Small institutions
Inspired by Louis Kahn's passionate and enigmatic interest in institutions and their origins, the aim of this studio is to investigate the possibility of a primordial architecture. A search for a “small” but essential architecture able to define the character of an institution. What is substantial? What is really defining a theatre, a library, or a school? We are looking for a new approach that transcends the functionality of pre-established programs and discovers their hidden nature, the invisible condition that characterizes each type of space and institution.
We aim to redefine and rediscover the architecture of the institution, “an organism that carries out a function of public interest” (according to the dictionary), “a world within the world”, “a center around which existential space is organized” (according to Kahn).
The Studio will take place in a specific location in Barcelona: a small plot between party walls, empty, with an irregular geometry, cohabitating with neighboring buildings that surround and condition it.
Each student will be assigned one of these possible institutions:
Library – Museum – School – Temple – Town Hall – Market – Theatre – Hospital – Swimming pool – Courthouse
The chosen site is voluntarily small – smaller than could be expected. The lack of space must be a positive condition, forcing us to take radical decisions. Necessary steps to discover the essence of the space: what is a priority, far from inherited or pre-established solutions.
To design the primordial (what really defines the place and the institution) we will need to go back and free ourselves from a part of what we have learned. To re-investigate the genesis of human activities, the sources and origins of what has historically set architecture.
This research requires a critical positioning. A confrontation with the established form, what could be a convention or just a trend. A fight against the status quo to allow us to redefine our values and our priorities, to discover the indispensable that qualifies as architecture.
We propose to deconstruct the great institutions, extracting the insubstantial and unnecessary to find their most elemental definition, their substance.
In the design of a new "small" institution, as in a good poem, it will be necessary to synthesize, reconstruct and retain only the fundamental. To find what awakens the most emotional dimension of architecture. What is necessary and unnecessary. What supports its meaning, its form, and its character. How is it built. What is it made of. How it behaves. It will be a precision exercise: learn to prioritize.
The reduction to the essential does not mean giving up ambition. It is an opportunity to find the most decisive expression of architecture (where nothing is superfluous or missing). A unique architecture that remains convincing over the years. Architecture that transforms inert matter into something vivid and extraordinary.
We will look for architecture that activates these processes from a pragmatic and polyhedral approach. From thermodynamics and interactions with the environment to the structure and tectonics of construction techniques. From space composition to social behaviors. Everything necessary to design and calibrate exceptional spaces. Spaces of inspiration and precision. Pre-institutions (or small primordial institutions) that redefine our priorities. A soft but radical plot twist, that perhaps can show us a different understanding of the architectural space.
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Fudo/Umwelt. Devising Transformative Environments in Japan
This studio is concerned with speculations (formal, material, social, cultural) on the future relations between architecture (design), people, and the city.
The site of the project and the focus of investigation will be the city of Tokyo. The studio will build on the frameworks established in the seminar, “The Project and the Territory: Japan Story,” and specifically its articulation of the concepts of risk, disruption and continuity as one way of imagining the architectural and urban potentials of a specific urban area. Familiarity with Tokyo or the seminar is not a prerequisite for participation in the studio, though the capacity to imagine difference is. The diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, experiences, and interests is also welcomed. In order to facilitate ideas and knowledge of the conditions, the studio will host a series of conversations between the members of the studio and with scholars and practitioners including, Atelier Bow-Wow, Inui Kumiko, Ito Toyo, and Ota Kayoko among others.
The premise of the studio is to question the replication of standard mixed-use formulas for the production of the city. Participants will be asked to devise alternative scenarios involving people and places—physical spaces and social relations both generic and specific- for the construction of transformative environments (umwelten). What role can design play in this process? How will it impact the life of the people?
The city is the site of repetitive and ever-changing scenarios and events, the accumulation of which constitutes the everyday. But how can the architecture and the landscape of the city- its buildings, streets, parks, and public spaces—make room for change, for the unexpected, and the temporal within the sites of permanence? How can the interrelations between the physical, social, and virtual worlds affect the way we not only experience our environments but also conceive and construct them in response to our contemporary conditions? How should the architecture and landscape of Tokyo and by analogy of other cities be different?
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BRIDGE WHERE YOU ARE: The Anamorphic Double
Uniquely called upon to embody purpose and beauty, bridges tend to be judged (more than any civic construction save the tower) on their singular object quality. The resolution of physics becomes synonymous with image, superimposing internal logic, with external symbolic forces of collective memory. This simultaneous condition, of rationality and iconicity, offers a double figuration: on the one hand, the instrumentalist objective to unify urban discontinuities, while on the other, the obligation to express the city’s identity. Amplifying this duality, bridges are both linear and volumetric, behaving as anisotropic entities, understood quite differently from the sequence of approach, than from a raking view. This bias could be said to lend itself to feeling (sensual experience) along the longitudinal axis, and knowing (shape recognition) in the transverse view. Or in Loos-ian terms, one might say that the interior experience is in the realm of culture, while the exterior countenance belongs to civilization. The result is a kind of urban anamorphosis in which a bridge might be seen through a lens of competing intrinsic and extrinsic figurations, offering fertile ground to reconcile formal / structural considerations with cultural / civic inquiry.
The studio will test the resolution of these competing interests within the context of each student’s current geographic location: 10 students x 10 sites x 10 bridges. Students will explore the creative tension and formal possibilities inherent in the resolution of the physics and aesthetics of the bridge typology, while confronting the idiosyncratic geometries and programmatic specificities inherent in their locale. The studio will commence with an individual site assessment, capitalizing on each student’s remote working condition and opportunity for an immersive approach to site, context and climate. This will be followed by collaborative precedent and preliminary spanning tests, culminating in individual site-specific proposals.
At a time of political and social discord, the studio will leverage the potency of civic force and the metaphor of connecting, through productive dialogues between the public realm (the haptic sphere of the individual vs the civic needs of the collective), tectonic assembly (dialogue between structure and skin, object and landscape), and iconic value (the intrinsically derived prosaic vs the extrinsically imposed poetic).
The studio will meet according to the GSD’s option studio schedule. The studio will also hold occasional workshops with structural engineers, possibly meeting at irregular times TBD.
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Midtown, Midrise, Mid-door
The studio will consider three recent and significant shifts in the design of collective housing in London: the viability and desirability of working from home; the emphasis on low carbon construction; and the requirements for energy efficient dwellings. Our response will be framed by three interrelated themes at their respective operative scales. The first, Midtown, addresses the changing nature of workspace and their related amenities brought about by the pandemic. As work and home increasingly become a single space, this compels us to rethink the concept of the 15-min city to perhaps a 5-min city. It points to the challenge of how we integrate workspaces in, or close to dwelling spaces, alongside third spaces – urban resources and amenities – that bridge and support the other two.
The second, Midrise deals with the potential for carbon neutral construction offered by cross laminated timber structures. The most effective scale for timber construction is in the midrise, between six to twelve storeys, and the structural spans afforded by the modularity of rooms. As CLT structures are often concealed by another external cladding material, making them mute to the tectonics of the city, we will explore the possibility of cultivating an architectural grammar of timber construction that is more conspicuous in its urban context, whilst maintaining the need for weather protection.
Mid-door, the third theme, challenges the 'fabric first approach' of Passivhaus in housing design. This static temperature, airtight approach often produces thick and solid facades and leaves housing typologies unexamined. We will instead adopt an adaptive comfort approach and explore the potential of using in-between spaces – mid-doors – as environmental buffers that mediate different micro-climatic zones. Mid-doors, as spaces to dwell in rather than merely to pass through, allows us to conceive of work, common spaces, and landscape as rooms in their own right. In this way, housing and workspace typologies can evolve meaningfully in response to climate change and the shift in how we live and work while contributing to a new conception of Midtown.
We will be working on a live site, at the centre of Hackney Wick, London. Located just west of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and part of the London Legacy Development Corporation masterplan zone. A formally industrial area on the edge of the Lea Valley, Hackney Wick has historically suffered from isolation and lies in one of London’s most socially deprived boroughs.The design task is to create a new mixed use neighbourhood centre here, comprising affordable housing, workspaces, artist studios and communal amenities.
Ian Lowrie, Associate at Serie Architects, will join the studio as Teaching Associate. We will be working with Dr. Wolfgang Kessling, a physicist, climate engineer and director of Transsolar on the principles of Adaptive Comfort. Peter Maxwell (Director of Design), Hannah Lambert (Design Principal,) of London Legacy Development Corporation, and Paul Karakusevic (Partner) of Karakusevic Carson will be our guide and critic as we approach the complex and challenging task of transforming Hackney Wick.
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Intuition and the Machine
This studio combines the experience of a multi-year design research agenda with the fresh outlook of a collaborative design experiment. The purpose of the experiment is to examine, through projects, the role intuition –as well as rules and protocols– plays in design. The difference between intuitive and machinic is not as clear-cut as doing something ‘manually’ versus doing it ‘with the computer’. There are manual moves that are machinic in spirit, just as there are intuitive deployments of algorithmic design, which the designer cannot explain.
The studio offers an open environment where students can chose a given site, brief, and context, and develop a proposal with the approach of their choice, the only requirement being a willingness to ‘play a game’, i.e. to approach the problem with a game-like rigor that will eventually enable comparisons between outcomes.
What does a willingness to ‘play a game’ actually mean? Participants will have two options: they can either learn & use a wide array of bespoke computational design strategies introduced by the instructor, or they can approach the design independently. The decision to proceed ‘mechanically’ versus ‘intuitively’ will be up to each individual and should take into account a particular combination of site, brief, and context, carefully curated by the instructor to fit either approach–and enable meaningful comparisons between projects.
There will be five sites/briefs/contexts to choose from, variously located in New York, Montreal, Oslo/Helsinki and Reading UK. All these sites have a key thing in common: over the past 12 years they have hosted international design competitions for small, medium, or large cultural facilities linked to contemporary art (museums, foundations, galleries, art centers). Each site will therefore come with a real-world brief to adhere to. Art spaces is the core brief of this studio, and participants will have access to related research from previous years. The sites are small, medium or extra-large. From Tabula Rasa to historic preservation orders, they are subject to varying degrees of pressure from immediate context.
Participants will gain access to a substantial technical and conceptual resources. Relevant research from previous studios (2013, 2015, and 2020) in the following related key areas will be shared on a need-to-use basis: art spaces, industrial (pre) fabrication, urban sedimentation , and, of course, computational morphogenetics.
Participants interested primarily in the machinic approach may opt to concurrently enroll in the instructor’s elective lecture course VIS-2227 Writing Form.
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The American Brick in Arcadia
‘The architect is a bricklayer who has studied Latin.’ – Adolf Loos
‘Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together.’ – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
‘Even a brick wants to be something.’ – Louis Kahn
The studio will investigate typological variations of the campus building type that utilizes the brick as its primary tectonic and material expression through the design of a new Multicultural Center on the Rice University campus in Houston.
The Arcadian model of the American campus, which began with the University of Virginia as the archetype, is being consistently challenged today. As the growth of cities encroaches upon the once remote campuses, along with the advancement in pedagogical approaches that promote active engagements with the city, the evolution of the isolated island campus as an ideal model for the city needs to be reexamined.
The Academic Building, the building block of the Arcadian campus, faces a similar challenge of fitting into an evolving master plan while accommodating for changing needs to foster collaboration and community.
Brick has been the building block for the construction of the American campus and a symbol of its tradition and permanence since the University of Virginia. Rather than perpetuating the use of the brick simply as a unifying stylistic armature for a campus’ identity, the studio will study and investigate the role that brick plays as a contemporary building material. Research will aim to reconsider archetypal brick detailing techniques and relations between forms and taxonomies, techniques and construction, and structural opportunities: serving as resources for the brick as both a tectonic and cladding material for the design of Multicultural Center.
Originally planned in 1910 by Ralph Adams Cram in the lineage of the University of Virginia, the Rice University campus is known for its architecture, landscape and planning. Architecturally, the campus has maintained an overall coherence over different periods of expansion, while at the same time being a palimpsest of different architectural styles and convictions. Organized around various quads, the Arcadian campus is a microcosm of Houston, an urban island situated within a city of fragments without zoning.
The 100,000 sq. ft. Multicultural Center will serve as a center for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for high-level strategic leadership around diversity initiatives and will house multiple diversity offices across the campus.
Research projects will be conducted in teams while the design projects will be developed individually. The research on typology and tectonics will be treated as collective knowledge and used as an inventory for individual projects. We will commence with precedent studies and building design at the outset of the semester-long studio. There will be invited guest presentations over the course of the semester, and 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 production costs anticipated to complete the course. Any special accommodations for Zoom sessions can be made prior to specific studio meetings.
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Extreme Urbanism (7), Imagining an Urban Future for Ishkashim, Afghanistan
Bordering Tajikistan and within the province of Badakhshan, one of the most natural disasterprone area in Afghanistan, lies Ishkashem. The name, Ishkashim stands both for the district and its capital, which is in a fertile valley that counts 20 villages engaged in cultivation, 3000 meters above sea level and carries a population of a 15,000-inhabitants.
Within an adverse context and region at risk of devastating hydro-metrological disasters including landslides, glacier lake outbursts, avalanches and earthquakes, Ishkashem nevertheless lies in an important strategic area along the border with Tajikistan. It commands the only route between Badakhshan, Shughnan and Wakhan that is accessible during winter season. This location at advantage will only get reinforced by the new multimillion-dollar investments from regional donors on a super highway trade corridor from China to Pakistan cross-cutting into Badakhshan province—including the 108km highway from Ishkashim to Baharak districts. For Ishkashim, this means a booming cross-border bridge and a resulting market hub – a condition that has already been in existence where all sides have engaged in robust trades, business and services for many years. Thus, Ishkashim (both on Afghan and Tajik sides) is increasingly considered an area of economic growth and of opportunities, offering a potentially safe habitat with sustained stimulus for livelihood and well-being. Ishkashim’s municipality is consequently in need of planning for these prospects, to foresee basic services (housing, critical infrastructure, vocational skills building, municipal services, etc.) that will absorb the marginalized and at-risk communities relocating from other disaster-prone areas.
This studio aims to imagine an urban future for Ishkashim that is responsive to its context, challenging the otherwise banal imaginaries of what urban life should look like. Tapping into the rich rural arena in which Ishkashim is located, the studio will seek to encourage speculation that anticipate the implementation of necessary physical, social, cultural , ecological, and economic infrastructures. Prospective programs of the Afghan government in Ishkashim already foresee teachers’ housing units, a traditional sports center and an airport, which should be integrated—and possibly deployed, to propose an inclusive, intelligent, and sustainable plan for Ishkashim as a ‘model town.’ The goal is to turn Ishkashim into a city and a community that can confidently embrace the future, aware of the challenges of the region (i.e. climate change, social and political instability, gender discrimination). The studio output,it is hoped, will propose strategic and tactical designs informed by the complexity of the site, building upon knowledge acquired through the semester via constant dialogue with local partners complimented by research exercises. The multi-scalar approach of the studio will allow for several types of outputs, from architectural projects to public policy strategies and propositions.
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In Search of Geographical Re-enchantment continued [M2]
In Search of Geographical Re-enchantment continued: a landscape intervention of function, atmosphere and identity
Both a Swiss and global phenomena, landscapes today are increasingly regarded as a resource serving a slew of lobbies such as agriculture, speculation, infrastructure, ecology, or recreation, each with a voice of its own except one – the landscape itself. Particularly on the urban periphery landscape fragments are rapidly transforming into well-functioning yet sterile places of constructed landscape imagery and semi-natural nature. Here terms such as atmosphere, landscape, nature, identity or sense of place put us as designers to the test. In this studio you will explore the potential of such seemingly faceless landscape spaces to offer us a powerful, site specific experience, to imbue them with what British writer Alistair Bonnet describes as a deeply needed geographical re-enchantment of our contemporary environment. What means do we have as designers to requalify residual landscape spaces through innovative design?
Site: On the urban edge of Zurich, the site is a newly constructed park built upon a strange landscape fragment at the front door of the Zurich Airport and encircled by the enormous, new multi-use complex, The Circle, by Architect Riken Yamamoto. The park is a glacial moraine hill consisting of layers of natural, artificial and artificially placed natural transformations. It represents a new form of urban nature, of landscape and built interventions, to be used daily by tens of thousands of airport employees, visitors and local residents.
Task: To create a personal reading and interpretation of the site, formulate clear theses about the site, and develop your own personal design language for an innovative, site-specific design intervention. We will practice developing conceptual designs and transforming them into powerful spatial experiences of site. The intervention you choose can take one of various directions: 1. a built structure of architecture, landscape or system of furniture, 2. use landscape means such as topography, paths, vegetation, or urban forestry, 3. the development of a spatial, ecological or user concept for the entire site.
Structure: four investigations structure the module: 1. analysis of a similar site in your homeland, 2. site analysis and interpretation, 3. design intervention, 4. visual / verbal communication of the site and intervention.
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In Search of Geographical Re-enchantment [M1]
In Search of Geographical Re-enchantment: landscape interventions between atmosphere, function + experience
Both a Swiss and global phenomena, landscapes today are increasingly regarded as a resource serving a slew of lobbies such as agriculture, speculation, infrastructure, ecology, or recreation, each with a voice of its own except one – the landscape itself. Particularly on the urban periphery landscape fragments are rapidly transforming into well-functioning yet sterile places of constructed landscape imagery and semi-natural nature. Here terms such as atmosphere, landscape, nature, identity or sense of place put us as designers to the test. In this studio you will explore the potential of such seemingly faceless landscape spaces to offer us a powerful, site specific experience, to imbue them with what British writer Alistair Bonnet describes as a deeply needed geographical re-enchantment of our contemporary environment. What means do we have as designers to requalify residual landscape spaces through innovative design?
Site: On the urban edge of Zurich, the site is a newly constructed park built upon a strange landscape fragment at the front door of the Zurich Airport and encircled by the enormous, new multi-use complex, The Circle, by Architect Riken Yamamoto. The park is a glacial moraine hill consisting of layers of natural, artificial and artificially placed natural transformations. It represents a new form of urban nature, of landscape and built interventions, to be used daily by tens of thousands of airport employees, visitors and local residents.
Task: To create a personal reading and interpretation of the site, formulate clear theses about the site, and develop your own personal design language for an innovative, site-specific design intervention. We will practice developing conceptual designs and transforming them into powerful spatial experiences of site. The intervention you choose can take one of various directions: 1. a built structure of architecture, landscape or system of furniture, 2. use landscape means such as topography, paths, vegetation, or urban forestry, 3. the development of a spatial, ecological or user concept for the entire site.
Structure: four investigations structure the module: 1. analysis of a similar site in your homeland, 2. site analysis and interpretation, 3. design intervention, 4. visual / verbal communication of the site and intervention.
GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions
Seeking Abundance – Designing Engagement and Experience for All
The landscape, 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, subaltern, oppressed communities are all terms that emanate from the non-reflexive view that inherently prioritizes its own experiences, 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 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, the immigrant, the blind, the black experience that must inform our design decision making. In this studio, we will learn how people of varied abilities and backgrounds feel, smell, touch, remember, and navigate the landscape, so as to create a responsive designed experience that, in serving their needs first, enriches all our experience.
The structure of this studio is one that can only happen at this precise juncture, which creates two remarkable conditions. First, we are all currently embedded in our home communities, which gives us access to a network we’ve been a part of for at least some part of our lives. Second, we are in a time where the voices of the underprivileged are being privileged.
1. Research – Our research will have three parallel tracks, to answer three questions. First, how do we find the partners in our communities who might benefit from our skills as designers, or the story that needs to be told through spatial experience? This is the upstream work that allows designers to bring our services to communities, organizations and institutions that are providing resilience, vision, or services to people everyday. Second, how do we engage with this topic or partner to understand how design can serve their needs? We will begin by understanding the long history of engagement, currently prevalent modes of engagement, and have guest speakers share their experiences and methods in each mode. Finally, how has design been able (or not been able) to respond to the needs of differently abled people or communities whose culture has traditionally been sublimated? These will be short case studies on approaches such as Deaf Space Design, design in Black Space, or Indigenous Planning.
2. Design the Process – 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. Experience Study – We will choose a sensory experience and work with to explore its properties and the effects that can be created through it. Each person will create a precise sensory experiment to better understand how a heightening or diminishing of one sense changes our relationship to the others, accesses memory, creates a feeling of well being or anxiety. Through this work we will develop a new design vocabulary, or a new landscape palette, that accounts for so much more of our body’s ability to take in information than we as designers typically tend to.
4. Design the Place – Finally we will design a new kind of place, space, memorial 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, or a large, newly preserved landscape. This could also be a new kind of lifeway center, housing for a rural, elderly community, or a new city scape that caters to the particular needs of a precise refugee population.
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