Porches, Portals and Passageways [M2]

This studio will be the second in a series that explores the potential of a small scale municipal building to engage the urban and social fabric of the city. In this time of radical societal change, with significant pressure on issues of health equity, the studio intends to explore new environments and contemporary realities activated by our enduring need to seek out the communal and aspire towards a more generous and sustained civic realm. We will be designing a 50,000 square foot community wellness center in South Central Los Angeles, within the Lynwood Civic Center. 

The studio will focus on the elements of architecture as a premise for making buildings. We will begin our studio module through examining building precedents – distinct spaces of movement and connection including architectural elements and thresholds such as stairs, ramps, landings, vestibules, windows, and doorways – without traditional programmatic function yet which are essential to the experience of architecture. These zones often inspire discovery and sense of wonder about the interrelatedness of spaces and atmospheres. We will speculate on how the architectural specificity of these elements can offer us new ways to relate to our built environment and blur the boundaries of formal development and social inhabitation. We will unpack the historic evolution from the compartmentalization of rooms towards the universality of accessibility in architecture. If historically thoroughfares drew disparate rooms closer by disengaging with those closer at hand through the hall and the doorway, we will be examining how a focus on architecture of connectivity and visibility can offer a new model of dynamic equilibrium linking the room to the promenade.

Matters of wellness have become increasing urgent societal issues, and we will discuss historical projects where matters of health were central to their conception, from the home to the sanatorium. Our focus on sustainability and resilience will be directed towards passive atmospheric conditions of daylight, ventilation, and porosity from inside to outside which are central to the climate of Southern California. We will be joined by experts from these fields for studio discussions throughout the term.

Our site is within Lynwood Park, currently occupied by natatorium that is slated for redevelopment and is integrated through the park to a middle school, a community center, and the city hall. Student projects will be developed with individual responses to the problem; our results will be viewed together as collective knowledge and an inventory of strategies. We will commence with precedent study and building design at the outset of the studio to optimize our seven week module. Participation in weekly studio meetings, readings, and collective documentation will be the basis of evaluation. All deliverables in the studio will be drawing based with no specific additional productions costs anticipated to complete the course. Any special accommodations for Zoom sessions can be made prior to specific studio meetings.

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The Black New Deal [M1]

The Black New Deal Studio is a Design Justice course exploring the architecture made manifest as a result of privilege and power structures that define this nations overlapping histories and systems of racial/spatial violence. We recognize that our values are validated by the spaces and places we design. For nearly every injustice, there is an architecture, plan, design that sustains it. Truly acknowledging, assessing, and responding to the complex racialized political systems that drive both our spatial realities and our spatial imaginaries, is perhaps, the most direct way for architects to move past the inherent position of complicity into one of anti racist action.

In this studio we are endeavoring to confront the new typologies of liberation born from dismantling systems of oppression. What physical spaces must we create on the other side of freedom. Students will commit to a continuous community design effort throughout the module. This is an exercise in deep listening and cultural understanding. Students will be expected to work both collaboratively and independently during the course. We will operate with an appreciation for lived experiences of the many communities we engage with throughout. We will engage with a bias towards appropriate action given the timeline of the project.

The studio is setup as two classes per week which will be divided to allow appropriate time to effectively bind community organizing methodologies and design justice practices to the building design. We will have at least one weekly guest speaker to help ground our efforts in first hand accounts of the issues on the ground in community. Fieldwork and research will be done collectively while your primary project will be done individually. Performance in the studio will be gauged by attendance, total engagement through out the module, and the radical
adherence to the voice of the community in the design of the end product. The studio critic will be available during the studio hours and during collectively determined times that allow for student flexibility. We will additionally setup a class communication channel with a select set of available hours aligned with the needs of students. A TA will be assigned to assist with session preparation and be available to manage a class notion page (Or similar to archive resources and group discussions.

The Outline of assignments is as follows:
1. Groundsetting documentation (week 1)
– A whole class collective Documentation effort that is intended to gather all of the preexisting conditions off place in order to better understand what questions have not
been asked and to clearly assess the geospatial perimeters and sociocultural parameters of place
– This work will be made publicly accessible via a format collectively determined.

2. Powermapping (week 2-4)
– Small groups will dive into the analysis of systems that drive outcomes of injustice to create a comprehensive power map
– The powermapping excercise will live on as a community artifact designed to support movement work happening both locally and nationally

3. Project (week 2-7)
– The promise of protopian spaces is infact an expectation of the design justice movement. As Angela Davis notes you have to act as if it were possible to radically change the world,
and you have to do it all the time.
– Small collective project teams will build out a typological library of spatial responses to a selected set of injustices as defined by a history of movements and the local voices on the ground.
– Your primary focus will be an Individual detailed midsized project, based in the case study city of Trenton, NJ, employing the strategies of design justice that focus on visioning radical spaces of racial, social, and cultural liberation.

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Parkitecture at Pullman [M1]

The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) has struggled to tell the complex story of America and to reflect the country’s rich diversity. Despite recent progress in this area, the majority of park visitors continue to be older, whiter, and wealthier than most Americans. This studio will explore the national park visitor center as a key site for welcoming a more diverse population and helping to connect people across differences, reinforcing the national parks’ potential as places of healing and personal growth.

Today more than one third of all national parks and monuments are in cities, a number that has steadily grown since the 1960s, when the NPS recognized the potential of urban parks and recreation areas to reach a wider range of users. This studio will examine one of the newest urban additions to the NPS system: the Pullman National Monument. Located on the far South Side of Chicago, Pullman was the first planned industrial town in the U.S., founded in 1880. It was the site of a consequential labor strike in 1894 and became further distinguished in the 1920s and 30s as a center of the African-American labor movement. While the company town eventually failed, much of the community’s architectural fabric and organizing spirit remains. Pullman was named a national monument in 2015 thanks to decades of work by community groups and local preservationists.

Our studio will design a new center for convening at the park that will serve both Pullman, the national monument, and Pullman, the Chicago neighborhood. Drawing on the area’s continued pursuit of community organizing, we will respond to the contemporary environmental and economic challenges facing Pullman as well as the opportunity to reposition its historic buildings and infrastructure toward new uses.

This course is offered on Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons, and is open to Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design students who will work in pairs of their selection after the first assignment. A specific design and/or research assignment will be given each week, that will cumulatively advance the design as a  final project. Guest speakers of diverse backgrounds and disciplines will join us each week to share their work and perspectives on Pullman.

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Xiamen Studio. Merging urban development and natural landscape.

Merging urban development and natural landscape: Searching for “spectacular or regular” projects?

The Studio Option focuses on the capacity of large-scale projects to direct the growth and transformation of open territories in big metropolises. It takes the example of Xiamen and its different extensions to investigate their potential for creating one or several centralities or leisure resorts well connected to the natural territory and provide new positive input to the local economy.

Simulation field. The region of Xiamen-Zhangzhou (China) seeks to diversify its economic base by revitalizing Xiangshan Bay, its seafront and natural landscape by capitalizing on the inherent qualities of its culture and traditions. Its position on mainland China and the monumental value of the historical centre of Xiamen present major potential for mobilization.

The gradual diversification of the economy of the great megalopolises of East Asia allows us to imagine the increase in free time of the new middle classes, interested in enjoying a cultivated natural landscape and taking part in sport and free-time activity, as has happened in other developed countries. In this potential field -of tourism and transitional residences-, it can be very attractive to simulate recreational and leisure uses in contact with nature and a reconsideration of the primary uses of the land: like the aquatic activities and fishing, among others. 
The enhancement of water as a spa, leisure and recreational space by means of the creation of various forms of water urbanisms has developed in all cultures: Southern Europe, the USA, later in Asia and more recently in the Middle East. Ways of approaching water have been very different and brought about major changes in the organization of pre-existing or newly created settlements, offering some truly paradigm models that offer a valuable range of experiences.

Relaunching these projects, with the twenty-first century well under way, requires us to take into account environmental commitments—natural space, energy use, etc.—and the great social challenges—inclusive development—that require local demands to be combined with the recreational needs of visitors in order to achieve a more just society. Those are the principles for the Urban Project to be developed in Xiamen-Zhangzhou area; it may simulate a multiple scale strategy including urban architecture and large landscape on its testing capacities.

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Building Respect on San Francisco’s Third Street

In the past decade (prior to the presence of the Coronavirus), San Francisco’s economy experienced its most substantial growth in nearly a century.  Two factors — the preferences of millennials and baby boomers to live in central cities, combined with the explosive growth of technology companies – created the perfect storm to fuel this growth.

The subsequent job growth and high salaries paid by tech companies, along with an acute housing shortage, begat the most expensive housing costs of any large city in America.

These economic benefits did not reach the city’s most vulnerable communities.  Fifteen percent of the city’s population remain below the Federal poverty level.  The city’s two historically African American neighborhoods, the Bayview and the Fillmore are greatly impacted by displacement pressures. In 2010 the City’s African American population was 6% of the city’s total, from a peak of 17%; it is likely to be less than 5% today.  

Third Street is the city’s primary urban corridor on the eastern edge of the city, along the Bay.  It extends seven miles from the downtown to the City’s southern boundary.  The southern half of Third Street is the core of the Bayview and the subject of this studio.  The booming northern half of this corridor and the more challenged southern half in the Bayview is separated by the City’s largest industrial zone, both a source of important jobs and the subject of environmental justice concerns.  

This studio invites students from all disciplines to work with members of the Bayview Community and the city of San Francisco, to envision a revitalized and unique future for Third Street, respecting the African American heritage.  After analyzing the corridor as a whole, students will work in teams on strategic areas of intervention to be defined with and by the community.  While considering a future for Third Street, it is the hope that the studio, with the community, will develop a new paradigm for a planning and community design process.

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SHADING SUNSET: Reimagining the Streets of Los Angeles for a Warmer Future

This studio reimagines the contemporary public realm of Los Angeles by reconceptualizing its streets as venues for social life in relation to sunlight. This work is occasioned by the recent acquisition of Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive by the Getty Research Institute. In partnership with the Getty, the studio will utilize the vast digital record of tens of thousands of Ruscha’s photographs of major LA boulevards taken between the 1960s and 2010s. This vast digital image archive will inform the development of machine learning processes that will allow students to extrapolate potential alternative futures for the city’s contemporary public realm.

Ruscha’s deadpan photographs of Los Angeles’s iconic streetscapes and automobile-based architectural typologies were appropriated by Denise Scott Brown as a graphic language applicable to the analysis of the Las Vegas strip as published in Learning from Las Vegas. Ruscha’s photographs were equally influential to Reyner Banham’s conception of the city’s Four Ecologies. In both cases, the postwar American city was seen through the lenses of limitless solar plentitude, extreme illumination, and the legibility of information at speed.

This image of the city seems ill-suited to the contemporary challenges of a warming climate, increasing heat island effects, and the disproportionate impact of heat events across class and race. The City of Los Angeles recently launched two urban design initiatives focusing on these topics. The design competition for a new streetlight standard invokes themes of illumination, security, and surveillance. The city’s initiative on street cooling suggests themes of shade, insulation, and refuge. In contemporary Los Angeles the modern goal of universal illumination is now more often associated with a loss of privacy, state surveillance, and policing. On the other hand, a more just, socially equitable, and environmentally desirable future seems to lie in the curation of a relatively more obscure public realm, a realm of shade and shadow.

The studio will convene a series of conversations with leading voices across a range of topics including the role of Ruscha’s image of the postwar American city, the shift from universal illumination to solar refuge in urban thought, and the potential for machine learning as a generative process for urban projects. These conversations will be informed by contributions from Harvard curator Dr. Jennifer Quick, as well as Eric Rodenbeck/Stamen, Andrew Witt/Certain Measures, and Eric de Broche des Combes/Luxigon, among others.

The GSD Office for Urbanization has worked in collaboration with Prof. Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez and the GSD Laboratory for Design Technologies to develop digital workflows based on the Ruscha archive. These workflows deploy StyleGAN generative models to project a limitless number of potential future LA’s extrapolated from the evidence of Ruscha’s images. Students will learn to curate these “machine hallucinations” in their development of potential design projects. Students will be invited to research topics of illumination, security and surveillance as well as shade, shadows, and privacy on the other. From this research students will be invited to develop unique street-specific thematic design projects at the scale of the street, sidewalk, park, building, block, or larger landscape.

The studio welcomes candidates from all departments and programs. It welcomes students with little or no experience with computation, as well as those with more experience. The studio forms part of the GSD’s Future of the American City Initiative sponsored by the Knight Foundation and supported by the GSD Office for Urbanization.

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Away…Offshore…Adrift… Shifting Landscapes, Unstable Futures

Nantucket, meaning "faraway land or island" or "sandy, sterile soil tempting no one” in Algonquin, is an island 30 miles off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts, formed through glacial processes and ice melt, and continuously re-shaped by strong ocean currents, winds, storms, and human constructions and impacts. It served as seasonal farming and fishing grounds for the Wôpanâak tribe (meaning "People of the First Light") and it came to be a haven for an extensive Black community, whose members could find stable work around the wharves, far from mainland racist attitudes and laws.  It has since become a summer playground for the elite—but this simplistic characterization denies the substantial year-round and seasonal workforces, racially and ethnically diverse, who power the robust service-sector economy.

Climate change is already bringing rising seas, regular flooding, and coastal erosion to many parts of the island, and threatening areas in and around the main harbor town that are low-lying, close to eroding bluffs, and to shifting sands.  While many are asking questions about how to protect, this studio will ask how to work with the dynamics that are in play—environmental, social, cultural, and economic—and will explore alternative futures for the island.  How can a re-thinking of the relationships between stability and instability lay new fluid grounds for more adaptive solutions? How can we render invisible processes and people visible and central to the conversations about land occupation, landscape and cultivation dynamics, and sustainable work practices?

This studio is part of the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge, a design initiative that will include interdisciplinary studios at Yale, UMiami, UFlorida, and Northeastern.  We will have access to live and recorded interviews /presentations by climate experts and local residents, and will collaborate with partnering institutions.  Work will be presented on Nantucket this summer. We will also participate in the Green New Deal SuperStudio to envision a “10-year national mobilization” of strategies centered on jobs, justice, and decarbonization.

This is a design-oriented, interdisciplinary studio focused on physical and social/cultural processes of making and re-making at various scales.  Landscape architects, architects, and urban designers are welcome to participate.

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LANDSCAPES OF THE VOID: URBAN PROJECTS ON RESIDUAL TOPOGRAPHIES.

Instructor: Danilo Martic

I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. 
– Edward Burtynsky

The built city has left a deep scar somewhere close; a negative space, a void equivalent to the extension and the proportions of the city, its materiality and its shape, invisible to most of those that inhabit it and that ignore the dynamics that have shaped the land. Immersed in the urban fabric of Santiago there are a number of sites that have been altered by extractive activities, such as gravel mines, large-scale sand pits and small-scale copper mines that remain dissociated from the city. These constantly changing landscapes generate an impact on the surface of the land comparable to that of a crater, and nonetheless, we still don’t know what to do with them once their productive life is over.

This studio’s work will focus upon developing skills and creative sensibilities with regard to project design in altered urban conditions. Specifically, we will develop, through formal design, landscape architecture projects for urban sites that have been affected by extractive activities; sites that have been subject to profound topographical transformations while in turn gravely deteriorating the city that enfolds them. We will specifically consider the ground as the fundamental material with which to operate, designing and modeling it to incorporate programmatic intensities, urban flows, ecological relationships, and occupation densities, with the intention to instigate the development of new urban ecologies.

The objectives of the studio are to advance the disciplinary bases of landscape architectural design and to develop a critical approach toward conceptualization and project design. We will navigate between theory and practice, with the intention of merging theoretical thinking with the practical aspects of design and project development. In this sense, intellect will not be privileged over technical competence, nor pragmatism over imagination. Rather, there will be a complete articulation of the many considerations that arise while developing a landscape project.

Students’ evaluation will be based on expositive meetings, case studies and their application to design problems, practical design exercises, and weekly reviews of their progress. 

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TAR CREEK REMADE

TAR CREEK REMADE: Environmental Legacy, Toxic Terrain and Re-Imagining the Future in the Tri-State Mining Area, Ottawa County, Oklahoma, USA.

TAR CREEK REMADE will explore technologies of toxic land reclamation and their agency in creating environmental and social equity within a critical practice of landscape architectural design and making. The studio site is the Tar Creek Superfund Site- the oldest, largest and most dangerous polluted land impacted by former mining activities in the United States. The intellectual question of the studio concerns – how does a tribal and non-tribal culture express itself through design in environmental form in a time of devastation and recovery?.

The studio will imagine alternative design futures working with the local Quapaw Nation as well as non-tribal communities living on and in the vicinity of Tar Creek as part of the Tri-State Mining Area of North-Eastern Oklahoma, USA. The site area of 40 square miles was formerly characterized as prairie and woodlands prior to mining activities that started in the 1900’s following the discovery of the largest subterranean deposits of lead and zinc in the world. A vast mining operation employing 11,000 workers in 250 mills was established that excluded the tribal communities and ran until the 1960’s when it closed down leaving a devastated landscape of polluted mining waste (chat), tailing ponds, sinkholes and tainted orange-yellow streams and riverways. The study area consists of the remaining principal towns of Quapaw, Commerce and North Miami. Two towns, Picher and Cardin have already been abandoned due to the extent of environmental hazards.

This area is contaminated by the residue of lead mining extraction resulting in an environmental legacy for the residents and the land and waterways of the region. Children under the age of six exhibit highly elevated levels of metals in their bodies causing neurological damage and serious health issues. The land and riparian ecology of the region has been devastated by acid mine drainage, land settlement of former mine shafts creates dangerous subsidence across the terrain affecting buildings, infrastructure and open space, waste ‘mountains’ of mining spoil and airborne lead dust pervade the area.
 
The studio will address how practices of landscape site design and environmental engineering can productively address the social, ecological and environmental realities of this toxic terrain. Class members working in groups and individually, and importantly through local tribal non-profit organizations and a range of experts will give spatial organization and advance detail design proposals for the remediation of, for example – the mining waste mountains and the intense pollution of local riverways including Tar Creek as well as reimagining the critical engineering of land subsidence and future form of the Superfund Site. Class members will be assisted by Rebecca Jim and Early Hately co-founders of Local Environmental Action Demanded, Inc. (LEAD), Quapaw Tribe in Miami, OK The studio is open to students in all GSD degree programs.

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Temporary and Ephemeral Structures [M1]

In light of recent global turbulence generated by a series of crises – environmental, economic, political, social, and medical – architecture is once again challenged with an increased need for flexibility and adaptability. These crises require architecture to nimbly respond to rapid change as its user-communities learn to do the same. Although we tend to think of crises as temporary, many have become chronic issues, requiring a reevaluation of traditional design solutions. Additionally, some building types are nearing obsolescence in the face of an increased desire for the built environment to accurately reflect contemporary understandings of intersectional identities, cultures, and lifestyles. Although such reevaluations have been needed for a long time, recent upheavals have brought them to the forefront of social conscience. Increased attention must be paid to designing strategic and tactically responsive ephemeral structures that work to combat the complex and highly mutable problems that we now face. As our world changes with increased rapidity, it will become necessary to contend with the element of time to create viable responses to large-scale issues. Instead of conceiving of architecture as obstinate and static, is there a way to invent a new model of resilient, flexible, and adaptable structures that can respond to unforeseen needs as they arise?  

Each student will be asked to select a site and program around which to design a flexible temporary structure, with consideration given to the logistics of its assembly and disassembly, materiality, fabrication method, and life cycle including possibilities for coexisting programs and combined usages. In addition to producing architectural solutions to ephemeral problems, the studio will study the effect of the resultant temporary structures on user experience and identity. Inevitably, the notion of lightness in terms of visual and physical weight as well as lessened ecological footprint will become a core advantage of these structures over traditional “slow-build” architecture. These ephemeral structures have the capacity to bridge traditional practice with contemporary innovation to become a new and more equitable hybrid architecture of the future.

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