Small Institutions: On rediscovering the emotional conditions of architecture

The city, according to Louis Kahn, arose through the establishment of institutions. By extension, he defined its “greatness” as “how sensitive [those institutions] are to renewed desire for new agreement.” Agreement, in this context, does not necessarily entail a declaration or even a conscious decision on behalf of any party. Instead, it may arise from a shared recognition of an ephemeral condition that creates “a center around which existential space is organized.” For example, Kahn believed “agreement. . . is what made the school a school, or what inspired the first room. It was an undeniable agreement that this man who seems to sense things which others don’t should be near the children so they can benefit from such a man.” When held to this standard, most, if not all, cities lack greatness. As Foucault and others have observed, many of our institutions, from schools to hospitals, have become manifestations of and tools for power instead of sites of cooperation, dialogue, and exchange. Their architecture and design atomizes by intention, separating people into individual cells or precisely demarcated spaces where they are sequestered and observed, and thereby controlled. Our institutions, from Kahn’s perspective, have “lost their inspirational impact of their beginning and have become operational.” For the spring 2021 studio “Small Institutions,” Roger Tudó Galí, Josep Ricart Ulldemolins, and Xavier Ros Majó—three partners at HARQUITECTES in Sabadell, Spain who served as the John C. Portman Design Critics in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for the semester—took Kahn as their inspiration and asked students to identify the primordial essences of various institutions: library, museum, school, temple, town hall, market, theater, hospital, swimming pool, and courthouse. By focusing students’ attention on determining and responding to the Kahnian agreement from which these institutions arose, the rituals inherent to these spaces become constitutive of their designs. In turn, this exercise illuminates how forms of communal interaction and public engagement have been lost and how they could be resuscitated. Moreover, it encourages a wholesale reconceptualization of architecture in which the plan begins with nothing, to which only the necessary is added. “A lot of new institutions are losing the emotional conditions of architecture, becoming too functional and rational, and just working to avoid practical problems,” says Tudó Galí. “We are very much about going against these preestablished ideas and the pragmatic approach to building. Instead, we try to rediscover the platonic idea of a place and its activities.” A novel methodological approach was fundamental to achieving these objectives, beginning with the non-architectonic meditation on agreement rather than a site-specific design problem like those typically given to students. “In general, from our experience teaching in Spain, we are always short on time in the projectural process when deciding what is really essential in architecture,” explains Ricart Ulldemolins. “We feel that students waste energy in terms of their approaches, whether academic, social, or personal. Here, we’re talking about institutions, not specifically about building, in order to put students into a very specific situation to come, from the very beginning, to the essential in architecture.” The site chosen by the trio aided their directive that the students eradicate any dependence on established forms. Located within a high-density block in the Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera neighborhood in the oldest area of Barcelona, the long, narrow plot between party walls measures just 493 square meters. Connected to adjacent streets, it was created through the hypothetical demolition of existing buildings. Ros Majó describes their selection as “a kind of trap for the students,” as the size, especially when considered with its irregular geometry, is too small to accommodate a conventional-size institution. More radical than its challenging dimensions, however, was that the site wasn’t disclosed until about halfway into the semester. Unbound by location or other restrictions, the students could first concern themselves solely with their unique institutions, the elemental aspects of which, the professors hoped, would become more definable with each task assigned. The first assignment foregrounded introspection. Each student chose four photographs and built a collage as a means of creating an individual and unexpected hypothetical institution. “We didn’t want the project to focus just on the visual, but this was the fastest way to produce a personal approach rather than one based in a very abstract, general, or ambitious concept,” says Ricart Ulldemolins. With the library, for instance, Alexis Boivin (MArch ’22) fused street images with Étienne-Louis Boullée’s epic proposal for the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Boullée’s vaulted ceilings are here made transparent, declaratively introducing the urban into the space. At the same time, perambulators heighten a sense of the library as a free and open public institution as they evoke those browsing or just walking by the bouquinistes stalls along the Seine. Following this warm-up exercise, the students began historical research in order to determine what parts of institutions had been retained over time, with an emphasis on typologies. “The delivery was not only to understand an evolution in history but to understand what is and is not important, and to propose what should be included in the next step of that evolution,” says Ricart Ulldemolins. As well as providing a generative cultural-historical perspective on these institutions, the assignment, Tudó Galí explains, helped reveal the negative aspects of these spaces that have persisted. “The most boring part of the institutional idea is when it becomes a building that is repeated a lot and becomes part of an automatic system. The specificity of the design is lost,” he says. “The idea for the students was to stop this evolution and take a more open point of view, to try to produce something which defines a very specific solution and not a repetition of the same kind of buildings.” This in turn led to designing archetypes of their institutions inspired by this research—models that illustrate the main performance that takes place in each space and that define their need to exist (as opposed to site-specific concerns). The emphasis on performance remained central in the subsequent assignment, when the site was revealed but not yet addressed as it typically would be. “We asked the students not to do a very conventional research process to understand the site but instead a short exercise that we call ‘the ephemeral project,’” says Ricart Ulldemolins. “It should be something that is not exactly a building but something that can be removed, to make the definition of the ritual stronger. It was quite a difficult moment for them, to try to expose them to the institution not as an object but as a happening,” says Tudó Galí. “Most of them work on buildings or objects but not on the activity,” adds Ros Majó. Ricart Ulldemolins notes that not only graduate students but architects broadly have difficulty projecting the performatic part of the institution onto a site. “I think it’s a general misunderstanding of the profession to confuse the shape of the object and the object itself with the experience of people,” he says. “Our experience in a building is not exactly the design of the object. It’s the design of the experience produced by the object.” The next step—“the primordial space,” as the professors referred to it—brought together the studies of archetype and ritual, with specific emphasis on the atmosphere of the space and haptic experiences related to temperature, materiality, natural light, and proportions. Tudó Galí believes it was the most important delivery, as it asked the students “to define what could be considered the most essential space in these institutions” and relate that to the site itself. It was the first time that the students’ assumptions of what was inherent to their institutions were brought into conversation with the material and geometrical realities of the constrained site. This confrontation stripped away additional notions of what is necessary, further distancing the designs of the institutions from the status quo. As if this process were not surprising and confounding enough for many, the trio had a final twist—“the strategic detail”—that would further ask the students to rethink their approach to architecture in and beyond this studio. “The strategic detail is a combination of the main strategies and the smaller definition of a building,” explains Tudó Galí. “The detail cannot be understood without the general idea, and the general idea cannot be understood without the detail. In this holistic idea, everything is the same, just at a different scale or dimension. It’s not a fragment or a part that goes after the main decisions. It’s a detail that holds the possibility of changing everything.” This directive required the students to determine an aspect of the total design from the previous assignment that was connected to the essence of the institution as developed throughout the semester. Once identified, that detail would then need to solve smaller problems through its incorporation into the space. “It started to shake everything for them a little bit, to determine if their previous ideas were a little naive,” Tudó Galí adds. Boivin, with the library, and Diandra Rendradjaja (MArch ’22), who was assigned the market, both agreed that the methodology the professors developed forced them to question constantly how they approached their designs. “Normally in studios, you’re given a prompt at the start and work at your own pace, defining by yourself the small steps you’re taking,” says Boivin. “But the professors were precise in setting goals for us, which really helped throughout the process. Libraries are usually humongous spaces placed in flat, unbounded plots. The assignments, such as narrowing the task and focusing on the evolution of libraries throughout time, really forced the project to take a radical approach and refine what the essential qualities of a library are. The site made almost irrelevant the canonical libraries that I looked into because they wouldn’t accept or fit into this kind of space. Instead I had to achieve monumentality through small spaces or aspects of light that adjusted to those smaller spaces.” At first, Boivin sought to play with movement, with a design that carried people throughout the library, and specifically around books, in a dynamic manner via stairways and ramps. But the process encouraged a more concentrated design, built across three levels. The ground floor resembles an agora, almost empty and fluid with low bookcases on which people can sit and that encourage communal engagement. The second floor—with individual reading and storage rooms—creates a more intimate relationship with the book. Openness returns in the third floor’s grander reading room. It features a table which follows the perimeter of the room and large windows that create a sense of suspension for occupants between the courtyard and the multistory surrounding buildings. In Boivin’s words, the plan emphasizes “circulating, browsing of books, and reading as a celebration of knowledge” as well as “the activity of encountering its physical form.” Rendradjaja also focused on public access and openness but further emphasized the site’s street-like nature. “In Barcelona, specifically in the context of the Old Town, the street is the only public ground,” she says. “Unlike the nearby Cerda blocks, which have courtyards, people here have less access to common space. The street-facing windows and balconies of neighbors are used as laundry-drying racks and plant hangers, as they are the only exterior space they have. The streets are the void between private properties. Because markets are public spaces, I felt the need to leave mine, which is almost the size of the streets around it, as empty as possible. It could be seen in multiple ways: the backyard to the surrounding buildings, a new plaza that’s half-covered, or a new courtyard that was missing from the neighborhood.” Just as Boivin’s historical research and the initial ideas for the library it prompted became largely irrelevant, Rendradjaja experienced significant shifts in her understanding of the market. “What I thought about at the beginning of the semester didn’t transfer at all,” she says, addressing how the methodology led to an understanding that the essence of the institution should dictate form and that the site should not restrict an architect from upholding that essence as primary. “Roger, Xavi, and Josep’s approach to the studio and in their work is always to try to find the most precise solution—not in the sense that there’s only one ultimate answer but finding one out of many possibilities to do something that’s simple, straightforward, and smart. It’s about doing something with very minimal effort but maximum effect,” she explains. “So the ephemeral exercise, which for me was the most eye-opening, was about discovering the ritual of an institution—the activity, not the building itself or its construction. In my case, that was market exchange and maintenance, and the minimum elements you need in order for that to happen. That was the moment I realized what the studio was about, and I thought it was very helpful throughout the semester.” Rendradjaja’s design reclaims the market from the enclosed hall, which she characterizes as “selective of its merchants and detached from the public surroundings as it forms a private entity,” and returns it to the open-air street as a “universal public space.” The design’s central facet is “a series of roofs, held by engaged columns that are structurally supported by and dependent on the existing walls.” These hang over the rows of stone tables permanently installed on the ground. At different elevations, they enable palpable light and shadow changes. Situated much higher than in traditional markets, they also instill an awareness of being within the city rather than confined within a form of transplantable architecture. Arguably most crucial though, in terms of the studio and the professors’ hopes for its methodology, is how these roofs also fulfill the “strategic detail” assignment. “The strategic detail is meant to be a precise response to something that facilitates the performance of your institution,” Rendradjaja says. In her case, that performance concerns water, a required resource for a market. “The roofs evolved from being protection from rain and for shade to being water-collection devices. In the final assignment, the structure that holds them up in compression are at the same time pipes that move water down from the gutter to a collection tank. In order to separate rainwater from the used water of the market, two independent routes are installed, sectionally. Both routes culminate at the center point of the project, where a tank underground stores water throughout the year and reveals itself aboveground in the form of a resource fountain.” Thus the roofs, through their multifunctionality as infrastructure for a water system integral to the institution, bring balcony and market together in a holistic design. The surprises experienced by the students at each step in the studio somewhat echo the need for shocks, gentle or otherwise, in our large-scale understanding of institutions. What is conventionally considered “institutional” refers to material facets—often linked to power rather than style—that become unoriginal through their repeatability and which reduce the institution to these typological details. The essences of these institutions—their “invisible conditions” as framed by Tudó Galí, Ricart Ulldemolins, and Ros Majó—are ephemeral, however, and therefore resist codification. To design with Kahn’s formulation of the agreement as one’s impetus is a rebuke against a society that has forgotten why our institutions exist and the rituals at their genesis. The only demand it makes is the continual questioning of the status quo and the stripping away of the superfluous. “It’s necessary to demolish the conventional building of the institution in order to understand what is essential to that institution,” says Ricart Ulldemolins. “The success of the course, for me, was that most students discovered this by themselves.  

GSD experts on a major barrier to climate crisis mitigation: “The majority of Americans have little experience with the land and its rhythms”

If Earth’s biosphere is in crisis, it is a peculiar sort of crisis. To human eyes, it appears drawn out in slow motion over decades and spread almost invisibly across vast tracts of land. A difficult cognitive leap is required to grasp such a diffuse phenomenon. Landscape architects face a further complication: while disasters like hurricanes and wildfires can focus attention, our natural response begins with triage and mourning—far from the sort of visionary optimism that helps propel longer-term projects. And where does recovery figure into future decades of a warmer globe? To understand these issues in the field of landscape architecture, I spoke with three professors at the GSD who taught courses on the subject this spring. Steven Apfelbaum, an ecologist and founder of the ecological restoration firm AES, began our conversation by noting the tendency in conservationist discourse to focus on charismatic megafauna—“big animals that we know and love for one reason or another, usually because we fear them.” We tend to notice megaflora as well, and major weather events like heat waves and floods likewise capture our attention. But this fascination with the large, the beautiful, and the fearful does not always translate into the sort of sustained engagement required to develop a deep ecological understanding, Apfelbaum says. This is a foundational conundrum of ecology: the majority of Americans have little experience with the land and its rhythms, and as a result we have insufficient understanding of ecological processes and principles. “We are ecologically illiterate as a civilization,” as he bluntly puts it. Apfelbaum’s course at the GSD, “Altered Rural and Urban Landscape Restoration,” takes steps to address this lacuna. Like the conservationist Aldo Leopold before him, Apfelbaum encourages a land ethic that comes from engagement with the whole complex biotic pyramid encountered in a particular locale.[1] He says that “it really takes people that are more knowledgeable and connected to these ecological understandings to deploy ecological principles” in the right way. The question of expertise arose repeatedly in my conversations. Silvia Benedito, a design critic at the GSD and founder of the multi-disciplinary design firm OFICINAA, emphasizes the need for community engagement and Indigenous knowledge rather than simply deferring to experts. This spring she taught “The Anatomy of (Wild)fire, a Design Quest?,” a course centered on rural communities in the Mediterranean. Benedito explains that a postwar exodus led to “rural areas becoming the back porch of cities—in many ways they became monocultures and sites of extraction.” The inter-generational transfer of ecological knowledge was interrupted and institutions stepped in to fill the void, often misunderstanding what they encountered. Benedito describes the case of one of America’s most beloved national parks: “There are reports that when John Muir arrived in the Yosemite Valley, he thought that what he was seeing was wild nature and that it should be controlled and maintained in the condition he found it. But it had actually been managed over many centuries by people indigenous to the area, who used it for food, for rituals, and—when it came to fire—they managed it for the safety of their communities.” Colonists brought with them their own ideas of fire as a destructive force to be managed from afar and eliminated from the valley when possible. Designers, by the very nature of their profession, are usually outsiders to the geographical areas in which they work—and thus ongoing place-based education is crucial. Cultivating in-the-field knowledge was among the goals of a course taught by David Moreno Mateos, an ecologist and assistant professor at the GSD. “Ecosystem Restoration” focused on land in New England that had been cultivated by settlers, but which has been abandoned for several hundred years. This situation has created a sort of natural laboratory for understanding the recovery process. Due to the pandemic, students were offered a framework for self-guided field trips to document local ecosystems. Extrapolating from these observations and correlating with research by ecologists, Moreno Mateos identified “the specific tools—combinations of soil fungi, plant species composition, plant traits—that promote recovery by increasing the functionality and resilience of any ecosystem, which if brought to landscape architecture will help design more functional and resilient landscapes.” The course dovetails with Moreno Mateos’s primary research. His major project this summer takes place at the site of an ecological catastrophe that occurred long ago. Swaths of Greenland were transformed by Norse farmers from Iceland beginning around the year 1000, and, for reasons still under debate, these settlements were abandoned about 500 years later. For the past five centuries, many of these landscapes have been left to recover on their own. His scientific research aims to understand the details of how these former Norse settlements have recovered from ancient anthropogenic impacts—which ought to offer us clues about how humanity can deal with the ecological disasters caused by anthropogenic climate change. Landscape architects, Moreno Mateos says, should be “armed with the powerful tool of ecosystem restoration that could be used in any landscape architecture project, conservationist tragedies, or management activities.” Like Moreno Mateos, Apfelbaum emphasizes the importance of experiencing functioning ecosystems in person. His own restoration practice begins at home, on his 80-acre farm in Wisconsin, the transformation of which is documented in his book, Nature’s Second Chance. Readers follow along as Apfelbaum restores a patch of fallow and semiwild farmland, coming to understand and appreciate the relationship between species in a diverse ecosystem that includes wetland, prairie, savanna, and spring-fed brook. But reading this or any other book is no substitute for field courses, Apfelbaum says. “When I went to school, I took field courses every semester, and I was out in the woods learning about nature a couple of days a week. Now, it’s very challenging to go get that sort of field exposure.” This lack of exposure has affected the way designers conceptualize the land, he says: “The landscape architect has focused on parcels, oftentimes small, and the ecologist has become less focused on systems, and more focused on smaller scale thinking… How can we work in a systematic way across scale, across boundaries of ownership, and across disciplinary subject matters?” Apfelbaum, Benedito, and Moreno Mateos all agree that landscape architects have a role to play as mediators in multi-scalar, multidisciplinary ecological discussions. Benedito points to invaluable lessons in the work of James Corner and his firm, Field Operations (where Benedito previously worked). Corner’s drawings focused on processes, helping landscape architects to see that narratives can be embedded in landscapes. Many of Benedito’s own projects conjure elusive sensory dimensions of landscapes. This sensitivity is crucial when dealing with phenomena such as fire, which are themselves fleeting but which leave traces on the land and in collective memory that can be rekindled in the course of design. Benedito emphasizes that “the potentials of landscape as a discipline of telling stories is fundamental when we have to interact with communities.” Apfelbaum concurs, mentioning that, at his firm, “the first function of the landscape architects, on many projects, is translation—the ability to convert ideas, including often complex scientific ideas, into graphic communication that builds a conversation between stakeholders from myriad backgrounds and with different things they care about.” The next step after translation, he says, is “creative ideation: how do you take people that are locked in a frame of mind and begin a conversation where anything you say might trigger a knee-jerk negative reaction against any sort of change?” Participation in map-making can be a key step in overcoming NIMBYism. “Neighbors see neighbors. Neighbors participate with neighbors. Neighbors draw,” Apfelbaum says. “They might not be able to say exactly what they’re thinking, and they might not really be able to draw it very well, but if they can get something down—a few words and then a few little scribbles—we can begin playing off it.” The importance of drawing communities into the decision-making process highlights a difficulty at the heart of many restoration projects: people may want to conserve what they have and to restore damaged areas to a previous state, but that is not always feasible. Events can push landscapes into new ecological states—a forest can become a grassland, or a coastal wetland environment can find itself under water. It can be difficult to gauge whether restoration is the best route to take. Fire, for instance, is a cyclical part of some ecosystems, but sometimes a burnt landscape doesn’t bounce back. Rising global temperatures are causing biomes to shift—and sometimes wildfires are “the last piece placed on top of a precarious wooden tower that unbalanced everything and topples it over,” as Benedito puts it. Moreno Mateos emphasizes the “need to have an open mind about restoration. Ecosystems are in a dynamic stable state—they are always adapting to the ever-existing environmental changes.” As a result, “restoration must be understood in a dynamic way, and that any restoration projects must be as adapted as possible to the current changing conditions, which may involve alternative states.” This is a frightening sort of openness. Moreno Mateos notes that we are experiencing a general biodiversity crisis; the United Nations has declared the current decade as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. For Benedito, it is important to engage with landscape disasters as cultural phenomenon. She points out that while fire management practice belongs, for the most part, to the field of silviculture, much of the literature comes from anthropology and sociology. Stories abound of fire and the birth of humanity and the importance of hearths and sacred flames in domestic and religious architecture. “The cultural domain of fire,” she says, “has been suppressed in landscape management, but not lost.” Benedito gives the example of the herding of goats and sheep in Portugal, a practice which has been displaced by industrial farming. Livestock provide a few things: meat and wool, certainly, but also fertilizer and the clearing of undergrowth. “They were providing ecological service—they were actually mowing these territories, reducing the biomass fuel for the reduction of wildfires,” she explains. Such cultural practices often have a long history. Fire management today should involve, Benedito says, “recuperating a culture: the ceremonies, the meaning, the symbolism associated with rural practices.” So while disasters—fires, floods—may appear limited in time, space, and in the factors involved, they really must be seen as only the most tangible moments of processes that occur across much broader scales. Landscape architecture may be among the best-equipped disciplines for engaging with such processes. Apfelbaum argues that engineering is too narrow. “Engineering solutions have done a great job for 150 or 200 years to help us with water quality and sanitation,” he says, “but they’re not addressing the larger, more complex solution sets that we need to address now. Engineering solutions are kind of single purpose—stop the flooding, you know. Whereas when you stop the flooding with the ecology, you get all sorts of secondary benefits: you get water quality improvements, biodiversity improvements, the replenishment of groundwater resources.” Apfelbaum makes a compelling case, supported by decades of successful projects: “With an ecological solution, the benefits are amplified. With an engineering approach, the benefits are usually narrow and the benefits are oftentimes short- lived—they’re best on the day the project is completed, and then they progressively deteriorate while the cost of maintenance increases. An ecological solution is weakest on the day of installation as a practice, and it improves over time while the cost of maintenance decreases.” Wide recognition of these benefits may be leading to a shift in perspective, and enthusiasm for ecological restoration following landscape disasters may be translating into broad public enthusiasm for ecological thinking. We should hope so. Ecological literacy is a crucial force for good in a world facing a crisis of a magnitude that is difficult to fully comprehend. [1] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: 1949)

“How can a building just collapse?” Hanif Kara shares lessons in building safety

On Thursday, the partial collapse of a residential building in Surfside, Florida, left 11 dead and 150 still unaccounted for. While we await answers about what caused this tragedy, we are left asking the question: What could cause a building to simply fall down? The answer, usually: exceptional circumstances. In modern times and in developed countries, where buildings and other structures are well designed and a lot of checks are undertaken during the design and construction stages, the cause of failure can often be complex and multifaceted. It bears repeating that we won’t know the reason behind this particular building’s collapse, but, speaking generally, a single reason for structural failure is uncommon. It is also worth recognizing that advances in technologies—structural theories and calculations—have extended our knowledge of architecture and engineering and reduced the failures. These advancements have allowed us to make exceptionally strong materials and develop a capacity to understand their limitations, a vast improvement on empirical building methods of ancient times. So, while these types of building collapses are tragic, they are also relatively rare in buildings that utilize new innovations. Still, even just 40 years ago, the exchange of essential information from design to construction relied heavily on the human hand, increasing the risk of mistakes; today the use of computer aided production and communications has rapidly improved the safety with which we exchange information and build (though this, of course, does not negate the need for qualified designers and competent constructors deployed in all construction projects). When buildings do collapse, however, it is sometimes due to unusual external forces—such as wind, earthquakes, gas explosions, fires, hurricanes, unpredictable snow and ice accumulation or impact that exceed the assumed loads which the structure was designed for. In these circumstance it’s not hard to understand why a building might fall. But other general causes can be less obvious. Unsuitable ground conditions below the structure, for instance, can pose a threat to the integrity of a building. All structures are supported by soils or rock of different capacity and strengths. These are not immune to failure in themselves, often caused by heavy storms, earthquakes, climate change and other environmental events. This can cause a building’s foundation to fail slowly (like the tilting Tower of Pisa) or without warning, bringing down the structure. Poor workmanship and badly constructed buildings, or the use of deleterious materials that do not comply with what was specified in the design, can also be a cause of failure. This can arise from undeliberate incompetence, but in rare cases can be considered criminal negligence. In the last several decades we have also seen the impact of chemical changes in materials that can cause local failure initially and then large-scale failures that, over time, render buildings unsafe. Rusting steel expands six or seven times its original shape and when embedded in concrete it can expand and weaken the structure of a building. So, with the possibility of unforeseen events, or structural issues that are invisible to the untrained eye, how can we be sure our buildings are safe? All structures are designed with code safety factors that have been developed over decades and with much care to ensure a certain amount of safety and tolerance for accidental loads or poor workmanship. If a building is up to code, it is generally deemed safe. Unusual structural failures have provided better understanding of how we design and construct, and have even changed codes of practice in some cases. Once such example is what is commonly known as progressive collapse or chain reaction when a small part of a structure fails but transfers its load (often weight in case of towers) to the next part of the structure. As the load aggregates, it becomes too much for the remaining structure to bear and a catastrophic collapse of the whole system takes place. The 1968 collapse of Ronan Point, a 22-story tower in the UK, is an early example of a progressive collapse. It led to a root and branch review of the cause, changes in codes of practice and the discovery of many buildings that had to be strengthened to prevent repetition of such a catastrophe. While Ronan point did not collapse in its entirety, the failure gave birth to the term progressive collapse of whole or large parts of the structure. As a result, today engineers throughout the world design with some redundancy—that is to carry loads by more than one mechanism to guarantee that if one part of the structure fails the loads will redistribute safely to other parts of the system to prevent a progressive collapse. Though building codes have evolved to better guard against collapse, when structural failures are first noticed, its paramount that test are undertaken, and proper remote and timely monitoring actions are put in place to check for such things as crack propagations. It’s also good practice to undertake non-destructive surveys, chemical tests and sometimes even small destructive tests to establish the nature and scale of the problem. Such actions require expertise, but tenants must bring issues to the attention of authorities and owners when they see warning signs; such as large cracks in the structure, fragmenting of material, vibration of floors and walls, or excessive changes in shape of the structure. It is not uncommon to undertake surveys when property is purchased, but it’s less common to survey a property that has been in the same possession for a long time. With the economic costs of new technologies such as drones, which can examine the elements of a building that were once inaccessible, structures that are showing distress or are above a certain age should be examined as a matter of course to prevent as best as we can more failure and tragic loss of life. So, while we can’t yet ascribe a cause to the tragedy in Miami, we can learn a lesson in building safety. Designers, builders, owners and tenants must all be vigilant and investigate the root cause of structural issues when they arise and more readily survey their properties to ensure that buildings that were once safe, remain safe. Hanif Kara is a professor of the practice of architectural technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the cofounder and design-director of the interdisciplinary engineering practice AKT II in London. He is a member of the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission Design Group and was previously appointed to the UK Design Council’s Commission of Architecture and Build Environment. This opinion piece originally appeared on CNN, posted June 29, 2021. Courtesy CNN.  

John Rahaim on the California Housing Crisis: What are planners to do?

In the past decade, San Francisco has become the poster child for income inequality, housing costs, and homelessness. The regional growth that fueled this national attention has been caused by a perfect storm of two factors: renewed interest in urban living combined with the explosive growth of technology companies. This has led to a worsening condition of economic inequality largely along racial lines. While the same phenomenon is also occurring in other coastal cities, the exorbitant cost of housing in the Bay Area has made the situation more acute. As a planner, urban designer, and former Planning Director for the City of San Francisco from 2008–2020, I was a key player in managing dramatic changes to the city, which saw the most growth in nearly a century during my tenure. It seems clear that in the Bay Area, the price of housing and the associated repercussions are both a cause of, and an almost direct result of, economic inequality and homelessness. In this politically charged environment—where housing policies, homelessness, and housing costs factor into almost every dinner conversation—the task most often put to planners is how to make more housing happen, and happen faster. There is broad agreement that California, and the Bay Area in particular, has fallen woefully behind in housing production. In 2018, Governor Gavin Newsom set a state goal to produce 500,000 new housing units per year. The state has only produced about 100,000 per year since (and only some of that shortfall can be blamed on the pandemic). It is not hyperbole to say that California is in the midst of a housing crisis. And in spite of the changes in living patterns brought by the pandemic, the housing shortage will likely continue. What are planners—and state and local governments—to do? First, cities must revise single-family zoning to allow multiple units. If cities don’t make this change, the state should require it. Single-family zoning was largely intended to keep out people of lower incomes, and therefore people of color. It largely worked, and still does. Today, the typical rationale for resisting changes to single-family zoning is to “maintain neighborhood character.” Minneapolis and Portland, which recently revised single-family zoning, are receiving a lot of attention in the planning media for taking this bold step. Low-density, detached housing zoning must change to open all neighborhoods to a variety of incomes. As any Black resident of San Francisco can tell you, the lower density neighborhoods are those with access to quality public services, especially parks and better schools. If the physical character of the neighborhood is truly the concern, alternative types of housing can be produced through better design and a robust design review process. But we must not kid ourselves into believing that changing single-family zoning will result in significant new housing production. It will not. Land assembly, delaying tactics by residents, and the cost of existing houses will hamper production. Further, residential neighborhoods, even in dense urban neighborhoods, are removed from public transit. Change zoning for the right reasons, but don’t assume it will increase housing production. Second, create minimum zoning requirements along all commercial corridors—but not more broadly. There have been several efforts in recent years by the state legislature to mandate higher density zoning around transit stations and other public amenities, regardless of the existing underlying conditions. These efforts caused enormous public backlash, and have generally failed. If the goal is housing production, the vast majority of production will, and should, occur along commercial corridors where there are public services, better public transit, wider streets, and more eclectic design conditions. In the Bay Area, zoning provisions in many suburban jurisdictions do not allow housing on commercial corridors. But based on building codes, the most economical housing type is a structure of 6 or 7 stories, allowing for wood frame construction; this is a building type and size well suited to commercial streets. Third, speed up the approval process—but don’t expect this to magically produce a lot of housing. The approval process is absurdly slow, and time delays are a factor in housing production. Among other delaying tactics, the California Environmental Quality Act has been turned on its head and used as a tool to stop housing production in precisely the locations where it is the most environmentally friendly—urban areas with access to transit and services. But let’s be clear: housing approved is not housing built. As of two years ago, San Francisco had 60,000 entitled housing units in the pipeline, with only 10,000 actually under construction. The housing approval process is the bogeyman cited by every real estate reporter and elected official in the state, because it is far easier to blame public sector agencies than to cite the private development industry which—even in the hottest economic climate in a century—was unable to produce the housing that was already approved. Finally, and most importantly, get government at all levels back in the housing business. President Biden has acknowledged that housing is an essential component of our infrastructure. We don’t think of our roads, sewers, and transit stations as private commodities—they are available to all. In America, housing is a commodity to be bought and sold like a car. The result is that those with means have a place to live, and those without means do not. We must change this paradigm. In San Francisco, 6 percent of housing is controlled by the public/nonprofit sectors, and that is higher than in most US cities. In Hong Kong and northern Europe, the comparable number is about 50 percent. In Singapore, it’s 80 percent. The provision of social housing in these places is based on a fundamentally different paradigm—that housing is indeed part of necessary public infrastructure. This combination of public and private provision of housing accommodates all income levels, which the private market alone simply cannot do. Further, governments must get involved in private housing production after it is approved, and not assume that the private market will simply take care of it. Why are so many approved projects stalled? Could the state provide revolving loans, via a mechanism such as an infrastructure bank, to kick-start horizontal development on large projects? More provocatively, should the state restart a form of redevelopment to allow cities to take control of large sites? The California housing crisis is a key, if not primary, component of economic inequality in the Bay Area, and many other regions. As the most populous state, California has on outsize impact on the national economy; and the state’s policy initiatives have often set the stage for other states and on national policies. If we are to realistically address this crisis, it is time for California planners to work with communities and elected officials at all levels of government to change our housing policy paradigms. John Rahaim is an urban designer and city planner. He was the Planning Director for the City of San Francisco for twelve years, the longest contiguous tenure of any Planning Director in the city’s history. He serves as a Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard GSD where he led the studio “Building Respect on San Francisco’s Third Street” in the spring of 2021.

Tar Creek Remade: Taking on 120 years of environmental injustice at an Oklahoma Superfund site

Envision a broad expanse of barren gray mounds riven with erosion channels. Pools of viridian, ochre, and bright russet water fill low areas between the piles. Some of these drain into a meandering multicolored creek that makes its way through rank grass and shrubs. A hot breeze lifts gritty dust from the mounds and swirls it across empty roadways. Its dull dry odor mixes with the sharp acidic tang of the creek. A trickle of water and the whisper of rushing air fill the quiet. Residential streets among the huge piles slowly narrow under encroaching weeds, and cracked concrete slabs hold back overgrown lawns. Only memories of the houses remain along 5th, 6th, and 7th, along Cherokee, Oneida, and Ottawa, and along Treece, Picher, and Main Streets. At Memorial Park a black gorilla on a red pedestal announces a 1984 football victory—Oklahoma division 1A. A block away, rising higher than the gray gravel piles called “chat,” a water tower announces: “PICHER Gorillas since 1918.” From an airplane or satellite, Picher, Oklahoma, appears as an anomaly in the endless green grid of agricultural land at the center of the United States. Huge irregular gray blots and dark pools interrupt the geometric precision of roads, and the colorful smear of Tar Creek runs diagonally through the town. Abandoned a decade ago—like its neighbors Cardin and Douthat, Oklahoma, and Treece, Kansas—Picher reveals a legacy of environmental indifference and staggering injustice. For just over 70 years, the town served an immense lead and zinc mining complex. Its corporations enjoyed virtually unregulated access to billions of dollars’ worth of buried minerals, which it extracted aggressively until profits declined in the early 1970s. Members of the Quapaw Nation, who owned parts of the land, derived little benefit, because they had been forced by the federal government to sign unfavorable leases during the mid 1890s under the pretext that they were “incompetent,” incapable of using their own land profitably. Consequently, the Quapaw tribal members received none of the mining profits but were left with the toxic and hazardous waste when the mines closed. Dust from the chat piles contain high concentrations of lead, zinc and cadmium; ground water is intensely acidic; and underground excavations give way unexpectedly under lawns, houses, streets, and the once-proud home of the Picher Gorillas. The Environmental Protection Agency designated the area as the “Tar Creek Superfund Site” in 1983 and eventually bought out the residents of Picher, Cardin, Douthat, and Treece. Disincorporated and abandoned by 2010, vestiges of the towns remain among the toxic piles and sinkholes. Cleanup has been exceedingly slow, and until recently, the Quapaw tribal members were excluded from the remediation effort. GSD professor Niall Kirkwood describes this passionately as “a horrific story. . . 120 years of environmental injustice.” By design, the brutal legacy of the mines haunted his spring 2021 landscape architecture studio, “Tar Creek Remade: Environmental Legacy, Toxic Terrain and Re-Imagining the Future in the Tri-State Mining Area, Ottawa County, Oklahoma, USA.” From the beginning, Kirkwood challenged his 10 students to take on this immense problem of Tar Creek—a project “so utterly terrifying and so utterly complex that any sense of a resolution within a 15-week period is almost impossible”—with energy and creativity, but also realistically, anticipating small steps and a long time frame. It is crucial, he warned, to anticipate that progress will occur only “little by little” over centuries. Accordingly, their task was to “to go down to the micro-scale on the site. . .” and to propose “test experiments. . . they could scale up over the site—a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times.” In addition to many technical experts, Kirkwood invited two long-time participants in the Tar Creek evolution to advise the class. Rebecca Jim and Earl Hatley, Quapaw tribal advisors and co-founders of Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD), based in Miami, OK, are deeply familiar with the frustratingly slow progress and long time frame at Tar Creek. Since 1997, their non-profit organization has advocated for all the tribal and non-tribal communities in the area, pointing out that “the EPA and State of Oklahoma have spent more than $300 million at Tar Creek—yet the creek still flows orange, tailings piles still loom on the horizon and children are still poisoned by lead.” In addition, environmental scientist Dr Kurt Frantzen, an expert in large scale environmental damage and superfund sites advised the class on issues of pollutants, site remediation and risk. Through more than a hundred hours of class time the three advisors helped guide the students through some of the otherworldly complexities that are so central to their everyday lives. The studio unfolded in four stages: “Legacies,” “Voices,” “Wisdom,” and “Futures.” During the first weeks of the semester, Kirkwood explains, “We start the course with a land acknowledgment. . . we get the students thinking about the idea that sites are not just given to you; this one has a very deep history that is tied to the Indigenous people.” Reinforcing the understanding that all sites have legacies, the students produced two acknowledgments—one for Tar Creek and another for where they were living during the semester (since the class met remotely). Subsequently, the students read texts, watched videos, gathered images, and listened to the voices of Tar Creek area residents so that they could begin to formulate initial “hypotheses”—first proposals of what they might test at the site. Over the course of several weeks, they interrogated and adjusted their hypotheses. During this third phase, which brought them to the midterm, they began to consider how their proposals might work for environmental remediation on small test plots, but they also sought to “infuse that within a cultural structure,” by adding programs that would accommodate people’s needs—for trails, agriculture, hunting, food security. During the final stage of the studio, the students more fully envisioned how the experiments might develop over the long term to address the question “what’s the future of this place?” This entailed not just an understanding of the sometimes agonizingly slow pace of remediation and cultural change, but also the inevitable interactions of these experiments with changes in larger global forces—shifting populations, rising temperatures, more violent storms, and new technological developments in remediation and clean-up. By the end of the semester, the students produced a wide range of proposals for the blighted site—addressing the contaminated water, the toxic chat piles, and the perilous sinkholes while also considering the residents of the area and their livelihoods. In one project, microorganisms would invisibly decontaminate the water and soil on many small sites where people could come together on the cleansed ground to play, learn, and enjoy each other’s company. Another project looked back at the legacy of the Quapaw Nation, understanding the community as mound builders who could reclaim their ancient expertise and reshape the chat piles to redirect hazardous airflows and accommodate beneficial plant life. One student took on “something no one has even considered,” Kirkwood says, choosing “to remediate groundwater contamination in the numerous sinkholes.” Surprising for its boldness, the project proposed using the collapsed ground as remediation ponds—monitored over the long term through robotics—so that, eventually, “the landscape could be loved.” Other students developed sophisticated plans for the slow reclamation of the land and water: regenerating the native prairie, rerouting Tar Creek around the toxic site, and highlighting the slow transformation of colors in a healing landscape. A day after the final review, Rebecca Jim sat down to recall the students’ efforts and generosity, writing: “I have long thought this place will only find the solutions and the reclamation deserved by establishing relationships with people with vision, skills and training, and ultimately the power who will see this place but also see and experience us, each of us they encounter as people who matter, who have lives that matter and desires to live in places students like these can imagine. . . . These students took on Tar Creek and with their projects ‘Remade’ it all and gave hope where there has been none.” Rebecca Jim zeroes in on the essence of good design: It can and must contend with the physical substance and challenges of a place, but design is, most importantly, about people, about justice, about care. The daunting story of Tar Creek—“so utterly terrifying and so utterly complex”—calls out for this kind of care. But Kirkwood points out that every country has Tar Creeks, places where global forces fall heavily and unjustly on the land and the people who live there. These are difficult but appropriate subjects of study for designers, he says, even in short-term academic studios where resolutions may be unattainable. The goal is to cultivate expertise and creativity, as well as humility and generosity. At the outset of “Tar Creek Remade,” Kirkwood cautioned the students to consider that in their designs, what matters is not “the ‘stamp’ or ‘signature’ of the author” but “ethical and cultural attitudes to land, landscape and the natural world” and a genuine concern for the people who work to repair the land and who live on that land.

Concluding an Unforgettable Year: A Message from Dean Whiting

Dear GSD Community, As we gathered virtually to watch the Class of 2021 receive their graduation honors, I was overwhelmed with admiration for what you each, and we collectively, managed to accomplish this year. While now is a moment for celebration, it is also a time to reflect, given the impact the past fifteen months and more have had on all of our lives. We all know—we all have lived through—how difficult that time has been. To celebrate and honor you each is also to remind ourselves what work and values we must continue to carry forward. I am always struck by the sheer talent and passion that thrives within our community. One aspect of this year I will never forget is how our students and faculty spoke out, compellingly and evocatively, about the challenges and legacies of racism in our world and in the design fields. I am beyond grateful for our faculty and students who have made race and equity not afterthoughts but core values. We must maintain that ethos. Some important projects on race, equity, and design emerged over the past year at the GSD, illustrating design’s agency to affect these big, structural questions. I want to highlight our African American Design Nexus (AADN) and the podcast it launched this year, “The Nexus,” as well as a specific project that emerged from it: the Harlem StoryMap, created by Thandi Nyambose (MUP ’21). Thandi’s engaging reveal of the designers and stories that shaped Harlem exemplifies both the self-scrutiny and reassessment we must undertake as designers, as well as the overdue honor we owe to those designers whose contributions have long been overlooked. I also want to applaud Toni L. Griffin for launching the inaugural Mayors’ Institute on City Design Just City Mayoral Fellowship, which convened seven Black mayors from around the United States to directly tackle racial injustices in each of their cities through planning and design interventions. These are exactly the sorts of projects that remind us all how much work we have to do, but also how dialogue and action can shift when design intervenes. The pandemic presented us with other challenges, both immediate and ongoing. We needed to create a virtual pedagogy that would be potent and inspiring, and our Innovation Task Force, and really our entire community, worked to develop the finest virtual education possible. I applaud the ITF for their insights, which directly shaped our academic year and will inform and elevate our pedagogy well beyond the pandemic. Introducing “GSD Now” to the community was a real thrill; to be able to gather, if virtually, in shared “Trays” and to immerse ourselves in the daily pulse of activity made our spring semester just a bit more normal. Our Fabrication Lab raised the bar, too, with their Virtual Gund. Our faculty and students deserve a hearty round of applause for pivoting so quickly and effectively and for producing such remarkable work despite great challenge. But we also face broader questions of how people will design and create space in a world where space and coexistence can be feared as dangers. Among those who have begun exploring that bigger question is Farshid Moussavi, who led a fascinating studio last fall on rethinking residential architecture in light of the pandemic and its erosion of the live-work dichotomy. Farshid is among the GSD faculty who are working, as we speak, on studying our own Gund Hall and preparing it to accommodate our return this fall. Despite the headwinds we faced, the GSD expanded and elevated its public programming and engagement. Our events and exhibitions remained top-notch, and it was especially powerful to see our exhibitions turn “Inside Out,” starting with last November’s Election Day message. Harvard Design Magazine returned with a stunning redesign and a roster of brilliant and dedicated contributors and guest editors, scrutinizing the idea of “America” from diverse angles. And in launching Harvard Design Press and the student journal Pairs, we have ensured that written word and expanded, immersive conversation will remain cornerstones of design dialogue at the GSD and beyond. With all that there is to celebrate in the moment, it feels almost hasty to look ahead to our return to Cambridge and to campus this fall. But that is where we currently stand: an inflection point between immense hardship and eager optimism. I encourage you each to take good care of yourselves, and to follow university guidance and public health recommendations as we embark upon our summers and start planning our return to campus. With optimism and with the wish that you all have a peaceful and promising summer, Sarah

2021 Class Day Speaker Jia Tolentino: An Interview

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the bestselling essay collection Trick Mirror, which has been translated into eleven languages. She was the recipient of a Whiting Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the 2020 Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize. She graduated from the University of Virginia, received her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, and lives in New York. Tolentino will present Harvard GSD’s annual Class Day Address during the School’s 2021 Commencement Exercises. Ahead of her address, Tolentino spoke with Harvard GSD’s Travis Dagenais about her writing, her pandemic experiences, and a cherished piece of personal art.

Let’s start with something I think a lot of people will want to learn more about: is that an original Ecce Homo in the backdrop of your headshot?

It absolutely is—thank you so much for noticing. I painted it several years ago while consuming three glasses of merlot on “free paint night” at a place in my neighborhood in Brooklyn called Wine and Design, which really sadly was a casualty of the pandemic. I’m not joking at all when I say that Ecce Homo speaks to me on a profound spiritual level—it is a reminder of the absurdity and transience of all human effort—and it was the ideal choice of subject for free paint night, because if I messed it up I would only honor its powerful energy even more.

Trick Mirror, like much of your writing, suggests clarity and conclusion amid chaos and conflict, though you write in the introduction that you are not always the “calm person who shows up on paper.” For you, what goes on in the space/s between thinking and writing?

For me, there is almost no space between thinking and writing, because I essentially can’t engage with my own thoughts outside a written form. My head is either empty or full of opaque gaseous substances. I can hardly even perceive properly without writing; I keep a notebook that’s mostly about the sky and the trees and the weather, because this is the best way to get myself to actually see the natural world. Outside writing, I have instincts, I feel conflict and trouble and dread and gravitation, but otherwise I have absolutely nothing—the only sense-making I am capable of always occurs in words.

You’ve observed that the pandemic has, among other things, altered your sense of the “possible rate of change.” That’s impressive, because I can barely remember what day it is. What sorts of events or phenomena have you seen accelerate, and what has slowed down?

In March of 2020, we shifted overnight to a way of life we’d thought of as unthinkable a week prior, and remained in that way of life for more than a year. Abolition and Universal Basic Income entered the Overton window, as did a near-unanimous acknowledgment that at least one specific form of healthcare, in COVID treatment, should be public and free. We stopped traveling, stopped using carbon in ways that many of us had thought of as completely essential. Not that I ever want to spend another year in one chair staring at my computer, but I have been galvanized by the reminder that we are capable of so much more than is typically expected of us, and that we are capable of reconstructing the way we live on other terms.

In an article in Elle—back in 2019—you were described as “extremely online.” How far did “extremely” expand last year?

It actually contracted—even as, like most everyone, I spent much more time looking at screens than I would have liked. I had been limiting my time on social media to 45 minutes a day for a while before the pandemic, but I had continued to excuse my participation in the world of memes and Twitter discourse with the fact that real life and real people were self-evidently and considerably more vivid and interesting to me, and the fact that I wrote about the internet for work. But in the pandemic, there was no real life to outweigh the internet; it was just the internet, and I was also shifting toward other kinds of work, like screenwriting. I eventually got off Twitter in summer 2020, shortly before having a baby, because I didn’t want to be up all night with her doing the numbing pleasureless scroll.

You’re intellectually omnivorous, and it’s enviable. The rest of us could probably use a revamp of our media hygiene, or some media hygiene to start with. What might you place in a starter pack for someone who wants to begin, or end, their day with a useful and enlightening periscope on social and cultural news of the day/moment?

I think that I’m probably underinformed right now, because I haven’t really looked for a workable substitute for Twitter in terms of finding and bookmarking new things to read; but reading books in the morning and evening has always been my main tactic for attentional hygiene. The most interesting way to think about the present almost never comes from the present, right? I try to indulge my passing curiosities, and read books about feudalism and cloud formation, and trust that nothing you go out of your way to learn is a waste.

You’ve been credited with revitalizing the essay over the last decade, and your writing is a pleasure, a master class, a therapy session, and a stand-up routine all in one. You’ve also deftly maneuvered what, in the early 2010s, felt like bit of a wall: the print-digital divide. You’ve taken on long-form writing and published a book, while also going viral somewhat regularly. What is it about the essay and long-form that suits your intellectual contours and desires? And what future do you see, or imagine, for long-form as our slightly bruised modern society continues tiptoeing through the 2020s?

You are very generous, and I can’t believe I wrote so much throughout the last decade. But I liked every kind of writing, from silly short blog posts to way-too-long essays in my book. It was a gift to be working at a time just before algorithmic flattening had completely taken over the internet, a time in which there was enough variety and flexibility in the media ecosystem to shift between flippancy and formality and giddiness and solemnity. I like writing long, because I like the depth and the challenge, and I think that readers, myself included, remain very eager for a winding, absorbing, consuming journey. But all types of worthwhile writing are disappearing right now because of the economics of publishing. Social media companies have made it impossible for publications to support themselves on advertising, venture capital is stomping local newspapers into the ground, and there are very few alternative or truly independent outlets for young writers to play around and develop a voice.

Your boyfriend Andrew Daley is an architect. You must, therefore, have some advice for our graduates. And maybe it’s advice on living with an architect, not being one.

My boyfriend and I historically do not speak about work with each other—he doesn’t read books and I don’t know what cement is. But there was one night that he brought home a 70-page drawing set and when I asked him to explain “what it was” I felt like I was a monkey being given a tour of a space station. I think (and hope, for the purposes of Class Day 2021) that there are parallels between writing and design in terms of mapping structure and identifying possibility and envisioning what does not exist yet, but I’ve always been kind of amazed at the way design work lives in the realm of the actual, when my work is just a sort of trick of direction in the mind.

Excerpt from Kazuo Shinohara: Traversing the House and the City by Seng Kuan

by Seng Kuan (ed.)

Shinohara Kazuo created a series of sublimely beautiful, purist houses that have reconfigured and enriched our understanding of domesticity, tradition, structure, scale, nature, and the city— the dwelling redefined as a space where meaning can be generated, based on a raw, private relationship between the inhabitant and the surrounding environment. Interest in Shinohara’s work has been in steady ascendance in recent years, especially since his death in 2006 and the posthumous awarding of a Golden Lion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, which took him from being a cult figure for initiated connoisseurs to an architect who is now widely taught in schools around the world. As one surveys the state of architecture today, the aesthetic values he espoused and promoted with singular conviction appear more insightful and germane than ever. Younger generations of Japanese architects, especially those who came of age after the collapse in 1991 of the so-called economic bubble, are indebted to Shinohara for new paths he forged and traversed in approaching the problems of form and context. In a similar manner, the appeal of Shinohara’s architecture to young architects abroad lies in its potential for renewed faith in modernism after fatigue and disillusionment from the formal exuberances and moral relativism of recent decades. Shinohara belonged to the remarkable generation of Japanese architects to come of age as Japan emerged from the trauma of war and began its course toward economic prosperity. Born in 1925, Shinohara began studying architecture at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) in 1950, stayed on to join its architecture faculty, and remained until retirement from teaching in 1986. Having studied mathematics before turning to architecture and therefore being slightly older in age than Kikutake Kiyonori, Maki Fumihiko, Isozaki Arata, and Hara Hiroshi, Shinohara was nonetheless part of that cohort of Japanese architects and engaged in the same intense discursive confrontations with modernity and tradition and between the house and the city, helping to establish Japan as one of the foremost centers of international modernism of the last half century. Shinohara’s many aphoristic pronouncements, such as “A house is a work of art” and “Inscribe eternity in space,” represented a distinct vertex in the topography of modern Japanese architectural thought. Shinohara’s key tenets, especially those from his early career, were often critiques of Japan’s prevailing architectural practices and ideology, especially the strain of techno-rationalism centered at the University of Tokyo with Metabolism as its most emblematic offshoot. Throughout the 1960s he sharpened his polemical stance with concepts like house as art, eternity in space, autonomy of the architect, superfluous space, and symbolic space. While these ideas may appear contretemps to the ethos of postwar Japan’s developmentalist economy and the bureaucratic state, the validity of Shinohara’s architecture came into focus as the logic of growth and top-down organization, encapsulated in the architectural excesses of the 1980s, came to its sudden and disastrous close. Most secondary literature on Shinohara has until now focused on a handful of the most iconic houses, especially House in White (1966), Tanikawa House (1974), and House in Uehara (1976), often presenting them as distinct, one-off phenomena by an elusive and mercurial architect. While Shinohara’s writings are widely understood to be an integral part of his creative strategy—as Okuyama Shin-ichi’s chapter in this volume addresses—even in their Japanese originals the vocabulary and language, always employed with precision and placed in a structured framework, are often deemed abstruse and inaccessible. Translating these terms faithfully and accurately indeed has been one of the major challenges of this project. Building on a series of archival exhibitions and symposia, the collection of new scholarly essays and translations of Shinohara’s key texts included in this book reframes Shinohara’s architectural achievements in terms of his oeuvre as a whole and situates them in the broader cultural and social contexts in Japan and globally. The inclusion of institutional-scale projects of the Fourth Style, which have been largely overlooked until now, is crucial to establishing Shinohara’s insistence on the equivalation between the house and the city. More pointedly, the three key historiographical themes this volume attempts to address are (1) continuity and change through Shinohara’s four successive styles; (2) a mathematical framework in his spatial imagination; and (3) his engagement with artists as clients and collaborators.

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

A major historiographical contention in studying Shinohara concerns the significance of the four successive styles, whether shifts between the ordinal numbers represented more disruption or more coherence. As Shinohara pursued distinct formal, technological, and even ideological strategies in each of the four styles, the individual styles invariably attract their own constituencies and followers. Those interested in a more overt dialogue with Japanese tradition, executed with great finesse and elegance, are naturally drawn to the First Style, whereas others seeking forceful structural expressions tend to focus on the Third. Each of the styles also encompasses a significant span of time—a decade or more with the exception of the Second—and bears the imprint of the broader context of its era. Several essays in this volume, especially those by Tsukamoto Yoshiharu and Shiozaki Taishin, underscore the coherence in Shinohara’s creative process, which specifically allows for different formal or even conceptual approaches. Tsukamoto describes a series of matrices, inherent in Shinohara’s method, as ontological spaces where specific design solutions can occur. Shiozaki’s chapter examines the dialogue between the earthen slope in two of Shinohara’s works, the famous Tanikawa House and the unrealized design of a mountain cabin for his own family, which are separated by almost thirty years. While Shinohara addressed the issue of style, or yōshiki in Japanese in his earliest writings, this nomenclature came with the Third Style, which emerged in the mid-1970s. He claims to have been inspired by Pablo Picasso’s periodization, the blue and the rose, and so on. For Shinohara the significance of style is rooted in the potential of a clear, rigorous framework of operation: “The creation of any style will axiomatically encompass any force that is opposed to it and [the result] is the consequence of the struggle to resolve that opposition.”¹ It is part of an ongoing process, an act that provides fresh nourishment to past achievements and affords the possibility of claiming as one’s own some uncharted territory of the future. Interspersed throughout this volume are image folios of Shinohara’s works. These drawings, sketches, and photographs are organized essentially chronologically, according to progression of the styles. Before delving into the thematic issues, it may be useful to introduce the key characteristics of the four styles here. “I would like for the houses I make to stand on this earth forever.” –“A Theory of Residential Architecture,” 1967²

THE FIRST STYLE

Shinohara’s First Style is an exercise in conversing with Japan’s architectural tradition, distilling compositional concepts such as frontality and division from his studies of prehistoric pit dwellings, minka commoner houses, and pedigreed shoin-style buildings like Katsura Villa and Jikō-in. Spanning one and a half decades, the First Style was the longest of the four phases. The first house in this series, House in Kugayama (1954), reveals a rudimentary interest in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and response to prevailing attitudes toward tradition as shown in contemporary works of Tange Kenzō and Shinohara’s teacher Seike Kiyoshi. Later works such as House in White and Suzushō House (1968) are far more abstract, as Shinohara turned to more symbolic aspects of space-making. The period also coincided with the peak of Metabolism’s popularity as he countered with a rhetoric of permanence, expansiveness, irrationality, and the emotive desires for dwelling. “I believe the world flows ceaselessly through the small spaces of the house.” –“Beyond Symbol Spaces,” 1971³

THE SECOND STYLE

For a brief few years between The Uncompleted House (1970) and Prism House (1974), Shinohara explored a series of formal and semantic themes, turning his focus to a new reductive, formalist approach and appearing to favor a system based on a series of abstract operative terms. The rigorous geometry of Shinohara’s Second Style emerged out of House of White’s cubic volume, and the idea of fissure can be found in the interstitial space between North and South Houses in Hanayama (1965, 1968). The tension between expansiveness and divisions that defined the First Style gave way to sequences of movement and volumes that are choreographed with an almost baroque theatricality. Narrow double-height crevices lead into light-filled courtyards shimmering in bronze-colored walls. These changes also call for different representational tools, notably emphasis on axonometric drawings and new photographic techniques. The Second Style was the briefest of the four styles, but the works from this period gave Shinohara his first major professional recognition and established his appeal to a rising generation of architects. In 1972, the annual prize from the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ), regarded as the most prestigious in Japan, was awarded to “the series of houses from The Uncompleted House onward.” Prior to Shinohara, the only other occasion on which the AIJ awarded its top prize to private residences occurred seventeen years before, to the works of his teacher Seike Kiyoshi. The timing of this public recognition of Shinohara’s architecture, following Osaka Expo ’70 and the student protests of 1968–69, also signaled a profound shift in the discursive context of Japan’s aesthetic culture. “In the city, the act of traversing has literal basic functions. I use traversing as a method of thinking simultaneously of the city and its antipode, the house.” –“When Naked Space Is Traversed,” 1976⁴

THE THIRD STYLE

In his design brief for a country house, written in verse, client Tanikawa Shuntarō described a summer room as “church for a pantheist.” Architecture is reduced to its most basic terms, like a geometric tent that drapes over a sloping landscape and raw earth. The 45-degree pitch in the roof and column struts clash with the gentler incline of the ground plane, resulting in a deeply unsettling space inside. In the Third Style, Shinohara pushed the dialogue between the inhabitant and the spatial environment to new levels of intensity, as a series of bare, brute confrontations. During this period Shinohara made extended journeys abroad. Traveling through these foreign lands, he was drawn to the rigors of the urban environment—the bodies and movement of people as formal elements that constitute, in their aggregate, space itself. Nakedness is to dispense with everything that obfuscates and confounds the basic ideas and shapes underneath. “The greatest probability for anarchy to produce vitality and liveliness occurs when buildings designed and produced on the basis of the most advanced technology of the age and replete with totally decorous beauty submerged in the planlessness of street.” –“Towards Architecture,” 1981⁵

THE FOURTH STYLE AND MODERN NEXT

Beginning in the 1980s Shinohara took on a series of larger-scale, institutional commissions. At the same time he came to embrace more overtly the generative potential of urban chaos, which he first commented on in the 1960s during his First Style. The pairing of Centennial Hall at Tokyo Tech and his own house in Yokohama collectively manifest his idea of the “space machine,” unmediated in its power and logic as a fighter jet. Shinohara’s rising notoriety abroad, with solo exhibitions traveling through Europe and North America beginning in 1979 and teaching appointments at Yale University and the Technical University of Vienna, led him to a series of international design competitions. These often more expansive site conditions yielded designs that play with basic geometric forms, in contrast with the complex programs within. This belated opportunity to intervene on an urban scale allowed Shinohara to realize fully his nuanced attitude toward the city. While this position was partly informed by his travels abroad, to Africa, the Americas, and Europe, it was also rooted in his earliest memories of suburban life in Tokyo, with his childhood home located in the environs of Shibuya Station. In an essay published in the journal Kenchiku bunka in 1988, Shinohara further introduced the term “ModernNext.” As a counterpoint to postmodernism, ModernNext is a commentary on the “contemporary enormous village” that Tokyo had ballooned into, as the scale and intensity of urban activity reached unprecedented heights. ModernNext is a decisively forward-looking attitude. In the same way tradition formed the basis of innovation for the First Style, chaos and randomness are to instigate a new vitality for architecture and the city. The essay is translated into English in its entirety for this volume.

SHINOHARA AS MATHEMATICIAN

Shinohara Kazuo was first trained in mathematics at Tokyo College of Physics.⁶ He turned to architecture in the immediate postwar years after a poignant moment of encounter with Tōshōdai-ji, one of the great ancient temples of Nara. Shinohara indeed looked back to mathematics for much of the architectural vocabulary he developed over time: division, transversality, discreteness, set theory, and chaos are the most salient appropriations. It is tempting for those in the Anglo-American world, where the writings of Rudolf Wittkower and Colin Rowe are widely taught, to draw parallels with the work of Andrea Palladio. This hypothesis becomes even more compelling as we consider Shinohara’s houses from the Second Style, abstract spaces such as The Uncompleted House and Shino House (1970), which give a hint of sympathy with the Renaissance master. In another fragment of this superficial affinity, the Institute for Architectural and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York hosted Shinohara’s first solo exhibition in the United States in 1981. The title of Shinohara’s 1964 essay, “The autonomy of house design,”⁷ would have appealed to IAUS’s leadership. Still, Shinohara was not overtly driven by Kantian aesthetics, rather he was speaking entirely within the context of Japan’s postwar construction industry. Using the term shutaisei⁸ to stand for autonomy, Shinohara referred to such precepts as freedom from urban master plans, avoidance of too much attention to site context, expansiveness, and independence from the client. More provocatively, the essay also suggests that the realities of everyday life render detailed spatial planning of domestic interiors pointless; the architect’s strategy should be to elevate design to abstraction and pursue beauty in the realm of fictive spaces, citing Mies’s Farnsworth House as an example. There is no record of Shinohara referring to the work of Palladio, nor that of Wittkower or Rowe. In the late 1950s, as Shinohara was developing his theory of Japanese residential tradition as based on principles of division and frontality, he looked to the Western tradition for comparison and contrast.⁹ As he was mainly interested in defining certain cultural and formal archetypes, such as pit dwellings and elevated granaries, as the origins of the Japanese tradition, he referred to Tragic Poet’s House and House of Pansa in Pompeii and even older houses of Priene and Olynthus. The archetypical Western example from the early modern period Shinohara cites is Montacute House, one of the so-called prodigy houses from Elizabethan England. Shinohara makes no pronounced effort toward an absolute, “fictive” idea of natural order and mathematical beauty. His very first published writing was titled “A critique of the Modulor,” stating that the modern age of atomic energy operates on abstract mathematics, whereas ratio-based theories based on natural observations like the golden ratio or Fibonacci sequence have little to contribute.¹⁰ In his final book of architectural theory, Toward a super big-numbers set city (2001), Shinohara obliquely addressed the issue of architectural harmony in the musical sense—the topic of Wittkower’s famous chapter in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism that situated Palladio’s proportions in sixteenth-century musical theory.¹¹ In praising twentieth-century advances in atonal music, Shinohara saw the same beauty in contemporary Tokyo, as the cacophonous, atonal manifestation of its underlying confusion and turbulences.¹² As a mathematician, Shinohara embraced the irrationality (higōriteki) of things around him as a necessary condition, but also employed mathematical tools to come to terms with these realities. Transversality (ōdansei) is the most powerful of these tools. It is the cutting across of different lines, spaces, and ordering systems, producing fragments and sections, but transversals also describe moments of intersection. In House under High-Voltage Lines (1981) we see this transversal vividly captured in the two swooping curves in the sky.

ARCHITECTURE AND ART

When Shinohara made the pronouncement in 1962 that “A house is a work of art,” it would have been immediately apparent to Japan’s architectural community that the antagonist was the techno-rationalism of the mainstream construction industry. In the postwar period Shinohara was hardly alone in recognizing the importance of working with allied disciplines in the fine arts—painting, sculpture, poetry, drama, film, and so forth.¹³ In 1949 the Shinseisaku Art Society expanded its membership to welcome architects, including Taniguchi Yoshirō, who was the éminence grise of Tokyo Tech; Tange Kenzō; and even Ikebe Kiyoshi, renowned for minimum dwelling prototypes for industrialized mass production. Throughout the 1950s, both Tange and Shinohara’s teacher Seike Kiyoshi were also highly active in exhibition designs, working alongside other avant-garde practitioners in the arts. Shinohara was more successful than his predecessors and peers in cultivating his artistic collaborators as patrons. This publication features interviews with some of the most loyal among Shinohara’s remarkable coterie of clients: poet Tanikawa Shuntarō (Tanikawa Houses of 1958 and 1974), painter Nomiyama Gyōji (Sea Stairway, House in Itoshima), and the widow and son of photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoshi (House with an Earthen Floor, House in Uehara). As Christian Kerez’s conversation with Tanikawa Shuntarō records, Tanikawa’s father had originally suggested the eminent Taniguchi for his son’s house, but was in turn referred to the slightly younger Seike, and the younger still Shinohara. Tanikawa, Ōtsuji, and Nomiyama all commissioned Shinohara with both a house in the city and one in the country. Shinohara’s clients indulged him with extraordinary liberties in reinventing domestic arrangements. Many of them are considered bunkajin, or people of culture, referring to a broad spectrum of well-educated individuals engaged in the arts, writing, or education. Shinohara also maintained a long friendship with painter and stage set designer Asakura Setsu. Their collaborations, beyond the house Shinohara designed for her in 1964, also included mingei-inspired designs on the shōji screens in Umbrella House (1961) and a two-person exhibition held in 1964 on their individual works. The identities of these clients are sometimes imprinted onto Shinohara’s designs in subtle ways, as in the shimmering bronze-color wallpaper in Shino House. Its owner was a publisher of encyclopedias. One of the hallmarks of Japan’s success in sustaining consistently high-quality architecture is the robustness of the infrastructure of architectural production and discourse—an extraordinary plethora of magazines, schools, design competitions, and professional organizations that defined and reinforced a strong community. Despite Shinohara’s reputation as a severe personality, he actively participated in these professional activities, not only through writings and publication of his personal work, but also by joining and hosting roundtables and other forums of discussion. This generous exception to his otherwise introvert demeanor was especially evident even in his later, post–Tokyo Tech years in bringing together younger generations. As the interviews make clear, the relationship between the architect and clients was not one of conventional patronage, as we understand of princely commissions of the Renaissance or those from bourgeois industrialists in the nascent days of modernism. Despite the paucity of specific design briefs, there was no lack of communication from these clients in conveying their beliefs and aspirations. The roundtable discussion translated for this volume documents a forum moderated by Shinohara. The clients were his peers and partners, and these houses were modestly scaled, typically located in new emerging suburbs in Tokyo’s periphery. What emerges from placing each of these houses in the context of its owners’ lives is a remarkable view into not only this bunkajin community as it evolved in postwar Japan but also Tokyo’s very urbanism. With few exceptions, the images of Shinohara’s houses presented in this volume are period photographs, meticulously staged with few visible traces of domestic life. Shinohara characterized architectural photographs as false images¹⁴ of spaces, but he noted that once we are accustomed to their conventions, “we are able to comprehend the true architectural spaces behind the false images.” Shinohara saw this true architectural space as a fictive space that becomes the new level of reality. Nomiyama Gyōji echoed this sentiment in the interview featured in this book: before he moved to France in 1952 he thought it was “a land that is not where humans lived,” but existed only as the place of paintings by Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. Shinohara’s clients were his collaborators in this act of fiction writing.

LEGACY

In 1979 the idea of a “Shinohara School” was first floated in the monographic issue of SD devoted to Shinohara’s houses. The column “Notes on architecture in Japan” refers to Sakamoto Kazunari, Hasegawa Itsuko, and Itō Toyoo as representing a new generation in the propagation of Shinohara’s architecture. All three were in their thirties at the time and had received much critical attention for their recent works.¹⁵ Under the collective pen name Gruppo Specchio, the column was written by a handful of graduate students from the University of Tokyo, most notably Takeyama Kiyoshi Sey and Kuma Kengo. They were known for sharp, witty, and occasionally scathing commentaries, and one cannot help but suspect that the label “Shinohara School” was proposed with a little tongue-in-cheek, as its authors anxiously contemplated their own professional futures.¹⁶ Four decades after Gruppo Specchio’s initial conjecture, we may ask: What would a Shinohara School look like today? Certainly Sakamoto, Hasegawa, and Itō, as well as other protégés of Shinohara, have cultivated their own followers, and different generations of architects, from different countries, have found lessons from Shinohara’s work. Many Japanese architects now attribute the ideas of architects as auteurs and houses as art as principles that were created almost single-handedly by Shinohara. Such adulation is perhaps overly enthusiastic, but there is no doubt that Shinohara was one of the true masters of the past half century, standing as a beacon of a particular conviction in space-making that remains relevant today. As Shibuya undergoes another round of transformation, there is no better time to revisit Shinohara and take a closer look.  

1. Shinohara Kazuo, “Daisan no yōshiki,” Shinkenchiku, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1977): 221–25. Translation used here from English version, “The Third Style, 1977,” in Kazuo Shionhara: Houses, ed. David B. Stewart, Okuyama Shin-ichi, and Shiozaki Taishin, 2G, no. 58/59 (2011): 268.
2. Shinohara Kazuo, “A Theory of Residential Architecture,” The Japan Architect (October 1967): 39–45.
3. Shinohara Kazuo, “Beyond Symbol Spaces: An Introduction to Primary Spaces as Functional Spaces,” The Japan Architect (April 1971): 81–88.
4. Shinohara Kazuo, “When Naked Space Is Traversed,” The Japan Architect (February 1976): 64–72.
5. Shinohara Kazuo, “Towards Architecture,” The Japan Architect (September 1981): 30–35.
6. The same school, now known as Tokyo University of Science, established its own architecture program in 1962.
7. Shinohara Kazuo, “Jūtaku sekkei no shutaise,” Kenchiku, no. 44 (April 1964): 52–55.
8. Typically the term “jiritsusei” is used to stand for autonomy in the Kantian sense.
9. These studies were presented at successive meetings of the Architectural Institute of Japan and subsequently published in its bulletins: “Kūkan no bunkatsu to renketsu: Nihon kenchiku hōhō (7),” (June 1960); “Kūkan bunkatsu kara mita heimen kōsei: Nihon kenchiku hōhō (8),” (October 1960); “Seiō no heimen kōsei tono taihi” (October 1961).
10. Shinohara Kazuo, “Mojyurōru hihan,” Nihon kenchiku gakkai Kantō shibu dai 17 kai kenkyū happyokai (February 1955): 19–22.
11. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949; repr., New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 132–42.
12. Shinohara Kazuo, Chō taisū shūgo toshi he (Tokyo: Kajima shuppankai, 2001), 127.
13. Seng Kuan, “Unity of the Arts at Sōgetsu Kaikan,” in Tange Kenzō: Architecture for the World, ed. Seng Kuan and Yukio Lippit (Zürich: Lars Müller Publisher, 2012), 127–41.
14. Shinohara Kazuo, “The Mechanism of Fiction Never Stops Functioning, Exchange of Letters with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron,” trans. Watanabe Hiroshi, SD, no. 401 (February 1998): 115. (Shinohara’s italics).
15. Guruppo supekkio, “Shinohara sukūru no kenchiku,” SD, no. 172 (January 1979): 223¬–28. The works cited in the column include Sakamoto’s Machiya in Daita and House in Kumano-Nagareyama, Hasegawa’s House in Kakio and Stationary Shop in Yaizu, and Itō’s PMT Building and Hotel D. Of the trio, Sakamoto was the only one formally educated at Tokyo Tech. Hasegawa joined Shinohara’s lab as a research student after working for Kikutake Kiyonori, whereas Itō lacked any formal affiliation with Tokyo Tech.
16. Takeyama Kiyoshi, “Kenchiku sekkei jimusho to iu ‘ba’ wo tsukuru,” traverse shinkenchiku-gaku kenkyū, no. 14 (October 2013): 72–79.

Excerpt from Very Vary Veri: “Crowded” by Oana Stănescu

Very Vary Veri is a journal about the built environment and how it is produced. Created by students and alumni from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the annual publication provides an alternative platform for students and professionals to share diverse perspectives on architecture and design concepts more broadly. “Crowds,” the fourth and latest issue of Very Vary Veri, aims to shed light on the various, and often contradictory, interpretations of the word. The following edited excerpt is taken from an essay contributed by Oana Stănescu, design critic in architecture.

Excerpt from Very Vary Veri: “Crowded”

By Oana Stănescu

The first crowds I consciously remember are the big orchestrated ones. I had to wear a uniform and stand for hours in a specific spot in the central square of Reșița, Romania, a tiny piece in a giant puzzle with timing and movement choreographed to perfection, dancing and waving at the helicopter that was said to “have Ceaușescu, waving back.” In spite of the huge numbers of people, the whole affair felt rather unconvincing—even at a young age I couldn’t help but be skeptical about this choreography of affection toward a mechanical bird. I was about six, though, when I discovered the depth of voluntary collective experience. On a sunny December day a group of about 15 people were walking energetically on the main street, yelling things I couldn’t quite understand, holding signs I couldn’t yet grasp. This was a welcome distraction on a slow afternoon, but my grandmother told me to go inside and mind my own business. On the next night a much larger crowd had gathered in the city square, this time louder and with an energy I hadn’t witnessed before. The air was filled with voices screaming “Down with Ceaușescu.” I asked my mom what it meant and she explained that if Ceaușescu wasn’t president anymore, I could buy as much chocolate as I wanted. Considering that these were times when you had to wait in line for hours for bread, milk, and maybe meat on weekends, that sounded perfectly reasonable. Like dictators before and after him, the man in power made a desperate attempt to instill fear and distrust, but there were no individuals left to buy into it; there was only the crowd which had its truth. The once all-powerful president had been reduced to a tiny, helpless being—like a lifeless doll on the oversized balcony—facing a hungry animal that even the monumental plaza couldn’t contain. You can watch it online, that instant, barely a minute into his speech, when the crowd turned from an obedient, numb creature into a force that was stronger than the fragile abstract entities it was facing. Not the army, not the presidency, not even Christmas could keep individuals from putting themselves in harm’s way. Because when they’re with their crowd, people are willing to die so that the animal can live. Crowds are mesmerizing and, in an unsettling way, hard to resist. Your voice becomes amplified in the anonymity, as if the air were flammable. Once ignited, it leaves you wondering if it was really your voice shouting at all. When I was growing up, my mother had a crocheted German saying on the kitchen wall: “Shared pain is half the pain and shared joy is double the joy.” It is worth remembering that the verb “to share” is defined as “to split, or divide, to give a portion of” or “to use, possess or enjoy something jointly with another.” Today we seem to have taken the generosity out of sharing, reducing it to the act of pos(t)ing. One doesn’t need to use a real name, to show one’s face, or even to get out of bed to “share” things: it has turned from an intimate, intentional act to something anonymous and oftentimes accidental. Yet despite the noncommittal nature of these new forms of sharing, when you do it you likely have the attention of a crowd. And you are certainly part of many more virtual crowds yourself—a couple of hundred on average each day, whether you know it or not, some real, many fake (an average of 15 percent of Twitter accounts are estimated to be bots). Read the full essay in the latest issue of Very Vary Veri, available for purchase at veryvaryveri.info.

Landscapes of the Void: Speculative design for tunnels, mines, cemeteries and other underground spaces

At once welcoming and foreboding, the underground realm has long captured our attention. When considered metaphorically and literally, it is simultaneously womb and tomb—infinitely expansive and claustrophobia-inducing. A well-organized infrastructure that challenges rationality by seeming outside time and space, it is also a storage space for human waste, computers, and even, in the Arctic, a plant-seed bank created in case of an apocalyptic event. In recent years, architects and designers have increased their focus on what lies beneath us. Necessity, in part, has driven attention downward: It is estimated that by 2050, about two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, where space above ground is finite. Solving the needs of these future megalopolises by continuing to build into the sky is inadequate and dangerous. Not only does the fetish for ever-taller buildings privilege visuality and surfaces, it supports an ideology that ignores earthly and human-scale problems, such as climate change and inclusive community-building. The logical conclusion of this hubristic, isolationist, and individualistic predilection—leaving Earth itself—is no longer cast as a total fantasy either. Underground spaces need not always be built anew. Many already exist but have been abandoned or entirely forgotten—even steps away from the GSD. As a child, Jungyoon Kim walked to kindergarten across Harvard Square, where she passed a nondescript grate each day. Decades later, she learned that this portal leads to the Brattle Tunnel, a decommissioned section of America’s oldest subway system. Opened in 1897 and completed in 1912, the Cambridge section of the subway was in part built underground as a means to preserve the landscape of the area’s historic buildings. Since it was closed in 1981, the Brattle Tunnel portion of Harvard Square Station—a 450-foot-long, 45-foot-wide, and 18-foot-high space just two feet below ground—has remained an empty and, to most, hidden chamber. In her studio “Below and Beyond: Imagining the Future of Underground Infrastructure at Harvard Square,” Kim asks her students to imagine the site as a public space whose design is sensitive to the urban fabric at ground level as well as to the Charles River and its surrounding landscapes. “The main topic we’re dealing with is where you should open up the tunnel so that people can have access to it,” she says. “We are also reconceiving the infrastructure which was once monofunctional and illegible into something multifunctional and legible, for the pleasure of the public.” Any speculative redesigns for this enclosed, cavernous space require attention to the location of the bedrock, the soil type, and other structural and natural concerns around the site. But these elements should not be viewed as limitations. Edda Steingrimsdottir (MArch ’22), for example, considers the area’s geothermal-rich soil as an impetus for turning the site into a heated swimming pool—a destination rather than an incidental or, as is the case for many underground sites, a transitory space. Annie Hayner (MLA ’21), looks at using the tunnel as a water passage, whether for emergency use (like Tokyo’s flood-defense systems) or as a detention area to slow down run-off caused by increases in torrential rain. This water can then be used to recharge the soil and keep it moist. The run-off could also become an aesthetic feature, echoing the Hakka Indenture Museum in Lishui, China, where an irrigation channel on the site’s roof creates a water curtain in the interior. These structural concerns demand that an ecological framework be introduced to conversations regarding urban growth. The students’ interventions will make legible the existence of the tunnel to those moving across Harvard Square, establishing novel relationships between them and the spaces below their feet. The same legibility issues are not present with all underground spaces, however. The vast mining pits that surround Santiago, Chile, for example, are etched into the urban fabric and in many instances draw its boundaries. “Santiago is defined by its topography,” says Danilo Martic. “The city is flat, but we’re surrounded by mountains. There are also a number of hills which have been a part of life here for hundreds of years. The Native peoples used to dwell in them. These mining holes are a nice counterpoint, making the cross-section of the valley not just a flat line with hills.” The mountains and hills are not the only inverted relationship in the city that involves these gargantuan holes, which can be carved roughly 60 meters deep and hundreds of meters wide. The gravel, sand, and stones extracted from these sites become construction material for buildings, turning the subterranean spaces into visible marks in the earth that are materially linked to the built environment. Martic emphasizes this relationship in his studio “Landscapes of the Void: Urban Projects on Residual Topographies” with a quote by photographer Edward Burtynsky: “I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time.” Rather than acknowledge these ecological scars as scars, current laws dictate that the holes be refilled whenever mining activity ceases, typically after a few decades. This erasure creates another type of void, because after the filling process—which can also take decades—no new buildings can be constructed on these sites. The policy compounds what was initially a brutal act against the natural environment by foreclosing many future possibilities for these spaces. Martic asks his students to consider how these pits might be transformed and utilized in terms of their landscapes, which introduces questions of topography, planting, and programming. For many of the city’s inhabitants, the holes are embedded in their collective memory, and the sites evoke a sense of mystery. “These places are fenced off, but you can smell them, hear the machinery and the explosions, and see the dust flying and the trucks carrying sand and gravel. But you don’t see what is done there. Young people try to find out, by trespassing,” Martic says. “These sites can be just 10 meters away from your house. It’s only fair not to erase that aspect of people’s reality.” The disappearance of collective memory also concerns Mohsen Mostafavi’s studio “Fudo/Umwelt: Devising Transformative Environments in Japan,” in the context of the underground realm’s associations with darkness, the illicit, the disruptive, and play. The project’s site and focus is the location of the now-demolished Tsukiji Fish Market. Opened in 1935, it was the world’s largest fish and seafood market and a major tourist destination in a densely packed area of shops, stalls, and restaurants. The tuna auctions and other activities of the inner market, a site of commerce and spectacle, took place at night, beginning at 3:00 a.m. and finishing by 9:00 a.m. Now, in an effort by Japan to compete as a corporate business hub against other Asian cities in particular, the 23-hectare site will become a sterile convention center, with the fish market moving to nearby Toyosu. “This nocturnal affair happened out of view from the vast majority of people. Its operations were a little extraterritorial as well—not seen, in the dark,” explains Mostafavi. “The experience of the city was different there. The marketplace is a circumstance with its own theater and is against normative rules and regulations. With its disappearance, the citizens of Japan and tourists face certain forms of erasure because new markets, whether in Paris or Tokyo, are farther away, much bigger, and more and more hygienic, which includes not letting people inside them.” Hygiene has been a focus of urban design and planning since the 18th century. The relationship between the Enlightenment’s obsession with cleanliness and the city began with the purgation of cemeteries from urban centers and continued, for example, with pushing prostitution and drug selling to urban peripheries. “The fish market is still a component of that argument,” says Mostafavi. “Part of its removal is the idea of not being able to bear witness to it, and part of it is also not enabling citizens to participate in situations and scenes that are thought to be not clean. It is a denial of participation in those operations of the city which make it vibrant and dynamic. When you turn the market into a convention center, you deny the theater, joy, and excitement that it offered and replace it with something that’s hermetically sealed, interior, often without windows, and where events don’t take place every day.” In contrast to the proposed convention center, students are developing projects with a range of programs, compositions, and densities. The work draws on a multiyear research project at the GSD supported by Takenaka, a major Japanese design and construction firm. In the studio, the Tsukiji site serves as a means to examine the sectional city, which Mostafavi describes as similar to “the architectural section in that it doesn’t have to do with the facade or appearance but that which is drawn but not made visible.” This concept has particular resonance in a Japanese context, where developers have long looked to the underground as a space for retail, restaurants, and other businesses, to maximize land value. As a mode of investigation, Mostafavi first had his students transpose “more than 100 buildings, landscapes, and urban assemblages from around the world onto the site at 1:1 scale,” including civic gathering spaces such as the Shanghai Bund and London’s Barbican Centre. Through this process of montage and photo-collage, they created unexpected architectural arrangements. Each student then chose as their focus a single fragment on the site, which, Mostafavi adds, “is never completely independent of its relationship to something bigger.” Every human, animal, inanimate object, and natural system that comes into contact with that fragment, he explains, sees and interacts with that space, and through it the entire site, differently. These exercises use the palimpsest as a tool, which Mostafavi describes as enabling “the students to start imagining multiple narratives, multiple stories, and essentially multiple descriptions of that site. It’s also a form of excavation. They have to do some digging to imagine how these things might work, fit, be there.” The introduction of foreign, and in many ways unexpected, architecture onto the site in the initial montages, and the process of making them fit together, forced the students to participate in a kind of archaeology that expands the capacities of their imaginations. “Part of this studio is how one constructs the circumstances for certain forms of imagination to take place,” says Mostafavi. “We’re not just relying on the pure intuition of the students. I prefer the concrete and described to going immediately to poetic associations and references.” The site for Mira Henry and Matthew Au’s “Underground” module also functions as a palimpsest: the Crenshaw Discount Store, located at the western border of Los Angeles’s Leimert Park neighborhood. It shares the shell of the original Grayson’s Women’s Fine Apparel (1941), designed by Victor Gruen. Adjacent to it is OneUnited Bank, notable for providing Black and brown families with home loans to combat redlining, as well as the currently under-construction Crenshaw Corridor, which involves an extension of the metro system and retail and residential developments. While Mostafavi’s studio focuses on the relationship between the palimpsest and the strange to create new conditions of possibility for the students’ imaginations, Mira Henry and Matthew Au’s module foregrounds pleasure. Their students will design a subterranean nightclub at the Discount Store site, which in turn will inspire their designs for two street-level facades. “We’re putting on the table that there are things that are valuable but not always seen as visible. It’s a counterargument to the hyper-visuality of a lot of architectural goals,” explains Henry. The project, she says, also riffs on the relationships between the historical demographics of the neighborhood, its history filled with underground clubs intended for a specific public, Black space, and the Underground Railroad. “The building itself is a little anonymous; it doesn’t present itself,” she says. “It plays with the idea that there is some sort of discreet network, a flow of communication, a set of resources, and a culture that is not in full view.” In contrast to Kim’s Harvard Square studio, where the relationship between the above and below ground will likely be made more legible, here the students will preserve the underground’s hiddenness. The effects of this choice, Au suggests, extend beyond the aesthetic to the social, political, and existential. “The club is out of view and can internalize itself without the external pressure of having to display or show itself,” he says. “It becomes a space where a mythology can form.” The party as a ritual event will serve as the genesis of that mythology. “We’re hoping to engage in a conversation about social practice and pageantry,” says Henry, who will incorporate works by artists Maurice Harris and Nikita Gale as further design inspiration to students of “highly generative and theatrical things embedded in pleasure.” She and Au also intend to probe the unique multi-sensorial aspects of nightclubs, which often invert traditional design practices and expectations due to being underground. These include limited lighting, which reduces visibility; unique lighting designs throughout the environment; and sound dampening. Together, such features create a highly embodied experience and support intimate relationships between occupants and with the elusive space. Henry hopes that “this rich interior will exist as information which, dialectically, will move in some manner to the exterior design.” Just as the Tsukiji fish market challenged power through its perceived uncleanliness, the club’s celebration of darkness and excess counters a hegemonic demand for surveillance and control. Like the other subterranean sites explored in these studios, it also resists capitalist injunctions for regimentation and order. As we build more and more into the earth, the challenge will be to retain these spaces’ potential resistance to such forces. By treating the underground not as a space in which to copy the world above but as a unique stratum whose symbolic dimensions resist fixity, its fugitive character can enable transformative design.