THAILAND REMADE: Lower Chao Phraya Flood Plain, Pathum Thani, and the Technological Imagination

THAILAND REMADE explores technology and its relationship to design in landscape architecture. The studio will develop alternative futures for Thailand’s Lower Chao Phraya floodplain using environmental engineering, landscape construction and technological imagination as a source of design ideas rather than as a set of prescriptive techniques instrumentally shaping the landscape. Class members will give material form and detail to the creation of a design language for water detention and control, reclamation of contaminated soils and water, removal and disposal of municipal waste (hazardous, construction) and imported e-waste and the reconstruction of agriculture, infrastructure and public space using the themes of ‘labor’, ‘permeability’ and ‘beauty’ as a guide within the context of Thai culture and citizens.

The Lower Chao Phraya floodplain is located between the Pathum Thani province, the City of Bangkok and the Gulf of Thailand and comprises highly disturbed coastal forests, salt flats, networks of historic khlongs (canals), dense urban riverfront(s) in the capital city Bangkok and underdeveloped perimeter districts. Over the past few decades, the dispersed form of Greater Bangkok has gradually transformed its agricultural periphery into a mixture of urban-rural landscapes.

The initial geographic and social perimeter of the studio consists of Greater Bangkok and its approximately 9.5 million population comprising a majority of Thai ethnicity but also communities of Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, Malay and Chinese residents.  Class members initially working in teams will confront the realities of environmental change arising from seasonal flooding from the mountains in the region’s north, extreme monsoon rains over the region and salt water inundation and land retreat south from the Gulf of Thailand and this year, even drought caused by climate change and carry out an inventory and critique of local, traditional and emerging new site technologies and techniques employed in Thailand, individually design a repertoire of outdoor test plots and experimental stations as ‘study windows’ in the Greater Bangkok area to address water, land and waste remediation, stabilization and management and then apply them strategically as ‘acupuncture’ within a future vision of the Pathum Thani district, north of Bangkok as well as a design language and expression using an individually developed technological imagination. The class will work between detail design and material invention and the planning of larger infrastructural landscapes incorporating industry, energy, food distribution, educational centers and movement of goods and people. A required sponsored field trip to Greater Bangkok will take place in early February. The studio is open to A, LA, and UD students, although the focus will be on landscape design responses to place, processes and cultural practices in the Thai context.

Note: This studio will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Niall Kirkwood will be in residence for all classes. Kotchakorn Voraakhom will be in residence for the first class, the studio trip, the midterm review, and the final review on either May 1, 4, or 5. This studio will travel to Bangkok, Thailand. 

Rewilding Seoul

This studio aims to elaborate a series of rewilding strategies for multiple sites in Seoul to reveal their immanent nature and mitigate the impact of climate change. Speculative, engineering-based, and holistic approaches, which take into account the cultural and physical uniqueness of the site, are necessary to successfully rewild any part of such highly urbanized and manipulated lands.

The initial phase of the studio is focused on investigation and site identification. Seoul and Boston will be comparatively researched, focusing on the lost and immanent nature of both contexts. The city of Boston evolved with an integrated park system that remains discernible. By contrast, Seoul’s development interweaves few connections to the mountains and a river that surround and traverse it. By researching how the two cities respectively underwent urbanization, and by recognizing what has been lost and what remains, each student will locate their own site in which to develop a rewilding strategy. Workshops on current climatic technology and the philosophy of wilderness of America and East Asia are planned.

The studio will travel to Seoul, Korea, to visit prospective sites. A one-day design exercise at the Seoul National University Graduate School of Environmental Studies will enable students to exchange ideas.

The latter part of the term is reserved for design research and the design of individual sites. Students will have a level of freedom in terms of their concentration, research media, and representation, although the importance of sectional thinking will be shared across the studio. The design process and the design product must proactively incorporate both the knowledge acquired through the workshops and field trip, as well as students’ own research findings.

This studio is open to A, LA, and UD student, and the instructors welcome and appreciate diverse disciplinary approaches.

Note: This studio will meet on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Jungyoon Kim will be in residence for all classes. Yoon-Jin Park will be in residence for the studio trip, as well as on March 4, 5, 11, 12; April 8, 9; and for the final review on either May 1, 4, or 5. This studio will travel to Seoul, South Korea. 

Sic. Building Syndrome

“If we are to discuss the faults of building and their correction, we ought first to consider the nature and type of the faults that may be corrected by the hand of man; as the physicians maintain that once a disease has been diagnosed it is largely cured.”
—Leon Battista Alberti

This studio is about visuality, or how vision changes from being a physical (or purely geometrical) behavior to becoming a social fact. Guided by an affinity for architecture to succeed something found—from an existing building with inherited social, economic, material, or drawn histories—we aim to study how different acts of revision—addition, subtraction, recycle, and reuse—are appraised by public perception.

When architecture works on an existing building, authorship is replaced with audience. Since the existing conditions will assume judgement on the architect’s ultimate work, the first act of revision is as simple as looking closely. And so, the pace of design is intentionally slowed down so that imperfections, occasional faults, or corrosive histories (i.e., sic) might be embellished or amended toward balancing truth with novelty.

The studio is bracketed by two parts: observation and projection. Part one will require students to produce an unconventional set of as-built drawings for an existing building situated within the American city of Tulsa, OK. The site offerings include five distinct building classifications: warehouse (Midwest Equitable Meter Building, 1929), mercantile (Guaranty Laundry Building, 1928), theater (Riverside Studio, 1929), office (Tulsa Club, 1927), and church (Boston Avenue Methodist Church, 1929). The context has been selected for its charged social history (oil economics, race riots, political conservatism) as well as its bounty of noncanonical buildings (by then-23-year-old architect Bruce Goff). Four distinct ways of looking—body (or naked perception), technology (or mediated perception), entertainment (or false perception), and politics (or public perception)—will be used to describe the existing building not as it is but as it is seen by the student. Part two will require the students to outline and implement strategies—through drawings, models, and small material assemblages (roughly one foot by one foot)—for making precise alterations to the existing building on view. The alterations will go beyond simple categories of preservation or renovation. Instead, the alterations will leverage visuality as architecture’s essential resource.

This studio has an irregular schedule. Thomas Kelley will be in residence on January 23, 24, and 30; February 20, 21; March 5, 6, 26, 27; April 9, 10, 23, 24; May 1, 4, 5, for Final Reviews. Carrie Norman will be in residence on January 23, 24; February 20, 21; March 5, 6 (TBD). The instructors also be available via Skype in the intervening weeks. This studio will travel to Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

Geometry, Order, and Mannerism

The architecture of the Italian Renaissance is an architecture consisting of incomplete individual buildings and magnificent urban fragments. The artistic return to antiquity was above all a creative act set against a background of only fragmentary knowledge. Often with modest means, the master-builders of the Renaissance created works that have still not lost their expressive power today. The Renaissance buildings that appeal to us draw their power from the tension and resistance intrinsic to works that equally admit ideal and reality, imagination and contradiction, recklessness and conformism.
 
The studio Geometry, Order, and Mannerism is an optimistic answer to a moment of crisis. We will look for strategies that allow us to absorb contradictions and conflicting goals into a project. The studio is therefore affirmative rather than critical. It values the fragmentary and open character of a project. This could result in work that feels artificial, not natural, work that is self-conscious and demanding – an architecture that values the observer as an intelligent, critical opposite. This semester we will design buildings in this spirit. We will look simultaneously at buildings from the Renaissance and from today. The richness of architecture is the theme of the semester.
 
Cambridge’s urbanity is determined by the dichotomy between Harvard’s formal plan and its surrounding 19th century urban street grid. Inside the grid, the individual character of each building creates a rich yet fragmented urban texture. This semester we will work along Broadway and we will explore the possibilities of its urban development. Each student will design an urban apartment building. We will work on the urban setting, the plans and the façades at the same time.
 
Reference pairs consisting of a work from the Italian Renaissance and an American project from the 20th century will form the cultural context of our work during the semester. The reference pairs constitute an “in-between space,” in which we will work on and discuss the questions of Gestalt and the effects of architectural elements. We will not look at the references in a historical or stylistic way, but as individual creative achievements, formed in a past era, which was just as contradictory and brittle as our times.

This studio has an irregular schedule. Oliver Luetjens will be in residence on January 23, 24; February 6, 7; March 5, 6, 16 (optional); April 16, 17; May 1, 4, 5 for Final Reviews. Thomas Padmanabhan will be in residence on January 23, 24; February 20, 21; March 16 (optional); April 2, 3; May 1, 4, 5 for Final Reviews. The instructors will also be available via Skype in the intervening weeks. This studio will travel to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  

Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect

1. On Effect: When the Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain in 1997 it produced an instantaneous reaction from around the globe. New pacts were formed between cultural institutions, architects, and cities all vying for their own version of this newly minted, shiny museum. Labelled the Bilbao Effect, the recipe was: iconic architecture plus cultural investment could reinvent dying cities. Similarly, the Dubai Effect, largely attributed to the rise of gravity-defying towers perpetrated during the construction boom of the 2000s, greatly altered Dubai’s skyline as a symbol for free market capitalism. In the late 19th century, post-Great Chicago Fire, the city of Chicago’s rebuilding effort resulted in the first tall building constructed out of structural steel. One-third the weight of its masonry counterpart, steel towers were fast to erect and exceeded fire code—a new type was born. With this disciplinary knowledge, in both material and structural innovation, the Chicago Effect shifted paradigms in the field. Studio participants will speculate on the possibilities of the Scandinavian Effect with interest in defining a new formula. Innovation around mass timber located in the Scandinavian countries suggests that another pattern is emerging—one that combines material, structural advancement, constructability, and architectural form. Much like the Bilbao, Dubai, and Chicago Effects, the Scandinavian Effect has the potential to travel to other contexts. 

2. Scandinavia & the American South: The studio will take a close look at Sweden as a starting point for a series of research questions around mass timber. Knowledge discovered during a 10-day research trip in Sweden will inform the individual studio work, tracing potential effects from Scandinavia to the American South. Two design projects include: a single family house and mid-rise tower located in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. 

3. CLT Blanks: When challenging the American house and the office tower, timber is both a familiar and unfamiliar material for the two. Familiar and possibly a seamless transition for the single family house, cross-laminated timber (CLT) offers an alternative to traditional stick-frame construction as 2X6s are laminated together into large panels instead of framed at 16” on center. However, constructing midrise towers out of wood is counter-intuitive, yet, parallels the revolutionary thinking of steel construction in the Chicago case. The studio will conceptually position CLT as a series of large structural sheets—or blanks—comprised of 3-ply, 5-ply, and 7-ply laminated timber panels measuring 9’ in width and 50’ lengths with endless possibilities for openings, shape, and geometry. These blanks will be used for elevation and interior walls, as well as, floor slabs (or plates). As blanks are sliced and cut into rooms for a house or multiplied into stacks for a mid-rise tower, CLT blanks becomes a prime material for testing architectural and structural ideas. 

4. Aesthetics of Wood: From plywood-veneered interiors and soft white-wash kitchen cabinetry to IKEA’s 2015 Skogsta furniture collection and Sam Jacob’s Plank Scarf at £30, the image of wood is on-trend. Donald Judd’s materials listed as “douglas fir plywood in 6 units” mounted on the gallery wall follows the proportions of standard sheet material while Rachel Whiteread’s “Untitled (Felt Floor)” are resin felt castings of a 120-year-old wood floor—meaning it looks like wood, but it is not wood. As contemporary artists grapple with real and fake imagery of wood, architects absorb the image of wood into contemporary interiors. Defining the aesthetic of wood as a representational device and tectonic question will become central to positioning the Scandinavian Effect.

Note: As a member of the instructional team, Nelson Byun will serve as Teaching Associate for this studio.

Generic Specificity

Architecture’s most dramatic evolution in the last century has been the increasing fissure between the generic and the specific. As Internationalism at the beginning of the 20th century evolved into Globalism at the beginning of the 21st, the roles that generic and specific architecture played in the course of globalization have been reversed. While the International Style of early modernism assumed a generic form to homogenize and sterilize the specificity of local context, the global architecture of late modernism has launched a counter-movement, which assumes a highly specific form to invigorate and colonize the generality of the newly homogenized local context. At a time when there is globalization without an international style, when generic specificity is replaced by specific generality, these two poles of architectural production—global and specific on the one hand, local and generic on the other—are more distant than ever before.

An architecture of approximation provides a methodology that assimilates local typologies, geographies, construction methods, symbols, traditions, and language as means to approximate global form. On a building scale, typologies and construction processes specific to the local context are deployed as a form of departure.

Adopting a strategy of assimilation and integration to reconcile the chasm between the generic and the specific, between global and local space, the studio will engage in the design of a 100,000-square-foot office building that will house a hybrid program of various workspaces. Changing scenarios of work that emphasize innovation and collaboration have challenged the organization and space of the office plan, while the boundaries and relationships of the workplace are becoming more and more porous and ephemeral. We will investigate new forms of ephemerality and adaptability in spaces for working and question how to make an open generic building adaptable to different specific uses over time. We will focus on different scales of design research: from building and infrastructure systems of multistory buildings, to notions of the longevity of the interior and furnishings in relationship to architecture.

After initial research on generic typologies, the studio will test the findings with the design of the specific program for an upstart tech office situated in the rapidly changing infrastructural and architectural landscape of the Arts District in downtown Los Angeles. The studio will travel to the site to study it and examine the surrounding urban landscape. Student projects will be developed with individual responses to the problem; participation in biweekly studio meetings, readings, and collective model production will be the basis of evaluation.

This studio has an irregular schedule. Sharon Johnston and/or Mark Lee will be in residence on January 23, 24; February 5, 6, 26, 27; March 11, 12, 25, 26; April 8, 9, 22, 23; May 1, 4, 5 for Final Reviews. The instructors will also be available via Skype or in-person in the intervening weeks. This studio will travel to Los Angeles, California. 

Making Next to Forest

Seventy-one percent of Japan’s northern-most island, Hokkaido, is covered in forest, comprising almost one-quarter of the entire nation’s forested landmass. It is also the center of wooden furniture design and production in Japan. Compared to other countries with similar forest-to-land ratios, such as Finland, Japan’s ratios are quite low with regard to both rates of locally-sourced vs. imported wood, and rates of wood use vs. waste (25 percent use vs. 140 percent, with reuse, in Finland). This studio examines the balanced ecology and economy of living and making next to a vast natural resource.

The first phase of this studio proposes alternative forest economies with the goal of promoting efficiency and increased local wood use. New material possibilities are investigated through an exploration of different tree parts and the recycling and reuse of wood for material production. In short, a new bioeconomy will be envisioned for Hokkaido, including proposals for enhanced sustainability and efficiency in forestry product development, alongside a reforestation program.

The second phase of the studio proposes a master plan for a site vacated by the Tokai University campus in Asahikawa, Japan. Asahikawa is the second largest city in Hokkaido after Sapporo, located toward the center of the island and snowbound throughout winter. A new campus will be proposed for bioeconomy research, production, and education facilities. As a part of this masterplan, an archive and study center for the history and craft of wood furniture in this region will be included.

In the third phase of this studio, a design will be developed for a chair museum in the Higashikawa township, the sponsor for this studio. The town suffered a severe population decline, but made a remarkable comeback in last fifteen years through the implementation of attractive incentives to bring back young families. The private chair collection of the Oda family—one of the largest and most prestigious collections of the 20th century—was recently donated to the township. The Chair Museum will be built with local wood and materials generated from its region, connecting the design to earlier research on forest ecology and bioeconomy centers.

Béton Brut and Beyond

At a time when it is more essential than ever to conserve resources and prevent carbon pollution—which critically includes limiting the demolition of existing buildings and new construction—we find that concrete architecture from the 1960s and 1970s is nevertheless frequently discarded. A host of justifications is given for its destruction: it cannot be easily adapted for today’s needs, its land value exceeds its architectural value, its cost of reuse is too high. Challenging these and other assumptions, this studio examines the design potential of working with existing concrete buildings—often referred to as Brutalist—that are defined by heroic forms, expressive structures, and raw use of material.

Our project is set in the Courbevoie suburb of Paris, located within La Défense, the main financial hub of France. The mixed-use social housing complex Les Damiers (1976), designed by Jacques Binoux and Michel Folliasson, was slated to be torn down in 2013, but with its replacement indefinitely on hold, the structure now sits vacant. This studio reconsiders the fate of Les Damiers, exploring how it might be adapted to improve its functionality and environmental performance as well as reconsidering its form and image.

Bringing contemporary technologies, materials, forms, and programs to bear on this challenge, students will work to recast this specific architecture toward a viable, extended future. The brief will call for a significant increase in program area in response to the contemporary cultural and economic demands of France’s most important financial district. Studio projects will address both the building and its larger urban and ecological context, including its relationship to the River Seine, as well as the artificial ground, or pedestrian deck (la dalle), characteristic of La Défense.

The studio will travel to Paris and visit the site. Through research, analysis, and critique of the existing architecture and surrounding site, students will identify physical and aesthetic opportunities for intervention. Projects will be developed collaboratively in small groups with the opportunity to individually design specific parts of the project.

This studio has an irregular schedule. Please consult with the instructors. 

Block Blob Mat Slab Slat: Art Spaces

“For this requirement there are no typologies”
—Rem Koolhaas (teased over the apparent lack of historical perspective in OMA’s proposal for the addition of a massive 20,000-seat auditorium for the Dutch Parliament, 1978)

Forty years on, the 19th-century belief that spaces ought to be planned according to some blueprint, or typology, is, give or take the odd revival, almost universally extinct. Our free-for-all approach to discourse, together with the extreme scale, variety, and programmatic inventiveness found in architectural briefs worldwide, have turned the idea of a common repository of design ideas (merging, maybe, into practice) on its head.

Or have they? Seemingly unrelated developments have recently imbued that improbable concept with a new lease of life. For one, we have the pressures of urbanization in places like China, where the prospect of housing 4,000 tenants in a single dwelling block has reliably reawakened the historicist appeal to architectural type, which held sway over Europeans at the height of their own postwar boom (in both instances, quantity seems to be the trigger).

Then there is the black swan of parametric digital design. Regardless of who’s doing it, or what the outcome looks like, parametric design, by its very nature, will foster variation, variegation, and versioning. It will, in other words, create its own types. The similarities end there, though. Unlike the conspicuous types of the past, the new types are abstract and invisible; they do not recombine building parts or figures to yield new arrangements, as the olden types did, but calibrate relationships and provoke mutations, expressed, for the sake of convenience, in abstract terms.

This studio has two aspirations: first, to offer an open framework for the exploration of some exciting intersections between “old” and “new” understandings of architectural typology; and second, to serve as a forum of “reflexion” on the spaces of contemporary art. Eventually, both aspirations shall converge on a carefully calibrated architectural proposal for a new urban art complex located in the heart of Old Montreal.

The studio is supported in part by the Quebec-based Phi Foundation, a nonprofit art foundation seeking to foster and mobilize “diverse forms of imagination and critical speculation around this specific site in Montreal, intersecting its own intentions and objectives” as an institution. A trip to Quebec is tentatively planned to visit the site and interact with sponsors, curators, artists, and archivists.

This studio has an irregular schedule. The studio will be meeting on January 23, 24, 28, 29; February 11, 12, 25, 26; March 10, 11, 24, 25; April 7, 8, 21, 22, and May 4, 5 for Final Reviews. This instructor will be available to meet with students outside of officially scheduled studio meetings at mutually agreeable times in the weeks that he is in residence. This studio will travel to Montreal, Canada. 

KING TUT’S SKULL

This dusty skull was Ol’King Tut’s.
I found it in this pyramid.
This tiny skull was King Tut’s too
(From when he was a little kid).

An Architecture of innocent origins
Suspends time and identity
In service to the liberation of logic
And the empowerment of the mythic.

In this studio, each student will select their own site and be assigned their own program to explore the possibilities of this type of, at once, deeply personal and profoundly inclusive architecture.