Porch House + 300 Panels, 400 Cuts, 400 Bandages
Porch House + 300 Panels, 400 Cuts, 400 Bandages
Anna Goga (MArch II ’20)
The pedagogical experiment of the studio questioned the aesthetic and structural possibilities of Cross Laminated Timber panels or “CLT Blanks”, through the lens of two typologies – a house and a mid-rise tower.
The Porch House engages an old-notion of “folding in architecture”, where the CLT Blank measuring 9’ X 50’ is folded to create a miter-joint connection, allowing for the material to appear less sheet-like and more like plastic. Large CLT folds are distributed at the scale of—a wrap-around-porch—a type found in the American South. The porch becomes the central space of the house, where domestic scenarios, functions, and personal objects change and move over time. The structural fold becomes an inhabitable space that blurs the boundaries between inside and outside and allows for the porch’s bigness to appear.
300 Panels, 400 Cuts, 400 Bandages uses the full 50’ CLT blank vertically with one simple squiggle cut for each of the 300 panels. Assembled as a structural tube, the exoskeleton maximizes 5-story tall CLT Blanks and minimizes material waste. The project rethinks steel connections commonly used in mass timber construction, by re-conceptualizing the generic plate as a “bandage”. Usually hidden within the exterior wall assembly, the bandages are carefully designed, exaggerated, and exposed as compositional facade elements. Structurally and programmatically, the project explores ideas of lightness, the exchangeability of housing and office space, and the afterlife of materiality. The interior of the structural tube is comprised of four 25 meter zones with a gantry system of cranes built into each of the four ceilings. This system allows for the possibility to reassemble the interior floor plates and walls with endless variations.
Stranger in Moscow: The Diplomatic Illusive
Stranger in Moscow: The Diplomatic Illusive
Ian Miley (MArch I AP ’20)
Diplopia (n.) describes a disorder of vision in which two images of a single object are seen. Situated among other disciplinary -opias, diplopia is re-imagined to invoke a double place, more narrowly, a space for diplomacy. Our modern concept of diplomacy emerged in the Italian Renaissance in the formalization of epistolary exchange between sovereign states. Ancestral letters – or diplomas – on the one hand an official state document conferring privilege, on the other simply a paper folded twice over, fold revelation within the act of concealment. This is the duplicitous act upon which diplomatic practices are founded. Since its emergence as a genre of space, the diplomatic setting has been framed by dramaturgical and optical techniques intended to produce a doubling of reality.
This thesis considers the Embassy for the U.S. diplomatic mission to the Russian Federation in Moscow — a structure implicated in a history of espionage, riddled with listening devices, procured via labyrinthine construction contracts. The reciprocal subversions performed across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War — succinctly illustrated in MAD Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy comic strips — appear to have been recently reanimated. Through the interplay of illusionistic techniques drawn from the ecclesiastical chancel, 1960s Op-Art, and recursive computation, distortive methods propose a dialectic of concealment and revelation in architecture. Stagecraft and statecraft conspire to project the possibility of built form through the production of doubt.
Project Acknowledgments
Rhetorical support: Samantha Vasseur (MArch, MDes HPDM ’21)
Drawing support: Samantha Vasseur (MArch, MDes HPDM ’21), Ian Bankhead (MArch ’22), Aleksis Bertoni (MArch ’18), Cynthia Deng (MArch, MUP ’21), Isabel Tiange Wang (MArch ’22)
Rendering support: Jung In Seo (MIT MArch ’20), Dalma Földesi (MIT MArch ’20), Danmo Fu (MArch ’22), Glen Marquardt (MArch ’21)
A House is Not a Home
A House is Not a Home
Qin Ye Chen (MArch I ’22) and Yiwen Wang (MArch I AP ’22)
“A House is Not a Home” addresses central questions that resonate in important ways with life in our cities today: “How can architecture offer a remedy to social isolation?” and “Can architecture organize different scales of community engagement over different time frames?”
This multifamily housing design redefines home as a space for knowing and engaging with objects and others for some amount of time. It acknowledges that the current housing system no longer responds to the need for community engagement or contributes to building higher levels of community attachment. The project manifests architecturally multiple time scales of knowledge, awareness, and engagement of one’s neighbors. Whether it is knowing your neighbors through windows over the years, a space occupied by different inhabitants for certain days of the week, or objects collected in treasure chambers changing by the hours.
This design combines a range of dwelling types in varying configurations, all seamlessly synthesized on the site. This range of apartment types and the idea of overlapping shared spaces that oscillate between private and public realms are used as an important component of community building and engagement. Furthermore, the aggregation of these varied units in different scalar configurations ranging from low to mid-rise building forms suggest choices in terms of living opportunities for different demographics across ages as well as income groups. Most critically, these aims and objectives are integrated into a form that is responsive to the urban fabric and context in which it is situated. The project suggests a new form of urban living that is socially inclusive and architecturally accommodative of varying lifestyles and cultural aspirations. In addition, the human-centric approach and experiential imagination of space have resulted in inventive places of encounters, which will “serve as a remedy to social isolation” through enhancing community engagement.
Landscape Practices
This seminar examines the nature of contemporary landscape architecture and public realm practices. In this context, practice is considered broadly in terms of the various ways designers have applied their ideas about landscape and the public realm into professional settings that allow them to develop work. The term is pluralized in the seminar title to acknowledge the increasingly diverse contexts in which we practice (and issues we could and should be addressing) and the multiplicity of practice types, approaches, and leaders that have emerged over the past few decades.
The seminar will shed light upon the ways in which a diverse array of practitioners and designers have both conceptualized what they do—the nature of and ideas behind their work—and operationalized it in terms of how they do it—the mechanisms, structures, and strategies that put their ideas into play. The focus will be landscape practices, as well as practices that work generally within the public realm, at the various edges of landscape architecture and beyond. For-profit, non-profit, and academic/research practices will all be featured. The course will benefit from individual presentations and case studies by over a dozen prominent designers working today. The firms featured are from across the country and around the world, of different races and socio-economic backgrounds, led by both women and men, from established and newly emerging practices, and are both at the center and at the various edges of landscape architecture. The seminar will include broader panel discussions on women in practice and on race and practice, and we will together identify—throughout the semester—barriers to entry and advancement for women and for people of color.
Interim assignments will ask students to reflect on issues of race, identity, and sex as they impact practice. Final projects will ask students to imagine their own forms of practice and to create an operational strategy for realizing them.
The seminar is intended especially for advanced Landscape Architecture, MLAUD, and MDes ULE students, but is open to all. Candidates should have already taken a basic/required course in Professional Practice, whether at the GSD or elsewhere.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Planning for Climate Change
This seminar explores how public and private institutions and individuals, under labels of “adaptation” or “resilience,” are positioning built and natural environments to respond to threats posed by climate change. The threats include flooding caused by sea level rise and storm surges as well as changing weather conditions. Specific responses include construction and reconstruction of physical infrastructure, deployment of new building designs, and population retreat, together described by the phrase “armor, elevate, retreat.” Embedded in each of these actions are diverse questions about equity, winners and losers, vulnerability, probability and risk assessments, scales of interventions, institutional competencies, mandates versus incentives, property rights and regulation, participation processes, political will and public opinion, and public and private financial and insurance mechanisms.
Classes will consist of presentations and discussions about selected case studies, research projects, and readings. Guests will bring real-life cases and projects to the class. Students are expected to attend class, participate in discussions, complete assigned readings, and prepare a 5,000-word paper on a topic chosen by the student.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Cotton Kingdom, Now
In 1852, the New York Daily Times commissioned a 31-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to conduct an immersive research journey through the Southern slave states. The country was headed toward civil war, and the paper dispatched young Olmsted for his ability to reveal the cultural and environmental qualities of landscape in a narrative voice. Today, landscape architecture, urban design, and planning—disciplines Olmsted helped to shape—continue to grapple with the economic, political, and ecological conditions rooted in systems he documented so vividly 165 years ago. This seminar will investigate the relationship between a host of major contemporary issues with the documented conditions in Olmsted’s 1861 book, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom. The seminar positions Olmsted’s journey not only as source material but also as methodological proposition, in reflection on the significance and methods of research and representation in design practice.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Architecture and Construction: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital
The course aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between architecture and construction through the study of key historical episodes such as the rise of modern tectonic ideals in the 18th century, the development of iron and concrete buildings, the 20th-century quest for light structures, or more recent developments in materials, structure and building technologies. The course will also raise theoretical questions such as what the terms material and structure truly mean, or how does architecture differ from mere construction. Beyond its historical and theoretical scope, the ambition of the course is also to foster students' reflection on the contemporary evolution of the relationship between architecture and construction. Indeed, the rise of digital technologies and more recently the development of strong environmental concerns challenge our received understanding of tectonics, materials, and ultimately design.
The course will consist of live lectures given online followed discussions. Lectures will be recorded and made accessible to the students of the course. Apart from regular attendance, the students will be asked to produce a short end-of-the-semester paper on a topic related to the course.
Plan of the course:
– Towards an Architectural History of Construction, Introduction
– Construction and Solidity in the Vitruvian Tradition
– The 18th-Century Crisis of Solidity and the Rise of the Structural Approach
– Early Iron Construction Development
– From Iron to Steel
– The Origin of Modern Concrete
– The Industrial Challenge from Ruskin to the Arts and Crafts
– Building Technologies in the 19th Century
– Structure and Ornament in the Industrial Age
– Modernist Architecture and Technology
– Concrete Engineering
– Concrete Architecture
– Early Space, Inflatable and Tensile Structures
– Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouvé and the Search for a Revolution in Design
– Postwar Technological Utopias and Dystopias from Archigram to Radical Architecture
– The High-Tech Temptation
– Contemporary Advances in Materials and Structures
– Digital Architecture and the Rise of a New Materiality
– Digital Fabrication, Between Futurism and Nostalgia
– The Environmental Challenge: From Mechanics to Thermodynamics?
– Architecture, AI: What is Next? Conclusion
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
The Idea of Environment
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations, and actions that calls them to intervene—that is, to make a plan, solve a problem, create a product, or strategize a process. They use various measures to assess and project their interventions from beauty and efficiency to systems and sustainability. Today, increasing volatility and uncertainty of the environment, however, alongside a growing sense and presence of crises and disasters, compels us to reconsider how we have imaged and imagined, defended and critiqued, planned and designed the environment. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.
This class is a seminar focused on reading and discussion. Course participants will be required to submit weekly reading responses, to contribute to discussions online and in class, and to develop an original research and/or design project over the course of the semester.
Forms of Assembly
This course is an advanced two semester research and project-based seminar initiated by Art, Design, and the Public Domain MDes, in collaboration with GSD Exhibitions, that will focus on the Harvard Campus as a site of inquiry, design propositions, and, ultimately, built projects for its common spaces. Practice-oriented, this advanced project-based seminar includes lectures, workshops, assignments and the production of onsite, or online, interventions.
The city is a place of complex socioeconomic, cultural, and political entanglements. In its public spaces, we come together, inform and form one another. These spaces of physical, social, and cultural encounters are critical for democracy, freedom, and a just society. The university campus, situated within the city, expresses these tensions along its edges in how it negotiates the city.
Confronted by a global pandemic, we become confined within a minimal space. Physically, our bodies are locked inside the domestic environment, and when outside, they are masked and at six feet apart from one another. Intellectually, our virtual and online exchanges, which are seemingly open, remain highly edited and surveilled. We communicate with a world of similarity, gated in social and professional networks.
Not only the pandemic imperils our public spaces, and, by extension, our freedom, and rights. We are living in times of changing climate and environmental destruction that have immense consequences on human and other species’ lives and habitat. These growing stresses threaten to solidify policies, culture, and spaces of isolation, exclusions, and violence. Walls and detainment camps are forming vast landscapes along national political borders. At this time of public health crisis, precarious public life, and environmental catastrophe, we need to come together in solidarity more than ever before.
How can we imagine today, from the quarantine, our way out of isolationism? Can art and design practices become agents and agencies to conceive, enact, and mobilize agonistic and less striated environments – spaces of unedited, uncontrolled, open exchange, and places of care?
This seminar, at the intersection of art, design, and activism – theory and practice. It includes guest lectures, research, and design assignments. Students will be required to investigate and reimagine the potentiality of public spaces between the campus and the city and use the format of ephemeral interventions, performances, exhibitions, and installations to enact encounters and Forms of Assembly that are critical for democracy, freedom, and a just society.
The first semester will focus on Forms of Assembly theory and praxis, the development of a project and its conceptual design. The second semester is dedicated to advancing concepts into in-depth detailed designs, including, when possible, fabrication and implementation of onsite physical interventions, or the creation of digital platforms, visualization, video works, and projections.
Prerequisites: Participation in the second semester is contingent on first-semester enrollment. Thesis track students, who participated in the first semester, can continue developing their thesis in the second term under auspices of the seminar and its instructors' guidance.
A percentage of enrollment in this course is held for MDes students who select this course first in the limited enrollment course lottery.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Cancel Architecture [M2]
This studio will be about the architectural power and paradox of negation, symbolically and spatially. Iconoclasm, involving both the desecration of images or sculptures and the dismantlement of highly revered and honored systems of belief, will be understood as a destructive act of reckoning and transformation. The ultimate aim of the project will be to design a building in which such an act is memorialized and hopefully continued.
Each student will choose a city in which a monument was recently shrouded or removed or in which there exists today an imperative to undertake a removal. Each will proceed to design new, multifunctional buildings in which to embed spaces for a particular kind of de-memorialization. Our focus will be the specific cases of Confederate monuments and statues that are located in particularly important sites in US cities, but there may be a few exceptions for students who wish to study a case in another country where there exists another kind of monument that also symbolizes social injustice rooted in racism.
The project will be at once an urban design and a “hidden room” type of project. Each student will produce multiple conceptual designs for altering existing buildings and adding new ones near the site of the removed monument. The scale, scope and functions of the urban building proposal will be determined differently for each case. The urban ensemble will be designed with the intention to embed a negative space within or partially below it, underground. The urban composition and its programs will do many things, among which is to establish expectations in order that the negative or hidden space containing the displaced and desecrated monument, as well as the sequence into it, will be perceived to be anti-monumental, an affect that will be achieved by means of carefully crafted architectural concepts of concealment. Be aware that, in order to undertake this project, you will need to be intensely interested in certain familiar architectural conventions.
The urban/architectural and the interior/architectural components of the project will at first be considered independently but ultimately become interdependent. Whether unified or conjoined but somehow still independent, the urban and interior forms and spaces will unmistakably avoid the usual contemporary tropes by which architecture calls attention to itself or behaves affirmatively.
The design of the hidden space and its newly configured urban context will be a decisive factor in determining the specific iconoclastic treatment of the found monument and its original site. In dealing with the monument itself, we will draw on research by Daniel Sherer (Architectural History, Princeton SOA), in order to investigate four paradigms of desecration: total destruction (pulverization) in which unrecognizable remains are nevertheless preserved; decapitation or gouging out of facial features, especially the eyes as a re-thematization of vision; breaking apart or dismemberment; partial removal and substitution of bodily or architectural parts to produce a re-signification; or a combination of all of the above.
Students will document their chosen sites and monuments in multiple media, all obtained on line, and will 3D Rhino model both the massing and key architectural features of the context. Multiple conceptual schemes will be studied in 3D and, in addition, by means of evocative drawings, montages and renderings. The final proposal will be carefully and succinctly documented in plan/section drawings and in a well articulated 3D model that will be supplemented by a few strategically selected still images and, in some cases, by animations.
GSD students may view additional information on option studios: