Biospheric Urbanism – Changing Climates

The Option Studio ‘Biospheric Urbanism’ explores how cities can be made more resilient in the light of the ongoing changes of climate. Conceived as a series of case studies, each Studio concentrates on one single city. New York City was the first subject of study in Spring 2023, Paris is next in Fall 2023.

 

All Studios follow a similar methodology, organized in three acts. Firstly, the Studio will jointly produce a new cartography of the chosen city, revealing its different microclimatic conditions. Secondly, the most problematic and urgent areas will be identified, for which, thirdly, pragmatic proposals will be developed. The main learning goal is to use science-based research to conceive solution-based design. Each Studio will inform the next one, resulting in a new set of solutions for the different climatic conditions encountered.

 

Critical Moment

The climate crisis poses the urgent question of how to make our built environment more resilient to the challenging atmospheric changes such as heat islands, rising temperature, intensified rainfall, and longer droughts. Landscape architecture has a long history in using growth and transformation as its agents to better inhabit this planet. This unprecedented crisis represents an opportunity, and equal responsibility, for landscape architecture to radically rethink its field.

 

A City as a Myriad Microclimates

Cities account for over 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, while only taking up around 3% of the land space. As such, cities present a crucial opportunity to combat the causes of climate change, while needing an urgent mitigating of its effects. A city can be understood as an imbrication of a myriad of microclimates. Buildings change wind patterns and sunlight exposure, while the streetscapes change soil permeability, runoff, and solar radiation.  

 

Urban Ecologies

For each man-made micro-climate, a comparable natural condition can be found. The study of their living organisms informs how to introduce vegetation and living agents into artificial environments with a similar climate. Using the logic of nature, cities can be transformed into complex urban ecologies, blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the natural. 

 

Biospheric Urbanism

Biospheric Urbanism is the study of the built environment as the interface between meteorology and geology. It aims at transforming the critical zone between the above and the below, to better cope with uncertain changes in climate, while better using its underground capacities. 

 

Case Study Paris

The city of Paris is one of the most densely populated in Europe. Its stone buildings with their zinc-top roofs act as a ‘heat sink’ in extreme weather. Paris is on average 2 to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding rural areas. During heat waves or ‘canicules’ the difference can grow to 10 degrees. The heat waves in 2003 and in 2019 have clearly shown Paris’ vulnerability to extended periods of high temperature.

 

The city of Paris has been a global leader both in the study of and the adaptation to climate change. It developed the ‘Climate Plan for Paris’ as early as 2007. The plan has been updated in 2012 and as of 2018 it fixes clear objectives, always more ambitious, to reach the Paris Agreement. The objective is to build a carbon neutral city by 2050. The Studio starts from the ambition of the Paris Climate Action Plan to develop proposals that could be implemented immediately.

Percent for Art: A New Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw

In the option studio, we design a new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by re-using the structure of a large-scale shopping mall.

We will look at museums that transformed and expanded existing structures as a springboard to investigate the potential of architecture to occupy and repurpose existing space. However, instead of post-industrial structures that house many of today’s leading contemporary art institutions, we inhabit obsolete retail space.

As implied in the ambiguous title, our project asks: what percentage of society is represented and acknowledged by museums? Official museum architecture within the context of urban landscapes represents the ideology of a certain percentage, not only acknowledging but also dividing communities.

Our site is situated in a charged urban context: the shopping mall—a slab 350 meters in length—faces the existing Museum of Modern Art with its white, abstract concrete facade and behind it the towering structure of the Soviet Palace of Culture and Science. This specific place embodies Warsaw’s recent history with the shift from communism to neoliberalism. During our studio trip to Warsaw, we will meet with artists, curators, and activists and explore the site’s artistic, architectural, and political environment.

You will not only work on the building’s design, but as architects you are also responsible for developing its spatial and cultural program. Learning from different strategies that challenge official narratives of urban memory, we aim to shed light on issues and communities which are consistently ignored. What architectural features ensure accessibility to a wider audience and foster the inclusive memory of Warsaw’s urban landscape, its appearance threatened by the onslaught of ongoing real-estate development? What happens when the cultural realm of the museum is confronted with commerce? What kind of activities—exhibitions, events, and collections—should the new museum envision?

The studio begins with a research phase, where you work on an “artist’s book” of your own to define and specify your cultural mission for the “museum of the future” that you are about to design. After visiting the site in Warsaw and discussing your projects with our clients, the curators at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, you will work on your individual project brief and scheme for a future program. You will not only design and produce a complete architectural project, but also its display for the exhibition at the museum that will be dedicated to the studio’s investigation (planned for summer, 2024).

Throughout the term we will be joined by numerous guests, artists, curators and scholars, contributing input lectures.

Reconstructions | Abandoned Lands + Abolitionist Futures

Harvard University has recently confronted its history with the release of a report detailing the institution's complicity in enslavement, stretching back to its founding. This revelation arrives amid a broader national discourse on reconciliation and remediation of our country’s oppressive history. The Reconstructions Options Studio engages with this report and additional literature to critically analyze and respond to the spatial, programmatic, and political implications emerging from such histories, both locally and globally. We understand architecture not as an isolated remedy but as an integral part of a broader array of strategies and future visions aimed at addressing the legacies of violence entrenched in our built environment.

The course challenges students to transition from passive observers to active participants by recognizing, evaluating, and responding to the complex racialized political systems that inform both our tangible and conceptual spaces. This process involves reimagining the potential of architecture in crafting new typologies of freedom through the dismantling of oppressive systems.

Reflecting on the post-Civil War era, the Reconstruction period was a time of revolutionary potential, marked by efforts such as colonization plans for the South, the redistribution of abandoned lands, and the extension of rights and services, including voting rights, healthcare, and education, to formerly enslaved individuals. Despite these progressive initiatives, subsequent political and social maneuvers ultimately undercut the transformative potential of Reconstruction. Through political disenfranchisement, spatial restriction, and the manipulation of historical narratives, the era's reparative actions were significantly undermined.

The perpetuation of oppressive ideologies often depends on the construction of a monolithic narrative, the commemoration of those narratives within our physical infrastructures, and the consequent obliteration of alternative historical narratives. As Paula Gunn Allen succinctly put it, "The root of all oppression is the loss of memory," suggesting that the foundation of liberation is, conversely, the unyielding preservation and recognition of memory—in culture, tradition, land, and place.

In opposition to power systems that necessitate the erasure of memory from marginalized groups for the sake of assimilation, Design Justice posits that the narratives we craft about places matter. Architecture, as a language, equips us with the means to narrate complex stories—because stories are powerful. They embed themselves in our locales, from neighborhoods to blocks to buildings, transforming memory into a monument. Thus, the place becomes significant. The cultural narratives that we allow to prevail in the built environment give birth to places of culture—because culture matters profoundly.

In this studio, we endeavor to confront and ideate upon the physical manifestations of spatial reparation that are necessary as frameworks for liberation. We will investigate and propose designs that both challenge the past and offer scaffolding for a liberated future.

Magna Parens Materia

In the last century, architects have been driven by market conditions to build with the highest possible combination of CO2-heavy materials, including steel and reinforced concrete frames hung with glass, aluminum, and fired clay bricks. The studio will speculate on the potential to turn construction from a major CO2 contributor to a sequestration industry — a strategic device — that demonstrates the ingenuity of an architectural response. Our model of inquiry will focus on stone as an ancient actor on the stage shared by architecture and engineering with the goal of lowering the carbon footprint of new midrise buildings. Aided by recent technological development, this ancient material is in search of a new language. The studio will seek opportunities to explore the contemporary understanding of how to design in stone in more meaningful ways.

We will begin with a speed course in material properties: structural, financial, and carbon cost, tactile and textural. This exercise will allow us to make informed choices that assemble a carbon-negative result while prompting a theoretical position that internalizes the technical as part of the intellectual apparatus for the project students will design.

Our base ingredients of stone and timber both need next to no processing and are validated by the climate crisis. Timber, a heavy carbon sequestrator, and stone enable the dramatic reduction of reinforced concrete and steel. Simultaneously limiting the mediums in this way defies normal architectural thought, largely because of practical differences between architectural elements. The roof that protects from the elements, walls that support buildings, and floors that support people must all be considered. This dichotomy will force inventions that transform and evolve our thinking.

Stone will need a comprehensive introduction. To this end, we have asked “source to product” suppliers and specialists to tour quarries, stonemasons’ workshops, and completed buildings. As we are setting the design project within an existing London masterplan, Earls Court development, these tours will occur across London and Belgium.

We will encourage learning that recalibrates practice and is immediately applicable in the real-world, that purposely engages with topics of building technology, sustainability, and codes, but more importantly, establish more reciprocity between technical and conceptual aspects such as aesthetic currency.

Students will be evaluated based on conceptual clarity, experimental representation, and design execution of individual projects. We will encourage the use of models as part of the methodology. The instructors will teach both in person and online, with details noted on the syllabus. 

City as Resource

”When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole.”
– The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, 1979

“The largest share of the mitigation potential of new buildings is available in developing countries, while in developed countries the highest mitigation potential is within the retrofit of existing buildings.” –  6th assessment report, IPCC, 2022

The Spring 2024 studio will focus on urban adaptive reuse in the ‘already built-up city’ in the context of climate change and resource scarcity, with Berlin serving as a test site. The studio seeks to explore new paths for urban development within the boundaries of our planet and the boundaries of the already built environment, focusing on utilizing material and non- material resources embedded in the existing urban structures and fabric. This involves investigations on how urban development needs can be accommodated through cultures of reuse, reparation, retrofit, and sensible densification of the existing rather than prevailing practices of obsoletion, replacement, extraction, and expansion.

The evaluation of projects will emphasize the successful retrofitting of neighborhoods to improve living conditions, community dynamics, and social balance.

The building and planning industries’ consumption of land and natural resources is a cause of great environmental concern. It drives resource scarcity, threatens biodiversity, and the energy consumed when processing these resources into building materials, constitute a substantial and increasing share of buildings and cities’ total carbon footprint.

Over the years the materials have accumulated in our buildings and cities, and the built environment today accounts for the majority of the global anthropogenic material stock. As part of a sustainable transition of our societies, it is necessary to consider how we can make better use these vast material resources. Research point to the environmental potentials of reusing the already built environment through practices of adaptive reuse, rather than building new. The importance and potential of doing so is also mentioned in the latest IPCC report, particularly pertaining to the cities in the developed world. However, up to now practices of adaptive reuse have been carried out a small scale, focusing on components, or small-scale buildings, even though there are indications that the impacts of such practices would be bigger on an urban scale – across buildings, infrastructures, landscapes and even entire urban districts.

In light of the above, the Spring 2024 studio will explore potentials for urban scale adaptive reuse in the context of climate change and resource scarcity, using Berlin as a test-site.

The aim is to explore and discuss how we can accommodate future urban development by utilizing the material resources in the existing building stock. The aim is also to explore how to draw upon the qualities, characters and structures of the existing city in the development of new urban environments.  This involves designing and inventing new typologies and programs, developing hybrids as well as new practices of transformation, necessary densification, and resource recovery within the existing built environments.

The aim is also to engage in critical discussions, on how to create meaningful spatial interventions and urban transitions, that can foster more sustainable, livable, and equitable cities.

This course has an irregular schedule. Please see the course syllabus for details.

Designing the Conditions: The Return of the Public Developer

The studio explores the role of design in emerging forms of public-sector housing development in the United States. Our testing ground is a former industrial site in Central Falls, Rhode Island currently being acquired by the municipality. Given the need to consider a range of physical scales and temporal dimensions in this endeavor, the studio explicitly seeks to include students from across the school's programs.

Direct public-sector development of housing has been a political no-go in the United States since the mid-1970s. After the purported failure of federal public housing, the private sector was considered better equipped to build and operate housing for low- and moderate-income households. The fact that such housing is made profitable only with massive public investment through tax breaks and rental subsidies, or that this housing remains affordable for a limited time only, is often left unsaid.

Today, the persistent lack of affordable housing has turned this argument on its head. Why subsidize the private sector if the public sector could more cost effectively finance, build, and operate homes and keep these affordable in the long term? Several jurisdictions have begun to set up new entities toward this end. They include Montgomery County, MD; Seattle, WA; and Atlanta, GA. California, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island are considering similar measures at the state level. Rather than building public housing that serves only the poor, however, these new models create social housing for a broader demographic.

What often falls short in these legislative efforts is a consideration of the role of physical design. When speed, quantity, and affordability are the goal, design quality—however understood—quickly takes a back seat. Most bills thus make only vague, if any, references to siting, housing type and size, flexible programs, energy efficiency standards, or other aspects crucial for the long-term viability of the public investment.

How, then, can architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and planners articulate, in intelligible and politically actionable terms, how design decisions contribute to public-sector housing development and vice versa? We will explore his challenge through a proposal for the Central Falls site. In addition, we will focus on the various ways in which housing design is codified and made replicable, including through design guidelines, funding formulas, performance criteria, and procurement processes, to name a few. Designing these conditions is an essential part of the exploration.

Throughout the semester, readings on the relationship of design ideas and public-sector housing will expand our understanding of the historical dimension of contemporary challenges. On a field trip to Atlanta we will engage with the past, present, and future of the public developer in a fast-changing city. In the 1930s, Atlanta was home to some of the first federal public housing developments; by the 1990s, these projects were demolished and rebuilt as mixed-income housing in public-private partnerships; in 2023, the creation of the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation moves control of development back to a public entity.

New New Zealand Housing: Recasting the Good Life at Mid-Density

The studio is about housing and recasting ideas of the good life amidst contemporary challenges. It centers on the currently unfolding housing legislation in New Zealand that stipulates a blanket increase of residential densities in the major cities to meet acute shortages. Colloquially known as the 3×3 rule, the zoning limit is raised to allow three apartments or townhouses on all residential land, marking a significant break from the long adherence to single-family houses on quarter-acre lots. Beneath the debate about economic and technical constraints, the core problem concerns dearly held ideas of the good life intimately associated with tropes of the single-family house, from backyard BBQs to DIY in the garage. While the situation is distinctly Kiwi, the challenge of transforming existing low-density neighborhoods to meet pressing environmental and demographic challenges has urgent international resonances.
 
Historically, New Zealand has often found itself a natural laboratory for new policies, products, and ways of living – from women's suffrage to the minimum wage and the eight-hour workday. The current circumstances present a rare and significant natural experiment to study key issues in contemporary housing and urban district-making. First is the idea of affording housing as a right and the question of how a distinct and high quality of life closely associated with low-density suburbs might be articulated and adapted to more resilient and sustainable patterns of settlement. Second is the urban architecture problem of moving from low to mid-density housing, which exacerbates challenges of safety, privacy, and long-term adaptability that require careful resolution, particularly in the seismic, multi-cultural, and climate-sensitive Oceanic context. Third is the circumstantial opportunity for leapfrog development to establish alternative modes of housing production and ownership, such as advanced timber construction in the logistically remote yet forest-rich country.
 
The studio is critically situated to learn from and contribute to an evolving and fast-moving situation. As output, students will produce and publish a public-facing think-piece illustrated by the design scheme, examining and recasting a familiar trope of the good life to catalyze an informed public debate on housing in a moment of transition. The studio is organized around three lines of inquiry. First is a longitudinal survey of ideas of the good life, tracing the debate back to its historical and philosophical basis of how such things can be defined and measured, and forward to cross-cultural variations and comparisons, including the emergence of Japanese and Scandinavian design as shareable ideas in the late 20th century. Second is a deep dive into the Kiwi milieu as the basis for articulating a local yet shareable idea of the good life compatible with contemporary challenges. Third is the design and communication of housing both as a building and an idea, learning from the arrival and unfolding of modernizing influences in the Austronesian milieu to amplify this work's reception and impact on housing outcomes in the near future.

Envisioning the Rural Metropolis

With the United Nations estimating 250 million climate refugees by 2050, there are depopulating inner areas in Europe and the United States that, while often safeguarded from the worst climate disasters, have the historic opportunity to refashion themselves as welcome regions. Embracing the potential of a growing digitalization, territories considered peripheral can become global hotspots that will offer a quality of life no longer found in megacities.

Envisioning the Rural Metropolis looks at one such region in Portugal’s heartland. In a territory that is geographically contained and marked by different scales of urban agglomeration across a largely rural area, the studio will use scenario-thinking to investigate how urban regions can transmute around topics of decarbonization, energy flows, circular economies, food security, water management, resource extraction, biodiversity preservation and interspecies mobility.

Departing from notions of ecological urbanism and analyses of the current environmental crisis, the studio will be organized in interdisciplinary groups that will imagine how the selected bio-region will look like in 50 years-time – and devise what must be planned, incentivized and implemented today, so as to achieve an ecologically-balanced, self-sufficient metropolis by 2074.

Design opportunities will range from the larger scale urban planning of a 40km long, low-density metropolis, to the consideration of case studies around strategic architectural facilities, new intermodal nodes or alternative landscape schemes – with the surrounding region calling for thinking on future land uses, the economic impulse of ecosystem services, water management, preparation for climate change impacts, new programs for job creation, the adaptive recycling of historical and industrial heritage, and even the presence of a UNESCO Global Geopark.  

This course has an irregular schedule. Please see the course syllabus for details.

Extreme Urbanism 9 – Imagining Housing as Urban Form

In recent years, housing has become an extremely scarce commodity in Mumbai. In 2007, Mumbai was the sixth most expensive city globally to rent an apartment. A 2013 report by Knight Frank, a global reality consultancy, lists Mumbai as the most unaffordable housing market in the country with 29% of its under-construction dwelling units exceeding the 10 million rupee mark. Reports estimate that approximately 57 percent of the total households in the city live in single room tenements while the 2011 census estimates that 40 percent of the city’s population lives in slums. Exponential real estate values coupled with a burgeoning population and lack of investment in affordable housing have created an acute housing shortage in the city. Owning a house in central areas of Mumbai has become a distant aspiration not just for the low income households but also for the middle class.

In the impulse to solve this problem, most policy privileges disproportionate FAR allocations (referred to as F.S.I in Mumbai) to the perceived carrying capacities of these areas. High FAR incentives given for redevelopment of existing housing stock have doubled the densities on existing plot areas without a corresponding augmentation of urban services. Such plot-by-plot redevelopment undertakings have fragmented the urban grain and created further socio-economic dichotomies. This development paradigm is disruptive to the historic fabric and existing community formations in the city.

This studio will address the challenge of strategically and advantageously leveraging the existing extremes of metropolitan and parcel-scaled development policies. It will investigate development promoted by this approach through a series of transects in the Inner City of Mumbai and explore strategies to reinforce and extend existing urban fabrics, making these transitions easier for local communities. The studio will be focused on developing typologies for affordable housing on high value land in Mumbai. Questions of hybridity, mixed use and high density will be among the several issues that the studio will grapple with the condition of extreme urbanism in the context of Mumbai. The design development will be informed by a fully realized real estate development proposal that meets the 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. Therefore, the studio emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of real estate, weaving together financial, market, regulatory, political, environmental, and contextual analyses into physical design and planning solutions in order to generative positive real estate outcomes. The studio asks students to utilize the skills and knowledge of real estate professionals, designers, and planners to transform how the built environment is produced and consumed.

Under the Palm Trees

Sultan Youssef ben Tachfine founded in the 11th century Marrakech as the new capital of the Maroc empire in the middle of a desert plateau on the northern foot of the High Atlas.  Not only was the Medina constructed, but also a territorial network of underground canals for irrigation of the areas around, called Khettaras, creating a vast artificial oasis of date palm trees (Phoenix dactylifera L.): the Palmeraie, a  significant territorial system anchored today as a landmark in Moroccan identity.

Since the French protectorate, the Palmeraie became the source of urban expansion and successively turned in the last decades into a sprawling suburb without scale and limit or any spatial logic that is heavily exploiting natural resources of water, soil, and vegetation and marginalized the local communities and their rural culture. Luxury resorts, villas, golf courses, and settlements for an international elite with the un-proportional need for water for lifestyle, lush gardens, and pools lowered the groundwater level for dozens of meters in a short time, dried out the traditional Khettaras. Most of the Palm trees died, and the local communities were impoverished.

Since 2001, UNESCO and official institutions from Morocco have faced the problem and taken initiatives to retrieve the Palmeraie of Marrakech. But climatic change with years of never-seen drought and never-measured peeks of temperature turn even the most intensively irrigated golf greens into shabby patchwork quilts, and the way of urbanizing and living in the Palmeraie gets into its final phase of obsolescence. Even though the earthquake of September 2023 damaged Marrakech and its surroundings less destructively compared to the mountain villages in the High Atlas, the consequences for the poorer population in the 'douars' of the Palmeraie are furthermore threatening.

Just in October 2023, FIFA designated the World Soccer Championship 2030 to Morocco/Portugal/Spain. Marrakech, and particularly the Palmeraie, will be one of the main competition sites.

The option studio Under the Palm Trees will engage these topics under the ambiguous notation of the beauty and imagination of an oasis and the reality of death, drought, and destruction:
   – Understanding and mapping the evolution of the Plamerie of Marrakech as an artificial oasis created in a traditional Muslim-Berber way of settlement in arid areas and the architectonical and general culture of this specific territorial approach;
   – Elaboration of new design-based strategies for water management and local solutions for villages, agriculture, resorts, and other kinds of settlements valorizing the specific cultural dimension;
   – Revaluation of „earth building“ and traditional adobe construction techniques of the Muslim-Berber culture under the view of a post-seismic defamation;
   – Integration of new sources of decentralized energy production, smart grids, and alternative mobility in a renewed and reconstructed landscape with historical value;
   – Spatial and territorial negotiation of extreme social differences for synergetic design solutions;
   – Proposals for temporary interventions for the FIFA World Soccer Championship 2023, ensuring synergetic effects for the territory.

Every student should develop a general position on at least one of the topics and develop large-scale or local design solutions for the communities. The critical reading of the Palmeraie, its threats, and the elaborated design solutions will be site-specific but also generally valid for similar situations in the Global South … and not only! A study trip to Marrakech is planned.