GSD Platform 2

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GSD Platform 2

Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Contents

MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI, DEAN | ALEXANDER AND VICTORIA WILEY PROFESSOR OF DESIGN

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PREFACE

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INTRODUCTION

FELIPE CORREA, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF URBAN DESIGN

PROCESSES OF FORMATION

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FORM

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LECTURE

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EXHIBITION

NETWORKS AND SPHERES

BRUNO LATOUR AND PETER SLOTERDIJK

PATTERNS: CASES IN SYNTHETIC INTELLIGENCE

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STUDIO MAT ECOLOGIES CHRIS REED

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THESIS U.N.ITED@LAST.ORG MATTHIEU LEMIEUX BLANCHARD

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THESIS PUBLIC SPACE IN SHIBUYA STATION MICHAEL SYPKENS

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OPTION STUDIO RISING MASS GEORGE LEGENDRE

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OPTION STUDIO STUBBORN URBANISM PRESTON SCOTT COHEN

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KELLEY PRIZE

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SYMPOSIUM

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CORE

ARCHITECTURE III

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CORE

URBAN PLANNING I

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GEOGRAPHY

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LECTURE

ASSEMBLAGE OF TWINS

JENNIFER BONNER

PARAMETRIC PERFORMANCES

CONTESTED GROUNDS

THE ART OF SURVIVAL

KONGJIAN YU

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STUDIO THE LANGUAGE OF SUSTAINABILITY LOUISA HUTTON AND MATTHIAS SAUERBRUCH

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STUDIO THE CONTESTED CITY TONI GRIFFIN, ROBERT LANE

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PUBLICATION

NEW GEOGRAPHIES: AFTER ZERO

STEPHEN RAMOS, NEYRAN TURAN (EDITORS)

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STUDIO UNAM DE-CENTRAL LIBRARY ERIC BUNGE, MIMI HATRAM HOANG, PAUL KASSABIAN, MAHADEV RAMAN

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THESIS A GEOPOLITICAL UNARCHITECTURE PETER CHRISTENSEN

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KELLEY PRIZE

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LECTURE

HEALTH CLINIC IN DURBAN

MAJA PAKLAR

THE URBAN ROOTS OF THE FISCAL CRISIS

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CORE

ARCHITECTURE IV

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CORE

ELEMENTS OF URBAN DESIGN

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INVENTION

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SYMPOSIUM

DAVID HARVEY

CONDITIONAL UTOPIAS THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

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STUDIO DESERT ISLANDS MICHAEL MEREDITH

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STUDIOS THE AL QATTARA OASIS IN AL AIN JORGE SILVETTI, FELIPE CORREA

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LECTURE

SMELL = INFORMATION

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SEMINAR

THE DEAD

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SISSEL TOLAAS

SCHERI FULTINEER

THESIS ON BOUNDARIES AND THE EXTRATERRITORIAL POINT: TIME MACHINE LISA HABER THOMSON THESIS AGRI-CULTURAL REGIMES: ADVENTURES IN THE MILITARY-AGRICULTURAL COMPLEX IN THE AMERICAN MIDWEST ANTHONY ACCIAVATTI JAMES ACKERMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI

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LECTURE

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CORE

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE III

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CORE

URBAN PLANNING II

NOW?

GSD Platform 2 Contents

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TRANSFORMATION

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LECTURE

NOW?

ADAPTIVE RESPONSIVE SYSTEMS HANIF KARA IN CONVERSATION WITH MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI

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STUDIO VERTICALISM IÑAKI ÁBALOS

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THESIS PERFORMANCE OF URBAN ORNAMENT FREDERICK PETER ORTNER

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LECTURE

FROM A REFLECTIVE TOWARD A RESPONSIVE PLAGUE ORGANISM

DIRK SIJMONS

STUDIO CLIMATE CHANGE, WATER, LAND DEVELOPMENT AND ADAPTATION ARMANDO CARBONELL, DIRK SIJMONS, MARTIN ZOGRAN

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LECTURE

GARY HILDERBRAND, CHRIS REED

LANDSCAPE PROVOCATIONS AND PRACTICES

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RESEARCH SEMINAR OLYMPIC INFRASTRUCTURES JUDITH GRANT LONG

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STUDIO A PLACE IN HEAVEN/A PLACE IN HELL CHRISTIAN WERTHMANN

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CONFERENCE

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CORE

ECOLOGICAL URBANISM

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IV

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AUTHORSHIP

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LECTURE

OPEN SOURCE MODELS

AGENCY

JOSHUA PRINCE RAMUS

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STUDIO ADVANCING THE STRATEGOSTRUCTURE JOSHUA PRINCE RAMUS

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STUDIO NEW WAYS: DIRIDON STATION RODOLFO MACHADO

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LECTURE

OPEN SOURCE CITIES

ECOSISTEMA URBANO

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THESIS GROUNDED QUILIAN RIANO

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THESIS THE INFINITE UNFOLDING OF CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER MARRIKKA TROTTER

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DIGITAL PRIZE

TAIPEI 2.0.2

TREVOR PATT

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CORE

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE I

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CORE

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE II

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PRACTICE

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SYMPOSIUM

MODES OF PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE ORDOS: NINE HOUSES BY GSD FACULTY

JEFF KIPNIS (MODERATOR)

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STUDIO THE ANXIETY OF DIFFERENCE MACK SCOGIN

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STUDIO AN URBANISM FOR LAS VEGAS ALEX KRIEGER

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THESIS ARCHITECTURE & ENTERPRISE NATHAN L. RICHARDSON

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LECTURE

ALL ABOUT UD!

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SEMINAR

BUILDING BOOKS

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CORE

ARCHITECTURE I

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CORE

ARCHITECTURE II

309 310

TECHNOLOGY

RODOLFO MACHADO LARS MÜLLER

AUTOMATION AND MASS CUSTOMIZATION

RESEARCH OSNAP! LEE-SU HUANG, GREGORY THOMAS SPAW

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STUDIO THE GINA STUDIO FRANK BARKOW, CHRISTOPHER BANGLE

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STUDIO RETICULATED FORM: UNITED STATES AIR FORCE ACADEMY JOE MACDONALD

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THESIS RESPONSIVE SPACE YEN TING CHO

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RESEARCH CONSTRUCTION AUTOMATION MARTIN BECHTHOLD

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THESIS A DEVELOPABLE LIGHTWEIGHT CAMPUS JESSICA LISAGOR

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RESEARCH MOBILE INFORMATION UNIT

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APPENDIX

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GSD PUBLICATIONS

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STUDENT GROUP ACTIVITIES

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FACULTY LIST

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IMPRINT

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Contents GSD Platform 2

Preface MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI, DEAN | ALEXANDER AND VICTORIA WILEY PROFESSOR OF DESIGN

The Graduate School of Design is the site of many research-based conjectures and experiments. In core and options studios, seminars, independent study, and thesis work, students and faculty expand the literal, figurative, and virtual boundaries of design. Despite our diverse disciplinary affiliations, the work of the school also strives to be collaborative and insistently cross-disciplinary, for only in this way can we make significant and innovative contributions to creating a better world.

Our intention is to explore the productive space between disciplinary advancement and cultural and social aspirations. We believe in the role of design as a form of constructed imagination that incorporates an ethical and political dimension. This engaged character of our work provides a voice—a participatory and perceptual presence—to our design efforts. In this process, the advances in research and scholarship of the disciplines are informed by a much wider and more complex set of influences.

This publication seeks to feature examples of the work undertaken at the GSD that confront these issues. In addition, it attempts to present the milieu, the intellectual conditions and contexts, for the production of that work. Each year we invite a faculty member to take on the role of selecting and editing the themes and projects that, for him or her, form the focus and organizational logic of our work, and hence of the Platform publication. This task is made more challenging by the remarkable quality of the projects of our students and faculty, as well as the scale and breadth of events sponsored by the school. One of the main aims of the book is to be selective yet broadly inclusive, and to reimagine the school by demonstrating both its diversity and the grounded specificity of ideas. This year, Felipe Correa, an assistant professor in the department of urban planning and design, together with the assistance of a talented group of students, has compiled a thought-provoking collection of projects and writings that highlight many of our current preoccupations. It is the amalgam and the consistency of these endeavors across multiple disciplines that makes the GSD so distinct.

The production of this publication was made particularly rewarding because of our ongoing collaboration with Ramon Prat and Albert Ferré of Actar, the publishers of the Platform series. I would like to thank them and all others who have contributed to the making of this book.

GSD Platform 2 Introduction

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Introduction FELIPE CORREA, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF URBAN DESIGN

Platform 2 amalgamates in a single document some of the most salient research and design initiatives undertaken at the Harvard Graduate School of Design throughout the 2008–2009 academic year. The book presents a synthesized cross-section of material distilled from an expansive array of academic initiatives. In doing so, it unfurls the complex diversity of design hypotheses, pedagogical focuses, research agendas, and disciplinary backgrounds that operate under a single roof.

As an edited compilation, the publication presents a symptomatic reading that postrationalizes the massive body of work that the school produces from September to May. This volume temporarily suspends the school’s three departmental affiliations —architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design–to highlight inconspicuous congruencies between studio work, theses, research, lectures, conferences, and writings. This allows for an alternative taxonomy that provides a crossdisciplinary reading of the critical ideas and interests currently being explored in the school’s academic programs.

The book is structured by two underlying systems. The first one, underscored in red brings together seven discrete chapters: Form: Processes of Formation Geography: Contested Grounds Invention: Conditional Utopias Transformation: Adaptive/ Responsive Systems Authorship: Open Source Models Practice: Modes of Practical Knowledge Technology: Automation and Mass Customization Each chapter features a body of work that explores contrasting tendencies within each particular rubric. The second system, underscored in green, presents the work done in core studios of each of the three departments. This material, in most cases presents “trans-departmental couplings” to highlight moments of overlap among the foundational courses of each discipline within the school.

Far from being a comprehensive overview of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Platform presents a “freeze frame” of a constantly shifting and expanding body of work. Its ultimate objective is to go beyond simply chronicling the events of one academic year, and register affinities and differences in a format that acts as a rich pedagogical platform that can address a wider audience within the design fields at large.

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Introduction GSD Platform 2

GSD Platform II

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Form Processes of Formation With material that shifts in scale from the restructuring of ďŹ ne-grain open space to the reconceptualization of the skyscraper, this grouping presents a wide range of research and hypotheses concerning diverse form-generating strategies, in relation to operative parameters and current projective techniques.

LECTURE

Networks N etworks and Spheres p BRUNO LATOUR AND PETER SLOTERDIJK EXHIBITION

Patterns CASES IN SYNTHETIC INTELLIGENCE STUDIO

Mat Ecologies g CHRIS REED THESIS

U.N.ited @ last.org g MATHIEU LEMIEUX BLANCHARD

Public Space p in Shibuya y Station MICHAEL SYPKENS OPTION STUDIO

Rising g Mass GEORGE LEGENDRE

Stubborn Urbanism PRESTON SCOTT COHEN KELLEY PRIZE

Assemblage g of Twins T JENNIFER BONNER SYMPOSIUM

Parametric Performances

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LECTURE

N Networks etworks and Spheres p BRUNO LATOUR AND PETER SLOTERDIJK

Spheres p Theory: y Talking T g to Myself y about the Poetics of Space p

BY PETER SLOTERDIJK FEBRUARY 17, 2009 | EXCERPT

Mr. Sloterdijk, as part of your trilogy on the spheres, you set out to create a theory that construes space as a key anthropological category. Why this emphasis?

We have to speak of space because humans are themselves an effect of the space they create. Human evolution can only be understood if we also bear in mind the mystery of insulation that so defines the emergence of humans: humans are pets that have domesticated themselves in the incubators of early cultures. All the generations before us were aware that you never camp outside in nature. The camps of man’s ancestors, dating back over a million years, already indicated that they were distancing themselves from their surroundings.

In the third volume of your trilogy there is an extensive chapter on architecture, “Indoors: Architectures of Foam.” Why did you choose such a provocative metaphor?

First of all for a philosophical reason: we are simply not capable of continuing the old cosmology of ancient Europe that rested on equating the house and home with the world. Classical metaphysics is a phantasm on an implicit motif that was highlighted in only a few places, e.g., by Hegel and Heidegger, namely that the world must itself be construed as having the character of a house and that people in Western culture should be grasped not only as mortals, but also as house residents. Their relation to the world as a whole is that of inhabitants in a crowded building called cosmos.

Form Lectures

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Lectures Form

So the questions are, “Why should modern thought bid goodbye to this equation of world and house? Why do we need a new image in order to designate how modern man lives in social and architectural containers? Why do I propose the concept of foams?”

The simple answer is: because since the Enlightenment we have no longer needed a universal house in order to find the world a place worthy of inhabiting. What suffices is a Unité d’Habitation, a stackable number of inhabitable cells. Through the motif of the inhabited cell I can uphold the spherical imperative that applies to all forms of human life but does not presuppose cosmic totalization. The stacking of cells in an apartment block, for instance, no longer generates the classical world/house entity, but an architectural foam, a multi-chambered system made of relatively stabilized personal worlds.

Is this deterioration of the world house or the all-embracing sphere into foam bubble an image of entropy?

On the contrary, in modernity far more complexity is established than was possible under the classical notion of unity. We must not forget that metaphysics is the realm of strong simplifications, and thus has a consolatory effect. The structure of foam is incompatible with a monospherical mindset; the whole can no longer be portrayed as a large round whole. Let me use an anecdote to indicate the immense change: In his memoirs, Albert Speer recollects that the designs for the giganto-manic new Reich Chancellery in Berlin originally envisaged a swastika crowning the dome, which was to be over 290 meters high. One summer’s day in 1939 Hitler then said: “The crown of the largest building in the world must be the eagle on the globe.” This remark should be taken as attesting to the brutalist restoration of imperial monocentric thinking—as if Hitler had for a moment intervened in the agony of classical metaphysics. By contrast, around 1920, in his reflections on the fundamentals of theoretical biology [Theoretische Biologie], Jakob von Uexküll had already affirmed: “It was an error to believe that the human world constituted a shared stage for all living creatures. Each living creature has its own special stage that is just as real as the special stage the humans have … This insight offers us a completely new view of the universe as something that does not consist of a single soap bubble that we have blown up so large as to go well beyond our horizons and assume infinite proportions, and is instead made up of millions of closely demarcated soap bubbles that overlap and intersect everywhere.” Le Corbusier himself used the image of the soap bubble in order to explain the essence of a good building: “The soap bubble is completely harmonious, if the breath in it is spread equally, and well regulated on the inside. The outside is the product of an inside.” This statement could be taken as the axiom of spherology: Vital space can only be explained in terms of the priority of the inside.

Form Lectures

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In your exploration of the “Architectures “A “ rchitectures of Foam,” you write that modernity renders the issue of residence explicit. What do you mean by that?

Here, I am developing an idea that Walter Benjamin addressed in his Arcades Project. He starts from the anthropological assumption that people in all epochs dedicate themselves to creating interiors, and at the same time he seeks to emancipate this motif from its apparent timelessness. He therefore asks the question: How does capitalist man in the 19th century express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs, the need to immunize existence by constructing protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this reason, Paxton’s Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building.

It forms the first hyper-interior that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park interiors and event architectures.

The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and brings them indoors, into a closed sphere. The antagonistic spatial types of salon and market meld here to form a hybrid. This is what Benjamin found so theoretically exciting: the nineteenth-century citizen seeks to expand his living room into a cosmos and at the same time impress the dogmatic form of a room on the universe.

This sparks a trend that is perfected in twentieth-century apartment design as well as in shopping mall and stadium design—these are the three paradigms of modern construction, that is, the construction of micro-interiors and macro-interiors.

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Lectures Form

EXCERPT

Spheres p and Networks: T Two Ways y to Reinterpret p Globalization BRUNO LATOUR — FEBRUARY 17, 2009

I was born a Sloterdijkian. When, thirty years ago, I was preparing the proofs of Laboratory Life, I had included in the pictures, to the disgust of my scientist informants, a black and white photograph of the air-conditioned machinery of the Salk Institute in which I had done my field work. “What does this have to do with our science?” they asked, to which I could only reply: “Everything.” Without knowing it, I had always been a “spherologist,” as I discovered about twenty years later when I became familiar with Peter Sloterdijk’s work in another locally situated, air-conditioned place: his school in Karlsruhe, which was separated by no more than one courtyard from the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, where I twice had the great chance to experiment with installations and exhibitions—what, with Peter Weibel, we call a “Gedanke Austellung” or “thought exhibition,” the equivalent in art of a “thought experiment” in science.

We are assembled tonight for another thought experiment, namely to imagine on what conditions the world, at the time of globalization, could be made habitable—all of those contemporary metaphors have become important: sustainable, durable, breathable, livable—and also to explore what would be the ideal program or curriculum or school to train its architects and designers (and “design” is taken here in the largest sense of the word, since as we know from Peter, “Dasein ist design”).

Peter and I have proposed to introduce, each in his own way, two sets of concepts— one coming from spheres and the other from networks. And let me say at the beginning that I have to agree with Peter that what is usually called networks is an “anemic” conjunction of two intersecting lines that are even less plausible than the vast global space of no space that it pretends to replace. Fortunately my own notion of network, or rather of actor-network, has borrowed more from Leibniz and diderot than from the Internet, and, in a way, one could say that Peter’s spheres and my networks are two ways of describing monads: once God is taken out of Leibniz’s monads, there are not many other ways for them but to become, on the one hand, spheres and, on the other, networks. I’d like to test those two concepts to see whether they begin to lead us to some testable conclusion—a thought experiment, remember, is indeed an experiment that, even though impractical, should be able to discriminate between arguments.

Spheres and networks might not have much in common but they have both been elaborated against the same sort of enemy: an ancient and constantly deeper apparent divide between nature and society. When Sloterdijk asks his master Heidegger the rather mischievous question: “When you say Dasein is thrown into the world, where is it thrown? What’s the temperature there, the color of the walls, the insulating material that has been chosen, the technology for disposing of refuse, the cost of the air-conditioning, and so on?” The apparently deep philosophical ontology of what is “Being qua Being” takes a rather different turn: Suddenly we realize that it is the Form Lectures

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“profound question” of Being that has been too superficially considered; Dasein has no clothes, no habitat, no biology, no hormones, no atmosphere around it, no medication, no viable transportation system even to reach his “Hutte” in the Black Forest. Dasein is thrown into the world but so naked that it doesn’t stand much chance of survival.

When you begin to ask these naughty questions, the respective relations between depth and superficiality are suddenly reversed: there is not the slightest chance of understanding Being once it has been cut off from the vast numbers of apparently trifling and superficial little beings that make it exist from moment to moment—what Peter came to call its “life supports.” In one stroke, the philosopher’s quest for “Being as such” looks like an antiquated research program. As Gabriel T Tarde had anticipated a century ago, philosophers had chosen the wrong verb: “To T be” has led them nowhere except to a melodramatic quandary of identity versus nothingness. says, no one can The right verb should have been “to have,” because then, as Tarde T sever the two-way connections between the “having” and the “had.” (It is hard to imagine an audience finding tragic a Hamlet who would ponder, “To T have or not to have, that is the question.”)

The same reversal of depth and superficiality has been achieved when science studies began to “embed” the practice of science–until then construed as the most implausible and most mysterious achievements of a disembodied set of invisible brains in the vat—into larger, more visible, more costly, more localized, and vastly more realistic vats: namely laboratories, or better, networks of connected laboratories. Once the little shock of realizing that science, which, until now, had been able to meander freely through the vast expanses of time and space without paying any special price or even being embodied in any specific human, came to be suddenly restricted and circumscribed to tiny, fragile, and costly networks of practices to which it could not escape except by paying the full cost of its material extension— once this shock had been absorbed, it became clear that science had found a much safer and more sustainable ground. Objectivity too had found its life supports; it had been reimplanted into plausible ecosystems. The truth conditions epistemologists had looked for in vain inside logic had finally been situated in highly specific truth factories.

Now I beg you to consider the two moves at once, because, taken in isolation, they produce the worst possible solution: If you understand what Sloterdijk did to Dasein in abandoning Heidegger and philosophy more generally (because he reconnected the naked human with its life supports), it means that you have confused the plug-in of life supports with the invasion of “nature.” It is as if he had said: “Enough phenomenology. Let’s naturalize the whole goddamn human by using the most recent results of the hard sciences: neurology, biology, chemistry, physics, technology—you name them!” Conversely, if you think that, by situating Science with a capital S inside the tiny loci of disseminated laboratories, we, the science students, have made it a hostage of human vagaries, it means that you have confused our enterprise with an appeal to “society,” as if we had been saying “enough belief in the objective view from nowhere. Let’s deconstruct science and make it a narrative among narratives inside a flow of narratives.”

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Lectures Form

EXHIBITION

Patterns: Cases in Synthetic y IIntelligence ntelligence g

Establishing links between otherwise disparate cultural, intellectual, and technological categories has long been the job of the architect. An arbiter of aesthetic connection, who else can create a bond between the Parthenon and a sportscar, bricks and B movies, octogenarians and the color orange? This task is not as esoteric as it may seem. The ability to create relationships where none existed before is endemic to both the production and experience of architecture. As a result of their increasingly sophisticated logic, appearance, and application, patterns promote such synthetic activity.

The projects in this exhibition foreground an emerging generation of patterns in architecture. Fueled by the introduction of new technologies and revised conventions of style, form, and temporality, they are no longer merely superficial, nor are they ideal, universal, and timeless—they remix distinct epistemological domains by anticipating fresh aggregations of them. Advanced patterns promiscuously combine a variety of materials, performance requirements, environmental factors, sensibilities, elastic geometries, optical effects, and kinetic forces. Their redundancy encourages technical precision, but because they do not discriminate between scales, materials, and applications, they are capable of absorbing numerous demands and desires into a vibrant, intricate, and aesthetically consistent whole.

These new breeds of synthetic patterns maneuver on spectra between organization and sensation, constancy and randomness, stability and flexibility, permanence and transience—with no clear predilection for the extremes. The emerging understanding of patterns is that their sensory, fleeting, and iterative traits are taken as seriously as their functional, everlasting, and essential ones—producing projects of protean vitality and multifarious intelligence.

Form Exhibition

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Exhibition Form

Exhibition Patterns

Form Exhibition

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A multifunctional and differentiated pattern:

IJP’s Shenzen Museum of Contemporary Art uses a locally specific yet globally consistent grid to integrate structure, programmatic distribution, form, circulation, material combinations, and interior partitioning.

2. ambi ent lig ht

insert s

1. cn c 78° zone 10 62° zone 6

57° zone 5

mille d bio

-ffoa mp anel

2. m o du lar w ind ows

aloe butterfly weed coreopsis

3. h ydr on ic h eat latt ice

4. the rm all yd

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iffffe ren tia ted

pla nte r

A synthetic pattern: a differentiated hydronic heat lattice in !ndie architecture’s Thermographic Theater creates microclimates for different plants and activities, while structuring distributions of texture, color, and sheen on airbrushed panels that line the lobby Exhibition Form

STUDIO

Mat Ecologies g CHRIS REED

The mat can be thought of as a systematic field of consistent and repetitive parts, dispersed across a large-scale territory, and governed by a set of formal or logistical operations. It is transformed according to its own internal logics, or in response to external inputs, or both.

The studio emphasized mats’ operational parameters and generative techniques over their formal effect; we also emphasized mats’ transformative effects through time— their ability to catalyze and provoke a set of emergent and provisional ecologies and economies (hence, “mat ecologies”). Here, the mat stages open-ended futures: it sets up conditions for use and appropriation in its delineation; it offers itself for opportunistic appropriation; and it is capable of responding to input through a set of unfolding operational principles. For our purposes, mats were operational frameworks that catalyzed transformation; they formed and performed across regional, metropolitan fields, yet were able to morph in response to localized inputs.

Our work focused on the creation of mat landscape strategies—hybridized technolandscapes—that deliberately frame regenerative ecological, social, and economic processes. We began with a broad range of two- and three-dimensional mat-pattern and mat-model studies, in order to develop a set of formal and verbal vocabularies and techniques for mat-making. We then considered a broad range of appropriations / adaptations of the mat, specifically in regard to landscape systems and ecologies, metropolitanization, and remediation technologies, in order to explore what might emerge within the context of a contaminated, demilitarized metropolitan landscape condition.

Form Studio

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Studio Form

Wetland Transition Development p Strategy gy

Wetland Treatment Strategy

Vegetation

Hydrology

Material

Form Studio

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Dune Formation Deployment eployment Strategy

Dune Strategies

GENEVA WIRTH

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Studio Form

Mat M at Structure

Infrastructural tural Types Types

Monarch Propogation

Rie Range

Sporting F Facilities acilities

Programmatic Spectrum

Ecological Timeline

CHRIS TUCCIO

Form Studio

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Milkweed Milkwee ed Inputs

Infrastructural Types T

Air A ir Stripping pp g

Energy Production

Greenhouses G ee ouses

Perspective

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Studio Form

THESIS

U.N.ited@ last.org g MATHIEU LEMIEUX BLANCHARD

The project questions the ability of architecture to formalize the informal diplomatic exchange between different entities, while creating a new space of representation for the world. It aims at exacerbating the paradox of unity and territory, as a labyrinth of shortcuts.

This is a project that reflects on the lost legacy of the hegemonic moment of Modern Architecture, when institutional authority was represented by the most extreme examples of rigorous anonymity. The Secretariat’s corridors and facades without qualities are reconceived in the oblique, reflective corridors of a building unusually hidden below a new UN plaza. The project brings the city and the UN together for the first time in the performance of a disappearing act of a very different kind.

Preston Scott Cohen, Thesis Advisor Form Thesis

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Thesis Form

The Place of the Nations

MATHIEU LEMIEUX BLANCHARD

Form Thesis

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Model

Plaza

Courtyard

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Thesis Form

THESIS

Public Space p in Shibuya y Station: The Hard, the Soft, and the Superflat p MICHAEL SYPKENS

This project takes the position that in Japan, physical objects are not as meaningful as social events, and therefore public space might be conceived as flows of people and forms of exchange. This is accomplished through the manipulation of infrastructure and building density to organize an environment through a ground condition that is empathetic in its quirkiness.

Michael rigorously, yet subtly confronted two complicated issues. The first was an appropriate manner of spatial appreciation in the contemporary Japanese public realm. The second was deft adaption of the busy, yet antiquated Shibuya interchange to meet projected rising demand.

Peter Rowe, Thesis Advisor

This thesis researched the urban specificity of Japanese public space. The project explored strategies of design constraint prompted by the economy of means required in those fields. The transformation focused on the construction of frames of intensification of the urban experience, through operations of ground treatment accommodating flows and distributing building mass to constitute a new “superflat” urbanscape.

Luis Ortega, Thesis Advisor Form Thesis

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Thesis Form

Vertical Circulation

Ground Infrastructure

Section Axonometric

MICHAEL SYPKENS

Form Thesis

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Model

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Thesis Form

OPTION STUDIO

Rising g Mass GEORGE LEGENDRE

Halfway between today’s dominant discourse of programmatic freedom and the alleged over-determination of pure form-making, this studio celebrated architecture’s ongoing critical return to form.

The studio scavenged the latest trends of global academicism to formulate our instrumental ideas in the context of what has become the hottest academic undertaking: planning high-rise structures for the fast-paced economies of the twentyfirst century. We devised tower proposals that sat halfway between the generic, potentially “semi-automatic” mode of development advocated in “High Rise Phylum” and the more specific adaptations required by site, program, and personal desire.

We explored ways that our formal analytic models fare in the light of the industry’s performance ratios and constraints (plot ratios, gross floor areas, floor-to-floor height, facade to core depth) utilizing simple concepts that produce complicated outcomes.

Singapore was our chosen context of operation. We earmarked several sites released by Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) to prospective developers and architects looking to build high. These included West Coast Crescent, Woodlands Road, Yishun Avenue, Playfair Road, Ophir Road, Outram Road, Marina Bay, and Marina View.

We were given access to site data issued to professionals by URA. Our ultimate ambition was to deconstruct the high-rise as a Modernist red-herring, the functionalist project par excellence, from the “primitive” occupational assumptions governing the layouts of floor plates in the 1950s to the “progressive” naturalistic metaphors in fashion today.

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Studio Form

Exploded Axonometric

Tower Plans

ANA MARIA FLOR AND RODIA VALLADARES

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Program Diagram

Model

Circulation Scheme

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OPTION STUDIO

Stubborn Urbanism PRESTON SCOTT COHEN

This studio investigated design techniques for the production of urban and architectural hybrids in Shanghai. We collaborated with the Hong Kong University studio led by Tom T Verebes. a relatively coherent district of greater architectural interest Li Nong or Old Town, T than most in Shanghai, is suffering from deterioration and the encroachment of incompatible contemporary developments. The studio explored approaches for its future transformation and their associated architectural typologies and tectonics, with an emphasis on the prototyping of infrastructure and building systems.

The studio confronted the life cycles of buildings and the architectural consequences of planned obsolescence. As an alternative to disposable buildings and the design of instant cities, the studio speculated on matters of relative duration and mechanisms of incremental urban growth, with the capacity to adapt to current and future contingencies.

The studio considered alternatives to the following typologies, by means of formal transformations, varying dimensional parameters of size, shape, topology, density, proximity, orientation, etc.: high rise towers, perimeter block massing, and low rise suburban sprawl, as the default architectural and urban typologies deployed in China’s urban densification and expansion, and the dominant models of its urban growth. Given the complexities of private and public investment arising from the current global economic turmoil overlaid on China’s goal to urbanize an additional 400 million of its citizens over the next twenty years, we assumed an intensified imperative to challenge, re-assess, and propose alternatives to conventional urban and architectural typologies and their associated conventions and standards.

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Studio Form

Li Nong T Typology and Aggregation A ggregation

New Programmatic c Insertion

MATTHEW ALLEN

Distortion of Fabric

Form Studio

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Front Perspective

Axonometric metric Sequence

Instantiations

BRETT T ALBERT

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Studio Form

Models

Diagrams of Aggregation Process

KATY BARKAN

Form Studio

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Process Drawing

View V iew from Street

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Studio Form

JAMES T. KELLEY PRIZE WINNER

Assemblage g of Twins: T A Luxuryy Landscape p JENNIFER BONNER

Form Kelley Prize

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Located in suburban Las Vegas, the proposed housing tower challenges the typologies of the Modernist bar and twin towers. Variations of nested programmatic elements achieve twinning through multiple scales.

Ultimately, a performative architecture and landscape is proliferated and attempts to domesticate the individual within the collective ‘overskyscraper’.

Assemblage of Twins is a radical overskyscraper proposition generated by the fragmentation of a condominium tower type and its reassembly in a porous collective, a paradoxical form of interior urbanism characterized both by selfreection and by self-alienation, where luxury residential units fearfully look at themselves and at one another.

Ciro Najle, Studio Instructor

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Kelley Prize Form

SYMPOSIUM

Parametric Performances CHRIS HOXIE, ROBERT LEVIT, JOE MACDONALD, CIRO NAJLE, NERI OXMAN, CAMERON WU

Robert Levit Introductoryy Remarks DECEMBER 2, 2008 | EXCERPT

I will open with a statement, which is meant to be something of a provocation on the question of parametric performance today: is performance really the crux of the matter in parametric architecture? There are certain clarifications to go through in order to carry out this discussion, and in particular we need to clarify what we mean by parametric architecture? Since all architecture can be described as an interrelationship of dependent variables, the question then is, what is not parametric architecture? Even quotidian relationships of budgets to everything else is a parametric relationship, and not trivial, given the computational enhancement of on-the-fly cost estimation with consequences for form, material, and sequencing. Also, the most exclusive questions of form have long been a parametric question.

As you can see in the slide, the interplay of coffering patterns and domes, for instance, such as the cross octagon and hexagon of Boromini’s San Carlo Alle Quattro Fontane, in the oval dome, is an example of a baroque parametric operation.

The size and geometry of the coffers diminish and distort as a constant number of them squeezes into the upper reaches of the dome. I think that the cannon of classical architecture, varied and violated as its rules have been, establish as a central theoretical vocation, parametric relationships of proportion between the parts.

So what do most of us mean when we talk about parametric architecture now?

Performance suggests the centrality of material reductions, of better and more effective quantification, of structural efficiency, better sequencing of production. These are critical issues, but not central aspects in what I think most design-oriented schools of architecture, or architects, are talking about when they use the term parametric.

Rather, parametric architecture is related to a body of work that is marked by a number of traits. Though it is not a unitary idiom of design, it acquires the name by sharing formal characteristics and interests. What are these traits? Perhaps foremost among them is a flexible modularity.

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Lectures Form

The most famous example, perhaps, is PTW’s Water Cube in Beijing. The interesting thing about the Water Cube is how Christian Carfray, the project’s engineer, described the criteria for selecting the famous forms of the space frame. He talks about the crucial choice as it related to a minimal surface geometry; as it related first, he laid out, to performance criteria.

But, the crucial detail in the choice of the now-famous Weir Phalin foam geometry was the peculiar characteristic of the minimal surface foam, which is made through the packing of two polyhedra. Carfray states, “When it is viewed at an arbitrary angle, it appears totally random, and organic.” And you can see that what it actually does is appealing to certain conventions of representation of liquidity, of liquid, of water.

My point here is to de-couple the questions of performance and optimization on the one hand, and those of a consistent formal idiom in contemporary parametric architecture on the other, and by so doing, to be able to ask the questions of motivation; unburdened by what I think is the false determination of performance to explain the emergence of a contemporary style. My use of the word style, I understand, is already going to be contended by other members of the panel, so we’ll see.

Free of this claim, we can then ask, what does drive the forms in the new parametric idioms of the present? And are there distinctions to be made in what might be lumped together, according to too crude a taxonomy of general parametric architecture? For instance, is it useful to distinguish between organic and other formal styles?

In the article that I wrote last year for Harvard Design Magazine, “Contemporary Ornament,” I argued that the organic appearance of many current works was a symbolic practice that sought to align architecture with nature, symbolically. It’s not to discount the fact that the performance exists. But nevertheless, I think the motivations, avowed or not, have a symbolic dimension.

I think that the symbolic alignment is more important than any related factors of improved performance. And whatever the constellation the factors from which the stylistic commitment derives, a significant part of the impulse stems from contemporary concerns with ecological sustainability. But, while arguments on behalf of an architecture of organic appearance may point to the improved performance of new building forms, I do think that the motivation operates primarily at a symbolic level—intended or not by the authors.

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There are other idioms that use the computational and geometrical mechanisms of parametric modeling. Here, I am thinking of the work that students, under Scott Cohen’s direction, undertook three years ago in his option studio. There, more normatively established forms of architecture, including domes, were dealt with. You Y can see here that parametric operations are used to resolve the problem of the pendentive, which creates the transition between the dome and the square base. It uses sophisticated contemporary digital computation in order to achieve this end.

I’d like to move the question of the contemporary parametric, though, into an arena in which it is treated as a style, as much as a technical idiom meeting performative criteria. Such a boot move does not discount the questions of performance, but simply locates them back in the ever-present but unremarkable fact that architecture must satisfy demands. Architecture must perform, and today, we are able to optimize performance to a greater degree, through the computational enhancements that we have access to. By treating a certain range of parametric architecture as style, we are able to discuss, I think, what makes it truly distinctive; that is to say, I think its distinction does not lie in its performance.

So, a few questions about parametric architecture should be asked today: What is the status of parametric architecture in the present? Or how should we understand the play between questions of performance, technique, and style? And, if we allow that style is a legitimate category of judgment, then what is at stake in the styles attached to the contemporary parametric? Finally, what are the relevant divisions in the manner that different architects are taking up the possibilities that are offered by parametric tools of the present?

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Lectures Form

KATY BARKAN

Form Ecological E F ocolo c ological Studio S diUr U Urbanism Conference Panel Discussion

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Core Architecture III INSTRUCTORS: JONATHAN LEVI (COORDINATOR), JOHN HONG, TIMOTHY HYDE, FLORIAN IDENBURG, LAURA MILLER AND PETER ROSE

FALL 2008

Harvard is contemplating a major self-transformation stimulated by the potential of large land acquisitions across the river in the Boston neighborhood of Allston. This territory will be the site of a major expansion including the relocation of graduate/ professional schools, the creation of new problem-based university units, cultural components such as museums and performing spaces, community interfaces, and commercial support structures. At the same time there will be a new vision of university life, and necessarily, a new vision of the interactivity of housing with intellectual work.

A portion of the new terrain bordering the riverfront and facing the Cambridge campus will be dedicated to undergraduate housing or, more accurately, to multifunctional undergraduate ‘houses’. The need for these houses is three-fold: first, to relieve overcrowding in the existing houses. Second, to provide swing space during the much needed extensive renovations of the old Cambridge houses. Third, and most idealistically, to expand the undergraduate population to allow greater access to a Harvard education by an ever-increasing pool of highly qualified domestic and international students.

The purpose of this studio was to study housing through the vehicle of the institutional question raised by Harvard’s foray into Allston. While the studio was guided by the functions, needs, and values of existing Harvard houses, our goal was to espouse models of physical planning that would provide for the future—not just the present or the past.

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Architecture III Core

WENDY SMITH

ALDA GAPI BLACK

JENNIFER FRENCH

RIKAKO WAKABAYASHI

Core Architecture III

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Perspective of Courtyard

Ground Floor Plans

Section

Model

TOMMY PAO

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Architecture III Core

Model

Model Detail Unit Types T and Distribution

VERA SHUR

Core Architecture III

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First Level Plan

Cluster Types T

Housing Perspective

SHANSHAN QI

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Architecture III Core

South Face Perspective

Transverse Section

Exploded Axonometric

KEVIN HIRTH

Core Architecture III

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Floor Plan

South Elevation

North Elevation

North Face Perspective

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Architecture III Core

Model

Vertical House Section

VICTOR LORENZO

Core Architecture III

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Core Planning Urban P lanning gI INSTRUCTORS: JUDITH GRANT LONG (COORDINATOR), KATHRYN MADDEN, KATHY SPIEGELMAN

FALL 2008

This core studio introduced the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to create, research, analyze, and implement plans and projects for the built environment. It was organized into four exercises, each representing a fundamental stage of the urban planning process: Part 1: ‘Ideas’ investigated the process of generating conceptual strategies for urban planning. Various sources and approaches to creative thinking were evaluated with respect to how they inform urban planning outcomes and are used to record and represent ideas.

Part 2: ‘Research’ surveyed the analytical skills used by urban planners to better understand and scrutinize the built environment.

Part 3: ‘Plans’ explored the making of functional plans for the built environment across a range of scales, from region to city to neighborhood to site.

Part 4: ‘Implementation’ delved into the execution of urban planning schemes, focusing on regulatory issues, money, and politics. Specific implementation strategies and tools were devised through the development of zoning text and maps, phasing plans, and stakeholder participation processes.

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Urban Planning I Core

Regional Diagram

Subdistrict Plan

Site Opportunities

JAMES MOORE

Core Urban Planning I

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Implementation Plan

Subdistrict Land Use Plan

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Urban Planning I Core

Stakeholder Diagram

CHRISTINA CALABRESE

Land Use Plan

Core Urban Planning I

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JILL ALLEN

Zoning Map and Zoning Regulations

Phasing Diagrams

Zoning Strategyy

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Urban Planning I Core

NICOLE LARSEN

Core Urban Planning I

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Geography Contested Grounds With work that explores tensions between port and city in Newark, New Jersey, to architectural strategies that propose models for a decentralized library system in Mexico, these provocations highlight a body of work framed by particular conditions of spatial contention. In doing so they expose multiple ways in which the designer can perform as an active agent in shaping the built environment as part of broader negotiative processes.

LECTURE

The Art of Survival KONGJIAN YU STUDIO

The Language g g of Sustainabilityy LOUISA HUTTON AND MATTHIAS SAUERBRUCH

The Contested Cityy TONY GRIFFIN, ROBERT LANE PUBLICATION

New N ew Geographies: g p After Zero STEPHEN RAMOS, NEYRAN TURAN (EDITORS) STUDIO

UNAM deCentral Libraryy ERIC BUNGE, MIMI HATRAM HOANG, PAUL KASSABIAN, MAHADEV RAMAN THESIS

A Geopolitical p Unarchitecture PETER CHRISTENSEN KELLEY PRIZE

Health Clinic in Durban MAJA PAKLAR LECTURE

The Urban Roots of the Fiscal Crisis DAVID HARVEY

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LECTURE

The Art of Survival: R Recovering ecovering gL Landscape andscape p Architecture KONGJIAN YU

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008 | EXCERPT

Landscape architecture is not a cosmetic art of gardening. It’s an art of survival. It tells people how to find a place, and how to design places for people to live. The poetic, nostalgic past of agricultural China, has created the picturesque, poetic landscape. That is a result of survival, a result of survival’s art of survival. Over the years this understanding has been lost; city planning and garden making have become a cosmetic art of urban design in such a way that the civic art of urban design is landscape gardening and landscape art. How can we recover the landscape as an art of survival, to create new vernacular and new poetic landscapes?

River Basin, a disaster caused a mudslide Five thousand years ago in the Yellow Y and a flood that buried a whole village. A woman was buried with her baby in her arm. She raised her head calling for a god to help because no one else could. Who is the god? The god was the landscape planner Da Yu. He is the first king in China who knew how to use rules and measures to select safe places for cities, and to lead people to where to live and where to cultivate the landscape. The king is the landscape planner, and from him, China learned how to use the land. He’d been selected as king because he knew how to deal with the flood, how to make friends with it.

These kinds of art of survival skills have been carried on by generations of Chinese Feng Shui masters. Feng Shui masters are also a combination of administration and design, so you can see how they use measures and compasses to select sites for safety, for security, and for people to use the landscape. About 1,000 years ago, the Chinese imagined the land as their motherland. Each temple, each village, was specially and carefully located at a specific site. The art of survival is about life taking place on the motherland.

Geography Lectures

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Lectures Geography

The art of survival is about making rice fields and containing water: terraces of rice patties are created by diverting water from the mountain. The art of survival is about making a land productive. It’s about land use; land being used in different ways for orchards, for sugar canes, for rice patties. The villages are sited at a slope, with a few feet of forest above and rice patties underneath. The water goes from the forest through the village and irrigates these rice patties. The art of survival is about planting, how to select plants and mix them together—bananas, sugar canes, rice patties— to make wise use of the land.

All these arts of survival have created a paradise, the Chinese vernacular: the traditional, old vernacular we called the Land of Peach Blossoms. This land is productive, safe, and also beautiful. The old Chinese vernacular is about a sacred landscape of ecological infrastructure. Is this old vernacular under the process of being destroyed?

The process of urbanity is becoming a single-minded engineering work, leading to the destruction of the ecological processes and ecological infrastructure. There are 25,000 dams in China—four times as many as in America, and about 50 percent of all dams in the world. The art becomes a trivial, cosmetic art of gardening and specific design. Every city becomes totally cosmetic.

Today in China, urbanization consumes more than 50 percent of the cement in the T world, one-third of the steel, and one-third of the coal. What forces the consumption of concrete? It’s the cosmetic art of urbanity. The art of survival has declined into the cosmetic art of gardening and specific design, which by mistake, we called landscape, architectural, and urban design. Y You can see this in China: Architecture is an ornament; landscape is ornament; the whole city is an ornament.

This process of urbanity or this process of cosmetic art didn’t start today. It started 2,000 years ago, when the empress who admired this kind of authentic, real land of peach blossoms asked the artists and the painters to copy a kind of landscape to create the garden. What’s missing here in this copying process is the productivity.

Here in this garden, even the peach blossoms bear no fruit. In the landscape, it’s the land of peach blossoms raising an abundance of fruit, rice, fish, and bamboo shoots.

In the garden, everything becomes ornamental.

This is the process of the art of urbanity. For more than 1,000 years, young Chinese girls were forced to bind their feet in order to be able to marry certified elites; natural, big feet were considered to be rustic and rural. That’s the art of urbanity that the Chinese high-culture valued very much—deprived of productivity.

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We can see the same in other cultures. The king of the Mayans does the same thing.

In order to become king, the mother usually deformed the baby, deformed the head and the hand in order to become urbanized, or to become part of the high culture.

China is not a single case.

Lots of westerners enjoy Chinese Penjing as a kind of art of China. Chinese beauty has been painted by Chinese high-culture intellectuals. It’s beautiful, but what’s missing here? What’s missing is productivity. Productivity has been deprived just for beauty. When you enter an American or European bookstore, you can see how many people from western cultures write about Chinese high culture, Chinese gardens, Chinese poetry, and Chinese paintings. It’s all about high culture; it’s all about this fake culture. Almost no one writes about Chinese authentic landscape—the vernacular, the vernacular culture, the vernacular art. That’s why the value has been carried on for generations and generations, even if these urban flowers are ornaments.

Today, this value has continued in urbanization processes in China. A dirty road isn’t T paved; it is OK because people need to travel, right? All these productive plants have been wiped out and planted with these kinds of ornaments. Ornaments are a hybrid of berries, collar leaved boxes—deprived of productivity! The same story happens everywhere in China. In the Grand View Garden, the native plants have been taken away and replaced with lawns from America and Canada, and you have to water them every day. One square meter of lawn in China, in Beijing, takes one cubic meter of water every year.

A lot of people talk about Shanghai and how beautiful it is. I just look at all these buildings, the landmarks in Shanghai, and think how ugly they are. They try to make it the Opera beautiful, but it’s an ornament. Beijing: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV Tower, T House, they are all ornaments. They consume 500 kilograms of steel per square meter. That’s ten times compared to a normal office building. All these ornaments create a city of ornaments. In the process of making ornaments of the new cities, we actually totally destroy the old, vernacular, poetic, productive landscape. The cost of the process of urbanization or urbanity is the brown field of China.

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Lectures Geography

OPTION STUDIO

The Language g g of Sustainabilityy LOUISA HUTTON, MATTHIAS SAUERBRUCH

This studio examined the current situation in the City of Detroit, Michigan. Students analyzed the urban situation as found, and proposed concepts for the future of a site of approximately 80ha, adjacent to downtown. This concept was to include programmatic choices based on the socio-economic situation observed, informed judgements on density and scale, as well as an urban and architectural vision for a sustainable city.

Believing that sustainability is not just a question of quantiďŹ able strategies (such as the reduction of carbon emissions), but equally a challenge to provide environments that stimulate the senses and create future well-being, an artistic component was introduced into the design method. Students sought a graphic expression of their understanding of luxury, and composed a ďŹ lm on the subject using photographic material collected on a week-long site visit. Ultimately, they were asked to develop an urban masterplan based on their own original observations and concepts, and to turn one small part of it into an architectural design.

The studio attempted to bring together the two most poignant conditions for sustainable development: the need to reinterpret the framework of existing cities and to construct desirable built environments with reduced resources. To T place this abstract experiment into the dirty and powerful reality of Detroit proved to be both exhilarating and challenging.

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ELIZABET ELIZABETH BETH T BET TI TIMME I MME M ME

Perspective Sequence of Media Campus

30% NODES DEVELOPED

ANNA CZIGLER

Site Development

ALM ALMIN M I N PR P PRŠIC R ŠI ŠIC C

Phased Masterplan

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Perspective Pe erspective Sequence of Media Campus

ANNA CZIGLER

Organizational Strategy Diagrams

Perspective of Neighborhood N eighborhood

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Studio Geography

OPTION STUDIO

The Contested City: y Newark and the Struggle gg for Sustainable Urban Regeneration g TONI GRIFFIN, ROBERT LANE

Once isolated, air and seaports have become a part of a larger urban system and transportation network in urban centers. This urban morphology requires a deliberate negotiation between the two urban systems: the port and supportive operations (industry and transportation) and the city (housing, commercial open space, small business). New land development policies and spatial strategies are needed to advance economic growth for the city, resident wealth creation, and environmentally sustainable neighborhoods. These policies and strategies must consider: reconciling the integration and adjacencies of living and working spaces; accommodating clean, dirty, and green industries; connecting industry and the immigrant/prisoner/lowskilled worker; and reducing unemployment and increasing the number of residents working in Newark.

The studio used site visits, interviews with public ofďŹ cials and community organizations, readings, case studies, demographic, economic, and development trend analysis, and spatial analysis to propose social policy, land use, zoning, urban design, building typologies, and real estate strategies for advancing both the Port of Newark and Newark Liberty Airport’s competitive position, increase economic growth opportunities for Newark residents, and create more sustainable industrial and mixed use neighborhoods.

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Studio Geography

Example Commodity C ommodityy Chain

WILLIAM GOODMAN,, MARY KIMBALL, ISAIAH MILLER, ANDREW SALZBERG

Sections of a Flexible Industrial District

Perspective

Geography Studio

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Method for Determining Priority Zones

Palette of Remediation Strategies

Pervious and Impervious p Surfaces

Vacant and vegetated sites

Green Streets and Open Space Network

MELISSA GUERRERO

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Studio Geography

PUBLICATION

N New ew Geographies g p No.1 – After Zero A STEPHEN RAMOS, NEYRAN TURAN (EDITORS-IN-CHIEF)

Design disciplines are challenged by the condition of the zero point. “Zero-context,” “cities from scratch,” and “zero-carbon” developments all force designers to address important questions regarding the strategic relevance and impact of a design intervention. As much as the zero point presents naïve innocence and embodies contradictory notions—such as crisis versus abundance or context versus model—it also creates a ground for doubt, self-critique, and rejuvenation for architecture and urbanism. As projects, indeed entire “new” cities, are built before they can even be imagined and then repackaged and replicated as models for any context, what do these projects suggest for the design disciplines? Beyond a focus on the vast scales and ambitions of these projects, it is important to see them as symptomatic of a much broader condition within contemporary architecture and urbanism. Along with the challenges inherent in the zero point, perhaps more meaningful are the provocations of the AFTER following the ZERO condition. The idea of an AFTER ZERO is crucial for us; not only to assert the need to reflect on the future following the zero condition but also in acknowledgment of the release of this volume after our previous Volume No. 0. If the zero condition presents crises of form, context, and social relevance for architecture and urbanism, perhaps one way to deal with this is “to redefine crisis, not as crisis but more simply as symptoms of larger urban trends whose logic is revealed only when judgment is suspended,” as Albert Pope writes in the volume. If we assess the current moment of crisis as a zero point, how can we think about the social, political, and formal significance of design after the Meltdown? After an era of reality mapping or iconic formalism, the volume aims to investigate possibilities AFTER crises, AFTER mapping, and AFTER signature architectures. Without relying on totalizing narratives, naïve morality, or escapism, AFTER ZERO is an opportunity to imagine alternative futures and a revitalized project for the city.

Contributors to the issue include: Albert Pope, Ulrich Beck, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Martino Tattara, Erik Swyngedouw, Keller Easterling, Thomas J. Campanella, Francois Blanciak, Yasser T Y Elsheshtawy, Matthew Gandy, Behrang Behin, Lola Sheppard, Mason White, Joseph Grima and Peter Hall.

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Easterling 87

Publication Geography

OPTION STUDIO

UNAM deCentral Libraryy ERIC BUNGE, MIMI HATRAM HOANG, PAUL KASSABIAN, MAHADEV RAMAN

This integrated architecture design studio used The National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM’s) campus in Mexico City as a site for political provocation and architectural invention.

UNAM deCentral Library was conceived as a dispersed and interconnected complement to the Central Library. Students designed a network of 5 smaller library buildings, inserted at strategic points in the campus, and ultimately focus on one 30,000 square feet building in detail. In addition to their smaller collections, these library nodes would differ typologically from the Central Library in expanded institutional and infrastructural agendas.

The library’s increasing role as a social and learning center was emphasized in this studio through a significant expansion and redefinition of group work spaces already found in libraries—reading areas, meeting rooms, etc. By providing more classroom space than stacks, these library nodes would also function as inter-departmental research centers.

At the urban scale, we considered the possibility of programmatically and physically integrating disparate regions of the campus. From a historical and theoretical perspective, integration as a design strategy was counterpoised with the dominance on the campus of Modernist strategies of articulation and composition. Students developed hybrid elements and conditions that provided a range of amenities, joining structural, environmental and spatial attributes into an integrated and systemic approach to architecture.

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Studio Geography

Model

Exterior View

Network Diagram g

DANIEL CASHEN

Geography Studio

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Assembly Diagram

Model

JOHANNES KOHNLE

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Studio Geography

MDESS THESIS

A Geopolitical p UN-Architecture: Armenian Antiquity q y in Modern T Turkeyy PETER CHRISTENSEN — ADVISOR: EVE BLAU

When Adolf Hitler remarked to commanders of the Third Reich “Who remembers the Armenians?” on the eve of World War II, he was confident that the rest of the world would remain indifferent to the removal of Jewish populations from Europe and beyond. The concept of Lebensraum, German for “habitat” or “living space,” became the central precept to Nazi territorial aggression and is largely indebted to the earlier writings of German geographers. Expansionism and Nazism, as political practices, had their counterpoints in political systems derived from Humanism and Enlightenment values. Nazi Eugenics, as a social practice, had its antithesis in Social Democracy and emergent discourses on Civil Rights. Geography, as a scientific practice, had no such verso. The onus was thus on the field of geography to explicate how it had preconditioned an abhorrent racial agenda under the aegis of a field that was, until quite recently, considered more of a natural science than a social science.

Whether directly related to the discipline’s new burden to explain itself or not, geography, particularly human and cultural geography, has steadily retreated out of favor over the course of the twentieth century.

Little attention, however, is given to the fact that geography was giving way to the nascent field of geopolitics. Etymologically, geopolitics is the fusion of geography and politics. Historically, it is the creation of a Swedish parliamentarian named Rudolf K Kjellen in 1899, who was exhausted with what he perceived to be a burdenburdensomely legalistic approach to states and their conflicts. Kjellen sought to create a new science, perhaps a new order, that would posit unilateral political laws steeped in truisms of global physical geography.

As a nation both whose constitution coincides near synchronically with the popular rise of geopolitics, and whose geographic condition is a touchstone in the hall of (perhaps cliché) geopolitical thresholds, Turkey and its distinct brand of modernity is likely the most powerful example of how geopolitical thought effected modern nation building in both an architectural and un-architectural sense. Architectural historians of modern Turkey reveal nothing about what happened to the Armenian environments in Turkey after the Armenian genocide. Effectively, Foucaudian poststructuralism cannibalizes itself, forcing a preoccupation with Turkishness that must obliterate what was a rich pre-history of Anatolian, if not Ottoman, multiculturalism in Geography MDesS Thesis

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order to function as a scholarly argument. Is a contextual reading possible, a positioning wherein Turkey is not situated as the amorphous amalgam of east and west, secularism and Islamism, traditionalism, and cosmopolitanism, but rather an ancient land with a remarkably polyvalent architectural history? How might we begin to think of such a project relationally, a “narrative voyage,” to use the words of Arnold T Toynbee, that is neither teleological nor inanimate?

A dissection of geopolitics, rife with unexplored and tacit influence, I argue, holds the key to absolving this conundrum while also affording the potential to make readings of other cultural enterprises richer and more contiguous.

In this thesis I examine numerous Armenian environments and the way that their fate was sealed within early Kemalist political doctrines, culminating in the controversial recent renovation of the Aghtamar Church in eastern Turkey.

What emerges is a change in the stakes typically associated with the relationship between modernity and antiquity. They become divisible projects in a dialogic tradition. Turkey’s Armenian ruins, in the context of change at breakneck speed, have been conveniently and literally unwritten, undone, and unarchitecturalized. It is in this new “long century,” an era which has seen geopolitics flourish in the pantheon of social sciences, that the persuasive tools and slogans that geopoliticians deploy have facilitated what might be called an emergent neo-colonialism of a particular intranational variety. Not until recently has the discourse been called into question, and so too might its physical manifestations—both those that go up as well as those that come down.

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MDesS Thesis Geography

JAMES T. KELLEY PRIZE

Health Clinic in Durban: Reconfiguring g g the Social Dynamics y of an Instable Urban Landscape p MAJA PAKLAR

The proposal hybridizes an AIDS and T.B. clinic and research facility with a community center in Durban, South Africa. The hybrid is conceived as an interface between the public and the medical institution that aims to overcome the stigmatization of disease by softening the social boundaries built up around the sick and impoverished populations of South Africa.

This thesis achieves an unusual level of completeness and depth. Grounded on an in-situ analysis of Durban’s social and cultural fabric, its heterotopic spatial nature; the unique characteristics of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa and the role and performance of urban visual symbols in the twenty first century, it creatively redeploys “the slab” and its consequent urbanity as a distinctive, discursive urban event that proclaims its mission and role in an unequivocal, inevitably engaging building.

Jorge Silvetti, Thesis Advisor Geography Kelley Prize

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LECTURE

The Urban Roots of the Fiscal Crisis DAVID HARVEY

APRIL 16, 2009 | EXCERPT

If you observed a city like Baltimore around 2002, you would have observed a significant increase in foreclosures. If you had persisted and tracked, you would have seen that the happening of foreclosures began to escalate over 2004, 2005, and into 2006, but almost nobody really took any notice. The media didn’t bother to talk about it. Officials didn’t pay any notice and I think the reason was very simple: the phenomenon was really affecting certain groups in the population, particularly African Americans and single female head of households. It was only in 2007 that people really started to take notice because by then the foreclosures began to hit white middle-class areas, and began to occur in other parts of the country, particularly in California and in Florida. In many ways, there was a certain parallel with what happened with HIV/AIDS: while it affected a certain minority population all of the time, it was actually not thought of as being significant nor part of the mainstream.

Nobody took much notice. And I want to make this point at the very outset because I think we need to recognize that we often pay a price for our prejudices. In this instance, had we taken notice in 2002, 2003, we might be living in very different times in exactly the same way that if we had taken notice of HIV/AIDS in those early stages, we would have saved a tremendous amount in terms of human pain and suffering, to say nothing of economic cost.

In 2007, you suddenly found that this phenomenon had engulfed the main investment banks on Wall Street and that it was leading us into a financial crisis that everybody looks at and says we haven’t seen anything like this since the 1930s. I want, however, to make a number of historical observations. When I started to look at the nature of this housing foreclosure crisis, I first off started to think the fiscal crisis has a certain urban origin; what would happen if, instead of calling it a fiscal crisis, we started calling it an urban crisis?

In the 1960’s, Johns Hopkins University became involved in a series of housing studies and I got sort of cantilevered. I, just off the boat, more or less, plunged into a housing study of what was going on in the housing market in Baltimore, and all sorts of interesting things came out. One of them was the following: that actually the dream of home ownership was made available to African American populations by way of a peculiar legal device called the Land Installment Contract. The Land Installment Contract went something like this: since it was almost impossible for a black person to get conventional mortgage financing, a property owner would come along and say, “I’ll buy a place for you. I will front the mortgage for you and then you pay me and after you’ve paid off enough of the mortgage then I’ll take you to the lending institution and you can become actually the real mortgage holder.” This was actually a way in which some people did indeed get access to home ownership. However, the first problem was that the person who bought the house usually said, “Well, it’s Geography Lecture

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not really fit to live in. I bought it for $10,000 and I put in some repairs and now I am going to pass it on to you for $14,000.” Now, they maybe put in, you know, $500 worth of repairs, so there was a mark-up at the very beginning actually. The second problem was that actually the contract had all kinds of clauses in it, which said, well, if there are expenses that are due to property taxes, they get added to the mortgage. If there are expenses due to renegotiation of the mortgage and so on then they get added to the mortgage. So, people would find after about 8 years that, in fact, this $14,000 house that they thought they had they now owed $18,000 on. And out of this came a bit of a scandal in terms of predatory practices, which we are seeing visited upon a vulnerable population.

The point about this is to say there has been a long history of predatory practices associated with mortgage finance and housing, particularly in relationship to vulnerable populations. And this long history, it seems to me, has to be put in the context of how the subprime crisis also came about because in the same way that some people got access through the Land Installment Contract, others did not. Some people got through in the subprime and some got ripped off. There have always been greedy people around, and there have always been predatory practices. To T pretend that something new happened in this last crisis seems to me catastrophically wrong.

What we need to do is to think about the structural reasons why at a certain point, all the restraints started to disappear. There is a very strong lesson to be learned out of what happened in the last Great Depression, because, in some ways, we are in a re-run of what happened with—I think—one very, very significant difference. The last Great Depression happened at a moment when the United States was moving into a position of hegemony in the global system where it was going to be number one in the non-Communist world. This depression is occurring at a moment where the United States is moving out of being in a hegemonic position in the global economy.

As the National Intelligence estimate says, by 2025 we are going to be in a different world; it’s going to be multi-polar. The United States is still going to be a powerful player but it ain’t going to be in the unique position it was in 1945. We’re living in this moment of transition in the global economy, and that is going to play a very big role in how this particular crisis can possibly be resolved. I would agree with the kind of comment that says the New Deal did not get us out of the depression. What the New Deal did was to stabilize things somewhat but, more crucially, what the New Deal did above all else was to revolutionize the financial and state apparatus, in order to position the financial institutions and the state apparatus in relationship to what was happening generally in society; particularly—when you look at the reforms— in terms of urbanization. 2025 we are going to be in a different world; it’s going to be multi-polar. The United States is still going to be a powerful player but it ain’t going to be in the unique position it was in 1945. We’re living in this moment of transition in the global economy, and that is going to play a very big role in how this particular crisis can possibly be resolved. I would agree with the kind of comment that says the New Deal did not get us out of the depression. What the New Deal did was to stabilize things somewhat but, more crucially, what the New Deal did above all else was to revolutionize the financial and state apparatus, in order to position the financial institutions and the state apparatus in relationship to what was happening generally in society; particularly—when you look at the reforms—in terms of urbanization.

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Core Architecture IV LLUÍS ORTEGA (COORDINATOR), JOHN HONG, FLORIAN IDENBURG, JOE MACDONALD, ANNA PLA CATALÁ , CAMERON WU

SPRING 2009

There is a long history of proposals and reflections on the city and the environment.

Since Vitruvius there have been attempts to construct relationships between the City, Society, and Nature. Whether we are considering the aesthetic history of the architectural Sublime, techno-futurist visions for utopian cities, the hygienics of orthodox Modernism, or the ideals of garden cities and the proliferation of suburban sprawl, architecture’s preoccupation with its relationship to the environment and the role it has to play in the interpretation or construction of Nature has taken many shapes. So what is the contribution that we could make today to the history of that discussion? Can we resume some of the unresolved questions of previous proposals? How do we frame our own speculations on Nature?

After a drift in disciplinary attention and energy from the city towards technology, we revisited the discussion of urban form equipped with a new set of tools and a new conceptual framework. Using feedback from all relevant inputs and processes— especially the particularities of environmental analysis and simulation—we searched for new and optimized manifestations of the sustainable city.

Cities were the medium with which to effectively address the pressing environmental problems of our time, and high-density urban scenarios were explored. Our task was to articulate a new aesthetic and cultural understanding of nature in response to current social and environmental problems, and to critically reimagine cities to address the current and future needs of a sustainable society.

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Core Elements of Urban D Design esign g INSTRUCTORS: RICHARD SOMMER (COORDINATOR), FELIPE CORREA, MARTIN ZOGRAN FALL 2008

A play on the terms gerrymander and geography, geomander is a nascent term referring to three-dimensional models that show the development of a system in space, time, or both. For our purposes, the geomander served as a reminder that urban design is fundamentally an art in which the political arrangement of any given territory is creatively equated with its physical features and constructed nature. T To explore this equation of politics and design, the Elements studio was divided into three iterative exercises, set within three distinct, but geographically related territories. To T engender a critical consideration of “urbanity” and its relation to differing physical geographies and political patterns of settlement, the program of uses essentially remained constant across the three exercises.

As the metropolis has become less a hierarchical whole, and more a distributed network of loosely associated parts, thinking in terms of center and edge has become a less constructive way to read and work on the city. How are new forms of community defined—and what shape might they take—when the entire milieu of the metropolis, from high-density concentrations to isolated fragments, can be increasingly considered as a distributed network of loosely associated parts?

In today’s metropolis, the urbanist should not only conceive of new relationships between existing parts of the urban landscape, but also rethink the nature of the parts themselves.

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MARC PUIG, IAN KLEIN, YOUNGJU CHO

ANDREW WATKINS WATK K INS

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IMAN ANSARI, MARC PUIG, IAN KLEIN, JIHOON SOONG

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Invention Conditional U topias p Utopias From speculations about the role of “the sensorial” at an urban scale to the agency of corn in restructuring America’s Midwestern hinterland, this collection focuses on expanding the designer’s imaginary. It brings together a body of work in search of inventive architectural models that can provide cogent alternatives to more established design practices.

SYMPOSIUM

The History Historyy of the Future STUDIO

Desert Islands MICHAEL MEREDITH STUDIOS

The Al Qattara Oasis in Al Ain JORGE SILVETTI, FELIPE CORREA LECTURE

Smell = Information SISSEL TOLAAS SEMINAR

The Dead SCHERI FULTINEER THESIS

On Boundaries and the Extraterritorial Point: Time Machine LISA HABER THOMSON

Agri-cultural g Regimes: g Adventures y g p in in the Military-agricultural Complex the American Midwest ANTHONY ACCIAVATTI LECTURE

Now? JAMES ACKERMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI

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The History Historyy of the Future MAY 11-12, 2009

Participants in the colloquium considered the instrumental role that utopian and dystopian narratives play in propelling projective thinking. They asked questions about technological determinism and put into historical perspective the ecological and developmental crises and the respective design and planning responses.

The colloquium interrogated the role of the avant-garde and its seeming monopoly of the speculative platform in design. It also examined ways in which the city has often provided the fertile grounds for the imagination of the future.

Keynote: Svetlana Boym K

I believe that in this architectural and artistic project, the off-modern reveals itself in the form of paradoxical Ruinophilia. New buildings and installations need not destroy the past nor rebuild it. Rather, the architect or the artist co-creates with the remainders of history, and collaborates with modern ruins. The resulting architecture reveals a spatial and temporal extension into the past and the future, into different existential topographies and cultural forms.

On Utopia: Timothy Hyde

Architecture does have a pertinent role in the constitution of utopia’s enclosure. But not, I would argue, the enclosure of distant utopias—not More’s trench—but the more permeable enclosure of proximate utopias, the mediatory enclosure that refracts the elements and relations of the exterior world to produce new arrangements as a semblance of a new reality in the present. My further hypothesis is that where the function of a distant utopia is, as Fredric Jameson and others have argued, to throw the present into relief by revealing a future for which the present is an inadequate past, the function of proximate utopia and near utopia is to employ its nearness to shift the balance between the real and the utopian, to make the semblance more possible and more effectual than the real.

Respondent: John McMorrough

To think about the apocalyptic contribution is to think about architecture’s future as T a dissolution of the very terms by which architecture defines itself. I would say that the apocalyptic is a kind of evocation of logics of the absolute: novelty, realness, and scarcity. So, if architecture operates through logics of plenitude (plenitudes of capital, plenitudes of time, and plenitudes of effort), the apocalyptic offers a version that would predicate logics of scarcity and survival. I think it offers a kind of tonic or counter example to even the initial description of the conference itself, which is devoted to the envisioning of better futures. I think in some way the apocalyptic, as a kind of concept, would offer a sense in which mere survival could also be on the table.

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On the City: Eve Blau

When you read across historical time (that is, chronologically forward as well as backward), the interactive dialectical process by which the city is generated over time and through authored urban and architectural projects, becomes clearly legible.

It brings into focus the role of practice—of urban architectural knowledge—in the process of generating the city. It also produces a kind of knowledge that is spatial, and fundamentally architectural—that is not contained in written documents, and most important of all, that highlights innovation—things that deviate from the norm. This method of reading the city both de-familiarizes it, and casts the city itself in an active role as protagonist in its own making.

Respondent: Charles Maier

The analysis is a plea for urban planning that encourages us to imagine multiple futures for the city, but which is receptive to history and does not exclude improvisation. Eve quotes Marx, “to change the city is to change society,” but we have to remember Marx also said that men make their own history but they don’t make it out of whole cloth—and I think this is especially true of the urban fabric. I don’t know where the weaving comes from but both what we can do and our interventions are limited.

On the Avant-Garde: A Michael Hays

Our problem now is to invent an analogous formalization of avant-garde out of a possible present dilemma. I will suggest that the contradiction between Nature and the Urban is a promising mapping of our current situation. A possible future avant-garde, then, will logically be the double negation of this contradiction. This position is not 117

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a synthesis of two substantive features, two positivities; it does not ask us merely to hold two contradictories in our mind at once. Rather, we must retain two negations and attempt to hold those together along with their mutual negation of each other.

We must strive not to combine them in some affirmative, humanist synthesis, but rather keep the negation sharp, scandalously vivid, and alive.

Respondent: Mark Jarzombek

The Symbolic promises something, perhaps, but in a social construction it really weds you forever, if you are a critic, into a hopelessness of being continuously pathological. The last pathology, if you’re theoretically consistent, can only be a desire because it would never really happen—because the moment it happens you really are not Lacanian anymore. That, of course, would have to be analyzed and then you’re back where you were; you are the subject and you are the pathologist.

On Technology: T Antoine Picon

I think there has been a tendency in the past to see technology as a determining factor. Why not consider it rather as first perturbation, something akin to random genetic variations or Darwinism. The temptation has been great to construct technology as a determining factor or, conversely, to believe that society determines technology; this is the information society that created, for example, the need for the computer. I think questioning these kinds of simple casual links between technology and the future might paradoxically be a way to re-open the question of the future. In other words, to entertain a different relation to the past less simplistically casual, with a contingent virtual reality instead of being a Telos.

T Respondent: Reinhold Martin

For the postmodern person to emerge as a product of the machine, you need another set of instruments that used to be called “human beings,” who not only make the machines but also keep them going.

On Ecology: Sanford Kwinter K

Sustainability thinks in balance sheets; ecology in far broader sets of objects in dynamic interrelation. (I think Daniel Abramson’s earlier thoughts on the temporal hostility implicit in sustainability ethics, would apply here as well.) The former can be said to be technological, insofar as it represents a posture of consensus regarding the mastery of nature—the second, the ecological one, represents an attitude more akin to what could be called a “cybernetic immanence,” the capacity to create an identity between the forces that comprise and modify us and those that comprise and modify the world.

Respondent: Sheila Jasanoff

There are different cultures and different natures being constructed, and I think that we do need to understand the mechanism by which those very different representations are coming into being. That, in a sense, is one way out of the silly essentialisms—because we see today many ages and many cultures. I think we have to ask a couple of questions. One is, how are natures being imagined and put in place, [and] by what kind of structures? Secondly, where are the imaginations through which the different ages are being imagined today coming from, and what is feeding them?

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on Technology Respondents: Wes Jones, Reinhold Martin, Neri Oxman on the Avant-Garde Respondents: Scott Cohen, Mark Jarzombek, Claire Zimmerman on the City Respondents: Alexander d’Hooghe, Charles Maier, Jesse Shapins

On Development: Hashim Sarkis

One last thought is related to the distinction between design and planning. Perhaps these ideas can help us reflect back not only on the relationship between development and design in general, and on the history of the futures embodied in the notion of development, but also on the relationship between the procedural and physical aspects of what we do, and to rethink the ways in which our discourse and actions have been organized along divides between procedures and aesthetics, planning and design, and “rules and models.” Much of the effectiveness of the work that lies ahead depends on revising, where necessary, such divisions.

Respondent: Ijlal Muzaffar

I would [say] it is important here for architectural history to identify what roles architects occupy, what sort of managerial forms they take, and what sort of assumptions they set in place. The whole of the social space can be converted to statistics and then the city plan is not a question of imposing a fixed plan; the plan keeps growing or the core keeps growing. It’s a question then of how you align different statistics— what phases do they come in—and then planning becomes a problem not of putting down a plan but of outlining phases; [for example] when do you add houses, when do you add industry, and these kinds of concerns.

Concluding Panel: Gwendolyn Wright

To a certain extent, the present lies between the history and the future of the colT colloquium title. We need to be looking at the present. How do we understand what those mechanisms, what those forces, what those groups will be in the future? The present allows us to see history continuously in ways that are relatively visible to us; we can see our own place, our own perspective, as opposed to floating in the ether some place. The present allows us, perhaps even forces us, to see things that have been good intentions in the past; it’s rare that architects and planners have wanted to do cruel and unequal things, but they often have thought, and still do, that they can bracket something out. Perhaps the most important thing that you can come away with today, is to realize that we tend, each of us, individually, and collectively, as generations, as different kinds of specializations and professions, to take a stance and then protect it, to give ourselves the ultimate freedoms within that—but those are freedoms that we take in part by bracketing out the things that we don’t want to deal with.

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OPTION STUDIO

Desert Islands MICHAEL MEREDITH

This studio was an open laboratory experiment in search of new architectural models. The goal was to rethink the architectural avant-garde—in particular Constructivism—as a strategy for developing the intersection between the technological/material/formal and the social/cultural.

Historically, cinema has offered architecture an almost psychological paradigm, providing a distinct subjectivity/social space and a very particular relationship between technology and architecture. Our studio took part in this history of architectural performance while expanding upon it, rethinking the role of Cinema within our contemporary visual regime, one in which the construction of collective visual experience seems to be less important than the creation of discrete micro-environments enabled by new technologies for ever more personal levels entertainment.

In the spirit of conflating “a relationship with a situation,” the situation/site for the studio was an undeveloped strip of land in downtown Denver, the mile high city. We paid particular attention to the specific environment of the site, its semi-arid climate, the politics of the site’s contingencies or, perhaps, its noticeable lack of contingency.

It was a strip of land for us to experiment upon, operating simultaneously at completely different scales, moving as quickly as possible through our own hang-ups, while employing all of the tools available to us from history so that we could speculate on what we would want to claim for our prototypical architecture.

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Parametric Doodles no. 26,35,7,94,68,24,15,64,85,74,32,3,4,61,73 35,7,94,68,24,15,64,85,74,32,3,4

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The Al Qattara Oasis in Al Ain JORGE SILVETTI (STUDIO A) | FELIPE CORREA (STUDIO B)

The oasis, as the primordial origin for water, has acted as a pervading facilitator in the relationship between people and arid ground. Oases have been key players in the cultural imaginary of arid geographies, depicted for centuries as a precise moment of happiness surrounded by despair.

From those of urgent need to those of excessive affluence, these globules of green within a boundless field of sand have had a time-honored tradition as instigators of diverse forms of settlement. The City of Al Ain, originally composed of a series of loosely associated tribal groups, serves as a paradigmatic example of an urbanism that capitalized on a singular water supply to define a new way to occupy and transform a barren environment.

This trans-disciplinary double studio used the Al Qattara Oasis as an open laboratory in order to explore the potential transformation of traditionally productive grounds into an integrated network of active open spaces within the city. The studio focused on investigating the broader role of the Oasis as an initiator of urbanism and its ubiquitous presence in the urban evolution of Al Ain. It aimed towards clear, configurative strategies that explore the embedded potential of the Oasis to perform as a dual operative device that can, on the one hand, continue to be part of the region’s larger productive ecology, while also acting as host for a variety of collective programs and qualitative infrastructures.

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Oasis Irrigation

Irrigation Schedules

JUSTIN FOWLER, ANDREW LANTZ, GENEVA WIRTH

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JUSTIN FOWLER, ANDREW LANTZ, GENEVA WIRTH

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LORENA BELLO GOMEZ, NICOLAS FAYAD, MARC PUIG

Studio Invention

Building Typologies T

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JOHANNES KOHNLE

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Site Plan and Exploded Axonometric

Micro-catchment Planting Strategy: Wet & Dry Season

GENEVA WIRTH

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OKHYUN KIM

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LECTURE

Smell = Information: AT Tool of Communication and Navigation Navigation g SISSEL TOLAAS

APRIL 1, 2009 | EXCERPT

When I became involved with the nose and smell, I asked myself some naïve and fundamental questions. I have been working on them ever since. Can I learn smells the way I learn the ABC’s? How can I describe and remember smells?

Is it possible to be neutral, to get rid of prejudices toward certain smells? Can I learn how to do this? What are the consequences? Can smell be measured? How do we use the information in smells? How do we navigate using smells?

I started a smell archive in 1990 to learn the alphabet of smells. The NOSE. The first aim of this process was to see if I could learn and remember smell as I did with letters and numbers. The second was to check the possibility of approaching the immense well of smells from a neutral position, that is, without responding to smells by liking or dislikk ing.

Creating a code system to name smell is very hard because it does not have the power to cover the full complexity and variety of smells. In the perceptual system, language is a code that substitutes words for things. This depends on the lexicon, on the social agreement as to the signals that will stand for certain percepts. But not everything can be coded.

There are of course many more smells in the world than there are words in the language.

When you smell something, signals from the smell receptor in the nose reach your amygdala first, producing an immediate visceral reaction. No other sense is directly wired to this emotion-processing part of the brain. All of the other senses you think before you respond, but with smell, your brain responds before thinking. Smell is our chemical alert system, responsible for detecting whether the molecules around our bodies are beneficial or toxic, a determination of fundamental importance to all forms of life. Each day we breathe about 23,040 times and move approximately 438 cubic feet of air.

Harvard University President, Drew Gilpin Faust, next to Sissel Tolaas’s Exhibit at the Graduate School of Design Invention Lecture

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With every breath, molecules of smells flood through our system. We can identify tens of thousands of smells. And how do we communicate all this information? The answer is in two ways: it smells good and it smells bad. And the rest are metaphors: it smells like this, it smells like that. The most immediate and basic response we have to scent is whether we like it or not. In scientific parlance, this is referred to as odor hedonics. Hedonics perception is an affection evaluation that centers on liking; that registers our preferences.

Pleasantness, familiarity, and intensity are the three factors most often evaluated with examining odor hedonic perceptions. Many anecdotal and observational examples illustrate culturally polarized responses we have to specific smells.

Asians consider the smell of cheese to be disgusting. Westerners considered it anything from comfort food to extravagant indulgence. Recent findings have shown that we learn our smell preference through associative learning, with emotion. Our smell preference can be manipulated and changed through emotional associative learning. I did this over seven years, and it’s possible. The word used to describe smells will be pivotal to how they are perceived. When a new smell is presented, how it will be perceived depends greatly on the emotional association that accompanies it. I used these methods over a long time to become smell neutral.

Planscapes are areas so empty of stimuli that they lead to an alienated sense of placelessness. This is a result of the sanitation imperative in contemporary culture that seeks the removal of all environmental smells, contributing to a decertification of experience. Perhaps the most striking change is the fairly recent adaptation of huge urban populations to a basic key smell, compounded by metal and oil products, industrial processes, and smog. Varnishes and glazes, tires, and other urban byproducts translate an olfactory condition into a visual experience. T To be shinny is to be smell-less, odorless. A smell is often a crucial component in defining and reacting to an environment, and is instrumental in generating appropriate activity. While smell settings may be taken for granted without reflecting, they are nonetheless cues to particular modes of involvement with the settings.

We navigate through smells. We experience every smell in a context: semantic, social, emotional, and physical. That context always has some emotional context, good or bad, albeit sometimes only in a weak manner. One’s olfactory identity is particularly associated with racial, class, and sexual identification. Perfuming is closely related to presentation and manipulation of those identifications.

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One project I feature is ‘The Talking T Nose of Mexico City’. Mexico City is much more complex. I worked on it for five years, and I really dug into the different neighborhoods and exhausted my nose. The urban environment is crisscrossed with symbolic and physical smell boundaries. Zoning laws, regulation, construction, and activity also regulate the distribution and circulation of smells. Some may seem neutral in one setting but intolerable in another one. The industrial domain contains industrial parks, garbage dumps, sewage treatment plans, and the like. Permanently bad and repugnant smells are usually considered legitimate. Public spaces include residential shopping and entertainment areas as well as parks, and usually smell neutral except for smells of food and spices from restaurants and bakeries.

Smells of all sorts become legitimate again in private space, in the space inside the home. I had 12 assistants, and we consequently went into all the homes in a neighborhood and focused on smelling. We went with black glasses and really forced our nose to do the job. It was quite exhausting. Then I made a film where I asked 2,000 people to please describe the smell of Mexico City in their mother-tongue language. We had a lot of discussion about why is this bad and why is this good, trying to challenge people to see it objectively and not from a neutral position. Then I filmed all of their noses at the moment of smelling and then they tried to speak about what they smelled. From the narration I tried to develop expressions that I attributed to the different neighborhoods for different purposes.

My intent is really to focus on life and the process of living, awareness in your surroundings, and the aspect of tolerance.

How does this end? I think we need a slightly different conclusion.

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RESEARCH SEMINAR

The Dead SCHERI FULTINEER

What do we do with the dead? Humans are the only species on earth to ritually prepare and intentionally place their dead, constructing graves, tombs, sepulchers, catacombs, ossuaries, crematoria, and columbaria, among other structures that mark our cities and landscapes. Hallowed ground, memorial, park, bird habitat, or contemplative refuge, the place of the dead has played many roles and continues to develop new ones. The ways that we commemorate and locate the dead are currently undergoing changes that reect new attitudes to the environment, the increasingly pluralistic character of communities, and the diminishing availability of either the land necessary for burial or the resources that complete the funereal process. This seminar examined the role of the dead in today’s world and investigated the issues that face planners, landscape architects, and architects as they grapple with the question of what to do with the remains of a rapidly growing world population. The seminar consisted of a series of readings engaging historical and contemporary funereal practices and design responses, guest speakers, and local ďŹ eld trips.

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Historic Imagery

JOHN SON

In this project, John Son designed a public park and system of memorial stelae that provide a locus for culturally signiďŹ cant ritual observances of mourning and remembrance for the dead who are corporeally absent.

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Tomb

DARWIN MARRERO

Darwin Marrero’ss proposals address the evolution of two typologies of funerary architecture—the e tomb and the columbarium.

The bench tomb provides a place for contemplation of the body’s regeneration into new life while the reshaping of the columbarium allows for the visual engagement with all compartments within a landscape of diversely scaled passages and gathering spaces.

Columbarium

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Research Seminar Invention

THESIS

On Boundaries and the Extraterritorial Point: Time Machine LISA HABER-THOMSON

This is a project for a time-traveling machine. It is a geopolitical project: mapping, with its reliance on measurements of space, would be entirely reformulated. Could a serious discussion of the possibilities inherent in a fluid time-scape allow an escape from the territorial evaporation of space?

From the outset, Lisa Haber Thomson was interested in physical, political, and psychological issues related to territorial boundaries. From the walls of ancient cities, to the Maginot line constructed by France between the two world wars, to so called “black sites” such as Guantanamo, her persistent research led logically to space/time boundaries and ultimately to the exploration of a time machine.

Peter Rose, Thesis Advisor

Invention Thesis

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Terrain Sections

Launch Station with Cat

Interior View of Tunnel

LISA HABER-THOMSON

Invention Thesis

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General View with Cyclist

Long Section with Traveller

Technical Section

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THESIS

Agri-cultural g Regimes: g Adventures in the Militaryy agricultural g Complex p in the American Midwest ANTHONY ACCIAVATTI

The man-made Lake Decatur, corn flake cereal, high fructose corn syrup, and soy extracts together comprise a synthetic kingdom of agri-culture operating in the American Midwest. Among all the histories of design and its various related cultures, agriculture remains a largely overlooked but an enormously significant motivator of design.

This thesis addresses the dynamo of agriculture and the cultivation of a new commonwealth as part of America’s post-war military-agri-cultural complex.

The central role played by our modern systems of knowledge on the physical and material environments in which we live, and by extension on our cultural and political worlds, is one of the most important discoveries of modern intellectual thought from the time of Marx and Weber to Foucault. The work presented here is a study of rationality and landscape that allows us to see how the management and use of territory is always, first and foremost, a martial affair. Emerging developments in landscape design, one of the most dynamic fields in design today, will soon routinely think of landscape as a system of managed assets put at the service of one or another human or natural regime.

Sanford Kwinter, K Thesis Advisor

Clothing made from soybean fiber, corn by-products as military weapons, a massive man-made lake to serve agri-processing enterprise in Decatur, Illinois, all fuse into chemurgy, in this superb, acutely-argued thesis delineated as a driving force in twentieth-century urban design.

John Stilgoe, Thesis Advisor Invention Thesis

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Agri-cultures merit study. T To decidedly drive through or flyover the highly complex and calibrated quilt of corn and soybean fields, and witness the enormous space and energy that these crops require, is to observe the ingenuity of a constructed ground too often taken for granted. Vast amounts of road and rail, small and medium sized townships, factories and laboratories all tend to the coordination of the U.S. Corn Belt. Innovations in farming, chemistry, and engineering support our contemporary world—all part of an apparatus of knowledge and logistics that compose a biochemical mega-machine—a social and environmental project. In order to historicize this machine, it is necessary to plot its intricacies as a social activity incorporating the vast amounts of everyday and yearly expenditures of energy and acumen of uncounted individuals. Agrarian spaces, while generally local and place specific, condition many cultural mores and institutions with national and even international implications ranging from systems of land tenure to community events, from genetically modified seeds to dietary supplements, and from road infrastructure to rail systems. These processes generate conventions of industrial and infrastructural configurations organically different from those which we are generally familiar with in design discourses of the twentieth century. They represent an excess of energy—of wealth as George Bataille would call it—of design, rivaling the most densely populated modern city blocks of Manhattan, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.

T The agrarian territories of the Corn Belt consist of numerous narratives in which regional conflicts are enmeshed with national and geo-political networks of power.

For this reason the study primarily focuses on the activities and changes wrought by the dynamo of modernity on the agrarian spaces throughout the American Midwest.

This study concentrates on a single town within this network: Decatur, Illinois.

Invention Thesis

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As the locus of bio-chemical knowledge and logistics of the wet-corn and soybean milling industry, the township of Decatur holds an unrivalled position within the regimes and discourses surrounding the bio-chemical colonization of territory. Situated in Central Illinois—the heart of the Corn Belt— the community owes its success to the technological mechanisms deployed to convert the economically unspent energy of volatile, natural hydrological systems and soil structures of the Sangamon River country into a powerful economic driver. Infrastructurally, the town features one of the best-situated rail hubs in the U.S. for the distribution of agricultural products due to the Wabash Railway and the Illinois Central Railroad, which provide direct access to the ports of New Orleans, Louisiana; Chicago, Illinois; St. Louis, Missouri; and Toledo, T Ohio. Moreover, during the twentieth-century, Decatur attracted two of the most important processors of farm products to locate their headquarters in the township. The A. E. Staley Manufacturing Company and the Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM).

As the U.S. entered the Second World and aspired to be what Franklin D. Roosevelt called the ‘Arsenal of Democracy,’ food production and environmental conservation became influential economic and design concerns in to the nation. Communities like Decatur, then ‘Soybean Capital of the world,’ benefited from a focus on renewable forms of energy like corn and soybeans to aid national security and emerging industrial markets. Knowledge of colloidal processes and physical changes of state became instrumental in recreating the U.S. landscape along metabolic rates of exchange between humans and non-humans. Subsequently, the American diet underwent drastic changes as products like meat were rationed, forcing industrial food processors and the government to provide alternative choices. By the close of the war, wealth and power was increasingly calculated along rates of agricultural re-production, rather than metallurgical scarcity—engendering a post-war militaryagri-cultural complex. It not only changed the way Americans and people all cross the world eat and traverse the land, but it also reconfigured social and environmental networks of common values and the status of commonwealth. The implications of this bio-chemical phantasmagoria have yet to be suitably imagined.

Today, agriculture and infrastructure provides a unique opportunity for architects and T urbanists to engage the realities and imaginaries of the present epistemological and practical crisis of assembling a renewed social and environmental project.

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Thesis Invention

LECTURE

Now? JAMES ACKERMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI APRIL 17, 2009 | EXCERPT

Palladio’s late church designs were something totally different from anything that had happened before. Not only in scale, but in majesty; in what contemporaries called “magnificence.”

Where did Palladio get these ideas? One possibility is from the second-century façade of the Pantheon in Rome, which really is obvious because it is shown in a woodcut in Palladio’s Four Books. So we know it’s relevant to his thinking. The Four Books were published in 1570, and this is 1578.

So what we have is the beginning of a series of late works in which Palladio attempted to change the nature of the fronts of buildings. Recently, a drawing was found with a plan in it for a portico façade like San Petronio. It showed an effort to project this magnificence onto the environment in Venice, and there’s a passage in the Four Books that talks about how churches are in a major spot in the city and project the character of the city’s ambitions onto the environment.

Perhaps more convincing is the Church of the Redentore. It gives you an idea of the plan that Palladio made to present to the Senate, to build a church possibly for thanking the Lord for keeping Venice, or possibly for the end of the plague of 1575 in Venice. And Palladio wanted desperately to have this centrally planned church, with a porch. The Senate that had to vote on it just narrowly beat out the people who approved of it, who belonged to a group of Rome-oriented nobles.

These nobles were out-numbered by those who were more restricted in their view and wanted to keep Venetian traditions.

And so they said they’d have to have a longitudinal church.

These drawings were preserved in the RIBA in London. When I wrote my book on Palladio I didn’t know that this was for the Redentore. Not long ago, in a journal of which I’m on the board of editors, a young student of Manfredo T Tafuri did a great article in which he revealed that the measurements on Invention Lecture

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the drawings fit exactly into the plot that was described in terms of its measurement in the Senate deliberations. So this, indeed, was a Redentore project, and in my book I called it something else, which it was thought to be at that time. Palladio did finally realize a church of this kind in the Masere at his Barbaro Villa—a chapel that looks not very different from this, but very small-scale and magnificent in concept but not in size.

It’s interesting that the patron of Palladio at Masere was Daniele Barbaro, who was a great sponsor of architecture and wrote an edition of Vitruvius–and Palladio illustrated it, so they were very closely knit. There is an essay composed by a Venetian, Paolo Paruta, in 1578, called “Della Perfezione”–“On Perfection.” It is an essay on political and moral virtue, and, very aptly, takes the form of a symposium with a lot of gentlemen in it; one of the gentlemen is Daniele Barbaro. Paruta has Daniele Barbaro talk about magnificence, and he says that the person who is privileged and noble has to be magnificent in the buildings that he supports and builds. Magnificence is described as a virtue–not like the McMansions we see around today that are usually regarded as a vice, but as a way in which to give the citizen pride in his culture and his fellow citizens.

This is in contrast with the peculiar situation of Venice; in Venice the people called nobles were not nobles in any other sense of the European understanding. They didn’t belong to the Holy Roman Empire, nor were they princes of the church, nor dukes, nor grand dukes, nor counts, nor other people of titles that were inherited.

These Venetians were merchants, belonging to families that had won themselves certain privileges in Venice, but didn’t belong to this aristocratic sphere. Therefore, Venice was a seed-bed for republican thinking. The things that the other aristocrats were doing manifested a very different kind of showing off compared to what was seen in Venice.

This is evident in Barbaro’s statement in Paruta’s book. “Magnificence,” responded Barbaro, “as a virtue of nobility is itself worthy of not just any work, so there is not often occasion to demonstrate it, but in those things where it is usually employed … One does only on rare occasions like banquets, weddings, buildings, where it becomes one to spend without consideration of expense, but only to the grandeur and beauty of the work. Such things, if they have suitable grandeur and if they are made with noble devices and with suitable decorum, they render the man worthy of the name Magnifico.” And that title is given to wealthy and civic-minded people.

Invention Lecture

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To see the origins of the concept of magnificence, as we saw in the Redentore T church, we must consider St. Peter. In an engraving of 1569 that was published so Palladio could see it, we can see that Michelangelo’s design had a portico like this— so Michelangelo beat Palladio to it. However, Palladio’s concept of urban magnificence was not only related to the church, but also civic. The feature I want to point to is the colossal order. The colossal order is one that embraces the entire main portion of a building, usually two stories. It became the vocabulary of public buildings for later generations. The origins of this approach can be found in the Valmarana palace in Venice, of 1565. This can be compared with Michelangelo’s project for the Capitoline hill, the ideal civic center. Michelangelo was the pioneer in the colossal order.

Here, the civic buildings had the same significance as the church façades that we’ve been seeing.

The most extraordinary instance of this from Palladio was the palace Porto Barbaran, in Vicenza, which is almost late Baroque in its expressiveness. And from there went the vocabulary of the Baroque, and the use of the portico façade didn’t have much influence for a while. It took off as a part of the vocabulary of Baroque and later architecture.

Moving forward in history, in many instances, both churches and public buildings employ the freestanding portico and the colossal order. They become the statement of absolutism in Europe; they then come to America, with the result that American architecture exuded the magnificence of earlier times. Jefferson’s University of Virginia has the Pantheon with the freestanding portico as the library and little colossalordered pavilions for faculty along the front. The White House is another instance of the colossal order, seen in the freestanding porch. Finally, the Jefferson Memorial looks exactly like the Redentore.

It is interesting how ideology plays its role, and then gets translated into something quite different. One wonders what, in the early days of American building, was the attraction to the aristocratic architectural ideal. But that’s for another time.

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Invention Lecture

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Core Landscape p Architecture III INSTRUCTORS: SCHERI FULTINEER (COORDINATOR), LAURA GORNOWSKI, KAKI MARTIN, ROBYN REED, PAUL COTE FALL 2008

This course reinforced and built upon the range of conventions of landscape architectural production introduced in previous core studios and academic courses.

Emphasis was placed on precision and craft in conceptual, schematic, and design development abilities. Issues of the physical, socioeconomic, technological, architectural, and ideological forces underlying the organization and form of human communities were incorporated into a series of projects.

These ranged from the complex reading and mapping of the city, the development and testing of innovative program strategies in unconventional sites, and the development of design ideas to the advanced schematic stage. At each stage, students were expected to reconcile the sometimes conicting characteristics among land resources, development pressures, privacy, and commonality. Throughout, a strong reciprocity between depth of thinking and the act of making was sought.

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Landscape Architecture III Core

A. CANTER, V. CHEUNG, J.IM, J.H. LEE, C. RENYI, J. WILLIFORD, M. WILSON

I. COHEN, J. GAWENDO, M. GIRARD, S. HE, L. ROMINGER A. SHARMA

E. BONIFACI, E. HUTTON, G. PARK, I. RIANO, M. SHRESTHA, T. WONG

Core Landscape Architecture III

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Food System

Ecology Diagram

Program Diagram

I. COHEN, J. GAWENDO, M. GIRARD, S. HE, A. SHARMA, L. ROMINGER

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Landscape Architecture III Core

Site Diagram

A A.. C CANTER, ANTER, V V.. CH CHE CHEUNG, E U N G , JJ.IM, .IM, JJ.H. .H. L LEE, EE, C C.. R RENYI, ENYII , JJ.. WI ENY WILL WILLIFORD, LLII FOR FORD, M. WILSON

Program Diagram

Perspective

Core Landscape Architecture III

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Seasonal Cycle Diagram

Remediation Phasing Diagram

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Landscape Architecture III Core

Perspective

E. BONIFACI, E. HUTTON, G. PARK, I. RIANO, M. SHRESTHA, T. WONG

Site Section

Site Section

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A. CANTER, V. CHEUNG, J.IM, J.H. LEE, C. RENYI, J. WILLIFORD, M. WILSON

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Landscape Architecture III Core

Core Planning Urban P lanning g II INSTRUCTORS: BRENT RYAN (COORDINATOR), STEVEN CECIL

SPRING 2009

The second semester core planning studio expanded the topics and methodologies studied in the ďŹ rst semester core studio, GSD 1121, aiming to prepare students for the mix of analytical and creative problem-solving needed to address planning issues at the advanced level of the options studios. GSD 1122 focused on a single, largescale planning problem with a regional, intermunicipal scope. The studio addressed the following concerns, all of which are currently central to planning: settlement form; visual and scenic impact of development; relationship of accessibility to location; the location and utility of open space, particularly with respect to development; and the respective roles of large-scale concepts (e.g. spatial plans) and regulation in shaping the built environment.

The studio site was Aquidneck Island in the state of Rhode Island, containing the towns of Portsmouth, Middletown, and Newport. The studio began with two short exercises in Cambridge and Concord, and concluded with students creating a schematic spatial strategy for all or part of Aquidneck Island. Studio strategies focused on topics such as open lands preservation, visual character and meaning, and enhancing the perception and access of island amenities.

Core Urban Planning II

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JILL ALLEN

CHRISTINA CALABRESE

CAROLINE JORDI

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Urban Planning II Core

Programming Diagram

JILL ALLEN

Perspective

Core Urban Planning II

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Site Cross Section

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Urban Planning II Core

Green Network Diagram

CAROLINE JORDI

Boundaries Diagram

Core Landscape Architecture III

Movements and View Diagram

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Zones of Intervention

Westside Greenway

West Road Commercial Corridor

Urban Growth Zones

Visual Conservation Zones

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Landscape Architecture III Core

KEVIN LEE, LACI VIDEMSKY

Transformation Studio

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Transformation Adaptive Adaptive p R esponsive p Systems y Responsive From actions that engage informal settlements to climate-change management strategies, this grouping presents research material, primarily at an urban scale, that focuses on well-tempered procedures that unfold through time and that can effectively take on the more animate forces within the built environment.

LECTURE

Now? Hanif Kara in Conversation with Mohsen Mostafavi STUDIO

V Verticalism IÑAKI ÁBALOS THESIS

Performance of Urban Ornament FREDERICK PETER ORTNER LECTURE

From a Reflective T Toward a R esponsive p P lague g Organism Organism g Responsive Plague DIRK SIJMONS STUDIO

Climate Change, g Water, Land Development p and Adaptation p ARMANDO CARBONELL, DIRK SIJMONS, MARTIN ZOGRAN LECTURE

Landscape p Provocations and Practices RESEARCH SEMINAR

Olympic y p Infrastructures JUDITH GRANT LONG STUDIO

A Place In Heaven/A / Place in Hell CHRISTIAN WERTHMANN CONFERENCE

E Ecological cological g Urbanism 167

LECTURE

Now? HANIF KARA IN CONVERSATION WITH MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI FEBRUARY 9, 2009 | EXCERPT

My view is that many architects inaccurately perceive structural engineers as parallel practitioners and as people with knowledge and means to innovate structural design, and probably people who have closer knowledge of construction and fabrication. AdamsKaraTaylor AdamsKaraT aTaylor has tried to promote a different kind of pluralistic model of engineering, primarily through a—literally—adaptive structure in the office, so that that structure can actually deal with the many derivative and diverse questions architects ask us, or we frame with the architect. We’re trying to adapt to all of these different ways of thinking, neither as a creator nor as a problem solver.

That’s where we sit. We don’t see ourselves as either of those two things. In the context of design engineering, this is quite a common paradigm, but our particular understanding is that it goes beyond having a technical competence and an aesthetic appreciation. Those two things do not differentiate Y got to go way beyond the structural engineer today. You’ve that. So our meaning of design engineering tries to lock, or at least connect, three legs: a construction leg—we’re very good at how things are made and built; a leg of practice— instructive engineering; and the third leg is education. The philosophy is, in a word, that of the empathetic structural engineer, meaning that we can sit very comfortably in the shoes of the architect or a developer or a constructor, but we choose also very carefully from all of those three tribes, the people we actually want to engage with.

Transformation Lecture

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For engineers, the narrative cannot begin at year one—it is reversed. We have to build a lot before anybody listens to anything we have to say. Architects could write books, do nothing forever, and be fine! We have to make buildings stand up very quickly so we can then reverse engineer a narrative. From that perspective and the introductory points I’ve made, I think that we are finding ourselves in the space between the disciplines, and that the multi-disciplinary as a model to us is dead. We are pure structural engineers. We are interdisciplinary. We thrive in an environment that has high risk in between the disciplines, and I think that’s part of the way we design—at least the way we describe design engineering. What that allows us is, more than just to build, to develop a shared discourse over time. For us now, it’s kind of year one—this course in that space between disciplines and between construction and design.

Ten years ago, when our practice started, all we had to do was really connect to new T ideas in architecture. T Today, that is not sufficient for us. New ideas in architecture do not allow us to operate. There was a paper in a magazine last August—talking about the engineers’ moment, which was typical of how, I think, journalists and practitioners and those who don’t actually do the work read the way engineers work. This huge atlas of engineers made stars out of a number of people, including myself, telling everyone how it was our moment in architecture. I do not agree with it, I’m afraid.

One of the things I’ve learned from architects is how to do two thousand years of research in a day. Y You’re all very good at that stuff. So we do that as well, and what we found is that our discipline is really only two hundred years old. Y You know, over the time in architecture, as we’ve gone from that workman model of the elephant carrying the bird to the model of the bird carrying the elephant, you need calculations, and all these clever things. You Y are, therefore, allowing the engineer to appear.

Transformation Lecture

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What differentiates engineers today? Y You could think of many agendas, but qual qual-ity and innovation, are what we aim for as a differentiator. How do we feed back to the machine, then? Well, one of the tactics is to crossbreed the stand that all of the avant-garde architects are taking. These people never talk to each other; they all talk to me. So I can translate stuff across these fields, and crossbreed without them even knowing what’s going on.

In the last ten years, the big thing that has happened is we have developed forensic tools rather than just form tools. So what we can do as engineers is almost anything we want. The difference is the engineers that are actually better at asking the question of why you want to do that. We’ve found these tools, then, have often become weapons. What we find in that sort of discussion or discourse is that the design process itself is lagging behind. Fabrication is lagging behind even further. But most of all, skills and education, we think, are way behind. So really, we’re the leaders of the world, way ahead of architects and everybody else. I’m standing as a promoter of technology and tools, but what we are finding is that the majority of architecture discourse or buildings is tool-driven today. What’s happening is you get this garbage made out of all these different software packages, and you end up with a situation where the compass no longer works. The problem with technology has also become that many of the bad architects are hanging your architecture onto us or to the tools that you have. We don’t do that with our tools.

So there’s an adaptive model. And we’ve been very literal in terms of the brand because, we have to talk about love and money at the same time, unlike architects.

Architects all just talk about love all the time. A studio environment that creates this kind of innovation and quality is a spiral organization where the most experienced guy is on top and the least experienced people in the office at the bottom of the spiral can actually connect very quickly, and the gradient between them is very simple. Inexperience is actually as important as experience. The power of having to relearn something very quickly from the younger guy coming in the office is extremely important to us.

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OPTION STUDIO

V Verticalism IÑAKI ÁBALOS

This studio was an exploration of the possibilities that the T line, the MTA’s new subway line under construction beneath 2nd avenue, opens for implementing “Verticalism” and contemporary public space in Manhattan.

Originally proposed in 1929, the new T line is scheduled to open in 2014 and to be fully operative in 2020, connecting 125th Street in Harlem with Lower Manhattan and reorganizing public transportation in the East side of the island. The public investment that such infrastructure requires is only comparable to the projected real estate benefits that will redraw the blueprint of neighborhoods like El Barrio (East Harlem), Alphabet City, or the Lower East Side.

Taking advantage of these future conditions, students were asked to imagine T and design models of development that substitute the omnipresent condominiums for cohabitations between institutional and residential typologies.

The final goal was to test different verticalist strategies (super tall mixed-use, bundle of towers, super block, etc.) in Manhattan. The sites would be defined by subway stations, traditional spaces of experimental cohabitations between public and private developments, and guarantors of an intensity of public use. At least sixty percent of the program would be residential, while the rest would house traditionally expansive typologies (libraries, laboratories, prisons, cemeteries, observatories, aquariums, asylums, fashion institutes, universities, museums, parks, sport facilities, etc.).

Transformation Studio

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Elevation of Construction Type

STEPHEN SAUDE

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Studio Transformation

Model and Model Detail

Transformation Studio

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Rendering

Programming and Circulation Diagrams

P th Penthouse and d Affordable Affordable ff d bl Housing H i Lobby Lobby bb Plans Pl

Luxury Apartments Community Performance Art Center Class A Offices Affordable Housing Workshops Class A Offices Program

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Class A Offices L Luxury uxury Apartments Small Businesses A Affordable ffordable Housing Workshops Class A Offices

Studio S tudio Transformation

Module Diagram

Plans

Interior Perspective

KEVIN LEE, LACI VIDEMSKY

Transformation Studio

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Circulation, Facade, Facade, St Structure tructure Diagram

Rendering

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Studio Transformation

THESIS

Performance of Urban Ornament: Challenging g g the Role of Architecture in the Redevelopment p of Baton Rouge g FREDERICK KP PETER ETER ORTNER

Grounded in a study of the polemics of ornament, this project replaces a dead zone created by Louisiana’s Interstate 110 in relation to residential, commercial, and educational urban spaces. This is done through an understanding of architectural structure as a deeply cultural process.

This project posits ornament’s cultural and experiential capabilities as solutions to problematic infrastructural borders in Baton Rouge. Reversing the traditional ancillary role of ornament, here architecture is produced through a parametric process within the constraints of the urban framework allowing for alternative urban spaces and programs to emerge.

Ingeborg Rocker, Thesis Advisor Transformation Thesis

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Thesis Transformation

Intersection of Modules and Infrastructure

Parametric Modules

Intervention on Site

FREDERICK PETER ORTNER

Transformation Lecture

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P Parametric t i Development D l t from f Component Co omponent to Structure

residence

can canopynopycommerce com mmerce

transition

ca canopy anopy un under nder highway

atrium

Modules in Urban Context

East-West E ast-W ast West Section

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DANIEL URBAN KILEY LECTURE

From a Reflective Toward a Responsive T Responsive p P lague g Organism: Organism: g Plague R emarks on Landscape p Remarks Urbanism DIRK K SIJMONS SI JMONS FEBRUARY 10, 2009 | EXCERPT

Dirk Sijmons: Ellen Weisman’s book, Life Without Us, sketches a well documented scenario showing how quickly nearly all the artifacts and traces that mankind left behind will have disappeared. With visible pleasure and a great feeling of a rush of details, the process of decay, the loss of constructive integrity, and the eventual collapse of roads, underground railway systems, skyscrapers, arched bridges, sewer systems—in short, entire cities—is described in the minutest details. When combined, such forces of nature as rain, wind, frost, erosion, landslides, fire, and of course an occasional earthquake, appear to be an astonishingly effective demolition team. In a split second on the geological timescale, everything that we have created in the past millennia will have disappeared or have been dismantled to such an extent that future archeologists will have a huge job trying to reconstruct our civilization. The only clues that will survive are the enormous holes our strip-mining and open-cast mining have caused in the earth.

Humble, guilty, and an existential loneliness are the key words for the human condition in this new, emerging world view.

Humble because every successive discovery in cosmology, biology, and evolution, has signaled a lesson in modesty for the human race, and guilty because humanity has become a formidable global factor. In the rather less polite terms of James Lublock, homo sapiens has developed into a plague organism, and there is gradually a broad scientific consensus emerging that the joint pressure that the number of people and the extent of consumption are placing on our basic supporting ecosystem and the associated climate machine has been too great to guarantee a sustainable future. Truly irreversible, the combination of large-scale cultivation, the use of fertilizers, environmental pollution, and the fragmentation Transformation Lecture

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and isolation of natural habitats have ensured that species are dying out rapidly. Five mass extinctions are etched out in the fossil archive, and mankind is now causing the sixth. Perhaps we would not be so worried about the extinction of our species, but more by the deterioration of the quality of life, if the functioning of these ecosystems falter. Nobody has expressed this better than the leading entomologist Edward O. Wilson, who warned that we are sliding from the Cenozoic, the age of the mammals, to the Irimozoic, the age of loneliness. This loneliness has yet another dimension: the world does not concern itself with those who look at it. The earth is aimless and remains completely unaffected by our gaze.

How are we, as society, to deal with this deadly serious problem? Defeatism is never the answer. After all, our culture also brings knowledge, involvement, and hope. So let’s immediately add that we might be a plague organism, but we are a reflective plague organism. We can reflect on our actions and learn from our mistakes. And what is more, we sometimes show that we can think in the very long term.

Being reflective is not enough; we have to be responsive too. Action must be taken.

We must not allow ourselves to be intimidated, but perhaps actually inspired by the huge [untamed?] problems ahead. And be optimistic, of course—that’s our middle name as designers.

In addition to more comprehensive eco-concepts, I imagine there might be a special role for utopia’s practical cousin, the plan. Plan and action are collectively capable of creating an accomplished fiction, as I call it. Culture is probably the most important source of innovation, and making plans could be the socially organizing medium for all this. The power of design-based research must also be tapped in this respect.

Spatial planning and design will play a modest but indispensable part in the essential response to the mixture of [untamed?] problems of climate, ecology, and poverty that we will face.

It will require more than some green roofs and LEED-platinum buildings, I’m afraid.

Urbanization, gradually becoming physically ubiquitous all over the world in the form of building and infrastructure, is high on the list of environmental problems, which include acidification, pollution, deforestation, fragmentation and dehydration, and more. Numerous visions and concepts have been generated on the basis of architecture and urban planning to make the footprint of urbanization press more lightly on the earth, from Howard’s garden cities, to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, Tony T Garnier’s beautiful studies, La Ville Radieuse by Le Corbusier, as well as current concepts like light urbanism and sustainable urbanism.

Transformation Lecture

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The present situation can no longer be described on the basis of the built component; landscape architecture is now also active in this discourse. Charles Waldheim, in The Landscape Urbanist Reader, quotes James Corner in saying that landscape is a medium uniquely capable of responding to temporal change, transformation, adaptation, and succession, thus recommending it as an analog to urbanization and suited to the open-endedness, inter-determinacy, and change demanded by contemporary urban conditions. Landscape is not only a formal model for urbanism today, but perhaps more importantly, a model for process.

The feature that distinguishes landscape urbanism and landscape architecture from urbanism is the dominant part played by processes. Social, ecological, and historical processes are the starting point for analysis and design; the role of the factor of time is different from that in urbanism, whose roots lie in architecture. This different viewpoint yields a landscape-related image of present urbanization, where using the traditional urban typology doesn’t work anymore. Perhaps landscape urbanism can give an answer to the polemical question, which has long remained open, of what ever happened to urbanism.

To finalize my lecture, and to summarize the part that can be played by landscape T urbanism, I would like to use another disaster film metaphor. This time the movie Titanic, not only to indicate that the recovery and recultivation of our planet may be the most expensive production of all time, but, if it turns out all right, to be able to use the image of the spatial disciplines having played their modest but indispensable part in the actions to safeguard our unsinkable society from a fatal collision with a melting iceberg.

We can play a fine supporting part, even if it all ends less positively. The landscape has the unique property of having a consoling effect; landscape architecture will be able to mediate between worried people and the indifferent earth to bring about a meaningful and hopeful relationship with the world. If pessimists see this as the orchestra’s violinist tuning up before heroically playing as the ship goes down, then so be it. That too is rewarding work.

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OPTION STUDIO

Climate Change, g Water, Land Development p and Adaptation p ARMANDO CARBONELL, DIRK K SIJMONS, SI JMONS, MARTIN ZOGRAN

Embracing the motto, “Water is Our Enemy, Water is Our Friend,” The Netherlands Ministry of Transport, Public Works, and Water Management sponsored this studio, which explored the expansion of Almere, a new town in the Amsterdam metropolitan region that is being considered to increase by as many as 40,000 residential units and 34,000 new jobs in the next 20 years. The studio was timely in that the government is expected to make decisions on the “increase in scale” of development and supporting infrastructure for Almere in 2009. We performed analysis and prepared a plan based on scenarios for development both inside and outside the existing dike.

Almere presents a rich field on which to plan for both mitigation and adaptation to climate change, while strengthening the town’s urban quality and connectedness to Amsterdam, the Randstad, and the wider world. A range of infrastructural interventions was evaluated, including flood resilient building strategies, advanced information and communications technology, and a possible new rail link. The studio also responded to the natural values of the site, as the area outside the dike supports significant biodiversity and is subject to the Bird and Habitat Directive. Students traveled to The Netherlands over spring break and met with Dutch experts and officials.

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Netherlands Bird Appearance and Disappearance

LEENA CHO

Habitat Location Pattern and Habitat Sustainability

Foraging F oraging Water Water Depth by Species

In Lake Treatment Strategies

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Habitat Habitus

Regular/Extreme R egular/E egular/ E xtreme W Water ater Level L evel

Adaptable A daptable Housing (Habitat/Habitus Unit)

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Studio Transformation

Development Area

Flood Diagrams for Inner Wetland Edge and Outer Park Edge

MARY LY L LYDECKER DECKER

Outer Park Edge

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Composition Plan

Storm Water, Open Space, and Development Strategies

PEDRO SANTA RIVERA

Residential Zone in Water Basin

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LECTURE

Landscape p Provocations and Practices: Processes of IImaging maging g g the Landscape p GARY HILDERBRAND, CHRIS REED STUDENT ORGANIZERS: ANTHONY ACCIAVATTI, ADRIENNE HEFLICH, THEODORE HOERR

APRIL 2, 2009 | EXCERPT

The Landscape Provocations & Practices Series is a forum for students, academics, and practitioners to confront directly the theory, values, and potentials that underpin contemporary landscape practice. Each presenter shared three images that employ three different representation modes and embody their approach to landscape practice for the first ten minutes, after which point the conversation with students came to the fore.

On the discussion of form

Chris Reed: We [at Stoss] talk about form as being important only in terms of the way that it performs, according to whatever set of issues are on the table. And yet, our form-making is quite robust in many cases. The question for me becomes, in form making, what is it that those things can produce, what is that they can do? Ecologically if you create a form that allows for wet and dry areas for instance, and then allows a series of natural dynamics—water rise and fall, wind, etc. to play out over that—the question is how the plant materials that you’ve embedded across that field might respond over time. And so the form in that case really has to do with how it supports or inaugurates a set of ecological dynamics.

Gary Hilderbrand: I feel in a way that we’re never really very much removed from form. Maybe it helps if I use the word morphology, and take some of the freight we associate with form out of the picture. Everything we work on has a morphology of some kind. It’s a shape. It’s a system. It’s an equation. An armature or a frame. Whatever you want to describe, from the components of an infrastructural support system to the organization of soils and vegetative cover. All of it has a descriptive morphology. ... The thing about making a landscape is that you come to this realization– extremely quickly–that things really fail if you don’t get the plumbing right.

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RESEARCH SEMINAR

Olympic y p Infrastructures JUDITH GRANT LONG

Olympic host cities hope to, among other things, leverage investment in Olympic infrastructure into a broader legacy of urban regeneration. Yet Y urban planners and designers have provided surprisingly little analysis of the nature and magnitude of this kind of Olympic legacy. In response, this research seminar invited students to investigate the urban aspirations and spatial expressions of sports facilities, athletes’ villages, transportation improvements, and other infrastructure built to accommodate the modern Olympic Games. Beginning with Pierre de Coubertin’s manifesto for the modern games, the seminar paired readings in infrastructure and urban development theory with discussions exploring the following themes: s 4HE HISTORY OF THE /LYMPIC 'AMES AND THE RISE OF ITS URBAN AGENDA 4HE HISTORY OF THE /LYMPIC 'AMES AND THE RISE OF ITS URBAN AGENDA s (OW CULTURAL INmUENCES SHAPE THE NATURE OF INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIRED (OW CULTURAL INmUENCES SHAPE THE NATURE OF INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIRED s 4HE IMPORTANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE HOST CITY SELECTION PROCESS 4HE IMPORTANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE HOST CITY SELECTION PROCESS s !PPROACHES TO SPATIAL PLANNING FOR THE SUMMER GAMES !PPROACHES TO SPATIAL PLANNING FOR THE SUMMER GAMES s 'AMES lNANCE AND TECHNIQUES FOR FUNDING INFRASTRUCTURE 'AMES lNANCE AND TECHNIQUES FOR FUNDING INFRASTRUCTURE s 4HE ROLE OF THE GAMES IN FOSTERING INNOVATIONS IN ARCHITECTURE AND ENGINEERING 4HE ROLE OF THE GAMES IN FOSTERING INNOVATIONS IN ARCHITECTURE AND ENGINEERING s 4HE INmUENCE OF THE SUSTAINABILITY DISCOURSE ON hGREENING THE GAMESv 4HE INmUENCE OF THE SUSTAINABILITY DISCOURSE ON hGREENING THE GAMESv s !DAPTING FACILITIES FOR POST GAMES USE !DAPTING FACILITIES FOR POST GAMES USE Transformation Research

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1992 Barcelona

1996 Atlanta

Olympic Infrastructures

Village Capacity

14 000 Village Capacity

16 500

Site Area

271 ac Site Area

269 ac

Far

1.28 Far

Removed Coastal Rail

4 km Bus Vehicles

New Ring Road TrafďŹ c Reduction

1 Bus Drivers 15% Terminal Loading Area

Total Cost ($ Million)

17 285 Total Cost ($ Million)

Total Revenue ($ Million)

17 285 Total Revenue ($ Million)

Balance ($ Million) KERRIE BUTTS

Transformation Research

0 Balance ($ Million)

1.78

1 700 2 000 74 ac 1 560 2 687 + 1 127

CHRISTINE WU

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2000 Sydney

2004 Athens

2008 Beijing

Village Capacity

15 000 Village Capacity

17 600 Village Capacity

17 000

Site Area

165 ac Site Area

323 ac Site Area

152 ac

Far

0.48 Far

0.23 Far

1.93

New Subway Lines

1 Extended Subway Lines

2 New Subway Lines

New Subway Stations

1 New Subway Stations

3 New Subway Stations

Days of 24hr Service

19 Replaced Airport

Total Cost ($ Million)

2 660 Total Cost ($ Million)

Total Revenue ($ Million)

3 928 Total Revenue ($ Million)

Balance ($ Million) ALEXANDER KARADJIAN

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+ 1 268 Balance ($ Million) STEVEN CHONG

1 New Airport

7 80 1

14 600 Total Cost ($ Million) 2 929 Total Revenue ($ Million) – 11 671 Balance ($ Million)

7 255 1 625 – 5 630

XU LI

Research Transformation

OPTION STUDIO

A Place in Heaven/ A Place in Hell: Tactical T Operations p in Sao Paulo’s Informal Sector CHRISTIAN WERTHMANN

Cantinho do Ceu (“A Place in Heaven”) is an informal city in the South of Sao Paulo; it houses 70,000 slum dwellers out of the 1.5 million in the metropolis. Cantinho is of strategic importance for Sao Paulo. It sits at the largest water reservoir of the metropolis, which it pollutes heavily. Despite its poor infrastructure, sanitation, and economic problems, Cantinho is a vibrant city. Its several kilometer long waterfront is undeveloped and has high potential.

Since finite masterplanning has failed, this studio pursued tactical operations that would unfold over periods of time. Investigations ranged from the watershed scale to the individual housing unit. Special focus was placed on the deep integration of public space with alternative infrastructure propelling current favela upgrading practices to more contemporary principals of ecological urbanism.

Although the intention was to run a studio about new forms of favela upgrading without many preconceptions, instructors developed in the preparation phase of this studio a set of themes that dominated the discussion: landscape and public space; alternative infrastructure; water; stigmatization; informal urbanism as a model; and poetry.

The Sao Paulo Housing Agency funded a site visit, and the studio was consulted by an international team of specialists, ranging from environmental engineers to artists.

The results of the studio were to be published in a book, presented and exhibited at the Museu da Casa Brasileira in Sao Paulo.

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Urban Runoff Treatment System

DOROTHY T TANG

Site Model

Transformation Lecture

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Tropical Fruits Diagram

JOSEPH CLAGHORN

Inlet Site Plan

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Project Materials

green painted stainless stell pole

yellow mulched rubber

blue mulched rubber

magenta mulched rubber

CIP concrete

compacted coarse aggregate

Elements: Forms

Elements: Pole

Elements: Pole Tree

ANDREW TEN BRINK

Transformation Lecture

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Favela Open Spaces

Axonometric

Timeline of Industrial History of Sao Paulo

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CONFERENCE

E Ecological cological g Urbanism SANFORD KWINTER (INTRODUCTORY REMARKS) APRIL 3–5, 2009 | EXCERPT

Ecological urbanism might refer to cities and to nature, but it also might mean something larger than even this. The habitual way we understand the relationship between these two entities—cities and nature—was imprinted on us largely by the Anglo-Saxon culture of the industrial revolution, when immense upheavals in social, economic, and political life transformed the very landscape around us, and our relationship to it, irreversibly and in depth. The dyad of city and country was the imaginary axis within which progress and modernization were conceived; not only then, but perhaps implicitly forever thereafter. The transformations of territory, of which even today’s most recent economic and biospheric crises are direct results, are rooted in this archaic and false opposition. T To speak of transformations of territory today, especially if we are to take seriously our historical task to begin to think ecologically, we must not exclude the existential territories; the existential ecologies that define our ways of inhabiting the worlds we have made. For if there is an ecological crisis at hand, it is one that as much concerns the deterioration and deformation of human experience as it does that of the physical habitat upon which we rely to provide the overabundant wealth that we too often use to hide this uncomfortable fact from ourselves. Or, as Al Gore would say, this “inconvenient truth.”

This is where cities, and especially the culture of cities, comes in. Cities arose as direct products of the new means of concentrating wealth, a process that exploded once wealth was able to be detached or abstracted from its moorings within the natural world. Once motive power, for example, could be detached from its fixed place at the river, where it is extracted in situ with a water wheel, and transposed, say, to a third-story manufactory in the heart of an environment like London—thanks of course to the invention of the detachable heat or expansion engine—there immediately came along the administrative and banking innovations that permitted accumulations of both wealth and population. Both, however, simply came to forget that this is what they were: abstractions only and not true emancipations from the obdurate, finite facts of nature. The heat engine’s emancipation from nature was no more than a willful illusion, despite the clearly stated principles of the thermodynamic science that Transformation Conference

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gave rise to it in the first place, as occupants of cities have all too painfully learned since the 1960s. And yet, not only do three billion of Earth’s citizens today live in cities, but virtually all of the exponential growth in population anticipated over the next 50 years will be urban. Current ameliorative development in cities targets the archaic physical structures and the archaic social life forms that adhere to them. Two T examples among hundreds are the destruction of Beijing’s hutongs and the redevelopment of the Dharavi Quarter in Mumbai. It is an unexamined and possibly dangerous supposition that the solution to the new demographic and economic pressures is to further rationalize and modernize our existing urban habitats or ecologies. The exact opposite may be true.

What is required to give birth to a true ecological praxis for our cities and our civilization cannot be found or resolved within the scope of sustainability workshops, environmentalisms, policy reforms, and technological and scientific research and their applications. The ecological question is much larger and more comprehensive.

The relationship between nature and economic life, for so long shunned as primitive and passé-ist thinking, is one that is beginning to appear in the foreground again: witness Thomas Friedman’s op-ed piece on “Market to Mother Nature” accounting in The New York Times two days ago; he’s been going on about this mother nature Y sort of economics of late, but based on incredible encounters with economists— obviously not American economists—all over the world. What’s more, there can be no ecological thinking that does not place the human social destiny at the heart of our posture toward our environmental context. We may well learn that cities, and even mega-cities, actually represent astoundingly efficient ecological solutions. But this fact alone does not make them sustainable, especially if the forces of social invention remain trapped in tyrannies that only ecological thinking on an ecumenical scale can free us from. In some ways, of course, I’m referring here to a kind of thinking that was once associated with what they used to call “deep ecology.” In addition, we must not believe that one can detach human and natural from the aesthetic and still maintain that we have met the challenge of ecological thinking and ecological praxis. These are just some of the important and utterly novel fronts that design thinking will need to acknowledge and address over the coming years.

Cities, on the one hand, have become the quintessential human habitat. They are as natural to us as the hunter-gatherer bands, whose optimum size of 150 members is said to have been ideal for both the easy and efficient exploitation of the resources of savannah biomes, and for maintaining the social and cultural equilibrium of these societies in all their dimensions, sexual, religious, and otherwise. The role of what I earlier called the existential ecologies of cities—that which is required for the creative and dynamic inhabitation and utilization of the environment—in a word, the cultural and social dimensions of our environment—are poorly theorized and understood, and at any rate insufficiently acknowledged. Yet Y they are key components of our ecology, without which none of the other parts could fit.

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LIST OF SPEAKERS

Iñaki Ábalos Kenzo Tange T Visiting Professor, Harvard GSD Michelle Addington Associate Professor, Yale Y University SOA Nathalie Beauvais Allston Development Group Pierre Bélanger Associate Professor, University of Toronto T Homi Bhabha Director of the Humanities Center, Harvard Stefano Boeri Editor-in-chief, Abitare Andrea Branzi Professor, Politecnico di Milano Lawrence Buell Professor of American Literature, Harvard Lizabeth Cohen Professor of American Studies, Harvard Margaret Crawford Professor, Harvard GSD Dilip da Cunha UPenn and Parsons Gareth Doherty Doctoral Candidate, Harvard GSD Herbert Dreiseitl Atelier Dreiseitl Andres Duany Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company Bill Dunster ZEDfactory, London Susan Fainstein Professor, Harvard GSD Drew Faust President, Harvard, & Lincoln Professor of History Richard T. T T. T Forman Professor, Harvard GSD Ed Glaeser Director of the Taubman T Center, Harvard Susannah Hagan University of Brighton and R/E/D, London Chuck Hoberman Hoberman Associates Walter Hood Hood Design and Professor, UC Berkeley James W W. Hunt III Cabinet, City of Boston Dorothée Imbert Associate Professor, Harvard GSD Mitchell Joachim Columbia University and Parsons Jerold Kayden Frank BackusWilliams Professor, Harvard GSD W Wooyoung Kimm Harvard GSD, Sungkyunkwan University Niall Kirkwood Professor, Harvard GSD Rem Koolhaas K OMA and Professor, Harvard GSD Alex Krieger Professor, Harvard GSD Nancy Krieger Professor, Harvard School of Public Health Sanford Kwinter K Visiting Associate Professor, Harvard GSD Nina-Marie Lister Associate Professor, Ryerson University Anuradha Mathur Associate Professor, UPenn Thomas M. Menino Mayor of the City of Boston William J. Mitchell MIT Media Laboratory T Toshiko Mori Professor, Harvard GSD Mohsen Mostafavi Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Design Federico Parolotto MIC Antoine Picon Professor, Harvard GSD Spiro Pollalis Professor, Harvard GSD Mahadev Raman Arup New York, Y Columbia University Rebar San Francisco Chris Reed Stoss Landscape Urbanism and Harvard GSD Christoph Reinhart Associate Professor, Harvard GSD Daniel Schrag Centre for the Environment, Harvard Thomas Schroepfer Associate Professor, Harvard GSD Matthias Schuler TRANSSOLAR and Harvard GSD Niels Schulz Energy Futures Lab, Imperial College London Kairos Shen Director of Planning, BRA Richard Sommer Associate Professor, Harvard GSD Donald Swearer Dir. of Center for Study of World Religions Ian Taylor T Feilden Clegg Bradley Sissel Tolaas T RE _searchLab, Berlin Charles Waldheim Associate Dean, University of Toronto T Christian Werthmann W Associate Professor, Harvard GSD K Kongjian Yu Y Turenscape, T Dean of GSLA, Peking University

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Left to Right, Top to Bottom: Matthias Schuler, Herbert Dreiseitl, and Toshiko Mori, Loeb Fellows Edward Morris and Susanna Saylor, Moshen Mostafavi and Mayor Thomas Menino, Gareth Doherty, Michelle Addington, Margaret Crawford and Nina-Marie Lister, Anuradha Mathur Dilip DaCunha and Niall Kirkwood, Andrea Branzi

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Core Landscape p Architecture IV INSTRUCTORS: PAULA MEIJERINK (COORDINATOR), MATTHEW GORDY, ALISON HIRSCH, CHERILYN RUANE, PAUL COTE SPRING 2009

The fourth of the four-term sequence of landscape design and planning studios developed the design concepts introduced in the ďŹ rst year and applied them to landscape site design problems of increased scale and programmatic complexity.

The studio investigated the landscape potential of a post industrial site in Chelsea, a terrain vague that was abandoned, contaminated, and neglected in its urban setting.

The site was considered a conceptual blank slate, with great potential for unheard of new futures. The intent was to reposition this site in the urban context of Chelsea and the greater Boston region as a public landscape, fully acknowledging its waterfront location. Investigation in program, infrastructure, natural processes, mitigation of pollutants, and phasing, with an underlying conďŹ dence in the resilience of landscape, was addressed in the studio.

Three-dimensional modeling techniques were integral to the studio process. As design research tools, rather than representation tools, these techniques oscillated between digital and material modeling through one connected platform.

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Section

Model

DIANE LIPOWSKY

Site Plan

Core Landscape Architecture IV

212

Landform Diagrams

GYOUNG TAK PARK

Landform Diagrams

Sections

213

Landscape Architecture IV Core

Project Layers

Dredge + Public P Space

Program Platforms

Liebherr Crane

Dewatering Bags

Platform Base

Water System

Model View

ALEXIS CANTER

Core Landscape Architecture IV

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Mapping Process

Site Plan

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Landscape Architecture IV Core

MATTHEW GIRARD

Core Landscape Architecture IV

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Authorship Open Op pen e Model Source Modelss These entries explore current thinking about the role of authorship within the design process, and how that role evolves in response to diverse working scales and degrees of complexity. From strategies concerning multi-authored urban fragments, to a lecture that presents the conception of an open-source form of practice, to the development of a framework for self-built housing, the material documented herein searches for models in which the collaboration of multiple hands results in something much greater than the sum of its parts.

LECTURE

Ag Agency gencyy JOSHUA PRINCE RAMUS STUDIO

Advancing g the Strategostructure g JOSHUA PRINCE RAMUS

New Ways: y Diridon Station RODOLFO MACHADO LECTURE

Op Open pen Source Cities ECOSISTEMA URBANO THESIS

Grounded QUILIAN RIANO

The InďŹ nite Unfolding g of Christopher p Alexander MARRIKKA TROTTER DIGITAL PRIZE

T Taipei aipei p 2.0.2 TREVOR PATT

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LECTURE

Ag Agency gencyy JOSHUA PRINCE RAMUS MARCH 19, 2009 | EXCERPT

This is a construction helmet that I was extremely proud of when I received it. It was at the groundbreaking of our project in Louisville a year-and-a-half ago. When I received it we were on the site; I was happy to see that the architect was given incredible importance, because our team was given silver helmets and everybody else got the standard white or yellow on-site construction helmets—including, I might say, the owner, contractor, and site engineer. I was thrilled until I got back to the hotel and threw it on the hotel bed and read the interior: “For decorative purposes only.”

Architects are obviously a smart group of people, but we are also cowards. We love to blame other people—consultants, the economy, or general contractors, for example—for all pushing us to places we don’t want to go. I think we can only blame ourselves. Over the last 50 years we have run from liability. Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out yet that where goes liability, also goes control. Effectively, we have run from control. Over the last 50 years we have found ourselves marginalized as “stylists,” resulting in two options: to fight and claw our way back to the center, or to do what we did and weirdly rebrand our retreat as conquest and say, “You Y know this? Hey! This is architecture over here!” That’s what we’ve done; we’ve created the worst schism possible.

We actually separated the creative act from execution.

We have convinced the entire media that this love of the signature sketch is what it’s about. The idea that we execute a vision, and then some minions merely do the dirty work of execution is absurd; it is as absurd as claiming 15 minutes of copulation–that one incredible creative act–is art while nine months of gestation, and God forbid, in the case of my wife, 24 hours of child labor—that is merely execution. That’s the absurdity of that claim.

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I believe this is where we need to go: back to authoring processes, not authoring objects. To T author a process we have to first figure out what that big thick thing called a contract is. We have to be able to argue the contract upside and down because if we don’t know what’s in it, it simply doesn’t exist, and we simply don’t know the rules of the game. We also need to know how to control procurement processes and strategies. This is, perhaps, the most important thing.

We need to be able to figure out, “OK, based on my design intent, what strategy do I need to put in place to get the right people to bid on it, the right people to become players within the procurement?”. We need to fully understand things like escalation, pricing, and to know that, in fact, only a fool would take liability for variations in price. That is called an insurance company; it is not called an architect. Unless they pay you like an insurance company, I suggest you not take liability for it. Most importantly, you need to know how to demand what is the value that you offer and get the appropriate fees. If you tell the notion that we design for a percentage of construction costs to any other professional on the planet, they will laugh in your face. Do you think it’s worth 7% of the construction cost of a paperclip to design a paperclip? Of course not.

Now, what might a process like this look like? How do you author a process? In the case of Seattle Library the issue issue was that there were two concurrent explosions going on within witthin the Library of Science: an explosion of physical materials aand nd an explosion of social functions. Our position was that the whole idea of universal flexibility simply doesn’t work because e one explosion was the squeaky wheel demanding the space e and the other one was getting literally moved out of the building. building g. Our position was dumbly just to divide and conquer, to create creaate compartments, to tear out your flexibility, to put one kind of tthing in one box, and another kind of thing in another box. By dividing diividing the program up into various compartments, each one having aving its own form of flexibility, and then holding onto that idea doggedly for the next five years, the result transcended absolutely anything that anyone of us could have either drawn individually or done at the beginning of the project. It was totally dumb but incredibly powerful in the endgame. It created a result that argues that “capital A Architecture” can stand against anything else. There is a difference compared to the Frank Gehry building that is down the road, which 50% like and 50% hate in terms of what it looks like, and our building, which I’ll also say 50% like and 50% hate. Our thing really works. When people are in it, they say, “you know, yeah, I got what I was in for. It was an exciting experience.” Many of them come out and say I still think it’s ugly but the performance was there.

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To rethink this process, we need to redefine T authorship. We have to take it from “I authored this thing” to “we nurtured this process,” which is much more exciting. I think we can turn the clock back 50 years and reinject agency back into the design process. This is how we are taught to operate: “I have my idea and God damn it, you are going to let me in!” Of course, they don’t get in; it’s a Trojan horse. I believe that this process works regardless of what your agenda is. While our agenda is challenging typology, another might be formalism. Frank Gehry is a great example: he has taken such control of the process that he has license to pursue his formal agenda.

I would ask you not to deliver Spartans. Whatever your agenda is I hope it’s benevolent; I beg you, please, at least make maidens. I don’t care what they are, or who they are, nor what color they are, but please don’t make it to the detriment of your client. If we are truly so good at our craft and what we do, why is it not possible for us to conceive of something that is still amazing as it passes through the project, satisfying our clients’ constraints. Why does greatness always come at four times the original budget, and three times the schedule? I argue that it is because of bad architects, and I don’t care what you say about them. That’s bad architecture.

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OPTION STUDIO

Advancing g the Strategostructure g JOSHUA PRINCE RAMUS | TEACHING FELLOW: EL HADI JAZAIRY

Massive development projects increasingly involve complex program mixes and/or public-private ventures, where design by a single architect is arguably not advantageous or even possible. The political processes surrounding these projects often require architectural solutions and imagery prior to determining the overall programmatic mix or commencing design on any individual program.

Architecture’s prevalent responses to this scale have failed to adequately consider multiple authorship and programmatic indeterminacy. Strategic loss of control has been limited to “visions” and “critiques” that do not take implementation seriously, or to promiscuous contraposition of programs in single-authored Big Buildings.

Although the latter may attain iconographic status, they rarely succeed in actually “engineering the unpredictable” as promised. Urban design navigates this territory with multi-authored, seemingly-heterogeneous “Mini-Cities.” However, the Mini-City is usually little more than an architectural zoo: an accretion of screeching, signature works, each trying to be unique but ultimately just different in the same way.

If architects overcome the profession’s imperative to jealously determine all aspects of a design, they can explore the potent ground beyond Big Buildings without surrendering large-scale development to urban design’s Mini-Cities of non-identical sameness. A new typology—the “Strategostructure”—must be pioneered that retains conceptual coherence and credibility.

Students collaborated to create a Strategostructure—including six cultural and educational venues—on the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.

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Studio Authorship

Library Project Schemes

Library Sections

Library Sections

ANA MARIA FLOR DAN HANDEL RODIA VALLADARES

Authorship Studio

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Small Museum

JOSE AHEDO, IGNACIO GONZALES

ConямБgurations for a Small Museum

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Studio Authorship

Section

COMBINED STRATEGOSTRUCTURE PROJECT

Plan

3D Perspective from WTC Memorial

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Model Views

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OPTION STUDIO

New Ways: y Diridon Station RODOLFO MACHADO

Diridon Station is a unique and unparalleled node for transit, office, commercial uses, housing, and entertainment. However, beyond the aspects of functionality and economic viability of the area, Diridon is ultimately about placemaking. The liveliness and success of the place will depend fundamentally on its urban design, on the relationship between buildings, space, uses, and people. The goal was not just to create a fiscally stable job, entertainment, and retail center with housing: Diridon should be a place where people want to be.

For the purpose of this studio, “new ways” referred to:

1.) the new means of transportation with which we can now reach the Diridon Station area—a large tract of land adjacent to downtown San Jose and ready for redevelopment; 2.) new technologies developed in the area of San Jose–Palo Alto (the Silicon Valley) in the last twenty years—technologies so innovative and that they have made globalization possible and changed the way in which we live today; 3.) new urban techniques—equally inventive ways of urbanizing that need to be deployed in the design of the new Diridon Station area in order to produce an appropriate and contemporary urbanity.

This entails that Diridon symbolize and be a place of culture, innovation, and diversity—qualities that attract, retain, and produce a talented workforce and creative class. These are the qualities that have allowed technological innovation to thrive in San Jose, and are the same qualities that must find their counterpart in San Jose’s built environment.

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Studio Authorship

Mixed Use Residential Mat Typologies T

ANDREW WATKINS AND NILAY MISTRY

Aerial View

Authorship Studio

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Land Use and Building Typologies T

Commercial Comm mercial

Sandwich

Residential Reside ential

Courtyard

Civic and and Institutional

River Edge

KERRY BUTTS AND DUCK SU SEOU

Site Section

Aerial View

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Studio Authorship

LECTURE

Op Open pen Source Cities ECOSISTEMA URBANO – JOSÉ LUIS VALLEJO, BELINDA TATO APRIL 7, 2009 | EXCERPT

Ten things we have learned from the city: T 1: Take care of public space

The idea of the city is completely linked to the creation of public space. We are not only interested in the space inside buildings, but equally interested in the space in-between buildings. In conceiving a row of projects to improve public space in central Madrid, selective points were chosen as catalysts to initiate a broader reconfiguration of the city’s open space network. In all of them we strategically apply five key concepts: unifying, concentrating, renaturalizing, conditioning, and activating.

2: Be inventive

Be optimistic about existing conditions, and try to challenge their processes. One should not always start from zero, but rather find the latent potential of established systems. An ECOBOULEVARD in Madrid’s periphery redefines open space by rethinking the median of an already executed urban development. Three pavilions, or artificial trees, function like open structures to multiply resident-selected activities.

3: Rely on low-cost

Achieve greater action with the least possible resources.

Built with citizen’s participation, this project relies on very simple technology to create a 2500m2 shaded space where multiple public activities can take place over the summer.

4: Bring instant change through urban action

We believe everything is architecture, small actions provoke huge reactions and everything is connected. The ad-hoc proposal of an urban park proved that through public encouragement one can assemble in five days a park that the city has been trying to build for the past fifteen years.

5: Integrate citizens

into the processes of changing the environment. The proposal for the vacant lots competition in Philadelphia puts forward a low cost physical and social mechanism that would serve as a launch pad for future urban activity.

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6: Create open systems

by establishing clear frameworks that can adapt to changing realities. For a landfill urban extension in Maribor, Slovenia—presently in a phase of ecological rehabilitation—we relied on a strategy where temporal processes informed the development of a broader formal strategy.

7: Build networks

to share knowledge and experiences. Our web is an internet platform to showcase worldwide experiences on creative urban sustainability. Through this platform we had the opportunity to meet professionals from other disciplines, share experiences, and collaborate on different projects.

ECOSISTEMAURBANO.ORG / EUABIERTO.COM / ECOSISTEMAURBANO.TV

8: Refurbish the existing

as an alternative to uncontrolled expansion. We believe it is more important to improve existing conditions rather than move towards the periphery of the city. Residual spaces between urban facilities in the outskirts of Madrid are reconfigured into an active network that renders them as active space.

9: Account for the intangible

Use new virtual technologies as a mechanism to create complexity. Architecture as management of energy resources, water, wind, and sun can become a driving force for activity engaging animate landscapes. A network of technological elements characterizes the operation and image of a proposed water park for Zaragoza.

Such networks choreograph the complex atmospheric, hydraulic, and social system, including simultaneous processes of water purification, water irrigation, energy generation, artificial flooding and leisure activities.

These elements then become the basic pieces that build up this recreational landscape.

10: Stay positive

to be able to change reality and to re-invent oneself, acknowledging that the model of the architect as sole problem solver is no longer responding to societal needs—therefore we must re-construct how we facilitate activity in our time.

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THESIS

Grounded: Ecology gy as a Frame for an Informal Communityy in Tijuana j QUILIAN RIANO

This thesis developed a system that is flexible and able to change over time while providing basic infrastructure in a frame grounded and specifically tailored to its site and context. The main parameter used for grounding the frame is WATER, controlling it, channeling it, and making it a part of daily life. This means that the master plan needs to respond to it, the paths and landscapes need to display it, buildings need to find forms to react to it, and, at times, the community needs to be able to play with it.

Located in the unstable territory of the Tijuana River estuary, on the Mexican side of the Border, and on a slope prone to erosion and mud slides, Riano’s thesis, “Grounded: Ecology as Frame for an Informal Community in Tijuana,” combines strategies of informal urbanism, landscape practices of erosion control, prefabricated construction, and social activism, to propose a thesis that anticipates a highly interdisciplinary mode of practice.

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Regional Diagrams

Housing Typologies T

Site Model

QUILIAN RIANO

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Masterplan Axonometric

East-West Section

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MDESS THESIS

The Infinite Unfolding g of Christopher p Alexander: Synthesis, y Ghosts and other Unbound Points in the Recent Architectural Past MARRIKKA TROTTER | ADVISOR: SANFORD KWINTER

From the very beginning of his long career, in the early 60s, Christopher Alexander believed that modern mechanology had so poisoned the practice of shaping space that architecture itself had been co-opted, and yearned instead for a prelapsarian condition in which “unselfconscious” shaping of the environment had once been ethico-moral “edification.” With his background in mathematics and chemistry, Alexander saw the relation between human design and the environment as a symbiotic and reciprocal completing that he referred to as “symmetry.” Alexander noted that since it was impossible to draw a line between a living lung and the air it breathes, the organism should be properly understood as [lung + atmosphere]. Analogously, architecture did not equal “lung” and environment did not equal “air,” but rather the environment was the air flooding into and flushing from the lung, and architecture was the lung coupling forever with the atmosphere. Alexander believed that, once, engagement with the larger environment had been a continuous cycle of feedback, failure, and adjustment at the rate of cultural flow—a condition he termed “equilibrium,” meaning not stasis, but a dynamic, changing stability.

For Alexander, the loss of symmetrical and equilibrius ways of understanding and shaping the environment was a consequence of Cartesianism, which fostered the conditions for the artificial and destructive separation of architecture as a profession from the total environment and culture. As a remedy, Alexander sought to cultivate architecture as an allopoeitic system. His pattern language was an attempt to codify latent or overlooked shaping and socio-economic practices into endlessly recombinatory genetic packets which would allow people to once again build for themselves.

With this language, Alexander believed he had figured out how symmetry and equilibrium could be recovered from the flows of historical time.

In rejecting Cartesianism in favor of Leibnizian monadology, Christopher Alexander has much in common with Greg Lynn. They both describe architecture in terms of allopoeitic systems, smoothness, stickiness, and unfolding, and they both believe that matter is never neutral or inert. Alexander and Lynn both see form as generated by surrounding forces, and they both describe architecture as a series of overlapping nestings in a living environment. Unlike Alexander, however, Lynn sees architecture Authorship MDesS Thesis

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as a discrete discipline. Therefore, when Lynn talks about embryological design, he is talking about the process by which he generates a form and the resultant form itself—an illustrative approach that Alexander once dismissed as “buildings that look like cabbages.” In contrast, when Alexander talked about embryological design, he was referring to architecture as an overall process that produces unfolding and continuously generating “life” in a living environment. The creation and curation of this bi-adaptive, living Umwelt is what Alexander meant by “synthesis.”

Alexander failed to implement this vision, mostly due to his own prejudices about making techniques and style. The former exhausted his cohorts and stifled his production efforts, and the latter alienated everyone who failed to reconcile with his views on form and ornamentation. On the other hand, another young architect, Teddy T Cruz, seems in some respects to have picked up where Alexander left off. Cruz’s designs and writings embody Alexander’s socio-economic priorities, principles of production, and early formal vocabulary with eerie accuracy. Alexander and Cruz share the same critique of the alienating nature of contemporary construction, the same anthropological research techniques, and the same early repertoire of forms as armatures for self-organization. In strategy, Cruz has surpassed Alexander’s dreamy visions, building a detailed and convincing system of mapping, micro-loans, advocacy, and kit-of-parts design. However, unlike Alexander, Teddy T Cruz has implemented almost none of these tactics in architecture—a major issue for an architect who claims his goal is to realize change now, in whatever increment possible.

Nevertheless, perhaps the real significance of Alexander and his echoes in contemporary architectural practice are their relation to each other across time. It may be useful to see these recurrences as ghosts: ideas and practices not taken up in the main, but continuing to haunt the profession with whispers of alternative possibility.

As Derrida reminds us, “ghost” originally meant to wound or to pull apart. Perhaps the power of such revenants is their ability to rend at least temporary tears in the fabric of convention, so that what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “background” manifests at the surface. As for us, contemporary witnesses to a haunted moment, Derrida relates the French “je t’en conjure” with “I charge thee, speak!” from Hamlet to suggest that the proper response to a ghost is to make it communicate. I would suggest that one way to make ghosts speak is to trace a history for them.

If the understanding that architecture is a complected and synthetic activity is an “unbound point” still ghosted in the margins of architectural practice and its history, we know that any careful act of mapping can inscribe through a diagrammatic surface and into the material of the real itself. Every existing history, like every existing map, contains certain unbound points within the apparent circumference of its netting that are actually outside its trawl. History is a way of shaking these free.

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DIGITAL DESIGN PRIZE

T Taipei aipei p 2.0.2: Computation p and the Urban Generic TREVOR PATT

The Urban Generic is a “black-box” interface that projects parametrically computed urban futures at multiple levels of resolution. Based on analysis of Taipei’s paradigmatic urban form and development patterns, the thesis rewires the Supertall project, now stripped of its signature iconic status, and repositioned as an anonymous “many.”

Rather than offering a series of limited architectural proposals, this project provides an instrument with which to produce urban design dynamically. It is among a series of projects in the school today that aim to define the essential architectural concept as an amalgam of parameters and types of variability.

In this instance, a mutable tower is shown to radically transform the city by altering the programmatic structure of a series of blocks and districts with infrastructural consequences of far greater reach.

Preston Scott Cohen, Thesis Advisor Authorship Digital Design Prize

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Digital Design Prize Authorship

Towermaker Schematic

MRT Expansion and Decentering

TREVOR PATT

Authorship Digital Design Prize

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North from National T Taiwan aiwan University y

Design Sketch

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COMBINED STRATEGOSTRUCTURE PROJECT

Authorship Digital Design Prize

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Core Landscape p Architecture I INSTRUCTORS: MICHAEL BLIER (COORDINATOR), JANE CHOI, PAULA MEIJERINK, MARTHA SCHWARTZ

FALL 2008

This studio was the first of four core design studios in the Department of Landscape Architecture. It provided an introduction to both the traditions and the techniques of the discipline of landscape architecture. Its structure, largely urban in nature, focused on a profound engagement with the phenomena of site, and the creation of meaning through form as the major generative forces of landscape design. Through the design process, the studio developed strategies that build from a careful reading of the “site beyond the site,” and engaged larger ecological environmental issues in order to redefine the role of diverse urban infrastructures.

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Landscape Architecture I Core

NANCY SEATON

MARIA MATEO

FIONA LUHRMANN

Core Landscape Architecture I

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Model

Model

NANCY SEATON

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Landscape Architecture I Core

Plan Detail

FIONA LUHRMANN

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Material Axon Axonometric nometric

Model

MARIA MATEO

Program Layers

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FIONA LUHRMANN

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Core Landscape p Architecture II INSTRUCTORS: DOROTHÉE IMBERT (COORDINATOR), SHAUNA GILLIES-SMITH, VIRGINIA JOHNSON, SYLVIA WINTER SPRING 2009

The second-semester core studio built on previous design investigations to address a set of relationships between the site and planning scales. Through a series of discrete but related exercises, students intervened on the suburban campus of Brandeis University in Waltham. The potential of landscape as a vehicle of spatial definition and as an infrastructure for future development are explored through an evaluation of the idea of ‘campus’, through the evolution of landscape over time and through contemporary disciplinary attitudes.

With a city-like organization in a suburban setting, the campus is a utopian environment with heterotopic experiences. However, the accretion of buildings, circulation, and parking lots, and the pressure on open space have weakened the original vision of the campus founders. In a sequence of projects increasing in scale and complexity throughout the semester, students critiqued the campus and the established relationship between architecture and landscape. In turn, they considered landscape design as a tool to restructure the campus and its identity.

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FIONA LUHRMANN

NANCY SEATON

FIONA LUHRMANN

Core Landscape Architecture II

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Model

Berlin Chapel Garden Plan

CLAIRE EDDLEMAN

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Landscape Architecture II Core

Plan

FIONA LUHRMANN

Perspective of Theater Terrace

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Model

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Section

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Site Plan

NANCY SEATON

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Landscape Architecture II Core

FIONA LUHRMANN

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Practice Modes of Practical K nowledge g Knowledge Inclusive of material ranging from a seminar that explores the role of the architect as editor to a lecture excerpt that presents a personal reading of the relationship between architecture and urbanism, this set presents research that questions standardized forms of practice in order to highlight a more expansive and diversified understanding of the disciplinary fields associated with design.

SYMPOSIUM

Ordos: Nine Houses byy GSD Faculty Facultyy JEFF KIPNIS (MODERATOR) STUDIO

The Anxietyy of Difference MACK SCOGIN

An Urbanism for Las Vegas V g ALEX KRIEGER THESIS

Architecture & Enterprise p NATHAN L. RICHARDSON LECTURE

All About UD! RODOLFO MACHADO SEMINAR

Building g Books LARS MÜLLER

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SYMPOSIUM

Ordos: Nine Houses byy GSD F acultyy Faculty MODERATOR: JEFF KIPNIS NOVEMBER 3, 2008 | EXCERPT, JEFF KIPNIS ( INTRODUCTORY REMARKS)

I am an unbridled apologist and enthusiast for this project— which, I have to say, probably makes me alone in this room, including the architects that are participating in it.

As I’ve discussed this with each one, they have apologized, hesitated, essentially disavowed their actual interest in the project. They understand that they are involved in a piece of crass commercial colonialism without any sensitivity to the context or to the people that live there. So, they all, actually, don’t like the project.

My guess is you don’t like it. But, I just want to tell you, I think it’s one of the most important experiments to be conducted in architecture, perhaps in my lifetime.

Lebbeus Woods tried to compare this project to the Weissenhof Siedlung, and I think that’s not a very apt comparison. That was a curated exposition by Mies van der Rohe, in 1927. He selected 27 architects, and they produced housing for sixty people. It was a curated effort, aimed at producing an exposition of modern architecture and its possible roles and staging new arrangements of life. The type and construction was taken for granted because it was polemic; implicit in the typology and in the sense of relationship to the context.

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Nor do I think that we’re in the situation that we see in the Sagaponack houses.

The Sagaponack houses were also an interesting experiment, but it was too lax. The site plan was too lax. These were suburban houses. Every house had a different budget or there was no budget. You Y could build whatever you wanted to. They were not particularly connected to one another in a community. It was at the other end of the spectrum, undisciplined and unconstrained.

In the Ordos project, there is no stylistic impetus, and no polemic. What are really acting as constraints are the construction techniques, the budget, and the site.

They’re all roughly a thousand square meters. They are all going to be built either of masonry or wet construction. They are not villas, in the sense of a villa-type, but individual family dwellings.

This is Ordos. All of the architects are coming from around the world to f--k this place up. It’s like one of those places in Africa, where there are these migrations from the south and they go to someplace like the Sudan and they find incredible lumber rocks, and nothing growing. “Wow, this is a great place. Let’s stop here and live.”

Ai Weiwei’s site plan looks generic and naive. It is, in fact, surprisingly subtle, in the sense that it’s a loose ensemble, that doesn’t really grid the site, but rather partitions the site on the basis of thrown dice. But it is rigorous in the sense that basically each site is the same size. The concentricities of it, the hole in the middle, the museum, and the relationship to the edge makes sure that each building, if it wanted to, could understand that its context was slightly different from every other building.

I was asking some students this morning what they thought of New Urbanism—and New Urbanism is now 30-35 years old. Basically, everybody that you ask about New Urbanism says, “I don’t like it.” Everybody of a liberal, progressive point of view sees in it a kind of cartoon of collectivity and an economic subterfuge, which they feel really discomforted by. And so they disassociate themselves from it, and most of my colleagues, and most of the people that I’m interested in studying—from Peter Eisenman through Rem Koolhaas to even younger architects like Jesse Reiser and MVRDV—are highly discomforted by New Urbanism.

However, over those 35 years, for all of the critique of New Urbanism, not a single significant proposal has occurred as an alternative planning scheme. Part of that has to do with the fact that no one wanted to admit that the New Urbanists were successful in many ways. They were successful in figuring out how to produce a sense of community and a kind of coherence. No one wanted to build on the idea that they were actually effective, but then try to build in critiques or alternatives to the way that they were producing a kind of hegemonic cartoon of a certain particular politics, and a certain particular lifestyle, as if it was generically good for everybody.

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So, New Urbanism is the new Modernism. New Urbanism is one alternative; this is another. And that is to produce essentially a pressure cooker that will try to produce some sense of architectural coherence. One thing that’s interesting is that no one in this entire project knows anything about the capacities of the people that will be living here to colonize new spatial arrangements. If you’re unable to go in and look at the indigenous spatial arrangements, and try to reflect those back, you’re somehow perceived as not being sensitive to the actual architectural authenticities that you’re responsible to. On the other hand, no one’s being forced to live in these things against their will. This is not social housing; they get to buy them.

History has taught us that our first reaction to these kinds of imperious colonialist gestures, our first reaction to the two most condemned cases, Milton Keynes and Brasilia, have proven completely wrong. It took forty or fifty years, in both cases, for the people that occupied them to learn to colonize the space, to adjust their sense of social and community arrangements. And now, we’re seeing a “coming out” of Milton Keynes and Brasilia in literature. We’re seeing an embrace of a condition against the original set of critiques. So, we’re learning the time frame. I think if we started judging Ordos now, it would be ridiculous. But, ten years from now, we can offer some preliminary thoughts about it. And we should do another experiment.

I think the Ordos Project is a wonderful architectural experiment that we’re going to learn a lot from. And that’s why I’m so actively collecting the schemes. My eyes began to see a kind of convergence of certain ideas and certain attitudes about what’s going to go on. So, in the 100 or so schemes, maybe I’ve collected 30 now, or 40. They’re starting to partition into very interesting ideas—basically new romanticism, and new, romantic narratives about the context or the site—about what constitutes a good living arrangement in the most generic sense of human habitats, stuff like that.

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OPTION STUDIO

The Anxietyy of Difference MACK SCOGIN

“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.�

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The studio was an assemblage of individualized explorations into the possibility of discovering the alienated majesty before it becomes the rejected thought.

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Dyptich

Approach to Red Island in the Salten Sea

Supery

ERIN KASIMOV

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Theater Opened

Opera Procession from Land

Opera House Destabilize Destabilized ed

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OPTION STUDIO

An Urbanism for Las Vegas V g ALEX KRIEGER

One of the most familiar “downtowns” in America, the famous Las Vegas Strip, being “repositioned” regularly, is not even located within the city limits of the City of Las Vegas, Nevada. Nonetheless, the Strip occupies the center of a major and rapidly spreading metropolitan area; a metropolitan area that some suggest has supplanted Los Angeles as the pre-eminent laboratory for emerging patterns of early twenty-first century American urbanism. The studio considered these emerging patterns and posed alternatives for how the region of the Strip might continue to evolve.

As the Strip continues to transform—most notably today by the construction of the immense MGM MIRAGE City Center development that advertises a more encompassing, mixed-use, “urban” future for the Strip, not only more gaming venues—there are two remaining sizeable landholdings that will serve as the primary focus for the studio. These occur at either end of the Strip, near the airport and towards the downtown area of the City of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas will continue to grow and evolve, but how? Is its urban DNA pre-disposed to more and more megaprojects only? Does it remain private investment willed only?

How or should it transform to accommodate the varied components of contemporary urban life, albeit in very non-traditional spatial configurations? How does one bring to the Strip genuine innovations in environmental stewardship, so essential for the long term viability of Las Vegas to flourish?

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Map Patterns of Urban Development

Housing Typologies T

FANG YUE

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Regional Siting Plan

MONICA FRANKLIN

Signage Mechanisms and Travel Indexing on Site

View Arriving at Las Vegas International Airport

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Axonometric

Programmatic Scenarios

YUNHE HWANG

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Masterplan

Energy Components o

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MDESS THESIS

Architecture & Enterprise: p A History, y Practice, and Analysis y of Architectural Extensions into Real Estate NATHAN L. RICHARDSON | ADVISORS: RICK K PEISER, P EISER, BING WANG

This thesis presents a history, practice, and analysis of the integration of architecture and real estate activities. These distinct activities are most often conducted by independent companies, however a substantial number of current and past professionals in architecture have taken on real estate expertise and functions within their organizations. This investigation is particularly focused on those within the profession of architecture that have integrated real estate functions. It does not propose to address those in the development business that integrate architectural services. In order to gain insight into the key issues inherent in this model of business-practice, a number of research methods are used. First, a literature survey of historic precedent for this method of operation is conducted. Practitioners of particular relevance and their work are illuminated; these practitioners were at once responsible for conceiving, designing, and investing in any number of projects. Some of their noteworthy successes and failures are documented here. Second, a survey of current practitioners is conducted in order to identify variations on the businesses that are currently in existence. A number of relevant practitioners have been identiďŹ ed through literature review and interviews conducted by the author. It is proposed that these businesses can be categorized into four distinct models of integration. The models illuminated in this study are the Service Model, Alliance Model, Multilateral Model, and Unilateral Model. The primary distinction among these models is the level to which they integrate real estate expertise, project risk, organizational resources, and organizational identity. Third, key issues are addressed in an analytical framework for this integrated practice. Based on the historic and current practitioners review, a number of pertinent issues that are central to operating in this capacity are identiďŹ ed. Among these issues are Vision, Organization, Strategy, Products and Services, Identity, and Ethics. As appropriate, these issues are addressed in light of relevant business, real estate, and architectural practice literature.

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Integration of Disciplinary Roles

Otto Wagner

Among the key conclusions of this research and analysis are the following. First, the manner in which the profession of architecture constructs its historical narrative reinforces a narrow conception of practice. This is evident in the emphasis on design and theory at the expense of issues such as project financing and delivery. Second, the profession at large stands to gain from integrating a basic level of real estate expertise, even if many are not prepared to take on extensive real estate functions.

Third, for those that do pursue a hybrid enterprise, a clear vision and definition of purpose is essential. Among the key concepts identified in this research are environmental, economic, urban, social, theoretical, and typological objectives. Fourth, there are significant costs and benefits associated with integration that must be considered, even though many of these are inherently difficult to quantify. Fifth, architects who engage in the real estate marketplace as speculators must recognize their relative strength in product differentiation. Competing on a cost-leadership basis does not appear to be a likely path to success. Sixth, professionals must gauge their underlying loyalty to the profession, given the peculiar conflicts that are present when conducting in-house development work in conjunction with design services for third-party clients. Among the most acute issues are ethical considerations and potential conflicts of interest. Finally, additional research and writing would well serve those that may pursue these integrated models of practice. Even though architects can and should build expertise from distinct resources, such as those in real estate, business, and architecture literature, the confluence of activities presented by this integrated model of practice presents a range of issues that may be more effectively addressed through a similarly integrated body of literature.

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JOSEP LLUÍS SERT LECTURE

All About UD! RODOLFO MACHADO

APRIL 22, 2009 | EXCERPT

It is customary that the chairs of the various departments at the GSD deliver a lecture in the last year of their chairmanship, and the Josep Lluis Sert Lecture is the one given by the Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. This lecture is given in honor of Josep Lluis Sert, Dean of the Graduate School of Design from 1953 to 1969.

Introduction

I feel that we need to talk about fundamental aspects of urban design again because there have been many questions recently about its disciplinary status as well as about the nature of its product. What is it that it does and does not do?

Thus, I wish to go over certain issues I like–and know–about urban design and talk about them as clearly and personally as I can. These observations of mine come from a taste for urban design, a taste shaped by one’s background and one’s experiences, and I intend them to be introspective, honest, and uncompromising yet unconcerned with either convincing you or being “of the moment” in addition, the tone should be humble, since I find it ideologically impossible today to advertise one’s views as if they were universal panacea.

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Urban Design in Relation to Architecture, Planning, Culture and Power

Urban design finds itself somehow suspended between two disciplines, architecture and planning, and it’s deeply entangled with both, while culture and power are the fundamental constructs it lives with and it needs to respond to. Culture and power are the air urbanism breathes; the blood it needs to exist. Urbanism as a professional practice (the one I am interested in) cannot happen without those two constructs and references. Clients, regulatory codes, and financial arrangements, among other things, epitomize power for urban design. This is the kind of professional practice of urban design that I will talk about.

Urban Design and Architecture

In western culture, urban design has always been seen as part of architecture. Architecture is then the foundational knowledge upon which an urban designer is formed, yet architecture, while necessary, is not sufficient in the making of this persona. Over time, there has been an accumulation of knowledge over architecture; the sheer quantity of concomitant knowledge added to architecture has lead to the present situation when one needs to reassert again the role of architecture in the formation of the urban designer.

The disciplinary status of urban design is weak compared to architecture. It’s more diffuse and loosely structured. A clear definition of our practice eludes us. We will remain suspended between architecture and planning, and that’s all right. I mean, after all, why not? It’s a good conceptual space to be in.

I will speak about the Urban Design/Architecture relation in reference to the concepts of Autonomy, Experimentation and Authorship.

In architecture, perhaps one can still speak of autonomy (by which I mean a mechanism for the production of form that is self-referential, centered on itself and its history, conscious of its boundaries and related to its institutions). Clearly the question of autonomy in urban design is a much riskier subject. Autonomous urban design makes little sense, in fact, as a concept, since its socio-cultural role precludes such a conceit. Yet, Y you may ask why talk about autonomy today? I think it has appeared in the discourse again because of the architectural core embedded within urban design and the perceived danger of its dissolution.

Regarding experimentation, a completely different ethical lens distinguishes urban design from architecture. Its responsibility towards society acts as a repressive mechanism controlling the type of experiments that may lead to the production of urban form.

The complexities of authorship in urban design (which has always been an interdisciplinary practice) bring to the foreground questions of the appropriateness of creative freedom—or subjective expression—and, again, differ greatly from architecture.

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On Urban Design and Planning

Much has been said about this pair … rather than repeating it I prefer to add my own views on it. I like to think of physical planning as a script or an instructive text, which is always open to interpretation; a text with instructions for its own interpretation.

In other words, I like to conceive of planning as the provider of something akin to a musical score for urban design to interpret. As we all know, interpretations are of the utmost importance; they are immensely varied and always of their time, marked inexorably by the moment of their execution.

I see urban design and planning as a mutual dependence; urban design executed in the absence of planning can get in trouble and become incongruous. It is interesting to note that urban design can be good even if the planning on which it is based is not so (in the same way in which a good piece of urban design may contain poor architecture . . . or even no architecture at all, as a positive and exhilarating urbanity may not need to be supported by great works of architecture).

I like to say that planning incarnates through urban design, or that it attains corporeality through urban design and architecture.

On Urban Design and Culture

In the past, the relation between urban design and culture has been simpler, inasmuch as most designs were done locally. That is to say that there was a communion between the urbanist, the city, and the work produced on that city. T Two factors have impacted the present condition of the urban design/culture relation: the consolidation of the global world and the emergence of post-colonial studies.

After globalization, professional work becomes universalized (we work everywhere and nowhere) and with this fact a new problem emerges: the relationship between urban products conceived abroad by foreigners, and a cultural context unfamiliar to them.

After post-colonial studies—after we understood the ideological implications of condescension through the mimicking of local building practices and vernacular languages—the designer has become paralyzed by fears of wrongdoing, of patronizing, of colonizing again, of turning in a product that celebrates the “exotic” by ways all too consumable.

Thus, urban designers seem caught between, on the one hand appearing to be imposing their own values, and on the other as contributing to the production of local kitsch. We risk appearing as either despots or mercenaries.

I happen to believe that the ethical and responsible thing to do vis-à-vis this problem is first to confront it; to confront the iconographic dimension, as well as to confront the typological question, the question of the image, and the question of character in buildings and spaces. Second, one must attempt to resolve it through design. One must try to do this; it’s the only responsible thing to do. There may be an answer in a discreetly representational strategy.

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This kind of work is not really for everybody, because it requires a special sensitivity to read culture through its many manifestations, to see it in depth, to interpret, and then have the capacity to inform one’s work in urban design with such knowledge. Is this teachable? Perhaps not, unless there is a “vocational” base that includes this sensitivity. We can increase cultural awareness and appreciation of difference through a belief that difference is a good thing to preserve, and avoid the catastrophic result of sameness in a global world.

On Urban Design and Power

Urban design as a professional practice depends on power for its existence (as an artistic or utopian practice is of course independent from them). By power I mean political power as well as financial power. Democracy should take many forms if it is well honed with the specificities of the culture where it develops, but, in its purest form, it is not a reliable friend of urban design. Its endless discussions and exhausting approval processes by a mostly uninformed public routinely end up favoring blandness and conformity over creativity or just unexpected formal difference. Looking at what has been built in Boston over the Central Artery is a case in point. Consensus-building acts as a soporific, as a kind of normalizer that kills inventiveness or freshness. Conversely, centralized or less diffuse forms of power may act more effectively when they are knowledgeable, and conversant on the issue. Capital can, in fact, be friendly to urban design because “it gets things done,” as it says in its language, while being at the same time very mindful of potential risk. Capital imposes on the urban designer its own modus operandi. It is fast, and seemingly capricious. It is demanding, usually impatient, and allows little time to think, but that is what the context in which we operate requires.

Practice Lecture

278

Conclusion

I see urban design as the main practice involved in the construction of the city and the urban designer as the main actor in that practice. I will add that urban design produces urban form and urban form generates urbanity and urbanity is the most desirable social condition in which to live. I will add that urban design is a necessary and beautiful thing to do, and it is not easy; but it can be very rewarding to see it built and performing socially. I have hoped through my teaching to transmit this love for it.

Lecture Practice

RESEARCH SEMINAR

Building g Books LARS MĂœLLER

This course introduced students to the potentials of the book as a medium for the communication of architecture, landscape, and design.

Editorial conditions and design rules have changed since the book shares its formerly unique media position with new and challenging offers by digital media. The course analyzed the structural and functional differences between analogue and digital media, and their abilities and limits in the expression and communication of architectural atmosphere.

Short introductions featured the characteristics of the book as an object and its materials, the structure, the content, the handling of text and image, typography, composition, rhythm, and sequence. Students were encouraged to develop their own publication proposals with their own design and written material.

Practice Seminar

280

281

Seminar Practice

Excerpts from Enabling Politics: Critical Notes on Modernist Persistence and Provocation

JUSTIN FOWLER

Practice Seminar

282

Excerpts from DEAF

ANDREW LANTZ

283

Seminar Practice

QUILIAN RIANO

Practice Seminar

284

Core Architecture I INSTRUCTORS: PRESTON SCOTT COHEN (COORDINATOR), PAUL ANDERSEN, ERIC HOWELER, MARIANA IBANEZ, DANIEL LOPEZ-PEREZ, LLUÍS ORTEGA, INGEBORG ROCKER FALL 2008

In this studio, architectural conventions and typologies were taught by means of anomalies: extreme or exceptional conditions of space and form that elicit a heightened awareness of the norms that are customarily taken for granted. The aim was to bring architecture to heightened consciousness and to confront it at a deeply conceptual level while learning the fundamental tools of the architect’s craft.

The first four projects were each conceived as a conundrum, a seemingly insoluble or paradoxical problem that demands ingenuity and inventiveness. The final project, “Trippled Dormer” synthesized the themes of the previous four.

The “Elevator Intervention” asked students to insert the continuously extruded circulatory device in a building composed of remarkably interlocked volumes, passages, and staircases. Though the context could accommodate the extruded spatial element, the student was required to reconcile the conflict that necessarily ensued.

“Building Between Plans” began with two plans with no discernible relationship.

The student had to “find” the single building that could contain the two plans, despite their discontinuities. “Building From Without” involved the exterior of a building for which there was no interior information available. The building’s envelope must nevertheless be made to produce evidence that it was inextricably bound to an interior. “The Hidden Room” project required both producing a space and making it go away. In each project, the interpretation of a specific idea elicited the processes by which it was represented in architectural drawings and in three-dimensional form.

285

Architecture I Core

MISATO ODANAKA

MAGDALENA NAYDEKOVA

BRIAN MILITANA

JEREMY JIH

Core Architecture I

286

Model

Axonometric View

Structural Scheme

CARL D’APOLITO-DWORKIN

287

Architecture I Core

Exploded Axonometric

mirror

ip/rotate

skylight

window

door

Model

BEN BRADY

Core Architecture I

288

3D Model

Project Model

289

Architecture I Core

Interior and Exterior Envelopes

JEREMY JIH

Interior and Exterior Envelopes

Core Architecture I

290

Interior and Exterior Envelopes

Interior and Exterior Envelopes

291

Architecture I Core

Axonometric View

Model Views

MAGDALENA NAYDEKOVA

Core Architecture I

292

Axonometric View

JEFFERY LABOSKEY

293

Model

Architecture I Core

Floor Plans

STEWART GOHRINGER

Core Architecture I

294

Model View Model Views

295

Architecture I Core

MAGDALENA NAYDEKOVA

Core Architecture I

296

Core Architecture II INSTRUCTORS: MICHAEL MEREDITH (COORDINATOR), PAUL ANDERSEN, DANIELLE ETZLER, ERIC HOWELER, MARIANA IBANEZ, INGEBORG ROCKER SPRING 2009

The pedagogical agenda for second semester was to expand upon the techniques and methodologies presented in the first semester such that students could develop an understanding of the complex relationship between form, space, structure, and materiality. Students sought to embody, frustrate, and motivate these techniques and methodologies of the architectural object with the performance of materiality—mass, acoustics, visuality, tactility, and structure.

The semester was divided into 3 assignments: Figurative System

Design a load bearing masonry structure based on the module of a singular material that produces a material object with an inside and an outside, a stair that allows access between the inside and outside, an occupiable exterior space, an interior space that has a door opening and a place for 2 people to sit. The proposal utilizes a singular material as a tectonic.

Discrete Seriality, Set Theory

Design an integrated system of book stacks and reading carrels within a thickened wall/facade that is at maximum 15’ thick. Within this space, there should be three material systems that operate at different proportional scales from the building scale to the intimate body furniture scale. Integrate these as a single set with three coherent subsets of material and organizational logic.

Rare Books Library

Design a rare books library in downtown Boston with an exterior urban space (or landscape) that is open to the public. This library is for scholarly research and includes a conservation laboratory for early American printed manuscripts and documents. It also has a public auditorium for lectures, a gallery to display the documents, and a cafe.

297

Architecture II Core

STEWART GOHRINGER, DARIN MANO, JEFFERY LABOSKEY, SUNG PARK, JESSICA VAUGHN, HYUN TEK YOON

Compilation

Core Architecture II

298

Model

Plan

JEFFERY LABOSKEY

Elevation

299

Architecture II Core

Models

Exploded Axonometric

HYUN TEK YOON

Core Architecture II

300

BEN BRADY

Programming Diagram

Section

301

Architecture II Core

Exploded E xploded Axonometric A xonometric xonom

JJESSICA E SSI SSICA CA VAUGHN VAUGH UG N

Core Architecture II

302

Perspective

Perspective

Model

303

Architecture II Core

STEWART GOHRINGER

Model JESSICA VAUGHN

Axonometric View

AARON O GOL GOLDSTEIN GO DS S TEIN

Axonometric View

Core Architecture II

304

Plans

Sections

Perspective

CARL D’APOLITO-DWORKIN

305

Architecture II Core

Plan

Axonometric View

JORDAN MACTAVISH

Section

Core Architecture II

306

Perspective

Programming Pro ogramming Diagram

307

Architecture II Core

CARL D’APOLITO-DWORKIN

Core Architecture II

308

Technology Automation T and Mass Customization From the student initiated invention of a solar-responsive lightweight wall system to the serial potentials of digitally-driven design strategies, this chapter explores the increasingly intertwined dialogue between design process, fabrication techniques, and the formal possibilities they enable.

RESEARCH

OSnap! p LEE-SU HUANG, GREGORY THOMAS SPAW STUDIO

The Gina Studio FRANK BARKOW, CHRISTOPHER BANGLE

Reticulated Form: United States Air Force Academyy JOE MACDONALD THESIS

Responsive p Space p YEN TING CHO RESEARCH

Construction Automation MARTIN BECHTHOLD THESIS

A Developable p Lightweight g g Campus p JESSICA LISAGOR RESEARCH

Mobile Information Unit

309

STUDENT RESEARCH

OSnap! p LEE-SU HUANG, GREGORY THOMAS SPAW

Osnap! focused on the integration of old and new technologies to effectively utilize the strengths of both digital fabrication and mass production techniques. Digital fabrication ensures consistent precision and quality of the master molds while allowing for fast turnaround in iterative design development or testing and proofing of new concepts. Inspired by commercial plastic packaging, the traditional vacuforming technique utilized facilitates immediate testing and feedback for development of the molds while also allowing swift mass-production of units in numbers great enough for an effective evaluation of performance.

The resulting installation employs the inherent thermoforming capabilities of PETG plastic laminated with laser-etched dichroic film, which is fashioned through the use of CNC milled molds. These similar units are in turn tectonically joined through their innate geometry without the use of foreign fasteners or joinery. The design incorporates snap joints, folds, friction fit button joints, and cap tension slip joints into one cohesive formwork. The dichroic film creates a multitude of effects depending on intensity, angle, and characteristics of the lighting condition it is exposed to, interacting and creating a dialogue with its environment.

The research opens possibilities regarding the fast deployment of such units on an architectural scale, with advantages such as recyclability, light weight, flat packing, swift assembly, variable geometry, and variable opacity of the material depending on the laminate or utilization of inherently opaque plastics.

Technology Research

310

311

Research Technology

Molds for the Parts

Assembly Process

LEE-SU HUANG, GREGORY THOMAS SPAW

Technology Research

312

Detail

313

Research Technology

OPTION STUDIO

The Gina Studio FRANK BARKOW, CHRISTOPHER BANGLE

GINA is an acronym for a formal and functional design philosoph philosophy hy based on an emerging technology developed by engineers and designers at BMW Group. The “GINA Light Visionary Model” is a radical departure to how a car’s body and interior, its outer and inner surfaces are conceived and produced. Replacing sheet metal with an elastic fabric has enabled BMW to envision a car’s surfaces surfaaces as something that can change.

While this is a concept that has yet to go into production for BMW, BM MW, it is an idea that resonates well beyond car design. It is a technology that challenges architecture’s very essence as something fixed and static. It challenges what a house should look like iconographically. Form and space as a fixed construct as well we ell as our physical body’s relationship to it are states that can be modified simultaneously and instantaneously.

The conceptual vehicle for this studio was a prototypical suburban house. Our goal was to ask what bearing an outside technology (GINA) could have haave on this building type. We also considered the enduring relationship between the e car and the suburban house. Can we move beyond the 2-car attached garage? Is there a more integrated approach as car and house begin to use similar productio on and aesthetical production tactics? What does this mean in terms of infrastructure: roads, la and-use, highways, land-use, streets, cul-de-sacs, and the driveway?

Technology Studio

314

315

Lecture Authorship

Kit of Parts Fabrication/Assembly

KENT K ENT GO GOULD GOU U LD

After the Storm

Animation Frames

Technology Studio

IGNACIO GONZALEZ

316

Aggregation A ggregation of Cells over Highway

JUSTIN CHEN

T Typical Cell Tectonics

View of New Road

Inside View of Courtyard House

317

Studio Technology

OPTION STUDIO

Reticulated Form: United States Air Force Academyy JOE MACDONALD

This research and design studio focused on parametric explorations of reticulation: division, marking, and assembly with the intention of forming a network. Reticulated surfaces—like the patterned skin of a giraffe or a python—have non-repeating patterns comprised of lines and surfaces that generate networks conforming to the predetermined programming of genetics. Using this process of form-making as inspiration, our work with reticulation aimed to systematically engage building and landscape as self-generating, multi-dimensionally connective systems.

The site for the studio was the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, designed by Walter Netsch in the 1950’s. Netsch’s own ‘Field Theory’ is at work here insofar as a series of cellular structures delineate the patterned MAT buildings and campus.

MAT building is an open-ended system that is inherently generative; its forms repeat at different scales and its regular, open assembly of spaces provide an environment that reflects and reinforces behavioral protocols of marching synchrony and flight formation that, in this case, its military mission dictates. Characteristically, this dynamic of repetition in form and motion suggests that MAT buildings can proliferate MAT and evolve endlessly. Y Yet M AT building as it was conceived in the 1950’s was limited by the manufacturing tools and processes of the day; its cells are standardized and rectangular in all dimensions.

Exploring reticulation as a significant evolution of the rectilinear formal language of MAT into a more open-ended universe of form-making, we introduced a non-standard building type into the Academy.

Technology Studio

318

319

Studio Technology

Model

ANTHONY DI MARI

Model

Technology Studio

HAOHAO ZHU

320

Longitudinal Section

Model

ANDREI GHEORGHE

Plan

321

Studio Technology

MDESS THESIS

Responsive p Space: p How Virtual Layers y of Mixed Realityy Augment g Spatial p Qualityy YEN-TING CHO | ADVISOR: ALLEN SAYEGH

This thesis explores and proposes possible applications of responsive space. Following the history of Human-Computer Interface (HCI), from Graphic User Interface to Tangible T User Interface, the applications serve as possible examples of the next generation of HCI: Natural User Interface. Through designing and analyzing interactions that provide both experience and function in various kinds of space, this thesis also seeks to obtain possible answers to the question of how mixed reality makes a space responsive.

The projects presented in this research, consisting of computer processing, projectors, and webcam, all support the interaction between the virtual layer and physical environment, as well as between mixed reality and its users. The three projects presented in this thesis are “Navigating Broadacre City,” “WHO cares!” (for Second International Conference on Critical Digital at Harvard), and “Ping Pong in Mobile Information Unit” (for GSD Open House).

The most important and comprehensive project was Navigating Broadacre City, which was designed to present the plan of “Broadacre City” in the exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward in Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Y The concept was to allow visitors to move their bodies and navigate through Broadacre City as if they were looking at the city from the top of a mountain. There were two layers of interaction; the first was a white dot. Visitors could see the landscape through the dot, which served as a kind of telescope. The second layer was Broadacre City itself. I connected all the photos to create a large landscape of the city. A projector on the ceiling projected the strip of photo and the dot on a painted dark-gray wall; a webcam was attached next to the projecting lens, which detected the visitors’ movement from above. For instance, if visitors moved from the left to the right, the dot would follow them. When visitors approach the projection, the dot would come down and its size would shrink to focus on a smaller area, as the projection was then above visitors’ eye level. In addition, if visitors create a larger amount of movement, the dot would bump more violently. I have assigned all these movements on a single dot to make it look more vivid.

Technology MDesS Thesis

322

These projects and tests have allowed others to understand more about responsive space and have sparked dialogues concerning the best application of responsive space, since each generation of HCI has its own strengths and is skilled at dealing with a particular set of tasks. People would begin to see that in addition to conveying existing meaning, creating new meaning is an important process in the design of responsive space. According to the concept of the special sense of the media, shaped by Zurich cultural historian Giaco Schiesser, it is presumed that all media have some special character and not only transmit messages, but are also involved in the content of the message. Responsive space provides new ways of thinking and new models of experience.

Moreover, when new forms of “natural” and “indirect” interactions develop, the consequences of their use in the public sphere raise important issues for the society.

While technology shapes the new meaning of our lives, the community of users also shapes the progression of responsive space. We expect the experiments to enhance people’s understanding of mixed reality and strengthen the connection between the study of Human-Computer Interface and architecture. Considering the increasing significance of digital culture, we expect this research to make a significant contribution to the research and practice of mixed reality.

323

MDesS Thesis Technology

RESEARCH SEMINAR

Construction Automation MARTIN BECHTHOLD

Offered for the second time this year, this seminar introduced students to emerging technologies under the broad umbrella of construction automation. An extension of computer-aided design and manufacturing techniques covered in GSD 6317, the seminar introduced the principles of robotics and automated systems in the context of architectural construction, with reference to product design and other industries.

Lecture topics included a historic overview and an introduction to different types of robotic systems, automation systems, and their elements. T Techniques and strategies for programming industrial robots were introduced, including the use of ofine simulation, scripting, direct programming, and programming environments with graphical user interfaces. Automation concepts within design development environments were also explored, and particular focus was given to the partly automated generation of robot programs.

The experimental part of the class was designed as a collaborative workshop and laboratory. The goal was to create a single robotic installation that would be deďŹ ned collaboratively. This installation would serve as a microcosm through which general issues of robotic fabrication and robotic control were explored. Students were able to explore particular interests within the framework of the installation (e.g. scripting and programming, design for robotic handling, fabrication, materials, and others).

Immersion experiments served as skill builders in robotic fabrication, and both industrial robots were used—the small material handling system as well as the large robotic mill/water jet.

Technology Research

324

325

Research Technology

Unit Production Process

SOLA GRANTHAM, RACHEL VROMAN, JUSTIN LAVALLEE, JESSICA ROSENKRANTZ, BRETT ALBERT, YA Y IR KESHET YAIR

Technology Research

326

Unit Production Process

Final Presentation

327

Research Technology

THESIS

A Developable p Lightweight g g Campus p and the Fabrication of Knowledge g JESSICA LISAGOR

This investigation looks to perforation and folding as a lighter, cheaper, faster manufacturing strategy for differentiated deployable architectural modules.

Beyond these efďŹ ciencies, folding has the added implication for architecture that it merges surface and frame.

This thesis revisits the mobile unit and its aggregation with ingenious dexterity.

Gently pinched, the doubly-curving form is punctuated by highly intelligent oval lenses that operate to maximize the capture of light. Parametrically designed, each lens and its modulated geometry clip effortlessly onto the constantly changing course of the mobile unit’s master geometry.

Joe MacDonald, Thesis Advisor Technology Thesis

328

329

Thesis Technology

Initial Investigations

Module Type T B

Top View of Project

JESSICA LISAGOR

Technology Thesis

330

Aggregation of Classroom ConďŹ gurations

Unit Model

331

Thesis Technology

RESEARCH PROJECT

Mobile Information Unit RUSSELL GOULD, JAIME HERNANDEZ, WEI BAO ADVISOR: MARTIN BECHTHOLD CONSULTANTS: STEPHEN HICKEY, ALLAN SAYEGH, DANIEL SCHODEK, MARCO STEINBERG, KOSTAS TERZIDIS. TEAM: BEN BEHIN, YEN-TING CHO, JUTA CINCO, ANTHONY DI MARI, DAVID GALE, ANA GONZALES, SABEEN HASSAN, MICHELLE MILLER, MASAYOSHI OKA, CHIS PARLATO, DIDO TSIGARIDI, ROSA URBANOG, RACHEL VROMAN.

The Mobile Information Unit (MIU) was designed by a team of GSD students in response to a request for proposals for a mobile kiosk design by the Harvard University Art Museums. The MIU incorporates a pixilated fiber-optics display that affords the opportunity for interactive play through the use of built-in sensors.

The MIU is able to specifically respond to site conditions by unfolding in two distinct ways. It can be positioned as an elevated-sheltered alcove with one panel open, or as an elevated corridor with both panels open. Each of these configurations creates a media threshold for people to enjoy. By opening the panels, the MIU extends into the landscape engaging any given site. The Mobile Information Unit offers three levels of communication: abstract information, general information, and specific information based on user input.

As the Harvard Art Museums reorganize and expand, the content shown on each of the MIU’s information delivery modes can be altered to suit the changing needs of the organization. In addition, the overall system could also host a variety of community or student generated content. Thus, the physical aspects of the MIU can serve as a platform for artistic-digital expression for students at the University and for the community at large.

Technology Research

332

333

Research Technology

Fiber Optic Assembly Process

Fiber Optic Assembly Process

Technology Research

334

Unit Configurations C on nfigurations

Initial Panel P Concept

The MIU Next xt to the Graduate School of Design Building Building

335

Research Technology

QUILIAN RIANO

Technology Research

336

Appendix GSD Publications Student Group Activities Faculty/Staff List Imprint

337

Appendix

GSD Publications 2008 – 2009

A View on Harvard GSD Vol I Tank / GSD

GSD ‘08 Platform Actar / GSD

Urban Design Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders, eds.

University of Minnesota Press

New Geographies 1: After Zero Neyran Turan and Stephen Ramos, eds.

Harvard University Press

Dance Space: Choreographing a Mobile Theatre Werner Sobek, Martin Bechthold, Christine Lemaitre, Dewi Schonbeck, eds.

Harvard University Press

Harvard Design Magazine Fall/Winter

GSD Platform 2 Publications

Harvard Design Magazine Spring/Summer

338

Harvard Design Magazine Spring/Summer 2009

339

Publications GSD Platform 2

GSD Platform 2 Publications

340

341

Publications GSD Platform 2

GSD Platform 2 Publications

342

343

Publications GSD Platform 2

Student Group Activities

SEPT

OCT

NOV

INFLATABLES

DEC

Installation:

POP! Contemporary Street Fashion in Asia

GSD Ping Pong

ASIA GSD

Tournament Fall Finals

Film Screening: Fi The Garden Th

LAND GSD

Jiang Wu,

Shanghai, A Place Where eE East Meets West, Past Meets Future

LOEB FELLOWS

Stefan Lehman,

GREEN DESIGN

Green Urbanism: Regenerating the Post-Industrial ria City

Film Screening: The Garden

SOCIAL CHANGE AND ACTIVISM

Taller 13, 3, Francisco sc Javier Rodriguez, ue ez, Living Roofs and d Four Short Stories and an No Conclusions on ns other Projects ts

LATIN GSD

Joseph Walsh, h, materials, purity, structure, form m

EUROPEAN DESIGN CIRCLE

Reception for Kate Orf R Lecture Le

WOMAN IN DESIGN

Jiang Wu, Ji Shanghai, A Place Where East Meets S West, Past Meets Future W

Laurence Liauw, w, New Urban China a

CHINA GSD

GSD PHD

Nat Nathaniel Furster, Designing in the D es Radical Tropics: R ad FUSTER + Partners Recent Work

Jinnai Hidenobu, u De u, Devin Fore, Chris Klemek, C Reading the Urban Landscape e Th The Myth Reversed: Moholy-Nagy, New LEFT Urbanism: N of Tokyo: Ecology and History r Pe ry Perspective and the New Vision The Th Politics of Design in the Age or “People Power”

STUDENTS

Yoonjin Park + Jungyoon Kim, Yo 8 Years After: Recent Works of PARKKIM

KOREA GSD

HOUSING GSD

JOINT CENTER FOR HOUSING STUDIES

Karl Case, Katherine e Coman and A.Barton, n, House Prices and the e Current Financial Crisis

Eric Belsky + Rachel Drews, Er State of the Nation’s Housing Report St L Le Lewis Ranieri, Jeremiah Eck, Je Revolution in R Re Why art matters in W n Mortgage Finance ho M home design?

Gregory Ingram, G Urbanization in China U

URBAN MOBILITIES

LANDSCAPE LUNCHBOX SERIES

Antje Stokman, n, Beyond Infrastructural Performance: e: Designing Water-Adaptive Landscapes es

STUDENT LECTURE SERIES REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT CLUB

CLUB MEDINA

HARVARD URBAN PLANNING ORGANIZATION

GSD Platform 2 Student Group Activities

Anita A a Berrizbeitia

Sean Corriel, S el, Informal Drainage ra ge Strategiess Accra, Ghana Ac na Andrew B Bryan, n, Monica Franklin, M kli The Swiss Army Solution: olu n: Implementing Systems-Based Im gS tem The Design Corps Bus Shelter - N NOLA LA Regional Planning Re ann in Cape Cod od Ronald Altoon, n, Esteban Un Undurraga, Es Building a Global al Sustainability S bili ili Strategies Practice and Surviving a Recession on for the Vancouver Winter fo nc Olympic Village lla Kathryn M Moore re

Makram El Kadi + Ziad Jamaleddine, e, (Dis)Orientalism, Lecture by Left eft F Film: C Contested Streets

344

JAN

FEB

MAR

APR

MAY

Bushwaffle Demos @Ecological Urbanism Film Series:

GSD Ping Pong

Where am I? On Place and Placelessness

Tournament Spring Finals

Panel Discussion: n: HighWaterLine: Visualizing g Climate Change e Albie Sachs, Art and Justice:

The Art of South Africa’s New Constitutional Court

Panel Pa an Discussion: o on Camilla Ween: n: Mapping/Networks: Map M w wo Exploring the Intersection London’s Changing in Ecological Footprint, t, Media, Public off M lic i process + Design Sustainable Design Initiatives tai es Panel Discussions: s: Beyond Generalizations, s, Freya Bardell and Brian Howe, Fr Implementing Sustainability ty D Designing Awareness: Lessons from Small Practice S

Jo os Ferrando do + Pedro Garcia, Daniel Zarza, a Josep a, Guallart, Fog ArquitectesVicente cte Vi From Urban Design to o Fog H Hyperhabitat: Reprogramming the World Landscape Construction o on Julien de Smedt, t, 100landschaftsarchitektur, ite ur, Embracing Diversity ty H ge He Over the Hedge

B Blanca Lleo, Contemporary Housing, C Reflections and Projects R

Discussion with Homa Farjadi adi

Carlos Sa Sambricio, C S a, Arindam Dutta, Ju e Vi Juan de Villaneuva and Classical re, e Mammoths, Inc: Architecture, Architecture: The Prado Museum in Madrid A ec c ctu bt Cartesian, and the Debt Symposium: Sym Landscape Provocations and Practices: s: Gary Hildebrand + Chris Reed e ed Ca Cambridge Talks III-Mediated Spaces Landscape Provocations ns and Practices: s: Martha Schwartz t + Mirko Zardini tz ni Jisop Han, an, D Doojin Hwang, Transforming Seoul - The New w S Seoul’s Quest for New Identity Songdo City ty Greg Russ, G Housing and Community Development H Policy in the Post-Bush Era Po

Jo Palmieri, John H Housing and Community Development in the Post-Bush Era

Symposium: S Housing Cities H

Georg Gartner, er, Ya Yasmine Abbas, Location Based Services, Real Time Cities and d ne neo-nomads: (dis)place x (re)locate 0 Webmapping 2.0 S g + Mobitlity on Demand Smart Biking Jane Choi Ja Anthony Acciavatti, An ci ti, Natalie Pohlman, n, Hydraulic Pastoralism: Hy as alis Transects of the Ecosan for Non-formal al Ganga-Jamuna G un Doab, oa India K Smith mi Ken Settlements ts

Solomon Garber S

Matthew Martinez, z, The Art of Condo Conversion n

Ken Foster K Jair Ja Lynch Ly

Film: m: West Beirut ut Film: m: Film: m: Children en of Heaven en The Edge of Heaven en Book Release/Panel Discussion: n: “City Bound” with Susan Fainstein, Tim Love e and Steven Bass Warner er LUNCH TALK

345

LECTURE

FILM SCREENING

Amale Andros, A 49 Cities 4 D David Harvey, Th Urban Roots of the Fiscal Crisis The

OTHER

Student Group Activities GSD Platform 2

Drew Gilpin Faust President of Harvard University HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

Mohsen Mostafavi Dean of the Faculty of Design Patricia J. Roberts Executive Dean Preston Scott Cohen Chair, Department of Architecture Niall G. Kirkwood Chair Department of Landscape Architecture Rololfo Machado Co-Chair, Department of Urban Planning and Design Jerold S. Kayden Co-Chair, Department of Urban Planning and Design Eve Blau Director, Master in Architecture Degree Programs Judith Grant-Long Director, Master in Urban Planning Degree Program Christian Werthman Director, Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs Richard. M. Sommer Director, Master of Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program Director, Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Program Antoine Picon Director, Doctorate Programs Martin Bechthold Co-Director, Master in Design Studies Program Sanford Kwinter Co-Director, Master in Design Studies Program

FACULTY OF DESIGN

Alan Altshuler Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor in Urban Policy and Planning and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor John Beardsley Adjunct Professor of Landscape Architecture Martin Bechthold Professor of Architectural Technology Eve Blau Adjunct Professor in Architectural History Michael Blier Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Giuliana Bruno Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, FAS Joan Busquets Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design Marco Cenzatti Lecturer in Urban Planning Holly Clarke Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Preston Scott Cohen Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture and Chair of the Department of Architecture Felipe Correa Assistant Professor of Urban Design Leland Cott Adjunct Professor of Urban Design Margaret Crawford Professor of Urban Design and Planning Theory Pierre de Meuron Arthur Rotch Design Critic in Architecture Peter Del Tredici Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Richard Dimino Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Susan Fainstein Professor of Urban Planning Richard T.T. Forman Professor of Advanced Environmental Studies in the Field of Landscape Ecology Jose Gomez-Ibanez Derek Bok Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Toni Griffin Adjunct Associate Professor of Urban Planning K. Michael Hays Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory Jacques Herzog Arthur Rotch Design Critic in Architecture Gary Hilderbrand Adjunct Professor of Landscape Architecture John Hong Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture Timothy Hyde Assistant Professor of Architecture Mariana Ibanez Assistant Professor of Architecture Dorothee Imbert Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Kenneth Kao Lecturer in Architecture Hanif Kara Pierce Anderson Lecturer in Creative Engineering Jerold S. Kayden Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design and Co-Chair Department of Urban Planning and Design Niall Kirkwood Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture Remment Koolhaas Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design Alex Krieger Professor in Practice of Urban Design Sanford Kwinter Term Professor of Architecture GSD Platform 2 Credits

346

Mark Laird Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape Architecture Andrea Leers Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Jonathan Levi Adjunct Professor of Architecture Judith Grant Long Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Joe MacDonald Associate Professor of Architecture Rodolfo Machado Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design and Co-Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design Anne McGhee Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Paula Meijerink Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Michael Meredith Associate Professor of Architecture Laura Miller Associate Professor of Architecture Rafael Moneo Josep Lluis Sert Professor in Architecture Toshiko Mori Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture Mohsen Mostafavi Dean of the Faculty of Design, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design Farshid Moussavi Professor in Practice of Architecture Mark Mulligan Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture Erika Naginski Associate Professor of Architectural History Paul Nakazawa Lecturer in Architecture Lluis Ortega Assistant Professor of Architecture Richard Peiser Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development Antoine Picon Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology Spiro Pollalis Professor of Design Technology and Management Christoph Reinhart Associate Professor of Architectural Technology Ingeborg Rocker Assistant Professor of Architecture Peter Rose Adjunct Professor of Architecture Peter G. Rowe Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Brent Ryan Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Carl M. Sapers Adjunct Professor of Studies in Professional Practice in Architecture A. Hashim Sarkis Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies Allen Sayegh Lecturer in Architecture Daniel Schodek Kumagai Research Professor of Architectural Technology Thomas Schroepfer Associate Professor of Architecture Matthias Schuler Adjunct Professor of Environmental Technology Martha Schwartz Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Mack Scogin Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture Jorge Silvetti Nelson Robinson Jr. Professor of Architecture Richard M. Sommer Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Christine Smith Robert C. and Marian K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History Carl Steinitz Alexander and Victoria Wiley Research Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning Marco Steinberg Associate Professor of Architecture John R. Stilgoe Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape Development Kostas Terzidis Associate Professor of Architecture Maryann Thompson Adjunct Professor of Architecture Matthew Urbanski Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Michael Van Valkenburgh Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Charles Waldheim Professor of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture Christian Werthmann Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Jay Wickersham Lecturer in Architecture T. Kelly Wilson Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture Martin Zogran Assistant Professor of Urban Design

347

Credits GSD Platform 2

VISTING FACULTY

Paul Andersen Design Critic in Architecture Inaki Abalos Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor in Architecture Frank Apeseche Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design William Apgar Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Sierra Bainbridge Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Christopher Bangle Design Critic in Architecture Frank Barkow Design Critic in Architecture Eric Belsky Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Conrad Bercah Design Critic in Architecture Andre Bideau Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Brian Blaesser Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Stefano Boeri Design Critic in Architecture Eric Bunge Design Critic in Architecture Scott Carman Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Armando Carbonell Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Steven Cecil Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design Jane Choi Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Elizabeth Colburn Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Nazneen Cooper Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Paul Cote Lecturer in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design Gareth Doherty Instructor in Landscape Architecture Winka Dubbeldam Visiting Practice Professor of Architecture Stephen Ervin Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Danielle Etzler Design Critic in Architecture Scheri Fultineer Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Daniel Forster Teaching Associate in Architecture Andreas Georgoulias Lecturer in Architecture Shauna Gillies-Smith Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Matthew Gordy Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Alison Hirsch Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Max Hirsh Instructor in Architecture Mimi Hoang Design Critic in Architecture Eric Hรถweler Design Critic in Architecture Christopher Hoxie Lecturer in Architecture Louisa Hutton Design Critic in Architecture Florian Idenburg Design Critic in Architecture Catherine Ingraham Visiting Professor in Architecture Richard Jennings Lecturer in Architecture Virginia Johnson Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Wes Jones Design Critic in Architecture Jan Jungclaus Instructor in Architecture Paul Kassabian Design Critic in Architecture Brian Kenet Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Matthew Kiefer Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Wooyoung Kimm Lecturer in Architecture Robert Lane Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design Samuel Lasky Design Critic in Architecture Michael Lee Lecturer in Landscape Architecture George L. Legendre Design Critic in Architecture Mia Lehrer Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Daniel Lopez-Perez Design Critic in Architecture Timothy Macfarlane Lecturer in Architecture John Macomber Lecturer in Architecture Kathryn Madden Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design Kaki Martin Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Wilson Martin Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Fernando de Mello Franco Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Glenn Mueller Visiting Professor in Urban Planning and Design GSD Platform 2 Credits

348

Lars Müller Lecturer in Architecture Ciro Najle Design Critic in Architecture Ken Tadashi Oshima Visiting Assistant Professor in Architecture Katharine Parsons Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Anna Pla Catala Design Critic in Architecture Mahadev Raman Design Critic in Architecture Joshua Prince-Ramus Design Critic in Architecture Stephen Ramos Instructor in Urban Planning and Design Elizabeth Randall Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Luis Rodriguez Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Chris Reed Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Nicolas Retsinas Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Robyn Reed Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Cherilyn Ruane Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Maura Rockcastle Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Matthias Sauerbruch Design Critic in Architecture Michael Schroeder Lecturer in Architecture Shohei Shigematsu Design Critic in Architecture Dirk Sijmons Visiting Professor in Environmental Design Werner Sobek Visiting Professor in Architecture Laura Solano Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Julie Snow Design Critic in Architecture Kathy Spiegelman Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design Ken Smith Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Byron Stigge Design Critic in Landscape Architecture James Stockard Lecturer in Housing Studies Thomas Sugrue Visiting Professor in Urban Planning and Design Dido Tsigaridi Instructor in Architecture Neyran Turan Instructor in Urban Planning and Design Sylvia Winter Design Critic in Landscape Architecture William Valletta Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Juan Carlos Vargas-Moreno Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Bing Wang Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Cameron Wu Lecturer in Architecture Mirko Zardini Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design Leonard Zax Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design STAFF

Jane Acheson Dean’s Office Patricia Alves Executive Education Administration Robert Angilly Frances Loeb Library Karen Antill Urban Planning and Design Alla Armstrong Academic Finance Office Lauren Baccus Human Resources Kermit Francis Baker Joint Center for Housing Studies Pamela H Baldwin Joint Center for Housing Studies Lauren L Beath Finance Office P. Todd Belton Computer Resources Sue Boland Computer Resources Dan F Borelli Exhibitions Stacey Buckley Executive Education Administration Leslie Burke Dean’s Office Kevin Cahill Building Services Bonnie Campbell Development and Alumni Relations Anna Cimini Computer Resources Doug Francis Cogger Computer Resources Ellen Colleran Urban Planning and Design

349

Credits GSD Platform 2

Kent Colton Joint Center for Housing Studies Sean Kelliher Conlon Student Services Anne Creamer Career Services Andrea Croteau Department of Architecture Maria Tina T da Rosa Frances Loeb Library Mary Daniels Frances Loeb Library Zhu Xiao Di Joint Center for Housing Studies Sarah Dickinson Frances Loeb Library Rachel Drew Joint Center for Housing Studies John Driscoll Joint Center for Housing Studies Kathryn Eaton Human Resources Barbara Elfman Advanced Studies Program Elizabeth Mary England Joint Center for Housing Studies Stephen McTee Ervin Computer Resources Maria Angela Fatouros Computer Resources Heather Gallagher Executive Education Administration Keith A Gnoza Student Services Meryl Golden Career Services Desiree Goodwin Frances Loeb Library Irina Gorstein Frances Loeb Library Hal Gould Computer Resources Norton Greenfeld Development and Alumni Relations Arin Gregorian Academic Finance Office Deborah L Grohe Building Services Gail Gustafson Student Services Mark Hagen Computer Resources Barry J Harper Building Services Jill Harrington Student Services Amanda Heighes Publications Jackie B Hernandez Joint Center for Housing Studies Ariel Herwitz Department of Architecture Stephen Hickey Building Services Megan Homan Development and Alumni Relations Maggie Janik Computer Resources Anne Jeffko Human Resources Nancy Jennings Executive Education Administration Deborah Johansen External Relations Pilar Jordan Academic Finance Office Johanna Kasubowski Frances Loeb Library Adam Kellie Frances Loeb Library Brooke King Administration and Academic Programs Linda Ruth Kitch Frances Loeb Library Karen Kittredge Finance Office Jeffrey L Klug Career Discovery Grace Kulegian Landscape Architecture Mary Lancaster Joint Center for Housing Studies Kevin Lau Frances Loeb Library Sharon Lembo Real Estate Academic Initiative Mary MacLean Finance Office Mike A McGrath Faculty Planning Margaret Meaney Department of Architecture Karin Min Development and Alumni Relations Margaret Moore de Chicojay Executive Education Administration Corlette Moore McCoy Executive Education Administration Maria Moran Urban Planning and Design Maria Murphy Student Services Geri Sue Nederhoff Student Services Page Nelson Frances Loeb Library Natalie Newcom External Relations

GSD Platform 2 Credits

350

Meg Nipson Joint Center for Housing Studies Brad Niskanen Computer Resources Trevor D O’Brien Building Services Dorothy Pacheco Student Services Hannah Peters External Relations Jackie Piracini Administration and Academic Programs Alix Reiskind Frances Loeb Library Ann Renauer Finance Office Carlos Reyes Student Services Nela Richardson Joint Center for Housing Studies Patricia J Roberts Administration and Academic Programs Meghan Ryan Harvard Design Magazine William S Saunders Harvard Design Magazine Paul Scannell Building Services Betsy Schwartz Computer Resources Emily Scudder Frances Loeb Library Laura Story Snowdon Student Services Shannon Stecher Exhibitions Olga Borisovna Strakhov Frances Loeb Library Aimee Taberner Landscape Architecture/Administration and Academic Programs Kelly Teixeira Student Services Kathan Tracy Development and Alumni Relations Laurel Trayes Joint Center for Housing Studies Jennifer Vallone Finance Office Edna Van Saun Development and Alumni Relations Melissa Vaughn Publications Sally U Young Loeb Fellowship Program Ines Maria Zalduendo Frances Loeb Library Mendel Mingteh Zou Frances Loeb Library

IMAGE CREDITS

Justin Knight Doug Cogger Laurence Kelly Deborah Johansen Mary Kocol Jean-Baptiste Bura K Pekoglu Kelly Mastraccio Kris Snibbe

351

Credits GSD Platform 2

Mohsen Mostafavi Dean of the Faculty of Design Preston Scott Cohen Chair, Department of Architecture Niall Kirkwood Chair, Department of Landscape Architecture Rodolfo Machado Co-Chair, Department of Urban Planning and Design Jerold Kayden Co-Chair, Department of Urban Planning and Design Felipe Correa Faculty Editor Dan Handel (M.ArchII ‘10), Ian Klein (MAUD ‘10) Editors Erin Kasimow (M.ArchI ‘10), John Pawlak (MAUD ‘10), Ryan Shubin (MLA II ‘10) Editorial Team Amanda Heighes Copy Editor Shannon Stecher Art Collector Anita Kan Model Photography (unless otherwise noted)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Publication would not be possible without the efforts of the following people: Jane Acheson, Dan Borelli, Leslie Burke, Andrea Croteau, Ellen Colleran, Sean Conlon, Barbra Elfman, Patricia English, Steven Ervin, Justin Fowler, Hal Gould, Timothy Hyde, Maggie Janik, Deborah Johanssen, Brooke Lynn King, Mike McGrath, Marc Puig Mengual, Mohsen Mostafavi, Trevor O’Brien, Almin Prsic, Pat Roberts, Meghan Ryan, Shannon Stecher, Karen Stein, Melissa Vaughn

IMPRINT

Published by Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Actar Design Andreas Hidber (Actar) Typeface Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Paper Offset On, Cyclus Silk Printing Ingoprint, Barcelona

GSD Platform II represents selected studios, seminars, research, events, and exhibitions from the 2008-2009 academic year.

For additional information and a more comprehensive selection of student work see www.gsd.harvard.edu/studioworks © of the works, 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College © of the edition, Actar and Harvard University Graduate School of Design All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design is a leading center for the education, information, and technical expertise on the built environment. Its Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design offer masters and doctoral degree programs, and provide the foundation for the school’s Advanced Studies and Executive Education programs.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data Correa, Felipe.

GSD platform II/ Felipe Correa 3xxp., 15.2x22.9 cm.

Includes Bibliographical References ISBN 978-84-92861-00-2 (alk. Paper) 1. Architecture – Research – Massachusetts – Cambridge 2. Architectural Design – Research – Massachusetts – Cambridge.

3. Harvard University.Graduate School of Design. I. Title.

DISTRIBUTION

Roca i Batlle 2 08023 Barcelona Tel +34 93 418 77 59 Fax +34 93 418 67 07 office@actar-d.com www.actar-d.com

GSD Platform 2 Imprint

DISTRIBUTION USA

158 Lafayette Street, 5th Fl. New York, NY 10013 Tel. 212-966-2207 Fax 212-966-2214 officeusa@actar-d.com www.actar-d.com

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