Studio Abroad. Small is Big; Newborn Typologies from the City without a Manifesto
“For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.”
– Christopher Alexander
Tokyo is a city in a constant state of becoming; metabolism reigns mighty as history and sentimentality are casted easily aside to make way for “newness” that comes already with an expiration date. Tokyoism[1] is an irresistibly veiled assemblage of the futuristic, the traditional, the ineffable, the finite, all bundled in a poignant narrative of the relational field of networked “super legal”[2] objects. Antithetical to an archipelago of skyscraper blocks and architectural debris floating, self-absorbed, in its own gleeful solitude, Tokyo is an ever-fluctuating, undulating network; thoroughly connected with embedded redundancies, resilient to hollowing, and simultaneously a stubborn collective of medieval structures, both physical and ephemeral. This city is a great laboratory and it is up to us to tease out an unintended, but nonetheless projective theory of Tokyo that may be more about the future of global cities.
Tokyo is a polycentric city, conceived from its inception and subsequent historical processes to develop in multiple nodes. It serves as a petri dish for a decentralized, highly distributed, and differentiated form of interventions in all scales. With this in mind, this studio will take a critical stance against the prevalent organizational model of consolidation and centralization insofar as urban developments have been concerned. We will begin by analyzing traditionally mega or XL-sized building typologies that occupy vast territories in other parts of the world, thrive in them, and perhaps some that can also be found in Japan. To name a few: shopping malls, hotels, office towers, high-rise condominiums, libraries, museums, theaters, concert halls, universities, convention centers, city halls, gymnasiums, stadia, aquariums, regional transportation hubs, airports, parks, parking garages, seawalls, power plants, water treatment facilities, dams, solar parks, and so on.
After a thorough analyses of those large to extra-large scale typologies, we will rigorously search for ways in which to dissect, fragment, atomize, combine efficiently, perhaps even absolve some redundancies in those bespoke contemporary megaliths into a distributed system instantiated into Tokyo. Thus, the whole city can potentially become a platform that thrives on diversity—in many senses conjured by that word—for complex coexistences of differences rather than demarcated into zoning segments for an efficiency of control, both politically and environmentally. Only then can Tokyo become a truly cosmopolitan global megapolis after the 2020 Olympics, and by chain reaction, can Japan become an open, unisolated archipelago in a sea of capitalism or whatever social order that may rise. Conversely, by releasing the programs from the sophisticatedly controlled interiority of a megastructure, a new kind of metabolism can emerge. This studio seeks to invent new typologies of architectural and urban space of diverse differences, rather than similarities; heterogeneity over homogeneity; heterotopic over utopic; exceptional over banal; small over large gestures.
Small is a new big, as it shall consume the city as a whole.
[1] Kaz Yoneda, 2014
[2] Yasutaka Yoshimura, Super Legal Buildings (Tokyo: Shokokusha, 2006).
Neuralisms Shenzhen: Fictions of Type and Territory
Shenzhen is China’s city of the future, a manufacturing and product development hub unlike any in the world. It is a place where innovation in the material world is increasingly enabling an entirely new vision of culture. Perhaps there is no better place to anticipate the lifestyle of the future—and how the city is integrated with the countryside—than the place where that future is being manufactured.
This studio will consider AI, data science, remote sensing, and other new modes of encoding and representing landscape and architecture as the raw material for a fictional and imaginative lifestyle futurism emerging in Shenzhen. Leveraging technologies of deep learning, neural imagination, and recombinant gaming, the studio will also draw on speculative fictions to imagine types and territories for the lifestyles of Shenzhen’s coming golden age.
Shenzhen is a planned city par excellence, created almost ex nihilo forty years ago from a framework of overlapping national and local mandates and policies. The result of this strict and fastidious planning logic is an archipelago of architectural, urban, and landscape monocultures, blocks of single types set in surprising juxtapositions to each other. Taking these individually homogenous and collectively diverse blocks as fuel, we will embrace ways to recode, remix, and recombine these strict distinctions into hybridized and interleaved inter-territories and between-types.
The project should consider the unique relationship of Shenzhen to the larger Pearl River Delta region, playfully rethinking near and far, locality and territory. In a sense, each project may become a network of territories shrunk to a microcosm, a specific view of the entire region distilled to an intensified block.
From our menagerie of mutant types and territories, we will speculate on the rules of life in Shenzhen’s coming golden age. Drawing inspiration from but moving beyond computational precedents, we will use gaming engines to develop logics of mutating and recombinant urbanism grounded in a projection of leisure and culture. Here we will anticipate a future in which innovation, industry, leisure, and agriculture are all intensely local and densely intermixed, a state in which dozens of territories are interdependently stitched together through electronic and biological technology.
These speculations will be represented in media appropriate to them—using dynamic projection mappings, film, and advanced simulation—in preparation for a major public exhibition of the studio’s work in Shenzhen in the fall of 2020.
TAISHAN: Designing the Rural Cosmopolis in China
Cosmopolitanism and its vibrancy are commonly associated with urban life; rural life by contrast is often seen as static, disconnected and monocultural. China’s rapid urbanization over the past two decades has led to a decline of its countryside, outward migration, an increasingly poor standard of living and a vanishing rural community. However, an emerging population of returning rural emigrants who have experienced and lived cosmopolitanism in their host cities have been transformed through the everyday negotiations of cultural differences. Taishan, in the Pearl River Delta region, experienced China’s earliest emigration in the 19th century and today retains a distinct diaspora community sustained by the clanship network. As a result, the culture is rooted in ancestral history coexisting with transnational mobility and openness to difference.
This studio will explore tourism as a catalyst for rural revitalization in Taishan. The aim is to support existing social capital while stimulating new development through stakeholder collaboration and local empowerment. The project demands strategies to incentivize returning migrants and small to medium scale entrepreneurs to settle in rural areas that provide an alternative lifestyle for economic and social mobility. Within rural revitalization, thematic tensions are considered: heritage and development. The challenge in defining what is heritage in an urbanizing rural context and how heritage is inherited and integrated into future developments will be of central importance.
Students will work in interdisciplinary teams focused on two tasks: 1) at the macro scale – a territorial design for Duanfen Town; 2) a built-form intervention for Tingjiang Village. Within these scales, strategies will be developed in parallel with tangible outcomes. The studio addresses revitalization issues examining the macro to the micro, tangible and intangible, in a dialogue that informs the whole process. Taishan’s cultural background and socio-economic restructuring creates an opportunity to recuperate the social capital between the ancestral clanships and local governance in facilitating the regeneration of the region. The complexity of issues requires concepts born out of the intersection of planning, architecture and landscape architecture.
The overarching goal of the studio is to facilitate Taishan’s transition from traditional agrarian to a new rural economy, from traditional farmers to cosmopolitan ‘rural’ residents along with the spatial transition from villages to contemporary rural settlements. The studio poses the following:
• How can new development transform the local residents from passive beneficiaries to active stakeholders?
• What urban qualities can be introduced without threatening the positive rural qualities?
• How can the existing clanship network be maintained in the context of a transforming marketing system?
• How can new agricultural enterprises be sustainably integrated economically with Taishan’s rural community?
• What can new development learn from the existing villages at the urban and architectural scales?
The studio is in collaboration with local universities, organizations and government agencies. The outcome of the studio will culminate into a set of design strategies and policy recommendations for action and implementation presented to the People’s Government of Duanfen Town.
Note: This studio will meet on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Elaine Kwong will be in residence for all classes. David Rubin will be in residence on February 4, 5, 18, 19; March 10, 11, 24, 25; April 7, 8, 21, 22; and the final review on either May 1, 4, or 5. Kathryn Firth will be in residence on January 28, 29; February 11, 12, 18, 19; March 10, 11, 24, 25, 31; April 1, 14, 15, 21, 22; and the final review on either May 1, 4, or 5. This studio will travel to Taishan, China.
PUBLIC FIGURE/PRIVATE GROUND: Redevelopment of the FBI Site in Washington, DC
In 1790, Washington, DC, was established as the seat of political power in the newly formed United States. The plan and building form within the core of the city reflect an underlying premise: that the public sphere is primary to the private—where public spaces, buildings, and monuments are emphasized as the figure of the city, and private uses are construed as the background or urban fabric. This emphasis continues to this day in the regulatory processes that promote streetscape development, limit the height of buildings, and control the location of public projects; it gives Washington a character that is unique in American cities.
Designed by the Chicago firm Murphy & Associates and constructed between 1965 and 1975, the J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters building is a 2.8 million square foot complex in a Brutalist style on a seven-acre parcel facing Pennsylvania Avenue, the city’s primary ceremonial avenue between the US Capitol and the White House. Despite its highly prominent location, the building is inwardly focused around a central court and with a fortress-like perimeter. It has been labelled by some critics as the ugliest building in Washington. Due to its age, deferred maintenance, and changes in the workplace, the building has been deteriorating and considered in poor condition for the past decade. It was the subject of a proposal in the mid-2010s that would have relocated the FBI to a suburban location and allowed the building to be razed for redevelopment. These plans for the site—diagonally across from the Trump Hotel in the renovated Old Post Office building—were halted by the Trump Administration in 2017.
This studio will explore possible scenarios for the building and site, informed by the wide-ranging constraints, possibilities, and complexities of the property. Themes to be considered include the expression of political power in architecture, the potential preservation of iconic Brutalist architecture and the urban landscape legacy of Pennsylvania Avenue, the relationship to the history of urban redevelopment in DC and the Pennsylvania Avenue context in particular, the integration of innovative or resilient systems, as well as the opportunities for new uses on the site—whether public or private, single- or multi-use, monumental figure or background fabric. Central to the studio will be contending with the property’s symbolic and rhetorical potential.
Beginning with a thorough analysis of the building, site, and Pennsylvania Avenue context, students will work to develop a deeper understanding of the patterns of history, use, urban systems, and physical design that have shaped the property. A planned trip to Washington, DC, is included in this initial research period and will give the students first-hand experience of the existing architecture, its immediate setting, and its place within the capital city. Based on this research, students will develop their own program for the site, leading to a design that addresses the salient issues of preservation, design expression, public space, and symbolic context.
Given the complex, cross-disciplinary issues raised by the project, students from different appropriate backgrounds are welcome and encouraged in order to promote collaboration and insight.
After Amazon – What’s Next for LIC?
On February 14, 2019, New York City received an unexpected valentine from Amazon, announcing their withdrawal from a major new campus expansion project dubbed “HQ2.” After an unprecedented competition among 238 US cities and municipalities, New York, along with Alexandria, Virginia, thought that it had won the intense competition for the 25,000 new jobs offered by Amazon for their new East Coast campus. But after 14 months of negotiations and the announcement that Amazon would move half of its headquarters to the Long Island City waterfront, local political pressure surfaced, and Amazon withdrew its selection of New York. New York’s Governor and Mayor’s secret negotiation with Amazon was viewed as an unacceptable backdoor deal. Their project entitlement approach included a little-used state process that was considered a runaround the city’s well established ULURP process, as well as a $1.5 billion tax benefit package that was viewed as a corporate giveaway to one of the world’s richest companies.
This studio will explore, study, and develop design concepts for the site in Long Island City, Queens, that was chosen, and ultimately abandoned, by Amazon. This prominent 15-acre waterfront parcel lies fallow and is looking for its next life. Amazon was presented with four possible sites in NYC, suggesting that this location has valuable, untapped potential as a new campus for workers, residents, and other uses. Given the extraordinary growth that Long Island City has undergone in the last two decades, this site is primed to be a key component in the continued activation of this neighborhood as the next engine for growth in New York City.
The studio will focus on developing an urban design approach that leverages the attributes of the site’s waterfront location while addressing the needs of the existing and growing communities in Long Island City and New York City at large. The studio will begin with an intense analysis of the site and neighborhood with a deep dive into the identification and definition of who this “community” is. This analysis is intended to develop a deep understanding of the physical, political, and community context in advance of the proposed site visit to New York.
Students will develop their own program for the site, responding to the needs of the community and balanced with the realities of the real estate market in New York. Beyond program definition, key issues include the development of a site plan that better connects the site to the rest of the neighborhood, waterfront activation that builds upon the success of nearby Gantry State Park, and approaches to resilient waterfront design, along with building planning and design that reflects current and future trends in innovative workplace, residential, retail, and potential onsite light manufacturing.
ROCKET CITY: Envisioning a Future for the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL
The US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is NASA’s official Visitor Information Center for the Marshall Space Flight Center and receives over 1 million visitors per year. Its world-renowned Space Camp teaches engineering to children and young adults surrounded by the facts and artifacts of space exploration. Opened in 1970, the center acts as a showcase for the nation’s space and defense programs and hosts authentic training simulations for space, aviation, robotics, and cyber instruction. The complex is nested within a 432-acre landscape carved from the US Army’s Redstone Arsenal and includes classrooms, exhibition halls, residential dormitories, and a hotel. An Energy Trail links the buildings with the Exploration Park, the Botanical Gardens, and a sports complex.
Enabled by an infusion of federal resources, the US Army is preparing to lease an additional 104 acres to the US Space and Rocket Center for new facilities, programs, and landscapes. Participants in the studio will work across scales and create both a short-term and long-term campus master plan for the center’s expansion. Short-term programs include a new headquarters and operations building, education center, experiential museum, mixed- and special-use zones, and an enhanced connectivity framework of roads, trails, pedestrian paths, and gathering spaces. Long-term efforts significantly expand Exploration and Rocket Parks and add additional housing opportunities and exhibition halls. Students will interact with the Executive Director of the center as well as the Directors of Education, Museum and Exhibitions, Space Camp, and Advancement.
This studio is open to all students in the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design departments. A site visit is planned to Huntsville, Alabama.
The Dam Studio: Climate Change Along the Mystic
Climate change presents one of the greatest challenges for cities. Extreme weather stresses infrastructures, nature, and the built environment. It impacts people, their health, safety, livelihood, and lifestyle. The capacity to adapt will determine the growth and decline of cities worldwide as 55 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a number that is expected to increase to 68 percent by 2050[1].
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the broader Boston metropolitan area have been a model for advanced collaborative thinking to address climate change. The studio will take advantage of the readily available wealth of regional climate knowledge, data, and analyses, and will explore the local implications of climate change on the Upper Mystic Watershed located within the Boston metropolitan area. It covers 76 square miles, roughly one percent of the land area of Massachusetts, and the upper watershed refers to the freshwater area above the Amelia Earhart Dam.
The dam is at the risk of being flanked or overtopped by 2050, which would impact communities in the upper watershed area. Concurrently, more frequent and intense precipitation coupled with increased densification and loss of pervious surfaces has increased the occurrence of stormwater flooding in the cities and towns within the river watershed.
The studio will explore the integration of climate science projections into planning strategies and design projects at the regional scale while also developing specific scalable design solutions derived from nature-based approaches, urban typologies, or infrastructure adapted to climate change. The studio is organized into three concurrent tracks of exploration:
1. Review of the science of climate change to understand its basis, probabilities, modelization, and risk and vulnerability assessments
2. Development of clear problem statements to define the planning and design projects and assess the effectiveness of the proposed flood-resilient strategies
3. Exploration of design solutions for a watershed master plan or for selected landscape and urban design projects adapted to climate change
Prerequisites: Knowledge of GIS.
[1.] “The 2018 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects” is published by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA). See https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html.
Osaka – World Expos as Transformative Engine: Potentials for the Regular City
This studio focuses on the capacity of big urbanistic projects to direct the growth and transformation of large metropolises. It takes the example of Osaka and its different expos and investigates their potential for creating one or several centralities in this diverse, dynamic city. Osaka, a large and well consolidated city, is the subject of study, which will focus on select infrastructures that were created for expos in the 20th century: an example of a multi-expo city in 1903, a Metabolist paradigm in 1970, and the use of well-differentiated locations in 1990.
The proposed new World Expo in 2025 offers an opportunity to rethink some of the city’s metropolitan axes as it prepares to host this big event. It is also a chance to explore more sustainable systems of urban mobility, prioritizing the Osaka Metro as the most efficient option for urban flows, with spaces designed for pedestrians, cyclists, and other alternatives to automobiles.
It is important to understand and decipher the complexity of urban form as a catalyst for other variables, including the program’s economic and social content, which are both evolving at a very fast pace.
The studio is part of a wider research project on “Revisiting the Urban Grids,” which may serve as a basis for the research of the studio. Students in the studio are recommended to enroll in the seminar DES 03472, “Urban Grids: Score for Designing the City,” which provides a complementary theoretical approach to this form of city design that can be applied to the case of the Osaka Metropolis.
The studio is open to students from Urban Design and Architecture. It will require a high level of representation skills and design ability. A visit to Osaka, Japan, is planned.
Note: This studio will meet on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Joan Busquets will be in residence on January 28, 29; February 4, 5, 11, 12, 25, 26; March 3, 4; April 7, 8, 14, 15. Dingliang Yang will be in residence on February 18, 19; March 10, 11, 31; April 1, 21, 22. This studio will travel to Osaka, Japan.
GET READY HOLYOKE! Climate Preparedness 2050
This design studio focuses on Holyoke, the second-poorest city in Massachusetts and one of the 25 designated Gateway Cities. Sitting along the Connecticut River, Holyoke was the first designed industrial town in America, and thus has a fascinating infrastructure morphology of canals, hydroelectric dams, historic buildings, and warehouses. It also has a lively and diverse cultural scene that includes many from Puerto Rico as well as other first-generation climate refugees. The city’s leaders are young visionaries who wish to create a pathway to a resilient, adaptive city that can thrive as it responds to climate change and adapts to new ways of life, technologies, and practice. This studio will take us beyond this remit to include mitigation (decarbonization) as part of the design approach. As students focus on reshaping the landscape of Holyoke’s urban core, they will learn to research and understand climate impacts that the city will face in the near future of 2050.
Working collectively, the studio will first develop a Public Realm Master Plan that incorporates landscape-based design strategies along with new technologies that can be integrated to help generate ecosystem services. The design will use large-scale landscape principles and resilient, adaptive, and mitigative strategies and techniques. The resulting roadmap/vision for the master plan design will consider stormwater management, heat island effect, afforestation, flood mitigation, energy infrastructure, materials of high albedo, low-carbon, and allow surface water percolation, land use, future economies, transport, and public open space, as well as address cultural and social issues of economic and environmental equity. After establishing the master plan, each student will identify a critical site that exemplifies climate readiness, which may help the city in prioritizing such initiatives. Students will convey their ideas by using hand sketches, plan, section, illustrative drawings, physical models, and computer renderings, and will be introduced to two analytical landscape tools, i-Tree and the Carbon Calculator, both of which will test the effectiveness of their proposals for climate-positive design. The city of Holyoke’s goal for the future is to keep and attract people to Holyoke through making the city more livable and equitable through the evolution of the public realm landscape.
The outcome of this studio will be formatted in a book and projects will be exhibited in Holyoke for public display and discussion. The studio is open to the entire GSD community. There will be two field trips, to Holyoke and to New York City.
Note: This studio will meet on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Paola Sturla will be in residence for all classes. Martha Schwartz will be in residence on January 28, 29; February 18, 19; March 3, 4, 24, 25, 31; April 1, 7, 8, 21, 22. This studio will travel to Holyoke, Massachusetts, and New York City, New York.
SMO PARK +/Climate Infrastructure, Arid Landscape
Santa Monica Municipal Airport (FAA code SMO) is a 227-acre general aviation airport about six miles from the Pacific Ocean that largely handles private and corporate flights. It has been the subject of much controversy and many legal fights due to the noise, pollution, and potential safety threats it generates. After many years of battles between the FAA and the city, the federal government agreed to close the airport in 2028, and the city will convert it to parkland. Despite this decision and Santa Monica’s relative wealth and prosperity, the city is struggling to imagine how it will afford to build and operate a new, large public park. More generally, Metro Los Angeles continues to burn and flood at an increasingly alarming rate due to the rapidly accelerating effects of climate change, homelessness is at a critical level, and the whole state of California continues to put pressure on food, water, and energy supplies in ways that exacerbate the state’s climate- and environment-induced challenges.
The studio is set within this complex environmental and social context, and will explicitly explore the nature of what a contemporary public park can and should be. The studio will take on questions of the role of the public realm within an arid environment, and in an era of climate change. Students will be asked to develop multifunctional park proposals for this large-scale urban site that address critical food and water supply issues, with potential secondary agendas for energy generation, provision of social housing, and/or revenue generation.
This will be a design-oriented, interdisciplinary studio focused on park and landscape design with integrated thinking on infrastructure, architectural elements, and overall urban design strategy. Drawing, modelling, time-based animation, and detailed design will all be expected. Landscape architects, architects, and urban designers are all welcome to participate.