Planning a Piece of a City, The Architectural Form of the Neighborhood
Contemporary cities generally grow in an amorphous and often mono functional way, generating peripheries that do not contribute to social life and identity. The latter is entrusted to individual buildings instated as urban acupuncture. The studio will work on a different strategy and endeavor to produce a model for an eminently urban city expansion.
Subject of the studio is the urban quarter or neighborhood. This is defined as a complex which belongs to the city as a whole, but which has a partial social and functional autonomy and its own character. It is a fragment of the city with the city’s complexity, and designing it means to design a city en miniature, dealing with all its determinants: social, ideological, political, technical, economical, and cultural. Clearly, not all these determinants will be addressed in depth in the studio work, but the students will have to be aware of this intricacy.
After a theoretical and historical introduction where possible definitions and significant examples of architectural neighborhoods will be discussed, the students will produce a short programmatic paper with their own definition of an urban quarter, contrasting the random city development and specifying the determinants they intend to privilege. Subsequently, they will produce an exemplary design of a new urban quarter on a lot of a little more of 12 Acres situated in a developing area near Bern, Switzerland. The design can be schematic, but exemplary parts of it, ideally a square or a street and two model residential building units, will be detailed. Particular attention shall be devoted to the connection of the urban spaces to the buildings and types and vice versa.
The design process will be underpinned with historical references: Rome, with its deliberately created 20. century Quartieri from Garbatella to Tiburtino, Berlin, and others, European and non-European. The students themselves will choose them, analyze them and share them with the group. The design process will also be accompanied by theoretical discussions. If the results are worth it, a small publication is planned.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Thursdays and Fridays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Vittorio will be in residence (Cambridge) during the first half of the semester (until 10/14) and will teach remotely for the second half.
Great Migration and Memorial Highway: Culture Heritage as Inspiration in New Rochelle
Long perceived as a bedroom community of New York City, New Rochelle is a place unique in colonial New York as being settled by a relatively large community of enslaved Africans, pre-dating the Revolutionary War by nearly 100 years. This legacy has left a lasting imprint on the city in numerous ways despite being largely hidden from the dominant urban narrative – one defined by leadership, projects, and policies that directly undercut the social and historic fabric of Black history.
At the same time, New Rochelle is growing and changing in significant ways as manifest in over thirty downtown development projects and a large transportation improvement planning initiative. The speed of this change and its significant imprint on the city fabric has had and continues to have the potential to overlook long-latent needs and histories. Change could also bring with it unintended consequences to long-term and historically disadvantaged populations that have experienced the negative and traumatic effects of urban change disproportionately already.
This studio will focus on cultural storytelling, systems-thinking, and investment in public infrastructure as means of surfacing new stories, addressing equitably issues of connectivity and change, and building more awareness of rich buried layers of the city's past. We will work directly with identified civic advocates and community members to better comprehend the lived experiences of the place – looking to learn from the past to envision an equitable future.
Engaged as a multi-disciplinary team of students and in collaboration with the community, we will (1) assemble a coherent compilation of the city's history and current physical attributes, (2) dig deeply into cultural archaeology and narrative via a series of project “muses”, (3) move from an assessment of city-wide systems thinking to the identification and design pilot exploration of key sites, and (4) share the studio findings in an outward public forum, micro-site online, and/or a physical and moving exhibition. Student work will be evaluated on its rigor and authenticity in story-telling, its technical and design excellence and its ability to align community need with grounded and aspirational strategies.
This funded studio will tentatively include multiple studio site visits and frequent community engagement. Travel expenses will be covered for day trips to New Rochelle.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Gena and Rhiannon will be in residence (Cambridge) on 9/2, 9/14, 9/16, 9/28, 9/30, 10/12, 10/14, 10/26, 10/28, 11/9, 11/11, 11/30, 12/2 and Final Reviews.
History, Boundaries and the Future – Conservation and Infill in Boston’s Chinatown
Boston is fortunate to have large, intact, precincts of fine scaled historic fabric whose character and conservation is carefully monitored through established regulatory processes. However, many historic neighborhoods in thriving cities have been significantly altered by modern, haphazard development. The resulting fragmentation makes the crafting of conservation guidelines a nuanced and daunting exercise, especially as these are often contested spaces in which community aspirations compete with development forces to preserve the integrity and affordability of their district. Nowhere is this more evident than in Chinatown, cleaved by two interstate highways and bounded by Boston’s high-rise downtown core, an intermodal transportation center and the continuously expanding Tufts New England Medical Center (TNEMC). For decades, with strong community support, Chinatown has struggled to simultaneously sustain its identity and cohesion as a neighborhood, while improving the quality of life for its inhabitants.
The South Cove neighborhood that became Chinatown was built on fill, a process that began in the 1830s. The Chinese began to settle this area before 1880, following waves of Irish, Jewish and Syrian immigrants, and had established a coherent, identifiable community in roughly the area occupied today by the 1940s. The buildings of this precinct are highly varied from mid-19th century brick rowhouses through turn of the 20th century manufacturing lofts and a plethora of modern era and recent development.
The purpose of this studio is to aid the community in the development of plans and guidelines to protect the integrity of those areas of Chinatown currently lacking historic designation; it will have two foci: The first will be to map and evaluate the physical and cultural history and general urban morphology of Chinatown with an eye to what has value and why. Students will identify ways in which resources may be protected, and where appropriate enhanced through sustainable development. Deliverables for this portion of the studio will be illustrated analytical maps identifying the type and location of historic fabric, with preliminary asset classification utilizing values-based conservation criteria and including a listing of general exterior character defining features.
The second half of the studio will be a design/planning implementation exercise incorporating knowledge gained in the first half, using one of three types of options. The first is to propose a program and concept level design for a vacant site, suggested at this time to be Parcel R-1, a cleared site bounded by Tyler, Harvard and Hudson Streets. An alternative infill site may be proposed with the instructor’s concurrence. The second option is to renovate an existing building within the district such as the 125 Lincoln St. Parking garage – which would be adapted for non-automobile mixed use. The third choice, geared particularly to Planning students, is to develop and present a more in-depth conservation planning study.
The studio will be informed by visits to the site, guest lectures, and meetings and a possible workshop with both community representatives and officials from the City of Boston.
Highways Revisited
The U.S. Interstate Highway System has been lauded as one of the greatest public works projects in human history. Encompassing nearly fifty thousand miles of standardized, limited-access highways, the system radically remade the built environment in the U.S. by connecting cities and making possible the massive suburbanization of the metropolitan landscape. But Interstate Highways also served to disconnect and disempower. Planners hoping to reinforce racial segregation routinely sited higways either through the heart of black and Latino neighborhoods or along boundaries between those communities and white ones. As a result, hundreds of thousands were evicted, thriving black and Latino neighborhoods were destroyed, and damaging color lines were reinforced. Those who remained were left to contend with increased physical, economic, and psychological barriers, not to mention noxious fumes from vehicle emissions, the constant whirr of vehicle engines, and other negative externalities that come with living next to a limited access highway.
Recognizing these historic injustices, the Biden administration, as part of its ambitious, two trillion dollar American Jobs Plan, committed $20 billion for reconnecting neighborhoods that were cut off, bulldozed, and blighted by urban renewal-era highways. Communities will compete for funds to remove, cap, or otherwise undermine these highways and replace them with parks and mixed-use development. For many communities, the newly developable sites created by highway removal offer a unique opportunity to address affordable housing shortages, especially considering the American Jobs Plan’s provisions for affordable and public housing.
This interdisciplinary studio invites students from all departments to work alongside community leaders in a number of cities across the U.S. to reimagine Interstate rights- of-way. Students will be required to 1) select an Interstate in the U.S. that is ripe for reimagining from a list provided by the instructor; 2) meet with community leaders to better understand local priorities; 3) present a clear, compelling case about the damage the highway did (and continues to do); 4) develop a compelling vision for what should be built; and 5) compile your work into a persuasive pitch. As the American Jobs Plan also includes provisions for affordable housing, public housing, clean energy, resiliency, and environmental justice, students will be strongly encouraged to incorporate these elements into their schemes.
Day trips to New York, the Hudson Valley, Portland, Lowell, and/or other local cities are tentatively planned.
Extending and mending Thamesmead: re-envisioning the town of tomorrow, today
It was a good place to be as a kid. There was so much nature and wide open space. In the spring there would be grass fights, in the summer there’d be water fights, in the autumn would be mud bombs and winter would be snow balls. Philip Samuel, Resident from 1975
In the mid-1960s, a vast concrete housing estate began to rise out of neglected marshland on the south bank of the River Thames. Headed by the Greater London Council (GLC), the scheme intended to solve the post-war housing crisis, and was heralded as visionary. Its design was both architectural and urban experimental: concrete townhouses, blocks of apartments and elevated walkways were all built around a system of lakes, canals and parkland. Architects, sociologists and politicians all turned their attention to the transformation of a marshland into the ‘town of tomorrow’.
In the beginning, the estate was so exclusive that families had to be vetted to get a home there. However, there were real hardships and difficulties for these early pioneers. The slow development of local infrastructure, leaking concrete buildings and, most importantly the failure to provide the new township with the quick and efficient transport links its population required started to erode Thamesmead’s shiny new image. In 1971 Thamesmead provided a backdrop to Stanley Kubrick’s seminal film, A Clockwork Orange. The abolishment of the GLC 1986 and ongoing lack of investment meant a continual slide into disrepair, crime and marginalization over the subsequent three decades.
In 2016 it was announced that the estate would undergo a £200million redevelopment. A joint venture partnership between a developer and a public housing association – Lendlease and Peabody – will steward the future of Thamesmead.
Thamesmead Waterfront comprises 100ha of the 647ha of the overall area. It is one of the few remaining undeveloped sites in London and the Southeast UK that offers the scale and capacity to accommodate significant, sustainable, long-term economic growth and housing. Thamesmead’s community is strong, but it is predominantly inward facing and physically isolated; weak transport connectivity reduces resident mobility, and the area is classified as amongst the most deprived 40% of neighbourhoods in England.
This studio will investigate what it means to extend and mend a ‘new town’. We will explore the many physical and social edge conditions and tensions that arise when the new meets existing populations and places.
Students will be asked to consider what qualities distinguish a place as urban or suburban. As the boundaries between work, learning and living have blurred geographically over the past 18 months do characterizations of urban and suburban still make sense?
We will study what holistic resiliency means in the context of an isolated district that will soon have better transport links to the metropolis of London.
The scale of Thamesmead Waterfront means that it has the potential to tackle all-encompassing challenges post COVID-19: climate change, social inclusion, diversity, diverse models of living and working, changing commuter patterns, infrastructure in a currently sub-urban context.
Students will have the opportunity to meet, work with and hear from local school students, the professionals that represent the diverse disciplines on the development and consultant teams and local government planners.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Wednesdays and Fridays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Kathryn Firth will be in residence (Cambridge) during the weeks of 8/30, 9/6, 10/18, 10/25, 11/1, 11/29, 12/7
Seeking Abundance: Designing Engagement and Experience for All
The landscape, the land itself, is where inequity has always, and continues to express itself. Access to health, wealth, safety and education are embedded in the timeless wheeling and dealing of space, place, property. Marginalized communities, subaltern communities, oppressed communities are all terms that emanate from the non-reflexive view, a view that inherently prioritizes its own experiences and world views, primarily those of the mainstream, the colonizer, the oppressor. These embedded predilections have created spaces that, at best, are not designed to welcome or make comfortable a diversity of users and communities, and at worst, have systematically destroyed the structures and networks that had historically catered to the needs of the non-majority. There is a wealth of knowledge and a richness of the deaf experience, the indigenous experience, the immigrant experience, the blind experience, the black experience that must inform our design decision making. How do we, as designers, design a process that leverages culturally specific experiences to create spaces of cross-cultural resonance?
In this studio, we will explore how various communities experience, navigate, or claim space, whether architecture, landscape, or metaphysical, in order to create a culturally responsive environment that amplifies community, connection, and care. The structure of this studio is one that is informed by both the freedoms and challenges of the past year and a half of remote learning and working. We have all been embedded in our home communities or adopted communities, which gives us access to a network we’ve been a part of for at least some part of our lives. Perhaps more importantly for the work of this studio, we are in a time where, at least for a moment, some voices of some underprivileged are being heard. Our work this semester will be guided by these unique opportunities.
1. Research – Initially, we will work through a few lines of questioning. First, who can designers serve? Why have we become designers, what affinities do we share with mission driven organizations or communities, and how can we bring our unique skillsets to support community efforts and partners through the spatial disciplines? Second, how do we engage with this topic or partner to understand how design can serve their needs? We will welcome lecturers, “desk mentors” and other experts as needs arise within projects to help approach topics such as Deaf Space Design, design in Black Space, or Indigenous Planning.
2. Design the Process – We invite students who have a clear idea of a partner and project they are interested in, but we also have a few sites and projects for students who are interested in the studio but may not have a particular project in mind. Having chosen a partner/project, we will design and implement an engagement to reveal the correct design drivers, understand the mission and build support and interest in the project.
3. Design the Place – Having determined the project site, chosen and engaged a partner, built a robust sensory design palette, we will design a new kind of place that is driven by a rich and diverse set of inputs, or design drivers built up over the semester. This place can be a small front yard for a special person, a park for a particular community, a memorial for a previously erased history, a large, newly preserved landscape, or a new kind of lifeways center.
Harnessing the Future
Harnessing the Future: How the Internet’s Physical Digital Infrastructure Influences Landscape, Local Economies, and the Ecologies of Communities.
Project Goal:
Envision strategies to generate sustainable and beneficial legacies for communities upon the arrival of a large infrastructure project in their backyard. By understanding and harnessing the demographic changes, improvements in local infrastructure and long-term financial infusions that are manifested in these situations, local communities stand to emerge and evolve equipped to nurture a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reimagine their futures without compromising their past and present.
Project Site:
Located in Western Ireland, the site presents the typical small historic community being confronted with this scenario as a representation of similar events happening around the world. The area has an ancient history, strong cultural traditions, strict environmental regulations, a comprehensive planning process, while simultaneously facing a strong need for economic development and job opportunities.
Studio Challenge:
Digital infrastructure has become the connective thread of today’s civilization weaving the virtual fabric of culture, community, and humanity from a historical compendium of events and facts to future explorations and manifests. The ‘cloud’ requires a robust network of physical infrastructure to power, store, consume and distribute the past and future knowledge we create and rediscover every day. Data Centers are the nodal nexus that houses, protects, and redistributes this data, where the demand for these facilities is only increasing. The scale of these projects is not without precedent and requires an intervention to graciously affect hundreds of acres, harness the access to electrical power, water resources, roadway infrastructures, and a multi-year construction cycle which can populate the site with an influx of over 1500 workers.
The quest will be to create a legacy of positive impacts for the host communities. This studio will examine the opportunities to harness the investments that preserve the sanctity of history, protect environmental integrity, accommodate the needs of the construction industry, and orchestrate economic benefits for the greater good and quality of life.
The studio will study precedents, undertake research, and develop watershed solutions enhancing the welfare and wellbeing of the community for generations to come.”. To succeed, each project will need a compelling storyline that presents the idea, a clear vision of how to implement it, and a creative visual immersion that brings to life this delicate balance of preserving the integrity of the existing culture while creating new possibilities that galvanize a certainty for the future
The studio will meet every Tuesday and Thursday from August 30 through December 2, with the final projects due December 8th and presentations December 9th and 10th. The first 5 weeks will be spent in teams, investigating, and understanding the local, ecology, history, culture, and economic conditions, while the remaining 8 will be devoted to individual projects. The Mid-term presentations will be October 5 and 7th, a week earlier than the academic calendar to allow for more time to be spent on Individual projects. Every other week will be virtual with either desk crits or conversations local or industry experts.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Thomas Oslund and Catherine Murray will be in residence (Cambridge) during the weeks of 8/30, 9/13, 10/4, 10/11, 10/25, 11/8, 11/29, 12/7
ENTO: Fostering Insect/Human Relationships through Design
This studio will focus on designing for insects, one of the most ubiquitous and diverse groups of animals on the planet. At first glance, this topic appears absurd. Insects can be a nuisance, a significant threat, and they are everywhere, representing 80% of the world’s species. It is estimated there are some 10 quintillion individual insects alive at any given moment. Yet insect abundance and diversity support the ecosystems that humans depend upon for life. Insects, at the bottom of the food web, provide critical ecosystem services including pollination, seed dispersal, decomposition, soil building, pest control, and wildlife nutrition. Without insects, our waste would not break down and most of our food would not exist.
The health of insect populations is directly tied to the health of our landscapes. Urbanization, agricultural intensification, and climate change are impacting insect populations to the point where popular media has pushed a narrative of a pending global “insect apocalypse.” While recent studies reveal more nuanced spatiotemporal trends of terrestrial insect decline and aquatic insect recovery, the status of the global insect population is not currently knowable and is attracting more scientific attention as concerns of a sixth wave of extinction escalate. This studio embraces uncertainty and will take a research-driven and multi-disciplinary approach to designing for insects, including direct engagement with experts in the disciplines of entomology, horticulture, ecology, and landscape architecture.
The semester will begin with a series of assignments and field studies focused on tracing the relationships between distinct insect taxa and three Eastern Massachusetts landscapes – a transect of rural, suburban, and urban sites. Students will research the needs of insects, review contemporary designed landscapes to evaluate their capacity to support insect life, investigate cultural practices and human-insect relationships, and participate in field work and entomological observation. By mid-semester, students will define an individual or group project of their choice that advances their research into a specific site-based design proposal. Design work will be evaluated based upon its relationship to knowledge developed throughout the semester and the degree of development and inquiry undertaken by the student. Studio will meet on Tuesday and Thursday at 3pm on a hybrid schedule.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet in person every week. Gena Wirth will be in residence (Cambridge) during the weeks of 8/30, 9/13, 9/26, 10/11, 10/25, 11/8, 11/29, 12/7
The Immeasurable Enclosure
This option studio proposes using immeasurability as the aesthetic and spatial expression of the public realm and asks students to imagine immeasurable single-space enclosures as forums for public life. Students in this course design one single-space environment using raw phenomena arrested by manufactured structures as the place for a public encounter of specific socio-cultural importance.
The garden and the room are considered the most fundamental spaces of the disciplines of landscape and architecture. These single-space environments are defined by enclosing and containing only a tiny part of the world and have conventionally been perceived as the means for designing coherent singular identities. However, the historical progression toward cultural diversity and social plurality has revealed the apparent inability of a single space to encompass multiple identities. This understanding led to alternative spatial models that invoked large-scale distributed spatial models as expressions and vehicles to accept and encourage multiple sensibilities and identities. Land mosaics, spatial fields, or network societies, just to name a few, became the new spatial paradigms to advance social, cultural, and ecological plurality and diversity. Instead of encompassing as much of the physical world as possible, as these expansive paradigms propose, this course aims to reframe the discrete singular space as the mechanism to advance progressive social agendas by containing multiple sensibilities.
The objective of this course is to imagine and design spaces that are simultaneously single-room buildings and single-patch landscapes. To this end, these uncategorizable enclosures—which can be outdoors, indoors, or in-between—demonstrate an aesthetic and spatial sensibility that defies traditional disciplinary categories but contributes to the long-standing tradition of these close quarters. These immeasurable enclosures are neither gardens nor rooms in a conventional sense. They are strange spaces that transcend the elemental nature of the garden and the room as building blocks for the expression of singular identities. These single-space environments aim to contain that which, by its definition and value, is immeasurable: the instance of acknowledging a different being. Students in this studio work individually, and each student is responsible for proposing an immeasurable enclosure within a specific socio-cultural context.
‘AQUA INCOGNITA:’ Deciphering Liquid Territories in the Mexican Altiplano
Aligned with the GSD´s focus on Mexico´s urbanization challenges, and with a further commitment to advancing research by design at the GSD, Aqua Incognita aims to decipher an array of visions capable of advancing “nature-positive[1]” repairing actions in today water-scarce Central Mexican altiplano, toward more sustainable livelihoods and biocultural landscapes. This critical zone[2]—originally a wetland territory and now bordering the most urbanized region of the nation—is engaged in a transformative trajectory associated with unsustainable urban development now further exacerbated by our human-induced climate crisis.
This process is particularly visible in the Apan Plains, a sub-region of the altiplano formed by smallsettlements and medium-sized towns at eighty kilometers East of Mexico City, and whose landscape and basic source of ejidal employment is characterized by rainfed barley monoculture for the beer industry, overlaying a past landscape of agave fields for pulque, aguamiel and alcohol production. In these shifting liquid territories, climate change is accelerating the depletion of water resources, desertification, and the loss of crops and biodiversity. Besides, contemporary farming in service of global commodity chains and major water-intensive industrial players are layering new risks and driving land use changes that further challenge the uncertain futures of this region.
Using Apan as the initial case study, we will first map the environmental, social, and political barriers and enablers to the conservation and equitable distribution of water across this rural-urban aquographies. With this knowledge, we will formulate new design visions, alternative growth strategies, and novel infrastructural interventions, whose implementation could lead to more sustainable management and governance of water resources. The studio forms part of a multi-level assemblage of local universities, the municipality of Apan, the Hidalgo State Secretaries of Economic Development and Public Policy, six Ejidos commissariats, and a local office (eeTestudio) who will participate in lectures and reviews, and counts with sponsorship from international development agencies.