Case Studies in Conservation and Adaptive Re-use

Traditional conservation practice is increasingly proving inadequate to address the cultural, economic, social and environmental challenges facing the diverse array of buildings and sites currently in need of renewal.  A new focus on creative thinking is necessary to accommodate both the volume and often erratic quality of the resources under consideration, but more profoundly to acknowledge that science and scholarship address only part of the full range of values and issues that must be taken into account to ensure the relevance, quality and ultimate success of any intervention.  While this approach does not circumvent the normal processes of assessment and evaluation it does recognize the essential need for a critical overlay in order to achieve a design synthesis that balances conservation and repair with appropriate future use, perception and socio-economic value.  

Case Studies in Conservation and Adaptive Re-Use will build upon the philosophical and practical underpinnings of the fall semester Building Conservation and Renewal course, and though that course is not a prerequisite, some familiarity with the intellectual and regulatory framework associated with working with historic sites is useful and recommended. The course will include a series of case studies on a variety of traditional and modern resources given by the instructor and guest lecturers, who will explore contemporary theoretical, political and practical issues that attend working with existing properties.  

The primary course deliverable will be student authored case studies from a curated project list that raise critical questions about conservation, interpretation, and the design of interventions.  Students will work in teams – with regular critiques throughout the semester – to develop a critical analysis that identifies the material and cultural values that define each property and suggest how best to manage their conservation and guide future development.  The ultimate goal will be to understand how the process of change – whether as a singular event or in multiple campaigns – has used, challenged or rejected attributes of the host structure, and the degree to which the result still embodies the design intent, meaning and quality of each building campaign.  Short essays and regular discussion of course readings will also be required.  

The course is a 3-hour weekly seminar with a maximum enrollment of 20 students.  

Mountains and the Rise of Landscape

To ask when we started looking at mountains is by no means the same as asking when we started to see them. Rather, it is to question what sorts of aesthetic and moral responses, what kinds of creative and reflective impulses, our new-found regard for them prompted. It is evident enough that in a more or less recent geological time frame mountains have always just been there. This ineluctable thereness was famously invoked by the athletic schoolmaster George Mallory when asked why he had made repeated attempts to reach the peak of Mount Everest, the allure of which was and remains demonstrably fatal. The mountaineer’s strenuously slow “perpendicular travel” toward an upward tending horizon was “work for supermen,” the New York Times suggested in a profile of Mallory published prior to his final all-too-human attempt. He was last seen on the afternoon of June 8, 1924, near the base of Everest’s summit pyramid before disappearing into the mountain mist.

It is possible that mountains, like the sea, best provide pleasure, visual and otherwise, when experienced from a (safe) physical and psychical distance. But it might also be the case that the pleasures mountains hold in store are of a learned and acquired sort. Which is also to say that mountains, for all their unforgiving thereness, are themselves the products of unwitnessed Neptunian and Vulcanian tumults or divine judgment. For the late seventeenth-century theologian and cosmogonist Thomas Burnet, mountains were “nothing but great ruins.” A dawning appreciation of these wastelands appeared in the critical writings of John Dennis. Satirized as “Sir Tremendous Longinus” for his rehabilitation of the antique aesthetic category of the sublime, Dennis expressed the complex concept of “delightful horror.” Mountain gloom was ready to become mixed with mountain glory.

More work was still to be done on the literary and philosophical front before the Romantic breakthrough, one high vantage point being the essayist Joseph Addison’s dream of finding himself in the Alps, “astonished at the discovery of such a Paradise amidst the wildness of those cold hoary landscapes.” But a kindred innovation in seeing and feeling was called for in the formation of mountains and the rise of landscape. Mountains, among other earth forms, are both the medium and outcome of still-evolving habits of experiencing, making, and imagining. Architects and landscape architects, mutually occupied with the horizontal surface, have had a touch equally as searching as that of mountaineers and poets in sensing the terrain.

The ostensible object and subject of this seminar, appearing as isolated peaks and as ranges, chains or systems, measurable and scalable but also cloud-shrouded and remote, rising and falling, massive and imponderable, will be studied across time and place with constant and careful attention to how mountains define and defy the discourse and practice of landscape architecture and architecture. We will look at texts, images, cultural constructs, buildings (mountain-scaled and otherwise), cities, wastes, and elsewhere all in search of the meaning of mountains.

Modern Architecture and Urbanism in China

Modernizing influences, largely from the hands of foreign powers, first forcefully entered China in the aftermath of the Opium War and signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. Since then, China endured a stormy if not tumultuous course of events before finding itself with burgeoning modern industrialization and urbanization during the contemporary era, as well as a certain ambivalence about the shape of its future identity. Against this historical backdrop, modern architecture and urbanism developed spasmodically, before emerging strongly during the past decade or so. Rather than attempting to provide a continuous and cohesive narrative of these developments, this seminar will concentrate on significant episodes during the last 150 or so years. Of particular interest will be the work of several generations of Chinese architects, planners, and public officials, as well as that of foreign architects and planners, working in China during various periods. The aim of the course will be to introduce students to this modern work and underlying attitudes, together with cultural influences, which lay behind them. Students will be expected to be prepared for seminar discussion, by undertaking prescribed readings, and to produce an article-length research paper on a pertinent topic. There are no prerequisites for this course.

Urban Grids: Open form for City Design-2

Framework:

Within a larger research scope on “Revisiting the urban grids in the XXI century”, this seminar will focus on the investigation of recent urbanistic projects which use the grid and its multiple variations as their main structural device for the construction of the city. The ultimate objective of the course is to develop new understanding of the way we are approaching the design of the city by means of “grids and networks”

This semester the seminar will focus on the forms of blocks with exploring the diversity of urban block types and  researching the important aspects of block-design, which include: 1) dimensions and scales; 2) parcellation and its relationship to the regularity of land division and the subsequent subdivision or aggregation; 3) the evolution of compositional strategies and formation logics, and the relation between the compositions and the densities the block system is able to accommodate; grid composition is a useful metric as it indicates the relative efficiency of different grid systems, considering the space required to render services and provide mobility across a set extent of private land subdivision; 4) the continuity or fragmentation of the facades of the urban blocks, as well as the sectional design of blocks with multilayered considerations; 5) patterns of built form vs open space or communal space; and 6) how the forms of buildings response to the general form of the block.

Research Topics:

The research seminar will specifically focus on the following topics:

Course Format and Method:

Even though a few introductory readings will be handed out at the beginning of the course, the seminar will explore the topics primarily through the construction of analytical and operative drawings.

The seminar is open to all students in GSD. Note that a high level of graphic skills is required.  Students will work individually and in groups of two.

Limited Enrollment: Number of students is limited to 24.

Notice: ***Please note that the material circulated during the seminar is for use within the seminar only.

The Fifth Plan

In this seminar we will consider the evolution of the floor plan across five iterations: proto-modern, modern, post-modern, sequel-modern, and, most importantly, the present. We will begin with a simple hypothesis about the present, namely that there is a new plan afoot. It has been making its way into architecture for several years, announcing its arrival via the paroxysms that come with a long gestation. Its terms are not those of the suck-the-air-out gangly hollowness of proto-modern experiments in iron and steel (as seen in train stations, department stores, and exhibition halls), nor the give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death plan of modernism (universal, free), nor the we-used-to-do-it-like-this-plus-je-ne-sais-quoi plan of post-modernism (neo-historical, juxtaposing), nor the plan-non-chalant of recent reinvigorations of modernist architecture (data-driven, a-formal). Given it descends from these four earlier paradigms of plan thinking, I’ve provisionally labeled this new plan the “fifth plan.”

As surely as it descends from these precedents, the fifth plan is decidedly not like its predecessors. Our understanding of plans (and of architecture) depends on our ability to distill the characteristics of plan-based organizations, characteristics that the fifth plan incessantly meddles with: open or defined, perimeter or interior, figure or system, history or future, homogeneous or varied. This new plan confounds classification because it conflates spatial temperaments. It slips into and out of categorical restraints as needed. It signals neither a return to nor a rejection of previous plan models and, most importantly, can’t be singularly aligned or contrasted with its antecedents. 

A few clarifications might be useful. First, “plan” here refers to the term’s basic definition in architecture, namely the horizontal organization that modulates degrees of enclosure, program organizations, circulation systems, optical dispositions, formal geometries, and hierarchies. Second, the plan is taken to be a primary part of architecture’s makeup, which is to say the plan is deeply wound into both the momentum of architecture’s disciplinary history and the transformation of architecture as we face the future. The plan structures architecture’s formal systems, economies, social constellations, and material constructs. It is the discipline’s constitution: equal parts social contract, technical diagram, spreadsheet, and aesthetic code.  What changes from plan-era to plan-era are the hierarchies among parts and the ways in parts deemed important are related to one another, invariably producing constantly changing definitions of what we think of as wholes in architecture.

Where can this new plan be found? In its nascent state, various strains of the fifth plan can be found in a range of contemporary practices including Mansilla & Tunon, Michael Maltzan, Sou Fujimoto, Barkow Leibinger, Johnston Marklee, Toyo Ito, SANAA, as well as a host of other practices. In fact, none of these firms lays claim to this new plan type, and none of them can be said to deploy it consistently. Further complicating things, individual examples can be found in unexpected authors such as SOM (the Burr Elementary School) or Gintautas Natkevicius (a Lithuanian architect whose Birstonas House is relevant). Nonetheless, collectively an increasingly forceful exhibition of new plan thinking is being produced by these practices and others. The fifth plan’s presence might be found in a single building, in a part of a building, or across a string of projects produced by a particular practice. And yet it appears evermore ubiquitously in architecture: across scales of work, types of programs, geographies, practices, and even economies and social worlds. 

 

Acoustic Space: A media archaeology of building types

We live in acoustic space. We live constantly plugged-in, travelling in our personal sonic bubbles defined by headphones and other devices. We listen because we like it, but also to disconnect and avoid other noises. Our times are defined by an unprecedented and simultaneous coexistence of sounds and images disseminated at the speed of light, and yet there is little understanding of the architectural implications of this phenomena. However, the construction of the media-populated environments that we inhabit is at least 100 years old and initiated when radio began to populate the ether, when television entered the domestic space, and now when the internet seems to cover every single aspect of our daily lives. This seemingly invisible and immaterial phenomenon has been producing—and has been produced by—new building types for over a century which have been widely overlooked by our discipline.
 
The seminar will focus on the intersection of buildings and electronic media technologies, with specific interest in sonicity, aiming to understand the material dimension of the media-populated spaces that we inhabit today. If media technologies such as radio, telephony, television, and the internet presume the construction of “space” without any material implication, the seminar proposes to look at the widely overlooked and highly material aspect of this phenomenon. In this context, the seminar will trace the genealogy of Broadcasting Houses, Television Studios, Cinemas, Acoustic Laboratories, Telephone Exchange Buildings and Educational Spaces, among others.

The seminar is a multidisciplinary course intersecting the history and theory of architecture with media history and theory. It is dedicated to architecture students and to other students enrolled in programs and intellectual disciplines with interests in media and/or sound studies. The seminar will be structured along thematic readings each week. In addition to reading discussions from diverse fields and disciplines, each student will lead a 30-minute discussion based on the presentation of a built case study.

Assignment:
The syllabus of the course proposes a list of buildings from which students will select a research case study. Participants in the seminar are expected to work throughout the semester on one case study and submit the following material at the end of the term: An exterior model of their case study; one model photograph of an interior space of their building; a 1-minute long sound or video composition made out of found footage or sounds; and a 1000-word research paper. 

Grading Rubric:
20% Class Presentation
40% In-class Participation
40% Final Presentation

Thinking Through Soil

Urbanization is always a process of soil formation. Every material process that shapes the construction of the urban environment passes through the soil at some point. In Thinking Through Soil, we will use ‘soil’ as an interpretive category to guide us through the political consequences, design epistemology, and material contingency of the urban environment. In particular, this seminar will take a close look at the Mexico City-Mezquital Valley system. The soils in the Mezquital Valley have been irrigated with untreated wastewater for longer than any other soil in the world, and are locked in a cycle of reciprocal presupposition with the desiccated soils of Mexico City’s rapidly subsiding lake-bed. As the world’s largest experiment in wastewater agriculture, the successes and limitations of this system are of deep significance to a warming world, and provide a concrete framework for testing the possibility of designing the relation between cities and the soil they produce.

The seminar will consist of two parts. In the first part we will examine the history and theory of urban soil, paying particular attention to the limitations and blind spots of the natural historical categories we have inherited and through which the category of soil has emerged. In the second part, we will use the Mexico City-Mezquital Valley system to rethink these natural historical categories, and test new design proposals for the architecture of post-natural soil. 

Style Worry or #FOMO

Reyner Banham once described the proliferation of styles after a waning epoch as “style worry,” an anxiety where the architect must decide how to go about choosing one out of the many. After digital architecture (90s-00s) and along with the influence of social media, the proliferation of post-digital styles has resulted in a different type of angst, characterized by a fear of missing out, propelling architects and their followers towards an eclectic and omnivorous diet of design methods. Nowadays, digital networks of production and distribution incentivize a culture of inclusiveness rather than discrimination, where producer and audience become one.

The core questions of the seminar prioritize architectural history and theory’s instrumental value, underscoring its direct role in motivating design innovation. The readings offer wide-ranging architectural thought, cultivating rancorous debate, contradictory presumptions, and generative hybrids. Some of these camps (Po-Mo 2.0, OOO, neo-neo-rationalism, and post-conceptualism, parametric semiology, and so on) are rumored to exist, and this course will prod them into shape, juxtaposing them in unexpected ways. As Sylvia Lavin describes it, “choosing and placing objects often of vastly different ontologies in a space is very close to a significant if often unacknowledged means of architectural design.” During the short period of a semester, this course will simulate the creative process involved in constructing a polemical and individual voice, especially amid the distraction of social media’s hullabaloo. Though timeliness is essential, historical texts will also serve as dialogical counterweight to these contemporary debates.

Coursework will include weekly readings, discussions, and student presentations. Additionally, students will develop their own formal treatise and a corresponding final design project. This course is for those students who are interested in positioning their design work within contemporary architecture culture. 

Please note, this course video is from last year's course.

Material, Atmosphere and Ambience

This seminar introduces an understanding of atmosphere and ambience within the discourse of material practice in architecture. The materials are a contextual and cultural manifestation of architecture.  In addition to their pragmatic function—as the basis for construction means and methods—materials also carry a long history of human civilization and tradition. This seminar aims to embed material practice into the history and culture of its origins, resource utilization, craftsmanship, fabrication and its role in performance within building assembly. We will look at the materials through the lens of various global crises such as environmental issues, economy, the politics of manufacturing, use of natural resources and its life cycle. Examples and precedents will be introduced to the seminar to discuss strategies and techniques for adaptation, rehabilitation, restoration, conservation, regeneration and preservation of buildings.  Material practice carries affects such as ambience and atmosphere. It impacts acoustics, lighting, tactility and aesthetics. This seminar aims to bring forth more comprehensive, complex and holistic understandings of material and materiality which varies in impact at different event scales—from personal to communal and local to global.

Additionally, we will look at a range of materials and their fabrication methods—handmade, mechanical and digital—within different economies, from vernacular building materials and techniques to new and advanced material explorations.

The seminar is meant to be a survey of diverse material practices. Thus, each student will be expected to choose one material of focus for research, exploring its application and the possibilities for its role, meaning, effects and message in contemporary practice.  The class will meet once a week on Wednesday mornings and will consist of a lecture on the topic in first half, followed by discussions and presentations with and by the students based on weekly topics and assigned readings. Evaluations will be made based on class participation and the quality of the final project—cumulative through the semester—on material research.

Experiments in Public Freedom

As places that accept and encourage multiple representations, cities need spaces to enable unregulated, temporary, and spontaneous events. Due to their role and meaning in the construction and definition of the public realm, public spaces are expected to embody a well-defined character and gravitas. Due to the multiplicity of publics, however, these spaces must engage with temporary, overlapping, and often-contradictory sensibilities and occupations. The design question that emerges is, what type of character and gravitas can be achieved with temporality and spontaneity?

This design theory seminar presents an amalgamation of views from different perspectives (architecture, art, landscape architecture, urban design) that coalesce around six spatial conditions that are useful for conceptualizing and designing spaces capable of promoting cultural diversity, social acceptance, and individual spontaneity. Through this amalgamation, this course explores containment, neutrality, blankness, normalcy, anarchy, and amnesia as conditions that can open up public space.

Despite their potential, these spatial properties are usually underestimated as they seem to lack aspects of what is generally considered essential for designing successful public spaces: site specificity, sensibility to local aesthetics, sociocultural appropriateness, permanent and fixed identity, etc. It is precisely due to these so-called deficiencies, however, that these spatial properties can be instrumental to imagine spaces that enable constant recirculation of multiple publics rather than permanent forms of regulation, identity, or appropriateness.

The course is composed of six sections, one per spatial condition. Each section comprises a lecture by the instructor around a constellation of references (projects and texts) to be discussed in class. For each section, students are asked to analyze an environment of their choice (building, landscape, open space, etc.) that demonstrates the spatial condition being discussed. At the end of the semester, students are asked to assemble these six analyses into a design primer for the enabling of public freedoms.