Solid State

Overview

Solid State will focus on the design of an office and exchange space prototype in Taipei, Taiwan. We will begin where the 20th-century legacy of Taipei’s Zhonghua Road district expired, with architecture at the intersection of national identity, socio-economic progress, and urban vitality.

In the early 1960s, a generation of Taiwanese found a doorway to the world along Zhonghua Road: eight buildings and an urban context filled with audio electronics shops. Solid State starts where electronics–a now anachronistic subject–trailed off, disappearing into an ether of its own making. Half a century ago, we soldered electrical components together, hoping to make something good: a radio, a telephone, a TV. Transistors, tubes, and capacitors have long since been replaced by a different lingua franca whose touchstones are scarcely touchable yet omnipresent: information, media, and belief. Twenty-first-century Zhonghua Road is now immersed in a wholly different (quasi-technological) synthesis comprised of interpretation, extrapolation, and plot…characteristics having more in common with social exchange than parts assembly. We make markets, stories, and relationships. We construct truths alongside wrestling with what truth means. And we want to sort this out while sipping a flat white in a fetching room.

Exchange

Solid State will begin with an assertion: Architecture is never more significant than when it shapes exchange. Visceral, human exchange. A person in a room with other people, a moment’s eye contact, a chair scraping on the floor. Our concern will be with spaces of tangible exchange that feed and are fed by the technological labor enveloping contemporary life.

Focus

Our focus will be on architecture. While we will work in a city, this will not be an urban design studio. Your work might ‘look like a city’ or ‘look like a building,’ but the means you use to get there must be architecture. Buildings. Participants will be expected to develop mature architecture articulated in plans, sections, diagrams, views, models, and other instruments important to our field. The most alluring tools are those right before you: floors, walls, doors, windows, columns, beams, stairs, and ceilings.

Program

The Solid State program includes Office Space and Exchange Space. These programs will be treated hierarchically. Office Space will be framed as generic, a white noise activity essential to contemporary urban life, but, for our purposes, no more than a reservoir for feeding Exchange Space. Our priority will be the design of Exchange Space.

The program will include eighty percent Office Space and twenty percent Exchange Space: eighty percent white noise and twenty percent intensity. Your attention will be reversed vis-à-vis this programmatic distribution: eighty percent on the smaller Exchange Space program, twenty percent on the larger Office Space program. 

There are two reasons for focusing your work on the Exchange Space portion of the program. The first is cultural. Exchange Space is where the most significant opportunities lie for experimenting with work-life relationships. The second concern centers on teaching aims. The overall Exchange Space area–around 3,000m2–is small enough to allow you to develop mature architecture during the time we have this semester.

Travel

We will travel to Taipei during the GSD’s allotted travel week, October 4–11. 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This studio will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.

New Rooms: Defining a Permanently Temporary Art Infrastructure

Over the last 20 years, art fairs, biennials, and expos have grown in number and scale globally, leading to over-saturation in the art market, diluted or compromised missions, and perhaps loss of some of these event’s original attraction. In comparison to ticketed purpose-built museums that are organized around their permanent collections, spaces for public art and cultural events vary from large anonymous convention centers to some temporary off-the shelf tent structures. Common between this spectrum of spaces is the repetitive cellular interior layout of temporary partition walls inside expansive swathes of space. Each temporary exhibition requires its own curatorial program, newly released work ranging from wall art to objects to theatrical performances, and feeds off speed demanded by its compressed timeframe. As such, these events that last from days to weeks are defined by their energy and intensity, building lasting brands from their recurring presence that draw galleries, artists, and large audiences year after year. To support this transient operation, there is a demanding and endless loop of planning, installation, operation management, and deinstallation. Not least, there is the continuous need for procurement of space and making due with what is available at a given time.

This studio seeks to define a new typology of space for art and culture to emerge: a permanently temporary art infrastructure. The infrastructure will accommodate temporary events for expos, fairs, and biennials and develop a calendar that supports both the permanent and the ephemeral in the practice and experience of art. The studio will begin by investigating spaces for viewing art by re-interpreting Remy Zaugg’s book The Art Museum of my Dreams or A Place for the Work and the Human Being as a means to research and model three lines of interest: the room for viewing art, the art itself, and finally seek to define an infrastructure that supports the permanently temporary. The objective is to invent a new spatial model for these temporary events: one that moves away from the large anonymous flexible space to a specific space for art viewing and experiencing.

While a permanently temporary art infrastructure is a typology that every city needs, Chicago is uniquely positioned to build on its strong legacy and current roster of fairs and expositions – and serve as a model for future developments. The studio will re-imagine the abandoned and endangered 1920s Chicago Union Station Power House, located on the south branch of the Chicago River, as the primary hub to develop a permanently temporary art infrastructure in addition to exploring off-site open space to expand and connect to the greater city. The studio will speculate a new future for this historic structure through re-use and repair. Students will selectively propose additional on-site and off-site space as purpose-built and temporary structures to support their permanently temporary infrastructural theses.

The studio will travel to Chicago to visit the Chicago Architecture Biennial, local galleries and artists’ studios, collectors’ homes, and hosts’ talks with thought leaders in Chicago.

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This studio will meet for the first time on Friday, September 5th.

City as Resource: Urban Repair Through Innovative Infrastructure

The “City as Resource” option studio is a research and design exercise focusing on urban adaptive reuse in the ‘already built-up city’ given the context of climate change and resource scarcity. The studio seeks to explore new paths for people-centric urban development within the bounds of the already built environment, focusing on utilizing material and non-material resources embedded in existing urban structures and fabric.

While situated in the larger global narrative, each year, we will explore the theme of urban repair through the innovative use of existing infrastructure and its transformation potentials in a different city, creating a lexicon of design solutions in post-industrial cities.

This year, Copenhagen will serve as the test site. Copenhagen’s urban identity has been characterized by constant reinvention and transformation. The Spring 2025 studio will focus on the development and transformation of Refshaleøen, projected to be one of the largest and most important urban development projects in Copenhagen. As the new center in the East Harbor, Refshaleøen stands to become a visionary pioneer project for sustainable urban development as a vibrant, creative, cultural, and green district with space for everyone in this unique and historical industrial yard.

The intent of the Studio is to engage in a larger global practice of creating more sustainable, livable, and equitable cities. While the Studio’s test site will be in Copenhagen, students will be tasked with adapting a wider lens of design thinking that is both intensely local, but also simultaneously global, particularly in the face of the current sustainability, material and resource, and climate crises.

This course has an irregular schedule and will be conducted 50% online and 50% in-person. Please see the Studio Schedule listed in the syllabus for details.

Extreme Urbanism 10: Mumbai Development Project, Imagining Housing as Urban Form

Over the last three decades housing has become extremely scarce and expensive in Mumbai. A report by Knight Frank, a global realty consultancy, listed Mumbai as the most unaffordable housing market in India with 29 percent of its under-construction dwelling units exceeding the 10-million-rupee ($100,000 USD) mark. Approximately 57 percent of households live in single room tenements and, according to the 2011 Census (the most recent census taken in India), roughly 40 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. Applying that percentage to Mumbai’s estimated current population of close to 18 million suggests a current slum population of over seven million. Even the middle class faces a dire housing market, with hopes for home ownership foundering on the shoals of extreme housing prices.

Current government policy prescriptions favor supply side solutions implemented through the availability of disproportionately high floor area ratios (FSI in Mumbai, FAR elsewhere) that overwhelm carrying capacities of many districts. High FSIs to encourage redevelopment of existing housing stock have doubled the densities on existing plots without any corresponding augmentation of urban infrastructure and services. Without a greater overall plan, such plot-by-plot redevelopment has fragmented the urban grain, disrupted the historic fabric, interfered with existing community formations, and exacerbated socio-economic dichotomies.

In collaboration with GSD 5251 The Development Project and its real estate students, this option studio will focus on creating a fully designed development proposal for a specific multi-acre site within Mumbai’s Elphinstone Estate, a warehouse district situated in the port lands along the eastern waterfront of the city and owned by the Mumbai Port Trust. Currently, the site is primarily composed of warehouses, leased on short tenure, some iron, steel, and transport offices, small scale retail, and slum housing interwoven throughout. The challenge for the studio will be to strategically and advantageously leverage the existing extremes of housing and land values to create housing for slum dwellers and other income groups.

To that end, the studio will explore typologies for affordable housing on high value land. Development patterns promoted by metropolitan and parcel-scaled development government policies will be examined through a series of transects cut through the inner city of Mumbai. Questions of hybridity, mixed use, mixed incomes, and high density will be front and center as the studio grapples with conditions of extreme urbanism. Methods for reinforcing and extending existing urban fabrics to facilitate easier transitions for local communities will be tested.

The studio’s design explorations will be part of a fully realized real estate development proposal, prepared in collaboration with real estate students working in small teams with design students, for the Elphinstone site that meets tests of financial viability and advancement of beneficial spatial, social, and environmental outcomes. The studio emphasizes the need for design to be embedded within the larger development practices of the city where real estate development has emerged as an important instrument of urban development. The studio will also explore implementation partnerships between city and state governments, the private sector, and civil society (housing NGOs, cooperative housing societies etc.). The interdisciplinary nature of real estate, weaving together financial, market, regulatory, political, environmental, and contextual analyses into physical design and planning outcomes that generate positive real estate outcomes for the city will be ever present. The studio asks its students, working with the real estate students, to integrate the skills and knowledge of real estate professionals, designers, and planners to transform how the built environment is produced and consumed.

Navigating Korail: An Informal Settlement in Dhaka

The context for this studio is the Korail, an informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh which has around 300,000 people living in approximately 100 acres. Congested houses with informal utility connections, narrow pathways and cramped living conditions for mostly migrants from the rural areas, often victims of climate change. ‘Surrounded and separated by a lake from the high-income residential areas, Korail developed and is developing through a complex dynamics of population, migration, urban growth and regeneration, economies, politics, employments, etc. In spite of its problems, the community in Korail thrives and is bustling with social and economic activity.

For students, Korail presents a multifaceted canvas of learning and application, starting from the houses to the overall settlement pattern. On another scale, there are issues of sanitation, water supply, waste management, open spaces, education, fires, floods, transportation, etc. Students will be required to identify an issue(s) that interests them and work toward a design solution for the same. With support from the instructor, students will develop design solutions to the problem/s in the site that they have chosen to address. The objective will be to develop a scheme that will make life better for the inhabitants of the settlement. Through steps that include, analysis of the context in totality, focusing on an issue(s), look at it from a design problem angle, identify the best path to go about addressing the problem, sequence the development through a set of progressive steps to arrive at workable scheme. There will be a number of virtual consultations with people on site, the inhabitants, architects and planners who work there and resource persons at GSD. The final presentation will need to be a comprehensive scheme that explains, analyses and is able to justify its application for improvement and upliftment for the inhabitants of Korail.

HOPE, CHANGE & EQUITY: The Obama Presidential Center and Redevelopment of the Woodlawn Neighborhood

This design and development option studio will explore the urban design impacts of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) and its ability to act as a catalyst for the equitable redevelopment of the Woodlawn neighborhood in the heart of the Southside of Chicago.

The Obama Presidential Center, set to open in 2026, and the greater Jackson Park district are currently under construction and represent over a billion-dollar investment in Chicago’s Southside. It was conceived of by former President Barak Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as a promise to positively transform the Southside and the future of the Woodlawn neighborhood. The studio will explore multiple sites in very close proximity to the OPC and what an equitable future urban design framework for Woodlawn neighborhood might look like.

The studio will leverage the excitement and energy of the future Obama Presidential Center to reimagine 63rd Street corridor and Stony Island Avenue as a mixed-use, mixed-income, and mixed density district, linking the Woodlawn Community to Jackson Park and beyond through economic development and urban design improvements.

The studio goals are:

Harvard Campus and the Changing Nature of the University

The campuses and yards of Harvard University, located on both embankments of the Charles River in Cambridge and Allston, will serve as a framework for reflection. Located within the metropolitan system of Boston with its constellation of powerful universities such as MIT, Boston University, and others, our context parallels that of other highly dynamic campuses in the USA (Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, etc.) and on other continents. The studio will virtually tour these different institutions, allowing us to decipher the evolution of academic fields and corporate campuses.

The evolution of university campuses ranges from the first models of Oxbridge University, with traditional medieval colleges with cloisters imitating monasteries well integrated in the city, introducing the habitual conflicts between “town and gown,” to visionary ideas like the University of Virginia, with a system of isolated buildings around the campus, outside the city, designed by Jefferson. With these models of reflection and learning, and in accordance with master guidelines, campuses were made bigger and more complex, leading to a modern reorganization of the university system. This was particularly true after World War II, with the multiplication of scientific, artistic, and professional disciplines leading to extension and replication on a large scale.

New urban morphologies were then introduced, such as those of Gropius at the Harvard Graduate Center or Mies at the ITT in Chicago, which reinterpreted the traditional quadrangle. Some constitute genuine urban paradigms, while others are seen as simple instrumental pieces in university development. After this initial explosion of institutions, the various university systems became increasingly complex organizations with labs, museums, research centers, and startups, seeking to develop synergies between science and business with different spatial models.

In this third and current phase, we see a greater overlap with the knowledge-based campuses that constitute the most advanced sectors of today’s economy. It seems that we are moving from a city campus to a campus city system due to the abundant integration of more diverse forms of speculative reflection, but also of applied research that feeds the most creative production.

The studio will address themes such as the advantages of integration in the natural environment and the exchange between individual development and collective knowledge. We will exercise the contribution of urban design and urban architecture in this complex reflection that we call research by design.

Organizing the studio on campus allows for understanding and addressing a very immediate reality, while also comparing and contrasting it with the dynamics in which the realities of the knowledge society are set. The studio is, then, an exercise in simulation of how Harvard campuses could evolve in this third stage of the changing nature of universities without intending to solve the many real challenges that any present-day campus must face. The proposals will have above all a theoretical and academic value.
 

Catalyst Landscapes / Urban Form

Background/Introduction

Rotterdam was leveled by Nazi bombing in WW II, but rose to become Europe’s most vibrant and diverse city. What was once 19th century farmland along the Rhine River was carved into Rotterdam’s largest harbor, Maashaven, the largest and busiest port in Europe. Behind a robust system of dykes and around the harbor, grew a blue-collar neighborhood with low income housing stock, but with little attention to parks and waterfront access.

A familiar post-industrial story unfolded. Harbor activities declined and their jobs left with them, leaving behind unused port-related buildings and affordable housing for recent immigrants. Today, harbor neighborhoods like Carnisee and Afrikaanerwick, while rich with culture are woefully lacking the kind of vibrant parks we now associate with our 21st century culture of social, recreational, and environmental resiliency. While development proposals for the area have appeared over the past decade, none have gained traction with the city, owners, and surrounding neighborhoods. In response, the city initiated an urban revitalization plan, calling for a new large park, Nelson Mandela Park, designed by SWA/Balsley, as its centerpiece. Understanding that parks must be nearby the communities they serve, the park will reclaim twenty acres of the innermost portion of the harbor as the neighborhood’s recreational nexus.

Course Study Site and Objectives

The specific area to be redeveloped extends for one half mile along Maashaven’s southern waterfront. Currently chock-a-block with a variety of older buildings and uses, this ribbon of post-industrial heritage holds the possibility of being transformed into an urban mixed-use district with vibrant streetscapes, plazas, and waterfronts that simultaneously enhance rather that gentrify the existing, adjacent, culturally diverse working-class neighborhoods of Afrikaanderwick and Carnissee.

Too often, real estate development and landscape architecture operate in silos, resulting in leftover open spaces that bring little value to the development or the communities they serve. The unique partnership between the landscape option studio and the Master in Real Estate’s “The Development Project” course provides an opportunity for students to collaborate in the preparation of a realizable, sustainable, and financially viable development scheme for the Maashaven district. Working together in small teams, students will find common ground and language as they seek to create a development paradigm where the public realm and its open spaces play a key role in the development’s urban form, financial viability, and public benefit. As an eight-unit course, the option studio will meet twice a week, overlapping in one of the meetings with the four unit The Development Project course, as well as the one-week site visit to Rotterdam with the MLA studio.
 

Echoes of Empire

The Southern Pacific Rim is among the most vulnerable regions to climate change. Extreme and unpredictable weather conditions, prolonged periods of drought, and intensified bushfire events, alongside the warming and acidification of oceans, continue to increase the vulnerability of both human and non-human communities. The relentless pursuit of economic growth propelled an ever-expanding demand for the extraction of natural resources, erasing, shaping, and altering cultures while transforming landscapes. Through the pursuit of power over resources, environments, and people iodiversity zones have been devastated, communities displaced, and profound racial, social, and economic disparities have emerged. These are issues inherently intertwined with environmental changes that produce a ‘climate colonialism’. Extractive practices have caused ecological damage, perpetuated systemic inequalities, and power imbalances that disproportionately affect marginalised communities that generates perpetual zones of sacrificed landscapes.

This studio redefines the delineated resource grounds, infrastructures, waste byproducts, and atmospheric territories as a ‘thickened ground’ condition encompassing interconnected ‘non-scalable’ processes and flows. The ‘thickened ground’ will be explored as alternative ontologies in which processes do not segregate substance from significance nor nature from culture. The studio will critically re-narrate the enduring material flows and metabolic transformations that have taken place in this region to exploit the evolving perceptions and values attributed to land and its non-human counterparts and propose alternative narratives, institutional regimes, and new legacies.

Commonwealth nations in the region share interconnected histories characterised by the British Empire’s building of power through their resource exploitation, indigenous displacement, migrant labour, and large-scale extractive practices. These commonalities present opportunities for the design of projected future scenarios that seek alternatives to historical regimes of expansion and exploitation and ones that resist and dismantle colonial regimes and systems of perpetual growth. This is timely given the increasing climate impacts, growing recognition of Indigenous land rights, emerging international environmental protection frameworks, and Commonwealth legal and institutional frameworks that can facilitate coordinated action.

The Galilee Basin in Australia is the site of the study. It encompasses the Abbot Point coal terminal, the Great Barrier Reef, coal mines, freight lines and the broader Galilee Basin (248,000 km2, approximately equal to the United Kingdom), which covers one-sixth of the Australian continent. The design approach aims to generate a detailed understanding of how colonial resource extraction has shaped these territories. The projects will explore alternative infrastructural territories along a transect from the Great Barrier Reef to the coal mines deep in the Galilee Basin. Designs will embrace techno-ecological relationships within a framework of territorial commons, addressing legacies of power, labour and productivity, land recognition, and toxicity.

This studio is structured around four phases: Phase 01: From Above -Counter-Narratives, Phase 02: From Within- Land and Ocean as Medium – In the Field, Phase 03: From Below-A Future-Kin, Phase 04: The Counter Empire Exhibition of 1924. The teaching and learning schedule includes a series of guest lectures and a range of mapping, narrative, film, and modelling workshops aligned with each of the phases. We will be working closely with the Powerhouse Museum, CSIRO, Geosciences Australia, Whitsunday Regional Council, and the Australian Department of Energy and Resources.

The Landscapes of the Norwegian Scenic Routes

Over the past thirty years, the “Norwegian Scenic Routes” project has produced imaginative buildings and landscapes in poetic dialogue with Norway’s unique scenery and road infrastructure. As much as the program remains vital, sensibilities toward the astonishing Norwegian landscape and what it means to enjoy the beautiful vistas along the road are changing.

After the program’s first three decades, there is increasing demand for a renewal of values and design techniques that address the scenic route’s relationship to Norwegian climate policies, as well as the evolving aesthetics and poetics around the terms “landscape” and “view.” Outside of Norway, the project has served as a platform for discussing architecture and landscape in relation to art and nature, disseminating the design culture it has contributed to creating. The scenic routes program daringly privileges artistic merit over experience, and has therefore become a platform for small, creative and young boutique practices.

The studio will consider three fundamental questions the program has yet to address:
— Vision and technology
— New scales
— The road as culture

We will explore how technology shapes a designer’s relation to beautiful scenery. In Norway, sophisticated high-resolution surveys and databases of the landscape are publicly available. Architects and landscape architects still need to capitalize on this rich material. We will explore techniques to translate these sophisticated surveys into concrete spatial decisions. This methodology is equally helpful for architects and landscape architects and opens the evaluation of these sophisticated documents beyond their technical implications.

The second question is about scale and media. With increasing pressure to produce new projects that go beyond beautiful objects amidst beautiful scenery, landscape architects are gaining relevance while architects are pushed to expand the limits of the poetic object in connection to the environment.

Along scenic routes, mining and other infrastructural sites located amidst astonishing landscapes create the need to design projects between architecture and landscape architecture that can simultaneously address nature’s exploitation and the extreme beauty of their context. Projects proposed in the studio will also contribute to the evolving nature of road and car culture in some of Northern Europe’s most delicate landscapes, a rapidly changing subject posing new design questions.