Utopia: Forms of Community

We need new forms of housing for a more sustainable and more just way of life.

Architecture is a language of form. Only by radically reconsidering architectural form can we find new forms of living and new forms of community.

In our studio Forms of Community will look beyond function and typology to find a new sensibility for a new way of life.

We will study the examples of leading protagonists in art and architecture such as Lina Bo Bardi, Louise Bourgeois, Denise Scott Brown, Agnes Martin and Richard Artschwager.

Five prototypical modern housing plans will provide the physical base, the foundations for the projects in the studio. We will design projects that rise from the morphological structure of these utopian visions, albeit on sites with new programmes and confronting present and future needs.
In the studio, the students will design a cooperative apartment building in Boston.

The studio’s methodology will include drawings, physical models, photography, lectures as well as discussions with practitioners, building cooperatives and developers from Switzerland and the United States.

The studio trip will lead us to utopian sites in the South West including Marfa, Taliesen West, Arcosanti and the Double Negative.

This course will meet weekly on Thursdays and Fridays.
Oliver Lütjens will be in residence on the following days: January 27, 28; February 3, 4; March 10, 11, 31; April 1 and for final reviews.
Thomas Padmanabhan will be in residence on the following days: January 27, 28; February 17, 18; March 31; April 1, 14, 15 and for final reviews.
Class will be held via Zoom on all other Thursdays and Fridays.

Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World

The architectural and urban projects of this studio are focused on the potentials of the declining, yet evocative area of Tokyo known as Bakuroch? Yokoyamach?. This shrinking neighborhood is made up of a diverse range of business. Historically, the neighborhood has been known as the blue collar garment district of the city. Yet the character of the neighborhood is changing. Recently, the area has become the subject of increasing interest by a younger generation of people who are seeking new ways to live and work there, a prospect welcomed by the older generation of residents.

Unlike the zoning regulations of many western cities, Tokyo’s policies are more open to the mixing and adjacency of functions. This situation creates many exciting opportunities for architecture and design. These include the use of both infill and open sites, interiors, modification of the existing building stock, roofscapes, gardens and landscapes.

Polemically, the work of the studio is situated between the prevalent large-scale projects of major developers and the very small-scale interventions of traditional neighborhoods. How can architecture, urban design, and landscape play a significant role in the transformation of the district without resorting to the hegemony of a mega-project? Can we construct a coherent and systematic urban design strategy for the district, based on the proximity of multi-scalar design proposals?

Each member of the studio, either individually or with another student, will be asked to develop a unique programmatic set of themes of their choice. These programs can be linked to a diversity of project types and precedents, each with its own distinct site/s. From workshops to a kindergarten, from residential projects to a small garment museum and garden, from a vertical/sectional public building to a transportation hub and community rooms, the intention is for the combination of individual projects (artifacts) from the studio to form the basis for the physical and social revitalization of this part of Tokyo.

The outcome of the studio will be presented in the form of detailed designs with drawings at different scales, models, and renderings. The student projects will be included on the Japan Story website and in a planned publication.

Travel is planned to New York City’s garment district and to Miami to study parallel developments and neighborhoods- including new projects. All course travel is subject to change or cancellation. All travelers must follow University and local travel guidance pertaining to COVID-19, and should read through the GSD Travel and Safety Guidelines webpage prior to enrolling in a course with a travel component.

Some students may also be able to travel to Japan for further research of their project, perhaps as part of an independent study during the summer of 2022.

We will meet on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and also be joined by a number of advisors/consultants, from Japan as well as the United States.

 

 

Kit House

The studio will explore the potential convergence of the American twentieth century tradition of the Kit House (exemplified by the Sears Modern Homes of 1908-1940) with the ultra contemporary Off-Site Manufacturing (OSM) phenomenon, which is revolutionizing our perception of building. As such, this new studio extends (and re-focusses) the thorough exploration of OSM carried out in 2018 and 2019 in the two option studios themed 'Model As Building – Building As Model'. This studio will focus on the Kit House. The tone will be both pragmatic and speculative. We will explore the instrumental and disciplinary implications of the house as product design, pre-made fabrication, self-assembly, design documentation, packaging, and delivery, as against the background of the new OSM paradigm.

While affordable housing had been the vocation of OSM pretty much throughout the twentieth century, need no longer the dominant factor. Desire in all its contemporary forms is now equally important (think consumer politics, digital technology, social media culture, and money).

 

This course will meet weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
George Legendre will be in residence on the following days: January 25, 27; February 1, 3, 8, 10; March 1, 3, 22, 24; April 12, 14 and for final reviews.
Class will be held via Zoom on all other Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Tall, Lean, In-between

The studio will consider three recent challenges facing the design of tall residential buildings in London: the stringent requirements for their careful placement and contextual efficacy in the city, the shift towards low carbon construction, and the provision of amenities and open spaces for dwelling units severed from the ground.

Our response will be framed by three interrelated themes at their respective operative scales. The first, Tall, recognizes that this vertical building type has always been an exception rather than the rule in London. Its troubled history, as failed mass-produced modernist tower blocks in the 1960s to its recent use as a tool for excessive densification in service of speculative capital, has cast doubts on its continued relevance. On the other hand, its modest footprint relative to its height, is still instrumental towards the provision of much needed affordable housing on brown field sites across London. The design of a tall building thus should transcend the justification by numbers approach towards the consideration of its role as a punctuator in a low-rise city. In other words, as an urban artifact that embodies and reifies the idea of collective living that simultaneously acts to cohere the fragments of a city that grew by increments and chance.

The second, Lean, deals with the potential of thinking about tall building structures pared down to their bare minimum to achieve low carbon construction. We will approach this through the design of hybrid structures – primary steel or concrete frame with secondary timber structure – to mitigate fire safety requirements for buildings taller than 18m. This lean hybrid structures offer the potential of reversible and flexible space in housing design, a reconfigurable tectonic that prolongs its life span by eluding programmatic redundancies.  

In-between, the third theme, addresses the predicament of stacking large amount of dwelling units above ground, severing them from amenities and open spaces. The provision of these in-between spaces – between private dwelling and common spaces, and between indoor and outdoor temperature zones – will enable us to rethink the design of forecourts, lobbies, corridors, vestibules, hallways, terraces, patios, balconies, and loggias as spaces to dwell in rather than to merely pass through. As such, they allow us to conceive of the in-between spaces for work, leisure and repose as distinctive and yet connected rooms.

We will be working on a live site, in Ledbury Estate, London. Located along Old Kent Road, in the borough of Southwark. The current plans by Southwark Council and voted by the estate’s residence, calls for the demolition and replacement of four 13-storey housing blocks built in 1968 that has deteriorated structurally. The design task is to design a cluster of tall residential buildings, comprising of affordable housing, workspaces, and communal amenities, following the themes of Tall, Lean, In-between.

Ian Lowrie, Associate at Serie Architects will join the studio as Teaching Associate. We will be working with Paul Karakusevic, architect and masterplanner of Ledbury Estate regeneration scheme. James Masini (Development Manager), Patricia Lewin (New Homes Project Manager), and Osama Shoush (Regeneration Project Manager) of Southwark Council, will be our guide and critic as we approach the complex and challenging task of designing a new generation of tall buildings for Ledbury Estate.

This course will meet weekly on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Christopher Lee will be in residence on the following days: January 28; February 10, 11, 24, 25; March 11, 31; April 1, 14 and for final reviews.
Ian Lowrie will be in residence on the following days: January 25, 28; March 8, 11; April 14, 15, 29 and for final reviews.
Class will be held via Zoom on all other Tuesdays and Fridays.

Eco Folly – Design

Our design research studio takes the folly as a typological springboard for coalescing formal creativity and sustainable imperatives. Whether at the scale of the structure, garden, or machine, the folly is a playful moniker in which the useless, the mad, the extreme, the theatrical, or the daring are made to intervene in both intimate and civic spaces. With sculptural and fantastical properties in mind, we use the folly opportunistically as a vehicle to foreground issues of materiality, micro-climate, and environmental response. For us, the folly offers a means to translate theory into practice; by leveraging its discursive status, diverse scale, and programmatic flexibility, we aim to create a space of design experimentation in which participants will explore the behavior of materials, understand the life-cycle of buildings, and evaluate sustainable consequences.

Environmental implications will ground our work: How might we imagine buildings to be more self-sufficient and self-sustaining through a deeper understanding of fundamental techniques without an over-reliance on digital technology? How might we re-wire networks of production, distribution, and consumption that are more tailored to environmental resources as well as regional and local conditions? How might we reconfigure the folly to focus on innovative techniques of ventilation, touch-the-earth-lightly, and optimization of land management, siting, and landscape? How can the concepts of pleasure and beauty be daringly connected to concepts of green architecture? How can the folly act as a precursor to the act of building itself, nesting responsive design parameters into design thinking?

Invited expert consultants will play a role in the studio and seminar through presentations, workshops, and discussions. The outcomes of the studio will take three forms: written, made, and measured, which taken together, will be the basis of an exhibit at House Zero. The studio and seminar are generously funded by the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities.

NB: Taught in conjunction with the seminar HIS-4480 in which studio participants are strongly encouraged to enroll.

A Paradoxical Paradox

Our writing system was devised by people who couldn’t read.

Paradox:
A statement or proposition that, despite sound reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory
i.e., something of extreme rare value that continues to sustain an innate fascination.

Each student should be prepared to designate their own site. After an initial series of “shared experiences,” they
will then be assigned their program. The studio will meet each week on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Each student is required to be present during the entirety of the allotted studio times each week unless otherwise permitted with prior approval.

 

The House: A Machine, Queer and Simple

What is a house? Who lives in one? And how? These are queer things to ask, insofar as the naivete of the questions implies an open field of possibility without a corresponding answer that emanates from the norms of propriety, sexuality, and form that shaped the development of American single-family home in the 20th century. This studio will return to the scene of a debate at the beginning of that century between two canonical modern figures. Le Corbusier, on one side of this debate, proposed the idea of house as a machine, while Eileen Grey, dissenting, argued that no such distinction could be drawn between the domain of the body and its extension via architecture – ergo, the house is not a machine, but the body may very well be architecture. Rather than taking sides in this too-convenient dialectic, we will use the analogy between architecture and machines to think afresh about the body and its relation to the thing we call a house and the set of practices we call dwelling. Associate Professor Andrew Holder will co-teach the studio with queer dance duo Gerard and Kelly. The semester will be organized around three movement workshops that use the body (your body) as a way to think through proposals for a building mass, a room, and a construction detail. Each student will design a single work of architecture on the site of Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road house in West Hollywood. Like Rudolph and Pauline Schindler’s queer living arrangement in that house with Clyde and Marian Chace (and a rotating cast of luminaries like Merce Cunningham), student projects will be cooperative live / work buildings for an audience bigger than a family but smaller – and more personally entangled — than an apartment complex.

This studio will meet weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Additionally, Ryan Kelly and Brennan Gerard will be in person on the following three Saturdays to lead Movement Workshops: January 29, February 19, and March 26.

Unterbau City

The studio will challenge the supposed opposition between heritage and progress in a mixed-use development within the Regent Quarter, a 6.2 acres site in London. The idea of the site as a 'self-sufficient' city within a city of King's Cross Knowledge Quarter within the city of London – a polycentric city – will frame the scale and outlook of the studio project.  The site of Regent Quarter is a unique intermediate scale, not just a district but a three-dimensional boundary: mediating between the traditional terrace housing neighborhoods of Islington to the east, and the extraordinary scale of the emerging mega-development to the northwest, currently the busiest construction site in all of Europe.

The district contains a range of historic properties, and students will construct arguments for and against the demolition of specific structures within the boundary of the site with the intention of optimizing and enhancing their historic value in combination with contemporary interventions. The variability of historic designations of different structures and their variable quality will form the basis of integrating nationally listed buildings, refining strategies for preservation and adaptation, as well as demolition of the other buildings. We will develop a considered framework and evaluative metrics including social utilization, historical value, embodied carbon, architectural quality, etc. that will form the basis of collective planning strategies to be implemented by each student in their individual project.

The program will be mixed-use, with each student designing commercial and office space in combination with some specific additional program (laboratory, industry, institution, garden/conservatory). Each student will develop their project at three scales from the urban, to the architectural, to the element, as in a room or detailed assembly. A particular focus on public open space in relation to buildings, in the form of courts, alleys, and pedestrian streets and circulation cores will be central to the campus-like urban order intended for the quarter across all scales of development.

The general schedule for the studio will consist of weekly meetings on Wednesday and Thursday. The presence of each faculty member in-person or remotely will vary over the course of the semester. Minor adjustments to the schedule may occur across the course of the semester.

Adaptive Quality

At a time when it is more essential than ever to conserve resources and prevent carbon pollution—which critically includes limiting the demolition of existing buildings and new construction—we find that concrete architecture from the 1960s and ’70s is nevertheless frequently discarded. A host of justifications is given for its destruction: it cannot be easily adapted for today’s needs; its land value exceeds its architectural value; its cost of re-use is too high.  These existing concrete buildings – often referred to as Brutalist – aspired in their time to reflect certain societal values via program and image, yet over the years their strong forms, expressive structures and raw use of material have often been publicly derided as cold and inhospitable.  This studio posits that, while opinions and definitions of Brutalism may fluctuate over time and with context, our current environmental crisis establishes an ethical urgency to extending the life of these structures.  

Students will work with Paul Rudolph’s Hurley Building (1972), part of the Boston Government Services Center complex in downtown Boston.  The complex was planned by Rudolph in 1963 as three interconnected buildings enclosing a central plaza, but construction was halted without the pinwheel-shaped tower intended to anchor the site.  It currently houses government offices but is being slated for redevelopment thanks to the value of the land on which it sits, its outdated systems, and its incompatibility with contemporary office needs.

This studio reconsiders the fate of the Hurley Building, exploring how it might be adapted to improve its functionality and environmental performance, and reconsidering its form and image.  Students will research the original building and the context of its design and construction, develop an understanding of embodied carbon and the environmental repercussions of varying degrees of intervention, and explore design solutions for its adaptation and new role in contemporary urban life.  The brief will call for the insertion of a cultural and educational institution to infuse the site with new energy and activity.  Bringing contemporary technologies, materials, forms, and programs to bear on this challenge, we will work to recast this specific architecture toward a viable, extended future.  

 

This course will meet weekly on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Jeanne Gang will be in residence on the following days: January 26 and 27, February 2, 3, 16 and 17, March 2, 3, 30 and 31, April 21 and 22, and for final reviews.
Anika Schwartzwald will be in residence on the following days: January 26 and 27, February 2, 3, 9, 10, 16 and 17, March 2, 3, 23, 24, 30 and 31, April 13, 14, 20 and 21 and for final reviews.
Class will be held via Zoom on all other Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Borderline(s) investigation #1 – Lightness

Studio topic: Economy & Excess

We aim to seize economic requirements to transform constraints into levers, producers of qualities. These may well be tangible or intangible, prosaic or poetic, constant or unstable, general or occasional… as long as they are initiated by the economy and located far from any rationality -creating generosity, “excesses” that make strength and uniqueness of a place. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, in our studio, the economy will no longer be a means of dominating money or matter but a tool for the incessant exploration of our uncertainties.

Method / Learning objectives: Borderline(s) investigation
It all starts with a question. We are not looking for an answer, we are looking for a way to formulate it. The question is in itself a quest.
To carry out this investigation, we walk on a ridge line, we put ourselves in danger, we take risks; we want to find what we are looking for.
We are moving forward on a path, on the path of defining the great values – those of architecture but also those of the architect, those of everyday life, those that make it exceptional, those of the ordinary and those of imagination, those of yesterday and today, those of tomorrow's world.
This line on which we walk is the frontier of our discipline, which we test, which we extend, which we do not limit ourselves to. So we go elsewhere, we use all kinds of media, we use all kinds of tools, we call on all kinds of experts, on all kinds of scales…
By flirting with the limits in this way, we find ourselves no longer being only an architect but also a photographer, a filmmaker, a sociologist, an engineer, an artist, a philosopher, a playwright, a writer or a poet…
We do not prioritize things other than by the subjective value we give them.

Borderline(s) investigation #1: Lightness
Travelling lightly means leaving with the bare minimum, arriving safely and discreetly in an unknown place and then keeping eyes wide open to carefully modulate daily life to this new environment. Lightweight construction is inspired by this traveler's ethics. Setting up only as little as possible, landing safely and discreetly on a unfamiliar site, and then keeping eyes wide open to carefully modulate projects to this new environment. We are well aware that, by its very nature, architecture does not escape gravity, but it is possible to restrict the meaning of the term. There is no obligation on us to make our architecture "weighty" in the solemn sense. On the contrary, it can only be satisfied with a few traces, firm enough to define a place, a space, a use, while leaving as many free appropriations and possible transformations. Lightness is not an ideal, but rather a form of accessible politeness. It means considering the material from an economic point of view, and thus paying tribute to its efficiency. It is a direct and pragmatic approach to implementation, without frills and in the full expressiveness of constructive modes. But by dint of lightness, would this architecture "more vague and more soluble in the air, with nothing in it that weighs or poses" (to use Paul Verlaine's words in Art Poétique) go so far as to take the risk of evaporation, even pure and simple disappearance? On the contrary, it is the human scale that will bring this architecture back "down to earth". In fact, lightweight construction is above all not to forget how the combined sciences of space and construction can offer mental "extensions" to our body envelop.

This studio will meet weekly on Thursdays and Fridays.
The instructors will be in residence on the following days: January 27, 28; February 10, 11; March 10, 11, 24, 25; April 7, 8, 21, 22 and for final reviews.
Class will be held via Zoom on all other Thursdays and Fridays.