The Monochrome No-image

The earth is no longer the background of human action. Now, more than ever, we can only speak of space in relation to the mobile, spontaneous and less than predictable landscape that is participating fully in our lives. As case in point, a 10,000-year-old barrier island formation named Captiva, Florida will be the focus of our studio research, helping to bring together otherwise disparate phenomena that settle upon it but have thus far been considered independent: the reprise of hurricanes, the mobility of sand, the impressions of concrete foundations and the salty, algal permanence of seawater. Because the varying patterns of human settlement across Captiva Island do little to trace the dynamics of its physical morphology, this studio proposes to engage with varying phenomena in order to land the challenges of climate disintegration that rupture everyday lives.

Residents of Captiva recognize that no one property can ‘tackle’ the issues any longer, aware that the risks no longer adhere to insurance claims, planning boundaries or the imaginary of the sunshine state. How can design respond with equal foresight? Leading this effort is the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, an organization committed to fostering the legacy of Rauschenberg’s life, work, and philosophy; embodying the same fearlessness, and multidisciplinary approaches that Rauschenberg exemplified in both his art and philanthropic endeavors. Working directly with the foundation and Rauschenberg’s studio and home on Captiva, students will refine what it means to design between intensifying global forces and community-wide awareness.

Rauschenberg’s practices are well known for exposing the shared fragments of contemporary culture: overlapping images, ghosts of newspaper clippings, slivers of discarded boxes, collages of unearthed materials and evidence of memories. Each act generates a collage and overlay to create an alternate image. Rauschenberg insisted that erasure was not a form of destruction, calling it a monochrome no-image, subverting form through subtraction. Such practices testify to a long-standing engagement with the quantitative, spatial and procedural systems that structure daily life, and his home and studio in Captiva were the center of this material commitment. In much the same way, geologic, biotic and hydrological forces will drive the design studio because we are in a moment of suspension between the usual order and the failure of most human systems, which also means that we are free to design, live and act another way.

Field Work: Brexit, Borders, and Imagining a New City-Region for the Irish Northwest

The FIELD WORK sponsored studio will advance alternative futures for the Irish Northwest through the collaborative disciplines of landscape architecture, ecology and anthropology. Focused on a cross-border area between Ireland and Northern Ireland, the studio will give form to a region (the Northwest City Region) which is arguably already in existence culturally and institutionally, but not well articulated formally through mappings and visual and spatial boundaries. The identification of this region is increasingly topical and necessary in light of the expected economic, social, and political impacts of Brexit, due to take place on March 29, 2019. Brexit is the impending withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) with the current Ireland/Northern Ireland Border the remaining boundary between EU and United Kingdom jurisdictions, laws, controls and identities. 

The studio will question the logics and limits of the City-Region at a range of scales from territorial to project sites and what forms these may take over 5, 20 and 50 years; investigate how the Region can be represented cartographically while respecting existing and future political borders; and consider the issues of ‘island’ and ‘island identity’ within the context of the European mainland. The nature of borders and boundaries will be tested against the concerns of climate change and population displacement and the studio investigations will ask how landscape design amplifies, focuses or masks national imagination within the context of Ireland and the United Kingdom. A field trip to the Irish Northwest will take place during the last week of March, 2019 where the class will carry out fieldwork, on-site research and take part in an academic conference with students from University of Ulster, Belfast and Letterkenny Institute of Technology. The studio is open to students from all degree programs although the focus of the work will be concerned with land and landscape as a planning and design medium.

SUPERBLOOM: Shelter, Drought, and Sculpture in the California Desert

This studio will focus on the Yucca Valley, CA, and its adjacent desert settlements. Students will consider the desert as a physical and metaphysical void, exploring opportunities to amplify experiences of both sublimity and reflection within the void. Against the current backdrop of climate change, the desert environment becomes the stage for ethereal and extreme manifestations of the landscape: the superbloom is one such phenomenon. Extreme drought, followed by torrential rains, collide on the desert floor to produce a spectacular and fleeting explosion of life, color, and energy.
The studio will confront the nature of shelter in the desert environment, the history of utopian modernism, and broader intersections of the aesthetic and the environmental in a rapidly changing climate. In all of these cases we will avail ourselves of various philosophical models, including phenomenological approaches to the aesthetic experience as constituted by a dialectical movement between perceiving subject and object perceived, and critical-theoretical approaches to the historically-conditioned relationships between humanity, technology, environment, and utopia.

The studio will be composed of a series of discrete and interconnected sections:

The studio will be open to both Landscape Architecture and Architecture students, however there will be a strong emphasis on engagement with the landscape.

The Anamorphic Double: A Bridge for DC

Uniquely called upon to embody purpose and beauty, bridges tend to be judged (more than any civic construction save the tower) on their singular object quality.  The resolution of physics becomes synonymous with image, superimposing internal logic, with external symbolic forces of collective memory.  This simultaneous condition, of rationality and iconicity, offers a double figuration: on the one hand, the instrumentalist objective to unify urban discontinuities, while on the other, the obligation to express the city’s identity. Amplifying this duality, bridges are both linear and volumetric, behaving as anisotropic entities, understood quite differently from the sequence of approach, than from a raking view.  This bias could be said to lend itself to feeling (sensual experience) along the longitudinal axis, and knowing (shape recognition) in the transverse view. Or in Loos-ian terms, one might say that the interior experience is in the realm of culture, while the exterior countenance belongs to civilization.  The result is a kind of urban anamorphosis in which a bridge might be seen through a lens of competing intrinsic and extrinsic figurations, offering fertile ground to reconcile formal / structural considerations with cultural / civic inquiry.

The studio will test the resolution of these competing interests within the context of the nation’s most iconic civic realm, the Mall in Washington DC.  Students will explore the creative tension and formal possibilities inherent in the resolution of the physics and aesthetics of the bridge typology, while confronting the monumental scale of the nation’s capital.  At a time of political and social discord, the studio will leverage the potency of civic force and the metaphor of connecting, through productive dialogues between the public realm (the haptic sphere of the individual vs the civic needs of the collective), tectonic assembly (dialogue between structure and skin, object and landscape), and iconic value (the intrinsically derived prosaic vs the extrinsically imposed poetic).

Students will identify a site and potential additional program based on their reading of the Mall’s past and future trajectory as both a modified riparian landform, and as a civic space for gathering, protest, commemoration and reflection. 

The studio will hold workshops with structural engineers, and tentatively travel to DC to tour the Mall and nearby cultural destinations.

American Gothic, Monuments for Small-Town Life

“American Gothic” is a painting of 1930 by Grant Wood, showing a white, middle-aged couple in front of a farm. The man wears jeans overalls and has a pitchfork in his right hand, the woman is dressed in a colonial-style apron with a red neoclassical cameo. The farm has a gothic window, both a sign of pretentiousness and a clumsy declaration of belonging to a European, Protestant tradition. The pitchfork suggests a rural and moderately hostile context.

At a time when recent political developments have brought attention to the small towns of the American Midwest, the studio proposes to design a public building in provincial Ohio, trying to imagine how public space and collective buildings could contribute to shaping the future of a community, and so contribute to overcoming its current fragility.

The studio will design a Methodist church on a plot located on North Main Street, in Clyde, Sandusky County, Ohio. Clyde was the inspiration for Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 classic Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life. As such, the town provides a prototypical place to observe the contemporary Midwest. 

The agenda of the studio is double: to understand the social reality of the Midwest by investigating the materiality of its territorial organization, and to design a simple architectural object knowing that, in the end, a building is a building, and the relationship of analysis and design is (fortunately) very indirect.

A list of hundred churches will provide a starting point for the design exercise. The observation of the context and the confrontation with disciplinary precedents will develop in parallel. It is left to the student to determine how personal creativity, disciplinary knowledge, and an understanding of context and politics, intersect with and determine a design hypothesis.

Designing a church in Clyde, Ohio is an experiment on the vitality of the classical tradition. In a context where classicism could easily be misinterpreted as traditionalism, if not worse, the studio asks to re-discover the openness and generosity (and ambiguity) of the classic tradition.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli will be in residence on January 24 and 25, February 7, 21, and 22, March 7, 8, 28, and 29, April 11, 12, 25, and 26, and May 3, 6, or 7 for Final Reviews. The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off-week” missed time.

 

Nelson Byun, Teaching Associate, will be in residence throughout the term and will meet with the studio weekly.

HOW TO LIVE TOGETHER?

Is there an alternative to the suburbs capable of satisfying contemporary needs and aspirations? Can we attend to our societies and their unexpected transformations through a collaborative drawing upon inherited bourgeois spaces? In a time when public and private spaces have no reality and our hyper-connected societies fight against solitude and isolation, what are we willing to share, and what is there to gain in reconsidering the suburbs as a potential digital commune where co-living and co-working are the basis of a new social structure? Can a group of modest houses inspire an alternative commune, a co-living form that revises and updates the idea of a collective Palace?

The studio aims to construct a new ecology of humans and non-humans, a modality of a New Palace centered around one of the deepest paradoxes of our time… How can we live together?

The studio will work on Roland Barthes’ book "Comment vivre ensemble, Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens", a collection of notes of his courses and seminars at the Collège de France, 1976-1977. The studio plans to travel to San Francisco to visit Sea Ranch and view “The Sea Ranch. Architecture, Environment and Idealism,” an exhibition of original drawings and materials at SFMOMA.

In groups of two, students will produce a research booklet dedicated to a systematic documentation of six or seven case study precedents located mainly in the US. Students will then individually design a small group of seven to fourteen houses along with their common equipment and facilities. The design component will entail a minimum of two models and four scale resolution drawings: Territory/ Context/ Architecture/ Matter, with at least one rendering for each scale and plans/ sections/ façades drawings at the four resolution scales plus a brief essay of 500 to 1000 words. Format of the final presentation will be analyzed and defined along the term. Both aspects, team research and individual design, will be considered in the final evaluation with a 1:3 ratio, 1 part for research, 3 for design.  

Although the course is intended for students of the Department of Architecture, Landscape Architecture students are also welcome.

Iñaki Abalos will be in residence on January 24 and 25, February 7, 8, 21, and 22, March 28 and 29, April 11, 12, 25, and 26, and May 3, 6, or 7 for Final Reviews. The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off-week” missed time.

A Novel Museum

The objective of this studio is to advance design proposals for the museum of the 21st century. Taking into account the historical precursors and the contradictions and challenges inherited from them, the museum to be designed will find its starting point in a private art collection focused on time-based media. The brief calls for exhibition and archive spaces for the collection of German collector Julia Stoschek who 10 years ago began to exhibit in Dusseldorf inside an adopted landmark industrial building. The subject of this studio is the planned venue in Berlin, which will be located on a site next to the existing Museum of Contemporary Art Hamburger Bahnhof.

The brief for a museum of the 21st century is to be considered open and deliberately incomplete. Acknowledging the important shifts taking place in the realm of collecting and exhibiting with the advent of time-based and performative art, the student’s task is to rethink the structure of the contemporary museum. Julia Stoschek who has recently been nominated as a trustee of the MOCA – Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, together with her curatorial team will take part in the project as interlocutors of the students at various stages, including a planned studio trip to Berlin, Germany. Additionally, there will be lectures and talks with artists and curators specializing in time-based art. Following a principled design approach, the studio will start with typological analyses and discussion of the historical and the modern museum as well as with reading of fundamental texts on conceptual art. 

The instructor(s) will be in residence on January 24 and 25, February 7, 8, 21, and 22, March 7, 8, 28, and 29, April 11, 12, 25, and 26, and May 3, 6, or 7 for Final Reviews. The instructor(s) will also be available via Skype to account for “off-week” missed time.

Zero Energy Residential High-Rise

As urbanization and internal migration to existing cities has been on the increase, residential high-rise typology became the norm in many countries. Although this typology has been used for almost a century, its energy performance has not evolved to a level that matched the environmental concerns. The repetitive approach driven by maximizing profit and relying mostly on machine-based conditioned space, has led to generic and anonymous solutions that can be placed in any given site.

In most cities, high-rise structures have been an important typology for residential buildings.  Their design has primarily been influenced by their structure and code. Environmental factors have not played a critical role in shaping the design of such buildings. As net zero energy buildings and communities are becoming mandated by many countries, the demand on understanding the environmental factors affecting such design is increasing.

Simultaneously, user expectations transcend physical space needs. Comfort, flexibility, energy and carbon performance as well as environmental legacy are all attributes of standard of living and quality of place – in this case: home. 

The studio will investigate developing a zero energy residential high-rise (50-60 story high) building design. It will investigate how site-specific factors will influence the design of such structures where form, function and performance, as they relate to beauty, will be the main drivers.  Students will engage in the development of the structure, exploring issues that are not fully considered in typical practice.

To better understand the influence of site and environmental conditions, the focus will be on two climate conditions typical of China and the Mideast, and two separate sites, Shenzhen and Dubai. Workshops related to environment issues, structures, and building envelope will help guide students’ concepts and ideas. A site visit to the two locations will provide a better understanding of the specific issues for the design of the structure. The site visits are sponsored by the Harvard Center for Green Building and Cities.

The New Generic

This studio will investigate new forms of ephemerality and adaptability in spaces for living and working through the design of a tall building in Miami, Florida. Moving beyond conventional planning scenarios of mixed use developments, the studio will merge the typologies of the deep plan office building and the parking structure with scenarios of diverse working and living programs. Our research will yield a productive dialogue between the economy of the grid and the value of spatial exception in a building historically dominated by the desire to maximize floor space over the design of signature, specific space.  We will reject design scenarios where everything goes in favor of singular planning concepts that work for everything. Nearly twenty-five years after Rem Koolhaas’s treatise The Generic City, our research will engage the city at the urban scale: informed by possible techniques of adaptation, equilibrium, and approximation by rejecting the binary of the generic or the specific between the exceptional and the typological.

In Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, the concept of the adaptable building as a non-formalistic, abundantly porous, and non-permanent environment without the need to confirm to any set program reached a limit. Here, Price opts for the bare minimum of an upright frame—a minimal, stackable, frame-locking unit—paired with limited components of movable screens and inflatable pod shelters. Such a building would never reach completion. Instead, it was defined by a process of endless chance and change, with inbuilt flexibility or its alternative—planned obsolescence.

Today, we face pressing challenges regarding longevity in buildings. If structures rapidly face obsolescence because of their programmatic inflexibility, how can we productively design and manage space that is in constant flux? In designing for the future, what gives a long life span to a building where various building components become obsolete over different time frames? We will question how to make an open building adaptable to different uses over time. 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 living and working are becoming more and more porous and ephemeral. We will focus on different scales of design research: from the overall building and infrastructure systems of multi-story buildings, to notions of the longevity of the interior and furnishings in relationship to architecture.

The studio will travel together to Miami in February. Student projects will be developed with individual responses to the problem; our results will be viewed together as collective knowledge and an inventory of strategies. Participation in biweekly studio meetings, readings, and collective model production will be the basis of evaluation.

Sharon Johnston will be in residence on January 24 and 25, February 7, 8, 21, and 22, March 7, 8, 28, and 29, April 11, 12, 25, and 26, and May 3, 6, or 7 for Final Reviews. The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off-week” missed time.

Setouchi (Seto Inland Sea) Studio

The Seto Inland Sea in western Japan has historically been an active location for trade, marine activities, fishing industries and tourism. The bay, which boasts a natural beauty, is dotted with significant sites. The area’s governments, businesses and cultural institutions were the first to patronize Modernist architecture after World War II.

These supporters were united by a shared desire to create a new identity—modern and democratic—for a society devastated by the War. The result is a rich architecture with a unique combination of Western influence and Japanese tradition, sculptural expressions as well as demonstrating technological advances in structure and material use. 

The studio will first study the context and history, placing particular focus on the prefecture of Kagawa and its prominent patronage of architecture, culture, and arts. Kagawa commissioned Kenzo Tange to design its governmental office building in 1958—which retains its original use—and more recently, has privately developed Naoshima, Teshima, and Inushima, becoming an international destination for contemporary art and architecture. The government also commissioned Tange to design a Gymnasium in 1964, the same year as Yoyogi National Gymnasium. As is often the case for architectural masterpieces of the 20th century, many of these buildings have lost their original purpose. Though the usage became obsolete, each retains its powerful iconic presence and Tange’s Gymnasium is no exception.

In this studio, we will imagine a new program for the gymnasium re-aligning it within the region’s society into the future. We will utilize our access to the Tange archive in Loeb Library for primary research material. We will begin by analyzing the building’s original context to re-contextualize and re-situate it within contemporary life. The studio objective for each student will be to come up with a proposal for the Gymnasium’s future use. Evaluation will be based on the rigor of initial research and analysis, the imagination and assessment of future programming and its narrative, and the thoroughness of the design proposal.