Recasting the Outcasts

At a time when it is more essential than ever to conserve resources and prevent carbon pollution, we find that buildings are frequently discarded rather than being reinvented to serve contemporary life. Indeed, today the life span of buildings in North America is often fewer than fifty years. In many cases, the reason for their demolition has less to do with a lack of architectural quality than it does with real estate speculation that aims to expand their sites’ financial value.

One group of architectural outcasts that are particularly vulnerable to being erased and replaced—and their embodied carbon thereby released—are the Brutalist structures of the 1960s and ’70s. How might we revitalize this building stock, which despite its material solidity, is being treated as throw-away architecture? What are the characteristics, real and perceived, that make these buildings seem like waste products—reviled both by their disenchanted owners and the public? We will explore how these buildings might convert their specific “waste-time” into a benefit, looking to our culture’s definition of waste and its unique ability, as Will Viney states, “to communicate across thresholds of time.”

Employing a palimpsestic approach, students will be asked to bring contemporary technologies, materials, forms, and tools to respond to this project with the challenge of recasting this specific architecture toward a viable, extended future. The semester will be divided into two parts. Working in pairs, students will first study, analyze, and critique the existing architecture, looking for physical and aesthetic opportunities for intervention. They will then develop design solutions for urban densification that reinvent, reuse, add to, and reposition these buildings. Adaptation scenarios will include supplementing the existing buildings’ commercial and institutional uses with new programs such as residential.

Because of the specific nature of the physicality of the building type being explored, the studio is open only to architecture students. Evaluation will be based on attendance, participation, and quality of design productiion.

 

Jeanne Gang will be in residence on January 24 and 25, February 6, 7, 20, and 21, March 6, 7, 27, and 28, April 10, 11, 24, and 25, and May 3, 6, or 7 for Final Reviews. The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off-week” missed time and in person on Thursday mornings on in-residence weeks.

Model as Building – Building as Model 2

This is the second -and final- instalment of a critical exploration of the phenomenon known as 'model as building – building as model', whereby buildings of any size or purpose are designed and built anywhere -except on site- using the latest materials, information technology, fundraising models, and cultural trending.

Building a building indoors and trucking it to another destination is not a new idea. The Bauhaus first proposed it in the 1920s as a socially progressive model for mass housing, while several European governments adopted it to alleviate housing shortages in the aftermath of WWII. Today, while need remains an important factor behind this mode of production, need is no longer the dominant factor; desire in its contemporary forms is equally important: digital technology, social media culture, consumerism, and money.

From volumetric cabins such as Minimod by Brazilian outfit Mapa, to larger housing terraces such as Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners’ Oxley Woods (UK), and, further afield, Shigeru Ban’s earthquake shelter terraces in Japan, the studio will explore the resurgence of Off-Site Manufacturing (OSM) and its central premise that building is merely a 1:1 model (and vice versa).

To better concentrate on its own creative work, the studio will make use of last year’s preliminary design research (OSM Manual Spring 2018). This year’s preliminary study will focus on four contemporary, ground?breaking OSM projects currently under construction, with exclusive access to unpublished design documentation.

This will be followed by a studio trip to Scotland for a joint Learning Week hosted by the Built Environment Exchange at Edinburgh Napier University. The learning week will include two site visits, several design seminars, and two eye-opening OSM factory visits in Glasgow and Inverness, with substantial road travel through the Scottish Highlands to connect the dots.

Upon returning from the studio trip, participants will have the option of developing proposals at drastically different scales -with correspondingly different OSM approaches- either in a rural location north of Edinburgh, or in the historic heart of the seventeenth century city.

This studio will be fast paced and extremely organized. It is open to motivated individuals from the Architecture and Urban Design programs.

Individual Performance will be evaluated on the basis of each student’s contribution to the opening research phase, the midterm submission, and the final project.

George L. Legendre will be in residence on January 24, 25, 29, and 30, February 12, 13, 26, and 27, March 12, 13, 26, and 27, April 9, 10, 23, and 24, and May 3, 6, or 7 for Final Reviews.  The instructor will also be available via Skype to account for “off-week” missed time.

FAMILY

Plant a radish.
Get a radish.
Never any doubt.
That's why I love vegetables;
You know what you're about!
Plant a turnip.
Get a turnip.
Maybe you'll get two.
That's why I love vegetables;
You know that they'll come through!
They're dependable!
They're befriendable!
They're the best pal a parent's ever known!
While with children,
It's bewilderin'.
You don't know until the seed is nearly grown
Just what you've sown.
So
Plant a carrot,
Get a carrot,
Not a Brussels sprout.
That's why I love vegetables.
You know what you're about!
Life is merry,
If it's very
Vegetarian!
A man who plants a garden
Is a very happy man!
Plant a beanstalk.
Get a beanstalk.
Just the same as Jack.
Then if you don't like it,
You can always take it back!
But if your issue
Doesn't kiss you,
Then I wish you luck.
For once you've planted children,
You're absolutely stuck!
Every turnip green!
Every kidney bean!
Every plant grows according to the plot!
While with progeny,
It's hodge-podgenee.
For as soon as you think you know what kind you’ve got,
It's what they're not!
So
Plant a cabbage.
Get a cabbage.
Not a sauerkraut!
That's why I love vegetables.
You know what you're about!
Life is merry
If it's very
Vegetarian.
A man who plants a garden
Is a very happy man!
A vegitari-
Very merry
Vegetarian!

The studio will meet every Wednesday and Thursday of the semester. Each student will select a site and each student will be assigned their own program. The studio will be a collective exercise to define and empower the individual toward a personal architecture.

The Agency of Mezcal in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico

The Oaxaca Valley in Southern Mexico is known for its cultural heritage but also for its high levels of poverty and unemployment. Limited access to water, aggravated by urban expansion and deforestation, affect agriculture, which is one of the region´s main economic engines. Every year 30% of the male population is forced to migrate for lack of work, and villages remain inhabited by a women majority with limited influence.

More recently, Oaxaca has become known for its production of mezcal. Several farming villages in the valley are also mezcal producers, which is an intensely laborious and hand-crafted process that takes the pines of agave plants, ferments and distills them into high-proof alcohol. Even though mezcal has been around for five centuries, a newly awakened appreciation for slow, authentic and culturally significant spirits has taken it to global markets. If properly managed, this could represent a valuable opportunity to reinvest economic gains in the community, improving its articulation with local ecology, agriculture production and social inclusion. Studio findings could serve as a thoughtful inquiry to guide the potential agency of mezcal in the region with viable holistic strategies focused on the following objectives:
1. Address the eminent limitations water scarcity has on productivity and living conditions through feasible water harvesting and water catchment infrastructure;
2. Articulate synergies and mitigate conflicts between village growth patterns, rural activity and cultural landscape;
3. Consider the social and environmental challenges a mezcal tourist industry could generate while instilling a sense of stewardship for cultural heritage and natural resources;
4. Explore production and social opportunities associated with mezcal and tourism that could advance inclusion and gender equality;
5. Review current public policy on land tenure and regional development to formulate suggestions for amendments based on studio findings.

Students will begin with an exploratory-research phase. The second phase coincides with the sponsored studio trip to Oaxaca and focuses on observation and analyses of each visited settlement. In the third phase students will work on individual projects. Performance will be evaluated through studio work, pin-ups, a mid-term and final review.

This course has an irregular meeting schedule.

This studio meets weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the exception of the following dates in which the instructor will not be in residence: September 11/13 September 18 October 2/4 November 13/15 To make up for missed studio sessions, the instructor will be available outside of the typical studio meeting times (including Friday, September 21) on weeks that she is in residence.

Multiple Miamis

This interdisciplinary studio will take on questions of how design can address issues of inequity, race, affordability, and resilience in the context of the contemporary American city.  Funded through the Knight Foundation, and using Miami as an urban laboratory, the studio will address contemporary urban challenges facing many American cities, including accessibility and mobility, housing and affordability, race and cultural identity, climate change and adaptation, and struggles for a more inclusive and diverse public realm.

This studio will focus on the Overtown neighborhood near downtown, home to a predominantly African-American population partly rooted in historic waves of migration. A source of skilled labor and cultural vitality through Miami’s rapid growth, Overtown has also been a target of racial discrimination, violence, and dispossession. Following decades of redlining and segregation, its vibrant commercial / entertainment district and residential neighborhoods were decimated by two interstate highway projects in the 1960s. As Miami transitioned into a major global hub for capital, innovation, and tourism in subsequent decades, Overtown experienced overwhelming public and private disinvestment. Today, the effects of real estate speculation and boom, together with climate change and sea level rise, compound pressures on the neighborhood. That parts of Overtown are served by the Miami MetroRail, near to the city’s premier cultural and medical institutions, and sit on high/dry ground poses both acute tensions and transformative opportunities.

Students will develop multi-disciplinary spatial strategies and design proposals for re-imagining a Miami that reckon with its multiple, conflicted pasts; recognize its full and diverse citizenry; and suggest new possibilities for living in the contemporary American city. Projects may focus on questions of housing and public space; on infrastructure and productive landscapes; and on access and mobility in relationship to just and equitable development strategies.

Work from the studio will be published in a GSD-produced Studio Report and will be presented in Miami. We will organize topical seminars on key issues with special guests from across the design disciplines, both at GSD and in Miami.  The studio will run alongside and be integrated with a project-based seminar course for MUP and MDes students taught by Lily Song.

Gendering Urban Development: Making room for women in urban planning and design in Argentina

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” – Jane Jacobs

Having adopted the New Urban Agenda and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the Argentine government is committed to making its cities better for all residents and reducing inequity, by removing slum conditions, alleviating poverty, and tackling climate change in one of the world’s most urbanized countries. Connecting all of these efforts is a commitment to integrate gender perspectives into urban development programs and policies in order to specifically account for, accommodate, and improve women’s experiences in Argentine cities.

This focus on gender endorses the observation, made by practitioners and researchers alike, that for cities to become truly equitable and sustainable – and meet the SDGs – they must attend to a broader range of experiences. Women and girls around the world face specific yet near-universal challenges in the urban realm, particularly in low-income settings. Male-dominated public spaces, physical and perceived barriers to access, insecurity on public transport, transportation networks designed for the male commute, street harassment, and the threat of gender-based violence obstruct women’s mobility, safety, social integration, civic engagement, and economic opportunity. Urban design and planning have central roles to play in mitigating these gendered challenges.

The Department of Urban Planning and Design has partnered with the Ministry of the Interior, Public Works and Housing, to take up this challenge through a fall studio. Students will approach familiar design and planning questions from new viewpoints, use a broader range of participatory tools, and reconsider the kinds of data included in their analysis and solutions sets. With this information, students will develop innovative, yet grounded design and planning strategies for re-shaping a critical portion of barrio ‘La Favorita’ (City of Mendoza), to better meet the needs of women and girls, and by extension, all residents. Specifically, students will create a plan that includes both specific design interventions for an existing plaza, and written and visual recommendations for wider community infrastructure systems. The planning methodologies and specific design outcomes developed will form the basis for future gender-focused urban design initiatives across Argentina.

This course has an irregular meeting schedule.

Studio sessions will take place on the following Wednesdays and Thursdays: 9/12/2018September 12-14; September 24-28 (pending studio trip to Argentina); October 3-4; October 17-18; October 31-November 1; November 14-15; November 28-29.

A Campus in a City – A City in A Campus: Harvard and Allston

While Harvard University’s roots are firmly planted in the City of Cambridge, the university now owns more land in the City of Boston.  The slow and strategic acquisition of land between the Harvard Business School, the Charles River, the I-90 Massachusetts Turnpike extension and the residential neighborhoods of Allston have enabled more than 100 contiguous acres of land and a number of other large sites to be assembled as the university grows its educational and research footprint in new, interdisciplinary directions. At the same time, after completing its first comprehensive plan in decades, the City has identified Allston as a key location to channel explosive growth and will leverage the capacity of the institution to engender a new urban district.  This new geography presents a rare opportunity to capitalize on the investment in 21st century public transit and knit together pieces of the city that were severed by the rail and road infrastructures of the 19th and 20th.

This interdisciplinary studio lies at the intersection of architecture, urban design, planning and landscape architecture to transform and grow a new neighborhood in Allston at the intersection of campus and city.  While vast growth continues apace in nearby Kendall Square, the Longwood Medical Area and the South Boston Waterfront, these high concentrations of development for the innovation economy lack resiliency strategies, long term transportation options, vibrant urban spaces and a mix of uses that characterize them as truly livable, urban destinations.  What’s more, as Harvard and Boston’s growth transforms the surrounding context in Allston, creating a host of urban design and planning challenges and opportunities, the campus and the city must change and grow in ways that build on traditions of innovation, but counteract trends that segregate the elite of the innovation economy both physically and socially.  The studio will establish a clear vision for what this 100 acres will become and how the campus and the city can grow in a direction that serves as a catalyst for constructive change.  

The New Selma

More than three years have passed since a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson shot and killed an unarmed black 18-year-old named Michael Brown. In that time, the protests that followed the shooting—which catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement—have evolved into a powerful, grassroots resistance. As the activist Rev. Clinton Stancil recently put it, "St Louis is the new Selma," the new center of the ongoing struggle for civil rights and equality.

While reforming discriminatory police practices remains a primary goal of this struggle, activists are increasingly looking for ways to reform the discriminatory way in which we plan, design, and manage cities, especially in the light of numerous autopsies of the Ferguson uprisings that cite uneven development as major factors of Ferguson's unrest.

Nowhere is uneven development more evident than in St. Louis’s 3rd Ward. Composed of the northeast neighborhoods of JeffVanderLou, St. Louis Place, Hyde Park, College Hill, Fairground Neighborhood, and O'Fallon, the 3rd Ward—which is 94 percent African American— has some of St. Louis’s lowest home values, lowest life expectancies, and highest poverty rates. Physically, block after block after block appear abandoned. But if the 3rd Ward is lacking in population, economic development, and basic social services, it is not lacking in pride, energy, and hope. Indeed, the 3rd Ward is home to a robust (and youthful) network of black artists, activists, and community-based organizations who are working together to build a healthier, more equitable 3rd Ward.

This interdisciplinary studio invites students from all departments to work closely with these community leaders to think boldly about how architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design can help build this future for the 3rd Ward.

Early in the semester, we will work together to create a community newspaper about the 3rd Ward. The idea is to create a fun, engaging, and accessible volume of diverse visual content (primarily visual) about the community’s history, people, and land use, as well as summaries / analyses / opinions of issues that we deem relevant during the course of our research. Students will also work together to create a community engagement campaign whose goal will be to solicit feedback from 3rd Ward community members in a meaningful (and fun) way. A major part of this campaign will be the creation of community engagement artifacts (interactive models, games, etc.) that we will deploy on our field trip.

Following the field trip, students will spend the bulk of the semester working on two assignments concurrently: 1) a framework plan for the Ward that uses insights from our community engagement campaign to outline recommendations for the Ward, and 2) individual priority projects that develop one of the plan’s recommendations. Priority projects can range from the design of individual buildings (housing typologies, community centers, educational facilities, retail, etc.), to the design of neighborhood and block typologies, to the design and planning of public spaces, transportation networks, and so on. As there are a myriad of ways in which architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and urban designers can intervene here, these priority projects are expected to be very diverse.

A field trip to St. Louis is planned.

Arlington National Cemetery: Engaging Hallowed Ground

Opened in 1864 to accommodate the massive casualties from America’s Civil War, Arlington National Cemetery is revered as the most hallowed shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States.

Born in the time of travel by foot, horse, and carriage, the years of accreted function have not been kind to the original elegant arrival experience.  Funeral attendees and visitors confront a fragmented, chaotic, non-intuitive condition at a time calling for simplicity, clarity, and solemnity.

The studio asks you to transform the basic rudiments of arrival into grace.  You will take on one of the most classic design problems landscape architects and architects confront – how to array a site and building program that intermingles conflicting and often dangerous modes of transportation while communicating to each user how to get where they wish to go, all while offering a safe and beautiful setting befitting of the place.  In this case, America’s most hallowed shrine.

To get to that point, we will first explore the meaning of arrival.  Your research, analysis, and solutions will be focused on strategies and designs that erase the negative effects of the cumulative degradation of the arrival experience through prior accommodations to modern life. You will map and study the history of Arlington National Cemetery.  This is a history of honoring extreme human sacrifice in military service.  What can we learn about arriving to a place that honors that which we all wish need not occur? 

Beyond the expected rigorous analysis and understanding of the physical site, you will be pushed for your opinions and your design response to the problem.  The places that move us – places that put us into a particular state of mind – do so as a result of physical arrangements and design decisions.  If you desire to explore site scaled design that touches the deepest core of human emotion, this studio offers that opportunity.

You will use the full array of software, physical modeling, and hand drawing skills to work as you would in a professional design studio.  Your presentations skills will be honed during a session with a skilled theater actor/director/playwright. 

RHIZOSPHERE

A new understanding of the relationship between agriculture and ecology will give the students new clues to design in the vernacular landscape of La Camargue in France. Landscape as a product of labor, limiting factors and potential based in regenerative agriculture, will guide the students to design rule-based proposals based in new complex associations.

With a long-term vision of reducing  the negative environmental and health impacts of current agricultural practices, activists such as Rachel Carson, and agronomists such as Albert Howards, E. Pfeiffer and Masanobu Fukuoka established decades ago  the conceptual and practical frameworks for regenerative agriculture. Their combined efforts were a reaction to the negative effects of increasingly industrialized agricultural practices. These works catalyzed what has since become a bottom-up revolution in the way we produce food. Farmers, activists, and private institutions have developed new and often experimental techniques that understand soil as a living resource requiring holistic management. These initial experiments have developed into the fields of natural agriculture, permaculture, biodynamic agriculture, agro-ecology, and regenerative agriculture that applied at a large scale could totally transform the landscape around us.

Alongside the development of these sophisticated and innovative techniques, there has been a growing body of work recognizing the potential of atmospheric carbon sequestration in a regenerated living soil. Capturing carbon from the atmosphere in a healthy soil would address two major challenges: new potentials for agriculture and climate change. This solution takes place in the rhizosphere.

Understanding the rhizosphere as a critical space for design is in our interest as landscape architects:   there is a profound opportunity to work with the potential of this media in a way that is specific to the climatic and geological conditions of any particular site. As designers working directly with the land, we cannot avoid this evolving paradigm: we must integrate this new knowledge, practices and technologies into our proposals, and understand it as a precious resource at the base of our interventions in constructed environments.