Wild Ways 3.0: California Connectivity

Site: Territorial California, from Death Valley to the Central Valley and the Sierra Madre Mountains

This studio will explore themes of peri-urban, rural, regional, and continental connectivity and resilience through the lens of wildlife and landscape infrastructure projects throughout California.

Our work will be grounded in the intertwined challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene – now understood as a global polycrisis.  We will engage conversations, projects and precedents that address our relationships to other species and the environments we share and on which our futures depend. We will consider new and reciprocal relationships with the creatures that co-exist with us. We will explore the conceptualization and development of new hybrid assemblages, new infrastructural ecologies, new imaginaries that foster deeper relations, entanglements, and kinships between and among all of earth’s inhabitants.
 
Importantly, this is not an anti-human endeavor; rather, and perhaps most profoundly, it an attempt to re-establish lost connections, re-affirm the culture of nature, re-embrace the living world, and re-engage us as social and ecological creatures through the multiple lenses of all who dwell among us – from surviving, to thriving and flourishing into an uncertain future.

In this complex set of contexts, then, we will ask: Can we imagine a new civic landscapes and infrastructure that re-stitch California’s wildlands and re-connect humans and creatures in new, empathetic ways?  The work will interrogate and explore what large-scale urban habitat and civic infrastructure projects across California’s biodiversity hotspots might look like and how they might work—in the face of increasing urbanization and intensifying climate change. Proposals will be generated from the primary lenses of different endemic, endangered and introduced species; will layer in humans as both users and audience (on/in the connectivity infrastructure versus driving, moving or inhabitating them); and will account for intensifying threats of wildfire and biodiversity loss.  The goal is to invent the basis for new infrastructural and creature-based ecologies—mixes of habitat, culture, geography, ecology, food webs, mobility networks, and lifestyles—adapted to a rapidly evolving and warming climate.

For us, though, we want to approach this through various non-human lenses first, excavating understandings of animal and plant worlds and the various interrelationships and evolutions that are at the basis of non-human sustenance in this arid environment. We want to see, hear, smell, feel and move through wildlife senses.  We want to understand how the logics of animal movement, plant growth and habitat connectivity might shape a strategic re-tooling of terrirotial-scale infrastructure networks in order to allow creatures to better thrive, and for ecosystems to flourish, to become a positive contributor to climatic and urbanistic forces.  

Importantly, we will do so by creating a new civic imaginary (perhaps re-capturing a sense of civic pride and expression that accompanied early motorway infrastructure) that fully engages humans within these environments and raises our collective consciousness—by integrating live-giving landscapes with human and wildlife use and bold civic expression, as appropriate to the contexts and environments in which you will work.

Bangkok Porous City: New Landscapes of Equity and Prosperity 2.0

This studio will bring together faculty and students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to imagine how the last development parcel where river and city meet in central  Bangkok could be designed as a "city for all," for greater social inclusion and for ecological and climate resiliency, while addressing developmental needs and cultural and recreational programs for the metropolitan region, today one of a handful of global cities in Southeast Asia with a population of 16 million inhabitants.

The site is Bangkok’s former container port facility in the Khlong Toei district, on the banks of the Chao Phraya River, Thailand’s main waterway. Its owner, the Port Authority, has the intention of developing the site. However, for the past 75 years the site has also been the home of an informal settlement, the largest in the city. The site gathers and magnifies all the contemporary challenges of Bangkok: flooding, exclusion, uncontrolled market forces, and significant impacts of climate change. At the same time, there is much inspiration to be gained from its past and present. We are inspired by the history of the encounter between water and city in Bangkok, and by the vibrant spaces of exchange and social adaptation in a watery terrain. We are also interested in the way extreme density induces the creative adaptation of places, making us realize our own rigid ways of assigning programs to spaces, and of making unnecessary boundaries that curtail possibilities for the enrichment of social life.

The studio will build upon the work of students developed during the 2022 Spring semester led by Anita Berrizbeitia and Alejandro Echeverri. This work provides foundational information about Bangkok and the Khlong Toei site. Four proposals will be examined in detail, critiqued, and advanced as design exercises. Pedagogically, this is a unique opportunity to develop interpretative and design developments skills that evolve a concept into advanced stages of design.

Working individually and in teams, students will focus on a deeper exploration of the canal system as a socio-ecological network, on the equitable distribution of shade and ventilation-producing canopy, on the integration of socio-economic communities within the urban block, on the different scales and modalities of sharing climate vulnerabilities, on alternative forms of public space, and on the equal distribution of life-enhancing resources and services, a landscape of equity and prosperity for all. This is a sponsored studio, its results will serve to catalyze conversations.

The studio will travel to Bangkok for one week. The studio will be led by Anita Berrizbeitia and Ignacio Bunster-Ossa, with regular participation of Kotchakorn Voraakhomm, and faculty from the GSD and Bangkok.

The Landscapes of the Norwegian Scenic Routes

Over the past thirty years, the "Norwegian Scenic Routes" project has produced imaginative buildings and landscapes in poetic dialogue with Norway's unique scenery and road infrastructure.

As much as the program remains vital, sensibilities toward the astonishing Norwegian landscape and what it means to enjoy the beautiful vistas along the road are changing.

An increasing demand to review the scenic route's relationship to Norwegian climate policies and the evolving aesthetics and poetics around the terms "landscape" and "view" perhaps requires the renewal of values, design techniques, scales, and media after the program's first three decades.

Outside of Norway, the program has served as a platform for discussing architecture and landscape in relation to art and nature, disseminating the particular design culture the program has contributed to creating. Traditionally, the program has served as a platform for young creative boutique offices, privileging artistic merit over experience.

The studio will ask three new fundamental questions the program has yet to address, proposing projects departing from new techniques and ways to survey the beautiful Norwegian landscape.
   – Vision and technology
   – New scales
   – The road as culture

We will explore how technology shapes a designer's relation to beautiful scenery. In Norway, sophisticated high-resolution surveys and databases of the landscape are publicly available. Architects and landscape architects still need to capitalize on this rich material. We will explore techniques to translate these sophisticated surveys into concrete spatial decisions. This methodology is equally helpful for architects and landscape architects and opens the poetic evaluation of these sophisticated documents beyond their technical implications.

The second question is about scale and media. As there is increasing pressure to produce new projects that go beyond beautiful objects amidst beautiful scenery, landscape architects are gaining relevance for the program; at the same time, architects are pushed to expand the limits of the poetic object in connection to environmental concerns.

New sites for the scenic routes include mining sites amidst astonishing landscapes, creating the need to design projects in between architecture and landscape architecture that can simultaneously address nature's exploitation and the extreme beauty of their situations.

Projects proposed in the studio will also contribute to the evolving nature of road and car culture in some of Northern Europe's most delicate landscapes, a rapidly changing subject posing new design questions.

This course has an irregular schedule. Please see the course syllabus for details.

The Coming Community

In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben recounts the following tale, as told by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch: "The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different."

Architecture may have been a little lazy. First, its long-held infatuation with newness – new forms, new media, new materials, new images, and new urgencies, creates a convex gaze of the field that often small and superficial (new) elements are magnified and obscure the complacency underneath. Then it has also perfected the art of copy-pasting through best practices, standardization, and as-of-right developments. Repeated enough times, the mundane becomes best-of-class. Finally, we seem to have forgotten the wonderous world of kintsugi, spolia, and metamorphosis, where that which has passed and which is to come engage in an alchemic dance of co-creation. The old scribes memories and histories for the new, for it to gain meaning and purpose, and thrust the mere possible into contingent.

The Coming Community studio turns its cheek away from tabula rasa and earnestly examines the fossils of architecture, including those that are no longer replicated. It refrains from the acritical production of complacent architectural objects varnished in a thin layer of newness and instead takes “disdained'' architectural elements – their outdated forms, overlooked (mis)uses, obsolete programs, (dis)functional parts, expiring materials, antiquated systems, and forgotten desires, and embed within, bond together, trace over and transform them anew. We explore the threshold where the past transgresses into the coming through the love affair between the old and the new. As the world becomes increasingly atomized and siloed, capitals increasingly consolidated, and unbridled material and energy extraction increasingly unsustainable, such critical discovery and nuanced interpretation of and more empathic attitude towards the past might bring worthy profit.

The site for The Coming Community studio at GSD 24’ is the Guggenheim Museum, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s latest works, completed in 1959. In 1990, the Guggenheim Museum was the youngest building to gain city landmark status. It is now designated as a National Historic Landmark and appears on the World Heritage List. Implicated by its own success, the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum has crystallized into a hermetic object, with the years passing, becoming fossilized in the past. What would it take for the Guggenheim Museum to not only be preserved but also to be alive? How can the whispers in its everyday hum be amplified and say something relevant today? Can we imagine a Coming Community for the iconic building that promises a future that is “just a little different”?

The design process takes the dual track of research and experimentation. Final designs will be represented through one model, drawings, and two printed archives catalogs. They will be exhibited and circulated at the museum in a form still to be determined.

Nordic Urban Weave: On Domesticity and Civic Continuity

Set within Copenhagen’s post-industrial Nordhavn District, the studio investigates the global challenges of water resiliency and housing—a common yet complex condition in many harbor cities that face the transformation of water-edges. From Boston to Hong Kong, this shift among port cities often involves a transition away from previous activities of shipping, commerce, and trade, and toward new civic and domestic models of public space and housing. Yet, the evolution of the water’s edge is seldom a tidy process, offering a unique opportunity for critique, intervention and design imagination.

Traveling to Copenhagen over spring break, the studio seeks to reconcile the specific forces at work in Denmark, at the confluence of a water-shaped civic landscape, a porous matrix of aggregated dwelling, and the Nordic concept of ‘Hygge,’ loosely defined as domestic coziness or togetherness.  What is a contemporary interpretation of hygge and how can this culturally specific concept recast traditional modes of housing and provide alternatives to market-driven criteria?  How is hygge rooted in climate and material culture, and how might we create a personal response to the evolving legacy of Danish modernism? Can emerging low-carbon material and construction technologies contribute to an architectural expression while addressing needs for water management and resiliency?

Copenhagen exemplifies a proactive approach to climate resiliency, and investment in its vulnerable waterfront, resulting in an on-going master planning effort, won in competition by the Danish firm Cobe in 2008. Aimed at integrating existing and new infrastructure, transforming Nordhavn’s water-front edges, and satisfying Copenhagen’s need for housing, the Cobe plan and other realized architecture and landscape projects, will serve as a foundation for our study to explore and advance site-specific housing proposals.  

Dense urban housing typically manifests in repetitive patterns of unit aggregation, mirrored and stacked pragmatically, relying on double-loaded corridors for efficiency, and often stuffed into arbitrary envelopes, absent of a socially binding civic promenade, geometric variation or domestic ambiance. As a counterpoint to the repetitive stack and its proclivity for alienation, we will conceptualize housing and urban landscape as a contiguous, fully connected pedestrian terrain that wends its way horizontally and vertically, seeking light and air, re-imagining the ground plane, and offering unique opportunities for architectural expression—in other words, we will integrate hydrology, housing, and hygge. Implicit in this act is a resistance to an overly privatized landscape and an active study of grade and circulation as collective tissue. Housing is thereby imagined as a porous container set amidst a terraformed landscape and skin, a shaped vessel that owes as much to its interior contour as to its exterior figuration. This approach questions the distinctions between private and public realms as typically defined by building skin, aspiring to reconcile a programmatically rich interior with an architecture of sculptural, civic and ecological presence.

Long Living Spolia

Spolia, derived from the Latin word for "spoils" or "booty," involves repurposing art and architectural elements from previous constructions or demolished structures. The practice dates back to the Constantine era, exemplified by the renowned Arch of Constantine (315 AD). In this historical context, Spolia served an ideological purpose, as "spoils" were transported over long distances to be incorporated into new monuments, imbuing them with symbolic meaning. The Arch of Constantine, for instance, utilized diverse construction parts from various origins to create a monument of imperial propaganda.

In contemporary times, Spolia finds application in both pragmatic and ideological realms. On a practical level, it entails recycling architectural elements or materials to create sustainable new buildings. This approach reduces carbon footprints, as materials are sourced closer to the desired building location, in contrast to the extensive transportation involved in Roman times. Ideologically, Spolia offers an alternative approach to construction, embracing our history, learning, and acknowledging past mistakes.

Anticipating the future, the architecture and construction sectors bear the responsibility of finding solutions to mitigate the environmental impact of building. Our focus this semester revolves around drawing inspiration from the ancient practice of Spolia and seamlessly integrating it into contemporary architecture. Engaging in this transformative process provides an opportunity to reassess various aspects of our lives, from societal structures to our perspectives on living and interpersonal relationships.

In this studio, we undertake the assembly of 800 stones repurposed from the remnants of a Portuguese quarry. Within the realm of architecture and design, stone emerges as a silent storyteller, a material that goes beyond its apparent stillness to embody a unique form of vitality. Rather than a static substance, stone reveals itself as a living material—a narrative that breathes history, carries the weight of time, and resonates with the echoes of the past. With a profound understanding of this living material, our goal is to craft a space for "long living." These stones, weathered by time, bear the marks of their experiences, much like the wrinkles etched on the faces of those who have traversed the passages of life. Metaphorically aligning stone with age, our focus is on creating an open environment dedicated to the well-being of the elderly. We actively challenge preconceptions surrounding age, aging, decay, and wrinkles, delving into the parallels between human and material nature.

By reshaping perceptions of old age as a valuable societal resource, we simultaneously reassess material resources and spatial programming. Our emphasis lies on spatial ergonomics, materiality, and multifunctionality, as we explore the dynamic interplay between the enduring nature of stone and the multifaceted aspects of the human experience

The chosen site is in Melides, Portugal, and our study trip will unveil the unique characteristics of the location.

Key Learnings:
   – Designing with a focus on material resources, particularly understanding stone as a material.
   – Executing design through research, treating the project as an archaeology of the future.
   – Programmatic research and questioning to inform the design process.
   – Cultivating critical thinking toward social constructs.
   – Incorporating ecosystem thinking into the design approach.

This course has an irregular schedule. Please see the course syllabus for details.

Rethinking Metabolic Rift: Tokyo: Architecture Between Scales and Typologies

Can Tokyo be a cultural city, a city that is cognizant of the “metabolic rift”—the often-inevitable environmental degradation that accompanies urbanization—and yet committed to confronting and even repairing it? Can it seek and imagine an alternative strategy, an architecture, that is more attuned to the nuances of relations between the social and the natural worlds and between scales and typologies of construction?

The proliferation of large urban developments in Tokyo is symptomatic of the increasing privatization of the public domain. Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Midtown, Toranomon Hills, COREDO Muromachi, and Azabudai Hills are among the completed megaprojects by a handful of big developers that are rapidly and dramatically changing the urban landscape and public life of the city.

The consumerist culture embedded in these technically accomplished and often lavishly made developments can be alluring. But these privately owned public spaces can also be exclusionary and challenging for the public to occupy and use with the same degree of freedom as they would a city street. Despite their thermal comfort and irresistible charm, these megaprojects seem blatantly to defy Henri Lefebvre’s argument for “the right to the city” and its implied erasure of social and spatial inequity.

This option studio will explore an alternative strategy based on the simultaneous choreography of a multitude of architectural ideas and interventions—of different scales and typologies, hybrids—that represent the needs and desires of Tokyoites to live together. Our intention is to shift the emphasis in contemporary development from the economies of scale to the economies of scope, an approach characterized by variety rather than volume.

The location for the projects will be a series of urban sites close to Ueno and the public park that was established in the nineteenth century. The park contains several museums and cultural institutions, including the city’s zoo and the National Museum of Western Art, the only building by Le Corbusier in Japan. The area also encompasses two of Tokyo’s foremost academic institutions, the University of Tokyo and Tokyo University of the Arts.

The area of investigation by the studio will be the urban spine connecting these institutions to the nearby neighborhood of Yanesen. The framing of the programs will take into consideration a diversity of topics, including culture and the everyday, the changes in the demography of Tokyo, the needs of young and old, the future consequences of degrowth, as well as alternative conceptions of the relation between architecture and nature.

If Ueno Park represents the nineteenth-century vision of culture/nature, how can the phenomenon be reconceptualized today? How can architecture’s situatedness within a broader environmental agenda help structure our contemporary projects? To achieve this task, each student will choose their own site/s and program/s with the aim of designing an architectural intervention or ensemble that will reconsider and question the role of scale and typology as a means of enhancing the quality of life of the district.

The studio will meet regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays and will travel to Tokyo in February. During this period, we will meet with several architects and academics, and participate in tours and talks with scholars including Kumiko Kiuchi and Shunya Yoshimi, one of Japan’s foremost scholars on Tokyo. Tom Heneghan, Mits Kanada, Yusuke Obuchi and Kayoko Ota will guide us through parts of our area. As in previous years, Professor Mits Kanada, a structural engineer who has worked with Toyo Ito and other contemporary architects, will act as the technical advisor to the studio.

 

Urban Glitch

Urban Glitch is a studio designed to research the pressing issue of systems-linked architecture in relation to the complex and intertwined ecological and social imperatives of our time. We will embrace architecture as anti-autonomous, as an agent of urban change that is necessarily collaborative, connected, and contingent; as a mode of engaged cultural production that requires fresh operational positions to facilitate this agency.

As a way into a more radical approach to the often-codified middle scale of urban form, the studio will collectively imagine an alternative present — an urban glitch — in which our architectural imagination is contingent upon altered and re-imagined outcomes to an event or decision in recent history that shapes the current status quo mode of operation and consumption within the built environment. The goal of this counterfactual approach to design production is to explore the spaces where current and future decisions are not fixed, where a combination of design imagination and radical pragmatism can impact the deep DNA and embedded path dependencies that shape our built world, and that generate or dissolve design's capacity to make change.

In practical terms, the studio will address the intersection of transportation infrastructure and architecture. The program is a mixed-use transit hub in Boston that accommodates public and private mobility within a paradigm of infrastructural decarbonization. We will travel to Amsterdam to learn from a system of urban infrastructure that yields dynamic forms of personal and shared mobility and a diverse range of buildings to store, charge, and host it. We will collaborate with artists, policymakers, and engineers, among others, to consider the following questions within the context of the design process:

What is the role of the middle scale of architecture in re-programming patterns of urban mobility for an era of decarbonization? Who owns, rents, and maintains our urban infrastructure, and what happens to urban form if variables of use and ownership change? What urban mechanics are contingent or changeable, and what conditions are inevitable factors in the shaping of 21st-century architectural form? What are the opportunities presented by an architecture of dependence in which form must act in concert with the larger conditions and constructs that drive urban change? What is the disposition and agency of a public architecture in an era of private capital? How and when does architecture have the power to act up and down the scales of the built environment?

Kit House II

This studio has two objectives. The first is to revisit an icon of American vernacular.  The second, to reflect on the design process itself, on how –and why– we choose to do things.

Our theme is part of the re-emergent phenomenon of OFFSITE MANUFACTURING or OSM, also known as Model as Building – Building as Model, whereby projects of any size or purpose are designed and built anywhere, anywhere (that is) except on site.

OSM is not a technical theme, and the studio is not about construction. It is about reflecting on the nature of building, and the various ways in which the conceptual breakthroughs performed by unsuspecting actors of the design and manufacturing world enrich our disciplinary understanding of architecture and urbanity.

The studio concludes a line of enquiry carried out in 2018-19 and 2022 with a renewed focus on the unique, all-American cultural phenomenon known as a the Modern Home –or Kit House. This quintessentially American experiment lasted from 1908 to the Great Depression (the last batch shipped around 1940).

The mail-order only Kit House was disseminated through Modern Homes Catalogues. Largely outdated by today’s social norms, this marketing literature did capture a moment of boundless American optimism, a can-do attitude, and a refreshing faith in everyone’s ability to build their own home. With its agnostic approach to architectural style and embrace of new technology, the Kit House set out some ground rules OSM still abides by today.

BRIEF:
Starting with a renewed appreciation of the economic, social and cultural ambitions of OSM Participants are invited to propose a contemporary concept of the Kit House. The brief is completely open, but we will pay special attention to the following design issues: Identity and Culture. Modularity. Assembly. Packaging. Shipping, Documentation and Nomenclature (Building by Numbers).

SITE:
OSM being first and foremost a matter of cultural geography, site is not a priority as such. In keeping with the American character of the concept and its broadly rural resonance, the studio will concentrate on a rural corridor off Everett Road in the town of Norfolk MA, where land is zoned for single-family dwellings. We will visit the site and devise on a strategy of collective occupation as a group.

DELIVERABLES:
The deliverables of the studio will consist in a flat-packed Kit House model, a brochure of guidelines and explanations, and a public performance.  

This course has an irregular schedule. Please see the course syllabus for details.

The Temporary Contemporary: Assembling a Public in Downtown Los Angeles

The contemporary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a nonlinear space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical.
                – Paul Rabinow, Marking Time

In a now well-known story, the decades since 1970 have seen a quiet “economization” of public space. Though diverse in its locational details and regional variables, in many cities the overall effect has been to render the concept of public space—historically an essential ingredient of democratic life—if not anachronistic, at least endangered. In a cruel irony, the “neo-liberalization” of urban space unfolds as a mostly unseen erasure of the spatial foundations of liberalism’s basic elements—enumerated by Wendy Brown as “vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries.”  

Today this condition raises basic questions: how can publics still be assembled? Where, if not in the old, familiar places—the city square, the free press, the candidate’s debate—can differences be publicly exercised?  

This studio argues that one possible site for contemporary political assembly is aesthetic life. This does not imply that the content of aesthetic work must become explicitly political, but rather that “art” (very broadly conceived) and the institutions where it is housed, can form spaces, arenas, and backgrounds for publics. These formations do not de facto result simply from the display of art, but depend upon commitments from directors, curators, etc., They also depend upon specific spatial and material conditions that can be called the architecture of art. In our work this semester, this phrase indicates more than (and is at times even critical of) “museum design.” It instead requires asking how an aesthetic institution can be made into a site for the reproduction of publics, which, by their very nature, are temporary and require constant revivification.

These theoretical concerns will be explored across two nearly adjacent sites in downtown Los Angeles. The first is the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Originally called “the Temporary Contemporary,” MOCA Geffen is housed in an existing building on the border between in LA’s Little Tokyo and Arts districts. We will work with MOCA’s curatorial staff to imagine possibilities for “The WAREHOUSE”—the only zone of the original building untouched by Frank Gehry’s 1982-83 adaptation of the building for use as galleries. Today, the WAREHOUSE serves as an empty space for staging events and public programs, but it has never benefitted from any cohesive architectural agenda.

A second site, less than a block away, will rework a lost opportunity: the recently completed Little Tokyo/Arts District Metro Station. Despite city incentives to densify housing at and near metro stations, however, only a single-story pavilion was constructed as an entry point to the underground station. We will reimagine this as the site of a new multistorey structure for housing MOCA’s new artists residency program, including live/work studios, administrative offices, and other functions.

Taken together, the two projects—one, an adaptive reuse design for MOCA’s public programming; the other a new home for the making of contemporary art—aim towards a single thesis: that formal, material, and programmatic speculation can result in the architectural production of an aesthetic site for public politics. The studio will travel to Los Angeles in February.