FLUSH: Waste and Intimacy in Berlin’s Civic Realm

In the 1870s, the Municipal Council of Berlin initiated the largest experiment in urban circularity with its public water supply and sewer system. Water was located far beyond view of Berliners, was filtered as it was extracted through Berlin’s sandy soil, held in reservoirs that mediated between hydrogeological time and social time in the industrializing city, used by new apparatuses such as WCs and showers, then pumped out to Berlin’s periphery as sewage. Using the Emperor’s rights to Eminent Domain in cases of public good, the Municipality purchased enormous feudal estates in the countryside on which to build its sewage farms, tripling the size of Berlin and making the City the largest agricultural producer in Brandenburg. Sewage percolated back through the sandy soil and returned, theoretically clean, to groundwater. The design and construction of these systems shaped not only views about hygiene, and introduced public toilets and showers in urban space, but left a legacy that defines the city of Berlin to this day.

It is this contemporary legacy that this studio will explore. The aim is to make these systems visible in urban space by exploring first the overall metabolic cycle that exists in today’s Berlin, and then by asking students to propose interventions that build upon the relationship between city and water in one of three sites: urban sites of commuter activity that require private spaces for bodily hygiene; sites of bathing in the river which still continues to receive raw sewage at times of heavy rain through the infamous overflow sewers; the semi-toxic sewage farm sites which, today, form a green ‘ring’ of landscape restoration, low-grade agriculture, and exhibition spaces around the city. The aim of the proposals in any of these sites is to make the relationship between the ‘ends’ of the system–the natural resources tapped in the countryside–legible in the center of the system at the scale of the body. Through these interrogations, we contribute to a discourse on circularity today by learning from the aspirations, mistakes, and opportunities of yesterday. 
 

Designing for Social and Urban Integration: Rosario New Alberdi

This studio will explore issues pertaining to the urbanization of vulnerable places of the global south and will propose planning, landscape and urban design strategies in the pursuit of its equitable development. We will focus on Argentina, where despite recent legislation that secures land tenure for residents of informal settlements, a recurrent lack of city rights remains as the primary condition of these neighborhoods.

Our studio will work on a challenging urbanization process located on the city of Rosario: the New Alberdi Popular Neighborhood, whose patterns of social and economic disparity showcase modes of political engagement and economic deployment similar to those prevalent in peripheries of big cities of the global south. Organized neighbors, planning agencies, public officers, and real state developers have ideas for the site, but despite all intentions, Nuevo Alberdi still wait for the design strategies that could trigger its development.

We will travel to Rosario, visit Nuevo Alberdi neighborhood and hear from residents and other relevant actors. Working around political frictions, environmental threats, and patterns of socio-spatial inequality, our studio will explore the diagrammatic and synthetic agency of design to bring forth an imagination of a shared urban future for the site.

As current regulation envisions the area structured around super-blocks, we will search for innovative block and housing typologies in a newly imagined urban grid. As the site includes the last functioning dairy farm on city limits, urban food production tied to affordable housing will be explored. And as the site is located in a flood-prone area, we will look for innovative landscape infrastructures to work as resilient ecological and productive buffer zones.

We will conduct a design laboratory for landscape infrastructures, planning frameworks and urban design strategies. By the end of this course, students will have developed abilities to pursue urban spatial analysis and to incorporate information from the political, social, economic, and cultural contexts to effectively craft progressive urban design agendas.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Hydric Negotiations: Interactions between Mexico City’s Housing and Water Systems

The Metropolitan Area of Mexico City, with 23 million inhabitants, is under the constant pressure of providing affordable housing and efficient water and sanitation services to its population. The hydric paradox of scarcity and floods that the city constantly from has been mistakenly linked to the construction of new buildings in central areas of the city. During the last years, few efforts were made to provide affordable housing schemes in these better served areas, driven by the idea that more density means less access to water. However, evidence shows that this premise is wrong and that the water paradox is the effect of archaic water management methods. It is urgent to demonstrate that density in central areas of the city can detonate better water management systems and positive interactions between humans and their environmental/urban contexts.  This studio will use design to explore alternatives that integrate new housing schemes and soft water management infrastructures to respond to two of the metropolis’ most pressing issues.

Mexico City was built upon a lake that is continuously being drained through a complex system of artificial basins, pipes, and pumps. The studio will work with and around Vaso El Cristo, the largest of a system of three regulatory basins located in the northwest of the metropolitan area, specifically in the border between the municipalities of Tlalnepantla de Baz, Naucalpan, and Mexico City. Since their construction, the city has reached the vaso’s limits with a diversity of urban uses that add to the existing adjacent historical village, such as industry, residential, education and services. Today this area is a consolidated part of the metropolis, with services and nearby transportation hubs. However, the nature of Vaso El Cristo, a hard drainage infrastructure estranged from urban dynamics, has caused insecurity, environmental hazards such as floods and fires, and the isolation of the different surrounding neighborhoods. This studio will argue for the transformation of Vaso El Cristo and its surrounding urban area into a symbiotic system, tackling the issues of housing and water.  This aligns with the idea that human activity can transition from an extractivist culture to becoming a catalyst for positive ecological processes .

There is an urgent need to rethink the city’s water and housing systems and adapt them to a continuously growing urban fabric that must set a harmonious dialogue and implement symbiotic relationships with its natural context.  This studio is an opportunity to try a variety of possibilities to connect the diverse urban fabrics surrounding Vaso El Cristo, while linking them to the transformed basin.

The following questions will guide the process:

We will depart from understanding several housing and water projects that can provide successful examples. In the realm of housing, we will explore social rentals, collective properties and the transformation of industry into mixed use compounds. In the water realm, the recovery of the Sapé water course in Sao Paulo, the design of the borough of Augustenborg in Sweden, and the wetland Tianjin in Qiaoyuan, China.  

The studio is open to students from all disciplines as we are convinced about the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to address a condition such as this one.

Vacant City: Re-imagining Downtown San Francisco as a Modern Mixed-Use Neighborhood

Downtown San Francisco knows it needs to get back on its feet. Conceived as a well-connected and dense central business district, the neighborhood has since followed the booms and busts that outlined the region’s economic history. After the dot-com bubble burst, San Francisco emerged as a hub for tech firms, attracting startups and large companies to its ample downtown offices. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this trend as tech workers adapted to remote work, leading many tech companies to question the need for physical office spaces. Millions of square feet of retail and office space are now unused, raising critical questions about the district’s future.

The studio will formulate a multi-scalar approach to address downtown issues through synthetic design and planning. Acting as a multi-disciplinary Urban Design team, we will propose a near-future scenario that envisions a downtown where less than half of the district’s total floor area is allocated to office, with the remainder programmed for residential, cultural, institutional, and retail uses. The studio will explore opportunities to vertically retrofit existing buildings and provide housing and other non-commercial programs. Simultaneously, we will enhance the streetscape to improve ground-floor retail, create walkable sidewalks, and ensure accessible public spaces. By integrating emerging legislation, building code changes, and tax policies into practical strategies, we aim to galvanize energy toward a better future for downtown. This approach uniquely allows us to address both the vertical and horizontal planes alongside policy, finance, and construction considerations.

The course will begin by understanding the lay of the land. Why is Downtown San Francisco the way it is in its tangible manifestation and operations, and how does it compare to other business districts worldwide? A studio trip to San Francisco will allow the studio to understand how downtown San Francisco functions by experiencing the context first-hand and meeting with local architects, planners, developers, organizers, and policymakers to understand the district’s challenges.

In the second half of the studio, specific teams will address the range of conditions and scales for operation. Some teams may address how existing architecture should be adapted to accommodate new programs, considering structure, heritage, and appearance. Other groups will address how these evolved buildings connect through interior and exterior public space. Others may consider how a re-programmed downtown should be planned towards more seamless mobility, greater affordability, and a more present natural environment in coordination with the rest of the city and region. Projects will be conceived independently while complementing each other to achieve a better integrated and balanced district.

To approach the challenge from various perspectives, the studio welcomes students eligible to undertake option studios across the Urban Design, Urban Planning, Landscape, and Architecture programs.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

The Future of Housing in Los Angeles

Like most cities in the US today, Los Angeles doesn’t build enough housing to keep up with demand, a fact that has contributed to what is arguably the worst affordable housing crisis in the country. But given how built up the city already is–and given how complex, contentious, and expensive it is to build in Los Angeles–solving this problem will require creative thinking, especially when it comes to site selection, design, and implementation. Where can the city add more housing? Are there underutilized, outdated, or redundant property types that presently don’t support housing but could (for example, golf courses, gas stations, power line rights-of-way, etc.)? What kind of housing should it add? Who should have a say in what gets built, and whose housing needs should be prioritized? How can coalitions of designers, policymakers, activists, residents, and other actors use policy to facilitate the construction of high-quality, sustainable, and affordable housing without adding time and cost to a permitting and construction process that is already too lengthy (and costly)? How can new housing create co-benefits, and ensure that it doesn’t exacerbate inequality and displacement? These are some of the questions we’ll be asking in this interdisciplinary studio, which invites students in all departments to help housing advocates in Los Angeles address the city’s housing shortage by creatively identifying how Los Angeles can add hundreds of thousands of housing units and rethink housing in the process. Following a short, creative research assignment that asks students to survey housing typologies (both traditional and emerging), underutilized sites that don’t support housing but could, and pro- and anti-housing policies and stakeholder groups, students will work individually or in small teams to create a bold (but still plausible) proposition for an unconventional site in Los Angeles. While these propositions are expected to be site-specific, the scale of the city’s housing shortage (255,000 units, by one estimate) invites solutions that contain prototypical elements that could repeat and scale up. A field trip to Los Angeles is planned, during which we will hear from dozens of leading designers, developers, planners, policymakers, activists, and historians.

Rockaway’s Housing Superstorm: Between Rising Waters and Climate Gentrification

The studio will design a new public realm and reimagine future housing on New York City’s Rockaway Peninsula. For over a century, the Rockaways have been defined by displacement of residents from their homes, from eminent domain wielded by Robert Moses to the tidal surge of Superstorm Sandy. Displacement from the peninsula’s housing has also accelerated since 2012, due to homes damaged and destroyed during the storm, uneven support to repair and rebuild, and rising rents and real estate prices.

As relations between coastal waters and lands change through rising sea-levels, cloudbursts, and storm surges, life on the Rockaways will become increasingly challenged. The studio recognizes that the peninsula will be inundated by 2100 and that inventive housing strategies of adaptation are needed, including repair, elevation, and even relocation. An expanded and resilient public realm will be essential to address decades of uneven development and to place community and climate justice at the heart of future designs.

Studio projects will firstly research the histories and plans of New York City’s Rockaway Peninsula, relations between the public spaces, dynamic waterfronts, and housing challenges. Secondly, students will work closely with community groups to co-design a new public realm, connecting housing with community spaces, public beaches, coastal defenses, and metropolitan transport. Thirdly, students will develop long-term strategies of repair, elevation, and relocation for the Rockaway Peninsula — addressing residents’ concerns for both housing and public realm.

The beaches, parks, and public housing of the Rockaway Peninsula have a strong presence and long history. However, they have also been used in the past to divisively disconnect neighborhoods and residents. A new public realm across the Rockaways will become more important in the coming decades as housing is repaired, elevated, and relocated. It will provide a consistent ground of spaces, buildings, policies, and actions that put concerns for residents at the core of Rockaway’s future.

This interdisciplinary studio will develop proposals that employ mapping, CAD, and 3D modelling, from the scale of public spaces, building massing, and coastal sections to regional topography and bathymetry. Studio projects will reflect on the initiatives of city and state agency programs, supported by FEMA. These include the NY Forward proposal to revitalize Far Rockaway with new urban developments elevated beyond the height of Sandy’s storm surge.

The studio will work in close dialogue with RISE (Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability and Equity), NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority), NYCDDC (New York City Department of Design and Construction), and designers working in the Rockaways. Details of the brief will be developed with these organizations and in close coordination with the Joint Center for Housing Studies and Department of Landscape Architecture of Harvard University.

A design background is strongly recommended and competence in GIS and three-dimensional modelling is required.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Envision Resilience: Imagining a Future Waterfront for Portland, Maine

Envision Resilience: Portland, Maine, is a semester-long multi-university design studio that calls on students to reimagine coastal communities and propose imaginative solutions to the current and future impact of sea level rise.

The studio will participate in the Envision Resilience Challenge developed by Remain, which connects academia, local leadership and community members, while inspiring coastal communities to envision innovative approaches to the impacts of climate change. “The program allows communities to engage in hopeful and meaningful conversations about the future, inspires real action in resilience projects and fosters the next generation of leaders to think interconnectedly and holistically about climate challenges through design and innovation.”

“Like coastal communities around the world, Portland and South Portland are at the forefront of a changing climate. The Gulf of Maine waters are warming, and sea levels are rising at three to four times the global average. Winter storms this year have flooded downtowns, damaged wharves, washed away historic structures and set record high tides. University teams will be tasked with tackling these challenges as they design novel ways of living under future conditions that address the intersecting issues of affordable housing, transportation, urban heat, equity, local industry and ecology.” — Envision Resilience, May 8, 2024

Through in-depth research and analysis, students will have the opportunity to explore coastal adaptation strategies potentially applicable to Portland’s working waterfront. In-depth community engagement, guest expert interaction, along with collaboration with the other academic institutions will facilitate a unique opportunity and encourage creative design interventions that seek to address the key challenges of our time.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Biospheric Urbanism – Changing Climates – Athens Greece

Biospheric Urbanism
These last few years, cities have been suffering on an unprecedented scale from the ongoing climate change. Extreme heat, extended droughts and flash floods have created crisis after crisis in the urban environment. This problem will most probably get worse in the years to come. Each city needs to urgently rethink its resilience to these radical changes in atmospheric conditions.

The Option Studio ‘Biospheric Urbanism’ explores how to make the built environment more resilient in the face of the climate crisis. It focusses on the transformation of the open space to better deal with heat islands, drought and floods. Biospheric Urbanism is the study of the built environment as the interface between meteorology and geology. It aims at transforming the critical zone to better cope with ongoing changes in climate, while better using its underground capacities. The studio’s ambition is to be pragmatic and visionary at the same time, predicting different scenarios for the future, while proposing concrete solutions that can be implemented immediately.

Methodology
Each studio focusses on one city as its object of study, and becomes part of a cumulative series of case studies, producing a growing set of solutions for different climatic conditions. New York City was the first in Spring 2023, followed by Paris in Fall 2023. In Fall 2024 the studio will center on Athens, Greece. Students from the former studios will present their work to students from the new studio to create a laboratory where each new studio learns from the previous ones.

The studio is organized in three acts. Firstly, the students will produce a new cartography of the chosen city, revealing its different microclimatic conditions. Secondly, this map is used to identify the most problematic areas. Thirdly, the students develop a pragmatic proposal for each identified site. The students will work both in groups and individually. The primary learning goal is to use science-based research to generate solution-based design.

Case Study Athens
Athens has been inhabited for more than 5.000 years as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world. The resulting dense urban development covers its seven hills without much green space. These last few years the city has suffered from record temperatures resulting in extreme heat and obliging the city to develop new strategies to augment its resilience towards climate change. The city of Athens has expressed their interest in a close collaboration with the studio, allowing the studio to become a real life exercise.

Field Trip & Partnerships
In the first week of October, the studio will move to Athens. During the field trip the students will explore the sites they had identified during the first act of microclimatic mapping. They will also meet different actors of the city to better understand their challenges and ambitions. At the end of the studio, the students present their proposals in return. Both the city and the studio benefits from this partnership.

Climate Engineering
The studio will collaborate with Transsolar, specialized in climate engineering. Erik Olsen, Managing Partner of the NYC office will come to the GSD studio multiple times. He will introduce the concept of Outdoor Comfort and explain the Universal Thermal Climate Index. During individual desk critics these concepts will be further integrated and developed in the design of the students. Erik Olsen will also be part of the of Mid Term and Final Reviews.

Abundance and Risk: Enhancing Resiliency in the Hydraulic Landscape of Kurobe

This studio aims to project a sustainable future for Kurobe, Japan, where the delicate balance among aspects of nature, industry, land, and economy will be challenged by the anticipated physical and social changes of great magnitude. Landscape architecture is the agent and medium of this projection for the future.

The current stable land use of the Kurobe River alluvial fan owes much to the flood control and water supply projects carried out since the turn of the 20th century, especially the construction of upstream dams and a continuous protective embankment alongside the braided Kurobe River system within the alluvial fan. At the same time, constructing a mechanized artesian agricultural network system of irrigation canals and farmland consolidation covering most of the area led to substantial growth in rice paddy cultivation. Combined with flood control measures, the hydrological structure of the alluvial fan has transformed significantly throughout the 20th century.

In the meantime, from the mid-1950s, large-scale manufacturing businesses (YKK and YKKAP) that use non-ferrous metals as raw materials have established operations here, taking advantage of the alluvial fan’s abundant groundwater resources and stable electric power supply. Such efforts have contributed to driving the local economy and improving the livelihoods of Kurobe’s working population.

However, practices of water use for agricultural development and industrial production have not been considered jointly or holistically, and as a result, these initiatives have drawn no particularly meaningful interaction despite the prosperity they owe to the same alluvial fan. The climate crisis requires us to think about an alternative sustainable future for Kurobe, especially given the overutilized groundwater resource, extreme power demand, declining population, and the dynamics of the current industry that will be affected. The abundance of water resources, once treated as a danger (i.e., flood control) and then as an unlimited asset (i.e., industrial and agricultural establishment), must be reexamined holistically to allow for water, industry, and civic life in this region to become much more intertwined and nourish each other mutually.

The studio will travel to Kurobe to perform field research and acquire local knowledge. Thoughts and ideas will be tested and developed through various lectures and workshops during the semester, including the topics of Japanese rural landscape, traditional and contemporary Japanese landscape language, environmental engineering, and model making. The students enrolled in this studio are strongly recommended to take the discussion-based seminar, “Origins and Contemporary Practices of Asian Landscape Architecture: Korean Perspectives and More (PRO-7453),” to gain a more fundamental understanding of the vicissitudes and unrealized potentials of Japanese landscape architecture. 

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

AQUA INCOGNITA IV: Designing for extreme climate resilience in Monterrey, MX

Aqua Incognita continues to engage students in grappling with water-resilient urbanization processes, through the design of nature-based [1] reparative actions in the water-scarce region of Monterrey, Mexico–where we will travel at the end of September. Mexico’s industrial cradle, and a region undergoing a nearshoring industrial boom, this metropolis of 5,4 million people has seen decades of unsustainable urbanization trends and is threatened by critically unbalanced water regimes. While facing its own version of a day-zero crisis in the summer of 2022, the city has also withstood recurrent flooding catastrophes over the years. These extreme climatic events are likely to intensify amidst the warming of our planet.

With the objective of drafting a vision and catalyzing actions that could trigger a more resilient water future in Monterrey, the studio will focus on one of Monterrey’s most strategic Critical Zones [2]: the Santa Catarina River. The regeneration and conservation of this river basin and riparian corridor is key to the future of water security, the reduction of flood risk and heat island, and the equitable distribution of safe and healthy biodiverse areas across the city towards climate justice. Achieving these three objectives is part of a contested vision today. The studio has established a collaboration with experts, citizen groups, academia, the government, and the regional conservation institution Terra Habitus (studio sponsor) to push the transformation of this river watershed into a climate-resilient and ecologically stable region in the near-future.

To do so, we will conduct five acts of design over the course of the semester by: 1) analyzing and learning from important case studies; 2) drafting a collective vision for the river shed; 3) enhancing this vision in a workshop with important actors and experts at the Tecnológico de Monterrey; 4) developing individual design proposals for strategic sites within the basin (both as part of upstream regional catchment areas and along the urban watershed); 5) articulating narratives to convince decision makers to change status quo postures that exacerbate these unbalanced water regimes.

Your assembled work will be published in a GSD studio report to be shared with our local collaborators. 
1 https://www.naturepositive.org/
2 https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones

 

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.