Architectural developments are increasingly massive, involving complex program mixes and/or public-private ventures where design by a single architect is arguably not advantageous, if even possible. Furthermore, the political processes surrounding these mammoth, single-building developments often dictate architectural solutions and imagery before their use combinations and ratios are finalized, or design on any individual program has commenced.

To navigate this increasingly prevalent scale–and the multiple authorship and programmatic indeterminacy it begs–architecture must explore strategic loss of control. So far, such forays have largely been limited to visions and critiques that do not take implementation seriously (e.g., Yona Friedman’s megastructures) or to the promiscuous layering of programs in single-authored ‘Big Buildings’ (e.g., OMA’s CCTV or REX’s Museum Plaza). Urban design has traversed the territory beyond solo-authored Big Buildings with multi-authored, seemingly heterogeneous ‘Mini-Cities.’ However, the Mini-City is usually little more than an architectural zoo: an accretion of individual signature works, each desperately trying to be unique but ultimately just different in the same way (e.g., Hudson Yards).

If architects can overcome their desire to control all aspects of a design, they can engage the potent ground beyond Big Buildings without surrendering large-scale development to urban design’s Mini-Cities of non-identical sameness. They can advance a new building typology–the “strategos-structure”–that effectively balances strategy and ego, retaining conceptual coherence and credibility even if its parts change and/or its size demands multiple authors.

In this studio, students will collaborate to create a cultural strategos-structure on the picturesque 150-acre site of the Santa Fe Opera, situated on a mesa seven miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It will consist of four closely related typologies: an opera hall, a concert hall, an operetta hall, and a multifunctional theater–the components that have defined contemporary opera house complexes since New York City’s Lincoln Center and the Sydney Opera House both broke ground in 1959.

For the first three weeks of the semester, the studio will work as a team to generate a conceptual framework–a strategy that hovers somewhere between a Big Building and a master plan–that allows each subsequent, independently authored venue to be a healthy component of the cultural strategos-structure. As planners of the strategos-structure, the team must determine the siting, zoning envelope, programmatic relationships and/or hierarchy, structural concepts, and circulation/service strategies, as well as whether to address issues such as formal harmony or façade expression through legislation.

Following this effort, for the remainder of the semester, students will work individually to design one of the four venues within the strategos-structure, resulting in three interchangeable options for each venue that can be used to test the success of the whole. Each student will have to navigate the rules decreed by the team during the planning phase, as well as address programmatic, organizational, experiential, acoustical, and aesthetic issues raised by their component. A large model–into which each student will place their portion of the strategos-structure–will be the primary vehicle for presenting and evaluating work.