Specific Ambiguity: The Well-Tempered grid [M2]

The grid is an elusive system, for some architects and artists it is a distinctive code for framing, understanding and producing space, a model. For others, is nothing more or nothing less than a geometrical order similar to infrastructure and fundamental to define the performance of form and it´s borders through a network and a framework of (architectural) elements. In any of those ways of approaching the grid, either as a model or as the network of specific elements the possibility for all those elements to come together in a pure ideal an ideological way are subject to a critical negotiation – mainly through form – one between the ideal grid and the site conditions or the given instructions, in other words the negotiation that takes place between ideas and a certain reality. 

For this purpose we will dig into Sol LeWitt´s exhibition at Williams College in 2012, titled: The Well-Tempered grid, and use its organization systems to be tested not anymore as art but as site specific architecture under tropical climatic conditions. 

The grid is highly ideological, historically romanticized, aesthetically adored and philosophically instrumental, but how much of those ambitions can prevail when put in to context in a complex social, and ecological condition?

We will design a small public food market in Medellin, Colombia. We will deal with complex social and urban conditions and a terrain with high slope.  We will determine and search for different spatial ideas, a space made of a tropical way of thinking. A space and architecture made of specific elements but ambiguous space. We will test the limit between inside and outside, nature, art, public and private, ideas and reality.

Each student or pair, will choose a different grid from Sol LeWitt´s work, and once a quick and intuitive analysis is made of it, it will be related and modified into a spatial system derived from a selected architecture precedent, once the two connect ideologically and ideally, the new “ensamble” will be taken to the site to give a response to the program, that of the public market.

Designing for the DNA of a Place [M2]

As a planet, we have over the past two years been in a collective state of reckoning. This has been true when it comes to facing racial inequalities, the fragility of our environment, our politics, or grappling with the colonial nature of a world where a minority has had an economic and cultural dominion for too long over a vast majority. Arguably, architecture is no neutral ground when one considers that even our education only takes into account the histories and built environment of the smaller section of the planet that is Europe as the universal reference point for the rest of the world.

This Studio will seek to challenge and widen the scope of precedents that have come to form the architecture canon. The focus will be on the American built environment, the ultimate colonial project of our times that has all but erased all traces of the pre-colonial identity of its lands. The question we will ask is: why hasn’t American architecture ever considered native spatial logics, traditions, relationship to nature, materials and sustaining principles that successfully helped its original populations thrive for centuries? And further, how do we begin to imagine new spaces and forms that honor the DNA of the place in an honest look at its history and missed opportunities?

Architecture Students will be asked to undertake a significant amount of research in the first days of the module in preparation for developing the speculative project of a community hub on a site in the Boston area. During the studio, students will research, produce mappings, diagrams, and physical models as a base for developing 3-dimensional solutions that draw on both local indigenous and contemporary architectural precedents.

 

Taylor Halamka will serve as a Teaching Associate for this studio.

Mariam Kamara will be in residence on the following days: October 21 and December 10.
Taylor Halamka will be in residence on the following days: October 21, 29; November 5, 12; December 2, 3; and for final reviews.
The instructors will hold studio every Friday from 2- 6pm. All group activity will be held during this time. Instructors will also be available 1-2 pm on Fridays for students who are free at that time. Additional twice-weekly office hours will be utilized for individual and/or small-group crits.

WINDOW WALL [M1]

Architecture is not that simple. The moment you enclose a space with solid walls and a roof you need to open it (for access, light and air). If you leave it closed, the room becomes a hidden one, accessible only through memory or imagination. From the outside, this blind space would be a solid block, with the presence of a sculptural mass, but not an inhabitable building. An opening on a wall is not that simple. An aperture on the opacity of a room implies both to interrupt the continuity of its enclosure and also to replace it by something else (by a view to the lake, to a noisy street, the sky or the texture of your neighbor’s fence). In its progressive buoyancy, the moderns rejected the obscure confinements of the room by introducing a couple of inventions: the panoramic window (equivalent to a horizontal film) and the glass curtain wall (equivalent to a large screen without thickness). The natural scene was then transfigured into spectacle, into a selective edge around a view. Crack! the house is no longer in the site but before it, they say. In its bucolic popularity, the window became a “picture”, a postcard, turning the building into a mere shooting device. However, in its abstract flatness, the opening can be understood as the physical and mental access to another dimension; as the literal and metaphoric mirror of an introverted domain. Paradoxically, this could be conveyed both for a window on a wall and for a painting on that same wall: for a picture plane to work, its size, position, depth, frame, shade and translucency, become the measures of its content. Again, a picture on a wall is not that simple. The illusion of space, the fictitious world beyond a “notional glass”, was already interrogated by the pre-moderns (since the secreted camera obscura) and cancelled by the post-painterly abstract painters (“what you see is what you see”, one said). Before them, perhaps without moral judgment, murals would fetch rooms into rooms and ceilings would be dissolved into heavenly firmaments filled with trickeries. Once more, the art of architecture is not that simple.

Since the studio project is a guest residence for a selection of Chilean wineries, the conflict between the presence of architecture amidst nature and its own representation (both as a large hand made painting of the building in its vineyard and as specific paintings placed within its rooms), ecology will inform oenology as much as fantasy will inform domesticity.

This course has a hybrid meeting schedule. Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen will meet in-person on September 2, 3, 16, 17, 30 and October 1 and14 for Final Reviews. They will also meet on-line the remaining sessions.

This course has an irregular meeting schedule. 

Sofia Martinez will be in residence Thursday and Friday on the following days: September 2, 3, 23, 24; and for final reviews.

Mauricio Pezo will be in residence for final reviews.

The instructors will also hold class via Zoom on the following Thursdays and Fridays: September 9, 10, 16, 17, 30; October 1, 7, 8.

The Third Space [M1]

This studio will explore community development, cultural complexity and displacement, place, and identity through the programming and design of a Third Space which will engage the built and social fabric of one of the United States’ most intensely gentrifying communities, South Atlanta.

South Atlanta was created as a land grant in 1867 to be settled by formerly enslaved African Americans after the Civil War. Once a prominent community, and home to Clark College & Gammon Theological Seminary, a movie theatre, and musical venues, South Atlanta carries a unique cultural history marred with overt prejudicial tactics. The vestiges of these discriminatory practices remain severely impactful on the community. Today South Atlanta’s rapidly changing demographics due to gentrification has resulted in cultural and political displacement and intensified police encounters of long term, lower-income, residents; and exacerbated sociospatial segregation between newcomers and the existing community.

The studio will partner with the nonprofit organization Project South. Students will begin with an exploratory research phase which includes discussions and interviews with South Atlanta residents and nonprofit leaders to develop an understanding of the conflicted history and state of the community. The oral histories will inform design speculations in the second phase in which students are tasked to ambitiously create a program and speculative design of a Third Space on the 4.7-acre site of the 9 Gammon Building. 

The 9 Gammon Building is recognized as a hub for community development, project creation, and civic decision-making. Despite being in disrepair, the 9 Gammon Building currently houses 5 different entities. Each provides services and community engagement opportunities to primarily poor and underserved residents of South Atlanta. The studio will focus on reinvigorating underutilized spaces, innovative programming, and reimaging of existing infrastructures, of the 9 Gammon building and/or its 4.7-acre site. Our theoretical positioning of Third Space will draw from 1. the urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s definition of Third Space as places, other than home or work, for social inclusion and interaction by otherwise disconnected groups and 2. Post-colonial theorist and Harvard Professor, Homi Bhabha’s Third Space as a liminal space ‘which creates something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and understanding.’

Student performance will be evaluated through studio work and participation, pin-ups, and final review. Thursday and Fridays are studio sessions.

This course has an irregular meeting schedule. 

Cory Henry will be in residence Thursday and Friday on the following days: September 2, 3, 30; October 1, 7, 8.

The instructor will also hold class via Zoom on the following Thursday and Fridays: September 9, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24; and for final reviews.

Miami Remix

Miami Remix will expand on emerging housing typologies as part of a larger urban design agenda as we take on Miami’s most urgent crises: equitable housing and climate change. Despite being in a near-constant state of crisis management further compounded by the global pandemic, Miami remains one of America’s most vibrant international cities. Preserving this vibrancy in the face of inevitable sea level rise and diminishing affordability requires a call to action to redefine and re-design how one will live in a future Miami.

Appropriating the concept of a “Remix” – the re-working of an original to create something new – this studio will explore progressive housing models for a mix of incomes, scales, and Domestic+ hybrid programs, from the single-family home to a multi-building district. Miami, already a mash-up of socio-economic and architectural extremes, is well-suited to explore alternative housing types including co-living, co-housing, micro-units, granny flats, ADUs, etc. Typologies which enable social mixing for immigrants, low-income residents, families, multi-generational households, digital nomads, and others will be deployed with the urban endgame of producing an inventive system of housing infrastructures to create a more resilient city.

The third and final Miami option studio funded by the Knight Foundation, the geographic focus will be Miami’s mid-section: the neighborhoods of Allapattah, Liberty City, and Brownsville. Predominantly Hispanic and black communities, these neighborhoods contain a significant concentration of affordable housing, much in neglect and nearing the end of its useful life. Given the relatively large amount of publicly-owned land and jurisdictional complexity, these neighborhoods are primed for testing novel housing prototypes on parcels which include small vacant lots, dilapidated public housing sites, and larger industrial areas.

This studio will develop a network of negotiated and reciprocal proposals. Given the proximity of the adjacent districts and sites chosen, these projects will operate as an interdependent urban lattice – each a part to whole – affected by and giving agency to each distinct site. The students will set up the parameters for this studio-wide negotiation by creating an urban design framework at the beginning of the semester. This will provide a conceptual map to guide architectural projects that will include new housing types, hybridized urban/domestic programs, and site/building strategies to address Miami’s urgent need for equitable and resilient housing.

Work from the studio will be published in a GSD-produced Studio Report/Booklet and will be distributed and presented in Miami. We will organize a series of talks on relevant issues with experts from across the design disciplines from the GSD, Miami, and other cities.

ROOM

This studio will focus on a room. More specifically, our speculations will concern the room that sits within those cultural and institutional programs that call for a form of collective space. One might think of the courtroom in a courthouse, the assembly space in a city hall, the waiting room in a train station, the auditorium in a theater, or numerous other spaces and programs that depend on an especially significant space to serve, define, or otherwise beckon an institution’s greater aims.

Our room — in essence our program — will be a new reading room for an existing library: The Central Boston Public Library in Copley Square. Our site will adjoin the existing building at its north-east corner and extend into Copley Square. While we will work on a library and its reading room, ‘the library’ will be not be our topic. This program and its specificities will serve instead as a means through which to explore the nature of significant interior cultural spaces in the context of important institutional organizations today. 

There are several reasons for the room being our focus. The studio will center on how we conceive of public life in relation to the workings of contemporary institutions. The emphasis will be on interior public space, complementing well-established discourses that engage exterior public space. By framing the studio in narrower programmatic terms, architectural outcomes will come forward in more explicit ways and through more natural and less harried means. The room’s circumscribed implications will allow us to wholly explore the ways that architects constitute architecture: walls, floors, ceilings, and the things that churn among them. For many architects (certainly for me) such rooms loom large in why architecture initially tempted us down its road…and continues to tug us forward as a worthy pursuit. Finally, there is an altogether visceral, and pleasurable, aspect to these rooms. They always entice with qualities that exceed their, and perhaps even our, reasons for being.

Studio methods will include seminar-style discussions, desk crits, reviews, and excursions to nearby rooms on campus and in Boston. 

Well-being: The function of a 21st century multi-story residential building

Over the past seventeen months, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, boredom, incarceration, and indolence for many living in cities around the world as they have been confined to their homes. As immunologists around the world believe that Covid-19 will become endemic, we must urgently rethink our relationship to housing, from it being a commodity to one that promotes well-being.

Alongside the recent pandemic, global warming has continued to be an ongoing crisis. This has been evident in the recent floods and wildfires in Europe, extreme heat waves in large parts of America and drought in the Andes mountains and vast regions in Africa. These events are a reminder that the Earth’s well-being is inextricable from humanity’s, and that a mutually beneficial connection between humans and nature must be cultivated for living organisms to continue to exist at all. We need a new approach to housing in the Anthropocene.

In the Twentieth Century, health crises prompted many creative responses from architecture. Rotating solaria and open-air classrooms were responses to tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases; the open front porch was a response to the Spanish Flu; the elevation of buildings off the ground, stacked gardens, and use of flat rooftops as recreation spaces were Le Corbusier’s response to hygiene and well-being; and the provision of multiple private gardens for each apartment were Jean Renaudie’s response to the need for nature in urban areas.

In the context of the ongoing pandemic and growing concerns about the global degradation of the environment, this studio will ask students to develop new urban collective housing typologies. These should allow both humans – looking for diverse spaces – and the planet, to thrive, and in doing so, make a case for the city as a place where well-being is treated as paramount.

Our investigations will focus on the adaptive reuse of Paris’s above-ground carparking structures – which are increasingly underused as two thirds of Parisian households no longer use a car – to avoid their demolition. Each student will choose from one of three carparking structures and transform its skeletal frame into a residential block with healthy living spaces.

This course has an irregular meeting schedule. 

Farshid Moussavi will be in residence Tuesday and Thursday on the following days: September 14, 16; November 16, 18; and for final reviews.

Yotam Ben Hur will be in residence on the following Thursdays: September 2, 16, 30; October 14, 28; November 11; December 2; and for final reviews. 

The instructors will also hold class via Zoom on the following Tuesdays and Thursdays: September 2, 7, 9, 21, 23, 28, 30; October 5, 7, 12, 14, 19, 21, 26, 28; November 2, 4, 9, 11, 23; December 2.

The Primitive Hut

Consisting of a roof and its supports, the Primitive Hut is the essence of architecture, and has always been an obsession and a fixed topos in the discipline of architecture. Built with the elements of nature – trees – it shelters the human from the inconveniences of nature, the weather. The Primitive Hut is, therefore, also an original inquiry into the relationship between man and nature.

Against the backdrop of increasing industrialization, our relation to nature has taken a turn since the 18th century – retreat back to nature! Henry David Thoreau’s Hut at the Walden Pond is part of a transcendentalist manifesto, an experiment with unique kinship to the wider romantic movements of the time.  The lineage of which led to classical modernism, defining many projects, from Le Corbusier’s green Ville Radieuse to Le Cabanon; from Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Falling Water to the Californian villas of John Lautner.  

Today, the human-nature relationship – under the pressure of climate change, scarcity of resources and the global pandemic – is particularly topical for discussion. Has the hyperdense global city become the enemy of the responsible citizen? Are current tendencies towards escapism and exit strategies sustainable? Allured by a simple, isolated life back to nature, are we now on the verge of a return to the Primitive Hut? 

In our studio we are relaunching the debate about the Primitive Hut. Using Henry David Thoreau's classic work "Walden" as a starting point for our discussion, we will (re-)visit the famous Walden Pond, "re-enact" the legendary retreat into nature, and critically reflect upon its actuality. Together, we will make radical re-interpretations of the Primitive Hut, speculating on renewed relationships between man and nature. 

The studio aims to re-examine the fundamentals of architecture, with the goal of combining historical knowledge and contemporary critical thinking. Built on the analysis of observations and contemporary texts, a program and scenario will be established as the basis for a new form of the Primitive Hut. The actual project will then be developed by working with typological references. The students will define their own location and scale of the building depending on the scenario.

This course has an irregular meeting schedule. 

Emanuel Christ will be in residence Thursday and Friday on the following days: September 9, 10, 30; October 1, 28, 29; and for final reviews.

Christoph Gantenbein will be in residence Thursday and Friday on the following days: September 30; October 1, 28, 29; November 11, 12; and for final reviews. 

The instructors will also hold class via Zoom on the following days: September 2, 3, 16, 17; October 14, 15; November 22, 23; and as needed to account for “off week” missed time.

De/constructing Cultural Tourism – Ke Zhan (Traveler’s Rest Stop) Case Study

The studio will take on the topic of cultural tourism in the context of China’s westward expansion related to its Belt and Road project, as well as questioning the relationship between cultural production (architecture) and cultural consumption (tourism). 
 
Many countries have seen an increase in domestic tourism as a result of the global pandemic triggering domestic lockdowns, forcing travelers to stay within national borders. Part of China’s recently unveiled five-year plan makes explicit the desire to deepen its international cultural links with countries along the Belt and Road network. New projects, especially targeted at cultural tourism sites seek to revive parts of the ancient Silk Road to strengthen China’s cultural exchanges abroad, support trade connections, as well as generating revenue for communities along its western frontier of less developed cities.
 
This studio will be looking specifically at the tourism rail connection between Xi’an to the city of Dunhuang, located in Northwestern Gansu Province. The city’s historical significance dates back to the Sui and Tang dynasties when it served as a main stop, commercial hub and gateway linking ancient china and the rest of the world. Its strategic location meant that it sat at the intersection of all three main silk routes (north, central and south) connecting India to Mongolia, and the northern Chinese plains and the ancient capitals of Chang’an, known today as Xi’an.  
 
The studio will delve into the topics of cultural tourism, related to John Ruskin’s formative influence on shaping contemporary debates in tourism studies, the impact of heritage tourism, modern forms of secular pilgrimage and the question of cultural identity as a commoditized experience. The notion of the tourist versus the traveler, a notion explored in Paul Bowles’ 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky provides another lens for the studio to investigate the relationships between architecture and the construction of the “tourist gaze”.  

Students will take on a speculative project wherein they will be asked to design a traveler’s rest stop (ke zhan, historically a tavern or inn) along the railway linking Xi’an and Dunhuang.

This course has an irregular meeting schedule. 

Rosanna Hu will be in residence on the following days: September 2, 3, 9, 10, 16, 17.

Lyndon Neri will be in residence Thursday and Friday on the following days: November 4, 5, 11, 12, 18, 19; December 2, 3; and for final reviews. 

The instructors will also hold class via Zoom on the following Wednesdays and Thursdays from 7pm to 11pm ET: September 22, 23, 29, 30; October 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 21, 27, 28.

Architecture for Statehood

If Washington, DC were to be granted statehood, what would the introduction of its new governing institutions and agencies do to the city and the federal district, spatially and symbolically? The new state, Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, would be the world’s fourth city state but would be the seat of three systems of governance, – city, state and federal – which would, in turn, multiply the three branches – executive, legislative , judicial – threefold. What forms and organizations at the urban and architectural scales would effectively articulate this complex amalgamation? 

The studio will reimagine the spatial relationship between the three branches with the intention to make the new state more just and accessible than others. The project will occur within L’Enfant’s plan of diagonal axes radiating from multiple nuclei which is superimposed upon and, by means of many anomalously wedge shaped buildings, fused with an elastic, orthogonal system of blocks.    

Washington Douglass Commonwealth will be the third least populous of the 51 states. The new state government’s programmatic scope will be modest compared to that of most states. The final projects for the studio can range in scale from the design of a single building to a conceptual development of an urban scale project. Examples of the former: a governor’s house located on axis with the White House near the Jefferson Memorial; a State House conjoined with the executive offices, residence and courthouse sited on a new sixteenth square within L’Enfant’s plan.  Example of the latter: conceptual massing and landscape designs for the new three branches programmed within a series of buildings on multiple sites across the city that either radically or subtly subvert L’Enfant’s scheme. In order to support a diverse range of projects, the scale and level of design development and the types of representation will be carefully considered and guided on an individual basis.  

The instructor has obtained a complete 3D model of the whole city including all relevant sites. This model, along with Google Earth, Maps and Bing Maps, will provide the information necessary to hit the ground running with analyses and conceptual designs for projects of diverse types and scales.