Anteroom

This studio will explore architecture’s role in two of life’s most vital transitions: early childhood formation and early-stage career ambitions. As is perhaps obvious, these transitions have altogether different reasons-for-being and wholly distinct yearnings for outcomes. No less obviously, these life-periods intersect in ways that are as entangled vis-à-vis one another as they are fraught with centrifugal pressures. Tending to children goes one way — toward the intimacy of home — while a parent’s career hopes point in the opposite direction — toward effectiveness in the world. These two transitions invariably collide in the timetables and exigencies of domestic life, handing them to us as a sort of Gordian knot, a seemingly zero-sum relationship that pits the twinned prospects of children’s futures and parents’ maturing societal roles against one another.

Program.
The brief for this studio will include a Pre-K childcare facility and office space. The Pre-K program has countless antecedents, ranging from Head Start schools in the US to French crèche spaces to recent programs in New York stemming from the de Blasio Pre-K and Free 3-K programs. The office space component, also rich in architectural history, will offer 12-24-36 month workspace allocations for parents with children in the Pre-K facility, a medium-term office space that will allow parents to advance careers while remaining steps away from their children.

Architecture.
What, one should ask, does architecture have to do with this piece of our social contract? Something. Not everything. But definitely not nothing. We will begin with the assumption that architecture can invigorate relationships between the early years of life and the maturing of our vocations when they are brought together as spatial concerns. Our walls, floors, windows, doors, and ceilings — our rooms — are conduits for our social and cultural ambitions. This assumption is meant to have a utopian aroma about it, a scent that might be strong or faint but that, regardless, will assure we are sanguine about our undertaking.

Proximities / Room for a House

“Making comparisons is the only good method in a world in which things take on consistency in relation to others. A comparison may be implicit or explicit, but without it, the mind could not function; [one] who knows one thing only, doesn’t even know that thing.”
      –Guido Piovene, Zodiac 8, “The Multiple Future of American Architecture”
 
This studio will explore the proximities within reflexive formalism in architecture. If proximate means almost or close, it conveys the sense both of aesthetic difference and of spatial nearness. Its etymology, from the verb “proximare,” suggests the consideration “to approach.” As things approach each other…. some amount of affecting between the two will arise. The tone, the texture, the posture of marks. How things come together. For film or literature, this reflexive method may be something like actors acting as actors. Like Pollack and Hoffman’s "Tootsie." Like Emily Eden’s coupled novels, “The Semi-Attached Couple & The Semi-Detached House.” For musicians, this may be more akin to reverb, or the empathy gained in the culture of covers. For architecture, it may be room for a house…
 
Students will make two models over the course of the semester. One to house the other. The site will be in Ghent, NY.
 
These models-for-models will be installed at the Art OMI Sculpture Park in Ghent, NY for exhibition, discussion, and documentation at the end of the semester. Construction documentation of these scalar proximities will be explored with stop animations for the final review at Gund.
 
The studio will meet each week on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Each student must be present during the entirety of the allotted studio times each week unless otherwise permitted with prior approval.

The Paradox of Hunger – Rural Mississippi

Mississippi has some of the richest soil in the country, with rivers such as the Mississippi, Pearl, Pascagoula, and many more flowing and supporting the fertile characteristics of the lands. The climatic conditions in this part of the country are favorable for growing during most of the year. These are the very reasons that settler colonists chose Mississippi and engaged in agrarian enterprises that led to the development of plantation economies powered by the labor of enslaved men, women, and children. As a result, Mississippi became a global economic force through its agrarian landscapes via brutal practices. The brutality did not end with the abolishment of slavery. It would continue through various strategies, including the legally sanctioned theft of farmland from Black farmers and political weaponization of food access as a means to fight against civil rights. These tactics continue today, and despite having some of the most versatile and arable farmland, Mississippi consistently ranks amongst the highest in the nation in food insecurity and poverty.  

This studio will explore socioeconomic justice by examining the environmental, economic, and sociocultural influences and implications of food insecurity. We will engage with: agents of change within the food system, from the national to the local level, to understand the interconnected dynamics that have caused disparate access to healthy food and wealth throughout the state; community members in Jackson and rural Mississippi; faculty and students of The Piney Woods School, the location of the studio project site.

The Piney Woods School is an independent historically African-American boarding school that sits on approximately 2000 acres in rural Mississippi, south of Jackson. The school was developed by Dr. Laurence Jones in a small sheep shed gifted to him by a freed slave in 1909 as a place to teach the poor and children of freed slaves how to read and farm. The school remains predominantly Black and accepts students from across the US, the Caribbean, and beyond. Students will work in pairs to propose a new space, based on a self-formulated program, on the campus of The Piney Woods School that will include a controlled horticulture component.

Travel to Jackson and Piney Woods, Mississippi is planned for early October.

The studio is open to students of all disciplines. Student performance will be evaluated through studio work and participation, pin-ups, and final review. Class will be 2pm – 6pm on Thursdays + Fridays. Cory Henry will be in residence Aug 30, Sep 15-16, Oct 20-21, Nov 03-04, Dec 01-02, plus two more weeks (TBD). Class will be held via Zoom on all other sessions.  

Complete Houses, Designing Non-Fragmented Landscapes of Beds

In this Studio, we will take further the concept of “Complete Streets” (safe, accessible to all, multi-program, sustainable, and context conscious), to reimagine the relationship between buildings, persons, and the environment through the design of “Complete Houses”, considering housing not as the multiplication of private universes, but as centers of production, consumption, education, socialization, and health. Houses account for the largest major built space on the planet but are still designed based on individual desires that disregard collective implications. For that reason, students will design landscapes with places to sleep, bathe, cook, eat, work, learn, exercise, and play…, where people, materials, and food are part of the same network. Each student will choose their own site in the area known as the Pacific Rim of Fire, and will decide on a crisis to respond to (a predictable disaster, flooding, earthquakes, pandemics, droughts, migration emergencies…). The intention is to work in geographies with radical conditions that demand deep engagement in environmental and social urgencies.
 
The course will be divided into two units: during the first unit, each student will create their own manifesto of what a “Complete House” should be and design a landscape of 1.000 beds (with what should be linked to them). After mid-term review, the second unit will provide the opportunity to take that concept further, considering the design of a territory of 10.000 beds. The intention is to foster designs that redefine the relationships between the individual and the collective, the urban and the rural.

Architecture at a Crossroads

In the early 20th century, Manhattan represented the culminating and most extraordinary form of interdependence between architecture and urban morphology. Its unprecedented density, confined to an island and for the most part built within a gridiron, was relieved publicly only by streets, avenues, parks, the delimiting facades of which were all masonry, punctuated by discrete windows and articulated according to shared architectural, linguistic codes.  

Bordering these spaces were blocks mainly composed of continuous rows of contiguous, unmistakably autonomous buildings of varying heights. The occasional, exceptionally large, whole block-sized building both differed from and shared numerous characteristics with the blocks that were produced aggregatively.

Owing to the city’s discernible architectural consistency, it was possible for Hugh Ferris, the urban visionary artist/architect, to reimagine and render the whole island as a continuous, mountainous, crystalline formed city.  Represented this way, the dimensions of the largest among his envisioned outcroppings appeared inscrutable and, to this day, invite us to speculate on innumerable consequences for their interior spaces and circulatory infrastructures.  

Three quarters of Manhattan, as it exists today, was built between the 1900s and 1930s (1.) and continues to embody the architectural consistency and general massing that Ferris both abstracted and elaborated upon. In contrast, most of the late 20th and early 21st century buildings have significantly eroded the city's continuity.

There are many causes for this post-Ferrisian period of both radical and unpolemical forms of disintegration. The results have been catalyzed and distilled by several of the most important works by modern and contemporary architects – from Mies, Saarinen and Yamasaki to Foster, Gehry and Adjaye.  

The project for this studio is a multi-use development (affordable, market and student housing; office space, coworking space; shared lab and learning space; flexible art production and performance space) to be comprised of four separate buildings located on the corners at the crossing of an avenue and a street (7th Avenue and 23rd Street). 

Such a development, highly unlikely or implausible due to the economics and protocols of property aggregation, would be unprecedented in New York.  It would have the effect of binding together entities – urban blocks – never before unified, architecturally.  By doing so, the hypothesis at once foils and resynthesizes the persistent coherence and incoherence wrought by New York over the course of more than a century.

The question for architects working in New York today is whether to allegorically resume and transform the evocations of pre-war architectural and morphological consistency or to proceed with the contemporary drive toward arbitrariness and entropy.

1. This finding was among the conclusions of an analysis undertaken by KPF, an architectural firm in New York. “40 Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today”, By QUOCTRUNG BUI, MATT A.V. CHABAN and JEREMY WHITE, The New York Times, May 20, 2016

THE AMERICAN HOME: Revisiting ‘Rural & Urban House Types’

“We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free him from this condition…” Henry David Thoreau, 1854, quoted by Steven Holl

“Even in a cursory study of American house types, it is important to focus on basic forms to achieve an understanding of more complex and sophisticated ones.” Steven Holl, 1982

What is the role of architecture if not to project a vision of home for a better life? If we believe in the possibility of changing our society through the profession of architecture, an alternative way of living – in a time where stable structures fall apart and ideologies serve to promote war and violence – is urgently needed. Thus, our studio this fall is a call for a collective effort in searching for new forms of living.

How can we, then, using the conditions of today to our advantage, re-invent the contemporary house that is capable of fulfilling the needs of our diverse community? And how can the future homes of America become the foundation for a new social structure leading to a more sustainable future, a place where the ecology of our cities is fundamentally revised, and the rural and the urban are potentially reconciled? By taking the challenges of the present as a potential, we will, in this studio, re-imagine and design a large-scale communal housing in the context of contemporary America.

We will start the semester by referring back to the seminal work by Steven Holl in 1982 – Pamphlet Architecture 9: “Rural & Urban House Types”, which we consider as one of the most inspiring publications on American housing. Focusing on houses with basic form and geometric simplicity, the compilation of the pamphlet makes visible the underlying logic and conceptual principle of the most thought-provoking typological organizations. The pamphlet is our point of departure, guiding us through the diverse typologies of the American houses in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. A studio trip to New Orleans and a visit to New York will take us into the urban and the rural, where we will re-visit and re-examine selected house types, inviting Steven Holl as our guest for discussion. It is in these simple small houses that we hope to find something timeless and universal, which could be taken on to the present, and with which we might conceive a large house that we could have never imagined – a new home for America.

The studio aims to re-examine the fundamentals of architecture in the aspiration of combining historical knowledge and contemporary critical thinking. The concrete assignment consists of developing first a program/scenario for a new form of the American Home based on the analysis of the above-mentioned publication and on case study surveys. The actual project will then be designed by working with these typological precedents. The site for the project and the study trip will be in New Orleans.

An American Model

In the three previous studios, our aim was to investigate simple (drawing) tools of architecture – plan, section and perspective – in order to obliquely arrive to a certain idea of American Architecture. An idea that is necessarily rooted in our European perspective, and ultimately, preconceived and equivocal. This detachment from the original in fact seems to be vital to our constant amazement and perplexity with everything American. As an epilogue to this trilogy, we will therefore focus on the ‘American Model’, tracing the ambiguous sources of our fervour. More precisely, we will tackle the architectural embodiment of the contested myth of the ‘promised land’, and the nominal proclamation of its universal values. Curiously enough, the novel concept of democracy adopted the most fundamental of European types–the house–which, scaled up to fit its ever-expanding new context, became a Big house, a place of common reference and public agenda. In the times of toxic populism and ideological nostalgia, we should start scrutinising our models.

The Shape of Things to Come

‘The Shape of Things to Come’ was the title of the 1971 Newsweek article which explored the role of the architect to help shape the built environment for the future. Coming off the heels of the World Exhibition in Montreal in 1967, there was the message that we must aim our efforts towards solving the challenges of humanity. The writer Douglas Davis wrote in the piece “Today for the first time in history, we are at the point where we can build exactly what we want for every human and social purpose. In that sense, architecture is now at the very frontier of our consciousness, at once the most practical and visionary of the arts.” Expo ’67 was the first World Exhibition to transcend pure nationalistic promotion with national pavilions and the like, and rather positioned focus on humankind and the planet and how we could make it better, through our collective use of innovative modern technology and design. To follow Expo, there were many speculations and built prototypes tackling this challenge. Examples included works by Team 10, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Rudolf and Kenzo Tange, and the continued study of the Habitat building system, setting a career-long interest on the topic of an industrially produced housing design with the mission for everyone a garden.

A few years later, in 1974 the Saturday Review published “The City in 2024 A.D.” The premise- a probe into the future- what will the city, the environment be like in the year 2024?

In this studio, we will engage in a thought experiment which will position us into the future, with a commission to design a mixed-use high-rise development in downtown Boston on the waterfront. The client has requested that the project represent the latest in ‘all season design’ in that it must transform completely for the hot summers and frigid winters. In addition, the designs will follow the latest Boston Planning and Development Agency Resiliency and LUSH greenery incentives programs. What will be the lessons learned from the Pandemic of 2020 where we learned to work from home and improve archaic mechanical ventilation systems? How will we uphold the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals and related professional design guideline circulars? How will our life be transformed by the move to compulsory electric and shared-car usage?

Bangkok: New Landscapes of Equity and Prosperity

This studio will bring together faculty and graduate students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to imagine how Bangkok can be designed for the future as a ""city for all,"" for greater social mobility and resiliency, and for ecological integrity. The site, in the Khlong Toei district, is located on the banks of the Chao Phraya River. It is currently mostly a container port facility, and is also occupied by an informal settlement on the north edge.  This community, at risk of eviction, has been there since the 1950s and has a population of approximately 100,000 people. Suggested research topics include infrastructure, informal and market-rate housing, institutional functions, ecology and landscape structure, as well as alternative forms of public space. The studio will critique the segregation of socio-economic classes and will explore integration through the equal distribution of life-enhancing resources and services, a landscape of equity and prosperity for all.

The studio will be led by Anita Berrizbeitia and Alejandro Echeverri, with regular participation of Rahul Mehrotra and other faculty from Harvard and Bangkok.

Anita Berrizbeitia will be in residence every week. Alejandro Echeverri will be in residence on the following days February 10-17, March 1-18, and April 21- May 1.

Studio instruction will be regularly supplemented by regular participation of Rahul  Mehrotra, Bing Wang, faculty in the Thai Studies program at Harvard, and other faculty and colleagues in Bangkok. Irving Fellow Zhao Sheng and Kiley Fellow Tomas Folch will be also part of the teaching team.

Houston: Extreme Weather, Environmental Justice and the Energy Transition

This multidisciplinary studio will use the lenses of climate adaptation, climate mitigation and climate justice to explore the design opportunities that could come with a wholesale reconfiguration of the Houston Ship Channel area, where sites left empty by the drawdown of fossil-fuel industries can be re-imagined as sites for clean energy, logistics and natural systems. This transition, so is the studio’s hypothesis, creates the opportunity for the communities near the Downtown end of the channel to reconnect, remediate and regenerate.

After the group research phase, interdisciplinary teams of 2 will design individual projects based on a self-formulated brief. Taken together, these designs form a catalogue of responses that can stimulate the conversation about the Houston’s transformation to a climate robust and just city in a post-fossil world.

For these types of complex questions, design can play a powerful role as a convener and synthesizer. The aim of the studio is to use design to visualize the challenges and opportunities, to develop strategies, and to innovate and envision the future environments (neighborhoods, landscapes, facilities and buildings) that a just transition to a climate robust city can bring, in a feedback-process with stakeholders and experts. The mid-term, which will also take place in Houston, will be used for local validation of, and feedback on, the initial design concepts.

The studio will use a pedagogy that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, multi-scalar thinking, and an awareness of the relationships between physical and social environments in the face of uncertainty. Within this format, we will explore how climate change and the energy transition and migration intersect with social, economic and environmental justice. In the process, we will leverage digital technology to help with analysis and projections.

This studio is the first of a series of studios sponsored by AECOM, who will also support the studio with subject-matter expertise. Focusing on ‘tropical resilience’, the studio series will span the globe looking at the unique conditions  of the tropics, many of which we also find in Houston, such as rapid urbanization and weak planning instruments, with no strong separation between functionalities in urban areas; intense climate conditions and risks – storms, wet bulbs, extreme seasonal variability-; histories of colonialism, segregation and extraction, often combined with a lack of appreciation for local knowledge and agency. As part of the series, each studio will result in a publication and an exhibition, combined with a symposium.

Friday 2:00 – 6:00, with additional desk crits during the week at mutually agreeable times.
Instruction will be in person.