FALLOWSCAPES, Territorial Reconfiguration Strategies for Arles, France
On a promontory on the left bank of the lower Rhone River, just before it reaches the Mediterranean Sea, the city of Arles presides over vast plains that, until fairly recently, were characterized as wastelands destined to remain permanently uncultivated. Once a thriving Roman outpost, built almost entirely from limestone quarried nearby, the city retains its original configuration. However, high unemployment for the past several decades calls for a renewed destiny beyond its high-end cultural and historical profile. By contrast, modernity radically changed the city’s hinterland, separating—in the Camargue Delta—salt from fresh water, and from sea, and redistributing fresh water from Alpine rivers into a filigree of canals that turned the arid Crau plain into a productive landscape. In the seams that formed between waterways, orchards, rice fields, quarries, logistics sites, infrastructures, and drainage ways, a fallowscape lies in a weird state of neglect. This studio will reconsider the interactions between systems and landscapes according to different scales, limits, time, and material, advocating for territorial reconfiguration strategies that investigate the existing and the potential, in order to face dramatic ecological threats and an enduring social crisis. All these issues and more will be brought together in the format of a libretto, articulating mapping, narratives, time-planning and designs in an open, interdisciplinary form.
Feeding Boston
The development of postindustrial food supply systems parallels the explosion of the modern city. This studio will deal with an ordinary matter whose future impacts every one of the world’s citizens. On the one hand, how we eat is related to global challenges as inequalities of distribution, climate crisis, or cultural sovereignty. On the other, attempts of healthiness in the production, sustainability, on chain distribution, or responsible comestibles consumption, often become individual and solitary actions against a system that responds to structural rules of economy.
Focusing on Greater Boston, the studio will analyze temporal, spatial, and relational patterns of food production, transportation, storage, and sale. The first part of the studio will consist of a thorough analysis in order to set Boston’s foodprint, understood as the complex web of both static and dynamic infrastructures between buildings, urban space, policies, and personal attitudes toward food. We will investigate the capacity of food supply systems to trigger social cohesion, to create local centralities, and to foster urban transformation processes.
At the start of the studio, students will select one of the following topics to develop:
– Food in central places/food as a commodity;
– Food in the suburbs/food deserts in Boston;
– Ethnic food versus luxury imported edibles;
– Farmers markets, local producers, and locavorist consumers;
– Food justice, gleaners, ugly food, and freeganism;
– Mobile food, takeaway, kitchen incubators, and dark kitchens;
– Food supply infrastructures, warehouses, and coldscapes;
– Food processing or the loss of freshness in raw foods; and
– Organic and inorganic food waste processing.
This research work will overlap with a continued design process to identify programs and research sites. Three sites with their respective programs will be proposed at the beginning of the course, but alternatives emerging from the analysis developed and equivalent in the ambition of the objectives they raise, will also be encouraged. Representations, both at urban and at detail scales, are posed as the main research and design tools.
Facing a reality in postindustrial metropolises in which food has become a commodity, and in which most people have settled into a passive relationship with edibles as consumers, designers are called on to be actors and to change the rules of future urban food systems.
Novi Sad ? The Agency of the Urban Ensemble: Community ? Action ? City
The main objective in this studio is to critically explore Novi Sad, Serbia, the European Capital of Culture 2021. In Novi Sad, we will research future spatial scenarios for upgrading a series of defunct factory complexes into“civic social districts.” These post-manufacturing districts have been in danger of becoming more victims to rampant commercialization and pressure to sell-out government’s property. Many of the defunct factories date from the time period between the two World Wars. They were nationalized by Socialist Yugoslavia and brought cultural programs to the workers. Today, decades after the collapse of socialism, the factories operate as loose, semi-legal, self-regulated, informal spaces for art and music, pop-up bars, clubs, and government organizations such as youth culture clubs and other administration. The challenge is to explore future civic design for these complexes via visionary urbanism, art, and design culture; finding a balance between government ownership and that of the private or informal sectors. The studio will be held in a lively “research architecture” manner, experimenting with typologies from small to large in synchronic ways.
Affordability Now!
The United States is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. Over the last two decades, rents have risen far faster than renters’ incomes, resulting in record-breaking numbers of families being unable to afford decent homes. The statistics are staggering: according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, in 2016, nearly one-third of all US households paid more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing (for renters, the cost-burdened share is 47 percent). In no US state can a full-time minimum wage worker afford to rent or own a one-bedroom dwelling. Fewer than four affordable and available rental homes exist for every 10 deeply poor renter households nationwide. To put the demand for affordable housing in perspective, consider that a recent development in Brooklyn received over 87,000 applications for 200 affordable units.
Despite apathy at the highest levels of government, this crisis has engendered a wave of activism and experimentation that has brought architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and urban designers together with tenants fearful of displacement, community-based groups organizing against gentrification, and local policymakers across the political spectrum. The resulting coalitions have resulted in some bold new affordable housing initiatives. From policies like universal rent control, to bottom-up initiatives for cooperative developments, community land trusts, and other communal environments that attempt to decommodify land, to architectural experiments with “tiny homes,” modular and prefab construction, and other types of low-cost housing, to a renewed push for municipally-constructed public housing, the present is an exciting time for bold new experiments in affordable housing production.
This interdisciplinary studio, offered in conjunction with Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, invites students from all departments to experiment with these—and many other—new weapons in the affordable housing arsenal. Our site is the Los Angeles region, where the affordability crisis is particularly dire (housing costs in Los Angeles eat up an average of 47 percent of residents’ income—more than any other major US city). After a field trip to the frontlines of Los Angeles’s most prominent affordability battlegrounds, students will work with tenants, community-based organizations, and city officials to imagine how we might creatively deploy cooperative developments, community land trusts, low-cost housing prototypes, and other weapons to help build a more equitable region. As there are a myriad of ways in which architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and urban designers can intervene here, studio projects are expected to be very diverse and range in scale from the individual building to the block to the neighborhood to the region.
Housing & Infrastructure in Yucatán: Beyond the Mayan Train
The Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico has been described as “one big flat slab of limestone gently slanting into the sea.” It is a place where urbanization and environmental preservation have always been in delicate balance due to its particular geological conditions: a medium to low tropical rainforest on water-soluble limestone. An underground water system produces sinkholes called cenotes, despite the lack of major rivers.
In the 1840’s John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, influenced by explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, traveled to the Yucatán Peninsula and documented some of the most important archeological sites in the region. Catherwood’s litographs and Stephen’s book, ‘Incidents of Travel in Yucatán’, were instrumental in sharing with the world the relevance, breadth, and impact of Mayan culture in the region
From Tulum and Bacalar in the east to Celestún and its mangroves to the west, from the archeological site of Calakmul in the middle of the rainforest to Rio Lagartos on the northern coast, and from centuries old cities such as Campeche and Mérida to recent tourist territories such as Cancún and the Mayan Rivera, the Yucatán Peninsula is a territory in constant flux.
In recent months, the new federal government in Mexico announced the construction of the Mayan Train, an ambitious work of infrastructure, which will connect an important number of cities and towns in the region including Campeche, Mérida, Chichén Itzá, Cancún, and Palenque. Highly polemical due to its environmental implications and its lack of clear objectives, the projects seek to address the historical infrastructural shortcomings in the region while also laying the groundwork for networked economic growth and new forms of housing and employment across the territory.
This studio will look at the region in its historical and contemporary shifts and develop more productive, sustainable, and inclusive models for territorial transformation. We will critically engage tools of environmental and hydrological restoration, cultural heritage preservation, housing, as well as infrastructure and tourism, as ways to think about connectivity, form, inhabitation, and development in the Peninsula at large.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Thursday and Friday Bi-Weekly: August 29-30; Sept 12-13; October 10-11, 24,25; November 7-8, 21-22; and for final reviews.
The instructor may arrange for skype sessions between visits.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Social Operative Infrastructure: Sustainable Water Models in Chile
According to the World Bank, countries need to invest 4.5 percent of their GDP in infrastructure to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2030. In order to do that, we need to start thinking about building new infrastructure and transforming the existing one. We must then question the actual operative infrastructure: How could we start recalibrating it to make them operate not solely as functional systems, but as a social and ecological tool for improving people’s quality of life? The scale of the infrastructure in cities is massive, making any change or improvement a profound impact at the metropolitan scale.
The studio seeks to explore operative water infrastructure in Chile as a way to start a discussion about networks beyond monofunctional operation, with the goal of bringing social, environmental, and functional upgrades to the city. The ubiquitous network built under the surface, with hundreds of nodes emerging in different parts of the city, will be the starting point for a contemporary discussion about infrastructure, including its obsolescence and the role it may play in improving people’s lives in the future.
Hundreds of operative sites throughout Santiago, historically isolated or in dispersed urban fabric conditions, are now surrounded by city growth. The infrastructure contained only utilize a small part of the surface, producing negative externalities in the surrounding area and having no positive relation with their context. The studio will work from the city to the site, objects and processes, opening up different approaches and scales of problems and solutions.
Starting from the urban scale of the water network, students will work specifically on one of multiple sites, looking for emergent processes of urban renewal in the most segregated and low-income areas of Santiago de Chile.
The Immeasurable Enclosure
This option studio explores the ability of a single enclosed space to be the spatial expression of that which is immeasurable.
The garden and the room can be considered the fundamental spatial expressions in the constitution of a culture and consequentially many consider them to be the essential spatial constituents of the designed environment. These single-space environments—outdoors, indoors, or in-between—are defined by enclosing and containing only a small part of the world and precisely because of this condition, they have traditionally been perceived as the means for designing coherent singular identities.
Due to their powerful but singular nature, the progression toward social plurality and cultural diversity seems to diminish the relevance of these fundamental spaces. As the inability of a single space to encompass and synthesize complexity becomes apparent, alternative spatial conceptions emerge as expressions and vehicles for multiple sensibilities and identities. Land mosaics, spatial fields, or network societies, just to name a few, have become the new spatial paradigms to accept and encourage plurality and diversity. Arguably, while these paradigms and the values that they represent have enabled the design of rich environments, their expansiveness has also enabled the appearance of multiple urban pockets, each of them behaving as nothing more than echo chambers of narrowly defined values and views.
As an alternative to these expansive spatial paradigms, this studio aims to reframe the discrete space as the mechanism for containing and expressing the world. Due to their confinement, single-space environments are places where one has to invariably acknowledge the other. Therefore, enclosures can contain the multiplicity which by its own sociocultural definition and value is apparently uncontainable. Through this paradoxical condition, these basic enclosures can transcend their fundamental nature to become comprehensive and holistic sociocultural expressions.
Through the design of a single-space environment, this studio proposes reframing the design technique of the enclosure and infusing landscape and architecture’s primordial roots with the ambition of holding the immeasurable. Students in this studio will work individually and each student will be responsible for selecting a physical and cultural context wherein to design an immeasurable enclosure.
Manifestos for Building the Utopia
The continuous ground movements that happen in Mexico City, specifically those that have occurred during the last 40 years, demonstrate the territory’s frailty due to its radical landscape transformation. The basin that originally held a 110,000 hectare lake is now home to the largest urban fabric in Latin America, where water occupies less than 5,000 hectare. The studio will focus on designing with such movements. Just as the Mexicas proved that inhabiting the lake was possible by constructing a utopian city, we believe in the potential of geological incidents as triggers for diverse forms of inhabiting a place.
Our focus will be ground-cracks, products of excessive water extraction, ground subsidence, and earthquakes. We are interested in their effects on the landscape and the urban fabric, and the possibilities they enable when considered as intrinsic elements that will shape the contemporary Mexico City.
Participants will express their positions toward these extreme conditions through a space manifesto. These statements will provide enough critical matter to define a sensitive vision for the site as well as its complex social and economic conditions, which will be expressed through drawings and physical models capable of showing divergent possibilities for inhabiting the current and distorted landscape of southern Mexico City, where memory and landscape come together.
Requirements:
– Modesty and openness when getting to know and understand a distant reality.
– High sensitivity and imagination to reframe the conditions in a specific territory permeated by culture and tradition.
– Compromise and passion to produce high-quality models, drawings, and texts that explain divergent visions of a specific land.
– Inquisitiveness to rethink the opportunities presented by a vulnerable territory.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Thursday and Friday Bi-Weekly: August 29-30; Sept 12-13; October 10-11,17-18,24,25; November 7-8, 21-22; and for final reviews.
The instructors will alternate weeks of instruction and may arrange for skype sessions between visits.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Geographical Reenchantment: Swiss Landscape Interventions between Atmosphere, Function + Experience
In tiny Switzerland, landscape is regarded as a resource that serves lobbies from agriculture and speculation, to infrastructure, ecology, tourism, and recreation, each with a voice of its own except one–the landscape itself. This studio explores the potential of these spaces to develop a strong landscape voice and experience of their own, to imbue them with what Alistair Bonnet refers to as “geographical reenchantment.” It is both a Swiss and global phenomenon. As designers, what means do we have to requalify landscape to express both archaic and contemporary contradictions and beauties?
Based on Studio Vulkan’s winning international competition entry for the Swiss national “Expo 2027,” which activates landscape at a territorial scale, we explore a vertical section from low lakes to high mountains on three sites: the Rhine River Delta, the Rhine Canal, and the River Valley, and archaic alpine peaks at mountain Säntis. We explore texts, reference projects, and artworks, sharpening our ability to perceive, articulate, and translate into concrete projects concepts such as identity of place, atmosphere, experience, contradiction, and the dialogue between the built world outside of us and the inner world of experience. The site visit to Switzerland includes studio work and critiques in our industrial hall in Zurich. We will explore the sites conceptually as well as via concrete issues of resources, uses, conflicts, potentials, poetics, and possible fantastical visions.
Each student will develop landscape interventions that offer a strong contribution to the voice, identity, and experience of the place—interventions that do not compete with the place but rather highlight its potential strengths.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Studio sessions will take place on Wednesdays and Thursdays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Robin Winogrond will be in residence: on August 29, 30; September 3, 4, 11, 12; October 9, 10, 15, 24; November 6, 7, 13, 14; December 4, 5; and for final reviews. Robin may also be available via Skype between visits.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Adrift and Indeterminate: Designing for Perpetual Migration on Virginia’s Eastern Shore
Virginia’s Eastern Shore, which together with its northern Maryland counterpart forms and protects the massive Chesapeake Bay estuary, is confronting sea level rise at a rate 40 percent faster than the global average. Climate models declare the inevitable: this land mass will be lost. As it washes away, one of the richest ecological sanctuaries on the eastern seaboard will be vastly altered, and fishing and farming communities that have subsisted for centuries will disappear. What can design offer in the face of this calamity?
In addition to losing land to the sea, Northampton and Accomack Counties are losing people in significant proportion. Northampton comprises 795 square miles; currently 75 percent of that is water. The population in 1930 was 18,565; today, it is around 12,000. Accomack County is larger, with 1,310 square miles—65 percent water. Its population was almost 36,000 in 1930; today, it is 32,000. Based on per capita income, these are two of Virginia’s poorest counties.
As the ocean surrounds them with increasingly dramatic force, coastal communities everywhere fear the inevitability of physical retreat. In this studio, we will examine a migratory phenomenon rooted in perpetual adaptation, one that has been in motion for far longer than the recent arc of concern for climate instability. Farmers on the Eastern Shore have always altered their operations, rotated crops, abandoned homes and barns, and turned their backs on a changing shoreline. Those who fish for a living have responded to shifts in estuarine resources due to staggering impacts from pollution, regulatory limitations, changes in boating practices and technological upheavals, market shifts, and more. Adaptation is a way of life—though suddenly, we are aware that the rate of change is not.
How do we design a more urgent climate migration? This studio will pursue adaptive processes, land use strategies, and the design of landscapes and structures that extend the life of a challenged community. Design and impermanence are the watchwords in this pursuit.