington Memorial Bridge, offers various functions – from a canoe storage framework to a concert stage structure. The bridge animates the river within the heart of DC’s picturesque landscape, serving as a dynamic contrast to the static monuments of the city, revitalizing the old Memorial Bridge with a tactile counterpoint.
Autonomous Urbanism: Towards a New Transitopia!
Autonomous Urbanism: Towards a New Transitopia!
Evan Shieh (MAUD ’19)
This manifesto envisions a near future (year 2047) in which the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) catalyzes a mobility paradigm shift towards autonomous public transit as a model of regional urban growth in the city of Los Angeles, in order to combat many of the major negative externalities that the private automobile has imparted onto its urban realm: urban sprawl, traffic congestion, environmental unsustainability, and mobility inequality. The manifesto instrumentalizes automation as a revolutionizing force in the NextGen bus transit network of LA, introducing a new range of automated vehicle sizes that plug mobility gaps while simultaneously critiquing current LA transit agencies’ obsession with the expansion of its light rail network. Methodologically, it proposes an alternative top-down AV-incorporated transit planning model that is populated by a bottom-up narrative framework, a graphic novel that envisions this future world through the eyes of 4 distinct Angeleno archetypes as they experience this mobility paradigm shift first-hand. The manifesto offers a radical story that might convince the everyday Angeleno that alternatives to car culture can exist, a set of concrete policies that would enable this potential LA of 2047 to emerge, and finally a set of urban implications and lessons-learned for the design and planning of the city of the future.
While the private car caused public transit to historically decline in the United States, we must now use the automated car to return us back to public transit as a model of urban growth. In envisioning this potential urban future and delineating the design, planning, & policy paths that one might take towards achieving it, this manifesto contends that there is hope in transitioning from the Autopia of today, to a Transitopia of tomorrow.
WILD RICE WATERS: Recovering Practice in the St. Louis River Estuary
WILD RICE WATERS: Recovering Practice in the St. Louis River Estuary
Melody Stein (MLA I ’19) and Emily Hicks (MLA I ’19)
The homeland of the Fond du Lac band of Ojibwe people in the St. Louis River Estuary was once blanketed with wild rice (Zizania palustris). Wild rice is a culturally and spiritually important wild grain that has been hand-harvested from the lakes and rivers of The Great Lakes Region for thousands of years. Today, wild rice harvest remains a treaty protected right for all Ojibwe people in Minnesota. As the estuary lost its wild rice to land dispossession, resource extraction, and industrialization, the people of Duluth have also lost their estuary.
We propose recovering the St. Louis River Estuary through the practice of wild rice harvest. This thesis takes the necessity of access to the lands and waters where wild rice grows as a framework for design and the first step toward recalibrating shattered relationships between people and land.
Rosetta S. Elkin, Faculty Advisor, GSD
John Koepke, External Advisor, UMN
With thanks to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa
Mixed Metaphors: The Poetics of Gravity, Machines, and Empathy
Mixed Metaphors: The Poetics of Gravity, Machines, and Empathy
Morgan Starkey (MArch I ’19)
The joint, that is, the detail, is the place of the meeting of the mental construing and of the actual construction
Marco Frascari, The Tell-Tale Detail
Gravity connects us to inanimate matter – literally – this attraction is the reality of our physics. Perhaps more importantly though, gravity links us figuratively and emotionally as we empathize with the load-bearing members in an assembly because we too are burdened by the same force. Empathy, the connective tissue between the construing of our mind and the construction of matter, permits us to “feel into” the objects in our environment as our bodies themselves become parts in these assemblies. It is the tectonic expression of joints holding together these co-dependent parts in precarious equilibrium that allows for an assembly to be coherently understood as representative of a larger order, idea, or system.
If the joint is the nexus between the mental and physical aspects of Architecture, where tectonic metaphors tell stories about the society that constructed it, these details become analogous to Architecture at large – that is, a mode of human creativity that imbricates the metaphorical, the allegorical, and the imaginary with the physics of reality. This thesis contends that the notion of the “detail” is scaleless, and at its best, a building can be read as a single detail, a simple machine of expressive elaboration of the work done to resist the gravity that wants to destroy it. It makes legible the flow of forces at play in coordination with and choreographed to its program and the ideas it’s tasked to represent as a unified whole.
In late 19th Century New York City, Boss Tweed, the head of the city’s foremost political machine, commissioned the construction of a grand neoclassical courthouse to ornament City Hall park in effort to establish Tammany Hall’s political dominance. During construction, Tweed infamously embezzled hundreds of millions of (2019) dollars and was later convicted in the unfinished courthouse and sent to prison. The central feature of the building, its Beaux Arts dome, was therefore never completed and the building today is capped by a simple glass atrium. This project seeks to “complete” the building, with an inverted dome held precariously in compression by the weight of a hung prisoner detention mass below. The intervention heroically cantilevers over City Hall Park, propped on one corner and tied back with a tension member in another. The tension member’s stay is a massive stereotomic anchor that serves as the grand entrance to the courthouse. At every scale, the building attempts to turn the tectonic into the scenographic, choreographing ostensibly inefficient structural solutions with the complex circulation and programmatic concerns required by the modern courthouse. The building is precariously held in balance through this combination of simple machines and props, where an intentional conflation of sociological and physical weight orients the courthouse’s various users through its constituent parts, each dependent on each other to stand
Urban Ethnographies
Planners’ understanding of social process and cultural values is often woefully inadequate, and their thinking is dominated by a “one-size-fits-all” approach and by excessive attention to the values of an international middle class rather than to local experience. In this course, we will read some urban ethnography inspecting the interactions among local people, planners, anthropologists, architects, and builders in order to think against the grain, especially in cases where disputes over whose heritage is at stake dominate the discourse. We will also examine the role of conflict in shaping urban space and ask whether attempts to smooth it over are necessarily to the benefit of local populations, especially where internal factionalism and political dissent are at stake. Finally, we will also examine the role of urban space in shaping people’s subjectivities and ask what that role tells us about governmental structures and the way they affect ordinary people’s lives.