Urban Glitch: Systems-linked architecture in a contingent world

This Spring 2024 GSD options studio, taught by Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti, is designed to research the pressing issue of systems-linked architecture in relation to the complex and intertwined ecological, social, and technological imperatives of our time. The work of the studio explores the potential disposition of a 21st-century systems-linked architecture, asking how and when design must act in the face of cultural complexity and climate crisis.

In the context of the studio, systems-linked architecture is focused upon infrastructures of energy, data, and transportation. The program is a transportation hub in Boston, MA. The studio begins with a counterfactual “game” that enables an understanding of the circumstances that led to our current condition of carbon-dependent mobility and imagines an alternative condition if just one historical event had taken a different course. This exercise acts as a radically pragmatic grounding mechanism to both situate design as a consequence of real-world contingencies and catalyze architectural imagination as neither the construction of wild utopias nor the acceptance of the existing status quo.

This hopeful work is informed by rigorous attention to the fragile contingencies of our shared world alongside the imagination of a meaningful future for urban mobility and public life in an era of decarbonization. We hope the work of the studio, as well as the methods explored within it, will positively contribute to the rapidly evolving discourse surrounding design for complexity, post-human design, and design for new nature.

The studio was made possible with the generous support of AECOM.

Series designed by Zak Jensen and Laura Grey
Report designed by Rita Rui Ting Wang

Softcover, 90 pages, 17 x 24.5 cm