The Path Between the Seas: Challenging the Legacy of the Panama Canal

The Panama Canal is one of the world’s greatest works of economic, environmental, and social infrastructure. In his book, The Path Between the Seas. The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914, David McCullough describes the feat of its construction and its multiple impacts. At the top of the list was the creation of the Republic of Panama itself. Globally, the canal shortened the route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from 21 days to less than 24 hours, driving international commerce. The canal sustained and continues to sustain the nation’s economy.

However, there is another–and less well-known–history of the Panama Canal, one of human displacement and suffering, unmitigated colonialism, and radical environmental transformation, all captured poignantly in Marixa Lasso’s Erased. The Untold Story of the Panama Canal. According to Lasso, the landscape of the canal zone is as much a creation as the canal itself, an introduced tropical-style jungle that “erased 400 years of local urban and agricultural history.”

These conflicting narratives are legible today in the canal zone, a ten-mile-wide swath of land that spans the isthmus of Panama and contains a series of repurposed military bases, residential compounds, warehouses, administrative offices, parks, and conservation lands. Connectivity between the canal zone, the city, and the surrounding landscapes is disjointed and hazardous. Water scarcity due to climate change places the population’s needs in direct conflict with the requirements of the canal for its normal operations.

As a speculative yet grounded exercise, the studio has broad applicability. Legacies of colonial occupation remain permanent unless challenged through alternative visions. While we will be working specifically with the conditions of Panama’s Canal Zone, the studio’s ambition is to provide a method for similar cases worldwide. Specifically, the studio will explore how a 19th-century symbol of “technological triumph” can be transformed into a 21st-century landscape that repairs, reconciles, and reconnects, safeguarding local conditions and aspirations from mounting pressures from ongoing global interests and climate uncertainty. 
 

The Spectacular Vernacular

Architecture’s most dramatic evolution since the advent of modernism has been the increasing gap between the extraordinary and the ordinary. The extraordinary distinguished by a predilection for spectacle and ordinary characterized by a penchant for the vernacular, these two opposite poles of architectural production–global and specific on the one hand, local and generic on the other–are more distant than ever before. This studio will examine this gap between the exceptional and the ordinary; the dichotomy between the classical spectacle and the background vernacular through an approach that attempts to reclaim a middle ground, to find the vernacular within the spectacle and the spectacle within the vernacular.

The studio will explore hybrid building types, combining the industrial shed and the vernacular barn in 15,000 to 20,000 square foot buildings. Developments including MLTW’s Sea Ranch, Edward Larabee Barnes’ Haystack, Venturi Scott Brown’s Trubeck & Wislocki cottages, and Stanley Tigerman’s Black Barn will be the subject of precedent study in the studio. These projects are notable for collective dwelling that fused the abstraction of modernism with the specificity of vernacular architecture through the rigor of geometry, disciplined form, and material detail. Inherent to these opposing historical lineages is an emergent type that embodies the local and the global, the generic and the specific, framing a relevant architectural approach of the spectacular vernacular. The studio project will be the design of rural community buildings clustered to serve new modes of contemporary life between home and work and other in-between models. Ambiguous in scale and use, between, a large house, a medium sized barn, and small industrial factory, the buildings will be precise in form and structure developed from a kit of parts assembly with an adaptable climatic interior. The hybrid nature of the buildings will activate new collective spaces as incubators of mixed-culture public space.

Located in a semi-rural community in Connecticut that is defined by small scale agricultural production with local town centers and rural residential parcels, each building will accommodate flexible workspace combined with a civic program of approximately 15,000 sq ft including programs such as a small community center, library, or theater to be identified by each student. The juxtapositions of use and climatic boundaries within the context of an active rural community together will form collective contemporary cultural precincts.

Our studio will reference foundational tenets of planning, program, and detail of various Shaker Villages in New England that we will visit in the development of individual studio projects. Our design process will begin with buildings and details and integrate into multi-building clusters before the completion of the studio. Individual buildings will engage shared pathways and open green space. Each building will encompass a range of climatic environments, diverse envelope conditions, and temporal use scenarios in relation to program criteria. Students will develop their project at three scales from the collective, to the architectural, to the detail. We will construct considered frameworks and evaluative metrics including social utilization, embodied carbon, architectural quality, etc., that will form the basis of collective planning strategies to be implemented by each student in their individual project. Participation in biweekly studio meetings, readings, field trips, and production of large-scale sectional models and collages will be the basis of evaluation.
 

Central London Montage

Though montage has served as an important strategy of composition and interpretation in most artistic mediums since the enlightenment, it wasn’t codified until 1923 by film maker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein. His theory of montage was inspired by an architect, Giovanni Battista Piranesi who, in his print “Ichnographia” — from Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma (1762), simultaneously valorized and betrayed architectural history by seamlessly representing a discordant assemblage of buildings, some of which were allegedly based on archeological sources while others were very evidently conjectural. Campo Marzio exemplifies a decompositional, temporally fragmented sensibility that has inspired architects from Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Soane in the 18th and 19th centuries to Louis Kahn, Rem Koolhaas and Lacaton & Vassal in the 20th and 21st.

The projects of this studio will deploy AI based analytical and synthetic techniques to transform an existing urban collage, a block in central London, into an architectural montage. Students will combine strategies of renovation, addition and new construction to support a hybridic program of mixed use, educational, cultural and housing components.

Occupied by the former campus of Central Saint Martins College, the entire site is presently slated for redevelopment. It features two non-descript one story warehouses (to be replaced by far greater density), a Victorian hotel (likely to be retained and surmounted with new construction), 1920s Edwardian and 1960s/1970s modern perimeter blocks (to be significantly altered and added to), a theatre/lecture hall (likely to be divided, expanded or replaced), and a truck yard in the center (which may be converted into green space and/or covered).

Students will be introduced and encouraged to use Machine Learning techniques that treat the urban context and architectural scaled spaces as signals to be analyzed and reconstructed. In this case the machine is not a generative substitute for the designer but rather an alternative gaze: a perceptual system that tends to transform categorical distinctions and binaries into continuous spectra. This is a view of the world that is fuzzy/probabilistic yet precise and may offer a new way to approach montage as a spatial editing, exploration and hybridization methodology.

Students will be given the digital tools specifically developed for this class to help make the relevant technologies accessible without any need for prior scripting experience or mathematical knowledge. The studio will work on two parallel tracks that periodically co-mingle. Working in collaboration with the MRE Development Project course, student teams will develop a multitude of programmatic scenarios upon which subsequent individual design proposals will be based. While the teams are sampling and diagramming general plans, students will experiment individually to develop formal and spatial montage techniques derived from several architectural as well as filmic concepts. AI will be used to identify and transformatively combine multiple abstract spatial configurations as well as types and styles of facades, roofs, interior spaces and other features derived from central London’s morphology and architecture.

The studio and GSD Master of Real Estate students and faculty will visit London, tour numerous buildings related to our project including John Soane’s Museum collection of Piranesi prints, and meet with several architects as well as stakeholders who are involved in the current planning for the site.
 

Engiadina — Elemental Living

In our everyday lives, we only become aware of the elements — fire, water, earth, and air — when they intermittently become dangerous during extreme weather conditions or natural events. However, this perspective represents a relatively recent shift. For over two millennia, the doctrine of the four elements profoundly influenced human understanding of nature and knowledge systems. This paradigm began to wane with the advent of modern natural science, the Enlightenment, and industrialization, which reframed nature as a quantifiable, exploitable, and productive resource for human use.  

According to philosophers Gernot and Hartmut Böhme, the displacement and alienation between humans and nature, initiated by the modern scientific paradigm, are partly responsible for the environmental crisis we are currently experiencing.

It is striking that current ecological movements rehabilitate the four elements and find great interest in their mutual effects and dependencies. In disciplines such as soil science, atmospheric research, and hydrology, nature is increasingly being viewed as an interconnected system. The «rediscovery of the elements» stands for a renewed relationship between humankind and nature in times of climate crisis.

In this design studio, we expose ourselves to the elements and ask how architecture and forms of living can arise from the intense sensual experience of the four elements and respective cultural techniques. Central to our inquiry is the interplay between habitation, architecture, and landscape, with the goal of proposing simple architectural and constructive solutions that respect and enhance this intricate relationship.

The high valley of the Engadin in Switzerland, celebrated for its iconic lake and mountain landscapes, faces significant environmental and societal challenges. Climate change has intensified issues such as glacier retreat, water scarcity, wildfires or landslides, while the growth of tourism has exacerbated housing shortages for the local population.

Our studio delves into the defining elements of the Engadin–its aesthetic attributes, the myths imbued within its landscapes, and the cultural techniques and practices that have historically shaped its terrain. By utilizing scales from 1:1, 1:10, 1:100, 1:1000, and 1:10 000 through models, drawings, and plans, the studio aims to conceptualize sufficient housing solutions that align with the environmental and cultural context.

Assignments and evaluation criteria:
• Analysis and research of the element and its associated cultural technique given to the students
• Formulation of an architectural question and identification of a suitable site in the Engadin
• Translation of the inquiry into a territorial, architectural, and constructive project
• Development of forms of living and sufficiency, reflected in the floor plans
• Creation of atmospherically rich plans, refined models, and poetic visualizations

Our approach is iterative rather than linear, encouraging students to simultaneously engage with different scales from the outset.

The studio is conducted in person with Elli Mosayebi and Christian Inderbitzin alternating weekly and both being present for mid- and final reviews. Students will work individually. During the studio trip, students will engage with local experts, gain an in-depth understanding of the Engadin, and learn from significant architectural, landscape, and infrastructure projects.
 

“Moshi Moshi, Shimokitazawa”: for an Architecture of Conviviality

Banana Yoshimoto’s short essay, published in Japanstory.org, reminisces about the Tokyo neighborhood of Shimokitazawa and the loss over the years of many of its charms. “All relationships, not just our love affairs, prove awfully difficult once the brightest days are behind us” is how she sums up her growing disaffection with the place.

Yoshimoto writes that smaller, independent businesses used to be lifeblood of the city, keeping things interesting. She blames their disappearance on the neoliberal policies of the government of Junichiro Koizumi, who was prime minister from 2001 to 2006. Since then, she claims, the distinctive atmosphere of the neighborhood has disintegrated, its ragtag collection of local shops and places with tasty food giving way to shiny chain stores and restaurants.

Despite Banana Yoshimoto’s longing for a lost Shimokitazawa, it remains one of Tokyo’s more vibrant and promising neighborhoods, best known for its many vintage clothing stores among a maze of narrow streets. Notable among recent developments is the Shimokitazawa Bonus Track, a living-working environment, on top of land owned by Odayku, a private railway company.

The aim of the studio is to build on the promise of Shimokitazawa through a series of architectural and urban interventions of different scales and typologies that respond to the needs of the neighborhood and the demographic changes, including degrowth, that are taking place across the whole country. Through architectures of adaptation and modification as well as new buildings and regenerated public spaces, we will attempt to restore Yoshimoto’s faith in the city and its potentials for conviviality.

In this task we plan to follow the Austrian social critic Ivan Illich, who in his book, Tools for Conviviality, speaks of the value of “autonomous and creative” interrelationships between people, as well as between people and their environment.

The studio will travel to Japan and visit many projects and people, including architects, engineers, and construction companies. As in previous years, we will be joined by the engineer, Mitsuhiro Kanada, who has worked with many contemporary architects.

Soft Slants, Mixed Gestures

This studio will focus on developing new forms of housing in sites shaped by extreme plans and sections within San Francisco. We will investigate the conflicts and confluences between the city’s topography and grid, as well as the significant disruptions in its cultures and countercultures that have shaped the city today.

Here, “the slant” serves as both a literal and metaphorical concept, symbolizing a dialogue between the uniqueness of San Francisco’s urbanism and the particular intersectional practices and subject positions that extend beyond the dominant aesthetic, social, and political frameworks typically considered normal. In the context of San Francisco, the slant is twofold: the city’s distinctive topography is ever-present, and the way it has been adapted for habitation represents a softening that facilitates both movement and occupation in inventive and unique ways. Additionally, San Francisco has nurtured various countercultures and produced legendary figures who operate from the margins, redefining and reshaping the center through their activism.

As a point of departure, we will first highlight and engage with the expansive body of work by Bay Area artist Rosa Lee Tompkins, an African American artist whose improvisational quilts are both abstract and figurative, domestic and cultural, each imbued with spiritual and personal resonance. This form of tapestry has historically occupied a space between the folklore of American domestic life and its elevation to high art, as exemplified by Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed” and the resilient collective efforts of Black women from Gee’s Bend.

The quilt serves as an intersectional art form that connects queer culture–especially following the AIDS epidemic–as a form of memorial, and African American culture as a ritual and shared knowledge between generations, influenced by Black migrants from the American South. In both cases, quilts carry collective and personal narratives, constructing a framework for creative and political expression. Tompkins’ quilts are often large, visually immersive compositions, with their patchwork units presenting nested narratives and symbols that engage with the larger whole. They serve as a visual representation of America as a melting pot and highlight the continuity of differences within it. Quilting as a spatial act accommodates multiple identities and embeds them in a single plane, where they can be observed in relation to one another. The assemblage of social and spatial identities in the tapestry is at once autonomous and reliant on one another for their perception and inhabitation.

Her quilts reflect Édouard Glissant’s ideas on difference and relation within modernity, showcasing how composite cultures create new, constantly evolving, and unpredictable configurations. Each work encompasses masterful color choices, sharp social commentary, and brilliant compositions of bold colors, patterns, nested figures, seams, edges, and overlaps. Her quilts can be seen as representations of new urban or architectural imaginaries that have yet to be fully explored.

Our effort to formalize these concepts will take shape through the medium of ceramics, which will serve as an analog to the patchwork nature of quilts–a material that is mass-produced yet carries the feeling of being bespoke. This approach loosely defines architectural enclosure and emphasizes the unitization and seriality of collective housing.

By integrating the visual narratives of Rosa Lee Tompkins’ quilts with our exploration, we aim to investigate alternative housing forms in San Francisco that reflect its rich cultural tapestry and diverse identities.

The Future of Work I: Awaji-Shima

This studio is the first of a series dedicated to the Future of Work in our rapidly changing eastern and western societies. The series as a whole will address societal developments in relation to the broader questions of employment, education, and work-life fulfilment. Specifically, it will address the many ways in which such societal developments challenge architecture, urbanism, the preservation of our environment, and the practice of sustainable growth.

The inaugural instalment of the series will focus on architectural design through the reprisal of our longstanding line of enquiry (2018-24) into the re-emergent phenomenon of OFFSITE MANUFACTURING or OSM, also known as Model as Building – Building as Model, whereby projects of any size or purpose are designed and built anywhere, anywhere (that is) except on site. This year, however, we will focus on the world of work and explore highly site-specific configurations located in a powerful geographic and cultural context.

This context is rural Japan.

With its stunning natural settings and steadily depopulating towns and fishing villages, Awaji-Shima, an island the size of Singapore located across the city of Kobe in the Seto Inland Sea, lies at the forefront of an ongoing effort to reverse the decline of communities living outside urban centers. This 15-year-long effort involves an original combination of social enterprise and business acumen centered on the provision of incentives for families to relocate in pursuit of a higher quality of life, and young, often underrepresented professionals to gain valuable employment and skills. Other key goals include the reintroduction of sustainable agricultural practices (the gradual recession of which has been threatening the food security of Japan). A combination of investment and patronage, this private effort is funded by strategic investments into cultural institutions and high-end hospitality.

The studio will explore this unique combination of social enterprise, hospitality, agriculture, and youth outreach on a beautiful terraced site located on the west coast of the island above the fishing village of Asano. We will look for ways in which off-site manufacturing in rural areas can contribute to the goal of sustainable development, while harnessing the power of this very unique context. Special attention will be lavished on the extensive use of timber, timeless building craft, effortless combination of tradition and modernity, and world-beating aesthetics of the Japanese.

OSM is not a technical theme, and this studio is not about construction. It is about reflecting on the nature of building, and the various ways in which the conceptual breakthroughs performed by unsuspecting actors of the design and manufacturing world enrich our disciplinary understanding of architecture and urbanity.
 

Material Embodiment: Logics for Post-Carbon Architectures

“So great are the changes required to alter humankind’s dealings with the physical world that only this sense of displacement and estrangement can drive the actual practices of change and reduce our consuming desires”- Richard Sennett

This studio explores biogenic and geogenic material strategies as catalysts that inspire us to reimagine our relationships with material culture and technology. We will investigate and seek to position frameworks toward robust architecture across scales–spanning material, building, and landscape to reveal the imaginative potential of post-carbon material practices.

Directing attention to one of the most fundamental yet complex architectural elements, the wall, the studio pursues materiality that informs a range of concerns from the performative to the expressive. We will develop durable material strategies in the context of architectural envelopes to understand their capacities as contingent and dissipative systems. In examining materials such as loam and hempcrete, the studio prioritizes wallness and solidity as performative necessities, spatial affordances, and atmospheres.

Situated along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood Green, the studio operates within a transforming post-industrial landscape that reveals the complicated reciprocities between historical landscapes of labor and local communities. A defining feature of Hazelwood Green is Mill-19, an existing quarter-mile long structure that serves as a striking reminder of prior industrialization. Partially deconstructed into an exoskeleton that envelops newly constructed labs, offices, and research institutes, the adaptively repurposed Mill-19 houses organizations that support the growth of regional advanced manufacturing and skilled workforce development.

We will develop material strategies through the design of a hybrid facility that condenses workforce training, research, and exhibition to merge efforts underway at Mill-19 with community-based workforce development endeavors across the city. Situated adjacent to Mill-19, a structure that exemplifies the carbon-intensive, trabeated logic of steel, the studio considers: What new logics and expressions might emerge from robust, harvested, and earthen materiality?

What are the cultural, environmental, and spatial opportunities of a thickened architectural boundary? In what ways can the layered histories of labor, industry, and environmental transformation at Hazelwood Green be revealed? Considering the labor-intensive nature of many bio- and geogenic techniques, how can technology enhance their scalability? How can notions of precision and control be reimagined to embrace the inherent variability of material resolutions? Given the natural weathering tendencies of these materials, how should we approach finishing, durability, and maintenance to align with their inherent characteristics?

Juney Lee, the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director, of the Regenerative Structures Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon Architecture will consult the studio. The studio will meet regularly on Thursdays and Fridays. Travel to Pittsburgh will include visits to industrial heritage sites, the Heinz Architectural Center, and design workshops.
 

Grafting the Aquarium

Oceans are heavily impacted by climate change. Rising temperatures, acidification, and deoxygenation caused by greenhouse gas emissions are damaging marine ecosystems at an alarming scale and rate. As these ecosystems are significantly threatened, human health and economic stability also grow more precarious. The fate of ocean life is intimately tied to our own.

In response to this crisis, aquariums have increasingly refocused their missions on conservation and education, attempting to outgrow their origins as menageries for human entertainment. To make this shift, common practices include partnering with scientific institutions to promote research, discontinuing breeding programs, and developing large mammal sanctuaries where former show animals can retire. Though these efforts are encouraging, aquariums are often forced to rely on entertainment and ticket sales to maintain their operations and facilities in addition to funding basic animal care. What will it take for aquariums to achieve their stated ambitions of becoming leaders in ecological stewardship and education rather than purely entertainment venues? And how can architecture, design, programming, economic, and urban considerations help evolve the aquarium and its role in our society?

To test these questions, the New England Aquarium, which overlooks Boston’s harbor, will serve as the project site. Like all of Boston’s waterfront, the site is vulnerable to sea level rise. Students will be asked to strategize for climate adaptation while researching Peter Chermayeff’s original Brutalist building from 1969 and its additions. The studio introduces complex themes involving climate-driven choices such as whether to protect, accommodate, or retreat from rising seas. We will consider embodied carbon, building adaptations, design for biodiversity, and regard for non-human species in the process of developing designs. In considering these complex scenarios and diverse actors, the studio positions architecture as a key agent in urban viability and transformation.
     
Day trips and tours in Boston and New England will be offered during the week of February 20-24. 

Conditions: Context and Climate

We will work on how to make architecture relevant to a specific place and context.

Our site is a former industrial site in the harbor of Copenhagen. The former shipyard was once considered the world’s leading producer of containerships and diesel motors. After 153 years, the shipyard was closed in 1996 due to bankruptcy, leaving 8,000 workers unemployed. Located on the last of several islands comprised largely of landfill, the site is connected to Copenhagen by a series of bridges. This limited access has made large scale development difficult, allowing for an alternative community of artists, galleries, restaurants, and startups to lease short term abandoned buildings of all scales. The municipality of Copenhagen recently decided to connect the island to the mainland via a Metro and a development plan is expected soon, allowing for potential architectural intervention.

We will understand our site by collecting and analyzing historic, climatic, cultural, social, and typological data. Using this collected knowledge as a shared point of departure, we will consider the project within the urgent global context of climate change. We are racing towards multiple global tipping points, one being temperature rising far beyond expected due to carbon emissions. Forty percent of global carbon emissions derive from the construction industry and, as architects, we have the opportunity to make a difference. We must radically reassess how to build with the goal of proactively minimizing carbon emissions. To do so, we are forced to develop new tools, a new library of references, without losing our aesthetic ambition.

Our focus will be on small-medium scale transformations, interventions, and additions to existing structures to create public or semi-public space that relate to the specificity of the site and utilize low carbon materials and processes.

Through individual exercises, we will explore tectonics and texture, understand the essential technical prerequisites of specific materials, investigate their aesthetic potential, and gain knowledge of the architectural use of up-cycled, waste based and, to some extent, bio-generic material.  Students will develop essential knowledge and be introduced to initial tools, allowing them to understand the general principles of assessing embedded carbon in both construction and operations.

The course is divided into 3 chapters.  

In the first chapter of the course, we will analyze the unique character of Refshaleøen, delving into its historical significance and the layered conditions of the site today. Through mapping and research, students will develop a comprehensive understanding of its physical, cultural, historical, and ecological contexts.
The second chapter introduces transformative architecture, the concept of upcycling and waste-based materials. Students will explore the intersection of material innovation and sustainability, examining the potential of unconventional and waste materials and their aesthetical value. A hands-on exercise will connect material properties and tectonics directly to the site, mapping available resources to inspire creative reuse.

In the final chapter, students will develop site-specific projects. Working with one of six provided water-connected programs. The students will identify a focus area, a site–whether an empty plot, urban void, or existing structure–during a study trip to the site, engaging deeply with its transformative potential.

Each chapter will be concluded with a formal crit. The result will be a series of interconnected architectural responses.