Harnessing the Future
Harnessing the Future: How the Internet’s Physical Digital Infrastructure Influences Landscape, Local Economies, and the Ecologies of Communities.
Project Goal:
Envision strategies to generate sustainable and beneficial legacies for communities upon the arrival of a large infrastructure project in their backyard. By understanding and harnessing the demographic changes, improvements in local infrastructure and long-term financial infusions that are manifested in these situations, local communities stand to emerge and evolve equipped to nurture a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reimagine their futures without compromising their past and present.
Project Site:
Located in Western Ireland, the site presents the typical small historic community being confronted with this scenario as a representation of similar events happening around the world. The area has an ancient history, strong cultural traditions, strict environmental regulations, a comprehensive planning process, while simultaneously facing a strong need for economic development and job opportunities.
Studio Challenge:
Digital infrastructure has become the connective thread of today’s civilization weaving the virtual fabric of culture, community, and humanity from a historical compendium of events and facts to future explorations and manifests. The ‘cloud’ requires a robust network of physical infrastructure to power, store, consume and distribute the past and future knowledge we create and rediscover every day. Data Centers are the nodal nexus that houses, protects, and redistributes this data, where the demand for these facilities is only increasing. The scale of these projects is not without precedent and requires an intervention to graciously affect hundreds of acres, harness the access to electrical power, water resources, roadway infrastructures, and a multi-year construction cycle which can populate the site with an influx of over 1500 workers.
The quest will be to create a legacy of positive impacts for the host communities. This studio will examine the opportunities to harness the investments that preserve the sanctity of history, protect environmental integrity, accommodate the needs of the construction industry, and orchestrate economic benefits for the greater good and quality of life.
The studio will study precedents, undertake research, and develop watershed solutions enhancing the welfare and wellbeing of the community for generations to come.”. To succeed, each project will need a compelling storyline that presents the idea, a clear vision of how to implement it, and a creative visual immersion that brings to life this delicate balance of preserving the integrity of the existing culture while creating new possibilities that galvanize a certainty for the future
The studio will meet every Tuesday and Thursday from August 30 through December 2, with the final projects due December 8th and presentations December 9th and 10th. The first 5 weeks will be spent in teams, investigating, and understanding the local, ecology, history, culture, and economic conditions, while the remaining 8 will be devoted to individual projects. The Mid-term presentations will be October 5 and 7th, a week earlier than the academic calendar to allow for more time to be spent on Individual projects. Every other week will be virtual with either desk crits or conversations local or industry experts.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Thomas Oslund and Catherine Murray will be in residence (Cambridge) during the weeks of 8/30, 9/13, 10/4, 10/11, 10/25, 11/8, 11/29, 12/7
ENTO: Fostering Insect/Human Relationships through Design
This studio will focus on designing for insects, one of the most ubiquitous and diverse groups of animals on the planet. At first glance, this topic appears absurd. Insects can be a nuisance, a significant threat, and they are everywhere, representing 80% of the world’s species. It is estimated there are some 10 quintillion individual insects alive at any given moment. Yet insect abundance and diversity support the ecosystems that humans depend upon for life. Insects, at the bottom of the food web, provide critical ecosystem services including pollination, seed dispersal, decomposition, soil building, pest control, and wildlife nutrition. Without insects, our waste would not break down and most of our food would not exist.
The health of insect populations is directly tied to the health of our landscapes. Urbanization, agricultural intensification, and climate change are impacting insect populations to the point where popular media has pushed a narrative of a pending global “insect apocalypse.” While recent studies reveal more nuanced spatiotemporal trends of terrestrial insect decline and aquatic insect recovery, the status of the global insect population is not currently knowable and is attracting more scientific attention as concerns of a sixth wave of extinction escalate. This studio embraces uncertainty and will take a research-driven and multi-disciplinary approach to designing for insects, including direct engagement with experts in the disciplines of entomology, horticulture, ecology, and landscape architecture.
The semester will begin with a series of assignments and field studies focused on tracing the relationships between distinct insect taxa and three Eastern Massachusetts landscapes – a transect of rural, suburban, and urban sites. Students will research the needs of insects, review contemporary designed landscapes to evaluate their capacity to support insect life, investigate cultural practices and human-insect relationships, and participate in field work and entomological observation. By mid-semester, students will define an individual or group project of their choice that advances their research into a specific site-based design proposal. Design work will be evaluated based upon its relationship to knowledge developed throughout the semester and the degree of development and inquiry undertaken by the student. Studio will meet on Tuesday and Thursday at 3pm on a hybrid schedule.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet in person every week. Gena Wirth will be in residence (Cambridge) during the weeks of 8/30, 9/13, 9/26, 10/11, 10/25, 11/8, 11/29, 12/7
The Immeasurable Enclosure
This option studio proposes using immeasurability as the aesthetic and spatial expression of the public realm and asks students to imagine immeasurable single-space enclosures as forums for public life. Students in this course design one single-space environment using raw phenomena arrested by manufactured structures as the place for a public encounter of specific socio-cultural importance.
The garden and the room are considered the most fundamental spaces of the disciplines of landscape and architecture. These single-space environments are defined by enclosing and containing only a tiny part of the world and have conventionally been perceived as the means for designing coherent singular identities. However, the historical progression toward cultural diversity and social plurality has revealed the apparent inability of a single space to encompass multiple identities. This understanding led to alternative spatial models that invoked large-scale distributed spatial models as expressions and vehicles to accept and encourage multiple sensibilities and identities. Land mosaics, spatial fields, or network societies, just to name a few, became the new spatial paradigms to advance social, cultural, and ecological plurality and diversity. Instead of encompassing as much of the physical world as possible, as these expansive paradigms propose, this course aims to reframe the discrete singular space as the mechanism to advance progressive social agendas by containing multiple sensibilities.
The objective of this course is to imagine and design spaces that are simultaneously single-room buildings and single-patch landscapes. To this end, these uncategorizable enclosures—which can be outdoors, indoors, or in-between—demonstrate an aesthetic and spatial sensibility that defies traditional disciplinary categories but contributes to the long-standing tradition of these close quarters. These immeasurable enclosures are neither gardens nor rooms in a conventional sense. They are strange spaces that transcend the elemental nature of the garden and the room as building blocks for the expression of singular identities. These single-space environments aim to contain that which, by its definition and value, is immeasurable: the instance of acknowledging a different being. Students in this studio work individually, and each student is responsible for proposing an immeasurable enclosure within a specific socio-cultural context.
‘AQUA INCOGNITA:’ Deciphering Liquid Territories in the Mexican Altiplano
Aligned with the GSD´s focus on Mexico´s urbanization challenges, and with a further commitment to advancing research by design at the GSD, Aqua Incognita aims to decipher an array of visions capable of advancing “nature-positive[1]” repairing actions in today water-scarce Central Mexican altiplano, toward more sustainable livelihoods and biocultural landscapes. This critical zone[2]—originally a wetland territory and now bordering the most urbanized region of the nation—is engaged in a transformative trajectory associated with unsustainable urban development now further exacerbated by our human-induced climate crisis.
This process is particularly visible in the Apan Plains, a sub-region of the altiplano formed by smallsettlements and medium-sized towns at eighty kilometers East of Mexico City, and whose landscape and basic source of ejidal employment is characterized by rainfed barley monoculture for the beer industry, overlaying a past landscape of agave fields for pulque, aguamiel and alcohol production. In these shifting liquid territories, climate change is accelerating the depletion of water resources, desertification, and the loss of crops and biodiversity. Besides, contemporary farming in service of global commodity chains and major water-intensive industrial players are layering new risks and driving land use changes that further challenge the uncertain futures of this region.
Using Apan as the initial case study, we will first map the environmental, social, and political barriers and enablers to the conservation and equitable distribution of water across this rural-urban aquographies. With this knowledge, we will formulate new design visions, alternative growth strategies, and novel infrastructural interventions, whose implementation could lead to more sustainable management and governance of water resources. The studio forms part of a multi-level assemblage of local universities, the municipality of Apan, the Hidalgo State Secretaries of Economic Development and Public Policy, six Ejidos commissariats, and a local office (eeTestudio) who will participate in lectures and reviews, and counts with sponsorship from international development agencies.
[1] https://www.naturepositive.org/
[2] https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones
Specific Ambiguity: The Well-Tempered grid [M2]
The grid is an elusive system, for some architects and artists it is a distinctive code for framing, understanding and producing space, a model. For others, is nothing more or nothing less than a geometrical order similar to infrastructure and fundamental to define the performance of form and it´s borders through a network and a framework of (architectural) elements. In any of those ways of approaching the grid, either as a model or as the network of specific elements the possibility for all those elements to come together in a pure ideal an ideological way are subject to a critical negotiation – mainly through form – one between the ideal grid and the site conditions or the given instructions, in other words the negotiation that takes place between ideas and a certain reality.
For this purpose we will dig into Sol LeWitt´s exhibition at Williams College in 2012, titled: The Well-Tempered grid, and use its organization systems to be tested not anymore as art but as site specific architecture under tropical climatic conditions.
The grid is highly ideological, historically romanticized, aesthetically adored and philosophically instrumental, but how much of those ambitions can prevail when put in to context in a complex social, and ecological condition?
We will design a small public food market in Medellin, Colombia. We will deal with complex social and urban conditions and a terrain with high slope. We will determine and search for different spatial ideas, a space made of a tropical way of thinking. A space and architecture made of specific elements but ambiguous space. We will test the limit between inside and outside, nature, art, public and private, ideas and reality.
Each student or pair, will choose a different grid from Sol LeWitt´s work, and once a quick and intuitive analysis is made of it, it will be related and modified into a spatial system derived from a selected architecture precedent, once the two connect ideologically and ideally, the new “ensamble” will be taken to the site to give a response to the program, that of the public market.
Designing for the DNA of a Place [M2]
As a planet, we have over the past two years been in a collective state of reckoning. This has been true when it comes to facing racial inequalities, the fragility of our environment, our politics, or grappling with the colonial nature of a world where a minority has had an economic and cultural dominion for too long over a vast majority. Arguably, architecture is no neutral ground when one considers that even our education only takes into account the histories and built environment of the smaller section of the planet that is Europe as the universal reference point for the rest of the world.
This Studio will seek to challenge and widen the scope of precedents that have come to form the architecture canon. The focus will be on the American built environment, the ultimate colonial project of our times that has all but erased all traces of the pre-colonial identity of its lands. The question we will ask is: why hasn’t American architecture ever considered native spatial logics, traditions, relationship to nature, materials and sustaining principles that successfully helped its original populations thrive for centuries? And further, how do we begin to imagine new spaces and forms that honor the DNA of the place in an honest look at its history and missed opportunities?
Architecture Students will be asked to undertake a significant amount of research in the first days of the module in preparation for developing the speculative project of a community hub on a site in the Boston area. During the studio, students will research, produce mappings, diagrams, and physical models as a base for developing 3-dimensional solutions that draw on both local indigenous and contemporary architectural precedents.
Taylor Halamka will serve as a Teaching Associate for this studio.
Mariam Kamara will be in residence on the following days: October 21 and December 10.
Taylor Halamka will be in residence on the following days: October 21, 29; November 5, 12; December 2, 3; and for final reviews.
The instructors will hold studio every Friday from 2- 6pm. All group activity will be held during this time. Instructors will also be available 1-2 pm on Fridays for students who are free at that time. Additional twice-weekly office hours will be utilized for individual and/or small-group crits.
WINDOW WALL [M1]
Architecture is not that simple. The moment you enclose a space with solid walls and a roof you need to open it (for access, light and air). If you leave it closed, the room becomes a hidden one, accessible only through memory or imagination. From the outside, this blind space would be a solid block, with the presence of a sculptural mass, but not an inhabitable building. An opening on a wall is not that simple. An aperture on the opacity of a room implies both to interrupt the continuity of its enclosure and also to replace it by something else (by a view to the lake, to a noisy street, the sky or the texture of your neighbor’s fence). In its progressive buoyancy, the moderns rejected the obscure confinements of the room by introducing a couple of inventions: the panoramic window (equivalent to a horizontal film) and the glass curtain wall (equivalent to a large screen without thickness). The natural scene was then transfigured into spectacle, into a selective edge around a view. Crack! the house is no longer in the site but before it, they say. In its bucolic popularity, the window became a “picture”, a postcard, turning the building into a mere shooting device. However, in its abstract flatness, the opening can be understood as the physical and mental access to another dimension; as the literal and metaphoric mirror of an introverted domain. Paradoxically, this could be conveyed both for a window on a wall and for a painting on that same wall: for a picture plane to work, its size, position, depth, frame, shade and translucency, become the measures of its content. Again, a picture on a wall is not that simple. The illusion of space, the fictitious world beyond a “notional glass”, was already interrogated by the pre-moderns (since the secreted camera obscura) and cancelled by the post-painterly abstract painters (“what you see is what you see”, one said). Before them, perhaps without moral judgment, murals would fetch rooms into rooms and ceilings would be dissolved into heavenly firmaments filled with trickeries. Once more, the art of architecture is not that simple.
Since the studio project is a guest residence for a selection of Chilean wineries, the conflict between the presence of architecture amidst nature and its own representation (both as a large hand made painting of the building in its vineyard and as specific paintings placed within its rooms), ecology will inform oenology as much as fantasy will inform domesticity.
This course has a hybrid meeting schedule. Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen will meet in-person on September 2, 3, 16, 17, 30 and October 1 and14 for Final Reviews. They will also meet on-line the remaining sessions.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Sofia Martinez will be in residence Thursday and Friday on the following days: September 2, 3, 23, 24; and for final reviews.
Mauricio Pezo will be in residence for final reviews.
The instructors will also hold class via Zoom on the following Thursdays and Fridays: September 9, 10, 16, 17, 30; October 1, 7, 8.
The Third Space [M1]
This studio will explore community development, cultural complexity and displacement, place, and identity through the programming and design of a Third Space which will engage the built and social fabric of one of the United States’ most intensely gentrifying communities, South Atlanta.
South Atlanta was created as a land grant in 1867 to be settled by formerly enslaved African Americans after the Civil War. Once a prominent community, and home to Clark College & Gammon Theological Seminary, a movie theatre, and musical venues, South Atlanta carries a unique cultural history marred with overt prejudicial tactics. The vestiges of these discriminatory practices remain severely impactful on the community. Today South Atlanta’s rapidly changing demographics due to gentrification has resulted in cultural and political displacement and intensified police encounters of long term, lower-income, residents; and exacerbated sociospatial segregation between newcomers and the existing community.
The studio will partner with the nonprofit organization Project South. Students will begin with an exploratory research phase which includes discussions and interviews with South Atlanta residents and nonprofit leaders to develop an understanding of the conflicted history and state of the community. The oral histories will inform design speculations in the second phase in which students are tasked to ambitiously create a program and speculative design of a Third Space on the 4.7-acre site of the 9 Gammon Building.
The 9 Gammon Building is recognized as a hub for community development, project creation, and civic decision-making. Despite being in disrepair, the 9 Gammon Building currently houses 5 different entities. Each provides services and community engagement opportunities to primarily poor and underserved residents of South Atlanta. The studio will focus on reinvigorating underutilized spaces, innovative programming, and reimaging of existing infrastructures, of the 9 Gammon building and/or its 4.7-acre site. Our theoretical positioning of Third Space will draw from 1. the urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s definition of Third Space as places, other than home or work, for social inclusion and interaction by otherwise disconnected groups and 2. Post-colonial theorist and Harvard Professor, Homi Bhabha’s Third Space as a liminal space ‘which creates something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and understanding.’
Student performance will be evaluated through studio work and participation, pin-ups, and final review. Thursday and Fridays are studio sessions.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Cory Henry will be in residence Thursday and Friday on the following days: September 2, 3, 30; October 1, 7, 8.
The instructor will also hold class via Zoom on the following Thursday and Fridays: September 9, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24; and for final reviews.
Miami Remix
Miami Remix will expand on emerging housing typologies as part of a larger urban design agenda as we take on Miami’s most urgent crises: equitable housing and climate change. Despite being in a near-constant state of crisis management further compounded by the global pandemic, Miami remains one of America’s most vibrant international cities. Preserving this vibrancy in the face of inevitable sea level rise and diminishing affordability requires a call to action to redefine and re-design how one will live in a future Miami.
Appropriating the concept of a “Remix” – the re-working of an original to create something new – this studio will explore progressive housing models for a mix of incomes, scales, and Domestic+ hybrid programs, from the single-family home to a multi-building district. Miami, already a mash-up of socio-economic and architectural extremes, is well-suited to explore alternative housing types including co-living, co-housing, micro-units, granny flats, ADUs, etc. Typologies which enable social mixing for immigrants, low-income residents, families, multi-generational households, digital nomads, and others will be deployed with the urban endgame of producing an inventive system of housing infrastructures to create a more resilient city.
The third and final Miami option studio funded by the Knight Foundation, the geographic focus will be Miami’s mid-section: the neighborhoods of Allapattah, Liberty City, and Brownsville. Predominantly Hispanic and black communities, these neighborhoods contain a significant concentration of affordable housing, much in neglect and nearing the end of its useful life. Given the relatively large amount of publicly-owned land and jurisdictional complexity, these neighborhoods are primed for testing novel housing prototypes on parcels which include small vacant lots, dilapidated public housing sites, and larger industrial areas.
This studio will develop a network of negotiated and reciprocal proposals. Given the proximity of the adjacent districts and sites chosen, these projects will operate as an interdependent urban lattice – each a part to whole – affected by and giving agency to each distinct site. The students will set up the parameters for this studio-wide negotiation by creating an urban design framework at the beginning of the semester. This will provide a conceptual map to guide architectural projects that will include new housing types, hybridized urban/domestic programs, and site/building strategies to address Miami’s urgent need for equitable and resilient housing.
Work from the studio will be published in a GSD-produced Studio Report/Booklet and will be distributed and presented in Miami. We will organize a series of talks on relevant issues with experts from across the design disciplines from the GSD, Miami, and other cities.
ROOM
This studio will focus on a room. More specifically, our speculations will concern the room that sits within those cultural and institutional programs that call for a form of collective space. One might think of the courtroom in a courthouse, the assembly space in a city hall, the waiting room in a train station, the auditorium in a theater, or numerous other spaces and programs that depend on an especially significant space to serve, define, or otherwise beckon an institution’s greater aims.
Our room — in essence our program — will be a new reading room for an existing library: The Central Boston Public Library in Copley Square. Our site will adjoin the existing building at its north-east corner and extend into Copley Square. While we will work on a library and its reading room, ‘the library’ will be not be our topic. This program and its specificities will serve instead as a means through which to explore the nature of significant interior cultural spaces in the context of important institutional organizations today.
There are several reasons for the room being our focus. The studio will center on how we conceive of public life in relation to the workings of contemporary institutions. The emphasis will be on interior public space, complementing well-established discourses that engage exterior public space. By framing the studio in narrower programmatic terms, architectural outcomes will come forward in more explicit ways and through more natural and less harried means. The room’s circumscribed implications will allow us to wholly explore the ways that architects constitute architecture: walls, floors, ceilings, and the things that churn among them. For many architects (certainly for me) such rooms loom large in why architecture initially tempted us down its road…and continues to tug us forward as a worthy pursuit. Finally, there is an altogether visceral, and pleasurable, aspect to these rooms. They always entice with qualities that exceed their, and perhaps even our, reasons for being.
Studio methods will include seminar-style discussions, desk crits, reviews, and excursions to nearby rooms on campus and in Boston.