Fall 2009 Arch 412 Building Sites

3G2_2009 Ach 412

Craig Borum Mireille Roddier Maria Josefa Arquero de Alarcon Taubman College of Architecure and Urban planning

Building Sites In our contemporary zeal to create to develop a massive amount of land, we tend to site plan rather than to build sites from our land forms. Site planning is a quantitative engineered act based on the assumption that any given parcel is a site, all it needs is a good plan. Building a site challenges this perspective and starts from the premise that all parcels are not automatically sites. Built sites are designed places where specific location has been centered and placed within the urban terrain. A lesson to be learned from all of these selected examples is the effort and vision that cultures and individuals have endured in order to marshal local resources together with their utopian dreams to create a proper geomorphic foundation for their buildings, gardens and cities. They didn’t accept parcels out of hand. Rather they constructed artificial earths and mountains to establish a grounded framework for the development of a specific urban place. Building a site establishes connections between universal and local, formal and spatial principles. Site planning tends to produce generic plans. Building a site illustrates ways in which urbanism through its buildings and gardens begins and evolves as a physical place in the open land.

-William Moorish, Civilizing Terrains

In architectural design, the demands of relating a building to a physical location are necessary and inevitable; the site is initially constructed and finally achieved in the architectural work.

-Carol Burns, “On Site: Architectural Preoccupations�

The first architectural act is to break the ground.

-Gottfried Semper

Situating the Studio This studio focuses on the relationship between architecture and site. The premise of the studio is based upon an understanding of site and architecture as equally constructed, both physically and intellectually, and is concerned with how the interpretation and representation of site form the basis of any architectural proposal.

Site often generically refers to a particular property or location; we will expand on this seemingly benign definition to include other contexts, scales and environments such that an enriched and layered understanding of site will provide the foundation for your architectural propositions.

This studio tests notions of architectural design as it responds to, realigns and defines conditions of its location, site and situation.

Sometimes architecture is nudged by its situation, and other times the building pushes back against the city and all of its diverse influences. Sometimes architecture is tested within the controlled environment of the lab, hermetically protected from the messiness, pressures and physicality of its various scapes, and other times it encounters these qualities head on. Among other things this studio will deal with documenting, reading, and reformulating conventional notions of site as it relates to architecture.

You will be working through both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of site. This includes the complex relationship between objective and measured properties of site (solar angles, wind directions, topography, climate, property lines, setbacks, utilities, etc.) and the more experiential, aesthetic, historic and peculiar aspects that are based on frequent site visitation, research and personal exploration.

The intent of this studio is to develop practices that enhance your understanding of the complex array of issues architecture encounters as it intersects with the complexities of its situation.

Generically referred to as site, this studio claims this seemingly benign condition as one that can propel, exaggerate and at the very least provide fuel to any number of architectural and design responses.