Urban Grids: Open form for City Design-2

Framework:

Within a larger research scope on “Revisiting the urban grids in the XXI century”, this seminar will focus on the investigation of recent urbanistic projects which use the grid and its multiple variations as their main structural device for the construction of the city. The ultimate objective of the course is to develop new understanding of the way we are approaching the design of the city by means of “grids and networks”

This semester the seminar will focus on the forms of blocks with exploring the diversity of urban block types and  researching the important aspects of block-design, which include: 1) dimensions and scales; 2) parcellation and its relationship to the regularity of land division and the subsequent subdivision or aggregation; 3) the evolution of compositional strategies and formation logics, and the relation between the compositions and the densities the block system is able to accommodate; grid composition is a useful metric as it indicates the relative efficiency of different grid systems, considering the space required to render services and provide mobility across a set extent of private land subdivision; 4) the continuity or fragmentation of the facades of the urban blocks, as well as the sectional design of blocks with multilayered considerations; 5) patterns of built form vs open space or communal space; and 6) how the forms of buildings response to the general form of the block.

Research Topics:

The research seminar will specifically focus on the following topics:

Course Format and Method:

Even though a few introductory readings will be handed out at the beginning of the course, the seminar will explore the topics primarily through the construction of analytical and operative drawings.

The seminar is open to all students in GSD. Note that a high level of graphic skills is required.  Students will work individually and in groups of two.

Limited Enrollment: Number of students is limited to 24.

Notice: ***Please note that the material circulated during the seminar is for use within the seminar only.

The Fifth Plan

In this seminar we will consider the evolution of the floor plan across five iterations: proto-modern, modern, post-modern, sequel-modern, and, most importantly, the present. We will begin with a simple hypothesis about the present, namely that there is a new plan afoot. It has been making its way into architecture for several years, announcing its arrival via the paroxysms that come with a long gestation. Its terms are not those of the suck-the-air-out gangly hollowness of proto-modern experiments in iron and steel (as seen in train stations, department stores, and exhibition halls), nor the give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death plan of modernism (universal, free), nor the we-used-to-do-it-like-this-plus-je-ne-sais-quoi plan of post-modernism (neo-historical, juxtaposing), nor the plan-non-chalant of recent reinvigorations of modernist architecture (data-driven, a-formal). Given it descends from these four earlier paradigms of plan thinking, I’ve provisionally labeled this new plan the “fifth plan.”

As surely as it descends from these precedents, the fifth plan is decidedly not like its predecessors. Our understanding of plans (and of architecture) depends on our ability to distill the characteristics of plan-based organizations, characteristics that the fifth plan incessantly meddles with: open or defined, perimeter or interior, figure or system, history or future, homogeneous or varied. This new plan confounds classification because it conflates spatial temperaments. It slips into and out of categorical restraints as needed. It signals neither a return to nor a rejection of previous plan models and, most importantly, can’t be singularly aligned or contrasted with its antecedents. 

A few clarifications might be useful. First, “plan” here refers to the term’s basic definition in architecture, namely the horizontal organization that modulates degrees of enclosure, program organizations, circulation systems, optical dispositions, formal geometries, and hierarchies. Second, the plan is taken to be a primary part of architecture’s makeup, which is to say the plan is deeply wound into both the momentum of architecture’s disciplinary history and the transformation of architecture as we face the future. The plan structures architecture’s formal systems, economies, social constellations, and material constructs. It is the discipline’s constitution: equal parts social contract, technical diagram, spreadsheet, and aesthetic code.  What changes from plan-era to plan-era are the hierarchies among parts and the ways in parts deemed important are related to one another, invariably producing constantly changing definitions of what we think of as wholes in architecture.

Where can this new plan be found? In its nascent state, various strains of the fifth plan can be found in a range of contemporary practices including Mansilla & Tunon, Michael Maltzan, Sou Fujimoto, Barkow Leibinger, Johnston Marklee, Toyo Ito, SANAA, as well as a host of other practices. In fact, none of these firms lays claim to this new plan type, and none of them can be said to deploy it consistently. Further complicating things, individual examples can be found in unexpected authors such as SOM (the Burr Elementary School) or Gintautas Natkevicius (a Lithuanian architect whose Birstonas House is relevant). Nonetheless, collectively an increasingly forceful exhibition of new plan thinking is being produced by these practices and others. The fifth plan’s presence might be found in a single building, in a part of a building, or across a string of projects produced by a particular practice. And yet it appears evermore ubiquitously in architecture: across scales of work, types of programs, geographies, practices, and even economies and social worlds. 

 

Acoustic Space: A media archaeology of building types

We live in acoustic space. We live constantly plugged-in, travelling in our personal sonic bubbles defined by headphones and other devices. We listen because we like it, but also to disconnect and avoid other noises. Our times are defined by an unprecedented and simultaneous coexistence of sounds and images disseminated at the speed of light, and yet there is little understanding of the architectural implications of this phenomena. However, the construction of the media-populated environments that we inhabit is at least 100 years old and initiated when radio began to populate the ether, when television entered the domestic space, and now when the internet seems to cover every single aspect of our daily lives. This seemingly invisible and immaterial phenomenon has been producing—and has been produced by—new building types for over a century which have been widely overlooked by our discipline.
 
The seminar will focus on the intersection of buildings and electronic media technologies, with specific interest in sonicity, aiming to understand the material dimension of the media-populated spaces that we inhabit today. If media technologies such as radio, telephony, television, and the internet presume the construction of “space” without any material implication, the seminar proposes to look at the widely overlooked and highly material aspect of this phenomenon. In this context, the seminar will trace the genealogy of Broadcasting Houses, Television Studios, Cinemas, Acoustic Laboratories, Telephone Exchange Buildings and Educational Spaces, among others.

The seminar is a multidisciplinary course intersecting the history and theory of architecture with media history and theory. It is dedicated to architecture students and to other students enrolled in programs and intellectual disciplines with interests in media and/or sound studies. The seminar will be structured along thematic readings each week. In addition to reading discussions from diverse fields and disciplines, each student will lead a 30-minute discussion based on the presentation of a built case study.

Assignment:
The syllabus of the course proposes a list of buildings from which students will select a research case study. Participants in the seminar are expected to work throughout the semester on one case study and submit the following material at the end of the term: An exterior model of their case study; one model photograph of an interior space of their building; a 1-minute long sound or video composition made out of found footage or sounds; and a 1000-word research paper. 

Grading Rubric:
20% Class Presentation
40% In-class Participation
40% Final Presentation

Thinking Through Soil

Urbanization is always a process of soil formation. Every material process that shapes the construction of the urban environment passes through the soil at some point. In Thinking Through Soil, we will use ‘soil’ as an interpretive category to guide us through the political consequences, design epistemology, and material contingency of the urban environment. In particular, this seminar will take a close look at the Mexico City-Mezquital Valley system. The soils in the Mezquital Valley have been irrigated with untreated wastewater for longer than any other soil in the world, and are locked in a cycle of reciprocal presupposition with the desiccated soils of Mexico City’s rapidly subsiding lake-bed. As the world’s largest experiment in wastewater agriculture, the successes and limitations of this system are of deep significance to a warming world, and provide a concrete framework for testing the possibility of designing the relation between cities and the soil they produce.

The seminar will consist of two parts. In the first part we will examine the history and theory of urban soil, paying particular attention to the limitations and blind spots of the natural historical categories we have inherited and through which the category of soil has emerged. In the second part, we will use the Mexico City-Mezquital Valley system to rethink these natural historical categories, and test new design proposals for the architecture of post-natural soil. 

Style Worry or #FOMO

Reyner Banham once described the proliferation of styles after a waning epoch as “style worry,” an anxiety where the architect must decide how to go about choosing one out of the many. After digital architecture (90s-00s) and along with the influence of social media, the proliferation of post-digital styles has resulted in a different type of angst, characterized by a fear of missing out, propelling architects and their followers towards an eclectic and omnivorous diet of design methods. Nowadays, digital networks of production and distribution incentivize a culture of inclusiveness rather than discrimination, where producer and audience become one.

The core questions of the seminar prioritize architectural history and theory’s instrumental value, underscoring its direct role in motivating design innovation. The readings offer wide-ranging architectural thought, cultivating rancorous debate, contradictory presumptions, and generative hybrids. Some of these camps (Po-Mo 2.0, OOO, neo-neo-rationalism, and post-conceptualism, parametric semiology, and so on) are rumored to exist, and this course will prod them into shape, juxtaposing them in unexpected ways. As Sylvia Lavin describes it, “choosing and placing objects often of vastly different ontologies in a space is very close to a significant if often unacknowledged means of architectural design.” During the short period of a semester, this course will simulate the creative process involved in constructing a polemical and individual voice, especially amid the distraction of social media’s hullabaloo. Though timeliness is essential, historical texts will also serve as dialogical counterweight to these contemporary debates.

Coursework will include weekly readings, discussions, and student presentations. Additionally, students will develop their own formal treatise and a corresponding final design project. This course is for those students who are interested in positioning their design work within contemporary architecture culture. 

Please note, this course video is from last year's course.

Material, Atmosphere and Ambience

This seminar introduces an understanding of atmosphere and ambience within the discourse of material practice in architecture. The materials are a contextual and cultural manifestation of architecture.  In addition to their pragmatic function—as the basis for construction means and methods—materials also carry a long history of human civilization and tradition. This seminar aims to embed material practice into the history and culture of its origins, resource utilization, craftsmanship, fabrication and its role in performance within building assembly. We will look at the materials through the lens of various global crises such as environmental issues, economy, the politics of manufacturing, use of natural resources and its life cycle. Examples and precedents will be introduced to the seminar to discuss strategies and techniques for adaptation, rehabilitation, restoration, conservation, regeneration and preservation of buildings.  Material practice carries affects such as ambience and atmosphere. It impacts acoustics, lighting, tactility and aesthetics. This seminar aims to bring forth more comprehensive, complex and holistic understandings of material and materiality which varies in impact at different event scales—from personal to communal and local to global.

Additionally, we will look at a range of materials and their fabrication methods—handmade, mechanical and digital—within different economies, from vernacular building materials and techniques to new and advanced material explorations.

The seminar is meant to be a survey of diverse material practices. Thus, each student will be expected to choose one material of focus for research, exploring its application and the possibilities for its role, meaning, effects and message in contemporary practice.  The class will meet once a week on Wednesday mornings and will consist of a lecture on the topic in first half, followed by discussions and presentations with and by the students based on weekly topics and assigned readings. Evaluations will be made based on class participation and the quality of the final project—cumulative through the semester—on material research.

Experiments in Public Freedom

As places that accept and encourage multiple representations, cities need spaces to enable unregulated, temporary, and spontaneous events. Due to their role and meaning in the construction and definition of the public realm, public spaces are expected to embody a well-defined character and gravitas. Due to the multiplicity of publics, however, these spaces must engage with temporary, overlapping, and often-contradictory sensibilities and occupations. The design question that emerges is, what type of character and gravitas can be achieved with temporality and spontaneity?

This design theory seminar presents an amalgamation of views from different perspectives (architecture, art, landscape architecture, urban design) that coalesce around six spatial conditions that are useful for conceptualizing and designing spaces capable of promoting cultural diversity, social acceptance, and individual spontaneity. Through this amalgamation, this course explores containment, neutrality, blankness, normalcy, anarchy, and amnesia as conditions that can open up public space.

Despite their potential, these spatial properties are usually underestimated as they seem to lack aspects of what is generally considered essential for designing successful public spaces: site specificity, sensibility to local aesthetics, sociocultural appropriateness, permanent and fixed identity, etc. It is precisely due to these so-called deficiencies, however, that these spatial properties can be instrumental to imagine spaces that enable constant recirculation of multiple publics rather than permanent forms of regulation, identity, or appropriateness.

The course is composed of six sections, one per spatial condition. Each section comprises a lecture by the instructor around a constellation of references (projects and texts) to be discussed in class. For each section, students are asked to analyze an environment of their choice (building, landscape, open space, etc.) that demonstrates the spatial condition being discussed. At the end of the semester, students are asked to assemble these six analyses into a design primer for the enabling of public freedoms.

Urban Form: Transition as Condition

The fixed categories by which we have traditionally understood the urban no longer hold. They have been undermined by the multiplicity of disparate urban formations that are transforming landscapes across the globe. These transformations radically challenge not only normative planning methods, but also traditional concepts of the urban, and even our ability to understand the dynamics of change. How can we understand the conditions of change, extreme differentiation, and hybridity that challenge current conceptual models and practices? How might the insights of history and theory inform one another as well as design practices more effectively?

The purpose of the seminar is to engage these questions and to explore a range of critical frameworks and research methodologies for understanding emerging conditions of the contemporary urban – historically, theoretically, and spatially across scales.

Urban Form: Transition as Condition takes as its starting point two working propositions that are implicit in the course title. The first puts forward a conception of urban form as dynamic and active – that is, as a process of urban formation in which transition is a continuous condition. The second working proposition is that in order to understand the generative dynamics of transitional urban conditions we need to develop new methodologies for understanding change and difference, methodologies that make it possible to chart continuities and discontinuities, to map relationships between the local and the translocal, and to examine complex and unstable phenomena over time and through multiple critical lenses. In short, our research needs to be both site-specific and comparative across cultures and geographies.

These propositions will be engaged in the seminar through readings and class discussions, and individual research projects. In the first half of the semester readings and discussions will focus on a series of theoretical frameworks that conceptualize emerging urban formations in categorically transitional terms – that is, in terms of post-industrial, post-fordist, post-socialist, post-communist, and post-modern formations. These transitional categories are framed in relation to historically-based urban paradigms that posit a relationship between social, political, and economic processes and systems (industrial, Fordist, socialist, communist, modern) and urban spatial forms. We will interrogate these concepts as epistemological categories, examine the paradigms on which they are based, and work to develop critical methods and visual techniques for site-based research of contemporary conditions. 

In the second half of the semester students will apply these methodologies to the analysis of a particular urban site or intervention in a city or other urban environment and geography of their choice. The topics for these individual research projects will be determined in consultation with the instructor within the first 6 weeks of the semester. The final project will have a written and visual/graphic component (due in early May) and will be presented in class towards the end of the semester.

Requirements/Assignments: Aside from completing the assigned reading and active participation in class discussions, students will be required to submit reading responses [posted to the course canvas site] in preparation for class discussions of assigned texts and the issues they raise. In addition, a final research project with a written and visual component is required of each student.

Please note that this course is now scheduled on Thursdays from 10 AM to 1 PM.

Design Anthropology: Objects, Landscapes, Cities (with FAS)

In recent years, there has been a movement in anthropology toward a focus on objects, while design and planning have been moving toward the understanding of objects as part of a greater social, political, and cultural milieu. This seminar explores their common ethnographic ground.
 
In spring 2020, the Design Anthropology course will focus on Afro-Brazilian sacred groves, terreiros, in Salvador da Bahia, the fourth largest city in Brazil. Terreiros can be understood as a combination of urban farm and monastery where energies of nature / orishas / deities associated with Afro-Brazilian religions are cultivated through combinations of plants and sacred leaves combined with animal sacrifice and religious rituals. In these spaces, Afro-diasporic memories, knowledge and deities are celebrated. 

Terreiros are plentiful in Brazilian cities such as Salvador which is commonly referred to as “the Black Rome,” because of its hilly topography, the number of churches, and the fusion of African religions that enslaved populations brought to the new world. There are officially about 1,300 terreiros in Salvador, although some researchers maintain that this figure is closer to 2,000. They have very particular internal arrangements—and they are among the last remaining green spaces in an increasingly dense city.

Fieldwork
Eight students will visit Salvador over Spring Recess (March 13–22) and, working in pairs, document the physical and social spaces. GSD students will be selected through the limited enrolment lottery. FAS students will be selected through a short essay due immediately after the first class session. The remaining twelve students who do not travel will conduct their research through secondary sources. There are no prerequisites. Knowledge of Portuguese would be helpful but is not required.

Assignments
Students are expected to engage in two main projects over the course of the semester. The first is the fieldwork either in person or using secondary sources. The class periods leading up to the fieldwork will prepare students—methodologically, ethnographically, and theoretically—for this exercise. After spring recess, all students will share in the results of the collaborative fieldwork to interpret it and produce visualizations of the physical space and lived experience. This first assignment will prepare students to complete the second main project of the course: a design proposal capturing their thinking on design anthropology and the future of the terreiros.

Learning objectives
Where possible, the synergy between anthropologists and designers will be cultivated to maximize exchange between disciplines. The seminar provides students with training in ethnographic methods which can be applied in other academic and professional projects. On completion of the course, students should be prepared for conducting their own ethnographic fieldwork projects, either alone or collectively. During the semester, students will:
1. Apply fieldwork as a bridge between design and anthropology;
2. Develop theoretical positions on landscape arising from fieldwork;
3. Identify non-written forms of note taking;
4. Experiment with visualizing social phenomena and the lived experiences of spaces; 
5. Analyze collective ethnographic data;
6. Imagine and recommend design and policy propositions informed by fieldwork.

Designing the American City: Civic Aspirations and Urban Form

The course is an interpretative look at the characteristic patterns of settlement and attitudes towards cities and urban life that are identified with American urbanization. It introduces the American city as a culturally meaningful form and presents a body of historical and social material relevant to its study. The course seeks to foster an understanding of the cultural processes, policies, planning and design actions, which have influenced American urbanization.

The course chronicles the “love-hate” attitude that Americans have shown toward their cities across history, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts to reconceive how and in what shape cities and urban regions should grow. While not abandoning long-standing precedents of urban organization, Americans have consistently sought alternative ways to form communities. This search for alternatives generally proceeded in concert with a body of ideals that became fundamental to the European Enlightenment, and soon after to the explosion of urban growth brought about by the Industrial Revolution.  Just being conceived, rather than as European cities needing to adapt (with considerable difficulty) to the cultural, political and technological transformations of the 17th through the 20th centuries, American cities heralded the arrival of the modern world. This is key to their appreciation.

The course also seeks comparisons and contrasts between periods of rapid American urbanization, and the even more rapid urban growth currently taking place in regions around the world.  As American cities grew in emulation off and in contrast to older European counterparts, so today many cities, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions, seek inspiration from and attempt to improve upon the American urban experience.

This course is a lecture in the College’s Program in General Education, with a weekly graduate section for GSD. Enrollment is limited to 25 GSD students.

 

Course jointly offered with FAS: GENED 1003