Washington Common – Martin Luther King, Jr., Upended [M1]
While the 1902 Senate Park Commission set forth a vision for the National Mall and the Monumental Core that is known to the world, its far greater ambition projected a metropolitan scheme of parks connected by the region’s riverine and estuarine hydrology—the “Washington Common”—a networked system of waterfront passages, scenery, and recreation sites that could build a healthy public realm in a deeply segregated city. Today Washington retains lasting tensions between the Federal City and the District of Columbia. Both are threatened by two fundamental crises: climate risk and white domination of a 49% Black population. This studio asks designers to devise protections for the nation’s most significant memorial landscape so it can survive extreme heat and a projected ten feet of sea level rise. But the real opportunity in this dual crisis is to reorient the landscape and its memorials towards the underserved and unjustly excluded. This requires us to reexamine the symbols, meanings, and experiences of a national narrative that is fundamentally unstable and must evolve through concerted and imaginative design action.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, placed on axis between the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials in 2011, is regularly inundated with storm surges today. The memorial must be reinforced against flooding or moved entirely due to subsidence of the Tidal Basin sea wall and the impending rise of storm surges and daily tides in the Potomac.
Students will undertake two approaches: one that reinforces the existing memorial site to prevent flooding, and a proposed relocation strategy. From these, students will choose one course of action and develop potent argumentation and highly detailed design expression.
This is an intensive design studio. Students with design backgrounds in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design are welcomed. Students must be proficient with modeling software and design animation. Physical models will be optional. Studio generally meets on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, 2 PM. Alternate times for studio meetings will also be arranged.
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Washington Common, An Unmonumental Core for Our Capital City [M2]
Congress shall make no law…prohibiting…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
—First Constitutional Amendment, 1789, rev. 1992
The second module of this studio builds on the context of the first, but is an independent effort pursuing social and ecological issues on the same foundation of knowledge and site history. This time, we will reimagine a public realm that challenges the traditional narrative of symbolic monumentality and makes a new spatial reading of the Core in support of free assembly. This is our nation’s most important site of dissent and witness.
While the 1902 Senate Park Commission set forth a vision for the National Mall and the Monumental Core that is familiar to all, the commission’s far greater ambition was to project a metropolitan scheme of parks—the “Washington Common”—that could build a healthy public realm and help reform a deeply segregated city. Today Washington retains lasting tensions between the Federal City and the citizens of the District of Columbia. Both are seriously threatened by dire climate risk and deeply implicit and explicit bias.
Again, with an underlying revisionist conceptual framework already established, students will design a spatial and topographic hinge between the National Mall and the Tidal Basin, which will protect the Mall from flooding, will become the designated ‘first amendment zone’ for the Mall, and will finally realize the vision for a Washington Common. Should we retreat to the original shoreline? Or, welcome inundation and ecological change and remain in place? In either case, we will shape a space that allows protest and dissent to thrive at the intersection of the many hallowed and sometimes contested markers of our social and cultural history: the memorials to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, King, and Mason; the war memorials; the Mall itself; Capitol Hill; and the White House—which has been traditionally thought to be the people’s house, though today we are not quite sure. There is no intersection like this one.
Students with design backgrounds in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design are welcomed.
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Spaces of Isolation – Bridges between home and health care [M1]
Modular units are an emerging and strategic development in triage within public health systems. The new reality brought about by the current pandemic exposed weak points in hospitals and other health care facilities – as well as highlighted the need for constant change and adaptability. The latest studies have indicated significant correlations between novel viruses and humanity's careless attitude toward nature, which is primarily manifested in deforestation and other means of land conversion. Such practices are driving exotic species out of their evolutionary niches and into man-made environment, where they interact and breed new strains of disease. Moreover, climate change poses a real and serious threat regarding the spread of future pandemics. Changing weather conditions and rising temperatures are exacerbating the already dire situation with the thawing permafrost soils, which have been increasingly releasing viruses and bacteria we as a species have not encountered for centuries.
During the seven-week course, we will carefully examine as many possibilities for the development of future isolation schemes as possible. The current pandemic has opened a broader discussion of the need to establish a working system of temporary isolation units for patients who do not need to be admitted to intensive care units. Home isolation is a valuable and valid alternative to a hospital setting, requires behavioral change, but no additional investment in infrastructure. The downside is that patients often find home isolation psychologically taxing, not least because of their awareness of putting their loved ones at risk of contracting the disease. We plan to address this issue by proposing modular units of several different scales, applicable to different housing models (nursing homes, apartment buildings, town houses, etc.). The principal feature of proposed isolation units is quick assembly and transportation between locations. Health care providers all over the world have repeatedly lamented the lack of effective communication and poor economic use of equipment. This situation requires novel micro-scale systems of help that could potentially ensure a higher quality of handling the pandemic in terms of the global community.
IMAGE: Haus-Rucker-Co, Günter Zamp Kelp, Laurids Ortner, Manfred Ortner, Klaus Pinter, Oasis no. 7, 1972
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After Property [M1]
“Is love a synonym for abolition?” Saidiya Hartman
How can we disentangle architecture from property? How can we use this moment of global lockdown and protests to disassemble the exploitative regimes of speculation and displacement that anchor the built environment? In other words, where do we go from here? This studio aims to identify temporal slippages and spatial practices that carve out moments of liberation from the limits of property. Studio participants will develop a collective intelligence that experiments with ways of seeing beyond the privatized enclosure, building a world that is not tethered to ownership. This work will be done by recognizing, drawing, and modeling ordinary spatial practices that operate against the hegemony of real estate—systems that value people over property—in order to develop a dynamic archive of spatio-temporal constructs. Through radical reinterpretations of historical and contemporary interventions where the everyday struggle begins to approach the surreal—or even, the sublime—we aim to liberate architecture from its inherent commitment to borderization. We will celebrate undervalued spatial practices that actively dismantle the cartesian frame of racial capitalism, as a gathering of performances committed to imagining a different world, because the status-quo is untenable. After Property reframes architecture in solidarity with contemporary movements of Black liberation, decoloniality, and mutuality, working against the ruthless policing, dispossession, and displacement of marginalized communities.
Structure:
Participants will work in pairs after the first week.
Site:
Participants will select and work with one ‘as found’ image: an emblematic image of the contemporary regime of property.
Samples:
Participants will gather ‘as found’ images of spatial practices working against the limits of property to the collective catalog of the studio.
After Property:
The strategies gathered from the samples will inform the imagination of a world after property.
Disciplines:
Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture. The studio will require extensive modeling and drawing using Rhinoceros 3D and the Adobe Creative Suite.
Availability:
Instructor will be available for all studio sessions (Tuesdays and Thursdays 2 – 6PM) and office hours (Wednesdays 10AM – 12PM).
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Can Parkitecture Heal? A Green New Deal Superstudio [M1]
This studio proposes to translate and spatialize the core goals of the Green New Deal into a new park architecture for Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), the most visited national park in the United States and a UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site.
Often referred to as “America’s best idea,” the U.S. national parks are sites of exemplary ecology and beauty, as well as emotional and physical healing. While these places and their beneficial qualities are intended to be accessible to everyone, the parks continue to struggle with inclusivity and their histories of racism, including displacement of Native peoples and segregation. Today a renewed movement is underway to address these issues and make all visitors feel safe and welcome across race, gender, class, and ability. We will examine this unfolding evolution at GSMNP through researching its history and analyzing its architecture, which includes historic buildings, rustic “parkitecture,” and a modern Brutalist observation tower. The program for the studio will be a base that facilitates and expands the use of the park for everyone and builds on its capacity for healing that is so needed today.
In 1930s America, the economic struggles of the Great Depression combined with environmental devastation to forests and crop land due to logging and mining, bringing suffering to seemingly every aspect of life. The federal government sought to address these intertwined challenges with New Deal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which provided jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources and the construction of public works projects. One of the largest federal work and land restoration programs was carried out in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a heavily forested portion of the Appalachian Mountains that straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. Here, the New Deal’s economic recovery policies were made visible in the park’s forests, infrastructure, and architecture, providing enduring legacies. In the spirit of that massive federal program, the proposed Green New Deal (2019) sets out to ensure a healthy future for the U.S. by enacting the core goals of decarbonization, jobs, and justice. This studio asks if and how critical and creative design work and construction concepts can help the park evolve to facilitate these contemporary priorities, making it a place that fosters inclusivity and equality in addition to ecology, recreation, and tourism.
The course is offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and is open to Architecture and Landscape Architecture students who will work in pairs of their own selection. A specific design and/or research assignment will be given each week, the result of which will advance the design toward the final project. Grading will be based on quality of work and participation.
Our option studio course will be affiliated with the Green New Deal Superstudio that will take place around the country from Fall 2020 to Spring 2021, culminating in an exhibition and summit in Fall 2021.
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House of Our Time [M1]
We live in a time in which previously-social activities such as teaching, learning, and working have been confined to the privacy of the home. This housebound state was generated by a pandemic which has exposed severe systemic inequity and structural racism in our country. As such, the current moment presents an opportunity to question the status quo and known paradigm, and to reflect on the meaning, ideology, and iconic architectural presence of the House. “House” can mean many different things: a single family residence, a collective housing building, or a space for a particular communal purpose such as arts, worship, culture, or learning.
Although this country and its populace have radically changed since its founding, the archetype of the American House is still based on a model that was born in colonial times. This archetype, then, carries with it the white supremacist legacy of colonialism. We must rethink the “House of our Time” as a more inclusive model that represents the diverse identities of this country, particularly those of African Americans. This studio proposes a new house prototype and tests it through six themes: Typology, Program, Materiality and Technique, Place and Location, Sociopolitical Meaning and African American Identity.
We will work with a team of African Americans of diverse backgrounds including artists, designers, real estate agents, and architects who will participate in weekly discussions concerning these six themes. Students are asked to work in a sequential and cumulative manner throughout the seven weeks of the course with the themes as guiding principles for design discovery. Each Tuesday there will be a presentation by the instructor followed by a discussion with team members and student presentations. On Thursdays, we will have a desk crits with the instructor and some of the team members.
Through the theme of the House, we will explore alternatives to our capital economy and the issues of labor associated with the domestic environment, including the role of gender. We will develop techniques of presentation, model making, and fabrication that align with this new model of the House.
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An American Perspective [M1]
This is the third studio of American Architecture. After studios contemplating the plan and the section respectively, this time we will focus on the perspective. Since the beginning of this series our aim was to investigate the simple (drawing) tools of architecture: plans, sections, details, perspectives… These tools are all we have to make the project, it’s our ‘toolbox’. Once put in relation with the American landscape – its size, its scale and finally, its own myth making – it enables us to make images through oscillation, images of American Architecture.
American Architecture is a fiction that can be described only obliquely. Thus, the studios have had the tendency to be sharp on drawings (tools) but ambiguous on intentions. Probably this iteration will not be different, as we ultimately wish for the projects to be precise yet evocative, pragmatic yet utopian. The last two semesters we worked with the students on the Allston campus development, an important site for the immediate (physical) future of Harvard. We wondered how an idea of American plan and section, respectively, could create a dense but contemporary urban educational environment. Each of the proposed projects proudly took a position that in some way could only be fully understood within the collection of all projects. If the first studio was imagining all buildings flat, and the second everything multiplied, here in its third incarnation we are confronted with an impasse: does our current virtual condition force us to think campus in a radically different way? This semester we embrace our own current placelessness and we radically rethink the Harvard infrastructure along the model of the American Academy elsewhere. America is only seen from elsewhere and experienced within the confines of a collective living and studying complex. As a contemporary incarnation of Noah’s ark, we will design satellites of excellence in different places in the world, populated by students, as a global archipelago of the Harvard campus. Partly an image, partly an object, partly Narkomfin, partly American corporate campus, pragmatic and utopian, deeply individual and disturbingly communal, a concept: an American Perspective.
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Aemulatio
Aemulatio.
The Renaissance period brings the idea of aemulatio, expressing the challenge to creatively imitate famous examples instead of inventing new themes. Imitation was the basic rule, an attitude which covered most of the arts, finding expression in different ways: translatio (translate), imitatio (creative editing) or aemulatio (surpass). Every architectural example, classic or contemporary, could be copied as it was considered to be an honor when others varied in one’s work. In accomplishing this, an architect had to know the conventions (rules, regulations) of different architectural expressions, tools, and elements. During this studio, we will work along this principle of aemulatio.
The Italian church Sant Carlo Alla Quattro Fontane was built between 1634–1677 in Rome, expressing an exciting ambiguity by containign two completely detached narratives: the exterior fully anticipates to the context, while the interior contains a clear and autonomous geometry – being mute from any disturbance of the demanding urban exterior.
Geometry.
The internal structure, carried by the notion of a collective space for the inhabitants, will find expression in a clear and complete geometry, becoming the backbone for the ordering of the building. This universe, this utmost specific space builds collectivity by expressing a typical characteristic of its inhabitants: anything, as long as it enforces the collective and the inhabitants are likely to share this.
Monumentality.
Could monumentality be a tool to obtain an equilibrium between being responsive to a context and simultaneously obtain a level of autonomy? Despite the plurality of interpretations, we will explore this in a non-political, neutral manner: mainly as an architectural mask towards the city, towards the public and the civic. Monumentality builds on conventions and the strategy of scaling and exaggeration proportions for obtaining urban figuration.
Weaving.
The original discourse on tectonics, as was fiercely debated by the German architects Karl Böttiger and Gottfried Semper, has led to two opposite approaches in the treatment of the facades and the role of the construction. Böttiger pursued massivity, with a loadbearing vocabulary as a result, while Semper alluded to lightness, referring to the expression of hanging textile instead. The latter seems to fit this era, as the current building industry is one of assemblage: this makes it relevant to explore the possibilities for developing a vocabulary of new coherences.
Threefold Presence.
During this studio we will work on contemporary architecture. Along the three themes as mentioned above, the ambition is to create a project which activates a “threefold presence”: it articulates a dealing with the presence of the past, the presence of the present and the presence of the future in one singular moment. We will explore this idea by means of architecture. The studio will be layed out in three parts: starting with the development of a clear geometric diagram and spatial narrative for the interior. Subsequently, the diagram will be confronted with the context: how to act in public? Finally, the formal aspects will be charged with a material layer. A catalog of generic plot-typologies will be provided for, to be found in various locations, for the participants to bring this further and propose a specific plot.
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Form As Knowledge – What Can a School of Architecture Be?
The studio “Form As Knowledge – What Can Be A School Of Architecture?“ is a follower to last year’s studio, “Places Of Knowledges”, that started to survey the architecture of knowledge. This year, we shall explore the relationship between form and content through the case study of designs of architecture schools. We shall take advantage of the diverse pedagogies to which GSD students have been exposed to during their respective curriculums, thanks to the diversity of their backgrounds before joining the school, to share discussions about architecture pedagogy. Beyond this, we shall study, during the first weeks of the semester, a series of famous schools of architecture buildings to try and understand whether their form is related to the specific pedagogy they are implementing. This initial research will help establish a common culture for the whole studio. Each case study will be described, producing, in the end, an online document combining texts and drawings. Parallel to these buildings studies, we will also investigate some of the most famous architectural pedagogies that have developed throughout history.
In a second stage, each student will have to design a school of architecture. To improve the specificity of those projects and to stress the link between form and content, each of those schools will be related to another academic institution dedicated to research within its own walls. Six different research institutions will be considered, orientating the schools’ pedagogies respectively towards studying the relationship of architecture with agriculture, the city, climate change, construction engineering, representation, and theory. Each of those six specific schools will be studied by two students and will exist through two different projects. At the beginning of the studio, a series of lectures will be given, by instructor and guests, about the relationship of architecture with those different topics.
By studying relationship between form and content, the studio will explore the assumption of a building’s ability to represent, in a way or another, its content. On a deeper level, we shall try to understand in which way the specific requirements of each school pedagogy can offer design opportunities, i.e. we shall give form to knowledge and try to understand how space and knowledge can be related.
Due to the studio’s position halfway between theory and form, it is required that all participating students have an architecture background to be admitted. Beyond this, it is highly recommended – though not mandatory – that students also attend the seminar "Marvelous Architecture – The Hallucination Of Reason", given by Éric Lapierre during Fall semester.
The final rendering will consist in a full project presented with a quite limited, but very specific, set of documents, ranging from conventional plans/sections, to perspective views and texts, the whole thing thus developing into a narrative suitable for online sharing.
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Dual-Use: The function of a 21st century urban residential block
The studio is concerned with politics that is latent in architecture- which is carried out through making aesthetic decisions regarding everyday spaces- as it can have profound consequences on people’s lives. This semester, we will explore the subject of housing combined with working from home.
The coronavirus pandemic has fast-forwarded a scenario previously thought impossible: billions of people have adapted to working at home. Not commuting has increased their personal time. But many have encountered distractions and become conscious of social isolation and inequality: not all work can be accommodated in the minimum space standards or configurations of the modern apartment.
Although the long-term impact of Covid-19 on the environment is unclear, working from home has contributed to the lowest carbon emissions recorded in years. But its immediate effect on our home and work environments raises the following question: can the architecture of a residential block provide a supportive live-work environment for diverse households – professional workers, the curtain-maker, the child-minder, the artist, as well as those on a low income that need to supplement their earnings with home-based work?
If inhabitants are able to carry out their home-based work openly, the residential block can foster social capital, and even reset the gendered division of labour: reversing the repercussions of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City plan which continues to characterise contemporary cities. In doing so, it could generate a radically different urban model, one with enlivened neighbourhoods and local economies.
Our site is located in Paris. Each student will be asked to design a large-scale residential block with a variety of live-work configurations and private outdoor spaces. We will benefit from the research of two previous housing studios examining flexibility vs. spatial diversity through the lens of the Georges-Eugène Haussmann block system and Jean Renaudie’s architecture respectively. A history of architecture combining dwellings and workplaces will be included in our investigation. We will also take virtual trips into homes of people engaged in various types of work to discuss the relationship between their domestic and work spaces.
Yotam Ben Hur, MARCH II with distinction, who participated in the Fall 2017 housing studio, and was TA to the Fall 2019 housing studio, and has worked with Farshid Moussavi at FMA, will join this studio as a Teaching Associate. The studio will meet for group pin-ups and presentations by guest speakers every Tuesday and individual crits every Thursday 9-11am and 2-6pm ET.
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