Pressing Matters 10

PRESSING MATTERS

TEN

WEITZMAN ARCHITECTURE

20 20 University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Department of Architecture

212 Meyerson Hall 210 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6311

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020 021 215.898.5728 www.design.upenn.edu/architecture/graduate/info archdept@design.upenn.edu

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INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION Already number TEN, Pressing Matters X is a special issue reflecting a year of reflection and change, after several waves of the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and newly developed hybrid teaching methods. It follows last year’s Pressing Matters 9 that was completely rethought with the aim to present an Open-Source publication that shares the Department of Architecture’s concept of design-research, an integral approach of critical thinking, rigorous research, and design, representing a deep understanding of the complex layers of architecture. Together with Jonathan Jackson & team of WSDIA, a more integral design was developed, allowing input from research [ARI labs], students, faculty and Penn’s special events. This anniversary of Pressing Matters X is celebrated by adding the ‘decade’ color of silver to the usual recycled cardboard cover of Weitzman’s Architecture publication. It also represents a year of new opportunities brought by the completely rethought education through the introduction of remote learning, zoom lectures and meetings, and a more inclusive, diverse approach. This difficult year also came with some small light points; a much larger international group of diverse jurors, experts and critics could be invited as travel was no hindrance for attendance, which really expanded the dialogue and drastically increased diversity and inclusion.

After a summer of protests the Department realized it crucial to create a DEI committee, that could assist in restructuring its curriculum, refocus the reading lists, and to also focus even more on an inclusive and diverse student and faculty body. The department also instigated a free summer school for the students as internships and jobs were hard to come by. The generous support of the great group of diverse external experts, critics, and speakers advised and consulted the students in their design for a temporary Covid testing station, where issues such as prefabrication, social equity and race and gender were discussed and inspired the student’s exquisite designs and awards generously published by Surface Media.

In conjunction with the 17th International Architecture Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia, CityX Venice, a virtual exhibition of new and recent work by leading architects and designers from around the world, opened online last May. I was honored to serve as one of the Creative Directors for the Virtual Italian Pavilion with City X under guidance of Tom Kovac and Alessandro Melis. For this exhibition the six architecture faculty members, Laia Mogas Soldevila, Dorit Aviv, Karel Klein, Ferda Kolatan, Masoud Akbarzadeh and Robert stuart Smith presented examples of their design-research under way at Weitzman. This also led to a great Log’Rithmn panel discussion with Cynthia Davidson under the theme: “the Science of Architecture.” It was fascinating for me to moderate the discussion with the six speakers who expanded on that title in three ways: ‘The material and ephemeral,’ ‘Irrealis Manu factum,’ and ‘Embedded aesthetics.’ Some 3000 attendants followed the dialogue and discussion that day.

The Department of Architecture will also host the ACADIA conference in Fall 2023. The conference theme, “Hybrids & Haecceities,” asks how technology enables, reflects, and challenges established disciplinary boundaries and design practices. Haecceities describes the discrete qualities or properties of objects that define them as unique,

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It is an exciting time to be studying architecture; challenges in society have impacted our lives and our profession greatly, environmental and natural disasters have put us on edge, and digital technologies continue to transform the means and ends of our field. The Department of Architecture actively engages in these issues, and our goal is to train our students to be the future leaders in these fields. Our students have proven to be extremely competitive in winning awards, such as Metropolis Future 100, and in finding internships and jobs, as evidenced in the Architecture department’s ranking as the fifth place in “graduate architecture schools with most hired students.” Collaborations with important innovators in advanced material fabrication and experts in the architecture field also give our students a direct connection to advanced practices and experiences.

INTRODUCTION

while Hybrids are entities with characteristics enhanced by the process of combining two or more elements with different properties. The conference invites contributions on how hybrids & haecceities pose new ideas and approaches to design — be they computational, material, aesthetic, robotic, genetic, biological, environmental, or theoretical.

Our fast-growing faculty includes world-renowned architects such as Thom Mayne, Ferda Kolatan, Marion Weiss, Scott Erdy, Billie Faircloth and many others. Our lecture series and panel discussions include a great cast of worldrenowned architects and innovators. We recently opened our brand-new Robotics Lab, connected to the Advanced Research and Innovation Lab (ARI), and our new MSD-RAS [Robotics and Autonomous Systems], where students join advanced classes in robotic design, and faculty and students develop design-research projects. Faculty members such as Robert Stuart-Smith, Andrew Saunders, Dorit Aviv, Masoud Akbarzadeh and Ezio Blasetti have been collaborating on a variety of innovative projects, including the development of a Nomadic House [Robert & Masoud], supported by alumni Hanley Bodek and Cemex, that will be built on the Pennovation grounds later this year, and Ezio Blasetti’s research with the students for a carbon-fiber Pavilion to be located in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.

The Department of Architecture is part of a multi-disciplinary School of Design and an exceptional research University.

This is only a small glimpse of what is going on in the Department of Architecture. We hope to see you at Weitzman to inform you more completely in the near future!

Winka Dubbeldam, MSAAD Miller Professor and Chair Department of Architecture Weitzman School of Design University of Pennsylvania

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CONTENTS

FOUNDATION 501 FOUNDATION 502 CORE 601 CORE 602 INTRODUCTION

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8–56

MIXING CHAMBERS

40–43

58–104

EVENTS

90–93

106–152

EVENTS

192

154–200

FALL NEWS

202–205

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EVENTS

EVENTS

CONTENTS

ADVANCED 701 ADVANCED 704 MSD–AAD MSD–EBD MSD–RAS IPD PHD THESIS

206–280 281–283

284–336 318–319

338–359

360–365

366–375

376–383

384–387

388–392 392–412 7

SPRING NEWS

Foundation 501

FOUNDATION 501 Andrew Saunders, Coordinator Professor of Architecture Danielle Willems, Coordinator Full-Time Lecturer DECOLONIZATION, a collaboration with the Penn Museum [Mixing Chambers] As the initial design studio in the MArch three-year studio sequence, the 501 studio plays a foundational role as an introduction to studio culture at Weitzman Architecture. The semester-long design project revolves around contemporary design questions concerning the role of cultural institutions in society. This year the studio capitalizes on the resources of the greater University of Pennsylvania through a cross disciplinary collaboration with the Penn Museum, one of the world’s finest archaeological and anthropological museums. Currently, the Penn Museum stands at a crossroad. No longer expanding its collection, the studio probes questions of public interface through the curation of its collection for the 21st century audience as well its physical presence in a rapidly expanding university campus.

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Foundation 501

This year has seen many institutions (including architecture) reassess their role in systematic forms of racism with sincere policy changes to promote issues surrounding BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) individuals and culture. Many museums are facing increasing pressure to decolonize. For the Penn Museum, like many western museums, the main problem, of course, is that so many monuments and museums were built a century or more ago by people who took colonialism, racial hierarchy, and slavery for granted.

The 501 studio examined a range of decolonization topics and worked exclusively with the Penn Museum American Section. The collection spans the continents of North and South America from Alaska to Argentina, and documents human habitation and history from the ancient past to the present day. The Indigenous people of the Americas suffered greatly from European colonization. Although many of these issues have been brought to the forefront this year, they have been part of a continual evolution of museum culture including enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. The Act requires federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funding to return Native American “cultural items.”

The studio begins by analyzing and precisely reconstructing digital and 3D printing models of 3D photogrammetry scanning of the original artifacts from the vast museum collection.

Building on the concept of space, a group project consisting on teams of three or four students designed Mixing Chambers for the Curation of Artifacts. The project housed and curated 3D scanned replicas of the original vessels each student analyzed in the initial photogrammetry exercise. The final Mixing Chambers were then reinserted into the context of the Penn Museum as a public exhibition.

The final project of the studio will continue to expand on concepts of space developed in he previous projects. Students develop proposals for the designs of an Archive and Research Extension to the Penn Museum to house research artifacts similar to those analyzed in the initial studio project at the beginning of the semester.

As a vehicle for design inquiry, the Penn Museum invites a range of overlapping contemporary design topics explored throughout the studio. Such topics include the roles of digital scanning and representation in preservation, socio-spatial relationships between object, viewer, history and institution, aesthetic and spatial decolonizing initiatives and the larger scope and scale of time of anthropological and archeological swaths. Most importantly, the ultimate goal of the studio is to test these concepts through their transposition into aesthetic, material and spatial formal expressions. The unique studio culture of 501 enables a thorough examination of these principles through multiple scales and innovative learning formats. The semester-long project ranges from the curation of the individual artifact, to a public installation of Mixing Chambers and finally to individual building proposals embodying the multiplicity of concerns.

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FOUNDATION 501

PROTOMORPHS EMERGENT ONTOLOGICAL FORMATIONS Danielle Willems (COORDINATOR) Hadi El Kebbi (TA) Danielle Willems (Coordinator): Co-Founder of Mæta Design (2008) – Visiting Professor at Pratt University, Brooklyn NY – Earned a MArch from Columbia University, GSAPP (2007)

Our world is increasingly being understood as an emergent outcome of complexity.

Similarly, both analytical and generative tools for the definition of spatial and architectural complex systems have been established within our discipline.

It is with these generative tools that this studio re-examines the typology of the museum, and proposes an extension to the Penn Museum.

In our current social political paradigm shift, designers have an important role in questioning the constructed historical narratives and spatial practices of institutions and communities that we engage with. This role translates into crafted speculative architectural spaces and forms that might facilitate a corresponding social change. The studio researched the cultural values and historical significance of specific archaeological and anthropological artifacts through the lens of Decolonization as a spatial and institutional practice. The studio speculated on the return and repatriation of specific artifacts and many student projects included alternative ways of experiencing those artifacts with holographic projection, virtual reality, mixed realities and other technologies of representation. As spatial and institutional practices shift, it has created new opportunities for students to develop alternative types of public spaces, 10

1 – Hermetic Evocation by Joao Freitas, Render 2 – Hermetic Evocation by Joao Freitas, Render

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HERMETIC EVOCATION Joao Freitas

Museums, as we are accustomed to seeing, accumulate an ideological history for a moment of pause in contemplation upon the human empire of things. Rather than a space of living cultures, collections are at once prospective and retrospective fortifications of power. Hermetic Evocation integrates spaces with the displacement of typically undisclosed principles that transcends the fallacy of dichotomy.

Translucent and opaque materials challenge the depth perception while textures define the progression of time. A centralized flow of spaces that feeds the material matters is also engaged by controlled light along the confines. Thus, an examination of the unbounded awareness that justifies the connection between old and new architecture. The composition of overarching vessels unveils the fifth facade of the architecture and form a summary of its surroundings and edges. These architectural redundancies provide the rupture in the apprehension of the real. Seeing the displacment of things and forms is nothing but a secondary experience; the epiphany that occurs in the depth of the space is an event of consciousness realizing underestimated consequences.

An inherited narrative of an eternal assumption that prevents the opportunity of diversity manifest.

Danielle Willems

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KISSING CORRELATION Yasmin Goulding

Ideas of the kiss are articulated on the interior through creasing and movement. But also through contrasting the interior and exterior geometries by creating a softened outer membrane. This wraps the links to soften the creases to a more fluid form. Allowing moments of slippage that engage the links with circulation space that exists between the fluid form and the linked form. The links now engage in the motion of the kiss, slipping between each other and softening the crease to create larger, more obscure links. These ideas of the kiss are articulated on the interior through creasing and movement. Sylvia Lavin’s book “Kissing Architecture” articulates a new relationship between the interior and exterior boundaries. “Kissing confounds the division between two bodies, temporarily creating new definitions of threshold that operate through suction and slippage rather than delimitation and boundary” (Lavin 36). The drip that emerges from the links dribbles down the form obscuring the identity of what a link is. Cascading across the facade it informs apertures and begins to initiate walkable space within the site. The contrast of the hard linkage against the reflective drippage, renders the geometry fluid, thus interrupting how faces and facades communicate with each other.

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building spaces, new hybrid programs of Decolonization, community outreach spaces, Decolonial and Indigenous places of research within the Penn Museum.

The studio methodology consists of three feedback phases: the generative diagram, prototyping/iterative modeling and formal/spatial animations. The first exercise starts with the generative diagram phase, which operates as the

Hybrid Ontological Formations is an investigation into multi-scalar definition of computational constructs. The focus of this studio is to develop innovative fabrication techniques using composite materials, in order to rethinking and reexamines the typology of the museum.

5 – Danielle Willems in Studio Review

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3 – Kissing Correlation by Yasmin Goulding, Elevation 4 – Kissing Correlation by Yasmin Goulding, Render

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abstract machine of assembly. The prototyping and iterative modeling phase is a method of rapid and recursive generation of form and materials experiments. Thus exploring the limits of the generative diagram in order to reimagine the realities of fabrication. The feedback loop between the digital and the physical is also tested in this prototyping phase. The final phase experiments with new mediums of digital representation. Animation, VR, and AR allow students to experience, test and develop possible scenarios of program and the transformation of architectural space and form through time. This semester the students interrogated new mediums of contingency through hybrid digital and material experimentation and behavioral systems analysis, looking deeper into the intelligence and complexities that surround our everyday experience.

FOUNDATION 501

SPECULAR RECLAMATION Emily Shaw Perception of an object is subjective, dictated by the entity in power. Throughout history, the ability to guide interactions with the works of marginalized communities has been removed from the creators by force. Our understanding of these works is then filtered through a lens of subjugation, removing or altering aspects of the original context that gives significant meaning. The effects of this power imbalance are seen both in how these objects are displayed and in the structures in which they are housed.

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Specular Reclamation responds to the Penn Museum’s role in this object-viewer relationship through the curation of distinct viewing experiences. Views through the facade refract, obscure, or reflect details which have previously been overlooked or misunderstood. At every angle, some level of contextual clarity is removed, causing moments of closer examination, where what is seen is not what exists.

These viewing conditions work with the placement of the programs to push the viewer to interrogate how they see the museum’s displays, the surrounding environment, and themselves as patrons of the museum.

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6 – Specular Reclamation by Emily Shaw, Perspective 7 – Specular Reclamation by Emily Shaw, Plan

8 – Specular Reclamation by Emily Shaw, Elevation 9 – Specular Reclamation by Emily Shaw, Render

The museum as we know it must change. What was once an institution of empire, housing plundered objects and riches, now must serve to celebrate and collaborate with those it robbed of their history. The process of repatriation is slow, but it is a process that can be undertaken and reflected in the new architecture of the Penn Museum extension.

point. At the same time, the museums is a temporary holding space for artifacts. Though it is full now, the spaces are ever changing, and reprogram when the goal of repatriation is met. Archives shrink to leave more space for education, or a rotating gallery. Formally, this is represented as a section of infinity, a period of time that has a beginning and end but alludes to something beyond its boundaries. Wrapping this structure, a reflection and refraction of color, swelling, and contracting to fill the gaps of what was once there.

Danielle Willems

FOLDING INFINITY Michael Willhoit

The Penn Museum archive, formerly tucked away from the public eye in the bowels of the Museum, becomes a focal

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10 – Folding Infinity by Michael Willhoit, Exterior Render 11 – Folding Infinity by Michael Willhoit, Axon

12 – Folding Infinity by Michael Willhoit, Plan

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FOUNDATION 501

REALITY CASTS Maya Alam (LECTURER) Yingzhi Chen (TA)

Maya Alam (Lecturer): Founding Partner A/P Practice – Dipl. Ing. Peter Behrens School of Architecture, Düsseldorf – MArch with distinction from Southern California Institute of Architecture (SciArc)

“REALITY AND REPRESENTATION MUTUALLY IMPLY EACH OTHER. THIS DOES NOT MEAN, AS IT IS FREQUENTLY HELD, THAT NO REALITY EXISTS OR THAT IS UNKNOWABLE, BUT ONLY THAT NO FOUNDING PRESENCE, NO OBJECTIVE SOURCE, OR PRIVILEGED GROUND OF MEANING, ENSURES A TRUTH LURKING BEHIND REPRESENTATIONS AND INDEPENDENT OF SUBJECTS […]

THERE CAN NEVER BE AN UNPROBLEMATIC – SIMPLY GIVEN – ‘REPRESENTATION OF POLITICS,’ BUT THERE IS ALWAYS A POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION.” — Rosalyn Deutsche, “Boys Town,” Environments and Planning D, Society and Space 9.1 (March 1991)

In times where the global condition highlights our shortcomings we knew were lurking in the shadows, it becomes clear that the question of reality is not a simple one. What is real from one perspective is not necessarily so from another. This applies from the different perspectives of various institutions to various ethnic groups: simply put what I see on my side of the screen might not be necessarily what you see on the other.

in the foreground the presence of their absence.

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MAGNIFIED MIXTURE Yicheng Zhang

From my perspective, the museum is a kind of magnified mixture, which contains different exhibits, cultures, and peoples. In order to correspond to the essence of the museum, our design strategy is mixing. By mixing different architectural prototypes and functions, we challenge the rule of a contemporary museum. By mixing photos of the physical model, we search for different materials and textures and apply them onto elevations and grounds.

And, by mixing different chambers (which are abstracted from different artifacts), we create an interesting interior experience and also affect elevations.

In conclusion, mixing is not only a way to design a new museum or make a program, but also an approach to explore and generate distinctive texture and material.

In this program and based on the contemporary background (COVID-19), our ambition is to make this museum become a real mixing chamber for visitors, a place for relaxing, learning, and communicating.

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Nothing, not even a 3D scan is a perfect representation of one single truth. This studio looks at the differing realities constructed by differing modes of representations as well as powers articulating this project. Starting from a series of artifacts with complex and contested histories, the students were asked to articulate a design sensibility focusing on both the objects themselves as well as the shadows they cast bringing

We called these “virtual casts” with the potential of allowing for more than one single reading. In Ripping Reality Hito Steyerl states: “What emerges is not the image of the body, but the body of the image on which the information itself is but a thin surface or differentiation, shaped by different na-

a – Steyerl, Hito. Duty Free Art. United Kingdom, Verso, 2017.

1 – Magnified Mixture by Yicheng Zhang, Material Detail Render

Maya Alam

Section (Scale: 1”=8’)

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tural, technological or political forces.ӻ Creating an embodiment of the copy of the image and investigating how it defines space is at the core of our studies.

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Section (Scale: 1”=8’)

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IN SEARCH OF THE PAST Chunyu Ma

The issues of decolonization and the repatriation of artifacts are hotly debated in this era, and it is important for museum programs to know what they mean. If there are no longer artifacts in the museum, does the existence of the exhibition space still make sense?

The current museum extension confronts this question with a design solution that redefines the connotation of museum exhibition space. The purpose of a museum’s exhibition space is to allow people to feel the presence of artifacts, so it does not have to be filled with physical artifacts. The space designed for this project aims to make people feel the presence of the artifacts through images, projections, and sound in many ways. In this way, the presen-ce of the artifacts will be reflected through the emptiness. In such a space one traces the history of the artifacts and feels their fascination. In addition, this project also redesigned the courtyard, which can provide a place for people to rest and communicate, while echoing with the whole building, together creating an excellent humanistic place.

Affected by the lockdown photography of empty public spaces and the politically charged debate around the museum as an institution, the final architectural proposal envisions an empty museum for expatriated objects.

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2 – Magnified Mixture by Yicheng Zhang, Elevation 3 – In Search of the Past by Chunyu Ma, Elevation 4 – In Search of the Past by Chunyu Ma, Axon

5 – In Search of the Past by Chunyu Ma, Project Description 6 – Maya Alam in Studio Review

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We looked at the effects a simple paper model has on our understanding of reality and how it can become instrumental when thinking about architectural materiality and its relationship to the observer: not unlike our current Zoom-based reality, these play across simulations of paper thin surfaces and monolithic figures. We took inspiration from the contrasting lighting environments of our remote/home/studio spaces on our physical models and utilized them as drivers when constructing digital materials and texture maps.

FOUNDATION 501

REVERSION OF LIGHT Wenjing You

and the facade created additional formwork, natural curvatures that fit into the volume of the extension.

The museum extension project evokes the feeling of holding something from both inside and outside. By focusing on the shape, texture and light of the extension, the museum collection is turned inside out in order to bring the invisible to light.

The arch-shaped volume act as thresholds for people to move through and enter the building from more than one angle. Underneath the extension is the sunken plaza which provides public space for people to communicate with each other.

The extension is a combination of multiple volumes.

Particular location and height were decided to ensure the accuracy and fluency from both interior and exterior after the translation process. The shadows casted on the ground

Different from the traditional idea of the archive, the exhibition becomes a play between spatial experience and narrative that brings hidden stories of humanity to light.

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7 – Reversion of Light by Wenjing You, Elevation

8 – Reversion of Light by Wenjing You, Exterior Render

This museum project is developed in response to the issue of decolonization and the repatriation of artifacts, and it is designed in the absence of objects. The focus of this project is visitor’s visual experience: The new wing, becomes a space to reflect on the past while wondering about the future. Many of the interior spaces allow for the absence to be felt. The facade becomes an important mediator between inside and outside which affects the visitor perception

depending on their location in the project. By adding the new wing, the view of the existing context is hidden and the visual absence of the original facade becomes an indexical play between past and future. Elements of the existing Penn Museum’s facade are copied, defamiliarized and appropriated. On the inside, the absence of any artifacts opens up possibilities to redefine what is an exhibition. The visitor is moving seamlessly through mediative, educational and exhibition spaces and how they engage with the space becomes the exhibition itself.

Maya Alam

COPY/PASTE Yumeng Qu

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9 – COPY/PASTE by Yumeng Qu, Interior Render 10 – COPY/PASTE by Yumeng Qu, Material Detail Render

11 – COPY/PASTE by Yumeng Qu, Section Render

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FOUNDATION 501

PERCEPTUAL OVERLAYS Brian De Luna (LECTURER) Bingyu Guo (TA)

Brian De Luna (Lecturer): Founder Studio De Luna – Teaches at Weitzman School of Architecture & Pratt Institute, SOA – MS.AAD. GSAPP Columbia University 2009 – B. Arch. Southern California Institute of Architecture 2006

The question of ethics and the role of the museum has recently come under criticism, challenging the perception of history and requiring a new stewardship of historical artifacts that will reimagine the role of the “Cultural Institution.” The premise of this project was to challenge the existing norms of a museum’s archive and exhibition, to reexamine opportunities of producing a more objective understanding of the museum’s collection. These projects will begin to challenge the existing norms associated with the museums “back of house” archive. We proposed to 1

HIGH HEELS Caroline Petersen

High Heels challenges the museum for its interest in object preservation. In the age of representation as object, itself, the project medicates human anxiety over the loss of the image. Figurally, the work references Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp and Sean Canty’s Folly Pavilion to practice borrowing form from, but mocking the formality of, the original Penn Museum. Additionally, the work toys with the possibility of rendering “outed” taste back in like Michael Graves does with his St. Coletta School in Washington, DC. Materialistically, the project is looking at the work of Jennifer Bonner and Anya Sirota, album covers of Harry Styles, Snail Mail, and Sufjan Stevens, and outfits of Drag Queen BOB, Elton John, and Grayson Perry for color, counter cultural, and compositional inspiration.

Ultimately, the project seeks to push back on the institution for romanticizing objects. The work takes a position on the agency of architecture, suggesting that design is capable of deconstructing the form and formality of the institution in order to render itself more accessible. As a composition, the suggested museum addition lets normative architecture meet up with an interpretation of itself, producing new opportunities for a self-reflective aesthetic.

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a – Steyerl, Hito. Duty Free Art. United Kingdom, Verso, 2017.

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integrate a spatial continuity between the archive and exhibitions to challenge the conventions of “private vs public,” to id in reestablishing public understanding. Using our mixing chambers as active agents to steward a realignment of current cultural institutions. Beginning with a single cultural artifact we will use its inherent geometry to interface with its prescribed container to produce an inside-out approach. Using these singular geometric experiments that contain and display solid and void we will propose a new reading of one’s artifact. We studied ideas of figure and figure ground to produce two types of interiority, by further integrating and deploying a series of sectional and 1 – High Heels by Caroline Petersen, Project Description 2 – High Heels by Caroline Petersen, Choissy 3 – High Heels by Caroline Petersen, Process

Brian De Luna

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INSIDE-OUT Cherie Wan Museum (n.) an institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value.

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This speculation presents an opportunity to scrutinize our intrinsic understanding of a museum. In particular, the display of objects relegated to years of confinement within the museum’s walls. Here, architectural discourse becomes a motor for reflection and historical self-awareness. How can one create space that protects and cares for these objects whilst making its content accessible not only to those within, but also to the public?

Inside-Out is an attempt to physically break away from our conventional assumptions of a museum. A radical shift brings the interior to its exterior. A space for protection. A space for exhibition. A space for experience.

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oblique joinery that will begin to propose new spatial connections. Students will make curatorial decisions about what to include and exclude to reshape ones perception in new measured and unmeasured ways.

6 – Inside-Out by Cherie Wan, Axon 7 – Inside-Out by Cherie Wan, Project Description

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4 – Brian De Luna in Virtual Studio Review 5 – Inside-Out by Cherie Wan, Elevation

It is not an attempt to clone, plagiarize, or reproduce. It aggregates on neighboring molecules where normative profiles from the museum facade are abstracted to be accepted into this extension. Particles absorb one another to expose connective tissues; creating a multitude of binary relationships; and ultimately generate an illusion of both distilled parts and unified volumes. Beyond considerations of ontological conservation, the extension captures a relationship between contemporary condition and theoretical-critical activity. A series of carefully articulated moments inside-out.

FOUNDATION 501

HIDDEN FIGURES Rhea Nayar The notion of the archive challenges us to unearth hidden figures but perhaps… they are better off hidden. The aim of the museum addition is to dissolve the preconceived threshold between the object and the observer and to provide a new experiential relationship when circulating through the site. Witness the exquisite gold infiltrating the fragile fissures and cracks of the museum addition,

elevating the value of the monumental sculpture that stands as an object in space unnoticed — the phenomenon of the container and the contained becoming one whole.

To show these deliberate ambiguities and dual identities of the objects challenges conventional modes of occupying space, and traditional methods of displaying artifacts in “glass boxes.” By breaking the formal barrier that exists in the courtyard entry, the observer is invited into the viewing experience earlier than expected and forced to interact with the museum’s contents without preparation.

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8 – Hidden Figures by Rhea Nayar, Elevation 9 – Hidden Figures by Rhea Nayar, Render

10 – Hidden Figures by Rhea Nayar, Axon

Museum, to most people, is a place to preserve and exhibit.

But for the artifacts, it is a place to settle and observe the revolution of the world and history. The extension was designed to be a place for visitors to observe and have meditation about the artifacts, the history and the society.

The main concept of the design here is to construct a space between interior and exterior that also blends the old and new. The gable and hip roofs of the museum were further developed to consist a new roof typology. These surfaces constructed some non-enclosed space that contains irregular openings.

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The classic elements from museum were simplified and redesigned to blend into the new form. The openings that arches created will also give a new definition of the structure being exposed to the passengers on the street. Visitors inside the building are able to observe the surroundings as well. The boundaries between the new structure and the museum will be blurry.

Brian De Luna

HIP VALLEY Hanyan Chen

The combination of the old and new, the futuristic shape and classic infiltration offer an extraordinary stage with openness for artifacts to be exhibited.

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13 13 – Hip Valley by Hanyan Chen, Elevation

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11 – Hip Valley by Hanyan Chen, Render 12 – Hip Valley by Hanyan Chen, Axon

FOUNDATION 501

MATERIAL UNDECIDABILITY Nate Hume (LECTURER) Amber Farrow (TA)

Nate Hume (Senior Lecturer): MArch Yale University – Principal Hume Architecture – Founder SuckerPunch

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In the museum today there exists a reexamining of the boundary between concepts of archiving and storage, collection and theft, or stewardship and appropriation. The studio is interested in thinking about the museum as more than a storage center and instead as a community center and place for a public to gather, learn, and celebrate. Rather than designing to further accommodate the display of objects (space currently allows for 3% of the 1,000,000 items to be shown) we are looking at what becomes of the museum when they have been repatriated. This opens up many questions for the institution and its spaces such as how do you mark the absence of the collection, does it exist digitally, and how is the building used for events, performances, and exhibitions from outside collaborators. We’re interested in how the building moves from a protective fortification of its holdings to a welcoming space of inclusion drawing in a wider public. The projects challenge the neoclassical building with its rigid mass and compartmentalized spaces through organizations which encourage overlaps and deny singular ways of circulating or viewing. To begin unpacking some of these ideas in the opening exercises we framed our questions around challenging the static item in a container and material used as a coding device. The projects developed an interest in using material not to code part to whole relationships but create moments of undecidability. These come in the flickering mismatch between

You come upon a monolithic structure. Painterly and natural, it stands out in its surrounding brick and concrete context. Dazzled by the organic magnificence before you, your first impression fails to fully realize the illusory nature and flimsiness of the materials. This project challenges if reality is more meaningful as actuality or if our perceptions and misjudgments are also acceptable. This project frames the museum in new ways. It plays with your understanding of what is real and what is false. It challenges our fixed perceptions of the social and political agenda of this new wing. This addition is so different from the surrounding context, it stands out and makes you question your perception of the museum and how it functions. The competition between the box structures, the geological structures, and the grid of the scaffolding leads to several interesting moments to experience.

It allows new passageways into the museum and ambiguously traps space between inside and outside. The geological forms, the textures, and colors used in this project were developed from previous material studies.

The layering of multiple substances in these studies also informed how I layered and blended these systems throughout the project. You have a slippage of space in plan and section between the box and the geological.

The forms fluctuate between straight and natural, thick and thin, glass and solid. As you progress deeper, the forms reveal their artificial nature, and encourage investigation and exploration. The visitor is motivated to doubt appearances and pretenses by being constantly challenged by the exposure of the thin fabricated geological elements and painted glass. It performs as a stage set. It looks impressive and solid from one angle, but move around it and discover the true hollowness of these forms. It is all fake, artificial, and deceptive. The layering of this project in materiality, form, and space leads to uncertainty and exemplifies misperceptions. This project pushes forth the question of what is reality and how does our preconceived notions influence our understanding of it.

PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY Emma McMonigal

familiar materials and other chromatic and textural qualities and also in materials seeming to delaminate or move freely across the massing and spaces becoming parts themselves.

The proposals resist presenting the artifact on a pedestal or in a vitrine for seemingly easy consumption. They conceal or obscure the object to some

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1 – Perceptions of Reality by Emma McMonigal, Project Description

Nate Hume

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3 3 – Perceptions of Reality by Emma McMonigal, Axon

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2 – Perceptions of Reality by Emma McMonigal, Elevation

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SHIFT + SONDER Nana Ntiriwaa-Berkoh sonder – n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

The ease of access to and digestibility of various cultural narratives offered by museums creates the idea that other ways of life are simple. This extension to the existing Penn Museum aims to shift and expand the visitor’s understanding of anthropological education and the museum’s innerworkings, while maintaining ease of access to this information.

By mixing a range of indoor and outdoor program spaces, allowing full visual access through the translucency of material, and breaking up the conical volumes to shift sightlines and allow access to more of the space, the extension puts its own activity on display. The result is a space were the visitor is able to understand the rich diversity of life and activity that is representative of their local community as well as those around the globe, through the experience of anthropology in real time. notions influence our understanding of it.

degree to induce a viewer to pay more attention and realize there is not such a straightforward relationship between the viewer and these artifacts as display objects. In some the object is marked 24

4 – SHIFT + SONDER by Nana Ntiriwaa-Berkoh, Axon

by an absence to indicate it has been returned and no longer physically held by the museum. The designs are meant to oscillate between flat profiles and thickened volumes so they are simultaneously container and contained. They are no longer static viewing armatures but rather dynamic assemblages setting up movement around and through and opening up the privileged vantage point to multiple points of engagement. We want them to flicker between states, never fully stable volume or static silhouette, sometimes there are implied viewing positions where profiles are more legible, but then they slip away. The artifact or its absence is never fully clear hinting at the fragmentation and dislocation of the items from their home and culture.

In all cases there are multiple profiles and volumes assembled resisting a whole or defined separate parts. This arises out of thinking about the archive as a collection of fragments of cultures

Nate Hume

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which can potentially form new relationships to each other. In this case we want to move out of clinical organization and storage and instead think of other organizations which can forge unexpected connections.

6 – Nate Hume in Virtual Studio Review

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5 – SHIFT + SONDER by Nana Ntiriwaa-Berkoh, Exterior Perspective

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BURIED IN THE SKY Yiran Zhao How would a buried relic feel if it had life? Maybe it would feel suspended somewhere in the universe while time and space remain still, or it would feel a fluidity of time and space. This project is intended to explore this fluidity of time and space with the contradiction and consistency. It challenges and questions people’s perception of objects through space, color, and material.

Half-suspended on the ground, this new addition of Penn museum intends to lead people peak through the apertures and view the existing museum as an item on display.

The facade of the existing museum is framed by the structures, which indicates people’s perception of the exhibited objects may be segmentary. Meanwhile, the apertures create a continuity of space and connect the visitors from contemporary life to the history. Also, the dripping figures in the form contrasts to the suspended structure: while

the upper part remains to stay in the air, the lower part intends to drop into the ground.

The building seems to be composed by separated parts but remains continuity in the interior, which corresponded to the contradiction between the isolation underground and the liberty in the sky. Curved and tilted walls frame and limit the views, but the space extends and keeping the fluidity because of the irregular shape and leaning composition.

The pink and mint color on the facade are contrasting but remains consistency with the red old brick and the green landscape. The con tinuity of patterns on the materials maintains the fluidity throughout the facade and minimizes the gap throughout time while the use of tiles and concrete panels indicate the difference of time.

Then, when we travel through those peeling panels, and walk through the apertures under the suspended structure, we would ask where are we slipping to, underground or sky? The history of time or the future?

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7 – Buried In the Sky by Yiran Zhao, Elevation 8 – Buried In the Sky by Yiran Zhao, Exterior Perspective 9 – Buried In the Sky by Yiran Zhao, Interior Perspective

10 – Buried In the Sky by Yiran Zhao, Model Render 11 – Buried In the Sky by Yiran Zhao, Choissy

This project explores the possibility that the dislocation, embedding, and fragmentation of iconic symbols of colonization and acquisition can be productive in shaping post-colonial conditions. The program calls into question what a museum is. Rather than acting as a container for stolen artifacts, External Allusion is a place for storytelling and recording visions of a post-colonial future.

This architectural intervention returns to mutual communication and sharing for the passing of knowledge and culture.

Revolving around a community space not different from a Turkish bath, a penny university, or a planned space for sharing stories. This new addition curls communities and

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cultures together into a vulnerable, yet nurturing space, through the dissolving of American cultural norms. The program hopes to bring people together in conversation, relaxation, and absorption. Soaking pools offer the opportunity for communal healing as well as the candid exchange of ideas.

Nate Hume

EXTERNAL ALLUSION Monte Reed

The central atrium serves as a cultural performance space.

Whether acting as a vessel for Native people’s drums to reverberate throughout or as a stage for contemporary Black Liberation leaders to exclaim their visions for the future, this space aims to cement these groups in the present time.

By providing this platform, this project seeks to make it obvious that these groups are actively shaping the American landscape and, thus cannot simply be represented by artifacts from the past viewed through a piece of glass.

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14 14 – External Allusion by Monte Reed

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12 – External Allusion by Monte Reed 13 – External Allusion by Monte Reed

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CHAOS AND COSMOS Vanessa Keith (LECTURER) Nicholas Houser (TA)

Vanessa Keith (Lecturer): MArch, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts (2000) – Master of International Affairs, Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs (1995) – Concentration: Economic Development – Focus Area: Urbawn Planning B.A., Columbia University (1992) – Major: Religion and Non-Western Philosophy – Minor: Fine Art (Printmaking)

“OUR KNOWLEDGE IS PROFOUND AND COMES FROM LIVING IN ONE PLACE FOR UNTOLD GENERATIONS. IT COMES FROM WATCHING THE SUN RISE IN THE EAST AND SET IN THE WEST FROM THE SAME PLACE OVER GREAT SECTIONS OF TIME.” — Chief Oren Lyons, in Sacred Instructions,

by Sherri Mitchell Weh’na Ha’mu’ Kwasset (She Who Brings The Light)

This studio will reexamine the museum program and the notion of display through the lens of decolonization. We will explore the relationship between the artifact as simultaneously precious

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CAVERNOUS CONNECTION Leah Janover

The Caddo people believe in a creation myth that humans and animals live together beneath the surface of the Earth.

The Caddo’s story begins with a leader guiding the tribe into a cave towards a new land. The leader cautions that on their journey no one can look back. When the tribe reaches the exit of the cave, one member disregards the instruction and looks back. The irrevocable consequence traps the Caddos and animals forever underground.

According to this creation myth, the Caddos believe that their ancestors come from Middle Earth, and that they will return there after death. The cave-like quality of my museum extension emulates Middle Earth. Designed as a research and exhibition space both above and below ground, visitors can enter the museum from South Street and choose their own path to explore and experience indigenous artifacts and history. As light streams in, the structure radiates, illuminating the experience of the Caddoan myth.

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1 – Cavernous Connection by Leah Janover, Project Description 2 – Cavernous Connection by Leah Janover, Section Perspective

Vanessa Keith

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4 – Cavernous Connection by Leah Janover, Night Render

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3 – In-Person Studio

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5 – In-Person Studio

6 – Global Promenade by Jesse Allen, Exterior Render

Vanessa Keith

physical construction and scanned digital simulacrum, as well as its deeper connection to ancient and contemporary systems of meaning. Our construction of space, whether digital, actual, or virtual, is given meaning by way of a process of analogy, translation, and narrative paths.

The Penn Museum’s Native American collection cuts across a wide swath of North and South American Indigenous cultures, as well as vast spans of time.

The artists and artisans who made these artifacts are members of ancient cultures that stretch far into the past, but also into imaginative and empowering digital and technological Indigenous Futurisms. Eliade’s notion of Chaos and Cosmos, or a rupture in space between an inhabited and organized territory, and the vast, undifferentiated, and unknown lands that exist beyond it, is a point of reference for the studio, as is his notion of hierophany, or the breakthrough of the sacred into the everyday.

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GLOBAL PROMENADE Jesse Allen

Global promenade takes a novel reexamination of the museum, setting aside the anthropocentric and refocusing on traditional and natural knowledge. This extension seeks to reimagine the museum as a space informed by the embodied history and knowledge contained in the objects present, in this case manifested through a renewed sense of connection to natural processes. Inspired by patterns and movement of interconnected global circulation systems, a space is formed that is shaped by threshold, temporal relationships, and natural process.

Augmented through partnership focused on grassroots environmental justice work with emphasis on feminist and indigenous futurism, this space seeks to offer a new set of spaces for ecological balance to permeate discussions of sustainability.

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8 – Vanessa Keith

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7 – Global Promenade by Jesse Allen, Section

FOUNDATION 501

THE LIGHT EXPERIMENT Harsana Siva

the sidewalk and the museum, making it more welcoming to pedestrians.

The extension would be a place for all ages, a catalyst for innovation and exchange of ideas, and for new technologies and media to be explored. It focuses on the concept of movement within the site; deriving inspiration from my chosen artifact (Chiriquí Whistle) and mixing chamber (lyrical descension). The notion of movement is explored through the massing design and flow of interior spaces. The extension aims at creating an uninterrupted experience for its occupants by creating a seamless connection between

Reimagining traditional beliefs, alternative histories, and futures of the Indigenous people that the museums have displayed over centuries are explored through architecture and technology. The extension aims to restore all the artifacts to their original groups (if possible) over time with the help of Initiative for Indigenous futures by displaying artifacts using digital versions such as VR and holographic projections at the museum.

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9 – The Light Experiment by Harsana Siva, Section 10 – The Light Experiment by Harsana Siva, Interior Render

11 – The Light Experiment by Harsana Siva, Aerial 12 – The Light Experiment by Harsana Siva, Perspective

15 – The Overlap by Zihua Mo, Close Up Render

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Unlike today’s boundaries between different states, indigenous territories did not have hard edges and clear distinction but overlap each other. Some areas were even overlapped by four or five Indigenous territories, which made them difficult to define. Similarly, a complicated object can be created

by the overlapping of simple elements. The result of overlap has the properties of the original objects but is different from the original objects. C is A and also B. C belongs to A and B at the same time. So through overlapping, form, skin, spaces, activities, and structures of the building can all be more charming and have multiple meanings. For example, circulation space is also exhibition space, and structural components are also shelves for artifacts.

Vanessa Keith

THE OVERLAP Zihua Mo

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15 13 – The Overlap by Zihua Mo, Exterior Render 14 – The Overlap by Zihua Mo, Elevation

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STRUCTURED VEILS Daniel Markiewicz (LECTURER) Madison Green (TA)

Daniel Markiewicz (Lecturer): Partner of FORMA Architects PLLC, co-editor of the architecture journal: PROJECT, Partner of Aether Images, formerly an Associate at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, MArch from the Yale School of Architecture, B.S.E. in Civil Engineering/Architecture from Princeton University

Veils are most commonly associated with garments or wearable materials that shroud an individual (or object) but allow visibility from within. They evoke a sense of mystique through their ability to conceal and also evoke concepts of ceremony, religion and purity through their use in various cultures. In the simplest of terms however they act as filters or mediators between an individual or object and the larger world. In the same way museums must necessarily act as filters of culture. While the mission of museums may be to present their collections “objectively,” decisions of display, from groupings of exhibitions to the physical design of vitrines cannot entirely remove the authorship of the museum. As both an archaeological and an anthropological institution the Penn Museum engages with both the history of objects and the history of cultures. These student projects engage both realms in the design of “Structured Veils.” Students began their explorations with a study of continuous structural frames and layered various techniques and materials on top of that frame work to produce their “Structured Veils.”

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FUSION WORLD Kewei Lin

The design is inspired by the original museum styles, which represent the internationalization of its series.

For example, the Asian-style entrance gateway and the Harrison Rotunda, which built by Ancient Roman construction methods. This project achieves quadra different fusions. The first one is the fusion of different styles of the original museum, the second is the fusion between different materials, the third one is the fusion between different forms of artifacts and the last one is the fusion between interior space and exterior space. Not same as the original enclosed museum space, the new design aims to play with solid and void space, use walls to create space and utilize light to expression the space. Instead of the arch entrance doors, the huge arch shape has been transferred to windows to lets sunlight and airflow inside the building. The invitation is made: move through these monumental windows, bathing this beautiful museum space with light. They also provide a possibility for visitors to look at interior space, which makes the museum open to public. The transparent gradual bricks cover the enclosed internal space with a layer of tulle, which seems to be absent, making the visitor want to explore the internal space.

With this loose studio framework students uncovered their own unique set of proposals and more importantly questions including: 34

1 – Fusion World by Kewei Lin, Project Description

Daniel Markiewicz

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2 – Fusion World by Kewei Lin, Exterior Perspective 3 – Fusion World by Kewei Lin, Choisy

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4 – The Nature of Pangea by Sarah Johnson, Model Render 5 – Daniel Markiewicz in Virtual Studio Review

THE NATURE OF PANGEA Sarah Johnson

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has a goal for its visitors to, “Experience the richness of the ancient past, gain an understanding of our shared humanity, and find [their] own place in the arc of human history.” With these goals in mind, I looked to Pangea as a basis for my design. Pangea, the super continent of 250 million years ago, was the land mass that formed our modern-day seven continents. I wanted to explore how pieces of our modern world fit together, how parts make up a whole, and how each continent, and by extension, each community, held a place in the original structure.

Daniel Markiewicz

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My building design shows to break up of the structure as it progresses through to courtyard. Starting at my new structure, the large forms merge through the connections in the building before getting smaller and spreading farther apart across the courtyard, finally continuing up the existing building facades. The overall forms create large gestures, and throughout the interior spaces I have created both small and medium sized rooms for exhibition, display, education and gathering, and visitors would feel these spatial variations as they move through each structure.

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• Can structured veils be employed to pursue contemporary notions of ornamentation in architecture?

• How can we build sensitively within the context of problematic practices of museum object collection?

• How can the courtyard’s formal typology be used to uncover latent power structures that exist within the museum?

7 – The Nature of Pangea by Sarah Johnson, Project Description

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6 – The Nature of Pangea by Sarah Johnson, Entrance Render

Below the ground level, I created a basement made of rammed earth. This space is intended for archive and storage, and the layered earth walls are reflective of this history. The large forms above are rather simple in aesthetic and made up of a transparent panel system.

This type of facade allows diffused natural light into the buildings during the day but also looks monolithic street. During the night and on overcast days, the building itself becomes a light source for the street, with the internal lights leaking through the paneled walls. This type of lighting is unique and changes a pedestrian’s experience every time they walk past the building. Glass connects the overall structures, allowing for natural light to flood the intercostal spaces between the structures and creates further dynamic spaces.

FOUNDATION 501

FLOURISHED IMPRESSIONS Kyle Troyer In an age of the Picturesque, John Ruskin employed theories of ornamentation that transformed the vapidness of Modernism into an art of fragility. While focusing on the honesty of the craftsman, his theory of ornamentation began with massing and ended with veiling, transitioning between the natural textures of the mass and artificial ornament. Unlike his sequential layering of mass to veil, this project challenges the agencies of ornament and texture and their relationship to volume and space; something that Ruskin’s watercolor sketches explored perhaps unknowingly.

The archive finds itself embedded in embellished surfaces of imperfection and variation. This language not only mirrors the complex aura of the artifacts within its walls but extracts it to begin building a dialogue for architecture and its tectonics. Ornament and texture pervade the project, vividly contrasting the museum’s white, vast walls.

The filigree of the embellishment and ornamental geometry is no longer subordinated by the spaces in which encapsulate it; rather, it begins to form space itself while allowing natural light to penetrate the interior. By revisiting John Ruskin’s theories of vital beauty, the archive extension begins to transform the ways in which a museum can operate and house artifacts of complex histories.

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8 – Flourished Impressions by Kyle Troyer, Elevation 9 – Flourished Impressions by Kyle Troyer, Choisy

10 – Flourished Impressions by Kyle Troyer, Axon and Ground 11 – Flourished Impressions by Kyle Troyer, Exterior Render

“Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.”

— Edward Said My project attempts to physically construct a power system, resembling the system behind the Penn museum as a cultural institution. This system dominates the museum’s narratives of their collections, its presentation of cultures, and, thus, our perceptions of the museum exhibits. By physically constructing this power structure, I aim to remind people of the omnipresence of power relations and the impossibility of fully dissolving the hegemonic saturation of power dynamics albeit any attempt at a “decolonizing practice.”

The power structure in my design is actualized through the highlighting of a hierarchical relation between the observer and the observed. The museum wing and the courtyard carved underground together form a giant “amphitheater,”

while an overpass is built on top of the museum to form a peripheral ring for the audience. As the overpass invites people to look down, the amphitheater-like museum wing maximizes the exposure of the different scenes, inviting unhindered visions to reach the core of the spectacle. Thus, every participant in this space becomes a performer and a director of a scene subjugated to the visions of the potential observers standing on the overpass.

Daniel Markiewicz

DISPERSIVE CENTRALIZATION Echo Ma

To ensure a dynamic spectacle across the stage, I designed several modules, including jungle gyms, swings, pet shelters, hammocks, climbing ropes, etc. to foster interactions throughout the space. When bodies encounter a playful presence, a drama unfolds — an intentional but unpredictable drama. The flexibility of the spatial activities aligns with the flexibility of the building form, which is transformable.

The grid scaffolding that upholds the museum wing is the only permanent structure, since the building’s body and “play” structures can change form to adapt to various activities and events. With the grid as the underlying logic that defines the space, every enclosed, semi-enclosed, and open space forms a merely transient presence that is interchangeable with its surroundings.

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12 – Dispersive Centralization by Echo Ma, Study 13 – Dispersive Centralization by Echo Ma, Interior Render

14 – Dispersive Centralization by Echo Ma, Axon 15 – Dispersive Centralization by Echo Ma, Exterior Render

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MIXING CHAMBERS

EXCAVATING HISTORY IN DESIGNING “MIXING CHAMBERS” FOR THE PENN MUSEUM

Vanessa Keith (Lecturer): MArch, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts (2000) – Master of International Affairs, Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs (1995) – Concentration: Economic Development – Focus Area: Urban Planning B.A., Columbia University (1992) – Major: Religion and Non-Western Philosophy – Minor: Fine Art (Printmaking)

Students entering architecture school often think of design as linear, says architect Vanessa Keith (MArch’00), who joined the faculty in the Department of Architecture this fall. They tend to want to move forward in stages: first the floor plan, then the elevation, and so on. But “creativity doesn’t work that way,” says Keith, who is principal at Studioteka in Brooklyn.

This reality is reflected in the way the first-year graduate architecture studios at the Weitzman School are organized, so students become nimble at moving between perspectives and scales, and thinking through the ethical and political implications of their work.

“If you’re constantly changing the way that you’re looking at a thing, then as you’re changing the way that you’re looking at it, you’re learning, and you’re also progressing in your ability to do design,” Keith says. “And I think it’s really important that design be beautiful but also meaningful.”

Keith taught one of six sections of the Architecture 501 studio, in which students designed new spaces for the Penn Museum in the context of wider conversations about systemic racism and decolonization in cultural institutions. As the 40

It’s the second consecutive year that students engaged intensively with the Museum’s collections, through a partnership initiated by Associate Professor of Architecture Andrew Saunders, who directs the MArch program, and Anne Tiballi, Mellon Director of Academic Engagement at the Museum.

The studios last year were organized under the banner of “Curious Cabinets,” in reference to the colonialist concept of the cabinet of curiosities. This year’s studios took on the theme of Mixing Chambers, “enclosed spaces intended to foster the combination of two or more discrete elements.”

MIXING CHAMBERS

syllabus notes, the Penn Museum is among “many monuments and museums [that] were built a century or more ago by people who took colonialism, racial hierarchy, and slavery for granted.”

As part of the studio, students worked on three projects. In the first, they each chose an artifact from the Museum’s American Section — which includes items like dolls, jars, baskets, bowls, boxes, whistles, and pipes crafted by North and South American indigenous culture—and designed a container to hold and display the object. The second project had students, in teams of four, design and fabricate “mixing chambers” housing all four of the artifacts they selected. The results of that project were displayed during midterm presentations as a public exhibition in the Penn Museum courtyard.

Finally, each student designed an Archive and Research Extension for the Penn Museum American Section, envisioned in the syllabus as “a new public gateway or threshold to the museum” facing the courtyard.

Keith says the assignments were organized to let students work at different scales while maintaining a certain continuity of purpose throughout the semester.

“If you do three completely different projects over the course of a semester, it’s exhausting and overwhelming, whereas with this one, they were able to sort of build on an idea and go up in scale,” Keith says. “And then at the end of the semester, they’re working at the largest scale, and they’re also working independently for the first time.”

Each of the six studio instructors had an original interpretation of the “mixing chambers” concept. For Keith, who studied religion and non-western philosophy at Columbia as an undergraduate, the studio was organized around “Chaos and Cosmos.” She aimed to push students to “explore 41

MIXING CHAMBERS

the relationship between the artifact as simultaneously precious physical construction and scanned digital simulacrum, as well as its deeper connection to ancient and contemporary systems of meaning.”

Keith asked her students to create a “DNA strand” based on their artifact containers, which they then combined with their teammates’ strands during the middle portion of the semester to create the mixing chambers to be displayed in the Museum courtyard. She also asked them to select a legend or creation myth from the culture where their artifacts originated, and to research the histories of the site — from Indigenous languages spoken in the area to historic environmental features like underground streams and creeks — and incorporate those elements into the design. The goal was to have students combine the physical qualities of their artifacts with the cultural histories of their origins and the constraints and characteristics of the museum site to create a design that told a story.

Jesse Allen, an MArch student who studied economics and environmental science as an undergraduate, said he wasn’t sure what to expect from his first graduate architecture studio, and that he tried to keep an open mind about learning new processes. Working in a team with students Jenna Selati, Leah Janover, and Xinlei Liu Allen designed Hollow Hierophany, reimagining the cave from the Caddo Nation’s creation story “to reinforce the active present and future of the artifacts and their originating cultures.”

“It was interesting to see what each group member saw as ‘essential’ at each step, whether in determining their own artifacts’ DNA or what aspects of other DNA strands they incorporated or emphasized in each iteration,” Allen says.

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Keith organized a workshop for students in WebVR, a platform that allows designers to build work in a virtual environment and experience it from different angles, above, below, and within their designs. The platform also allows students to share work with each other and with anyone else who has a phone or computer. And it’s a preferred tool of many of the artists and designers that students studied and worked with in the course, including many indigenous futurist artists.

Throughout the semester, Keith pushed students to continuously review their work from different perspectives and at different scales, and to incorporate more information about the cultures that produced their artifacts.

MIXING CHAMBERS

“Finding this key aspect or aspects of an artifact or design was challenging, and I thought our group worked well to resolve some of the confusion to achieve a meaningful design.”

“One of the things that’s important is to keep bringing in another element to sort of weave back in,” Keith says.

Keith says the constraints of COVID-19 learning also opened up possibilities the group might not have considered before.

The students used collaborative tools like Bluescape and Discord to work with each other and with the artists Olivia McGilchrist and Tom Watson, also known as Commonolithic, who helped the students learn how to use WebVR. For their final projects, Keith’s students selected nonprofit organizations to partner with on the design of the Museum extensions, including the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, a platform for imagining the future of Aboriginal communities in Canada; the Caddo Conference Organization, which promotes archeological knowledge of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma; and the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum, which works to protect and preserve the archeological heritage of the city. By the time they completed the semester, students had employed a range of design approaches and presentation media, including virtual and augmented reality elements. And they entered into a critical conversation about the role of cultural institutions in creating and perpetuating injustices in society.

“We need to change the planet, we need to live in a more sensitive way, and we need to respect each other more,” Keith says. “So I think that a project like this is really important, especially for beginning students of architecture to then take forward into their lives as designers.”

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EVENTS

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EVENTS

Michael Webb was born in Henley-on-Thames, England, in 1937. He studied architecture intermittently at the formerly named Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture (now the University of Westminster) between the years 1953 and 1972; a somewhat lengthy student career. A project he designed during his fourth year at the Polytechnic found its way, owing to a curious set of circumstances, into an exhibition at MoMA New York entitled “Visionary Architecture” in 1960. The following year his thesis project for an entertainments center in the middle of London was repeatedly failed at the Poly; nevertheless, it became widely published, and was featured in November 2009 at the “First Projects” exhibition at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

In 1961, he was invited by Sir Peter Cook to be part of an assortment of young architects who referred to themselves as the Archigram group, publishing a magazine with the same title. The group rebelled against what it saw as the failure of the architectural establishment in Britain to produce buildings reflecting the dynamic changes, both technological and social, the country was then undergoing. For the last 26 years a large exhibition of the group’s work has been touring world capitals; and in 2006 Archigram was awarded the Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Webb emigrated to the USA in 1965. He sees his raison d’etre as deriving from the drawings he has produced over the years: among these being the Temple Island Study, which resulted in an eponymously titled book published by the AA in 1987; and the Drive-in House series. A monograph entitled Two Journeys was published in 2018.

His writing has appeared many times in Architectural Design magazine, Daidalos, and in the Journal of Architectural Education.

October 7, 2020 THE CUNNINGHAM LECTURE: Michael Webb

He has had one man shows at the Cooper Union, Columbia University, the Storefront Gallery in NY, the Architecture League in NY, the University of Manitoba at Winnipeg, and the Art Net Gallery in London. He was a fellow at the CCA in Montreal in 2010 and 2011 and has been honored with grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

He has taught design studios and drawing at Virginia Tech, the Rhode Island School of Design, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute and the Cooper Union, where he occupied the Charles Gwathmey chair.

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FALL FIRST YEAR COURSES

[ARCH 511] HISTORY AND THEORY I Joan Ockman ARCH 511 is a global history of modern architecture from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century taught in the fall semester and required of all incoming MArch. students. Along with ARCH 512, which picks up in the spring with the period after World War II, this lecture course is intended to provide not just wide and deep knowledge of the history of modern architecture but also a critical reflection on the present. Among the large questions taken up in ARCH 511 are the following: How did accelerating processes of industrialization and urbanization transform the practice and profession of architecture? What social and environmental problems attended these transformations, and how did architects endeavor to solve them? What role was played by aesthetic movements, cultural and intellectual discourses, and visionary proposals? How did wars and political upheavals, economic cycles, and ideological cross-currents affect architecture?

In what ways did new attitudes toward public and private space, toward identities and popular culture, and toward nature shape architecture and its imaginary? Questions like these have lost none of their resonance as we grapple with unprecedented changes and challenges in today’s world. The course goes well beyond the familiar canon of names and -isms, aiming to impart knowledge that can amplify and enrich the education of professional architecture students.

More specifically, ARCH 511 engages with historical episodes and theoretical issues that are implicitly or explicitly relevant to the 501 studio with which it runs parallel. Currently, students in first-semester studio at Penn design and fabricate containers for the display of artifacts in the collection of Penn’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (see statement by Andrew Saunders, p. 9). This design problem can be valuably informed by discussions in 511 related to the institutionalization and systematization of forms of knowledge, the history of colonialism, the changing status of the object in the shift from craft to industrial production, the rise of new modes of visuality and spatial perception, modern architecture’s relationship to history, the role of representational and symbolic spaces like exhibition pavilions and world’s fairs as cultural flashpoints, and many others. These shared thematics offer interesting opportunities for integrating studio and classroom learning, from formal and informal dialogues to collaborative research to joint workshops and reviews.

[ARCH 521] VISUAL STUDIES I Nate Hume, Brian De Luna The coursework of Visual Studies will introduce a range of new tools, skills, and strategies useful for the development and representation of design work. Drawing and modeling strategies will be investigated for ways in which they can generate ideas and forms rather than be used solely as production tools. Control and the ability to model in an intentional manner will be highlighted. Likewise, drawing exercises will stress the construction of content over the acceptance of digital defaults in order to more accurately represent a project’s ideas. Documents will be produced

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which strive to build on and question drawing conventions in order to more precisely convey the unique character of each project. The workflow will embrace a range of software to open up possibilities to achieve intended results and resist constraint of a single program’s abilities.

The course will be separated into three phases each focusing on a different set of topics which are related to the work in studio. These phases will be in a sequential consolidation of techniques and methods. Each exercise must therefore be complete before progressing to the next. The exercises will have specific requirements and be presented by the students, as well as submitted for grading, before the next exercise is introduced.

Phase 01 will strengthen drawing and modeling techniques necessary for working with precise controlled geometry. A workflow will be developed to move from photographs and scans of artifacts to controlled digital constructions. These models will then be used to produce a series of drawings conveying and interrogating the qualities of the artifacts.

Drawing and modeling techniques will be used to amplify conditions and generate additional features. Layout, notation, projection, and post production will be explored to fully represent the conceptual and geometric ideas embedded in the work.

Phase 02 will work through orthographic drawing conventions within digital environments. The orthographic set, namely: plan, section and elevation will be emphasized individually as autonomous entities instead of an interrelated group of drawings to explore the potentials of aesthetics within each disciplinary convention. Existing digital models (501 Pavilion Project) will serve as the test objects to further explore and speculate through the abstraction of planametric, sectional and elevational line drawings.

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Phase 03 will explore ways of building a conceptual and spatial argument through drawing. Diagrams and analytical drawings are the ways to communicate ideas and design intentions, by reducing a whole to digestible parts and uncovering unrecognized relationships between these parts. On one hand, an analytical framework defines an armature of measureable constraints and observations; on the other, it is a rhetorical device – a selective re-presentation of the object or site that reveals the architect’s attitude toward it. During this phase, parallel projections (multiview, axonometric, and oblique) and descriptive geometry will be used as analytical and generative tools to re-present and explore the individual projects from the concurrent 501 studio.

FALL FIRST YEAR COURSES

[ARCH 531] CONSTRUCTION I Philip Ryan ARCH 431/531 is the first of two courses explaining Construction Technology. The first course will introduce the student to the relationship of design and construction in the creation of buildings.

The early lectures will trace the evolution and innovation of construction technique throughout history. It will then be followed by a primer describing how design and the act of drawing establishes a vocabulary that architect’s use to describe the construction of buildings. This will look at how conceptual design and communicating intent aids in the creation of a great building. The remainder of the semester will build a “light scale” building from the ground up, examining the fundamental material and construction concepts related to construction starting with excavation and ending with interior finishes. The labs will complement the lectures with site visits and more focused lessons.

The second course, ARCH 532, will explore larger and more complex buildings at the institutional and commercial scale and tie this exploration into the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM), a tool that is utilized extensively throughout the design and construction industry. The lab component will focus exclusively on teaching the student how to marry the concepts of lecture with an actual BIM Model.

[ARCH 535] STRUCTURES I Masoud Akbarzadeh, Richard Farley The Structures courses serve multiple purposes within the program. Fundamental structural principles of systems, elements and materials are related to the study of morphology of structure. Methods are taught to develop skills, knowledge and intuition for the application of structures to architectural design, including form-finding. The students are propelled to apply analytical and digital skills directly to architectural design and to pursue structural optimization in subsequent seminars and design studios, carrying out into the profession.

The Arch 535 course introduces structural principles, morphology, form-finding and material science, complemented with digital analysis techniques that are verified with standard calculation techniques for selecting and sizing structural elements.

This then becomes an increasing resource in the students’ architectural design process with particular consideration for physical dimensions, span, materiality, and construction determinants .

Lectures provide a study of skeletal behavior and experiencing structural principles. The analysis and design of cables, trusses, beams, columns, and frames are covered, as well as an investigation of the properties of structural materials. Homework exercises and labs demonstrate the relation of structural configuration and efficiency in the design of architectural structures.

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GALLERY 49

Hidden Figures by Rhea Nayar Critic: Brian De Luna [p.20]

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GALLERY 51

The Overlap by Zihua Mo Critic: Vanessa Keith [p.33]

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GALLERY 53

External Allusion by Monte Reed Critic: Nate Hume [p.27]

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GALLERY 55

Flourished Impressions by Kyle Troyer Critic: Daniel Markiewicz [p.38]

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Folding Infinity by Michael Willhoit Critic: Danielle Willems [p.13]

EVENTS

October 28, 2020 KORDAE HENRY As a filmmaker, visual artist Kordae Jatafa Henry’s work is a form of storytelling that is a revival of 21st-century counter-cultures and human experiences. Kordae is interested in expanding our understanding of futures by taking fragments of these worlds and examining the variety of human interactions. Through a collaborative process, his projects are able to amalgamate those fragments into new narratives and myths. His most recent work explores the ontological themes of raw materials, mysticism, landscapes, movement performance, race, gender and emergent technologies through the power of ceremony and ritual. As a non-binary approach, Kordae’s work reconstructs past, present, and future narratives driven by pop-culture, and Black speculative fiction. Through live-action music films, installations, dance, game engine environments, and mythology, Kordae’s work invites new ways of seeing humans, folklore, mysticism, popculture, post-genre music, labor, and creation stories as tools to explore the radical imagination.

Kordae graduated from the Weitzman School with an MArch/MLA in 2015.

“The connection between the black body and landscapes [...] when held against another image, combines terms that may seem opposed to each other — like what is the real and the virtual?”

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FOUNDATION 502 Annette Fierro, Coordinator Associate Professor of Architecture, Associate Chair

The second design semester of the first year, Architecture 502, follows the introduction of properties of objects and lessons of artifacts in 501. In Architecture 502, these foundations are situated and challenged within the plethora of external contingencies which architecture must answer. The semester preoccupies itself with concepts of site, taking students through analytical and speculative methodologies through which the complexities of an urban site are understood, conveyed, and mobilized. The semester also introduces students to the aspirations of program, assigning a large, multifaceted program for students to implement, but also asking students to write for themselves an addition to that program, imparting

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the affect that program, as a dimension of human activity, has to embodying architectural form. The first part of our semester is devoted to research — research of site, research of program and typological precedents, as well as research of representation in conveying urban information and attribute. In exercises which incrementally embrace design, the content of research is embedded into the architectural form which it precipitates. During the first part of the semester, students in sections across the studio meet together bi-weekly for lectures and symposia. Taken up in conjunction with the history/theory curriculum of the first year, the final component of Architecture 502 is a historical precedent, a figure or seminal idea or reading, chosen yearly for its ability to reflect on a contemporary issue; this year’s is The Carnival. The carnival offers a testing ground for the radical abandonment of the Status Quo, it is an instrument of interconnection, a rehearsal of Utopia. Its protagonists acquire the power to participate in the formation of a new world. The Carnival for this studio is metaphor as well as technique, enactment as well as aspiration.

Every year we address an issue which is at the heart of discussion of public space and public commons. We returned in fact to home, to the 52nd Street Corridor in West Philadelphia, the heart of an ethnic neighborhood with which our home, the University, has had a long and mixed relationship. 52nd Street is and always has been a street of commerce, of entertainment, of culture and yet the vicissitudes of economy have ultimately rendered the possibility of the pure market economy left to its own devices, inept in meeting the need and desires of its community. This is as well a historical center for protest and identity. West Philadelphia is a neighborhood in a constant and continuing search of a new becoming, while staying the same, a desperation to grow but a resistance to outside interests which have betrayed it so many times. How do we as architects admit this conflict into thinking while planning a critical intervention into the neighborhood?

This year’s program is an urban market and transportation hub, at the main stop of the city’s rail system with the 52nd Street Corridor, thus a gate to the larger city. The first intention of the urban market is to explore its potential as a social condenser, overlapping and accommodating the intersection of different agencies and agendas: historically the urban market functioned as the agora, the center of social and civic life, as well as the commercial center of every city and town.

While urban markets still function in this capacity to varying degrees around the world, the urban market in the United States can be traced through a series of diminishments. In contemporary America, the cultural centrality of the traditional market has long been suspended, but its traces continue in different forms, scales, and disposition to city morphology. It is open to reconsidering—a market is transparent to its local and regional constituency, a market acts as a potent translator of the needs and conditions of site, a mobilizer of economic past and future.

The 52nd Street Carnival market is a site for celebration and self-realization of identity.

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SECTIONAL /INTERSECTIONAL /INTERACTIONAL Annette Fierro (COORDINATOR) Yi-Hsuan Wu (TA) Annette Fierro (Associate Professor of Architecture, Associate Chair): MArch from Rice University (1984) – BS in Civil Engineering from Rice University (1980) – Author of The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle/Paris 1981-1998 (MIT Press, 2003)

Components and contrivances of theater, historically a companion, a shadow, a fellow of architecture, will be mobilized to explore the spatial and literal narratives of the community of West Philadelphia. Theatre, theorized by Vitruvius, set the stage for propriety of civic speech and emotion in the context of the street. Theater, for iconoclasts of the 1960’s, returned human loci to the street, a performance space embedded in Renaissance tradition. For Cedric Price and Joan Littleton, it became the device through which unintended actors became actors, and, shedding the foil of persona, engagement became empowerment. Genres of “happenings” and “street theater” of the same era appeared to call forth explicitly the ambiguity between the imaginary dramatic and the real of everyday life.

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PERPETUAL FLOW Caroline Petersen

“Perpetual Flow” is a transportation marketplace that practices intervention at the intersection of 52nd and Market Street in West Philadelphia in order to ask questions about the agency of design in urban landscape. The project reflects on the banality of what Rem Koolhaas might call the “humanmade experience” in his book “Delirious New York” and argues that architecture can do more for humanity through use of tools the practice already acquires.

The project lives in a clash between the normative and interpretations of the normative. These moments form oddities that are designed for confusion. The “two-take” reinverts attention to the banal spaces we all occupy and aims to lend architecture back to the public for their own, more autonomous occupation; a tool itself to decompose its ageold privileges. Ultimately, the project takes the position that archi-tecture should be able to look as hard and as fantastical as our imaginations can.

The reality of the street was instrumentalized for the purposes of theater, and often with political overtones. Indeed, the actional, subject-oriented structure deeply embedded in “New Theater” returned to that of the Renaissance illusion between stage and street. This new theater however was charged with the particular conflict of the era, a propensity to upturn all conventional notions of interaction; allogical relationships in theater were mobilized to embody stage sets comprising the 1 60

1 – Perpetual Flow by Caroline Petersen, Vignette

2 – Perpetual Flow by Caroline Petersen, Section Perspective

Annette Fierro

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MANIFEST REFLECTIVITY Monte Reed

Manifest Reflectivity deploys the familiar in order to evoke memories of the neighborhood. Reflection is a theme throughout the project that mirrors elements of the vernacular, activities and its inhabitants. The goal of the project is to metaphorically, visually, and psychologically manifest a theatrical reflection of the neighborhood, rather than a manifest destiny.

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everyday, with moments of multiple foci and non-characterized performances, in shifting definitions between piece and audience. The theater is a space of carnival, it is a space of transgression and becoming.

Within the last few years, 922 streets in Philadelphia were banned from obtaining permits to host block parties on their street. In response, The proposed new building will act as a market, transit hub, and Nature Park gives the surrounding area access to outdoor gathering spaces that are usable — loosely programmed greenspaces. Both the Nature Park and a community market are two amenities that have been identified as important opportunities for the area. Greenspace and outdoor gathering space, especially in the face of airborne viral infections, becomes a great place to escape the home, but also a necessary area for the ability to practice social distancing.

6 – Manifest Reflectivity by Monte Reed, Project Description

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3 – Annette Fierro in Virtual Studio Review 4 – Manifest Reflectivity by Monte Reed, Axon 5 – Manifest Reflectivity by Monte Reed, Exterior Render

West Philadelphia rowhomes are often found as a twinned, mirrored or reflected typology. The operation of reflection, taking one facade and mirroring it along a vertical axis as a design method, is a prominent architectural theme in West Philadelphia. The mirrored facade allows for some continuity among rowhomes, but also allows for anomalies to occur.

Color, material, texture, details, rooflines, and vegetation are all elements that acknowledge but sometimes disengage their mirrored facade counterpart. Gables, ogee arch, and other modified pointed arches occur throughout West Philadelphia’s vernacular.

FOUNDATION 502

FLÂNEUR-SCAPE Echo Ma Flâneur-scape, inspired by Pina Bausch’s dance Café Muller, explores the multitudinous thoughts, emotions, and movements evoked by the choreographic quality of its site in West Philadelphia, constructing an urban spectacle through the artificial creation of a natural habitat. The exploration of multilayered erratic trajectories focuses on the seemingly aimless paths mapped out by urban birds, cats, and insects. Their choreographed paths develop an adrift performance, guided by the rules of the unpredictable and unintentional, resembling the trajectory of flâneurs such as Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin during the early rise of the modern city.

The major program in Flâneur-scape is a bird, plant, and insect market that mimics a microhabitat for both domestic and wildlife animals. The giant canopy covering the open market and the train track become a nesting place for birds and a bird-watching spot for people. With the Philly

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skyline leading to thousands of bird deaths each year, and with the unnatural city environment driving Philly birds to change their natural diet to fattier foods, this bird market and canopy regenerates a healthier urban environment for those potentially most harmed by urban development.

The insects complement the market, growing and proliferating in an insect farm, providing basic nutrition to birds and cats in the market as a self-sustaining ecological niche. An alternative protein source, insects fulfill the nutritional needs of both pets and humans and constitute a growing industry, potentially boosting the economy in West Philadelphia. While unstable economic resources often leave residents struggling to feed their pets, the pet-feeding program promotes pet care and a healthier community united by the emotional appeasement provided by pets.

Flâneur-scape indulges visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, and vestibular stimuli. These layered experiences and movements mirror the trip of a flâneur, a sensual, incidental, and changeable experience.

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7 – Flâneur-scape by Echo Ma, Section

8 – Flâneur-scape by Echo Ma, Vignette 1 9 – Flâneur-scape by Echo Ma, Vignette 3

Teatro Olimpico, famous for it’s forced perspectival performance space, creates a moment where the stage becomes the street, and vantage point determines the performance derived from interaction with the space. Through this applied notion, perception of space is falsified to create a catalog of

moments initiating scaling profiles cut through space, and sectional qualities of the facade condition. This operation is carried out through several vantage points in these spaces, the fluctuation of profiles cut through the site create light play and new views, depending on their axis, context, and power they transform the environment, having different sites of intervention that occur within the marketspace and how these cuts extend to the other buildings.

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Annette Fierro

ALTERED PERSPECTIVE Yasmin Goulding

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13 12 – Altered Perspective by Yasmin Goulding, Section 13 – Altered Perspective by Yasmin Goulding, Exterior Render

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10 – Altered Perspective by Yasmin Goulding, Render 3 11 – Altered Perspective by Yasmin Goulding, Render 6

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EXPOSURES: OR CHOICES ON (IN-) VISIBILITY Maya Alam (LECTURER) Miguel Matos (TA) Maya Alam (Lecturer): Founding Partner A/P Practice – Dipl. Ing. Peter Behrens School of Architecture, Düsseldorf – MArch with distinction from Southern California Institute of Architecture (SciArc)

“THE REVELATORY POWER OF MASKING IS SIGNIFICANT HERE. THE IDEA THAT BECOMING UNIDENTIFIABLE (TO AUTHORITIES, THE MEDIA AND EACH OTHER) MAGNIFIES COMMONALITY AND ENABLES COLLECTIVE ACTION SIGNALS ANOTHER FORM OF MASKING WHICH WOULD OBTAIN A SPECTACULAR PRESENCE ON THESE OCCASIONS. (...)

AS A MEANS OF EXPOSING, OR INDEED UNMASKING, THE OPERATIONS OF THE ‘SPECTACLE,’ MASKING IS CENTRAL TO CARNIVALESQUE RITUAL. COLLECTIVE ‘MASKING UP’ ATTRACTS ATTENTION TO ONE’S CAUSE (RATHER THAN ONE’S SELF), CONTESTING THE FIELD OF APPEARANCES THROUGH A KIND OF TACTICAL DISAPPEARANCE.” — Graham St. John, Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnivalized Politics in the Present

meanings. Exposing film is a delicate process — artful, scientific, and entangled in forms of social and political vulnerability and risk. Who is seen and under what terms holds a mirror onto more far-reaching forms of power and inequality each other.” What tools do we use to determine what is visible and who decides on that standard will be an important factor in our observations and exercises. The audience for our selfrepresentations is no longer, as a few decades ago, ourselves and each other.

Our audience today extends to include machines, and the biases we maintain

Something so seemingly simple like seeing, cannot be divorced from its socio-political context. Questions like Who is seeing what? Who is looking at Who? Who has a choice to be seen? are not as simple as one might assume.

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As Ruha Benjamin states in Race after Technology: “Some technologies fail to see Blackness, while others render Black people hypervisible and expose them to systems of racial surveillance.

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1 – Layered Realities by Xinlei Liu, Section Model

LAYERED REALITIES Xinlei Liu

Exposure is defined as the condition of being unprotected from the structure of power, where all-encompassing gaze and surveillance is executed with the pleasure of looking.

Considering the multiple forms of exposure constantly exercised in the community, the new proposed site foregrounds the choices of invisibility and serves a space that feels safe for people. As the cultural and economic gateway to West Philadelphia, the site is also designed to host multiple vernacular events besides market and transportation hub, such as Juneteenth Festival, Pericles, and Mural Arts Training, for the purpose of booming the existing community and resisting the forces of gentrification. Flexible spaces for the aforementioned events are generated by the multi-layered system of enclosure, in which the relationship between inside and outside is obscured through curved mirror, interstitial space and apertures. Thereout, the issue of singular and distorted perspective of exposure will be reflected when experiencing the site.

2 – Layered Realities by Xinlei Liu, Render

Maya Alam

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HIDDEN IN PLAIN SITE Cherie Wan

The choice here is to build society, and not to place a building in society. This proposal strives to provide opportunities to an existing community by prioritizing what’s already there. Details on material surfaces are extracted from billboards around the site and manipulated to intentionally hide or reveal spaces and also provide official mural spaces for West Philly’s arts community.

As spaces sweep off of the station’s roof, changes are only proposed to provide anti-surveillance systems whilst circulation around the site is retained and expanded. The use of the color black is not only to disguise itself in surveillance systems beyond Google Earth, but to address the sociopolitical layers implicated on the color itself. By taking back the negative perception of the color can we begin to actively engage with the local community when designing — providing spaces to ease the lives of commuters; allocate spaces for local organizations to foster its work; as well as give disadvantaged people opportunities to find work, develop their skills and conduct their jobs safely.

when dealing with each other permeate the hard- and softwares we create: in fact, too often we end up confusing such automatized processes and mechanisms as being neutral. Where algorithms have to help us filter through the steady influx of information in order to keep track of “the big picture,” remaining critical towards the norms we create is essential in order to maintain agency in this new, more complex terrain. Comparably, our site investigation will look critically at surveying technology, its data biases, what we understand as real and true.

Who controls what we see and how we see it? What is included in our digital Google Earth but maybe more importantly — what is not?

The overarching idea is to counteract and subvert the power structure as we know it — thinking about the revelatory power of masking and returning agency to those who are suppressed as a result of controlled surveillance or unwanted exposure.

5 – Hidden in Plain Site by Cherie Wan, Elevation

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3 – Maya Alam in Virtual Studio Review 4 – Hidden in Plain Site by Cherie Wan, Render

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EXPOSURES/ENCLOSURES Monique Robinson Exposures/Enclosures explores “exposures” and its related themes including masking, surveillance, and reimagining.

Stemming from research on Protestivals and Carnival, a question arose that asked “What does it mean to mask and how does it form a collective?” Carnival is a tool used to expose social, political, and economic injustices. In context, this idea led to the premise of a world where people of

color are free to exist and thrive in Philadelphia. As an act of rebellion to engineered iniquities like institutional racism or discrimination that plague society, the site serves as a tool for community agency to uplift and promote black ingenuity. Black as the primary material color was used as an act of protest of architectural tropes, textures becoming more articulated as one traverses throughout the building showing the complexities of black. Enclosed spaces include a farmer’s market, amphitheater, communal kitchen, restaurant, grocery store, and aquaponics farming space.

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6 – Exposures/Enclosures by Monique Robinson, Elevation 7 – Exposures/Enclosures by Monique Robinson, Perspective

8 – Exposures/Enclosures by Monique Robinson, Axon 1 9 – Exposures/Enclosures by Monique Robinson, Axon 2

In the age of technology, exposure oftentimes serves as a visual representation of the inequality still present in society.

The issue of exposure in a technological world is multi-faceted, sometimes manifesting as a lack of necessary exposure, and other times materializing as too much of an unwanted thing; paradoxically, technology has placed the power of exposure in the hands of people and things that are unaffected by its consequences.

Transient Perspectives explores how exposure might be redesigned as a means of agency, promoting community connections through the visual union of spaces. The architecture is composed of various material conditions that manipulate how its spaces are perceived in different exposures, challenging the reliability of human perception.

Its apparent visual fluctuations demonstrate the complexity of exposure, as well as how the information encoded in an image or object — and the amount of exposure it receives — informs how it might be seen, experienced, and ultimately understood.

Maya Alam

TRANSIENT PERSPECTIVES Jenna Selati

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10 – Transient Perspectives by Jenna Selati, Section Model 11 – Transient Perspectives by Jenna Selati, Section

12 – Transient Perspectives by Jenna Selati, Render 13 – Transient Perspectives by Jenna Selati, Render Close Up

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SOCIAL CONDENSER /SPOLIA AGENCY Brian De Luna (LECTURER) Paul McCoy (TA) Brian De Luna (Lecturer): Founder Studio De Luna – Teaches at Weitzman School of Architecture & Pratt Institute, SOA – MS.AAD. GSAPP Columbia University 2009 – B. Arch. Southern California Institute of Architecture 2006

“PROGRAMMATIC LAYERING UPON VACANT TERRAIN TO ENCOURAGE DYNAMIC COEXISTENCE OF ACTIVITIES AND TO GENERATE THROUGH THEIR INTERFERENCE, UNPRECEDENTED EVENTS.” — Koolhaas, Rem, Ed. (2004). Content, pp. 73

This Studio began with multiple modes of researching and cataloging Philadelphia through graphic and symbolic representation. The first exercises studied cartography, texture, data, projection, and topographic types of mapping. We researched and explored how to layer various elements and results of the cultural, social, topographic and the built environment. Students also selected an artist to be used as a lens to produce a more focused, rich and in depth aesthetic. Themes drawn from certain art tendencies or artists’ works were used as a filter for analysis, inspiration, graphics and form finding.

The market became a culmination and hybridization of multiple exercises from 2D and 3D objects and graphics. This Studio included historic precedents from the Baroque to the Contemporary.

The goal of the Studio was to utilize new and existing explorations of cities to produce original architectural scenarios (prototypes) that lead to new visual and spatial relationships.

“UTOPIA: DECLINE AND FALL?” — Colin Rowe

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GARDEN CITY John Round

This project is called Garden City, named in reference to Ebenezer Howard’s urban planning concept where selfcontained communities are surrounded by ”greenbelts” of industry and agriculture in an attempt to combine the best aspects of urban and rural life into a functioning whole while eliminating the negative aspects associated with each.

The hope was to create healthier communities where people neither felt stuck working in farming, or stuck in unhealthy cities.

My proposal is not a literal translation of the idea, but approaches the smaller scale of the neighborhood and asks “how can green space be integrated within the built environment to create healthier communities?” The hope is to create a space that people find comfortable and peaceful to explore.Within this concept, the subway line transformed into a park, while the new subway and terminal are placed underground. The ground level of the building is space for a market, and the other levels become public gardens and community space.

I looked at forming clusters of geometry that would form the internal massing of the building and then considered how pathways could connect the external to the internal.

The design uses screens and brick patterning to create an interesting facade while the external circulation acts to blur the boundary of interior and exterior. The interior gardens are large and open spaces that are flexible and can be used for collaborative group/public events.

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1 – Garden City by John Round, Circulation

Brian De Luna

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2 – Garden City by John Round, Elevation 3 – Brian De Luna in Virtual Studio Review

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4 – Evocation by Harsana Siva, Object 5 – Virtual Studio Review

Brian De Luna

Cities are extensive systems that contain histories and memories, ones that goes beyond the memories of the built environment. Understanding and cataloging cities into a myriad of different architectural typologies, one can also begin to examine the built environment as a “Holistic design of urban elements.”

Colin Rowe believed that “Real cities have been shaped by the acclimation of a step by step process,” that retain and record hidden characteristics and less tangible histories. Rowe believed that modernism strived for unrealistic and unobtainable concepts of “Utopia and tradition” and theorized that “Utopias are despotic and lack tolerance.” Today as the discipline of architecture seeks to realign itself creates entirely new forms of cultural alignment and expression.

Rowe’s criticism of modernist urbanism stemmed from their lack of understanding of the city, he criticized modernism’s belief that cities are understood as a construct of unlimited space, with a great emphasis on “Utopian visions” and agued for more spacial diversity with greater variety between space and object through a process of collaging and layering of parts, objects and space which can be seen in Rowes ideal precedent “Hadrian’s Villa” which was the epitome of Roman opulence.

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EVOCATION Harsana Siva

Evocation aims to create a contemporary and diverse space that can be used by the residents of the area to share and connect. The proposed market/travel hub aims to create a smooth transition between existing traditional conditions and contemporary changes through deconstruction and collaging of different urban elements within the 52nd Street corridor.

The market hopes to provide a better experience for the neighborhood. This is achieved by relocating the elevated subway and replacing it with an outdoor market/elevated park. The intervention of the market would also serve the community’s need for growing fresh produce. It would also include a travel hub, a community kitchen, and a local exchange program. The local exchange program is tailored for the community and would be a place for them to share and exchange belongings, acting as a method to preserve within the community. Evocation hence aims to encapsulate, share, and create new memories.

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6 – Evocation by Harsana Siva, Axon

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URBAN CONNECTOR Zoe Ho According to the Philadelphia Garden Data Collaborative, hundreds of Philadelphians are growing food on their land; however, urban development replaced many urban farms.

Philadelphians’ farmers are in threat. At the same time, people living in the urban context do not have many opportunities to see the growth of local food.

Urban Connector is a project that connects the existing urban farms to our site. The urban farm associates with the market and communal kitchens provide space for people to observe the process of food, sharing food, and cooking healthy organic food. The market also promotes local culture by providing space for local businesses that supply local goods and artworks.

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The billboard structure was designed to hold up green walls that celebrate local plants and occasionally showcase local art pieces. It brings transparency and natural light to the people.

Series of tubes that act as urban connectors to link up different spaces; people may access the building from various locations by manifold methods. People from the interior will be able to observe the city from multiple points of view.

By doing so, people living in the urban context will observe and witness the process of local food. It is a vision to cultivate a healthy city, grow solid communities, and promote a sustainable food system.

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7 – Urban Connector by Zoe Ho, Object 8 – Urban Connector by Zoe Ho, Elevation

10 9 – Urban Connector by Zoe Ho, Choisy 10 – Urban Connector by Zoe Ho, Plan

Historically the market functioned as the commercial civic center. Even if the traditional market was challenged by the development of technology and the emergence of the grocery store and the shopping mall, it still has its unique value in the community. Nowadays, it is valuable to consider how the market can be re-envisioned and functionally fit contemporary life. The market belongs to the community.

It should be a place that benefits the community and redefine the neighborhood.

This project searches for the possibility of creating a park as a market, and this idea was developed based on the analysis

of the 52nd Street corridor. Park has its unique value to the community in an urban environment that it provides a space to allow people to get in touch with nature. Having access to nature is a fundamental and important human right; however, it turns out that the community near the 52nd street corridor in west Philadelphia does not have equal access to nature, especially learning that the 52nd station area is not covered by any park within 400 meters. At the same time, the park is also an important part of the memory of the city that it has witnessed many significant events and became a space for people to interact with each other. What if we make the market a park? By creating both horizontal and vertical garden, the market will become not only a social condenser but also a place that contribute to the environmental justice of the community.

Brian De Luna

MARKET-GARDEN Yumeng Qu

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13 – Market-Garden by Yumeng Qu, Axon 14 – Market-Garden by Yumeng Qu, Plan

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11 – Market-Garden by Yumeng Qu, Object 12 – Market-Garden by Yumeng Qu, Visual Study

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SPACEWAYS — IMAGINING AFROFUTURISM Vanessa Keith (LECTURER) Nicholas Houser (TA) Vanessa Keith (Lecturer): MArch, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts (2000) – Master of International Affairs, Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs (1995) – Concentration: Economic Development – Focus Area: Urban Planning B.A., Columbia University (1992) – Major: Religion and Non-Western Philosophy – Minor: Fine Art (Printmaking)

This studio will push the boundaries of existing paradigms to envision new models for life on this planet rooted in practices that are both ancient and cutting edge. We will be working at the intersection of the urban and architectural scales to develop visionary proposals for the site in the present day, as well as generations into an imagined utopian future. We will be referencing Afrofuturist art, music, and literature for inspiration, as well as utopian and alternative strategies for creating equitable and environmentally sound future sociopolitical ecologies.

Our site, located in a predominantly African American part of West Philadelphia, sits at the intersection of the 52nd

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1 –Vanessa Keith in Virtual Studio Review

Street Corridor, a commercial strip with local businesses that serve the surrounding community, a mix of mainly two and three-story row houses with the occasional taller building and a smattering of empty lots, and the Market Street L which connects the neighborhood to other parts of the city. Our work will be centered on the design of a market and transit hub, while also considering the suggestion of smaller interventions in the surrounding urban fabric that, along with our project as centerpiece, may prove to create a series of shifts that alter the urban landscape for the better. It is understood that even a small or seemingly insubstantial event may touch off a series of larger transformations, as well as the reverse. Indeed, Michael Sorkin urged that, as designers, we should be “ready for an explosion of fresh forms, inspired by the democratic roots of the critique of modernist urbanism, by a deeply ecological sensibility, by a fond embrace of the

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TECHNOBABBLE Sarah Johnson

Combining Afrofuturist ideals, futuristic technology and neighborhood needs, Technobabble aims to bring new technological opportunities to the West Philadelphian community. Connecting commerce, transit and community, the structure becomes a hub for the neighborhood and creates both commercial and educational outlets. Through the market space, the individuals of 19139 are able to utilize small markets stalls for business ventures, without the burden or risk of renting out and filling entire stores. The community portion of the building is dedicated to after-school programming for the children of West Philadelphia, giving them a safe and educational environment to be their curious and engaged best while exploring integrated and relevant STEAM learning opportunities while their parents or guardians are working. The underside of the platform is covered in an undulating design, subtly inspired by the African Adinkra of Ghana symbol Gye Nyame. This wraps the platforms structure and connects to the building’s facade, which is inspired by technology and computer chip design, creating a unique Afrofuturist fusion.

This studio also seeks to celebrate the creative, vibrant and multifaceted uses of space in African-American communities that differ from the mainstream, indeed, as Hunter et. al. attest, it is time we put “forth a notion of black placemaking that privileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being black and being around other black people in the city. ‘A spot in the universe,’ writes sociologist Thomas Gieryn, ‘becomes a place only when it ensconces history or utopia, danger or security, identity or memory.’” b

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pluralist character of our culture, and by a critical incorporation of the new and inescapably transformative technologies of electronic adjacency.” a

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INTERCONNECT Emma McMonigal

Food, art, and Afrofuturist ideas combine to bring new opportunities to the West Philadelphian community. This building allows commercial, transit, and educational program to develop into a large hub of activity and community. Through the food hall, stalls, and ghost kitchens, the community members are able to utilize these spaces for business ventures without the burden of renting out larger spaces. The outdoor market space also allows other popup businesses to test their products. Another aspect of this building is the art center and community garden group that occupies the space. Residents are given the opportunity to participate in art classes and display their work in exhibitions. Community gardens located throughout the building also give people the option to learn more about gardening and healthy foods. This hub will act as a stepping stone to a larger intervention into the site that will utilize art, food, and gardening to help businesses and a sense of community grow in the area.

Framework and Context “LET US NOT FORGET DIMENSIONS. THE CITY HAS A SYMBOLIC DIMENSION; MONUMENTS BUT ALSO VOIDS, SQUARES AND AVENUES, SYMBOLIZING THE COSMOS, THE WORLD, SOCIETY, OR SIMPLY THE STATE. IT HAS A PARADIGMATICAL DIMENSION; IT IMPLIES AND SHOWS OPPOSITIONS, THE INSIDE AND THE OUTSIDE, THE CENTRE AND THE PERIPHERY, THE INTEGRATED AND NONINTEGRATED TO URBAN SOCIETY. FINALLY, IT ALSO POSSESSES THE SYNTAGMATIC DIMENSION: THE CONNECTION OF ELEMENTS, THE ARTICULATION OF ISOTOPIES AND HETEROTOPIES. AT ITS SPECIFIC LEVEL, THE CITY PRESENTS ITSELF AS A PRIVILEGED SUB-SYSTEM BECAUSE IT IS ABLE TO REFLECT AND EXPOSE THE OTHER SUB-SYSTEMS AND TO PRESENT ITSELF AS A ‘WORLD,’ A UNIQUE WHOLE, WITHIN THE ILLUSION OF THE IMMEDIATE AND THE LIVED. IN THIS CAPACITY RESIDES PRECISELY THE CHARM, THE TONICITY, AND THE TONALITY SPECIFIC TO URBAN LIFE.” — Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City, 116

space, whether digital, physical, or virtual, is given meaning by way of a process of analogy, translation, and narrative.

Afrofuturism is inspired by the wisdom of ancient cultures that stretch far into the past while at the same time projecting into vastly imaginative and empowering futures. Decolonization is here seen as a positive effort to co-construct spaces that center and privilege people and cultures that have been and continue to be oppressed, displaced, silenced, and rendered invisible. This means that non-dominant worldviews and ways of being, knowing, and acting guide the way in creating new systems and ways of living together in our shared world.

Decolonization is also about unsettling and decentering the dominant systems and cultures that have perpetuated unsustainable ways of living and treat our planet as inputs for manufacture, plunder and exchange. Nascent ecologies, innovative techniques, and climate resilient strategies will be explored and expanded upon as part of our overall approach to the site.

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“CITIES, AFTER ALL, ARE JUXTAPOSITION ENGINES, MUTATION MACHINES.” — Sorkin, Some Assembly Required, 8

This studio finds its framework in Afro-futurism and nascent ecologies.

Afrofuturism cuts across literature, music, visual arts, fashion, and other creative expressions to blend the traditions of the past into the future — an imagination cut free of the constructs of colonialism. Our construction of 77

6 – InterConnect by Emma McMonigal, Project Description

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CHROMIUM FRAY Ziai Huang

for youth and adults, art galleries, and indoor and outdoor markets will respond to those opportunities.

This project attempts to become an artistic catalyst to make more people of the Philadelphian community participate in the creation and appreciation of the arts. Inspired by the Julie Mehretu and Afro-futurist ideals, the color tunnel as the new layer of urban graffiti will bring more education and employment opportunities to the west Philadelphian community. Programs like the transit hub, art education spaces

The canopy of this building is fluid and colorful, and the general form is visually striking and will attract people to come. Those colorful and artistic panels on the facade and ceiling of the building will create a beautiful, relaxed, and inspiring space for those who feel tired during their travel and those who have some interest in art.

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7 – Chromium Fray by Ziai Huang, Aerial 8 – Chromium Fray by Ziai Huang, Assemblage Close Up

9 – Chromium Fray by Ziai Huang, Assemblage 10 – Chromium Fray by Ziai Huang, Interior Render

This project aims to serve the local neighborhood of West Philadelphia by providing healthy, sustainable, and accessible methods of nourishment to communities impacted by food insecurity. Philly Urban Creators transforms landscapes into dynamic safe spaces that foster connectivity, self sufficiency, innovation, and joy through urban agriculture. The

52nd St Transit Hub and Market will serve as Urban Creators’ second outpost, by incorporating a fresh food hall, art gallery, education spaces, and a co-op food market and garden that is run by community members as a self-reliant, sustainable system. By combining Afrofuturist ideals and symbols such as “Sankofa” in its textural qualities, the hub serves as a way of a reimagining the past and transforming the community into one that nourishes the mind, body, and spirit.

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IN BETWEENNESS Rhea Nayar

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11 – In Betweenness by Rhea Nayar, Axon 12 – In Betweenness by Rhea Nayar, Section

13 – In Betweenness by Rhea Nayar, Axon 14 – In Betweenness by Rhea Nayar, Entry Render

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BETWEEN CATEGORIES Andrew Lucia (LECTURER) Daniel Yang (TA) Andrew Lucia (Lecturer): LUCITO, Founding Principal – Andrew Lucia (Solo Art Practice) – 2015-17 Cass Gilbert Visiting Fellow, University of Minnesota – University of Pennsylvania, MArch, 2008 – University of Minnesota, B.A. in Architecture, 2001

“AT THE BEGINNING OF A TRANSFORMATION TOWARDS ASYMMETRY, EXCEPTIONAL EVENTS ARE INTRODUCED INTO SYMMETRY AND ACT AS AESTHETIC STIMULI. WHEN THESE EXCEPTIONAL EVENTS MULTIPLY AND BECOME THE GENERAL CASE, A JUMP TO A HIGHER LEVEL OCCURS. THE LEVEL IS ONE OF DISORDER, WHICH, AT LEAST IN THE ARTS AND IN THE EXPRESSIONS OF ARTISTS, PROCLAIMS ITSELF AS ENGENDERED BY THE COMPLEX, VAST, AND RICH VISION OF THE BRUTAL ENCOUNTERS OF MODERN LIFE.” -Iannis Xenakis, from Formalized Music, 1991

This studio section will approach the city and typology of the urban market-station as assemblages that exist in a space between categories, defying classification at the intersection of the geometric and the social. Taken as such, architectural objects comprise distributed elements and events through time — aggregate collections of material, data, qualities and experiences. Considered in this manner, the market-station as an urban condition can be seen as a condensation of disparate qualities, social/ cultural/economic realities and spatial/ material moments that routinely intersect, collide, commingle, and disperse.

Here, residues of the past persist as artifacts, echoes whose permanence give rise to an overarching sense of composite identity and character.

Between: image — geometry raster — vector fiction — reality

ugly — beautiful lyrical — gross orthographic — spatial planar — spherical quantity — quality logic — emotion fluid — rigid surface — cloud poetic — scientific organic — rigid static — dynamic affect — construction paradise — purgatory

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Project 1: Collector Condenser Collecting and cataloging will play an initial role in this studio, however not as a means to arrive at a particular truth or set of facts. Rather, these collections will act as a method of decoupling our engrained preconceptions of systems and their images, to find that space where quantity gives way to quality; to defy classification in order to dispel assumptions of identity, in a state of potential that is neither and both: between categories. Images will play a central role in this investigation — as material, mediator and model.

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1 – Situationism by Joseph Depre, Axon

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SITUATIONISM Joseph Depre

If it is taken from Debord that the spectacle is the image of the ruling economy, the one that controls the spectacle controls that ruling economy. This is not a Situationism, for there is no Situationism, there is only the Situation. The geometry of the Situation is a transformation of the mural culture of Philadelphia into volumetric form. It is a literal reflection of the colorful architectural skin of the local environment and culture. The primary programmatic concern of this transportation hub is with the transformative effects of the psychogeographic experience found within the marketplace. The Situation is the spectacle endowed with purpose, a gravity-well pulling diverse groups of people into its orbit.

It is a multicultural buffet of food and drink, programmed across multilevel roof gardens, providing sanctuary from the ordinary. Traffic from Market Street has been moved underground and the El Train tracks have been encapsulated to provide a tranquil street level gathering space accessible to mobile vendors. The roof Market has over twenty different small vendor kiosks arranged to create an experiential meandering. The goal is to normalize the relationship between indefinite “others” in the between place of circulation. The transition between program A and program B becomes activated as the primary experience of action is akin to the playfulness of discovery found through continuous dérive.

Project 2: The Predicament of Texture Using a combination of photography and/or photogrammetry, you are to generate a series of 12 image texture swatches. These swatches are to consist of two types: having a basis in Philadelphia/Site, and having a relationship to your conceptual agendas emerging from Assignment 1 (Collections). These could stem from material textures, visual patterns, atmospherics, architectural elements, etc.

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2 – Situationism by Joseph Depre, Section

You are to produce three exhaustive collections of artifacts to be approached as aggregates of images, urban conditions, and architectural material. As a primary mode of research you may use digital imaging, spatial scanning technologies, online data banks, Google Earth, Google Street View, search engines, etc., and their misappropriations. These collections must have minimally 100 elements each and should address the following:

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3 – Andrew Lucia in Virtual Studio Review 4 – Ambient Anomalies by Francesca Dong, Render

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Project 3: Between Geometry and Image

Bricolage: something constructed or created from a diverse range of available things.

For this exercise you are to derive a taxonomy of architectural primitives that begin to synthesize your emerging formal/conceptual agendas and texture swatches. This should be approached as an open-ended process, one in which you are to develop the rules and constraints of play through informed decisions and evaluation at each step of this non-linear process.

AMBIENT ANOMALIES Francesca Dong

Ambient Anomalies explores the mixed language that occurs from architectural bifurcation and visual amalgamations.

This market proposal galvanizes the transportation hub into a vibrant, all encompassing community space that highlights the goods of aspiring chefs and small business owners local to Philadelphia. The mobile market coils around the station massings, serving as a tangential envoy to visitors in an increasingly modernizing digital age. The luminescent signage becomes an experience solely in itself, inviting pedestrians to define a new type of hyper-mobile architecture on the 52nd Street Corridor.

The transportation hub serves the community by providing a platform for local chefs to showcase their food, eliminating food waste within the city, and enhancing the station’s existing circulation as people traverse through the site.

Ambient Anomalies embraces the fast-paced momentum of the transportation hub while creating desirable spaces for people to explore West Philadelphia’s immensely diverse food scene.

6 – Ambient Anomalies by Francesca Dong, Project Description

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5 – Ambient Anomalies by Francesca Dong, Axon

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WINDOW “PUZZLES” Wenjing You The 52nd St. Station project was based upon an observation of the bay windows inherent to West Philadelphia row houses. Within these facades planarity is broken, while symmetry is refused by the inclusion of the modest bay.

By transforming basic geometries through an overwhelming interjection of multiple bays, a new type emerges,

yet its original features can still be observed through this new condition. Here, bays have become the facade while delineating space and program within the interior of the station. The overall massing strikes a balance between the inherent solidity of the bays’ form and the void of suggested space within. As a formal complement, archways carve voids within the interior while stretching outward through the facade forming volumes in tandem within the field of bay windows.

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7 – Window “Puzzles” by Wenjing You, Elevation 8 – Window “Puzzles” by Wenjing You, Axon

9 – Window “Puzzles” by Wenjing You, Exterior Render 10 – Window “Puzzles” by Wenjing You, Interior Render

As a medieval construct, the carnival has long been a form of action capable of revealing contradictions and unmasking truths. In an era of extreme historical flux, it offers the possibility to challenge the future of cities within its realm of utopia and freedom. This project revisits the origins of carnival and looks at the medieval as a lens for contemporary design practice and speculation of the past market typology and its 10-year trajectory.

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Interrogating the historical model of the mixed-use, the project mixes the vantages of the resident, the passerby, and the delivery drone into a hyper model of carnival. Operating on two systems of a utopic present and dystopic future, it cultivates a relationship between the informal marketplace and a drone delivery system that inhabits poche and the spaces between.

Andrew Lucia

IN THE MIDDLE OF AGES Kyle Troyer

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13 13 – In the Middle of Ages by Kyle Troyer, Vingette 2

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ARCHITECTURES OF COMMONING VOL.3: COMMONSPOLY’S CARNIVAL Eduardo Rega Calvo (LECTURER) Matthew Kohman (TA) Eduardo Rega Calvo (Lecturer): Founder of Architectures of Refusal – Editor at urbanNext, Actar publishers – M.Sc. in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia

In this semester engaging with urban and architectural design, students generate collective research by mapping and diagramming the work of activist organizations, workers cooperatives, and non-profits working in Philadelphia.

Building on the last two years’ conceptual and methodological strategy, we use the board game Commonspoly to structure the studio.

In an attempt to offer an alternative to Monopoly, the game that celebrates huge economic and real estate accumulation for the few and collective bankruptcy for the many, Commonspoly was recently released to illuminate, through play, alternative non-exploitative processes of city-making. For its capacity to broadly educate on the general dynamics of urban development by questioning current regimes of property, our 502 design studio this semester redesigns the Commonspoly board game to reflect the specificities of West Philadelphia’s 52nd Street Corridor.

52nd Street Corridor’s Commonspoly serves as a launchpad for our critical discussions around architecture’s entanglement in the systems of power that produce space and the city. Just like the Carnival, games create spaces for temporary liberation, alternative systems of social relation characterized by particular rules, codes and protocols that open different ways of being together.

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PHASE 02: THE SECOND GROUND Jingxiao Zhou

During the 52st occupy movement of phase 01, organizations like Philly for REAL and POP, manage to build enough political support, gather resources and make alliances with other grassroots organizations in the city to develop a more stable form of autonomy. The coalition of organizations built structures above streets, on rooftops, and between buildings to set up a new ground for commons, autonomous zones that connect already commonized architectures of the neighborhood. The architecture provides neighbors an elevated ground for programs that can yield their goals of self-determination such as classrooms, workspaces, markets, and living units. In order to encourage the neighbor’s self-sufficiency in the autonomous zones, farms are spread over the city on previously vacant lots and commonized buildings’ rooftops. People plant, harvest, and serve food around the farm where architectures aggregate. Another element of the project includes spaces open to programmatic interpretation, these exist within the structure to provide flexibility in facilitating temporary activities like performance space, outdoor classrooms, etc.

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1 – Phase 02: The Second Ground by Jingxiao Zhou, Axon 2 – Phase 02: The Second Ground by Jingxiao Zhou, Perspective

PHASE 02: PUBLIC/PRIVATE PARTNERS CITY Li Yang

This project considers that Philly for REAL’s activity highly depends not only on the community, but also on the fluctuating conditions in the structures of power on the city and state levels. It recognizes that organizations for social and urban justice must adapt to address the specific challenges that come with varying circumstances. Sometimes conducting their work under relatively smooth social conditions, while other times they must contend with intensification of structural racism and aggressive gentrification. In more favorable conditions, their efforts can focus on integrating and commonizing spaces with peer groups, and benefiting neighbors with community engagement.

In times of more intensified state violence, surveillance, and displacement, they must shift their attention to interconnecting peer organizations, communicating their message, and getting their voices heard broadly by society.

Meanwhile, in both cases, they are using direct action to convey their ideas and demands. This project considers the scenario in which street protest is their crucial form of activity. In this reality of severe social segregation, spaces of the richand those designated for people of lower income are equipped with unequal resources, working separately with rare interactions and communication.

However, with a skillful usage of the structural modules, grassroots organizers form an integrated space between the two linking the street blocks divided by the segregated mixed income neighborhood to create spaces for grassroots action and expand their influence.These scattering spaces of action form an invisible archipelago inside the original city blocks where interior guerrilla urbanism is mobilized in the support of the community.

Through the act of playing the 52nd street corridor’s Commonspoly, we access different world-making processes, space-producing systems of exchange and land ownership where profit is replaced by benefit, market value by use value, and where accumulations of capital and private property are challenged by the collective reclamation of the commons.

In the midterm, after three weeks of group work in studio, participants presented their West Philadelphia 52nd Street Corridor-specific version of Commonspoly, their mapped and diagrammed research on the organizations selected, and the first narratives of urban projects that insert spatial organizing tactics into our studio site, with a market

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constituting its general and open program. During the rest of the semester students make connections across this collectively generated research and its architectural ramifications to generate narratives and ideas that yield radically imaginative and politically conscious architectural designs.

6 5 – Phase 02: Public/Private Partners City by Li Yang, Axon, 6 – Eduardo Rega Calvo in Virtual Studio Review

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3 – Phase 02: Public/Private Partners City by Li Yang, Project Description 4 – Phase 02: Public/Private Partners City by Li Yang, Exterior Render

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PHASE 02: DÈTOURNEMENT Jun Lee Gentrification, capitalist enterprise, and hegemonic institutions have decimated networks of support and community developed in West Philadelphia over generations. These family networks are severed as communities are displaced, perpetuating inequitable systems of power and exacerbating the marginalization and dehumanization of the Black community.

This project learns from two key players in West Philadelphia: the Women’s Community Revitalization Project (WCRP) and the Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project (YASP). The WCRP works with the Community Justice Land Trust, aiming to create developments that are collectively owned and protected. YASP works to fight against

the disproportionate incarceration of Black children in Philadelphia by breaking the school-to-prison pipeline.

Their relationships with speculator entities such as the University of Pennsylvania create complex networks that are reflected in the architectural design proposals in two phases. The first phase explores a relationship between grassroots organizations that is mutually beneficial with a spatial strategy focused on visibility, whilethe second phase proposes guerilla architecture strategies that work to reclaim spaces of autonomy and sovereignty co-opted by hegemonic systems.

By empowering the community and its grassroots organizations through collaboration and participatory action, we can begin to see an alternative future for architecture in which we act not as agents of hegemonic systems but as accomplices and assets for social and cultural reparation.

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8 – Phase 02: Dètournement by Jun Lee, Narrative Diagram 9 – Phase 02: Dètournement by Jun Lee, Exterior Render

Responding to the theme of the Carnival, the project speculates on the construction of a temporary autonomous zone at the base of the 52nd Station, to create shelter and promote education and other basic services for people in need.

This zone is thought to be born from movements for racial justice and food justice Philadelphia, like the Philadelphia Coalition for Racial Economic and Legal Justice (REAL) and

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the Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP). Considering that the space is built after a street takeover by protestors associated with activist organizations, and that it must be built quickly, the architectural design proposition utilizes flexible and lightweight structural systems such as deployable, inflatable, and tensile structures that can be compressed and transported to the site secretly. The resulting spaces include a shelter for people in need, but also a playground for everyone from the neighborhood.

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PHASE 01: OCCUPY 52ND STREET Zihua Mo

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EVENTS Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University.

Her lecture is titled, “Architecture and Pandemics: From Tuberculosis to COVID-19.”

September 2, 2020 THE EWINGCOLE LECTURE: Beatriz Colomina

She writes and curates on questions of design, art, sexuality and media. Her books include Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994), Domesticity at War (MIT Press, 2007), The Century of the Bed (Verlag fur Moderne Kunst,2015), Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg, 2014), Clip/ Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X–197X (Actar, 2010) and Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Lars Muller, 2016).

She has curated a number of exhibitions including Clip/ Stamp/Fold (2006), Playboy Architecture (2012) and Radical Pedagogies (2014). In 2016 she was co-curator of the third Istanbul Design Biennial. Her latest book is X-Ray Architecture (Lars Muller, 2019). In 2020 she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for her contributions to the field of architecture.

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November 2, 2020 SOPHIE HOCHHÄUSL: Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence

Sophie Hochhäusl is an Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and a member of the Executive Board for the program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.

In the 2020-2021 academic year, Sophie will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University and a Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities. She will also be the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington, D.C. in the 2021-2022 academic year. Before joining the Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, she was the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Sophie is interested in discourse on collectivity, difference, and dissent in architecture. Her scholarly work centers on modern architecture and urban culture in Austria, Germany, and the United States with a focus on spatial histories of dissidence and resistance, intersectional feminism, queer theory, and gender studies, as well as environmental history and labor theory. She is currently working on two book projects: an interdisciplinary history and translation project titled Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989 as well as the monograph, Housing Cooperative: Politics, Architecture, and Urban Imagination in Vienna, 1904–1934. Sophie is the co-editor of the forthcoming Architecture, Environment, Territory, Essential Writings Since 1850 with Daniel Barber and Irene Cheng.

Sophie has published articles and essays in academic journals including Architectural Histories, Architecture Beyond Europe, and Ediciones ARQ. Currently, she has forthcoming texts in Aggregate, Platform, and The Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians. In 2020 she was chosen to deliver the Detlef Mertins Memorial Lecture on

the History of Modernity at Columbia University, which honors promising research in architectural history. She is the recipient of a Carter Manny Award by the Graham Foundation (2015) and the Bruno Zevi Award (2017) for the best historical-critical essay by an emerging scholar.

Sophie’s research has been supported by the Botstiber Foundation for Austrian-American Studies, the Clarence Stein Fellowship for Landscape and Urban Studies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, and the Viennese Mayor’s Office. In 2020 she was awarded the Perkins Holmes Undergraduate Teaching Award, based on nominations by her undergraduate students. In the same year she also won the inaugural Lynda S. Hart Teaching Award for a faculty granted by the Alice Paul Center and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Sophie coordinates the undergraduate honors thesis in architecture in the College of Arts and Sciences and she is a member of the Graduate Group in Design. She co-organizes a Provost-sponsored “Excellence Through Diversity” lecture series. Her Ph.D. students’ work spans topics including gender and kinship, housing and cooperative movements, architecture and literature, and urban culture in fin-de-siècle Vienna and modern Israel. Sophie deeply values collaboration in architecture and academic life. Her steady collaborators beyond the department at the University of Pennsylvania include Erin Cross (LGBT Center), Akira Drake Rodriquez (City and Regional Planning), David Hartt (Fine Arts), and Davy Knittle (English, Urban Studies). Sophie holds a MArch. from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in History of Architecture and Urbanism.

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November 4, 2020 MICHEL ROJKIND: Shared Responsibility

Rojkind was born in Mexico City, where he studied Architecture and Urban Planning at the Universidad Iberoamericana (1989-1994). In 2002 he founded Rojkind Arquitectos to explore new challenges addressing contemporary society, to design compelling experiences that go beyond mere functionality, and to connect the intricacies of each project at a deeper level.

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Michel Rojkind is the Senior Vice President of Architecture at WeWork and founding principal of Rojkind Arquitectos.

Completed projects include concert hall Fora Boca on the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico’s National Film Archive and Film Institute, and the Nestlé Chocolate Museum in Mexico City.

In 2019, Rojkind joined The We Company, parent of WeWork, as the Senior Vice President of Architecture.

Upcoming projects include a 200,000-square-foot building in Bentonville, Arkansas.

He has been a visiting professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles, at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IACC) in Barcelona, and at the Weitzman School.

In 2010, Rojkind was named as one of the “Country’s Treasured Architects” by the Mexican Civil Registry. The Los Angeles Times named Michel Rojkind among the “Face to Watch in 2010.” Also in 2010, Rojkind was selected by the Architectural League of New York as one of the “Emerging Voices.” In 2011, he was named by Wallpaper* magazine as one of the “150 Movers, Shakers and Makers That Have Rocked The World in the Last 15 Years.”

In 2013, Forbes magazine named him “one of the most influential architects of contemporary Mexican scene.” In 2018, he served on Dezeen Awards master jury and chose the final award winners.

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SPRING FIRST YEAR COURSES

[ARCH 512] HISTORY AND THEORY II Joan Ockman How do architecture, urbanism, and the environment reflect the dominant social, economic, and political changes of the 20th and 21st centuries and how did its vast geopolitical shifts such as Imperialism, Fascism, the Cold War, Neoliberalism, the “War on Terror,” and nationalism reshape architecture culture? How might architecture culture respond and help construct its resistant variants, anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, decolonization, and making “quieter places” in Donna Haraway’s sense? How do critical frameworks to rethink positivism, efficiency, standardization, and even utopian thinking become revised through the lenses of queer, postcolonial, critical race, and eco-feminist theory in postwar architectural production? And how do these frameworks allow us to conceive of more equitable ways of being in the world while thinking with a varied pasts? This course provides twelve discursive and theoretical frameworks to rethink architectural history in the 20th and 21st century. Through 12 lectures the course traces critical questions confronting architectural modernity from the violence of settler colonialism to the possibilities of making kin. While we will trace instances of architecture, city planning, landscape and infrastructural developments that corresponded to dominant ways of conceiving modernity and its analog progress narratives, the course is mainly interested in considering resistant paradigms that elide attempts to speak of a unified or homogenous notion of modernity.

The course will be active and interactive and will include building a collaborative dictionary of architectural terms.

[ARCH 522] VISUAL STUDIES II Nate Hume, Brian De Luna The coursework of Visual Studies will introduce a range of new tools, skills, and strategies useful for the development and representation of design work. Drawing and modeling strategies will be investigated for ways in which they can generate ideas and forms rather than be used solely as production tools. Control and the ability to model in an intentional manner will be highlighted. Likewise, drawing exercises will stress the construction of content over the acceptance of digital defaults in order to more accurately represent a project’s ideas. Documents will be produced which

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The course will be separated into three phases each focusing on a different set of topics which are related to the work in studio. These phases will be in a sequential consolidation of techniques and methods. Each exercise must therefore be complete before progressing to the next. The exercises will have specific requirements and be presented by the students, as well as submitted for grading, before the next exercise is introduced.

[ARCH 532] CONSTRUCTION II Franca Trubiano

SPRING FIRST YEAR COURSES

strive to build on and question drawing conventions in order to more precisely convey the unique character of each project. The workflow will embrace a range of software to open up possibilities to achieve intended results and resist constraint of a single program’s abilities.

Construction Technology II is an advanced course in building technology that informs, instructs, and demonstrates the extent to which industrialized building systems and innovative building technologies impact and guide the architect’s design process. The course focuses on multistory buildings whose complexities require the adoption of varying material, constructional, and informational technologies; all which, are never standard, typical, or obvious. Construction Technology II is focused on exploring and understanding the reciprocal relationship that binds design to construction and construction to design. Designs can be conceived to produce spectacular constructions and construction can be organized to produce ever more wondrous designs.

Construction Technology II advances the idea that Architecture is, in fact, an Art of Building. The success of any design is predicated on the success of its materials, construction practices, and the means used to communicate both. The architect’s competent and innovative choice of building materials, (concrete, stone, wood, steel, and plastic) assembly techniques, and methods of fabrication assures a building’s success. So too does the architect’s choice of representational means.

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[ARCH 536] STRUCTURES II Masoud Akbarzadeh, Richard Farley The Structures courses serve multiple purposes within the program. Fundamental structural principles of systems, elements and materials are related to the study of morphology of structure. Methods are taught to develop skills, knowledge and intuition for the application of structures to architectural design, including form-finding. The students are propelled to apply analytical digital skills directly to architectural design and to pursue structural optimization in subsequent seminars and design studios, carrying out into the profession.

Structures I – the course introduces structural principles, morphology, form-finding, and material science, complemented with digital analysis techniques that are verified with standard calculation techniques for selecting and sizing structural elements.

This then becomes an increasing resource in the students’ architectural design process with particular consideration for physical dimensions, span, materiality, and construction determinants .

Structures II – the course furthers structural analytical and form-finding techniques in anticipation of future structural explorations enhancing structural skills and knowledge to be applied to architectural design. The course culminates with the introduction and implementation of three-dimensional design using digital analytical techniques including a class project to analyze a structural system, given a prescribed set of conditions or implementing the student’s design studio project.

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GALLERY 97

In the Middle of Ages by Kyle Troyer Critic: Andrew Lucia [p.85]

GALLERY

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GALLERY 99

Urban Connector by Zoe Ho Critic: Brian De Luna [p.72]

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Arachnida by Christine Eichhorn Critic: Gisela Baurmann [p.141]

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Chromium Fray by Ziai Huang Critic: Vanessa Keith [p.78]

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Flâneur-scape by Echo Ma Critic: Annette Fierro [p.62]

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Phase 01: Occupy 52nd Street by Zihua Mo Critic: Eduardo Rega [p.89]

The Kanter Tritsch Medal in Architecture and the Kanter Tritsch Prize in Energy and Architectural Innovation were established in 2017 through a gift from Lori Kanter Tritsch, who earned her MArch degree from Penn and serves on our Board of Advisors, and her partner William Lauder, a graduate of the Wharton School and a Penn Trustee. On behalf of everyone at the Weitzman School, we thank you, Lori and William for your generosity and support of architecture.

The Kanter Tritsch Prize is given to a Master of Architecture candidate entering the final year of study who demonstrates transformational thinking on the built environment and innovation in his or her approach to one or more challenges of energy, ecology, and social equity. Chair Dubbeldam announced that this year’s student Prize went to Paul Germaine McCoy, a second year architecture student. Paul’s portfolio was truly remarkable for its command of material and form, strong point of view, and intellectual rigor. In his vision for architecture, buildings are vehicles for memory, imagination, and desire.

KANTER TRITSCH AWARD

2020 WEITZMAN SCHOOL OF DESIGN ARCHITECTURE AWARDS

The Kanter Tritsch Medal, honors architects or firms that are changing the course of design history through leadership and education. The medal this year went to one of the more controversial protagonists of the architectural scene, Peter Eisenman, who is known as much for his theoretical essays as he is for his architecture. In her introduction, professor and chair of the Architecture department Winka Dubbeldam framed the discussion by two of Peter’s books, his original thesis The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture: Dissertation of 1963, recently published and his latest [not last] book “Lateness” from 2020. In the intro he ties the 2 books together, he states: “It was at this point that I realized that neither seeing nor representation was the basis for architecture, but rather, abstraction and the critical, which refers to the possible or necessary commentary on a work. To be critical meant learning to see not only what was present, but also what was absent. This realization, along with my linguistic concerns, begin to shape the foundation of my dissertation research”.

Peter’s built career started with a striking series of house designs: House VI - House VI, or the Frank Residence, was Peter’s second built work, and is located in Cornwall, Connecticut and completed in 1975. It is both an object and a kind of cinematic manifestation of the transformational process. The Wexner Center was the first major public commission for Eisenman, it emerged from a 1982–‘83 competition held by The Ohio State University calling for a bold building to house its ambitious new multi-disciplinary contemporary arts center. Eisenman’s proposal integrates the geometries of both the city grid and the OSU Oval within a new Center for the Visual Arts on the campus, thus projecting an image of belonging both to the campus and to the larger context of Ohio. In a later work; The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany. [ 1998-2005], Eisenman placed 2711 concrete slabs of different heights. the pillars extend between two undulating grids. A perceptual and conceptual divergence between the topography of the ground and the top plane of the stelae is thus created. It denotes a difference in time. The monument’s registration of this difference makes for a place of loss and contemplation, elements of memory, and as seen here; allows for the creation of new memories. His latest work in Milan, the 140,000 sqft residence of Carlo Erba, Eisenman architects designed a series of horizontal bands stacked with slight offsets that create four different layers in the nine-story building, with subtle but significant transition from warm, rough travertine to the cool, smooth marble, resulting in multilayered and often highly complex assemblies.

At the end of the ceremony Peter thanked Lori for her dedication to architecture and the awarded medal. As he stated, it is not often that a theoretical architect wins an award, and he so appreciated the honor bestowed upon him.

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CORE 601 Hina Jamelle, Coordinator Director of Urban Housing

The Core 601 Urban Housing Studios define new contemporary modes of living in an urban environment.

In a world of increasing demand on existing resources there is newly focused attention on adaptive reuse and the expansion of existing facilities. Each Urban Housing studio section positions the housing project relative to an existing structure. The student proposals will be required to engage with this existing building condition — with 1/3 of the proposed project interacting directly with the existing structure while the remaining 2/3 to be new construction. A goal is to encourage the production of hybrid forms, programs, and architectural conditions that interrogate relationships between new and existing conditions. All Studio Sections

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develop housing projects of 50,000 sq. ft. on an urban lot with a minimum of two facades. The housing project is designed as a hybrid form of housing/dwelling with a commercial or cultural program that can co-exist with housing. Other key objectives include the study of a building’s massing and the physical impact it makes on the city with a highly detailed facade.

Starting with the 2020-21 academic year the Urban Housing and Integration studio’s at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design will take as a shared theme Public Common Space. Public Commons has become a term used for shared, equitable access to resources such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as to social creations such as libraries, public spaces, scientific research etc. Public Common Space for the 2nd Year Architecture studios will be a catalyst to study the confluence of equity and inclusion through thoughtful inquiry. Each student will engage in architecture’s agency to format spaces of equity and proactively develop new modes of ground, landscape, thresholds, and spaces that provide for safe assembly and freedom from harassment.

Across all Urban Housing studios there are three separate event weeks: Plan Week immediately precedes the mid-review and addresses unit design, clear divisions of public and private spaces, building circulation, and preliminary documentation of life safety, egress, and ADA requirements. The Section and Facade Week immediately follows the mid-review and addresses an understanding of vertical and horizontal circulation, building program distribution, facade design, and docu-mentation. Public Common Space Week Development Week culminates the coordinated weeks with a focus on how to design and develop architectural solutions that address concerns of equity, inclusion and justice. Public Common Space Week is also supported by a lecture series from key thinkers in the field.

The studio faculty are also practicing architects of note: Kutan Ayata of Young & Ayata, Jonas Coersmeier and Gisela Bauerman of Buro NY, Scott Erdy of Erdy McHenry, Hina Jamelle of Contemporary Architecture Practice NY SH, Ben Krone of Gradient Architecture, and Brian Phillips from Interface Studio Architects, Each studio critic may recruit a project influencer — an outside stakeholder who will contribute knowledge at key milestones during the semester [E.g. Site Visits, Reviews, Topic Lectures etc].

Taught concurrently are Professional Practice by Philip Ryan and Environmental Systems by Dorit Aviv, which use the Urban Housing Studio Project as a basis of investigation. Professional Practice augments the studio project to bolster the student’s understanding of their project through the lens of budgeting, team formation, scheduling, articulating a design vision, and formulating a hypothetical design practice ethos. The Environmental Systems course considers the impact of building designs on the environment and human comfort via three topics: Daylight and Solar Gain, Facade Thermal Performance, and Water and Energy Harvesting.

Through drawings and numerical analysis of multiple proposed iterations, the students learn about their studio project’s facade performance in relation to material conductivity, insulation, and condensation.

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SHIFTING HYBRIDS: ADAPTIVE REUSE OF THE SUNSHINE THEATER ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE OF NYC Hina Jamelle (COORDINATOR, DIRECTOR OF URBAN HOUSING) Megan York (TA) Hina Jamelle (Coordinator, Director of Urban Housing): Architect and Director, Contemporary Architecture Practice, New York (2002) and Shanghai (2014) – Awarded Fifty Under Fifty: Innovators of the 21st Century. (2015) – Awarded Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award (2004) – Author: Elegance. Architectural Design, John Wiley and Sons Inc., London. (2007) – MArch from University of Michigan

Evaluating real estate opportunities involves an amalgam of economic, political, and social factors. Inclusionary housing — where developers are incentivized to provide a stipulated number of units at below-market rates in exchange for tax credits and relaxed zoning regulations — has had two primary benefits.

First, it expands the issue of substandard living and income inequality from being strictly a governmental issue and opens it to private sector investment, where there is funding for large-scale housing and aggressive competition. Second, it moderates housing shortages onset by the rapid gentrification of traditionally low-income neighborhoods. On its surface, inclusionary housing strategies appear to be able to achieve results with sensitivities toward issues of segregation and class inequality by mixing disparate income groups; however, inclusionary housing has not been implemented without controversy. One big issue with mixed-income developments has been the details of how “integration” is achieved. A pressing topic has been how to design buildings where space is shared between low and high-income tenants without marginalizing one group or the other. One solution advanced by developers has been coined “the poor door” — a separate entrance often on

an adjacent street that services below market units. This move has been criticized and deemed by many to be a form of segregation.

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There are a host of anti-segregation laws in place that may be able to prevent such practices; however, greater questions still exist regarding how developers should navigate these issues.

Governmental authorities are faced with shrinking budgets, which force them to figure out how to do more with limited vacant land and fewer capital resources.

New York City has proven to be a pioneer in housing policy in the past; today’s challenges once again call for innovative strategies, approaches, and ways to attract a diverse mix of incomes, households, and lifestyles. The question for archi-tecture is whether design can become a catalyst for bringing numerous stakeholders and vocal communities together in support of such projects.

The re-use of existing buildings for new

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1 – Eroded Figures, by Lauren Hunter, Balcony Detail

The adaptive re-use of buildings has several advantages over demolition and reconstruction. It can support and benefit local culture, especially in cases where a building is rooted in city or neighborhood identity, history, and culture and offers inspiring spaces. It can be used as a tool for leveraging and streamlining investment, particularly if there is support from vocal community groups. Additionally, new buildings require tremendous amounts of energy and resources to construct. Re-use is often a more environmentally friendly solution, or as a 2005 National Trust for Historic Preservation campaign put it, “the greenest building is the one that is already built.” Finally, re-use can strengthen a community by positively linking a city or neighborhood’s past to its future.

Despite its many benefits, adaptive reuse projects are often criticized for hastening gentrification. Urban development can displace longtime residents, particularly when it does not include affordable housing. However, repurposing an existing building can act as a catalyst for attracting and retaining a diverse mix of households through unique spaces and structures and can be critical to the character of a neighborhood. Re-using a beloved local building also usually requires and brings with it a great deal of local support necessary for the building’s ultimate success. When combined with the principles of inclusionary housing, re-use has the potential to stave off criticisms while enhancing its acknowledged positive aspects.

The Sunshine Theater, formerly located at 143 E. Houston Street between

Hina Jamelle

purposes offers one compelling such catalyst and warrants further inquiry.

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ERODED FIGURES Lauren Hunter

The Sunshine Theater is a much-loved landmark in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Its intricately designed facade is enhanced by changes over time to its materiality, texture, and color. In this proposal — through the layering of new residential units, surgical incisions of new metal openings, and excavation of materials — a new residential material typology emerges. The integration of a food cooperation with a system of balconies also gives a new life to fire escape stairs by utilizing them to connect the public balcony spaces that exist across the entire envelope of the building. A food cooperation will bring a much-needed grocery store into the site as well as bring the community together in order to run a successful business. The excavation of both material and space also helps to facilitate programmatic elements needed for a food cooperation.

Balcony spaces allow the program to infiltrate the building on all levels and serve as space to grow fresh produce that can, in turn, be sold by residents in the food cooperation.

The proposal, Eroded Figures, serves as a catalyst to think about public space as a priority in design as well as being thoughtful about the way in which buildings relate back to their history and context.

Eldridge and Forsyth streets in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is an intriguing architectural reuse case study — both for of its storied 175-year history and its eventual demolition. Its architecture reflected a mish-mosh history, with two symmetrical church towers, a central arched span punctuated by windows, and a theater marquee with a neon sign.

The building began as a Dutch Reformed Church in 1844. In its lifespan, it served 109

2 – Eroded Figures, by Lauren Hunter, Project Description

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3 – Studio Review with Hina Jamelle (far right) 4 – Hina Jamelle in Virtual Studio Review

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as a church, an immigrant meeting hall, a boxing venue, a nickelodeon, a Yiddish vaudeville house, a hardware warehouse, a graffiti showcase, and an indie-rock playroom. The building’s last chapter as an independent art-house movie theater operated by Landmark Theaters began in only 2001. It stood at the center of daily life for generations of Lower East Side residents before it was sold on January 21, 2018 and demolished the following year.

The studio proposes an alternative reality where the Sunshine Theater was not demolished; instead, it reimagines the beloved venue as the site of a new residential building. Engaging inclusionary housing within the context of adaptive re-use, the project leverages the building’s unique historical qualities to ensure and create added property value while procuring additional space through new construction. One third of the project engages directly with the historic Sunshine Theater, and the other two-thirds are devoted to newly constructed residential units.

Each student will refine the particular program and strategy for market rate and social housing during the course of the semester. Also to be developed is a Public Common Space as a catalyst to study the confluences of equity and inclusion through thoughtful inquiry.

Each student will engage in architecture’s agency to format spaces of equity and proactively develop new modes of ground, thresholds, and exterior and interior spaces that provide for safe assembly and freedom from harassment.

The goals are for each student is to deal with a range of familiar architectural issues — how to turn a corner, multi-room configurations and circulation patterns for example. The intended result is a project exhibiting innovative architectural organizations and strategies for market and social housing using topological surfaces, unit arrangements and patterns scaling from an individual room to the entire building with different spatial and material qualities contributing to the development of architecture.

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5 – Eroded Figures, by Lauren Hunter, Plan

Hina Jamelle

Our Studio will be joined at key junctures

by Martha Kelley from Goldman Sachs.

Her division, the Real Estate Principal Investment Area [REPIA] makes direct, opportunistic equity and credit investments in real estate assets and portfolios around the country.

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X – COMMONS Maria Sofia Garcia Proposing a rebranding strategy for The Sunshine Theater, X – Commons seeks to catalyze equity and inclusion for all generations while embracing skating, a subculture that is often marginalized from the mainstream society. The design intent is to use skating as a tool to engage and foster individual and social creativity, promote physical athleticism, and increase community engagement.

Aiming for a blend of existing site conditions of brick, graffiti, and metal, the new structure reflects the neighborhood rationality, while generating creative chaos. As the new form evolves vertically, material density starts to break the linear rational qualities of brick materials creating moments of extended three-dimensional brick forms from which evolves a new way of living on the lower east side.

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6 – X – Commons by Maria Sofia Garcia, Street View Render 7 – X – Commons by Maria Sofia Garcia, Elevation

8 – X – Commons by Maria Sofia Garcia, Exterior Render 9 – X – Commons by Maria Sofia Garcia, Render

The new residential building transforms the public street into an open gallery space. Passing through the street as if experiencing a free exhibition, people of any class will enjoy the equality of art provided by the building, which will increase the possibility of public access to art.

Turning the street into a shop window, the multi-facade of the new residential building enables the public, walking

along the street from different directions, to enjoy multiple art exhibitions simultaneously through each window view.

Instead of preserving artworks in the closed space, the facade of the building opens the art gallery space to the public street, to achieve a democracy of art. Continue upwards along the facade, the multi-facade enables the resident to attain the city views from different directions, thereby each window views turn out to be picture frames describing the New York City views.

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OVERLAPPING PICTUREFRAME Bingyu Guo

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12 – Overlapping Pictureframe by Bingyu Guo, Plan 13 – Overlapping Pictureframe by Bingyu Guo. Street View Render

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10 – Overlapping Pictureframe by Bingyu Guo, Street View Render 11 – Overlapping Pictureframe by Bingyu Guo, Window View Render

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MICRO //MAXIMUM: DESIGNS FOR THE CONNECTED BODY Gisela Baurmann (LECTURER) Merrick Castillo (TA) Gisela Baurmann (Lecturer): Founding partner of Büro NY – MArch with honors from Columbia University as a Fulbright Scholar – Has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and the Technical University Berlin – Finalist and first runner-up in the World Trade Center Memorial Competition (2004) – New York State Council of the Arts Fellowship (2004) – Nominated for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (2003)

The studio proposes an urban housing project and a community justice court on a densely urban site in SoHo, New York. It discusses the notion of comfort in the context of human and non-human habitats, and proposes built environments for various living organisms to room together. These environments may spawn interstitial spaces that facilitate novel modes of comfort. MICRO//MAX is invested in matters of social justice while exploring the idea of integrating

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1 – Symbiohaus by Jordanna Ibghy, Facade Render

human housing systems with other ecological processes.

Beyond the anthropocentric idea of housing, the studio develops spaces for co-habitation of human and nonhuman dwellers, giving equal developmental agency to all inhabitants.

Each studio project designates one non-human species to live in an undomesticized environment side by side with humans. This “other” living organism may belong to the kingdom of animals, plants, fungi or protozoans.

Threads of wellness, symbiosis, air, water, and vegetation become entwined to serve plant, animal, human, and other living communities.

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SYMBIOHAUS Jordanna Ibghy

In the contemporary city, urban housing places the needs of the human inhabitant above the needs of all other species.

Furthermore, it looks upon the resident as a temporary visitor, rather than an agent that fuels the prolonged life of its non-human inhabitants. The human is comforted by using resources, rather than contributing to cultivating them. Guiding this project is a focus on a narrative of life cycle transformations where the inhabitant and the building components fuse together over time in a mutually beneficial structure of sharing resources for nourishment and comfort.

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4 – Symbiohaus by Jordanna Ibghy, Project Description

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2 – Gisela Baurmann in Studio Review 3 – Symbiohaus by Jordanna Ibghy, Axon

The project argues for a symbiotic outlook on nature and society as an interwoven collective, inviting humans to cohabitate with mycelium, a decomposing agent with air purifying properties, while supporting a local social justice initiative. Compost from the building is directed into the poche space between the housing units where the mycelium feeds. Situated on the rooftop of a functioning UPS facility in Lower Manhattan, the urban massing recalls a dense urban fabric, with public, commercial, residential, and green spaces. In collaboration with the Center for Court Innovation, the project provides space interlocked within the massing for a Mental Health court — a justice initiative which seeks to offer fair sentencing and provides social services to offenders suffering from mental health challenges.

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5 – Gisela Baurmann in Virtual Studio Review 6 – Hummhaus by Siwei Zhu, Axon

HUMMHAUS Siwei Zhu

This project proposes a living environment with not only human but also other creature like hummingbird and the plants.

Original idea comes from seeds from lotus, the project is seeking an answer to what is comfort living in terms of size and program. What powerful about seeds and hummingbirds is that they are so small but full of power, so the project is not aiming to provide luxurious apartments, but a balance between public and privacy. Therefore, there are various shared common corridor cooperate with the personal sleeping pods. Moreover, the project also provide hummingbird a habitat space and people can use it or interact with the space seasonally. Neighborhood in action program is provided on the ground floor and connect to the upper common space.

in the design of their individual public commons program.

The living communities, different in range and scale, may operate in parallel and independently from one another, yet unexpected forms of symbiosis beyond the hierarchical master-servant relations of human/pet, human/nature or judge/ offender are encouraged. The search for such new relations and connections between species and communities opens opportunities to rethink boundaries as defined by normative housing and communal space. It may lead to novel cross- species and cross-community interiorized urbanities. Ideas of wellness, safety and responsibility in the context of dense urban living are discussed and redefined, while primary housing considerations as light, air and circulation are reexamined through the lens of different species and viewpoints, and multiple scales.

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The studio explores procedures and protocols drawn from observation of a community court and alternative detention programs for delinquent youths developed by the Center for Court Innovation, NYC. Community-based violence prevention projects and alternatives to incarceration open opportunities to define new spatial routines.

Our liaison to the Center for Court Innovation, Adam Mansky, a lawyer, who worked at the Center since its very inception in the mid-1990s and developed many of its programs, advised students 8 – Hummhaus by Siwei Zhu, Interior Render

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7 – Hummhaus by Siwei Zhu, Project Description

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NIGHT OWL Anabella Gilbert “Synanthropes violate the once prevalent human conception of the city as a place without nature and challenge us to re-examine the design of our shared urban environment.”

From: Sarah Gunawan from The Expanded Environment, A Non-Profit Organization Over the last few decades, our wildlife populations have undergone a dramatic decline. Although this is due to many reasons, one of the biggest factors is human activity. We are overusing the Earth’s biocapacity with many of the processes that our lifestyles currently require. For instance, many of our construction methods are not as sustainable as they should be and too many native habitats are being turned into agricultural systems for food production. Overall, this is an incredibly large issue that one building project cannot solve by itself. However, this project can begin to introduce new ways in which architecture can play its part in shaping a better future.

This project studies cohabitation between different groups of people and synanthropes (animals that exist between domestic

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9 – Night Owl by Anabella Gilbert, Interior Unit 3 10 – Night Owl by Anabella Gilbert, Interior Unit 1

environments and wild habitats, and they benefit from living close to humans). Common synanthropes in large cities like New York include pigeons, squirrels and rats. They always seem to be around large groups of people, but people don’t consider them as worthy of their attention as they would a domestic pet. Recently in New York City, another synanthrope species has been of high attention: the owl. Central Park birdwatchers’ dream to get a glimpse of the celebrity owl Barry, for instance. Or just a few weeks ago, a little owl was found in the Rockefeller Christmas tree.

These animals are susceptible to dangerous realities in the present conditions we live in. Because buildings are not always designed with these animals in mind, certain construction methods and building practices create harmful environments for them. This project challenges those practices and presents an inviting structure that can be enjoyed by both humans and animals. Finally, Night Owl introduces new ways of approaching public and private programs through the inclusion of several community spaces as well as circulation that provokes collaboration and communication.

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12 11 – Night Owl by Anabella Gilbert, Axon 12 – Night Owl by Anabella Gilbert, Elevation

This project proposes a housing complex which includes the cohabitation of humans, plants, and composting creatures. The domestic comfort of the detritivores is considered equally to that of their human neighbors. The nutrient-rich compost created by the building’s non-human inhabitants supports plant life located throughout the building. These areas of vegetation are then used as public gathering spaces for healing, comfort, and protest for

members involved with the studio-wide public program of the Center for Court Innovation.

In the context of this project, comfort includes environmental qualities such as sunlight, fresh air, acoustics, and temperature. It also includes experiential qualities: large windows letting in light, soft curvature, whispyness of curtains, plush surfaces, and steam coming off a compost pile. Comfort is living within an active community and having access to natural resources and fertile land in an urban context.

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DOMESTIC DETRITIVORES Juli Petrillo

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13 – Domestic Detritivores by Juli Petrillo, Axon 14 – Domestic Detritivores by Juli Petrillo, Perspective Render

15 – Domestic Detritivores by Juli Petrillo, Interior Render 16 – Domestic Detritivores by Juli Petrillo, Facade Closer Render

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LOLUX COMMONS Jonas Coersmeier (LECTURER) Sami Samawi (TA) Jonas Coersmeier (Lecturer): Founded Büro NY, NY (2004) – MArch from Columbia University GSAPP (2000) – Received an engineering degree from TU-Darmstadt (1998) & MIT Architecture (1996) – Teaches studios & research seminars at Pratt & serves as guest critic at Princeton and Columbia GSAPP

MATERIAL URBANISM: The studio introduces the idea of Material Urbanism, which offers a method and disciplinary position for urban design, while it refers to the materiality of the urban condition itself.

The studio encourages deep material exploration and gives agency to material behaviors in physical models.

Its projects are based on organizational and aesthetic principles found in the study of aleatory material expression. They produce unplanned urban fabrics through detailed composite models — Urban Materials — that work across various scales (city, neighborhood, block, and building.) The method promotes an inclusive approach to media, fostering a continuous transposition between analog and digital models. Agency is assumed for both, the routines of the universal machine and the performance of the material engine. The perpetual negotiation between physical objects and their digital counterparts sparks moments of design innovation at the level of the structure of the city and the building alike. The studio introduces 3Dprintcasting and re-appropriated photogrammetry into the design process to advance speculative mediation between physical and digital material.

With material alchemy playing an active

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MULTI-GENERATIONAL HOUSING IN BROOKLYN Riley Engelberger

This project adapts and adds to an existing NYCHA urban housing tower located in Brooklyn. It strives to provide equitable urban housing opportunities to low-income residents in the neighborhood through the implementation of a multigenerational housing scheme, whereby three generations of people – whether family, foraged family, or other like-minded groups of people can occupy shared living spaces. Beyond the introduction of an alternative housing scenario, the project extends the adjacent public Commodore Barry Park up through the core of the building, allowing for publicly accessible space at the existing building’s roof level. The intervention further integrates a community-supported agriculture program, where community members and residents of the building alike work urban agriculture zones which not only feed the community but provide a source of income that is generated by the building for its low-income residents.

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1 – Multi-Generational Housing in Brooklyn by Riley Engelberger, Material Cast

part in its method, Material Urbanism proposes new models of densification and resilience.

Material Urbanism is invested in the materiality of the urban condition and offers a reading of the city as an

Jonas Coersmeier

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organism of living matter. It points to urban atmospheres and sensations as material effects that cannot be produced by purely rational operations of the top-down planning method. It rejects the idea of the master plan, not only as a potential authoritarian instrument, but also as an inefficient method of dealing with the complexities of massive global phenomena (global warming and urbanization) and frequent challenges to the very idea of social urban space (quarantine and social distancing.) At the same time, it gives value to design coherence at the scale of urban structures and infrastructures. It does so by ascribing design intelligence to matter itself.

Material Urbanism attempts to uproot the deep-seated idea that designer and design material interactions are always already hierarchical, aims at a less anthropocentric approach to urban

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2 – Multi-Generational Housing in Brooklyn by Riley Engelberger, Exterior Render 3 – Jonas Coersmeier in Studio Review

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design, and offers a method for engaging with the city in crisis.

EQUITY AND INCLUSION: LoLux Commons discusses socio-economic and political issues of urban housing and how they relate to the architectural mandate. It acknowledges that architecture alone cannot solve systemic inequity, but it assumes significant agency for the design disciplines in these matters. It takes the position that architecture provides cultural content, creates spatial, material, and aesthetic value, and thus holds the potential for improving human coexistence in a more just society.

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URBAN PUZZLE Beikel Rivas

The project embraces the idea of Material Urbanism as introduced by the studio. It presents itself, not as an addition to the urban fabric, but as its extension focusing on possible connecting strategies. The project is a geometrical puzzle at multiple scales: from the detail of how apartment units interconnect with each other, to larger clusters of housing typologies that fit together leaving out interstitial spaces to become urban public ones. The project emerges from a series of shapes that use photogrammetry mis-mapping techniques to advance the speculative transposition of material effects to tectonic expression. The mis-mapping define moments of tension where there exists relationships within the distinct shapes to create different spaces that are interlocked with each other and allow for various housing typologies to manifest themselves tectonically. The apartment units are connected by a series of circulation paths that mitigate these tensions and ultimately complete the urban puzzle.

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4 – Urban Puzzle by Beikel Rivas, Aerial

LoLux Commons addresses equity and inclusion directly and at three different levels: First, it develops models for overcoming Internal Segregation in urban housing, the separation of less well-off tenants from wealthy user groups. It does so by proposing the LoLux model of spatial and organizational integration as well as shared access to internal resources, communal spaces and amenities.

Second, the project scope includes a public common space that provides open and equitable access to essential urban resources for the community at large. By way of studying the larger urban context, including spatiomaterial and infrastructural, as well as socio-economic and cultural conditions, students develop an urban agenda for their project. The studio encourages students to define a public program that is specific to their individual urban agenda. The public common space is intrinsic to the individual project narrative and to the identity of each building proposal.

Third, LoLux Commons develops models for overcoming External Segregation by proposing changes to the urban fabric and infrastructure of the site. It identifies the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway as an instrument of displacement and segregation, and proposes alternative future scenarios for the roadway, including those that could reconnect and potentially heal the urban tissue.

Jonas Coersmeier

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6 – Urban Puzzle by Beikel Rivas, Facade Detail Render

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5 – Jonas Coersmeier in Virtual Studio Review

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NYX: ACROSS ALL INTERSECTIONS Nicholas Houser Focusing on conditions of Hyper-density and infrastructure, The New York X, or NYX, is the result of synergy between the desire to create a high rise while defeating the possibility of gentrification as an outcome. Situated on NYCHA housing, between the Navy yard and BQE, this project dances with the BQE while remaining respectful of the exiting housing estate.

The act of bridging the BQE is the result of several different avenues, the first being the motif of hyper density, negating the idea of a highway to only hold the zoning as a highway. The second avenue is to create a central node of transportation to relieve pressure from the constant use of the BQE as well as create a one stop shop before Brooklyn grows and commuting becomes exceedingly more difficult. By routing multiple forms of transportation through this hub, stacking infrastructure on pre-existing infrastructure, commerce will commence, globally, locally and internally. By equipping the hub with a concourse of various revenue generating programs, shops, restaurants, temporary housing for travelers in the form of a hotel, creating

a flux of profit, in return this system will provide services that will be compensated in the monetary form. The revenue produced will go directly to the current and new residents by paying for utilities as well as property taxes, creating a fixed rental for decades. Currently in Brooklyn, if you own property the tax rate is 0.6%; however, if you rent, tax is upwards of 45%.

Because the fear of gentrification is so relevant to the addition of high rises and luxury housing, this economic module can slow down the rates of displacement of socioeconomic classes and keep the neighborhood of the intervention consistent with locals. So as tax rates inevitably become greater as Brooklyn grows, this can be avoided.

If this method of an economic model is viable, a series of these can begin being constructed over current NYCHA housing, ultimately slowing the process of gentrification through providing services, while staying ahead of the globalization curve, creating individual nodes of mass circulation and infrastructure on all levels from People to utilities to data, which at this moment in time, have become painfully obvious in our current pandemic situation.

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7 – NYX: across all intersections by Nicholas Houser, Aerial 8 – NYX: across all intersections by Nicholas Houser, Material

9 9 – NYX: across all intersections by Nicholas Houser, Chunk

This project attempts to challenge the notion of a gentrified building formally, and functionally. It overcomes the aftermath of gentrification by providing and giving back to the community what gentrification usually takes away. The project provides housing that defeats the existing organizational norms and communal spaces that penetrate the existing building structure. The multiplicity of the project is evident in the way the different layers are designed. The layers range between infrastructural layers, architectural

layers, and layers that are characterized by their dualities.

Based on that mode of operation, the project alters the reality of the existing building by using it and differently. The same notion is dealt with in a synthetical way in both the drawings and the images of the project. Lastly, the criticality of the projects lies in the way it deals with the memory of the reality of existing buildings and the way the neglected housing and communal structures are rendered. The background and the foreground qualities of the project are highlighted by the rusticated materials. The generated rustic qualities are digital manipulations of the memory traces of the existing material qualities in site.

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Jonas Coersmeier

RUINS AND THE NEGLECT OF PUBLIC HOUSING STRUCTURES Bashayer Bamohsen

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10 – Ruins and The Neglect of Public Housing Structures

by Bashayer Bamohsen, Axon 11 – Ruins and The Neglect of Public Housing Structures

by Bashayer Bamohsen, Chunk

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by Bashayer Bamohsen, Render Detail 13 – Ruins and The Neglect of Public Housing Structures

by Bashayer Bamohsen, Axon

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HIGH-RISE Scott Erdy (LECTURER) Nate Mollway (TA) Pleasure Gardens of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, the park-like setting is close to the Market Frankford Line’s 46th Street Station and a rapidly Public Housing, meant to provide a safe developing University City district. The and affordable place to live for the housing development sits on a ridge, underprivileged, has long been critinot far from University City and Center cized for its top-down, tabula rasa City. While most urban, high-rise public approach that destroys neighborhoods housing projects came about through and displaces residents. In particuslum-clearing activities, West Park lar, the Public High Rise housing type Towers were built on an area that was is disparaged for its density, a lack largely undeveloped. of “defensible space,” and a controversial connection to violent crime. This Program semester we will re-examine the public housing high-rise through the insertion West Park Towers will require transforof Public Common Space. mative proposals that address issues of equity, inclusion and justice. PHA’s plan The Site to evict more than 200 residents is no different than the “de-slumming” of lowWestpark Apartments is a high-rise income neighborhoods that was popular public housing development located in the 1960s. With each family or person at 46th and Market Streets that feadisplaced, the continuity of local culture tures a mixture of families and older is partially erased. adults. There are 109 units per tower, offered in one to four-bedroom 2 CLOUD TOWER schemes. The three towers occupy Yuxuan Xiong approximately 12 acres in West Philadelphia. Originally part of the Cantilevered from the structural skeleton of the West Park Scott Erdy (Lecturer): Principal, Erdy McHenry Architecture – AIA Philadelphia Gold Medal (2001) – AIA Philadelphia Silver Medal (2004)

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Tower, this proposal aims to subvert the high-rise typology that is commonly seen in public housing projects of the late 20th century. Their failure can be attributed to the lack of autonomy, the absence of public commons, and the scarcity of natural resources. To address these issues, the Tulou Typology, or “earthen building” is used as the morphological and spatial foundation for the proposal. By pushing all the units to the periphery of the structural frame, the building forms a protective, vertical ring of apartments, and an open, public space at the heart of the tower. Between the cantilevered units and the central public commons, is a series of semi-open spaces which reconnect the scattered residential units at a communal, neighborhood scale. Not only are the spaces within the highrise handed back to the residents, natural resources such as rainwater is also purified and recycled within the building to allow the residents to take more control of their life above the earth, and in the clouds.

1 – Cloud Tower by Yuxuan Xiong, Plan

2 – Cloud Tower by Yuxuan Xiong, Project Description

Scott Erdy

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Our studio will reimagine housing in West Park Towers through insertion of Public Common Space, which has become a term used for shared, equitable access to resources such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as to social creations such as libraries, public

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3 – Cloud Tower by Yuxuan Xiong, Axon 4 – Scott Erdy in Virtual Studio Review

spaces, scientific research and other amenities of the common good. Public Common Space for West Park Towers will act as a catalyst to study the confluences of equity and inclusion through thoughtful inquiry into architecture’s agency. This is the pursuit of Architec-

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MEMORY COMPLEX Weiya Zhou

As our living conditions change we become more and more independent and detached, leading to loneliness.

In this information age, our best friends existing in our social media apps instead of living next door. We not only lose neighbors and social spaces in front of the doors, but also real interactions and shared memories. Is this social progress or retrogression?

The Memory Complex creates a retro lifestyle in the high rise and restores the sense of community through the common spaces. The Public Commons is the place that creates common memories. The are also vertical gardens that provide food to the building thought Controlled Environment Agriculture.

Kids have fun here, neighbors work together for harvest, at the same time, memories are made.

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ture that offers safe assembly and freedom from harassment, which reframes relationships of social vs market housing. We will examine the possibility of spaces of equity and proactively develop new modes of ground, landscape and thresholds.

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5 – Memory Complex by Weiya Zhou, Perspective Render 6 – Memory Complex by Weiya Zhou, Interior Render

Oscar Newman’s 1973 text “Defensible Space People and Design in the Violent City,” all but erased any future of the high-rise as a solution to the acute need for safe, affordable housing in America.ª The high-rises often were built in large wind-swept open spaces created by slum-clearing and lacked meaningful engagement with the street. All of the neighborhoods former vitality was gone.

These sentiments were echoed by urbanist Jane Jacobs, a community organizer, writer and activist in New York City, who was responsible for a major shift in the direction of city planning who embraced the “urban chaos,” that gave neighborhoods their unique character.

Jane Jacobs, in her 1956 lecture at Harvard University and published later that year in Architectural Forum, addressed leading architects, urban planners, and intellectuals (including Lewis Mumford), speaking on the topic of East Harlem. She urged this audience to “respect — in the deepest sense — strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order.” b This placed her in direct opposition to the leading thinkers in urban planning at the time. In particular, she openly criticized Edmund Bacon of Philadelphia’s progressive Young Turks in a 1954 story covering most recent housing development. Jacobs criticized Bacon’s project, reacting against its lack of concern for the poor African Americans who were directly affected. When Bacon showed Jacobs examples of undeveloped and developed blocks, she determined that “development” seemed to end community life on the street.c We will analyze West Park Towers as their own “urban context” and seek ways to embrace their “urban chaos.” In the spirit a – Oscar Newman, “Defensible Space -People and Design in the Violent City,” 1972 b – Alexiou, Alice Sparberg (2006). Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary. New Brunswick: Rutgers. p. 60.

Scott Erdy

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of Jane Jacobs, we will build new public housing within the context of the existing towers.

be required to develop a written theoretical thesis for their project that posits a specific argument for their Public Commons and the larger social needs of Methodology the program. Each student will develop the specific assigned program compoThe studio will begin with precedent nents in ways that reinforce their thesis analysis and a short warm-up exercise to through individual and group research. design a deployable single occupancy dwelling that will provide a compact, self-sustaining shelter that accommodates the basic needs of human habitation. This analytical study will provide the conceptual basis for the development of a living module that will be adapted for the specific needs of the program.

This module will be adapted and transformed based on specific program criteria and environmental conditions.

These modular studies, together with the specialized programs will be assembled in response to site-specific conditions.

As part of this investigation, students will 7 – Scott Erdy in Studio Review

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c – Design of Cities, first published in 1967, is an illustrated account of the development of urban form, written

by Edmund Bacon, who was the Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970.

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WEST PARK GARDENS Yasmine McBride The existing west park towers sited north of market street are slated for demolition, following a long history of tearing down public housing high rises when they are deemed “unsuccessful.” There is nothing inherently problematic about a high rise itself, but more so that the lack of maintenance, funding, and productive common space does not allow for the resident’s autonomy or flexible gathering space. The new west park towers will remedy these issues by reimagining the public common space and creating new opportunities for residents to coexist and interact. A vertical community garden serves as

food sustainability, educational programming, and income generation for the residents. Units comprised of sliding components allows residents to decide for themselves how they want to relate to their neighbors and the greater community around them. Flexible, open floor space in between units create opportunities for informal gathering where there was once merely a narrow, dark corridor.

The problems posed by high rise housing do not require a bulldozer, they require precise interventions driven by community and by prioritizing people. The new west park towers are about highlighting people, their activity, their lifestyles, and their aspirations.

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8 – West Park Gardens by Yasmine McBride, Interior Render 9 – West Park Gardens by Yasmine McBride, Perspective Render

10 – West Park Gardens by Yasmine McBride, Axon

In America, a stoop is a small staircase ending in a platform and leading to the entrance of an apartment building.

Traditionally, in North American cities, the stoop served an important function as a spot for brief, incidental social encounters. Homemakers, children, and other household members would sit on the stoop outside their home to relax, and greet neighbors passing by. In Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she includes the stoop as part of her model of the self-regulating urban street.

Here, the key problem with the existing high-rise building is that there is no intermediate space for social interaction as other street-level housing typologies can provide such as the front porch and a stoop space. Typical high-rise spaces are condensed and spatially monotonous that people just want to get into their private space or to get out of the building as soon as possible. You cannot feel the street vibe in this building. My aim is to bring back the idea of stoop from the street level as a social device for the high-rise apartment and a continuous stoop space will become the public common space as a strong vertical and horizontal bond to provide a dynamic street vibe for everyone.

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Scott Erdy

URBAN STREET LIFE Tuo Chen

13 13 – Urban Street Life by Tuo Chen, Exterior Render

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11 – Urban Street Life by Tuo Chen, Model 12 – Urban Street Life by Tuo Chen, Interior Render

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CREATIVE HOUSING: RED HOOK GRAIN TERMINAL Ben Krone (LECTURER) Veronica Rosado (TA) Ben Krone (Lecturer): Founded Gradient Design Studio, NYC (2006) – B.Arch from the University of Florida (1999) – MArch degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, GSAPP (2004) – Winner of McKim Prize for Excellence in Design & the Sol Kaplan Traveling Fellowship.

An Opportunity Exists A new trend in market rate development of both permanent and temporary housing has moved much closer to the models set up by transient housing of the past. Market rate hotels and apartment rental developments are offering alternatives to traditional unit typology with many shared basic amenities like kitchens common living areas, and even in some cases shared bathrooms. Cost is not always the driving factor in the choice to live in these developments. Millennial tendencies are toward the social space, viewing housing as more of a necessity rather than a luxury, where the opportunity to socialize and mix with others is more important than larger privatized spaces.

The disparity between this model and traditional low-income temporary and permanent housing is far less defined. It affords us a unique opportunity to envision a new building typology (creative housing) where the concept of integration in inclusionary housing is not simply to provide for varying incomes but actually to attempt to desegregate them.

Carving out new housing organizations: The shift in thinking toward smaller unit types is generational and a response to changes in family demographics and

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THE RED HOOK EXCHANGE Yiyi Luo

A hybrid housing project with the idea of combining barter system with housing program to enhance community collaboration and resources recycle under the wave of gentrification. Working with existing silos that have a long history in Red Hook Brooklyn required cautious understanding of the old and new. The added elements defined scale changing spaces served for both unit types and different bartering activities. With a hierarchy of publicity, markets are located along the circulation, while workshops and exhibition are programmed within the inserted semi enclosed volumes. Units share a conjunct yet divided circulation to maintain privacy. The goal of this project is to value an exchanging system that can only exists within a strong bounding community with a collaborated configuration of housing project as a way to resist the negative effect of community separation that gentrification is bringing to the Red Hook Community.

the ways in which younger generations gravitate toward cities. Value is less about privately owned space and is instead geared toward shared economies, social structures, and the integration of work/life into domestic settings. There are many novel ways to achieve high efficiencies within the units themselves and the prospect of new types of spaces

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1 – The Red Hook Exchange by Yiyi Luo, Perspective Render

Ben Krone

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that are afforded by “configurations” of stacking and shifting prefabricated micro units.

Reuse vs Build New: In most cases the ratio of developable existing buildings to empty lots is high.

In cities like New York, nearly all of the empty developable building sites are on the periphery of the city in non-residential zoned areas. It is for this reason that the largest percentage of construction projects in urban centers focus on the renovation and development of existing building stock.

In the last decade, incentives have evolved for greener building developments which automatically point to reuse wherever possible. Although new buildings can generally be constructed to perform better then old buildings in terms of their energy efficiency, new innovations in building materials and more aggressive city regulations makes

The intent of the studio is therefore multifaceted. It will address the following sets of issues.

• What are the various possible models for types of creative housing for Red Hook Brooklyn? This should include either or both temporary and permanent 133

2 – The Red Hook Exchange by Yiyi Luo, Elevation

it possible for older buildings to be retrofitted to perform quite well. This is especially true when considering materials used in older buildings that are either no longer available or too expensive to deploy. In many cases these building have characteristics making them more likely to last and are naturally better insulators than the lightweight building materials of today. Performance alone is not the only factor. The amount of energy required to demolish an existing building and the material production to build new, including carbon footprints required to access materials, far outweigh the life cycle cost of performance enhancements of new buildings.

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housing requirements that are bound by economic constraints?

• How can new building technology aid in the development of feasible and economic solutions for its development?

• How might this influence broader notions of appropriation and facilitate acceptance amongst others with economic disparity in the context of urban domesticity?

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• How can an approach toward housing preserve the character of a neighborhood against the forces of economic development?

• What kinds of spatial arrangements and organizational frameworks could accommodate the hyper-specificity of

The studio will propose a solution for the relationship between the creative mixed housing and the existing Red Hood Grain Terminal. One third of the proposed building must interact directly

housing as well as the mixing of creative disciplines.

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3 – Art Generator by Yuxiang Qi, Skatepark Render 4 – Art Generator by Yuxiang Qi, Axon

ART GENERATOR Yuxiang Qi

Ben Krone

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Housing for lower-income groups is an enormous issue nationwide. Upscale and profitable development often undermines efforts to sanction land use to house families at or below the poverty line. For decades cities have been trying to figure out ways to deal with the issue. In recent times an assortment of new innovative urban growth policies have been put to the test.

Art is a powerful form to reflect life and attitudes .As the gentrification movement became more and more intense, many artists began to rebel it by means of art. Art became an crucial weapon against the gentrification movement.

There are mutiple artworks in Red hook, basically have two different type, commerical art, and street art.

The increase of commercial art has improved the artistic and cultural value of their community, and the developers have taken the opportunity to raise the housing price, thus forcing some relatively poor street artists and other people to leave their original living places. Ironically, street artists who have been kicked out are fighting gentrification through street art. When art has been commoditized, there is a delicate relationship between street artists and commercial artists I wonder if these two different art forms can be integrated into one building to form the juxtaposition and penetration.

The juxtaposition of these two different art will displayed by a facade billboard and trigger a greater impact and critique.

This building can also be considered as a vessel of transition. Before commercial artists became famous, they were street artists. When commercial art becomes mainstream and art is commercialized, the confrontation and juxtaposition between street art and commercial art becomes a new issue.

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strategies as designed through the lens of each student’s spatial and programmatic identifiers is key at this stage.

Finally, these defined elements will be combined and tested in both building and unit form and will have the opportunity to react to the existing structure and the public program.

with the existing structure while 2/3 to be new construction. The building will be aprox. 50,000 sq ft. and provides a diversified type of living units. One public program must be included and students will interpret its relationship with the housing program. Finally, students must present feasible strategies which specify the fabrication and assembly of the building.

The initial investigations and proposed housing models will be developed in teams to facilitate the sharing of research across the studio. Each individual will then choose one of the models to develop into a fully realizable building. Proposing new methods and 6 – Ben Krone in Studio Review

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5 – Art Generator by Yuxiang Qi, Project Description

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LIVING IN MARGINS Shifei Xu The research started with the SoHo effect, which is the phenomenon of artist-led gentrification. By the 1950s, the SoHo district had become known as Hell’s Hundred Acres, an industrial wasteland, full of sweatshops and small factories in the daytime, but empty at night. In the 1970s, this space attracted artists who valued them for their large areas and low rents.

The changes attracted capital, reinvestment, and new residents into the area, pushing up real estate values and rents, pushing out the artists, and transforming the neighborhood into a highend residential and consumption mecca for the elite.

Artists started and accelerated the gentrification of the SoHo district, but they gradually lost their places in this gentrified

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community. They play the role of “marginal” gentrifiers in this bifurcated process. Three analogs start with the concept of “margin.” Firstly, when margin generated thickness, it served as a staircase to connect the living room and bedroom diagonally. There are skylights in the middle of the two rooms to let in light. Secondly, the margin creates a shared balcony between two housing units to connects neighbors. Thirdly, margin pieces create a semi-private room with a mesh system at the corner.

The project is designed for artists and focuses on education space as main public space. Classrooms use art as a link to open a dialogue with the community. The educational programs would lead by the resident artists to help teenagers in the Red Hook community to jump into the worlds of art and art-making.

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7 – Living in Margins by Shifei Xu, Interior Render 8 – Living in Margins by Shifei Xu, Exterior Render

9 – Living in Margins by Shifei Xu, Axon

A living environment to help foster the education of its residents and the larger Red Hook community by providing a diverse collection of literary, audio, visual, and technological tools to the neighborhood’s residents. With 65% of the Red Hook neighborhood being categorized as low-income and 21% of them having a registered disability, the goal of this project is to provide housing and adequate access to educational resources that are currently scarce to suit the needs of all people within the community.

The housing provided by the Co-Living Learning Center will be a mixture of studio, single, double, triple, and quintuple apartment units. This diversity in unit size will support some low-income dormitory style units, low-income studio apartments, multi-bedroom family focused units,

and high-income single or double units. The focus of this project is on low-income housing however some highincome units will have to be produced to offset the costs of the other housing.

Ben Krone

CO-LIVING LEARNING CENTER Liam Lasting

Additionally, lifting the educational spaces off of the ground level, to occupy levels one and two, the learning center can be protected from storm surges and other potential flood damages. This allows for the bottom level to act as a stilt system so the water can simply flood the area and then proceed to drain back into the neighboring basin.

With the project’s armatures wrapping and folding their way around and through the terminal’s silos, it transforms the grain terminal into a home for those that are in need.

Moreover it becomes a center for the community to come together to help nurture and foster the goals of everyone within the neighborhood.

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12 – Co-living Learning Center by Liam Lasting, Axon

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10 – Co-living Learning Center by Liam Lasting, Facade Render 11 – Co-living Learning Center by Liam Lasting, Elevation

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STREET LIFE Brian Phillips (LECTURER) Tianhui Zhang (TA) Brian Phillips (Lecturer): Founded Interface Studio Architects (ISA), Philadelphia (2004) – Master of Architecture University of Pennsylvania (1996) – BSED University of Oklahoma (1994) – Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2011) – Architectural League of NY – Emerging Voices (2015) – AIA National Housing Award (2017) – AIA Philadelphia Gold Medal (2018) – AIA Pennsylvania Firm of the Year (2019)

A city is only as good as its streetscapes.

Even though big cities are often where global companies and brands want to be — the real gift of urban places is their provision of the local, authentic, and off-the-beaten path experiences. They are amplifiers of local culture and histories through the production of unique food, retail, art, music, and entrepreneurship. Every great city (large and small) encourages residents and visitors to experience their streets like flaneurs, engaging the city in an adventurous and unscripted process of discovery.

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The studio will examined the concept of “tops and bottoms” as a means to develop novel and productive relationships between existing, old commercial fabric and new upper-level housing that optimizes and authenticates both programs.

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1 – Studio Review with Brian Phillips

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PLACE-HOLDER Weiting Zhang

In neighborhoods like Philadelphia’s East Kensington, vacant land, informally adopted by adjacent residents, is quickly disappearing to a flurry of construction activities propelled by the city’s 10-year tax abatement. In response, Place-holder looks to strategically incorporate undeveloped land into value-add opportunities for adjacent development. The process begins with preserving some existing vacancy before drawing the building boundary so as to maximize the symbiosis between land and housing.

Beginning on the ground floor, a folded line frames a triangular site with three distinct attitudes—storefronts on the commercial corridor, garden on the south-facing plot, and playgrounds on the residential back. These unbuilt portions encourage residents to live sustainably and to appropriate the land for their needs and pursuits. Within any segment of the building, by leaving blank space around fixed housing components like bathroom, kitchen, and sleeping area, more spontaneous programs such as living, playing, and working can happen at different locations at different times. The flexible co-mingling of private rooms and public programs situates otherwise singular entities within a larger, growing urban community.

This strategy could be deployed on more than one site across the city, tuned to react to particular site conditions and open-ended enough for communities to make it their own. Place-holder is a canvas for the community.

It provides the basis for shelter, food, and a sense of belonging — simple elements that enable people to live an autonomous and authentic life.

Mixed-use buildings have become divided — with upper level housing and lower level street fronts playing in completely different realities. The studio will shift our understanding of “urban retail frontage” 2 – Place-holder by Weiting Zhang, Perspective Render

Brian Phillips

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THE 2 MINUTE BLOCK Anna Lim

The urbanist Carlos Moreno’s model of The 15 Minute City has become a hot topic of discussion between designers and planners as post-pandemic futures are assessed.

The model argues that work, home, shops, entertainment, education and healthcare should all be available within the same time as an old normal commuter. The 2 Minute Block is an architectural response to this dialogue, to develop an ensemble of buildings that effectively mix places for living and working within very close proximity.

The project proposes a super-local node at the center of a 15-minute walking radius of the site in Kensington, Philadelphia, creating new convenient housing and commercial programs with amplified links to many existing amenities. The 2 Minute Block consists of three buildings, two residential and one commercial, with a public rooftop park and ground floor open to retail. Circulation plays on the strengths of the existing Dauphin-York Station that spans the longest edge of the site, bringing in pedestrian flow through a dynamic ground floor experience.

Moments of curious encounters, such as atrium spaces, enable experiences of surprise and delight.

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Residents enjoy a series of mini streets, shared between just two to three units per floor, that act as a passive hallway and backyard condition. Units have access to a ‘seasonal door’ that can be opened and closed with the changing weather, allowing for more efficient usage of energy and a nod to the block party culture of the city.

3 – Place-holder by Weiting Zhang, Axon 4 – The 2 Minute Block by Anna Lim, Interior Render

5 – The 2 Minute Block by Anna Lim, Axon 6 – The 2 Minute Block by Anna Lim, Project Description

away from the idea of top dollar retail tenants to a kind of “public commons” which positions this space for the accumulation of neighborhood identity, economic production and as a key ingredient in making a city fundamentally attractive for residents and visitors.

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CROSS-PLATFORM Hayoung Nho This project acknowledges high-rise development as a likely reality for the future of Kensington and considers it a community-building opportunity. The proposal embraces the notion of a divergent top and bottom architectural personality where the tower capitalizes on proximity to transit and dramatic skyline views, with a lower plinth level of public play, community and entrepreneurship amenities. The ground level invites the neighborhood to participate in a series of passive and active recreation moments, storefronts for commerce and

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co-working, as well as whimsical routes to the upper level.

More structured programs are featured on the upper plinth level including a playground and events hall.

Extending above the plinth is a clean rectangular tower featuring compact units that take full advantage of the glazed perimeter. An amenity floor is defined by an offset block in the tower massing. The proposal intentionally combines the more generic extruded tower typology with a dynamic lower level organization in an effort to emphasize the importance and quality of the ground-plane.

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Small business Pla�orm

Atrium Pop-up Pla�orm Resident Ameni�es

Sunken Rest

Small gathering Space

East York Street

Railway Pla�orm

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7 – Cross-Platform by Hayoung Nho, Perspective Render 8 – Cross-Platform by Hayoung Nho, Render

9 – Cross-Platform by Hayoung Nho, Section

12 – Edge Condition by Jie Bao, Render

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Fishtown continues to undergo substantial economic and social changes while relying almost exclusively on the row house as its primary housing solution. New higher-density typologies stand out as signals of change and often utilize interior corridors and isolated lobbies and amenity spaces that push away from the street and neighborhood. As a response to this situation, Edge Condition explores a higher density housing model that aims for the sociability of the traditional row house block.

Two spatial layers as top and bottom are distinguished with the top by private residences and the bottom as public interaction space. In plan, blocks of row houses are usually identified by the flat edge facing the street and the rough edge facing the year yard. In this proposal a textured, social edge faces a central spine allowing terraces, balconies and windows to engage one another. The outer perimeters serve as more traditional access corridors. Perforated metal and masory panels veil and expose activity and light between users and the public throughout the project.

Brian Phillips

EDGE CONDITION Jie Bao

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10 – Edge Condition by Jie Bao, Perspective Render 11 – Edge Condition by Jie Bao, Axon

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[ARCH 611] HISTORY AND THEORY III David Leatherbarrow, Juliana Barton, Carson Chan Insofar as cities throughout the world are growing in size and cultural importance, individuals entering the architecture profession must be prepared to approach the several tasks of urban architecture with understanding, confidence, and imagination. Failure to grasp the challenge and opportunity of shaping urban culture will marginalize practice. Most histories of modern architecture celebrate designs of small, rather isolated buildings, and criticize projects that proposed entire cities or large sections of them. Less well studied, but quite possibly more relevant today, is the middle scale, at which the new architecture inaugurated urban transformation by example, not comprehensive design.

This seminar has a simple thesis: positive urban transformation can result from discordant insertions that prompt new developments, previously seen to be unlikely. We will examine and interpret urban projects built in cities throughout the world during the five middle decades of the 20th century. Spatial techniques will occupy our attention, as will concepts and theories articulated by designers. But no less important will be concerns of common culture: social justice, intelligent use of natural resources, and appropriate, legible, and beautiful form.

[ARCH 621] VISUAL STUDIES III Nate Hume, Brian De Luna The coursework of Visual Studies will introduce a range of new tools, skills, and strategies useful for the development and representation of design work. Drawing and modeling strategies will be investigated for ways in which they can generate ideas and forms rather than be used solely as production tools. Control and the ability to model in an intentional manner will be highlighted. Likewise, drawing exercises will stress the construction of content over the acceptance of digital defaults in order to more accurately represent a project’s ideas. Documents will be produced which strive to build on and question drawing conventions in order to more precisely convey the unique character of each project. The workflow will embrace a range of software to open up possibilities to achieve intended results and resist constraint of a single program’s abilities.

The course will be separated into three phases each focusing on a different set of topics. These phases will be in a sequential consolidation of techniques and methods. Each exercise must therefore be complete before progressing to the next. The exercises will have specific requirements and be presented by the students, as well as submitted for grading, before the next exercise is introduced.

Phase 01 will strengthen modeling technique and workflow for developing tectonic relationships from simple controlled strategies. Emphasis will be placed on creating clearly resolved geometry through controlled modeling. The models will be drawn through a series of new strategies to produce clear representations of the forms.

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Phase 02 will explore the discourse of “The Plan” both in the pre- and post-digital period of the discipline of architecture. The fundamental shift in our methods of designing within digital environments requires a new attitude in terms of how we, as a discipline, re-conceptualize the plan drawing. This module will develop in two stages to speculate on the conventions of plan making: First will be to identify, collect and categorize disciplinary examples of seven plan strategies put forward by O.M. Ungers and second will be to work through strategies of “plan as collage” to produce new hybrids developed out of these existing plans. The exercise will require to work through inherent conflicts (i.e. geometry, scale) between unrelated parts to produce a “working plan.”

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Phase 03 will focus on the development of a ‘cutaway drawing’ – a single, multi-layered, composite assemblage, which synthesizes multiple drawing types together. This phase will move through various types of drawing precedents, such as hybrid perspectival constructions, transparent wall sections, exploded volumetric compositions, and flat orthographic projections, and explore ways of combining multiple visualization techniques, such as rendering and line drawing.

The final project will culminate in a large hybrid drawing presented at the studio final review,

[ARCH 631] D3 DETAIL + DATA + DELIVERY Franca Trubiano Field + Method: This course activates an integrated model for teaching advanced subjects in the delivery of building: subjects inclusive of construction, structures, and environmental design. Students engage in deep research and forensic analysis of the detailing, fabrication, data scaping, simulations, and workflows that are necessary in mastering building.

Sources: Using construction documentation, building information models, fabrication shop drawings, construction site photos, analysis models (structure, energy, sun, wind, materials), and data created for and by the construction process, students analyze, report-on, and critically evaluate important innovations in project delivery that are rapidly changing the nature of design and construction.

Agency: Advanced knowledge of building technology and systems integration fosters increased curiosity in how things are made and how they perform. Cultivating one’s critical decision-making skills in service to the means and methods of building delivery remains an essential aspect of the architect’s work. The most technologically innovative aspects of the AEC industry are found in this quickly expanding and highly collaborative part of the practice. In the best of circumstances, architectural leadership and agency are inspired by work-flow innovations that capitalize on team building, innovative labor practices, effective automation, and material advancements recorded in detailed design, construction modeling, or post-occupancy performance.

Tech Integration: Structural analysis, energy and life-cycle analysis, facade design, and fabrication are areas which benefit from the integration of advanced collaborative forms of project delivery: they are the areas of focus for this class.

[ARCH 633] ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS I Dorit Aviv The past year (2020) has challenged teaching and learning to a new limit. The Environmental Systems I course, like many others, changed format to meet virtually while being physically confined to the interior spaces of our homes.

We explored this domestic context as a site of thermal events and deployed sensors to collect temperature and humidity data in different activity zones within the home. We then considered heat, airflow, and daylight as variables informing the design of apartment units in the context of their ARCH601 Urban Housing studio. In a series of exercises, the students used their studio projects at different stages of their designs — apartment unit formulation, overall aggregation study, and facade development — to explore principles of daylighting, solar shading, heat loss through the envelope, condensation prevention, rainwater harvesting and natural ventilation, thereby connecting environmental analysis with design.

We met weekly through an online interface and used this format to connect with a community of researchers and architects from around the world who are innovators in the field of environmental systems. The pandemic thus both limited our face-to-face interaction with each other, but at the same time expanded our reach to a wider community of experts beyond the constraints of a physical classroom.

First, we virtually visited Kipp Bradford, engineering researcher and entrepreneur, at his laboratory in Rhode Island, where he builds high efficiency heat-pumps.

Kipp gave us a live demonstration of a refrigeration cycle and explained the consequences of current cooling practices for the greenhouse gas emissions and how they can be improved.

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Later on, in a lecture titled “The (Trans)formation of Air Conditioning Complexes: Regimes of Comfort, Architectural Assemblages, and Thermal Material Entanglements” Jiat Hwee Chang, Associate Professor at the department of Architecture, National University of Singapore, discussed the exchanges between air conditioning technology, society, culture, and urban form in three Asian megalopolises.

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Aletheia Ida, associate professor of Architecture at the University of Arizona, took us for a tour in her material laboratory, where she develops novel materials for improving indoor air quality and for climatic adaptation in the desert.

Architect Shirish Beri gave us a special tour of his own home, the Laya House, at the outskirts of Mumbai, where every aspect of materials, systems, and living has been integrated into an architecture that aims at a synergy between nature and human inhabitation.

Back in Penn’s own urban context, Akira Rodriguez, assistant professor at the Weitzman School of Design, Department of City and Regional Planning, discussed toxicity and environmental health risks in Philadelphia public schools and the role of environmental justice activism.

Environmental health has come to the forefront in the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic as critical factor to consider in buildings’ design and operation. Additionally, the climate crisis poses an urgent demand to reduce energy consumption in buildings. Architects in the 21st century must be able to work through these challenges and design buildings that are both healthy and energy efficient. The Environmental Systems I course is aimed at equipping architecture students with tools and knowledge to face these complex challenges in their future practices through integration of environmental principles into their design process.

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Domestic Detritivores by Juli Petrillo Critic: Gisela Baurmann [p.119]

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Cloud Tower by Yuxuan Xiong Critic: Scott Erdy [p.126]

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Living in Margins by Shifei Xu Critic: Ben Krone [p.136]

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Cross-Platform by Hayoung Kim Critic: Brian Phillips [p.140]

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NYX: across all intersections by Nicholas Houser Critic: Jonas Coersmeier [p.124]

October 5, 2020 ESRA AKCAN: Right-to-Heal: Architecture and Transitional Justice

Esra Akcan is the Michael A. McCarthy Professor in the Department of Architecture and currently the Director of European Studies at the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. She completed her architecture degree at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degrees at Columbia University in New York. She taught at UI-Chicago, Humboldt University in Berlin, Columbia University, New School, and Pratt Institute in New York, and METU in Ankara. Akcan received awards and fellowships from the

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Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, Graham Foundation (3-time grantee), American Academy in Berlin, UIC, Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, Clark Institute, Getty Research Institute, Canadian Center for Architecture (2-time scholar), CAA, Mellon Foundation, DAAD and KRESS/ARIT. Akcan’s research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe and West Asia, and offers new ways to understand architecture’s global movement, as well as its complicit or constitutive role in global, social and environmental justice. She is the author of Landfill Istanbul: Twelve Scenarios for a Global City (2004); Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (2012); Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (with S. Bozdoğan, 2012), Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and Urban Renewal of BerlinKreuzberg by IBA 1984/87 (2018) and Building in Exile: Bruno Taut in Turkey (with Bernd Nicolai, 2019). Her book Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Living and Learning will be coming out from Canadian Center for Architecture in early 2021. Currently, she is editing the anthology Migration and Discrimination and working on her book Right-to-Heal: Architecture in Post-Conflict and Post-Disaster Societies. She has also guest edited three journal issues, and written around hundred-and-fifty articles and essays in multiple languages on critical and postcolonial theory, modern and contemporary architecture in West Asia and its diasporas in Europe, architectural photography, immigration, translation, globalization and global history.

Akcan’s lecture “Right to Heal: Architecture and Transitional Justice” will deliver research from her current work-in-progress.

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CORE 602

Simon Kim, Coordinator Associate Professor of Architecture Public Commons The fourth semester core studio is integrative: an architectural practice where design teams and construction consultants are focused on an urban site in the production of a large, multi-use building. In this segment of the curriculum, what has been taught in the prior three semesters in Structures, Environmental Systems, Professional Practice, Visual Studies, Building Construction — as well as History and Theories are brought to focus in this studio.

While these courses are comprehensive, they also provide a technical and standardized base upon which polemics and challenges of cultural expression, context, energy, iconicity are further developed within each studio as directed

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by its instructor. These means and methods are made functional by placing students in small design teams, with repeated meetings with specialists and consultants from the allied disciplines as organized by each instructor.

These consultants have ranged from Arup, Buro Happold, Front Inc, Foster and Partners, and Walter P. Moore.

As well as meetings with their consultants in each studio section, there are two studio-wide exercises — Structures Week and Envelope Week. These assignments are a continuation of the shared studio exercises from ARCH601 — Section Week and Plan Week — and are considered necessary in the education of an architect before progressing into Option Studios and the professional realm.

The goals of Structure Week — early in the semester — is to develop and demonstrate a feasible and projective structural system in digital finite element analyses (FEA), and in its calculations. These structures are tested in physical models and prototypes. Drawings of materials, sizing, and connections are also submitted. The second shared exercise of Cladding Week expands upon Structures Week with developed sections, elevations, and details for the cladding system as defined: single or double facade, masonry, cavity wall, insitu, or shell. This is done shortly before final presentations as schemes become advanced.

The Master Lecture Series is developed by the coordinator around the 602 shared exercises and other milestones. This series supports the integrative studio by bringing in globally renowned figures in the allied disciplines or architecture. These specialist consultants work at the highest levels in teams to support an architecture at the highest ambitions. Noted speakers have been Hanif Kara from AKT II, Martha Tsigkari from Foster and Partners, Wolf Mangelsdorft from Buro Happold, Mark Simmons from Front Inc, Dorit Aviv from Thermal Architecture Lab, Forrest Meggers from CHAOS Lab, Taylor Dover from Studio Olafur Eliasson and Catherine Ircha, an art director in film and television.

Furthermore, ARCH602 continued the polemic of Public Commons, introduced in ARCH601 housing studio. Public Commons has become a term used for shared, equitable access to resources such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as to social creations such as libraries, public spaces, scientific research, and technology.

Equity and justice has been explored in what was Seneca Village in New York Central Park, and in food scarcity and production in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Dr Matthew Miller, Weitzman’s Director of Justice and Belongingness lead a workshop on The Color of Wonder: A Prismatic Turn in Art and Design.

Due to the nature of ARCH602’s role in advancing projective design with the ability to pursue it within industry-standard systems and code-compliancy, it is led by instructors who practice as architects. This past year the instructors were Miroslava Brooks of FORMA, Nate Hume of Hume Coover Studio, Simon Kim of Ibañez Kim (coordinator), Ben Krone of Gradient Architecture, Daniel Markiewicz of FORMA, Danielle Willems of Mæta Design.

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CUBOIDS AND CYLINDS Simon Kim (COORDINATOR) Megan York (TA) late capitalism or bound to western European ideologies, our discipline of shaping cities, private, and public spaces should be freed to pursue difference and diversity. Other narratives, other worldviews may be enfolded in the work of This fourth and final in a series of the structural, mechanical, tectonic systems Core Design Studio Sequence is to dem- that come together to produce buildings. onstrate adaptation of the surrounding curriculum in history and building techSITE nology into an architectural design For this studio in particular, we will work on In 1853, the New York State Legislature architecture as fictive narratives and fu- enacted a law that set aside 775 acres turisms, towards architecture and site in of land in Manhattan — from 59th to interaction with history and technology.

106th Streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues — to create the country’s first Architecture at this moment can be exmajor landscaped public park. But there amined afresh to the sociopolitics and was a vibrant and thriving Black commuecological pressures of the anthroponity already on that site: Seneca Village. cene. Rather than remain complicit with The City acquired the land through Simon Kim (Associate Professor of Architecture): Co-founded Ibañez Kim Studio, PA & MA, (1994) — Graduated from the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association (AA) – Taught studios and seminars at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the AA – Director of the Immersive Kinematics Research Group

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1 – Simon Kim in Virtual Studio Review

AGENDA ARCH601 and ARCH602 have a common theme of Public Commons: Public Commons has become a term used for shared, equitable access of all communities to natural resources such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as to social creations such as libraries, public spaces, technology and scientific research.

We will redress this history of Seneca Village through the concept of Nature, Narrative, Myth and Homunculi. Architecture need not refer to exterior disciplines to order its internal concepts of space, thickness, depth, and time.

Figuration, pose, and performance does not require entries into fields of psychoanalysis nor biomimesis. We will take a critical position on the big box as a late-capitalist type, and place within its common spaces different world upon worlds. These worlds can be discrete, conjoined, in enfilade and episodic, or speciated by scale. Their traversal will be designed with atmospheric and meteorologic change, thick and thin envelopes, synthetic natures, and nonhuman agency.

will be in the training of novel structures, and response behaviors to participate in architecture of immersion and bewilderment.

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eminent domain, the law that allows the government to take private land for public use. There were roughly 1,600 inhabitants in Seneca Village, a predominantly Black community, that was displaced throughout the NY area.

The programme is an institute, archive, and performing culture center for the BIPOC arts community.

This Culture Center will respond to everything that the ADA and local building codes require, but the design will revel in what is unexpected and bewildering — strange surfaces, soft objects, pattern overlaps. The domains of the future forward and the technological determinism displayed in the work of these figures will be the means in which their institutional parts are organized and arranged on the islands. How they interact, how they interact with ground and sky, and their behavioral materiality will be central to the studio.

We will work through several exercises that work directly toward a final project. These exercises build from each other so that a complete documentation is prepared. Our siting of the Seneca Village is not a historical reenactment (remaking Seneca Village as it once was) but a projection of Afro-IndigenousBIPOC Futurism, Genders Equity, LGBTQ Futurism, Ecological Justice.

PROGRAM In terms of space and construction, we focus on how to generate a meaningful understanding of space and tectonics that is based on the ideas of longspan and thick facade — or big box — in order to generate total environments, fully immersive atmospheres. These 157

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NO NATION EMBASSY Anna Lim and Danny Ortega It is our hope that the No Nation Embassy will act as a tribute towards the broken history of Seneca Village. With the ideology of anti-empiricism, this remake of Seneca Village accepts all as citizens with equal rights through a micro-urbanism of architectural characters united by a common roof.

Characters in architecture inhabit a strange terrain. They are both an object and a narrative operation. They contain traits and features that work in communicating a story.

Much like characters in films, plays, and novels, architectural characters must also represent something more than the mere performance of their qualities. Characters are

location specific, but not necessarily location exclusive.

A character might be deployed in multiple settings, and the change of scenery surrounding a character elicits new meanings accordingly.

In John Hejduk’s Victims (1985), an unbuilt proposal for a pavilion park in Berlin, these characters go so far to have names, in a Faulkner-esque world-building. Such characters became inspiration for the various spaces of the No Nation Embassy. Our architectural characters have taken on qualities of creatures wearing clothing and seemingly engaged in a moment of life. Sometimes they are perched on the edge of a hill about to pounce, other times they are rolling across the water, or nestled into a puddle of water deep asleep in a slumber.

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2 – No Nation Embassy by Anna Lim and Danny Ortega, Interior Render 3 – No Nation Embassy by Anna Lim and Danny Ortega, Axon

4 – No Nation Embassy by Anna Lim and Danny Ortega, Interior Render

Death in Architecture has for an extensive period been explored through the creation of memorials, cemeteries, mausoleums, and cenotaphs. Yet the increasing global environmental crisis has not fared well under the continuous practices for post death. The greater population often has greater needs that must be addressed through more substantial attempts.

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Ecological justice does not cease to exist when human life does. The Seneca Growth Complex attempts to incorporate and diminish the impact humans have by posthumously incorporating donators into new organic materials that will be used to grow, monitor, and sustain the native natural ecology of Seneca Village and of Greater Central Park.

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SENECA GROWTH COMPLEX Diego Ramirez and Dario Sabidussi

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5 – Seneca Growth Complex by Diego Ramirez and Dario Sabidussi, Interior Render 6 – Seneca Growth Complex by Diego Ramirez and Dario Sabidussi, Axon

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PLAYSCAPES Miroslava Brooks (LECTURER) Maria Jose Fuentes (TA) Erleen Hatfield (STRUCTURAL CONSULTANT) John Hodder (FACADE CONSULTANT) Miroslava Brooks (Lecturer): Founding partner of FORMA – an architecture practice based in New York City – holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University, where she was awarded the William Wirt Winchester Travelling Fellowship – school’s most prestigious prize – Graduated Summa Cum Laude from The Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture – Has taught design studios and seminars at Yale School of Architecture – worked as Project Designer and Research Assistant at Eisenman Architects

Infectious diseases have often taught us that the outside is safer than the inside.

However, even before the global pandemic, “children in the US have gradually been losing outdoor playtime as schools put emphasis on reading, writing, math and other indoor subjects.” a Furthermore , a lack of access to quality early childhood education has been a persistent problem, especially in the US. Public Commons — a sub-theme for all the 602 studio sections — has become a term used for shared, equitable access of all communities to natural resources such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as to

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THE WEDGE FOREST Dongqi Chen and Tingdong Xiong

We were interested in exploring how sets of aggregated modules could be deployed on the given site in a linear logic and produce a clear figure of a line, yet at the same time how those same modules could set up more complex and dynamic relationships between the surrounding landscape and the structure’s interior. The figures of the landscape overlap with the figure of the building and, as seen in the ground level plan, the figure of the line dematerializes and “erases” itself through the landscape cuts. This creates visual and physical porosity, allowing the interior playrooms branch out into the landscape system which keeps over 90% of the existing trees intact. A forest with diverse plants growing within the wedges, the site is an assemblage of soft and hard scapes which mix the natural and artificial surfaces together. Such juxtapositions encourage children to interact with the different environments throughout the day – via direct observation, movement, and touch – and in doing so cultivate their natural sense of wonder and curiosity about the world around them.

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a – https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/arts/ design/16shat.html?auth=login-email&login=email

1 – The Wedge Forest by Dongqi Chen and Tingdong Xiong, Project Description 2 – Miroslava Brooks in Virtual Studio Review

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social creations such as libraries, public spaces, technology and scientific research. This studio treats childcare as another such social resource and asks: How can architecture respond to these challenges? How can we start thinking of viable and inspiring alternatives?

The studio focused on the design of a new exterior/interior hybrid of playgrounds and childcare/community center located in downtown Stamford, Connecticut along the Mill River. Central to our explorations was the concept of PLAY. Students were encouraged to consider how PLAY can open up novel ways of thinking about the community and the city and how the playground can reclaim its function as a creative laboratory for learning and experiencing the world. We explored “cluster” and “mat” building typologies, working horizontally through aggregation, and investigated new Playscape ideas where the

4 – The Wedge Forest by Dongqi Chen and Tingdong Xiong, Interior Render

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3 – The Wedge Forest by Dongqi Chen and Tingdong Xiong, Exterior Render

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distinction between objects, furniture, building, and landscape is blurred through scalar indeterminacy and functional flexibility.

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5 – Miroslava Brooks in Virtual Studio Review 6 – Sensatorium by Meera Toolsidas and Ellie Garside, Exterior Render

and play sculpture, which he believed had educational potential through their sculptured forms, and Aldo van Eyck’s prolific body of work that included hundreds of public playgrounds in Amsterdam. Both van Eyck’s and Noguchi’s playgrounds had an added

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SENSATORIUM Meera Toolsidas and Ellie Garside

Sensatorium encourages exploration and promotes wonder through interactive environments and sensory stimulation.

The project, a childcare and community center situated in downtown Stamford along Mill river’s waterfront, demonstrates the power of free play to provoke imagination and creativity. The building and landscape, derived from a playfully manipulated yet highly organized modular aggregation, produce a series of sounds, varied lighting conditions, and tactile components that engage a visitor’s sense of hearing, vision, touch, and smell. A heavy, textured stone exterior and a gently undulating roofscape opens to a bright and open interior of high, curved ceilings and unique skylight conditions. Form, space, light, and texture blend and build on each other to create an interior playscape as dynamic and engaging as the landscape that surrounds it. Children and adults alike are invited to look, listen, touch, and smell the environment around them, supporting the growth and development of children and bringing play to the community at large.

value of public art — their programmatic flexibility and scalelessness offered meaningful urban places for children and adults alike. Similarly, the studio posits that architecture can transcend any specific program and can establish spatial and tectonic order that can lead to the invention of new programs during the life of a building.

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WATERSCAPE Tianchang Chu and Hayoung Nho Can building generate play? Can it encourage different kinds of play? Such questions and others were explored in our Waterscape project through the intentional manipulation of form, spatial sequencing, color, and materiality.

Our spatial module set up courtyard conditions at various scales when aggregated together and positioned most of the massing at the upper level. The result is a spatial contrast between the two levels of the proposed building — the ground level is composed of thin stretches of interior space, while the upper level is largely extensive continuous

interior that links the entire building together. While running around the courtyards might be possible and even encouraged upstairs, hiding within the nooks and crannies of the curved and vaulted spaces at the ground level encourages a more focused play. Passing through the more compressed vaulted zones within the iridescent brick facade, an expansive secret garden is revealed within each of the courtyards, while water weaves in shallow channels throughout the site and connects multiple water playscapes and the river. Color not only delineates zones of play, but together with water reflections and caustics, creates a dream-like atmosphere.

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9 – Waterscape by Tianchang Chu and Hayoung Nho, Render 10 – Waterscape by Tianchang Chu and Hayoung Nho, Axon

11 – Waterscape by Tianchang Chu and Hayoung Nho, Plan 12 – Waterscape by Tianchang Chu and Hayoung Nho, Section

The project is situated along the Mill River in Stamford, Connecticut on a site characterized by recent transformation. The site was previously occupied by detached residential buildings that were demolished in the 21st century and lies within a master plan and river restoration project which aims to partially restore the river to its undisturbed state. As such, both the proposed landscape and the building are conceived of as artificial constructs; the project makes this condition visible to varying degrees, at times contrasting the quasi-natural with the clearly artificial.

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The constructed nature of the proposal is made particularly clear by the ribbons of vegetation that cross the site, with precisely defined edges that delineate changes in flora, material, and program. Layering of spatial, material and tectonic systems results in a non-hierarchical building ensemble with various degrees of ambiguity. As a result, the project puts into questions fundamental architectural conditions such as the ground, roof or threshold through scalar shifts and material overlaps, providing a rich playscape of learning and discovery.

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DUAL COURTYARDS Juli Petrillo and Eric Fries

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13 – Dual Courtyards by Juli Petrillo and Eric Fries, Exterior Render 14 – Dual Courtyards by Juli Petrillo and Eric Fries, Interior Render

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ENVELOPE STUFFING Nate Hume (LECTURER) Merrick Castillo (TA) Eddy Roberts (STRUCTURAL ENGINEER CONSULTANT) Jamison Guest (FACADE CONSULTANT) Michael Tortella (MEP CONSULTANT) Nate Hume (Senior Lecturer): MArch Yale University – Principal Hume Architecture – Founder SuckerPunch

The studio was interested in looking at the nevelope as an inhaibtable mediator bringing the exterior in and interior out. These liminal zones have the potential to house public spaces which resist traditional solutions such as static ground floor lobbies or inert atriums but instead forge dynamic zones laminated, embedded, and suspended in the envelope. The buildings looked to produce new relationships between volumes and enclosure through understanding them as an ensemble of things and denying the reading of a single mass and wrapper. The stuffing engaged the expanding palette of building materials which break down the traditional distinction between the natural and the artificial. Historically, building materials have either been sourced from nature or produced artificially, with natural materials being conceived of

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as ones that come from raw, organic matter, and artificial materials being produced from chemical or factory processing. Today’s material culture exists largely in a fuzzy territory between the two states. Composite materials hold multiple properties of the raw and the processed, not only questioning what is natural but also producing new natures and aesthetic effects. The hybridization of these materials are formed through several means including laminating, embedding, and compressing organic and inorganic matter. The strategies are extracted from the composition of the materials to be mined for spatial and tectonic strategies. Banding, stacking, and clean delineation give way to patches, peeling, embedding, growing, and accumulating in all directions.

The material effects move form the zoning of the cladding to re-conceiving the spaces of the building as the projects look for inhabitable rustication.

The wall becomes not just a traditional division between what is conceived of as the interior and exterior but as a mediator between slippery notions of the public domain of the city and the private as well as nature and the constructed inner world of buildings. The strategies developed through looking at material composition serve to find provoke relationships in the mediation that exist between these binaries to arrive at new architectural conditions.

To explore these notions the studio designed a headquarters for a food center

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OFF CYCLE Nicholas Houser and Bingyu Guo

Focusing on the embedment of a space for inner city food production to supply local food kitchens, a closed system utilizing hydroponics and aeroponics, a microcosm of growth, decay, and regeneration avoids consuming outside resources. Through the incorporation of growth beds, aquariums, compost, and small animal pens, the natural cycle that occurs in nature becomes downscaled into a concentrated urban scale, becoming hyper-synthetic, operating on a 24-hour growth cycle.

In consequence this project is also open to the public 24/7.

The versatility and engagement created through the ability to view a space of production facilitates public engagement as the system completes its primary purpose of food production. Public engagement is achieved through the promenade and exhibitionism of the various components at hand, from the farming and harvesting, to distribution, as well as atmospheric biproducts that influence the affect of the public park, as it circumnavigates all systems involved in production.

Through these methods, recreation and function have become meshed together to create a space in between spaces, open and welcome to all.

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4 – Off Cycle by Nicholas Houser and Bingyu Guo, Interior Render 5 – Off Cycle by Nicholas Houser and Bingyu Guo, Section

6 – Off Cycle by Nicholas Houser and Bingyu Guo, Project Description

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dealing with shortages and surpluses.

These ranged from companies combating depleted food sources through alternative products to organizations developing food from waste. As more of the planet becomes inhospitable for farming and urban populations continue to rapidly expand, there is intense need for new means of producing food — whether it is through artificial lab grown items or natural foods produced in new ways. A plethora of start-ups exist which are tackling these problems as well as plugging into a growing interest in the culture around food sourcing and preparation. Similar to the loosening of the distinction between artificial and natural building materials in the construction industry, these food companies are working with methods, techniques, and ingredients which shift between the two states. Tastes and textures get mixed and recalibrated to produce seemingly contradictory items such as plant-based shrimp, bacon made from mushroom roots, animal free eggs, or insect burgers. The origins and compositions of the food become quite different from the expected as items are produced through new pro-cesses. Architecture can produce environments to complement the synthetic worlds of these new food production spaces. This project will investigate the ramifications of these developments on material form.

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LES GRAINS Lisa Knust and Riley Engelberger Situated in the Lower East Side of New York City, LES Grains examines the issue of food waste and production through the implementation of a brewery that fuels a food bank pantry. The spent grain waste of the brewing process is a highly nutritious grain medium that can directly be reused in the production of bread related food products. This program works to negotiate the overarching themes of the project, namely the frame. Developed through a rigorous

process of layering, a series of frames and subsequent frameworks are developed and either reinforced or eroded through the buildup of other mediums. This layering process develops a sense of veiling that carries throughout the entirety of the project, and through a consistent immersion in nature, the building works to dissolve boundaries of public and private, internal and external, and reinforces the idea of nature being a public commodity for all, a different approach from how nature is typically handled in built environments — where it is often relegated only to exterior, controlled spaces.

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8 – LES Grains by Lisa Knust and Riley Engelberger, Section 9 – LES Grains by Lisa Knust and Riley Engelberger, Model

10 – LES Grains by Lisa Knust and Riley Engelberger, Interior Render

“Interposed” aims to challenge the singular notions applied to nature within the urban setting by shifting the focus of the city as a factory first, nature second environment. The intervention acts as an extension of nature around the site by unfolding landscapes that spill inside and outside of the building, blurring ideas of what is natural and what is human-made.

Encouraged by the cultural aspects of our site, it seeks to tackle the issue of food surplus by acting as an urban hub that alleviates food insecurity in the city.

By acting as a vertical farm, the intervention reimagines the distribution of surplus food by combining automated systems and landscapes to create new experiences within the building. These experiences embrace the tension between nature, humans, and machines with the addition of the textile milling process.

Nate Hume

INTERPOSED Miguel Matos and Maria Sofia Garcia

The project is a food waste compost center that focuses on the development of textiles as a community catalyst.

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11 – Interposed by Miguel Matos and Maria Sofia Garcia, Model 12 – Interposed by Miguel Matos and Maria Sofia Garcia, Exterior Render Close Up

13 – Interposed by Miguel Matos and Maria Sofia Garcia, Interior Render 14 – Interposed by Miguel Matos and Maria Sofia Garcia, Elevation

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A WORLD OF FAIRS: CELEBRATING A WORLD OF ACHIEVEMENTS THROUGH DESIGN Ben Krone (LECTURER) Martha Tsigkari (FACADE SYSTEMS CONSULTANTS) Adam Davis (FACADE SYSTEMS CONSULTANTS) Veronica Rosado (TA) Ben Krone (Lecturer): Founded Gradient Design Studio, NYC (2006) – B.Arch from the University of Florida (1999) – MArch degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, GSAPP (2004) – Winner of McKim Prize for Excellence in Design & the Sol Kaplan Traveling Fellowship.

I. PROGRAM World’s Fair: A brief look into the world of expositions The World’s fair, originally conceived by the French as a series of national expositions of new industry advances, culminated with the 1844 Industrial Exposition held in Paris. Subsequently, the 1851 World Expo held in Great Britain and titled ‘The Industry of All Nations,’ produced one of the most important architectural achievements in modern history. The Crystal Palace was constructed of cast iron and plate glass; a masterpiece and wide exhibition space to house examples of innovative technology built during the Industrial Revolution. However, it was the building itself conceived by Joseph Paxton that

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1 – Heat Island by Mengdi Jia and Shiyue Liu, Project Description 2 – Heat Island by Mengdi Jia and Shiyue Liu, Section

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HEAT ISLAND Mengdi Jia and Shiyue Liu

This project is designed for the Expo 2025 in Osaka with theme “designing future society of our lives” and focuses on sustainable cities. It seeks to raise awareness about the heat island effect in urbanized area and its related issues about climate equity. Building materials such as concrete, absorb and re-emit solar energy more than natural landscapes. The material itself would also have higher surface temperature than the atmospheric temperature. Thus, the initial concept models express the process of heat penetrating into concrete surfaces, through absorbing, storing, and releasing.

The overall form and performative nature of the paper models correspond to the kinetic energy of compression and tension. The pavilion expresses a fluid play between tension and compression and the volumes wrapped by these large gestures form spaces with different pockets of heat. The central mass, formed by thick concrete walls, serves as the main heat source for the pavilion and radiates to the periphery, which echoes the heat island effect. The varying sizes and density of folded panels further emphasize the distribution of heat. The design encourages a sensory experience influenced by contrast of heat, light and mass, and also suggests ways of mitigating heat island effect through building materials, vegetation, and water.

Ben Krone

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was considered the highest achievement of modern architecture. This sets off a tradition of World Exposition buildings becoming center pieces of each nation’s achievements culminated into a single structure representing the contemporary trends and developments in design.

most defining pieces of architecture in the Western World, a historical landmark.

A second example is the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, initially a building for the 1893 Chicago Expo that was able to be repurposed and remains today as one of the most visited structures in the United States.

In this semester’s studio we will propose a series of structures for one of the two upcoming World’s Fairs:

Each team will select one of the two Expos and adhere to both the planned theme and its affiliated site. This research will form the foundation of each team’s conceptual approach toward programming, and ultimately will be the basis for defining the proposed Exhibition Structure as a new building typology.

1) Expo 2023 in Buenos Aires themed ‘Creative Industries in Digital Convergence’ 2) 2025 Expo in Osaka, Japan themed ‘Designing Future Society of Our Lives’ Throughout the last 170 years, World Exposition buildings have maintained a level of significance in defining our modern architectural panorama. The structures have been both temporary and permanent, sometimes by design and sometimes by the popularity of the structures becoming markers of time and place. Of course, the Eiffel Tower is the most recognized World’s fair structure that was initially conceived to be “temporary” and has become one of the

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3 – Ben Krone in Virtual Studio Review

Each team will be responsible for the research and inclusion of ideas that are representative of our time and potential futures. This should be a basis for the programming, materials, and methodology of the construction of the building, its performance, and the purpose it serves both in the expo itself and as a symbol of present-day achievements.

Although modern era of World’s fair pavilions are mainly about nation branding, we will not select any national representation, but rather focus on the

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Eras of past Expos’ pavilions which were representations of industrialization or cultural exchange.

visits will not be possible. It will be up to each individual team to select one of the two Expo sites and theme which most interests them and to gather all The studio will work in collaboration the necessary site-specific data which with Martha Tsigkari, who is a partner in is required to locate the building proNorman Foster Architects, a design sys- posal. These should be thought as tems analyst and the head of the Applied more program driven restrictions rather Research and development Group. than through the lens of traditional site She specializes in performance driven analysis. Instead of researching the design and optimization, interfaces, specifics of the buildings and contextual and interaction. She is also an Architect surroundings, each pair will be asked and a teacher at the Bartlett school of to instead draw some sort of specific Architecture. Martha will be able to aid relationship to other studio members’ the studio both in early phases of repavilions whether that be by proximity, search, programming and will be able circulation, theme-based relationships to offer means of applying technology to or other physical or spatial connecresolve complex design systems. tions. Each teams’ proposal will act as the context to its neighboring proposExpo pavilions traditionally are not als and should therefore be thought of considered to be site specific installaas a whole studio team effort. Instead tions, though historically there are of a traditional site plan for each of the great examples which a theme-based proposals, we will create a studio wide manufactured site has played an imcollaborative map which will serve as a portant role in its development. Due to themed guide or advertisement plan for Covid related restrictions physical site the expo.

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4 – Heat Island by Mengdi Jia and Shiyue Liu, Render

II. SPATIAL AND GEOMETRIC STUDIES: (DIGITAL VS MANUAL) The studio will investigate both space and geometry through careful research and experimentation into various manual techniques of weaving, stitching, stacking, molding, and a host of other complex structural assemblies. These will be investigated initially at the scale of the body, involving notions of craft and careful attention to how repetition and technique yield complex geometric systems. These results are embedded with the DNA for both spatial and geometric innovation that may be applied at various scales and utilized to test a host of programmatic functions.

Digital design tools by themselves operate free of scale and gravity. They do not fail when they are incomplete. They posses a freedom to explore space, structure, and program simultaneously and expand the boundaries of experimentation that traditional technique driven processes may hinder. They also do a very good job at managing huge amounts of information, specifically the ripple effects that the fulfillment of programmatic requirements can have across complex structural and spatial systems. They are a necessity to the process but still a tool rather then a selfsufficient means to an end. The studio’s spatial and geometric investigations will be interrogating the dichotomy of digital design practices and manual techniques of making. As architecture is ultimately craft that requires the integration of both types of thinking, it will be

a studio requirement to investigate both.

It will be up to the individual studio teams to weigh each influence against the project’s overall conceptual framework.

You will be charged with determining the balance of each to facilitate the most holistic design that not only suggests a complete formal strategy, but also considers how it will be constructed.

Ben Krone

Instead of a traditional site plan for each of the proposals, we will create a studio wide collaborative map which will serve as a themed guide or advertisement plan for the expo.

III. INTENT The studio’s intent is threefold: 1) to gather and analyze the various programmatic issues surrounding a predetermined innovation or theme 2) to ‘re-mix’ and apply this knowledge to create progressive exterior building design and spatial organizational strategies, and 3) to combine and integrate the knowledge and methodology gained into a fully integrated building enclosure structure. I will be guiding the studio’s primary objectives; however, it will be up to each individual group to determine their own specific process for translating these ideas into physical form. This will require each student to be extremely rigorous and self critical at every moment throughout the semester. Your proposals will be presented to a real and especially important jury. therefore, it is critical that the studio produces work that is both inventive and realizable.

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POST PANDEMIC PAVILION Ruijie Xu and Yukuan Guo Our pavilion aims to commemorate the pandemic disaster to human beings, and illustrates the life in post pandemic through a continuous dialogue between past and future.

By overlapping, crossing, and stretching – procedures in endocytosis – simply shaped prototype become complex configurations in space, where outside and inside merge.

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Since each part has different section profile, people can experience the transition when they walking through different program space.

In the atrium, related programs connect and intersect with each other. The continuity of space is disrupted, and the spatial experience becomes an incomplete narrative, without a constant circulation. It also represents the uncertainty and diversity of life post pandemic.

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5 – Post Pandemic Pavilion by Ruijie Xu and Yukuan Guo, Axon 6 – Post Pandemic Pavilion by Ruijie Xu and Yukuan Guo, Interior Render

7 – Post Pandemic Pavilion by Ruijie Xu and Yukuan Guo, Exterior Render

For the Osaka Expo 2025 (Theme: “Designing For the Future Society of Our Lives”) our team’s pavilion seeks to spread awareness around global food waste, as currently one-third (33%) of food produced in the world is never eaten. In spatial translation of this concept, our form explores the process of DECOMPOSITION, incarnated architecturally in a system of structural “bones,” wrapped in degrading, paneled “tissue,” which degrades and sheds itself over the course of the Fair’s tenure.

We became enamored with the process of DECOMPOSITION in plant and animal matter, as it is quite architectural in its logic, procession and unlikely beauty. Conceptually, it fires on all cylinders and has great implicit narrative and

story-telling promise. Ultimately, we found the concept salient, compelling, thoughtful, provocative, and playful.

Perhaps what we found most exciting and opportune about the concept of DECOMPOSITION is that the given form experiences more than one “life” related to how it’s physically comprised. The matter that constitutes it in the early days of decay hardly resemble the so called ‘remains’ — or its ultimately skeletal destiny. As World’s Fairs Pavilions are transient architectural entities by virtue — often rapidly deployed and then torn down once they’ve served their initial purpose — we aspired to endow our form with a “Second Life” of sorts. That is, choreograph its progression from its “Fair Life” of tidiness and order into its ‘After Life’ of decay and natural overgrowth that could be explored and occupied by exploration-minded individuals for years to come.

Ben Krone

RE·COM·POSED John Nedeau, Changzhe Xu, Weiting Zhang

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8 – re·com·posed by John Nedeau, Changzhe Xu, Weiting Zhang, Exterior Render 9 – re·com·posed by John Nedeau, Changzhe Xu, Weiting Zhang, Axon

10 – re·com·posed by John Nedeau, Changzhe Xu, Weiting Zhang, Interior Render

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DECADENCE & DEGRADATION Daniel Markiewicz (LECTURER) Madison Green (TA) Vishwadeep Deo (FACADE CONSULTANT) Erich Oswald (STRUCTURAL CONSULTANT) Daniel Markiewicz (Lecturer): Partner of FORMA Architects PLLC – MArch from the Yale School of Architecture – B.S.E. in Civil Engineering/Architecture from Princeton University

an architectural cladding material and explored a process of form making that mirrors one of the conceptual drivers of the studio: degradation.

This studio designed a Bath House set within Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.

We engaged with concepts of the picturesque as described by Yve-Alain Bois in “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara,” as well as the relationship between cultural excess and formal erosion, or in other words: decadence and degradation. We studied, used, and pushed the limits of metal paneling as

Nothing epitomizes decadence like a bath house. And nothing signals societal decline like excessive decadence.

Rituals of bathing have wide ranging cultural roots from Turkish Baths, to Scandinavian Saunas, to Japanese Onsens and Rotenburos. Notions of excess and hedonism have in certain cases signaled the decline of empires: there were 856 baths in ancient Rome by the 5th century

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1 – Studio Review with Daniel Markiewicz

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2 – Daniel Markiewicz in Virtual Studio Review 3 – Sublime Subversion by Alan Fan and Elizabeth Anderson, Aerial

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just before it fell. The Bath House is also in many ways a flexible program, whose intent is primarily the production of pleasure through relaxation.

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SUBLIME SUBVERSION Alan Fan and Elizabeth Anderson

Formally, we wanted to create a controlled, orthogonal layout based on a shifted grid that responds to the directionality of the entry paths. From a distance, the bathhouse appears to float above the sunken program as a hovering mass, distorting conventionally heavy bathhouse typologies. The mass appears as an austere form, clad with metal paneling, reflecting its surroundings.

resistance to orthographic plan drawing.

As described by Bois, Serra’s preference for the elevation, as opposed to the plan, is a characteristic inherent to the picturesque movement which with rolling landscapes is itself “a struggle against the reduction ‘of all terrains to the flatness of a sheet of paper.’” This studio however loved the plan. And this studio refuted the positions of Bois, Serra and others by using the plan to engage with other central notions of the picturesque.

We decided to invert the typical courtyard bath typology, by placing the lobby and changing room in the center, with the baths on the perimeter. The lobby is connected to other program by dry canals that organize and divide the building.

Water was used as a means of transportation and a way of delineating programs. We incorporated a lazy river that runs on the perimeter, forming a highway between pools.

Instead of extruding interior volumes upward to divide the plan, we inverted this and sunk all the programs below grade. Inside the sunken plaza, light pours from the glass slit, creating an unobstructed 360-degree view through the interior of the project. The floor level adjusts based on head height, so you have a constant, uninterrupted view through the slit. For example, it is 5’ below grade in the lobby where visitors would be standing, and 3’ below grade in the café seating.

We created an undulating ceiling geometry that is offset from the walls, allowing light to pour in from the perimeter.

The ceiling form is only revealed to the viewer once inside the structure. The ceiling expresses a similar material quality to the exterior and reflects the light bouncing off the water’s surface.

We began our Bath House explorations with an examination of the picturesque, which is most commonly associated with the 18th and early 19th century discussion of pictorial values of architecture and its relationship to landscape. The picturesque was born out of a reaction to neoclassical order and rigidity and a desire for a more fluid experience of architecture through the embrace of nature. Yve-Alain Bois’ engages with the picturesque through the work and discourse of the sculpture Richard Serra.

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4 – Sublime Subversion by Alan Fan and Elizabeth Anderson, Project Description 5 – Sublime Subversion by Alan Fan and Elizabeth Anderson, Model

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Materially, the studio explored various types of metal paneling as an exterior cladding material. We worked with facade consultants FRONT Inc. and Amuneal, a local metal fabricator in Philadelphia, to uncover and quickly master techniques of metal fabrication and facade detailing.

The formal process for the studio began with the concept of formal degradation.

Using cloth and everyday objects we explored an analog process that produces a “loss of resolution” of those objects.

By wrapping and shrouding objects in

Daniel Markiewicz

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thin fabric and using techniques of pinning common in upholstery fabrication we arrived at new but degraded forms of these original objects. Folds, creases, pleating, stretched curvature, piling, seaming and the recombination of all of these techniques provided ample grounds for formal exploration to start the studio.

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FLOW WITH THE RIVER Yiyi Luo and Yuxuan Xiong Abstracting the form of Schuylkill River, the Riverside Bath simulates the processes of water-induced degradation, through an interplay of metal facade and stone panels under the effects of erosion. Water itself acts as the manifestation and hint for this erosion, for it flows around the Bath as a landscape feature, transcends the envelope as an open pool, and blends into the surrounding meadow as a water collection device. Bath as an interface for its visitors

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to undress, and to voluntarily return to a primitive state, blurs the boundary between manmade structures and the nature by merging a series of civic, social activities with the naked body. As the Riverside Bath offers safe and engaging public space through its wave-like green roof on the outside and recreates natural and exotic bathing experience through its free-flowing furnishing and spatial organization on the inside, Bath enables its visitors to escape their daily travails and to embrace the beauty of nature that is unseen by the city.

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7 – Flow with the River by Yiyi Luo and Yuxuan Xiong, Model 8 – Flow with the River by Yiyi Luo and Yuxuan Xiong, Interior Render

9 – Flow with the River by Yiyi Luo and Yuxuan Xiong, Section 10 – Flow with the River by Yiyi Luo and Yuxuan Xiong, Elevation

Situated in a clearing of the meadows at The Cliffs in Philadelphia, this Bath House is a focal point of convergence for the intersection of decadence and degradation. Contrasting Convergence engages the picturesque through the dichotomy of two intersecting concepts. The first, representing decadence, is the hovering mass, an aggregation of eight pristine volumes around a decentralized courtyard. These

pure, platonic cubes are then met with the resisting force of the second concept; the eroding stalactites. These touchdowns, representing degradation, eat away at the form of the hovering mass, creating new profiles at their intersection and finally organizing the baths underneath as they meet the ground and become occupied. Highlighted by the microcosmic experiences of its jewel box interiors, this Bath House stands at the height of its opulence as a beacon of empires of old reaching reclamation through ruinification.

Daniel Markiewicz

CONTRASTING CONVERGENCE Benjamin Hergert and Umar Mahmood

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11 – Contrasting Convergence by Benjamin Hergert and Umar Mahmood, Section 12 – Contrasting Convergence by Benjamin Hergert and Umar Mahmood, Interior Render

13 – Contrasting Convergence by Benjamin Hergert and Umar Mahmood, Model 14 – Contrasting Convergence by Benjamin Hergert and Umar Mahmood, Pool Render

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MONOLITHIC, MACHINIC HYBRIDS Danielle Willems (LECTURER) Xinyi Chen (TA) Jingyi Zhou (TA) Florian Meier (STRUCTURAL ENGINEER CONSULTANT) Danielle Willems (Lecturer): Co-Founder of Mæta Design (2008) – Visiting Professor at Pratt University, Brooklyn NY – Earned a MArch from Columbia University, GSAPP (2007) Florian Meier (Consultant): Associate with Knippers Helbig – Advanced Engineering

Monolithic, Machinic Hybrids — perceives architectural formation as part of a larger, self-organizing, adapting, material process. Our studio will start with reconsidering the Cenotaph, being both “Monolithic” and ancient, these impressive vessels of void, as a generative point of departure to re-conceptualize a new type of artifice in relationship to the typology of the Data Center. While engaging in the production of ontological architectural axioms through the generative capacities of algorithms, one focus will be the relationship between computation and machine learning.

Conceptually, the Data Center and Water Treatment facility will operative as a platform to explore post-human and machinic architectural space.

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SUBLIME MULTIPLICITY Hadi Kebbi & Richard Rodriguez

Sublime Multiplicity expresses an intrigue with concepts of the sublime, the ambiguous, and the estranged. It intends to address multiple readings of architectural spaces through form, hybrid materiality, and expressions of light in order to redefine conceptions of water treatment centers and data centers to create a unique typology reminiscent of the two.

It creates an enclosure that wraps around the Pennsylvania Water Works’ boardwalk, inviting inhabitants to congregate and introducing them to a newly defined form of accessibility, where once inaccessible programs become transparent and welcoming, guided through form and materials that inform elements of private and public.

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1 – Danielle Willems in Virtual Studio Review

2 – Sublime Multiplicity by Hadi Kebbi & Richard Rodriguez, Project Description

Danielle Willems

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4 – Sublime Multiplicity by Hadi Kebbi & Richard Rodriguez, Render

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3 – Sublime Multiplicity by Hadi Kebbi & Richard Rodriguez, Exterior Render

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6 – Autonomous Territory. by Bashayer Bamohsen, Close Up Render

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AUTONOMOUS TERRITORY Bashayer Bamohsen

The interest of this project is to provide multiple architectural readings, in a ghostly way. It captures the potential hybridity of the two programs by creating spaces that aestheticize the machinic understanding of the two highly infrastructural programs.

be our focus, providing a unique opportunity to rethink public infrastructure.

PUBLIC COMMONS Public Commons has become a term used for shared, equitable access of all communities to natural resources such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as to social creations such as libraries, public spaces, technology and scientific research. Public Common Space for the 2nd Year Architecture studios will be a catalyst to study the confluence of equity and inclusion through thoughtful inquiry.

Each student will engage in architecture’s agency to format spaces of equity and proactively develop new modes of ground, landscape, thresholds, and spaces that provide for safe assembly and freedom from harassment. At stake is how to design and develop architectural solutions which address concerns of equity, inclusion, and justice.

Danielle Willems

The contemporary paradigms of robotic manufacturing, augmented reality, blockchains and artificial intelligence, are going to have profound repercussions for our discipline. Our world is increasingly being understood as an emergent outcome of complex systems.

Similarly, both analytical and generative tools for the definition of spatial and architectural complex systems have been established within our discipline. This studio will focus on the development of a Data Center/Water Treatment facility and Public Commons as an exciting opportunity to rethinking the architectural typology of Infrastructure/Resiliency/ Public space and Material/Computation.

In addition, this project investigates the notion of the digital picturesque and its potential to blur the boundaries between architecture and infrastructure. Lastly, the project challenges the machinic understanding of programmatic hierarchies by hybridizing and automizing the operational dynamics between the two programs to produce new systems.

PROJECT SITE Fairmount Water Works and Waterfront Public Commons, PA In 1798, Benjamin Henry Latrobe implemented the first steam-powered water supply infrastructure in America. This municipal water infrastructure was further developed by Frederick Graff when he proposed the Fairmount Water Works as a sustainable alternative.

These groundbreaking inventions transformed the city of Philadelphia as manifestations of the industrial revolution and the birth of the ecological movement as a critique of industrialization. This historic site and surrounding waterfront will 187

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ONTOLOGICAL ORDER Shan Li and Siwei Zhu The fundamental starting idea of this project is to think about what is the physical form of data in the nondigital world and how it should be hosted in a way that could generate unique space for people to experience.

If we see the repetitive data servers as part, then by implementing a certain order, even repetitive parts could form a complex whole. Also incorporating with water treatment facility, we challenge the conventionality that machinery and service space is always hidden in the least favorite space, the goal of this project is to design a building facilitating not only for humans but machines.

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8 – Ontological Order by Shan Li and Siwei Zhu, Section 9 – Ontological Order by Shan Li and Siwei Zhu, Render Interior

10 – Ontological Order by Shan Li and Siwei Zhu, Visual Study 11 – Ontological Order by Shan Li and Siwei Zhu, Axon

In this project this team aims to experiment with water in different scenarios. They explore it as a method of form finding as well as, structural design, and programmatic agenda. To find form, the began by analyzing how water behave in gravity zero and how it reacts when a force is applied to it. This process that emerges from studying the dynamics of water allowed us to explore a different method of form finding.

Furthermore, as the project captures different forms from water, that begins to explore how these manifest themself tectonically as multiple puzzle pieces. In addition to studying how water’s physical properties manifest themselves in our project, we want to create spaces that allow the user to

experience the many qualities of water we have found in our research: Nasa’s Zero Gravity Facilities: one way of creating the effect of no gravity on earth, is to create an underwater facility. With that in mind, we used our buoyancy bubbles to create spaces where you can experience water at gravity zero. Water Management Facility: the project proposes an extension of the existing water management facility that exists on the site.

Danielle Willems

CETACEAN ASSEMBLE Ana Celdran and Beikel J Rivas

Data Center Facility: with this particular program, we take full advantage of the body of water that exists in the site. As we are already allowing water inside the project to create the needed buoyancy to balance the it on the water, we also use it as a cooling system and energy source for the data center.

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12 – Cetacean Assemble by Ana Celdran and Beikel J Rivas, Exterior Render 13 – Cetacean Assemble by Ana Celdran and Beikel J Rivas, Axon

14 – Cetacean Assemble by Ana Celdran and Beikel J Rivas, Visual Study 15 – Cetacean Assemble by Ana Celdran and Beikel J Rivas, Model

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[ARCH 634] ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS II Efrie Escott In the spring portion of Environmental Systems, we consider the environmental systems of larger, more complex buildings. Contemporary buildings are characterized by the use of systems for ventilation, heating, cooling, dehumidification, lighting, communications, and controls that not only have their own demands, but interact dynamically with one another. Their relationship to the classic architectural questions about building size and shape are even more complex.

With the introduction of sophisticated feedback and control systems, architects are faced with conditions that are virtually animate and coextensive at many scales with the natural and manmade environments in which they are placed.

The task of the semester is to establish an understanding of how the concept of “high performance” shapes the design of modern buildings, building on the basic concepts of energy transfer and thermodynamics covered in Environmental Systems I. Through case studies, we will interrogate approaches to building enclosure, dynamic interaction between active and passive systems, air quality, acoustics, and material performance.

[ARCH 636] MATERIAL FORMATIONS Ezio Blasetti, Robert Stuart-Smith Material Formations introduces principles of generative design into the discipline of architecture, providing opportunities for architects to synthesize multiple performance criteria within design and robotic production in the context of additive manufacturing. Participants develop an approach to design-computation that questions relations between form, structure and material across a number of scales, with robotic production and material dynamics also explored as active agents in design rationalization and expression. Lectures covering technical and research/project casestudies are supported by practical tutorials that focus on the incorporation of material-physics simulation, generative computation, and robot fabrication concerns within design and in partnership with structural analysis. While production is traditionally viewed as an explicit and final act of execution, the course explores the potential for aspects of building production to participate within the creative design process, potentially producing performance and affect. Students will develop skills and experience in computer programming, robot motion planning with geometrical and structural adaptation and material-physics simulation. Throughout the semester a number of discrete assignments are undertaken that facilitate the development of a design synthesis between form, structure, and material considerations alongside robotic production constraints.

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Professional Practice discusses the issues and processes involved in running a professional architectural practice and designing buildings in the contemporary construction environment. The course will describe the methods involved in getting, designing, and constructing a building project. Lectures will delve deep into the mechanisms for articulating a design vision, both visually and verbally, and the systems employed to insure successful implementation of that vision.

The lectures will draw connections between the student’s studio design knowledge to date and the instructor’s experience in practice including local building examples and guest lectures by relevant professionals.

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[ARCH 671] PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE I Philip J. Ryan

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EVENT

Charles Renfro joined Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) in 1997 and became a partner in 2004. Charles led the design for a number of projects including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and Zaryadye Park, a 35-acre park adjacent to the Kremlin in Moscow.

November 18, 2020 THE KPF LECTURE: Charles Renfro

Charles has also led a number of academic projects at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Brown University, and is currently designing new facilities for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Toronto.

He will be leading the renovation of Dallas’s Kalita Humphreys Theater — Frank Lloyd Wright’s only built free-standing theater. Abroad, Charles is leading the design of the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro, the Tianjin Juilliard School in China, and Adelaide Contemporary, a new gallery in Australia.

Charles received a Bachelor of Architecture from Rice University and a Masters of Architecture from Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He is a faculty member of the School of Visual Arts.

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Contrasting Convergence by Benjamin Hergert and Umar Mahmood Critic: Daniel Markiewicz [p.183]

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re·com·posed by John Nedeau, Changzhe Xu, Weiting Zhang Critic: Ben Krone [p.177]

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Arachnida by Christine Eichhorn Critic: Gisela Baurmann [p.141]

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Sensatorium by Meera Toolsidas and Ellie Garside Critic: Miroslava Brooks [p.163]

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Seneca Growth Complex by Diego Ramirez and Dario Sabidussi Critic: Simon Kim [p.159]

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Off Cycle by Nicholas Houser and Bingyu Guo Critic: Nate Hume [p.168]

EVENTS

February 3, 2021 GÖKHAN AVCIOĞLU

Gökhan Avcıoğlu is the principal and founder of GAD in Istanbul, established in 1994.

Among his projects are office buildings, public spaces, commercial spaces and residences in Istanbul, Bodrum, New Jersey, Washington DC, Virginia and Connecticut.

Among his most recent award winning projects are Media City, AKH KNDU Villas, KUUM Hotel andResidences, Pınar Logistics Centre, Fish Market and Trump Cadde.

A number of his projects have been short-listed for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, including two projects in Kadikoy Park, completed in 1998 and 2004, Yalova Elyaf completed in 2001, and Esma Sultan completed in 2005. Recent awards include 2017 WAFX Smart City Prize, 2017 The American Architecture Prize, 2017 AR Future Projects Awards, Jeu d’Esprit Prize, 2015 Green Good Design, 2014 German Iconic Awards.

He has been recognized by a number of different publications, including Wallpaper, Surface, City Magazine, NY Times, The New York Post, Transforming Cities — Urban Interventions in Public Cities, Braun Malls and Department stores, Archtekturfuehrer Istanbul, Gestalten Lets go out, Monocle, Architectural Digest, Architectural Record, plus design books such as World Houses Now, Urban Houses and Cafes, Restaurants and Bars, Atlas of Contemporary Architecture, Modern Interiors — Cool Restaurants in Istanbul. Gokhan has also been featured in TV programs, including BBC & Channel 4. Since 2001, Mr. Avcioglu has been conducting studios and seminars at the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris, Yildiz Technical University and Istanbul Technical University.

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FALL NEWS

AUG. NEWS DANIEL BARBER PUBLISHES NEW BOOK In his new book, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning (Princeton University Press, 2020), Daniel Barber, associate professor of architecture, charts the ways that 20th century architects incorporated climatemediating strategies into their designs before the widespread use of air conditioning. The book was described in the Architectural Record as “the most comprehensive and concise corrective to the reigning histories of Modernism that have tended to exclude, or at least consider only superficially, environmental context.”

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NATHAN MOLLWAY (MARCH’21) EXAMINES PHILADELPHIA’S HOUSING CRISIS IN PLACES JOURNAL

FALL NEWS

SEP. NEWS Nathan Mollway (MArch’21) describes the confluence of issues leading to the Occupy Philadelphia Housing Authority encampment on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway — set to be closed by the City — in an article for Places.

“Lack of affordable housing has been a different kind of pandemic in Philadelphia for decades,” Mollway says.

In his article, Mollway highlights the conflict between the city’s “functional shortcomings” with rapid real estate development.

“The occupation of the Parkway is clearly not a long-term solution to the housing crisis in Philadelphia, or to the inequality spotlighted by the BLM movement,” he says. “But it is a defiant stand in the face of a city that continues to fail its most vulnerable citizens.”

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NOV. NEWS ANNETTE FIERRO AND ARIEL GENADT PRESENT AT ARCHIGRAM SYMPOSIUM Associate Professor Annette Fierro and Lecturer Ariel Genadt presented research at the M+ Matters: Archigram Cities Online Symposium.

Organized with the Department of Architecture at University of Hong Kong, the symposium “reappraises Archigram through interpretations of the group’s work in relation to the histories and practice of architecture and urbanism across a wider set of geographies.”

Formed in London in the 1960s, Archigram was a radical architectural group comprised of Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Web. Fierro’s presentation, “Housing Subjectivities: From the LCC to Uncle Wilf,” was shared during the “Inhabitations” session. Fierro regularly teaches an elective course on the innovative group titled “Archigram and Its Legacy: London, A Technotopia.” She recently gave the introduction to Archigram co-founder Michael Webb’s lecture as part of the Department of Architecture’s lecture series.

Genadt’s presentation, “Dismantling Architecture! Archigram and Isozaki ca.1970,” was shared during the “Transmissions” session.

In 2018, the Department of Architecture hosted Archigram co-founder Peter Cook for a lecture and series of workshops for first year MArch students.

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Masoud Akbarzadeh, an assistant professor of architecture and director of the Polyhedral Structures Lab, is on a team of Penn researchers who have been tapped to drive “the Future of Manufacturing” with innovative, interdisciplinary projects supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grants come from the agency’s $40 million program to develop new technologies, processes and skills in the fields of “biomanufacturing, cyber-manufacturing and eco-manufacturing.”

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AKBARZADEH WINS NSF AWARD TO PURSUE ‘THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING’

Akbarzadeh’s team will focus on “self-morphing building blocks,” or cell-sized modules that can be assembled into human-scale structures, maximizing strength and minimizing weight in the same way evolution has optimized biological organisms.

Inspired by these biological materials, Akbarzadeh’s team will develop artificial structures that are load-bearing, lightwave-guiding, sound insulating, and self-morphing from the nano- to macroscales. The 5-year, $4.6 million grant will see them collaborate with researchers at Princeton University, Rowan University and Rutgers University Camden.

Through a modular design, the researchers will be able to combine these building blocks to produce meter-scale components and structures with unique geometries and advanced performance. The group’s proposal is organized under the program’s “eco-manufacturing” initiative, as these large-scale systems will be able to morph into final design configurations with less waste and with materials that have less impact on the environment.

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ADVANCED 701 Ferda Kolatan, Coordinator Associate Professor of Architecture

THE EMPTY CITY The extraordinary times we live in bring into focus the critical importance of the city as a place where agency meets matter. Rarely do cities come alive as they do when their streets are filled with protest, their walls covered with graffiti, and their institutions exposed from behind their concrete facades. In times of crises like these the dual meaning of the term “city” as both a physical place and a body of

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In a twist, the same qualities that empower the city as a public forum are also those that render it vulnerable to infectious disease. The eerie images of emptied out city streets due to COVID-19 followed by gatherings of thousands of BLM protesters will haunt us far into the future. The virus and the protests have exposed unfamiliar aspects of the city that lay dormant during ordinary times. Here, the city reveals its dependency on compartmentalization, partitioning, and protocol. In these strange times we witnessed how the street — the pulse of urban life — has transformed radically within days; from being sealed off and emptied out, to becoming the staging ground for demonstrations, to performing as an open-air venue for restaurant and bars.

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citizens — which reaches all the way back to its origin in the Greek polis- becomes evident. The architecture of the city is the staging ground for self-expression and political action.

In observing this current situation, we register the city’s enormous resources, its resilience, and its impediments. But we are also reminded of the larger historical transformations the postindustrial city is undergoing like the urban expansion and hyper-densification motored by the politico-economic forces of global markets.

Or the infrastructural and technological innovations that have changed how we move around the city and communicate in it. Or the growing ecological pressures toward cities and the environment that characterize our era of the Anthropocene.

In a time when “nature” has become fully cultured, how does architecture as a traditionally synthetic practice redefine its role?

All these transformations, which can be understood only in relation to one another, impact the complex material and cultural conglomerations we casually refer to as the city. Today, age-old territories blur, contradictions thrive, and novelties arise.

In this shifting urban landscape new arenas open up — not only for architecture’s immediate ambitions (be they realist, speculative, or utopian) — but also for a profound rethinking of the contemporary city, its meanings and values, agencies and aesthetics, potentials and challenges. Since the term “city” operates mostly by approximation, as a sort of specter without clearly defined physical or conceptual boundaries, a reexamination of what these boundaries are and how they function is an important aspect for urban architecture today.

The 701 Design Research studios, in their individual ways, are committed to this reexamination. Each section deals with a large international city and formulates an architectural position that registers the above mentioned, multifaceted trends and their impact on the selected city. However, “Future of Cities” is not an urban design or a planning studio. Rather, its focus is on a distinctly architectural scale such as building, city-block, street, infrastructure, park, etc. It is within this scale that the pressing themes of today’s urban life are reflected on and innovative design solutions sought. The future of our cities rests significantly on our ability to imagine an architecture that promotes social equity and participation, considers environmental and ecological threats, and integrates advanced technological innovations into progressive design proposals.

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EMPTY ARCHITECTURE /NEW HYBRIDS: RETHINKING NEW YORK’S FINANCIAL DISTRICT AFTER COVID-19 Ferda Kolatan (ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE) Caleb Ehly (TA) Ferda Kolatan (Associate Professor of Architecture): Founding Director of SU11 Architecture+Design – MsAAD, Columbia University – Dipl.Ing., RWTH Aachen, Germany

“I’M REALLY SURPRISED THIS IS STILL THIS EMPTY,” JASON BLANKENSHIP, AN OPTOMETRIST, SAID AS HE LOOKED AROUND A QUIET BRYANT PARK. “I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE MORE PEOPLE THAN THIS FOR SURE. I WONDER IF ALL THESE PEOPLE FROM THESE OFFICES WILL EVER COME BACK.” — New York Times (June 23, 2020) THE MOST ROBUST FORMS COME FROM A DEEP SYNTHESIS OF MENTAL HABITS. THERE IS MORE INFORMATION IN MESSY, MIXED, EXCHANGES BETWEEN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SPECIES OF THOUGHT AND ENDEAVOR. — Keller Easterling, Medium Design (2018)

What if Jason Blankenship is right and “all these people from these offices” will not return? The haunting prospect of an “empty” city in the aftermath of COVID-19 appears like a real possibility.

Fears of contagion and the proliferation of online communication tools may trigger an irreversible depopulation of business districts worldwide. For New York, a global leader in business

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1 – Artificial Intelligence Art Exchange by Xinyi Chen and Jingyi Zhou, Axon

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ART EXCHANGE Xinyi Chen and Jingyi Zhou

Although art has been treated in a commodity fashion throughout history, the commodification of it has not accelerated until the 1980s. In the past few decades, the overall art market has had a 2,000% growth and the contemporary art market share went from less than 1% to almost 15%.

This astonishing growth is associated with the increase of commodification of art-based practices, the rapid development of technology, and the technological making of art, aka A.I. generated artworks. Through these A.I. creations, we witnessed the dissolution of individual authorship in the art world and changes in how people evaluate artwork.

From this point on, art has moved away from the romantic idea of an individual genius artist’s product, while accelerating its process of commodification, for it to be an asset and eligible to be bought in a global market.

Our project wants to dichotomously explore and comment on this seemingly inevitable trend of commodified art by making an analogy of the past and the present. The once extravagant building should be viewed as a performative whole encapsulating the A.I. print shop, the broker’s office, and the storage/gallery where each space has its unique condition but is interconnected with each other, this idea is exploited through a new reading of the interior spatial conditions once present within the original building. Our program will be a new kind of art market, selling AI-generated artwork exclusively as investment items, offering partial ownership of art with storage and shipment service, while allowing the public to visit at a distance. There is a sequence of corridors with “baroque” like components wrapped around an introverted, theatrical space, presenting the intertwined relationship between the romanticized genius-invented artworks with individual signature to the asset art, where the sugarcoating of the capitalism is removed and the monetary nature is revealed.

2 – Artificial Intelligence Art Exchange by Xinyi Chen and Jingyi Zhou, Interior Render

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3 – Ferda Kolatan in Virtual Studio Review 4 – Ferda Kolatan in Virtual Studio Review

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5 – Virtual Studio Review 6 – Between Natures by Glenn Godfrey & Calli Katzelnick, Section

The need to radically rethink urban architecture has become a pressing issue even before the current health crisis.

New York, like most postindustrial cities, is ill-equipped to deal with the ecological, political, and cultural issues of our time. One reason for this insufficiency lies in the modern paradigm and its promotion of lifestyles contingent on efficiency, perpetual growth, endlessly renewable natural resources, and commercially exploitable desires. This type of society and the city it fosters, however, is no longer sustainable and perhaps never was. The modern dream of a progressive history, which effortlessly carries society to evergreater heights, has proven illusionary and needs change.

“Empty Architecture” may then become the ground zero for this change, ushering in a different kind of city, shedding past ideologies and embracing the present with an eye toward the future.

The physical desertion and emptying out of buildings and streets echo the conceptual void created by the seemingly indestructible alliance of capital and technology. What does it take to change the course? Architecture has unparalleled powers to instill images in our collective minds through which we first imagine and eventually alter our built environment and how we live in it. Architecture can become the new real.

The projects in this studio have focused on six iconic buildings built during New York’s financial heydays before the Great Depression. Each of these buildings is

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BETWEEN NATURES Glenn Godfrey and Calli Katzelnick

Between Natures subverts the romantic ideas of what is “garden,” and re-enchants us with the idea of nature or wild, presented through a lens of ambiguity. As this studio focuses on the post-COVID Financial District of New York, the American Stock Exchange is reimagined as a contemporary garden in the modern world; a space that merges culture with nature. As a new reflection of capitalism, the project emphasises medicinal research and pharmaceutical production. These two concepts of attraction and pharmacy are hybridized as the needs of people have been altered during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The project’s intervention primarily takes place in “The Pit,” a large space previously used as a trading floor, once a representation of economy and consumer culture, now holds the hermetic containers which act as both spectacle and contemporary monastic garden. The aquarium and terrarium share geometries of the existing structure and hybridize with the medicinal archives and dispensary through the use of pneumatic tubes, which are vital to the transportation of packaged prescriptions as well as material samples taken from the gardens. The project presents two contemporary monastic gardens as new ecologies; exploited for medicinal research while they perform through ambiguity as visitors never occupy their interior environments, and only experience its contents by retrieving prescribed samples.

used as a testing ground for a different kind of hybrid urban architecture in which new forms of nonhuman/human collaborations are fostered.

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7 – Between Natures by Glenn Godfrey & Calli Katzelnick, Project Description

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and finance, the consequences could be devastating. However, the unsettling notion of physically intact buildings with no human occupancy may just be the kind of trigger needed for a substantial rethinking of the city’s architecture and our interactions with it.

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MATTERS OF DISPOSAL Paul McCoy and Matthew Kohman Humans are just a tiny portion of all material objects that make and fill the city.

Engaging a paradigm of empty architecture within New York’s Trinity Center, Matters of Disposal reimagines this NeoGothic monument to speculative real estate as a conservatory for objects no longer in use, institutionalizing object value beyond hyper-consumptive capitalism. The conservatory

operates through a hybrid of an object distribution system and Neo-Gothic surface articulations that alter the conceptual and material edges between three actants: the human, the building, and the object.

The latent edges of this new monument engage the calling power of objects, their edges and their stylistic representations, to implicate that discarded value is the contemporary condition. The human, the object, and the building are valorized as assets released from the hyper consumptive ecology that occupies the city.

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8 – Matters of Disposal by Paul McCoy and Matthew Kohman, Exterior Render 9 – Matters of Disposal by Paul McCoy and Matthew Kohman, Interior Render

10 – Matters of Disposal by Paul McCoy and Matthew Kohman, Section 11 – Matters of Disposal by Paul McCoy and Matthew Kohman, Egress

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12 – Policing Data Garden by Yang Yang and Yiding Wang, Axon 1 13 – Policing Data Garden by Yang Yang and Yiding Wang, Axon 2

14 – Policing Data Garden by Yang Yang and Yiding Wang, Section 15 – Policing Data Garden by Yang Yang and Yiding Wang, Interior Render

The Equitable Building is retrofitted with a new core/roof structure to store, make accessible, and display surveillance data. Our project takes on the abundance of stored surveillance data and seeks to both reveal and further understand its implications on everyday life.

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The whole building would be three integrated parts which similar to the original articulation consists of three horizontal sections, top for the personal data labyrinth, core for the

engine, bottom for the lobby. We engaged language that comes from both architectural tectonic language and machine. The entry condition utilizes the filling of the void to empathize the drawn-in vaulted interior and a major component in the development of our data storage. For the core part, sandwiched sectional layers allow for nonhuman spatial conditions for all the requirements of the servers, storage, cable management, and most importantly the use of the thermal exchange. For the top part, the labyrinth and roof garden consists of the walls with the rendition of data to color and image, which let the visitors be exposed to the perversity of our life during the data age.

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POLICING DATA GARDEN Yang Yang and Yiding Wang

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FUTURE HISTORIES OF THE CITY Kutan Ayata (SENIOR LECTURER) Ryan Henriksen (TA) alter political, social & cultural discourse; it is a space where our diverse politics, aesthetics, desires, and expressions form countless microconstituencies and define the make of our mosaic. Outside of its continuArchitecture as built form is a clumsy ously expanding physical bounds, medium to speculate on the “present.” its aura lives on virtually. Constant input The slow pace of its becoming material, and growth of its virtual representathe inanimate nature of its gestalt, the tion through subjective perception deconvoluted manner of its medium, the fines and redefines the definition unmeasurable immaterial qualities it of the city. The digital connectivity of radiates, makes Architecture an insufdistant territories across the world ficient tool to shape and counter the defines new collectives through virtual daily transformations of our world. The cities. Groups, communities are definreality is that architectural speculaed beyond the bounds of traditional tion is perpetually stuck between its national borders, galvanized around incapacity to effectively influence and mutual desires and aspirations. A sense frame rapidly evolving conditions of of belonging, presence and citizenship the present and the unpredictable con- is ever more real in a virtual domain. text of future reality. Similarly, the speIt is impossible to paint a total picture culations at the scale of the city operof what the city is or what it should ate between now and eventual, as one be. Overarching attitudes to define must presently consider the conditions the nature of the city are at best overof a distant future for the city to take simplifications and cannot capture hold, for the evolving social conditions the nuances and potentials they hold to unfold. within. The city is too broad to reduce to a single-line item, it is too complex The City is a cultural construct. It is to cover with blanket visions. What still not fully known, it is evolving, it is are then possible visions for the future episodic, it is made of fragments of of the present city? qualities; it is capital accumulated over time as matter, slowly; it is governed This studio asked students to colby shifting ideologies and evolving lectively document speculative future markets; it is a stage where extremes histories of the city through the design of uneven distribution of wealth, racial of episodic instances. inequalities, social tensions most transparently clash; it is where cultures The students were asked to choose an most effectively progress, otherness issue that currently pressures and influmost broadly embraced; it is a space ences the development of the city. where mutual resistance and protest The task then was to document the Kutan Ayata (Senior Lecturer): Co-founded New Yorkbased architecture firm, Young & Ayata (2008) – Young & Ayata are winners of The Architectural League Prize (2014) – Received a MArch from Princeton University (2004) – Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architecture from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston (1999)

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1 – Kutan Ayatain in Virtual Studio Review 2 – Bhasan Char Island by Michael Caine and Amber Farrow, Section

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3 – Virtual Studio Review 4 – Bhasan Char Island by Michael Caine and Amber Farrow, Axon

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BHASAN CHAR ISLAND Michael Caine and Amber Farrow

2040 Throughout history, we have seen waves of refugees displaced, exiled or deported. As history repeats itself so has the involuntary migration of minorities to countries that can only offer temporary shelter. How could an alternative future for refugees be imagined where their place of asylum becomes more than a shelter? In 2020, the Bangladeshi government used the island of Bhasan Char to relocate the displaced Rohingya people, and provide refuge from the ethnic cleansing in their native Rakhine State of Myanmar.

This project investigates the Rohingya people, who over the course of half a century went from one of the most discriminated groups of people in the world to the leaders of their own autonomous nation. While still a fledgling nation, in 2040, Bhasan Char positioned itself as a repository for unwanted goods, specializing in the recycling of decommissioned ships. As the island matured their economy did as well, allowing them to start infrastructural development around the island. Over the course of 20 years the island turned from a place of refuge to their home.

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state and impact of these issues in the year 2040 and 2060 respectively, speculating on multiple outcomes for better or worse. The site of implementation and transformation was left to the students. The effort culminated in two digital exhibitions over the semester. First, the overall imaging of the speculative future context with regards to what the city could become in its fragments within the convention of a photographic series; second, emphasizing the nature of the specific architectural artifacts which spatialize the projected future reality with its particular characteristics explored through various conventions of architectural representation. The goal of these representations were to project a future reality that neither channels an unattainable utopia nor a nihilist dystopia, but episodic instances of plausible reality. The two key questions pertain to plausibility as established through the representations and the aesthetics of estrangement in realism.

TERRAFORM SEVEN Terraform Seven symbolizes the growing autonomy and self-reliance of the Rohingya people through a permanent governmental body. Governmental buildings are nested within this constructed landscape, creating a tension between architecture and ship hulls. The space between the layers of construction are given back to the public through extended gardens and open spaces: subverting typical boundaries between the public and governmental bodies.

The first forty years of Bhasan Char’s development proved that the definition of edge was important, both in terms of water and land. Constructed landscape became a means to address both the increasing need for buildable land and protection against erosion. Whilst shipbreaking became a logic of adaptation and the skeleton for infrastructure on the island. Through shipbreaking and terraforming new forms of architecture were embedded into this constructed landscape, layering the island with a constant evolution between new and existing infrastructures.

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5 – Bhasan Char Island by Michael Caine and Amber Farrow, Project Description

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THE GROWING BUILDING In Pun Narrative In 2060, the decentralization of the waste process is implemented. A waste collection/process center is located every ten-block within the city. Each type of waste sorted at the household has its respective process center within the neighborhood. Certain building design integrated the waste process system within the building, other processes it at the rooftop.

Organic waste is a big part of the waste thrown away each day.

Compostable trash holds a lot of energy and is very useful in fertilizing soil. The city approaches the compostable trash at the same local scale as any other waste. Organic waste is transported to the neighboring community garden or rooftop garden.

This system rethinks the unification of infrastructure in our daily life. Infrastructure takes on the aesthetic of architecture. Waste treatment facilities became part of the city where they regenerate the waste into another form of “life.”

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The Growing Building Organic waste is about one-third of the total garbage thrown away. Rather than waiting for it to decompose over decades in the landfill, the compostable waste is much more useful as fertilized soil promoting growth.

The project envisions a new way of dealing with compostable waste. A self-building architecture utilizing build forms with robotic arms attached at the bottom level. The building can construct soil structures layer by layer that provides suitable surfaces for growing and self-organizing using a binding-agent with the 3D printing in the deposition of soil from the in-vessel composting.

The sequence of photos visualized the building printing and growing over a decade of construction.

The plans and elevations show the total of three jump forms constructing the building. Each jump form is processing the neighborhood compostable trash and they can be at various stages of construction where the building can configure and change base on its need as it continues to “grow.”

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6 – The Growing Building by In Pun, Interior Render 7 – The Growing Building by In Pun, Section

8 – The Growing Building by In Pun, Plan

all these elements would move along major trails and create landscape hybrids.

This is one of the first people to fully experience the city through the wearable back in 2022. Valerie would be part of a project prototyping and creating content that promoted widespread AR technologies in our cities to enhance the quality of life. After much backlash, the senate hearings came to their conclusions and major policies were put in place to optimize the city for this new condition.

The elements would come together into new conditions that augment the landscape, mimic it, emphasize it or overpower it with episodic structures along major trails that hikers, animals and ecologies can interact with. We can now experience our old cities as curated ruins in the landscapes that surround our highways.

In 2020, multiple multi-national tech firms have invested in wearable technologies to bridge the gap between the physical world and a digital one that was slowly coming to be. Well, for this technology to work, it must understand the space around it to fully create a digital /physical interaction. Augmented reality maps the physical world around it and projects its digital information.

Another instance of their use can be found inside the new urban centers of our major cities. The London monument was erected in 2055, it sits in Trafalgar square and houses a carefully and densely curated inner facade of all the collected elements. The result is a hyper dense and texturized interior that we could not possibly experience in the new condition.

These elements were being stored in large empty lots throughout the city, idly waiting to be reused. Empty fields, warehouses, abandoned piers and so forth. most of these elements still today are waiting, a testament to the sheer abundance that exists. One instance happened in the blackhole zones, with the rise of 6G and now 7G, the remote locations have close to no network coverage at all and can not use the wearable technology to project, the idea is that

The common thread here is a new way of presenting history unlike it has existed before. it attempts to tell a more inclusive version of history, one that is not absolute, one that is broader, one that is collapsed and that collapses unto itself. preserving older structures as they have existed has become a nuisance to our highly dense and fluctuating urban centers, instead these old structures live on within these new structures in fragments and have found new life and purpose towards an ever-changing future.

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12 11 – Digimorphosis by Sami Samawi and Hosung Jung, Exterior Render 2 12 – Digimorphosis by Sami Samawi and Hosung Jung, Render Close Up

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9 – Digimorphosis by Sami Samawi and Hosung Jung, Interior Render 10 – Digimorphosis by Sami Samawi and Hosung Jung, Exterior Render 1

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DIGIMORPHOSIS Sami Samawi and Hosung Jung

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THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION Matthijs Bouw (ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE) Abinayaa Perezhilan (TA) Matthijs Bouw (Associate Professor of Practice): Director of Urban Resilience Certificate Program – McHarg Center Fellow for Risk and Resilience – Founder, One Architecture & Urbanism (Amsterdam/New York)

Irreversible climate change will result in areas of New York City becoming uninhabitable, in spite of earlier pronouncements by politicians to double down on the waterfront. In this urban resilience studio, we will explore the complex issue of ‘retreat’. In an initial research phase, the studio will investigate strategies for relocation from, and conversion of, coastal areas, as well as strategies for the preparation of areas at higher elevations for resettlement. Can we re-imagine the coastline, clean up our waste, and re-direct our resources? Can we envision new, integrated and inclusive communities resilient to other climate impacts, such as urban heat and stormwater flooding, but also to other shocks such as pandemics, with strong social infrastructures and a limited carbon footprint? And how do we get from here to there in an

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1 – Growing with the Jamaica Bay by Tianxiao Wang and Esther Jung, Axon 2 – Growing with the Jamaica Bay by Tianxiao Wang and Esther Jung, Exterior Render

equitable way? How does one decide where to retreat from, and when, and where to? After the group research, teams of 2 have designed individual projects based on a self-formulated

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GROWING WITH THE JAMAICA BAY Tianxiao Wang and Esther Jung

Jamaica Bay is gradually growing in size putting many coastline communities and infrastructures at risk. To relieve this, our strategy is to redesign the already expanding bay, to create resilience in the coastline communities, and to bring back its lost ecology and habitats. Foreseeing the new “growing” future of the Jamaica Bay coastline, the project plans for a retreat process that implements a proactive public investment while preserving its local culture.

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RE-CONCEPTUALIZATION OF COASTAL CITIES: LIFE ON DAM Meichen Ai and Tao Luo

Jamaica Bay is a critical area for the inland residents and natural habitat for flora and fauna. We created a climatefiction to simulate the continuous action of retreat and start the process of giving back to nature.

To protect the inner Jamaica Bay from frequent tidal flooding, we propose a dam for harnessing the tidal energy and creating a retreat opportunity for the people in the surrounding communities.

Communities can settle on top of the dam, bringing their current housing materials and lifestyles. This circular economy is further supported by clean farming and factories that create work opportunities.

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brief. Taken together, these designs form a catalog of responses that can stimulate the discussion about this often-controversial topic. As a core requirement for the urban resilience certificate, the studio’s mix of landscape and architecture students (with maybe a few planning students) will use a pedagogy that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, multi-scalar thinking, and an awareness of the relationships between physical and social environments in the face of uncertainty. Within this format, we will explore how climate change intersects with social, economic, and environmental justice.

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3 – Re-conceptualization of coastal cities: Life on Dam by Meichen Ai and Tao Luo, Exterior Render 4 – Re-conceptualization of coastal cities: Life on Dam by Meichen Ai and Tao Luo, Aerial

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POST-FOSSIL CITY Nuosha Wang, Xue Wan and Xiaomeng Sun

Our strategies include:

Against the background of climate change, sea level rise will also have a huge impact on industry. Thus, an industrial retreat plan in Newtown Creek in North Brooklyn is proposed, and connected to new industrial development in Southern Queens. In the project, we anticipate what future industry would be when concerning climate justice.

• Reduce pollution — wetland remediation towards current contamination in heavy industry areas • Redistribute IBZ — moving current industrial areas at risk to nearby communities or new concentrated zone • Reform future industry — identify future industry types and create space and building typologies • Resilience community — relate nearby residential area to new industry and revitalize work and life.

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6 – Post-Fossil City by Nuosha Wang, Xue Wan and Xiaomeng Sun, Exterior Render 1 7 – Post-Fossil City by Nuosha Wang, Xue Wan and Xiaomeng Sun, Exterior Render 2

8 – Post-Fossil City by Nuosha Wang, Xue Wan and Xiaomeng Sun, Aerial 9 – Post-Fossil City by Nuosha Wang, Xue Wan and Xiaomeng Sun, Plan

11 – Brooklyn Energy Highway 2100 — Retreat to a lowcarbon future by Tonghuan Wu, Street View Render

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The climate crisis is forcing waterfront residents to retreat inland, and challenging New York City’s resilience system — energy shortage caused by the location of fossil fuel installations in the floodplain, the incomplete emergency

evacuation system, and the heat island effect and pollution caused by the retreat to those densifying area...

ENERGY HIGHWAY is a clean energy production, transmission and energy-saving system to improve living conditions and rebuild the relationships between the community districts that people are retreating from and retreating to while ensuring a more resilient and sustainable New York City in 2100.

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BROOKLYN ENERGY HIGHWAY 2100 — RETREAT TO A LOW-CARBON FUTURE Tonghuan Wu

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11 10 – Brooklyn Energy Highway 2100 — Retreat to a lowcarbon future by Tonghuan Wu, Axon

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ARCHITECTURE’S DOUBLED MODEL: LIVING BRIDGE LONDON Homa Farjadi (PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE) Max Hsu (TA) Homa Farjadi (Professor of Practice): Principal of Farjadi Architects (1987) – Received a graduate diploma from the AA School of Architecture in London and an MArch with distinction from Tehran University – The work of her office has been exhibited and published internationally.

TOPIC: In a semester where our studio normally travels to London to study the city and its architecture to propose a contemporary project, we are invited to do the same only this time from right here wherever you are. As social distancing has laid new patterns and habits on the use of public space in most all cities our project for a post pandemic living bridge on the Thames will consider alternative spatial matrices for a bridge doubling as inhabited outdoor space.

The project’s development takes the same format as we have in the past relative to the study of London precedents in juxtaposition with a doubled referent to formulate a contemporary project considered in its potential spectrum of a proposed expanded field 1

THE DOUBLED HORIZONS Chengzhe Zhu and Qian Qiu

operates regardless of its purpose or its surroundings in an autonomous way.

The physical form we adopted to test out our ideas is a tensegrity pseudo sphere model created by Robert Le Ricolais. Maintaining the structural logic of the model, we pushed it to its limit. When a certain scale is reached, the subtle changes in proportion, symmetry, inclination, spatial partition, and depth of the interior begin to accommodate and trigger various ways of interpretation and appropriation, making the project more than just an instrument for crossing or a monumental set of disks, but an active and inhabited urban tissue spanning across the River Thames.

METHODOLOGY: The design methodology for the project will focus on models of imaginative and performative space when architecture is considered between disciplines.

More specifically we will investigate how we read architecture’s strategic models, assign value to them relative to the design and in the process of translation in their site. In the first instance a model might be seen to represent something we assume we already know in the project. Yet our interest is to suspend such one-to-one representational reading and explore structures of ambiguities that can be constructed in dialogic fields between disciplines.

We will take on operations within two

In this project, we studied the set of oppositions between the instrumentality and monumentality of urban elements using the Klein group, a mathematical set that accepts two self-inverse sets A and B and generates a corresponding matrix of themselves and their opposite Not A and Not B. Monument is typically something that occupies the center of one’s vision and stands for the value of consistency and permanence. Instrument is a way of achieving something or be specialized for a certain type of usage.

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We marked the transition from monument to not-monument as breaking the stability of the object and what it stands for. The instrument to not-instrument is an object which its purpose is blurred. The combination of the two is an instrumental monument that intensifies its surroundings instead of itself. And the opposite is something that

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1 – The Doubled Horizons by Chengzhe Zhu and Qian Qiu, Project Description

2 – The Doubled Horizons by Chengzhe Zhu and Qian Qiu, Elevation

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texts, in writing and in design, and will formulate a Kline diagram to map the productive ambiguities to be set up within the project.

ture, landscape/not landscape, and the secondary layer of fields in site construction, marked sites, axiomatic structure, sculpture. In our project this model will be applied to reading architectural design theoretically as well as in strategic positioning of architectural projects with specific additional references to the work of buildings.

TEXT 2- is a large set of works by Robert Le Ricolais held at the Penn Architectural Archives. The collection offers a rich array of physical models which experiment with primary abstract 6 and performative design parameters.

Robert Le Ricolais’ experimental structural models were means by which TEXT 1- Rosalind Krauss’s essay, sculpthis imaginative structural engineer ture in the Expanded Field, read the analyzed the performance of inventive works of sculpture during the 1960’s applying the Kline diagram. This diagram modes of bearing load in super long space structure of bridges, roofs etc. maps forces operating on a series of He called it ‘distribution of materials or negativities in the design work through structuring holes in materials.’ As he degrees of opposition or affinities the experimented with thickened surfaces project brings to bear between disciof sheets of metal which transferred/ plines. She observes the references in spread structural forces though the the fields of architecture/not architecsurface. The set of experiments where 226

5 – Homa Farjadi in Virtual Studio Review 6 – Flying Urban Fabric by Chaoqiong Guo and Bohao Sun, Model

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FLYING URBAN FABRIC Chaoqiong Guo and Bohao Sun

In this project, we started by studying le Ricolais’s structure models. The first model is double parabolic thrihex bridge for skyrail. After analyzing it, we concluded three features of this model, which are thrihex network, equilibrium and automorphic. Moreover, two tension lines pass through all the pyramids’ apexes and pull them all together, making it more stable. The second one is named light structure with heavy member. Le Racolais created a pattern for members come from two direction connected with each other with tetrahedron, pyramid joints. The special quality of joints becomes parameters in our further study.

Then, we reassembled pyramid units in three directions and use tension lines to pull them together to form a single bridge member. According to our second model’s logic of arrangement, we placed our single bridge members into it. Each joint works as a connective part, connecting two members in different heights and directions.

After studying the Kline diagram, we learned that we could focus on negativity and position contradictory terms together, exploring the tension and the fields between them.

In this way, different potential and paradoxical qualities underlying these conditions will enrich the concept and reach a level of ambiguity.

Interested in the idea of paradox and the idea of having lightness and heaviness in one structure. We came up with three features of lightness and heaviness: linearity and multiplicity, flying and grounding, open and enclosed.

Concluding these terms, we developed them into three groups of terms that could be placed in our own Kline diagram, which are bridge and urbanism, environment and interior, flying in the air and grounding.

Homa Farjadi

geared to find economy and efficiency in the load bearing performance, extend the spanning potentials of structures as well as find occupiable space within the structure.

Our research interest in analyzing this set is to juxtapose the work of performance and abstract form and engage with how the criteria from each work might be inserted dialogically in the larger matrices of an architectural project in London.

References such as the program, structure, interior, the site, technology, materiality, etc. will be introduced into the specific project proposed Kline diagram in parallel fields on the design of the London site of Thames living Bridge.

DESIGN PROCESS: Students will be asked to study the historic conditions of the work of the protagonists and choose specific models — one by each student — analyze the specific conditions operating within the work. The study of the texts by Rosalind Krauss will be presented to the class as examples of analytic reading of spatial/material design. Students will be asked to all read and present the chapters assigned in the studio meeting.

The study of the Thames in London will offer a specific set of conditions for the infrastructural and sociocultural operations of a contemporary post pandemic urban bridge and will enter into the diagram referents.

Furthermore, we placed directional connection, enclosure spectrum and vertical connection into the in-between fields. Sensory and cultural monument are placed at two apexes of our 3D version Kline diagram. The degrees of these conditions will change in different parts of our project. This Kline diagram becomes a guide, pointing out different directions one space could be and blurring the boundaries.

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Bridge as A Breach Yunshi Chen and Ruichen Xu Our bridge borns as a vision for the new living patterns in the post-pandemic era after 2020. With openness and flexibility in any of the spaces on the bridge to accommodate people’s new behavior. We envision our bridge as a [breach space] that could provide safe ways for people to enjoy the world as usual. Based on our selection of Le Ricolais’ [monkey saddle] and [octahedron] structures, we envision the saddle structure as a large-space surface carries by octahedron as the framework. This parallel model

allows possibilities of modularity, in which we melt the saddle surface into different conditions guided by the parameters based on the rephrased [Klein Diagram].

The different scope in gathering scale, intimacy, shading, and inclination is reflected by the unique saddle surfaces in each of the module.

In this breach bridge, there is no fixture, same with the Klein diagram. All spaces are flexible, [ambiguous], and lack of domain. It functions as an extended urban fabric, and a living bridge.

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Connecting the financial and cultural areas of London across the Thames river, the Living Bridge not only seeks to link the two areas together but also provides infrastructure and indoor and outdoor activity spaces. The Living Bridge sits between three primary positive identities, which are Landscape, Building, and Bridge, and interrogates the difference and tension between them. Moreover, the Living Bridge expands its interrogation into the negative aspect of these identities and defines what characterizes them as Not Landscape, Not Building, and Not Bridge. The positive

and negative primary identities constructed the formal framework of the Living bridge, while extend and merge between each other to create a secondary identity such as Indoor Space, Infrastructure, and Barrier from the positive identities and Urban Block, Tunnel, and Foundation from the negative identities. Each of these secondary identities shares partial similarities from the primary identities they extend from and occurs around the Living Bridge. With the occurrence of the primary and secondary identities throughout the bridge, the Living Bridge constructs a passage that invites daily activities above the Thames river.

Homa Farjadi

The Living Bridge of London Gordon Cheng and Maoqiang Li

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THE PUBLIC COMMONS, RETROACTIVE WORLDBUILDING Simon Kim (ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE) Adam Schroth (TA) Simon Kim (Associate Professor of Architecture): Cofounded Ibañez Kim Studio, PA & MA, (1994) — Graduated from the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association (AA) – Taught studios and seminars at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the AA – Director of the Immersive Kinematics Research Group.

Architecture — as a proposition or a form of intellectual investigation — is tethered to an environment of nonhuman or non-anthropocentric entities. This may be expanded into terrain and even Worldbuilding where outside-inside is not easily divided. Its implicit and explicit meanings and affects are to be developed in material and also in behavior over time.

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SHAN-SHEN: THE ECO-MYTHICAL Dekang Liang and Ming Jiang

Carved out of the mountain and buried deep in the earth, our project puts forth an eco-mythic shelter, where children are protected from the external stresses of their physical environments. As occupants of this world, they can climb the walls, run wild among bushes, and play in the slides — It is a kind of haven for them to play with their fellow occupants.

In this realm, the context is created, guarded and maintained by a god/mechanism called Shan-Shen. It may appear as though the architecture is enveloped by branches and roots that grow out of the mythical creature’s extremities.

However, upon further examination, it is a Dougong — the traditional wooden structure — that holds the inner space and caviites of the eco-mythic environment, covering the walls, the roof, the ground.

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To do this, we will imbue architecture and urbanism with duration, with its own agency and self-governance. We also address race, gender, lgbtq and ecological injustice as a matter and medium of space and environment. With new media and new materials, it is not impossible to conceptualize the built environment of ground and building as a sensate and 230

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BIOME BACILLUS Katharine Vavilov and Bridget Farley

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A world dominated by microbes serves to both include and isolate, much like a virus itself. As both individual bodies and society at large have been infiltrated by Covid-19, design principles must utilize the very characteristics of the bacteria itself. The ideas of microbiomes, membranes, and elements of infiltration offer potential for consideration of spaces designed for interaction, or lack there of. Looking closely at the pandemic politics of NYC, and the societal injustices that resulted, the disproportionate risk of exposure and exploitation within BIPOC communities is tremendous. The subway, a hub of both culture and survival for these communities, serves as the infectious link between human and virus. We design with and against the virus, creating a common space of healing, refuge, and testing to both isolate from and interact with the virus itself.

In a similar way to the virus attacking the respiratory system, our project embraces generative worldbuilding where infected microbes begin to infiltrate the poche space of underground structures. Spaces carved out of the bacteria either get taken over by infection or get segmented to reveal various levels of safe human interaction, echoing social distancing and PPE measures that segment society.

sentient field. Our role as designers and as inhabitants is to coordinate and live in this new city and new nature as a shared endeavor. Rapid advancement in light and heavy industries, with late capitalism, places us in a situation with an urgent need for advanced thinking of new environment and eco-intelligence for all communities.

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This studio will break from the classical hierarchy of human-centric design and allow for nonhuman (all manner of flora, fauna, and matter) authorship and stewardship. Rather than design from a compositional position, and to dwell in a seamless zone of human comfort, this studio will engage in a design process with transformations over time, to produce environments that change and behave for other-than-human requirements (such as seasons, water, air, animal).

8 – Biome Bacillus by Katharine Vavilov and Bridget Farley, Section

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THE FERMENTED COMMONS Tianhui Zhang and Hillary Morales Robles The Fermented Commons envisions architecture as a character of chemical transformations, and discusses how microbes are the original foreigners/immigrants, drawing its parallel to our human world. The pantheon of fermentation doesn’t glorify the gods in the sky or capitalism, abandons the anthropocentric notions of a fresh, clean and

pristine world. This world-building focuses the eyes on the production of terrestrial grounds that deepens the roots of human-microbes connection in traditional chemical transformation practices. It celebrates the rotten, spoiled and decay. Fermentation offers a spatial connection for dialogue between traditional cuisine practices, socio-political contingencies, transmogrification and the tragedy of the tragedy of the commons.

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Carved out of the mountain and buried deep in the earth, our project puts forth an eco-mythic shelter, where children are protected from the external stresses of their physical environments. As occupants of this world, they can climb the walls, run wild among bushes, and play in the slides — It is a

kind of haven for them to play with their fellow occupants.

In this realm, the context is created, guarded and maintained by a god/mechanism called Shan-Shen. It may appear as though the architecture is enveloped by branches and roots that grow out of the mythical creature’s extremities. However, upon further examination, it is a Dougong — the traditional wooden structure — that holds the inner space and caviites of the eco-mythic environment, covering the walls, the roof, the ground.

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ECOLOGICAL DOMAIN; THE SHIFTING REPARATIONS OF SENECA VILLAGE Maria Fuentes and Madison Green

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NEURAL PATHOLOGIES: (ARTIFICIAL) PATHOGENS AND THE REORDERING OF (ARTIFICIAL) NATURE Karel Klein (LECTURER) Patrick Danahy (TA) logically and literally. Pathogens, defined as specific causative agents of disease, can also be understood as disruptions or disordering of normative systems. In This studio has previously positioned George Canguilhem’s text, “The Normal AI as a partner, or collaborator, to the and the Pathological,” what is termed human decision maker, in order to chal“normal” is called into question. Health, lenge both the methods and the status he writes, can only be defined through of the artist/designer, and thereby obthe observation and identification of disfuscating the notion that AI might be ease, and he further argues against merely understood and used as a new equating health with normality. Normal, kind of tool. This allowed students to then, is not only necessarily determined collaborate with and employ the AI netthrough the lens of pathology but is works in order to develop new agenalso constantly re-defined and re-made cies for radical material and tectonic as a result of the disruptive presence forms and expressions in architecture. of pathogens. Introducing foreign parts This semester in addition to aligning and features, through AI neural networks, oneself with AI as a collaborator, we con- to our architectural project — our site sidered and deployed AI as (image) and program, for instance, will oblige genes or progeny — as pathogens, anaus to discover and define new archiKarel Klein (Lecturer): Director, RuyKlein – Visiting faculty, University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design

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SPATIAL SYMPTOMS OF A PATHOGEN Sharvari Mhatre and Atharva Ranade

This project is developed through an active collaboration with Artificial Intelligence networks. The latent space outputs derived from a marine life input dataset have dynamic figurations and allusions to 3-dimensionality and diverse materiality. The layered acrylic assembly shows the various mutations of the specimen to its current form which has attributes based in Callois’ understanding of biological evolution unrelated to function. The site intervention takes advantage of the qualities of estrangement that the GAN internalizes and lets it introduce new edge conditions that straddle the line between what is perceived as normal or physical and tactile, in the case of the site, and the uncanny otherness that the contaminants compute. The normal is a rock formation that makes pareidolic associations to ruins of a medieval city within the micro textures of the rock. The pathogen is a set of specific attributes of the specimen that manifest as symptoms of its influence on the normal. In the mostly above ground human spaces, the visible symptoms of the pathogenic transformation possess quasi-architectonic qualities of the specimen. In the mostly underground aquatic creature spaces, the invisible symptoms of the pathogenic transformation possess organic qualities of the specimen. The varying densities of the pathogenic transformation can be identified as the layered build-up or carving in of the the “other” DNA based on the degree to which the pathogen has affected the normal. There is a spectrum of changes that the normal undergoes in the physical realm. The normal rock formation is more dominant in some spaces and entirely taken over by the pathogen in others with the in-between condition scattered throughout.

These degrees of effect represent how pathogens affect bodies and parts of bodies very differently and most often unpredictably.

tectural expressions. In other words, new normals.

Observing that images produced with AI neural networks not only builds entities with misappropriated and misaligned features, but that these newly featured forms have a peculiar relationship with their visual environment due to their mimetic qualities, recalls the essay, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” by Roger Caillois. Mimicry, Caillois suggests, is a form of sympathetic magic, which embodies the “overwhelming tendency to imitate, combined with a belief in the efficacy of this imitation.” The AI neural networks work with a plasticity that seamlessly reconstitutes features into entirely new forms — uncanny progenies of a gallimaufry of parentage. Images produced with these networks, like the insect mimicry Caillois references, is akin to “an incantation frozen at its culminating point and having caught the sorcerer in its own trap.”

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UNCANNY MILIEU Xinyi Huang, Jingchu Sun, and Jasmine Chia-Chia Liu

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The project explores and reinterprets normal and pathological through the lens of artificial intelligence in an iterative process that leads to a redefinition of “new normal of architecture.” AI tools such as Runway ML and ostagram take the roles of collaborators with architects in the redesigning of Governors Island in New York City.

Our project begins to explore, interpolate, and generate new marine creatures through machinic visions. Then multiple style transfer experiments were performed iteratively to study the tectonic and textures, leading to a final specimen with two distinct materials that mimic calcium stones and leather, but blending well together. The “new normal” of Governors Island were reimagined through the GAN network and style transfer algorithm, leading to an artificial-looking ground texture as a base. We manipulate the new normal with the textures and tectonics from our specimen studies as pathogens that corrodes through the site, which then creates the architecture.

Programmatically in the project, the architectural space exists above ground serves as a research center and dwelling units for the residents, while underground spaces serve as facility usage. Nutrients and water were extracted from the new normal environment, purified in the machinic space, and transported to the human spaces above ground. Different materials adapted from style transfers intertwine on the surface condition, yet being distinctive and legibly separated. The project diverges from typical architectural creations, but reclaims an opportunity of collaboration between human and AI to create an uncanny occupiable architectural space.

“will to resemble” as the compliment to space’s “will to devour” what it contains.

Governors Island, the site for this studio, is an ideal test case for our investigation with its plethora of contextual paradoxes: the natural and the synthetic, the historical and the contemporary, the urban and rural, the terrestrial and aquatic. However, it is the liminal space between these categories that is compelling, the space characterized by ambiguity rather than clarity. It is AI that will amplify the necessary ambiguity latent in these territorial scaled conditions by introducing artificial density — density revealed and realized through the AI image. Intrinsic to these field

conditions are the qualities of density, ambiguity and paradox, terms also used to describe “the marvelous,” as embraced by the Surrealists, and defined

by Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park in this way: “To register wonder was to register a breached boundary, a classification subverted.” The becoming and dissolving of edges, of figures emerging from and disappearing into fields, of paradoxical features resisting classification — these are the traits we aim to be opportunistic with in order to test our alchemical AI experiments.

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(UN)NATURAL ENCHANTMENT Christine Eichhorn and Robert Schaffer (Un)natural Enchantment is an investigation into the partnership between artificial intelligence and the human decision maker. We view this selection of works, not as the final determinate ending, but rather the culmination of experiments conducted with the collaboration of AI. Utilizing convolutional neural networks and generative adversarial networks, each outcome is carefully positioned, iterated, and re-positioned until a successful, molded output is achieved. Moving through time, all scales of elements are examined, from the minute workings of seams, joints, parts, and texture within a catalog of specimens; to the larger relationships of tectonics, erosion, ornament, and materiality within an architectural scale. These ex-

periments examine architecture through the lens of George Canguilhem’s text, “The Normal and the Pathological.” In it, he defines Pathogens as specific causative agents of disease or disruptions of normative systems.

Further, he defines normal, not always through the lens of pathology, but also as constantly being re-defined and re-made as a result of the disruptive presence of pathogens. Using AI networks as a causative agent, these experiments allow us to discover new expressions, new normals, of architecture. Having a long history of native wood, Governor’s Island, or Pagganuck meaning “Nut Island” inspired a deeper investigation into wood and the myriad possibilities related there. The juxtaposition of such a primitive building material paired with the new possibilities of AI led to an enchanting re-creation of our (un)natural world.

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This project explores the design partnership between human and AI in the construction of a new normal. The architectural spatial potentials are manifested through the training of GAN machine intelligence before being reimagined into an architectural project. The machine is fed a carefully curated training set that is then able to produce outputs that have an uncanny quality to the resulting images. These images speak of an ambiguity between where “normal” and “pathological” meet. Familiar features may manifest in unfamiliar patterns, a natural quality in an artificialized composition.

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In this project the site on Governor’s Island has been reimagined into a new normalized terrain. With the insertion of a pathogenic species into the site, new boundaries and features are remapped and recalculated by the AI into its perceived normal state. The pathogen itself becomes a framework around which the land and water on the site come together and in turn form unique architectural spaces. The combination of human decisions with AI allows the development this project to ultimately subvert the viewer’s understanding of the natural world and question the nature of artificial and natural creation.

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AN ARTIFICIAL NATURE Cindy Zheng, Kathy Yuan and Henry Zeng

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ORGANIC WASTE TO ENERGY RECYCLING CENTER Joe MacDonald (LECTURER) Zachary Kile (TA) Joe MacDonald (Lecturer): Joe MacDonald received his MArch from Harvard and BArch from the University of Washington. He is a founder at Urban A&O. Awards include IDEA International Design Excellence Silver Award for Environments for the WaterPlanet, China’s Most Successful Design Award for the Johnson & Johnson Olympic Pavilion in Beijing, Architecture Magazine’s Vanguard Award.

We live in a time of urgency: climate change, sea levels rising, long overdue crises in race relations, and pandemics.

What are we doing? This studio is a research and design studio where we will continue to study concepts around resilience through the lens of computational design. Sustainability in the Americas offers a narrow focus on building materials and assemblies as the primary solution to environmental stewardship while neglecting a more wholistic approach to living with and practicing resilience. This studio wholesale rejects American models and definitions of sustainability, and embarks on a global search for answers.

If we look to China and their effort to phase out carbon by 2050 and initiatives in Europe and Scandinavia, we see

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ORGANIC WASTE-TO-ENERGY AND RECYCLING CENTER Bingkun Deng and Jingrong Ning

This project is an Organic Waste-to-Energy and Recycling Center in Queens. As a public program, this recycling center is not only running the industrial facilities, but also aims at bringing vitality to the city and increasing the charm of Queens with a giant public pool and its unique form incorporating the landscape on the site.

According to the flood zone, the land is very likely to be submerged in 2040, and even more in 2060. But our scheme will have the capacity of dealing with different sea levels. The building is sitting on its own artificial islands. The veins for transportations could be covered in water and be still available after being submerged.

People from Queens will enter the building from north, passing through the landscape that is covered by vegetation and walk up the ramps to go inside. And the south part of the building is for waste-to-energy processing. The waste will be transported upstairs by the logistic systems along the south side of the building, and get processed in the center zone where mechanical facilities are. The swimming pool is surrounded by the industrial zones and heated up by the energy that is generated by the waste-to-energy processing.

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more radical, responsible and inventive research and planning to address global warming. Sir Tim Smit of the Eden Project in Cornwall and his team, work

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across borders with agencies such as Mistra and the Stockholm Resilience Centre developing progressive frameworks to address the crisis we are currently facing.

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ANABLE BASIN ORGANIC WASTE TO ENERGY CENTER Donghan Yan and Yuxuan Liang

This studio is a research and design studio where we continue to study concepts around resilience through the lens of computational design. Sustainability in the Americas offers a narrow focus on building materials and assemblies as the primary solution to environmental stewardship while neglecting a more wholistic approach to living with and practicing resilience. This studio wholesale rejects American models and definitions of sustainability and embarks on a global search for answers.

This Project is an organic waste to energy center located in Queens, New York City. It provides us an opportunity to integrate waste-to-energy plants physically and programmatically within the urban contexts in New York, as well as potentially lessen the generally negative perception of industrial buildings. The goal of this organic Waste to Energy center is to develop hybrid WTE building typologies which not only re-connect and communicate to the public, but also integrate recreational and educational programs with energy production in a mutually beneficial way.

As designing this organic water to center, we learn from nature. Slime molds are master planners of nature. They look like fungi and behave like animals. The slime molds were placed in the maze with their favorite foods at both the start and end points, and the paths connecting the two food sources in the maze consisted of four different lengths of route. Slime molds shows remarkable circuit planning abilities and they have designed efficient and complex food transportation networks to get resources exactly where they are needed. This kind of network may be applied to the energy supply system or the material transportation system, and that also helps us generate the forms.

various initiatives in which researchers and users make joint contributions to solving key environmental problems.”

Through Mistra’s vision, the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) was tasked to “make a difference for sustainable development by building a world-leading research Centre that would take the interdisciplinary research on linked ecological and social systems significant steps forward” and provide “insights and means for the development of management and governance practices in order to secure ecosystem services.” They took on this task with great excitement, asking new questions, collaborating across disciplinary borders, and generating new findings and insights of relevance for sustainability.

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“The world faces major challenges associated with our environment, human use of natural resources and our impact on our surroundings. The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra) plays an active part in meeting these challenges by investing in the kind of research that helps to bring about sustainable development of society. This is done by investing in

They regularly and flexibly adjust and restructure their research to stay at the frontier. Since the beginning, this was essential because science is moving rapidly. In their first ten years, research has accumulated on what it means to live in the Anthropocene — the age of humanity. Industrialized societies are shaping the Earth system at the planetary scale. Humanity has moved from being part of the biosphere — that thin sphere around the planet which supports all life on Earth — to the prime driver of change in the biosphere. Humanity

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and well-being, and transformations towards global sustainability are necessary, definitely possible, and highly desirable.

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is truly intertwined in biosphere processes from local to global scales. It is becoming clear that a resilient biosphere serves as the basis for just and sustainable development, for human health

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ORGANIC WASTE TO ENERGY RECYCLING CENTER Qi Che and Jessica Greene In our design, we focus on developing rich public space through an interaction between Waste-to-energy, educational, and recreational programs. We have included educational and artistic programs in our building, provided a light manufacturing program that would generate jobs, and extended Gantry park north of the site.

An indirect but dominant design constraint of this project has been how to work with a site that speculated under six feet of water in twenty years. We are inevitably weighing how to create a resilient infrastructure that will have to protect surrounding areas and remain an active public space for the neighborhood.

Our design provides a constructed berm at the north of the site and a pavilion with deployable flood walls at the basin waterfront. The new building itself would sit on a floating platform in the expanded Anable Basin.

Our design process began through the analytical drawing of our fungal precedents, which were then re-interpreted

using Culebra program to analyze hybrid systems of interactions with custom visualization data and nature animal performance features data. From that we developed a form that sits low and lightly on-site through this parametric process and reaches deeply into the surrounding neighborhood. Dynamic pathways that run through the industrial buffer around the site can pull people into the waterfront and circulate them through a vibrant public space.

The building’s dynamic form allows for a unique interaction between the public program and the waste program. The swimming pool and event space weave between and sit adjacent to the waste programming, allowing visitors to catch a glimpse of the waste cycle underway.

The prospect of planning for resilient infrastructure in New York is socially, ecologically, and economically complex.

Precedents worldwide tell us that the most critical part of a successful waste-to-energy program is buy in from the neighborhood. We believe that architecture can help generate public investment in the success of a waste to energy program. We hope this building would provide an energizing, regenerative, and community-driven form of growth for the Anable Basin.

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8 – Organic Waste to Energy Recycling Center by Qi Che and Jessica Greene, Exterior Render 9 – Organic Waste to Energy Recycling Center by Qi Che and Jessica Greene, Axon

10 – Organic Waste to Energy Recycling Center by Qi Che and Jessica Greene, Interior Render

As an artificial inlet of the East River located at the periphery of Queens, Anable Basin was home to numerous oil refineries and factories. Nowadays, Anable Basin is gradually being occupied by residential buildings. Thus, introducing the recycling center in front of the riverbank which has turned into a public’s front yard, instead of placing it in an industrial district that’s normally afar from urban area, is a great opportunity to challenge the traditional characters of heavy industrial architecture, and encourage the public to engage into a traditionally undesirable environment.

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We wanted to demonstrate a possibility where the industrial process doesn’t have to take its own land and be separated so afar from the city. Instead, it can stay close to people and interact with our daily life. Here we are predicting a scenario where the city gets so dense and the buildings that are traditionally not people friendly such as factories and power plants have to invade the urban areas. The solution we were looking for is to marry the industrial programs with public activities and celebrate the waste to energy progress.

By putting the power plants on stage, people would be able to experience how much waste we produce in our daily life and witness the life cycle of garbage.

Joe MacDonald

THE PENINSULAR OASIS Huadong Lin and Zhenxiong Yang

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13 13 – The Peninsular Oasis by Huadong Lin and Zhenxiong Yang, Exterior Render

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11 – The Peninsular Oasis by Huadong Lin and Zhenxiong Yang, Axon 12 – The Peninsular Oasis by Huadong Lin and Zhenxiong Yang, Aerial

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COMBINATORY CAMPUS: SONGSHAN LAKE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY CONVENTION CENTER Thom Mayne (CRET PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE) Nicole Bronola (TA) dispersed urbanity — a constellation of polynucleated attractors, or downtowns, in which architecture is but one more network with infrastructure as its center of mobility. Our time suffers from an inability to organize, much less exploit, Heterogenous Ecologies of the possibilities that it has itself proCombinatory Urbanism duced. While we have relied principally on the quantitative and controlled Never static, the contemporary city frameworks of physics and geometry is dynamic, unstable, and increasingly to define and manage the seemingly difficult to trace as a linear process. incomprehensible, the qualitative and While cities have traditionally provided approximate world of biology is now stable and hierarchical spatial organizations appropriate to the once relatively emerging as a more useful model of both scientific and metaphysical explauniform nature of social composition nation. Mirroring biological evolution, and concentrated political power, the which produces incredibly complex contemporary city has liquefied into a Thom Mayne (Cret Professor of Practice): Founded Morphosis in 1972 – Mayne’s distinguished honors include the Pritzker Prize (2005) and the AIA Gold Medal (2013) – He was appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2009.

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1 – Thom Mayne in Studio Review

Thom Mayne

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URBAN PENINSULA Qiyuan Cao and Yu Qiao

Located in Songshan Lake area, Dongguan, a regional base for major high-tech and scientific industrial districts, this project aims to serve as a culture and science center to connect surrounding campuses and technology headquarters.

Urban Peninsula takes a unique approach to the site strategy and urban organization, in which the isolated island is connected to the adjacent lakeshore and create a peninsula. Instead of traditional methods of creating peninsula, such as reclaiming land from Songshan Lake, this project uses architectural programs as connective tissues to bridge the gap between the island and urban contexts. The future R&D Center along the lakeshore serves both as part of the surrounding urban context and the extension of the programs on the island. The Conference Hall across the bay extends out to enhance the feeling of continuity. The programs on both sides and the waterscape in between collaboratively generate a distinct way of urban connection.

In an effort to create a sustainable set of system, Urban Peninsula offers two separate circulations for automobiles and pedestrians to experience landscapes and water spaces on the island. Electric carts serve as a major way of transportation on the ground. Elevated pedestrian ways weave through the landscape canopy and ensure that programs can be accessed from different levels.

The result of this circulation system is a highly accessible and pedestrian friendly environment.

The true territory for innovation in urban architecture begins as a critique of the totalizing singularity that motivated modernist thought. Such a critique is possible through the design of the operational strategies that deal with the multiple and overlapping forces of a highly complex and entirely uncertain “collective form.” This entails work that in both its physical and mental state identifies the particular, the individuality unique to each situation, maximizing difference, developing a coherency, a consistency made of the partial, of fragments or juxtapositions.

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2 – Thom Mayne in Virtual Studio Review 3 – Urban Peninsula by Qiyuan Cao and Yu Qiao, Section

forms over time, the city is a field of permanent genesis; the constant flux of its systems is the means by which its social structure evolves with ever-greater complexity. Systems never get simpler.

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4 – Urban Incubator by Flori Kryethi and Dominic Deng, Perspective Render 5 – Urban Incubator by Flori Kryethi and Dominic Deng, Section

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URBAN INCUBATOR Flori Kryethi and Dominic Deng

We began by looking at the existing zoning configuration for clues on how our project can be sited. In tandem, the ambitions of Dongguan to become a global digital technologies research hub, the existing urban morphology, and the island-condition of the site, offer particular and unique opportunities for a convention center that architecturally connects multiple zones and challenges an atomized idea of the city. We envision our project as a regional incubator that facilitates the transformation of Dongguan from a manufacturing hub into a global tech hub.

Introduction To Songshan Lake Science And Technology Convention Center Songshan Lake Science and Technology Convention Center is located on an island in the Songshan Lake Park. Surrounded by water, the island has an area of nearly 6.3 hectares within the scenic lake zone. Positioned in the center of the Science and Technology Innovation Corridor of Guangzhou-ShenzhenHong Kong-Macao, Songshan Lake area is the regional base for major scientific and high-tech industrial centers.

Songshan Lake Science City will be developed as a scientific and technological innovation hub to become the core engine to promote the regional economy.

Thom Mayne

As architects, it is vital to understand the city as an evolving organism, an open-ended design that contrasts markedly with the closed-end assemblage that is associated with architecture. So how does one design for an open-ended ecology where the evolution is not authored or predicted at every detail?

The site strategy lies in organizing these operational and programmatic systems that are spatial, physical and flexible. As well-integrated and sustainable set of systems and develop an inherent intelligence that adapts, optimizes, and allows Connecting our island project to existing urban infrastrucfor multiple unseen elements, narrature meant producing an ambiguity between vehicle and pedestrian access. Requirements for parking and pedestri- tives, desires, contamination and lives. an plaza are further duplicitous, questioning the ability These systems, in turn, are integrated of infrastructure to delineate architecture. Our major proto produce a relationship between archigrammatic components of concert hall, exhibition space, tecture and urbanism that is acutely hotel and conference, are shaped by a spatial inversion or fracturing of the island shell, favoring outward looking intimate and inseparable; infrastructure, views and connections. In both section and plan, the goal housing, social values, service-manufacwas to maximize slippage in circulation and envelope turing economies and politics co-mingle using an architectural language based on coherent primitive forms. Complexity is the result of highly deliberate to create a complex organism within programmatic juxtapositions. a hyper-heterogenous ecosystem. These interwoven urban systems are critical Combinatory Urbanism offers an alterto your ability site architecture in a way native method of urban organization that where it maximizes the architecture’s integrates flexible frameworks of relarelevance and potential and ultimately tional systems within which activities, advances urban life. events, and programs can organically play themselves out. As such, Combinatory Urbanism, engages the premise of continuous process over static form, identifying the socio-political imperatives of architecture while pushing formal organizational possibilities.

The artificial nature of Songshan Lake and the existing island site prompted us to reconfigure landscape and built form concurrently, favoring urban coherence and a heightened environmental utility. Treating ground and building as a continuous surface sublimates the incubator scheme as an alternative to Dongguan’s current form.

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6 – Urban Incubator by Flori Kryethi and Dominic Deng, Project Description

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URBAN TRANSITIONER Fang Cheng and Yue Pan The project is located in Songshan Lake area in Shenzhen, China.

The area where the site is located is both a high-tech industrial area as well as an ecological scenic spot centered on Songshan Lake. Therefore, from the perspective of working and urban environment, our site needs to supplement the surrounding infrastructures, such as the conference hall and concert hall. Meanwhile from the perspective of ecological landscape, this project needs to respond to the green area with scenic spots along Songshan lake.

First, from the perspective of working and the urban environment, the site will be the transition from height of urban environment to height of natural environment like the water. And the form of the site and the land is reshaped to create a touching posture which connects the land and the site. Basic functions like conference and concert will be connected to the whole industrial park by being attached to the original road. On the other hand, in responding to the natural environment, the change in elevation combined with the height of the original site resulted in all the building volumes to be integrated into the landscape, which makes the whole site walking friendly. Combined with the treatment of the terrain at the entrance to the site, the entire base’s vehicular route is completed underground, while above ground is a complete pedestrian space.

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7 – Urban Transitioner by Fang Cheng and Yue Pan, Section

8 – Urban Transitioner by Fang Cheng and Yue Pan, Perspective Render

11 – Infrastructural Lineaments by Eric Anderson and Molly Zmich, Section

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The Songshan Lake Science and Technology Center is a new island campus located in China’s densely populated Pearl River Delta. The project positions itself as distinctively different from the existing urban fabric of Dongguan.

Rather than being a campus of discrete structures, the composition of buildings is unified through a formal language which seeks to evoke a notion of thrust and fluidity.

From a performative standpoint, these aspirations treat the campus as not merely a terminus but rather a hub which leverages infrastructure to interface with the broader city.

Conceptually speaking, this formal language also alludes to the region’s geology, as the project’s “force lines” suggest an alluvial fluidity found in the Delta.

The campus itself consists of four main programs: a concert hall, a convention center, a hotel, and an exhibition hall.

Each program is informed by a layering of undulating surfaces, which act as both an overarching roof and an interstitial datum from which volumetric rooms emerge. A main bridge reaches out to the nearby highway and bike paths, becoming an isthmus that spills into the campus center. This connection point is both a bridge and a tunnel, providing pedestrian paths above ground and vehicular/ service access below grade. As the program’s most private element, the hotel is situated along the island’s north side, having choice views of the lake. South of this, the convention center, exhibition hall, and concert hall are linked as a sequence of public-oriented spaces.

Thom Mayne

INFRASTRUCTURAL LINEAMENTS Eric Anderson and Molly Zmich

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11 9 – Infrastructural Lineaments by Eric Anderson and Molly Zmich, Plan 10 – Infrastructural Lineaments by Eric Anderson and Molly Zmich, Elevation

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SALINE DREAMS 4: ECOINFRASTRUCTURAL ARCHITECTURE (IN AN EXTRAURBAN CONTEXT) Jason Payne (LECTURER) Caroline Morgan (TA) Jason Payne (Lecturer): Associate Professor, UCLA – Principal of Hirsuta – Co-partenered the award-winning office Gnuform – Worked as Project Designer for Reiser + Umemoto RUR architects and Daniel Libeskind Studio – Payne holds a Masters of Advanced Architectural Design Degree from Colombia University.

This studio is a fourth iteration of coursework on the problem of Owens Lake. Each version has been different in learning objectives, design problems, and deliverables. This semester’s studio project is the most ambitious and different yet, briefly described here.

Full text of the more comprehensive syllabus begins thereafter. (However please note that our deliverables will be different from those described therein. They are included to help describe the foundations for this new direction for the course.)

Two primary themes are addressed through this design project, each their own separate problem to begin.

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SYNTHETIC SUTURE Alexander Jackson and Megan York

Situated at polygons T2-1 Addition and T2-1b, the Synthetic Suture aims to establish an infrastructural system that proliferates the active engagement of artificial ecologies located at Owens Lake, California. Acting as a direct resultant of existing geological and manmade flows, the project stitches not only individual polygons together, but toward the larger ecology of the Owens Lake Valley, and the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. The proposal engages the lakebed in three manners: infrastructural sutures, ecological sutures, and architectural sutures.

These devices become subtle interventions that nurture an active form of an environment. Focusing less on architecture as generator, large scale infrastructure elements act as key drivers for the generation and maintenance of the lakebed.

The site engages multiples audiences, from biologists and engineers that work within the lake’s environment, to visitors that come to seek understanding about the complex history of the draining of Owens Lake. Beyond human agents many nonhuman actors play an integral role in this ecosystem. Pipes and water lines that feed the shallow flooding ponds become sources for the genesis of life.

Tillage generates wells for growth of native vegetation.

Microbial life, salt grasses, and reoccurring wildlife now frequent the renewed lake. Eco-engineering infrastructure proliferates the creation of this environment and sustain the project well into the future, setting forth generations of revitalization.

The building becomes BACM (Best Available Control Measures) as the lines between what is natural and artificial are blurred, creating a strange and active extra-urban architecture through the means of infrastructure and synthetic ecosystems. The Synthetic Suture stitches together the natural and the unnatural, the managed and unmanaged, and the micro and macro, through architecture, ecology, and infrastructure.

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1 – Synthetic Suture by Alexander Jackson and Megan York, Aerial

2 – Synthetic Suture by Alexander Jackson and Megan York, Project Description 3 – Synthetic Suture by Alexander Jackson and Megan York, Exterior Render

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Ecoinfrastructural architecture refers here to existing and imagined forms of building in zones, conditions, and sites in service of extraordinarily large infrastructural assemblages. Further, our focus is specific to architectural design for infrastructures required of large scale ecological geoengineering interventions.

Extraurbanism expands the contours that most often form misleading conceptions of “city limits” — u ­ rbanism’s physical manifestations — ­toward those less visible but far more urgent defined by the extents of vast metropolitan infrastructural footprints. Los Angeles has long been a poster child for urban overreach into surrounding natural environments and the story of its effective incorporation of Owens Lake within the City’s various jurisdictions among the most significant. A key reference for a studio-wide development of a working sense of what extraurbanism is and how it might inform strange new architectures is Keller Easterling’s text

Each of the two terms above begin to define their own unique problems and are, to some degree, independent issues. For us, however, they are deeply related with the first problem (architecture and design) located somehow within the second (the extraurban context.) Built upon previous research and work described below, some of which is deliberately and decidedly ciruitous, taking more oblique approaches to defining a design agenda for Owens Lake (and similar extraurban infrastructural landscapes) — albums, images, general aesthetic directions and so forth — o ­ ur project now takes a rather more direct approach. Building design is our charge and as such, deliverables will reflect key aspects of architectural interest: what buildings here are b – Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014). Here the term “extraurbanism” is 2 coined with reference to Easterling’s term “extrastatecraft.”

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4 – Jason Payne in Virtual Studio Review a – Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).

Extrastatecraft. As yet, the architectural implications and b designerly interests contained within this expanded definition of urbanism — p ­ otential manifestations, morphologies, and visualizations — a ­ re largely unknown.

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made of, how they might be constructed, who are their occupants, and most importantly, why they should be there anyway. It is this last question that requires the coursework that came before this, and whatever the role of architecture within the inevitable development of such vast extraurbanisms as this remains unclear.

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5 – Virtual Studio Review

Abstract This project involves the engineered ecology and resultant aesthetic implications of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Dust Mitigation Project at Owens Lake, a large site in eastern California of major environmental, historical, political, and infrastruc6 – Biotics of an Efflroescene by Hayden Wu and Veronica Rosado, Axon

BIOTICS OF AN EFFLROESCENE Hayden Wu and Veronica Rosado

Situated at polygon T1A-3, the project seeks to explore how the post remediation phase of gravel’s apparent inertness can translate into active elements of mineral flows and ecological revival. Introducing brine as the secondary best available control measure (BACM), the site starts to build off of the underlying effects of efflorescence. The proposal explores the potential behind efflorescence, cataloged as a secondary effect of Owens Lake, as a primary resource instead that divulges the lake’s aesthetic and ecological vitality. Efflorescence operationally infiltrates the site at all scales. From the top-down viewing experience at the macro and micro scale through to the surface’s accumulation of natural salt and minerals which aggregate in dynamic shorelines and landscape. The flowing brine pools that run through the site serve as vital sources for halobacterium and algae cultivation, which then attracts other organisms like migratory birds to forage and nest in the nearby gravel lands. Dividing the site into smaller polygons is an imposing design disposition that turns the polygon into a post remediation microcosm for research on what engineers and scientists could potentially externalize at Owens Lake at large.

Three main programs are allocated in this microcosm: gravel distribution infrastructure, brine research facility and snowy plover preservation center. Starting from the north side polygons, the unstable nature of the surroundings prompt a rather stable program for gravel infrastructure. Moving down to the south east polygons, the increasing engagement with the east channel areas becomes an ideal location for brine bacterium and efflorescence control exploration. The active engagement of the brine and gravel lands builds up the final ecological rejuvenation: the preservation of the native species snowy plovers. For years, LADWP has been carefully protecting the nesting sites of the snowy plovers on these gravel zones. Their delicate nature prompted this project to include the snowy plovers as our/agent in the landscape, carefully laying out nesting zones using several indented gravel beds surrounded with managed vegetation acting as protective radii.

“Efflorescene Bioma” at T1A-3 becomes a host which subsidizes the aforementioned landscape effects. This creates a more porous reading of the post remediation consequences from both far satellite and perspectival points of view.

In the end, the buildings aim to utilize the channelized brine technique to create a multiplier effect that brings gravel from a passive to an active state. As a result, efflorescence is a landscape making tool. The interplay of these multiplying effects define a spatial software that illustrates gravel’s generative sequences. We will explore these spatial definitions and relationships according to Easterling’s definition of form as an action rather than as an object.

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tural significance. Until very recently the largest single source of dust pollution in the U.S., the studio examines control methods developed by LADWP to manage this difficult landscape: a complex synthesis of fields, pools, plants, animals, microorganisms, chemicals, minerals, roads, berms, dams, plumbing, power lines, grading, gravel, roads, sensors, and salt that is only partially visible to the human eye. The effects of these reworkings of the landscape are striking, inevitably aesthetic in their expression. Our work imagines a near-future evolution of this infrastructure toward strange new landscapes, turning radically empirical environmental engineering techniques toward a more expansive, aesthetic dimension. The design problem imagines arguments, in the form of visual albums and design projections for the creation of a new national monument for this gigantic anthropocene landscape.

8 – Biotics of an Efflroescene by Hayden Wu and Veronica Rosado, Aerial Close Up

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7 – Biotics of an Efflroescene by Hayden Wu and Veronica Rosado, Project Description

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EXPOSURES AWASH Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo “Exposures Awash” explores concepts from Gerhard Richter Landscape paintings, Where he re-imagines landscapes using blurring, which creates a flickering between the subject and the medium. This flickering reshapes the environments into hyper realities, where saturation, exposure, and resolution create a new understanding of landscape. Using Vaughn Oliver’s shoe-gaze album covers as a visual lens, we transformed existing Owens lake satellite images into new unfamiliar realities. By superimposing logics from Gerhard Richter and Vaughan Oliver onto Owens Lake, we established a form of double exposure or flickering between landscape and eco-infrastructure creating new synthetic ecologies.

Our proposal, explores an overlaying of ideas and logics from the site including delimitation across the tillage grid, defined natures, and perimeter networks, these form a new typology on Owens lake. The satellite images view reveals this typology as a super long perimeter eco-

infrastructure, which can only be experienced in the macro scale of a satellite image. The satellite image is first presented in black and white as a way examining geography, tectonics, and fluid natures. The relationship between footprint and landscape is explored when the site is zoned into smaller vignettes, these small moments reveal how footprint and landscape become new elements of the Owens lake ecology.

Analytical Minard maps play an important role in representing non-static flows, this Minard map diagrams how the flow of brine merges with footprints and the adjacent polygons. The Minard map bridges the geographical understanding towards the hyper real experience that would exist in Owens Lake. The program of these footprints is a Bacm research center, where the landscape is rezoned into smaller polygons for environmental experiments, focusing on tillage and flooding. The roofscapes of these footprints allow for viewing of the micro polygons by researchers and the public. Visitors exist in between machine support systems and the synthetic landscape, constantly in view of both.

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9 – Exposures Awash by Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo, Axon 10 – Exposures Awash by Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo, Aerial

11 – Exposures Awash by Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo, Aerial Close Up 12 – Exposures Awash by Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo, Perspective Render

Owen’s Lake, an environmental disaster zone, is now home to an ecosystem of BACMs working to mitigate dust pollution. Often, these BACMs exist separately in a neatly sorted array of polygons. The potential for these BACMs to function and thrive beyond dust mitigation lies at the points in which they collide. At these edges, a natural state of anabiosis takes over; this is a temporal state of death, or a period of suspended animation, in which one BACM may sacrifice itself to the other.

Site T1-2A is currently designated as a managed vegetation site with tillage backup. There is a three year window with biannual planting seasons that must be completed, resulting in site coverage of at least 37%, with patchiness accounted for in a gridded analysis of success. The struggle to meet this timeline, with weather influx or infrastructural issues decimating key planting times, prevents other sites from sustaining this BACM. Tillage roughens the surface which captures dust particles and, furthermore, provides necessary edging to the vegetation fields due to the arid system. While important to be designed perpendicular to prevailing winds, their patterning on site can apply to a variety of other services, such as planting separation and flood control. The intersection then of tillage and the other BACMs creates opportunities for intentional design.

Cutting across the center of the site crafted by two aligned culverts is a flow channel. With the longest border of the main brine line and the intended study of botany’s resilience to salinity, the anabiosis of the symbiotic BACM concedes a brine bloom to flourish in this zone. Following fluid dynamics and the patterning of tillage as its borders, the halophilic object takes shape and becomes the ultimate catalyst of anabiosis.

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THE ANABIOSIS OF THE SYMBIOTIC BACM Karen Vankovich

The plantings on site are inherently reliant on the composition of its host, the ground. If saline levels are not moderated, the vegetation will not survive. The border of the halophilic object is a flexible membrane, expanding and contracting based on site conditions of leaching, runoff, and more. Its edge will remain a constant point of high activity: a visual result of Darwinism.

The google tourist now has attraction to visit, fostered by the image of the halophilic object, yet its definition as such is subverted once on the ground. The mouth of the bloom is left unblocked by built intervention, welcoming visitors on a collection of curated and uncurated routes. The architectural interventions on site are positioned along the perimeter, programmatically split by the halophilic object. Their posturing on site ultimately determines their collision with the halophilic object, sparing or sacrificing its landscape to the edge.

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13 – The Anabiosis of the Symbiotic BACM by Karen Vankovich, Satellite View Render 14 – The Anabiosis of the Symbiotic BACM by Karen Vankovich, Axon Close Up

15 – The Anabiosis of the Symbiotic BACM by Karen Vankovich, Axon 16 – The Anabiosis of the Symbiotic BACM by Karen Vankovich, Aerial

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MACHINIC-INSITES Robert Stuart-Smith (LECTURER) Patrick Danahy (TA) Robert Stuart-Smith (Assistant Professor of Architecture): Assistant Professor of Architecture and Program Director, MSD Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD–RAS) – Director of the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab | Penn Architecture & UCL Computer Science – Director of Robert Stuart-Smith Design, Founding Partner of Kokkugia – Ma. Architecture & Urbanism, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London

We are no longer cognizant of the nature of today’s built environment or the technologies that enable it. Urban Operating Systems (Urban OS) such as living-PlanIT™ manage city logistics in real-time; monitoring traffic and initiate trash collection on-demand, while high-frequency trading in the global financial market is being relayed off non-descript rooftops, unaware to passers-by below. The built environment is a complex, chaotic system, that emerges from the interplay of a multitude of agencies, that are perceived, surveyed and managed by machine vision and machine learning technologies, of which we have little knowledge or oversight of. Machinic-inSites explores high-frequency building — ­ a temporary occupancy of the built

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URBAN DYNAMIC ARCHIVE Zhe Zhong and Sijie Gao

The project started from the rapid urban changes and renovation. The built environment of city is constantly in flux and not merely the physical entity of communities and also the memory, the culture of them was forgotten, during the gentrification as high line park could be a case. This project aimed to record and exhibit as museum for urban memory. The program, or in other words, the method of recording was through capturing the artifacts on site, to some extent similar to the time capsule. The artifacts collected would be like the content in the capsule for the memorial of the specific time period, but in an architectural scale. Different from the static capsule, this recording museum was able to adapt itself to the built environment and as the urban environment was constantly changing, this project could also keep taking the process of extension and demolition over time. As a result, it could be called as the dynamic adaptation. The “dynamic capsule” tended to fit into here to record the change of communities during the rail park renovation, so this nearby building was selected to become its site. The adaptation process and rapid installation would necessarily require quick design, so machine learning could be applied here as the semiautonomous design process. The reading by machines gave this project the kind of appearance both alienated and belonged to the site, to the built environment.

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1 – Urban Dynamic Archive by Zhe Zhong and Sijie Gao, Research

2 – Urban Dynamic Archive by Zhe Zhong and Sijie Gao, Project Description

Robert Stuart-Smith

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4 – Urban Dynamic Archive by Zhe Zhong and Sijie Gao, Exterior Render

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3 – Robert Stuart-Smith in Virtual Studio Review

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6 – Nomad Anti-Violence Center by Haochun Zeng and Heyi Song, Exterior Render

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NOMAD ANTI-VIOLENCE CENTER Haochun Zeng and Heyi Song

As a temporary building, this project is tailored to the unoccupied gap between a future railway park and an existing school, it is designed with the help of machine learning to evolve with the development of railway park. The plants begin to take over after the architectural elements are demolished with only the main structure remains, allowing the railway park extends into the structure and the plants, the animals become the inhabitants of this place.

This project serves the community as a temporary antiviolence education center that wondering around the city.

It seeks for the unoccupied urban space and its function evolves with the development of its context. In this case, during the rebuilt of the abandoned railway, the temporary building functions as a plant research center that helps with the design of the park. When the construction of the park is done, the project will start its function as an anti-violence center, which brings the students from school into it, and the plant hub will instead be a plant maintenance hub.

environment that can be rapidly developed through computer vision and machine learning technologies and implemented by additive manufacturing on-demand. Operating as a bespoke tailored infill, proposals speculate on community-led entrepreneurialism, challenging established design and development practices through novel forms of autonomous agency and aesthetic affect.

This temporary structure is an infill of the city and explores the opportunity of reallocating city space resources by attaching itself to existing buildings or other urban infrastructures. Our society evolved from nomadic life which relies on an ability to share a common ground and adapt to different environments. We believe that we evolved to a more productive and settled community, but the social tension that is exacerbated during the pandemic is questioning are we allocating resources equally to each citizen and are we ignoring the underprivileged groups under such unusual circumstances.

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7 – Nomad Anti-Violence Center by Haochun Zeng and Heyi Song, Project Description

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UBER – ART CENTER Huajie Ma and Jing Yuan Our site is in Callow Hill, Philadelphia. Our engagement to the site is a part of the untouched railway, an unused land of bushes, and an unrenovated parking lot. As Uber has several greenlight hub that are used for providing aids for uber drivers and enable the company to communicate with its employees and the communities. While inner-city land is expensive to lease, Uber has negotiated a temporary lease without fees to Philadelphia’s rail park district in exchange for providing public outdoor space and a cultural gallery. The UBER – ART Center is a temporary Uber services center combined with art gallery. As Uber Center can provide necessary assistance for the drivers, it also become the destination for drivers to engage to local art works.

Local artist could express their thoughts in this UBER-ART Center. Either attracting more people to see their works

on site or been delivered to more places by Uber drivers.

In relation to site feature with machine vision, we utilized some custom computer vision and multi-agent design methods for generating an initial 3D design from a 3D site scan. We then developed a back-and-forth dialogue between multiple iterations of explicit design by us and machine vision and learning. Our interest was in leveraging machine perception to interpret what we were doing and to contribute further to the design. These machine learning results were used to explore rapid design development through semi-autonomous methods, and increases in complexity, intricacy, color, and texture. Developing unique character for the project from machinic perception. 3D printing would be used for this project. Different parts would be prefabricated in factory so that saving construction time on site. The methods for the construction are Lenticular printing, it is an emerging technique that contains a color shifting quality.

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8 – UBER – ART Center by Huajie Ma and Jing Yuan, Aerial 9 – UBER – ART Center by Huajie Ma and Jing Yuan, Interior Render

10 10 – UBER – ART Center by Huajie Ma and Jing Yuan, Model

With the partnership of machine perception, the project explored a colorful polyscalar volume that is tightly tailored to the site surroundings. Continues with the exterior’s nondirectional and porous aesthetic, the program of immersive theatre challenges the traditional theater in fixed and massive settings. Our project designed five performance spaces linked in multiple routes.

Audiences are meant to immersive themselves in the designed space and explore their own adventure. The tailored choreograph scene with the exiting fictional environment renders an unconscious subliminal aspect of the theatrical world, which engages the senses in a primordial instinctive way rather than traditional consciousness. The project aims not only rekindle an artistic neighborhood but eventually provides a possibility to construct a theatric urban atmosphere in eastern Philadelphia.

Robert Stuart-Smith

URBAN STAGE Saina Xiang and Yuhao Zhang

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14 13 – Urban Stage by Saina Xiang and Yuhao Zhang, Interior Render 14 – Urban Stage by Saina Xiang and Yuhao Zhang, Aerial

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11 – Urban Stage by Saina Xiang and Yuhao Zhang, Style Transfer 12 – Urban Stage by Saina Xiang and Yuhao Zhang, Street View Render

ADVANCED 701

[ARCH 710] CONTEMPORARY THEORY 1989-PRESENT Alexandra Quantrill A chronological overview of the approaches and attitudes adopted by architects, theorists and inter-disciplinary writers from 1993- today that havehelped shape the current discourse of architecture. This course will introduce and contextualize key projects, and polemics over the last 25 years. Central themes in this course include the impact of digital technologies and methods of design, production and materiality. These are explored through texts, movements, projects and buildings that help form an overview that has shaped the contemporary condition that we live in. There have been a myriad of different approaches and through a select set of readings and lectures students will be exposed to crucial texts, projects and buildings making students versatile and knowledgeable in the important concepts that shape our current discourse. A focus will be the organization, configuration, and articulation of buildings and the conceptual and cultural arguments they are associated. Formal, organizational, and material characteristics of this period will be explored. This class will develop students’ knowledge and provide a platform from which they can continue the discussions surrounding architectural thought and practice. The students will learn to communicate their ideas verbally and in writing.

Contemporary topics in architecture theory and projects are introduced in a weekly lecture format critical to the shaping of our discipline today. A weeklyrecitation session allows students to engage with the readings critically in the subject matter. A midterm and final paper are required to pass this class. (Topics to be covered: Seminal projects and buildings in the last 25 years, situating the architects work within a culture of debate and discourse identifying the important readings surrounding each building/project.) This course is a requirement of the MSD-AAD curriculum.

[ARCH 711] CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL DISCOURSE: RACE, ENVIRONMENT, GENDER Daniel Barber Architecture, as a profession and as an academic discipline, is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Ongoing pressures related to increased climatic instability, alongside the intensified recognition of inequities resulting from both the #metoo movement and Black Lives Matter, have all shaken the foundations of the field. They are opening pathways to new ways of considering the role of architecture in the public sphere, while also encouraging architects and others to reimagine the contours of the future we might build. Our aspirations are changing, and the contemporary architectural discourse reflects this. The course has two ambitions: to examine and engage these righteous transformations through a review of recent literature in the field, and to consider the role of scholarship in shepherding these transformations into the profession and discipline. A corollary ambition: to provide a forum for PhD students and MArchs to consider their research interests and examine their scholarly methods in the context of these transformations. Guests — authors and editors of the books being read — will join the seminar discussion most weeks, to give us insight into their process and ambitions.

[ARCH 711] MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN JAPAN — CULTURE, PLACE, TECTONICS Ariel Genadt This seminar explores the diversity of forms and meanings that modern architecture took on in Japan since its industrialization in the 19th century. With this focus, it poses wider questions on the capacity of construction, materials and their assembly to express and represent cultural, aesthetic, climatic, social, and political concerns. Rather than an exhaustive survey, the course demonstrates salient topics and milestones in Japan’s recent architectural history, as a mirror of parallel practices in the world. It examines drawings, images, texts, and films, about architects whose work and words were emblematic of each topic.

[ARCH 711] REBELLIOUS ARCHITECTURE: ON SOCIAL MOVEMENTS FOR SPATIAL JUSTICE Eduardo Rega Calvo The seminar offers the theoretical tools to explore a rebellious mode of practice for architecture, one that acknowledges its relations to the structures of power, and stands in solidarity with movements for justice. Through weekly readings, class presentations, and discussion, students will be introduced to the tools with which to navigate architecture’s entanglements with the social and political processes that produce space. They will become familiar with key concepts like the rebel, refusal, and spatial justice; expand their exposure to the roots of structural injustice (capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy), and their inscription in space and architecture; and learn from social movements for justice (autonomist, feminist, decolonial, and post-capitalist) as they refuse the status-quo and construct other, more equitable worlds. Covering a wide range of essential theoretical texts, the class positions architecture in relation to other fields of study, including geography, anthropology, political theory, and beyond.

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Acknowledging the ubiquitous proliferation of “Hi-Tech” architecture in contemporary London, this research seminar examines the scope of technology as it emerges and re-emerges in the work of various architects currently dominating the city. This scope includes the last strains of post-war urbanism which spawned a legacy of radical archtecture directly contributing to the Hi-Tech; a particular focus of the course will be the contributing and contrasting influence provided by the counter-cultural groups of the 60s – Archigram, Superstudio, the Metabolists and others. Using the premise of Archigram’s idea of infrastructure, both literal and of event, the course will attempt to discover relational networks between works of the present day (Rogers, Foster, Grimshaw, etc). As this work practices upon and within public space, an understanding of the contribution of technology to urban theatricality will evolve which is relevant to contemporary spheres of technological design practices. Students will be required to produce and present a term research paper.

ADVANCED 701

[ARCH 719] ARCHIGRAM AND ITS LEGACY: LONDON, A TECHNOTOPIA Annette Fierro

[ARCH 721] DESIGNING SMART OBJECTS FOR PLAY AND LEARNING Assaf Eshet Today’s children enjoy a wide array of play experiences, with stories, learning, characters and games that exist as physical stand-alone objects or toys enhanced with electronics or software. In this course, students will explore the domain of play and learning in order to develop original proposals for new product experiences that are at once tangible, immersive and dynamic. They will conduct research into education and psychology while also gaining hands-on exposure to new product manifestations in a variety of forms, both physical and digital. Students will be challenged to work in teams to explore concepts, share research and build prototypes of their experiences in the form of static objects that may have accompanying electronic devices or software. Final design proposals will consider future distribution models for product experiences such as 3D printing, virtual reality and software-hardware integration. Instruction will be part seminar and part workshop, providing research guidance and encouraging connections will subject matter experts throughout the Penn campus.

[ARCH 724] IMMERSIVE KINEMATICS/PHYSICAL COMPUTING: BODY AS SITE Simon Kim, Mark Yim The aim of this course is to understand the new media and new technologies of design within the format of a research seminar. There are two research components: the first is implementing a prototype for interactive bodies.

The second is a project working in reactive and nonreactive materials.

The subject matter of new media is to be examined and placed in a disciplinary trajectory of building design and construction technology that adapts to material and digital discoveries that place anti-racism at its core.

Technology is not neutral, and techno-segregation must be confronted. We will build prototypes with the new media, and establish a disciplinary knowledge for ourselves as an inclusive practice.

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ADVANCED 701

[ARCH 725] DESIGN THINKING Sarah Rottenberg Creating new product concepts was once a specialized pursuit exclusively performed by design professionals in isolation from the rest of an organization. Today’s products are developed in a holistic process involving a collaboration amont many disciplines. Design thinking — incorporating processes, approaches, and working methods from traditional designers’ toolkits — has become a way of generating innovative ideas to challenging problems and refining those ideas. Rapid prototyping techniques, affordable and accessible prototyping platforms, and an iterative mindset have enabled people to more reliably translate those ideas into implementable solutions. In this course, students will be exposed to these techniques and learn how to engage in a human-centered design process.

[ARCH 731] EXPERIMENTS IN STRUCTURES Mohamad Al Khayer This course studies the relationships between geometric space and those structural systems that amplify tension.

Experiments using the hand (touch and force) in coordination with the eye (sight and geometry) will be done during the construction and observation of physical models.

Verbal, mathematical, and computer models are secondary to the reality of the physical model. However these models will be used to give dimension and document the experiments. Team reports will serve as interim and final examinations. In typology, masonry structures in compression (e.g. vault and dome) correlate with “Classical” space, and steel or reinforced concrete structures in flexure (e.g. frame, slab and column) with “Modernist” space. We seek the spatial correlates to tensile systems of both textiles (woven or braided fabrics where both warp and weft are tensile), and baskets (where the warp is tensile and the weft is compressive). In addition to the experiments, we will examine Le Ricolais’ structural models held by the Architectural Archives.

[ARCH 732] DAYLIGHTING Jessica Zofchak This course aims to introduce fundamental daylighting concepts and tools to analyze daylighting design. The wide range of topics to be studied includes site planning, building envelope and shading optimization, passive solar design, daylight delivery methods, daylight analysis structure and results interpretation, and a brief daylighting and lighting design integration.

[ARCH 732] MATERIAL AND STRUCTURAL INTELLIGENCE Sameer Kumar

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The semester long project will involve a gradual development of architectural ideas that are intimately informed by and centered on knowledge of Structure and Materiality.

Employing both physical and digital simulations, the students will synthesize knowledge acquired in previous courses in structures, materials, and construction methods to develop architectural solutions within a carefully selected set of determinants.

[ARCH732] GEOMETRIC STRUCTURAL DESIGN Masoud Akbarzadeh Geometric structural design provides a comprehensive introduction to novel geometric methods of structural design based on 2D and 3D graphical statics. The primary emphasis of the course will be on developing a general understanding of the relationship between structural forms in equilibrium and the geometric representation of their internal and external forces. This link is the main apparatus for designing provocative structural forms using only geometric techniques rather than complicated algebraic/ numerical methods. Moreover, special consideration will be given to materialization of the structural geometry and the proper fabrication techniques to construct the complex geometry of the structure. Note that this course is based on ongoing research in the field of 3D graphical statics, and therefore provides students with the opportunity to directly contribute to the current research in geometric methods of structural design. Familiarity with a parametric software is required, and code-writing ability is an asset. Particular attention will be given to structural model making and careful structural drawings. The outcomes of the course will become a primary collection of Polyhedral Structures Laboratory. Also, a unique summer research fellowship will be available for highly motivated students to build a one-to-one scale structural prototype based on the forms developed in the class.

[ARCH 732] MATTER AND ENERGY Franca Trubiano This seminar/workshop promotes architectural innovation in the field of construction technology. Matter + Energy are the two fields of enquiry which guide and structure the course’s reading seminars and prototype workshops. Students will design and fabricate building related prototypes that productively respond to a well-documented and socially relevant environmental need. The creative and critical integration of Matter + Energy is the ambition of each prototype. Materials such as films, composites and plastic/ polymers will be central to the investigation, as will the energy related topics of thermodynamics, light/heat studies and renewable energies. Invited design and building industry professionals will advise student teams and offer critical reviews of their process during the semester. Lastly, students will be introduced to performance design metrics used in evaluating the environmental impact of their material and energy choices, be they embodied energy, carbon emissions, or Life Cycle Assessments.

This elective seminar focused on precast concrete and specifically it’s history, materiality — how it is manufactured and the logistics of its assembly — and cultural affects through both its traditional uses within the urban environment as well as new approaches to building typologies such as housing. Through a strategic partnership with Northeast Precast (NEP), based in Millville, NJ, students will gain access to places where precast concrete is made, formed, and put into action. The class will be organized as a seminar, with a group of 18 students. The course was conducted in a “hybrid” context, meaning lectures will primarily be remote, however, physical access to materials and methods is an important aspect of the class. In addition to readings and case studies via remote delivery, students had access to Northeast Precast’s state-of-theart facility where they:

[ARCH 737] SEMI-FICTITIOUS REALMS Jeffrey Anderson The pursuit of immersive digital experiences has long been a goal of the computing industry. Early wearable displays designed in the 1960s depicted simple three dimensional graphics in ways that had never been seen before. Through trial and error, digital pioneers reframed the relationship between user and machine, and over the last five decades, have made strides that advanced both the input and output mechanisms we are so comfortable with today. As a field, architecture has been reliant on these advancements to design and document buildings, but these tools still leave the architect removed from the physicality of the design, with their work depicted as 2D lines or 3D planes alone. This course will study the evolutionary advancements made that now allow us to fully inhabit digital worlds through Virtual Reality. Using the HTC Vive and Unreal Engine, students will generate immersive, photorealistic models of unbuilt architectural works and explore digital/ physical interactivity. From the terraces of Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway to Boullee’s Cenotaph for Newton, the goal of this course is to breathe new life into places and spaces that have, until this time, never been built or occupied.

ADVANCED 701

[ARCH 732] MATTER, MAKING & TESTING: DESIGNING WITH NEXT GENERATION PRECAST CONCRETE Richard Garber

[ARCH 739] NEW APPROACHES TO AN ARCHITECTURE OF HEALTH Mikael Avery Health care is taking on a new role in our society — with a refocusing from episodic care for those who are ill or symptomatic to providing life-long care geared towards maintaining wellness. These changes are evident across numerous areas of design, from wearable technologies that track and analyze, to large scale building initiatives that aim to create healthier environments and improve lives through strategic planning initiatives.

1. Over two weekends, attended two six-hour sessions to learn about the precast concrete manufacturing process.

Students were exposed to the fabrication process from material selection, to formwork production, to pour, and disassembly.

2. Utilized NEP’s facilities and their workforce, a group of professional engineers and concrete experts. Students worked in teams to produce panel prototypes for wall assemblies that responded to structural, thermal, and water-proofing performance; and received feedback from NEP’s expert staff on the construction feasibility and applicability of student-proposed prototypes. Students produced and exchanged digital and physical content with the team at NEP.

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3. Developed a delivery workflow utilizing digital tools to communicate with and transmit panel, assembly and formwork concepts to NEP staff, fostering a collaboration opportunity for students that is not regularly experienced in architecture school. This workflow allowed students to virtually study panelization schemas and jointing, as well as panel performance characteristics, ahead of actual prototype preparation.

A concrete, physical representation of this paradigm shift can be found within the hospital building itself and in the new manner in which hospitals are looking to serve their patients and care for their clinicians. Simultaneously both public and private spaces, hospitals are complex systems in which sickness, health, hospitality, technology, emergency, and community share space and compete for resource.

ADVANCED 701

[ARCH 741] ARCHITECTURE DESIGN INNOVATION Ali Rahim The mastery of techniques, whether in design, production or both, does not necessarily yield great architecture. As we all know, the most advanced techniques can still yield average designs. Architects are becoming increasingly adept at producing complexity & integrating digital design and fabrication techniques into their design process — yet there are few truly elegant projects. Only certain projects that are sophisticated at the level of technique achieve elegance. This seminar explores some of the instances in which designers are able to move beyond technique, by commanding them to such a degree as to achieve elegant aesthetics within the formal development of projects.

[ARCH 743] FORM AND ALGORITHM Ezio Blasetti The critical parameter will be to develop the potential beyond finite forms of explicit and parametric modeling towards non-linear algorithmic processes. We will seek novel patterns of organization, structure, and articulation as architectural expressions within the emergent properties of feedback loops and rule-based systems. This seminar will accommodate both introductory and advanced levels.

No previous scripting experience is necessary. It will consist of a series of introductory sessions, obligatory intensive workshops, lectures followed by suggested readings, and will gradually focus on individual projects. Students will be encouraged to investigate the limits of algorithmic design both theoretically and in practice through a scripting environment.

[ARCH 749] INDETERMINATE DELINEATIONS Maya Alam

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Architecture has always been closely entangled with modes of vision. Devices ranging from Durer’s perspective machine to the photographic eye have strongly shaped the way we think and design the built environment of our cities. A strange loop is in place here: our world-views provide the development of specific modes of representation, of engagement with the world, and in turn they begin to have an impact in that same world, becoming an active element in the way we understand it. Put more simply, it is the technologies through which we see and experience the built environment that define the way we construct it.

In this class, we will focus on visual and physical points as anchors to tie modes of vision with modes of construction.

Points play an important role in the history of visuality: if during Impressionism and Pointillism they were devised to delineate the contrast and alignments between what we see and how we see it in an attempt to investigate the mechanics of vision, it was during the post war period that Max Wertheimer’s work at the Berlin School of Gesalt Psychology leveraged them as graphic elements to understand part to whole relationships central to Bauhaus’ design pedagogy. Today, imaging technologies are once again placing points as central elements in the construction of our contemporary visual language, transforming ever-growing datasets of partial images in three dimensional machine readable survey models: it is with points and aggregated clouds that we are constructing the figure of our cities. As such, they become a necessary site of design investigation

to move beyong monolithic views of the world. This class leverages the bi-product of scanning technologies — point clouds and image making — to explore inclusive modes of delineations: a visual sensibility to engage with the multifaceted nature of the built environment.

[ARCH 750] PARAFICTIONAL OBJECTS Kutan Ayata This representation/design seminar explores the aesthetics of estrangement in realism through various mediums.

The reality of the discipline is that architecture is a postmedium effort. Drawings, Renderings, Models, Prototypes, Computations, Simulations, Texts, and Buildings are all put forward by architects as a speculative proposal for the reality of the future. Students will explore the reconfiguration of a “found object” in multiple mediums and represent parafictional scenarios in various techniques of realism.

At a time when rendering engines enable the production of hyper-realistic images within the discipline without any critical representational agenda, it has become ever more imperative to rigorously speculate on realism.

[ARCH 751] ECOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, AND DESIGN William Braham This course will examine the ecological nature of design at a range of scales, from the most intimate aspects of product design to the largest infrastructures, from the use of water in bathroom to the flow of traffic on the highway.

It is a first principle of ecological design that everything is connected, and that activities at one scale can have quite different effects at other scales, so the immediate goal of the course will be to identify useful and characteristic modes of analyzing the systematic, ecological nature of design work, from the concept of the ecological footprint to market share. The course will also draw on the history of and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now charachterized by the powerful concept of the complex, self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the first principle of design and organization. The course will also draw on the history and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now characterized by the powerful concept of the complex, self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the first principle of design and organization.

[ARCH 754] PERFORMANCE DESIGN WORKSHOP Jihun Kim The workshop applies simulation and diagramming techniques to a series of discrete design projects at different scales. The emphasis is on refinement and optimization of performance based building design. Performance analysis techniques can provide enormous amounts of information to support the design process, acting as feedback mechanisms for improved performance, but careful interpretation and implementation are required to achieve better buildings. Energy, lighting, and air flow are the three main domains convered in the workshop. Students will learn how to utilize domain tools at an advanced level, and

[ARCH 765] PROJECT MANAGEMENT Charles Capaldi This course is an introduction to techniques and tools of managing the design and construction of large, and small, construction projects. Topics include project delivery systems, management tools, cost-control and budgeting systems, professional roles. Case studies serve to illustrate applications. Cost and schedule control systems are described. Case studies illustrate the application of techniques in the field.

[ARCH 768] REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT Alan Feldman

This is the second of a two-course sequence that discusses the issues and processes involved in running a professional architectural practice and designing buildings in the contemporary construction environment. Arch 771 will build on the knowledge of the project process gained in ARCH 672 to examine the way in which an office is “designed” to facilitate the execution of design and construction. Issues of finance, liability, ethics, and the codes that overlay atop the design and construction industry will be discussed.

The lectures will draw connections between the student’s studio design knowledge to date and the instructor’s experience in practice including local building examples and guest lectures by relevant professionals. Guests from within the field of architecture andconstruction (and outside frequently) will supplement the semester lectures.

[ARCH 801] MATERIAL AGENCIES: ROBOTICS & DESIGN LAB I Andrew Saunders, Ezio Blasetti The Fall Material Agencies course consists of two halfsemester long sections and is supported by two aligned Core Technical Seminars of half-semester length each.

Students will typically work in pairs. Section 1: Programmed Matter: Introduces students to a generative approach to digital design and robotic manufacturing with the goal of unifying design and production within one creative process. The studio will commence with students gaining first-hand experience programming and operating Penn’s industrial robots. 3D design models will be developed in parallel to fabrication experiments and digital simulations. The design brief will focus on a small scale design prototype that is explored at a micro-scale of resolution relative to normative architectural practice. Material placement and material affect will be considered intrinsic to design expression and integral to considerations of space, form, structure and production concerns. The brief will focus on a small scale object or architectural part design with ornamental features. The course introduces material dynamics, robot programming, 3D modelling and computer programming within design. Section 2: Manipulative Matter explores both robotic fabrication and the use of sensors and actuators within responsive fabricated objects or architectural elements. Design Prototyping involving manipulation-based Manufacture e.g. Sheet metal folding.

This will complement the first studio by requiring more pre-determined design intent, fabrication rationalization and robot sensor and electrical integration. A final design prototype will demonstrate embodied material intelligence — through an integrative approach to material organization, electronic circuity, production and design. Electronic wiring and parts will be integrated within larger material prototypes through fabrication methods such as: inlays, additive manufacturing, casting, soldering, painting, laser-cutting, or milling.

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This course evaluates “ground-up” development as well as re-hab, re-development, and acquisition investments.

We examine raw and developed land and the similarities and differences of traditional real estate product types including office, R & D, retail, warehouses, single family and multi-family residential, mixed use, and land as well as “specialty” uses like golf courses, assisted living, and fractional share ownership. Emphasis is on concise analysis and decision making. We discuss the development process with topics including market analysis, site acquisition, due diligence, zoning, entitlements, approvals, site planning, building design, construction, financing, leasing, and ongoing management and disposition. Special topics like workouts and running a development company are also discussed. Course lessons apply to all markets but the class discusses U.S. markets only. Throughout the course, we focus on risk management and leadership issues.

Numerous guest lecturers who are leaders in the real estate industry participate in the learning process. Format: predominately case analysis and discussion, some lectures, project visits.

[ARCH 771] PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE II Philip Ryan

ADVANCED 701

utilize them as applications to examine the environmental performance of existing buildings. Using the results of analytical techniques, the students will develop high-performance design strategies in all three domains. Lectures will be given on specific topics each week. A series of analytical class exercises will be assigned to provide students with hands-on experience in using the computer models. A case-study building will be provided at the beginning of the course and students will model different components each week throughout the semester. Every week students present the progress of their work, which will be used to correct methodological and technical issues.

Energy, lighting, and air flow are the three main domains covered in the workshop. Students will learn how to utilize domain tools at an advanced level, and utilize them as applications to examine the environmental performance of existing buildings. Using the results of analytical techniques, the students will develop high-performance design strategies in all three domains. Prerequisite: ARCH 753 lectures will be given on specific topics each week. A series of analytical class exercises will be assigned to provide students with hands-on experience in using the computer models. A case-study building will be provided at the beginning of the course and students will model different components each week throughout the semester. Every week students present the progress of their work, which will be used to correct methodological and technical issues.

ADVANCED 701

[ARCH 803] GENERAL OVERVIEW OF ALGORITHMIC DESIGN AND ROBOTIC FABRICATION Ezio Blasetti Directly supports ARCH 801 Material Agencies I: Section 1. This seminar will teach students computer and robot programming skills that will be utilized to deliver a complimentary and integral aspect of design-prototyping and fabrication work. Topics will vary in application to suit the studio brief. Participants will be introduced to the Robotics Lab, and will learn to set up ABB Industrial Robot tasks.

Design algorithms will be developed that establish a conceptual relationship to the manufacturing process and attempt to leverage it for creative forms of design expression whilst addressing material and production performance constraints. Examples include computer programming that simulates a material placement and robotic manufacturing process such as additive manufacturing, filament winding or weaving, and utilizes these tasks in a generative design methodology, where design character, variation in material organization is evaluated relative to performance criteria such as material quantities, production time, etc. Submissions will be technical in nature and will also be implemented within ARCH 801 prototypes.

The course provides a foundation for more specialist technical development in Semester 2.

[ARCH 805] INTRODUCTION TO MICRO-CONTROLLERS, SENSOR AND ACTUATOR SYSTEMS Ezio Blasetti Directly supports ARCH 801 Material Agencies I: Section 2.

This seminar will teach participants to design and assemble electronic circuits using sensors/actuators and microcontrollers, and to program digital and analogue means of data exchange. Students will develop a closed or open loop reactive system that consists of embedded sensor systems that will operate within the Design Studio project prototype, and utilizes feedback from sensors to drive designed affects (E.g. kinetic, lighting, variations in porosity.). The course will consider degrees of control, feedback, energy and force in relation to interactions of matter, space and active bodies (human and non-human). Participants will learn how to design electric circuits, solder and weld these and to integrate circuits with micro-processors, sensors and actuators. Exact equipment and methods will vary over time as these technologies evolve rapidly.

At present possible micro-controllers utilized include Arduino, Raspberri Pi, Odroid, Intel Nuc, Atom and others.

Sensors such as flex, pressure and proximity sensors will be utilized. Possible forms of actuation include servo and stepper motors, linear actuators, Nitinol muscle wire, pneumatic actuators. A Programming Language will be utilized to for the writing of simple control algorithms that clarify how input and output data is processed and acted upon, with a particular focus on leveraging physical world actions within a designed control loop where possible.

[ARCH 807] RAS THEORY Evangelos Kotsioris This seminar provides a theoretical context to the program, relating autonomous robotics and fabrication research to architectural discourse, philosophy, science and technology. The course commences with a historical overview of scientific topics including cybernetics, complexity theory, emergence/self-organization, evolution/developmental biology, behaviour-based robotics. The course also critically assesses present and future societal trajectories in relation to technology, exploring socio-political, ethical and philosophical arguments that concern a broader technological shift that has occurred during the last decade which has given rise to our unquestioned reliance on algorithms within our everyday lives (social media, shopping, navigation), and similar impact from Urban OS’s, Industry 4 and driverless car technologies. Readings cover philosophy, computer science, cybernetics, robotics, sociology, psychology, and will be discussed in relation to their consideration within the domain of architectural design and building technology. Examples include: Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Maurice Conti, Norbert Weiner, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, Ed Finn, Donna Haraway, Andre Gorz, Bruce Sterling, Daniel Kahneman, Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant. A theoretical written statement related to ARCH 801 Material Agencies I Section 1 or 2 will be produced by participants within this core seminar.

[ARCH 811] THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE David Leatherbarrow The purpose of this course is to provide to students who are embarking on careers in teaching and scholarship in architecture a re-introduction to some of the principal issues and writings of the architectural theory, as they developed historically from antiquity to the present. In addition to introducing recurring themes and primary texts, this course aims to help students develop the practices that are typical of scholarship, the forms and habits of scholarly inquiry. It is a required course for all incoming Ph.D. and M.S. students.

[ARCH 851] FIELD BIBLIOGRAPHY This course is essentially an independent study, undertaken by doctoral students in preparation for the Candidacy Examination. This course should be taken in conjunction with ARCH 852 after all other courses have been completed. Normally a member of the student’s Dissertation Committee supervises this course.

[ARCH 999] INDEPENDENT STUDY This course enables students to undertake self-directed study on a topic in Architecture, under the supervision of a faculty member. Students are required to make a proposal for the study to the Department Chair, outlining the subject and method of investigation, and confirming the course supervisor at least two weeks prior to the beginning of the semester.

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GALLERY 273

Shan-Shen: The Eco-Mythical by Dekang Liang and Ming Jiang Critic: Simon Kim [p.230]

GALLERY 274

Arachnida by Christine Eichhorn Critic: Gisela Baurmann [p.141]

GALLERY 275

Matters of Disposal by Paul McCoy & Matthew Kohman Critic: Ferda Kolatan [p.212]

GALLERY 276

Bhasan Char Island by Michael Caine and Amber Farrow Critic: Kutan Ayata [p.217]

GALLERY 277

UBER – ART Center by Huajie Ma and Jing Yuan Critic: Robert Stuart-Smith [p.264]

GALLERY

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GALLERY 279

Organic Waste-to-Energy and Recycling Center by Bingkun Deng and Jingrong Ning Critic: Joe MacDonald [p.242]

GALLERY 280

Spatial Symptoms of a Pathogen by Sharvari Mhatre and Atharva Ranade Critic: Karel Klein [p.237]

January 27, 2021 THE JEFFREY FINE (C’76, MARCH’78) AND ANDREA KATZ LECTURE: Jeanne Gang

EVENT

Jeanne Gang, FAIA, is the founding principal and partner of Studio Gang, an international architecture and urban design practice headquartered in Chicago. Known for an inquisitive, forward-looking approach to design that unfolds new technical and material possibilities and expands the active role of designers in society, she creates striking places that connect people with each other, their communities, and the environment.

Her studio’s diverse, award-winning work includes major projects throughout the Americas and Europe, ranging from community-centered cultural institutions like Writers Theatre to public projects that connect citizens with ecology, such as the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, and high-rise towers that foster community, including Aqua Tower. Ongoing projects include an expansion to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City; a new United States Embassy in Brasília; the University of Chicago’s European hub for study and research in Paris; a unified campus for the California College of the Arts in San Francisco; and the new O’Hare Global Terminal in Chicago.

Intertwined with built work, Jeanne and the studio also develop research, publications, and exhibitions that push design’s ability to create public awareness and give rise to change — a practice Jeanne calls “actionable idealism.”

A new monograph of her studio’s work, Studio Gang: Architecture, was published by Phaidon this spring.

A MacArthur Fellow and a Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Jeanne has been honored with the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture and was named one of the most influential people in the world by TIME magazine.

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EVENT

FORMA is a full-service architecture studio founded in 2018 by Miroslava Brooks and Daniel Markiewicz. The design-driven practice is committed to developing projects with architectural clarity and conceptual rigor, aiming for a harmonious combination of order and whimsy.

FORMA has completed and continues to develop a range of building types from single and multi-family residences, high-end retail and commercial office, to elementary education and cultural projects among others.

March 31, 2021 MIROSLAVA BROOKS AND DANIEL MARKIEWICZ: Preliminary Plans

Both Miroslava and Daniel are licensed architects and received their Master of Architecture from the Yale School of Architecture where they were awarded, individually in subsequent years, the William Wirt Winchester Travelling Fellowship — the school’s most prestigious award. Prior to establishing FORMA, Miroslava worked as a Project Designer at Eisenman Architects, leading the design development of the Yenikapi Archeological Museum in Istanbul, and since 2014 has been a faculty at the Yale School of Architecture. Daniel is a founding member and editor of Project, a journal for architecture published since 2012, and previously worked as an Associate Architect at Diller Scofidio + Renfro Architects, most notably as lead designer of the public spaces of the renovation project for the Museum of Modern Art Expansion in New York City. Miroslava and Daniel teach architectural design in the graduate core sequence at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.

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EVENT June A. Grant, RA, NOMA, is Founder and Design Principal at blink!LAB architecture; a boutique research-based architecture and urban design practice. Launched in 2014, blink!LAB is based on Ms. Grant’s 20 years experience in architecture, design and the urban regeneration of cities and communities. Her design approach rests on an avid belief in cultural empathy, data research and new technologies as integral to design futures and design solutions.

March 24, 2021 JUNE GRANT: DESIGN, ADVOCACY, AND REIMAGINING AGENCY

blink!LAB has three mandates — A commitment to Design Exploration, Advocacy for Holistic Solutions and the Integration of Technology as a central component for a regenerative society. Because we are designers committed to new forms of knowledge through making, we prefer to situate ourselves in the middle of catalytic design — where new challenges and emerging opportunities are addressed through multi-layered thinking and design.

Open and collaborative, blink!LAB is a small multi-disciplinary design studio with projects bridging architectural form, urban economics, urban design, industrial design, furniture, and digital fabrication towards the creation of regenerated communities.

Ms. Grant is the immediate Past-President of the San Francisco Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (SFNOMA); Board member of ACADIA, a YBCA 100 honoree, 2020 CEDAW Human Rights honoree, and the 2020, 10th Annual J. Max Bond Jr. Lecturer.

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ADVANCED 704 Ferda Kolatan, Coordinator Associate Professor of Architecture

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The 704 Design Research Studios are an in-depth examination and exploration of critical architectural topics through rigorous conceptual thinking and advanced design methodologies. These elective studios are taught by a selection of leading professionals in the field who share and develop their research expertise with the students over the course of the semester. All studio topics and project briefs are devised in ways to support the various objectives of each specific research subject.

The primary goal of this final studio of the Master of Architecture program is to equip the outgoing students with a multi-facetted and robust knowledge base — encompassing design, theory, and technical skills — necessary to participate in the field of architecture at the highest level. The ability to formulate, develop, and conclude a design project based on a larger set of research parameters is a crucial experience toward achieving this goal.

The boundaries for design research have expanded with the increasingly diverse trajectories that define architecture’s territories today. From the effects of global economic markets on cities to the ecological realities of the Anthropocene, we find ourselves entangled in forces seemingly elusive and yet profoundly impactful on our profession. The role of the research studio is to examine such forces in more depth and devise detailed architectural responses, which reflect sensibly on the cultural and environmental circumstances of our day.

Additionally, in recent years, new media and advanced technologies have provided us with uniquely powerful tools that require the integration of unprecedented technical skills and logistical expertise into the practice of design. However, in order to take full advantage of these tools, and to speculate productively on their vast potential to positively influence our world, we need to engage these new technologies in regard to their cultural, societal, and aesthetic ramifications as well. Several of the design research studios are operating within this realm.

Architecture’s unique ability to express physically and conceptually the circumstances of its own environment, to analyze and synthesize, to evoke and provoke, to learn from the past and to imagine the future, is contingent on our ability to integrate research-oriented thinking into our everyday practices. Only through this integration can we assure that design -and architecture at large- can maintain its disciplinary rigor while simultaneously engaging with the most pressing challenges of our contemporary times.

In this spirit, the 704 Design Research Studios are taught with a progressive and explorative mindset and without a default reliance on prior modes of design thinking and making. Each of these studios, in various ways, articulates a unique vision of what it means to practice architecture in the 21st century. The ever-diversifying context and complexity of our world can only be satisfactorily met with an equally dynamic approach to architectural design.

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ICONOCLASH: ARCHITECTURE AND MONUMENT AFTER 2020 DEVELOPING NEW VISIONS FOR THE CLASSIC NEW YORK BANK BUILDING Ferda Kolatan (ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE) Caleb Ehly (TA) Ferda Kolatan (Associate Professor of Architecture): Founding Director of SU11 Architecture+Design – MsAAD, Columbia University – Dipl.Ing., RWTH Aachen, Germany

“ICONOCLASM IS WHEN WE KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE ACT OF BREAKING AND WHAT THE MOTIVATIONS FOR WHAT APPEARS AS A CLEAR PROJECT OF DESTRUCTION ARE; ICONOCLASH, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS WHEN ONE DOES NOT KNOW, ONE HESITATES, ONE IS TROUBLED BY AN ACTION FOR WHICH THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW, WITHOUT FURTHER INQUIRY, WHETHER IT IS DESTRUCTIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE.” — Bruno Latour, Iconoclash, Exhibition Catalog (2002)

This studio examines what role, if any, pre-Depression era New York monumental architecture can play in contemporary culture. Six former bank buildings, all landmarked and with rich historical heritages, are re-originated through new conceptual, programmatic, and aesthetic features. Once proud status symbols of the capitalist super-power

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CRYO VAULT Kerry Hohenstein and Alexander Brown

Iconography stemming from Greek and Roman temples charge an experience based in praise, a higher place, celebration of life, and perpetual desire for the beyond. Our new design uses the fragments of these themes on the facade to drive a related, but more contemporary, interior program: a cryonics facility.

The redesign of the East River Saving’s Bank is founded on confronting subjects of icon, authenticity, design origin, and what they bring to a spatial experience. The rehabilitation to this historic structure was meant to feel empathetic towards its history whilst keeping this structure relevant to its time.

We beg to question authenticity in the eternal — relative to both iconic architectural symbolisms as much as it is for eternal life. Can we maintain relation to an origin or is it rendered obsolete upon its infinite presence? The patients hold the same debated values of authenticity that monumentality and iconography hold to this structure. Are they the original soul simply continuing on, or a relatable visual copy that undergoes a new life upon their reanimation?

We ask if holding memory is the key to embodying uthenticity and originality. Is it possible to create new authenticities using relative elements?

Iconoclash is analyzed through the provoking ties of imagery between capitol and spiritual spaces via the temple architectural style as well as the structure’s history in the American Banking system playing off the idea of this space being a location to store your valuables. The facade is separated from its original historic ties through its new physical organization, textural treatments, and metaphysical detachment. The key iconic elements that formed a hierarchy rooted in institutional importance is replaced by elements which stack and shift in a new language that is more closely related to the user’s lives in their new eternal state.

New York, these buildings have long since lost their original significance and appear today as displaced and largely useless leftovers of bygone times. To be rehabilitated productively both their iconic image as well as their function needed radical rethinking. Our approach was thus twofold: First, how to alter 2 – Cryo Vault by Kerry Hohenstein and Alexander Brown, Project Description

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the monumental “image” of these classicist/revivalist buildings to reflect more diverse values rather than that of a single authority, and second, how to program them more adequately for our current time?

restructuring dichotomic value-systems like new/old, mundane/precious, nature/ culture, substantial/banal into architectural “anti-icons.” These new types promote unprecedented forms of participation with architecture and the city but also make us caution and rethink how to design for a future that appears ever more precarious. Rather than embracing yet another “novel” iconic architecture, this studio embraces the existing and defines progressive design as an act of ambiguity and hybridization.

Borrowing a term from Bruno Latour, the studio investigates “icono-clashing” as a design methodology for combining “at odds” elements into newly collaborative forms and hybrid architectures. Unprecedented prototypes and programs for the six buildings are developed by carefully mixing and 287

3 – Ferda Kolatan in Virtual Studio Review 4 – Cryo Vault by Kerry Hohenstein and Alexander Brown, Elevation

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CLONED & CLASHED Megan York and Eddie Zhiqi Sheng The question of what is original and what is replicated is posed within the new nature of this artificial landscape. The original and the clone are lost in translation as they interrelate within a new technologically driven environment.

Smaller hybrids of the classical architectural elements clashed with contemporary technologies are integrated throughout the interior; the cupola and dome extend downwards to enclose artificial environments for the host and cloned bees,

and the classical Corinthian column embeds ventilation systems for cloning operations.

The new monument generates a series of dialogues in relation to the power of value in technology, what we perceive as original and replicated, the homage towards the gleam of temples, and the interdependent relationship of the mundane and the spectacular. Columns clash with ventilation, ziggurats clash with machines, and intricate drums clash with new materials and synthetic environments, inevitably redefining the role of the monument in contemporary times.

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Authentic Replicas, identifies the monument as a singular entity, intrinsically tied to an environment, time, and often specific meaning. Our research seeks to understand the role of hybrid and counterfeit as it relates to the authenticity of monuments, icons, and architecture in the context of our site, The First National City Bank Building of New York. This capitalist temple is challenged by the Canal street subway. The building sits in contrast to the infrastructure that allows the masses to enter New York City and feed into the economy which supports the bank.

Additionally, the now abandoned bank, which stood as an institution verifying the financial gains of selected social groups, has become the background to illegal street vendors selling counterfeit goods. Materials associated with the subway, such as the white tiles and functional detailing are

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We propose that a new institution is created on this site.

One which collects the confiscated counterfeit goods, and takes them to a depository for alteration, to a predetermined degree of differentiation, by local artisans. The seized items are transported to the site via the subway. The objects are collected and stored before being evaluated for reuse.

The altered objects are then sold back to the community as new high-end, limited edition, hybrid goods. This “Counterfeit Bureau” will expand upon the existing economy at work on Canal Street. The ambiguous nature of both the hybrid objects and hybrid architecture challenge ideas of the speed of consumption. It is the lack of understanding of origin that forces us to stare, amplifying the mystification and ultimately the monumentality.

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12 11 – Authentic Replicas by Amber Farrow and Molly Zmich, Section Chunk 12 – Authentic Replicas by Amber Farrow and Molly Zmich, Interior Render 2

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brought onto the facade of the bank, blurring the spatial boundary between what others may deem as “low” and “high”-brow spaces. Additionally, this material shift raises questions around monuments, their maintenance and purity.

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AUTHENTIC REPLICAS Amber Farrow and Molly Zmich

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CALAMITY LIBRARY Winka Dubbeldam (MILLER PROFESSOR AND CHAIR) Richard Garber (LECTURER) Ryan Barnette (TA) Winka Dubbeldam (Miller Professor, Chair): Winka Dubbeldam is the founder and partner of the WBE certified New York firm Archi-Tectonics NYC, LLC. Dubbeldam is widely known for her award-winning work, recognized as much for its design excellence as for its use of smart building systems, sustainable materials, and innovative structures. Archi-Tectonics’ work is found in the USA, Europe, and Asia. Archi-Tectonics recently won the Asian Games 2022 Design Competition in Hangzhou, China [2018], with a 16-acre park five buildings and two stadiums, that is under construction to open in 2022.

Richard Garber: AIA, is a founding partner at GRO Architects. Bachelor of Architecture from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University.

Sponsor: John Ruga & Team from Northeast Precast NJ

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This studio will consider how architects can anticipate and address a series of future conditions that will allow shoreline areas to take on different functional uses, and more importantly develop a design pedagogy that is both forward thinking while also being protective of, and progressive towards, naturalassets.

The students in the Calamity Library Project Studio will specifically focus on such global ecological challenges concerning architecture and water systems in the Anthropocene. Themes like climate change, politics, infrastructure, new economies, and culture will form the lenses to understand the cities

along the river and urban landscapes in the context of a transforming environment. Flooding, drought, and other forms of extreme weather are observed more and more as normal occurrences everywhere on the planet. The impact of urbanization, its global reaches into rural, oceanic, and atmospheric environments, has become immense, and often damaging. Human impact thus forms an ongoing feedback loop of dynamic interactions between the built and nonbuilt environment.

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River and bypassing New Orleans. The long-term interactions between humans and the watershed will be analyzed and discussed as catchment areas for ecological, cultural, economic and social realities. Topics of spatio temporal transformations like mobility, pollution, and resource extraction will be looked at as water culture that is both human and non-human in order to inform futureoriented design projects. the Mississippi underwent construction measures to control the flow of water over hundreds of years, man changed the appearance of the River and its riverscape. The natural waterways were straightened and narrowed for shipping and flat-bottomed boats and dykes were built as a flood water protection on lengthy stretches.

The Mississippi threatens to explode beyond its engineering structures with the biggest floods recorded, spring flooding is not uncommon along the Mississippi, but last year’s floods were exceptional.

According to the National Oceanic and

River as Generator The Anthropocene flood plane is our field of study, in specific the Mississippi flood planes in theUSA, the world’s fourth-largest drainage basin (“watershed” or “catchment”). The basin covers morethan 1,245,000 square miles (3,220,000 km2), including all or parts of 32 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. During the first decades of the 20th century it saw the construction of massive engineeringworks costing billions of Dollars, such as levees, locks and dams, often built in combination.

A major focus of this work has been to prevent the lower Mississippi from shifting into the channel of the Atchafalaya

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Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), flooding last year in the Missouri, Mississippi, and Arkansas River basins were responsible for an estimated twenty billion dollars in damages, and 2019 was the second-wettest year in the Lower 48 states in the 125 years of record-keeping. It is time to give back and sometimes give UP. Calamity Library

much interested in the study of landscapes — many biologists are working on this — but more in how these architectural interventions/inventions would integrate into the flood landscapes and riverbanks, and how they merge with the urban, economic and cultural.

Material Ecologies Research

Student teams will rigorously analyze and study the Mississippi and will develThe goal of the Calamity Library Project op architectural concepts through Studio is to create HYBRIDS, to develop research-design and in-depth commuarchitectural interventions for the more nication with external experts to ground and more defunct infrastructures such their concept and develop their design as levees, dams, etc., for human orpost- intervention. One of such experts is human occupation. The intersection of North East Precast, a concrete company the large infrastructural structures with located in Millville, NJ, where we will a precise architectures inserts as hybrid be able to learn how to make complex structures could be of great interest to formwork, develop detailed large reinvigorate the Mid-American city, and models, and pour them in the factory. societies. Over the last century human Innovations in concrete performance, interventions have disturbed the natural and the investigation of new filler materiwater balance, results are disastrous and als are possible areas of research. The it is time to re-calibrate. We are not so Material Ecologies Research will focus

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on concrete and specifically it’s materiality — how it is manufactured and the logistics of its assembly — and cultural affects through both its traditional uses within the urban environment as well as new approaches to infrastructure and building typologies.

With thanks to our Sponsor NortEast Precast who generously hosted and educated our students multiple times in the semester.

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5 – Archipelago of The Chthulucene, Daniel Yang and Xinyi Huang 6 – Concrete Site Visit

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GROUND, INTERTWINED Amie Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo Ground intertwined proposes a self-sufficient AI run biodiverse farm on the edge of the Mississippi River. The design corresponds to both the grid of the farm land, as well as the natural growth and change that occurs over time in the region. The project explores the possibility of a hyper productive farm, capable of producing produce for one thousand farms. In order to achieve this, the flooding river water is mitigated for the inner land and the water is

then collected and purified through the system of networks designed at the site. The intervention inverts the precedent of the Cahokia Mounds by creating inverted terrace farming, forming a relief in the landscape. The terrace farming allows water to step down and be stored in inverted wells located at the center nodes of each zone, these wells push deep into the earth, allowing the water to fall and generate electric power while storing it for agricultural use. All of the systems form a feedback loop, allowing the farm to run without human interaction, creating a truly self sufficient system.

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7 – Ground, Intertwined by Amie Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo, Section 8 – Ground, Intertwined by Amie Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo, Render

9 – Ground, Intertwined by Amie Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo, Axon 1 10 – Ground, Intertwined by Amie Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo, Axon 2

Located at the last lock and dam along the Mississippi River and surrounded by dense rail network, Granite City has been famous as a transport hub for raw and processed agriculture products. This industrial city has spent much investment to reconstruct the Mississippi River and to resist flooding. As a pivot point, the levee is the key to balance the city and the river – rather than seeing it as a dividing line between water and land, we consider it as a media of river edge restoration as well as bioproducts exchange. This project visions that a berm not only serves as a defense against flooding, but also should serve as a distributor of bioproducts and an activator for human production. At the back of the berm, we propose a massive man-made system against the environment malfunction including flooding, energy shortage and transportation inefficiency. The previous levee prevents any use of river and human access. Yet, with the

potential of water edge malleability, the visitors now have a chance to approach the natural-like berm park along the Mississippi River.

The distribution center inside the levee hybridizes the existing bioproduct processors with a futuristic logistic system.

Currently the transport of agricultural products and byproducts is heavily relying on highway and barges, which are energy-demanding and unreliable. This proposal challenges the traditional transportation of bioproducts by introducing autonomous transport via non-human agency. With its collection of drone hive, pod dock, and freight station, the distribution center collects crops from farmland along the river, delivers them to the bioproduct processors and redistributes the processed products to afar. Its symbolic gesture of twoway exchange shows how agriculture commodity exchange can be expedited with technology and architecture.

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RIVER’S EDGE FULCRUM Yunshi Chen and Sami Samawi

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11 – River’s Edge Fulcrum by Yunshi Chen and Sami Samawi, Exterior Render 12 – River’s Edge Fulcrum by Yunshi Chen and Sami Samawi, Longitudinal Section

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THE BARN AND ITS OTHERS A MEDIA ART FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM CENTER Homa Farjadi (PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE) Max Hsu and Neda Mostafavi (TA) Homa Farjadi (Professor of Practice): Principal of Farjadi Architects (1987) – Received a Graduate Diploma from the AA School of Architecture in London and an MArch with distinction from Tehran University – The work of her office has been exhibited and published internationally.

Research Topic The Barn and its others will consider the architecture of the barn building in its potential relations of alterity to a contemporary building project. As a vernacular, the constructional logic of “the barn” instantiates a mode of design thinking in response to specific cultural and geographic conditions.

Although in its spectrum of typological and material systems barns offer a rich array of systematic parameters of identification relative to the environment, structural design, spatial organization

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and performance in the landscape of a locality, the historical displacements of the type and its situational variants point to the dynamic nature of the vernacular.

Methodology TEXT 1 - Rosalind Krauss’s essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, read the works of sculpture during 1960s applying the Klein diagram. This diagram maps forces operating on a series of “negativities” as models of alterity in the design work through degrees of opposition or affinities that the project brings to bear between disciplines.

TEXT 2 - The Barn: As a vernacular of farming building the barn will first be studied in its historical development in specific regions. The analysis of the

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typology however is to bring the operations of the structural, material, environmental, and performative systems to bear on the design of a contemporary building when considered in its doubling with the text of Krauss in its exploration of its potential expanded fields within each project.

Site Students are free to choose their site relative to the cities they are familiar with preferably in the country surrounding the city.

Program: Art + Media Fellowship Program Center Fellows to stay for periods of 1-6 months to engage with landscape and environment through mediatic studies and events. Fellows would be able to focus on specific projects of interaction with the environment.

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ORCHARD CAMPUS Tianhui Zhang and Lingxin Feng The orchard campus is an exploration into the distinct barn building typology and its intersection with the industrial and institutional building types. Borrowing from Rosalind Krauss’s Klein diagram structure, the project studies the spatial transformations between these three typologies in the expanded field. The barn as a highly vernacular typology, lends itself to the project as the central axis, from which the project expands toward the industrial and the institutional.

Each space in the project can be located as a single volume on the Klein diagram, and though having distinct qualities, consistently rejects singular readings. Moreover, while the barn building type puts emphasis on the economy of materials, the industrial type on the economy of labor, the institutional type puts emphasis on the economy of organization.

Orchard campus is not only a single project, but it also establishes a framework in which these relationships can be interrogated in a quantifiable manner, as well as a study into the architectural/spatial meanings of methods of construction and planning.

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3 – Orchard Campus by Tianhui Zhang and Lingxin Feng, Section 4 – Orchard Campus by Tianhui Zhang and Lingxin Feng, Interior Render

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In Rosalind Krauss’s writing Passages in Modern Sculpture she utilizes the Klein diagram to propose a series of relationships between Architecture and Landscape. Tectonic Inlay frames itself around a spectrum of affiliations focused on the dichotomy between additive and subtractive methods of creation. Research investigating existing barns and mines led us to propose a design that investigates ways in which assembled structures embed, slip, and interlock within an

excavated site. The architecture generates ambiguous, interstitial spaces, pushing the inversion of “exterior interiority.” Perhaps best captured by the words of Krauss herself, the tension between interior and exterior — assembly and excavation — is expressed in the following. “The result is a sense of voluptuous reciprocity between the form of the container and that of the contained — the exterior mass cradling the void set at its center like a vital organ, and the shape of the void appearing as the key to the developed form of the whole.” a

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TECTONIC INLAY Robert Schaffer and Christine Eichhorn

10 8 – Tectonic Inlay by Robert Schaffer and Christine Eichhorn, Perspective Render 9 – Tectonic Inlay by Robert Schaffer and Christine Eichhorn, Interior Render 10 – Tectonic Inlay by Robert Schaffer and Christine Eichhorn, Section

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AESTHETICS OF CONCEALMENT Ali Rahim (LECTURER) Ryan Henriksen (TA) Ali Rahim (Professor of Architecture, Director Advanced Architecture Design): Director, Contemporary Architecture Practice, New York and Shanghai – Awarded Fifty Under Fifty: Innovators of the 21st Century [2015] – Awarded 10 x 10_2 Phaidon Press 2005 – Awarded Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award [2004] – Author: IMPACT Architectural Design, John Wiley and Sons Inc., London.

[2020]. Future Airports. ORO Editions.

Contemporary Objects and Aesthetics The architecture object builds on the cultural impact of each architecture that affects Baltit culture and also has the potential of affecting global culture. This will be achieved by exploring the influences of architecture in the region that include Buddhist monastic architecture, Mughal Architecture and Chinese architectural traditions from Xingang Province.

In addition to architecture, we will also study other forms of culture including

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the artisanry of carpets, painting and sculpture and/ or other objects from the region. Below are some examples. The knowledge gained will lay the foundation for the architecture of concealment.

Our goal will be to synthesize qualities from these cultural objects into a contemporary architecture object that has the capacity to cut across cultural and disciplinary boundaries — producing the greatest cultural impact.

Architecture Architecture has a long history in the region and brings together elements from various dynasties through time. We will study specific buildings that have impact on culture and provides a rich terrain to begin to investigate, from literal cities of concealment developed in 2000 BC,

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with monastic buildings being carved out of rock two thousand years ago, to the Moghuls in the 16th to the late 18th Century.

Contemporary Artists from the region are developing globally prolific. 2001 unleashed a tremendous amount of creativity and by Mala’s incident on 2012 they were mature enough to incorporate current trends within their culture and develop a sophisticated response in their work. Artists featured above include Shazia Sikander, Rashid Ran and Ghulam Muhammad who have all won international awards and are represented by the best Galleries in New York and London. We will study these artists and understand their notion of concealment in their work.

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Design Research: Disjunctive Continuity Within this studio, we will look at new design research techniques to manipulate, blend, weave, splice different aesthetics 301

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SHELTER Yuhao Zhang and Qiyuan Cao

Farming is one of the most important industries in this country. However, Pakistan is currently short of food because women are not allowed to farm for some cultural reasons. Enlarging the scale of the farming is the main point.

Specifically, we try to reverse the traditional process and social opinion about female, farming is the first step to let women participate in the social industry. Furthermore, under CPEC policy, we can equip them with all the high technology, education and funding sources they need. We believe all these efforts would bring the revolution to the current society and set up cutting-edge status for local females.

This building is like a fortress to camouflage itself with the surrounding condition as an infrastructure relic. The material inspiration of different metals from the armor would promote and protect the concealed program such as the hydroponics lab, girls’ school and dormitory, which is not accepted by the public.

can be defined as any blending of dissonant elements which creates an original, inexhaustible beauty.

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from cultural objects. Baltistan is the perfect place to look for these influences that will lead us to various opportunities from the region. Baltistan’s cultural landscape has often been described as homogeneous but with extreme differences. This more fragmented and hybridized cultural reality requires a redefinition of space suitable for the new empowerment of their youth to thrive, allowing them to pursue careers and develop businesses while at the same time creating a new reality far from preconceived ideas of normalcy and success.

Novelty and innovation in Aesthetics with their direct impact on society is directly tied to technique and technology. To be influential and impactful in culture, Architects must understand what technologies are at the forefront in their day, develop techniques that utilize these technologies for novel aesthetics, and find a way to make them architecturally useful and relevant.

Disciplinary Focus: The Contemporary Detail/ Building We will study details in contemporary culture and shift them into the discipline and scale of the detail of architecture.

Within the design process, it is common practice to work from a concept and increase the resolution in ever finer details and at a smaller scale. In this studio we plan to reverse this process, designing the finest detail based on the possibilities of a manufacturing process accessible to the discipline of architecture. We will start with the detail of the surface and expand the detail to a volume and finally to experience.

Architecturally the icon of the region is a fort from the 8th century. One can see the different amalgamations of cultures literally accumulated to form the building. Each area can be echoed as ‘disjunctive continuity’, where different qualities at times collide, overlap or merge to create an unexpected building. Contrasting geometries can be woven into one another. Design techniques derive from visual cues of these various cultures, generating formal, spatial, structural and material innovation. In essence, ‘Disjunctive Continuity’ 303

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AESTHETICS OF CONCEALMENT Jingchu Sun and Haochun Zeng With the project’s exterior referring to a post-colonial architecture in terms of characteristic of accumulation, the interior space tells a different story arguing the traditional Pakistan architecture in excluding Pakistani women from the public sphere. characteristics of continuity and penetration

are expressed in the project’s interior spaces and get enhanced by bringing in the water as an important component.

Natural water is captured, filtered, and stored at different levels throughout the whole project from top to bottom and eventually connects to the environment. As a girls’ dormitory, this project empowers the women by the concept of breaking the traditional Pakistani architecture as their imprisons sphere for centuries.

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Due to the influence of religion, poverty, and local traditions, gender inequality has been rooted in Gilgit-Baltistan culture for decades. Gender inequality is deep-rooted in the region that it can be seen spatialized in religious/cultural structures that divide spaces along gender boundaries.

Such gender inequality is particularly prominent in the local Muslim religious buildings. There are three architectural elements that have historical relevance to the unequal treat-

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ment of women in the Kashmir region that are: muqarnas, jharokhas and jali.These three architectural elements are not exclusive to this one structure but exist across a multitude of buildings that embody the religious architecture of this region. We want to explore how they can be deployed to develop a design concept to deal with gender inequality to not only reverse but generate a new role of architecture in an attempt to foster connectivity versus division by using these three elements in the mosque to design a mountain temple that conceals a women’s hub inside the cliff but also reveals in a way to empower women’s status and rights.

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CONCEALED INTER-PERMEABILITY Bin Liu and Baoqi Ji

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RADICAL PLAY Bryony Roberts (LECTURER) Katarina Marjanovic (TA) Bryony Roberts (Lecturer): Founder of Bryony Roberts Studio,MArch Princeton School of Architecture, BA Yale University, Rome Prize 2015-16, finalist for Wheelwright Prize, MacDowell Colony Fellowship in Architecture, Architectural League Prize, New Practices New York from AIA NY

Play as Activism Play is a complex social construct. Like many other species on this planet, humans engage in exploratory, openended activities that seem to have no functional purpose besides pure enjoyment. From their first interactions with objects and other people, people find ever more complex delight in games, in imaginary worlds, and in the expression of music, dance, and sports. In the 20th and 21st centuries, biologists and psychologists have debated the function of

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1 – Temporal Nature by Madison Green, Model

these seemingly nonsensical activities, and late capitalist societies have increasingly found ways to contain, regulate, and monetize them. From the scripting of early childhood development through close supervision, commercial products, and tightly regulated spaces, to the ruthless commodification of adult expression in the arts and sports, play has become highly individualistic and competitive. The radical potential of play — its unbounded, imaginative, and collective joy — is constrained and managed.

In contrast, this studio explores the potential of play as a medium of radical care. Learning from theories and practices of radical care and intersectional feminism, the studio examines play as a catalyst for building supportive community networks at multiple scales.

As the global pandemic, economic downturn, and ongoing social inequities have devastated communities around the country, there is need to plan for healing and recovery in the years to come.

Practices of radical care and intersectional feminism illuminate how collective healing can take place both by challenging conditions of inequity and by cultivating spaces for play, connection, and joy. For both children and adults who have been living in isolation, play offers much needed cathartic release and opportunities to rebuild social bonds. As articulated by adrienne maree brown in Pleasure Activism, joy can be a powerful tool for empowering the self and building community relationships.

Consequently, the studio frames play as

Specific Play

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TEMPORAL NATURE Madison Green

The project considers the existing social and spatial history of Samuel Powel Elementary School and its surrounding neighborhood to form an alliance supporting artistic expression, ecological education, and an expanded perception of greenspace. The project imperfectly engages the existing school’s modern articulation to create a public facing library surrounded by exploratory gardens and assembly spaces for learning, gathering, and unprescribed play. New constructions house private and shared art studios, classrooms and exhibition galleries to support the practices of local artists and create multiple points of engagement between artists and the neighborhood. These programs are connected through a landscape that embraces the community garden’s holistic lifespan, including it’s periods of dormancy, decay, and brown-ness, often diminished in conceptions of desirable greenspace. By acknowledging value across this wider timeframe and identifying avenues of support from local organizations, the underlying burden of maintenance embedded in a community garden transforms to become shared stewardship, nurturing symbiotic interactions between nature, students, artists, families, community groups, and neighbors alike.

Equitable Play Although play is ostensibly an experience of freedom and exploration, its conditions are highly structured and constrained by existing social inequities.

Spaces of childhood play, for example, are shaped by larger conditions of gender, race, and labor. Childcare centers perpetuate economic disparities through the financial burdens they place on working families and through the poor conditions of care workers, who are often women and people of color.

Playgrounds are also often highly regulated and exclusionary, limiting access to play to specific ages and populations.

Playgrounds prohibit non-parental adults and often feature spaces that are alienating for neurodiverse, visually impaired, or mobility impaired children.

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2 – Temporal Nature by Madison Green, Aerial

This attention to play inevitably conjures previous work on ludic spaces in architecture, especially the work of the Situationists and Constant Nieuwenhuys, but this studio brings a much more specific engagement with the socioeconomic conditions of play and its entanglement with existing inequities.

While Constant’s New Babylon conceived of an abstract, future world after the eradication of capitalism, this studio fosters networks of care in the difficult conditions of today. Rather than general and abstract, the projects will be specific, situated, and rooted in the economic and social realities of place.

Bryony Roberts

simultaneously individual and collective, and as a catalyst for radical change.

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Networks of Play Building on previous phases of site research and case study analysis, participants will propose new networks of play within their neighborhood. Questioning and transforming existing typologies, participants will conceive of alternative and hybrid spaces that are more active catalysts for social equity. More than a single site, participants will conceptualize a network of play that can support multiple populations simultaneously through a combination of interior and exterior conditions. Not only a spatial proposal, the network of play is also a

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social system of care, which learns from existing networks of social support in their neighborhood.

Node of Play Within their network of play, participants will develop one site in detail, articulating its architecture through close attention to its materiality and tectonics.

Participants will study case studies of experimental materiality and consider connections to different pedagogies and philosophies of play. Participants are encouraged to explore forms of play through their own design process to arrive at inventive spatial organization and surface articulation. The studio will discuss how formal techniques of pattern and ornament are linked to discourses on play. Final projects will therefore articulate the social and spatial conditions of play from the urban scale of the network down to the architectural scale of a specific play space and its material surfaces, tectonics, and connections to existing conditions.

BLOOMING DAY Xinyi Chen and Jingyi Zhou

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Mantua, a marginalized community located in West Philadelphia, has a long history of suffering from the city’s policymaking and planning. In the 1940s, it was identified as a “dangerous” zone by a discriminatory practice called Redlining. In the following years, Philadelphia Urban Renewal and University of Pennsylvania’s expansion, city’s infrastructure developments further prevented the residents in the neighborhood from thriving. In the last two decades, gentrification started to greatly influence the community.

Many of the minority residents were forced to leave, and space was taken over by developers and university students.

In the past year, under the impact of the pandemic, the situation intensified as the whole neighborhood fell into despair.

We used a now-closed art studio in the neighborhood as an anchor point, designed an urban revival plan for a cultural hub, providing open public space, recreations, social services, and art-related activities. We intend it to be an amplifier to broadcast the energy of the existing art studio to the whole community; at the same time, help construct a better living environment, draw in more social and educational resources, and achieve cultural preservation.

The studio stages constant exchange between theory, research, and design.

Reading discussions on theories of care, intersectional feminism, pleasure activism, and the design of play will

3 – Blooming Day by Xinyi Chen and Jingyi Zhou, Models

4 – Blooming Day by Xinyi Chen and Jingyi Zhou, Aerial

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Methodology

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encourage participants to develop and articulate individual positions on contemporary discourses. Participants will research case studies of experimental play spaces and conduct extensive urban research on sites in their own neighborhood, honing skills of observation, documentation, and systems research. The research process will guide the site selection, programming, and identification of stakeholders.

The theoretical position and research that each student develops will offer a conceptual framework for the refinement of their architectural proposal.

perform in-person observation and to develop critiques of existing conditions.

As guidance for their individual projects, participants will analyze case studies of experimental and inclusive spaces of play as well as case studies of material innovation. Building on the case studies, critiques, and urban research on their sites, participants will develop individual design proposals for new sites of play.

Studio Sequence The studio will begin with an introductory reading discussion, to address key theoretical frameworks and concepts, before moving into research. In order to maximize the potential for site observation and analysis in a condition of remote learning, participants will conduct research in their own neighborhoods and identify sites and programs specific to their local context.

Participants will seek out sites of play near where they live—playgrounds, child care facilities, schools, and parks—to 309

5 – Bryony Roberts in Virtual Studio Review

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F[OLLIE] Calli Katzelnick and Glenn Godfrey Focusing on the neighborhoods of Cedar Park and Spruce Hill, F[ollie] aims to provide spaces of informal play to permanent, local families that are currently underserved, particularly in Cedar Park. The project addresses the current ‘play desert’ through the creation of a network of roaming follies that provide unprescribed spaces of play. The three nodes located at Clark Park, Penn Alexander School, and

the Community Gardens act as hubs to fabricate and restore follies, with the help of local community members and resident artists.

The project focuses on Clark Park as the primary hub location, blending the two neighborhoods through varying ideas of play. The project aims to overlap programs of skate, maker, and market in order to challenge conventional ideas of play and engage the local communities through a pedagogical network.

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6 – F[ollie] by Calli Katzelnick and Glenn Godfrey, Elevation 7 – F[ollie] by Calli Katzelnick and Glenn Godfrey, Entrance Render

8 – F[ollie] by Calli Katzelnick and Glenn Godfrey, Interior Render 9 – F[ollie] by Calli Katzelnick and Glenn Godfrey, Axon

In Mill Creek, the buried floodplain has caused land problems in the west Philadelphia area. Over time, houses on these filled up lands deteriorate fast and eventually collapse into vacant lots. There’s a high correlation between low-income households and vacant lots, making it psychologically challenging to see neighboring properties falling apart.

In the past few years, local communities are collaborating with researchers from nearby universities to rebuild the neighborhood, introducing community farms to the vacant

lots. Our proposal is to build on this developed idea and expand the use of vacant lots to serve more people within the neighborhood.

Our network of play seeks to introduce a system that brings the community together in various aspects. Introducing programs that not only brings in outside funds to improve the community’s economic conditions, but also having community kitchens with childcare centers that can offset the burden of domestic labor, especially on the women population. The expanded kinship would start to raise community awareness, and hopefully revitalize the community in a way that still respects its local culture.

Bryony Roberts

SERENE INTERLUDE Yi-Hsuan Wu and Saina Xiang

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12 – Serene Interlude by Yi-Hsuan Wu and Saina Xiang, Section 13 – Serene Interlude by Yi-Hsuan Wu and Saina Xiang, Vignette

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10 – Serene Interlude by Yi-Hsuan Wu and Saina Xiang, Perspective Render 11 – Serene Interlude by Yi-Hsuan Wu and Saina Xiang, Assemblies

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OUTSIDE THE WALLS: THE TRANSFORMATION OF DAWSON JAIL Marion Weiss (GRAHAM PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE)) Nicole Bronola (TA) Marion Weiss (Graham Professor of Practice): Marion Weiss is cofounder of WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/ Landscape/Urbanism based in New York City and the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Her multidisciplinary firm operates at the nexus of architecture, art, landscape, and urban design.

Her firm’s Olympic Sculpture Park exemplifies this cross

Dallas is a city of paradoxes. As an urban center defined by a dramatic skyline and the slalom of infrastructure, it has also been tied to the fates of the Trinity River that has been reconfigured and relocated over the last century to protect the city from flooding. Now, a levee system protects the city from the river, yet is also defined by an ambiguous limbo of parking lots and freeway on and off ramps that separate the citizens of Dallas from the future re-naturalized river park.

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ECOCELL Chia-Chia Liu and Yu Qiao

EcoCell aims to connect the neighboring existing prison, the Trinity River belt, and the Dallas downtown, and to transform the Dawson Jail building from a barrier to a gateway to the trinity river park. The project reintroduces greenery, milkweed, and pollinators such as monarch butterflies, hummingbirds, and honeybees back into civilization, and opens up an opportunity for the incarcerated fellows to work on cultivation projects. The once daunting Dawson State Jail is now reborn with a new life.

The project adapts and reuses the existing structure of the Dawson State Jail. The vertical structure components are 312

1 – EcoCell by Chia-Chia Liu and Yu Qiao, Axon

transformed into vertical gardening. Aiming to create a more porous threshold between the river and the city, the floor plates and the roof are selectively opened up to emphasize the openness in the east west axis. The building facade is dematerialized, and the lattice structure extends into the river belt and becomes the pollinator garden.

Not only does the lattice structure extend in the east west direction, but it also links the project to the existing neighboring prison and justice complex. The incarcerated fellows are able to occupy half of the building to work on the vertical gardening. Employees and visitors can use the site as a therapeutic garden during their break or waiting time. Besides green nursery, EcoCell also serves as a non-profit community center that provide support and education for those formerly incarcerated.

Flanking both sides of the West Commerce Street Bridge, the Dawson State Jail and a prison frame one of the most prominent gateways to the city. Dawson Jail, dubbed the city’s ugliest building, also earned a reputation as one of the country’s most poorly managed jails and was ultimately closed in 2013.

In 2019, the Trinity Park Conservancy purchased the jail and announced their commitment to transform it from a place of incarceration into a community gateway to the park. While the program is yet to be defined, the conservancy is searching for a new vision that can transform the legacy of the building into one that can host programs committed to underserved communities, park facilities, and ultimately become an inspiring landmark changing the horizon of the city. Perhaps as important is the potential of the building to be transformed through subtraction and additions, into a more porous threshold between the river and the city, and a new site for urban and ecological transformation — from barrier to gateway.

Marion Weiss

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2 – Marion Weiss In Virtual Studio Review 3 – Virtual Studio Review

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4 – EcoCell by Chia-Chia Liu and Yu Qiao, Night View Render

5 – Path on the River by Kathy Yuan and Henry Zeng, Render

New Symmetries: Without predetermined answers, the creation of this new hybrid raises critical questions: How can the recasting of a jail — thinking outside walls — become a new cultural infrastructure? What are the systems that inform the subsurface, surface and silhouette of this hybrid?

Through the lens of active research, how can the specificity of this place, located at the central intersection of the river and the city, be leveraged to become a place of connection?

Marion Weiss

Of significance is the philosophical and physical locus of the project. As the last building allowed to be built so close to the levee, it is vulnerable to increased risks of flooding intensified by climate change. As a facility associated with incarcerating so many from underserved communities, it illuminates pressing issues of social justice. And as a building at the edge of an emerging park and a city expanding ever closer to the river’s edge, it has the potential to become a catalyst for urban transformation and ecological thinking.

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PATH ON THE RIVER Kathy Yuan and Henry Zeng

The Dawson States Jail is located in Downtown Dallas on the banks of Trinity River. For a long time, officials from the City of Dallas have advocated for the closure of the jail to use the land for the Trinity River Corridor Project. This project is an approach to repurpose the jail and its site. It proposes a culinary school and food market as rehabilitation programs for the released incarcerated. The site is reshaped into a public-friendly urban market and pool garden. Together, the project becomes an open gate between the river and the city, and a bridge to connect the released incarcerated back to society.

Students proposed new strategies to transform the existing Dawson Jail from a place o f incarceration into a structure that connects the city, river, and the community. Through the creation of a new center for ecology and social justice, the building has to potential to recast the definition of architecture’s capacity to transform reality.

Research: Translating And Recasting Prototypes The studio was initiated with a threeweek research project on Hybrid architectural prototypes, with case studies that began at the scale of architecture and extended to the scale of urban infrastructures. These case studies, with distinct architectural and infrastructural DNA, were utilized as experimental beginnings to will inform new design strategies that transform the jail and connect to the liminal territory between the city, the highway and the river.

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6 – Path on the River by Kathy Yuan and Henry Zeng, Landscape Render

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CYCLOPEDIA OF TREES Jane Chenyang Yu and Huayu Jin Dallas has one of the largest urban forest within the country, but most of the citizens are unaware of its existence due to the uneven distribution of trees that clustered to the southeast end of the city, far from downtown Dallas. This lack of knowledge on trees led to the mismanagement and lack of budget on the trees in the city for a long time in the past until recent. The uneven distribution has also resulted in serious heat island effect around Dallas, particularly those areas around the site.

This Cyclopedia of Trees takes the existing but neglected catalog of plants on the site into the building, and extracts the horizontal nature vertically to form a vertical catalog of

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forest, arranged by species. The rest of the building include an archive, reading rooms, outlook spaces, galleries, a rooftop green house and other activity spaces for visitors to further study the plants systematically through books and images, after being absorbed in the vertical forest. The horizontal catalog of plants on sites by the Trinity river, the vertical catalog of trees ascending the building, along with the specimen galleries and written catalog of trees in the library space, together form a Cyclopedia of Trees.

The two intertwining green paths, one pedestrian and one for bicycle, connecting the other side of the river on the west, while reaching the Union Station and extending deep into the city on the east, construct a green emerald in Dallas for pedestrian walkability and civic activities.

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7 – Cyclopedia of Trees by Jane Chenyang Yu and Huayu Jin, Aerial 8 – Cyclopedia of Trees by Jane Chenyang Yu and Huayu Jin, Interior Render

9 – Cyclopedia of Trees by Jane Chenyang Yu and Huayu Jin, Exterior Render

Gateway house transforms Dawson’s Jail from a windowless enclave of a private carceral state to a new node and beacon within the Trinity River Park, integrating the neighborhood of Trinity Groves through a hybridized pedestrian passage and culminating in a vibrant community center and transitional residency program.

Puzzling across the flood basin are a series of plinths curating environments of passage and play. Floating above the basin, programmed plinths are supported by deep infrastructure encasing stairs or trees as the surfaces act as a continuous ground plane. The scape is segmented by plantings, passage, and material, with some figures fitted with a flexible mesh creating moments of trampolines or giant cots. Perforations and louvres above filter diluted light to the shaded caverns below, where a series of public pools not yet seen in the modern era of the city live.

The public infrastructure is meant to bias the neighborhoods to the west in its consideration and connection. These

low-income neighborhoods are facing redevelopment that, while bringing assets to the community, threaten gentrification. We seek to give them primary access to this civic expansion while providing opportunities within the building to support residencies of their locally owned businesses.

The trade for this real estate is provided training for those in temporary housing who require job skills, creating a framework for lasting community connection for both parties as well as necessary skills for those who need it.

Marion Weiss

GATEWAY HOUSE Karen Vankovich and Matthew Kohman

Temporary housing not only has the opportunity to serve those formerly incarcerated but many populations in transitional circumstances from the elderly to the unhoused. By serving a variety of groups of people, this temporary housing can create diverse and supportive residential environments, fostering inner community on site.

The ultimate goal is to return agency of the site to those most affected by the institutional biases and corrupt systems of the former building, allowing the project to find roots in a connection to the Trinity River ecology and West Dallas community.

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10 – Gateway House by Karen Vankovich and Matthew Kohman, Plan

11 – Gateway House by Karen Vankovich and Matthew Kohman, Render 12 – Gateway House by Karen Vankovich and Matthew Kohman, Interior Render

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March 17, 2021 SHARON E. SUTTON: DECOLONIZING THE CITY-MAKING PROFESSIONS: Learning from the Dreams and Defeats of the 1960s

Dr. Sharon Egretta Sutton, FAIA is a distinguished visiting professor of architecture at Parsons School of Design and has also served on the faculties of Columbia University, Pratt Institute, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington. She was the twelfth African American woman to be licensed to practice architecture, the first to be promoted to full professor of architecture, and the second to be elected a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects.

Dr. Sutton’s scholarship explores America’s continuing struggle for racial justice. A recent book, When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in Americas Cities and Universities, portrays an audacious affirmative action effort at Columbia University during the Civil Rights Movement. A forthcoming book (Fordham 2021), A Pedagogy of Hope: Pursuing Democracy’s Promise through Place-Based Activism, characterizes the struggles of lowincome youth to improve their rundown surroundings as a new form of activism.

Early in her career, Dr. Sutton worked as a professional musician in New York City, most notably with the original cast of Man of La Mancha. Her fine art is in the Library of Congress and has been widely exhibited and collected.

She holds five academic degrees—in music, architecture, philosophy, and psychology—and has studied graphic art internationally. She has been a keynote speaker at conferences in five disciplines and a distinguished lecturer and guest studio critic at more than 100 colleges and universities internationally.

Dr. Sutton received the Whitney M. Young Jr. Award from the American Institute of Architects, the Medal of Honor from both the New York and Seattle chapters of that organization, and the Oculus Award from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. She is a distinguished professor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and an inductee into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.

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SPRING ELECTIVE SEMINARS

[ARCH 712] ARCHITECTURE AND MEDIA AFTER WWII Taryn R. Mudge

This course will question how architects have engaged in visual research of the built environment within the process of architectural design. In particular, we will consider the media and methods architects have used to observe and to record building sites and how visual information has influenced design thinking and informed architectural proposals in the postwar period. The visual material under investigation in this course will include, but is not limited to, photography (aerial, documentary, street, etc.), film, sketches, painting, collage, mapping as well as magazines and advertisements.

Additionally, we will consider the physical distance and relationship between the observer and the observed. For example, does the architect observe the site from the air, as a pedestrian, or through a windshield? Do they borrow images or make their own? Are they in search of precise information or are they hoping to uncover the mood or local character? Are they preparing for a commissioned project or are they dreaming of a utopian future? The course is organized into three parts: Part I will concentrate on approaches to visual research and observation in Europe immediately following the Second World War, Part II will focus on the American context and images of postwar consumer culture, and Part III will discuss the rapid evolution of media and architecture in the late 20th century and question the trajectory of the “post” periods — post-modern, post post-modern, post-documentary, post-digital, and beyond.

[ARCH 712] TECHNOLOGY AND EXPRESSION Ariel Genadt Since the mid 19th century, architectural envelopes have become the prime subject of experimentations and investments, as well as theoretical conflicts. This seminar takes the revolution of steel and glass technology in the 19th century as a starting point to examine the relationship between construction technologies and architectural expression in the 20th and 21st centuries. It explores the interdependence of theory and practice in case studies located in various cultures and climates around the world, and built in a range of techniques and materials. The lectures are organized thematically, looking at the different ways by which technology can be instrumental in selectively revealing and concealing structural logic, material properties, fabrication, digital tools, climate control, sensorial perception, image-making, symbolism and atmosphere. The seminar develops students’ critical thinking towards contemporary practice, where globalized technology and large capital often hinder the creation of architecture with local cultural pertinence. Understanding the reciprocities between building, technology and expression is essential for creatively tackling architecture’s impact on the environment and sustaining its civic agency.

[ARCH 712] ARCHITECTURES OF REFUSAL: ON SPATIAL JUSTICE IN THE SOUTH BRONX Eduardo Rega Calvo A neighborhood with a remarkable history of struggle against inept municipal governments, neoliberalism and the forces behind the breeding of decay, the South Bronx is currently experiencing an aggressive wave of gentrification and policies that keep benefitting small elites. Grassroots organizations are fighting back while practicing radical imaginations for a more just future. Architectures of Refusal: On Spatial Justice in the South Bronx aims to reflect and develop collective architecture research on contemporary visionary architectural and urban activist practices in the South Bronx that refuse capitalist exploitation vis a vis New York City’s economic transformation: from top-down public disinvestment and privatization to bottom-up self-provisioning and organizing. Through reading discussions, film/audiovisual analysis and mobilizing various tools of inquiry on the city, the seminar will learn from those involved in the long-term and grassroots processes that have been redrawing the limits of socio-spatial organization in the South Bronx. The seminar will study the history of radical social movements from the second half of the 20th century in NYC with a special focus on the South Bronx. Groups of students will develop research and spatial visualizations of grassroots struggles for environmental and food justice, post-capitalist economic practices, public health, prison abolitionism and anti-gentrification. Some of the work produced in the seminar will be included in the Architectures of Refusal online platform that aims to study and present the socio-spatial, territorial, urban, and environmental dimensions of social movements that prefigure a world that refuses the neoliberal oligarchical status quo.

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In the past three decades, discussions about ecological impact and sustainability have come to prominence in the Arts and Sciences as well as in Architecture and Urban Planning. On the one hand, the growing priority of ecocriticism across the humanities (e.g., the recently developed Undergraduate Minor in Environmental Humanities at Penn) and the enlarged agenda of Eco Art to engage with environmental, aesthetic, social, and political relations have led Art Historians to strive at a probing and pointedly ethical integration of visual analysis, cultural interpretation, and environmental history — for an “Ecocritical Art History.” Architecture schools, on the other hand, have created MA programs, such as “Landscape Urbanism” and “Sustainable Design,” and “Environmental Building Design” and architectural theorists and ecological thinkers coin new terms – “resilience,” “adaptation,” and “mitigation” – in efforts to reframe and more effectively tackle the urgent environmental and demographic pressures of global urban developments. Many of these development aim to articulate a more earth-conscious mode of analysis for art and architecture alike. Such concerns have been intensified recently by initiatives to designate the current era of geological time as the “Anthropocene” — the epoch that began when human phenomena started to have a major influence on the Earth’s appearance and ecosystems.

SPRING ELECTIVE SEMINARS

[ARCH 713] ECOLOGICAL THINKING IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE Daniel Barber, Mantha Zarmakoupi

[ARCH 714] MUSEUM AS SITE: CRITIQUE, INTERVENTION, AND PRODUCTION Andrea Hornick In this course, we will take the museum as a site for critique, invention, and production. As architecture, cultural institution, and site of performance, the museum offers many relevant opportunities to this time we are living in. Students will visit (online or in person, as their place of residence during the course allows), analyze, and discuss a number of local exhibitions and produce their own intervention in individual or group projects. Exhibition design, design of museum, the process of curating, producing artworks ranging from paintings to installation, performance, and audio works, as well as attention to conservation, installation, museum education, and the logistics and economics of exhibitions will be discussed on site and in seminar. These topics and others will be open for students to engage as part of their own creative work produced for the class in the form of an online exhibition. Museums have been greatly impacted by the current pandemic and the accompanying sea change in social, racial, gender, and economic equity. We will look at how various institutions are creatively responding to the challenge. The students will be asked to respond to these issues within their projects.

In the first class, we will understand the current location of each student, and which in-person resources they have access to. This discussion will shape the course of the class; students who are able to visit traditional museums in person, will document and present responses to their visits, and use them to shape a final project. Others will use online resources as well as outdoor spaces within their local environments and urban fabric, including spaces connected to institutions or responding to them. This will include public art, monuments, ruins, outdoor sculpture, graffiti, parks and gardens, arboretums, etc.

[ARCH 718] HISTORY AND THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE AND CLIMATE Daniel A Barber, Anwar Islem Basunbul Climate change is upon us. This course discusses the history of thinking about climate in architecture. We confront the geographic and epistemic challenges of climate change and other environmental threats, and reconsider the forces seen to condition the development of modern architecture. The course will explore the history of buildings as mechanisms of climate management, and the theoretical and conceptual frameworks that pertain. As many of the arguments and innovations in the climate discourse were made through visual means, the images produced by architects and others interested in understanding the relationship between “man” and “climate” will be a central arena of exploration. We will treat these images as evidence of material innovations in energy efficient architectural design technologies and also as evidence of new ways of thinking about ecological, political, cultural, and economic relationships. These narratives, images, and methods — and the broader understanding of environmental systems that emerged since the immediate post-war period — also suggest a complex relationship to the present. Rather than examine instrumental aspects of these methods and their histories, we will explore different historiographic and conceptual means for the archival analysis of climate, technology, and architecture. Recent texts concerned with theories of historical change, of new ideas about the human, and with the cultural anxieties associated with the Anthropocene will be read to this end.

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[ARCH 720] VISUAL LITERACY AND ITS CULTURE Brian De Luna The digital turn in the creative fields resulted in profound transformations of techniques, aesthetics and underlying concepts in the development of contemporary visual culture. The dissemination and consumption of information through images through all types of media platforms influence and re-define (for better or worse) all aspects of our culture and reality. It is vital to develop a deep knowledge of the current visual concepts and techniques in arts, photography, cinema, product design and architecture to claim a critical stance through which we can positively contribute to the evolution of contemporary culture. The discipline of architecture has been deeply influenced by the digital shift in modes of design and visualization which yielded a wide array of directions within the architectural discourse, especially with questions and problems regarding representation. One clear outcome of this transformational period is the diversity of new representational strategies to seek alternative modes of visualization. It is clear that no one representational medium can be defined as the locus of architectural thought and architecture, as a cultural practice, can no longer be defined through the output of a single medium. The reality of our discipline is that we work through collective mediums and conventions of drawings, models, images, simulations, texts, prototypes and buildings to visualize architectural concepts. These mediums all require degrees of expertise in techniques that are necessary for their execution: they all involve conceptual depth that define their disciplinary positions; they all require translations across each other to enable subjective work-flows; they all require aesthetic attitudes to influence the development of visual culture in architecture. This course will introduce the AAD majors to contemporary topics of visualization in arts, photography, cinema and architecture. They will explore multiple mediums of representation to help them gain the vital visual literacy to excel in the program. Students will be introduced to discursive background and contemporary concepts of line drawing, fabricated object and constructed image as they work through 3 distinct projects during the semester. Each exercise will be initiated by a topical lecture and be followed by weekly pin ups to advance student projects. (Topics to be covered: Discourse of Contemporary Line Drawing, Multi-part 3D Printing, Vacuform/CNC Milling, Digital/Analog Surface Articulation, Rendering, Abstraction and Realism, Montage/Collage/Photorealism).

322 Ezio Blasetti in “hybrid” mode: producing student prototypes with robot at home

Like architecture, furniture exists at the intersection of idea and physical form. Due to the specific scale that furniture occupies, however, this physical form relates not only to the environment in which the furniture is set, but also intimately to the physical bodies that interact with and around it. Additionally, as a manufactured product, often specified in large quantities, furniture must also address not only poetic considerations, but practical and economic ones as well. Instead of being seen as one-off objects, the furniture created in this seminar focuses on furniture development as a strategic design process where the designer’s role is to understand the various responsibilities to each stakeholder (client/manufacturer, market/customer, environment) and the additional considerations (materials, processes, manufacturability, etc.), that ultimately translate these points into a potentially successful product.

of architecture. This seminar seeks to establish a framework of understanding enclosures in this sense of the revelatory detail. We will seek to counterpoint the numerical (external) facts of what is accepted as facade design (criteria, codes, loads, forces, and consumptions) with an understanding of the generative processes underlying these physical criteria. The aim of this seminar is to arm the student with a guided understanding of the materials and assemblies available to them to form enclosures.

The underlying intent is twofold. In a generative role as architects, the course intends not for an encyclopedic overview of the elements and calculative methodologies of envelope design. Rather we will endeavor to investigate concepts of enclosure through assemblage of elements, mediated by details, in the service of the architectural intentions of the student. In a execution role as architects in practice, the investigation into methodologies of deployment and execution of enclosure, materials and assemblies is intended to arm the students to engage proactively in their future practices with the succession of consulting engineers, specialty facade consultants, manufacturers and facade contractors that they will encounter during the execution of their work.

SPRING ELECTIVE SEMINARS

[ARCH 726] FURNITURE DESIGN AS STRATEGIC PROCESS Mikael Avery

[ARCH 732] COMPUTATIONAL COMPOSITE FORM Ezio Blasetti

In order to approach furniture in this manner, the course is structured around specific design briefs and clustered into two distinct but continuous stages. First, through research into stakeholder needs and potential market opportunities — as well as hearing from industry insiders — students craft tailored design proposals and develop concepts accordingly. Next, students work towards realizing a concept (complete with sketches, mock-ups, scaled models, technical drawings, connections, and other pertinent details) in order to refine their proposals and secure a real world understanding of the manufacturing processes as well as the potential obstacles created by their decisions. From insights gained and feedback from these steps, students ultimately develop a final design proposal for a piece, collection, or system of furniture that successfully leverages their understanding of a thoughtful and deliberate design strategy.

[ARCH 732] ENCLOSURES: SELECTION, AFFINITIES & INTEGRATION Charles Berman

[ARCH 732] DEPLOYABLE STRUCTURES Mohamad Al Khayer The objective of this course is to introduce the rapidly growing field of deployable structures through hands on experiments conducted in workshop environments.

Students develop skills in making deployable structures.

[ARCH 732] DAYLIGHTING Jessica Zofchak This course aims to introduce fundamental daylighting concepts and tools to analyze daylighting design. The wide range of topics to be studied includes site planning, building envelope and shading optimization, passive solar design, daylight delivery methods, daylight analysis structure and results interpretation, and a brief daylighting and lighting design integration.

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Details should be considered in the traditional sense, as assemblages of constituent elements. Not as a mere collection of parts, rather as an “assemblage,” the act of assembling under a guiding principle; the relationship to a whole. Frascari defines the detail as the union of construction — having the dual role of ruling both the construction and construing of architecture. This obligation of the relationship of the parts to the whole and the whole to the parts is the essence of the revelatory detail in service

This seminar will research algorithmic generative methods and the use of carbon fiber in robotics for architectural design. The research will focus on the intersection of computation, form generation, simulation and robotic fabrication. The objective is to develop and document specific computational tools and material prototypes than span across design phases, from concept to fabrication. This course investigates computation as an embodied application in the design, manufacturing and lifespan of architectural building ele¬ments. Students will use objectoriented programming to develop advanced generative and analytical algorithms. Students will explore techniques of advanced geometric operations for the design and robotic manufacturing of complex building components.

The seminar will include workshops with micro-controllers for the design of prototypes with embedded informational systems. Students will be in¬troduced to concepts and techniques of evolutionary computation and machine learning and explore their application in architectural design.

SPRING ELECTIVE SEMINARS

[ARCH 732] PRINCIPLES OF DIGITAL FABRICATION Mikael Avery Through the almost seamless ability to output digital designs to physical objects, digital fabrication has transformed the way designers work. At this point, many of the tools and techniques of digital fabrication are well established and almost taken for granted within the design professions. To begin this course we will review these “traditional” digital fabrication techniques in order to establish a baseline skill set to work from. We will then utilize a series of exercises in order to explore a hybrid approaches to digital fabrication in which multiple techniques are utilized within the same work.

[ARCH 732] HEAVY ARCHITECTURE Philip J. Ryan Heavy Architecture is a seminar that will examine buildings that, through their tectonics or formal expression, connote a feeling of weight, permanence, or “heaviness.”

Analysis of these buildings and methods of construction stand in relation to the proliferation of thin, formally exuberant, and, by virtue of their use or commodified nature, transient buildings. The course is not a rejection or formal critique of “thin” architecture, but instead an analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of the “heavy” building type in terms of a building’s financial, environmental, symbolic or conceptual, and functional goals.

The course will parse the alleged nostalgic or habitual reputation of “heavy” architecture within the context of architecture’s ongoing struggle to be the vanguard of the built environment even while its relevancy and voice is challenged by economic, stylistic, and social forces.

[ARCH 732] EMBODIED CARBON & ARCHITECTURE Stephanie Carlisle

With the advent of 3D printing technology in the late 1980s and the current wave of widespread adoption as a design tool – found in design schools and offices across the world – the immediate testing of complex digital models has never been quicker, clearer, or more immediate. Despite this formal freedom to test and print, the installations and buildings generated from these complex digital models rely on much more traditional building techniques for their construction. By combining various digital fabrication approaches, we seek to challenge and reframe the often reductive geometries that currently supports much of this work and bring with it a new way of approaching aesthetics, structure, and construction based on the possibilities inherent in these digital techniques.

The environmental impacts of the built environment are staggering. Buildings are currently responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions, when both operational and embodied carbon are taken into account. Architects have a vital role to play in responding to the current climate emergency, but we can only make substantial progress when we are equipped to evaluate decarbonization strategies and the effects of design decisions. This course brings together an introduction to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the industry-standard method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a building over its whole life cycle, paired with discussion on broader industry trends and technologies aimed at radically decarbonizing the built environment. In the course, students will receive hands-on experience building comparative LCA models, while also exploring material life cycles, industrial processes, supply chain dynamics, and political and economic dimensions of environmental impact data. We will also discuss current innovations in materials manufacturing and policy changes that focus on embodied carbon, which will transform construction practices. The overall goal of the course is to increase carbon literacy and to empower students with a working understanding of climate change, life cycle assessment, and the many strategies by which designers can immediately reduce the carbon footprint of their projects. This course does not require any previous modeling or software experience.

[ARCH 732] INQUIRY INTO BIOMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES Laia Mogas-Soldevila

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Traditional building materials are environmentally- and economically-expensive to extract, process, transport or recycle, their damage is non-trivial to repair, and have limited ability to respond to changes in their immediate surroundings. Biological materials like wood, coral, silk, skin or bone outperform human-made materials in that they can be grown where needed, self-repair when damaged, and respond to changes in their surroundings.

Their inclusion in architectural practice could have great benefits in wellbeing and the environment defining new tools and strategies towards the future of sustainable

This course covers the fundamentals of architectural acoustics and the interdependence between acoustics and architectural design. The course explores the effects of building massing, room shape and form, and architectural finishes on a project site’s soundscape and the user’s acoustic experience. It will include fundamentals on sound, sound isolation, room acoustics and building systems noise control, a lecture on the history and future of performance space design, a virtual visit to the Arup SoundLab, and two assignments. construction. Crucial projects describing future biomaterial architectures are emerging in the field. In this seminar, students will review their potential through lectures followed by case studies and propose future developments through a guided research project with special attention to functional, industrial, environmental and aesthetic dimensions. The course is structured to foster fundamental scientific literacy, cross-disciplinary thinking, creativity, and innovation in biomaterials in design.

[ARCH 733] NEW MATERIALS AND METHODS RESEARCH Laia Mogas-Soldevila The primary goal of this course is to help students formulate a robust research proposal for their culminating design studio in digital large-scale fabrication and robotics manufacturing using new materials such as carbon fiber and other composites. The course provides a forum for critical discussion of contemporary design practices that is exploratory and speculative in nature. In addition to collaborative thinking and debate students will develop their own research interests to formulate contemporary positions in the making of architecture through the research of materials and their fabrication methods.

[ARCH 734] ECOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE, CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES Todd Woodward

[ARCH 736] WATER SHAPING ARCHITECTURE Stuart Mardeusz & Jonathan Weiss While efforts in sustainable design have focused on energy use, carbon footprint, light and impacts on human occupants, it could be argued that water is the ultimate test of sustainability. Water is amongst the most compelling and significant design topics of the 21st Century. Not just a necessity of life, water has central social, cultural, and symbolic meanings and plays an essential role for all living organisms. As our planet is ever more challenged to provide for increasing populations with finite resources, our approach to water will need to evolve to meet our new and future realities. The goals of this course are to recognize the significant history of designing water, and touch upon the social, cultural, ecologic, and economic impact that designed water has had and will play in the 21st Century, and in addressing urgent global challenges linked to climate change. Water Shaping Architecture will challenge individuals to project possibilities for our disciplines and begin to inform students about the crucial role design plays in shaping this resource. How do our choices as architects impact access to water, and how are those issues predetermined on a building, local, regional and continental scale? How can our projects react resiliently to changing climate and changing reality? If Sustainability is about providing for our needs while allowing for future generations to do the same, how does our outlook on water shape our decision-making process? The class includes readings, short sketch assignments and case studies, field trips (in person as possible or virtual) and a final case study report.

[ARCH 736] ARCHITECTURAL WORKFLOWS IN THE DESIGN AND DELIVERY OF BUILDINGS Richard Garber This seminar in design and technology will focus on the concept of the architectural workflow as it pertains to both contemporary operations in design practice as well as novel project delivery methods enabled by Building Information Modeling (BIM). The synthesis of these digital design platforms with simulation and increasing access to data in the form of natural phenomena, ecology, and building performance has allowed contemporary architects to engage the notion of workflows with others in design and construction practices. Increasingly, this engagement involves object-oriented computing operations and non-human interfaces that expand architectural scope beyond buildings, allowing us to more broadly consider the complex environments in which our buildings

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Architecture is an inherently exploitive act – we utilize resources from the earth and produce waste and pollution to create and occupy buildings. We have learned that buildings are responsible for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions, 15% of water use and 30% of landfill debris. This growing realization has led building designers to look for ways to minimize negative environmental impacts. Green building design practices are seemingly becoming mainstream. Green building certification programs and building performance metrics are no longer considered fringe ideas. This course will investigate these trends and the underlying theory with a critical eye. Is “mainstream green” really delivering the earth-saving architecture it claims?

As green building practices become more widespread, there remains something unsatisfying about a design approach that focuses on limits, checklists, negative impacts and being “less bad.” Can we aspire to something more?

If so, what would that be? How can or should the act of design change to accommodate an ecological approach?

SPRING ELECTIVE SEMINARS

[ARCH 736] BUILDING ACOUSTICS Joseph Solway

SPRING ELECTIVE SEMINARS

exist. As such, workflows occupy an expanded territory within architectural practice and merge digital-design operations with construction activities, project delivery, and post-occupation scenarios in both virtual and actual formats. The implications for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry could not be greater, and these new collaborative models have become as important as the novel buildings they allow us to produce.

[ARCH 744] DIGITAL FABRICATION Ferda Kolatan Objective The objective of this course is to examine how “3D Color Printing” can expand our conceptual, historical, and material understanding of the relationship between images and objects in the context of architecture. Through the design and digital fabrication of a contemporary folly, the students will advance their technical skills in image and fabrication technologies while also reflecting and building on architecture’s rich tradition of manifesting cultural ideas by combining the pictorial with the tectonic in novel ways.

[ARCH 746] CINEMA AND ARCHITECTURE IN TRANSLATION Danielle Willems, Nicholas Klein Cinema and Architecture in Translation is a course that will survey key cinematic moments and techniques within the history of film and find new intersections between architecture and dramatic situational narratives. This course is organized into a series of thematic lectures that parallel the contemporary development of the two disciplines both in theory and technique. The focus will be on the analysis of mise-en-scène, the architecture of the film scene and developing speculative architectural futures. Current preand post-production techniques in filmmaking are converging with architectural digital representation. This is an opportunity that provides fertile ground for architects to critically re-examine the ‘digital’ and ‘image’ making in a variety of scales in relation to impactful narratives and visualizations. There is a rich history in constructing images, speculative worlds and scenes for the film industry. These tools, specifically the technique of “matte painting” will be explored in this course. We will examine the parallels between the tools and strategies of cinematic visualization as it relates to advanced architectural image making.

Students will engage and explore selected readings on the intersections between architecture and cinema. While an important aspect of this course will be to identify the differences between “real” and “cinematic” architecture, we will also explore the ever more porous borders between the physical, the virtual and the amorphous. The emphasis is to encourage more intellectual rigor along with more fearless and technically proficient visualization. This is an advanced representation course that produces 2D images and narrative texts.

[ARCH 748] ARCHITECTURE AND THE NEW ELEGANCE Hina Jamelle The Digital Folly The classical architectural folly is a historically unique structure. As suggested by its name (roughly translated as “foolish”), it is typically viewed as an extravagant and superfluous artifact with no specific function or deeper purpose. Having been popularized in the 17th and 18th centuries as pleasure pavilions in English and continental gardens, follies often reference different times and places through a mixture of types and features. It is not uncommon to find within the same landscape follies depicting such diverse entities as ancient temples, ottoman pavilions, and chinoiseries. Another important characteristic of the folly is a deliberate and intricate integration of pictorial imagery with form and object. These playful qualities of the folly are examined, reevaluated, and expanded on through 3D color printing techniques.

The seminar will define and elaborate on the following topics for the digital discourse- diagrammatic relations, technique and aesthetic principles. Technological innovations establish new status quos and updated platforms from which to operate and launch further innovations.

Design research practices continually reinvent themselves and the techniques they use to stay ahead of such developments. Mastery of techniques remains important and underpins the use of digital technologies in the design and manufacturing of elegant buildings. But, ultimately, a highly sophisticated formal language propels aesthetics.

The seminar seeks to reframe the questions facing architectural design, setting the intellectual framework for an increasingly expansive set of design solutions. The goal is to narrow the gap between aesthetics, design research and practice.

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This newly reconstituted course will introduce designers and planners to practical methods of design and development for major real estate product types. Topics will include product archetypes, site selection and obtaining entitlements, basic site planning, programming, and conceptual and basic design principles. Project types will include, among others; infill and suburban office parks, all retail forms, campus and institutional projects. Twoperson teams of developers and architects will present and discuss actual development projects.

[ARCH 765] PROJECT MANAGEMENT Charles Capaldi This course is an introduction to techniques and tools of managing the design and construction of large, and small, construction projects. Topics include project delivery systems, management tools, cost-control and budgeting systems, professional roles. Case studies serve to illustrate applications. Cost and schedule control systems are described. Case studies illustrate the application of techniques in the field.

[ARCH 768] REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT Asuka Nakahara This course focuses on “ground-up” development as well as re-development, and acquisition investments. We will examine traditional real estate product types including office, R&D, retail, warehouses, lodging, single-family and multi-family residential, mixed use, and land. “Specialty” uses like golf courses, resorts, timeshares, and senior assisted living will be analyzed. You will learn the development process from market analysis, site acquisition, zoning, entitlements, approvals, site planning, building design, construction, financing, and leasing to ongoing management and disposition. Additional topics — workouts, leadership, and running an entrepreneurial company — will be discussed. Throughout, we will focus on risk management, as minimizing risk first results in maximizing long run profits and net worth accumulation.

[ARCH 804] ADVANCED RAS PROGRAMMING Jeffrey Anderson, Jose Garcia Del Castillo Lope This course will support ARCH 802 Material Agencies II with a greater level of technical competency and detail.

More ambitious functionality will be developed that will enable student’s greater degrees of freedom and creativity in their engagement with design and production processes. While students will not engage in science/engineering development, research and software developed in such disciplines will be applied within design, fabrication and user occupation orientated scenarios. Topics will vary in application to suit studio briefs and shifting capabilities within industry and academia. Examples include mechanical and electrical design for bespoke robot tooling, use of Computer Vision for real-time sensing and live behavior-based adaptation, machine learning in design or fabrication applications, or deeper engagement in robot communication and control (e.g. Linux ROS Robot programming framework).

SPRING ELECTIVE SEMINARS

[ARCH 762] DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT Alan Razak

[ARCH 806] EXPERIMENTAL MATTER This course aims to extend knowledge into state of the art materials, material applications and fabrication methods and contribute research and experimental results towards ARCH 802 Material Agencies II course prototypical projects. Operating predominantly through research and controlled physical experiments, students will develop a material strategy for their ARCH 802 Material Agencies II work, investigating scientific research papers, industry publications and precedent projects in order to develop know-how in materials and material applications. A material application method will be proposed and experimented with to evaluate and develop use within a robotic fabrication process. Submissions will incorporate experimental test results, methods and precedent research documentation.

[ARCH 808] SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND WRITING Billie Faircloth Following a framing of architectural design-research and theory in Semester 1, this course aims to provide students with knowledge of state of the art robotics and design taking place in the research community and to introduce methods to evaluate and demonstrate academic research that encompasses both creative and technical work.

Submissions will include a technically written statement related ARCH 802 Material Agencies II work, which will be produced by participants under direction within this core seminar. This will train students for additional technical career opportunities and raise the level of discourse and prospects for further research from the program and its participants to a level suitable for continuation within PhD studies.

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[ARCH 812] METHODS IN ARCHITECTURAL FIELD RESEARCH Franca Trubiano Methods in Architectural Research is an advanced research seminar aimed at PhD and MS students which introduces means, methods, types, and values typical of architectural research. This “Methods” course (which is also open to M.EBD and MArch students) speaks to the “how” and “why” of research. It investigates how one identifies a field of enquiry, what are the questions of value to the field, the various methods, strategies, and tactics of engagement representative of the field, as well as the critical knowledge needed in communicating one’s results. The architectural profession is largely predicated on studio-based practices and yet the larger discipline — as defined in post-professional programs, doctoral studies, think tanks, research centers, and labs — participates in multiple forms of enquiry whose investigative protocols and metrics of excellence are often borrowed from both the humanities and the sciences. Why therefore, do we hardly ever engage in this form of knowledge production in professional schools of architecture? Architecture’s destiny is to be a form of composite knowing, in which both qualitative and quantitative methods of enquiry are needed in delimiting its research horizons. As such, students in Methods in Architectural Research are introduced to a spectrum of methods inclusive of the arts, design, theory, history, social sciences, environmental sciences, building science, and engineering. Whether architects reflect, theorize, analyze, or test ideas; whether they construct, build artifacts, simulate environments, develop software, or cull data, they do so by implementing research processes and by communicating their results using verifiable reporting mechanisms. The seminar introduces, discusses, and reviews the full spectrum of research methods typical of the discipline with the goal of having students design the research process for their respective Dissertations.

[ARCH 813] QUALIFYING RESEARCH This is an independent study course for first year Ph.D. and M.S. students, supervised by a member of the Graduate Group in Architecture. A course of readings and advisor sessions throughout the semester will result in an independent study paper, which will also be used as the student’s qualifying paper for the Qualifying Examination. This research paper will be prepared as if for scholarly publication.

[ARCH 851] FIELD BIBLIOGRAPHY This course is essentially an independent study, undertaken by doctoral students in preparation for the Candidacy Examination. This course should be taken in conjunction with ARCH 852 after all other courses have been completed. Normally a member of the student’s Dissertation Committee supervises this course.

[ARCH 999] INDEPENDENT STUDY This course enables students to undertake self-directed study on a topic in Architecture, under the supervision of a faculty member. Students are required to make a proposal for the study to the Department Chair, outlining the subject and method of investigation, and confirming the course supervisor at least two weeks prior to the beginning of the semester.

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GALLERY 329

Ground, Intertwined by Amie Hanqing Yao and Merrick Castillo Critic: Winka Dubbeldam and Richard Garber [p.294]

GALLERY

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GALLERY 331

Serene Interlude by Yi-Hsuan Wu and Saina Xiang Critic: Bryony Roberts [p.311]

GALLERY 332

Aesthetics of Concealment by Jingchu Sun and Haochun Zeng, Critic: Ali Rahim [p.304]

GALLERY 333

Tectonic Inlay by Robert Schaffer and Christine Eichhorn Critic: Homa Farjadi [p.299]

GALLERY

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GALLERY 335

Authentic Replicas by Amber Farrow and Molly Zmich Critic: Ferda Kolatan [p.289]

GALLERY 336

Gateway House by Karen Vankovich and Matthew Kohman Critic: Marion Weiss [p.317]

EVENT

April 14, 2021 SCOTT ERDY: LIVING OFF THE LAND

Since their critically successful beginning, Erdy McHenry has won numerous awards for their innovative work, including the cover of Architectural Record Magazine in July of 2013. As it befits their complementary skills sets, they have been able to create many fully realized buildings for diverse client types; developers and socially conscious non-profit organizations. They use a unique business model and Design Philosophy: Integrated Decision Making as a Design Tool, where Budget, Program and Schedule are reconciled each in terms of the other with each design decision. This approach enables them to create a “value proposition” on all projects regardless of budget and still produce cutting edge work.

Scott Erdy is a Principal at Erdy McHenry Architecture and Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at Weitzman.

All Erdy McHenry projects embrace construction technology, systems integration design, and material cost as the primary methods for creating critical design projects. By using in-depth, digital synthesis to coordinate the process of both design and construction, their designs evolve realtime as a result of systems design.

Erdy and David McHenry joined forces in 1999 to work together on the Southern Poverty Law Center. With great business acumen, they were able to leverage their previous experience at a larger firm to make a “lateral transition” into projects of a scale and complexity not always possible for a start-up architectural firm. Their first project as a partnership garnered them a Philadelphia AIA Gold Medal and the cover of the September 2001 Architecture Magazine.

Educated in the modernist tradition, Erdy and McHenry are creating an economical, digitally driven method of construction which embraces the purity of material tectonics while revealing the aesthetic of space. They believe materials (structural, mechanical and otherwise) should be considered finish materials that are integral to the design and are not to be hidden under layers of costly and unnecessary materials.

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MSD-AAD

MSD–AAD MASTER OF SCIENCE IN DESIGN: ADVANCED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN Ali Rahim, Director Professor of Architecture

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MSD-AAD

This studio speculates that a new typology can help sustain New York City’s financial global leadership in the world. New York cannot solely rely on import and export economies with the uncertainty of political pressures that affect the prices of goods and services. New York and other cities need to re-invent existing networks to be able to compete with trade barriers that are cumbersome and willfully destroying the growth of the economy.

The future brings with it new opportunities that fuse technological innovation with growth in the US economy. The re-tooling of global manufacturing networks is underway with Vietnam, Taiwan and Malaysia becoming the recipients of global manufacturing needs. To add to a versatile and robust manufacturing agenda existing networks such as UPS, DHL, USPS and FedEx can gain considerably by allowing for new opportunities that extend their networks into facilities that aid in the development of quick prototypes for each point on their network, reducing the cost of shipment internationally and hence making pricing cost effective with a quick turnaround. Price Water-house Coopers indicates that currently 90 percent of global trade flows through 39 airports and states, which pales around 28,000 points of distribution only for UPS along the networks that can enhance efficiency nationally. The city’s that become the most important along these networks will thrive. US manufacturing will benefit with an efficient hub accessible directly from New York City establishing it as the leader of prototyping nationally. The new hub will increase the relevance of NYC as a business and logistics hub making a stronger connection to global centers due to the quick turnarounds of the prototypes and strengthening development locally.

The site is on the corner of Washington Street and Houston Street in West SoHo. We are designing a project with three programs, a distribution network that houses trucks, UPS offices and a prototyping space that can turn around working prototypes fast, developing a new hybrid typology for UPS and New York City. The existing UPS hub is uniquely equipped to speculate on the future of the network Hub into a precise and novel architecture and urban proposal that are unprecedented that links local efficiency with global demands.

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MSD-AAD

UPS HUB Ali Rahim (LECTURER) Na Wei (CRITIC) Mo Zheng (CRITIC) Caleb White, Grace He, Wenjia Guo (TAs) Ali Rahim (Professor and Director MSD–AAD): Architect and Director. Contemporary – Architecture Practice. New York [2002-] and Shanghai [2014-] – Awarded: Fifty Under Fifty: Innovators of the 21st Century [2015] – Awarded: Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award [2004] – Author: Catalytic Formations, Routledge. [2012 and 2008]

This architecture studio will explore design techniques, the history of New York Cities architecture and combine it with an understanding of global capital markets to develop a new Headquarter/ Distribution Center Hub for New York City.

Airports to UPS Hubs More specifically, this studio speculates that a new typology can help sustain New York City’s financial global leadership in the world. New York cannot solely rely on import and export economies with the uncertainty of political pressures that affect the prices of goods and services. New York and other cities need to re-invent existing networks to be able to compete with trade barriers that are cumbersome and willfully destroying the growth of the economy.

The future brings with it new opportunities that fuse technological innovation with growth in the US economy. The re-tooling of global manufacturing networks is underway with Vietnam, Taiwan and Malaysia becoming the recipients of global manufacturing needs. To add to a versatile and robust manufacturing agenda existing networks such as UPS, DHL, USPS and FedEx can gain

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considerably by allowing for new opportunities that extend their networks into facilities that aid in the development of quick prototypes for each point on their network, reducing the cost of shipment internationally and hence making pricing cost effective with a quick turnaround.

Price Water-house Coopers indicates that currently 90 percent of global trade flows through 39 airports and states, which pales around 28,000 points of distribution only for UPS along the networks that can enhance efficiency nationally. The city’s that become the most important along these networks will thrive. US manufacturing will benefit with an efficient hub accessible directly from New York City establishing it as the leader of prototyping nationally. The new hub will increase the relevance of NYC

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1 – Voids by Mingda Guo and Xiaotong Ni, Model

Ali Rahim

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VOIDS Mingda Guo and Xiaotong Ni

The goal for our project is to explore a new office typology for UPS Hub that integrates human experience with logistic density through visual aesthetics. Our design strategy for achieving both experiential quality and logistic efficiency is amalgamating the technique of layering and the concept of solid vs. void.

We started with six basic volumes that each of them is composed by two parts, including a voided part to provide visual experience and a solid part to hold logistic spaces.

The different volumes are arranged three-dimensionally to generate the overall space. Larger elliptical voids are introduced at the building scale which reshape the volumes around them and at the same time provide an opportunity to create a celebrated office space.

The volumes are then wrapped in a monolithic shell, where the striation of the interior layer is gradually moving to the exterior, breaking the boundary between inside and outside. The facade connects the different volumes inexplicitly where the interior striation is gradually moving towards the exterior contrasting the monolithic surface and the delicate layering details.

Through the visual effects created by the density of the layers and the perspectivity resulted from the voids, we would like to make the interiority an immersive environment. Wherever the viewers stand, they are surrounded by more than one immersive void and their sights are guided to multiple directions. When one steps in the atrium space, he would have the opportunity to see conveyers for logistic transportation and escalators for human circulation. While the offices are framed by compacted logistic spaces, the logistics and layering define the aesthetic qualities for the space.

A New Typology of Headquarters and Prototyping Facility, West SoHo, New York The site is on the corner of Washington Street and Houston Street in West SoHo. We are designing a project with three programs, a distribution network that houses trucks, UPS offices and a prototyping space that can turn around working prototypes fast. developing a new hybrid typology for UPS and New York City. The existing UPS hub is uniquely equipped to speculate on the future of the network Hub into a precise and novel architecture and urban proposal that are unprecedented that links local efficiency with global demands.

Design Research/ Methodology Design research is a method of researching through the act of designing. To assist in the development the 341

2 – Voids by Mingda Guo and Xiaotong Ni, Section

as a business and logistics hub making a stronger connection to global centers due to the quick turnarounds of the prototypes and strengthening development locally.

MSD-AAD 3

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3 – Ali Rahim in Virtual Studio Review 4 – Virtual Studio Review

Ali Rahim

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INHABITED MECHANISMS Yiliang Shao and Xiaohan Wang

The start point of our project is basically 3 questions: How logistics machinery could have intervention with architecture? How could logistics system coalesce with office space? And how to understand the relationship between the human and the non-human space? There is no clear differentiation between the wall and the floor slab. There just are many surfaces, folding in different angle in this building, the distance between 2 surfaces is constantly changing. This changing made the passage way could smoothly become a big space, or vice versa. And since the folding is not just happened in 1 or 2 direction but 3, this could see happened in the horizontal and vertical at the same time. And since the folding could make continuity of space, some program changing moment could happened.

For instance, as at the 1st floor, the logistic system is happened in an office space. Another advantage of this folding is we could connect it with the logistic machinery. In the left corner, the giant gear engages with the surface, and drive the interior space changing.

The folding also gave us a good chance to rethink the elevation in our project. We control the elevation composition in the same way of the folding prototype. The seaming of these metal surface is controlled in the same way, too.

Through the trace of the line happened in the elevation, you could sense how the interior space goes. Sense the connection between interior and the exterior.

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final proposal, the project is broken into assignments that will explore the structural, spatial and logistics typologies simultaneously. We will also build physical models using precise digital methods that will require assembly and multiple materials to accomplish the form and materiality of each proposal.

The assignments will be as follows and will be distributed and discussed when each assignment begins. Through the cumulative nature of the assignments the proposals will develop in design and concept. UPS HUB is written specifically for students to grapple with concerns that are relevant to the design education of a Penn student. Undergraduate knowledge is a strength and will be challenged through the course of the semester.

Organizationally, there are 2 layers on it, the trace of the folding surface, and the machinery. One might see the curve of the folding, and the organization of the machinery.

We choose to expose some of the logistic machine subtlety outside, producing a working phenomenon to the outside. So, in surroundings you could sense the operating of the entire building.

6 – Inhabited Mechanisms by Yiliang Shao and Xiaohan Wang, Section

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5 – Inhabited Mechanisms by Yiliang Shao and Xiaohan Wang, Axon

MSD-AAD

AGGREGATE LOGISTICS Yanpeng Wang and Jiaying Zhang The building utilizes forms of curvature through line and arc in contrast with the rectilinear frames and logistics storage grids. Beginning from the façade design, various scales of arcs create voids to accommodate logistics storage racks, conveyor systems and even office spaces. They form a continuous system that flows along the façade and connects the interior and exterior. This language continues in the interior design, where curvature defines the human and nonhuman spaces by various movements through rotation and

integration. They also divide various open areas surrounding the building and enables truck and people to circulate.

Different from the traditional design methods, office spaces are closely connected with the storage spaces, and the circulations are established by variations of curvature. By operating different geometry, office spaces can receive sunlight inside. Logistics system that circulates both horizontally and vertically is implemented based on these elements, which makes the circulation inside and around the building more systematic. Therefore, the building revitalizes the region by circulating methods and redefine the perspective towards office building design.

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7 – Aggregate Logistics by Yanpeng Wang and Jiaying Zhang, Perspective Render 8 – Aggregate Logistics by Yanpeng Wang and Jiaying Zhang, Isometric Visual Study

9 – Aggregate Logistics by Yanpeng Wang and Jiaying Zhang, Section Cut Perspective

For this project, we want to create a soft experience in the busy and orthometric urban environment of New York, both for office users and for citizens. So, we choose to wrap complex logistics with arc surfaces.

The logistics are placed in the facade and the interlayers between floors, so that most of the office will not be disturbed by noise. And logistic blocks can become an element to shape the facade.

Some logistics blocks are put on the facade to deal with air logistics by drones. The ground floor and the underground floor are for trucks. These two kinds of logistics are connected by transmission systems in the interlayers. Finally, we wrap the logistics with curved surfaces, and then develop to our final form.

On the ground floor, spherical corners create more public space on the ground floor. The site is long, so we cut a pedestrian path in the middle, with the logistics function on the left and the office lobby on the right. Due to the length of the entire block, we added a lane on the left side of the base adjacent to the old building to integrate the logistics distribution and underground garage entrance to the left side of the building.

Ali Rahim

FUTURE POCHE SPACES Zheyuan Fu and Yiqi You

On the typical floor, the logistics system cuts the office into several pieces. Whenever users go to another office space, they will pass through the logistics interlayer and feel the mechanical nature of this building.

On the long section, the curved surface extends from the exterior of the building to the interior space of the building.

Shells of different levels wrap and nest each other, shaping the inner space.

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10 – Future Poche Spaces by Zheyuan Fu and Yiqi You, Perspective Render

11 – Future Poche Spaces by Zheyuan Fu and Yiqi You, Section 12 – Future Poche Spaces by Zheyuan Fu and Yiqi You, Axon

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INNOVATIVE MID-RISE TIMBER: TIMBER TECTONICS MEETS SPATIAL FORCE FLOW Masoud Akbarzadeh (LECTURER) Yao Lu (TA) Dr. Masoud Akbarzadeh (Assistant Professor of Architecture in Structures and Advanced Technologies): Director of the Polyhedral Structures Laboratory (PSL) – D.Sc. from the Institute of Technology in Architecture, ETH Zurich – Master of Science in Architecture Studies (Computation) and a MArch from MIT – M.S. in Earthquake Engineering and Dynamics of Structures from the Iran University of Science and Technology – National Science Foundation CAREER Award 2020

For thousands of years, wood has been an important building material for its abundance, strength, and sustainable nature. Engineered mass timber such as glue-laminated, cross-laminated timber, I-Joist, etc., include a range of products manufactured by binding or fixing the strands, fibers, veneers, or boards of wood by applying adhesives to form composite materials. These products were developed to utilize material more efficiently with respect to the inherent variability (anisotropic

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MID-RISE TIMBER FUNNEL Zihao Jin and Wen Tian

In this project, the main direction is to investigate the potential of using timber construction of mid-rise buildings through developing novel funnel structure and architectural concepts. Based on further developments of funnel structure by analyzing force diagram and form diagram, various modules with different diagrams are generated to create an open space for tech center. In the spatial layout of the whole building, lightness and openness are the main spatial features. Both indoor and outdoor, a strewn distribution of flow space is used. Outside, the terrace is formed, and inside, the communication between the different levels is facilitated, making the space freer and more flexible.

Taking into account the traffic environment and functional distribution around the triangular site, we have separate entrances to the internal plaza on both sides of the street facing the urban main road, and visitors can access the roof terrace via outdoor steps distributed at different locations on the site.

properties) of wood systems. The main objective of this studio is to investigate the potential of using mass timber in the construction of mid-rise buildings through developing novel structural and architectural concepts. The outcome of the studio is aimed to increase the perception, motivation, and awareness among the industry practitioners to adopt engineered timber as an important material.

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1 – Mid-rise Timber Funnel by Zihao Jin and Wen Tian, Axon 2 – Mid-rise Timber Funnel by Zihao Jin and Wen Tian, Project Description

3 – Mid-rise Timber Funnel by Zihao Jin and Wen Tian, Section

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A SPATIAL NETWORK OF TIMBER TUNNELS Sina Lee and Jingyi Chen

In this project, we designed a timber mid-rise building that has functions including office and incubator spaces, and the building serves as an expansion project of Pennovation.

The structure of the building is an unconventional funicular system. We start from the exploration of basic modules to achieve structural units in elegant curvatures, clean connections and multiple directions. Then we select two basic modules to make an aggregation that has multiple levels, smooth shape and different directions, which becomes the main structure for whole building. Considering the site surrounding, the building mass can be divided into two parts, the tower with more levels is facing towards the secondary main road at west. There are several main entrances of the building face the main street at north, and the landscape and parks are surrounding the building at east and south. As for the interior design, the main functional spaces of a typical floor include individual offices and shared working spaces, large area of gathering such as meeting rooms and common area for leisure. One characteristic of our structure is that we utilize the tunnel parts in structure as circulation cores and contain elevations and staircases.

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6 – A Spatial Network of Timber Tunnels by Sina Lee and Jingyi Chen, Interior Render 7 – A Spatial Network of Timber Tunnels by Sina Lee and Jingyi Chen, Project Description

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4 – Masoud Akbarzadeh in Virtual Studio Review 5 – A Spatial Network of Timber Tunnels by Sina Lee and Jingyi Chen, Exterior Render

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TIMBER FLOW Han Zhang and Qiao Wang In this project, our group mainly aims to create an office and incubator space in a mid-rise timber building as an expansion project of Pennovation. By using Polyframe, a plugin for Rhino, we create polyhedrons to help generate structure, trying to control the parameters and geometries in various units, which can form multiple possibilities of the patterns on the facade and in the structure of the buildings. In computational process, we use Grasshopper as tool to generate

beams and columns for each cell, and then combine them together. After that, we use multiple analysis tools such as Fusion360, Karamba and Lifecycle to research on the structure rationality and its impact on environment. These software also assist us to improve our system. To fit in the triangular site, we set two rectangular blocks. Bigger one faces the main road while smaller one faces residential area.

Learning from precedents, we arrange programs fit in the building that left part for innovation laboratories and other public function while right part for private spaces such as meeting room and faculty office.

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8 – Timber Flow by Han Zhang and Qiao Wang, Section 9 – Timber Flow by Han Zhang and Qiao Wang, Interior Render

10 – Timber Flow by Han Zhang and Qiao Wang, Exterior Render 11 – Timber Flow by Han Zhang and Qiao Wang, Panel

14 – Strut-and-Tie Method Applied in Timber Tectonics by Yiliang Shao and Yuanben Gao, Axon 15 – Strut-and-Tie Method Applied in Timber Tectonics by Yiliang Shao and Yuanben Gao, Render

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This project is about the use of the strut-and-tie method in the design of timber structures for buildings, based on the research by Salma Mozaffari. With her algorithm, the most efficient force calculation for a 2D truss can be achieved.

Empowered by the algorithm, we are able to design a special truss system, which enables us having this abstract structural model that explores the balance between aesthetics and spatial quality. Furthermore, we explores the materialization of this truss system, trying to find a materialization that can best express the aesthetic qualities of wood trusses and then apply it to design the whole building.

Masoud Akbarzadeh

STRUT-AND-TIE METHOD APPLIED IN TIMBER TECTONICS Yiliang Shao and Yuanben Gao

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12 – Strut-and-Tie Method Applied in Timber Tectonics by Yiliang Shao and Yuanben Gao, Interior Render 13 – Strut-and-Tie Method Applied in Timber Tectonics by Yiliang Shao and Yuanben Gao, Section

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15 MINUTES AND COUNTING: A NEW ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM FOR TOKYO Hina Jamelle (LECTURER) Eric Shiner (CONSULTANT) Caleb White (TA) Hina Jamelle (Director of Urban Housing): Architect and Director, Contemporary Architecture Practice, New York (2002) and Shanghai (2014) – Awarded Fifty Under Fifty: Innovators of the 21st Century (2015) – Awarded Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award (2004) – Author: Elegance. Architectural Design, John Wiley and Sons Inc., London (2007) – MArch from University of Michigan

“THE IDEA IS NOT TO LIVE FOREVER; IT IS TO CREATE SOMETHING THAT WILL.” — Andy Warhol

Pop Art in the West emerged in the postwar period as an ironic, self-examining, but enthusiastic look at the mass imagery of our consumerist society. Pop Art stood firmly at the crossroads of the elite avant-garde of the art world and the broader interests of popular culture and society at large. Andy Warhol, one of the leaders of the Pop Art movement also became a cult icon and a cultural symbol.

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1 – Pop Chiaroscuro by Weihang Huang and Yanpeng Wang, Elevation

The Andy Warhol Foundation is the global keeper of Andy Warhol’s legacy.

One of the foundation’s goals is to increase its influence and visibility and a new museum in the international city of Tokyo is a strategic one. Tokyo is one of the world’s most vibrant cities and is also a confluence of art, fashion, architecture, and other contemporary cultural media. A new Warhol Museum would have an excellent opportunity to expose the work of Andy Warhol to new audiences but also to merge contemporary pop art with the long lineage of the genre.

The goal for each student is to evaluate the potentials of artistic techniques and to apply these to a range of familiar architectural issues. Using machine learning tools, the students were

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tasked with isolating techniques for color and light from their selected artworks. The final proposal of each student emerged out of an inter-related working method between artistic techniques, machine learning tools, program, space, atmosphere, and materials that combine to develop an innovative new museum proposal.

POP CHIAROSCURO Weihang Huang and Yanpeng Wang

Pop Artworks traditionally use color with stark contrast and figure-ground relationships. Andy Warhol in particular utilizes colors that vary greatly in saturation for visual effects. Extracting from Pop Art-Chiaroscuro, defines the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, and shows the interplay of light and shadow as if on a surface. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modeling threedimensional objects and figures. Serving as the cultural landmark displaying Pop Art, Our New Andy Warhol museum aims to bring a new conception of viewing art.

Chiaroscuro takes a two-dimensional technique and develops it three-dimensionally through space, light, color, and materials. For spatial effects, the depths of walls and spatial volumes within galleries are being varied. Chiaroscuro is also achieved through artificial and natural lighting effects, by utilizing glass openings and interior lighting projecting in curvature spaces. The interplay of the two colors blue and orange varies along with the depths of space. Ceramic tile is the main material as it can follow the variations of colors and better show the light and shadow effects. Our museum stands out in transforming the building design following the techniques of artworks. This enables a stronger relationship between spaces and artworks inside. By utilizing the concept of Chiaroscuro, we begin to establish the tight development of this concept from twodimensional artworks to three-dimensional spaces.

4 – Pop Chiaroscuro by Weihang Huang and Yanpeng Wang, Project Description

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2 – Hina Jamelle in Virtual Studio Review 3 – Pop Chiaroscuro by Weihang Huang and Yanpeng Wang, Interior Render

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FIELDS AND FIGURES Xiaotong Ni and Mingda Guo

and figures fuses the spaces and provides clues for how the color and light would integrate into.

In our design, we refer closely to Warhol’s vast body of seriality and repetition in his print work to create a museum that allows the display of multiples of both artworks and viewpoints. Reflecting the analytical diagram from the artworks, the facade is layered with three-dimensional pixelations and framed to indicate the inner program from enclosed galleries to public atriums with opaque tiling and glazing system.

By penetrating the facade modules inside, the extension and enlargement of them are organized in an indented manner to figuratively interpret the diago-nality and to divide spaces into smaller volumes, which could be used for independent exhibitions and special media rooms at the interjunction between lobby and galleries. This oscillation between the fields

With a tint color, yellow, we emphasize the curvature within volumetric enclosures and public passages, resulting in spotlighting visual movements along with the surfaces inward and the tourist circuits. Hues of yellows are controlled to create a spatial hierarchy and distinct auras with dense orangish shadows in open areas, which also turns into a less vibrant illumination in exhibition spaces. The rest of the space is filled with different shades of white, where the simplicity of the color is used to highlight the potential shadow qualities generated by the complex geometries.

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Gallery

Gallery

Gallery Media Rooms

Storage

Media Room Public Theater

Conference Room Lobby Shop

Media Room

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5 – Fields and Figures by Xiaotong Ni and Mingda Guo, Interior Render 6 – Fields and Figures by Xiaotong Ni and Mingda Guo, Exterior Render

7 – Fields and Figures by Xiaotong Ni and Mingda Guo, Section

Andy Warhol is known for his interpretation of aesthetics in the Western pop art. Accordingly, the research of Takashi Murakami on Eastern visual symbols and colors greatly influenced Japanese and even global pop art. Through the study of Murakami, we try to confirm Andy Warhol’s pop art from another side from the Oriental Art vocabulary.

To build a new pop art museum in Tokyo, we wish that people can associate the museum with pop art at the first glance, which lead to the symbolic language as Murakami always use such language in his works, including skulls and eyeballs and flat color. These elements are used in our museum design, corresponding to a Janpanese well-known pop concept named “Superflat,” and then we build up a visual and natural artwork exhibition machine.

The whole building is located in Tokyo’s most prosperous Ginza area, with Imperial Garden of Japan located on its west block. We try to introduce the courtyard as the motif of space to enrich the exhibition experience. The courtyard can be used as a container of artificial landscape as well as a window of pop art. Considering the diversily of Pop Art art forms, several atriums with daylighting are used to organize the exhibition space of the building, and they interact with the different forms of the platform to form a rich indoor and outdoor viewing flow.

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POP ART MACHINE Yixin Wang and Yiqi You

The facade itself is like a large cabinet. When the light is transmitted from the interior of the building, the niches on the facade reflect colorful lights and the art works displayed inside the building are cut into pop art collages. The Architecture is just like a machine of pop art, which directly shows pop art itself to the public space of the city.

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8 – Pop Art Machine by Yixin Wang and Yiqi You, Visual Study 9 – Pop Art Machine by Yixin Wang and Yiqi You, Render

10 – Pop Art Machine by Yixin Wang and Yiqi You, Elevation 11 – Pop Art Machine by Yixin Wang and Yiqi You, Plan

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ON WEAVING Florencia Pita (LECTURER) Caroline Morgan (TA) Florencia Pita (Lecturer): National University of Rosario – 2000 Fulbright-Fondo Nacional de las Artes Scholarship – Master’s Degree from the MSAAD Program at Columbia University – work experience includes the offices of Greg Lynn FORM and Gehry Partners in Los Angeles – Featured in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale – Louis I. Khan Visiting Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at Yale’s School of Architecture – 2019 she was Visiting Faculty at Princeton University School of Architecture – Teaches Design Studios and Visual Studies courses at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles.

“BRILLIANT YOUNG WOMEN WERE DRAWN TO THE GROPIUS-LED BAUHAUS WITH DREAMS OF BECOMING ARCHITECTS, ONLY TO BE INFORMED, FALSELY, THAT WEAVING WAS THE ONLY APPROPRIATE DISCIPLINE FOR WOMEN… HOWEVER, ARCHITECTURE’S LOSS WAS TEXTILES’ GAIN, AND THIS AS IT TURNED OUT WAS A TREMENDOUS GIFT TO 20TH-CENTURY TEXTILES AND PUT ANNI ALBERS FIRMLY INTO THE PREMIER RANKS OF CELEBRATED MODERNISTS.” — Dominique Lutyens, ‘Anni Albers and the forgotten women of the Bauhaus’.

Course Abstract In 1919 weaving was an ‘appropriate’ discipline for women, at least that was the thinking at the then emerging Bauhaus School. As an entering student Anni Albers reluctantly joined the weaving workshop to later embrace the experimental nature of the craft. ‘Women were segregated and given their own workshop, the Weaving Workshop, regardless of talent or inclination” , yet for these a woman weaving was not just decoration (such as embroidery, etc), weaving had intrinsic structural constructs, it necessitated notation in order to play out a myriad of alternative patterns and variations, an endless field of possibilities. This is what Anni Albers has argued in her book ‘On Weaving’ first published in 1965, were 354

a – Sigrid Wortmann Weltge writes in the introduction to her book Women’s Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus.

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FUZZY WOVEN NATURE Linxuan Xie and Mary Diyang Shen

Our project explores a balance of vagueness by wrapping the interior and exterior, and the fuzziness of woven and nature through different colors and textures. Our initial envelope notation challenges the conventional combination of woven horizontal and vertical patterns and breaks the scale to design the warp and weft pattern diagonally in a more natural way.

The project is located at the Viejo Gasometer, which is an important landmark right beside an essential highway, on the edge between the city and the province. Taking the climate condition into account, porosity is an element that allowed permeability of light and air and broadened visitors’ vision. The weaving works as partition walls and creates spaces for program purposes and for people to visit and utilize. Also, the weaving allows hydroponic structures to grow various plants and vegetables, there are horizontal plates, stacked shelves, vertical hanging tubes, and weaving-metal slabs for trees to grow.

For exterior spaces, the weaving serves as a skin. By wrapping the skin onto the exterior surfaces, we achieved a double fluidity of the pattern and the composition. Also, we created a large weaving coat-like surface that covers the building, which not only works as a blanket but wraps to the inside and becomes pockets to create spaces. It also extends onto the landscape.

The gasometer is a memorable icon for local Argentineans, our project redesigned the stiff and rigid infrastructure into a fuzzy-like nature that focuses on hydroponics growing for modern time. The application of colorful weaving becomes a structural system for plants to grow, the porosity of the facade brings the local semi-open balcony characters into the originally enclosed gasometer, and the internally connected spatial design allows more flexible and fluid circulation for people to visit and get closer to nature.

1 – Fuzzy Woven Nature by Linxuan Xie and Mary Diyang Shen, Project Description

Project Overview This project takes on Weaving as a technique, and aims at extrapolating it from the realm of textiles to the realm of architecture. We will weave a new faca-

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Landscape Farm Design Trees and vegetable greenhouses are arranged with the weaving on the landscape.

de into an existing building in order to create a new space between the surface of the building and the new skin. At the same time we will expand the textile fabric into the ground, to create a landscape of farmland, here weaving becomes an urban medium, one that considers the land as a shifting paradigm that can be both urban and rural at the same time.

This ‘textile architecture’ will unravel new interpretations of the relationship between the building and the ground.

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she articulates the case for a discipline that spans thought time, thought history and though countless cultures, from Greece to Peru, from analog to technological, we find the loom inextricably attached to humanity. ‘During the 4,500 years, in some estimates, even 8,000 years that we believe mankind has been weaving’ b, as an inherent material of our culture, textiles can always be redefined.

This is the foundation of this studio, to look at weaving without any preconceptions, and embrace it for its design potentials and the challenge it forges onto the discipline of architecture.

Site This project is locates in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina), exactly at the edge between the city and the province.

We will develop proposals to re-use an obsolete gasometer, an 85 meters tower that stands in stark contrast to its context. This gasometer has been vacant for more than fifty years, therefore it stands as a monument to our reliance on non-renewable sources of heat. This gasometer was already obsolete only ten years after it was constructed. The city of Buenos Aires never fathom to imagine what to do with it, due to its rigidity and lack of functionality for anything other than its original purpose. This class will embrace its unbending character, and will find alternatives to be adamant in finding new purposes to this emblematic figure.

As case study we will look at the photographies created by Bernd and Hilla Becker, their work documents a teeming Landscape Farm number of industrial machines, Exterior weaving extends onto most the landscape and integrates with already obsolete, that stand as memories of an industrialized world. These photos do not stand to document the machines but rather to abstract them in order to reveal their intrinsic forms.

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b – Anni Albers, On Weaving, 1965.

2 – Fuzzy Woven Nature by Linxuan Xie and Mary Diyang Shen, Aerial

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WEAVING MESH Lyuxin Liu (Lindsey) and Yiming Zhao

Our project interrogates how degrees of tightness in weaving can devise an architectural system. When weaving on the loom, we find the different effects brought by tight threads and loose ones, which seems to be an interesting quality for us. We think this quality with its derivative space could be used in our architecture. Extending the vertical farm function to the new project, we attached it to the original gasometer and thought it would be nice to apply the tight weaving to their surface like a woven basket.

During the color study, we got our color collage go back between things found in nature and commercial things, also the forms from flat to round. It is very exciting for us to find out that the combination of complementary color and the comparison between spaces that shaped by flat elements and round surfaces can increase layers of space and diversity of weaving textile. Therefore, the balance of different colors and different volumes is what we are striving for during the whole project design.

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4 – Weaving Mesh by Lyuxin Liu (Lindsey) and Yiming Zhao, Aerial

In nowadays, vertical farming already has a comprehensive system for industrial production. But for this project we want to see how the weaving would influence the quality of the gasometer interior when we introduce the weaving into the hydroponic system. For example, some loose woven surfaces attach between the floors, which not only can separate the space but also can be the farming infrastructural syntax. The plantings follow the weaving notation which means that the void between strips house our hydroponic farming containers. There are also elements of this “weaving mesh” that create pockets of program.

In this project, we attempt to mix various factors like diverse color tonality, shapes of volume, nature plants and different hydroponic techniques together to get a blurring but harmonious visual effect, challenging the innovation possibilities that weaving brings to architecture. The reason why the spaces can have so many qualities like from flatness to volume, is because we weaving a mesh that can goes from 2D to 3D.

In opposition to the carbon driven nature of the original gasometer, we will develop a program that stands in contrast to it. The inside of the tank is a large void, without any light, or spacial subdivisions, at the same time the surface cannot be punctuated in order to create windows. These features would not allow a lot of programming to happen inside.

For our program we will develop ideas to create a Hydroponic farm, we will grow nature from within, by creating an indoor vertical farm. At the same time we will contrast this by converting the land next to the gasometer into farmland. Both the vertical farm and the farmland will be the antithesis to the monument to non-renewable energy and a dense urban fabric of the city of Buenos Aires.

Gasometer + Tower (18 x 18 Model) Next to the gasometer we will include a tower, in the same height as the gasometer at 85 meters, this tower will house several programs, such as a research center, the Buenos Aires Environmental Agency offices, and public programming. Students will develop proposals on how to connect the two buildings and will create a detailed section drawing.

In addition to that, students will fabricate a chunk model that measures 18” x 18”, this model will articulate the connection between the tower and the gasometer and will also describe the weaving facade that will cover both of them.

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Program

Tools and Techniques The studio will use a combination of 3D scanning techniques, 3D modeling in Rhino and Maya, 3D printing, AI texture mapping, analog models, photography, etc. We will begin with a series of analog models, first paper models and then yarn models, which will be translated into a 3D digital model. By midterm review we will fabricate an 18’ x 18’ chunk model that will inform the building section, this model will be created with an array of materials: 3d print, paper, plastic.

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5 – Weaving Mesh by Lyuxin Liu (Lindsey) and Yiming Zhao, Section

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FARM UP Xiaohan Wang and Zheng Gong Our program is a cultural complex with the theme of vertical farm, including farming, production, study and entertainment. One of the most important purposes is to create an integrated farming space with advanced production and hydraulic systems in the urban environment, which is different to traditional agriculture mode.

The gasometer in the project has a long history in the local area. It has been standing on General Paz since the 1940s. It not only serves as a gas storage container, the huge volume also makes it one of the local landmarks. After decades of abandonment, we decided to transform it into a cultural complex so that the citizens can not only look up to it from afar, but also enter and experience the new landmark personally.

The most important concept of our project is to introduce the new technique of 3D weaving into the architecture

design, not only in the form language of the section but also in the relationship between weaving and structure, where we benefit a lot from the previous study. From the later loom and yarn study, we benefit from its two most interesting features. The first is the potential of the weaving technique itself, including the change of density through the arrangement of the yarns and the knot structure to help stabilize the boundary of the weaving. With the help of the Houdini model, we are able to realize these features on our digital section model. The other important aspect is the space potential of the weaving structure in three dimensional space, especially when combined with architecture structure. The richness of the architectural space from the section design stage gives the weaving structure great flexibility.

With the combination of 3D weaving technique and new farming space, we offer the citizens a new farming life style without the trouble of driving hours to the suburb.

Our project is not only a vertical farm but an answer to new city life.

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6 – Farm Up by Xiaohan Wang and Zheng Gong, Exterior Render 7 – Farm Up by Xiaohan Wang and Zheng Gong, Axon

8 – Farm Up by Xiaohan Wang and Zheng Gong, Model

Series Of Test With Digital Weaving Model

Our architecture explores and highlights the softness in weaving and the materials used to weave, as well as the strong new aesthetic it creates when applied to architecture.

On the basis of warp and weft, following the rule of weaving, we weave threads of different densities, materials, sizes, textures and colors together and make them tectonics. The weaving become rich facades, creating interior volumes, and community farms in urban landscape.

Rhe rhythm we found in previous studies is emphasized when the pattern is transformed into architectural spaces.

In our project, weaving creates the volumes for vertical farming. The soft cloud-like pockets and drooping threads challenge the edges of the tough industrial building, contrasting with the repetitive office spaces. The crisscross weaving structure and thinness also challenge traditional hydroponics’ mechanical and industrial forms. Plants are tightly integrated with the weaving, allowing the hydroponic to change from regular rows of shelves to light patches of green attached to soft paper and loom weaving, softly tucked into the gasometer’s industrial mega space. At the

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same time, the weaving landscape also provides people with large shared spaces (the community farm and small gardens). The farm spaces that is originally for production now become public, providing chance for people to shuttle from urban landscapes to architectural spaces. People can farm and study related knowledge together, that’s where we start to weave in society thereby promoting communication. In addition, the re-innovation of industrial heritage is also reflected in the absorption and circulation system of the water pipes inside the building. It responds to the external climate conditions and provides green and efficient water for hydroponic plants. The weaving hydroponic plants are closely connected with the overall circulatory like water pipe system. The closer you are to the water pipe, the more hydroponic plants will grow. This circulation system of water can be traced through our section.

Florencia Pita

SOFT THREADS Siwei Yu and Xinyi Zhao

In conclusion, our project started with the softness of weaving and explored how this unique materiality can be interpreted into space and facade within the building. This new aesthetic not only brings novel experiences, but also brings new opportunities to Buenos Aires’s urban space along the continuity of inner and outer spaces.

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11 11 – Soft Threads by Siwei Yu and Xinyi Zhao, Axon

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9 – Soft Threads by Siwei Yu and Xinyi Zhao, Elevation 10 – Soft Threads by Siwei Yu and Xinyi Zhao, Exterior Render

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MSD–EBD ENVIRONMENTAL BUILDING DESIGN Dr. William W. Braham, Director Professor of Architecture

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The global pandemic has made clear that spatial arrangements and the cultural practices embedded in them are directly related to environmental impact. It has been clear for decades that to confront the pressing task of reducing carbon emissions, environmental building design must be integrated in the disciplinary practices of architecture. The MSD–EBD is a post-professional degree program created to teach architects to innovate in the field of energy and environmental design, training them for a low-carbon economy.

The program’s pedagogy is based on theories of ecology and sustainability, building science and performance analysis, and their integration into design workflows.

The challenges of low-carbon construction demand practices and/or practitioners that can reconcile the divide between design and engineering, recognizing that architecture has to directly address environmental problems and also make the results visible and intelligible to its occupants. Five guiding principles organize the program: 1) make visible the invisible, 2) many simple models, not one complex simulation, 3) design for comfort and specific climates, not energy, 4) find the architectural narrative, not the energy score, 5) innovate through modeling and prototyping.

The program has a two-design studio sequence, the first on Bioclimatic Design and the second a Research Studio. The bioclimatic studio begins with passive strategies in multiple climates, but also seeks to explore the impact of the many novel techniques that are being deployed in progressive buildings, from thermal air movement and evaporative cooling to double glass walls, diurnal and season thermal storage, solar recharged desiccants, and radiant night-sky cooling. The Research studio continues that work with direct modeling and experimentation.

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ECOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, AND DESIGN Dr. William W. Braham (DIRECTOR)

Dr. William W. Braham (Director, Professor of Architecture): Received an MArch and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a BSE from Princeton University – Organized the Architecture and Energy symposium and published the books Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (2006) and Modern Color/Modern Architecture: Amédée Ozenfant (2002)

“WE LIVE IN A FABRICATED WORLD. UNDER HUMAN IMPACT, THE PLANET HAS BEEN TRANSFORMED TO SUCH A DEGREE THAT GEOLOGISTS PROPOSE A NEW NAME FOR THE AGE THAT BEGINS WITH THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: AFTER THE PLEISTOCENE AND THE HOLOCENE, THE ANTHROPOCENE.” — Luis Fernandez-Galiano

The course draws on systems ecology and the history and philosophy of technology to examine the complex task of environmental building design. Re-thinking ecological design at the beginning of the twenty-first century means reconsidering the strong claims made about ecology and technology — utopian and dystopian — through the twentieth century, as the impacts of technology on eco-systems were encountered.

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1 – Aquaponics by Tian Tian, Derek Yueh, Paola Zarate, and Jun Xiao, Rendering 2 – Virtual Studio Review with Dr. William W. Braham

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KITCHEN COUNTER Zhenxiong Yang, Meng-Fang Tsai, Qi Yan, and Rachael Kulish

The City of Philadelphia manifests with both designed and self- organized systems. The city’s historic growth shows a western expansion due to multiple factors driving its trajectory and structure. Our team is focusing on Center City, where the Ludlow creates a multiplicity of street furniture arrangements facilitating different interactions between people and places.

The Ludlow Apartments employ both private and public food preparation places, as well as indoor and outdoor locations giving tenants the opportunity to utilize the full spectrum of surfaces and locations that have been traditionally dedicated to food preparation with a modern update.

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colleagues. Considering the theories of self-organization, natural selection, maximum power, and energy transformation hierarchies will provide a scientific basis for the examination of energy and resource flows in buildings. The next section applies those concepts to buildings as shelters, and the final section to the products and processes that occupy buildings, from working, eating, sleeping, playing, and so on.

Course work will include weekly readings, in-class exercises, and a project in 3 stages. Weekly class meetings will be divided between lectures, discussion, exercises, and student presentations.

The class will be taught synchronously online this year, using Zoom as a meeting tool and a variety of collaboration and interaction tools for the project and team work. See Canvas.upenn.edu for more details.

The term ecology was first coined in the late 19th century to describe the complex role of the environment in the evolution of species, and has grown to become the branch of biology concerned with the organization and dynamics of the entire bio-geosphere.

Since the 1930s, the reach of ecological thinking has been extended dramatically by two developments, increased awareness of the environmental effect of human actions and the refinement of systems theory.

Environmental building design is a process of discovery, of deciding what to work on, before it ever becomes a matter of design. The course begins with urban self-organization, using cities to explore the principles of systems ecology, developed by HT Odum and his 363

3 – Kitchen Counter by Zhenxiong Yang, Meng-Fang Tsai, Qi Yan, and Rachael Kulish, Diagram

MSD-EBD

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Billie Faircloth (LECTURER) Shibei Huang (TA) Billie Faircloth (Lecturer): Partner at KieranTimberlake – MArch from Harvard University - Author of Plastics Now: On Architecture’s Relationship to a Continuously Emerging Material (Routledge, 2015) – Recipient of Architectural Record ’s 2017 Women in Architecture Innovator Award.

Organization To meet the studio’s goals and objectives, studio teams will work through the following three areas of focus:

A window is a need and a right; an asset Focus 1: A Window and a liability. It lets in light, air, and view and lets out heat, cold, and pressure.

Studio teams will use Focus 1 to thorA window is often an exception— it is oughly index the factors that shape our a transparent figure in an otherwise needs for a window. They will gather opaque wall that marks the passage of time. Or it exists without comparison, having become a window-wall, a curtainwall, that privileges expanse over enclosure. A window’s shape, l ayers, and assembly signify the convergence of specialist knowledge. It is at once the concern of the thermodynamicist, manufacturer, engineer, and architect, as it is the physician, environmental psychologist, counselor, and anthropologist.

Our understanding of a window should be technical and social; spatial and temporal; functional and ethical. The potential of a window is ever-evolving as it now signifies the interface to an otherworld for the quarantined, lonely, and at-home learner.

The 2020 EBD Research Studio will explore the demands on a window, and the total potential there-in for it to do and be more both environmentally and culturally. Studio teams will make one proposal demonstrating the comprehensive rethinking of a window informed by a program of research, assessment, design, and prototyping.

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AEDIFICIUM ALCHEMY Junjie Lu, Vidyashree Unnikrishnan, and Congqi Wang

Aedificium Alchemy conceptualizes the window as a dynamic interface that interacts with fluctuations in heat, light, and air quality. As the living lab’s totalizing component, the window’s two layers, an external bamboo veil and the internal transparent wood screen, respond to external stimuli of environmental conditions through a sensory network.

The layers work in tandem with each other to provide optimum thermal and visual comfort based on the building context and real-time weather data.

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1 – Aedificium Alchemy by Junjie Lu, Vidyashree Unnikrishnan, and Congqi Wang, Model

The outcome of Focus 1 is A Window Research Catalogue that includes a comprehensive framework for evaluating a window, as well as selected case studies that demonstrate the application of the framework. Students will produce sound insights that lead to window innovation.

Focus 2: A Site Studio teams will use Focus 2 to develop a comprehensive understanding of a selected, real window in-situ. The studio will then develop a framework, informed by Focus Area 1, for conducting a post-occupancy evaluation (POE). The POE will collect both quantitative and qualitative data. Students will amplify their understanding of this data by modeling and simulating the behavior of the window across a longer timescale. Students will also perform targeted analysis and simulation through selected study questions and performance criteria.

Billie Faircloth

a window’s underlying technical, material, psychological, and cultural criteria using peer-reviewed literature, studies, and analysis, building and zoning code, manufacturer’s briefs, and cultural surveys. Students will balance the knowledge that shapes a window and the spatial effects created by a window.

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SEEING YOU EVERY DAY Yuqing Liu, Zequn Zhang, and Jiayuan Wang

Seeing You Every Day explores the relationship between a quarantined mother, a visiting son and their daily interactions as mediated by the configuration of two room, their windows and the thermal environments therein. The mother’s quarantine lab focuses on the life experience of a quarantined person, both physically and emotionally.

The son’s hotel lab is designed to be interactive, comfortable and playful, providing a module that transforms into a living room, a bedroom or even a party room.

informed by a program of research, assessment, design, and prototyping.

The outcome of Focus 3 is a Proposal for a Window that challenges its form, performance and meaning holistically.

The outcome of Focus 2 is Design Hypothesis for the reinvention of the window as well as a burgeoning set of investigatory methods for Focus 3.

Focus 3: An Intervention Studio teams will use Focus 3 to develop one proposal demonstrating the comprehensive rethinking of a window 365

2 – Seeing You Every Day by Yuqing Liu, Zequn Zhang, Jiayuan Wang, Render

MSD-RAS

MSD–RAS MASTER OF SCIENCE IN DESIGN: ROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS Robert Stuart-Smith, Director Assistant Professor of Architecture

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MSD-RAS

The Master of Science in Design: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS) is a new, one-year, post-professional degree program that commenced this year.

It has been an exceptional first year, that has culminated in exceptional projects and exciting career opportunities for our first year’s graduates! The MSD-RAS aims to develop novel approaches to the design, manufacture, use, and life-cycle of architecture through creative engagement with robotics, material systems, and design-computation. The program has launched in a period where the building industry is adopting robotic approaches to prefabrication and on-site construction at an accelerating rate. Industry is motivated by the opportunities these technologies afford in improving abysmal productivity and quality levels compared to other manufacturing sectors, while reducing the time, cost and safety hazards of building work, also addressing a skilled labour shortage in construction workers.

These greater levels of automation are also creeping into architectural software and practice, challenging established means of design production, while offering opportunities for us to think differently about the way we conceive, develop and materialize architecture. The MSD-RAS aims to address this shifting and increasingly automated approach to architecture and construction through a fusion of creative, practical, and speculative means of design that aim to expand the agency of architecture and the architect to develop innovative and alternative means of engagement with the world at large.

The degree fosters integrative design thinking, allowing students to gain skills in advanced forms of robotic fabrication, simulation, and artificial intelligence, to develop methods for design that harness production or live adaption as a creative opportunity. Going beyond automation, the MSD-RAS explores how varying degrees of autonomy can offer sensitive, situated, and adaptive relations between design, production and the our experience of the built environment, that enable designer’s to re-think social, environmental and ethical considerations not only within design outcomes, but also in the conception and making of architecture. The MSD-RAS runs over two semesters. In the Fall semester students participate in two half-semester design studios each supported by a technology course (in algorithmic design and cyber-physical systems), a theory course taught by MOMA curator Evangelos Kotsioris, and an elective within either the design or engineering school. In Spring, students focus on the production of a single project deveoped within semester length courses including a design studio, industrialization, materials and tooling course, advanced RAS programming(coding for AR/VR and real-time robotics), and a course in scientific research and writing. Throughout both semesters, design is explored primarily through the hands-on production of experimental robotically fabricated prototypes, and the synthesis of knowledge gained in theoretical and technical courses.

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MATERIAL AGENCIES STUDIO I Andrew Saunders (ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE) Caleb Ehly and Yujie Li (TA) Andrew Saunders (Associate Professor of Architecture, Director of Baroque Topologies): Principal of Andrew Saunders Architecture + Design (2004) – Received an MArch from Harvard GSD with Distinction for work of clearly exceptional merit (2004) – B.Arch from Fay Jones School of Architecture, University of Arkansas (1998) — Winner of The Robert S. Brown ‘52 Fellows Program (2013)

The studio focuses exclusively with industrial robotic arm and a large hot wire cutter end effector to cut foam as way to quickly introduce students to the robotic lab and robot interface and ultimately to produce tangible results quickly. The architectural project for the studio is a speculative ceiling re-design for one of the large galleries in Meyerson Hall that currently features a ubiquitous hung acoustical tiles system.

AUTOMATED Ruled geometry of Constructivist Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner

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Riley Studebaker and Deon Kim

We structure explicit visual signatures as embedded information, put into a latent space image which is then fed into a convolutional neural network, generating learned arrangements of the embedded information. With a rule set taken from the analysis of Gabo’s sculptures, we are able to extract instructions for novel and meaningful three-dimensional geometric relationships. Our selected zone’s form was a result of the logic from ruled surface sculptures, the organization from convolutional neural networking, and the process of robotic hot wire fabrication. Building from our combination of a geometric logic with neural networking, we proposed a 900 square foot bespoke suspended foam ceiling, generated from, and indicative of, ruled surface sculpture, convolutional neural networking, and robotic arm fabrication.

One hundred years after the two constructivist brothers published their Realistic Manifesto (1920), each of the eight students selected one of the brothers ruled surface sculptures to analyze.

The re-modeled rails and rulings of the sculptures became choreographed paths for multi-axis robotic cutting routines. The ruled geometry of the sculptures is endemic to architecture (although often not as extremely hyperbolic) and embedded in the fabrication process of cutting with a single line (also able to be used as an additional rotational axis). In addition to cutting the geometry, each student developed their own bespoke rail profile manipulations. Each unique tooled micro reliefs reinforce the geometric rigor and the complimentary fabrication process.

AUTONOMOUS Deep learning: exploring the latent space between Gabo and Pevsner

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1 – By Riley Studebaker and Deon Kim, Perspective

For the second phase of the studio, students were paired to produce a spe2 – By Riley Studebaker and Deon Kim, Project Description

Andrew Saunders

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Claire Moriarty and Matthew White

We were both drawn to pieces by Pevsner that were similar in form, fabrication, and materiality, yet differed in both the overall proportions and year that they were constructed.

The pieces were conceptually conceived as a ruled surface defined by two rails, then fabricated out a series of brass or bronze rods that were soldered together to create the overall form. Simplistic in concept, the shape of the rails created two unique conditions or topological signatures that align with the Realist Manifesto. As one moves around the piece, the hypbar creates an illusion that the surface is transforming continuously opening a perspective to what is behind, implying a sense of motion and continuous depth. Ultimately the piece was able to be fabricated out of two open rails.

We utilized a variety of section cuts of our individual projects to create this input image, allowing us to maintain our original topological signatures. When it was applied through the CNN, this resulted in an autonomous interpretation of the signatures across the field, which was then further explored through the ceiling, used in a directional manner.

culative ceiling proposal for the Upper Gallery of Meyerson Hall. Through the introduction of deep learning, a rapidly developing branch of artificial intelligence, students identified and introduced local geometric signatures of their original Gabo and Pevsner analysis to neural network processes. The teams generated iterative variations as a way to deploy the original local geometric signatures at a global scale.

between the geometric rules learned in the first phase of analysis to produce completely new part-to-whole relationships — unrecognizable to familiar tropes such as Vitruvian, Fordist, Collage or Parametric.

For the final review, each team will present their proposal for the entire 900 sf ceiling in addition to a 1:1 scale robotically fabricated mock-up of a critical section of the ceiling proposal. We look forward to discussing the work a century after the Realistic Manifesto in a new era of automated fabrication and autonomous systems.

As a critique to the Fordist tendencies of the existing standardized dropped ceiling, each proposal is motivated by autonomous latent space operating 369

3 – By Claire Moriarty and Matthew White, Ceiling

MSD-RAS

MATERIAL AGENCIES STUDIO I Ezio Blasetti (LECTURER) Patrick Danahy (TA) Ezio Blasetti (Lecturer): Master’s of Science in Advanced Architectural Design, Columbia University - Founding partner at Maeta Design – Co-founded ahylo – Founder of algorithmicdesign.net

This research studio will investigate non-linear systems at both a methodological and tectonic level and it will focus on algorithmic generative methods and the use of carbon fiber in robotics for architectural design. The exploration will take the form of design research, which will be tested through a rigorous architectural proposal. Design research is not defined here as a linear scientific optimization process with objective outcomes, but rather as the iterative, non-linear and speculative process with the ability to reassess and shift our disciplinary discourse.

Conceptual Framework Our speculative condition is that computation is not solely dig ital but omnipresent and that life is a state of information. M ater, is increasingly becoming indiscernible from media.

A plethora of different scales of time, from the genetic to the geological, are in direct contact with our abstract predictive models, computational infrastructures, and technical apparatuses.

In our contemporary post-human context, our hybrid languages increase their potency of affection of the “real” through acceleration. What is at stake then, beyond notions of mimicry of life and optimization of matter, is the search for a new type of poetry: a “logos” inseparable from ‘becoming real’.

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CHOREOHEDRON Riley Studebaker, Deon Kim and Xiangguo Cui

This project focuses on a public garden installed onto an abandoned steel frame in the South Philadelphia shipyard.

The massing is developed through a 3D topological shape optimization process and is then algorithmically massed and robotically woven with carbon fiber, and volumetrically arranged using a space-filling system. Layered dynamically visible film creates shifting degrees of transparency throughout the site, exposing the existing steel frame and allowing light to transmit through the site. Our team developed visible light sensors in parallel to the computational design research to replicate the layered transparency present in the project proposal.

Project The project of the studio will be the design of an Artist Residency. The studio proposes a hybrid program between a Collective Residency and a Public Garden. The project will be concerned with the relationship of art and architecture, formation and performance. Key elements of the programmatic narrative will be internal to the development of each project. The definition of the scenario, the various active elements and their architectural implementation is part of the design problem. Working in feedback between the various scales, from the urban and infrastructural to

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1 – Choreohedron by Riley Studebaker, Deon Kim and Xiangguo Cui, Interior Render

Reyner Banham, in his article ‘A Home is Not a House’ identifies two archetypical strategies for the emergence of domestic space: “Man started with two basic ways of controlling environment: one by avoiding the issue and hiding under a Rock, Tree, Tent or Roof (this led ultimately to archilecture as we know it) and the other by actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a Campfire.” Banham expands on the noArch 801 Stuart Weitzman School of Design, instructor: Ezio Blasetti tion of campfire, to outline a definition of an ephemeral architecture based upon infrastructure, networks and energy.

This studio explores heterotopic aspects of domesticity in an attempt to displace its inherent anthropocentric conceptual bias. Historically, the space of the Garden is a hybrid gradient of public and private, a territorial buffer that interfaces with the commons and the environment. The Garden acts as a design space for the care, metabolism and aesthetics of a variety of species with various degrees of domestication.

Open and adaptive to change over time, the Garden is an archetypal diagram of a network open to ecological, cultural and economic feedback mechanisms.

Today’s notion of Home, perhaps more than ever before, cannot be thought in isolation of its virtual territorialization, networked intelligence and its ecological footprint. Transposing the diagram of the Garden onto the concept of a Home shifts the focus from the ontological core of human identification to the multiple layers of synergetic natural and artificial agencies that constitute domesticity. In this studio we operate under the conceptual framework for

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PERSEPHONE Grey Wartinger, Jiansong Yuan and Yuxuang Wang

On the North West end of Fairmount Park lies the living (section) team: Jiansong Yuan, G Philadelphia Organic Recycling Center. This center isdesign open to the public as a place to drop off and collect organic matter. Fallen trees, broken branches, leaves, and any scrap organic material collected by the city is processed in this facility and made available to the public free of charge for use. We were initially drawn to this site as a novel facility located in a public place, providing a public good. Not only is the organic matter, such as compost and mulch, invaluable for the growth of a garden, but even the waste material themselves have the potential to be used in the construction of form and space. The computational methods of this project center around agentbased design methods and discrete carbon fiber winding elements with variable formwork to adapt to changing agent conditions.

domestic space as a form-of-life itself: a living nexus operating in a multiplicity of material, biological, technological and economic domains.

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2 – Persephone by Grey Wartinger, Jiansong Yuan and Yuxuang Wang, Section

Ezio Blasetti

the architectural and tectonic, will allow the studio to speculate on the limits of architecture as an organizational, structural and aesthetic agent of change.

MSD-RAS

MATERIAL AGENCIES: ROBOTICS & DESIGN LAB II Robert Stuart-Smith (ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE) Patrick Danahy (TA) Robert Stuart-Smith (Director of Penn’s Autonomous Manufacturing Lab (AML-PENN), Assistant Professor of Architecture, and Program Director for MSD-RAS): StuartSmith’s research explores architecture through robotic manufacturing and generative design, specializing in multiagent systems and behavior-based computation. He also co-directs AML-PENN’s sister lab, AML-UCL, in the Department of Computer Science at University College of London, where he is currently undertaking funded research into autonomous multi-robot construction.

Design Research Material Agencies engages with robotic fabrication and material production as generative contributors to creative design outcomes. Qualitative design character will be curated through the parallel development of custom approaches to conceiving, manipulating, and responding to matter. Material Agencies explores an architecture designed and manufactured to leverage robotic fabrication to operate as polyvalent matter, a complex heterogeneous whole that goes beyond discrete functional or aesthetic expression and

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operates as a bespoke solution to multiple conflicting design criteria. Working with ceramics, teams were tasked with developing new approaches to design and production that expand agency in architectural facades, while also supporting the formal and ornamental qualities seen in early high-rise ceramic cladding by architects such as Louis Sullivan that are not economically feasible in present-day, mass-produced building ceramics. Participants developed an approach to design and

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3 – Robotic Prometheus by Matthew White, Jiansong Yuan and Grey Wartinger, Render

Speculative Application Scenario The studio developed designs aimed at challenging established roles for architectural ceramics with a focus on facade screens, rethinking their ability to operate within the public sphere,

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particularly at street level. Designs were developed digitally to the scale of approximately one typical structural bay (approx. 20m x 5m), a small part of which was physically fabricated. Each student group was free to vary the site, scale and application scenario to best fit their thesis proposition. Teams proposing scenarios where new architectural agencies were explored through the development of novel approaches to bespoke robot manufacturing, computational design and by re-thinking the role and use of architectural facade screens.

Projects included a multi-species facade that supported bird nesting, a green wall that re-purposed city steam-waste and a sound-distortion wall that channeled displaced air from arriving trains in the subway. All three projects projected an alternative vision for architectural design now possible through advances in manufacturing and design production.

Robert Stuart-Smith

production, operating primarily through the development of fabricated prototypes and computational, material, and robotic processes, with the aim of developing novel design affects intrinsic to material and production efficiencies.

ROBOTIC PROMETHEUS Matthew White, Jiansong Yuan and Grey Wartinger

The project started from the rapid urban changes and renovation. The built environment of city is constantly in flux and not merely the physical entity of communities and also the memory, the culture of them was forgotten, during the gentrification as high line park could be a case. This project aimed to record and exhibit as museum for urban memory.

The program, or in other words, the method of recording was through capturing the artifacts on site, to some extent similar to the time capsule. The artifacts collected would be like the content in the capsule for the memorial of the specific time period, but in an architectural scale. Different from the static capsule, this recording museum was able to adapt itself to the built environment and as the urban environment was constantly changing, this project could also keep taking the process of extension and demolition over time. As a result, it could be called as the dynamic adaptation. The “dynamic capsule” tended to fit into here to record the change of communities during the rail park renovation, so this nearby building was selected to become its site. The adaptation process and rapid installation would necessarily require quick design, so machine learning could be applied here as the semi-autonomous design process. The reading by machines gave this project the kind of appearance both alienated and belonged to the site, to the built environment.

5 – In-Person Studio

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4 – Robotic Prometheus by Matthew White, Jiansong Yuan and Grey Wartinger, Model

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DISTORTION Claire Moriarty, Deon Kim and Geng Liu Acoustic deformation explores a dynamic process for additive clay fabrication that leverages varied tensile strength throughout a fabric surface to support the deposition of clay to create a holistic representation of the interaction between their respective material characteristics.

The fabric formwork process utilizes the dynamic relationship between the resistance of a deformable surface and the gravitational force of the deposited material. This process creates shallow sloping surfaces to support the clay at angles otherwise impossible to achieve with unsupported clay deposition. This process highlights the natural tendencies of both materials, the clay’s weight, viscosity and malleable condition as well as the fabric’s resistance and the concession to an equilibrium between the two materials. This dynamic process required preliminary digital simulation, real-time monitoring and response as well as post-production refined digital representation.

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We have used this highly calibrated process to fabricate bespoke, shallow sloping panels for use in a proposed facade design. These panels are meant to connect to create a largely freestanding, double-sided, engaging architectural intervention. The connectors utilize a bespoke panel design to create overlapping areas for connection between the two facade surfaces creating a network of connections between both sides that unify to create an overall static structure.

The connectors not only serve a structural purpose but their unique geometry acts as a distortion device for ambient sound. Like air blown over the opening of a bottle, our connectors refract sound on their interior to distort and amplify the incoming sound waves. We are proposing the installation of our material artifacts in a subway dividing a central platform.

The extreme air pressure change created by trains passing the platform generates intense atmospheric movement. These strong currents evoke the largest response from our ceramic refraction devices.

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6 – Distortion by Claire Moriarty, Deon Kim and Geng Liu, Section, Model 7 – Distortion by Claire Moriarty, Deon Kim and Geng Liu, Section, Model

8 – Distortion by Claire Moriarty, Deon Kim and Geng Liu, Section, Render

11 – Steamed Greens by Yuran Liu, Riley Studebaker and Yuxuan Wang, Model

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Steamed Greens explores the utilization of urban steam waste to support community gardens and the greening of dense urban centers. A distributed series of green facades is envisaged that attaches to existing buildings, and distributes waste heat and water to support plant growth. As each site varies in geometry, solar exposure, and use, a variable design and production method was required. A materially efficient 6-axis incremental forming method for architectural ceramic panels was developed that enables custom doublycurved ceramic panels to be fabricated from flat slabs of

clay without requiring the production of molds which involve substantial material waste and cost. A micro-relief surface treatment method to support plant irrigation was also developed that is adaptive to the geometry and solar radiation conditions of each ceramic panel. These fabrication methods were supported by site thermal and geometrical data capture and a generative design method that enabled for ceramic green-wall designs to be developed that were adaptive to individual site solar radiance and desired plant species growth conditions. Steamed Greens advocates for a situated architecture that is custom tailored to site conditions and can recycle existing urban steam waste.

Robert Stuart-Smith

STEAMED GREENS Yuran Liu, Riley Studebaker and Yuxuan Wang

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9 – Steamed Greens by Yuran Liu, Riley Studebaker and Yuxuan Wang, Render 10 – Steamed Greens by Yuran Liu, Riley Studebaker and Yuxuan Wang, Model

IPD

IPD

INTEGRATED PRODUCT DESIGN Sarah Rottenberg, Adjunct Assistant Professor Executive Director, IPD Program

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The Integrated Product Design Master’s program brings the School of Design together with two other world class institutions, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Wharton School of Business, to offer students an opportunity to develop a holistic understanding of the product design process. Students from design, engineering, and business backgrounds learn how to integrate the other disciplines into their process and design what’s next. Our graduates go on to become product designers, design engineers, corporate innovation leaders, and entrepreneurs.

The Integrated Product Design program addresses many trends that are reshaping design. Businesses increasingly acknowledge the impact of design on their bottom lines, and bring designers into the product development process earlier and in strategic roles. Rapid prototyping capabilities like 3D printing have shrunk the resources required to prototype, test, and manufacture products. And the products, services, and experiences that attract both customers and capital are those that combine hardware and software to create a compelling user experiences. IPD draws upon the heritage and research strengths at Penn and teaches students how to implement fully formed product ideas.

In addition to skills in design, business and engineering, IPD students learn how to creatively solve problems, how to wade into ambiguity and create a path forward, and how to adapt and evolve their projects in response to new learnings and feedback. This creative agility became incredibly useful as teams navigated new norms, developed new digital collaboration skills and worked together in person to create compelling physical prototypes.

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DESIGN PROCESS Sarah Rottenberg (ADJUNCT ASSISTANT PROFESSOR) Alice Gilmore (TA) Sarah Rottenberg (Executive Director, IPD Program (Adjunct Assistant Professor): Faculty Director of the Executive Program for Social Innovation Design — Co-Founder of LIA Diagnostics

This studio is structured for IPD students as an intensive, interdisciplinary exploration of Design as purposeful for Integrated Product Design. The goal of the studio is to give students a firsthand experience of various processes involved in creating successful integrated product designs. This first semester of the four-semester studio sequence focuses on giving students experience developing designs based on a range of starting points: form, function, materiality and manufacturing process.

Students will practice design through rigorous, consistent processes for thinking through the evolution of their ideas. In this course, they will go through an entire design process from conceptualization to design to producing

prototypes. They will be taught to focus on the specifics of their designs, causing them to be conscious of what drives their choices as designers and providing them with a wider range of tools to design from in successive projects.

Course work will involve readings, assignments, class participation, in-class 1

BIODESIGN Sherry Chiu, Tamara Salman, Jonathan Zur, and Nicolle Belaunde

The Biodesign Challenge (BDC), an educational program and competition shaping the first generation of biodesigners, was looking to grow and strengthen their alumni network.

Through a series of interviews with instructors, staff, and alumni, we uncovered three key categories for further development — community, compass, and confidence — and developed a series of activities designed to support the students emotional needs both during and after the Biodesign Challenge. To test our hypotheses and further develop strategies to address stakeholder needs, we trialled several of these activities with recent participants and alumni using Zoom and other online platforms. Based on feedback, we then created recommendations based on a sustainable, grassroots, and accessible approach to current student and alumni relations.

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1 – Biodesign by Sherry Chiu, Tamara Salman, Jonathan Zur, and Nicolle Belaunde, Project Description

2 – Biodesign by Sherry Chiu, Tamara Salman, Jonathan Zur, and Nicolle Belaunde, Diagram

Sarah Rottenberg

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exercises, a midterm presentation and a final submission.

Biodesign Challenge The Biodesign Challenge (BDC) is an education program and competition that is shaping the first generation of biodesigners. In order to support this mission BDC asked the IPD students to help them better understand their alumni with a goal of creating community among program alumni, maintaining relationships with alumni, and supporting alumni in various levels of engagement throughout their careers. Through a series of in depth interviews, outreach, and online engagement activities, this group created, tested, and demonstrated the potential of a series of grassroots efforts to meet the BDC’s goals. These solutions included: an online platform to allow for continued, informal connections and conversations amongst BDC alumni; small, hosted events that foster confidence across the BDC network, and a focus on bringing students and alumni together through active mentorship during the BVC challenge.

Penn—COVID Testing Across the country colleges and universities are utilizing testing as one tool to address the current COVID-19 pandemic. In the Fall of 2020, the University of Pennsylvania—along with many

PENN-COVID Rachel Cole, Samuel Biddle, Zining Liang, and Vashvi Shah

During the 2020-2021 academic year, the University of Pennsylvania was looking to evaluate their current covid-19 testing strategy, better understand what motivates students to test, and to transition to saliva based testing for the spring semester. In order to gain these insights and improve the end-to-end experience for students and staff, we conducted a series of interviews with stakeholders as well as in-person observations at testing sites. After the analysis and synthesis of findings, we proposed a redesign of the coronavirus. upenn.edu website (making information accessible, easy to understand, and clear), revised signage at testing sites (creating a streamlined experience), and the addition of lemon aromatherapy strips to the testing protocol (reducing testing time and increasing the ease of test completion).

other institutions—used the nasal swab test; while other educational systems employed an alternative, saliva-based approach. In order to gain insights into best practices for saliva-based testing, the university and health system partnered with IPD students to evaluate the implications of and methods for deploying a saliva based test on campus.

During the course of the project, the students worked directly with all stakeholder including those who were running the testing program, those who administer the tests, and those who have taken the test. With this broad perspective, they were able to develop a suite of solutions that included a revised online presence to aid in providing information clearly and intuitively; onsite graphics to explain testing procedures; and the use of scented strips to increase saliva production and decrease testing time.

4 – Penn-COVID by Rachel Cole, Samuel Biddle, Zining Liang, and Vashvi Shah, Homescreen

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IPD

PROBLEM FRAMING Mikael Avery Sarah Rottenberg Paul Castellan, Armando Marquez (TAs) Mikael Avery (Lecturer): Founded draft works, a design studio – MArch from the University of Pennsylvania – Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Rutgers University

and test their assumptions about what will succeed in the marketplace through real-world experimentation.

In this studio course, we ask students to take a step back from what and how they are designing and ask the question of why they are designing. Students will learn a rigorous process for understanding stakeholder needs and for translating those needs into implications for product design. They will begin to develop greater awareness of the personal, social, competitive and technological contexts that their products fit into, and to learn how to design for those contexts. They will learn to articulate

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CRESCENT Sherry Chiu

People want designated nap spaces outside of the bedroom for short, light sleep. They would make do with the sofas they had, but interestingly, each person had unique rituals and nap routines. Most wanted moderate levels of natural light, a bit of sound of their family’s hustle and bustle, specific positions on the sofa. They would conform themselves to their living room space for their naps, but be subject to the light and energy of the people around them.

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Crescent provides a dedicated nap zone for those who need to recharge throughout the day. Having this dedicated space creates the mental shift needed for temporary sleep that’s separate from the bed. In addition, the Crescent’s adjustability allows seamless integration into the home and benefits those who want to save space.

1 – In-Person Studio

2 – Crescent by Sherry Chiu, Stand and Sleep

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IT IS TIME TO CHECK OUT AND DINE IN Sean Barrett

The kitchen is the heart of the home, and the dining table is the place where families gather at the end of the day to share a meal, decompress, and re-connect. In the words of one young father, “Life just happens here.” But, unfortunately, more than ever before, so does work. As the office continues to expand into the house, it’s harder than ever to connect with our families even when they are right there in the room.

Remember what it was like to leave the office at the end of the day?

Mikael Avery

The course will unfold over two projects.

The first, short project will focus on experience and service design of a domain that is easily accessible with a corporate client in mind. The second, longer project will involve a real-world client in a more complex setting. By moving through the design process twice, students will improve their skills and be able to reflect upon the design process.

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Course work will involve readings, assignments, class participation, in-class exercises, and a final submission.

The Hideaway is a convertible dining table that swiftly and effortlessly transitions from work time to family time. There is no need to disrupt your carefully laid-out files and notes.

It only takes a moment to slide the work surface downward and close the lid resulting in a pristine dining surface in two simple movements. With your laptop and paperwork securely stowed out of sight, you’ll be free to relax and focus on what matters most. There wont be any more stacks of memos creeping into view from the corner of your eye and no little blinking light tempting you to open the laptop and answer one last email. The Hideaway will reduce stress and encourage bonding while simultaneously reinforcing the dwindling boundaries between work and home, leading to an increased quality of life for the whole family.

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3 – It Is Time to Check Out and Dine In by Sean Barrett, Desk and Table

IPD

FINAL PROJECT Sarah Rottenberg (ADJUNCT ASSISTANT PROFESSOR) JD Albert, Chris Murray (TAs) Sarah Rottenberg (Executive Director, IPD Program (Adjunct Assistant Professor): Faculty Director of the Executive Program for Social Innovation Design— Co-Founder of LIA Diagnostics

The last two semesters of the IPD studio sequence consist of the IPD Final Project. Students choose to work on design problems that follow their passion or a real world problem provided by our partners in academia, industry, or the non-profit world. The Final Project enables students to put the skills that they have developed in engineering, design arts and business into practice, following the process from initial opportunity identification into the development of a working product with a complementary business plan. Interdisciplinary group work is encouraged on final projects.

Working in teams offers students the opportunity to collaborate across skill sets and learn from teammates from differ-

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THE HAPPY CAMPER Mari Andersen, Claudio Angrigiani, Alice Gilmore, and Terry Huang

The Happy Camper is a family board game that creates opportunities for middle school boys to reflect on their emotions and experiences and to share them with their family.

In addition to the physical game, there is a digital platform that coaches parents about how to utilize the game to best build connection and open communication with their sons. To make the game engaging and fun, the game is centered around three things that humans crave — stories, competition, and connection. Each player navigates the board to unlock clues that will help them guess a secret emotion. As players move around the board, they land of tiles that prompt them to share stories and to imagine how other players might react in a particular situation.

Te team created this game as the culmination of a yearlong project that explored how gendered socialization and messages about what it means to “be a man” impact the emotional well-being of boys. The product experience was informed by our research with child psychologists, parents and middle-school boys. Guided by their insights, the team created content that allows boys to raise concerns, share their stories and reveal sides of their personalities they don’t always get the opportunity to show. The balance of lighthearted and more heavy-hitting content provides families a low-friction tool to strengthen their bonds, improve communication and build emotional resilience.

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1 – The Happy Camper by Mari Andersen, Claudio Angrigiani, Alice Gilmore, and Terry Huang, Game Pieces

2 – The Happy Camper by Mari Andersen, Claudio Angrigiani, Alice Gilmore, and Terry Huang, Project Description

Sarah Rottenberg

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IMPACK Anastasia Dombrowski, Jorge Echeverria, Juncheng Qian and Yuqi Zhao

Impack is an easy to use, custom packaging solution that improves the fragile item packing experience, for craftspeople and small manufacturers.

The Impack mobile app uses 3D scanning technology to recognize object size, geometry, and materials, and generates customized insert designs. Those designs are sent to the Impack machine to cut. Just like a printer, all a person needs to do is feed a sheet of cardboard into the cutter, and the machine handles the rest. The cardboard based inserts are easy to assemble and offer excellent protection comparable to packing peanuts. The designs were put through intense drop tests as well as shipping tests to ensure their durability.

Impack can generate inserts for a variety of shapes, offering customers adaptability as well as the convenience of at home packaging.

The team designed Impack for individual makers who are looking for a more efficient and easier way of packaging their unique items. Through the personalized packaging generation process and automated insert manufacturing process, the team brings artistry to the end user’s packaging. The ultimate result is a safe journey, more sustainable packaging and a well-crafted unboxing experience.

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RHEA: THE CUSHION FOR MOMS-TO-BE Echo Wan, Shivam Dehinwal, Yve Tang

Every year, around 3.8M American women give birth, and over 60% are working desk jobs during pregnancy. Almost every pregnant woman we spoke with experienced physical pain while working at their desk; and, unlike other prominent pain, they find it hard to seek accommodations for sitting discomfort. So, we designed Rhea—an adaptable cushion for pregnancy.

ent disciplines. Final Projects provide students with ample opportunity to learn leadership and collaboration skills that are invaluable in today’s workplace.

Rhea offers different lumbar-sacral cushions for changing lumbar spine curvature, which would gradually increase by 41% over the course of a pregnancy. The seat cushion shape promotes weight distribution allowing for longer, comfortable sitting. In cases like perineal swelling or tears during childbirth, the option of a donut-shaped cushion helps relieve pain in their perineum. The curved design of the base creates a pivot point and allows women to rock while maintaining back support. In both a relaxed and active posture, Rhea ensures a healthier and more supportive sitting position.

4 – Impack by Anastasia Dombrowski, Jorge Echeverria, Juncheng Qian and Yuqi Zhao, Render

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3 – Rhea: The cushion for moms-to-be by Echo Wan, Shivam Dehinwal, Yve Tang, Process

PHD

PHD

Dr. Daniel Barber, Associate Professor of Architecture Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture Daniel Barber (Associate Professor of Architecture): Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture – Topic Director of the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities – Co-Director of the UPenn/Mellon Humanities + Urbanism + Design seminar on the Inclusive City – Author of Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Advanced research in architecture is of increasing importance to understanding and engaging the changing social, political, and technological context for architecture and allied disciplines, even more so today as architecture is reeling from the pressures of the pandemic and climate disruptions, and the righteous unrest surrounding racial and social injustice.

The Graduate Group in Architecture at the Weitzman School offers a PhD in Architecture focused on the production of knowledge in historical, theoretical, or technological realms of architecture, landscape architecture, and historic preservation. Operating within the context of a design school in a university setting, it is an interdisciplinary program, and explores opportunities across Weitzman and in the wider university to reconsider the terms, methods, and futures of architectural knowledge.

The Program is especially focused on scholarship that explores and rescripts the boundaries of relevant disciplines.

Projects in History/Theory often examine connections between architectural or landscape histories and theories; histories of technology and environment; of race, class, and gender; of politics, economics, and equity. Many are

READING AND WRITING A GARDEN, MATERIALS OF A GARDEN MADE IN GERMANTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA (C. 1683–1719) Miranda E. Mote SUPERVISOR: John Dixon Hunt ADVISORS: David Leatherbarrow, Michael J. Lewis, and Bethany Wiggin

Reading and Writing a Garden describes and interprets an example of a relationship between belief, imagination, reading, writing, and the art of gardening in colonial Pennsylvania. The chapters analyze and interpret the role and influence of Francis Daniel Pastorius’ art of gardening in early American garden culture as it was based on his own Christian Humanist and polyglot demeanor, German Pietism, early modern natural science, and the multilingual culture of the newly forming Quaker colony. The garden in question was made behind his home at, what is now, 6019 Germantown Avenue, between 1683 and 1719. His garden and garden art are reconstructed based on a close reading of his own plant prints, botanical and devotional poetry, literal descriptions, and didactic writing about plants and horticulture. This writing is found in several of his notebooks that survive at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, The German Society of Pennsylvania, and the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania. His writing documents a garden of over two hundred and twenty species of exotic, ornamental, culinary, and medicinal plants that he cultivated in his garden, orchard, vineyard, and fields and a productive apiary of four to five hives. It also reveals his deeply felt, mystical intimacy with bees and plants. He celebrated this intimacy in his writing, and in the manner that he arranged, cultivated,

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1 – Nature prints of medicinal plants grown in Germantown before 1700. The prints are a reconstruction of nature printing methods used by Francis Pastorius in printing plants in his letters, books, and notebooks.

attuned to the role of media in producing and understanding architectural ideas.

Technological research operates on structural and environmental knowledge, offering innovative methods and processes within a rich humanistic context, and seeking novel approaches to labor, construction, and thermal experience.

The Graduate Group in Architecture is also a venue for exploring equity and social justice in the architectural discourse, hosting lectures and events that encourage a relational, engaged understanding of how design interacts with wider social and ecological world.

Recent visitors to the program’s “PhD Talks” series include: Ateya Khorakiwala (Columbia GSAPP) on infrastructural buffering; Malcolm McCullough (University of Michigan) on the grid in STS research; Holly Samuelson (Harvard GSD) on healthy buildings… PhD students and candidates also attended a talk by Adrienne Brown (University of Chicago) on her book The Black Skyscraper organized in collaboration with the Penn/Mellon Seminar on Humanities + Urbanism + Design. Penn Faculty Dorit Aviv and joined us to present recent research and discuss professional development, and we hosted public dissertation defenses for most of the year’s completed projects (summarized below).

Research by advanced students in the PhD program is diverse and wide ranging, reflecting the multifaceted nature of the design fields.

PHD

and propagated plants in his garden beds. His art was a lyrical and didactic, multilingual hortenses poesis: a garden poem that celebrated the creative act of making a garden in a Pennsylvania woods.

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ADOLF BEHNE’S WRITINGS ON ARCHITECTURE, 1912-1933: ‘NEUES BAUEN,’ SOCIALISM, AND THE QUESTION OF AGENCY Kevin M. Berry ADVISOR: Dr. David Leatherbarrow

Adolf Behne (1885 – 1948) was a German avant-garde art critic who, during the 1910s and 1920s, remained an “überzeugter Sozialist.” He was also an important theorist for the neues Bauen architectural movement in Germany.

Several architects and critics of the avant-garde declared themselves socialists, especially during the Weimar Republic; Behne was certainly not the only one. Yet, if we want to understand in greater detail the ways that German modernists conceptualized the nature of architecture’s socio-political agency, Behne’s texts prove to be among the most important. His writings reveal the grandiosity of the political ambitions of the neues Bauen movement and, unlike most other figures who advocated for the new architecture, Behne was focused most of all on explaining to readers that and how the new architecture had socio-political agency, or a means of influencing politics.

This dissertation examines Adolf Behne’s writings on architecture between 1912 and 1933 from a Humanist Marxist perspective. I show that his work was primarily about the question of architectural agency, that his theory was guided by a humanistic idea of socialism, and that he sought to outline what I call a ‘constitutive’ theory of agency. To explain this, I analyze his definitions of architecture as ‘bauen’ and ‘Lebensgestaltung.’

This study also demonstrates that two conceptual models of architectural agency dominate architectural history today: ‘reflectionism,’ which holds that architecture can reflect politics, and ‘productivism,’ which maintains that architecture can produce a new society. Behne, influenced

by Neo-Kantianism and Life-Philosophy, instead believed that architecture had agency insofar as it constituted human reality. I conclude that, even if parts of his theory may no longer be appealing, Behne’s writings have problematized the concept of architectural agency and exposed the limited ways in which historians have conceptualized architecture’s relationship to society and politics, past and present.

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2 – Behne, Adolf. Neues Wohnen, Neues Bauen (Leipzig: Hesse und Becker), 1927.

PHD

NATURE, BETTER: RECONSTITUTING WOOD IN AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE, 1927-1941 Erin Putalik ADVISOR: Daniel Barber In the decade preceding America’s entry into the Second World War, a fascinating range of experimental houses were constructed out of wood-based materials. These houses reflected larger trends within the practice of architecture, during a time in which architects eagerly engaged and experimented with the wide range of new or improved materials that were finding their way into the architectural market. Many of these products were made of wood, with their specific materiality and composition profoundly affected by simultaneous changes in how American forests were valued, managed, and harvested.

This project examines a selected set of these experimental houses and seeks to demonstrate the degree to which their emergence was imbricated in, and to a large degree arose from, seemingly unrelated discourses of resource conservation and the scientific management and improvement of American forests. Furthermore, it explores how the construction and taste culture of American domestic architecture transformed, specifically with regard to how wood-based materials were used and valued, in tandem with transformations in the quality, type, and availability of the wood that was coming from American forests during the 1930s. It argues that the potent myth of the frontiersman and the log cabin can be shown as participant in the same reciprocities between forests, building materials, and taste culture as the postwar family in their low-cost and prefabricated plywood house.

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Eleanor Raymond, Peabody Plywood House, 1940-41. Image Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library Special Collections, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.

ADVISOR: David Leatherbarrow In 1961, Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos launched a program that attempted to reinvigorate and develop the northern borderland region of México. The Programa Nacional Fronterizo (National Border Program, PRONAF) sought, among its established goals, to: “improve the general environment of the border cities… Promote the constant raising of the cultural standards of the population…and stress the values of our history, folklore, language, culture and arts.” Through projects of urban beautification, it would build the entrance gates of the country, and civic, cultural and commercial centers that would attract and maintain a certain type of tourism.

Dr. Daniel Barber

LIFE ON THE BORDER: CONSTRUCTING THE MÉXICO/U.S. BORDERLANDS, 1961-1971 Germán Pallares Avitia

I argue that Mario Pani’s master plans not only sought to exalt Mexico’s national identity through an architecture, at once both modern and yet appearing to be linked to an indigenous past; but that the few actual built projects were an architecture of hybridity, that of resistance to, and assimilation of, the post-war American way of life in the midst of Cold War politics. While the Mexican centralist government wanted to prevent the Americanization of the borderlands by building the last cultural frontline that would remind fronterizos of their mexicanidad, it also wanted to build “the biggest storefront” that, by leveraging on the purchasing power of its northern neighbor, would allow México to be seen as an equal participant in the new world economy.

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Master Plan for Commercial Center in Cd. Juárez, Chih. 1961 by Mario Pani Arquitectos Asociados, Source: PRONAF Cd. Juárez Booklet

THESIS

THESIS

Annette Fierro, Associate Professor of Architecture Associate Chair Annette Fierro (Associate Professor of Architecture, Associate Chair): MArch from Rice University (1984) – BS in Civil Engineering from Rice University (1980) – Author of The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle/Paris 1981-1998 (MIT Press, 2003)

of ideas into a final statement and set of design conclusions.

The thesis project is also essentially timely: questions are posed to address current issues and crises in which Each year a small group of honors architecture is implicated, even while students elects to pursue the thesis to often drawing on historical matter. In undertake critical and speculative exploration of their own devising. Building 2020-21, eleven thesis projects addressed the extremes of contemporary an independent topic or set of quessubject matter, often springing from tions, they work closely with an advisor deeply ethical questions of the moment. and group of students and faculty over Natalia Revelo (featured) positioned the course of the entire academic year. the resiliency of water in Rio de Janeiro’s The thesis project at Penn is concepfavelas as a possibility for resistance tualized as an open work, that is, its and autonomy of communities. Erik scope is limited only by the parameters Anderson questioned the prototypes of of the questions which emerge. The Capitol architecture given the current thesis topic/question is necessarily a structural failures of American governchallenge to the discipline, establishment. Jay Greene challenged standards ing a relationship to ideas formally or of constructional practices for the safety popularly identified as architectural, whether belonging to the realm of build- and well-being of workers as an issue ing or the multiple discourses embraced of architectural design. María Jose Fuentes contested normative contextual within architectural study. The thesis is criteria to explore the queering architypically the site of invention and intectural space and form for marginal novation, where students broach the communities in West Philadelphia. The periphery of definitions and practices after becoming wholly conversant in the urgency of climate occupied a considerable share students’ focus: Tone Chu issues involved. For students completderived a system of architectural and ing dual degrees — with Landscape landscape registers to inevitable climate Architecture, City Planning, or Historic change and engineering in Svalbard, Preservation — this periphery exists as cross-disciplinary study hybridizing into Norway; Aaron Stone (featured) fictionalized the interaction of possible a “third” subject. Throughout the yearmethods of carbon capture as monulong thesis process, topics/questions are concurrently researched, elaborated, ments within future societies; Rebecca Sibinga repositioned historical ideas of edited, and finally manifested in a work collective utopias as part of a prediction of architectural dimension. A thesis of political collapse and rejuvenation project is a work of craft, building a set 388

All of the issues lie at the periphery of the discipline but also comprise the centrality of architecture’s role and responsibility within many pressing issues. The 2020-21 Thesis Program involved these students, and their faculty advisors from across the departments, at the Weitzman School of Design. A total of twenty-seven students and faculty were involved throughout the year, meeting regularly, forming the largest effort in cross-disciplinary exploration in the school.

THESIS

of nearby peri-urban contexts; Paola Zarate examined technical interventions into existing warehouses for urban food supplies. Finally, some students chose to delve deeply into the practices of the discipline itself, in manifestos which fully embraced history with new forms of post-digital concerns. Michael Caine addressed Las Vegas, spanning from Venturi’s writing and academic studio to current dreamscapes problematized by commercial practices. Julianna Cano’s work (featured) took on the issues of spectrality in Salvador Dali’s work and writings, enacting these within the ecological and picturesque facets of Central Park in New York. Paul McCoy (featured) took on an exhaustive examination of water systems and decorative immersivity of the Alhambra and its vicinity.

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SPECTRAL MINUTIAE — THE MAKING OF A TINY TERRAPOLIS IN THE PARK Julianna Cano ADVISOR: Ferda Kolatan WRITING ADVISOR: Joan Ockman PROJECT CONSULTANT: Roger Rothman, Bucknell This thesis aims to conceptualize a new paradigm for urban parks that no longer reinforce anthropocentric ideologies and idealistic visions of nature, but instead call attention to the complexities of the environment and the current role we play within it. New York City’s Central Park is the case study to test this model, as its widespread success as a public amenity and modern marvel make its spatial boundaries between nonhuman and human activity all the more complex and nuanced. This thesis proposes a new iteration of Central Park through the implementation of a series of tiny architectures, or Spectral Follies. These follies are strategically placed along cultural and programmatic boundaries; calling attention to the forgotten ghosts embedded within the landscape, while still operating as autonomous objects.

This work argues that before we can begin to reconceptualize public spaces, we must re-engage with the seemingly imaginative and irrational. Salvador Dali’s writings and paintings from the 1930s were deconstructed through a series of speculative exercises and recontextualized within contem-

porary object-oriented thought models. Salvador Dali’s early theories and artistic techniques like his paranoia critical method and the double image distort the distinction between foreground and background, in turn dismantling existing categorizations and capturing tiny objects with the upmost objectivity. According to Dali, only a paranoiac mind can see an object’s true spectrality; a beauty only visible when an object is detached from its prior associations or functional aptitude. This ideology serves as a retroactive guide for conceptualizing an idiosyncratic architecture that fosters new realities and dissolves outmoded societal biases.

The Spectral Follies of Central Park embody the same spectral beauty; their presence is both seductive and inexplicable, similar to the illusion of the double image in many of Dali’s paintings. From afar their beauty is enchanting and at moments reminiscent of a classical past, yet upon closer look their strange and grotesque qualities start to become apparent. They exist along the threshold between our contrived perception of reality and the more sobering truth.

While encountering a Spectral Folly, the passerby experiences a sense of delirium, as the ghostly twin of “nature” (ecological reality) becomes visible, no longer hidden to the anthropocentric eye, bringing to the foreground our complex relationship with nature.

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1 – Spectral Minutiae by Julianna Cano, Axon 2 – Spectral Minutiae by Julianna Cano, Exterior Perspective

3 – Spectral Minutiae by Julianna Cano, Axon 2 4 – Spectral Minutiae by Julianna Cano, Perspective Render

This thesis project embraces the statement that favelas are a type of urbanism that does not solely exist as a strategy of survival, but as a form of resistance. Therefore, the knowledge and organization practices that exist in favelas are explored as academic research and employed as the building blocks for this design process. This is accomplished through the in-depth analysis of the spatial agency of three typological case studies: a museum (Museu da Maré), public

7 – Designs for Autonomy by Natalia Revelo La Rotta, Collage 2

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ADVISOR: Daniel Barber and Eduardo Rega Calvo

plaza (Pedra do Sal), and a cultural center (Insituto Favela da Paz). For this design thesis, I use the tools of architecture practice and theory to explore an imaginative project of transition design. This is done through the development of a design process that utilizes spatial, material, and programmatic lessons from the analysis of the case studies and personal involvement in Catalytic Communities’ Sustainable Favela Network to design a network of transformation of Rio’s Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora (UPP) centers into a network of community spaces that embrace collectivity and mutual aid. This process and spaces are speculated to ultimately support the development of favelas as autonomous communities. The project speculates this through the design of the Formiga Pilot Project, both as a physical and political manifestation.

Annette Fierro

DESIGNS FOR AUTONOMY: A CASE STUDY OF RIO DE JANEIRO’S FAVELAS AS SPECULATIVE EXPERIMENTS FOR EQUITABLE COMMUNITIES Natalia Revelo La Rotta

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7 5 – Designs for Autonomy by Natalia Revelo La Rotta, Timeline 6 – Designs for Autonomy by Natalia Revelo La Rotta, Collage

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JAN. NEWS FERDA KOLATAN JOINS STANDING FACULTY

The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design congratulates Ferda Kolatan on joining the standing faculty as associate professor in the Department of Architecture. “Ferda Kolatan has taught in the Department of Architecture since 2004. He is the founding director of SU11 Architecture + Design, an award-winning practice in New York City. SU11’s projects range from art installations to buildings and large-scale urban speculations. Acclaimed for its innovative designs, SU11’s work has been published internationally and exhibited at such renowned venues as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; FRAC Centre; Walker Art Center; Vitra Design Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art; Art Basel; ArchiLab, Orleans, France; Artists Space, New York; and the SCI-Arc Gallery. Kolatan has also participated in the Venice, Beijing and Istanbul Biennales, and the ACADIA and SIGGRAPH conferences. He received his Architectural Diploma from the RWTH Aachen and his Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University with honors. He has taught and lectured widely, most recently as the Jaquelin T. Robertson Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia and visiting critic at SCI-Arc and Pratt Institute. Kolatan has published several texts on architecture and co-authored the book Meander: Variegating Architecture (Bentley Institute Press, 2010). His Weitzman Research Studios in Cairo won the inaugural 2017 ARCHITECT Studio Prize and were exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016. In 2011, Kolatan was awarded the title of “Young Society Leader” by the American Turkish Society in New York for his achievements as an educator and designer.

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STUDENTS EARN HONORABLE MENTION IN RENDER OF THE YEAR COMPETITION

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FEB. NEWS

Ryan Henriksen (MArch’20) and Tae Hyung Lee (MArch’20) earned an Interior Award Honorable Mention in Arch Out Loud’s Render of the Year competition for the «best visualization.»

Their submission, Renewed Palimpsest, was originally created for Associate Professor of Architecture Ferda Kolatan’s 701 studio, “Oddkin Architecture in Istanbul III: Remaking the Büyük Valide Han.” Of their original studio work, Henrikson and Lee write: [The project] reinterprets and transforms existing circulatory moments into manifestations that embed new spatial conditions within the Han. This series of interventions and its programming is intended to extend and enhance the current usage of the Han. Ordinary elements such as stairs, arches, and domes collaborate with newly configured architectural elements giving life to unique episodic moments.

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EXCERPT: BOUW ON NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS

In a new book, Building with Nature: Creating, implementing, and upscaling Nature-based Solutions (nai010 publishers, 2020), experts from science, engineering, design and nonprofits describe the key concepts of EcoShape, a Dutch initiative to promote eco-friendly building practices through hydraulic structures. Edited by Matthijs Bouw, who is an associate professor of practice in architecture and landscape architecture and director of the Urban Resilience Certificate at Weitzman, and Erik van Eekelen, the book links building projects in Europe and Southeast Asia to their landscapes and economic and social systems, and provides a manual for “Building with Nature.” Building with Nature landscapes, systems, and concepts in the book are illustrated by One Architecture & Urbanism (led by Matthijs Bouw) and the information can also be accessed at www.EcoShape.nl. In this excerpt from his essay “Learning from Place,” Bouw describes a trip to Demak, Indonesia, with a group of students from the Weitzman School to see how EcoShape hydrological engineering projects are bringing urgently needed, nature-based solutions to local conditions that are rapidly changing due to the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.

Engagement

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Site visits specifically impact the many groups of design, engineering, and ecology students that visit Building with Nature projects. Young people are keenly aware of the challenges posed by the climate crisis and biodiversity loss; they understand the urgency to develop new paradigms for design and engineering now. Often, they are eager to learn from local communities and vernacular practices. For a group of architecture and landscape architecture students from the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, touring the Building with Nature project in Demak, Indonesia, was a natural highlight of their study trip to Asia.

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Through Apri Susanto Astra and Eko Budi Priyanto, the local representatives of Wetlands International, the student group connected with Robert Wahyu from Jelajah Tour. The business runs sightseeing trips in Semarang, often focused on the Dutch heritage of the coastal city’s Kota Lama district. Recently, there has been increasing demand to organize trips to coastal villages in Demak; a group from the Netherlands had visited the prior week. From Semarang, the Jelajah Tour van took the coastal road east. After passing Kota Lama, it crossed the 530hectare Banger Polder, which was constructed with Dutch assistance in 2018 to manage floodwaters in the rapidly subsiding (by as much as eight centimeters per year) area. Further east, signs of subsidence were abundant. In the industrial area of Genuk, a number of estates seemed to be drowning in water. The van had to slow down periodically to navigate the significant height differences between bridges, culverts, and the sinking road. Some twenty kilometers east of the city, rice fields came into view along with more flooded land. At the end of the road in the village of Betahwalang, wooden homes from various eras stood side by side. The new houses were prominently raised above their older neighbors. Successive elevations over time reflected the rate of subsidence and could be readily understood at a glance.

Transferring from the van into fishing boats, the students could see the ecosystem services promoted by Building with Nature in action. Along the mangrove-lined channel, fishermen worked on platforms made from the same bamboo used to build permeable structures at the coast. Making their way onto newly formed land behind the fences, villagers explained how mangrove restoration took place with particular varieties and how this has encouraged sediment buildup. As it regenerates, the mangrove belt will attenuate wave energy during storms and protect the villages from continued coastal erosion.

In Demak, as elsewhere in Indonesia, the deforestation of mangroves has put local livelihoods at risk. Because mangroves are highly effective at removing carbon from the air, deforestation has destroyed major carbon sinks and released long-buried greenhouse gases, thus contributing to global warming. Mangroves can store twice as much carbon as salt marshes and up to four times as much as rainforests. They do so by rapidly converting carbon dioxide into biomass and storing dead material in the soil, where there is little oxygen. This form of “blue carbon” has a price on the global markets for carbon offset, which is now helping fund the restoration of mangrove belts worldwide, in part to mitigate the greenhouse gases released by earlier deforestation. The fishermen and women who stood nearby up to their shoulders in the water pointed to another benefit of mangroves. Their root systems form a protective, resource-rich habitat for smaller fish and crustaceans, which benefits nearshore fish populations as well as those farther offshore, at the reefs.

During the visit, it was clear the entire community was engaged in Building with Nature. In the community hall, a banner proclaimed, “Sugeng rawuh” (“welcome”).

The kepala desa (the head of the village), a local police officer, and a group of villagers greeted the students. The introductory speeches and a slideshow on the importance of Building with Nature served a double purpose: helping visitors understand the project and describing community involvement in the program.

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After the group returned from the water, lunch was served in a local house. Astra had arranged lunch on the condition that the student group paid double so that the entire group of fishermen, guides, and maintenance workers could join. Locals

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and students savored plentiful dishes of freshly caught seafood while sitting together on the carpeted floor.

In the Global South, the economic benefits of Building with Nature will be critical to its success. While ecosystem services, avoided losses, and local community impact are difficult to predict or measure and thus render “bankable,” they are nevertheless evident in Betahwalang. One aim of the EcoShape pilot in Indonesia is to develop better tools to analyze these benefits and use them to form a stronger basis for intended subsequent programs in Indonesia as well as other countries.

Building with Nature works from the idea that nature can be harnessed to address multiple sustainable development goals simultaneously, which represents a departure from conservation practice and is especially critical in emerging economies.

The ambition of EcoShape is to replicate the successful integration of Building with Nature in a range of landscapes and environments elsewhere. One such place could be the city of Semarang. Later in the study trip, officials there shared plans that had been developed in the Water as Leverage program, which imagined a coastal zone of mangroves and wetlands integrated with the industrial estates and the port, tidal parks, and new retention ponds near Kota Lama, as well as the fishing settlements, and where sediment is put to beneficial use in flood protection.

Were these to be realized, the strengthened ecosystem could extend thirty miles west from Demak. It would not only provide flood protection and enhance biodiversity but also support the fishing industry. Ideally, these Building with Nature measures coincide with improvements to the water supply, the state of which now contributes significantly to land subsidence.

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The expertise with sand and mud that Building with Nature has developed in the past decade is crucial for addressing the big challenges of the current era: climate change-induced sea level rise, biodiversity loss, and subsidence. The first challenge indicates the need to raise and fortify coastlines to keep water out and protect our populations and economic activity. The second is to keep our natural resources — including beaches, marshes, and mangroves — from drowning to preserve their role in sustaining biodiversity. Both require large amounts of material: sand and other sediment. Large-scale, unregulated sand mining has had a devastating global environmental impact, often exacerbating floods, destroying ecosystems, and negatively affecting livelihoods in local communities. Traditional engineering uses a lot of sand, and it has altered streams such that sediment can no longer reach the sea. Harnessing the forces of nature to capture sediment is essential to mitigate these destructive practices. Using mud to make clay for dikes or develop protective mangrove foreshores are but two examples. Sustaining our coasts is another.

To outpace sea level rise, however, we must strengthen the systems that protect and support us soon. Unlike traditional solutions, Building with Nature takes time.

Ecosystems adapt slowly, and we are just beginning to discover how best to Build with Nature and to adjust our practices and institutions to facilitate implementation at scale. From this perspective, the interest of students in Building with Nature, and their engagement with sites such as the villages in Demak, suggests that the next generation of professionals will be committed to this urgent task.

Master of Architecture students from the Weitzman School of Design made a clean sweep in the 2021 HOK Futures Competition. All three of the finalist spots were awarded to teams of Weitzman students:

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WEITZMAN STUDENTS WIN 2021 HOK FUTURES COMPETITION

First Place: “Enigma” by Nicholas Houser (MArch’22) and Danny Ortega (MArch’22) Second Place: “Under One Roof” by Eric Anderson (MArch’21) and Megan York (MArch’21) Third Place: “Seaming Picturesque” by Monte Reed (March’23) and Kyle Troyer (MArch’23) Now in its fifth year, HOK Futures invites Philadelphia-area architecture students to participate in the competition. The three finalists were recognized at a virtual award ceremony on February 16.

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WEITZMAN FACULTY AND ALUMS NAMED 2021 AIA FELLOWS

The American Institute of Architecture awarded 102 of members admission into the College of Fellows for 2021, the highest level of membership and honor within AIA, and three are Weitzman faculty members and eight are alums.

With nearly five decades of distinguished experience in practice and teaching among them, they exemplify the School’s ongoing commitment to advancing not just the design professions but also the public good.

This year’s new Fellows include three faculty members of the School: David A. Hollenberg (MArch`75), adjunct professor of historic preservation and former University Architect at Penn; Billie Faircloth, adjunct professor of architecture; and Brian D. Phillips (MArch`96), lecturer in architecture.

Six other alums were also inducted into the College: Brad Jacobson (MArch`98), Robert C. Kelly (MArch`78), Brian A. Lane (MArch`90), Chere R. LeClair (MArch`95), Richard E. J. Mohler (C`80, MArch `84), and Stephen John Phillips (MArch`94).

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A project by recent MSD-EBD graduates Suryakiran Prabhakaran, Abinayaa Perezhilan, and Di Sung will be featured at the London Design Biennale in June 2021.

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STUDENT WORK SELECTED FOR LONDON DESIGN BIENNALE

An energy-efficient datacenter entitled Sanctuary of Datum, the design was produced in a 2020 studio led by Dorit Aviv, assistant professor of architecture and director of the Thermal Architecture Lab.

The project will be featured in the Design in an Age of Crisis Gallery, showcasing “radical design thinking from the world’s design community, the public and young people.”

“In the era of digital preeminence, we look towards design as a medium to modify the environmental impacts of energy hogging data centers,” write the students of their submission. “The project challenges the norms of how we perceive space, materiality and form through designing for climate. Intricately merging geometries, building systems and landscape to seek regeneration.”

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MAR. NEWS WINKA DUBBELDAM AMONG “100 WOMEN TO WATCH IN ARCHITECTURE”

Miller Professor and Chair Winka Dubbeldam is featured in Architizer’s recent showcase of “100 Women to Watch in Architecture.” The list is “one of the most extensive collections to date of innovative women in architecture” with the goal of increasing visibility beyond Women’s History Month. Architizer describes Dubbeldam as a “veteran academic and leader in design [with] a resounding impact on the industry.

Known for its elegant and innovative designs, [her] pioneering firm harnesses hybrid sustainable materials and smart building systems.”

WEITZMAN FEATURED IN DEZEEN’S “22 WOMEN ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS YOU SHOULD KNOW” In recognition of International Women’s Day, Dezeen asked 22 of the world’s most inspirational women architects and designers to «nominate another woman who should be better known for their work.» Weitzman is well represented on the list, which features Miller Professor and Chair Winka Dubbeldam, alum Lin Huiyin (BFA’27), and former professor Anne Griswold Tyng.

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Dubbeldam was nominated by Sonali Rastogi of Morphogenesis. She writes, “Being in academia myself, what resonates with me is [Dubbeldam’s] significant influence on the emerging generation through her involvement in architectural education and design juries worldwide. Her designs are evocative and transformative, and she creates architecture that matters. I read somewhere that she maintains a fluid balance between energy and calm, precision and informality, experiment and comfort in her designs, studio, and life, a mantra I have been following all my life.”

Huiyin was nominated by Rossana Hu of Neri&Hu. Hu writes, “Lin Huiyin was the first female architect in modern China. Lin and her partner Liang Sicheng (MArch‘27)

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were the pioneers in architectural heritage restoration and documentation in China during the 1930s. Although it was the two of them who brought China’s ancient architectural treasures to light, Lin’s recognition in documenting and restoring China’s historic buildings has often been overshadowed by her partner, who is recognised as the ‘father of modern Chinese architecture.”

In 2018, Lin and Sicheng were featured in a major traveling exhibition at the Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum. Hu delivered a virtual talk in November 2020 as part of the MSD-AAD Meet the Building Experts Lecture Series.

Tyng was nominated by Huang Wenjing of Open Architecture. Wenjing writes, “Born in China in 1920 to missionary parents; a classmate of Eileen Pei and IM Pei — these two little details seem to have brought [Tyng] closer to me, my being Chinese and had worked in the office that IM founded. Tyng was one of the first women to study architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design; the only woman to take the architectural license test in 1949.” Tyng taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1968 until 1995. Her courses were an extension of her writing and research focusing on geometric order and human scale in architecture. A collection of her work is housed by the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

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PENN AMONG TOP ARCHITECTURE SCHOOLS IN QS WORLD UNIVERSITY SUBJECT RANKINGS Penn was ranked 8th among U.S. colleges and universities for the study of architecture in the latest edition of the QS World University Rankings, advancing from the number 11 spot in the 2020 edition. The international rankings are based upon academic reputation, employer reputation, and research impact.

According to QS’s Jack Moran, there are three factors that are generally shared by this year’s best-performing universities: an international outlook—both in terms of faculty body and research relationships; strong targeted investment from governments over a decade or more (among institutions in East Asia); and relationships with industry, which are correlated with better employment, research, and innovation outcomes.

QS World University Rankings by Subject ranks the world’s top universities in individual subject areas, covering 51 subjects. In producing this year’s report, QS analyzed nearly 14,000 individual university programs from 1,440 universities across 85 locations around the world. 220 institutions in total appear in the 2021 rankings for architecture, and the United States has the highest concentration to top-ranked institutions for architecture. Penn was ranked 28th among institutions worldwide.

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THERMAL ARCHITECTURE LAB TACKLES PUBLIC HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES

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APR. NEWS

Two studies by Dorit Aviv, assistant professor of architecture and director of the Thermal Architecture Lab at Weitzman, show how architecture can help create interior spaces that are both COVID-safe and energy efficient.

The first study, published in Indoor Air, provides design-based solutions on how to best use ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) to disinfect occupied rooms without harming individuals. This research was conducted by Aviv, visiting scholar Miaomiao Hou, and Jovan Pantelic, an air quality expert at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

The second paper, published in Applied Energy, describes the massive amount of energy required to increase ventilation in current HVAC systems and provides an approach for creating comfortable, well-ventilated indoor environments using radiant cooling. This study is the result of a collaboration between Penn, Princeton University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) devices use short-wavelength ultraviolet light to inactivate viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens by destroying their DNA or RNA. UV light is highly effective and has long been used to clean air and surfaces, with increased uptake in settings such as subway cars during the pandemic.

However, UV light can also damage skin and eyes and must be used cautiously in occupied spaces.

Striking a balance between efficient disinfection and personal safety is fundamentally a spatial problem, says Aviv, and in this study the researchers used their architectural expertise to determine optimal placement of a UVGI device to sterilize a space safely.

“You’re trying to disinfect the air but also make sure people are safe, so it means you need to understand how the device is working throughout the space,” she says.

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For their Indoor Air paper, the researchers used simulations of an industry-standard UVGI device and looked at how different design variables impacted the distribution of UV light between a room’s upper zone, where disinfection of aerosols should take place, and a lower “occupied” zone which people inhabit and where UV light leakage

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should be avoided as much as possible. “The idea is to create a high intensity irradiation zone in the upper part of the room and make sure no high-intensity radiation reaches the person in the lower zone,” says Aviv about the setup.

The researchers found that ceiling and mounting height had a major impact on the efficiency of disinfection in the upper zone. Based on their simulations, the researchers recommend that UVGI device height be increased wherever possible. This not only increases the disinfection rate but also reduces the possibility of UV exposure in the occupied zone.

The variable that was found to have the biggest impact on reducing leakage was material reflectance. Because UV light can be absorbed or reflected by a material, much like visible light is, using paints or wall coverings with lower reflectance coefficients reduced the likelihood of UV forming dangerous “hot spots” in the occupied zone. Importantly, changes in reflectance didn’t impact disinfection efficiency in the upper zone.

Along with guidance on how people can install these devices in a way that is both effective and safe, Aviv’s group is now studying the role of air flows in UVGI disinfection, key insights which could be used to direct how contaminated and clean air moves within a room.

Most modern buildings have centralized heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems that heat or cool external air before it is brought indoors. Before the pandemic, one common way to reduce energy use was to recirculate air, and building standards generally only require 10-20% of outdoor air intake at any given point in time.

Now, because of the risks of airborne exposure to COVID-19, the American Society of Heating and Air-Conditioning Engineers recommends increasing the amount of outdoor air to avoid recirculating virus particles. However, doing this within the current HVAC paradigm means a massive increase in energy usage in an already highly-carbon-intensive sector, putting the health of a building’s occupants and the environment at odds.

In their Applied Energy study, the researchers first modeled the energy requirements needed to increase the outdoor-to-indoor-air ratios in several cities in the United States at different climactic zones. In hot and humid cities like Miami, for example, the researchers found that as much as a 300% increase in energy output was needed in order to use 100% outdoor air.

To address what could be done to increase ventilation and keep spaces comfortable without using more energy, the researchers detail a simple, cheap, and scalable solution using radiant cooling systems. This system decouples air temperature control from ventilation and comfort by relying on surface-level cooling alongside natural ventilation.

Read the full article on Penn Today’s website.

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Q&A: LAIA MOGAS-SOLDEVILA, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE

Laia Mogas-Soldevila joined the graduate architecture faculty at the Weitzman School of Design last fall, after holding appointments as a visiting professor in Cornell University’s Department of Architecture and an instructor with the MIT Department of Architecture and MIT MediaLab. She earned an interdisciplinary PhD from Tufts University and two master’s degrees from MIT. She co-founded DumoLab, an experimental architecture and engineering research studio, in Barcelona in 2008.

This year, Mogas-Soldevila is teaching the seminar New Materials and Methods Research in the MSD-AAD program, and a new elective called Inquiry into Biomaterial Architectures. Because those courses meet online as part of Weitzman’s hybrid approach, she has yet to move to Philadelphia. In her research, she examines the potential for new types of materials to drive the process of design, and the implications for architecture’s relationship to the environment. Mogas-Soldevila was also recently named a faculty fellow at Lauder College House.

WHY DID YOU WANT TO COME TO PENN?

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Penn has been on my radar since 2016, when I took part in the Under Pressure: Urban Housing Symposium and had the chance to witness the depth of inquiry here. By 2019, former MIT colleagues were doing great work here, a new stateof-the-art robotics lab was emerging, and I was in regular discussion with senior faculty developing very exciting publications. It felt natural to join the team and contribute to the research vision. After my (virtual) visit and public talk for the community at large, the excitement went both ways, devising new avenues for material-driven research to bridge design and science within the graduate architecture curriculum. I have now taught (from Boston) for almost a semester and met over 50 wonderful Weitzman students. I can’t wait to land on campus in the summer!

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YOUR RESEARCH IS FOCUSED ON MATERIAL-DRIVEN DESIGN. HOW DID YOU GET INTERESTED IN THAT AND WHAT ARE THE MAIN AREAS OF RESEARCH YOU’RE EXPLORING? For the past 10 years at MIT DesComp, MIT MediaLab, and The Silklab at Tufts, I’ve been working on what I call “New Design Companions,” strategies that architects are beginning to use with the aim of reconquering agency in all aspects of the building lifecycle. I started by looking at computational tools developed by designers to escape the rigidity of existing software and devise novel structural geometries. My research soon expanded into practices of incorporating advanced fabrication processes from engineering and allowing for new sets of parameters to be controlled for, and by, design.

In the last few years, I have been increasingly interested in intervening in materials engineering and cross-pollinating new computation and new fabrication with new materials for the emergence of architectural practice that challenges the fragmentation of traditional building construction. I explore material design down to the molecule, what I call “reviving matter.”

My most recent work is reverse engineering biomaterials to form everyday objects with the outstanding properties we find in wood, skin, shell, or bone. My goal is to broaden design research and inquiry starting from the very building blocks of matter and up to the macro scale, responding to the needs for sustainability and efficiency.

HOW CAN NEW TYPES OF BIOMATERIALS BE USED IN ARCHITECTURAL APPLICATIONS? WHAT ARE THE POTENTIAL CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPLICATIONS OF MATERIAL INNOVATIONS? A new wave of at-scale biodegradable and environmentally-conscious materials is coming: bricks produced by fungi and agricultural waste without need for firing; micro algae illuminating the city at night without electricity; wood veneer programmed to change shape and control climate within buildings; biopolymers like cellulose, silk, chitin, or keratin, which fully break down after use, replacing plastic parts. For such emerging prototypes to turn into products, a sustainability-first paradigm must govern industry, economy and society. It most certainly will entail replacement of entire modes of industrial manufacturing, reformulation of building code and testing standards, and the integration of biomaterials value and aesthetics in contemporary culture.

In my practice, I embrace both new and old efforts towards ecological integration.

On one hand, I find vernacular architecture’s hyper-local material strategies and energy-saving solutions are now more relevant than ever and need to be revised and updated. On the other hand, I look at how biomaterials are used in biomedical engineering and life sciences to develop devices that are digested, implanted, and that heal the human body. Scaling them up to architectural applications is crucial not only to avoid resource depletion, but also to ensure that our building solutions degrade, nourishing the Earth and ultimately ourselves.

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DumoLab is an experimental design studio that my partner Jorge Duro-Royo and I founded back in 2008. Our practice does information-driven design and develops the frameworks for that to happen. We bridge computational design and advanced manufacturing, with projects focusing on structural optimization, multi-scale city data analysis, parametric urbanism, multitouch territorial navigation, industrial robotic interfaces, fabrication information modeling, and we are recently developing advanced interactive data environments.

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WHAT KIND OF WORK DO YOU DO WITH DUMOLAB?

YOUR LATEST PUBLICATION IS CALLED “ADDITIVELY MANUFACTURED LEATHER-LIKE SILK PROTEIN MATERIALS.” WHAT IS THE STORY THERE? This is an example of the power of designing materials at the molecular level. In collaboration with biomedical and material engineers, we developed soft biomaterial surfaces to replace traditional environmentally-unfriendly animal leathers.

Using shrimp shell waste and silk protein from discarded silkworm cocoons, the surfaces were extruded from gels into layers enabling a wide variety of formats.

Using a precise set of processes, the resulting materials are not only comparable to animal leathers, but also enable designers to alter their performance in terms of opacity, flexibility, strength or responsiveness. On top of their versatility, their production requires minimal energy and mild chemicals, and their ability to biodegrade facilitates sustainable production.

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WEITZMAN STUDENTS CHOSEN FOR “METROPOLIS FUTURE 100”

Six Weitzman Master of Architecture students were selected for Metropolis magazine›s Future 100, a group of the top 50 interior design and top 50 architecture students graduating from North American institutions. There were only 31 students in the Graduate Architecture category with Weitzman students comprising of nearly 20%. Featured students include Maria Fuentes (MArch’21), Paul McCoy (MArch’21), Hanqing (Amie) Yao (MArch’21), Megan York (MArch’21), Chenyang (Jane) Yu (MArch’21), and Jingyi Zhou (MArch’21).

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All six Weitzman students were nominated by Andrew Saunders, associate professor and director of the MArch program. The student work is featured online and in the March/April print issue. Of the selected students, Metropolis says, «They are a diverse group — with many identifying as BIPOC or LGBTQIA — who advocate for openness, equity, and inclusion through their work and extracurriculars. They are leaders on their campuses who are sure to be forces in the industry.»

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PHD CANDIDATE EARNS GAPSA-PROVOST FELLOWSHIP

Nancy Ma, PhD Candidate in the Building Technology of Architecture, was awarded a highly competitive GAPSA-Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation to support a project she is developing in conjunction with the Children›s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Sleep Lab. Ma’s project is titled, “Indoor Environment and Sleep Health: In-Lab and In-Field Analysis of Environmental Factors on Sleep Quality and Quantity.”

In her abstract, she writes, “General sleep hygiene recommendations suggest that individuals maintain a cool and fresh sleep environment, but these were primarily developed for healthy adults. Specifically, it is ill-defined how the environmental parameters potentially affect children sleep quality and how to utilize available demographic, environmental, physiological, and polysomnographic parameters to optimize current sleep environment design.”

Ma’s study will contribute research towards critical design strategies for residential bedrooms and wards in children’s hospitals.

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The fellowship program is jointly funded by GAPSA and the Office of the Provost to foster interdisciplinary work among graduate and professional students at the University of Pennsylvania. The fellowship serves to help the project-leader develop, pursue, and complete their proposed interdisciplinary initiatives.

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MAY. NEWS NICHOLAS HOUSER (MARCH’22) WINS KPF TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP

On May 11, Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) announced Nicholas Houser (MArch’22) as one of five winners for their annual Traveling Fellowship.

The award recognizes students in their penultimate year at one of the twenty-seven design schools KPF has partnered with. Winners receive cash prizes to fund summer research “on far-reaching topics that push the boundaries of critical thinking and architectural design.”

The announcement was made by the jury during a virtual event. Due to the travel restrictions, winners were awarded a scholarship to fund a “Journey of the Mind.”

Jury members included Milton S.F.Curry, Jury Chair and Dean of University of Southern California School of Architecture; Mariana Ibañez, Chair of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design; Michael Maltzan, Principal of Michael Maltzan Architecture; and Doug Hocking and James von Klemperer, Principals at KPF. KPF was co-founded by alum A. Eugene Kohn (AR’53, GAR’57).

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CITYX VENICE’ HIGHLIGHTS WEITZMAN ARCHITECTURE FACULTY

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JUNE. NEWS In conjunction with the 17th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, this May, CityX Venice, a virtual exhibition of new and recent work by leading architects and designers from around the world, opened online. Winka Dubbeldam, who is Miller Professor and chair of the Department of Architecture and director of the Advanced Research and Innovation (ARI) Lab, served as one of the creative directors for the Italian Pavillion’s Virtual exhibition, which was curated by Tom Kovac, RMIT University, and Alessandro Melis, Portsmouth University, to “investigate and identify dynamics of change and engagement with nature.”

The exhibition includes work by six faculty members of Weitzman’s Department of Architecture: Masoud Akbarzadeh, assistant professor of architecture and director of the Polyhedral Structures Lab (complex geometries); Dorit Aviv, assistant professor of architecture and director of the Thermal Architecture Lab(resilience); Karel Klein, lecturer in architecture and co-director at Ruy Klein (artificial intelligence); Ferda Kolatan, associate professor of architecture and founding partner at SU11 (synthetic nature); Laia Mogas-Soldevila, assistant professor of architecture (material science); Robert Stuart-Smith, assistant professor of architecture and director of the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab (robotics and autonomous systems).

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Participants are represented by a series of virtual pavilions, which have been launched in succession since May 22. The pavilions link to further information on each exhibitor, including a series of videos on YouTube. Dubbeldam’s selection of designers for the exhibition brings together the work of several faculty members affiliated with ARI, along with others who are engaged in design-research projects that, as Dubbeldam put it, “exemplify the ‘design-research’ approach taken in the School’s studios.” While the projects highlighted from the exhibiting faculty members show widely diverse approaches to new materials, nature, and technology, Dubbeldam notes that together they achieve her aim for the Department’s longterm vision: “to actively expand the role of the architect into the field of research.

On July 15, at 10:30am EDT, Dubbeldam was joined by the six participants for a virtual conversation as part of a series of events called Log’rithms organized by CityX and Log’s editor Cynthia Davidson hosted Log’rithms 2: The Science of Architecture.

The panel examined three themes: The material and ephemeral, Irrealis Manu factum and Embedded aesthetics In addition, Archi-Tectonics, the New York-based firm where Dubbeldam is founding partner, will celebrate the publication of its new book Strange Objects, New Solids, and Massive Things (Actar, 2021) at the CityX Venice midissage on 27th / 28th / 29th August 2021 in Venice

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Dean Steiner invites graduates, their guests, and friends of the School to join him, the department chairs and program directors, and guest speakers Anne Whiston Spirn (MLA‘74) and Amber Farrow (MArch‘21) in celebrating the Weitzman Class of 2021.

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VIRTUAL COMMENCEMENT AND GRADUATION CELEBRATION

The webcast will be recorded for those who are unable to watch live, and students will receive a printed program commemorating their achievements by mail in June. For those without access to YouTube, the webcast will be streamed at the bottom of this page.

The webcast will include a preview of the Year End Show, an extensive online gallery featuring work by the Class of 2021 that goes live on May 15. (Because of COVID-19, the Department of Fine Arts is presenting work by the Class of 2020 as well.)

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE AWARD WINNERS American Institute of Architects Henry Adams Medal Saina Xiang Arthur Spayd Brooke Memorial Prize Gold Medal Paul McCoy Arthur Spayd Brooke Memorial Prize Silver Medal Christine Eichhorn

MSD-AAD Prize in Design Excellence In Pun Bingkun Deng MSD-RAS Prize for Design & Robotic Fabrication Grey Wartinger Matthew White Jiansong Yuan

Paul Philippe Cret Medal Madison Green Alpha Rho Chi Medal Robert Schaffer Faculty Prize Julianna Cano Baoqi Ji

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CREDITS

CREDITS & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design Gordon Goff: Publisher www.oroeditions.com info@oroeditions.com Published by ORO Editions Copyright ©Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, 2021 Text and Images ©Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying of microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publisher.

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Design: WSDIA | WeShouldDoItAll (wsdia.com) Typefaces: Rand designed by François Rappo – Optimo Type Foundry Editorial Team: Winka Dubbeldam, Miller Professor and Chair Scott Loeffler, Director of Administration Ivy Gray-Klein, Events and Publications Coordinator Copy Editor: Ivy Gray-Klein, Scott Loeffler, Sarah Lam ORO Project Coordinator: Kirby Anderson 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition Library of Congress data available upon request. World Rights: Available ISBN: 978-1-943532-31-5 Color Separations and Printing: ORO Group Ltd. Printed in China.

International Distribution: www.oroeditions.com/distribution ORO Editions makes a continuous effort to minimize the overall carbon footprint of its publications. As part of this goal, ORO Editions, in association with Global ReLeaf, arranges to plant trees to replace those used in the manufacturing of the paper produced for its books. Global ReLeaf is an international campaign run by American Forests, one of the world’s oldest nonprofit conservation organizations. Global ReLeaf is American Forests’ education and action program that helps individuals, organizations, agencies, and corporations improve the local and global environment by planting and caring for trees.

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University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Department of Architecture 212 Meyerson Hall 210 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6311 www.design.upenn.edu/architecture