Translogic Studio: A Proto-Urban Vertical Monastery

For this Studio we will focus on typological transformation and archetypal hybridization, integration of design and technology, and the relationship between precedent, speculation, and invention in order to identify, produce, and develop a tectonically rich urban figure.  These assertions of focus will support a search for immanence in a place-specific atmospheric architecture,

In recent decades, new forms of monasticism have been developing, and can be generally characterized not only by reclusive reflection and prayer, but also by immersion in community life, social service, and ecological stewardship. Many of these new organizations have been locating in urban areas, but to date there has been no effort to typify a spatial organization for this emerging phenomenon. The studio provides the opportunity to develop an atypical urban monastic prototype, transforming the traditional rustic and horizontal monastery into a new form characterized by an urban location and formal and organizational verticality. This new monastic prototype is based in the writings and teachings of inter-spiritual modern-day monks, Brother Thomas Merton and Brother Wayne Teasdale.

Our monastic prototypes will be sited in Colonia Atlampa, a re-emerging neighborhood within a former industrial zone northwest of the historic center of Mexico City.  The monastery will contribute to the comprehensive regeneration of the Atlampa neighborhood, with human, social, economic, and cultural development.  We will travel to Mexico City for a week, visiting historical, cultural, architectural, and religious sites, including monasteries.  A master planning workshop for our site will be held in the offices of renowned Mexican architect Javier Sanchez, located in a renovated ice factory adjacent to our site.

Fundamentally, this studio aims to broaden our understanding of architectural space and typologies.  Through an examination of the fundamental values of architecture in space, light, and material, conceived as the setting for experiences, we will resist the limiting prejudices of a pictorial architecture manifested through overt transparency, shallowness, and structural legibility …the thin, fast and explicit.  The excessive transparency of modern architecture is so often saturated with light and overexposed. What is often far more inspiring are spaces where there is more darkness than light, more mystery than clarity – spaces that are thick, slow, and implicit. These tonal spaces unite the traditional and the modern through a preference for an emotive and sensual interiority where a relative absence of light invites us to linger, to experience the eternal, the atmospheric, the ambient.

Our ambition is to put forward a logic that opens the raw repressed power of architecture and the environment through a re-thinking and re-making of where we already are.  This translogic will function as the basis for your work, developed as a comprehensive, integrated system of inter-scalar relationships – sensual and sensible – with authenticity and integrity that do not rely on store-bought theories and conventional expectations.  Ultimately, we are motivated by the search for an architecture of use and beauty, deeply rooted to its place, sensitively responsive to its environment, constructed within a material culture with an emotive atmosphere and poetic qualities that affect us deeply…a SpiritForm Revival!

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

Mingei and its Future: Hida Takayama, Japan

The studio looks at the legacy of Mingei, the “Craft of the People.” Mingei is a philosophy developed in the 1920s in Japan by Soetsu Yanagi and his colleagues in an effort to counter newly imposed Western aesthetics and artistic values and to protect the significance of traditional art and craft in Japan. One hundred years later, this philosophy has a larger implication for contemporary global society, at a time when we are reassessing the overlooked contributions of marginalized communities and re-evaluating cultural production everywhere. Today, we are also questioning the role of museums and reexamining their programs as they continue to play a vital role as participants in the dynamic dialogue of our time.

The studio will study the philosophy of Mingei through the movement’s writing and artistic examples. The program of the studio will be the design of a contemporary Mingei museum on a site adjacent to the existing Kusakabe Mingei Kan in Takayama, Gifu. Takayama is situated in the middle of the Japan Alps and is often called “Little Kyoto” for its gridded urban formation. This area of Hida is known for its expert carpenters and the Kusakabe Traditional House, one of the most important examples of traditional building craft. Built in 1879 for a merchant family, it was converted into the Mingei Museum in 1966. We will interpret the ways in which Mingei philosophy can be integrated into the architecture of our time and look at the legacy of Mingei beyond any historical theory to engage larger global cultures. We will look at works of contemporary African American artists following Theaster Gates’ “Afro Mingei” practice, which blurs and brings together distinct cultural identities to form a new hybridity that retraces cultural roots.

We plan to travel to Tokyo and Takayama and will visit the pottery studio of Theaster Gates in Tokoname.

Architecture or the City

Today, it would be reasonable to argue that the architecture of urban morphology is more visibly autonomous than at any time since the advent of modernity. Contemporary housing and multi-use developments are either architectural archipelagos or islands, each composed of differently shaped, styled and scaled buildings.

This profusion of difference is not the manifestation of a radical project of architectural autonomy as, for example, theorized by Manfredo Tafuri in his analysis of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio. The renowned ichnographic project illustrates an urban district that is at once unified by a single language derived from Roman ruins and composed as a conflict of extremes between discrete, exceedingly monumental complexes and buildings.

Tafuri’s hypothesis is a prescient, allegorical narrative of the historical process of disenchantment that ensued from the multiplication of sacred icons repurposed again and again for secular functions, from the house to the bank and ultimately to the gas station. The city evoked by Camp Marzio is composed only of a monstrous or sublime collection of colossal symbols of power vying for supremacy and ultimately canceling one another out.

Aldo Rossi, a contemporary of Tafuri’s, characterized the city as transhistorical and analogical. His non-narrative drawings, akin to still lifes, depict everyday objects alongside numerous types of building fragments, ruinous or unfinished. If analogy promises to synthesize disparate, unrelated and incommensurately scaled objects, architecture and urban morphology are destined to be manifest only in fragments. Any dream of narrativity or coherence is consciously irretrievable.

The projects of the studio will originate in one or a hybrid of these two theorizations of wholes and fragments with the aim to transformatively distill or resist the archipelagic propensity of architecture. Students will either design large buildings that define a synecdoche – i.e., a “city within a building” – or design prototypical housing units and sets/systems thereof that aggregate to produce a legible, discrete fragment of urban morphology derived from singular or hybrid precedents.

The studio will invest considerable time exploring the anticipated experience of units and their arrangements with emphasis on contemporary modes of living as well as the multivalent interrelationships of the units with the building, street, block, and urban morphology.    

Though the primary intention of the studio project is theoretical, it will be embodied by economically viable and sustainable proposals for a 110 acre site in Alameda, CA, the best remaining development opportunity along the bay’s eastern waterfront.

Students working in pairs will develop urban designs for between 2.8 and 5.6 million ft2 of multi-use. Concurrently, students will work individually on concepts for housing. The urban and architectural will thus be theorized and composed simultaneously. The final individual projects will vary in scope depending on each student’s theoretical/architectural interests.

The studio will work in tandem with The Development Project, GSD’s Master in Real Estate course in which students will establish constraints for the projects of this studio. Together, we will travel to the San Francisco Bay area in mid-February.

Sao Paulo Reaction: Vacant Infralandscape

This Option Studio is about dissolving the rigid limits between architecture, landscape and urbanism and it’s about Sao Paulo and its vacant infrastructures. We propose a deep investigation on the urban structure of the city in the downtown area. We are going to study and discuss possibilities of transformation of a fundamental site where the city was born.

Architecture is related to the action. It is a propositional activity by definition. Therefore, imagining the future is the basis of architects’ works. But architecture also talks about something pre-existing, part of the "real world". Therefore, the object of the design studio will focus on empty, underused, abandoned and/or deteriorated buildings and spots in the center of São Paulo, both public and private, which do not respond to their urban social functions.

The new proposals for the reuse and redesign of these key places in the city, together, should raise debates for the renewal of downtown neighborhoods based on a sensitive and holistic approach, attentive to the balance between physical, social, economic, political, and environmental aspects, promoting a review of the consumerist and irresponsible way of building cities. The selection of these spaces must be carried out with the support of the Municipality of São Paulo, in partnership with the Municipal Department of Urban Planning and Licensing, SMUL.

For the developed projects to be compatible with legal procedures and, above all, with the priorities outlined by current urban planning instruments, the participation of the Public Power is necessary as a supplier of guidelines and consistent information.

Nowadays urban voids in SP are spread across the downtowns area, as part of our everyday life. Our aim here is to study and propose a new relationship from this area, proposing new uses, squares, and a new landscape within the city.

However, this studio will not be the place to solve the problems about this issue, but to propose poetic essays for a global city whose themes are universal but brought from the cultural contribution of each participant of the course.

We believe that part of our work in urbanism is a capability of negotiation, we have to mediate different interests and actors in a certain situation. We will practice this in our studio. We will provide graphic bases, maps, photos, but you will have to produce much more.

You will be asked to find some place and building to intervene in the downtown and you will have to provoke a reaction to this urban context and reality. We are going to guide you, step by step, to establish the site recognition and analysis, create a conceptual atmosphere to the urban plan, and develop the ideas with high graphic strategies and skills. Architecture and urbanism are always about transformation.

We are going to work in modules, dividing the semester into 3 parts – Approach, Infiltrate, Rehabilitate – clearly shaped to organize the work of each student.

The Rohingya Camps; Permanence in Transition

The Rohingya refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh host the largest refugee population in the world. The Rohingyas are a Muslim, ethnic-minority people who live in the Rakhine state in west Myanmar. For a long time, they have been finding their way into Bangladesh to escape persecution in their country. Following the violent persecution of 2017, there was huge influx of about 800,000 Rohingyas into Bangladesh. Currently there are more than 1.2 million refugees living in these camps.
 
Besides the Bangladesh government, there are about 136 national and international agencies that work in the camps to help the refugee population in aspects of health, education, water supply, sewerage and waste management, construction, etc. and to help the refugees cope with issues of mental health, neonatal care, and so on. The sheer scale of the problem often overwhelms the support services.
 
There are 35 camps located in mildly hilly sites across the southwestern parts of Bangladesh, close to the Bay of Bengal. There are a host of issues related to habitat and infrastructure in these camps. Families live in 10’x15’ houses or rooms. Toilets are communal and inadequate. Water supply is limited. Access roads and paths are of poor quality. The solid waste disposal systems are inadequate. The rainy season brings flooding and landslides, and there is the threat of hurricanes that form in the Bay of Bengal. There is the need for adequate social infrastructure to improve the quality of life of these people, particularly women and children.
 
In this studio students will be required to develop design solutions to either housing or infrastructure issues in the camp. They may design housing units that consider social and environmental factors for better living conditions and investigate the way these housing units come together. Alternatively, some may attempt design solutions to problems of infrastructure such as water supply, landscape, access roads, waste disposal etc. This can include social infrastructure such as gathering spaces, particularly for women and children or spaces/buildings for socio-cultural activities.
 
To get a better understanding of the conditions in the camps there will be site visit by the studio participants to the camps in Bangladesh in the 2nd week of October. The visit, besides providing the opportunity to get a first-hand experience of the conditions there and the site, will allow students to identify any other problem they want to address. The studio is open to that.
 
The pedagogical process followed in the studio will consist of the five following components:

The final design solutions will be shared with camp personnel to explore the scope of implementation on site.

TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 7th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Detroit Re-Connected: Reparative Mobilities in the Motor City

Ten years ago, Detroit Future City, a citywide strategic framework plan was released, addressing six urban elements including economic prosperity, neighborhoods, land use, city systems, public land and civic engagement. Also, during that time, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) took on an option design studio titled Detroit Interrupted:  Defining the New American Urban Geography, exploring the economic and social drivers that should inform new urban form patterns, densities, and city infrastructures.  Since then, the city has recovered from fiscal bankruptcy, invested in neighborhood stabilization and growth, and experienced new office, hotel, and residential construction downtown for the first time in decades. However, these trends are not being experienced everywhere and by everyone.

Detroit is home to the nation’s first urban (depressed) highway, constructed by raising existing neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal”. These highways, I-375 and 1-75, plus the Lodge Freeway, form a spatial “moat” around the downtown. The historic grand boulevards that extend from the center of the city, Michigan, Woodward and Gratiot Avenue, today exist as shadows of their former stature boulevards due to the vast scale of urban removal that took place to create highway network.  Together these highways and boulevards have become dividing lines, separating neighborhoods by race, class, land use, and economic investment.

In an era for restorative justice, Detroit, like many other US cities, is looking to repair the harms of urban renewal by reimaging these highway systems as walkable streets and parkways that reconnect divided neighborhoods and communities. Civic leaders are now interested in advancing Detroit’s legacy mobility innovation to model new mobility infrastructures that are more inclusive, climate responsive and adaptive. City leaders believe that redesigning these infrastructures can right some of the wrongs produced by the uprooting and displacement of African American and Asian American businesses and community life in and around downtown Detroit.

Detroit’s street and highway network will serve as an experimental laboratory for designing new mobility infrastructures models that must also accommodate issues of climate, technology, economic and population flux, the future of work, public health and safety, and cultural identity.  The studio, Detroit Re-Connected: Reparative Mobilities in the Motor City, will use 3 city street and 2 highway reconfiguration typologies in Detroit to investigate various mobilities and address the following four design questions:

  1. What it means to be “mobile” to a Detroiter – to commute; to grow income and wealth; and to make choices about where to live, work and play?
  2. What are the expanded functionalities of the street public realm based on the changing nature of how we work, live, and promote health; changing climate and technology; establish in-person community and social capital; exercise democracy; support one another in crisis; and/or express our personal identities?
  3. How should adjacent development patterns be redesigned in response to the changing functions and technologies of the street public realm?
  4. How can street design and adjacent development produce restorative justice for displaced families, businesses, ecological systems that realize measurable equitable outcomes?

TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Wednesday, September 6th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Biospheric Urbanism – Changing Climates

The Option Studio ‘Biospheric Urbanism’ explores how cities can be made more resilient in the light of the ongoing changes of climate. Conceived as a series of case studies, each Studio concentrates on one single city. New York City was the first subject of study in Spring 2023, Paris is next in Fall 2023.

 

All Studios follow a similar methodology, organized in three acts. Firstly, the Studio will jointly produce a new cartography of the chosen city, revealing its different microclimatic conditions. Secondly, the most problematic and urgent areas will be identified, for which, thirdly, pragmatic proposals will be developed. The main learning goal is to use science-based research to conceive solution-based design. Each Studio will inform the next one, resulting in a new set of solutions for the different climatic conditions encountered.

 

Critical Moment

The climate crisis poses the urgent question of how to make our built environment more resilient to the challenging atmospheric changes such as heat islands, rising temperature, intensified rainfall, and longer droughts. Landscape architecture has a long history in using growth and transformation as its agents to better inhabit this planet. This unprecedented crisis represents an opportunity, and equal responsibility, for landscape architecture to radically rethink its field.

 

A City as a Myriad Microclimates

Cities account for over 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, while only taking up around 3% of the land space. As such, cities present a crucial opportunity to combat the causes of climate change, while needing an urgent mitigating of its effects. A city can be understood as an imbrication of a myriad of microclimates. Buildings change wind patterns and sunlight exposure, while the streetscapes change soil permeability, runoff, and solar radiation.  

 

Urban Ecologies

For each man-made micro-climate, a comparable natural condition can be found. The study of their living organisms informs how to introduce vegetation and living agents into artificial environments with a similar climate. Using the logic of nature, cities can be transformed into complex urban ecologies, blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the natural. 

 

Biospheric Urbanism

Biospheric Urbanism is the study of the built environment as the interface between meteorology and geology. It aims at transforming the critical zone between the above and the below, to better cope with uncertain changes in climate, while better using its underground capacities. 

 

Case Study Paris

The city of Paris is one of the most densely populated in Europe. Its stone buildings with their zinc-top roofs act as a ‘heat sink’ in extreme weather. Paris is on average 2 to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding rural areas. During heat waves or ‘canicules’ the difference can grow to 10 degrees. The heat waves in 2003 and in 2019 have clearly shown Paris’ vulnerability to extended periods of high temperature.

 

The city of Paris has been a global leader both in the study of and the adaptation to climate change. It developed the ‘Climate Plan for Paris’ as early as 2007. The plan has been updated in 2012 and as of 2018 it fixes clear objectives, always more ambitious, to reach the Paris Agreement. The objective is to build a carbon neutral city by 2050. The Studio starts from the ambition of the Paris Climate Action Plan to develop proposals that could be implemented immediately.

Mar·gi·na·lia. Marginality and redemption in New York City, alternative landscapes for Rikers Island

Rikers Islands stands as a critical site to investigate scenarios of climate change mitigation, energy transition, community centered models of land regeneration and, eventually, experimenting new forms of justice.

The long-awaited closure of the prisons opens to possible new post-incarceration alternative futures: non-speculative landscape-based models of regeneration in the city of New York.

The invisibility of the island has long hidden the system of feedback loops that were tightening together Rikers Island with the city, making it a technical/operational land deeply linked with its urbanized context.

Only apparently a margin, it can be seen as a Marginalia: residual space of new possibilities.

Students are asked to develop a projective cartography of New York City. They will depict the complexity of spatial and nonspatial implications of selected investigation topics, on Rikers Island.

Reciprocal landscape-based design scenarios will be developed: firstly the island itself, and, a second site, at students’ discretion, able to articulate a dialectical reflection on New York and, eventually, on urbanization.

Harnessing The Future; How the Internet’s Digital Infrastructure Influences the Global Landscape

Studio Challenge:  
Digital infrastructure has become the connective tissue of today’s civilization weaving together culture, community, and humanity from a historical compendium of events and facts to future explorations and manifests. The ‘cloud’ requires a robust network of physical infrastructure to power, store, consume and distribute the past and future knowledge we create and rediscover every day. Data Centers are the nodal nexus that houses, protects, and redistributes this data, where the demand for these facilities is only increasing. The scale of these projects is not without precedent and requires careful intervention to develop hundreds of acres, harness access to electrical power, water resources, roadway infrastructures, and orchestrate a multi-year construction cycle which can populate the site with an influx of over 1500 workers.

The quest will be to create a legacy of positive impacts for the host communities. This studio will examine the opportunities to harness the investments that preserve the sanctity of history, protect environmental integrity, accommodate the needs of the construction industry, and orchestrate economic benefits for the greater good and quality of life.

The Studio
The studio will undertake research, study precedents, and develop watershed solutions enhancing the welfare and wellbeing of the community for generations to come.” To succeed, each project will need a compelling storyline that presents the idea, a clear vision of how to implement it, and a creative visual immersion that bring to life this delicate balance of preserving the integrity of the existing culture while creating new possibilities that galvanize a certainty for the future.

Located in Western Ireland, the site presents the typical small historic community being confronted with this scenario as a representation of similar events happening around the world. County Galway has an ancient history, strong cultural traditions, strict environmental regulations, a comprehensive planning process, while simultaneously facing a desperate need for economic development and job opportunities.
 

TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 7th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Beyond Borders Life Abounds

Borders are everywhere: between countries, between populations, between outside & inside, between disciplines, between genders… In early childhood, we see a being in the making, open to exploration and discovery. In adulthood, we too often see a being who knows, who has become, even though there are so many frontiers still to be explored to better understand what lies on either side of a line, and why it exists. Adults, in the light of early childhood, should ask the question of why, as much as what it implies in terms of what, for whom and how. This attempt at discernment opens up the field of criticism. So let's open our eyes and senses, let's judge for ourselves, let's discern and analyze what's good to indulge in and what's not. Let's not let our imaginations, emotions and reason be siphoned off by the prevailing noises.

Landscape design has to be cultivated from many points of view. It's up to each of us to choose the one that opens up a promising path for the benefit of ourselves and the greater number. The figure of Fort Nagaur is fertile in what it inspires as a critical dialectic. An hybrid of Architecture and Landscape, the fort covers an area of around 15 ha, and has undergone several incarnations over the ages, from the 4th century (of which nothing remains), with adobe structures and a 1.5km enclosure, to the 12th century, to the remains of the present day, whose main purpose is to defend the site and distance it from the outside world – in other words, to act as a frontier. This distancing presupposes an autonomy of survival while cultivating resources above & below, outside & inside, visible & invisible in a territory constrained by the hazards of the semi-arid climate of the Rajasthan region, bordering the Thar desert on the West and punctuated by the summer monsoons on the edge of the fertile Chambal valley to the South East,

It's not the child who becomes an adult, it's becoming a child that makes a universal youth […] It's becoming itself that is a child.
Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari, Mille plateaux, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 2 (1980).

The aim of this term is to explore a laboratory of living processes from a number of angles for the purposes of a landscape project.