Housing as a Sustainable Common
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architects were the driving force of progress in developing housing typologies that would enable people to live more socially equitable and healthier urban lives at times of massive social change. These included Garden City homes in response to the overcrowding of cities in the 19th century, mass-produced collective housing with terraces and roof gardens in response to the expansion of tuberculosis epidemics, or high-density, low-rise housing that fostered community relations in response to the destruction of the Second World War.
Today, we are facing a rapid decline in our planet’s health, and the construction of housing is one of the major contributors to our environmental crisis. In Western countries, housing is also unaffordable and increasingly detached from the way people live, and the societal changes that have led to the existence of different types of households. If we are to address these social and environmental challenges, it is imperative that new approaches to housing are developed that are affordable and more caring, with a reduced impact on the planet.
The studio will approach housing as a collective infrastructure of sustainable living by combining commoning with adaptive reuse of an existing building.
Commoning is a practice of sharing and self-governing of resources. It involves relinquishing some of what we have become accustomed to using privately to share with others. In housing, it leads to less overall space and energy being used, more affordable lives and forming bonds between people with shared interests. To be equitable, a housing common today needs to accommodate different types of households such as a group of adults sharing accommodation, a person living alone, blended families, multigenerational families, live-work households, a collective of singles or the elderly, as well as the two-parent family. The opportunity and challenge of such a common is the provision of different scenarios for sharing to ensure the meeting of the everyday needs of different households.
The site of the studio projects will be an existing office building in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. Each student will produce a proposal to transform the building into a housing common that provides a diverse community of 150 persons with a variety of shared living arrangements. The adaptive reuse of the existing building will reduce its embodied carbon and the overall construction cost. Whereas the social question raised by the common will be what are the motives that will attract people to enter into commoning, the formal problem posed by the existing building will be how to provide its future inhabitants with a variety of living arrangements within its uniform structural grid.
The studio will be an opportunity for each student to develop a vision for how we should live together and in a sustainable way, and how architects should anticipate users’ requirements in their absence. We will travel to Paris and Zurich from October 1- 6. The trip will be an opportunity to learn more about the site and to visit exemplary housing precedents in both cities.
The studio will meet weekly on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Farshid Moussavi will meet the studio in person on September 6, 7, 20, 21; October 1-6 (Studio trip), 18, 19; November 8, 9, 29, 30; December 12,13. She will meet the studio via Zoom on September 13, 27; October 11, 20, 25; November 1, 15; December 6. Yotam Ben Hur will be in residence on September 7, 14, 28; October 12, 26; November 2, 16; December 13.
Forgotten Fort Kongestein
This studio will explore potential new attitudes toward historical preservation, transformation, and adaptive reuse. The location is Fort Kongestein on the Eastern Coast of Ghana, near the village of Ada Foah. A little-known site, now almost entirely in ruins, the fort was built in 1783 by Danish traders. It is one of many European fortifications which survive along the Gold Coast, erected for the trade of people and goods; between 1482 and 1786. These can still be seen along the coast of Ghana between Keta and Beyin; they were links in the trade routes first established by the Portuguese during their era of great maritime exploration. Purchased by the British in 1850, Fort Kongestein, therefore, sits within a rich historical and cultural framework of contact, commerce, and colonial administration and is a fragmentary and material vestige of a bygone era.
The site is now almost completely dormant and mostly neglected.
The village of Ada Foah, located, as it is in a place of calm and natural beauty where the Volta River meets the Atlantic Ocean, was once a prominent market town but has since lost its regional status and is now becoming a more minor attraction, a place for tourists wishing to temporarily escape Accra, the big city; there are now beach houses, sailing clubs and boutique hotels dotted around the area.
This studio is interested in prompting design explorations that make intelligent and imaginative leaps between architectural past, present, and future, as well as the hybridization and combination of cross-cultural architectural languages within a single project. We will ask how sites like this, with their complicated and problematic pasts, might be reclaimed and reused as generating starting points (both real and symbolic) with potential new narratives and multiplicity of meanings in connection with local communities and their futures. Also of interest is the growing overlap between the landscape of recreational tourism and of historical memory rooted in this place which intersects with a trajectory of growing prosperity and a living community along the coast.
You will be challenged to design a project with either one or two programs. You will be offered a choice of programs (museum, archive, community center), and program selections will be made within the first two weeks of the studio. The project will bridge the past and present, reappropriating the site for new relevance in the 21st century through adaptive reuse, extension, and other strategies.
A number of precedents and essays will be offered up for digestion and consideration at the beginning of the semester, and there will be a trip to Accra and the coast of Ghana in the first week of October. To give a deeper understanding of the current state of cultural production and preservation in this region, a series of (optional) virtual talks will be arranged with a selection of artists, makers, curators, and architects currently doing work of interest in West Africa.
Programmatic, experiential, and spatial investigations will take place through drawings and physical models at the scale of landscape, architecture, and interior. You will be invited to articulate strategies for how your project might engage with and meet the surrounding context and how material language, technology, and process could also instill meaning and relate to broader themes of culture, craft, and environmental conditions. We welcome diversity of approach and attitude, including the speculative and imaginary.
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.
Earth Curvature: Context as Material / How to Read Place
Students will craft their own architectural language, guided by personal ethics and an original vision towards a sustainable architecture that also strives to timelessly resonate with its 'special place'. The site with the Earth Curvature art installation expands the scope of your work to include the planet and our place in the universe in the largest sense and America and its’ Great Salt Lake Desert in another sense. Early assignments will require you to model and draw analytic-like drawings of the site and its art installation before a site visit early in the semester. Other analytic-like drawing assignments will include the work of certain artists concerned with light, place, and similarly related themes. Others will include envelope and building skin performance (environmental/phenomenological). In the end, you will be expected to develop and defend your own architecture for this site and program at a Design Development level at the conclusion of the semester.
Parisian Knees
There is little doubt that density is reshaping our cities, at a furious pace and with vast implications for urban life. As far-reaching as these transformations are, this studio will focus on a particular pressure point: the base of the density cross-section, where density (life that goes up) and public space (life that spreads outward) have no choice but to meet. This is the city’s urban knee, its horizontal-to-vertical bending point, out of which the public spaces of tomorrow will spring.
This studio has three aims:
• Researching spatial typologies of public space in high-density contexts, with a focus on those transformations of public life and the human condition that arise with increased density.
• Investigating structure and horizontal/vertical circulation as they relate to new forms of public space.
• Exploring alternative programming modes (as public space, as private space, and as hybrids of both) that result from more intertwined public and private Program
Program: Types
The studio program will have two parts: housing (50%) and strategic programming (totaling 50%) that will be determined by each of you. ‘Strategic programming’ means uses selected by you that will enable you to develop your thesis about public life in light of your specific architectural/urban model. This could be office space, cultural space, institutional space, additional housing, or some other program that you frame as significant for the ambitions of your project.
Program: Size
The total program area is anticipated to be approximately 15,000-25,000m2. Please note: Much of this program area will be allocated to the upper reaches of your projects, which will be treated more schematically than the first few floors.
Site
Everyone in the studio will work on the same site, the new La Courneuve Six-Routes station in Paris, one of the metro stations that are currently being designed and built as part of the Grand Paris Express project. The GPE project is among the most ambitious urban propositions in the world today, with broad implications for Paris’s legacy, present, and future.
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.
Nexus of Ecology, Education, and Design – A new School of Design on an Island at Yangtze Estuary
This studio project touches upon two important areas relevant to our collective future— ecology and education. This is a future in which we must change the way we live as the threshold for climate change is about to be crossed and this future lies in the hands of our young people. The task at hand is the design of an architectural design school within a new college at Yangtze Estuary on Chongming Island, China. The studio will explore new modes of operation needed to face the complex and difficult, yet still hopeful, realities. Each student will transform seminal ideas to spatial ideals as they imagine their own design school.
We will approach this project with three primary considerations in mind:
• Ecology as a Social Agenda
• Architecture as Means to Gather and Connect
• Education as Spatial and Cultural Interventions
Architects need to change our mode of operation and consider how design can encourage healthy lifestyles and form new communal relationships with nature. We will explore how we can ground ourselves, together with other species, on this carefully reserved small piece of land, which is surrounded by a beautiful yet danger-ridden ecological system.
As uncertainty is the only certain thing, in a complex system such as the education of multidisciplinary designers, physical and mental spaces that are flexible and adaptive to changes are needed. We must build resilience into the core of the future designers and discover new spatial relationships among different components of teaching, learning, and campus living.
The world is a complex system of elements, constantly interacting and in flux. Architecture is a vessel, a medium, through which we interpret increasingly complex issues at work. It is a means to gather and connect in tangible ways. The studio will search for architecture that connects us with people, to meet, exchange, and share; architecture that connects us with nature—trees and birds, sea and land, air, and light – and architecture that connects us with our inner selves.
Instead of didactic teacher-pupil relationships, we see a design studio as a constant dialogue, in which new knowledge and understanding form, new ideas and reflections emerge. We encourage our students to ask questions and seek solutions; heighten awareness and enact changes. We learn from each other; we learn from the world. We expect from each student, in way of a final product, to produce a piece of architecture that is genuine, in depth, grounded, with surprises, magical, touching—both radical and poetic—designs that are authentically born out of each student’s own interests.
Percent for Art: A New Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
In the option studio, we design a new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by re-using the structure of a large-scale shopping mall.
We will look at museums that transformed and expanded existing structures as a springboard to investigate the potential of architecture to occupy and repurpose existing space. However, instead of post-industrial structures that house many of today’s leading contemporary art institutions, we inhabit obsolete retail space.
As implied in the ambiguous title, our project asks: what percentage of society is represented and acknowledged by museums? Official museum architecture within the context of urban landscapes represents the ideology of a certain percentage, not only acknowledging but also dividing communities.
Our site is situated in a charged urban context: the shopping mall—a slab 350 meters in length—faces the existing Museum of Modern Art with its white, abstract concrete facade and behind it the towering structure of the Soviet Palace of Culture and Science. This specific place embodies Warsaw’s recent history with the shift from communism to neoliberalism. During our studio trip to Warsaw, we will meet with artists, curators, and activists and explore the site’s artistic, architectural, and political environment.
You will not only work on the building’s design, but as architects you are also responsible for developing its spatial and cultural program. Learning from different strategies that challenge official narratives of urban memory, we aim to shed light on issues and communities which are consistently ignored. What architectural features ensure accessibility to a wider audience and foster the inclusive memory of Warsaw’s urban landscape, its appearance threatened by the onslaught of ongoing real-estate development? What happens when the cultural realm of the museum is confronted with commerce? What kind of activities—exhibitions, events, and collections—should the new museum envision?
The studio begins with a research phase, where you work on an “artist’s book” of your own to define and specify your cultural mission for the “museum of the future” that you are about to design. After visiting the site in Warsaw and discussing your projects with our clients, the curators at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, you will work on your individual project brief and scheme for a future program. You will not only design and produce a complete architectural project, but also its display for the exhibition at the museum that will be dedicated to the studio’s investigation (planned for summer, 2024).
Throughout the term we will be joined by numerous guests, artists, curators and scholars, contributing input lectures.
New York New York
There is a famed anecdotal evidence that designing a tower is easier than designing a chair. The boastful comparison was rather meant to aggrandize architects’ furniture, but this improbable claim reveals a curious analogy: both are veritable object proper. An accidental type, stemming from sheer real-estate speculation, the tower is the ultimate architectural object, New York its indisputable place of origin. Akin to furniture, tall buildings of various kinds have been seemingly haphazardly placed in the city's urban landscape, as copiable items in a vast and sprawling family of things. The singular model proved to be easily malleable and able to adapt to any zoning codes and developers’ legerdemain, continuously breaking the records. Its indefinite condition makes the tower an expression of the latest fads, their agglomeration a testament to our collective unfolding. This studio somehow takes the tower at face value and sees its proliferation as the ultimate outcome of the building as a thing; an object with a DNA, a structure, a system, a figure, a type and a form—and all this always, at the same time. In an attempt to do justice to the radical idea of the tower, and its supreme indifference, we propose to embrace one of the many available towers in the New York skyline and make a duplicate of it: New York New York. What happens when we copy an object as a building; how does it transform; what and who is it for; what makes it relevant; what changes in hundred, or just twenty years; what are the potentials of a seemingly outdated figure… Many questions to answer in one semester, but we can only try.
Baizo House – Perception Description Representation
On October 8, 1980, New York band Talking Heads released Remain in Light, their fourth album. The album's final track, "The Overload", was written in the style of the Mancunian band Joy Division. But, at the time of recording, the members of Talking Heads knew Joy Division's music only from the record reviews they'd read about it; they'd never listened to it before. The result is a "copy" full of errors, in a way, and at the same time, one is also struck by the accuracy of certain parts or sounds. This copy is of the same order as those made by Renaissance architects seeking to build as accurately and well as the Ancients, i.e. the Romans. But archaeological knowledge in the 15th century was very incomplete and inaccurate, as we have since learned from the progress made in this field. Taking as true what was false, having to imagine what they didn't know, Renaissance architects invented a new architecture, which is an obvious echo of Roman architecture, but which is also totally singular.
For the autumn 2023 studio, we propose to make the imaginary project of the Baizo house from the real one of Le Corbusier’s Baizeau house. Students will conceive the Maison Baizo project from the description of the Maison Baizeau, built in Tunis by Le Corbusier in 1928, by the grandchildren of the house's owners as adults when they vacationed there as children. Naturally, the vision is fractional and fragmentary, as are memories, all the more so when they are distant. They will deal here more with mental images than visual ones. Our aim is to know nothing more about the Baizeau house than what the owners' grandchildren say about it. The aim is to design a house that can be described by the same fragments but which, apart from this aspect, will be far away from the original model. We'll have to learn to forget the original Baizeau house project and imagine the Baizo one. Armed with this almost total ignorance of the project, the students will design the Baizo house in the same way that the members of Talking Heads, in association with Brian Eno, wrote "The Overload", inspired by songs they had never heard.
In this way, we'll highlight the joys of induced ignorance as a means of guiding intuition from fragments of spatial devices – those described, explicitly or implicitly, in the text – which are to form part of the final project but whose status in this new ensemble will be quite different. A kind of imaginary ready-made.
Moreover, because the historical perspective is itself historicized, the project will not seek to mimic one from the 1920s and will take into account aspects of reality, such as climate change, use, or composition, in a contemporary way. The aim is, therefore, to create a totally new work based on a reasoned relationship with an existing architectural object, but one that can, in part, be described as the Baizeau house.
To underline the fact that architecture takes on multiple modes of existence and perception, the Baizo house is a copy of the Baizeau house, based on its description. Copying has long served as the cultural and pedagogical basis for architecture. This is undoubtedly still true but in a less structured and conscious way. We still need to agree on the definition of "copy"…
As part of the project's rendering, we'll be exploring a mode of representation we call "textures". At the crossroads of traditional perspective and geometrical representation, and concrete poetry, such drawings express the link between architecture and writing, or space and ideas, i.e. the way in which ideas serve to give rules to the shaping of space, but also give a singular meaning to the actual construction. And the more relevantly the ideas are able to combine distant planes of reality in this shaping process, the richer the work and the more complex its meaning.
Modulating Change
Mumbai’s urban identity has been in flux since its founding as a colonial port city. Its economy in the post-colonial phase of its history has transitioned from a trade-based to a service-based one. And in the past five decades, Mumbai’s population has grown from 6 million to close to 20 million thus putting enormous pressure on its physical as well as social infrastructure and creating enormous tensions between conservation and development. Although by Indian standards, Mumbai is a relatively young city, its short history has bequeathed a range of architectural styles and urban formations. Mumbai’s historic buildings and historic ensembles reveal the changing priorities and aspirations of citizens through time. In this broader landscape, the one area that stands out as a codifier of the city’s colonial history is the historic core referred to as the Fort Area.
Mumbai’s Fort Precinct is the iconic image center of the city that is currently undergoing a state of transformation. On the one hand, the heritage conservation movement has been relatively successful in protecting several landmark buildings and areas. On the other hand, there are contemporary development pressures from massive infrastructure projects that are underway. While the Fort had an indispensable defensive and subsequently commercial role to colonial Bombay, in modern-day Mumbai, the area has taken on new meaning and a range of altered use patterns.
The studio will focus on creating a series of strategies for different parts of Mumbai’s historic district at different scales. The intent of this exercise is to create imaginations for the Fort Area to not only consolidate its integrity as a historic precinct, but also connect, respond, and react to contemporary aspirations in the city. Students will engage in design and planning exercises across three scales – city, ward, and site. From these exercises, we will work towards a comprehensive strategy for the Fort Area – one that can weave together the area’s historic architecture, modern realities, and emerging aspirations as we understand these impulses.
Housing Future: Reclaiming the Chicago 6-Flat as a Site for Architecture [M2]
The pairing of “Housing Future” and the “6-Flat” is somewhat contradictory. Housing Futures typically point towards advancements in new technologies or new configurations. On the other hand, this studio takes on the developer’s 6-Flat – a typology that is as recognizable, yet static, as it was a century ago. This studio explores the 6-Flat as a site for architecture.
The 6-Flat is a common housing typology in Chicago that borrows many of its elements from its generative and more well-known type, the Chicago 3-Flat. To simply explain, the 6-Fat is a double or a mirror of two 3-Flats sited together side-by-side. Having emerged as a typology that was considered a “vehicle for social mobility” in the early 1900s, it has maintained its economic viability, yet, at the same time, very little substantial spatial consideration has been given to bring these flats into a conversation that contemplates contemporary living environments.
The 6-Flat is capitalized throughout greater Chicago by builders and developers who offer cookie-cutter “open-plan” concepts and promote these projects as contemporary and responsive. One might call this typology a “builder’s dream” due to its standardization (three slabs stacked upon each other), flexibility (the units can easily be reconfigured), economic feasibility (materials and building construction techniques are local and standard to Chicago), and speed of construction (due to their standardization, these projects are delivered quickly and abundantly).
Our studio holds the ambition to redefine the 6-Flat for the next home buyer, anticipating and speculating a housing future for contemporary living in Chicago. The market demands new models for the 6-Flat beyond the traditional nuclear family needing 2-3 bedrooms in an apartment unit. New modes of living beg for consideration of what it means to live together, in the city, in a building, and in a unit.
In the studio, we will be building ½”=1’-0” large-scale physical models to evaluate and design from the apartment unit plan to the entire 6-Flat.