Domestic Orbits
Brief: In December 2018, the Mexican Supreme Court recognized the right of domestic workers to be affiliated to social security putting an end to a long history of discrimination and invisibility. Under the present administration, the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS) launched an 18-month pilot program for voluntary affiliation. Once the trial period has passed, affiliation will be mandatory for all domestic workers. What will be the consequences of 2,4 million domestic workers progressively entering the formal economy? What solutions can be devised to organize access to healthcare, labor rights, decent working conditions, and leisure? How can architectural interventions help recognize, reduce, and redistribute the problems faced by domestic workers? In other terms, this studio inquires on the capacity of material spatial practices to realize the provisions made by laws. This studio proposes to visualize and understand how space is articulated according to specific gendered, classist, and racist configurations of the social. Our aim is to provide narratives of Mexico City that foreground the conflicts faced by the workforce onto which domestic labor is unloaded. Each student will be asked to identify the conditions that domestic workers face such as distance and time use, representation and appropriation, safety and wellbeing—among others.
This studio is a continuation of Frida Escobedo’s Domestic Orbits (Gato Negro Ediciones and iii, 2018), a publication in which we studied how the unequal distribution of reproductive labor within the Mexican household was mapped out onto the city. Our perspective was historical —what are the ways in which the housing unit has changed—, as well as spatial —how do relations of power expressed in terms of visibility/invisibility within the household come to articulate questions of access, transportation, and location when we look at the urban scale. Domestic Orbits is a collaborative research led by Frida Escobedo’s studio and the instituto de investigaciones independientes.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Frida Escobedo will be in residence Tuesdays and Wednesdays bi-weekly: August 29 and 30, September 10, 11, October 8,9, 22, 23 and 31, November 1, 5, 6, 19, and 20, and for final reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Reflective Nostalgia: Alternative Futures for Shanghai’s Shikumen Heritage
Nostalgia tends to be taken dismissively or negatively in both architecture and general culture, as Charles Maier aptly states: “Nostalgia is to longing as kitsch is to art.” This studio is based on the premise that nostalgia, rather than being reductive, offers a productive means to engage with issues of heritage, collective memory, displacement, and urban renewal. The studio will explore how reflective nostalgia may offer a new model for adaptive reuse in the context of China, where the erosion of cultural identity and local heritage have come as a consequence of rapid urbanization. Our test case for the studio will be looking specifically at Shanghai and the remnants of its historic housing typology—the shikumen lane houses. The site is located in the heart of Shanghai, encompassing the historic shikumen compound called Zhang Yuan (Zhang Garden) built by a British merchant in the late 1870s and later sold to a private businessman as a private garden. In its prime, the site was the most well-known place for entertainment and urban cultural diversions. Once a glamorous site that boasts of many monumental “firsts” for the city: the first electric lights, choice venue for foreign circuses, the first Western-style wedding, hosting the first public speech by a woman, the first nude painting exhibition in China, etc. Widely regarded as the city’s largest, best preserved compound, it still houses a lively community despite the adjacent encroachment of modern commercial developments. Today, after decades of social and economic changes, much of the compound is dilapidated and many of the residents who are migrant laborers and elderly citizens are struggling at the poverty line.
The project will be the design of a hotel integrated with hybrid programs to be developed by each student. Students will research the hotel typology and make bold propositions for alternative models for the hospitality industry. Students will explore tectonics, materiality, and how to translate concepts into built, tangible form across various scales. The studio is interested in articulating methods and techniques of adapting an existing collection of buildings, interior spaces, and urban voids to create meaningful dialogue between old and new.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Rossana Hu and Lyndon Neri will teach on Tuesdays and Wednesdays: August 29 and 30, September 3 and 4, October 15, 16, 22, 23, 29 and 30, November 19 and 20, and December 3 and 4, and for final reviews.
The instructors will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
A Typology of Knowledges
This studio will reconsider the types and spaces of institutions that are dedicated to the classification and transmission of knowledge—schools of architecture, libraries, and museums—and imagine how they can improve not only the society at large, but also their neighborhoods, at different scales and in different ways.
In order to improve their efficiency, the architecture of schools, libraries, and museum are often designed as enclosed spaces, metaphorically huge receptacles to protect knowledge and prove its value: their types usually appear as kinds of secular sanctuaries. Consequently, the buildings usually do not activate public space or favor integration of their main function with other ones. We shall consider how we might modify these types to allow them to offer more to the public space by transforming them into commons that engage more than their typical users. We will attempt to show how architectural form is not led only by the personal taste of the architect, but can have specific meaning on an aesthetic level, but also on a social and political one, even in our time when no common architectural language exists.
Typology is usually described, as Aldo Rossi did, through its permanent dimension. We will go beyond this idée reçue and explore how types are also there to be rethought and mixed. To do so, we shall explore the ways that typology can be a tool for invention and not only conservative variation.
The first two weeks of the semester are dedicated to description, and this research will lead to a series of original drawings of different scales and types, from overall plans to construction details. The three buildings that we shall look at as matrixes (i.e., buildings that have a large offspring) include: the Dulwich Gallery—an enfilade—by John Soane, the Bauakademie—a courtyard—by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and the main room of the French National Library—a field—by Henri Labrouste. These buildings were, more or less, firsts in each of their own categories, and link the issues of typology, composition, space, and construction. At the start of the term, a series of lectures will give students conceptual and practical tools and a system of references that will help them to design an achieved tectonic piece of architecture. These lectures will address the issue of typology as seen through different authors, construction in relationship to space and materiality, the ways that history can be involved in contemporary creation, and the commons. This studio aims to explore the ability of typology to create an inventive architecture that is able to address contemporary issues while still being linked to history. The final rendering will include a short but precise series of plans and sections, an inner view—a photograph of a large-scale model—and a view expressing the commons dimension of the project. Projects will be evaluated on their inner coherence as tectonic objects in relation to the initial interests of students and goals of the studio.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Eric Lapierre will be in residence Thursday and Friday bi-weekly: August 29 and 30; September 12, 13, 26, 27; October 24, 25, 31; November 1, 7, 8, 21, 22; December 5, 6, and for final reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Cross Rhythm (New House in New Orleans)
We can find many beautiful residential typologies in New Orleans, like the creole townhouse, shotgun house, and double-gallery house, to name a few. As each is the product of New Orleans’s unique mix of cultures, evolved over several generations, the objective of this studio will be to study the potential of these typologies in their current context and to redesign them.
To explore how a new house might be made at the intersection of two cultures, we will borrow a technique from music: the cross rhythm. “Cross rhythm” is a term used to describe a composition made of different rhythms. When played together, two different and contrasting rhythms may cross by sharing a common starting place, accents, and meter. In doing so, the cross rhythm offers a framework for inclusion and a means to reconsider Robert Ventruri’s difficult whole.
This studio tries to deal with the building typology in positive way. How can we design a new house in New Orleans as a building of cross rhythm?
Students will begin by investigating the townhouse in New Orleans. They will then start an individual project on a chosen site in New Orleans.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Go Hasegawa will be in residence on the following Thursdays and Fridays: August 29 and 30; September 19, 20; October 17, 18, 24, 25; November 14, 15, 21, 22; and for final reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Groundless
Disciplinary interests in architecture are both in flux and viewed by many as disengaged from the world’s pressing needs. This studio posits that this flux reflects the field’s unease as we collectively grope for architectural expressions that are both novel and fundamental and that it is precisely from architecture’s disciplinary obsessions that we create new ways to engage the world.
In this studio, we will consider the progression of increasingly eccentric, atectonic works of architecture over the last 50 years—a progression that put into question the ground as architecture’s stable substrate—and contrast it to current reactionary formal impulses. We will examine these opposing tendencies with the supposition that the urge to return to stability is both inevitable and made impossible by our recent past. The studio will seek out contemporary architectural expressions within this paradoxical dilemma.
The studio project is the new International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The museum has three physical components: the ground, which acts as a memorial garden; the interior exhibition; and the architecture. Charleston was the most important center for the importation and sale of enslaved Africans in North America, accounting for an estimated 40 percent of that trade. The museum’s site is part of the former Gadsden’s Wharf. Between 1806 and 1808—in the years of the trade’s most aggressive and brutal activity—it was the sole place the city permitted such debarkation. The planned garden, occupying the museum’s open site, intends to memorialize this tragic past. The museum’s mission is, “to re-center South Carolina’s place in global history, illuminating its pivotal role in the development of the international slave trade and the Civil War.” With the Center for Family History database and other interpretive displays, the museum is conceived as a non-collecting institution with no significant artifacts on display. Rather, these interactive and didactic features will serve as its content.
In architecture, attempts at explicit political expressions often result in built platitudes of indifferent form. However, characterizing any architecture as autonomous is also illusory. Executed in the midst of larger events, architecture is inevitably colored by those events, shaping—even if unconsciously—their tenor and sensibility. This studio, while not looking to explicitly express either the meaning of this museum or of our own fraught times, will, at a minimum, test the consequences of pursuing a disciplinary investigation as it germinates within the study of a charged project.
Our focus will be on the architecture itself as it negotiates between a hallowed ground, whose memorialization is a separate project, and interior content which, like the ground, is its own independent project. The architectural task is thus bracketed between the ground/meaning of the site expressed symbolically by the landscape architecture and the program/content of the interior expressed didactically by the exhibition design. Rather than see it as a diminution of architecture’s role, the studio will view it as a crystallized opportunity to negotiate the interrelationship of site, meaning, and content in the context of this evocative project.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Andrew Zago will be in residence Wednesday and Thursday Bi-weekly: August 29 and 30; September 11, 12, 25, 26; October 22, 23; November 6, 7, 20, 21, and for final reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Laboratory School, Stacking, Pragmatism, …
This architecture studio will be composed of three distinct and interrelated parts in working toward a design project.
1. A Laboratory School
This studio will focus on rethinking the scope and scale of a specific educational program: the laboratory school. Students will reimagine a new type of primary public school for Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus, drawing on historic precedents including pragmatist John and Alice Chipman Dewey’s Laboratory School (1896–1903) at the University of Chicago. The analysis and representation of additional historic and contemporary education buildings—ranging from one-room schoolhouses to demountable classrooms to large-scale, H- and M-type centralized school district buildings—will provide the basis for subsequent work. Students will work through architectural drawings, large-scale paper models, and photography.
2. Stacking
Designing for a metropolitan site, and within a larger university campus, students will confront an urban neighborhood that demands the stacking of school programming. Problematizing prevailing organizational types that privilege single-story structures, corridors as social space, and peripheral connections to landscape/nature, this design methodology will diverge from existing references while acknowledging the American school’s design through the constraints of typical block dimensions.
3. Pragmatism
Students will revisit, almost 20 years later, the Museum of Modern Art conference “Things in the Making” and other early aughts discourse around pragmatism. Examining various contemporaneous publications and lectures, students will be asked to think about the shift in architectural methodologies and techniques toward social and constructional instrumentality. Particular attention will be paid to the similarities and differences of Pragmatist thought as it influenced the development of 20th-century educational programs, aesthetics and “Art as Experience,” and new architectural types.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
This studio will meet on Tuesdays and Wednesdays on the following dates throughout the semester: August 29, 30; September 10, 11, 24, 25; October 15, 16, 29, 30, 31; November 1, 12, 13, 25, 26, and for final reviews.
Hilary Sample will be in residence at least six of the weeks that the studio is in session.
Michael Meredith will participate as a guest lecturer.
Paul Ruppert and Lafina Eptaminitaki will offer workshops on two of the weeks that the studio is in session.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
An American Section
This is the second studio of American Architecture. Our aim is to investigate the simple (drawing) tools of architecture: plans, sections, details, and perspectives. These tools are all we have to make the project. Once put in relation with the American landscape—its size, its scale, and finally, its own myth making—we believe they could ultimately become a set of tools for reflections on what is quintessentially American Architecture. After considering the American Plan last year, this time we will focus on the Section. In parallel to our previous endeavors, we will again work on the university campus, perhaps one of the last pockets of collective life, gradually endangered by contemporary desires to be commercially successful. Convinced as we are that the campus should retain its public position, we feel this is where an experiment in “Americanness” could be realized in the most open-minded way. How do we embrace the reality of the market development, tech startups, and medical and biological research centers without renouncing the collective values of an educational facility? A similar struggle defined the American building campaign after World War II, when the corporate logic coincided with the idea of collective and humanistic progress. We want to investigate this idea of American corporate education, perhaps best embodied in the image of the Mies van der Rohe’s Armour Institute. We want to look into Mittel Amerika, the Midwest, and the Great Lakes megalopolis, where the sheer economic expansion most apparently instigated this ambiguity between the idea and its mass production. The (architectural) idea is reproduced to the point it becomes only a detail, where every expression is in its reduced version of the section. In a way, the section is a better tool here. The plan becomes irrelevant, a matter of quantity and flexibility to accommodate the ever-changing technological requirements. As a concentrated addition to a fully urbanized world, the American Section might offer a responsible answer in times of confused economy and ecology. It is the thinness of the envelope that enables a plan to happen, and we want to explore the consequences of such a prospect by making a tower for Harvard’s campus.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Kersten Geers and/or David van Severen will be in residence on August 29 and 30, September 12 and 13, October 10, 11, 24 and 25, November 7, 8, 21 and 22, and for final reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Type vs. Difference: The Function of a 21st-century Residential Block
The studio is concerned with the politics of architecture and its agency in everyday life. This semester, we will address the subject of housing in relation to the individualized society of the 21st century. We will use the work of the French architect Jean Renaudie (1925–1981) as our laboratory.
Renaudie began with the dwelling and rejected any form of repetition in housing, above all the “standard apartment” that CIAM and the French State had advocated in the large housing estates, or Grands Ensembles, that were built on the outskirts of French cities during the 1950s and 1960s. Each dwelling designed by Renaudie was unique, and he saw the inhabitants as actors, encouraging them to appropriate these spaces as their own. His aim was not only to promote a less segregated society but to challenge the conventional boundaries between architecture and urban planning, and between urban life and nature. Most importantly, he foresaw the move toward particularity and difference in the 21st century. Yet housing continues to be designed in a way that ignores these radical changes.
Our site is located in a dense historic area of Paris. Each student will be asked to design a large-scale housing project that responds to the needs of our individualized and ever-changing society. The first two weeks will be devoted to research on contemporary forms of domesticity. Analytical drawings will be used to explore their individual and shared needs. The remainder of the semester will be devoted to the development of individual projects.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Farshid Moussavi will be in residence bi-weekly: on August 29, 30; September 2, 3, 4, 17, 18, 19; October 1, 2, 3, 15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 31; November 1, 19, 20, 21; and for final reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time. Students should maintain their studio schedule and attendance in the intervening weeks as this is when the instructor will schedule Skype calls.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.
Adapting Miami – Housing on the Transect
Miami is on the front lines of climate change. Its famous beaches and waterfront condominiums are projected to suffer significantly with sea level rise in the next 50 years. How can designers address issues of resilience and adaptability at a range of scales, from the district and neighborhood down to the individual building proposal? This interdisciplinary studio will look at architecture, transportation, mobility and climate adaptability as critical issues facing the contemporary American City. Funded through the Knight Foundation and using Miami as an urban laboratory, the studio will address contemporary urban and architectural challenges facing many American cities.
The studio will focus on housing types along an urban transect, cutting from the high density coastline and following the primary commercial corridor of Calle Ocho (Eight Street) through Little Havana and out to the Florida everglades. Calle Ocho, also known as Route 41, is a primary east-west corridor that historically marked the entrance to Miami as well as the route west to the Gulf side of the peninsula and beyond. Students will study sites along this corridor to develop a catalog of urban and architectural types, from the high-rise transit-oriented development in Downtown Miami to the mid-scaled developments along its axis, to the ex-urban developments around Sweetwater and Tiamiami. This urban transect cuts through different neighborhoods, and different ethnic and socio-economic groups. The section through Calle Ocho also cuts through different eco-systems and water bodies, from Biscayne Bay to the Everglades.
Students will be looking at housing through the lens of typology, density, access to transit and climate adaptability to develop a climate adaptation tool kit consisting of approaches for both new construction and adaptation through a study of building types and eco-systems.
Work from the studio will be published in a GSD-produced Studio Report and will be presented in Miami. The studio will conduct a week long site visit to meet local planners, community members and designers. The studio will run alongside Jesse Kennan’s course on Integrated Design & Planning for Climate Change, SES 5389, and will benefit from engagement with faculty from Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture.
Habitat Kashgar
Habitat is arguably the most primitive and, at the same time, most futuristic subject for architecture. The word “habitat” provokes at once multiple architectural imaginations: from Unités d’habitation to Habitat 67, from the remotest villages to the greatest metropolises, from ancient human settlements to SpaceX’s vision of the Mars Habitat.
Yet a discussion of habitat always brings us to the question of “dwelling on earth,” as habitat may be traced back to its Latin root habitare, meaning to dwell. If “dwelling” is the perception of “habitat” for mortals, then “habitat” is the perception of “dwelling” for the gods. The meaning of habitat has gone through fundamental evolutions—from the ecological and environmental domain in which humans existed to the physical environment humans created.
Immediately, further questions are raised: Is it possible to envision new types of habitats—habitat micro, habitat macro; habitat horizontal, habitat vertical; habitat of a people, habitat of different people together; habitat with new infrastructure, habitat with new metabolism? Increasingly, habitats are becoming interlinked, overlapped, pushed against each other, and merged. Ultimately the questions are: How do we better share our habitats together? How do we make our habitats more inclusive, resilient, safe, and sustainable?
The studio will undertake the challenge of designing a series of projects related to the subject of habitat, either as a single-family house, multifamily housing, or as community service programs (a school, a library, or an art center) in Kashgar, the ancient oasis city situated in between the great desert of Taklimakan and snow mountains of the Pamirs. It is a trading center on the historical caravan routes—the old Silk Road—and a key city on the newly evolving Belt and Road.
Students may choose from a series of provided sites in the historical center of Kashgar or in the county of Tashkurghan on the plateau of Pamirs. Departing from research on precedents related to habitat and analyzing problems and potentials of the given sites, students will make conceptual designs in the first two to three weeks and finalize their site selections and program proposals during a field trip to Beijing and Kashgar at the end of September.
Following the studio trip, students will revise and further develop their concepts and designs. Projects will be reviewed in small-scale conceptual models and later in large-scale material studies or detail mockups.
Note:
This course has an irregular meeting schedule.
Zhang Ke will be in residence Thursday and Friday bi-weekly: August 29 and 30; September 12, 13; October 3, 4, 17, 18, 31, November 1, 14, 15, 21, 22; and for final reviews.
The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off week” missed time.
Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.