Exploring Collective Bonds: Creating Spaces of Solidarity [M2]

In what way can design serve as a conduit, spanning the gap between heterogeneous groups and binding them through their shared collective endeavors? How do spaces-places matter for social practices and historical change? In our 8-week module, we embark on a journey to cultivate havens that not only provide refuge and reprieve but also spark opportunities for collaboration and empowerment—a deliberate effort to speculate on spaces that stand as beacons for catalyzing social, ecological, and cultural transformation. This studio will explore community development, social movements, place, identity, memory, and history, through the programming and speculative design of a Movement Building Retreat Center in rural Georgia (USA).

We will work with the nonprofit organization Project South: The Institution for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. Students will begin with an exploratory-research phase which includes discussions and interviews with nonprofit organizations, Indigenous community leaders, and residents of Atlanta and Griffin to develop an understanding of the conflicted history and state of the region and their shared interests and needs. The site was previously used as a Girl Scouts Camp, and several cabins remain. In 2022 the 44-acre site was purchased by Project South. Students will be given an area within the 44-acre site to design within. A program will be provided that students are to expand on.

Student performance will be evaluated through studio work and participation, pin-ups, and final review.

Revisiting Utopia: Bio-Based Megastructures in the Texas Desert [M2]

The social and political tumult of the 1960s prompted a resurgence of utopian architecture. Rising fuel prices, a growing dependence on technology and, in particular, the television, the international space race, and the Cold War unleased a variety of direct and indirect challenges to mainstream architecture with grand visions for alternative ways of living in a future with diminished resources, including Superstudio, Archigram, Haus Rucker Co., Global Tools, and others.  And, over time, a variety of maverick figures such as Yona Friedman, Paolo Soleri and Simone Swan championed their own, at times even questionable, solutions to societal ills—from mobile architecture, to extreme density, and the economic and environmental benefits of building with adobe. The social and environmental problems of the 1960s have largely been exacerbated in the intervening five decades or more. Today, the threat of climate change is no longer a fringe issue, and the affordable housing crisis is worldwide. Can or, even, should recent scientific and technological advancements bring the visions of the 1960s avant-garde to life? Are more recent supposedly utopian projects like NEOM’s The Line” in Saudi Arabia or “Telosa,” an American billionaire’s answer to creating a more equitable and sustainable city, realistic or even desirable solutions to the climate and housing crises?

This studio takes the extreme climate of Texas and in particular the desert of Presidio County where Simone Swan developed her rammed-earth prototypes as its site. From 1980 to 2020, the state experienced 273 weather and climate-related events resulting in substantial losses of life and property. At the same time, the prospect of remote work has enabled towns in Texas to offer cash incentives, attracting residents seeking affordable housing. By the 2040s, Texas is projected to surpass California in population due to economic diversification, a lower cost of living, and ample land for expansion. The state leads not only in oil and gas but also in renewable energy sources like wind and solar power.

The core question of the studio will be: How large scale can bio-based construction go? With what type of structures? With which materials? At what density? In which typologies? For what kind of program? Students will be asked to think critically about their own vision of a desert utopia and experimental megastructures (with all their inherent contradictions) and to explore the adaptability and scalability of emerging bio-based materials as the basis for their vision. Recognizing that a module studio is a focused architectural investigation rather than a full project design, the studio will operate as a kind of seminar with weekly guest lecturers on such topics as land art and material innovations. Using a range of representational and narratives strategies such as models and collages like those of the 1960s avant-garde as well as written statements and/or hypothetical guidebooks or catalogues that articulate each student’s vision of utopia, the studio also explores of how architecture and storytelling co-exist in the creative process.

Transforming the Urban Villa with Private Garden into a Contemporary Typology [M1]

The studio will deal with the strategies for the transformation of a coveted but obsolete architectural type, the urban villa in the park, keeping its attractive features but adapting it to contemporary social, economic, and ecological conditions. We will analyze the ambitions that the traditional urban villa type embodies and dismember it into the features that fulfill these ambitions. Based on a critical assessment, we will produce a new set of ambitions and cast it into a program. We will investigate the transformations that have already been experimented with in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially in Rome, Milan, Zurich, and Berlin. Finally, every student will produce his or her own design proposal, not as an accomplished project, but as deliberately unfinished work focusing on selective main issues.
 
The studio will be structured in six steps.

First step: anatomy of the urban villa in the park. Its main qualities: relation to park and nature, privacy, spaciousness, neutrality and flexibility, and representation. Average dimensions: 500 sqm, 2 floors plus roof floor. Historical examples of urban villas in their specific urban context that should evolve without being disrupted.
 
Second step: pragmatic dissection of the urban villa, with the aim of developing a functional program for a contemporary specimen. Use: residential; exceptions are possible but must be justified with good arguments. Critical assessment of the function of the urban villa. What is contemporary in this way of living? Social aspects. Climatic aspects. Ecological aspects. Grouping and scale. Confrontation of old/new requirements. What should be kept? Spacious rooms, representation, and relationship with the park. What should change? Overall dimension, use of the rooms, representation, economy, ecology.
 
Third step: conceptual dissection of the urban villa. A personal description of experiences and emotions in an ideal urban villa, structured under, among other things, entering the house, cooking, eating, and socializing, view, and physical relationship with nature. The narrative should focus on what are – subjectively, individually – considered the main emotional dimensions.

Fourth step: decision for a specific transformation of an obsolete type into a contemporary one, ranging from shrinking to the mutation into a multi-apartment complex. Other options are possible as long as the intense relationship with the park is maintained. The choice must be made on the grounds of the brief developed in the second and third steps.

Fifth step: research of references complying with aspects of the pragmatical program and the narratives, 20th and 21st century: Plans, elevations, photographs. Interpretation and justification. How do the references comply with the new brief, the experiences and emotions it requires? How do they not? How can they be used as conceptual construction material for a new project?

Sixth step: a new proposal for a contemporary urban villa as a consistent result of the first five steps, focusing on the conceptual issues and architectural features considered to be crucial. Collage representation techniques are encouraged. The projects are not expected to be complete, accomplished designs: rather, results of a methodic process of research and choices, fragmentary proposals with in-depth investigations of specific aspects.

Second Opportunities in Architecture [M1]

In its historical context, architecture has demonstrated an extensive capacity for the adaptation of typologies or forms to different sites, programs, and circumstances. In opposition to functionalist or contextualist philosophies, a good idea in architecture is independent of time, context, scale or function, and is therefore open to multiple explorations.
 
This course will aim to demonstrate the elasticity of architecture through the reworking of student projects from their own “archives”. The goal of the instruction is to demonstrate the intellectual position that the creation of built space is a succession of iterations of past architectural solutions, rather than entirely new inventions with each project. By the end of the course, students should reach both formal (visual) and methodological (written) conclusions about the manipulation of their own architectural archives.

Do-It-Anyway: Place, Tectonics, and Time [M1]

In this studio, students will design and fabricate a sleeping space at one-to-one scale in the period of seven weeks. Why?
 
We are living in an unpredictable and volatile era. A seemingly unending series of natural disasters and anachronistic wars affect our daily lives. The places we inhabit may be unstable or mobile—a trend that will accelerate in the future—and we are expected to quickly adapt to a changing environment.
 
In this situation, we must question the traditional status of architecture as a stable occupant of real estate. Should we instead imagine ephemeral, temporary, or transient architectural artifacts? How could forms and techniques of building be adjusted flexibly and spontaneously to adapt to new situations? How do these tectonic strategies respond to the specificities of place? And can these architectural ideas be used to address pressing contemporary problems including housing instability, economic inequality, and climate change?
 
This studio will address these questions through a hands-on project with a clear outcome: a Sleeping Space. Sleeping is an essential part of our daily lives. A safe and comfortable place to sleep is indispensable for everyone, especially people affected by disaster and instability. When we rest, we find solace from worldly troubles, and we are free to explore a less constrained imaginative realm. In this studio, we will use sleep as a starting point for tectonic experiments that result in a space or assembly that engages the body. Often, sleeping spaces are flat, quiet, covered, and separated from other functions. The outcome of this project will be based on goals created by the student. It could be a shelter, partition, or structure which can accommodate a person for a restful night.

Students will design and fabricate the space and assembly at full-scale to put into practice their own concepts. As the studio designs and builds, we will examine and experiment with materials considering the constraints of time, ease of assembly, and cost. Typical building materials will be re-examined in addition to waste materials and other atypical materials.
 
Throughout the studio, we will discuss our methods of working, and how adaptable spaces and details can and should be used. At the same time, we will also work quickly and intuitively to reach a tangible conclusion. We will start with the conviction that something must be made, hence the theme of the studio: do-it-anyway.

From Within to Without [M1]

This studio will explore the notion of interiority in the public realm by reimagining an existing mid-sized commercial building. As e-commerce, shifting consumer habits, and diminishing demand for retail space alter the social, environmental, and urban fabric of communities, these same circumstances invite innovative design opportunities. How can new life inhabit a building’s interior and surrounding environs is the question that leads our studio to the Design Research (D/R) Building, designed in the late 60s at 48 Brattle Street in Harvard Square.

Denounced by some as a decade of turbulence and disillusionment, the Sixties is also noted as a revolutionary period in which civil rights, feminism, protests against the Vietnam War, and the emergence of the gay and lesbian movement marked a radical departure from conservative norms and outmoded values to usher the beginning of a new era. Nowhere else is this sweeping transformation better illustrated than in cinema, music, dance, and design.

In 1969, set against the political and social tensions of the times, Cambridge-based architectural firm Benjamin Thompson and Associates realized the Design Research (D/R) Building. Described as a place where people could buy everything needed for contemporary living, the awe-inspiring shop artfully presented a selection of home furnishings, clothing, toys, music, food, and drink. The 22,000-square-foot building’s frameless glass façade, expansive open plan, and uniformly finished floors in the same brick as the neighborhood sidewalks render an architecture of elemental simplicity and salient presence. At its peak, D/R’s prominently visible interior from the street performed, in part, as a public theater that extended a cohesiveness and depth to Harvard Square. That no longer exists. This coveted symbol of urban architecture has faded over time, in sync with the neighborhood’s dwindling character, into a lifeless shell with an uncertain future.

Harnessing Cambridge’s innovative spirit and Harvard Square’s scattered sublimities of experience, design, cuisine, and the like, students will develop strategies for infusing the D/R Building with renewed relevance and engagement. The premise is one of mutability: as life changes, so should the building and its interior. The environment Ben Thompson sought to create, inside and out, resulted from giving equal consideration to all design elements — a teacup, a chair, an apron — as he did with the architecture. Good design is good design. Similarly, we see no separation between architecture and interior design. Moreover, we see the interior as an agent of change, offering programmatic, spatial, and architectural implications. Accordingly, this studio will engage the D/R Building from within to reimagine a new interiority. By actively operating at various scales, we believe it is possible to speculate on how the studio’s insights might set the tone for a renaissance of sorts, serving as a microcosm for what could come of Harvard Square. What possible futures await as we contemplate the notion of without from within?

In this studio, students will leverage a myriad of cultural, economic, environmental, social, and technological possibilities. We will begin the 7-week studio with an inquiry into unique, small-scale environments that examine the past to know what has been lost and how these lost elements, in terms of experience, can be reclaimed in light of current times. The collective reproduction of scaled drawings and models of the D/R Building will follow. These artifacts will serve as ideation tools for ensuing design investigations. A large-scale physical model, digital rendering, and floor plan will be the primary modes of representation at the final review.

Housing as a Sustainable Common

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architects were the driving force of progress in developing housing typologies that would enable people to live more socially equitable and healthier urban lives at times of massive social change. These included Garden City homes in response to the overcrowding of cities in the 19th century, mass-produced collective housing with terraces and roof gardens in response to the expansion of tuberculosis epidemics, or high-density, low-rise housing that fostered community relations in response to the destruction of the Second World War.

Today, we are facing a rapid decline in our planet’s health, and the construction of housing is one of the major contributors to our environmental crisis. In Western countries, housing is also unaffordable and increasingly detached from the way people live, and the societal changes that have led to the existence of different types of households. If we are to address these social and environmental challenges, it is imperative that new approaches to housing are developed that are affordable and more caring, with a reduced impact on the planet.

The studio will approach housing as a collective infrastructure of sustainable living by combining commoning with adaptive reuse of an existing building.

Commoning is a practice of sharing and self-governing of resources. It involves relinquishing some of what we have become accustomed to using privately to share with others. In housing, it leads to less overall space and energy being used, more affordable lives and forming bonds between people with shared interests. To be equitable, a housing common today needs to accommodate different types of households such as a group of adults sharing accommodation, a person living alone, blended families, multigenerational families, live-work households, a collective of singles or the elderly, as well as the two-parent family. The opportunity and challenge of such a common is the provision of different scenarios for sharing to ensure the meeting of the everyday needs of different households.

The site of the studio projects will be an existing office building in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. Each student will produce a proposal to transform the building into a housing common that provides a diverse community of 150 persons with a variety of shared living arrangements. The adaptive reuse of the existing building will reduce its embodied carbon and the overall construction cost. Whereas the social question raised by the common will be what are the motives that will attract people to enter into commoning, the formal problem posed by the existing building will be how to provide its future inhabitants with a variety of living arrangements within its uniform structural grid.

The studio will be an opportunity for each student to develop a vision for how we should live together and in a sustainable way, and how architects should anticipate users’ requirements in their absence. We will travel to Paris and Zurich from October 1- 6. The trip will be an opportunity to learn more about the site and to visit exemplary housing precedents in both cities.

The studio will meet weekly on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Farshid Moussavi will meet the studio in person on September 6, 7, 20, 21; October 1-6 (Studio trip), 18, 19; November 8, 9, 29, 30; December 12,13. She will meet the studio via Zoom on September 13, 27; October 11, 20, 25; November 1, 15; December 6. Yotam Ben Hur will be in residence on September 7, 14, 28; October 12, 26; November 2, 16; December 13.

Forgotten Fort Kongestein

This studio will explore potential new attitudes toward historical preservation, transformation, and adaptive reuse. The location is Fort Kongestein on the Eastern Coast of Ghana, near the village of Ada Foah. A little-known site, now almost entirely in ruins, the fort was built in 1783 by Danish traders. It is one of many European fortifications which survive along the Gold Coast, erected for the trade of people and goods; between 1482 and 1786. These can still be seen along the coast of Ghana between Keta and Beyin; they were links in the trade routes first established by the Portuguese during their era of great maritime exploration. Purchased by the British in 1850, Fort Kongestein, therefore, sits within a rich historical and cultural framework of contact, commerce, and colonial administration and is a fragmentary and material vestige of a bygone era.

The site is now almost completely dormant and mostly neglected.

The village of Ada Foah, located, as it is in a place of calm and natural beauty where the Volta River meets the Atlantic Ocean, was once a prominent market town but has since lost its regional status and is now becoming a more minor attraction, a place for tourists wishing to temporarily escape Accra, the big city; there are now beach houses, sailing clubs and boutique hotels dotted around the area.

This studio is interested in prompting design explorations that make intelligent and imaginative leaps between architectural past, present, and future, as well as the hybridization and combination of cross-cultural architectural languages within a single project. We will ask how sites like this, with their complicated and problematic pasts, might be reclaimed and reused as generating starting points (both real and symbolic) with potential new narratives and multiplicity of meanings in connection with local communities and their futures. Also of interest is the growing overlap between the landscape of recreational tourism and of historical memory rooted in this place which intersects with a trajectory of growing prosperity and a living community along the coast.

You will be challenged to design a project with either one or two programs. You will be offered a choice of programs (museum, archive, community center), and program selections will be made within the first two weeks of the studio. The project will bridge the past and present, reappropriating the site for new relevance in the 21st century through adaptive reuse, extension, and other strategies.

A number of precedents and essays will be offered up for digestion and consideration at the beginning of the semester, and there will be a trip to Accra and the coast of Ghana in the first week of October. To give a deeper understanding of the current state of cultural production and preservation in this region, a series of (optional) virtual talks will be arranged with a selection of artists, makers, curators, and architects currently doing work of interest in West Africa.

Programmatic, experiential, and spatial investigations will take place through drawings and physical models at the scale of landscape, architecture, and interior. You will be invited to articulate strategies for how your project might engage with and meet the surrounding context and how material language, technology, and process could also instill meaning and relate to broader themes of culture, craft, and environmental conditions. We welcome diversity of approach and attitude, including the speculative and imaginary.

TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 7th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Earth Curvature: Context as Material / How to Read Place

Students will craft their own architectural language, guided by personal ethics and an original vision towards a sustainable architecture that also strives to timelessly resonate with its 'special place'. The site with the Earth Curvature art installation expands the scope of your work to include the planet and our place in the universe in the largest sense and America and its’ Great Salt Lake Desert in another sense. Early assignments will require you to model and draw analytic-like drawings of the site and its art installation before a site visit early in the semester. Other analytic-like drawing assignments will include the work of certain artists concerned with light, place, and similarly related themes. Others will include envelope and building skin performance (environmental/phenomenological). In the end, you will be expected to develop and defend your own architecture for this site and program at a Design Development level at the conclusion of the semester.

Parisian Knees

There is little doubt that density is reshaping our cities, at a furious pace and with vast implications for urban life. As far-reaching as these transformations are, this studio will focus on a particular pressure point: the base of the density cross-section, where density (life that goes up) and public space (life that spreads outward) have no choice but to meet. This is the city’s urban knee, its horizontal-to-vertical bending point, out of which the public spaces of tomorrow will spring.

This studio has three aims:
   • Researching spatial typologies of public space in high-density contexts, with a focus on those transformations of public life and the human condition that arise with increased density.
   • Investigating structure and horizontal/vertical circulation as they relate to new forms of public space.
   • Exploring alternative programming modes (as public space, as private space, and as hybrids of both) that result from more intertwined public and private Program

Program: Types
The studio program will have two parts: housing (50%) and strategic programming (totaling 50%) that will be determined by each of you. ‘Strategic programming’ means uses selected by you that will enable you to develop your thesis about public life in light of your specific architectural/urban model. This could be office space, cultural space, institutional space, additional housing, or some other program that you frame as significant for the ambitions of your project.

Program: Size
The total program area is anticipated to be approximately 15,000-25,000m2. Please note: Much of this program area will be allocated to the upper reaches of your projects, which will be treated more schematically than the first few floors.

Site
Everyone in the studio will work on the same site, the new La Courneuve Six-Routes station in Paris, one of the metro stations that are currently being designed and built as part of the Grand Paris Express project. The GPE project is among the most ambitious urban propositions in the world today, with broad implications for Paris’s legacy, present, and future.

TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 7th. It will meet regularly thereafter.