The Intelligence of Scarcity: Lessons from Atacama

The Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar landscape on Earth, provides an unparalleled setting for examining how landscape architecture can contribute to addressing intensifying climatic pressures. As an environment characterized by the almost absolute absence of water, constant solar radiation, and geomorphologies shaped over extraordinarily slow stretches of time, it offers a revealing stage from which to examine how landscapes evolve when climatic, geological, and hydrological forces act with little human interference. Yet, as in most regions on Earth, centuries of settlement and extractive practices have inscribed a new set of layers of order: agricultural, infrastructural, and cultural practices that not only inhabit the desert but also transform it. Working in and around the Reserva Puribeter in San Pedro de Atacama–an active site where scientific research, conservation, and centuries-old Likanantay knowledge systems intersect–the studio focuses on landscape conditions where scarcity becomes a generative principle. We will look at Atacama as an environment that embodies an intelligence of scarcity–one where the absence of water becomes the impetus of landscape form, and where human intervention amplifies ecological richness.

This perspective will draw from research on oasis systems worldwide, and how the simple reconfiguration of topographic, hydrologic, and ecological conditions yields positive feedback loops of unexpected fertility: depressions that gather moisture through gravity alone; shallow excavations that expose the water table; terraces that preserve soil; vegetation that modulates heat; and irrigation systems that stabilize water regimes. The goal is to explore how geomorphological constraints and human practices can converge to produce enduring agricultural patterns in conditions of extreme aridity, and how these systems might inform adaptive design.

At its core, the studio explores questions that tie together contemporary science and local forms of knowledge: How might landscape design contribute to hydrological resilience in hyper-arid regions increasingly stressed by climate change? What ecological and agricultural techniques might emerge in places shaped by intense scarcity, and what is their role today? In the face of intensifying tourism and environmental pressure, how might forms of land knowledge developed in extreme aridity–both locally and comparatively in other regions of the world–contribute to curating evolutionary paths for the landscapes of Atacama that are ecologically healthy, economically viable, and culturally relevant?

The studio will begin by collectively producing an atlas of ecological and agricultural techniques developed across extremely arid environments worldwide. This catalog will serve as a comparative framework for understanding Atacama as part of a broader family of hyper-arid ecologies shaped by both human and natural adaptations. Readings, films, and scientific documentation will accompany this work. 

A trip to Atacama will immerse students in the local material, cultural, and institutional realities. We will meet with Likanantay communities, local water authorities, scientists, conservation practitioners, and territorial organizations. Fieldwork will include participatory mapping, the study of hydrological and geomorphological processes, documentation of agroecological practices, and situated experiments that test how design might intervene in these delicate environments.

Students will leave the course with a deeper understanding of how scarcity generates its own forms of intelligence–biological, ecological, cultural–and how landscape architecture can engage extreme environments with rigor, respect, and imagination. 
 

Parliament Slip Commons

Architecture within transforming urban terrains must operate as a performative ecology in which tectonic systems mediate between environmental forces and the collective production of shared urban life. The material, structural, and spatial logics that organize form become the catalyst through which experience, ecological process, and community are coherently synthesized.

The Toronto Port Lands’ history is one of significant transformation from a natural wetland to an industrial area, and now, to a revitalized waterfront district. Historically, the area was the Ashbridges Bay Marsh, a vital ecosystem for First Nations. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, construction began to fill in the marsh and redirect the Don River, creating land for industrial development. Today, the Port Lands are undergoing a major revitalization project focused on flood protection, environmental restoration, and creating a vibrant mixed-use community.

Our studio will focus on the design of a new performing arts center which will serve as the cultural anchor in the Port Lands and the broader waterfront of Toronto. Eschewing the primary optics of a theater as a monument, we will critically consider the relationship between space and performance, between site and action, between object and event. As Bernard Tschumi noted in Event-Cities, “architecture is as much about the events that take place in spaces as about the spaces themselves […] the static notions of form and function long favored by architectural discourse need to be replaced by attention to the actions that occur inside and around buildings–to the movement of bodies, to activities, to aspirations; in short, to the properly social and political dimension of architecture.”

Over the semester, students will approach architecture as a material, iterative, and performative practice. Emphasis will be placed on the development of tectonic clarity, spatial precision, and conceptual rigor. The work will require careful attention to the interdependence of form, construction, landscape, and public realm, situating the performing arts center within wider ecological and infrastructural systems. Students will produce a sequence of analytical and projective artifacts including diagrams, drawings, physical and digital models, and representational studies, that collectively articulate a coherent architectural proposition grounded in the complexities of the site and the dynamics of performance.

As part of the studio’s investigation, we will travel to New York City to tour and attend performances across venues of various scales, typologies, and organizational logics. Additional performances in Boston and Cambridge will extend this research, enabling students to closely analyze how dimensions, format, circulation, and spatial sequencing shape the character of public gathering and inform their own emerging proposals. We will meet in person every other week with digital reviews and meetings taking place between.

Students who complete the studio will demonstrate a capacity to integrate site interpretation, conceptual reasoning, tectonic thinking, and representational precision into a synthesized architectural project. While peer dialogue and critical exchange are central to the studio environment, all submitted work must be produced independently.
 

Interim Urbanism: An Elevated public ground above Miami Avenue Drawbridge

With the imminence of obsolescence due to sea level rise, Miami faces an inevitable destiny. Despite this, Miami views resilience planning through three temporal modalities. The first involves the present, with first-response attentiveness during major storms to ensure the safety of its citizens: food, shelter, medical assistance. The third involves the future: the relocation of millions to higher ground, the acquiescence to nature. The second is the most salient for architectural and urbanistic thinking: the interim period recognizes that the economic and social vitality of these areas is sufficient reason for continual investment, even if they are in the path of danger. If the volume of that investment comes with sobriety and restraint in certain cities, Miami has built its skyline–over one hundred new towers in the last twenty years. Scholars on different ends of the political and disciplinary spectrum have weighed in on the interim period with competing narratives, some bringing certainty to the city’s demise on an earlier timetable, others imagining more optimistic alternatives for extending resilience. We will examine the “interim urbanism” that will define Miami’s public realm before it succumbs to rising tides.

The infrastructure of Miami–including its airports, highways, and metro-rail system–was developed in the last century. All were developed with an acknowledgement of their relationship to the water: the Everglades National Park to the west, the coastline to the east, and the Miami River with its network of tributaries in between. With billions of dollars in public expenditure, none of these efforts were coordinated, nor did they tap into the possibility that transitions between varied media of transportation could become opportunities for public space. With waterfront access primarily privatized, the city’s disposition toward real estate speculation has dominated public investment.

Over time, a tropical suburbia evolved, with predictable morphologies including strips, malls, apartment tower districts, and raised highways with their offramps that guarantee a measure of alienation between adjacent neighborhoods. These areas have been motored by vehicular access through the 20th century, but with the densification of the suburban environment, there has emerged the capacity to define pedestrian zones. This studio will examine the latent public potential of infrastructure to foster civic spaces–above, below, and between major pieces of engineering.

Our chosen site brackets a theatrical combination of the Miami River twisting inland on the north, a monumental Miami Avenue Drawbridge twenty feet over the river on the west, the Metro-mover 5th Street Station elevated sixty feet in the air to the east, and the recently completed Brickell City Center, an open-air mall whose elevated promenades overlook our site, to the south. The studio challenge is to develop a raised ground that mediates between the four elevations of the site, but also a ground that is public, potentially civic, a constructed platform that gives public access to the river as much as to the city’s transportation networks and pedestrian zones of the downtown area.

The program of the studio includes a School of Art and Architecture for Miami Dade College, including student, faculty, and affordable housing. Students are encouraged to work in groups of two, developing joint site strategies while retaining the freedom to develop certain buildings independently.
 

Bigness Revisited: Healthcare Typologies for a Blue Zone 3.0 City

Big-scale architecture has evolved from the visionary into a commonplace model of planning and development, especially in emergent global cities such as Singapore. Contemporary living demands a new magnitude in capacities, speeds, climate, construction, and integrated programming that makes the big-scale logical and practical. At the same time, when buildings reach a certain size, they take on new behavioral characteristics, becoming more than cities unto themselves. How can we embrace and critique this transformation to create a new type of urban artifact that is both architecture and the city? This studio will design a healthcare and wellness complex measuring almost half a mile in length and 2 million square feet in floor area and explore how the big-scale healthcare and wellness typology can integrate into the new vision of healthy living in suburban Singapore.

Located along the north-south axis of the city-state’s mass-rapid-transportation network, our site at Yio Chu Kang –a new town built in the 1980s–is a key focus of Singapore’s 2025 Master Plan, which the state has envisioned to shape a “Happy, Healthy city.” The capacity to create a coherent big-scale project presents a unique opportunity to challenge design ideas from developmental, environmental, and ethical perspectives, on both the large and granular scales.

In Singapore, the average lifespan is 84 years, while the average health span is 74. This entails 10 years of ill-health for the average Singaporean. To close this gap, Singapore’s Ministry of Health, announced in October 2023 that healthy living and preventive care will become a way of life in Singapore in the coming decades, embedded in and supported by its built environment. This vision, dubbed Blue Zone 3.0– an accolade bestowed on Singapore as a region that hosts many centenarians–unlike the other five Blue Zone regions, is achieved through forward-thinking policies rather than long-established cultural traditions, in a high-density urban environment.

Our response will be framed by three considerations.

First, the idea of the Blue Zone 3.0 city questions our assumptions of what makes an urban core of a high-density city conducive for a healthy lifestyle predicated on the abundance of open space and sports infrastructure, and programmatic intensity. In other words, what is the alternative vision of a center that is therapeutic, tranquil, and yet engaging and convenient?

The second consideration is typological: the possibility of conceiving a building as an open framework. As hospitals and sports typologies tend to be closed buildings, inverting attention from the exterior to the interior for performance and curative care, their placement next to transport nodes requires them to opportunistically merge and act as an anchor point for an accessible and thriving urban core. To this end, we will draw lessons from the archetypes of “urban condensers” to transform, hybridize, and charged them with intense use, engagement, and repose.

Lean tropical architecture, our third consideration, will deal with the potential of these two typologies pared down to their bare minimum for low-carbon construction and super-low operational energy. We will approach this by investigating the relationship between structures, cores, shafts, and façades as interrelated elements that can induce clear spatial arrangements and are suited for a hot and humid climate.
 

FAITH PARK

THEME
The studio will be about imagining a large public space that is dedicated to the different religions and worldviews of a multicultural society. The project will be at once a master plan, a landscape design, and an architectural project. The intention is to create a park that functions as a new center for public life, for cultural discourse, and for interfaith coexistence.

LOCATION
The context is the Albanian society where different religions coexist since long in a peaceful way, but where religion in general was heavily repressed during the communist era. The project will be situated inside the main park in Tirana. Within this vast green area of around 120 hectares inside the city, students will individually select a precise location of around 10 hectares.

PROGRAM
While the site is vast, the actual built program will be limited. A welcome pavilion, event spaces, specific cult spaces, a small museum, a greenhouse, and restaurants are required. Next to buildings, new nature, symbolic landscaping, gardens, water features, and cultivation surfaces will be added to the existing park. Celebration as well as meditation areas will be incorporated.

TRAVEL
The students will visit Tirana in the last week of February. The trip’s primary purpose is to get acquainted with Albanian culture in general and study the area to select a precise location for individual projects.

CALENDAR
De Geyter will teach at GSD every second week and remotely on alternate weeks. Phillip Denny, Teaching Associate, will be present on these alternate weeks.
 

New Creative Worker Housing in NYC

In today’s gig economy, everyone can benefit from understanding an artist’s way of life, and how living and working can be combined. A 2019 study found that 1.3 million New Yorkers (about one-third of the city’s total workforce) were freelancers relying on daily work for income. An artist’s income is similarly unstable. Many artists have moved out of city centers, including Manhattan, to be able to afford rent and adequate workspace.

 

Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi faced this challenge as well. In 1961, he moved his home and studio from Manhattan to Long Island City, Queens, seeking affordable space and proximity to the metal and stone fabricators with whom he worked. Over time, Noguchi combined his studio with galleries and a sculpture garden, creating a museum environment within this manufacturing area, and eventually attracting other cultural institutions to the neighborhood.

 

Today, affordable housing of all types has become even more scarce. New York City currently has the highest level of homelessness since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and more than half of all city households are rent burdened. Newly elected and committed to building 200,000 new housing units over the next ten years, the incoming Mamdani administration considers Long Island City to be a key focus area for addressing the city’s affordable housing crisis. Within this context, the studio’s site adjacent to the Noguchi Museum serves as a critical testing ground for strategies that expand site capacity, provide artist workspace, and adapt existing infrastructure to contemporary housing needs.

 

Close to the museum and along the East River, Socrates Sculpture Park exhibits large-scale art installations and offers annual fellowships and workspace to emerging artists. Like all of New York’s waterfront, the site is vulnerable to sea level rise. Students will develop strategies for climate adaptation while studying existing warehouse buildings as potential rootstock for future grafted housing. Through this process, the studio considers how experimental artist communities can inform how architecture, shared in living and making, can shape today’s collaborative, creative communities. Designing for relationships–or in other words, ecology–is key to creating successful affordable living and working for artists and beyond.

 

The studio will travel to New York to visit the site during the week of February 23-27. 

Monolithic Montage

Downtowns in the United States are entering a phase in which their most pervasive inherited forms–office towers raised above retail podiums–no longer correspond to the ways cities function. The assumption that a CBD (central business district) revolves around concentrated office employment has collapsed in the post-COVID, remote working era, exposing the need to rewrite and redraw its spatial diagram. The accelerating wave of office-to-residential conversions, even in recent buildings considered too deep to adapt, signals a decisive shift: downtown is becoming a fine-grained composite of living, working, learning, making, exhibiting, convening, and performing. The question is no longer which single use can anchor it, but how multiple programs can coexist while recalibrating one another’s protocols.

This condition is especially acute in San Francisco, where the rise of AI enterprises and new civic initiatives introduce temporalities and operational logics out of sync with inherited retail and office structures. The former San Francisco Centre, a 1.2 million square-foot block in the center of downtown, currently on the market, offers an exceptional platform for speculating on a new synthesis of programs at the convergence of major commercial, cultural, and transit corridors.

This redevelopment will require structural interventions, both subtractive and additive, or large-scale new construction: cuts through deep floor plates to accommodate oblique paths of light and movement; terraced elevated commons; hybrid social and retail spaces; new stacks or aggregates of co-living units; and volumes configured flexibly for exhibition, performance, training, and collaborative work to serve a multitude of tech mini-communities.

The studio will be conducted in collaboration with GSD 5251 The Development Project and will operate on two coordinated tracks: teams will define the programmatic and organizational framework, while each student independently develops a distinct architectural proposal. Design students will work in teams of two paired with groups of Master in Real Estate students. Early in the semester, these combined teams will establish the program, build block models, and test massing strategies, while each student simultaneously pursues an individual design trajectory focused on the project’s most public and circulatory spaces.

Modeling in Rhino, students will produce 3D abstract studies of masses and voids coordinated with wide columnar elements, forming a methodological basis for new atrium types with branching spatial entrails and circulatory extensions engaging the cores. The form, structure, and scale of these experimental models will evoke approaches to preserving, transforming, adding to, or replacing the existing structure. After midterm, the individual studies will integrate with or strategically inflect the team proposals, culminating in two distinct design outcomes per team.

We will travel to San Francisco to meet stakeholders, civic leaders, developers, and architects, and to tour recent conversions and mixed-use projects where programmatic transformations are emerging. The ambition is to treat downtown not as a fixed morphology but as a montage of spatial forms requiring reintegration, and to derive from their synthesis a new urban figure capable of sustaining density, diversity, and civic life without reverting to obsolete geometries.
 

Ceci tuera cela: Jimbochõ, Tokyo

In one of the most famous scenes in Victor Hugo’s Gothic tale, Notre-Dame de Paris, the clergyman Claude Frollo looks at a printed book on his table and then at the towers of Notre Dame, and pronounces: “Ceci tuera cela”, or “This will kill that.” Meaning, the invention of the printing press will spell the end of the monumental cathedral, with its “sermons in stone”–its lessons in faith encoded in its built fabric.

The same sentiments can be expressed today concerning the impact of new technologies and the increasing digitization of everyday life. How might the relations between books, texts, and buildings be reconsidered? How can we create new urban environments that transcend the engorging of the city through the norms of typical private development? Is it possible to conceive of a vertical public domain–to imagine spaces of sharing–that truly belong to the inhabitants of the city? Should the tendencies towards craft-based, mechanical, or digital methods be recalibrated in architectural production?

Our studio site will be in Jimbochõ, a Tokyo neighborhood best known for its vast array of second-hand bookstores, cafes, and curry houses. People visit the area to browse through endless shelves of books and journals about Manga, literature, foreign languages, sports, science, architecture, and more. Browsing entangles the visitor with the past. But the act of reading brings that past into the present, even shaping a possible future.

How might Jimbochō and its bookshops help us reimagine the beguiling neighborhood as a new and contemporary urban realm?

The aim of the studio is to be cognizant of the repercussions of demographic change, including the degrowth that is increasingly becoming a long-term scenario for Japan. One approach could involve a process of densification, exploring greater opportunities for co-existence without sacrificing more land and resources. Another might focus on addressing the needs of Tokyoites, including children and the elderly, by creating new urban institutions, facilities, and spaces that can enhance the quality of life offered by the area.

The play or negotiations between architecture, landscape, and the urban will form an important part of our conversations. Equally important for the future of Jimbochō will be the investigations of interiors, both small and large, as well as the interconnections between the “horizontal” and the “vertical” lives of the city. This will be a sectional, three-dimensional urbanism.

As part of the process, we intend to construct a collaborative model of the area that will allow us to examine the impact of our interventions during the semester. Each participant will be expected to develop their own individual brief–scenario–and project through large-scale models and detailed drawings. These investigations will deal with both the inside and the outside and form an important part of the studio’s culture and practice.

We will visit Tokyo from 21-28 February 2026, and meet with various architects, scholars, engineers, and construction companies. These interactions, together with multiple visits to the site, will form the basis for our scenario planning. As in previous years, Mitsuhiro (Mits) Kanada will act as the structural engineer for the studio. To get a sense of Jimbochō, you might be interested to read Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa.

BBSMS | ML: OLD & NEW TYPES

This studio has two objectives.

The first is to devise concrete proposals for an art-themed institution located in Manhattan, NYC. The second, to step back from site and brief and engage with the disciplinary questions of typology and design syntax.

We will take the long view and ask ourselves the following question: when it comes to designing, regardless of program or site, what are our options anyway?

While the 18th-century conceit that space ought to be planned according to some blueprint or type, is almost universally extinct, two recent unforeseen developments seem to have granted it a new lease of life. The first is the acceleration of overnight urbanization. In Asia, the prospect of housing 3,000 people into one building has rebooted the same historicist appeal to type which obsessed Europeans during their own post-war boom. The second is the black swan-type emergence of parametric design. Parametric design generates variation and versioning, creating new types along the way. These types are abstract and invisible; they do not recombine to generate variations but instead calibrate relationships, expressed in mathematical or computational terms.

We will explore the convergence of the “old” and “new” readings of design typology. Our purpose is to examine, through projects, the respective roles intuition and rules play in design.

BLOCK BLOB SLAB MAT SLAT | MACHINE LEARNING (BBSMS ML)
This is a software studio with attitude. The difference between intuitive and machinic does not mean doing something “manually” versus doing it “on the computer.” The machinic predates personal computing and dwells within any creative endeavor–architectural, literary, etc. –that is machinic in spirit. Conversely, there are intuitive patterns of machinic thinking, which creatives will not explain.

Drawing on the instructors’ expertise and deep skepticism of current paradigms of AI in design, the brief will incorporate aspects of Machine Learning (ML). ML is an analytical and generative framework for understanding multimodal signals such as images, audio, or space. ML provides a machinic approach distinct from traditional computational design strategies. With ML, design variations exist in a probabilistic space, rendering the design process one of discovery, rather than generation.

SCHEDULE
The studio will unfold in three phases.

The first four weeks will be devoted to the acquisition of core knowledge in parametric design, ML, and typology. The results will be evaluated on February 19th.

From then to the midterm (March 26th), participants will develop concept designs for an art-themed institution next to United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan. We will make use of multiple case studies of Modernist building typologies compiled by the cohort of 2015. The objective of the midterm is to select one concept design for further development.

Participants will then devote the remaining weeks to a scheme design for the selected option. The scope will be up to each individual participant. You may also choose to engage with questions of museography, drawing on instruments developed by Pan Michalatos for his class Quantitative Aesthetics.

All designs will be explored as both diagrams and physical models. There are no formal prerequisites for enrolment. A working knowledge of Rhino 8 /Grasshopper is a plus. The instructors will provide a bespoke environment suitable for ambitious and highly motivated beginners as well as sustained technical support.
A two-day site trip to NYC during studio travel week is planned.
 

Shophouse Metropolis

Bangkok is Jakarta is Kuala Lumpur is Hanoi is Manila is Singapore…  

Southeast Asian cities are quickly morphing into clones of one another as developer-driven luxury condos, office towers, and mega-malls homogenize their skylines and streets.    

Lost in the march towards “development” is the Bangkok shophouse – the Thai capital’s most longstanding and recognizable building types.  Due to its low-rise nature, abundance, and ubiquity, the shophouse is commonly perceived as outdated “urban trash” as much of it is underused, ageing, or partially vacant. Yet its spatial DNA – narrow frontages, deep floorplates, stacked floors, and active street thresholds – aligns with the operational logics of the often-invisible grass-roots economies that sustain the city. Street food vendors, motorcycle taxi networks, craft workshops, migrant labor, night markets, and micro-logistics occupy these interstitial spaces, generating a dense, layered, and temporal urban fabric often overlooked in formal planning.

The studio invites students to re-imagine Bangkok as a new bottom-up urbanism.  We will look to the shophouse typology as the foundation on which to ‘grow’ a responsive, adaptive, and resilient “Shophouse Metropolis”.  We will explore how aging shophouses might be reimagined as the next-generation live – work infrastructures that serve Bangkok’s “forgotten citizens” — the working class. Through adaptation and hybridization, these buildings can accommodate informal labor, domestic life, micro-production, mobility hubs, and night-time economies within a single vertical structure. Students will examine strategies that integrate low-tech, organic operations with digital and high-tech systems, creating a “bottom-up smart city” that legitimizes and organizes informal practices while enhancing productivity, safety, and social value.  

Drawing on the methodologies of Chat’s ‘Bangkok Bastard’ Research, students will travel to Bangkok and explore city’s ‘live’ street architecture.  In addition to surveying standard and ‘bastardized’ shophouses, we will record Bangkok’s street food networks, local ‘chumchons’ (shanties), and other informal objects, buildings, and conditions.  Through research, mapping, and speculative design, students will generate proposals that reveal and reinforce the socio-economic networks at the heart of Bangkok. The studio positions shophouses not merely as heritage or housing, but as adaptable engines of urban life – buildings capable of transforming the 21st-century city through vertically layered, socially, economically, and technologically resilient urban infrastructures.

Through the re-imagining of the shophouse typology at the urban scale, the studio aims to position Bangkok as the first SMART urban laboratory to champion the concept of the Bottom-up Smart City … one that legitimizes, organizes, and combines digital, high-tech systems with organic, low-tech operations, that have the potential to significantly transform the 21st century ASEAN metropolis.

PREREQUISITES: Students should have on-site recording skills to survey small-small buildings and objects as well as basic 2D drawing and 3D modelling skills.

Chat will be in Cambridge, teaching in-person for 10 weeks out of the 13-week studio duration.   During his 3 weeks away, Chat will work with the students via Zoom.  Chat will also be travelling with the studio to Bangkok in late February.