The Spectacular Vernacular

Architecture’s most dramatic evolution since the advent of modernism has been the increasing gap between the extraordinary and the ordinary. The extraordinary distinguished by a predilection for spectacle and ordinary characterized by a penchant for the vernacular, these two opposite poles of architectural production–global and specific on the one hand, local and generic on the other–are more distant than ever before. This studio will examine this gap between the exceptional and the ordinary; the dichotomy between the classical spectacle and the background vernacular through an approach that attempts to reclaim a middle ground, to find the vernacular within the spectacle and the spectacle within the vernacular.

The studio will explore hybrid building types, combining the industrial shed and the vernacular barn in 15,000 to 20,000 square foot buildings. Developments including MLTW’s Sea Ranch, Edward Larabee Barnes’ Haystack, Venturi Scott Brown’s Trubeck & Wislocki cottages, and Stanley Tigerman’s Black Barn will be the subject of precedent study in the studio. These projects are notable for collective dwelling that fused the abstraction of modernism with the specificity of vernacular architecture through the rigor of geometry, disciplined form, and material detail. Inherent to these opposing historical lineages is an emergent type that embodies the local and the global, the generic and the specific, framing a relevant architectural approach of the spectacular vernacular. The studio project will be the design of rural community buildings clustered to serve new modes of contemporary life between home and work and other in-between models. Ambiguous in scale and use, between, a large house, a medium sized barn, and small industrial factory, the buildings will be precise in form and structure developed from a kit of parts assembly with an adaptable climatic interior. The hybrid nature of the buildings will activate new collective spaces as incubators of mixed-culture public space.

Located in a semi-rural community in Connecticut that is defined by small scale agricultural production with local town centers and rural residential parcels, each building will accommodate flexible workspace combined with a civic program of approximately 15,000 sq ft including programs such as a small community center, library, or theater to be identified by each student. The juxtapositions of use and climatic boundaries within the context of an active rural community together will form collective contemporary cultural precincts.

Our studio will reference foundational tenets of planning, program, and detail of various Shaker Villages in New England that we will visit in the development of individual studio projects. Our design process will begin with buildings and details and integrate into multi-building clusters before the completion of the studio. Individual buildings will engage shared pathways and open green space. Each building will encompass a range of climatic environments, diverse envelope conditions, and temporal use scenarios in relation to program criteria. Students will develop their project at three scales from the collective, to the architectural, to the detail. We will construct considered frameworks and evaluative metrics including social utilization, embodied carbon, architectural quality, etc., that will form the basis of collective planning strategies to be implemented by each student in their individual project. Participation in biweekly studio meetings, readings, field trips, and production of large-scale sectional models and collages will be the basis of evaluation.