2013 SMArchS Theses | MIT Architecture

REVIEW

SMARCHS THESIS 2013 In Depth

MIT Department of Architecture

Arindam Dutta SMArchS Director The SMArchS degree was founded in 1979.

SMArchS reflects the notion that training in architecture and its ancillary disciplines requires support in the form of specialization beyond that of basic professional competence alone. SMArchS at MIT also reflects the fact that MIT is one of the foremost research institutions in the world, and the SMArchS format as well as courses of study create opportunities for students to link with the broader world of research at MIT (and Harvard). This separates it from professional studies in architecture where the design studio serves as the melting pot to which connected disciplines contribute. The continued vitality SMArchS and the intellectual application that is evinced in the work of its students, reflects the high standards and immense intellectual churning of that setting. The SMArchS program at MIT is administered through six ‘areas of study’ reflecting the different disciplines taught within the Department of Architecture: Architectural Design, Architecture & Urbanism, Building Technology, Design & Computation, History, Theory & Criticism, and the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture.

Over the years, the challenge has always been to see if the work of SMArchS students could be more than MIT’s many and varied intellectual parts, and SMArchS students have been encouraged and emboldened to explore connections in their research with multiple

disciplines, whether this be in artificial intelligence, art and curatorial practice, science and technology studies, and so on and so forth.

There is no equivalent program in this country that offers the range of areas of study as within the SMArchS program, nor do most advanced programs offer the kind of dedicated faculty under whom SMArchS students do their work. The degree requirements are timebased (two year residence) rather than unitbased, allowing the students to investigate widely unconstricted by credit requirements.

The SMArchS program offers transformative opportunities for students to address and enter a host of fields: philosophy; programming; fabrication; urban design; critical art practice; building ventilation and diagnostics; curatorship; criticism; science and technology studies; policy studies; history; media arts and critical media studies; engineering; applied sciences; sustainability; energetics; religion; landscape; preservation; computation; visualization; history of science; structures; building performance; theories of urbanism. Such connections are unavailing within the constraints of an M.Arch. program, and therefore this interdisciplinarity continues to be a key strength of the Department of Architecture.

SMArchS is exactly as diverse as the impact of architecture and art on the world is diverse. MIT offers a unique blend of the cultures of architectural design and research, and

the best SMArchS work is synthetic, drawing from the many fields of high specialization that MIT offers. Both its faculty and students are inherently, strongly oriented towards greater interdisciplinary collaboration and investigation on higher, research-informed platforms. These platforms can render signal service to the architectural profession in terms of instigating independent-minded and provocative debates and projects that speak to the field at large. Thesis work such as those you see in these pages often reflects that desire, in many cases are often more than that, in the sense that they present occasions for intellectual invention and surprise beyond disciplinary boundaries that tell us something new about the world and the ways in which it works or may work. Over the years, I have seen, or supervised, SMArchS theses that have, for example, explored letters written between philosophers, or have devised new pieces of software or hardware that bring some cognitive aspect of the human organism to new technological resolution, and, in one case, involved dance performances twirling around sensor-triggered columns that responded to the dance! For many students, this work will define their subsequent careers, offering them, in their future challenges, a beacon and inspiration to steer by even as they break new ground in vocational situations that we can perhaps today only dimly

imagine. Over the years, each and every one of the alumni I have had the opportunity to canvass about their SMArchS experience at MIT have described it as life-transforming, as having made them into something completely different from the world that they had been used to, and all the better for that.

CONTENTS

Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture Jenine Kotob Layla Karim Shaikley

Building Technology

Alexander F. Keller Jose Ramos

Design Computation Moa K. Carlsson Yu Gao Laia Mogas-Soldevila Vernelle A. A. Noel Woongki Sung Thomas Wortmann

History, Theory & Criticism Irina Chernyakova Antonio Furgiuele Samuel Ray Jacobson Mariel Villeré

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Architecture & Urbanism Celina Balderas Guzmán Sreoshy Banerjea Michela Barone Lumaga Aditya Barve Andres Bernal Peng Huang Menglin Jiang Aristodimos Komninos Ryan Kurlbaum Yu Jung Nam Kobi Ruthenberg Kristen Zeiber

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090 096 102 108 114 122 124 128 134 140 144 152

Architectural Design

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Appendix

Perspectives Faculty Bios Advisors & Readers Guest Critics Graduate Contact Information See Back Cover for Credits

160 164 178 179 180

Faculty Nasser Rabbat James Wescoat

Students Graduating Jenine Kotob Layla Karim Shaikley Continuing Mariam Abdel Azim Hala Malik Farrah Sabouni Emily Williamson

AGA KHAN PROGRAM FOR ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at MIT is a unique international graduate program designed to promote, sust­ain, and increase the teaching of architecture in the Islamic world. It prepares students for careers in research, design, and teaching.

With strong links with the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Aga Khan Programs at Harvard, AKPIA concentrates on the critical study of the history and historiography of Islamic architecture; the interaction between architecture, society, and culture; strategies of urban and architectural preservation; design interventions in disaster areas

and environmental and material-sensitive landscape research. The siting of AKPIA at MIT’s Department of Architecture is intended to negate the polarizing dichotomy between the discipline of architecture (derived from Western architectural history and praxis) and Islamic Architecture, which is routinely relegated to area and cultural studies.

Redefining Learning Environments in a Conflict Area: A Palestinian Case Study Jenine Kotob, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture Advisor: James Wescoat, Reader: Azra Akšamija

This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of learning environments in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) as administered by private, refugee and public school systems. Learning environments in the OPT are examined with a two-fold methodology: historical and architectural. The two-fold analysis utilizes a spatial and social framework, where child, building, neighborhood context, and education system, are understood as the four components of a learning environment.

The historical analysis is framed from the Late-Ottoman era until today; and, follows changing theories on education in parallel with the changing relationship between schools and the socio-spatial reality of the conflict. Results from the historical analysis indicate that educational institutions cannot operate during times of crisis, leading local family and teacher networks to develop informal education systems in informal spaces. It is determined that learning environments must be able to adapt to the conflict and must embrace local communities as architectural, spatial, and social resources. This conclusion serves as a critical foundation for the architectural analysis.

The architectural analysis uses data collected from field work of 24 schools in the West Bank in August of 2012 through informal interviews with locals, photography, and journaling. Data reveals that the socio-spatial contexts of each school are unique due to divisions of the land. In order to limit the number of variables, special focus was given to three schools in Ramallah, which is a unique enclave that encompasses within it the socio-spatial realities of other enclaves in the West Bank. Results from the architectural analysis indicate that newer UNRWA and public schools are designed 008 SMArchS Review 2013

in an insular manner, which leads to divisions between community and institution on architectural, spatial, and social levels.

While private school architecture acts on the environment and enhances programmatic function of space; breaking insularity and potentially improving socio-spatial conditions.

This thesis concludes with several short-, medium-, and long-term recomm­ endations that stem from revelations in the histor­­­­ical analysis and results from the architectural analysis. Learning environ­ ments must span outwards allowing for an expansion of school resources, a broadening of learning experiences for youth, and the unification of Palestinians.

Chapter 1: Introduction, Learning Environments in the OPT “The environment surrounding children is a key element in the evolution and development of the child’s physical, mental, and psychological development, and affects the circumstances surrounding the way the child is raised, including the formation of ideas and beliefs, perceptions and attitudes towards the core issues relating to his life.”

Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Palestinian Children–Issues and Statistics Annual Report. Ramallah: Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2012.

This thesis is an exploration of learning environments in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) as administered by three educational systems: private, refugee and public. In the West Bank, there are private schools that date back to the late

Right: A UNRWA school close to the militarized separation wall.

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Ottoman era with both secular and religious affiliations, UNRWA schools that were created after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that serve refugee populations within 19 camps in the West Bank, and public schools that are controlled by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) which was established in 1994.

In order to understand learning environments in the OPT, this thesis examines the intersection of several major topics: the socio-spatial nature of conflict zones, local and global theories on education, and learning environments as architectural and spatial places. In a conflict zone, an environment for learning must be understood as a tool for promoting culture, community pride, and societal empowerment. In the OPT, the environment in which a child lives is absorbed by a military presence and is the reality of life for every child, regardless of political or social status. Schools intended for learning must find ways to encompass this reality, while simultaneously providing youth the ability to step out of the trauma for a few hours a day.

Problem Statement Schools have existed in the OPT since the late-Ottoman era, and the development of new education systems along with the construction of new schools is directly related to the progression of the conflict. The eldest of these systems is the private school system, whose learning environments have always been closely related to their immediate spatial contexts due to local community involvement. UNRWA refugee schools were

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instituted after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and sit on the edges of internal refugee camps on the land, remaining constrained to the same borders for 65 years. And since 1994, the OPT have experienced a proliferation of public school construction at which time the Palestinian National Authority became the official government of the Palestinian people.

The most recent period of school construction is the result of humanitarian efforts and a discourse that demands education for all. Despite the boom in public school infrastructure, however, student drop-out rates have increased, enrollment rates have decreased, academic achievement is low, and students suffer from traumatic stress. With these discrepancies in mind, this thesis questions the effectiveness of school architecture and planning as implemented through these three school systems in the OPT. Children do not just suffer trauma as a direct result of the military occupation, but they can also suffer from issues such as domestic violence in the home.

Aside from violence, children in the OPT have been documented to suffer from issues of poverty, overcrowding, child labor, and detention. In schools, these issues also affect teachers and staff, thus, counselors who are placed to work with youth may not be effective.

This thesis hypothesizes that certain school building programs and policies, past and present, have produced insular schools that overlook the broader community and the socio-spatial issues impacting student success and state of mind. This hypothesis is based on

preliminary research that shows a universal lack of understanding and communication between educationalists and architects when defining learning environments through architectural, spatial, and social terms. This miscommunication has led to the need to redefine learning environments. By using the OPT as a case study, this thesis will show that in conflict zones a successful learning environment must address the needs of a child from a series of interrelated levels.

Learning Environment Spatial Framework To analyze the three types of educational systems, a spatial framework will be used as a form of cross-sectional examination. This thesis recognizes that in a conflict zone, children are impacted on a series of levels which should be addressed by learning environments. The conceptual framework will look at learning environments as inclusive of a child’s journey to and from school, the school building in which they study, their neighborhood context defined by military boundaries, and finally as a result of certain administrative policies instituted by an educational system.

This thesis utilizes constructivist theory as a foundation to bridge the gap between environment and learning. Constructivist theory, primarily addressed here through the work of E. Von Glasersfeld (1917-2010), emphasizes a child’s experiences as the source of knowledge and the teacher’s role as a support system or scaffolding. In this sense, there are no single truths established in the school but rather a multiplicity of realities carried by each individual that must be

Left: Percentage of children (12-17) who were exposed to a form of violence at least once by one parent during the 12 months that preceded July 2011. Source: Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Palestinian Children – Issues and Statistics Annual Report. Ramallah: Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2012.

acknowledged and questioned. When applied to a conflict area such as the OPT, children’s negative experiences as a result of their socio-spatial identities are realities that must be reckoned with in the learning environment, and analyzed on a cognitive level.

Thus, the conceptual framework is like a concentric spheres model, where the locus is the child, then the official place for learning within the building, and the spatial context of their daily lives that encompasses their family and community. The last level of this conceptual framework recognizes that the institutions in place—private, UNRWA, and public—play a significant role in policy formation that then affect each of these layers down to the child.

By using this framework, it is understood that a learning environment contains within it spatial characteristics - both territorial and architectural - that need to be analyzed. Each of the layers in this conceptual framework is bound by a physical, architectural manifestation. The neighborhood context is bound within a military enclave that is defined by walls, fences, checkpoints, and settler roads. Within a military enclave there are varied degrees of limitations placed on the constituents according to its military classification. The school zone is bound by the perimeter wall constructed to wrap around the school’s outdoor spaces and can be understood as the negotiator between the learning environment and the outside world, it decides what can enter the space and what cannot. The building is enclosed by the walls of the school and is punctured by windows and doors, elements that also negotiate what can enter and what cannot. Finally, interior spaces have a variety of programs, and on the smallest scale are instructional classrooms defined by four walls with windows looking out to the outside world.

The element of focus that breaks through each of these layers is in fact the child, who is supported by friends, family, school staff and AKPIA 011

community. It is a child’s movement across these layers that makes each layer a part of the learning environment. This spatial framework will be used as a conceptual as well as methodological tool throughout this thesis.

Thesis Chapter Outline The following section summarizes the main points in each of the chapters of the thesis.

Chapter two contains a literature review that was conducted on learning environments in three categories: Educational Research, Architectural Research, and Development Research. The literature review highlighted some important issues in relation to the education system and it was realized that terms like “quality” were defined ambiguously by educationalists, leaving the design of learning environments open-ended. Furthermore, the research that has been conducted on the architecture of schools in the OPT tends to be in the form of pilot program testing, where schools that are more site-specific and of high quality are constructed. Then student achievement in these schools is compared to that of students in lower quality schools.

However, no conclusive results can ever be made because researchers acknowledge that there are too many variables that affect the learning environment in a conflict zone.

Between educationalists and architects, there is a communication gap, where educationalists are articulating the need for something ambiguous, and architects are designing and testing schools in an insular fashion, regardless of the context.

And generally, most publications on school architecture in the OPT do not address all of the educational systems, and are separated according to institution – lending to misrepresentation of the current state of schools in the region. From this point, it was decided that two approaches need to be used in order to examine the current state of learning environments in the OPT: a historical and an architectural analysis.

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Chapter three focuses on methodology, and is entitled How to Assess Learning Environments. The historical approach is framed from the late-Ottoman era until today. It traces the relationship and fluctuation of learning environments of the three educational systems within a socio-spatial context, utilizing parallel discourses of educational theory. The architectural approach looks at contemporary schools within the three educational systems from field work done in August of 2012, and focuses primarily on those in the city of Ramallah. This approach looks at donor contribution, design quality, and community ownership as three categories for comparative analysis across the three educational systems.

Chapter four is the historical analysis and is entitled Changing Times and Changing Schools. Palestinian land has changed significantly since the late Ottoman era, and particularly since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. What once was agrarian open space with villages has become a densely populated land divided into segregated enclaves. This transformation has had a significant impact on education. While ongoing political and military conflict has ensued since the early 20th century, there are notable ebbs and flows in the level of instability endured through the years. By looking at the transformation of learning environments over time, this chapter lends towards the comparative analysis of each school system in the architectural chapter. These periods are significant in that they affect access to education and the community’s response when access is blocked.

In significantly hard times, institutional schooling was closed from days to months and led families, teacher groups, and private NGOs to establish informal education in homes, mosques, and churches. During these periods of heightened instability, education was connected to the concept of a Palestinian community that transcended all divides, rather than just localized communities segregated by political or social status. Groups pool their efforts and teach

in unconventional, informal spaces. At such times, community assumption of control across the three educational systems leads to empowerment of youth and communities.

This becomes significant as it establishes the empowering nature of education, as well as the flexibility of learning environments to encompass a variety of architectural spaces.

Chapter five is the architectural analysis, and focus on three schools in the Ramallah governorate. Due to the complexity of the militarized enclavisation, Ramallah was chosen for its unique position as the official center of PNA government activity. Among Ramallah’s characteristics is that it is home to many private, UNRWA, and public schools. Experiences of traveling to the Arab Evangelical Episcopal Co-ed School (private), the Amari Camp Boys School (refugee), and the Spanish Girls School (public) were similar due to common architectural typologies. Results from the architectural analysis show that older schools, specifically in the private school system, have traditional school designs that reflect rote educational theory; however, their long time on sites has allowed for learning environments to become invested in the landscape; while, the newest public schools indicate a trajectory towards more innovative school design, however, they lack cultural relevance. And that standardized design as implemented through UNRWA is both traditional in its form and isolated from the neighborhood. It was concluded that school buildings must also become active agents in the environment, influencing change on the immediate surroundings. Thus, schools must be designed in a way that combats the bleak architecture of enclavisation and militarization.

Chapter six is the conclusion, and is entitled Broadening Learning Environments.

This chapter begins by summarizing the points of synthesis from the historical and architectural analyses, and reminds the reader that the patterns that emerged from the historical analysis were used to develop

a more relevant architectural approach. This resulted in an emphasis on the dynamics between learning environments and sociospatial contexts. It is proposed that issues that relate more to community and life outside of the school must be addressed, because as constructivist theory poses, those experiences are carried with the child throughout the layers of spaces. Recognizing the outside world as lived by a child through architecture and program can begin to alleviate issues of high drop-out rates, low enrollment rates, low student scores, and issues of psychological trauma. In making proposals for short-term, mid-term and long-term solutions, this thesis reflects on the Palestinian traditions related to school-community sociospatial relations unveiled in the historical chapter. In determining that ownership of education and unity across social and class boundaries can yield empowerment, these types of mechanisms are proposed for future approaches for the management of school construction and design in the OPT. This thesis concludes by reflecting on the field of architecture at large; and, a call is made on all school design in conflict areas to push the limitations of socio-political boundaries, and attempt to project towards ideals of the future.

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Iraq’s Housing Crisis: Upgrading Settlements for Internally Displaced Persons Layla Karim Shaikley, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture Co-Advisors: Reinhard Goethert & James Wescoat, Reader: Yu-Hung Hong

The most recent war in Iraq has resulted in a large wave of internal and external displacement with increased sectarian violence and ethnic tension. Subsequent conflict has exacerbated conditions within the nation and further increased displacement. Throughout the country, over one million Iraqis are currently displaced. Inadequately supported by infrastructure due to a negligent dictatorship and consecutive wars, over 250 settlements have peppered Baghdad’s landscape and aggravated the capital’s insufficient infrastructure. It is clear that the rapid rate at which informal settlements for internally displaced persons (IDPs) are being established exceeds the rate in which settlements are forming.

Many settlements have exhibited user-initiated incremental housing processes. The topic of this thesis is upgrading settlements for IDPs in Baghdad, Iraq through user-initiated methods. Baghdad is facing an overwhelming amount of sub-standard IDP settlements, and while some settlements are turning into slums, other settlements are becoming more durable. Community action can be a solution for the problems addressed in semi-durable settlements that have exhibited enough solidarity through incremental processes to reach a semi-durable state. This thesis examines the solution through three methods. First, it looks at a historical review of incremental housing processes parallel to Iraq’s housing policies and history to understand the nation’s current housing crisis. It finds that Iraq has struggled in addressing housing needs for the low-income sector since its independence. Following the historical review, this thesis screens IDP settlements in Baghdad to evaluate the feasibility of upgrade for different types of settlement. In the screening process, settlements that exhibit semi-durable characteristics and are available for secure 014 SMArchS Review 2013

tenure are most eligible for upgrade. One particular semi-durable settlement is studied: Al-Sadeq in Baghdad’s peripheries. Al-Sadeq is evaluated based on the following measures of durability: infrastructure, housing, and social networks. As hypothesized, findings supported the role of incremental housing principles and community action to improve the settlement’s state of durability. Lessons are extracted from community field research. As hypothesized, social cohesion and community action are the catalysts that allow incremental methods of infrastructure and housing improvements to thrive. This is especially important in a conflict zone as Baghdad, where displacement is often a direct outcome of danger. In such environments, social networks can provide feelings of security to invest in development. Lessons for communities like Al-Sadeq include the power of community action in incremental housing processes and user-initiated development. Lessons from the historical review shed light on the ineffective solutions for mitigating social housing concerns in the nation’s past. Lessons for the government in this study challenge the lack of an established tradition of community action in public sector projects in Iraq.

Right and Following Spreads: Images courtesy of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

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Faculty John Fernandez Leon Glicksman Les Norford John Ochsendorf Christoph Reinhart

Students Graduating Alexander F. Keller Jose Ramos

BUILDING TECHNOLOGY Building Technology offers students the opportunity to explore critical topics for the future of the built environment and resources.

This area explores ways to use design and technology to create buildings that contribute to a more humane and environmentally responsible built world. Strategies employed toward these ends include integrated architectural design strategies, resource accounting through material flow analysis and life cycle assessment, building and urban energy modeling and simulation, human comfort analysis and control design and engineering and other technologically-informed design methods. Students interested in any of these strategies will be challenged to address topics of clear and important relevance to the future of the built environment through creative and analytically rigorous approaches.

Research areas supervised by the faculty address innovative materials and assemblies, emerging and nontraditional building materials, low-energy and passive building energy strategies, innovative analysis and modeling of historic structures and various issues of energy and material resources at the urban scale, including urban environmental sensing, the urban heat island effect and urban metabolism. Ideally, students entering into the program will be incorporated into active and ongoing research projects while

pursuing their own intellectual and career agendas. These projects change regularly and individual faculty are best informed of current research position opportunities.

Students will often work alongside students from other departments, including Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Material Science and Engineering, Urban Studies and Planning and others. The only class requirement stipulated by the BT group, 4.481 Building Technology Seminar, is offered during the first semester. BT SMArchS students will be accommodated in the Building Technology student lab area and will have the opportunity to work with and share their interests with BT students in other degree programs.

These areas of study are offered with the primary intention of providing the tools and perspectives necessary for changing the nature of the built environment toward a resource-efficient future.

Recharging the Facade: Designing and Constructing Novel BIPV Assemblies Alexander F. Keller, Building Technology Advisor: John Fernandez, Readers: John Ochsendorf, Kurt Roth

Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) have been the subject of research and design applications for several decades. While some large-scale applications have been realized, prohibitively high costs and multiple technical complexities persist. A main cause of these challenges is a lack of system-level design and engineering of photovoltaic (PV) systems coupled with traditional methods of building construction. PV installation remains a highly specialized construction practice and is typically completed by skilled experts in the field who deal with intricate electrical connections like wiring to batteries and inverters. This complicated installation process, in addition to other soft costs like permitting and system components, account for approximately fifty percent of the overall cost

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of a solar power system. In order to address these issues, the installation of photovoltaic systems must be simplified and streamlined.

This thesis presents the design, development, and construction of two novel BIPV products. One is integrated with masonry construction, and the other is integrated with pre-fabricated panel construction. By developing power-generating building products that integrate with common methods of construction, existing issues of cost, complexity, and low market acceptance are challenged.

Motivation Our buildings are dependent creatures. For over a century, an antiquated network of wires and pipes have supplied them with unsustainable resources that power our energy

demands. Architects and engineers have cleverly, and at times masterfully, buried these systems into the walls and floors of our buildings. They have become illusionists; tricking us into believing that there is a reservoir of

Left: BIPV Masonry units provide remote villages in developing countries with a quick deployment strategy for constructing and energizing communities. Essential appliances like lighting and ovens can easily be powered by the material that the village homes are made of. Photo by CDRD Project Somalia Block Above: The building envelope does not have to be made entirely out of the units.

For instance, a customer may have a specific energy load (i.e. electric lighting) that he or she is interested in generating from the BIPV units. The number of units that would generate this electric load would be installed and the rest of the wall could be constructed with typical block. The patterning created by integrating typical block with BIPV units could add aesthetic value to the building.

energy held within our walls. We are never reminded where this source of energy originates from. The room simply illuminates when we flip the switch. The air conditioner simply cools the room down when we plug the cord into the wall. We are completely unaware and disengaged from the chaotic network of piping and wiring that originated at some intangible power plant in some distant location.

Energy has become an abstract notion to us.

This concept was challenged in the 1970s when the first photovoltaic powered residence was built. Twenty years before this, photovoltaic cells were commercialized solely for the space industry. Lower prices and simpler manufacturing processes allowed them to no longer be characterized as space-age objects seen only in futuristic comic books and on movie screens. They became practical devices for residential homes. This was especially true during the energy crisis in the late 1970s. Although the use of solar energy systems for our buildings has increased each year since this time, our built environments Building Technology 023

are still dominated by dependent buildings that rely on unsustainable energy sources.

Research and development into high performance enclosure materials have enabled our buildings to be more resource efficient.

The introduction of air and vapor barriers, thermal breaks, and low emissivity materials have dramatically reduced heat and moisture transfer through the wall. Although these dramatic improvements are critical first steps in creating sustainable environments, they only slow down the bleeding.

Our buildings may be using less energy, but they are still dependent on power plants.

To achieve a state of independence, our buildings must become the power plant. The problem can no longer be addressed purely as a technical issue. Slapping solar panels onto the roof two years after construction can no longer be accepted as a sustainable solution. Solar panels are objects like wires and pipes. Similarly, they are applied as an element to the building and are not part of the overall, integrated design. They do not embody the building. From conception, the building needs to be understood as an 024 SMArchS Review 2013

independent energy producer. The loads need to be calculated and determined from the start and the enclosure system must respond. This issue is a design problem.

Opportunities for Power Generating Enclosures Building Integrated Photovoltaics, often condensed and referred to by its acronym BIPV, has been the subject of research and design applications for several decades. The term

Above: The solar panels are framed by an aluminum skin which serves as the exterior material of the building. The aluminum is perforated which allows ventilation into the cavity of the wall and cools down the solar panels to prevent overheating. The all-inclusive design incorporates all of the components built into the product prior to installation. This dramatically decreases installation costs.

Right: BIPV Plug-n-Play panels are a pre-fab, sandwich panel system that incorporates the structure, insulation, exterior sheathing, water / air barrier, moisture barrier, interior sheathing, solar panel, battery, inverter, charge, controller, wiring and wall outlet into one assembly.

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has been associated with a small niche in the building construction industry that attempts to “balance the technical and aesthetic-al aspects of PV technology with those of the building envelope without compromising the functional characteristics of each other.” The electricity producing technology replaces traditional enclosure materials and becomes the exterior skin of the building.

BIPV products emerged in the 1980s, when companies like General Electric, Solarex and Sanyo developed PV shingle prototypes, but technical challenges and high costs slowed the commercialization of these products.

Building Integrated Photovoltaics are a step towards enabling a building’s independence.

BIPV is an intriguing concept because it requires the architect and engineer to address the building’s energy loads early on in the design process. The building’s solar orientation, geographic location, program, and square footage requirements are not only critical factors in determining the overall concept of the design scheme, but they also dictate how much energy the building will likely consume and how much energy the building potentially can produce. There is a balance in decision making between function, form, and energy demand/production.

Opportunities for power generating enclosures are indispensable. There are BIPV precedent examples which include both new construction and retrofit applications. Everywhere from urban to suburban to rural environments require strategies for enabling a sustainable energy supply independence. The question now becomes, “Why isn’t the built environment being transformed by BIPV applications?”

Existing Challenges Although integrating energy producing systems into the building’s envelope may seem like an attractive and exciting strategy, it has remained part of small niche in

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the building construction industry. Prohibitively high costs and multiple technical and design complexities persist: 01. Installation: Assembly techniques and methods vary among existing BIPV products. This increases labor costs and decreases the likelihood for standardization and optimal integration with various building enclosure barrier materials.

02. Structural Components Cost: Racking and structural rail components are expensive and require additional assembly processes.

03. Optimal Geometry: Locations for BIPV (other than the roof) are not optimally oriented for PV performance. Cell efficiency and power output suffer.

04. Cell Ventilation: The building envelope is typically designed to be as thermally tight as possible. PV power production can be reduced by as much as 8.9% [69] without proper cooling.

Addressing these two conflicting requirements is especially challenging.

05. Separate Components / Inefficiency: BIPV assemblies and products require several electronic components that are obtained and installed separately. These include things like batteries, inverters and charge controllers. These separate pieces of the system complicate installation, are inefficiently shipped and transported to the site, and make operation difficult for the end user.

These challenges can be organized into three main categories: 01. Soft Costs a. Installation b. Structural Components Cost 02. Function a. Optimal Geometry b. Cell Ventilation 03. System a. Separate Components b. Inefficiency

Vision and Methods To confront these challenges and barriers, a radically new approach that addresses the components of BIPV as a systemic network must be established and initiated. The following five methods have been identified in correspondence to the three challenge categories:

Above: Underwhelming urban spaces can be reinvigorated by charging walls that allow individuals to stop for a quick power-up: walls become the power plant.

Soft Costs: 01. Simplification: Simplifying installation by integrating with traditional methods of construction.

02. Modularization: Standardizing assemblies that can easily integrate with both traditional building components like concrete block and high performance materials like vacuum insulated panels.

Function: 03. Adaptation: Geometrically transforming the section of the faรงade to provide optimal orientation for PV performance and ventilation capability.

System: 04. Reduction: Reducing the number of components by designing all-inclusive products.

05. Plug-n-Play: User-centered design that attractively allows effortless charging and integration with smart grid.

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Energy Reduction Strategies for Existing Air Force Healthcare Facilities Jose Ramos, Building Technology Advisor: Leon Glicksman, Reader: John Ochsendorf

Federal buildings are required to reduce 30% of their energy use intensities by 2015 and 37.5% by 2020. Despite rigorous efforts, current Air Force healthcare building performance reveals only a 15% decrease has been achieved from the 2009 baseline levels. Projections similarly reveal full compliance by 2020 may not be achievable, therefore, the need for a comprehensive and more robust effort is proposed.

This thesis seeks to develop a road map for the Air Force’s 68 existing healthcare buildings towards compliance by 2015.

A methodology has been developed that leverages the Air Force’s state-of-the-art energy efficiency strategy, the energy performance analysis for 68 healthcare facili028 SMArchS Review 2013

ties and multi-agency interviews. Findings indicate an energy master plan and a systematic building diagnostics approach that targets HVAC equipment and system operations as the most effective strategy.

The results reveal that HVAC retrofits and implementation of no cost measures such as temperature set points and setbacks collectively reduce building energy use by 85% and energy use intensities by 50% by 2015.

Right: The United States Air Force Memorial.

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Faculty Terry Knight Kent Larson Takehiko Nagakura Mine Ă–zkar Larry Sass Dennis Shelden George Stiny

Students Graduating Moa K. Carlsson Yu Gao Laia Mogas-Soldevila Vernelle A. A. Noel Woongki Sung Thomas Wortmann Continuing Guillermo Bernal Phillip Ewing Shan He Ekaterina Ob’Yedkova Athina Papadopoulou Yaniv Turgeman Cagri Zaman

COMPUTATION The Design and Computation Group inquires into the varied nature and practice of computation in architectural design, and the ways in which design meaning, intention, and knowledge are constructed through sensing, thinking, and making computationally. It focuses on the development of innovative computational tools, processes and theories, and applying these in creative, socially meaningful responses to challenging design problems.

Stratified, Destratified and Hybrid GIS: Organizing a Cross Disciplinary Territory for Design Moa K Carlsson, Computation Advisor: George Stiny, Readers: Anne Whiston Spirn, Diana Balmori

Although the term Geographic Information System (GIS) is most commonly associated with a computer software, the principles of GIS existed long before it was implemented on a computer. This thesis hypothesizes that the computerization of the formerly analog GIS in the 1960s, which emerged with CGIS and initiatives at the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, can be read as the establishment of a pre-existing analytical conception of the environment, over its synthetic and holistic counterpart. It is often claimed that the analytical nature of computerized GIS was determined by the capabilities and limitations of the digital computer. While this techno-centered trajectory of GIS is fairly well documented, this thesis aims to open up a new perspective of GIS, by highlighting an alternative history of modeling both natural and artificial, geographical information through the Ecological Method of Ian L. McHarg, the late Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the thesis, these two parallel trajectories of analytical and synthetic/holistic methods are examined through two general schemes by which cross disciplinary geographical information is organized, from the perspective of a general user. The two models, henceforth characterized as “stratified” and “destratified” model, both deal with the linking of cross-disciplinary and geographically referenced information, differ in logic and user interaction, but are argued to be equally computational.

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The motivation behind the presented research is the realization that to date, the technological aids available for design in cross disciplinary and dynamic environments, do not suffice.

Whispers of a new design-oriented platform, which one might characterize as “Landscape Information Modeling” or “LIM,” are starting to surface, and the main purpose of this thesis is to contribute to such discussions.

Right: Carl Steinitz, Plan for Delmarva Peninsula. SYMAP computerized map showing potential for wildlife (detail). From Chrisman, N., Charting the Unknown: How computer mapping at Harvard became GIS (2006), p. 46.

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Self-Organized Collaboration: A Self-Evolving Collaborative Production Model for Social-Enterprise Grassroots Startups Yu Gao, Computation Advisor: George Stiny, Reader: Ethan Zuckerman

How does personal motivation meet collaborative production for social enterprise grassroots startups?

Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound. The process of collaborative production is highly complicated and unpredictable in most cases.

New tools, such as Wikipedia, allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution. However, other tools, particularly those that involve financial motivation, have great difficulties in getting multiple levels of contribution. The investigation of the methods in aggregating individual and often tiny contributions for social enterprises such as the grassroots startup, may offer new frameworks from which a great range of applications can be established.

The importance of grassroots social entrepreneurism is undeniable. In Joseph Schumpeter’s book The Theory of Economic Development, he argues that economic development is not by capitalists, but by entrepreneurs. The role of the entrepreneur is to break away from the routine way of economic life; this action results in propelling economic growth in our human history.

Furthermore, social enterprise commit their efforts in applying commercial strategies to maximize social improvements at large, rather than maximizing profits for themselves or external shareholders. It is a unique mechanism to combine economic advancement and social improvement, enabling sustainable social changes in a larger climate.

In particular, social enterprise, grassroots startups struggle greatly in their process of seeking for matching resources, contribution, 034 SMArchS Review 2013

and support. Furthermore, grassroots social entrepreneurs need to seek every possible ways to develop their ideas/projects through their personal endeavor, including finding team members, funding, and recognition.

The process tends to be highly unpredictable, and seems to be a “black box” type of journey.

Due to grassroots social entrepreneurs’ lack of access to potential collaborators and contributions, an online presence in collaborative production will shed new lights in their process.

This thesis studies the case of wiki to understand how the model of peer mass production contributes to collaborative problemsolving process; specifically, how the contributors should take different roles and interact uniquely to accelerate the process through an online presence for social enterprise grassroots startups. This research explores if and how the peer mass production model (i.e. the wiki model) can improve the productivity and efficiency in the highly unpredictable social enterprise grassroots startups process.

Right: Collaboration for Social Enterprise Grassroots Startups

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Above: Recommendation for Establishing Self-organized Online Platform Serving Social Enterprise Startups Right, Top: Dynamics among Key Actors in Existing Online Platforms Serving Social Ventures Right, Bottom: Difficulties for Social Enterprise Startups 036 SMArchS Review 2013

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New Design Companions: Opening up the Process through Self-Made Computation Laia Mogas-Soldevila, Computation Advisor: George Stiny, Readers: Mark Goulthorpe, Takehiko Nagakura, Mine Özkar

This thesis is about man and machine roles in the early exploration of designs where it investigates computational methods that support creativity and surprise. It proposes a new approach to the relationship between human and digital medium in the enterprise of Computer-Aided Design and it discusses Self-Made Computation to empower the designer as driver of digital processes taking the computer as an active collaborator, or a sharp apprentice, rather than a master.

In a design process, tool personalization enables precise feedback between human and medium. In the field of Architecture, we tend to evaluate a project by its final result, however there are as many design workflows as designers, and yet current off-the-shelf software has an inflexible built-in structure targeting general problem-solving that can interfere with non-standard design needs.

Today, those with programming agility look

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for customized processes that assist early problem-finding instead of linear converging solutions. Contributing to the alleviation of software frustrations, smaller tailor-made applications prove to be precisely tailored, viable and enriching companions in certain moments of the project development.

Previous work on the impact of standardized software for design has focused on the figure of the designer as a tool-user, this thesis addresses the question from the vision of the designer as a tool-maker. It investigates how self-made software can become a design companion for computational thinking -observed here as a new mindset that shifts design workflows, rather than a technique.

The research compares and diagrams designer-toolmaker work where self-made applets where produced, as well as the thought structures in the work of rule-maker artisans.

The main contributions of the work are a comparative study of three models of computer-aided design, their history and technical review, their influence in design workflows and a graphical framework to better compare them. Critical analysis reveals a common structure to tailor a creative and explorative design workflow.

Its advantages and limitations are exposed to guide designers into alternative computational methods for design processes.

Introduction There is an upcoming shift in the way we look at the computer role and the human role in design computation. The thesis document leads the reader through a discussion about the emergence of a designer tool-maker­—instead of a designer tool-user—a professional

Left: Self-Made Computation lies at the intersection of Tool-Using and Tool-Making and takes the best from both worlds. It is observed as a mixed —passive and active­—approach of computational abstraction.

Above: Rule-Based artisans aim to explore the design space for emergent outcomes rather than convergent solutions. Contemporary designers, as well as early pioneers, claim that computational thinking is a mindset rather than a technique.

who sees the computer as a companion, who builds rule-based systems to dialogue with it, who embeds Applets in the design process to reveal a moment of discovery—a moment that redefines the way we look at both the work and at our imagination. In summary, this thesis investigates the value of embedding self-made software into the design process.

In recent years we have witnessed the emergence of the “maker culture,” the first stages of manufacturing democratization that promises to revolutionize the means of design, production and distribution of material goods and give rise to a new class of creators and producers. “A disruptive technology and several cultural and economic driving forces are leading to what has already been called a new industrial revolution: public access to digital fabrication tools, software and databases of blueprints; a tech Do-It-Yourself movement; and a growing desire amongst individuals to shape and personalize the material goods they consume.” (Mota, 2011) Neil Gershenfeld describes a close future in which everyone will have a personal fabricator, a machine capable of producing not only material objects but also other machines that make things (Gershenfeld, 2005).

Can we also be witnessing a “tool-maker culture”? In the way makers make machines that make things, can designers too make the tools that help them think about design?

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Today the world of software tools for design is changing the designer’s role from driven to driver in computer-assisted design. There has been for a while an emerging “scripting culture.” We can read about it in the recent book with the same name by Mark Burry where he argues that “initiation in scripting for CAD has already started in education and practice, questions like “this could well be too difficult and beyond me”, or “how would I use it anyway?” started being answered, and scripting or visual programing for CAD is now becoming mainstream.” (Burry, 2011) This is reflected in the online communities of “scripters” that support that programming or modifying software through scripting, “provides a range of possibilities for creative speculation that is simply not possible using the software only as the manufacturers intended it to be used. Because scripting is effectively a computing program overlay, the tool user (designer) becomes the new toolmaker (software engineer).” (Burry, 2011) There is also another culture emerging which is the “applet-making culture,” that of designers as tool-makers creating software applications that perform only a small set of tasks, that run by themselves, not embedded on CAD packages. Free from the constraints that standard software 040 SMArchS Review 2013

packages impose to certain non-standard design approaches. Constraints related to a strict and hierarchical formal description of the functionalities of the tool and the use of scripting languages which do not scale well to complex and explorative problems.

Above: “If you just look at the work of many young designers, you can immediately see what sort of CAD system they are using.”

(Bill Mitchell, 2009). There is a certain “style” in houses designed with mainstream CAD packages that results from the underlying structure and the development history of their geometric kernels.

Below: Contemporary design workflow models. [CAD] The designer is a tooluser drawing in the computer through external devices. [SCRIPTS] The designer is an expert tool-user exploring the limits of traditional CAD through programming.

[APPLETS] The designer is a tool-maker inventing new tools to explore designs.

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Catarina Mota, open-source advocate, maker and research scholar, argues that we should have a better understanding of the components that make the world around us. One of the aims of her organization is to facilitate open source technology transfer to help create resilient communities around the world. She addresses the benefits of opening scientific research, on new materials and technologies, to non-expert communities of makers. She explains that makers “create out of passion and curiosity, are not afraid to fail, and often tackle problems with unconventional approaches and, in the process, end up discovering alternatives or even better ways to do things,” (Mota, 2011) which is exactly what happens when designers create their little design tools to invent with the computer.

The effort in acquiring the knowledge to create these self-made software tools, and the process of making them, will provide the mindset shift from computation as a technique to computational design thinking, discussed in the thesis.

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Notable Quotes Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976 One programs not because one understands, but in order to come to understand. Programming is an act of design. To write a program is to legislate the laws for a world one first has to create in imagination.

Michael J. Crosbie, 2000 Architects have many tools for visualization at their disposal, finding and using the right tool to fashion a design solution is a bit like woodworking—it takes practice. Drawing, model making, and digital media are not just methods to communicate an idea already formed—they are more valuable used as tools to explore design. Working on a drawing or a model is another form of conversation—between you and the design, back and forth. Suddenly you see something you didn’t know was there.

Catarina Mota, 2012 We cannot shape what we don’t understand, and what we don’t understand and use ends up shaping us.

Mark Burry, 2011 We all seem to be waiting for a natural language and a seamless physical interaction system to appear, one that does not require the designer to prematurely declare priorities in order to comply with strictures of computing logic, nor to be forced to interact so palpably with a black box.

Roland Snooks, 2011 Our interest is in how an algorithm, loaded with design intent, emerges from the design problem rather than simply the architecture emerging from a known algorithm.

Marvin Minsky, 2010 You have to distinguish between writing a program that helps you test your theory or analyze your results, and writing a program that is your theory.

Mark Burry, 2000 The design process is presumed not to be a prescriptive situation but something unique to the designer. The semantic difficulty comes from the use of the word ‘process’, process implies something that can be defined, and automated.

References (bibtex code) @BOOK{weiz76, author = {Weizenbaum, J.}, title = {Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation}, publisher = {W. H. Freeman, San Francisco}, year = 1976, } @BOOK{ger05, author = {Gershenfeld, N.}, title = {Fab: The coming revolution on your desktop—from personal computers to personal fabrication}, publisher = {Basic Books, New York}, year = 2005, }

@ARTICLE{mota11, author = {Mota, C.}, title = {The Rise of Personal Fabrication}, journal = {Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Creativity and cognition}, pages = {279-288}, year = 2011, } @INCOLLECTION{burry00, author = {Burry, M. and Datta, S. and Anson, S.}, booktitle = {Introductory Computer Programming as a Means for Extending Spatial and Temporal Understanding}, publisher = {School of Architecture and Building, Deakin University, Australia}, year = 2000, title = {ACADIA 2000: Eternity, Infinity and Virtuality}, } @BOOK{burry11, author = {Burry, M.}, title = {Scripting Cultures - Architectural Design and Programming}, publisher = {John Wiley and Sons Ltd.}, year = 2011, }

Above, Left: Anatomy of an Applet, a software application that performs only a small set of tasks. Its structure resembles World-Making, where the designer negotiates and integrates rules, elements and constraints at every run.

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Trinidad Carnival: Improving Design through Computation and Digital Technology Vernelle A. A. Noel, Computation Advisor: Azra Akšamija, Readers: Larry Sass, George Stiny

Carnival was introduced to Trinidad by French planters in 1783. After the emancipation of slaves in 1834, former slaves openly celebrated their newly won freedom in a carnivalesque style, bringing the music, the dance and energy to what is now Trinidad Carnival. The main components of Trinidad Carnival are the steelpan, calypso, and mas (masquerade). This carnival has had a great impact on the global cultural economy with more than 70 diasporic carnivals around the globe (USA, UK, Canada, Caribbean, and Europe), generating millions of dollars and attracting millions annually. The Carnival of Trinidad however, is “the most copied, yet least major studied carnival in the world.”

This phenomenon has been studied from a historical, socio-political, anthropological, 044 SMArchS Review 2013

economic, and cultural perspective. I am filling a gap in current literature by carrying out design research in the Trinidad Carnival.

One of the traditional techniques for constructing costumes in the carnival is wire bending, where wire and other materials are bent to create forms and structure for costumes. This thesis attempts to address four (4) problems in design in the Trinidad Carnival. First, the dying art form of wire bending. Second the lack of time and resources to generate design alternatives. Third the lack of an inclusive and diverse design process; and last, the lack of involvement by individuals and communities in “making” in Carnival. This thesis explores the integration of computation and digital technology to support design in the Trinidad Carnival.

Left: Wire bender Stephen Derek doing wire bending for a costume.

Above: Design alternatives generated by using different spatial rules with the same shapes.

My objectives are to: 01. Address the dying art of wire bending 02. Improve design, and 03. Foster a more inclusive design process.

In this thesis I develop support based on a comprehensive study of the existing situation, and the integration of computational tools and digital technology in the design process. I (1) address the current gap in knowledge in Trinidad Carnival by conducting design research, (2) establish the relevance of shape grammars in capturing the dying art form of wire bending, (3) propose a new, more inclusive design process with digital fabrication, (4) use computation and digital technology to enable the creation of design alternatives and objects to think with, and (5) add to the understanding of a design process

outside the domains of product, industrial, architecture, and engineering design.

These results are significant because: 01. The wire bending shape grammar can be used as an educational tool to address the current absence of a system to address this dying art form.

02. A digital tool can be developed from the encoding of the visual design features in wire bending further supporting this art form, and 03. The integration of computation and digital technology in the design process can improve design by generating design alternatives and “objects to think with� in design.

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Above and Right: Illustration of rules in wire bending

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Above: “Dance the Bele” Right: “Bird of Paradise”

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Sketching in 3D: Towards a Fluid Space for Mind and Body Woongki Sung, Computation Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura, Reader: George Stiny

This thesis proposes a new type of computeraided sketching tool for three-dimensional designs. Sketching, as a process, has been used as an effective way of exploring and developing ideas in the design process.

However, when designers deal with volumetric designs in three-dimensional space, current sketching means including traditional free-hand sketching and contemporary computer-aided design (CAD) modeling have limitations, such as dimensional inconsistency and non-intuitive interactions.

By observing the roles of sketching in the design process and reviewing the history of design tools, this thesis investigates and proposes new digital methods of threedimensional sketching that take advantages of motion detecting and computer-vision technology widely available today. In this thesis, two prototype tools have been developed and compared. The first prototype uses a motion detecting sensor, projection screen, and gesture tracking software. The movement of

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the user’s hands becomes an intuitive interface for shaping three-dimensional objects in the virtual space. The second one, a collaboration developed with Nagakura, uses a hand-held tablet computer with marker-based augmented reality technique. The hand-held device displays the virtual object from desired angles, as well as works as a virtual tool like chisel, plane, drill, and glue gun for shaping virtual objects in three-dimensional space. Testing these two prototypes for use, and comparing the resulted objects and user responses reveal strengths and weaknesses of different threedimensional sketching environments. The proposed systems provide a possible foundation for novel computer-aided sketching application that takes advantages of both the physical knowledge and virtual interactions.

Introduction This thesis explores new computer-aided sketching systems that facilitate design explorations of three-dimensional ideas.

The term ‘sketch’ can be used in many ways depending on the focus of interest. A sketch, as a noun, is often used to mean the visual product of a design exploration, such as a traditional free-hand drawing on paper. While the term sketch has a focus on physicality, this thesis focuses on the process of ‘sketching’. In this thesis, sketching is defined as a behavioral and cognitive process where designers explore, develop and externalize ideas with visual-spatial elements.

Many researchers have argued that sketching plays an important role in the creative design process. This is because creative design involves exploring diverse design options and solutions, and the sketching process supports this exploration by letting designers interpret and reinterpret their designs in unexpected ways with its unstructured, ambiguous nature.

According to Goel’s (1995) identification, two kinds of reasoning transformation occur in the sketching process: the lateral transformation and the vertical transformation. In the lateral transformation, designers shift to slightly different ideas from one idea, rather than to a more detailed version of the same idea. In contrast, the vertical transformation occurs when designers move from one idea to a more detailed version of the same idea.

Goel believes that the ambiguous nature of the free-hand sketch facilitates the lateral transformation and prevents early fixations.

The initial motivation of this thesis arose from the question: do current sketching means adequately support such creative design explorations for three-dimensional design ideas?

The history of design tools reveals that not only designer’s needs, but also socio-

Left: Design samples using Si3D-Mobile.

Above: Screenshot of the Si3D-hands.

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Above: Sketching development using the Si3D systems

Left: A screenshot of the Si3D-Mobile screen and screenshot of the Si3DHands screen.

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Above: 3D printed design samples made with the Si3D systems.

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economic changes have affected the development of design tools. In ancient times, the needs of systematizing, documenting and representing design ideas motivated the development of design tools. Thus, design tools such as documentation materials, drawing instruments, and visual representation methodologies were devised. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, socio-economic changes have prioritized industrial qualities such as productivity, reproduction and standardization. Consequently, design tools have been developed mainly in a way that supplements limited accuracy and productivity of human hands. In addition, design tools also have been devised to provide ubiquitous environments to overcome time and space restraints. Meanwhile, there has been less effort to develop creativity support tools.

In similar fashion, the recent development of computer-aided design (CAD) tools has made it possible for designers to have pinpoint precision and high productivity. This also implies that, regarding sketching, the vertical transformation has been greatly aided by those improvements that CAD tools provide.

However, it seems that very few tools has been developed to facilitate the lateral transformation where the exploratory nature of design is emphasized. Moreover, when designers deal with three-dimensional ideas, current sketching means including traditional free-hand sketching and contemporary CAD modeling have limitations, such as a dimensional inconsistency, non-intuitive interactions and insufficient support for design ambiguity.

Based on these understandings and observations of sketching, I argue that current sketching means do not sufficiently support a design exploration of three-dimensional ideas, and there is great potential of developing intuitive sketching systems that can support such an exploration.

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three-dimensional sketching systems, utilizes human hands as a main input interface and provides a three-dimensional sketching environment, not requiring any prosthetic equipment. From the self-trials using Si3D-Hands, several deficiencies were observed. Based on these findings, the second version of threedimensional sketching systems, Si3D-Mobile, was developed to explore alternative ways to supplement the issues found in Si3D-Hands and to compare the two systems. Instead of using bare hands, Si3D-Mobile uses a handheld mobile device as an input method allowing flexible navigation of a sketching environment and precise detection of an input device.

From the development of the two systems and user-trials, the strengths and weaknesses of the three-dimensional sketching systems proposed in this thesis were identified. Intuitive interface and interactions, and non-hierarchical geometric representation of proposed sketching systems supported effortless and impulsive sketching operations. In contrast, difficulties in perceiving spatial depth from a two-dimensional screen, and unstable gesture tracking had to be improved. In addition, user-trials also provide meaningful insights into how people would approach sketching their design ideas with the two sketching systems.

Since this thesis does not account for every aspect of the computer-aided sketching process, the validity of the three-dimensional sketching systems proposed in this thesis is not fully confirmed at this point. However, findings and evaluation from the development and trials of this thesis contribute to envisaging a new computer-aided sketching system by providing viable proofs of rich and creativity-centered design interactions.

Above: Light Painting Photograph, one of the earliest explorations into the spatiality of the sketching (Pablo Picasso and Gjon Mili 1949). Image from lightpaintingphotography.com

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Representing Shapes as Graphs: A Feasible Approach for the Computer Implementation of Parametric Visual Calculating Thomas Wortmann, Computation Advisor: George Stiny, Readers: Takehiko Nagakura, Rudi Stouffs

Computational design tools currently fall into two broad categories: tools for representation and tools for generative design, including scripting. However, both categories address only relatively formal aspects of designing, and do little to support the design freedom and serendipitous creativity that, for example, is afforded by iterative sketching.

Calculating with visual rules provides an explicit notation for such artistic processes of seeing and drawing. Shape grammars have validated this approach by formalizing many existing designs and styles as visual rule-sets. In this way, visual rules store and transfer design knowledge. Visual calculating in a more general sense supports creativity by allowing a designer to apply any rule she wants, and to capriciously see and re-see the design. In contrast to other explicit design methodologies, visual calculating defines 056 SMArchS Review 2013

a decomposition into parts only after the design is calculated, thus allowing formalization without impeding design freedom.

Located at the intersection between design and computation, the computer implementation of visual calculating presents an opportunity for more designerly computational design tools. Since parametric visual calculating allows the largest set of design possibilities, an improved method for the parametric implementation of visual calculating will allow flexible rule-based design tools that intelligently combine design freedom with computational processing power. As a step towards this goal, this thesis proposes a graph-based representation for parametric shapes that is compact, strongly supports design freedom, and is close the original formulation of visual calculating.

The thesis is motivated by two conflicting notions of design: a formal one that underlies explicit design methodologies, and an artistic one that views design freedom as primary.

This dialectic can be reconciled with visual calculating, i.e., calculating with shapes, which provides a formal, rule-based notation for exploratory visual design, without the limitations that usually accompany explicit design methods. (For example, to apply explicit methods effectively, designers need to know in advance what they want to achieve.)

Although sets of visual rules can be codified as shape grammars, while designing, designers can apply any rules they want in any way they want. Visual calculating supports this freedom by allowing a definite decomposition of a design only after the design process has taken place. This property results from the embedding relation, which guarantees that a shape is always composed of maximal elements. Maximal elements ensure that no elements overlap, contain, or adjoin each other.

In other words, a shape is represented by the smallest set of the largest possible elements. Complementing the embedding relation, the part relation ensures that any part of a maximal element can be picked out for rule application. In this way, a rule that creates two overlapping squares from a square can apply recursively to the third square created by the overlap. (In CAD programs, the third square is usually not acknowledged.) In fact, a shape can be decomposed in indefinitely many ways. In this way, maximal elements and indefinite decompositions guarantee design freedom. Maximal elements are an important contrast between visual calculating and other design methods, which, as a first step, tend to decompose a design problem. (Later in the design process, this prior decomposition can make it hard for designers to change their minds.) Calculating with maximal elements also contrasts with digital computation, which works with the largest set of the smallest possible elements: zeros and ones.

The dialectic between explicit methodologies and design freedom can also be observed in the field of computerized tools for architectural design. Generative design techniques like scripting or parametric design suffer from the same limitations as other explicit methods, which is why a computer implementation of visual calculating promises an opportunity for more designerly design tools. Research about the computer implementation of visual calculating has been ongoing for the past thirty years, but implementations have remained limited in scope and popularity. Relatively recently, computer implementations with threedimensional and curved geometries have been developed. However, the implementation of parametric visual calculating has received comparatively little attention. (Parametric visual calculating allows the arguments of a rule to vary geometrically. For example, a parametric rule can apply to “all quadrilaterals”, as opposed to “all squares.” In other words, rule application is governed by different transformations, some of which are parametric.)

A key question for the implementation of parametric visual calculating is how shapes are symbolically represented. (Shapes are visual entities, but computers work only with symbols.) There are several approaches to choose from, however, most of them do not work with parametric shapes, including geometry-based approaches and image recognition. Other approaches apply restrictions, such as pre-defined objects or hierarchies that undermine the design freedom that makes visual calculating uniquely promising for computerized design tools. The remaining option, which is explored in detail in this thesis, is to represent shapes as graphs. (A graph is a data-structure composed of nodes and edges, with the edges representing connections between the nodes.) Graphs are suitable for Left: Four shapes are represented by five different graphs. The inverted graph is visible in the fourth row and the elaborate graph in the fifth.

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representing parametric shapes because they are based on topological connectivity, and not on fixed geometric features. While geometric representations need to be loosened to make them parametric, graphs are flexible datastructures that can be constrained tighter when necessary. Graphs have been employed in several computer implementations, but only one type of graph has been employed for parametric visual calculating while preserving the design freedom that is manifested by the embedding and part relations: the so-called elaborate graph. The thesis compares several graph-based representations for rectilinear, two-dimensional shapes and proposes an inverted graph that is clearer, more compact, and closer to the original formulation of visual calculating than the alternatives. In the inverted graph, nodes represent infinite elements (the collinear extension of maximal elements); and edges, their intersections.

Another key problem for the computer implementation of visual calculating is subshape recognition: In order to apply a visual rule to a shape, one needs to find, in the shape, instances of the rule’s argument, which is itself a shape. This problem is especially difficult for parametric visual calculating, since, when searching for instances of parametric shapes, computers often have to examine many possibilities. When employing a graphbased representation, subshapes can be found via graph search. Graph search is a wellknown algorithmic technique, but can be difficult to compute. However, graph search has many applications and continues to be an area of active research in computer science. Advances in graph search indicate that, in many practical cases, the theoretical difficulty of this technique translates into workable solutions.

The thesis describes algorithms that construct the inverted graph for two-dimensional, rectilinear shapes, with special attention given to non-maximally connected shapes (i.e., shapes with non-intersecting maximal elements). When interpreted naively as graphs,

non-maximally connected shapes result in unconnected graphs. Since unconnected graphs are unsuitable for computation, nonmaximally connected shapes need to be interpreted as connected graphs. This need for interpretation potentially introduces definitions and distinctions that potentially limit design freedom. (Undesirable limitations are a recurring challenge for the symbolic implementation of visual calculating.) Non-maximally connected shapes, though addressed early for non-parametric visual calculating, have not received prior attention in the context of parametric visual calculating with graphs.

In interpreting non-maximally connected shapes as connected graphs, the key question is which intersection points (also known as registration marks), should be included: if one includes too few intersection points, the resulting graph is unconnected; if one includes to many, the graph is over-defined, i.e., more constrained than a designer would expect. To address this question, the thesis proposes four heuristics based on a typology of intersection points, and an algorithm that combines three of those heuristics in a hierarchal fashion. The algorithm achieves good results for a variety of shapes; however, it ultimately should be up to the individual designer to decide how to represent a given shape appropriately. In a design tool, designers should be free to choose heuristics, or to pick an appropriate set of intersection points by hand, in case the proposed algorithm results in an inappropriate symbolic representation.

Left: Infinite elements are represented as nodes and their intersections as edges. Different heuristics for nonmaximally connected shapes lead to different representations.

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Towards Design Tools with Flexible Constraints for Serendipitous Discovery The freedom to choose and customize constraints is a big advantage of the proposed, graph-based representation. Since graphs are highly flexible data structures, they can be (un)constrained almost at will. The only constraints inherent in graphs are topological relationships of connectivity, but even those can be released to some degree. For example, one can apply a rule to “any closed polygon� by searching for closed cycles in the shape graph. (In graphs, a cycle is a path that returns to the starting node.) By requiring the graph search to preserve different types of geometric information (such as length, angles, proportions, convexity, and/or parallelism), rule application with different transformations can be achieved; by constraining angles, distances and the embedding of maximal elements, shapes can be restricted to similarity transformations, while, for affine transformations, one would release angles, but preserve proportions of point distances along lines. As an example of a more general transformation, one could preserve only embedding and convexity, etc. etc. Shape graphs can also be constrained by non-geometric information, such as embedding or labels, which creates even more 060 SMArchS Review 2013

possibilities. For example, shapes can be defined to be of certain colors or line weights.

One can thus imagine a computerized tool that not only lets designers experiment with shapes, but also with the heuristics and constraints that govern rule application and the creation of symbolic representations.

From this perspective, the prime virtue of constraints is not that they narrow the design space, but that they become part of design experimentation. In that way, a computer implementation would not only be a convenient tool that stores and automatically applies visual rules: By offering designers the choice from a range of constraints that are hard to replicate by hand-calculation, the flexible, nimble application of visual rules can lead to surprising results and, in that manner, stimulate creativity in ways that go beyond non-parametric visual calculating. (To be more useful to designers, such a creativity enhancing, rule-based design tool would have to include geometries other than two-dimensional line segments.) I hope that this thesis is a step towards such a rule-based design tool for serendipitous discovery based on all kinds of heuristics, constraints, and geometries. In any case, the thesis articulates a clear agenda for further research in that direction.

Further Research As already mentioned in the previous section, one interesting avenue for further research is the extension of the inverted graph to other geometries and dimensions. For example, it is of interest to connect the inverted graph to previous research about the computer implementation of visual calculating with three-dimensional or curved elements. The inverted graph, with its logic of nodes as infinite elements and their intersections as edges, extends naturally to other geometries; however, the details of such an extension certainly deserve closer attention.

Another interesting topic is additional and possibly more sophisticated heuristics for unconnected shapes, since the heuristics outlined in this thesis do not make any claims to completeness or optimally.

A related issue is the application of geometric and other constraints to restrict the graph search for subshapes, which was discussed in the previous section.

These constraints afford various (parametric) transformations that certainly merit exploration in more detail. Most likely, the examples from the previous section form only a small part of the intriguing transformations that are afforded by the inverted graph. An

especially interesting challenge is the development of a customized graph search algorithm.

As mentioned in the first section, graph search algorithms are a topic of research in computer science. However, a graph search algorithm that is tailor-made for (parametric) visual calculating is potentially much more efficient than general-purpose approaches.

The last avenue of research has received almost no attention in this thesis: The question of what kind of user interface would be appropriate for a design tool of the type sketched in the previous section.

As we have seen, there are many possibilities for different visual calculations based on various geometries, heuristics, and constraints. Making these complex opportunities available in an intuitive and simple manner is an important design task in its own right. The agenda outlined in this section holds great promise, so let’s get to it!

Above: The embedding and part relations allow the designer to pick out any shape she wants, in this case the third square created by two overlapping squares. This allows the recursive rule application of the four derivations, which are governed by the same rule, but under different transformation.

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Faculty Stanford Anderson Arindam Dutta David Friedman Mark Jarzombek Caroline Jones Kristel Smentek

Students Graduating Irina Chernyakova Antonio Furgiuele Samuel Ray Jacobson Mariel VillerĂŠ Continuing Ann Lui

HISTORY, THEORY & CRITICISM SMArchS students in History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture and Art expand upon prior experience (which can be in design, theory, history, practice, or other postundergraduate work) to explore compelling research that links historical or contemporary topics with methodological issues. Working alongside doctoral students in the program, SMArchS students will be exposed to a wide range of historical periods and theoretical approaches. It is expected that research topics are developed in close discussion with HTC faculty, building on the required Methods Seminar (taken twice) to clarify the appropriate scope and original sources required for the master’s thesis. The HTC program is intensely interdisciplinary, and students are expected to enrich their core disciplines of history and theory with inquiry into other fields as appropriate for their research interests. Opportunities occasionally emerge for HTC students to become involved in editing, organizing research symposia, and preparing exhibitions; students will also be brought into discussion with colleagues from across the discipline groups in the SMArchS program.

Systems of Valuation Irina Chernyakova; History, Theory & Criticism Co-Advisors: Arindam Dutta & Mark Jarzombek, Reader: Kristel Smentek

The 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth marked a watershed moment in ongoing environmental debates among politicians, economists, scientists, and the public in the postwar period. Sponsored by the Club of Rome, an influential think-tank established in 1968, the report was published against the backdrop of the progressive activism of the 1960s, and prefigured the neo-conservative politics of the 1980s. It represented a decisive moment in that it appeared to reconcile critiques of consumerism and capitalism by 064 SMArchS Review 2013

linking the limits of global consumption to a finite totality of resources on the planet.

As a pre-history to current systems of valuation, this thesis looks at some of the intellectual tendencies that undergirded mindsets such as those manifest in the report.

More importantly, it follows the intricate logics and narratives buried within the enigmatic web of geometric symbols and snaking lines that suffuse the writings of systems thinkers, tracing a genealogy of this mode of thought that begins with semiotic language

of ecologists Eugene and Howard T. Odum, and of Jay Wright Forrester and the Systems Dynamics Group at MIT, to its manifold ends.

These actors will ground the implications of systems theory-in-practice, its implications, and its biases. In doing so, the thesis reconstructs how “environment” was first defined and captured by systems thinking.

Navigating through a series of international conferences in which these principles were substantiated, the thesis looks at the ramifications of systems thinking in the present.

Above: Frames from Howard T. Odum, “The Energy Game,” ca. 1980, as reported by John Thomas. University of Florida Archives, George A. Smathers Libraries.

Next Spread: “The World Model,” in Donella Meadows, et al. The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972).

Following Spread: Howard T. Odum, Systems diagram for United States of America, 1980.

University of Florida Archives, George A. Smathers Libraries.

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Architecture of the Cloud: Virtualization Takes Command Antonio Furgiuele; History, Theory & Criticism Advisor: Mark Jarzombek, Readers: Arindam Dutta, Richard Nisa, Joao Ribas, Joseph Godlewski

A single manageable architecture of the Cloud has been one of the most important social and technical changes of the 21st century. Cloud computing, our newest public utility is an attempt to confront and control cultural risk, it has rendered the environment of our exchanges calculable, manageable, seemingly predictable, and most importantly as a new form of capital.

Cloud computing in its most basic terms is the system of virtualization of data storage and program access into an instantaneous service utility. The transformation of computing into a service industry is one of the key changes of the Information Age, and its logic is tied to the highly guarded mechanisms of a black box, an architecture machine, or more commonly known as the data center.

In 2008, on a day with without the usual fanfare or barrage of academic manifestoes, grand claims of paradigm shifts, virtualization quietly took command. A seemingly

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simple moment where a cloud, the Cloud, emerged as a new form of managerial space that tied a large system of users to the hidden mechanisms of large scaled factories of information, a network of data centers.

The project positions the Cloud and the data center into the architectural discourse, both historically and materially, through an analysis of its relationship to an emergent digital sublime and how it is managed, controlled and propelled through the obscure typologies of its architecture and images.

The study of the Cloud and the data center through the notion of the sublime, and the organizational structures of typology we can more critically assess architecture’s relationship to this new phase of the Information Age. Below: June 6th, 2011 Debut of iCloud, Steve Jobs.

Right: Analyzing the Cloud

The Cloud links individuals technologically to a potentially infinite archive of information, from any location, and for any eventuality.

The sublimity of the Cloud operates through an oscillation between an infinitely atemporal – scaleless – placeless - riskless set of positivist beliefs for the individual user that are conditioned by the scientific logic of the architecture of the data center, and vice versa.

It is a near perfect feedback loop between a belief system and an architecture machine that can reciprocally regulate, maintain and propel each other. The distance between users, the Cloud and the data center are created by its architecture and its images, an aesthetics of disappearance, which facilitates and maintains its black box status.

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To critically engage the processes of black boxing, and make palpable the ways in which architecture and images facilitate the Cloud, the development of typologies enabled a historical and material ground from which to understand its inner mechanisms. Architectural typologies of data centers include: Urban Data Retrofit, Data Hotel, Data Bunker, Data Big Box, Server Farm, Data Stock Exchange, Data Haven & Sovereign Data.

Typologies of Cloud images include: The Symbolic Cloud and Image Maintenance.

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Above: Interior photographs of Google Data Centers.

The Cloud, as a notation, communicates to the user an active displacement, both symbolic and literal, that the current information within lies in hands of the expert, the one unseen that wields both technical and legal authorship.

The emergence of the Cloud and the data center have become a new automated social and technical life support system in the social, political, economic environment of the Information Age. The complex logic of the Cloud highlighted by a new form of the digital

sublime provides new ways to understand the individual’s relationship to an architecture of the data center, and how its architectural and image typologies regulate and maintain this new phase of the Information Age.

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Notes on Sexuality & Space Samuel Ray Jacobson; History, Theory & Criticism Co-Advisors: Mark Jarzombek & Caroline Jones

Very little has been written on the subject of sexuality in architectural scholarship.

Sexuality & Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), which contains the proceedings of a 1990 conference of the same name held at the Princeton School of Architecture, was both the first and last book-length publication dedicated to a comprehensive discourse on sexual identity within the discipline of architecture. While symposium organizer and proceedings editor Beatriz Colomina writes in the proceedings interdiction that the occasion’s effort to “raise the question of ‘Sexuality and Space’” was but “one small event” in an ongoing discourse; that discourse failed to materialize. Twenty years later, I have tried to figure out what happened.

The reality of historiography is that from text alone there is no way of knowing. However, by carefully examining the construction of the constative within the publication Sexuality & Space, I have come to a better understanding of how that publi074 SMArchS Review 2013

cation was both the beginning and end of the conversation it sought to inaugurate.

In this thesis, I investigate three related essays published in Sexuality & Space: Laura Mulvey’s “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity,” Beatriz Colomina’s “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” and Mark Wigley’s “Untitled: The Housing of Gender.” Each investigated essay has been given a corresponding chapter. My method has been close reading, or the sustained interpretation of brief passages of text. By paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which ideas unfold as they are read, I have developed a comprehensive narrative of how these three essays in Sexuality & Space, together, both instantiate and negate a shared discourse. My investigation is centered on “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism;” to that end, the first and third chapters are written in support of the second.

Above: Untitled, Samuel Ray Jacobson, 2013.

Excerpt: Laura Mulvey and the Status of the Antecedent At the beginning of “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity,” Laura Mulvey takes note of her self-reflexivity in composing that essay. In her words, “I became conscious of a dawning sense of déjà vu. While thinking I was mapping new ground, I found myself back with themes that had frequently figured in my work before” (Mulvey, “Topographies” 54). Instead, where “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity” explores Greek myth, Hitchcock, psychoanalytic theory, and the look in cinema (again), Mulvey proceeds as if through a “new turn of the kaleidoscope,” representing familiar themes in unfamiliar ways.

Laura Mulvey’s kaleidoscopic turn is appropriate, when examined in context. In its own way, each essay included in Sexuality & Space takes the same approach, presenting material that had already been published in a new configuration. This is particularly true of the two other texts considered in this thesis: “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” combines material from a magazine Beatriz Colomina worked on during her college years, a co-authored book, and articles published in Assemblage and AA Files01; “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” consists entirely of historiography. Moreover, in both “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” and “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is cited extensively. These citations are offered in a manner that makes the essay seem emblematic of the “kinds of work on representation and desire developed over the last fifteen years by feminist theorists” (Colomina, introduction to S&S n.p.) that the 1990 symposium intended to bring to the attention of architectural discourse and practice.

Reading laterally, it is apparent that a shared interest in unveiling is what established “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” as the primary conceptual antecedent to both “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” and “Untitled: The Housing of Gender.” For example, in “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” Beatriz Colomina considers the female body as signified in representations of space; as Colomina makes evident in her essay, media such as photography and film undermine and dematerialize architecture’s gendered “organizing geometry.” Additionally, in “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” Mark Wigley considers the regulation of the female body through spatial and disciplinary boundaries; as Wigley writes, “subordinated femininity is produced historically” by the evolution of domestic interiors and discourse on exterior ornament. In both of these essays, dialectics of interior and exterior are derived from connotations implicit in the female/male gender binary; in the terms of “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” this is “the role of sexuality in the construction of space.” Following this proposition, the role of the architectural historian is to make explicit these implicit connotations.

Such performance is analogous to Laura Mulvey’s demonstration of how the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

The veil itself is the subject of “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity.” It is through the figure of the veil that Mulvey can speak to the spatial concepts of interest to her architectural audience. In the essay, Mulvey considers the image of the female body as a sign, and analyzes it in terms of its symbolic topography. In this manner, the exploration of cinematic tropes speaks to issues of ontology in space. As “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity” explains, the topography of the female body in cinema both History, Theory & Criticism 075

conceals and reproduces anxieties projected onto the feminine within the patriarchal psyche. Beginning with an extract from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), Mulvey explores how narrative clichés are translated into characters in art and drama, informed by the aesthetics of gender. Because representations of the mythic figure Pandora in different media02 involve a shared iconography, Mulvey argues that the figure of Pandora presents “an intermittent strand of patriarchal mythology and misogyny” that extends “across the ages” (Mulvey, “Topographies” 63). The spatial manifestation of this mythology derives from “the inside/out polarization” in castration anxiety, iconographically represented in images of the female body. Depictions of Pandora by men in art, psychoanalysis, and cinema are each in their own way generated by castration anxiety, a fetish whereby “an appropriate object is substituted to stand in for the missing penis” (68). In this way, fetish depends on topography, where the psyche produces a signifier (Pandora) who functions as a mask, which veils a trauma which cannot itself be signified (castration).

Because the concept of topography bridges the symbolic and spatial, as well as space and its representation, it functions as a fulcrum between Mulvey’s interest in signification and her interlocutor’s interests in media and the built environment. In both “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity,” signifiers articulate topography because they are spatial rather than because they refer to spaces. Consider, for example, Mulvey’s depiction of cinematography in Hitchcock’s Notorious: “The camera itself emphasizes the look of curiosity, tracking with Ingrid Bergman’s point of view as she surreptitiously and inquisitively looks for clues. Again, the chain of signifiers builds up metonymically, linking together the images of space and enclosure from the house itself, the double clanging of the front door, to 076 SMArchS Review 2013

the montage of cupboards that she looks into. I would argue that the topography of the miseen-scène enhances the spatial implications of the look of curiosity and also reflects the spatial configuration of the heroine’s masquerade.”

(Mulvey, “Topographies” 65; emphasis mine) Here, the physical interval traversed by a tracking shot is analogous to its corresponding duration in cinematic narrative.

As Mulvey describes it, space is configured by the gaze, which is in turn subject to the symbolic signification of what it sees.

This process occurs in space, but the space in which it occurs is only a medium.

The “space of secrets” Mulvey analyzes from Notorious and her study of iconographically similar depictions of the figure Pandora emerges from the gendered aesthetics of curiosity rather than a pre-existing territory.

While Mulvey analyzes realities manifest in space, the spaces she depicts are secondary to their intersection of the feminine, memory, and cliché. Paraphrasing Dora and Irwin Panofky’s iconological study Pandora’s Box (1956), Mulvey argues that the figure of Pandora can be identified by the presence of a box, across art history. The connotation of woman and box, together, is dependent on their juxtaposition in space.03 The space of this juxtaposition and that to which it refers is represented by Mulvey—for example within the engraving

by Abraham van Diepenbeck and drawing by Paul Klee identified by the Panofksys in their book04 and cited by Mulvey in her essay—but only insofar as this depiction illuminates an argument about symbolic signification.05 With this in mind it can be said that the evocative nature of Pandora’s spatial imagery is phantasmagorical, in the literal sense of the word. Like “phantasmagoria” as defined by Merriam Webster, the “intermittent strand of patriarchal mythology and misogyny” evident in historical depictions of Pandora and her box consists of (1) optical effects and illusions, (2) a constantly shifting succession of things seen and imagined, and (3) bizarre assem-

blage: images and the cinema are discussed, the representations produced are all dependent upon the manipulation of the visual, and the complete set of art historical artifacts considered is eccentric to Mulvey’s particular investigation. The etymology of “phantasmagoria” captures this last, enigmatic nature of Laura Mulvey’s desired “reformulation” of Pandora’s iconography. While Pandora characterizes clichés of femininity as a transgressive and dangerous enigma, “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity” resituates these motifs within a transgressive, feminist curiosity. In so doing Mulvey leverages the spectral quality of phantasmagoria, as derived from the Old French fantasme, in the interest of a collective, hermeneutic effort: “an investigation of the slippages between signifier and signified, that characterize both the structure of the individual psyche and the shared fantasies of a common culture” (Mulvey, “Topographies” 66).

It is also noteworthy that phantasmagoria, in the theatrical (rather than literal) sense, is politicized within Laura Mulvey’s essays. In “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity,” the interval between the iconography of Pandora and Bergman’s portrayal of “the look of curiosity” inhabited by her character (Alicia Hoberman) is analogous to the interval between the spectral terror of phantasmagoric theater and the collective, affective pleasure of the cinema.06 In Notorious the spatial register of mise-en-scène enhances the experience of feminine curiosity so that it can be “transmuted into a pleasure of decipherment;” in this way, the “mystery and threat” of female sexuality signified by Pandora’s Box can be “interpreted as a curiosity about the mystery she herself personifies” (Mulvey, “Topographies” 65-6, paraphrased liberally). As Mulvey writes, the experience of cinema amplifies this phenomenon by translating the imaginary into the symbolic. Inasmuch as Pandora functions as a collective mnemic (imaginary) symbol, her presence in cinema materializes

the anxiety she signifies in an emotionally resonant form.07 In this way, narrative is transformed into a collective experience.

As Mulvey writes in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” when accompanied by psychoanalytic theory this transformation can advance the understanding of the patriarchal status quo as exemplified by the scopophilic gaze. In contrast to the symbolic space of film, the topography of built objects resists connotation. Charged with the responsibility for use, architecture lacks the “dislocation of word and image” characteristic of cinema by Mulvey’s description; while film is viewed, architecture is sensed: seen, felt, and occupied in continuous and unrepeatable ways. Although in Beatriz Colomina’s investigation of architectural representation in “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” and in Mark Wigley’s architectural historiography in “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” seek for architecture to signify in the multiple registers of metonymy, their use of second-order material (photography and film, and architectural treatises, respectively) both render architecture as symbolically impotent on its own accord. Their architecture cannot signify alone.

Ironically, the interdisciplinary exchange between theories of architecture and sexuality initiated by Sexuality & Space re-enforces architecture’s symbolic impotence. In the terms of castration anxiety outlined by Sigmund Freud, one can argue that the discourse exemplified by the 1990 symposium stands in as an “appropriate object” to compensate for the symbolic impotency of architecture relative to other media. The shared dialectic of inside and outside allows for Laura Mulvey’s feminist theory of iconography to facilitate an architectural engagement with the gendered ontology of space; to this end Beatriz Colomina expands upon Mulvey’s theory of the gaze to discuss the gendering of interior and exterior spaces in architectural photography, and Mark Wigley interrogates the gender identity of the “Renaissance space” History, Theory & Criticism 077

referred to in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”08 However, in their engagement with gender both Colomina and Wigley inadvertently assert an architectural interior/exterior condition coextensive with embodied sexual difference.09 Even though Mark Wigley claims that architecture’s “subordinated femininity is produced historically” both “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” and “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” portray an unavoidably phallocentric relationship between sexuality and architecture. In sum, Colomina and Wigley’s essays in Sexuality & Space instruct readers in a chronic architectural reality rather than offering indications for dialectical engagement and political transformation.

In Sexuality & Space, the mask of interdisciplinarity covers over the problematic aspects of architecture’s patriarchy. In this sense, without intending to do so, the historians castrate architecture as a symbolic system. “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity” was published two years after the initial symposium at Princeton University, and its conclusion offers some a critique of the event.

I bring this final passage to our attention now as a means of framing the aspects of Sexuality & Space that made it of such interest to me, from a critical perspective. It is clear that rather than exploit curiosity about the condition of the feminine in architectural history, Sexuality & Space remains fixated on concealed spaces, hidden areas, and discursive silences. In this fetishization of the void, event and proceedings perpetuate the “refusal to accept the difference that the female body signifies” identified by Laura Mulvey in “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity” as axiomatically antithetical to study of gender. Consequently, Mulvey’s paraphrased iconology of Pandora in applies equally as a historiography of Sexuality & Space:

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“Out of this series of turning away, of covering over, not the eyes but understanding, of looking fixedly at any object that holds the gaze, female sexuality is bound to remain a mystery, condemned to return as a mnemic symbol of anxiety while overvalued and idealized in imagery.” (“Topographies” 70) In response to this problem/problematic, “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity” offers the scholarly subject-position of “feminist theory” as a type of complicated directive: “The deciphering that feminist theory has undertaken in order to analyze the female body as a sign has revealed the literal realities of spaces and images to be as elastic as the forms of metaphor and metonymy themselves. There is nothing behind the mask, no veil to tear away, not even an emptiness to be revealed, only traces of disavowal and denial, the shifting signifiers that bear witness to the importance that psychoanalysis and semiotics have had to feminist criticism.” (“Topographies” 71) The final sentence in the excerpt above gives presence to the analysis Mulvey speaks of, and then concludes using the present perfect tense. While Mulvey seems to imply a progress from an antecedent, there is no projection and nothing to follow. Recalling Frederic Jameson,10 Mulvey notes the ongoing methodological shift from decipherment into interest in surface manifestations, and then the collapse of latent and manifest into textual play. These lines question the relevance of feminist inquiry in the postmodern era, undermining the structuralist framework of architectural theories developed by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. So Mulvey argues, by 1990 “feminist theory” had exhausted itself as a depth model: its semiotics softened by deconstruction, such inquiry could only offer ideological critique in the mode of self-reflexivity. With the privilege of age Mulvey addresses hermeneutic crisis through kaleidoscopic self-reflexivity, revising her earlier work through the prismatic refraction

of the postmodern turn. To the extent that this is not possible for her younger, extradisciplinary peers, the void that would emerge at the intersection of feminist and architectural theories resulted from the critique of an ideology that had already been redacted.

In Sexuality & Space, there was nothing to say because there was nothing to say.

Works Cited 01. Colomina, Beatriz. Introduction. Sexuality & Space. Vol. 1. New York: Princeton Architectural, 1992. N. pag. Print.

Princeton Papers in Architecture.

02. Colomina, Beatriz. “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism.” Sexuality & Space. Vol. 1. New York: Princeton Architectural, 1992. 73-130. Print.

Princeton Papers in Architecture.

03. Mulvey, Laura. “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity.” Sexuality & Space. Vol. 1. New York: Princeton Architectural, 1992. 53-72. Print.

Princeton Papers in Architecture.

04. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18.

Brown University. Web. 19 Feb. 2013.

05. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Captialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Print. 11 06. Wigley, Mark. “Untitled: The Housing of Gender.” Sexuality & Space.

Vol. 1. New York: Princeton Architectural, 1992. 327-89. Print. Princeton Papers in Architecture.

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Endnotes 01. Respectively, Quetglas, José. “Lo Placentero.” Carrier De La Ciutat 9-10 (1980): 2.

Print. Note, cited in Colomina “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” 92; for an indepth discussion of this citation, see the second chapter of this thesis.

Risselada, Max, and Beatriz Colomina.

Raumplan versus Plan Libre: Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier 1919-1930. New York: Rizzoli, 1988. Print.

Colomina, Beatriz. “”Le Corbusier and Photography”” Assemblage 4 (1987).

Print. Note, cited in Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” 112 (footnote 47) Colomina, Beatriz. “Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interior of Adolf Loos.” AA Files 20 (1990): 5-15.

Print. Note, cited in Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” 385 02. In Renaissance painting, early twentieth century science fiction, Freudian psychoanalysis, and contemporary consumer goods, specifically 03. Mulvey writes, “[t]he reverberations of connotation between Pandora and her box depend on contiguity: both the juxtaposition of the figure to the box and the topography of the female body as an enclosing space link metonymically to other enclosing spaces” (“Topographies” 63).

04. Panofsky, Dora, and Erwin Panofsky. Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol. New York: Pantheon, 1956. Print. 77, 113 05. As Mulvey notes, this method of spatial depiction has a precedent in the work of Sigmund Freud. “Freud used the concept of a topography to convey the structure of the psyche, the relation, that is, between the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious minds. He used spatial imagery to visualize the dream work, describing the manifest content as a façade, 080 SMArchS Review 2013

concealing the latent dream thoughts.

The image of concealment, of veiling, seems to imply that one lies, like a layer, behind the other” (“Topographies” 66).

06. Invented in France in the late 18th century, phantasmagoria is a theatrical technique which uses a “magic lantern” to project frightening images onto walls and screens; this form of projection is one of the many precursors of film.

07. “[Certain] images persist through history, giving private reverie a shortcut to a gallery of collective fantasy, inhabited by monsters and heroes, heroines and femme fatales. To my mind, these images and stories function like collective mnemic symbols, and allow ordinary people to stop and wonder or weep, desire or shudder, resurrecting for the time being long lost psychic structures The symbolic space of cinema allows for the resurrection of these persistent figures in the present imaginary: The cinema, with its strange, characteristic dislocation between word and image, fulfills this psychic function beautifully, drawing on preexisting connotations, metaphors, and metonymies to achieve a level of recognizable, but hard to articulate, emotional resonance that evades the precision of language and then materializes amorphous anxieties and desires into recognizable figures who will gain strength and significance from repetition” (Mulvey, “Topographies” 67-8).

08. In two instances: 1) “A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man’s-land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe’s first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall’s songs in To

Have or Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen” (Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure” n.p.). 2) “The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude” (ibid).

09. Interiors are feminine and therefore the space of women, exteriors are masculine and therefore refer to masculinity 10. “This is perhaps the moment to say something about contemporary theory, which has, among other things, been committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside and of stigmatizing such models as ideological and metaphysical. But what is today called contemporary theory--or better still, theoretical discourse--is also, I want to argue, itself very precisely a postmodernist phenomenon. It would therefore be inconsistent to defend the truth of its theoretical insights in a situation in which the very concept of “truth” itself is part of the metaphysical baggage which poststructuralism seeks to abandon. What we can at least suggest is that the poststructuralist critique of the hermeneutic, of what I will shortly call the depth model, is useful for us as a very significant symptom of the very postmodernist culture which

is our subject here. Over hastily, we can say that besides the hermeneutic model of inside and outside which Munch’s painting develops, at least four other fundamental depth models have generally been repudiated in contemporary theory: (1) the dialectical one of essence and appearance (along with a whole range of concepts of ideology or false consciousness which tend to accompany it); (2) the Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of repression (which is, of course, the target of Michel Foucault’s programmatic and symptomatic pamphlet La Volante de savoir[The history of Sexuality]); (3) the existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity whose heroic or tragic thematics are closely related to that other great opposition between alienation and disalienation, itself equally a casualty of the poststructural or postmodern period; and (4) most recently, the great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified, which was itself rapidly unraveled and deconstructed during its brief heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. What replaces these various depth models is for the most part a conception of practices, discourses, and textual play, whose new syntagmatic structures we will examine later on; let it suffice now to observe that here too depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what if often called intertextuality is in that sense no longer a matter of depth)” (Jameson, “The Postmodern Condition” n.p.). Thanks to Caroline Jones for making this connection clearer to me.

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Life Behind Ruins: Constructing documenta Mariel Villeré; History, Theory & Criticism Advisor: Mark Jarzombek, Reader: Caroline Jones

A transnational index of contemporary art, documenta in its current form is known in the art world for its scale, site-specificity and rotating Artistic Directors, each with their own theme and agenda. On a unique schedule, the expansive show is displayed in Kassel, Germany from June to September every five years. The origins of the exhibition-event are embedded in the postwar reconstruction of West Germany and a regenerative national Garden Show. This thesis focuses on the architectural condition of the first documenta in 1955, which I argue has ultimately shaped the nomadic and parceled form of documenta as it evolved. In a liminal space between a violent, isolated history and a hopeful, democratic future, the organizers of documenta appropriated the damaged, but centrally located Museum Fridericianum as shelter for an exhibition of modern art.

I trace the early history of the siting and architecture of the Museum Fridericianum and central urban plaza, the Friedrichsplatz, to unfold the urban planning schemes and controversies of the 1940s and 50s. In the midst of replanning, the national Garden Show– the Bundesgartenschau, a catalyst for economic regeneration as a tourist attraction 082 SMArchS Review 2013

and proponent of urban parks, offered the support needed for the germinating plans for an art show that would be called documenta.

Arnold Bode, a designer, painter and professor at the Art Academy in Kassel took advantage of the Bundesgartenschau exposure and funding to install an exhibition of modern art in the damaged neoclassical Museum Fridericianum. Although the details of the building’s restoration are often overlooked, the thesis examines the built conditions of Bode’s Fridericianum in an attempt to reposition documenta in an architectural history. I argue for the influence of Kassel’s urban and landscape history on the staging of documenta, and in turn, the exhibition’s dialogue with the form and ideology of the Bundesgartenschau. In displaying the architecture as part of the exhibition, Bode resurrected the Enlightenment ideology that birthed the building and reinterpreted it for a postwar message. Now one among many biennial format global exhibitions, documenta offers a unique and compelling confluence between the subject’s relationship with landscape, urban design, architecture, exhibition design and art, based on its inception in 1955 in the Museum Fridericianum.

Built a decade before the French Revolution and touted as the first public museum in continental Europe, the 1779 building was transitioned to a state library in the early 20th century and then damaged in World War II, reduced to its shell and an indeterminate fate. Ninety percent of the inner city’s historic structures had been destroyed in World War II, then incrementally rebuilt and unevenly conserved. The bombing had heavily damaged Friedrichsplatz, the cultural center of the city, and the buildings surrounding the Fridericianum were successively cleared in postwar demolition and clean up efforts.

Hardly left unscathed, the Fridericianum’s roof had completely collapsed, taking the interior floors with it, and later its southeastern corner was partially torn down in fear of further subsidence. As if a symbol, the neoclassical façade optimistically stood tall on the plaza, at the center of the restructuring city and as token of Enlightenment ideals and Kassel’s identity in the public imagination. Without a clear decision on an alternative programmatic purpose for the building, the city slowly rebuilt portions of the structure over the next ten years.

In February 1954, a photograph of the second story “Grand Hall” appeared in the local newspaper with an enticing caption: “the hall would provide ideal opportunities to exhibitors to design their own exhibition.” Meanwhile, the city busily prepared for the grand event, the Bundesgartenschau, which would travel to and open its third postwar show in Kassel after Hannover in 1951 and Hamburg in 1953.

Kassel’s once fortuitously central location became peripheral upon the division of East and West Germany. Lagging behind the progress throughout the American sector, the Bundesgartenschau was to make up for this shortfall of the recovery program. Our protagonist, Arnold Bode, a Kassel painter, designer and professor, recognized an opportunity for global attention and financial support for an art exhibition if he could

position it alongside the nationally recognized and sponsored agriculture and garden show, scheduled to arrive in Kassel in 1955.

Although the prevailing historical narrative has only obliquely related the first documenta to the Bundesgartenschau, this thesis puts forth the Bundesgartenschau as a progenitor for documenta in 1955 and its evolution as an art exhibition operating at the urban scale. Orchestrated by the Federal Republic of Germany, the traveling Bundesgartenschau and its locally developed counterpart, documenta would together foster an ideology of beautification through landscape, architecture and art for the reconstruction of this archetypal mid-sized German town.

Landscape architect Hermann Mattern designed the grounds and created an industrial exhibition hall out of the ruins of the baroque Orangerie, hemming “the bitter truth [with] glorious past.”01 Bundesgartenschau workers buried the rubble to form a hill between Karlsaue Park and Friedrichsplatz and over the former “small” river Fulda, rehashing the demonstration of mastery over nature and over the more recent horrors of mankind, burying memories of the war by growing roses out of the rubble.

Below: Bundesgartenschau poster, graphics by Kurt Kranz.

Left: The Museum Fridericianum open for documenta in 1955

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Upon this hill and throughout the park, emerging architect and structural engineer Frei Otto perched his early experiments, including the first of his now famous lightweight four-point tent as the Bundesgartenschau music pavilion. Thoroughly rejecting the idea of everlasting monumentality and groundedness that had “contaminated” architecture and planning during the Third Reich, Frei Otto’s utopian tensile structures designed a potentially nomadic modernity.

While the Bundesgartenschau turned up and blended historical lines in the park, the architectural interventions were temAbove: Museum Fridericianum Groß Halle, 1954 and 1955 for documenta. top: HNA bottom: Günther Becker / © documenta Archiv

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porary, lightweight and meant to encourage movements throughout the garden and mobility from recent history. Further, these visitors, some Kasselers, others tourists, could follow the show’s perambulation to other West German cities, on a path to reaggregate a new democratic nation. While the Bundesgartenschau interpreted the “art” of landscape as the perfected ideal through forgetting, documenta left the past uncomfortably legible in a process of reanimation.

Having actively built an exhibition repertoire as a participating artist, organizer and designer for exhibitions, storefronts, theater sets and trade shows, Arnold Bode set his aims higher in 1946, when he first conceived of an international exhibition with his colleagues at the “New” Art Academy in

Kassel, including Hermann Mattern, the landscape architect for the Bundesgartenschau.

When presented with the option of a similar tent designed by Frei Otto to be placed on Friedrichsplatz, Bode was seduced by the site rather than the nomadic structure; specifically by the promise of the vast space within the Fridericianum, which by 1954 had been provisionally rebuilt by the city since bearing damage from the war. His decision to use the damaged Fridericianum for its stature and symbolism marks the interconnectedness of the two exhibitions, their divergence and the curatorial vision for documenta as a mechanism to reference history. Staging the exhibition in the Fridericianum, as an identity marker of Kassel and a symbol of Enlightenment ideals, represented a return to, or a resurrection of, the tolerant and humanist “neoclassical” society and politics.

Bode and his art students as assistants reconfigured the interior structure of the Fridericianum as a modernist gallery behind the building’s conserved façade. In the accompanying exhibition brochure, organizers sent the message that while it is important for the viewer to realize the history of the building, it is equally important to note that the exhibition’s design depends on the gutted and unfinished interior, accepting the realities of the situation and using only the available means. While the decision to use the salvaged building may be unremarkable for citizens whose city had been nearly completely destroyed and the ruins of which made up their postwar environment, Bode’s architectural intervention dissolved the tense dichotomy between preservation and demolition and presented an early form of adaptive re-use.

A familiar typology in our post-industrial era, Bode’s Fridericianum marks a paradigm shift in exhibition design and the turn to installation art; grapples with the German understanding of historic preservation around the void of the Nazi period; and positions mimetic architecture against the non-mimetic, abstract art that was put on display.

Its architecture linked past and present, tradition and innovation, space and object and represents the historical complex at a time of political and architectural transition, a liminal space for the formation of a modern and democratic viewer. After the State Department had reinforced original walls with applied concrete, they were left rough and painted white. Bode took advantage of the open plan incorporating elements of modernist architectural style, using only raw materials –primarily plastic curtains, bricks, wood wool concrete boards and stock wood.

The space was further divided by a series of planes of varying materiality and permanence: temporary walls hovered, disrupting any traditionally clear connection between load and support and sheer curtains hung on the inside of the strong façade, blurring interior and exterior space, filtering light. Rather than a white cube, closed off from external contaminants of the outer world as more fully expressed in the 60s, Bode’s Fridericianum is porous and in motion, bringing both the art and architecture into spatial dialog with the viewer as she moves through the exhibition space.

With the curtains muting natural light, artificial lighting was added but disguised by an extended network of a pergola-like structure, at once unifying the space with continuous lines and bringing the grand height of the ceilings down to human level and modernist proportions, particularly in the double height of the second floor. Here, in the Groß Halle, a black wooden trim outlines the trace of the former floor plate, encircling the void and floating an imaginary ceiling. To create more wall space for paintings, Bode installed temporary walls covering the windows on the façade, shearing planes of old and new.

More than just a white wall for hanging pictures, the gallery materialized as a medium for making art from architecture, a condition that Bode would take advantage of in the Fridericianum by framing the spaces between the frames. Beneath the canopy of roof beams, History, Theory & Criticism 085

Bode hung paintings set out from the wall, displaying the space around the paintings and the “primitive quality” of the bricks just as much as he did the art. The exhibition design inspired a spirit of community through viewing: paintings rotated from vertical poles on V-braces at a remove from the brick walls and on short poles standing on square feet with a light touch on the rough floors, altogether disrupting any regulating datum line and challenging the ground. The viewer circulated around the space of each anthropomorphized object, equalizing sculpture, paintings and the body within the architecture. With these spatial and visual cues, the exhibition enhanced the “sphere of experience” already expressed in the abstractionist art, in which the visitor encountered her own (nostalgic) nature, in movement and tension with the ephemerality of the damaged and unfinished building.02 Bode’s design of an environment for “visual understanding” can be contrasted with the trade fairs under the Marshall Plan around the same time, which inspired consumer desires in their viewers. However, it is important not to forget the professional detail of Bode’s prior experience designing wallpapers, modular trade fair booths and furniture. Of note is the booth design at the 1951 Constructa building exhibition in Hannover for the plastics company, Göppinger Plastics, which had donated the sheet material for documenta. One of Bode’s assistants attributed the name documenta to the lexicon of interior design, or a “spin-off of the ‘1950s advertising neologisms’” including the Constructa exhibition, the German furniture manufacturer Korrekta and the synthetic fabric line Abstracta, another material that Bode used in several design series for the plastics company. 03 Although the first documenta did not display design objects autonomously, but rather through the exhibition architecture, it did appropriate the advertising culture in its name and graphic design –lower case lettering; black, white, and primary colors; and the severe geometry and sans-serif typeset.

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We see this design motif in the exhibition brochure as well, in which the architecture itself becomes a graphic. A total of 32 gallery rooms were used documenta, ranging in size from cabinet sized to expansive halls.

On the first floor: “European Development since 1905” by historical movement; “Painting and Sculpture of Present and ‘Special Cabinets’” organized by artist on the second floor; capped by a portion of the uppermost floor displaying “Architecture from 1905-1955” in ‘parallel’ to the 670 paintings and sculptures on display. The objective photographic display of modernist, built, architecture, allowed the viewer to imagine the rebuilding of her own environment.

The catalog announced the aim of the exhibition “clear,” seemingly obvious and necessary,04 to trace the development of visual art in Europe since the Weimar revolution of 1918-19 and the cultivation of modern style between the wars to approximate an “overview of the state of art today,” through the distinct work of young European artists.05 Moving away from displaying a static collection due to obvious financial constraints, documenta abandoned the reciprocal relation between collecting and exhibiting and began to break down the traditional Museum model as the modus operandi for displaying art, while of course still depending on the institutional structure for the loan of the artwork on display. The expanded biennial format and open-ended nationalist approach called for, and was reinforced by, a rotation of artworks –no proceeding episode would be the same in content, form or attendees. Every four to five years, a new event, depending on the particular blend and contemporary conditions.

The Bundesgartenschau ended its season in mid-October, packed up Frei Otto’s tents to install them in Cologne and restore the Right: documenta II in 1959 in Karlsaue park and the ruined baroque Orangerie; Ossip Zadkine’s La Ville Detruite (The City Destroyed), 1951. Photograph by Günther Becker, © documenta Archiv

war-damaged Rheinpark to open in 1957.

Bode continued to form the plans he had suggested in 1954 for the quadrennial art exhibition, raised funds independent of the Bundesgartenschau based on the recognized success in ’55; and in 1959, installed paintings in the Fridericianum, and in the Orangerie, he displayed sculpture with architecture.

Rather than floating a glass and steel structure over the Orangerie façade as Mattern had, Bode exposed the ruins as a dynamic backdrop for the modern forms, layering a series of walls, some braced with steel rods at the top, and inserting temporary white brick walls as screens in the bowling green, creating a sculpture garden within and surrounding the ruins, once again and further blurring the distinctions between art and architecture.

Bode absorbed the Bundesgartenschau’s format –a repeating schedule, and expanded documenta into its form in the space of an urban garden and the Orangerie. Co-opting pieces of ruined, yet historically and spatially significant architecture for temporary exhibitions, documenta progressively configured the space of the city as the space of the exhibition, while retaining the past without forget-

ting. Derived from the original partnership with the Bundesgartenschau, documenta maintains the alchemy of landscape, architecture and art, and as demonstrated in its most recent episode in 2012, the sentiment that regeneration is never complete.

Endnotes 01. Heinrich, Vroni. Hermann Mattern: Leben und Werk. Berlin: Universitätsverlag der Technischen Universität Berlin, 2012. 66.

02. Belting, Hans. Art History after Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003. 41.

03. Ernst Schuh, Bode’s assistant at the first documenta in 1955, quoted in Christoph Lange, “The Spirit of Documenta: ArtPhilosophical Reflections.” in Archive in Motion, ed. Glasmeier and Stengel, 14.

04. Haftmann reinforces this senti ment in his opening speech to a packed Groß Halle with the first line, “it doesn’t seem to require any further justification.” documenta Archiv. Documenta 1, Mappe/Folder 10. Delivered 16 July 1955.

05. documenta: Art of the Twentieth Century catalog, issue 1: 1955.

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Faculty Julian Beinart Alexander D’Hooghe Michael Dennis Miho Mazereeuw

Students Graduating Celina Balderas GuzmĂĄn Sreoshy Banerjea Michela Barone Lumaga Aditya Barve Andres Bernal Peng Huang Menglin Jiang Aristodimos Komninos Ryan Kurlbaum Yu Jung Nam Kobi Ruthenberg Kristen Zeiber Continuing Phebe Dudek Dessen Hillman Fei Hong Jihak Hong Xing Huang Shaoyi Liang Georgios Samartzopoulos Sakine Dicle Uzunyayla Ana Vargas Mingxi Zou

ARCHITECTURE & URBANISM Architecture and Urbanism is a special deg­ree program for students interested in the development of critical urban design, as well as its history, and theory. Consciously locating itself in the contemporary debate about what constitutes good city form, the program encourages the development of intellectually articulated and grounded positions. Students are expected to question, and/or defend current views in order to explore critical alternatives to existing paradigms of urbanism. The assumption is that design is an intellectual act embodying both a critique and alternative possibilities.

The program aims to nurture wellversed, intellectually grounded and historically conscious architects, who understand the relationship between architecture and urbanism – not merely as a question of taste and fashion, but as form with meaning. The program emphasizes both design and scholarship, and students are unique in their capacity to relate to both.

The emphasis in work by faculty and students may vary, but the goal is always the achievement of the most advanced and effective methods of shaping the form, sustainability, and social condition of the built environment. The design, theory, and elective subjects are organized to achieve this.

The first year of the program is a core year, with a required sequence of two studios: an Introductory Urban Design Studio for all incoming students in the fall, and a choice of Urban Design Studio options in the spring; and a required sequence of two theory courses: Urban Design Theory in the fall, and Theory of City Form in the spring. In the fall of second year an optional studio may be taken, but a Thesis Preparation course is required, and in the spring, a thesis is required.

Students may tailor their work within a large array of elective options, and are encouraged to extend their studies into other areas.

Students may also work within the Joint Program for City Design and Development, and the Center for Real Estate. Some students choose to follow a sequence leading to the Urban Design Certificate obtained with their degrees; others choose to extend their study period to seek dual degrees.

Strategies for Systemic Urban Constructed Wetlands Celina Balderas Guzmán, Urbanism Co-Advisors: Alan Berger & Andrew Scott, Reader: Heidi Nepf

As a result of conventional infrastructure and the degradation of natural hydrologic systems, most American cities suffer from compromised hydrology, particularly problems with storm water. The consequence is externalities at multiple scales: increased disaster vulnerability, climate change, poor water quality, habitat loss, etc. Because upgrading conventional single-purpose infrastructure has become an increasingly cost-prohibitive option, cities are finding that reincorporating natural systems can be more effective. In the last 20 years, constructed wetlands have arisen as a promising multipurpose solution to storm water problems.

Constructed wetlands are artificial systems designed to mimic natural wetlands by using the same physical, biological, and chemical processes to treat water. They are relatively large, but their size gives them high ecological potential and numerous other benefits, such as flooding protection and recreational spaces, while having low life-cycle costs.

Since the effectiveness of constructed wetlands comes from mimicking natural wetlands, then the analogy to nature should be extended as far as possible. In nature, wetlands are a system connected to a regional hydrologic network. Therefore, constructed wetlands distributed systemically throughout a watershed have potential to deliver more networked benefits than the current practice of dispersed and disconnected wetlands for individual sites. Yet little research exists examining the implications of urban constructed wetlands in design 090 SMArchS Review 2013

and planning terms, at multiple scales. In fact, few urban constructed wetland projects for storm water exist in the first place.

This thesis proposes a framework for understanding the potential of systemic constructed wetlands as landscape infrastructure in cities. Based on an understanding of science, engineering, and urbanism, this thesis identifies the urban zones of greatest potential for storm water constructed wetlands, and considers how urban design and wetland design can merge. Finally, this thesis suggests the benefits that could arise out of an urban constructed wetland system, beyond simply water treatment.

Right, Top: The anatomy of a constructed wetland, detailing the marsh and deep zones necessary for hydraulic efficiency and ecological diversity.

Right, Bottom: As the effectiveness of constructed wetland lies in their ecological richness, only particular areas of the city have enough remaining ecological potential to be suitable for new wetlands. The thresholds for ecological potential are based on the level of impervious cover in a watershed.

Next Spread: The zones of ecological potential mapped for the city of Minneapolis, as an example.

Following Spread: Potential for constructed wetlands as landscape infrastructure exists primarily in suburban watersheds with impervious cover under 25%. Constructed wetlands in these areas should be built in connection with the natural hydrologic system of streams and creeks.

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Beyond Shock City: Towards a Cultural Model of Riverfront Development Sreoshy Banerjea, Urbanism Advisor: James Wescoat, Reader: Julian Beinart

In India, rivers hold profound meaning formed by sacred rituals, and traditions.

Today, urban waterfront degradation has led to a focus on the greater good implemented through modern objectives of development, leading to a tension between past and present modes of city-river interface.

In the state of Gujarat, India, the Sabarmati Riverfront divides Ahmedabad into the east and the west, the old city and the new city, characterized by populations varying in religious, social, and financial status. Due to the tension between the two sides, the river is a physical and sociological barrier between the two ‘worlds’. Howard Spodek in Shock City portrays Ahmedabad steeped in shocking contradictions: a city of extraordinary economic growth and innovation, horrendous communal violence and appalling poverty.

In order to go beyond Shock City, the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Corporation (SRFDCL) was formed in 1997 to stitch together both sides and create a unique global identity for the city via a modern model of riverfront development. Today, as the decade long effort comes to fruition, it has mixed results. While it has expanded the outlook 096 SMArchS Review 2013

of its inhabitants, it can also be critiqued as using a heavy handed approach that has marginalized the lower rungs of society.

In order to demonstrate a new cultural model of riverfront development, this thesis takes inspiration from multiple perspectives via three analyses. Firstly, a historiography of India riverfront urbanism leads up to the analysis of the Sabarmati Riverfront Development. Secondly, a conceptual framework is created via a precedent analysis of a more authentic site along the Sabarmati, the Gandhi Ashram. Thirdly, a downstream sites’ contemporary relationship with the Gandhi ashram is traced in order to propose and develop a new riverfront design framework through a cultural approach which integrates across multiple scales. This strategic focus area is developed as a contemporary embodiment of the inclusive spirit of the ashram, resulting in a landscape which is truly exemplary of the consciousness of unity, communal identity and diversity which can lift Ahmedabad beyond Shock City, beyond the current SRFD, and beyond the Gandhi Ashram today.

Howard Spodek in Shock City, labels Ahmedabad, located in West India, as Shock City attributing the coining of the term to British Historian, Asa Briggs. For Briggs, a shock city is, “a center of problems, particularly ethnic and social.” Spodek attributes the roots of Ahmedabad’s state to being in the front line of national problems, where developments took place first and most intensely.

Intense Developments of National Importance 01. Gandhian Era (1915-1950) 02. The Westernizing City (1950-1980) 03. Creativity and Chaos (1969-

First in the Gandhian era, the Independence movement was held in the early part of the century. Next, in the early 50’s, during the westernizing era, where after independence, the city went through a rush of industrialization leading to a social revolution through an era of Creativity and Chaos. This thesis starts by investigating how these tensions manifest spatially in the city in order to strategically appropriate a site, and propose a counterpoint, a microcosm that can mitigate between the tensions, in order to lift Ahmedabad beyond its Shock status.

Firstly the tension between the East and the West, is manifested through a land use division: The westernizing city from the 50’s to the 80’s created this division, through time between creating heavy industry on the East of the Sabarmati river, and the era of creativity leading to Civic and Educational Institutions on the West. Its shock status is also manifested

Above: Site concept in axonometric Left: Program inventory

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through an income divide where 2.5 Million live on the East, mostly middle management workers and 675,000 in the West, generally the higher middle class and the rich. It is also seen in a fractured socio-cultural landscape.

The East side is more segregated and prone to cultural conflict, due to closure of the mills and political experimentation, leading to the worst riots in 2002. These riots have intensified segregation and led to communal, social and geographical divisions.

This violence in 2002 did not stall Ahmedabad from its growth, in fact it helped fuel it. Development became part of the new agenda to take attention away from a conflicted past. One such mega development is the Sabarmati Riverfront Develop-

ment which seeks to rejuvenate Ahmedabad through environmental improvement, and social upliftment. The project is partially successful because it draws people back to the river, and along it. However, it has also led to the marginalization of the lowest rungs of society. This thesis seeks to develop one site as a microcosm of what the city ought to be. The redevelopment will be a way to connect through a new cultural waterfront model in order to lift Ahmedabad beyond Shock City. Spodek presents a vision in his concluding chapter. He quotes the Selfemployed women’s association as a way to look towards a more hopeful future.

The real task of tomorrow is the rehabilitation of “hearts and minds,” of getting people to live and work together in the same occupations, and to study together in the same schools. We have to organize and join hands in the same organization. That is the India to which we belong.

That is our tomorrow -Self-employed Women’s Association (SEWA)

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This thesis seeks to contribute to this vision via the demonstration of a cultural model of riverfront urbanism, not to solve the immense problems laid out, but to create a ripple that can start the process of the rehabilitation. It will weave a cultural model downstream in the eastern banks via the following 3 analysis which then leads to a design demonstration: a historiography of riverfront urbanism, a precedent analysis through the Gandhi Ashram, and site analysis and reinterpretation.

Through a historiography of Indian riverfront urbanism through selected case studies of river Yamuna, Gomti, and Sabarmati, one discovers five perspectives:

01. Ghats and Goddesses 02. Garden 03. Civic Space 04. Waste Disposal 05. Public/Private Redevelopment

The fifth theme leads to the Sabarmati, the river on which this thesis is situated. In order to address the waste issues, where cities originally had their back to the river, cities have been now been redeveloping and returning to the waterfront. The Sabarmati Riverfront Development is a partnership between the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, and HCP, an urban design and service firm. It is also the most frequently consulted as an example for future riverfront projects involving public and private redevelopment. Three main objectives emerge: making the riverfront accessible to the public, creating riverfront parks, promenades and ghats (steps) to

enjoy the water, and creating a memorable identity for Ahmedabad. In order to create a memorable identity for Ahmedabad, the project runs the risk of losing authenticity while manufacturing heritage. However there is an exception to the current riverfront redevelopment. The Gandhi Ashram is identified upstream as a partial exception, and offers a major precedent for modifying it in key places. A Gandhian framework will be generated as ideals for planning and design.

01. Sustainable 02. Empowerment 03. Sanctuary 04. Equity 05. Civic-ness

This framework will be then applied to a downstream site along the river resulting in a landscape that will decrease vulnerability and increase civic awareness through an integrative cultural model. Correa interpreted Gandhi’s advocacy for the village through a postmodern lens, interpreting it through the idea of village and civic space. His museum, located within the ashram boundaries, honors Gandhi’s advocacy for the village spatially through a sense of openness and freedom. This thesis takes the stance that it can be re-interpreted again downstream on an urban scale. The third analysis interprets and analyzes the chosen site. One crucial surrounding community, Ram Rahim, is a site exemplary of communal harmony and a contemporary spirit of inclusion fostered by the Gandhian NGO, Manav Sadhna.

Having maintained peace throughout the

Left: Site plan Architecture & Urbanism 099

riots, they were rewarded the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration. It traces this contemporary relationship with the Gandhi ashram in order to propose and develop a new riverfront design framework through a contextual and cultural approach. In conclusion, this section leads to the creation of a new model of cultural riverfront development that takes into consideration multiple layers of historical and cultural information.

This alternative vision is demonstrated in the re-designed Calico Mills, the largest waterfront open space located downstream on the Sabarmati Riverfront Development resulting in a landscape that will decrease vulnerability and increase civic awareness through an integrative cultural model.

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Right: The Maidan Below: The Riverfront

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Public by Design: Auto-fabrication for a Contemporary Urban Physiognomy Michela Barone Lumaga, Urbanism Advisor: Larry Sass, Readers: Brent Ryan, Gediminas Urbonas

The revolution in modes of design and production anticipate a liberalization of material/fabrication that can potentially allow the masses to take control of the design of the urban space. Historically with each technical invention, writing, printing press, and video-cameras, came not only the possibility for new creative practices but also the formation of the socio-political structures to allow such new praxis to mobilize and become effective. For example, with the advent of printing press, publishing houses organized the literary world, selecting culture for mass consumption, or film and television industry grew to broadcast programs and movies. During the ’90s, theories of virtuality and the commercialization and privatization of public spaces, were seen as potential dissolvers of physical public places.

Today we should acknowledge the power of networked media and digital fabrication for their potential to physically build public good. This thesis explores and proposes a method to create urban places by designing three prototypes of urban objects that can be customized by the public and easily fabricated with a CNC router which will allow a digitally networked audience to participate in the physical making of space in their cities.

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The first experimentation on participatory design for cities consisted of selecting one of the designed prototypes, the Hermitage, and inciting the public to design its own version of the pavilion. The experiment was called “Holistic Urban Objects: a Networked Design Experiment” as to express the possible universality of the design proposal. The Hermitage, structurally based on a notched waffle configuration, was designed revolving around the vertical z axis a series of equal “RIBS” that would interlock on varying sized horizontal rings. To reach to a broad audience circuit, this experiment used different media templates. For simplicity, the public was asked via email to design, digitally or by manual hand sketching, a single rib of the pavilion.

The public was also asked to think about the function and the skin of their pavilion and to incorporate that thinking into the design.

Above: Project vision Right: Networked Design Experiment, instructions for customization

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Below: Project Vision Left, Top: Networked Design Experiment, Holistic Urban Objects designed by the public, from drawing to making Left, Bottom: Fabricable Prototypes as Public Infrastructures for Civic Society

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Above: Networked design experiment, Holistic Urban Objects designed by the public.

Left: holisticurbanobjects.tumblr.com

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Semantics is a discipline that studies meaning. It is based on the relation between a word and its denotation. The Atlas is a semantic model of pavilion functions that the public designed; the data to generate the model was obtained by individual submission of the experiment’s participants. The model geometry is structured by the pavilions’ functions which are displayed as regions in

the map (the ovaloid shapes). Each region contains a node or clique, in this model the clique represent the minimal unit of meaning and can be identified by the title that the participants gave to their Hermitage design.

All functions in a clique are synonymous and analogue to each other’s. The proximity or distance indicated the treatment of meaning.

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Urbanism of Disassembly: Strategies for Alang’s Shipbreaking Industry Aditya Barve, Urbanism Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw, Reader: Brent Ryan

Waste is an integral part of our contemporary civilization based on consumption and material culture. From an empty soda can to the spent nuclear fuel rod, we define waste as the matter without immediate use: rotten, broken, and unwanted. The notion of waste is also spatial—waste is simply matter in the wrong place and consequently of no value. One defining feature of globalization is the flow of waste to the places that extract value out of this otherwise worthless matter.

Situated on the western shore of the Gulf of Cambay in India, Alang is one such place.

Alang owes its existence to the rise of modern maritime industry. Here obsolete end of life ships are broken, by manual labor, to transform them into reusable commodity- steel.

With an average lifespan of 25 to 30 years, most of these ships, often full of hazardous waste at the end of their working life, end up on the beach of Alang to be dismantled for their steel. Taking advantage of its unique 108 SMArchS Review 2013

geographical conditions, cheap migrant labor, and lax environmental regulations, Alang recycles half of the world’s scrapped ships. It is the epicenter of a scavenger economy that turns obsolete vessels into reusable commodities for a rapidly developing economy.

With the example of Alang, this thesis asserts that, due to their intricate connectivity to the global networks, places of resource extraction acquire an extra-territorial urban character. Only by acknowledging the urban nature of such places can we start to design for these flows of waste, migration and resources. This thesis aims to explore the potential for urbanism to intervene into an industry like Alang to develop a regional strategy of urban metamorphosis.

Above: A worker supervising a furnace that will eventually turn steel plates from the ship into reinforcement bars.

Below: Snapshot of Greek economic crisis: Map tracing the flows of obsolete ships from country of origin to Alang.

Bottom: Mapping of gulf of Alang: infrastructural divide between eastern and western coast, 8 mile long beach of Alang in adjacent image.

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Above: Existing beach and proposed beach after rerolling industry moves in

Left: Shipbreaking in action, a ship with bow cut from it; a symbolic reminder that the ship will never sail again.

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Left: Industrial ecology of waste at Alang Below: Industrial urbanism at Alang: projecting a remanufacturing spine of waste economies.

Bottom: Adjacencies of waste and resource economies. Coal harbor, seawater green houses and controlled beaching

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Articulating the Urban Boundary: How to Integrate Bogota with Los Cerros Orientales Andres Bernal, Urbanism Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw, Readers: Brent Ryan, James Wescoat

Los Cerros Orientales, a ridge of mountains that spans the eastern edge of Bogota are the most iconic and monumental feature of the city. They were also critical in the city’s history as they provided the resources to support the original settlements, supplied the materials to build the city and dictated its urban form.

Because of their symbolism and visual prominence preservation policies have been implemented to protect them from urbanization.

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Starting in 1977 the government instituted an urban growth boundary to prevent urbanization in Los Cerros. However, the large rural to urban migrations that began in the midtwentieth century created an erratic urban expansion that the boundary was unable to contain. Informal and formal developments have continued to expand into protected land regardless of the different containment policies that have been institutionalized.

The aim of this thesis is to reexamine Bogota’s urban boundary in order to devise alternative strategies that can better address the inevitable urbanization of Los Cerros. The argument is rooted in the premise that social, political and economical conditions will prevent strategies to contain urban expansion from succeeding. As a result, urbanization is acknowledged and used as a proxy to design strategies that will bolster and

improve existing social and natural ecologies.

Informality, infrastructure and architectural monuments are the lenses through which this thesis explores and articulates alternative strategies for the urban boundary.

Below: Existing site plan

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Above: Formal to informal, building view Right: Aerial view of the formal to informal transition

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Above: View of bridge building Right: Aerial view of the bridge building

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Above: View of the catalyst building Right: Aerial view of the catalyst building

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Made in Hong Kong: Re-envisioning the Pedestrian Interface Peng Huang, Urbanism Co-Advisors: Julian Beinart & Michael Dennis, Readers: Alexander D’Hooghe, Miho Mazereeuw

World famous as shopper’s paradise, Hong Kong itself is becoming the shopping complex of mainland China. However, shopping malls with endless elevated pedestrian system have strict limits and constraints of social activities and only serve as economic space.

Hong Kong is gradually losing its diverse civic space since the government launched the “privately owned public space” (POPS) policy to promote the development of open space. Managed by private developers, the priority of such POPS is given to economic space rather than to civic space. By exploring

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the ambiguity of open space through examining both traditional and modern linear pedestrian networks that are associated with different categories of shopping space, the thesis aims to design a diverse civic space which truly matches Hong Kong.

Right: Illustrations of the interface

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Site Open: A Transformation of Walled Communities in Nanjing, China Menglin Jiang, Urbanism Co-Advisors: Adèle Naudé Santos & Yung Ho Chang, Reader: Tuney Lee

The walled communities emerged as a result of rapid urbanization in the 80s and present a unique typological settlement in the urban areas of Nanjing, China. These walled communities not only enclosed the housing clusters to provide sense of privacy, but also close off valuable city features adjacent to the walls of the communities and prevent the public from accessing these city features, such as water system, ancient city wall, and mountain. Therefore, making these resources within the walled communities open to the public should be highly prioritized during the process of the old town’s renewal and renovation. However, to keep the privacy of the housing within the community presents a challenge in the process of making the resources available to the public and hence the main issue to tackle in this thesis.

This thesis contains three parts. The first part defines the main issue and proposes the basic strategies as solutions. Through case study and drawing analysis, the second part defines the theoretical framework for 124 SMArchS Review 2013

the design issues and outlines the spatial composition and section design as the organizational solutions to open up the closeness of walled communities. The third part identifies appropriate walled communities in the old town area as sites to test out the new design strategies. The overall objective of this thesis is to open up the walled communities and return the once-enclosed resources to the public in hope to make the city features better connected to the urban space while maintaining the privacy for the housing itself.

Right, Top: Basement Floor Plan Right, Bottom: Ground Floor Plan

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Above: Sections for the site with city wall Right: Program Diagram Below: The main entrance for the new community.

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Hellinikon: And the Question of the Large Urban Void Aristodimos Komninos, Urbanism Advisor: Michael Dennis, Reader: Brent Ryan

The intention behind this thesis is to examine how the latest socio-economic crisis, in Greece, Europe and the World affects our cities. This thesis is an attempt to invent strategies for the declining city of Athens and trace the opportunities offered by the Athenian landscape and the recently ceased airport of Hellinikon.

Twelve years after the cease of its operation, Hellinikon remains the largest abandoned urban void in the fabric of Athens. Neither the public demand for a Metropolitan Park nor the state-driven privatization attempts have yet proven to be fruitful. In a critical time of economic recession and social segregation, the question of the large urban void emerges and traditional redevelopment practices are questioned.

The answer to the question of the large urban void lies next to grassroots initiatives currently active within Hellinikon that creatively exploit the public land.

This thesis argues that spontaneous and individual activities can shift into a holistic self-instituted narrative for the Hellinikon area, constructing a new urban vision; the Collective Superstructure.

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development of Hellinikon. The goal behind this initiative is the fair redistribution of public land to those in need and the development of the much-anticipated Metropolitan Park through collective and voluntary action.

The urban narrative commences with the gradual occupation of the former airport’s territory and evolves as a community-based development, relying on the use of local natural resources, water-management systems and re-use of facilities found on site. The community acquires a polemical form over time that reflects its self-sufficiency, selfinstitution, and its resistance to the pressure exercised by the market and the state.

The goal of this thesis is to state that the use of prime urban land as an investment to generate profit and redistribute it to the people has failed us and can no longer constitute our primary objective. The postcrisis era should signify a holistic turn on how we perceive urban space and spatial justice.

Above: An upscale of the existing bottomup practices could transform Hellinikon into an autonomous community that denounces economic growth and relies on its own resources and its self-institution; the Collective Superstructure.

Above: Consecutive phases of the community’s evolution

Top: In the first phase of the development agriculture is managed individually. When density reaches maximum capacity agriculture is formalized and moved outside the urban fabric.

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Left, Top: The structure of the Community Centers together with a maze-like street network system, provide a line of defense for the squadrons. Interconnected rooftops offer a secondary pedestrian network while water towers are used as observatories.

Left, Center: Physical model of a Community Center

Left, Bottom: Critical components of the urban patches are the Community Centers.

The community centers are linear structures, perpendicular to the direction of growth that are built collectively by the community. Their role is to provide incoming settlers with basic amenities and define future axes and general urban form.

Below: The foundations of the community Centers are used as underground cisterns that capture and store surface water runoff, while the rooftops of the built fabric operate as an interconnected aqueduct system. Water is pumped into water towers that maintain pressurized water for distribution across the community.

Bottom: The community, at least in the beginning, will receive immense pressure from private interests and the real estate market and, a fact that often translates into raids by the police.

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Far Left: Successive steps of the urban patch evolution along with the deployment of the community centers Left: Overall aspect of the landscape strategy, re-connecting the mountain to the waterfront Below: Master plan

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Social | Infrastructure Ryan Kurlbaum, Urbanism Advisor: Alexander D’Hooghe, Readers: Alan Berger, Brent Ryan

“…all of these projects, all of this work that we are doing, spring from a necessity, a definite human need, a need of this generation, a need of the year in which we live and of the last year, and the year before.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (on the WPA) “(Infrastructure): public assets that facilitate production” John Maynard Keynes Current urbanization patterns and aging transportation infrastructures have marginalized millions of US citizens. The result is that 14.5 million US residents live within 100 meters of a four-lane highway01 and have become bound to communities, which endure social hardship and environmental detriment. For too long, the physical form of the city has taken a relaxed position on these endangered and often hazardous urban edges.

Considering the social, spatial and environmental conditions, the central argument of this thesis is that architecture built along major transportation corridors must respond to the scale of the infrastructure itself.

Dense concentrations of pollution and rising transient populations (homeless, working poor and chronically unemployed) surrounding transportation infrastructure call for a new approach to contemporary urbanism. The thesis Social | Infrastructure investigates an elevated 3/4 mile stretch of highway I-93 in South Boston, an infrastructural remnant of the 14.6 billion dollar Big Dig.02 The elevated highway built in 1955, has formed a number of under-utilized and vacant sites along and under the I-93 corridor.

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infrastructural scale and to demonstrate new potential for this bleak urban condition.

The result is a set of three hybrid architecture and landscape typologies which seek to resolve social inequity, reuse infrastructural space, and remediate environmental conditions.

Endnotes 01. Brugge, Doug, John L. Durant, and Christine Rioux. “Near-highway Pollutants in Motor Vehicle Exhaust: A Review of Epidemiologic Evidence of Cardiac and Pulmonary Health Risks.” Environmental Health 6, no. 1 (August 9, 2007): 23.

02. “Boston’s ‘Big Dig’ Opens to Public.” Msnbc.com. Accessed November 11, 2012. http://www.msnbc. msn.com/id/3769829/ns/us_news/t/ bostons-big-dig-opens-public/.

Right: Social infrastructure site plan

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Above: Exploded Axonometric Infrastructure

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Top: Exploded Axonometric - Housing

Above: Exploded Axonometric Distribution Center

Next Spread: I-93, Southbound

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Revitalizing & Reinventing the Diminishing Public Sphere: The Namdaemun Market District in Seoul Yu Jung Nam, Urbanism Advisor: Michael Dennis, Reader: Julian Beinart

This thesis begins from the premise that public spheres are currently disappearing and losing their social role in the city; it focuses on traditional market places in Seoul, Korea. Its aim is to explore the possibilities for the re-design of traditional market places, so that they may better serve not only their economic role but also become proper public spaces in a city. Although Korea has achieved impressive economic, social and cultural evolution, traditional market places are not keeping pace; rather, these places have been lagging and have declined, including the Namdaemun Market District. Currently, large-scale traditional markets have little future in their present form since changed consumption patterns mean that most people no longer visit them. Besides, 50 year old market buildings do not interact well with market streets, and the tangled streets could hardly cope with the problems brought by more stalls and a larger number of visitors.

This thesis will start with a conceptual framework for comprehending the current situation, exploring the potential of the traditional market place in Seoul and seeking architectural solutions to the absence of 140 SMArchS Review 2013

‘publicness’. With these solutions, I will suggest what changes in the ‘spaceness’ are needed in traditional market places in order to meet the requirements of the present day and people’s changed sensibilities. The thesis suggests that a new version of the traditional market place could be developed that is combined with other programs, especially tourism spot, that are better adapted to meeting modern requirements. It would focus on social demand and fixing market problems, thereby reviving its own inherent competitive advantage as a space for commercial activities and interpersonal communication.

Right: Sections through the development

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Ultimately, this thesis attempts to devise prospects of the diminishing public space and to seek sustainable solutions that are in tune with time. A society is continually transforming which also impacts the quality of human life to become more efficient and convenient. Nevertheless there are values that have remained constant over time such as a sense of community. Reviving and reinventing the declining public realm might be minimal, but necessary efforts need to be taken at this point.

Left: A bird’s eye view of the proposed development

Below: The proposed market

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Monuments for Capital: The Production of Urban Centralities for a Global Economy Kobi Ruthenberg, Urbanism Advisor: Alexander D’Hooghe, Reader: Miho Mazereeuw

The Central Business District (CBD) is the monument of the regional urban condition.

A monument, which is expressive of financial competence and global connectivity. A monument for capital accumulation. The CBD of the global city is a representational tool manifesting bureaucratic capability and 144 SMArchS Review 2013

economic ambition. Historically originating in the United States, the CBD grew in an organic manner out of the city’s core and thus articulated a natural tie between congestion and financial growth – embodied in the typological invention of the skyscraper. Today the CBD of the developing city rises as a “pure”

device of the planning and political authorities, a projection of the western paradigmatic “downtown� models into foreign contexts that fail to embody or represent the idea of their city or the collective domain of its inhabitants. Manifested as a cluster of towers, this urban and architectural project has seemingly

detached itself from both context and content and appears to be increasingly self-sufficient.

Above: Towards the complete globalization of economy and culture, it appears that the contemporary CBD rises increasingly faster and in previously unexpected geographical locations.

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Above: The distributed model restrains the size and capacity of each CBD and preemptively plans for future economic cycles.

Left: The continuous monumental building serves the CBD as a symbolic mirror which internally refuses to participate in the speculative market.

Next Spread: Types of corporate office markets and their spatial organization – from laissez-faire to authoritarian capitalism.

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Yet while the CBD plays an essential role as a designed urban element that expresses financial progress, this thesis would contest its emphasis on the production of aesthetic contrast and uniqueness, and propose to consider it first and foremost as an operative device with real economic and social validity – not merely a representation of business but a business and an urban asset by its own right.

Thus this thesis proposes a strategic revision of the typical CBD models by formulating a set of principles to correspond with key

planning and design challenges, namely issues which are: Dimensional, Social, Symbolic and Organizational. These principles would hypothetically promote the mediation of contrast between the global capitalist drive for geographical expansion and the local circumstances that are often facing a process of radical transformation, while maintaining the necessary morphological flexibility and programmatic structuring, which is fundamental for the proper operationally of the CBD. Architecture & Urbanism 147

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Above: The CBD is composed out of five distinct elements, each operating on the scale of the CBD as a whole while maintaining a sense of autonomy.

Right: The regional data sets combine together to form a network of 4 CBDs, each representing an expected business cycle for the future participation of the region in the global and national economy.

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Retrofitting the Tennessee Valley Authority Kristen Zeiber, Urbanism Advisor: Julian Beinart, Readers: Alan Berger, Brent Ryan

As the flagship of the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was a triumph of regional and environmental design that has since fallen on hard times. Uniquely for its time, the TVA employed infrastructure and design on two simultaneous levels – the pragmatic, and the symbolic – to convey both socioeconomic improvements and an overarching message of modernism. When writer James Agee toured the region in 1935, he described the massive dam construction underway as a great skeleton across the valley, to be fleshed with social programs; economic incentives; navigation; flood control; power; and economic develop-

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ment. There were planned towns, parkways, jobs, and cheap energy – a regional utopia.

Eighty years later, what remains of that skeleton is a static system of dams and their reservoirs, and an aging power grid more reliant on heavily polluting fossil fuels than hydroelectric power. The program is heavily in debt, regularly challenged to privatize and decentralize, and regularly cited for violations to environmental legislation. Meanwhile, the TVA’s region has reoriented itself along new programmatic and spatial lines, increasingly relegating the TVA to irrelevant anachronism.

Today’s TVA is an important American landscape facing obsolescence, largely due

to organizational ossification and a failure to adapt to changing attitudes towards environmental management. This thesis revisits the original goals of the TVA and critically examines their contemporary incarnation, asking how a relatively rigid and anachronistic regional plan may be retrofitted within a wholly different economic and political climate in order to update the TVA and rescue it from its gradual decline.

Using the Tennessee River as a conceptual and physical bounding device, the thesis critically examines the original goals of the TVA against the current conditions of its region, mapping its remnant components and pulling out physical layers which have some connection with three primary lenses most in need of retrofitting: ecology; energy; and the public. Ultimately, the thesis argues that rather than reinstituting the original New Deal

toolkit of large monumental infrastructure within a heavily interdependent regional plan, a contemporary retrofit could instead take the form of a flexible series of minimal components around these three lenses of intervention. These can then be layered onto the existing network to reframe its symbolism for the 21st century. In this way, the project identifies points of entry for grafting contemporary uses and meanings onto the TVA’s remnant spine.

Below: The Tennessee River today functions as a series of tightly controlled reservoirs linked by a monumental system of dams, with infrastructure & ecology inextricably intertwined.

Next Spread: Norris Dam, TVA’s first, under construction in 1933.

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Left & Above: A stretch of the river between Muscle Shoals, AL and Chattanooga, TN was chosen and mapped for regional threads that could then be layered according to lenses of inquiry.

Below: Pickwick Landing Dam and its associated reservoir. Already acting as monumental objects, the dams have forcibly reshaped their entire region in order to convey messages of modernism and nationalism.

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Faculty Mark Goulthorpe

Students Continuing Ignacio Peydro Duclos Rodanthi Vardouli

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN The SMArchS Architectural Design program offers both a theoretical foundation in the history and development of architectural design pedagogy and praxis and a platform for applied research into new design methodologies.

To nurture independent theses related to the notion of design, the program aims to equip students with a critical understanding of different modes of creative synthetic production with particular focus on emerging modes of design activity, conceptual or technical, and on the potential for radicalizing current modes of architectural and building praxis.

The program encourages interdisciplinary engagement with other areas of specialist research within the Department and across the entire Institute, seeking to benefit from the remarkable academic and research environment of MIT. We see design as a potentially integrative activity and support work that is collaborative or that bridges to other domains of knowledge.

The rich graduate design studios and workshops in the Architecture Department and Media Lab are open to SMArchS students, but the program intends to offer a distinctly post-graduate opportunity for individual design inquiry structured by seminars and lectures that give critical depth to such independent research work.

PERSPECTIVES

Mariel Villeré History, Theory & Criticism 2013 SMArchS thesis reviews consolidate the exciting energy around and between the discipline streams into a single forum.

Rigorous projects collide after an extended period of intensely passionate independent study. Just a portion of that work is represented in these pages as an entry point to the culture and structure of SMArchS at MIT. The degree program and its participants are in constant tension of expansion and contraction. With a loosely structured curriculum prescribed by each discipline group, SMArchS students circulate within several departments, research groups and MIT at large. Working across these overlapping spheres, architecture students are pushed to examine problems that are perhaps not traditionally solved by architects. The diversity of the projects enclosed in this book is testament to that fact. Reaching out to new frames of thought while maintaining a particularity makes for dynamic thought processes, and sensitive and informed approaches to architecture. SMArchS students have called each other their own best teachers.

In the first year, SMArchS students convene in the space of the Colloquium, a weekly series of lectures delivered by pioneering scientists, musicians, artists and designers that simmer our manifold intellectual and creative domains on themes such as “Trouble in Utopia” and “Waste and Failure.”

Conversation on contemporary practice is foregrounded by seminal philosophical texts,

notably Martin Heidegger’s 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” as a way to think about projects and propositions through techne and poesis and question the creative thought and “standing reserve” trends against the essence of modern technology.

Perhaps we can use these terms to think about our own projects, be our own critics, and consider our “instituting” of technology.

Students across Building Technology; Computation; Urbanism; Design; the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture; and History, Theory and Criticism collaborate and debate with one another in a meeting of the minds, weaving in disciplinary discourse for thought-provoking conversation. Projects in these pages challenge and explore the tools of architects and the history of our built environment while making percipient suggestions for the future. Reconsidering disciplinarity, working in variable materialities, and driving technology from the center, we position our tools for better relationships with each other and with nature.

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Ana Vargas Architecture & Urbanism 2014 On my first day of school back in September, I was told that MIT is a place where ideas can transcend imagined boundaries. It has been over a year, and I can say MIT is a world of opportunities where dreams come true if you work really hard for them. My thinking and creative skills have made great leaps and it is a result of the flexibility and scope that the SMArchS program provides.

Within the SMArchS in Architecture and Urbanism group we have a core urban design curriculum that is flexible enough to allow research on different levels of architecture and urban planning. The SMArchS program emphasizes research and writing skills but, at the same time, by being part of the Architecture School the program has a strong design component. It is indeed an amazing combination of theory and practice on the topic of the city.

MIT offers us the possibility to test and combine our urbanism interests with a wide range of disciplines, from art to engineering.

Interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial activities are combined to create the possibility for fast-paced, innovative and successful projects.

The range of thesis projects out of the Urbanism program is a demonstration of the possibilities in student research in the SMArchS platform. In the end it is up to the student to discover their interest, find the professors to guide them and make their ideas happen.

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Moa K. Carlsson Design & Computation 2013 SMArchS is unique in so many ways. The program offers six different trajectories of study, which engage in the common enterprise of understanding, criticizing, and designing from complementary viewpoints.

One of the most unique characteristics of the program, and one which differentiates it from the majority of studies at similar institutions, is its position as entry point for explorations in all the departments of MIT. This possibility to branch out offers students the opportunity to navigate in a vast field of scientific and humanistic disciplines. As a student in this environment, the responsibility is not only to design one’s path but also to allow oneself to change and be changed by rich landscape. In my experience many students, including myself, enter the program with a pre-meditated idea of one’s area of focus, which, by the time of graduation, has morphed into a personal and salient contribution to the dynamic context of academic and practical research, in and beyond MIT. As a student in the Design and Computation Group, I like to think of the SMArchS program as a generative mechanism, from which the output is learning, reflection and capacity for change. Through interactions with candidates from other SMArchS streams, as well as with Professors and faculty from the different departments, unique and symbiotic dialogues are created, which allow for the propagation of ideas not only for the benefit

of each researcher, but also of the different SMArchS groups as a whole. In this sense, although design is not always dealt with in its physical manifestations, “designerly” ways of thinking and knowing are ever present, in the process of both constructing one’s pre-cursors and in the application of design processes and theories in creative, socially meaningful responses to challenging design problems. I am confident that my fellow SMArchS candidates, upon leaving MIT, will continue as active participants and contributors to the broad field of design, well-equipped to make significant contributions to areas that remain uncharted.

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FACULTY BIOS

Stanford Anderson Stanford Anderson is Professor of History and Architecture and was Head of the Department of Architecture from 1991 through 2004. He was director of MIT’s PhD program in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture, Art and Urban Form from its founding in 1974 to 1991 and in 1995-96.

Anderson’s research and writing concern architectural theory, early modern architecture in northern Europe, American architecture and urbanism, and epistemology and historiography. He has organized numerous professional conferences and served on the editorial boards of Assemblage, Journal of Architectural Education, Places, and The MIT Press.

Julian Beinart Julian Beinart’s teaching is in the theory and practice of designing the form of cities. In 1980 He succeeded Kevin Lynch in teaching the major theory of city form subject which has now been offered continuously for over 50 years, His writing and work have been published widely in architecture and planning journals, and he has authored chapters in over half-a-dozen books. He has been Program Chairman (twice) and President of the International Design Conference in Aspen, one of the founders of ILAUD in Italy, American editor of Space and Society, and research director of the Mellon Foundation

study of US architectural education. Since 1984 he has been principal of Cambridge International Design Associates, an architecture and urban design firm with projects in many parts of the world. Between 2001 and 2005 he was in partnership with Charles Correa on the MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences building, the largest such research facility in the world, which opened in 2005.

His post-graduate degrees in architecture and planning are from MIT and Yale, and he has been a Sir Herbert Baker Rome Scholar, a Fellow of the WBSI in California, and has lectured in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. He has written about African popular art, directed a series of design summerschools in five African countries, and produced two LP’s of African jazz. Some of this work was the subject of a BBC film and an ICA exhibition in London in 1965. Recent publications include studies of the U.S. downtown, 19th century grid form, public/private and history/memory relationships, and image construction in pre-modern cities. His commemorative talk, “Cities and Resurrection : Jerusalem and US” given on Sept. 11th, 2002 has been published in a volume on urban resilience. He was cochairman of the first two Jerusalem Seminars in Architecture ( published by Rizzoli); and a major speaker at the 50th anniversary conference in Chandigarh. In 1991 he gave a series of lectures on divided cities at the Faculty Bios 165

Bezalel Institute and the Al Quds University in Jerusalem. At MIT he has won the ACSA award for urban design studio teaching.

Alexander D’Hooghe Alexander D’Hooghe is associate professor with tenure at MIT and founding partner of the ‘Organization for Permanent Modernity’, a professional firm and think tank for urbanism and architecture, with locations in Boston and Brussels. Currently, he also directs the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, focused on large-scale contemporary design problems. He has published internationally, notably with ‘the Liberal Monument’ (Princeton, Fall 2010) and with recent papers in relevant journals in Germany, Israel, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, etc. His urban designs and analyses have included sites in New York City, Shenzhen, Brussels, Ostend, The Hague, Reykjavik, South-Korea, parts of Russia, etc. With the design office, he develops durable architectures: simple artifacts able to handle complex demands and requirements. Currently ongoing projects include a masterplan for the slaughterhouse district in Brussels (including a 25,000 sq.m. market building), development prototypes for middle ring suburbs in East Coast cities (for NAIOP), a series of public facilities and town centers around Brussels, a plan for the protection and expansion of the coastline between France and the Netherlands (68km, 2009), as well 166 SMArchS Review 2013

as a competition-winning entry for a large landfill in South-Korea (401 sq.km, 2008).

D’Hooghe obtained his Ph.D. at the Berlage Institute in 2007 with T.U. Delft, after achieving a Masters in Urban Design at the Harvard GSD in 2001, and a master in Architecture and Civil Engineering from the University of Leuven in 1996. He worked with among others Rem Koolhaas and Marcel Smets.

Michael Dennis Michael Dennis has been in private practice in Boston since 1981 and prior to that in Ithaca, New York from 1970. His experience extends over 30 years and includes projects of various types and scales. The firm’s work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. Much of the firm’s recent work is institutional, beginning with the Art Museum for the University of California at Santa Barbara, which received First Prize in a national design competition in 1983. Recently completed are the Science/Technology Building at Syracuse University and the first buildings in the extensive plan for Carnegie Mellon University. The Carnegie Mellon Campus Design won first prize in a major design competition and received a 1988 Progressive Architecture Urban Design Citation as well as a 1990 AIA award. The firm’s Precinct Plan for the University of Southern California in Los Angeles won a 1993 Progressive Architecture Urban Design Citation. Dennis has also lectured

widely and is the author of Court and Garden: From the French Hotel to the City of Modern Architecture, 1986. Dennis has also been actively involved in research concerning campus design and planning. He has used the design studio to explore such issues as the possibility of buildings having their own independent identity, but also relating to the continuity of the place and being a part of the campus fabric. Over the last few years, work at Arizona State University, Syracuse, University of Virginia, the University of Southern California, and Carnegie Mellon University has provided the opportunity for such exploration.

Arindam Dutta Arindam Dutta is Associate Professor of Architectural History. Dutta teaches surveys and advanced research courses at the graduate level, and directs the SMArchS Program at MIT’s Department of Architecture.

His teaching interests are in the area of modern architectural theory and history, imperialism and globalization, gender and body politics, Marxist thought, and poststructuralism. Dutta obtained his Ph.D. in the History of Architecture from Princeton University in 2001. He has degrees in architectural design from the Harvard Design School and the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad, India. Graduating with gold medals from his undergraduate institution in India, Dutta has been the recipient of the Woodrow

Wilson Fellowship, the Getty Fellowship, in addition to numerous research grants and awards. Dutta’s articles have appeared in the Journal of Society of Architectural Historians, Grey Room, the Journal of Arts and Ideas, and Perspecta. Dutta is the author of The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility, (New York: Routledge, 2007), a wide-ranging work of cultural theory that connects literary studies, postcoloniality, the history of architecture and design, and the history and present of empire.

He is also the editor of the recently published volume, A Second Modernism: Architecture, MIT and the ‘Techno-Social” Moment, on the postwar conjuncture of architectural thought and linguistic/systems theories and is at work on other publication projects.

John Fernandez John E. Fernandez is an Associate Professor and member of the Building Technology Program in the Department of Architecture. He has been a member of the faculty since 1999 teaching in the design studio and numerous technology courses including Integrated Building Systems, all department structures courses, construction and materials and various workshops.

His research has been focused on the materials and physical elements and components of the assemblies and systems of buildings. A culminating publication of his research of the Faculty Bios 167

past several years is the newly published book, “Material Architecture: emergent materials for innovative buildings and ecological construction.� (2005. Architectural Press: Oxford).

Currently, Professor Fernandez is engaged in the articulation of concepts of the ecology of contemporary construction.

This effort involves identifying the distinct consumption profile and resource requirement attributes of our existing anthropogenic stock of buildings while formulating design strategies that contribute to reuse and recycling of building materials and components.

David Friedman David Friedman is Associate Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture.

He joined the faculty in 1978, and teaches courses in the history of urban form and Italian Renaissance architecture. His current research focuses on the history of mapping and its application to urban design.

Friedman graduated from Brandeis University with a BA in 1965, attended the University of Munich for a year, and received a PhD from Harvard University in 1972. He has held fellowships at I Tatti in Florence (1969-71, 1976, 1988), the American Academy in Rome (1988-89), and the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton (1985). His book Florentine New Towns: Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages (MIT Press) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock award from the Society of 168 SMArchS Review 2013

Architectural Historians for the most distinguished work of architectural history in 1989.

David Friedman retired at the end of the 2012-2013 academic year.

Leon Glicksman Leon Glicksman, Professor of Building technology and Mechanical Engineering, works on research and consulting related to energy-efficient building components and design, natural ventilation, sustainable design for developing countries, and design tools.

He is a member of the MIT Energy Council and co-chair of the campus energy initiative.

He did basic studies to improve thermal insulation for buildings during the period when CFCs were removed from insulation. He has directed several experimental studies of ventilation flows in buildings that form the basis for a book on design guidelines for displacement ventilation He has also been carrying out basic studies on the hydrodynamics and heat transfer of fluidized beds for clean combustion of dirty fuels.

Currently, he is leading an MIT effort to develop energy-efficient, sustainable building technologies and compatible designs. This program is carrying out research on natural ventilation of buildings,, building designs to reduce energy use, and integration of energyefficient measures with indoor air quality considerations. A series of technical studies and residential designs were developed for

Chinese cities working jointly with researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing. The results are summarized in a recent book. He is a member of the team that recently was awarded the program for the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center in Buildings.

Mark Goulthorpe Mark Goulthorpe is an Associate Professor at MIT Dept of Architecture, teaching in undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate programs, and undergoing research in digital design and fabrication. He is currently Head of the new Design Stream in the SMArchS program. Current research centers on robotic fabrication and a variety of composite fabrication methodologies, as well as a new iteration of the dynamically reconfigurable HypoSurface. In particular, the Zero+ housing targets a ubiquitous new building technology that looks to bring a radical new methodology into second world markets where global housing needs are extremely pressing.

He has two published books: ‘Autoplastic to Alloplastic’ by Hyx/Pompidou, articulates via design projects the shifts in design methodology occasioned by digital technologies; and ‘The Possibility of (an) Architecture’ by Routledge theorizes the broad implications of a digital paradigm for architecture. A forthcoming book is in draft form, ‘Paramorph’, which foregrounds the design and fabrication research that lies behind the evolving

projects. There are many published essays and articles by Goulthorpe and on the work of dECOi and HypoSurface in journals.

Goulthorpe is a practicing architect, acting as creative and technical director of 3 groups of networked inter-disciplinary teams: dECOi Architects, HypoSurface, and Zero+.

Goulthorpe also organizes conferences, the most notable being the Non Standard Praxis conference at MIT Stata, 2005; the recent ACSA 100 Anniversary Conference hosted by MIT in Boston, 2012; the on-going thematic inter-disciplinary SMArchS Colloquium; and the internal Homegrown (with Mustard) debate series at the Dept of Architecture.

Mark Jarzombek Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, is the Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning.

He teaches in the History Theory Criticism program (HTC) of the Department of Architecture. Jarzombek has taught at MIT since 1995, and works on a wide range of historical topics from the Renaissance to the modern.

Jarzombek received his architectural Diploma in 1980 from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1986. He was a CASVA fellow (1985), Post-doctoral Resident Fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Humanities and Art, Santa Monica, California (1986), a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Faculty Bios 169

Princeton, NJ (1993), at the Canadian Center for Architecture (2001) and at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2005). He has worked extensively on nineteenth and twentieth century aesthetics, and the history and theory of architecture. He has published several books including a textbook entitled A Global History of Architecture (Wiley Press, 2006) with co-author Vikram Prakash with the noted illustrator Francis D.K. Ching. He is the author of Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective (forthcoming, Wiley Press, 2013). Jarzombek teaches a range of courses from the undergraduate to the Ph.D. level.

Caroline Jones Caroline Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Trained in visual studies and art history at Harvard, she did graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York before completing her PhD at Stanford University in 1992.

Previous to completing her art history degree, she worked in museum administration and exhibition curation, holding positions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85) while she completed two documentary films. In addition to these institutions, her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at the 170 SMArchS Review 2013

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Hara Museum Tokyo, the Boston University Art Gallery, and MIT’s List Visual Art Center, among other venues.

She is the recipient of several fellowships.

Her books include Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005), Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (1996/98, winner of the Charles Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian Institution); Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965, (1990, awarded the silver medal from San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club); and Modern Art at Harvard (1985).

She edited Sensorium: Embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art (2006) and co-edited Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998). She has published on subjects ranging from Francis Picabia to John Cage to new media art to biennial culture, in journals such as Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Res, Science in Context, caareviews online, Texte zur Kunst, and Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne.

Jones’s ongoing research interests include globalism and new media art, which will be published in her forthcoming book Desires for the World Picture: the global work of art.

Terry Knight Terry Knight joined the faculty in 1996, after teaching at the University of Califor-

nia, Los Angeles beginning in 1988. She conducts research and teaches in the area of computational design, with an emphasis on the theory and application of shape grammars. Her book, Transformations in Design, is a well-known introduction to the field of shape grammars. Her recent research includes work on visual-physical grammars: rule-based, customizable building assembly systems that support cultural sustainability through the incorporation of vernacular patterns and local resources. She is also exploring the incorporation of sensory aspects of design, beyond the visual, into grammars.

She has served on the editorial boards of Languages of Design and Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, and has published extensively in these and other design research journals. She holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and an MA and PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Kent Larson Kent Larson has practiced architecture in New York City since 1981: in partnership with Peter L. Gluck from 1981 to 1995, and as Kent Larson Architects, PC from 1995 to present. His firm was selected as one of The Architectural Digest’s 100 Architects for residential design.

His architectural design work as partner-in-charge has been published in

Architectural Record, Global Architecture (GA), Progressive Architecture, Architectural Digest, House and Garden, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He was awarded an AIA Award for the design of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, and was selected as a winner of the American Institute of Architects Florida Headquarters Design Competition of 1980.

The 1982 project, Pavilions and Pool at a Mies van der Rohe House in Weston, CT, has been widely published and won numerous awards.

Larson is Founder and Director of the MIT Digital Design Lab, which focuses on architectural research and design using digital tools and the development of new techniques for the visualization of space. He is technology consultant to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. He is currently the director of an MIT research project called “The Unbuilt” to create hyper-realistic simulations of visionary architecture of the 20th Century. This work is now being exhibited in the largest architectural show ever attempted, “The End of the Century,” which opened in Tokyo in 1998 and travels to South America, Europe, and the United States through 2001.

Since 1990, Larson has written for the architectural press on the use of advanced digital tools for architectural design and inquiry. His article, “A Virtual Landmark,” published in Progressive Architecture in 1993, was funded by two grants from the Graham Faculty Bios 171

Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. This work, described as a “stunning act of digital cyber architecture” was selected

by Time Magazine as a “Best Design of the Year” project. Kent Larson’s Digital Visualization work has also been featured in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Progressive Architecture, Architecture Magazine, I.D. (The International Design Magazine), OPEN: Redefining Creativity in the Digital Age, Interior Design, “Interiors: Computers and Design” (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.). The essays, “Digital Light and Space” and “A Balance of the Perceptual and Conceptual” and introduction to “Hyper-Realistic: Computer Generated Architectural Renderings,” were published by Rockport Press. His book, Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterworks, is published by the Monacelli Press, with a foreword by Vincent Scully and afterword by William J. Mitchell. This material was the focus of a winter 1998 exhibition, “Design for the Spirit,” at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Kent Larson curated a winter 1999 exhibition called “Unbuilt Ruins” at MIT’s Compton Gallery. The exhibition will travel to the University of Pennsylvania, the Palladio Center in Vicenza, Italy, and other venues.

Miho Mazereeuw Miho Mazereeuw is a landscape architect and architect, who has taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and 172 SMArchS Review 2013

the University of Toronto prior to joining the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As an Arthur W. Wheelwright Fellow, she is completing her forthcoming book entitled Preemptive Design: Disaster and Urban Development along the Pacific Ring of Fire featuring case studies on infrastructure design, multifunctional public space and innovative planning strategies in earthquake prone regions. Her design work on disaster prevention has been exhibited at the Architect’s Museum in Tokyo Japan, University of Texas at Austin and de Ark Architecture Center in Leewarden Netherlands. As a co-director of OPSYS, Mazereeuw is collaborating on a number of projects with international non-profit organizations in the field of disaster reconstruction/ prevention and is currently working in Haiti, Japan and Chile. She was formerly an Associate at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam where she worked on projects in the Latvia, China, Belgium, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. She has also worked in the offices of Shigeru Ban and Dan Kiley.

Mazereeuw completed a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in Sculpture and Environmental Science at Wesleyan University and her Master in Architecture and in Landscape Architecture with Distinction at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she was awarded the Janet Darling Webel Prize and the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship.

Takehiko Nagakura Takehiko Nagakura is an architect from Tokyo. At MIT, he teaches courses related computer-aided design, and his research focuses on the representation and computation of architectural space and formal design knowledge. He has founded and led Architecture, Representation and Computation group (ARC) since 1996.

His recently finished building, Gushikawa Orchid Center in Okinawa, Japan has been awarded with SD Review Award (1998) and Nikkei Kyushyu District New Office Award (1999).

He is the co-author of Gendai Kenchiku no Hassou (Ideas in Contemporary Architecture)(Maruzen, 1989) and translated William J. Mitchell’s the Logic of Architecture (MIT Press, 1990) into Japanese (Kajima, 1991).

His essays include “Shape Recognition and Transformation” in the Electronic Design Studio, edited by William J. Mitchell, Patrick Purcell and Malcolm McCullough (MIT Press, 1990). The result of his past MIT studio courses in electronic design environment is summarized in a co-authored article, “Digital Pinup Board -- The Story of the Virtual Village Project” in Virtual Design Studio, edited

by Jerzy Wojtowicz (Hong Kong Press, 1995).

Before coming to MIT in 1993, Nagakura worked for Fumihiko Maki in Tokyo, and was an instructor at Harvard University, Graduate School of Design. He earned Bachelor

of Engineering in Architecture from Tokyo University in 1985, Master of Architecture from Harvard University in 1987, Master of Engineering in Architecture from Tokyo University in 1988, and completed his PhD at Harvard in 1996. In 1985 he received the prestigious Ishizaka Memorial Foundation scholarship from the Japanese Federation of Economic Institutions. He is the recipient of the Japan Information Culture Society Grand Prize in 1999.

Les Norford Norford specializes in energy studies, controls, and ventilation and is seeking to improve the way buildings use the earth’s resources. With Tabors Caramanis and Associates, he consults in the areas of electric utility energy conservation, electricity pricing, and control of thermal storage systems. Before his appointment to the school’s faculty in 1988, Norford was for four years a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

At that time he was a research engineer at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University. From 1974 to 1979 he was a nuclear power engineer with the US Navy and the US Department of Energy.

Trained as a mechanical engineer, Les Norford has focused on the sustainable design and operation of buildings since the oil shocks of the 1970s. He specializes in building energy measurements and simulations, Faculty Bios 173

building system diagnostics and controls, natural and mechanical ventilation, and the development of efficient cooling systems.

Recently, his participation in the SingaporeMIT Alliance for Research and Technology has led to a growing interest in the interaction of buildings and the urban environment, a key aspect of the urban heat island effect.

As an educator, he teaches classes in energy and building design, building ventilation and HVAC systems and an undergraduate building technology laboratory that focuses on schools and housing in developing countries. He has served as Associate Head of the Department of Architecture since 2006.

John Ochsendorf John Ochsendorf is a structural engineer with multi-disciplinary research interests including the history of construction, masonry mechanics, and sustainable design. Trained in structural mechanics at Cornell, Princeton, and the University of Cambridge, he conducts research on the structural safety of historic monuments and the design of more sustainable infrastructure. An expert on the mechanics and behavior of masonry structures, Ochsendorf collaborates with art historians, architects, and engineers on the study and structural assessment of historic monuments around the world. His group’s work on equilibrium methods has been 174 SMArchS Review 2013

extended to include early stage structural design tools for architects and engineers.

Ochsendorf is the author of “Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) and several dozen journal papers in structural mechanics. He has been awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Mine Özkar Visiting MIT for Spring 2013 semester, Mine Özkar is an associate professor of architecture at Istanbul Technical University, where she also serves on the executive committee for the Program in Computational Design.

She earned her SMArchS in design inquiry and her PhD in design and computation from MIT. In some of her previous work, she has interpreted the history and theory of progressive pedagogy in art and design from a computational perspective. Her current research focuses on shape representation, spatial computation, and computational design methods. She also publishes on the theory and practice of foundational design education and the ongoing global and local curriculum reforms in architectural education. She recently guest-edited the 2012 ACM SIGGRAPH/ Leonardo ISAST Special Issue and co-edited a book titled Shaping Design Teaching.

Nasser Rabbat Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. An architect and a historian, his scholarly interests include the history and historiography of Islamic architecture, art, and cultures, urban history, and post-colonial criticism. He teaches lecture courses on various facets of Islamic architecture and seminars on the history of Islamic urbanism and contemporary cities, orientalism, historiography, and the issue of meaning in architecture. In his research and teaching he presents architecture in ways that illuminate its interaction with culture and society and stress the role of human agency in shaping that interplay.

Christoph Reinhart Christoph Reinhart is a building scientist and architectural educator working in the field of sustainable building design and environmental modeling. He joined the Department of Architecture in January 2012 as an Associate Professor. He is leading a research group called the the Sustainable Design Lab. Between 2008 and 2011 Reinhart served on the faculty of the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University where he led the school’s sustainable design concentration area. In 2009, the GSD student forum voted him ‘Teacher of the Year’ out of 77 instructors in the Department of Architec-

ture. From 1997 to 2008 Reinhart had worked as a staff scientist at the National Research Council of Canada and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany.

His research expertise is in daylighting, passive climatization techniques, urban modeling and the influence of occupant behavior on building energy use. The design tools developed by his group are used by thousands of architecture and engineering firms in over 90 countries. He currently serves on the editorial board of several journals including the IBPSA Journal of Building Performance Simulation.

He has authored over 100 scientific articles including three book chapters and his work has been supported by a variety of organizations from the National Science Foundation to Autodesk. The outcomes of his research have been recognized with various awards among them the ARUP Best Paper Price at Building Simulation 2009 and the 2010 Leon Gaster Price from the Society of Light and Lighting.

Larry Sass Larry Sass is an architectural designer and researcher exploring digital design and fabrication across scales. As an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT, Larry has taught courses specifically in digital fabrication and design computing since 2002. He earned his PhD ‘00 and SMArchS ’94 at MIT, and has a BArch from Pratt Institute in NYC. Larry has published Faculty Bios 175

widely, and has exhibited his work at the Modern Museum of Art in New York City.

Larry’s research builds on his belief that hand crafted, hand operated construction will soon be a thing of the past, and that in the future, buildings will be printed with machines run by computers. He proposes that the practice of architecture must incorporate new and emerging means of machine operation within fields of design and construction, and that these changes require the development of a new knowledge base for design where designers will plan a larger role in the delivery process. The challenge for architecture schools and the profession will be the development of new research and teaching agendas related to creative digital design and fabrication across scales - from furniture to skyscrapers. Larry will share findings from current research projects, including largescale prototyping of design artifacts from CAD data, and digitally fabricated houses.

Dennis Shelden Dennis R. Shelden is Associate Professor of the Practice in Design and Computation, and a Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Gehry Technologies. Shelden studied architecture, engineering and computing at MIT, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design in 1988, a Master of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1997, and a Ph. D. in Computation and Design in 2002.

176 SMArchS Review 2013

Shelden joined Frank O. Gehry and Associates in 1997 while non-resident in MIT’s Ph.D. program, and lead the development of the firm’s technology driven design and project delivery program during a critical period of the firm’s history. He performed the roles of Senior Associate, Director of Research and Development, and Director of Computing for the firm during the period 1998 - 2002.

Kristel Smentek Kristel Smentek is an historian of eighteenthcentury European visual culture with specializations in the history of collecting, the art market, and the European encounter with Asia. Smentek has received several fellowships and awards from the Council of Graduate Schools/UMI, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, Washington, DC, among others.

In her first book project, “Art and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Pierre-Jean Mariette Between Science and Trade,” she analyzes the transformation of scholarly discourse on art in Enlightenment Europe through an investigation of the celebrated eighteenth-century print dealer, book publisher, and connoisseur of art and antiquities. In other areas of research, Smentek follows two central themes: the role of the market in structuring the reception of art; and

the cross-cultural dimensions of eighteenthcentury European art. In an article published in 2003 in the exhibition catalogue Colorful Impressions: The Printmaking Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (National Gallery of Art, 2003), Smentek analyzed the marketing of new color printmaking technologies in the late ancien régime. Another article on the role of fashion and novelty in the print market of the 1780s was published in Genre Painting in Eighteenth-Century France (Studies in the History of Art, 2007).

While her research and curatorial work is anchored in the eighteenth century, Smentek’s teaching bridges the modern and early modern periods. She has taught courses on European visual culture from the Renaissance to the present, on eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European painting, the history and theory of the art museum, and the Asian-European encounter in the eighteenth century.

George Stiny George Stiny, a theorist of design and computation, joined the Department of Architecture in 1996 after fifteen years on the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles. Educated at MIT and at UCLA, where he received a PhD in Engineering, Stiny has also taught at the University of Sydney, the Royal College of Art (London), and the Open University.

Stiny’s particular contribution to the field has been in the invention and refinement of

the idea of shape grammars, and his work stands as a critique of the vast majority of existing computer-aided design systems. He is currently working on a book on shape to be published by the Cambridge University Press and is the author of Pictorial and Formal Aspects of Shape and Shape Grammars, and of Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts with J. Gips. Prof. Stiny is a member of the Editorial Boards of Planning and Design: Environment and Planning B and Languages of Design.

James Wescoat James Wescoat is Aga Khan Professor for Islamic Architecture at MIT. His research has concentrated on water systems in South Asia and the US from the site to river basin scales. For the greater part of his career, Professor Wescoat has focused on smallscale historical waterworks of Mughal gardens and cities in India and Pakistan.

Faculty Bios 177

ADVISORS & READERS Azra Akšamija Diana Balmori Julian Beinart Alan Berger Yung Ho Chang Alexander D’Hooghe Michael Dennis Arindam Dutta John Fernandez Leon Glicksman Joseph Godlewski Reinhard Goethert Mark Goulthorpe Yu-Hung Hong Mark Jarzombek Caroline Jones Tuney Lee Miho Mazereeuw

Takehiko Nagakura Heidi Nepf Richard Nisa John Ochsendorf Mine Özkar Joao Ribas Kurt Roth Brent Ryan Adèle Naudé Santos Larry Sass Andrew Scott Kristel Smentek Anne Whiston Spirn George Stiny Rudi Stouffs Gediminas Urbonas James Wescoat Ethan Zuckermann

GUEST CRITICS Pierre Belanger Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Harvard University GSD

Axel Killian Assistant Professor, Computation Design Princeton University School of Architecture

Julian Bonder Professor of Architecture Roger Williams University Principal, Wodiczko + Bonder & Julian Bonder + Associates

Meredith TenHoor Associate Professor at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture Chair, Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative

Luis Callejas Director, LCLA Office Lecturer in Landscape at Harvard University GSD

Ashley Schafer Professor, The Ohio State University Editor & Founder of PRAXIS Journal of Writing + Building

Alexander Eisenschmidt Assistant Professor University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Architecture

Rafi Segal Principal, Rafi Segal Architecture Urbanism

Rania Ghosn Assistant Professor of Architecture University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Elijah Huge Assistant Professor of Art, Wesleyan University Director, Pheriphery Architecture, LLC

Joshua Uhl Director of Design, Toshiko Mori Architect Adjunct Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Columbia University GSAPP

GRADUATE CONTACT INFO Celina Balderas Guzmรกn celina@mit.edu celina.mit.edu Sreoshy Banerjea sreoshyb@mit.edu Michela Barone Lumaga mblumaga@mit.edu Aditya Barve asbarve@mit.edu asbarve.com Andres Bernal abernal@mit.edu abernal.net Moa K. Carlsson moac@mit.edu

Irina Chernyakova ich@mit.edu Antonio Furgiuele af2@mit.edu Yu Gao gaoyu@mit.edu Peng Huang hp_9@mit.edu Samuel Ray Jacobson srj1@mit.edu samuelrayjacobson.wordpress.com Menglin Jiang jiangml@mit.edu Alexander F. Keller akeller@mit.edu alexkellerdesign.com

Aristodimos Komninos komninos@mit.edu ariskomninos.com Jenine Kotob jkotob@mit.edu Ryan Kurlbaum kurlbaum@mit.edu

Jose Ramos jiramos@mit.edu Kobi Ruthenberg kruth@mit.edu Layla Karim Shaikley shaikley@mit.edu

Laia Mogas-Soldevila dumo@mit.edu

Woongki Sung noclew@mit.edu noclew.net

Yu Jung Nam nyj5021@mit.edu

Mariel VillerĂŠ makv@mit.edu

Vernelle A. A. Noel vernelle@mit.edu vernell5.wix.com/vernelle

Thomas Wortmann wortmann@mit.edu Kristen Zeiber kzeiber@mit.edu