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17 18 University of Pennsylvania School of Design Department of Architecture 212 Meyerson Hall 210 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6311 215.898.5728
www.design.upenn.edu/architecture/graduate/info archdept@design.upenn.edu
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INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
by Winka Dubbeldam, Chair
We are pleased to present the seventh issue of our annual publication, Pressing Matters. At PennDesign we’re proud to be a think tank for exchanges and debates across disciplinary boundaries and a broadcast center engaging a growing audience and international network. Education at PennDesign is focused on the future, a future that is multi-faceted and complex, we aim to prepare our students for that future. Our identity as a laboratory for ideas, expertise, and innovation, evolves through collaboration between our various programs, with other departments, and external experts in the field, this prepares our students as the next generation of leaders, ready to evolve the discipline and renew its capacity to be an important player in the complex set of challenges facing society today. Pressing Matters VII showcases recent faculty research and student research projects, not only published in this annual publication, but also on the Department’s new website: https://www. design.upenn.edu/architecture/graduate/info. We participated in the Architecture Biennale in Venice again this year; Practice Professor Ferda Kolatan curated an exhibition named 12 Objects & 12 Images, that featured work from the design studios of faculty members Kutan Ayata, Hina Jamelle, Simon Kim, Ferda Kolatan, Ali Rahim, and Robert Stuart-Smith. The exhibition will remain in place for the duration of the Biennale in Palazzo Mora, Strada Nuovoa 3659, Venice, Italy, we hope you can visit. Ferda stated: “One could argue that the oscillatory play between objecthood and background Image denes the way we experience architecture in the city. From our surroundings, some qualities leap forward, toward us, in object form, while others fade away and melt into the background, becoming image. This seemingly simple observation carries with it profound questions not only in regards to how we perceive our temporal-spatial environment, but also how we ascribe content, meaning, and value to architecture itself.” Furthermore in the Biennale’s Arsenale we find Graham Chair Professor of Architecture Marion Weiss and partner Michael Manfredi with an immersive installation Lines of Movement, that “examines new terms and conditions for design in a century when natural resources are limited and challenged further by the interconnected issues of climate change and social isolation,” which the firm wrote in a recent press release. Our focus on research and innovation was further deepened through the founding of an Advanced Research and Innovation Lab [ARI], that is at the forefront of advanced research & design, incorporating new design methodologies and future manufacturing through the interlinked intelligence of digital design, scripting, and robotics. Our Robotics Lab recently opened and new classes were developed to embrace design and manufacturing with robotic arms. Architecture is experiencing an extraordinary renaissance in its practice, fueled by many different sources: new technologies and materials,
Winka Dubbeldam, Assoc. AIA Miller Professor and Chair Department of Architecture winka@design.upenn.edu
INTRODUCTION
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information technology, advances in engineering and manufacturing, globalization of culture, education and practice, crossovers with the sciences, visual arts and other design fields, a growing audience for design culture in general, and ecological architecture in particular, and a focus on creativity and innovation in leading schools around the world. We initiated a new series of Post-Graduate Programs, Master of Science in Design [MSD] programs, with an Advanced Architectural Design (MSDAAD), an Environmental Building Design (MSD-EBD), and an upcoming MSD in Robotics. While the focus of this expansion is to deepen the pedagogical effectiveness of the program, it will also increase the offerings within PennDesign focused on design excellence and in-depth design research. To summarize, our goal is to be at the forefront of advanced research & design by creating advanced research institutes and MSD programs, that allow students to focus on new design methodologies. As we focus on social awareness and responsibility, we aim to be a connective device between academics and architectural practitioners, who we engage in lectures, symposia and publications. We hope to welcome you at PennDesign soon.
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AUGUST 2017 MARION WEISS SELECTED FOR 2017 WOMEN IN ARCHITECTURE “DESIGN LEADER” AWARD
Marion Weiss, Graham Chair Professor of Architecture, has been selected as the recipient of the 2017 Women in Architecture “Design Leader” Award. Organized by Architectural Record, this annual recognition honors design leaders that have helped to highlight the impact that women make on the profession. "These awards allow us to recognize women pushing the boundaries of innovation and creativity in design," says editor-in-chief Cathleen McGuigan.
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SEPTEMBER 2017 PENNDESIGN STAGES URBAN RENEWAL AND “STRANGE WEATHER” AT SEOUL BIENNALE
Amidst radical social, economic, and technological transformations, will the city of the future be a driving force of creativity and sustainability, or will it be a mechanism of inequality and environmental decay? This is the question
“Human-centric, controlled interior environments are not easily separable from the natural world,” says Kim, and urbanization “has consequences across scales in nature.”
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WITH $1.25 MILLION ALUMNA GIFT, PENNDESIGN LAUNCHES $50,000 STUDENT PRIZE AND PROFESSIONAL MEDAL FOR ARCHITECTURE PennDesign alumna Lori Kanter Tritsch (M.Arch’85) has pledged $1.25 million to establish a $50,000 fellowship for the most promising graduate architecture student at PennDesign and an international medal of excellence for a practicing architect. It is the largest single gift made to the School for fellowships in its 149-year history. “PennDesign has been home to so many visionary architects,” said Lori Kanter Tritsch, “we want to celebrate today’s visionaries and encourage the next generation to follow their lead.”
Kanter Tritsch has served on the PennDesign Board of Overseers since 2015 and holds a Master of Architecture from the School. She made the pledge with her partner and fellow alumnus William P. Lauder (W’83), who holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Wharton and is a Penn Trustee. The Kanter Tritsch Prize in Energy and Architectural Innovation will be awarded annually beginning in the fall of 2018 to a second-year student pursuing a Master of Architecture degree at PennDesign who demonstrates transformational thinking on the built environment and innovation in his or her approach to energy, ecology, and/or social equity. The Kanter Tritsch Medal for Excellence in Architecture and Environmental Design will be awarded annually beginning in the fall of 2018 to an under-recognized architect who has changed the course of design history, with a particular focus on the areas of energy conservation, environmental quality, and/or diversity. Standing PennDesign faculty will not be eligible. “The architecture profession can be slow to recognize young talent,” said Winka Dubbeldam, Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture at PennDesign. “At the same time, many established architects never receive the public recognition they deserve.”
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posed by the curators of the 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. One answer comes from Associate Professor of Architecture Simon Kim and third-year students in the Department of Architecture, who revisited one of Seoul’s most successful urban renewal projects for an exhibition at the Biennale. Completed in 2006 at a cost of $900 million, the 11-mile Cheonggyecheon waterway project demolished an elevated highway to restore a stream, creating a massive new public recreation space in downtown Seoul. Kim and his students were asked to analyze the project in terms of ecology and sustainability, as well as expand upon its function of urban renewal. Their resulting designs are on view as part of the Seoul Biennale International Studios (SBIS), a researchbased exhibition curated by John Hong, professor at Seoul National University. “The faculty and students engage the Biennale theme of Urban Making. Instead of generic factories based on mass production segregated to the city outskirts, urban production is seen as a new scalable way to aggregate many diverse disciplines,” Hong explains. “A swarm of micro-businesses, from garment making, electronics and sensing, and digital fabrication, potentially come together to leap-frog over current making techniques to create new products and experiences.” Kim’s students produced a site analysis, master plan, site plans, sections, and various models. In the process, according to Kim, they strengthened their critical thinking skills and came to understand the layered histories of Cheonggyecheon as well as the expansion of monument- and place making in Seoul that is focused on culture and leisure. Cheonggyecheon was the subject of Kim’s Fall 2016 third-year graduate elective studio Seoul: The Sensate and the Augmented. Students in the studio included Michelle Ann Chew, Wooyoung Choi, John Dade Darby, Ricardo Hernandez, Chang Yuan Max Hsu, Jieming Jin, Dawoon Jung, Ritika Kapoor, Han Kwon, Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, and Mingjie Zhu. Kim’s teaching Assistants were Brett Lee and Aidan Kim. SBIS is meant to be a “bridge” between the academic, professional, and governmental stakeholders of the Biennale—encouraging visitors from around the world to make connections between the imperatives in Seoul and issues facing other cities. PennDesign was one of 10 American universities invited to participate, along with 17 institutions from across Europe and Asia. The reshaping of cities “as devices for the common good,” in the words of curators Youngseok Lee and Jeffrey Anderson, is also the subject of an installation Kim designed with his firm Ibañez Kim for the Biennale’s main exhibition. The curators asked designers to consider the resources of air, water, fire, and earth alongside technologies for making, moving, communicating, sensing, and recycling. Ibañez Kim’s design, Strange Weather, is an immersive environment that uses vaporizers, high-lumen LEDs, and heaters, to produce a range of conditions—from dry and unnaturally bright, to dark and clouded—in response to visitors’ behavior. It’s a visceral reminder that buildings—and the climate-controlled offices that dominate our cities—account for most of the world’s carbon emissions.
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Led by Dubbeldam, the juries were announced in the fall of 2017, and the recipients will be recognized at a public ceremony in the fall of 2018. Lori Kanter Tritsch completed her Master of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, having earned a Bachelor of Science in Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1983. She began her career at Eli Attia Architects, New York, focusing primarily in the design of high rises. In 1987, she joined Miller Construction Company, Jersey City, to work on commercial and industrial design projects. Currently she works in New York City designing commercial interiors and undertakes private commissions, largely in high-end residential development.
FERDA KOLATAN’S “REAL FICTIONS CAIRO” EARNS AIA STUDIO PRIZE
THOM MAYNE AMONG “MOST ADMIRED EDUCATORS” IN ARCHITECTURE
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PennDesign’s Ferda Kolatan, Associate Professor of Practice, and graduate students in the Department of Architecture have won the 2017 AIA Studio Prize. Real Fictions Cairo, which creates new public spaces and captures lost sites in the Egyptian capital, was selected by the jury as one of the most compelling studios in U.S. architectural education today and is featured on the cover of the September 2017 issue of ARCHITECT magazine, the publication of the American Institute of Architects. Kolatan was asked by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture in Cairo to develop a studio that offered solutions to some of the city’s most pressing quality-of-life issues. The goal was to hybridize existing infrastructure with new architectural elements. In a departure from convention, the studio called on students to present these ideas as decontextualized “objects.” “Rather than suggest specific solutions, we wanted to present prototypes that can be implemented at different scales,” Kolatan says.
for the studio was Michael Zimmerman. The studio received support from Eng. Ibrahim Mehlib, Dr. Laila Iskandar, Eng. Mohamed Abu Saeda, Dr. Gihane Zaki, Dr. Haby Hosney, Aly Abouzeid, and Ahmed Zaazaa. This year’s jury of distinguished practitioners and educators included Renée Cheng, FAIA, professor and associate dean of research, University of Minnesota, School of Architecture, College of Design; Carlos Jiménez, Principal and lead designer, Carlos Jiménez Studio, professor and interim dean, Rice University, School of Architecture; and V. Mitch McEwen, principal, McEwen Studio, co-founder, A(n) Office, and assistant professor, Princeton University, School of Architecture. “In the past, it was sufficient for the studio premise to be bound by the traditional silos of the profession,” Cheng told ARCHITECT. “Today’s studios are embracing influences well outside of traditional architectural concerns, and use analytical techniques that may be data-driven or scaleless. When these explorations are catapulted into form and space, the results can be spine-tinglingly exciting.”
Students in Real Fictions Cairo included Alexander Tahinos, Angela Huang, Meari Kim, Kyuhun Kim, Angeliki Mavroleon, Rosanne Pitarresi (featured projects); Aly Abouzeid, John Dade Darby, Carrie Rose Frattali, Angeliki Tzifa, Kaikang Shen, and Jianbo Zhong. Teaching Assistant
Thom Mayne, Cret Chair Professor of Practice, has been named one of the most admired educators in the U.S., according to the latest report from DesignIntelligence. Each year, DesignIntelligence honors excellence in education and administration by naming 25 exemplary professionals in these fields. These role models are named along with America’s Best Architecture and Design Schools based on input from thousands of design academia. “Breaking new ground in design, research and teaching for decades, Mayne is inspired by social benefit, technological advancement, and formal invention,” according to the report. “He uses physical urban planning as a platform to integrate social, sustainable and political issues.”
NOVEMBER 2017
PARTNERSHIP WITH EGYPTIAN MINISTRY OF CULTURE
BAROQUE TOPOLOGIES EXHIBITION Baroque Topologies, the exhibition organized by Associate Professor of Architecture Andrew Saunders in partnership with Autodesk and FARO Technologies, returned state-side as part of a world tour. On view at Autodesk University, Las Vegas, from November 14-16, 2017, the exhibition documented a major new survey of 18 Baroque churches, with images and models generated from millions of data points captured through laser scanning and photogrammetry. The survey offers an unprecedented look inside some of the most studied buildings in Western architecture: churches in Rome and Piedmont by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, Pietro da Cortona, Guarino Guarini, Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi, and Bernardo Vittone. “The works selected for the project can be seen as topological variants of the centrally planned church of the Renaissance,” says Saunders. “Taken together, they demonstrate the blossoming evolution from the early and high baroque in Rome extending to the late baroque in the Piedmont Region in Northern Italy.” To produce the survey, Saunders and his team spent six weeks over the summer of 2016 with the support of FARO Laser Scanner Focus 3Dx130 and proprietary software. An additional six months were dedicated to processing the data with Autodesk ReMake, ReCap and 3dsMax; producing highresolution 3D prints for the exhibition; and developing a public website.
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The Department of Architecture at PennDesign has renewed its ongoing collaboration with the Ministry of Culture in Cairo, Egypt. The collaboration was initiated in 2016 by the 704 research design studio Real Fictions: Maspero Triangle, Cairo, Egypt, led by Associate Professor of Practice Ferda Kolatan, which resulted in a PennDesign exhibit in the Egyptian Pavilion in the 2016 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy. The studio also earned a 2017 Studio Prize from the American Institute of Architects. Again in 2018, PennDesign students’ work will be exhibited at the Pavilion. The Real Fictions studio’s design strategy responded directly to the Aravena’s biennale concept. As Kolatan states, “Post-humanist theories are strongly concerned with the perception of the ‘real.’ These theories posit that the real is just another cultural construction controlled by the powers in charge. As such, the title of the studio ‘Real Fictions’ aims to set the stage for projects, which challenge the categorical ‘real’ as a defunct concept of late-capitalist ideologies and an expression of human-centric tunnel vision. The studio will examine this type of work and use it as an apparatus through which to address some of the issues in the Informal Settlements. The urban and architectural conditions of the site will be viewed both as real and fictional, leading to proposals that are speculative in nature but concrete in design.” Kolatan’s studio has most recently tackled the bridge landings in Cairo, and is currently focusing on the complexity of highway overpasses in the city center. “The studio is an exemplary model for the new directions the Architecture Department is taking, and the more direct involvement with the ‘real,’” says Dubbeldam. “We aim to participate in the international dialogue concerning these urban conditions, and see this as only the start of where we are going in the next few years. We are extremely thankful to recent alumnus Aly Abouzeid and his family for their introduction to the Ministry of Culture of Egypt, and for the support of the studio.”
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“The era of ‘big data’ calls for new approaches to analysis and representation in all fields of design,” Saunders explains. “The ability to capture, record and simulate increasingly larger sets of data, coupled with remote access to cloud computing and progressively more affordable additive fabrication technology, provides new opportunities and methods for understanding and assessing complexity and representa-
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tion in architecture.” In addition to their value to preservationists, the data offer a reexamination of the tools of contemporary representation and their impact on architectural production. Saunders began using the data in a seminar at PennDesign last year to encourage students to “write the next chapter in the way architects study, reassess and reinterpret the past.” Since it premiered at Penn, Baroque Topologies has been exhibited at Autodesk University in London (June 21-22), Istanbul (October 5), Darmstadt (October 17-18), Sydney (October 17-18), Autodesk University, Bangalore (December 14).
DECEMBER 2017 PENNDESIGN ALUMNI, FACULTY EARN 2017 AN BEST OF DESIGN AWARDS
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ARCHITECTURE EXCHANGE
PennDesign hosted a visit by a team from Seoul National University (SNU) on November 8 and 9. Led by SNU Associate Professor John Hong, AIA, architecture students from SNU presented their research and design work based in Seoul, Korea. This visit was part of a collaboration between SNU and PennDesign M.Arch students who are enrolled in the fall elective studio of Associate Professor Simon Kim. The ongoing collaboration also produced a body of scholarship on the post-anthropocentric city that is currently on display at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. New and shared models and types of occupancy, post-industry, and conservancy are offered and explored. The PennDesign-SNU studios are supported by Heerim Architects and Planners, a global leader in architecture and construction. Offering services and specializations within architecture, master planning, and construction management, Heerim is led by alumnus (M.Arch’89) Young Kyoon Jeong, CEO and Chair of the Board. Mr. Jeong, who has an undergraduate degree in architecture and an M.Arch from SNU, as well as an M.Arch from PennDesign, has generously sponsored the joint studio of both institutions.
Endemic Architecture, led by alumnus Clark Thenhaus (M.Arch’07), recently completed a project for California College of the Arts (CCA) that has won a 2017 AN Best of Design Award from Architect’s Newspaper for a public landscape. Confetti Urbanism reimagines the CCA Back Lot as a lively layering of architecture, furniture, plantings, and human activity. Also representing PennDesign among the winning designs is WEISS/MANFREDI’s Kent State Center For Architecture and Environmental Design, which tied for Building of the Year Midwest, and Mathews Nielson’s design for Pier 55 in the category of unbuilt landscape. WEISS/MANFREDI Cofounder Marion Weiss is Graham Chair Professor of Architecture at PennDesign, and Mathews Nielson Founding Principal Kim Mathews is a PennDesign alumna.
ADVANCED RESEARCH & INNOVATION LAB
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[RE]ACTION, a full day of workshops empowering future leaders in design. Organized by PennDesign Women in Architecture, the event presents opportunities to acquire a toolset for a successful career. Workshop topics include Negotiating Offers, Networking for Impact, Knowing Your Rights, Navigating Construction Sites, and Vocal Empowerment. PWIA is committed to equity in design, all are welcome.
Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture Winka Dubbeldam presented new research at The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. On 7, she was invited to speak as part of the The Barlett School of Architecture International Lecture Series. On her presentation titled "New Solids," she writes: There is a new interest in the body, in the solid, in massive forms. No longer minimal, light and thin, but full-bodied, soft, glowing and sometimes transformative, these solids give us comfort, ground us, and wrap us in a soft embrace. These solids are not anonymous, cold and sleek, but they have character, identity, and make us smile. They are not overly serious, but yet often are a feat of great engineering, new material ecologies, and ground-breaking production methods. In short, they stand for innovation.
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[RE]ACTION: EMPOWERING THE FUTURE LEADERS IN DESIGN
WINKA DUBBELDAM DISCUSSES "NEW SOLIDS" AT THE BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
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The Advanced Research & Innovation Lab (ARI) brings together the combined expertise of PennDesign faculty members with state-of-the art fabrication, measurement, and modeling technologies. ARI is led by Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture Winka Dubbeldam and comprises a wide variety of research groups: the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab (Assistant Professor of Architecture Robert Stuart-Smith), the Polyhedral Structures Lab or PSL (Assistant Professor of Architecture Masoud Akbarzadeh), and the Baroque Topologies Lab (Associate Professor of Architecture Andrew Saunders), with additional initiatives in development. As part of multi-year plan to provide additional tools and facilities to support the scholarship of PennDesign faculty and students, ARI opens up vast new territories for innovation and places the School at the forefront of applied and speculative research in several domains. Innovation in the realm of fabrication in architecture and design has taken a dramatic shift in recent years due to the increasing accessibility of industrial robotic arms. Typically, in industrial manufacturing, robotic arms are equipped to complete one repetitive task. When deployed in creative industries such as architecture, they represent an entirely novel platform for multi-task and multi-axis fabrication. Unlike computer-aided manufacturing tools that are designed to do one operation, robotic arms provide up to seven degrees of multi-axis freedom and can be equipped with a limitless array of specialized tools. In addition to augmenting traditional subtractive techniques, including laser cutting and milling, robotic arms carry out contemporary automated modes of additive and formative manufacturing including, but not limited to, bending, folding, 3D printing and deposition, composite material filament winding, 3D scanning, real-time sensing, and much more. Access to robotic arm technology will enable designers to develop unique routines and customize material manipulation and transformation through an endless range of end effectors.
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MAKING MONGOLIAN GER DWELLINGS MORE ENERGY-EFFICIENT
Gers, called yurts in Russian, are the traditional one-room, round, tent dwellings of Mongolian herders. In the last twenty years, about half of Mongolia’s population has settled in permanent “ger districts” around the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, bringing their nomadic tents with them. Mongolia has an extremely harsh winter climate—midwinter temperatures in the capital regularly drop as low as minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit. Residents stay warm by burning wood and unrefined coal, making Ulaanbaatar one of the most polluted cities in the world and improvements in ger heating a top priority. But not much formal information exists about the thermal characteristics of gers, in terms of energy use and interior comfort. Now, researchers from the Center for Environmental Building and Design(CEBD) in the School of Design, working with the Mongolian non-profit GerHub, are auditing these things to understand ger thermal behavior and identify opportunities to improve comfort, durability, and energy performance. They arranged to install sensors in gers in Mongolia and, in February, constructed a research site at the Pennovation Center at 3401 Grays Ferry Ave., adjacent to Penn’s campus. Over spring break, the team traveled to Mongolia to study a group of buildings in Ulaanbaatar’s ger district and join a UNICEF project designing the “ger of the 21st Century.”
APRIL 2018 STUDENTS’ SUSTAINABLE PET FOOD WINS $50,000 IDESIGN PRIZE It was a big night for Chipper. The specialty pet food designed by graduate students Laura Colagrande (Department of Architecture and Integrated Product Design Program), and Haley Russell and Amanda Robison (both of Wharton) earned all the winnings in the third annual iDesign Prize competition. First they were awarded $5,000 toward the venture in the “people’s choice” category, the outcome of a
secret-ballot vote by their fellow students and awards-ceremony attendees. And then the professional jury that was judging the competition granted them the big prize: $50,000.
MAY 2018 PENNDESIGN ALUMNA, FACULTY WIN NATIONAL DESIGN AWARDS
One PennDesign alumna and one faculty member are among the winners of the 2018 National Design Awards, announced by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Weiss/Manfredi, the New York-based architecture firm co-founded by PennDesign Graham Chair Professor of Architecture Marion Weiss, was awarded the National Design Award in architecture for 2018. Weiss/Manfredi’s projects include the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, the Women’s Memorial and Education Center, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Visitor Center. The firm’s current work includes the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India, Phase II of Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, Tulane University Commons, the Artis—Naples Master Plan for the Kimberly K. Querrey and Louis A. Simpson Cultural Campus, and the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale.
The Wharton Charity Fashion Show brings together worldclass designers and student models for a night of fierce looks and playful struts down the runway. Models have walked the runway wearing Michael Kors, Theory, Anthropologie, Uniqlo, Bloomingdale's, Warby Parker, and more! We are also excited to showcase the work of talented PennDesign students, who are creating a collection for the show for the fourth year in a row. All event and raffle proceeds go to YouthBuild Philadelphia, a local charter school focused on providing education and support to underprivileged young adults.
WEISS/MANFREDI UNVEILS IMMERSIVE INSTALLATION AT VENICE BIENNALE
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THE WHARTON CHARITY FASHION SHOW
WEISS/MANFREDI, the New York-based design practice cofounded by Graham Chair Professor of Architecture Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, unveiled a new immersive installation in the main exhibition space at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. The installation, called Lines of Movement, “examines new terms and conditions for design in a century when natural resources are limited and challenged further by the interconnected issues of climate change and social isolation,” the firm wrote in a press release.
PENNDESIGN FACULTY AND STUDENTS REPRESENTED AT VENICE BIENNALE
ERIC BELLIN AND BEN KRONE WIN FACULTY AWARDS
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PennDesign PhD Candidate Eric Bellin and Lecturer Ben Krone are recipients of two 2018 G. Holmes Perkins Distinguished Teaching Awards. Eric Bellin was awarded Distinguished Teaching in the Undergraduate Programs and Ben Krone was awarded Distinguished Teaching by a Member of the Non-Standing Faculty. The G. Holmes Perkins Teaching Awards are presented annually, based on the input of students at PennDesign, to recognize distinguished teaching and innovation in the classroom, seminar or studio. These all-school awards consider faculty from across disciplines at PennDesign. Eric Bellin's research examines 19th through 20th century histories and theories of architectural detailing in France, Britain, and America. His work aims to both clarify understandings of the historical development of the concept of "detail" and through it to better understand how disciplinary, socio-cultural, and technological factors help condition the evolution of an architectural idea. Ben Krone founded his firm Gradient in 2006. He has designed and constructed a wide range of projects and exhibitions, including art installations, high end residences, restaurants, and boutique hotels.
Ferda Kolatan, associate professor of practice in the Department of Architecture and director of the firm SU11, presented a project called Hybrid Urbanity along with SU11 associate partner Hart Marlow, and 2017 PennDesign graduates Miguel Abaunza, Angela Huang, Emilija Landsbergis, Angeliki Mavroleon, Rosanna Pitarresi, and Alex Tahinos. The work is part of an event organized by Tom Kovac called Iskandar Puteri 100YC. Winka Dubbeldam, Miller Professor and chair of architecture, was also represented by her firm Archi-Tectonics’s submission Bottom up Design for Bogota: My Ideal City. Time Space Existence, hosted by the European Cultural Centre, includes PennDesign's 12 Objects and 12 Images. Curated by Ferda Kolatan, it explores the relationships between architectural objects and background images. The exhibition features work from the design studios of faculty members Kutan Ayata, Hina Jamelle, Simon Kim, Ferda Kolatan, Ali Rahim, and Robert Stuart-Smith; teaching assistants: Joseph Giampietro, Angela Huang, Aidan Kim, Brett Lee, Emma Peng, Caleb White, and Michael Zimmerman; participating students: Nicole Bronola, Zhuoqing Cai, Mark Chalhoub, Woo Choi, Sarah Davis, Wenjia Guo, David Harrop, John Hilla, Angela Huang, Insung Hwang, Bosung Jeon, Dawoon Jung, Keaton Kane, Zachary Michael Kile, Kyuhun Kim, Joung-Hwa Kim, Han Kwon, Wan Jung Lee, Phoebe Leung, Lexie Li, Qingyang Li, Yang Li, Yisha Li, Michael Liu, Andrew Singer, Andre Stiles, Angeliki Tzifa, Morgynn Wiley, Long Ye, Mengqi Xu, Zehua Zhang, Yuanyi Zhou.
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FOUNDATION The 501 Studio is the introductory course in the Master of Architecture Design Studio sequence. In contemporary pedagogy, design studio is the primary course in the preparation of the professional architect. Exercises and projects are designed to train the student so that the methodology gained will sustain the practitioner through the challenges of practice. More importantly, this methodology provides a framework of values and criticality to elevate the output of this practice to its highest expression. The studio sequence involves carefully developed projects to introduce students to the first principles of material and its properties, shaped and formed in particular geometries, to produce space and enclosure that imparts meaning. Furthermore, the studio imparts the irreducible basics of architectural design media, its notations of communication, and their spaces of design. Production requires learning of both techniques and strategies introduced through a series of design procedures. The design processes, in turn, requires the fluent use of both analog and computational tools—including those of digital modeling and fabrication. These techniques and strategies are gained through the studio’s progression of projects and the lectures and readings that accom-pany each project. Each project’s requirements include the appropriate 2D and 3D documents, a short writing requirement and physical models. In addition, assignments of the Visual Studies (ARCH 521) course reinforce essential skill sets integral to the objectives and deliverables of the 501 studio.
DESCRIPTIONS OF THE STUDIO PROJECTS:
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There are two projects that successively build upon one another: PROJECT01 / PAVILION During the first stage, students engage descriptive geometry and generative analysis of a cultural artifact, working through disciplined and explicit modeling and fabrication. Once documented, a container is designed and fabricated for the partial display of that object. The container curates by hiding and revealing precise traits as well as negotiating prescribed nor-mative boundary conditions. Based on the concepts developed in the container project, generative drawing and modeling techniques are introduced to interrogate the artifact and amplify its effects. The generative exercise motivates the construction of aggregations and part-to-whole relationships by developing new objects through a series of transformations. For the second stage, students are divided into three groups per section based on common tactics from the initial exercise. The groups proceed to design and develop full-scale (non representational) pavilions demonstrating the architectural consequences of part-to-whole relationships. Pavilions accomplishing structural span, component variation, durable construction and reaffirmation of prescribed normative boundaries for the formation of differentiated and habitable space. PROJECT 02 For the second project, students are challenged to evolve concepts from their pavilion in the design of a larger architectural intervention within an architecturally and culturally significant context. The project utilizes skills and analytical concepts from Project 01 to fully engage architectural criteria including, enclosure, program, circulation, lighting, materiality, space and form. Andrew Saunders, Coordinator
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CRITIC: Andrew Saunders
CRITIC: Ben Krone
-P rincipal of Andrew Saunders Architecture + Design (2004) -M .Arch from Harvard GSD with Distinction (2004) -B .Arch from Fay Jones School of Architecture, University of Arkansas (1998) -W inner of The Robert S. Brown ‘52 Fellows Program (2013)
- Founded Gradient Design Studio, NYC (2006) - B.Arch from the University of Florida (1999) - M.Arch degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, GSAPP (2004) - Winner of McKim Prize for Excellence in Design & the Sol Kaplan Traveling Fellowship
With the goal of producing “Frankensteins” or monstrous child from Russel Wright’s American Modern ceramic collection, students analyze the original pieces by identifying and mining specific Euclidian geometry and topological signatures. The traits are modeled, extracted, and eventually merged with characteristics from different Russel Wright pieces. The new combinations do not retain any functional relationship to the original piece, but do reference a genetic topological relationship with the parent pieces. Put simply, geometry innate to the American Modern collection is used to generate new hybrids. The sibling pieces are often surprising, bizarre, and weird, but clearly possess traits from the parent American Modern geometry. The genetic variations are something that Russel Wright never designed, but could have. Free from the original functionality of the mid-century domestic vessels, the new hybrids are developed to generate unique consequences both tectonically and spatially as architectural components. Transcending mere geometric transpositions, students work in teams to develop, fabricate and assemble half-scale pavilions to explore the basic architectural consequences of part-to-whole. The material and fabrication research coupled with the initial generative analysis phase culminate in a gallery proposal for the former rock quarry site of Russel Wright’s home and studio at Manitoga.
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. The studio’s research into the physics of structure, material and motion will play a crucial role in translating small-scale geometric studies into programmatic and spatial manifestations. 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 than a self-sufficient 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 constructed.
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FUNDAMENTALS - Founding Editor of the architecture journal: PROJECT - Founding Partner of Aether Images - Former Associate at Diller Scofidio + Renfro - M.Arch from the Yale School of Architecture - B.S.E. in Civil Engineering/Architecture from Princeton University
- Co-Founder of Mæta Design (2008) - Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute - M.Arch from Columbia University, GSAPP (2007)
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: Protomorphs perceive the architectural production as part of a larger, self-organizing, material process. While engaging in the production of protomorphic architectural environments through the generative capacities of algorithmic/diagrammatic logics, our primary focus will be the relationship between city and architecture. Finding the constitutive difference between the two in time, more so than in form. Protomorph is an investigation into the processes of becoming, and as such, it fuses the two modes of thought into a unified phase space. One of the challenges in the studio will be to re-invention of the means of assessment, the development of notations and techniques that will document the forces and the production of “difference” in the spatial manifestations of the generative systems. With the introduction of a secondary scale of time in the design process, borrowing a concept from biology, symbiogenesis will be the primary force in the evolution of the projects. PROTOMORPHS METHODOLOGY: The studio methodology consists of three feedback layers: generative diagram, prototyping model, and video. The generative diagram is the assembly machine to forms. The physical model should be a method of rapid prototyping the limits of the generative diagram in order to make specific spaces/scapes and formal behaviors in relationship to the projects spatial/temporal thesis.
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The prompt of this studio was to design an archive extension of the Penn Museum. The radical approach taken by this section took the form of a two-fold assignment asked of all students: (1) Have an idea. (2) Investigate that idea through the production of form in the shape of a building. Rather than supply students with the conceptual problem to consider, this studio asked students to develop their own approach, essentially to formulate their own set of questions and then defend that rigorously through design. Some questions that were raised over the course of the studios’ explorations included, but were not limited to: (+) Can the concepts of perception, visual distortion and camouflage be employed architecturally to critique the accepted functions of an archaeology and anthropology museum? (+) What are the architectural implications of allowing public access to a typically private, secure, enclosed, and insular program, such as an archive? (+) Can Monumentality and a looming adjacent Sports Stadium be instrumentalized to raise questions about the imbalance between the often socially significant spectacle of sport and sometimes less significant display of archaeological artifacts? (+) Can the forcible combinations of various strategies of digital form making lead to the complete erasure of those operations (i.e. the absence of a painter’s stroke)? Each project had to address core issues related to the design of an archive extension of the Penn Museum including: site strategies within an existing courtyard, programmatic relationships, circulation, security and the interface between public and private zones, entry, and facade.
CRITIC: Danielle Willems
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CRITIC: Daniel Markiewicz
PROTOMORPHS: EMERGENT ONTOLOGICAL FORMATIONS
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OCCUPY PENN MUSEUM, DECOLONIZE THE ARCHIVE CRITIC: Eduardo Rega Calvo - Editor and Art Director of the Editorial Project and Investigation System "From Spam to Maps" - M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University - M.Arch from Polytechnic University of Madrid, ETSAM - B.Arch from University of Las Palmas, Spain
For project 01, in order to add to the Native American Voices Exhibition (currently on display at the Penn Museum) our studio designed and built pavilions as unsolicited fragmentary occupations of the Penn Museum displaying narratives of protest, struggle, and achievement of indigenous social mobilizations since the 1960s. Departing from such narratives of resistance, in project 02 we learned from and further expanded on insurgent Native American histories and events to architecturally translate and imagine a decolonizing process of the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In parallel to the production of manuals of spatial tactics that are autonomous and removed from program and context, we developed a narrative that re-imagined, decolonized, and enriched the context of intervention. Students assembled stories that combined photographs from their visit and experience of the Penn Museum with images that illustrated Native American stories relating to the indigenous social mobilizations studied in the Pavilion Project (Longest Walk, Standing Rock, & Survival Schools). Imagining partnerships and relations between the museum staff, grassroots organizations, and architects, students used the stories to plan a spatially visualize a decolonizing occupation of the PennMuseum through the Stoner Courtyard.
SOLID // WORKS // CRITIC: Gisela Baurmann - Founding partner of Büro NY - M.Arch 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)
METHODOLOGY The studio set out to inquire ideas on geometry, components, and their juncture through the study of crochet as design methodology. Crocheting activates a single line—the thread —to generate an elastic surface by moving around and through an empty core. The topology of a crochet fabric is relatively complex: the thread describes an undulating path along each row, the loops of one row being pulled through the loops of the row subjacent to it. Lifting them out of their traditional craft context, crochet stitches (knots) were investigated in regards to their performance qualities—their structural capacities, transparency, enclosure, tectonic and material traits, and their ability to aggregate. DESIGN FUNDAMENTALS AND ARCHIVE SYSTEMS Penn Museum’s new research extension and archives requires cultivating differentiated ideas of enclosure, entry, and passage that ultimately allow engagement with a trove of cultural legacy in the institution and with the articulation of the museum buildings. The Tectonic Stitch Merger develops Design Fundamentals by hybridizing elements from the brick facades of Penn Museum‘s Stoner Courtyard with the knot topology of crochet stitches. In their proliferation, scaling, and assembly, the Design Fundamentals qualify to respond to site, program and organizational requirements.
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INSTITUTIONAL FORM -F ounding partner of FORMA - M.Arch from Yale University - Awarded William Wirt Winchester Travelling Fellowship - B.Arch from The Ohio State University, Summa Cum Laude -H as taught design studios and seminars at Yale School of Architecture -W orked as Project Designer and Research Assistant at Eisenman Architects
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Architecture’s preoccupation with power is longstanding, from the Egyptian pyramids and Catholic cathedrals to the latest towers of President Trump. Given the studio brief—to design an archive and research extension to the existing Penn Museum—this studio was particularly interested in the problem of institutional form. Acting as a piece of social and cultural infrastructure within the University of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia, what type of “image” should a public institution, such as the Penn Museum, project? What is a conceptual model for a museum or an archive today? Students were encouraged to clearly articulate their aspirations for the project and formulate their own critical position within a larger architectural discourse. In addition to the part-to-whole problem of the entire 501 studio, of specific interest in our section was (1) the use of precedent, (2) the architectural problem of the plan, and (3) the building’s relationship to the ground. Students developed their individual design proposals using detailed drawings and large-scale physical models, using them as conceptual and generative, rather than documentation, tools.
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CRITIC: Miroslava Brooks
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STUDENT: Jiachang Ye
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As components aggregate to become one whole, profiles & surfaces morph into each other. The boundary line between part and whole blurs. The result is a field of bulbous surfaces that together create a remarkable monster.
CRITIC: Andrew Saunders
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Design aims to intentionally frame different moments of the museum and makes the historical faรงade part of the design of the new archive. Therefore, the architecture is not blocking, but framing the views to the museum.
CRITIC: Andrew Saunders
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Once engaged and within, the filtering of light and mass push one from space to space, archive to archive, letting one’s curiosities unravel and regain spatial awareness.
CRITIC: Ben Krone
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The design reflects a mediation and an interconnection between a displaced whole, through a dialectic of completion and incompletion, inside and outside, solid and void, and presence and absence.
CRITIC: Ben Krone
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STUDENT: Catherine Kai Shih
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DANIEL MARKIEWICZ
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STUDENT: Kapaj Ira
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It disintegrates into smaller parts, cutting deep into earth. Tight pathways and the geometric articulation of the masses disrupt your view. Light, as time, acts as a catalyst, reflecting off the glass prisms, always changing.
CRITIC: Daniel Markiewicz
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STUDENT: Ellison Blair Turpin
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Stalactites swell to accommodate their new purpose. Below the surface, they cling to the ceiling anchoring the veil from leaving the earth, to preserve slivers of courtyard, while attempting to leave some secrets still hidden.
CRITIC: Daniel Markiewicz
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DANIELLE WILLEMS
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A building of layers, the boundaries are peeled back to reveal artifacts and building activities to the broader public. From layers between object and populous to facade and structure, inside and outside, spontaneity is born.
CRITIC: Danielle Willems
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STUDENT: Sierra Sinclair Summers
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The project explores quasicrystalline forms and their impact on space. Quasiperiocity displays regularity and irregularity within the same system, creating local order and anamoly.
CRITIC: Danielle Willems
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32 501 [M.ARCH] EDUARDO REGA CALVO
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Stolen cultural property needs to be repatriated. Unlearn, Relearn, Repatriate is an architecture proposal that creates the spatial and material possibilities to open up the Penn Museum’s stolen archive.
CRITIC: Eduardo Rega Calvo
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Where western cliches of the museum’s archive are exposed, the visitor ascends into more specific architectures where more precise indigenous anti-colonial histories are revealed and shared in discrete spatial typologies.
CRITIC: Eduardo Rega Calvo
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STUDENT: Perry E. Ashenfelter
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Transforming the concept of the traditional archive and its accessibility, like a coral skeleton, the short-term archive is visible, reaching up, and continuously defining the visitors experience and circulation as they are directed around.
CRITIC: Gisela Baurmann
PERSPECTIVE SECTION 1’=1/8”
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The striped pattern and lifted skin surfaces suggest the directions of original crochet loops and offers natural light for the interior space, and together become an organic skin texture, which is suitable for metal panel assembly.
CRITIC: Gisela Baurmann
GISELA BAURMANN
STUDENT: Yuting Qian
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STUDENT: Hyun Jae Jung
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Archive is a storage, limited, stagnant, and bounded. Collections grow, every day we find something that belongs to the past. Inevitably archives must be infinitely found and be a storage of ever-growing volume of history.
CRITIC: Miroslava Brooks
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The clusters deteriorate from a roomy display to an infestation of history, questioning who the space is for: human or artifact? A taunting placement of the pristine defines the collection of artifacts within the construct.
CRITIC: Miroslava Brooks
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PROJECTS
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PENN MUSEUM – VESSELS The 501 studio begins in the Penn Museum—one of the world’s great archaeology and anthropology research museums, and the largest university museum in the United States. At its most basic, architecture is a vessel of space. Through the process of photogrammetry, students digitally scan ancient vessels from all corners of the world made from the Penn Museum Archive. From the digital models, students analyze the ancient vessels for governing geometry, material effects, and cultural significance.
Sketch of the Penn Museum masterplan, Wilson Eyre, 1911.
Shixiang Zheng scanning a Penn Museum vessel artifact using photogrammetry.
Digital models from scanned vessel artifacts using photogrammetry.
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CONTAINER PROJECT – FIGURE GROUND The digital models of the artifacts are 3D printed and each student designs a unique container for the vessel. The exercise explores figure ground relationships between the interior space of the vessel and how the container is able to simultaneously negotiate alternate figuration of external conditions. Similar conditions are described in the Nolli’s famous map of Rome. The exercise is a prelude to digital fabrication and formal skill sets required in proceeding projects as well as the design of poche or an interstitial space between the interior and the exterior.
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Figure-ground containers fabricated for scanned and 3D-printed vessel artifacts. 501 Section Critic: Andrew Saunders.
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Figure-ground containers fabricated for scanned and 3D-printed vessel artifacts. 501 Section Critic: Gisela Baurmann.
PROJECTS
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PAVILION PROJECT – PART-TO-WHOLE Conceptual and digital skill sets from the restrained initial container exercise expand in the Pavilion project where the container boundaries are enlarged to full-scale. Student groups design, fabricate, and install full-scale pavilions to fill the gallery. The problem engages contemporary methods of design and fabrication while being rooted in the classic architectural “problem” of part-to-whole. “Order gives due measure to the members of a work considered separately, and symmetrical agreement to the proportions of the whole. It is an adjustment according to quantity. By this I mean the selection of modules from the members of the work itself and, starting from these individual parts of members, constructing the whole work to correspond. Arrangement includes the putting of things in their proper places and the elegance of effect which is due to adjustments appropriate to the character of the work.” Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Book I, Ch. 2 “THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF ARCHITECTURE”
“In order therefore to be as brief as possible, I shall define Beauty to be a Harmony of all the Parts, in whatsoever Subject it appears, fitted together with such Proportion and Connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the Worse.” Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria (1452, On the Art of Building), Book VI, Ch 2.
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Students form a thesis on the relationship of the parts that they are designing to relationships of the whole as a pavilion. The part-to-whole relationship in architecture is one that is constantly being redefined and reinterpreted according to contemporary methods of making and perceived metaphysical relationships of architecture to contemporary society. The research from the 501 studio is currently being published in a book titled 57 Pavilions edited by 501 coordinator Associate Professor Andrew Saunders. 57 Pavilions is a 21st century manual documenting architectural design research at PennDesign examining new potentials for part to whole assemblies. Experiments in material expression, morphology, performance and culture fuse with advanced digital design and fabrication processes to produce full-scale architectural consequences.
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FOUNDATION Architecture finds itself today as one of deep questioning and redefinition in how it draws its disciplinary boundaries and in doing so, affects the sociospatial realm of cities. As a microcosm and accelerator of this debate, the seven 502 studio sections this year offer a diversity of agendas, methodologies, and possibilities of what architecture could be, in its role in neighborhood and community organization. The studio’s curricular orientation is toward urbanism, in this second semester of the student’s education. It begins with a deep analysis of conventional urban attributes: infrastructure and transportation, natural resources and the environment, urban morphologies and typologies, and cultural, socio-economic and political patterns. Important in the studio’s production is the representational techniques documenting these attributes, from different types of historical mapping types to new content opened up by digital media. We focus on Philadelphia, using the context of our quickly changing but historic post-industrial city to frame issues which are vital to understanding cities in general. This year we center our study on the East Parkside neighborhood in West Philadelphia, which offers a unique perspective of our city. Adjacent to Fairmount Park, the original neighborhood housing was monumental and significant architecturally, but is now afflicted by the effects of decades of disinvestment. We work tightly together in the first half of the semester, sharing research across the seven different sections, even as we begin to pull apart in types of representational and analytical modes toward the mid-term. We share numerous symposia and lectures across the sections where we have lively discussions and debates. Our large mid-semester forum compares and discusses how methodologies of research and analysis of the city prompts different types of production and conclusion, from issues of urban morphologies, to economic resilience, to deeply political substructures. This semester as an academic focus, we explore together the work of Cedric Price as embracing concepts of indeterminate environment-architecture and urbanism in states of actual physical change and fluctuation, comprising temporary and transient programs, systems and infrastructures. The program of a community branch library serves as a vehicle to galvanize all of these interests. Presently in the spotlight of a substantial initiative of municipal funding in Philadelphia, the form of the traditional library is in dynamic flux. The upheaval in the nature of accessing and archiving information through digital means has posed a challenge to its historical definition. In communities across the United States, the library is evolving as a multi-purpose entity especially within underserved communities, serving as emblem and facility to many unexpected community needs and desires. It is thus a transparent typology, morphing in response to unexpected programs and situations. This relationship to community instigated for the studio a vibrant opportunity for engagement between students, faculty and East Parkside neighbors. Working closely with the neighborhood CDC, we collaborated closely with the neighborhood's people to locate desires and strategies. At the end of the semester student projects were presented to the neighborhood community in a lively event with students, critics, faculty, city officials, and journalists present. Annette Fierro, Coordinator
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PLAY-SETTING CRITIC: Annette Fierro -M .Arch from Rice University (1984) -B .S. in Civil Engineering from Rice University (1980) -A uthor of The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle/Paris 1981-1998 (MIT Press, 2003)
This studio, Play-Setting, sets forth the activity of play as a fundamental act of human creativity, a model for the learning and exploring to occur in The Parkside Branch Library. To learn, to explore, to grow, is to play. Freed from constraints, Play creates a fictive space in which worlds are imagined and enacted, and yet conversely, for play to exist, it must create its own set of rules. Central to this contention is that at the scale of the site and the community processes of negotiation and interaction between the community and local entities might also be prompted and governed by principles of play. The studio will generate and articulate the concept of play through various devices. Initially, conventional childrens’ building toys will serve as “props” through which principles and rules of play might be generated. As physical analogues, manipulated, they will leave residues of formtypes and their transformations, which will also suggest “infrastructures” which govern interactions. These narratives will expand from eccentric stories and imaginative fictional projections of toys, to narratives and interactions of our site in Parkside, with all its multiple constituencies. Students are directed to identify imperceptible networks working the challenged site of the Parkside neighborhood. These networks are based in factors through which space is manifested and practiced, and which offer opportunities of intervention that are minimal, practical and cost-effective. Play is utilized as a way of making these networks operative. The library is a component of these invigorated networks, operating from within the neighborhood’s created and creative impulses.
(DIS)ORDERLY SYSTEMS CRITIC: Joshua Freese - Partner of Sp[a]de (2012) - M.Arch from PennDesign - B.Design in Architectural Studies from Florida International University
The library is both a space for collection and a space for creation. It is an incubator and an archive; cultivating and curating culture simultaneously. The regular order of a library archive is regulated through orderly alphanumeric systems that show themselves on the library floor, but are now associated through digital media and a variety of query terms. This strange relationship between regular and irregular patterns of input, organization, and selection have become indicative of the complexity that new media has added to the long standing institution of the library and its internal logics. Our studio will explore new ways of engaging and reinterpreting the library as a spatial, material, and archival realm whose systems and patterns of order and regulation may need reorganizing, interrupting, or disrupting through both media and program that reflect the contemporary situation of a public institution and the physical and cultural engagements that occur when embedded in the urban environment. Patterns are understood through their repetitions and differences, and through their ability to be predictable and reliable. Patterns whose behavior is aperiodic and asymmetric are still robust and perform efficiently, but they offer nuanced capacities to accommodate irregularities and produce unique differentiated moments. The agenda is to define a set of relationships between the physical form of the city, the cultural and social content of the neighborhood, and the programmatic extent and capacity of the library and market. The approach takes both a critical and optimistic stance on the nature of civic institutions and public space to play a greater role in serving a community.
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-C o-Founder of Mæta Design (2008) -V isiting Professor at the Pratt Institute -M .Arch from Columbia University, GSAPP (2007)
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: “Ontological Formations” perceives the architectural production as part of a larger, self-organizing, material process. While engaging in the production of Ontological-architectural axioms through the generative capacities of algorithmic/ diagrammatic logics, our primary focus will be the relationship between time and architecture. Finding the constitutive difference between the two in time, more so than in form. Ontological Formation is an investigation in the processes of becoming, and as such, it fuses the two scapes into a unified phase space.
- Editor and Art Director of the Editorial Project and Investigation System "From Spam to Maps" - M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University - M.Arch from Polytechnic University of Madrid, ETSAM - B.Arch from University of Las Palmas, Spain
In this studio, existing Temporary Autonomous Zones, tactics that oppose capitalism through community organizing, and cooperativism are architecturalized. The studio investigates key Philadelphian organizations that are currently active in the city fighting for justice and civil rights, representing the excluded, empowering with education, art and culture, amplifying people's narratives, defending their rights to their city, struggling against class hierarchy, racism and patriarchy, refusing the neoliberal status quo and inhabiting its cracks to transform it. Students generated a collective archive/intelligence through, on one hand, audiovisual, mapped, and diagrammed descriptions of activist organizations, workers cooperatives and non-profits doing work in Philadelphia (The New Sanctuary Movement, HIAS, Tiny WPA, Rebuilding Together Philadelphia, Home Care Associates, Planned Parenthood, Vietlead and GreensGrow) and, on the other hand, a set of contextless and programless architectural/urban tactics that were extracted from the Detroit Thinkgrid and ATOM projects by Cedric Price. The research on Philadelphian actors/activists/cooperatives/community groups, developed up until the midterm was used to project their mission, goals, visions, activities, strategies and relations on Parkside, our studio site. On the second half of the semester, students developed iterations of urban projects done in groups that hybridized spatial tactics to respond to specific struggles and polemics on the site.
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ONTOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY: The studio methodology consists of three feedback layers: generative diagram, prototyping model and video. The generative diagram is the assembly machine to forms. The physical model should be a method of rapid prototyping the limits of the generative diagram in order to make specific spaces of resistance/resilience and formal behaviors in relationship to the projects spatial/temporal thesis. The video component will be used as a different method of exploring, experimenting, generating spatial sequences, creating immersive environments, and building a narrative inside or through the architectural forms. The studio thesis will venture into an investigation that is embodied within a novel approach, to the relationship between the emerging narrations of two modes of time/architecture. (typologies of time)
CRITIC: Eduardo Rega Calvo
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ONTOLOGICAL FORMATIONS TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS – GENERATIVE METHODS OF NETWORKS VOL.2: RESILIENCE AND RESISTANT CO-OP ARCHITECTURE AND REAL UTOPIA CRITIC: Danielle Willems
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SITES OF EXTRANEOUS NARRATIVES CRITIC: Carrie Norman -C o-Founder of Norman Kelley -P articipated in the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2014) and the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015) - Architecture League of New York Young Architect's Prize (2014) - M.Arch from Princeton University - B.S. in Architecture with Honors from the University of Virginia
This studio begins from the premise that context is about narratives, real and imagined, attached to objects, places, and spaces. Sites of Extraneous Narratives chronicles the rituals that occur around the seemingly familiar and existing elements of the city that disproportionately form the urban fabric, but are readily overlooked. Rather than pursuing spectacles of novelty detached from context, this studio reviews the familiar and the existing as possible sites for initiating a process of reevaluation. In so doing, the studio questions and advances mechanisms for revealing architecture’s capacity to form overlapping and ambiguous identities of time and place. As a point of departure, Sites of Extraneous Narratives examines fragments from the city that exhibit cycles of ruin and transformation. These fragments are looked to not as decommissioned artifacts defined by age or state of decay, but rather as sites layered with coinciding narratives. From this perspective, ruin is not a singular moment within a linear spectrum between binaries of past and present, built and wild, or permanence and obsolescence. Instead, sites of ruin are occasions where connections among people, histories, spaces, and culture have begun to fray. The goal is to show that once reconnected by links of our own imagination, new contexts can emerge, and spawn the invention of fantastical new attachments. By working though attachment issues, the studio considers the effects these linkages have on the social, formal, and programmatic identity of a civic institutional typology: the library.
ACTIVIST ARCHITECTURES FOR THE PARKSIDE COMMUNITY CRITIC: Léopold Lambert - Editor-in-Chief of The Funambulist - Author of four books investigating the political power of architecture in Palestine, the French banlieues, and elsewhere - M.S. in Architecture form the Pratt Institute - B.Arch from École Spéciale d'Architecture
Designing is never an innocent gesture. The lines on paper or in the computer will soon materialize into walls and other surfaces that ultimately organize bodies in space. Good intentions are not enough; architecture always exercises a certain power on the people it claims to serve. What does that mean for architects external to a community to design something supposed to serve it? How to reconcile this fundamental divide? These questions that are almost always true in any architectural practice take an additional meaning when addressing this studio’s program situated in East Parkside, Philadelphia. The state of disenfranchisement in which this neighborhood, as well as its neighbor, Belmont, has been left by public authorities certainly gives to any cultural and community-based architectural project an urgent dimension that appears, at first glance, to transcend the fundamental divide. Yet, this studio assumed otherwise and questioned two points that appear as particularly formative to students as they are simultaneously specific to the neighborhood and applicable to other situations in Philadelphia and other U.S. cities: - How can the library’s program and spatiality serve an African American community whose relation to municipal and national authorities coincides with a history of systemic discrimination? - How can this project bring significant cultural value to the neighborhood while fundamentally controlling its real-estate value whose increase would necessarily trigger processes of gentrification and subsequent displacement as seen in many neighborhoods of the city?
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48 502 [M.ARCH] ANNETTE FIERRO
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The cracks are a structural means to generate a new network of paths connecting existing green spaces and diffusing vegetation and new program spaces, while also improving on site groundwater recharge.
CRITIC: Annette Fierro
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Inhabitable roof acts as an elevated platform for locals to enjoy views of their own neighborhood, & creates opportunities for social gathering. Tree pathways & branches form open circulations, creating freedom for explorations.
CRITIC: Annette Fierro
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STUDENT: Lichao Liu
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The sense of directionality and motion is enhanced by consistent features in the massing, which can serve as a thread to direct visitors.
CRITIC: Joshua Freese
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This speculation of emergent qualities of the library is necessary to break down contemporary preconceptions of the role of libraries and propose alternative ways of organizing and systematizing factors,
CRITIC: Joshua Freese
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A patterning system becomes a productive way to challenge the implied order of the neighborhood and propose a new logic which responds to specific climatic and programmatic agendas.
CRITIC: Danielle Willems
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The material sprayed on the buildings skin will erode and be constantly changing color and effect. The effects of the skin will grow from sparse to dense, making an ever changing and wondrous exterior condition.
CRITIC: Danielle Willems
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In the year 2075, new legislation has been passed making it illegal to harvest raw materials for production, requiring any new construction to be made from recycled parts and composites.
CRITIC: Eduardo Rega Calvo
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In 2040, preserving the environment becomes a priority for humanity... a library/community center and recycling plant that uses old building fragments to construct a new architecture.
CRITIC: Eduardo Rega Calvo
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The building looks as an impenetrable slab that has the voids to bring in light into the interior of the building while creating views down to the courtyards below.
CRITIC: Carrie Norman
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The upper part of the library is also designed to pop out of the school that surrounds it, giving hints to people outside in programmatically and morphologically.
CRITIC: Carrie Norman
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Too often schools concentrate educational resources and construct instructional environments to be separate from non-instructional environments (the city).
CRITIC: Léopold Lambert
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Through a (capitol) hill, wrapped by a programmed ramp, all structured around a fully accessible monolithic core, the necessary democratic space for further organization and action is created for the community.
CRITIC: Léopold Lambert
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The arch element evident throughout the project is taken from the history of the site and defamiliarized by scaling & rearranging specifically that their outer profile becomes continuous, creating a new positive profile.
CRITIC: Andrew Saunders
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The goal is that the pool become a new wealth creation program & improve the local economy. The project can provide a public space for locals who have different backgrounds to communicate, becoming a cultural exchange model.
CRITIC: Andrew Saunders
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APRIL 5TH - 6TH, 2018
SPRING SYMPOSIUM
This symposium explored how the structural instabilities of the 21st century are legible in histories of architecture and related spatio-political disciplines, insofar as they engage questions of economy, gender, race, and environmental change. Co-sponsored by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. SYMPOSIUM CONVENED BY: Daniel A. Barber, Associate Professor, Graduate Architecture, PennDesign Sophie Hochhäusl, Assistant Professor, Graduate Architecture, PennDesign and 2017-2018 Frieda L. Miller Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University Eduardo Rega Calvo, Lecturer, Graduate Architecture, PennDesign Naomi Waltham-Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of Music, Penn Arts & Sciences
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STRUCTURAL INSTABILITIES: HISTORY, ENVIRONMENT, AND RISK IN ARCHITECTURE
PROGRAM THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2018 PANEL 1: Peg Rawes, Barlett School of Architecture, University College London Insecure Predictions: Buckminster Fuller's Energy Slave Maps Jason Rebillot, Woodbury University Manzini's Dilemma Whitney Moon, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee The Rise and Fall of the Atomic Energy Commission Pavilion PANEL 2: Paulo Tavares, University of Brasilia Containing Poverty: Architecture between Environmentalism, Development and Counterinsurgency Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Harvard University and Rachel Lee, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration Léopold Lambert, Editor-in-Chief of The Funambulist The Architecture of the Colonial Continuum Ginger Nolan, University of Basel Self-Help Technics: Bricolage and the Management of Neo-Liberal Uncertainty Keynote Felicity Scott, Columbia University GSAPP Productive Vulnerabilities
FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 2018 PANEL 3: Elisavet Hasa, Royal College of Art The Rise of Solidarity Movements and the Architecture of Collective Equipment in Athens during the Years of Crisis Susanne Schindler, ETH Zurich The Model Cities Program: Productive Instabilities Maros Krivy, University of Cambridge and Estonian Academy of the Arts Urban Complexity: A Fad? PANEL 4: Megan Eardley, Princeton University The Mine, the Surveyor, and the Production of Apartheid's Boomtowns Nikki Moore, Rice University For Bread, Peace and Economic Expansion: Robert Malthus and the Architecture of the Green Revolution Fabrizio Ballabio, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and University of York Measures of security: Ferdinando Fuga’s Reali Granili and the politics of grain provision in Eighteenth Century Naples. PANEL 5: Mark Wasiuta, Columbia University and Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Columbia University Unstable Control Samia Henni, Princeton University Planning Instabilities: Monnet, Marshall, and Constantine Plans Concluding Remarks 5:30pm Brett Steele, Dean, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture
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STUDENT: Caleb Birch Ehly Reference. page 26
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STUDENT: Lichao Liu Apart from hosting exhibitions, the newly designed infrastructure also opens up opportunities for the community organizers and grassroots activists from the city of Philadelphia to use, organize, learn, and protest.
CRITIC: Eduardo Rega Calvo
68 GALLERY FOUNDATION STUDENT: Andrew Joonsung Homick Lee Reference. page 52 32
CRITIC: Eduardo Danielle Willems Rega Calvo
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CRITIC: Miroslava Brooks
GALLERY FOUNDATION STUDENT: Jianan Dai Defamiliarization is the process of articulation & presentation of common items in an uncanny way. The studio discovers, & extracts building elements from the neighborhood reconstructs them as architectural elements.
CRITIC: Andrew Saunders
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Introduction by Hina Jamelle Introduction by Simon Kim
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CORE In 2011-12, we re-structured the ARCH 601 Design Studio to become an Urban Housing Studio that moves beyond the traditional programmatic housing approach to propose contemporary modes of living in an urban environment. Hybrid forms of housing/dwelling including a commercial or cultural program that can co-exist with housing is the topic explored during this semester. Due to the difference in scale between housing and a cultural program, an inherent curricular goal is to develop formal arrangements in accumulation and scalar variation that develop a speculative, comprehensive solution for a 50,000 sq. ft. building located in an urban environment. The use of digital techniques is a given for this semester’s projects, but the goal is to use these technologies in an opportunistic fashion for the generation of growth and the evaluation of patterns in the development of the overall form. In particular, each studio examines part-to-whole organizations and their potential for architecture by offering the tools to create effects that exceed the sum of their parts. Most part-to-whole organizations share common characteristics, including structure: defined by parts and their composition; and the interconnectivity of the various parts that have functional, structural, and spatial relationships with each other. During this semester, a primacy is given to formations that are varied, accumulative, and subject to change that may shift spatial experiences, scale, and material aspects. In addition, buildings are to incorporate program, spatiality, structure, and enclosure into a singular formation that incorporates a range of experiences and formal variations of gradated intensities and patterns. An exceptionally sophisticated part-to-whole relationship is one which goes a step further and resolves the integration of materials, structure, scale, and spatiality to allow for the overall formation to appear suspended, or possessed of a particular lightness. In terms of formal appearance, this lightness includes qualities of fineness and daintiness, determined within the multiple individual elements and parts that constitute the building design. The scale of the part to the whole [unit to building] is attenuated, adjusted with precision and refinement, in order to produce the desired effect. If the scale of the part is too diminutive in relation to the whole, or if the whole is constituted of too many smaller building components, then the occupant of the space may be overwhelmed. When the relation of part [housing unit] to whole [building] is attuned, unique living environments and innovative housing solutions can be achieved. The form of the building impacts the selected urban environment. Each instructor provides their own site for exploration within a city of the instructor’s choice. Each building’s goals contribute to and impact the city in which the building is located. The highly formed object incorporates a detailed façade and its relationship to the massing, plans, and sections, with an understanding of vertical and horizontal pedestrian circulation that maximizes their impact on the urban environment. Hina Jamelle, Coordinator Director of Urban Housing. Penn Design
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FRONTLINE CRITIC: Brian Phillips -F ounder of Interface Studio Architects (ISA), PA (2004) -M .Arch from PennDesign (1996) -B .S.E. from University of Oklahoma (1994) -W inner of the 2011 Pew Fellowship in the Arts - I SA has received multiple AIA Pennsylvania Merit & Honor Awards
Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) has been a buzz-term in urban planning and housing circles for decades. It refers to developments that are adjacent to mass transit stations and take advantage of that proximity through increased density. There has been much made about the positive impacts of such development—walkability, health, reduced energy usage, reduced traffic, etc. However, the most effective transit systems, like elevated high-speed rail can be challenging neighbors. Shadows, noise, smell, trash, crime, and marginalized activities can be typical of traditional transit-oriented zones. This studio offered a critique of typical TOD thinking. Rather than simply good, polite urbanism that tends to downplay the contradictions of transit-oriented sites—studio projects looked to connect with both comfortable and uncomfortable aspects of this atmosphere and elevate them as defining characteristics. Programs hybridized market rate housing with other prevailing nightlife, commercial or retail programs found along the corridor. Proposals made novel, relevant and expressive buildings that enhance the authentic urban atmosphere of the transit corridor and adjacent neighborhoods.
SHIFTING HYBRIDS: Transformations for a Residential Building + WEWORK /WELIVE in TriBeCa. NYC. CRITIC: Hina Jamelle - 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). - M.Arch from University of Michigan
This studio will examine emergence and its relation to the formulation of architecture by using digital techniques in an opportunistic fashion for the generation of growth and evaluation of patterns in the development of form. In particular, this studio will examine part-to-whole organizations and its potential for architecture by offering the tools to create effects that exceed the sum of their parts. An exceptionally sophisticated part-to-whole relationship is one which resolves the integration of materials, structure, scale, and spatiality to allow for the overall formation to appear suspended, or possessed of a particular lightness and elegance. In terms of formal appearance, this lightness includes qualities of fineness and daintiness, determined within the multiple individual elements and parts that constitute the building design. The program for the studio is a new hybrid residential Live Work Prototype to be located in TriBeCa in downtown Manhattan. Each student refined the particular program and strategy for the new business model during the course of the semester. The intended result is a project exhibiting innovative architectural organizations and strategies using topological surfaces, unit arrangements, and patterns scaling from individual apartments, and workspaces to the entire building with different spatial and material qualities contributing to the development of architecture.
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MEGA-BLOCK REDUX
CRITIC: Jonas Coersmeier
CRITIC: Kutan Ayata
- Founded Büro NY, NY (2004) -M .Arch from Columbia University GSAPP (2000) -R eceived an engineering degree from TU-Darmstadt (1998) & MIT Architecture (1996) -T eaches studios & research seminars at Pratt & serves as guest critic at Princeton and Columbia GSAPP
- Co-Founded Young & Ayata (2008) - Awarded Architectural League Prize (2014) - M.Arch from Princeton University (2004) - BFA in Architecture from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston (1999)
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The architectural design studio LoLux DUMBO invents typologies for ultra luxury and low-income housing, and proposes a new type of mixed-use urban superblock in Brooklyn, New York. LoLux DUMBO simultaneously focuses on the two primary growth markets of New York City’s real estate: Luxury condominiums and affordable housing. It discusses these two extreme segments in context, probes into their interaction and systematically works out areas of synergy in order to add value for various stakeholders and for the community at large. The studio encourages the discussion of socio-economic and political issues of urban housing, and how they relate to architectural responsibilities and desires. It promotes the idea that design itself holds the potential for improving human coexistence, and that it does so through the production of core architectural qualities. Architecture itself provides cultural content, creates spatio-material and aesthetic value and thus improves the urban condition. It has been widely accepted that massive population increases can no longer be supported by sprawling cities, which claim the most valuable agricultural land and increase greenhouse gas emission. Cities must grow inward, not just for ecological sustainability, but for sociospatial and economic sustainability as well. The search for new forms of densification is driven as much by the urgent necessity to create space and resilient structures for habitation, as by the desire for density itself, an inherently urban condition. The pursuit of density is not merely a parametric routine for maximizing floor area in the volumetric exploitation of the city.
One of the most significant impacts of 20thcentury modernist urbanism in dense urban environments was the implementation of mega-blocks which enabled large scale interventions, originally for social housing ambitions within densifying urban areas through the means of welfare state, later for concentrated expansion of private capital through the channels of neo-liberal economic policies. As modernist visions of new utopias for the city ambitiously attempted to redefine the city by replacing its small-scale fabric with large interventions in the name of “new living,” their less finessed and realized versions, in most cases regardless of their location in the world, created mostly undesirable consequences; segregation, lack of density, urban discontinuity, increased crime, lack of urban character, homogeneity to name a few. Majority of these realized projects can be seen as black holes in the city, sucking out all potential urban life in and around them. They are too big to fail, they are deeply rooted and most likely here to stay. They are products of our own discipline, occupying a significant territory in the discourse of architecture and urbanism. They have been imagined with noble intentions and realized with endless optimism; things just did not go according to the plans. What do we do as a discipline to deal with our own garbage? To treat tabula-rasa with tabula-rasa at this scale seems like a pointless exercise and a massive material waste. Perhaps the response needs to be more surgical.
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LIVING OFF THE LAND CRITIC: Scott Erdy -F ounding partner of Erdy McHenry Architecture, PA (1998) -M .Arch from Syraccuse University (1990) -B SC Architecture from The Ohio State University (1987) -A IA Philadelphia Gold Medal (2001) - AIA Philadelphia Silver Medal (2004)
In 2016, more than 60 million refugees—equivalent to the population of the UK—were displaced from their homes. Compare this to the 40 million people displaced after the Second World War. This mass migration threatens regional stability in many parts of the world and has created an acute shortage of both food and housing. The unpredictable conditions of climate, location, and political will has led to food scarcity. LIVINGOFFTHELAND (LOTL) is a concept for an adaptable, self-sustaining, cooperative residential community. Beginning with William Penn and his treaty with the native Lenape people, Philadelphia has long been a world leader for tolerance. In its early beginnings, this city was one of the few settlements along the eastern seaboard without walls or fortifications. Its “open border” policy allowed for the peaceful coexistence of varied groups of people with multiple and divergent cultures. Today, Philadelphia continues to uphold these values of acceptance by being the largest self-designated “sanctuary city” in the country, despite various legal threats and economic bullying from the Federal Government. In spite of these pressures, Philadelphia’s Mayor Kenny remains defiant in response to closed borders, and continues to issue bold proclamations resisting current federal mandates. His leadership on immigration makes Philadelphia poised to remain a national and world example for tolerance and inclusion.
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Student work from Kutan Ayata’s studio
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82 601 [M.ARCH] CORE BRIAN PHILLIPS
STUDENT: Jinah Nicole Oh BLOCK PARTY is a vertically oriented housing development that seeks to harness the eccentric social energy of the Philadelphia Row house block. BLOCK PARTY reimagines the traditional elements of sidewalk, stoop, house, and yard within the context of a mid-rise housing block that behaves with some of the social intimacy and connection familiar to the Philadelphia urban fabric. A dynamic, centralized public space exists as the integrating core of the vertical block party, truly offering new perspectives.
CRITIC: Brian Phillips
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STUDENT: Daniel Silverman Fishtown exemplifies this demographic trend of increased aging plus an influx of youth culture. Presently the two groups appear to coexist in parallel with minimal day to day interaction. However, this project suggests that people between the ages of 20-35 and 55-70 have more preferences in common than one might think. What if we could create an architecture of analog curiosity that encourages residents to explore, discover, and socialize in ways that create surprising new links of mutual interest and support?
CRITIC: Brian Phillips
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86 601 [M.ARCH] CORE HINA JAMELLE
STUDENT: Keaton Peter Kane This building seeks to serve one of the largest growing sectors of internet businesses: e-commerce. By 2020, it is projected that e-commerce sales will bring in over $4 trillion worldwide. Designed to accommodate the specific needs of e-commerce businesses, this building houses a state-of-the-art shipping center and package delivery system. Additionally, this building offers flexible pop-up spaces to accommodate product reveals and sponsor partnered events. This building will position any business, small or large, at the forefront of the e-commerce market.
CRITIC: Hina Jamelle
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By 2035 the predicted number of digital nomads will rise to one billion. In the digital age, the pendulum of the work life balance is beginning to swing towards work. Young entrepreneurs, investors, and tech startups are looking for temporary accomodations that will facilitate a rapidly evolving life. The Nomad Hive integrates programmatic distribution of space based on three categories of nomads. The first explores the life of an individual with minimal spacial needs. The second explores the collaborator, with spaces activated by moderate interactions. .
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90 601 [M.ARCH] CORE JONAS COERSMEIER
STUDENT: Yunzhuo Hao Celebrating its prominent location on DUMBO (NY), the city's fast-growing urban corridor and technology hub, the building's architectural design formally and philosophically questions the current understanding of luxury in urban housing design, proposes to define the high-luxury as affordable space with richness in spatial experience rather than the size and location. By waving and merging two conventional housing types—mat building and slim pencil tower—into one, the building gradually transforms the private living space into the public entertaining and commercial space.
CRITIC: Jonas Coersmeier
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STUDENT: Shih-Kai Lin The project is proposing a compact and hybrid density for the area and exploring the relationship between low-income & luxurious housing typology in a megacity. On the global scale, it creates an elevated ground that could be extended & linked the open & green spaces between the riverside and downtown BK, which is disconnected by bridges and highways. And with its high-rise residential tower, housing block in the air, and elevated ground on top of the podium, the hyperdensity of the spatial volume it proposes is an imagination for the future of the urban area.
CRITIC: Jonas Coersmeier
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STUDENT: Alexandra Mae Adamski, Carla Liliana Bonilla-Huaroc, Xuanhao Han, Elizabeth Anne Heldridge, Tae Hyung Lee, Siyi Li, Grace Soejanto, Logan Bradley Weaver, Yan Zheng, Yang Li, Katherine Anne Lanski, Yi Lu, Yitian Zheng, Isabel Cristina Lopez-Font The studio worked collectively to transform the current condition of Stuyvesant Town, an 18 block territory in New York City. Unlike the modernist strategy of tabula-rasa to replace what has been previously implemented, we looked to fully embrace the permanence of the physical context and accept all that it has as a 3-dimensional site to operate on. What is there remained there to initiate the next stage of development. We added, subtracted, intersected, fuse, gutted, grew, bridged the existing typology to produce new masses, new characters. Each student generated a proposal in a self-similar yet specific portion of the complex with their self-generated housing agenda to create a heterogeneous urban assembly. This required a strong communication and coordination among each member of the studio who were working on adjacent territories. The collective effort of the studio seeked to define a prototypical urban densification strategy for this mega-block. Of the spatial volume it proposes is an imagination for the future of the urban area, which densifies the urban fabric to create prosperity and sustainability of the city. On the local scale, through analyzing the social-economical condition of its context, the project addresses the environment of tech companies in the area through its hybrid functions of residential and working spaces. The fluidity of this project within both the spatial organization and formal expression provides a new possibility of the relationship between public and private, living and working.
CRITIC: Kutan Ayata
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STUDENT: Ian Walter Pangburn Migrant workers from various countries harvest produce from the vertical fields within a new city infrastructure, able to tackle the needs of the growing city while also generating the financial capital to support their families back home, developing the county from the lowest income base up. This cycle produces an effective driver of domestic and foreign aid adding to this century’s global goal of a sustainable future.
CRITIC: Scott Erdy
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Greenhouse Agriculture
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STUDENT: Yi Zhang Cluster Housing is a high-rising housing project designed for refugees from Nigeria. The architecture of displacement often emphasizes the integration into western society while ignoring the cultural identity of the migrants. This project aims to restore the traditional lifestyle into the sanctuary city of Philadelphia, promoting the communication between the refugees and the Philadelphia citizens while respecting their life pattern in Nigerian habitats.
CRITIC: Scott Erdy
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CORE Fourth semester ARCH602 is the Integrative Design Studio, a culmination of the three successive core studios that build up in formal strategies, indexicality, and spatial repertoire in the context and scales of the single, the group, and the many within the city's edges and centers. The manner in which the exacting pedagogy for a complete architectural artefact replete with services and performance is threefold: As an integration of the past departmental curriculum, previous design studios as well as the satellite core courses are enfolded within the design pedagogy so that systems of structure, energy and environment, as well as histories become units of knowledge to be utilized. In addition to these internal academic courses, students work with consultants from the external world of practice. These engineers and specialists come from renowned offices such as AKT, Buro Happold, Arup, Front, and Foster and Partners. The atelier model of students working in design teams is compounded by periodic meetings with consultants specializing in facades, structural analysis, mechanical systems, and robotics. The consultants work with the student teams to collectively develop an architecture, to be represented for the first time in detailed sections and plans, elevations, and performance diagrams. Lastly, a Master lecture series is developed each year that assembles a bespoke coterie of leaders in the allied disciplines. Figures such as Hanif Kara from AKT, Marc Simmons from Front, Martha Tsigkari from Foster and Partners give lectures dedicated to the training of the ARCH602 teams. Each presentation builds upon the matrix of allied disciplines so that the design teams are prepared for each stage of work from site analysis, span, energy, and envelope. Given these channels of academics and practice, the students work within the polemic structure of each instructor. It is this arena of site, programmatic requirements, and the folding in of a theoretical premise where the above disciplinary strategies are played out. The resultant is an elevation of the default materials and systems of building to an architecture that holds meaning, social value, and cultural content.
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Simon Kim, Coordinator
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CUBOIDS AND CYLINDS: THE MULTI-SPAN AND THE THICK ENVELOPE CRITIC: Simon Kim -C o-founded IbaĂąez Kim Studio, PA & MA, (1994) -G raduated from the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association (AA) -T aught studios and seminars at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the AA. -D irector of the Immersive Kinematics Research Group
This fourth and final in a series of the Core Design Studio Sequence is to demonstrate adaptation of the surrounding curriculum in history and building technology into an architectural design For this studio in particular, we will divest ourselves from architecture as fictive machines, towards architecture and site as characters in interaction. Founded in 1986, Socrates Sculpture Park is the only site in the New York Metropolitan area specifically dedicated to providing artists with opportunities to create and exhibit large-scale sculpture and multi-media installations in a unique outdoor environment that encourages strong interaction between artists, artworks, and the public. The park's existence is based on the belief that reclamation, revitalization, and creative expression are essential to the survival, humanity, and improvement of our urban environment. Socrates Sculpture Park was an abandoned riverside landfill and illegal dumpsite until 1986 when a coalition of artists and community members, under the leadership of artist Mark di Suvero, transformed it into an open studio and exhibition space for artists and a neighborhood park for local residents. Today it is an internationally renowned outdoor museum and artist residency program that also serves as a vital New York City park offering a wide variety of free public services. But next to the Socrates Park is a typology invented in the past 20 years: the single occupant big box. This Costco is fascinating in its pretensions and social inaccuracy. We will take it down and reclaim that site and its large volume of programme for the arts and the community of Queens.
MADlab CRITIC: Nathan Hume - Partner at Hume coover studio (2008) - Editor & Founder of suckerPUNCH (2008) - B.Arch from The Ohio State University (2003)
A binary world has emerged full of shock or banality that are equally interchangeable. Within architecture this has forced a turn towards the vaguely familiar. The alien digital architecture of the past decades which was meant to shock through novelty has been replaced by a series of developing tendencies which uncover and reflect aspects of contemporary material, social, and visual culture through variations on the expected. Rather than a return to the generic, a state of multiple extremes can be explored to cultivate accelerated versions of the known by creating spaces full of elevated qualities which foster new experiences. A subversive space of contradiction resulting in multiple inner worlds unfolds as a critique of austere blankness or overt iconicity. Through calculated interference between geometric, textural, and chromatic qualities the work produces uncanny states of heightened awareness. Forms, materials, and organizations are not just cast against type but enhanced and reworked to fully reveal their strangeness. Further, a synthetic nature or an artificial rawness provoke traditional notions of the built world and its relationship to "nature" to shape conditions which reflect our current material culture. The studio will speculate on a center for MAD Food Organization, a nonprofit group founded by Danish chef Rene Redzepi. The organization includes chefs, farmers, academics, thinkers, and artists who work to expand knowledge of food to to influence the way people consume and connect with food. The building will be a center for events, classes, labs, and grow spaces. The center will be a think tank open to the public to expand curiosity and knowledge of food production and consumption.
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PERPETUAL MOTION -F ounded Gradient Design Studio, NYC (2006) -M .Arch degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, GSAPP (2004) -B .Arch from the University of Florida (1999) -W on the McKim Prize for Excellence in Design & the Sol Kaplan Traveling Fellowship.
- Founding Director Robert Stuart-Smith Design - Co-Founder of computational research group Kokkugia - M.Arch and Urbanism from the Architectural Association School of Architecture’s Design Research Laboratory - B.Arch and Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design from the University of Canberra
Hirst’s recent work: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, was exhibited at Palazzo Grassi in last year’s Venice Art Biennale. The gigantuan series provides an immersive collection of antiquities alongside photo and video documentation from their fictional discovery. In these works, the gallery is recast as a fictional museum. Reality is subverted, and meticulously detailed in high-quality crafted works that engaged numerous materials and trades. The studio extends Hirst’s fiction into architectural scale art that aims to operate as both gallery and artwork. Designs were developed as a series of interlocking artefacts that are to be sold off in parts after use as a temporary gallery. The temporary gallery is located on Flatiron Plaza, a trapezoidal block of land between 5th Avenue and Broadway in New York City that directly faces the Flatiron Building and Madison Square Park. The studio will develop designs for a non-serial assemblage of bespoke pre-fabricated parts that will be rich in detail, material and ornamental affect across multiple scales that aim to make innovative use of structural, and material principles from industry. These parts will extend Hirst’s Treasures of the Wreck Unbelievable into architectural scale work that will be utilized to exhibit Damien Hirst’s private art collection. The temporal and artistic nature of the work provides a challenging opportunity to creatively engage with principles of fabrication, assembly, disassembly and re-use as a thought experiment or investigation for alternative forms of bespoke art and architecture.
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For hundreds of years advancements in transport have been the marker of human progress by which most other technological achievements are measured. The future of transportation has been an obsession of countless visionaries throughout history. Their writings, illustrations and inventions have altered the course of just about every facet of human technological development. In the 1950s Walt Disney envisioned cities that centered around future transportation which included specific ways that would one day be accepted modes of travel. Amazingly, many of Walt Disney’s predictions from the 1940s for the future of transportation have come to fruition. These included autonomous vehicles, personal flying devices and tubular highways. In present day Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, is involved with the development of compressed air hyperloop capsules and is working toward space travel for the general public. Some of his earlier innovations like the autonomous electric car are already gaining wide acceptance and are no longer considered to be concepts of science fiction. New material sciences which are making enclosures lighter and stronger, use of alternate fuel propulsion techniques such as compressed air and super magnets, and the advancement of lithium batteries have all played a major role in the transportation renaissance that is currently underway. The electric car, magnetic trains and people movers, Compressed Air Hyperloops, drones, wind and solar powered cars and boats are examples of what is likely to become a ubiquitous means of travel. This studio seeks to explore the modern transport system through the creation of a hub to act as a major collector and departure point.
CRITIC: Robert Stuart-Smith TECHNICAL CONSULTANTS: Wolf Mangelsdorf, Andrew Lyon (Burohappold)
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CRITIC: Ben Krone
DAMIEN HIRST NEWPORT NYC
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OBJECTS OF NATURE CRITIC: Kutan Ayata -C o-founded New York-based architecture firm, Young & Ayata (2008) -Y oung & Ayata are winners of The Architectural League Prize (2014) - M.Arch from Princeton University (2004) - BFA in Architecture from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston (1999)
As our cities grow, the demands of contemporary urban life diminish the chance to explore outdoors on a regular basis. Certain outdoor recreational activities such as cycling, rowing, climbing, diving (and others) find new appropriations within the bounds of the city in the confines of constructed environments. While the degrees of difficulty and thirst for fitness can be satisfied in a utilitarian manner in these artificial terrains, what typically cannot be experienced in them are the totality, sublimity, and majestic qualities of grand outdoors. Architecture’s response to this interesting problem and challenge has been mostly a retrieval, where the architect is relegated to designing the shed around these artificial constructs created by “specialist experts.” Traditionally though, the discipline of architecture (as well as the arts) has always been preoccupied with questions of representing/ recreating/redefining/embodying “nature” through various strains of its histories. The two most common pitfalls of all such aesthetics can be summed up as follows: either the design aims for a simulacrum, resulting in literal visual interpretations of “what is commonly assumed to be natural” or aims for juxtaposition through absolute abstractions to posture against “the nature.” What if we explore this problem yet again, but aim to operate away from these opposite poles? What if we claim that we can produce specific objects that can begin to undermine our assumptions about the culture/nature divide? The studio will explore an indoor/outdoor rock climbing facility next to the Viaduct Rail Park in Callowhill neighborhood of Philadelphia. This piece of infrastructure was a railway which ran through neighborhoods, sometimes as a tunnel, sometimes as an elevated platform.
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STUDENT: Katherine Lanski and Daniel Silverman Mother Culture is as a living archive of mother cultures, aka mother yeasts, as well as herbs, and spices. This project acts as a market and production space and reimagines the possibility of the cohabitation of starter and finisher to procreate new culinary potentials in the realms of breadmaking, yogurt elaboration, pickling, and other forms of fermentation, with fermentation being an in between condition, between the raw, the cooked, and the rotten.
CRITIC: Nathan Hume
108 602 [M.ARCH] CORE SIMON KIM
STUDENT: Andrew Matia, Andrew Michael Homick An architecture of representation defined by being-ness and unto-itself-ness; and an architecture of episodes that mediates among environments and atmospheres. It is revealed in section through World of Worlds and World By Worlds. Further, a myriad of details indicate the sensate qualities of its architectural character that both questions that which is industry standard vs. that which is of a new standard.
CRITIC: Simon Kim
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Physical Model
SIMON KIM
STUDENT: Grace Soejanto, Yitian Zheng Derived from questioning the world of The Quick and The Dead, two distinct characters emerge. One chooses to expose its conic shape to the outside world while another hiding its conic among the cubes. There is this fascination toward conic that represent a space of solemnity in commemorating death, like those pyramids of our ancient time. The “Snake,” inspired by Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time, is clothed with corten steel finish.
CRITIC: Simon Kim
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SIMON KIM
112 602 [M.ARCH] CORE NATHAN HUME
STUDENT: Elizabeth Anne Heldridge, Margarida Gomes Mota A subvertion of the traditional relationship between “served” and “servant spaces.” This experimental prototype of urban farming combines a closed loop of hydroponic greenhouses, aquaponic aquariums, and test kitchen laboratories for the purpose of exploration, education, and entertainment. Formally, InsideOut is expressed through the intersection of light filled, glass shells, and more monolithic appearing rectangular bars.
CRITIC: Nathan Hume
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NATHAN HUME
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STUDENT: Yi Lu, Carla Liliana Bonilla-Huaroc Its greenhouse is composed of a grid matrix that contains within it a series of planters. This scaffolding like structure, allows the vegetation a volumetric nature, which lets it purposefully bleed into adjacent spaces and overtake the exterior facade at times. Within this grid, a series of bubbles contain the restaurant facilities. This layered space, broken through by this vegetation poche, blurs the thresholds between exteriority and interiority.
CRITIC: Nathan Hume
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NATHAN HUME
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STUDENT: Moise Tshilonde Yamba, Riwan Augustin Julien Heim Transportation systems are thriving in a highly connected world. However, the transition in between speeds of transportation methods needs to be hovered in one building, a hub. The Hive is thought as a highly connected transition node in between a hyperloop system, an amazon fulfillment center with drone deliveries and autonomous vehicles. Therefore, it blurs the perception of transport, moving people or goods in the same infrastructure.
CRITIC: Ben Krone
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STUDENT: Xiaoyu Duan, Yan Zheng Bike Hub poses as the foot of a bridge connecting the Red Hook neighborhood and Governors Island. The bike hub and the bridge are proposed based on the established City Bike and shared bike system in these two places. The hub contains various relating programs including bike reparation, bike shops, cafe, bike storage and exhibition areas responding to the current integration of bike culture and other mainstream cultures in New York.
CRITIC: Ben Krone
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BEN KRONE
120 602 [M.ARCH] CORE ROBERT STUART-SMITH
STUDENT: Shih-Kai Lin, Ian Walter Pangburn The gallery exterior connects these discrete cast bronze fragments using a curve-folded steel sheet structure that is materially and structurally efficient while aesthetically contrasting and complimentary to the cast fragments. The building will serve as a gallery for ten years before being broken into volumetric bespoke fragments that will be sold of as artworks themselves, each embodying part of the Leviathan sculpture.
CRITIC: Robert Stuart-Smith
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ROBERT STUART-SMITH
122 602 [M.ARCH] CORE ROBERT STUART-SMITH
STUDENT: Mohamed Ali, Gwan Sook Kim The interior comprises of a ground floor open foyer, cafe and some exhibition spaces that sit underneath the belly of snake-like volumes that hover above. This space is dark and compressive in nature, and designed to entice the visitor to enter into a more reclusive set of volumes that rise up above the ground floor which contain a collection of works from The Wreck of the Unbelievable.
CRITIC: Robert Stuart-Smith
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ROBERT STUART-SMITH
124 602 [M.ARCH] CORE KUTAN AYATA
STUDENT: Ariel Nicolas Cooke-Zamora, Kurt Alexander Nelson The project is composed of a forest of concrete cones which are vicariously connected through intersections of a normative volume. The form is defined by a third reading of these connections. The simple act of climbing has an intricate set of operations and elements embedded within it. The building exerts force on the climber on all levels of interaction, driven by its mass, spaces, and materiality.
CRITIC: Kutan Ayata
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KUTAN AYATA
126 602 [M.ARCH] CORE KUTAN AYATA
STUDENT: Yi Zhu, Zehua Qi The project suggests climbable exterior surfaces and balconies that not only makes the project a thorough climbing entity, but also creates the neighbor/ pedestrians’ visual experiences of outdoor activities. The striated concrete frame on the exterior blends into the board frame where the textural transition makes the project unique and bizarre. To enrich the interior climbing experience, various indoor climbing spaces are developed.
CRITIC: Kutan Ayata
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CRITIC: Scott Erdy
130 GALLERY CORE STUDENT: Logan Bradley Weaver, Alexandra Mae Adamski Transformation was explored through material studies that manifested in and on the building. Synthetic and organic hybridization were explored, as well as deconstruction and reconstruction matter produced defamiliarized results.
CRITIC: Simon Kim
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STUDENT: Xiaoyu Duan, Yan Zheng Reference. page 116
CRITIC: Ben Krone
134 GALLERY CORE STUDENT: Yi Lu, Carla Liliana Bonilla-Huaroc Reference. page 112
CRITIC: Nathan Hume
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136 GALLERY CORE STUDENT: Tae Hyung Lee Reference. page 92
CRITIC: Kutan Ayata
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Advanced'' 706 [THESIS]
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Introduction by Winka Dubbeldam Introduction by Ferda kolatan Introduction by Annette Fiero
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MASTER STUDIO ARCH701 is the third year elective Design-Research studio that focusses on the superblock, not only as object, but as urban innovator in order to move beyond traditional planning. The superblock is a new model of mobility that restructures the typical urban road network. With its implementation, superblocks provide solutions to the main problems of urban mobility and improve both the availability and quality of the public space for pedestrian traffic. It is in this interface between the micro and the macro that a different mode of operation can be found, thus avoiding the prevailing structure and allowing space for new conditions. Graham Shane in his book Block, Superblock and Megablock, writes: Early block systems persisted in modern times as urban actors shifted from bio-power (human slaves, animals, wind and water) to coal in the first wave of industrialization and then to oil reformatting the block system yet again at an enormous super-scale. Only the early empires of China or Rome matched the modern superblock scale that in turn was nested inside contemporary megablocks that rely on global communication systems for their linkages […] The megablock and the megacity appear as the urban future, but a closer examination reveals many older systems and surprising scales nested within. Anna Pla-Català’s Studio “SuperBlock_SmartGrid and the Architecture of the Ill-Tempered Environment” studied Barcelona’s superblock strategy. Under this plan, the superblocks will be overlaid on the existing street grid, each one consisting of as many as nine contiguous blocks. Within each superblock, streets and intersections will be largely closed to traffic and used as community spaces, such as plazas, playgrounds, and gardens. Other studios with themes such as Ferda Kolatan’s “Real Fictions Cairo III: Mixing and Making” focused on two important neighboring squares and their adjacent spaces: Opera Square and Ataba Square. Robert Stuart-Smith and Masoud Akbarzadeh’s Studio “P2P Site-less House—Sculpture Habitacle” developed ideas for a robotically fabricated precast concrete house, a 1:1 prototype that will be constructed later in the year. Conversely, the anti-superblock concepts were investigated by several studio instructors. Georgina Huljich’s studio “Unusual Ensembles in the Rural Outskirts” examines how urban developments in cities across the globe grow at a rate never seen before throughout history and how our discipline seems to have failed to produce any underlying theory which could grapple with that which is decidedly not urban. The anti-superblock was also investigated by Homa Farjadi in “Manhattanism: A London Conjecture on the Culture of Congestion, or How to Avoid Global Architecture?” Given that in the new metropolis, the foreign and the local, the real and the illusory, the functional and the pragmatic, the public and the private have found new economies and interrelationships, they employed matrices of Culture of Congestion as a metonymic interlocutor for the spatial design of their project in London. These are just a few examples of our 700 visiting faculty, research projects, and collaborations, many of whom are steadily becoming part of our team of returning guest critics, always adding great discourse and enticing studios to our own renowned faculty. Winka Dubbeldam, Coordinator Professor and Chair
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MANHATTANISM, A LONDON CONJECTURE ON THE CULTURE OF CONGESTION OR HOW TO AVOID GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE? CRITIC: Homa Farjadi TA: Pierandrea Angius
HOMA FARJADI
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-P rincipal of Farjadi Architects (1987) -R eceived a Graduate Diploma from the AA School of Architecture in London and an M.Arch with distinction from Tehran University -T he work of her office has been exhibited and published internationally.
On the ground with London at our feet and Delirious New York in hand the studio will consider alternative methods for the projection of architecture in London. Why, you might ask, such displacing overlap of ideas and realities? and why now? Here are two reasons: 1- Manhattanism, formulated in Delirious New York, offers a structural prototype for research into culture of congestion, a potential blue print for matrices and alternatives to global architecture and life style in Global cities. 2- Post-Brexit London is a global city at the brink of its own cultural re-description—beyond its financial bravado if not architectural bravura— ready for a reassessment of its urban architecture. DELIRIOUS NEW YORK, MANHATTANISM In 1978 Rem Koolhaas remapped Manhattan’s architecture to offer a theoretical ground for Manhattanism in his now classic Delirious New York. He called the text a “retrospective manifesto” formulating a theory for Manhattan’s urbanism produced through the revolutionary life style he called “culture of congestion at all possible levels.” The text analyzed the history of how new Technology, island geography and high finance propped by ferocity of competition, delirium of cultural pleasure and bottom line generated the fabric of the new metropolis. Through its metaphoric planning, the architecture and the psychological make up of such cultural desirables such as Lobotomy, Schism, the Elevator, Automonuments, City within the city, Venice system of solitudes, etc. are articulated in the urban components and architecture of the city. Bottom up and Top down city intersect in the development of chapters on Coney Island, the Grid, Central Park, the Skyscraper, the 1916 Zoning law. Projects for Downtown Athletic club, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, The Empire Estate building, the Rockefeller Center, the Lincoln center, the United
Nations are identified as key blocks of his text for the city. In Delirious New York, we have a research whose textual building blocks mirror the building blocks of the city. For our project the strategic makeup of the book is as important as the makeup of the city it describes. The text partly employs the surrealist critical paranoid method whereby the montage of elements is glued together through critical analysis of formation of each project. Here commercial intentions and metaphoric desirables accumulate to set up independent worlds between inside and outside of buildings, or between infrastructure, technology, and symbolic desirables. This is not just a city of planning good intentions but one which accumulates metaphoric ideals and commercial bottom line in the same stroke. LONDON Global Finance City: London planning and buildings at this globalized moment, is affected by the city buildings becoming an investment vehicle for the world. The London Archipelago: Prehistory of urbanism in London can be described as an accumulation of parallel towns, an archipelago of islands developed in contiguous configurations making up the larger capital. The structure of aristocratic estates, administrative borough councils, real estate development, planning codes and processes, beyond infrastructural buildings, create cultural and legislative island configurations with different degrees of influence, order, control, and freedom. No matter the historic presence of the government, the aristocracy the church/ parishes and trade and infrastructure, various parts of the larger city have developed without a masterplan. Yet specific areas of the city carried on to produce their own history and typologies.
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HOMA FARJADI
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STUDENT: Alyssa Brooke Appel, Portia Tinuviel Zeneb Poppy Malik, Joanna Ptak Our goal is a proposal for a boardwalk infrastructural system that stitches, transports, and enables London's development on an urban scale over time; an urban artifact that becomes a continuum for the city as a “unplanned” growth within the city through its ability to develop programmatic and occupy-able spaces. We looked to the boardwalk—as it is a cut in the relationship between city and its waterfront disrupting normative relationships and everyday life. Using infrastructure as a backbone, the proposal has responsive potential if there is a need for new economies, social constructions, political situations and opportunisms. It can be a pleasure-scape that connects, but becomes a place in itself, a leisurely continuum through the city and for the city with pattern as a placing and scalar planning mechanism.
CRITIC: Homa Farjadi Pierandrea Angius
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STUDENT: Meari Kim, Xi Chen Our team aims to have Coney Island as a new future urbanism on Thames River in London and apply "Manhattanism" near Canary Wharf, London. Coney Island was a full of fantasy and desire for Manhattan residents who wanted to escape from their metropolitan lives. Its artificiality became an Attraction and Pleasure. Through fantastic technology, Coney Island was the place for the fulfillment of desire and pleasure.
CRITIC: Homa Farjadi Pierandrea Angius
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SUPERBLOCK_SMARTGRID AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ILL-TEMPERED ENVIRONMENT CRITIC: Anna Pla-Català TA: Matthew Mayberry
ANNA PLA CATALÀ
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Anna Pla-Català graduated at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London (Hons Finalist) and holds a M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation from Columbia University of New York (Fulbright). She worked at Foster and Partners in London and Eisenman Architects in New York before setting her own private practice in Barcelona where she is registered (COAC). APC_Studio is an architecture office focused on the research and development of models of higher integration between advanced digital technologies and everyday architectural production, from its conception to its construction on site.
The research focused on the “SuperBlock” as a new urban model, increasingly being proposed by many cities worldwide in order to reduce vehicular traffic, low-carbon pollution and re-distribute public and private space according to more sustainable and equity-based criteria. A pioneer city in the field, Barcelona implemented its first Superblock pilot project during the spring of 2017, and plans to further implement 503 additional SuperBlocks across its urban extension during 2018. This makes it a hyper-critical case study with space for creative speculation about the potential it offers, simultaneously at the scales of urban landscape, the urban block and the building itself. The SuperBlock as an urban type restructures the road network set up by the Cerdà Grid in 1859, condensing nine traditional urban blocks into a single SuperBlock covering an approximate extension of 16 Hectares with a 2.65 FAR index. The inside of the perimeter is closed to motorized vehicles and street parking, improving both the availability and quality of the public area for pedestrian use in order to enhance social cohesion and increase economic activity while reducing the environmental impact of vehicles. In essence, it is a “small town” with a population of 5000/ 6000 inhabitants that needs to take into consideration the challenges of this turn of a century and take Cerdà’s philosophy forward by making it live within and for the ecosystem. PROTOBLOCK: URBAN ECOLOGY Such a renewed version of the Gridiron Plan and the “9-Square Grid” as a relational tool is what built the premise for this Studio’s research: How
to instrumentalize the SuperBlock as contemporary urban prototype. The “ProtoBlock” proposes highly abstract self-referential formations based on “part-towhole” relations. Nevertheless, prototypical design procedures have become prevalent today, because they are able to surpass the “kit-of-parts” problem and become systems of organization based on real time data articulated into responsive systems. The Protoblock as an urban prototype methodologically blends geometrical, computational and industrial processes in order to respond both to the efficiencies of serialisation and the flexibility non-standardisation. METHOD Focusing on the intersection of computation, ecology and design, we made use of analytical and generative design techniques to propose new procedures for city making that enhance the role of technology on the formation of new urban environments. In the Age of Participation, user-generated content overlaps with professional contributions. Data-driven and algorithmic engines have the capacity of becoming participatory tools mediating amongst diverse agents, organizational and productive demands and the management of environments, networks and information. ProtoBlock will be a test-bed for multi-scalar components with embedded intelligence. The Protoblock is a smart system within a smart grid that articulates climatic, ecological and productive neighbourhoods questioning the implications of ICT for the city of the 21st Century.
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Model - Xiaoyu Ma & Boqun Huai
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Elevation - Wen Zhu & Yiwei Gao
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STUDENT: Fangjie Guo, Tiantian Guo With the aid of our generative tool ”cellular automata,” countless geometries are derived at ease. the most desired outcome is picked. We are able to see a new aesthetic, spatial and material order within it. Besides deriving the massing of the project, flows of energy, pollution data and information are also collected, processed and fed back in real-time to on site Amazon data center for analyses. Then optimized data as well as material goods distribution methods within the block are suggested. The outer skin of the building near the main road is made of customized concrete sheets with rough and uneven in surface, to reduce the traffic noise. The geometry of the inner façade is also carefully designed to produces unique sonic effect to be decoded by the human ears nearby. It reacts to the realtime noise data, developing sound rays that bounce back and forth until dissolution, or complete interference. Moreover, artificial air purification system is installed in certain cubes on site as well to help filter air pollutants.
CRITIC: Anna Pla Català
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ANNA PLA CATALÀ
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STUDENT: Hewen Jiang, Yuchi Wang The project starts from the analysis of typical Barcelona living style—the use of exterior activity space. During the process of project development, several issues have been taken into consideration: Existing disadvantages of Superblock such as the reduction in traffic accessibility and under-use of new public space. The tools are developed according to the scales they work on. The urban scale tools take existing urban infrastructure into consideration. It creates a new urban fabric with less through traffic and more public space accessibility. The building scale tool maximizes the building occupants view to the public space, this is done by deforming building volumes and creating distinct corner conditions. The core concept of Superblock is to reduce traffic inside the 3x3 city block and increase walkability in the large nine block area. Then, increase the interaction between urban scale public space and the building scale public space including the rooftop, balcony and piloti.
CRITIC: Anna Pla Català
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REAL FICTIONS CAIRO (III) – MIXING AND MAKING A NEW DESIGN FOR THE ATABA AND OPERA SQUARES IN CAIRO, EGYPT. CRITIC: Ferda Kolatan -F ounding partner of su11 architecture + design, NY (2004) -R eceived an Architectural Diploma with distinction from the RWTH Aachen (1993) - M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia GSAPP (1995) -S elected as a Young Society Leader by The American Turkish Society (2011)
FERDA KOLATAN
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Today the word “real” is mostly used as an intimidation. The common notion is that realities are laws, which we can neither change nor escape. So I have to ask myself: “Is the real never found, discovered, encountered, or invented? Is it always necessarily the originator of rules?” Alain Badiou, “ Search for the Lost Real” CONCEPT Real Fictions, each year with a different focus, speculates on an architectural vision for Cairo that is neither utopian nor pragmatic. We do not aim to drop a phantasmagorical idea into the bustling reality of Cairo nor do we advocate insular problem-solving maneuvers. Rather, we identify typical yet unique urban moments, which already present an aberration from the intended and the expected. These moments or “fictions” withdraw from their original objective and meaning thus opening up to new architectural interpretation. Our goal, in Badiou’s words, is indeed to “find, discover, encounter, and invent the real” as a deliberate act of physical mixing and making. Real Fictions hybridize the old with the new, the infrastructural with the organic, the structural with the ornamental, all in an attempt to soften and reshape the hardened categories through which cities construct a realness governed by rules and control. OVERVIEW “Real Fictions” is a multi-year collaborative studio project situated in Cairo. Hosted by the Heritage Center, an arm of the Egyptian Cultural Ministry, these studios travel to Cairo to engage with the city’s complex architectural and urban challenges. Each year’s studio develops an independent project stringing together over time a coherent vision for Cairo’s future. Real Fictions—I was chosen by the Egyptian Pavilion to be exhibited at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. A comprehensive catalog of the work was also published. Plans were underway to submit the current studio’s work to the Venice Biennale in 2018. As part of the research a trip to Cairo will be organized during Penn’s travel week in October. PROJECT This year’s Cairo studio is titled “Mixing and Making” and is located in Khedival Cairo. It focuses on two important neighboring squares and their adjacent spaces: Opera Square and Ataba Square.
Opera Square once fronted the old Khedival opera house but lost its anchor (and meaning) after the opera burned down in 1971 (it was later replaced with a multi-storey parking structure). Ataba Square used to be a vital public space but also suffered after elevated highways sectioned it off. Just north of both squares was once one of Cairo’s most beautiful parks. But over the years Azbakiya Garden has been neglected and reduced in size to a shell of its former self. All these developments combined with years of carelessness have diminished the functionality as well as the urban and architectural integrity of a neighborhood once conceived to become the beacon of modern Cairo. Khedival Cairo was originally built in the 19th century based on Baron Haussmann inspired plans. The two squares form an axis together with the Garden, which was lined with luxurious apartments, offices, shops, and restaurants. The flair was distinctly European evidenced by the fashion on the streets and the rational architectural style. Khedival Cairo with its prestigious businesses and thriving cultural street life was planned to create a modern and secular counterweight to the older Islamic Cairo. However, after decades of infrastructural mismanagement, economic neglect, and loss of public amenities, many leading businesses and affluent residents began to leave. Suffocating traffic conditions, decrepit buildings, and a lack of usable public space characterize Khedival Cairo today. The studio will take on the above challenges and work on new designs for the space spanning between the two squares and their immediate surroundings. The designs should incorporate infrastructural, organic, and tectonic components and hybridize diverse elements from landscapes, buildings, and bridges into unique urban objects. These conglomerates should function in multiple scales, reflect the dynamic character of the place, and serve as a unique magnet for the revitalization of Khedival downtown. The final projects will critically aim at both the conventions of the modern city plan as well as the chaotic patterns of informal growth. Instead, strategies will be devised to “mix and make” a different kind of local architecture that simultaneously belongs to and estranges its own context.
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Photography by: Angeliki Mavroleon
FERDA KOLATAN
Photography by: Angeliki Mavroleon
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STUDENT: Yiqun Chen, Shuxin Wu Through a process of selective excavation and creative hybridization, the design transforms the old Tiring Building and the surrounding local markets with a reinvented water system. Used to be the glamorous shopping center, the site was part of the larger area named after the Azbekeya lake... The new water system is verticalized and transplanted into one corner of the old building, where the tower of the dome is located: the infrastructure transports water from the top water tank to the underground mechanical pumps and pipes; it becomes the central spiral axis the designed mosque, bathhouse, and water pods in the market plaza. The infrastructure, more than being displayed and fulfilling programmatic functions, is inseparable from the architecture and the city. The infrastructure is celebrated and shared by citizens. It completes the spatial experience and enthusiastically embraces a technological future with its new accompanying aesthetic.
CRITIC: Ferda Kolatan
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STUDENT: Ryan Mcchord Barnette, Jin Woo Lee Through a revamping of the existing metro station, the project was able to reimagine how a metro station could also become a machine that supports the growth of a park. The project hybridizes properties from the existing subway station—piping, pumps, and filtration systems—with elements of vegetation, in order to create a new type of garden. This new hybrid, one of nature and machine, is deployed as elements from the infrastructural station peel out into the garden in order to create various conditions for plantings to sprout out of. The new terracing on top of the metro station also becomes an extension of the garden with its pathways and fountains that allude to the nature of the infrastructural piece that rests just below. From the mixing of these mechanistic qualities with those of nature emerges an aesthetic which becomes ornamental, both naturalistically and mechanistically. Mixing and making new hybrids from these existing urban conditions allowed us to make a new type of urban spatial configuration that also mixes and borrows qualities from the adjacent plots of the urban site.
CRITIC: Ferda Kolatan
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STRANGE PERIPHERIES UNUSUAL ENSEMBLES IN THE RURAL OUTSKIRTS CRITIC: Georgina Huljich
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Georgina Huljich is Principal of PATTERNS ARCHITECTS, an architectural design practice based in Los Angeles which gained international recognition for its subtle approach to architecture; one that seamlessly integrates advanced technology within an extensive consideration of form, novel tectonics and innovative materials. With a decidedly global influence and working across multiple scales, programs and cultures, the office completed projects in the US, South America and Asia. Its work was exhibited and published worldwide and has received numerous prizes and awards. Huljich has previously worked at the Guggenheim Museum and Dean/Wolf Architects in New York and as project designer at Morphosis. She has lectured extensively in the U.S. and internationally, and has held visiting teaching and critic positions at several institutions including Yale University, UC Berkeley, Tokyo Institute of Technology, USC, Syracuse Architecture, PennDesign and the Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Together with Marcelo Spina she has been the recipient of the prestigious United States Artists 2012 Grigor Fellowship. PATTERNS Architects first comprehensive book- monograph entitled Embedded was released in 2011, followed by the forthcoming title ‘Mute Icons: The Pressing Dichotomy of Contemporary Architecture’ made possible by a grant from the prestigious Graham Foundation and to be published by ACTAR by end of 2017.
THE COUNTRYSIDE IS NOT AS EMPTY AS YOU THINK As urban developments in cities across the globe grow at a rate never seen before throughout history, our discipline seems to have failed to produce any underlying theory which could grapple with that which is decidedly not urban. Known as “the rural” or countryside, these areas are characterized for low density, low population and small settlements. Rem Koolhaas argues that it is precisely in the countryside where some of the most progressive and innovative aspects of our culture are being developed. Specifically, and although long associated with issues of the idyllic, the French countryside has been the site of experimentation of architects like Etienne-Louis Boullee and Claude-Nicolas LeDoux, for what is widely considered the beginning of the project of architectural autonomy. A Etienne-Louis Boullée: Cenotaph for Newton century apart, Eugene Viollet-le-Duc restored the medieval fortified town of Carcassonne, highly criticized during his lifetime as incongruous to the vernacular of the region. Then: Autonomous and Authentic or Historical and vernacular? The studio will look at the countryside as a way to conceive new ideas about authenticity and autonomy while embedding a strong historical, cultural and typological context. We will propose paradigms for development and growth in peripheries that incorporate architecture, landscape and countryside territory as a form of “second nature,” a man-made ecology able to be at the same time integrated with its larger geography yet relatively autonomous and selfsufficient from it. Along those lines, the studio will investigate the potential of creating a protourban condition, one that articulates a new sense of hierarchy [albeit a loose one], concentrated low density and a countryside interiority. La Cite, with its massive fortifications, is predicated on the lack of context to assert its unapologetic monumentality. As a studio, we are interested in this quality: overtly dominating and overpowering and at the same time modest and neutral. A form of character that relies far more on posture and scale rather than history and style. A form of countryside [folk] brutalism disguised in the sublime picturesque.
PROJECT & SITE: CARCASSONNE, FRANCE The project asks for the design of an ensemble of buildings in a historic countryside, a form of strange outskirts and weird peripheries. The site is located near the city of Carcassonne, France, and provides a remarkable canvas for investigation. The physical and historical presence of the medieval castle and fortress; the contemporary industrial context of the new city and the agricultural grid, all will allow the studio to pursue ideas of context beyond the known specificities of site, by understanding it as a larger cultural and a social framework from where projects can cultivate and construct new physical images. While decidedly not in an urban center, the site is bounded by history and its associated stereotypes, such as the need to maintain and preserve a local historic language and land use. The site comprises a large Chateau and a series of warehouses dedicated to farming, which provides the opportunity to operate on a hybrid ground; one that consists of the past and the future simultaneously. The studio will work on a “countryside ensemble,” consisting of a grouping of both existing and new buildings on a large rural terrain. The class will explore the construction of architecture not just as a formal whole, but as a figural patchwork wherein disparate and yet conforming styles, buildings and volumes will coexist, strangely. Using abstract and de-familiarizing techniques to instigate infractions on, and misappropriations of the real, the studio will aim to propose a new architectural paradigm for the rural outskirts: one that is comfortably at odds with its context and vernacular references as a foundation for its originality.
161 [701]
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GEORGINA HULJICH
162 [701] ADVANCED' GEORGINA HULJICH
STUDENT: Jingyi Sun, Xiaonan Chen Our program is to build a glamping resort in the countryside in France. We are supposed to build a glamping resort including innovation of a chateau and a barn in the site. We subdivide the site into different levels by different scales of 3-dimensional grids. The principle is also applied to the various elements of the farmland, glamping yard, and swimming pools. In this way, the glampings are camouflaged in the countryside context and also keep the intricate modern features. By pixelized both the site and the buildings, we unify the original buildings and the glamping in a whole system and keeps the autonomous feature of each part. In order to camounflage all the units into the context. We create four strategies: 1. Chateau renovation: Keeping the basic shape of the original faรงade and inserting glamping units inside. 2. Glamping units on the ground: Using the reflective material as the faรงade and vegetational pattern on the top. 3. Glamping units under the ground: Using the earth pattern material as the faรงade and vegetational pattern on the top. 4. A tree house.
CRITIC: Georgina Huljich
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GEORGINA HULJICH
164 [701] ADVANCED' GEORGINA HULJICH
STUDENT: Xueyan Sabrina Li, Sookwan Ahn Rem Koolhass's said, the countryside is the new playground for radical change. To further take on that notion, this project is challenging the norm and tradition of the countryside. The crops don't grow in the field anymore, instead they grow under the roof, over the roof and go throw the building mechanicals, in that sense, the building in countryside becomes a new medium between the living crops and existing infrastructure. The project is trying to define the boundary by constructing landscape, mechanical infrastructure and the architecture all together. In another aspect, this project is also trying to redefine the relations between the factory workers and the visitor coming into the site. By utilizing the distribution of softscape and hardscape, we intended to accentuate the threshold between where visitor can pass versus where they are not accessible. Overall, the project create a scenario where the machinic factories coexist with the artificial field nature that blur the boundary between non-human space and human occupancy.
CRITIC: Georgina Huljich
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GEORGINA HULJICH
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RURBANSTUDIO CRITIC: Iñaki Echeverria
IÑAKI ECHEVERRIA
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-A rchitect and landscape urbanist based in Mexico City. -F ounder of Iñaki Echeverria -T he firm has been awarded numerous high profile commissions, both public and private. - I ñaki Echeverria holds a M.Arch from the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, a Bachelor’s degree from UNAM in Mexico and Art History studies at UCBerkeley.
We aimed to Introduce the notion of intensive vertical farming as a potential new site for design, architecture, and infrastructure. The studio engaged global challenges such as water scarcity & pollution, land depletion and food security. This studio explored the old Tempelhof Airport in Berlin as a probe to transform the space of the city into a system of enhanced architecture/ infrastructure to create a landscape of production, culture, and public endeavour. Emergent conditions demand new paradigms in all fields. In today’s new world, old categories will not suffice: local vs global, modern vs tradition, science vs art vs engineering, city vs Landscape; all become too narrow divisions that need to be radically reinvented. The demand for high yield production within limited constraints of territory make vertical farms a feasible endeavour in the near future, both technically and financially. Avoiding the need for territorial expansion and redirecting to vertical structures that breed life, while making most of scarce resources such as water and energy, will radically transform the landscape that we know both in cities and the countryside. This opens the possibility to reconsider the space of agriculture.
It may become one no longer limited to production of food but a rather more complex construct. A site where production of aliment and culture within cities come together. This “new countryside” holds the potential to transform how we produce, relate, and consume food and ideas, to enhance our conscience of water, land, soil, and energy waste, management and contamination. A new realm for design, one where architecture, infrastructure, engineering, science, and art become almost indiscernible opens up. One where production, consumption and management of food, waste, resources, and culture become one. It withholds the possibility to enhance public health, and avoid unnecessary waste to sustain an economic system. Briefly, to our cities more balanced and resilient. Should this new landscape introduce a new dimension of public space, and if it can become more than just about the production and exchange of goods is both the focus and the design challenge of the studio.
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IÑAKI ECHEVERRIA
168 [701] ADVANCED' IÑAKI ECHEVERRIA
STUDENT: Yuchen Zhao, Siyang Lv A Seasonally Driven Center for Berlin’s Templehof. Our project starts with site strategy, we have two points in the site stategy, Firstly, the water system, according to our previous research, we found the plenty water resource in Berlin give us the inspira on to design a water system on our site. We hope it not only can solve some essen al issue but also could be a comprehensive and integrated design that provides dynamic and inspiring spaces for gathering, leisure and exploration. There are three reasons why we want to add a water system into our project. 01: Base on the face that there is plenty of water resource around our site, so we want to make good use if it and design a waterscape which can help the landscape in our site can unify the site with the city. 02: Find a new way to reflect and respect the history, design the water system by tracing the original infrastructure of the airport. 03: Water is crucial for our program, we design water system to provide enough water resouce for our project.
CRITIC: Iñaki Echeverria
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IÑAKI ECHEVERRIA
170 [701] ADVANCED' IÑAKI ECHEVERRIA
STUDENT: Kaiyue Zhou, Yunlong Zhang This project is trying to redefine the value of vertical farming from an urban perspective. Urban farming, to bring farming into the city, not only means stacking agriculture vertically in a denser space, but also means the possibility of new hybrid systems. These systems can collaborate farming with direct food production lines and hybrid multiple production systems together for a recyclable and efficient food production. There is two production system that hybrids in the park—sausage production and beer brewing. The architecture investigates how the juxtaposition of the programs of the two systems can produce synergy, and how this urban foo production can be joined with the city and its visitors. The park has an industrial factory inside, but touches the city with a friendly, nature inspired topography.
CRITIC: Iñaki Echeverria
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IÑAKI ECHEVERRIA
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GIGANTIC AMBIVALENT OBJECT VI CRITIC: Jason Payne
JASON PAYNE
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-P rincipal of Hirsuta -C o-partenered the award-winning office Gnuform. -W orked as Project Designer for Reiser + Umemoto RUR architects and Daniel Libeskind Studio. -P ayne holds a MAAD Degree from Colombia University.
CULTIVATING THE ICELANDIC GEOTHERMAL SERVER FARM Relatively sparse in its diversity of flora and fauna, subject as the island is to extremes of temperature and daylight, Iceland provides little by way of a cultivated means of sustenance…until recently. Iceland’s new crop, however, requires that we look past outmoded distinctions between the natural and artificial worlds to see that what is poised to grow now in Iceland is not plant-based (in the chlorophyllic sense, anyway), but rather a strange fusion between hydrothermal dynamics and information architecture. Server farms in Iceland are nothing short of this, tied in their development and rapid proliferation to limitless supplies of volcanic energy and the equally limitless growth of raw data in need of managed, secure storage. RADICAL INTROVERSION AND THE “WHITE SPACE” The inside of a data center is referred to in the industry as the “white space.” The source of most published research on white spaces comes in the form of white papers—industry—sponsored reports describing the state of the art of this specialized type of building interior. That the locus of knowledge on the subject should be found primarily in white papers rather than in more common sources of architectural research and development reportage reveals a surprising lack of attention from the larger design community for a vital, emerging building type frameworks, but that each corresponds to a very different meter (one to do with building structure, the other to do with server cabinet dimensions.) In this way, inside and outside are separate entities. We also know that white space design trends heavily toward distributed, flexible systems and this implies a loosening of centralized-grid planning. The trajectory toward increasingly complex interior organization governed exclusively by the demands of servers (heating and cooling, proximity to one another, length of data pipelines, etc.) only furthers the detachment of the data center’s internal world from its exterior envelope.
GIGANTISM, EXTERNAL FORM AND FIGURE Big, big boxes (usually white) dominate the landscape of the industry both literally and figura tively. As Iceland prepares for the rapid proliferation of such buildings in its countryside, surely our collective imagination sees more than white boxes which, for all of the rectangle’s merits, amounts to a generalized formlessness. Imaging the data center in the spirit of formal and compositional deviation from the norm seems both an opportunity and a responsibility for architectural design in this rapidly evolving field. Given the current obligatory formlessness of exterior massing for data storage facilities, much here is left to the imagination, but it does seem likely that a move from the vast, uninflected box to something else would involve featuring the featureless, subtle deflections over large surfaces, development of profiles both near and far (blur) and modulating reflectivity, tone, and coloration, among other things. The eventual form and shape of the projects should surprise us. ICELAND: STRANGE TRAVEL For our purposes, travel to Iceland using Google Earth will indeed be important, and some of this project’s most fundamental work foregrounds this vehicle and tool for design travel. We will also, however, actually go to Iceland to study at close proximity the ways Icelandic hydrothermal engineers and planners situate the apparatus of power within, around, over, and through their bizarre natural landforms. Theirs are acts of advanced mechanical/natural composition of real formal sophistication, assemblies of pumps and fumaroles, pipelines and mountains, power plants and lava flows, roadcuts, moss, gas separators, glacial outflows, server racks, solar arrays, and volcanoes. Finally, here, anthropogenic and geologic constructions blur like shoegaze toward layered composites, each sensitive to the other and both indifferent to former categories of origin.
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JASON PAYNE
174 [701] ADVANCED' JASON PAYNE
STUDENT: Gary Polk This project utilizes steam as a mechanism that gets re-appropriated as fog to shroud the geothermal data center, allowing the building to recede into its environment. The concept of blur takes shape to conceal the structure at different scales, through both fog and the duplication of seams, allowing the building to exist functionally yet simultaneously disappear, obscuring architectural turf with geology, and in turn creating an ambiguous state of gigantism. In the satellite view—arguably the dominant form of realism for iceland, along with the constant stream of air travel flying in and out of Keflavik—the building begins to suggest itself to be a hybrid cloud-like mass. On ground level, this building only reveals itself in specific angles that are constantly in flux, with the fog dissipating as one gets closer. Ultimately, the obscurity of the structure will cement itself into Icelandic culture, where the mystery of the strange object will transform into mythology.
CRITIC: Jason Payne
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JASON PAYNE
176 [701] ADVANCED' JASON PAYNE
STUDENT: Yunhwan Jung The building formation follows the site conditions, where the building comes close to cliff, it remains as Lyngbakur (Loose up) and where the building comes close to city, it starts to gain machinery envelops (Tight). Playing with these ambivalent exterior aspects, the project starts to gain life with Data Centers and Geothermal Plants. Speculating what kind of architecture programs go into this building is defined by exterior conditions of the building. Lastly, the project has two different degrees. First was exploring the Iceland through the satellite image; it gives opportunity for understand the distances between the landscape and city context. Second was using different formal languages needed to classify the building. Since this building is an infrastructure, it has the potential to serve both landscape and city. This building is not just a building, it includes the Icelandic people’s beliefs and the architect’s beliefs of a new type of Data Center with Geothermal Plants.
CRITIC: Jason Payne
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JASON PAYNE
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BOSTON STRONG: A COMMERCIAL, CULTURAL AND CLIMACTIC RESILIENCY PLAN FOR SOUTH BOSTON CRITIC: Matthijs Bouw -F ounding principal One Architecture -R ockefeller Urban Resilience Fellow, PennDesign
CRITIC: Kai-Uwe Bergmann
MATTHIJS BOUW
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- Partner at BIG - Registered as an architect in the USA (eight states) and Canada (one province) - Alma mater: the University of Virginia - Is on the Board of the Van Alen Institute
Boston has proven its resiliency as the cradle of resistance to British Rule. It was in its harbors that in 1773 the Boston Tea Party was held and led to the “no taxation without representation” motto. It is in these same harbor waters that new challenges arise with future storm surges and rising sea levels that will lay siege to the shores of South Boston. Bostonians have also proven their resilience to adversity and are inherently proud of being “Boston Strong” creating a strong sense of community and a collective consciousness that comes together whenever the challenges are greatest. Boston is also home to the world’s finest research institutions where innovations are produced every day and where multidisciplinary teams work on the cusps of discovery. This studio will tap into these great strengths —Boston’s independent spirit, its sense of community as well as depth of intelligent research— to create a commercial, cultural and climactic resiliency plan for South Boston or better known as Southie. This area, partly also named Seaport District, is undergoing rapid transformation as the growth hub for Boston. Already a mix of residential and office high rises, with cultural and commercial amenities along the waterfront, the area is attracting more and more development, the only caveat is that it is being done mostly on landfill. Much of South Boston is built on landfill and in the floodplain. While some areas might in the future be protected by a coastal protection system (there are currently studies under way), this will not be feasible for the entire area. Port functions, for instance, require access to water. And, as mentioned above, sea level rise might happen faster, and have more impact, than collective protection schemes can prepare for.
In this studio, we will look at the future transformation of South Boston, both from a programmatic perspective as well as from the perspective of resilience. As an outcome, we would like to design structures (or propose retrofits) that can adapt to extreme sea level rise, and through those designs explore how a district such as South Boston can function over time. If, as some of the fiction writers foresee, the city will become an archipelago of individual projects, how do these function in terms of energy, food, community functions, open space requirements and transportation? How do we design both for the city of today and for the amphibious city of tomorrow? How can the transition between the different stages take place? Just a few months ago, an iceberg the size of Delaware unexpectedly broke off the Antarctic ice shelf. This incident increased fears that sea level rise might occur much faster than what is now predicted; an extreme case scenario of the United States suggests the water along the East Coast might be almost eight feet higher than it is now. These ideas are becoming more interesting as we realize that whatever we design now in the floodplain might need to adapt to rapid sea level rise. And that while certain high density areas might have collective protections such as a sea wall, it is neither clear that our society has the capacity to collectively prepare, nor the resources to protect everything. It just might be that adaptation occurs on a building level as well. Bostonians have proven that they can resist, that they can adapt and that they can accept the challenges that they face everyday. Our studio will let you live for a few months as a Bostonian and envision what their future will be like.
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MATTHIJS BOUW
180 [701] ADVANCED' MATTHIJS BOUW KAI-UWE BERGMANN
STUDENT: Jia Lyu, Jieping Wan In order to achieve the goals of food supplement and accessibility, we took one street as a sample and studied the existing logic in both a single building scale, and between different buildings. Then we focused on architectural problems such as lighting, space distribution, entrance transformation, etc. After calculating the overall food requirement, we decided to add community farms in an atrium, balcony and rooftop; light is received from the rooftop; upper pedestrian streets indicate a more healthy, convenient and accessible life style. The structures allow Boston to become extremely flexible. When the ground is dry, people entering the building can access the rooftop by outer stairs. When a flood comes and water levels rise, floating decks rise as well. The handrail panels on each stair could be uninstalled so that people will be able to access the building after parking their boats. No matter how high the water is, people will not lose their access to the shops.
CRITIC: Matthijs Bouw Kai-Uwe Bergmann
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MATTHIJS BOUW KAI-UWE BERGMANN
182 [701] ADVANCED' MATTHIJS BOUW KAI-UWE BERGMANN
STUDENT: Yue Peng, Kai Tang The transportation infrastructure in this site is very complex, including metro line, bus line, high way, an elevated main road, and ground parking. These separated and unorganized transportation infrastructures could be extremely vulnerable in the flooding area. It’s high time to build a transportation hub to reorganize the nearby transportation system, sustain the mobility and adapt to future transportation use and needs during the sea level rising time. Besides, it also increases local asset value beyond solving the transportation problem during shocks. The site is close to the Sea Port, surrounded by culture centers, hotels, and offices. The transportation hub might gather lots of people to this area, creating huge commercial value and activating the local community.
CRITIC: Matthijs Bouw Kai-Uwe Bergmann
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MATTHIJS BOUW KAI-UWE BERGMANN
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P2P SITE-LESS HOUSE — SCULPTURE HABITACLE: THE DESIGN, ROBOTIC FABRICATION AND CONSTRUCTION OF A PRE-CAST HOUSE. CRITIC: Robert Stuart-Smith, with Dr. Masoud Akbarzadeh WORKSHOP ASSISTANT: Mohammed Bholsanni RESEARCH COLLABORATING PARTNER: Cemex
ROBERT STUART-SMITH
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-F ounding Director Robert Stuart-Smith Design -C o-Founder of computational research group Kokkugia -B .Arch and Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design from the University of Canberra -M .Arch and Urbanism from the Architectural Association School of Architecture’s Design Research Laboratory
P2P Site-less House—Sculpture Habitacle enabled students to gain first-hand experience in robotic manufacturing within Penndesign’s new Robotics Lab while collaborating with concrete company Cemex on the use of robotic hot-wire cut EPS foam as formwork for the casting of ultra thin, complex cavity concrete. Students developed ideas for a robotically fabricated precast concrete house that will be continued into the spring semester as a technical fabrication seminar, allowing the work to be further developed into the construction of a 1:1 prototype house that will be constructed later in the year. Conceptual design proposals aimed to orchestrate geometrical, formal and material affects that were developed in parallel through hands-on experimentation with Robot Hot-Wire cut EPS foam. House designs were constrained to 350 square feet. At such a small scale, the equipment and technical functions of a house are dispropor tionately large relative to architectural space, and can easily be too influential in many design decisions. The studio countered this by exploring design through the lens of Andre Bloc’s Sculpture Habitacle (Habitable Sculpture) questioning the functional and formal typology of the house and advocating for a non-functionalist architecture that leverages robotic production processes for design expression. The studio explored the idea of a Peer-to-Peer shared home that can be adapted to a range of uses. The suburban house has changed little since Levittown’s construction in 1951. Levitt & Sons Inc.’s first suburb offered a model of housing grounded in a social, economic and technological
past, one that leveraged mass production and advocated industrial and social homogeneity. While Levittown was designed for the nuclear family (a married couple with children) who privately owned their house and car, today only 24.1% of households in the U.S. support nuclear families. With the immanent rise of driverless car technologies and google-maps satellite navigation, the importance of the physical street address has diminished, with a ‘pin’ now providing sufficient information for one to arrive successfully at any destination. Such effortless mobility challenges existing urban models of housing by de-emphasizing location, and instead prioritizing travel time and serviceability. Providing a house can receive serviced deliveries, it could be located anywhere. With urban, suburban, rural, and wild land-use constantly in flux, there persists a substantial quota of under-utilized land available at any one time. There is a social and economic opportunity for on-demand real-estate to make use of this land, providing such ventures can operate without long-term ownership or utility arrangements that would involve substantial site-specific investment. A relocatable house might help alleviate temporary housing short-falls and by its nature could also provide a seminal example of sustainable design through its re-use of wasted space, and a DesignFor-Disassembly approach to architectural tectonics. While the motor car is historically considered an external object separate to the house, the studio also speculated on the role and integration of driverless cars in the home and looked for symbiotic relationships between the house and the car: operationally, formally, and spatially.
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ROBERT STUART-SMITH
186 [701] ADVANCED' ROBERT STUART-SMITH
STUDENT: Yunxiu Peng, Xiaoyu Zhao This project advocates for the use of a site-less relocatable micro-house for the temporary accommodation of the Olympic village. This DFD (Design for Disassembly house) offers a small footprint of 300 square feet, and is able to be configured into a number of different high density urban matt-building configurations during the Olympics. It would be repurposed and relocated after the games to other locations to be utilized as suburban or outdoor recreational housing, freeing up the Olympic site for other development. The house interior accommodates parking for a Tesla model X right in the center of the house keeping the area to a minimum by allowing the car to share the living room space rather than utilize a separate garage space. It is envisaged that not only would the car offer the primary means of transport to and from the house, but also share its power supply and offer its storage trunks and stereo to house internal activities.
CRITIC: Robert Stuart-Smith
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ROBERT STUART-SMITH
188 [701] ADVANCED' ROBERT STUART-SMITH
STUDENT: Ce Li, Yijia Wang A technique was developed to enable interior space and form to be defined through straight cuts that enable form-work voids to be removed from a larger block without damage. While this significantly constrains the design geometrically, it offers an economization of formwork by ensuring all foam parts are not damaged. This however, requires the intersection of multiple cuts to create geometric interest within the design. Although the design employs precast concrete cavity construction methods, the house design is conceived as a solid block of material from which space is carved out through multiple cuts at various orientations. The intersections of these cuts enables geometrical profiles for space, furniture, and fixtures to be intrinsic to the overall design expression and production technique. The continuous horizontal gap between the floor and the ceiling is also derived from the single incision line in which the geometrical studies were carefully developed.
CRITIC: Robert Stuart-Smith
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ROBERT STUART-SMITH
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SEOUL: THE SENSATE AND AUGMENTED CRITIC: Simon Kim
SIMON KIM
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-C o-founded Ibañez Kim Studio, PA & MA, (1994) -G raduated from the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association (AA) -T aught studios and seminars at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the AA. -D irector of the Immersive Kinematics Research Group
AGENDA Architecture of a city—as a proposition or a form of intellectual investigation—is tethered to a built, shared environment. Its implicit and explicit meanings and effects are to be developed in material and also in behavior over time. To do this, we will imbue architecture and urbanism with duration, with its own agency and self-governance in the location of Seoul. With new media and new materials, it is not impossible to conceptualize the built environment as a sensate and sentient field of beings. Our role as designers and as inhabitants is to coordinate and live in this new city and new nature as a shared endeavor. Korea’s rapid advancement in light and heavy industries places it as an ideal post-industrial model with an apex towards advanced thinking of new-environment and eco-intelligence. 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). We will consider the postwar projects of Gordon Pask, Nicholas Negroponte, and the writings of Timothy Morton and Gilbert Simondon, while rejecting the mecha-ideologies of Archigram and Evangelion. Architecture that is sensate and nervous do not need to look like giant robots, and projects based in Korea should not be simplified to an easy reading or cliche. FROM THE SEOUL BIENNALE BRIEF: If the term “Anthropocene” defines the global impact of human activity, the city is at the concept’s core. Although on one hand a ‘human-centered’ approach to urbanism can generate positive discussions on the quality of life, all too often it is used to place humans at the hierarchical apex of the ecological system. Therefore, rather than a holistic vision of the city, massive imbalances continue to degrade the global ecology; paradoxically massive social inequalities also escalate as wealth accumulation becomes a geopolitical game of subdividing the city as “real-estate.” In fact modernist planning classifies the city along functionalist lines of housing, business, retail, production, and the like—fragments that on the
surface seem to define human-centered ac vices, but in practice can easily be captured by power structures. Within this dilemma, Seoul has the potential to become a metropolis that exemplifies an alternate form of urbanism that challenges outdated modes of city-making. Poised between the ancient and the modern, its founding principles were cosmological rather than anthropocentric: Foregoing the idea of nature vs. artifice, human settlement was considered in a horizontal relationship with the basic elements of water, earth, air, and energy flows. Meanwhile Seoul has now become one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world where almost all of its citizens are “wired” into the internet as well as physically connected to every region of the metropolis through the smoothness of its infra-structure. To address the imminent ecological and social crises, we have the opportunity to rethink the obsolete nouns that segregate the functions of the city and engage the city as a set of verbs. The enaction of the city as a place of making, sensing, recycling, connecting, and archiving therefore can be thought of as a new kind of commons that has spa al consequences transversely connected to social and political reforms. These technologically driven action-commons also connect the contemporary urban to the ancient cosmologies through new forms of stewardship that preserve the very elements that make urban life possible. The premise of the studio will be to accelerate the urban growth with a new model of LAB / LIFE, which is a micro/macro hub of housing and fabrication spaces for 400 people. The area is well-disposed to transport and shipping, and the growth of integrated design and fabrication will be the experiment. We will develop behaviors and duration in architecture and ground, and apply it to a new model of LAB / LIFE. The scope of the work in fall option studio is the large urban scale. We will 1. transform the area and the river into a synthetic masterplan that is reactive, interactive, and sensate. We will then 2. focus this world into a proto-community of 400 people who operate and dwell in LABS: fabrication, wearable technologies, synthetic biologies, prototyping—any manner of making and self-sustained economy—and a marketplace to showcase and sell.
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SIMON KIM
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STUDENT: Kyuhun Kim, Yisha Li The architectural character of Water Agent is motivated by its innate thirst which dominants the logic behind its behaviors. These characters are wellsuited to collect and store water through unique mechanisms that in turn result in the creation of other-than-human environments in which they grow, evolve, and converge. Agents in a family interact and share resources in ways much like in the rhizome model. Different families thrive in different conditions, whether human made or not, and share conjoined areas where they evolve into hybrid forms among families. The agents cycle through various states of existence in both macro and micro scale, i.e. different components go through life stages independently from the whole, be it floating, drinking, aging, or gathering.
CRITIC: Simon Kim
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SIMON KIM
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STUDENT: Carrie Rose Frattali, Xiaoyi Gao The Pulmonary Cloud has the capacity to collect and convert particulates and solids from air for the production of two ecological fields of matter—the purified atmosphere and the underground miasma. The artficial field acts as an interactive place for humans to work and inhabit while the cavernous underground realm serves as a neo-nature. A place reserved only for the creatures constructing it and for evolutionary processes to develop over time. Human conception of a place merely for the purpose of new life to occur, could prove to be either beneficial or destructive, depending on the unpredictability of new technological beings. We no longer have to preserve a wilderness from human intrusion, nor should we repress non-human intrusion on the human world.
CRITIC: Simon Kim
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SANTA MONICA FREEWAY CAP CRITIC: Thom Mayne
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- 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.
The Santa Monica Freeway Cap studio will speculate on reclaiming the corridors of vehicular infrastructure to locate opportunities for redefining Los Angeles urbanism. By claiming the air-rights over the freeway with public spaces or structures, a new species of hybridized infrastructural typologies is made possible. Generating differentiated organizational systems and possibilities, freeway “caps” introduce connective tissue that simultaneously extends the urban fabric and establishes new cultural destinations. Several cities from Seattle to Dallas to Boston have implemented and tested these freeway cap projects to remarkable success; instantly, public parks and open spaces appear and separated neighborhoods are connected. As pedestrian activity is enhanced and normalized above the freeway cap, the future of electrified data-driven autonomous cars benefits significantly from newly
created “digital tunnels,” where power, public wi-fi and public information data could be supplied within a defined and semi-enclosed spatial matrix. The post-war urban landscape of Los Angeles has been fragmented and divided by the aggressive implementation of state and federal high-speed vehicular highways. National planning initiatives of the 1950s, with an intent to provide a fast and efficient network of transportation, brought interstate highways deep into the American city. These initiatives were heavily lobbied by the automotive industry as they eyed a virgin burgeoning American metropolis with minimum legacy of public infrastructure. However, with increasing populations and the environmental issues of carbon based transportation, the time as come to re-evaluate strategies and re-form the physical infrastructure of our transportation systems.
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does not have a border. The port and exports, thus nent.
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of cruise ship isnds are agents to nsion of the existan entertainment
THOM MAYNE
STUDENT: Shixiang Zheng, Rose Deng, Mingxin He LA GATE Los Angeles as one of the major port cities on the west coast, does not have a gateway for the hundreds of daily visitors arriving on its western border. The port of San Pedro to the south has a heavy focus on industrial import and exports, thus the need for a gateway for tourists arriving by sea becomes pertinent. Santa Monica stands as a natural site for the genesis of a group of cruise ship islands to welcome visitors coming in from the West. These islands are agents to convey tourists inland to various attractions in LA using the extension of the existing purple metro line, while at the same time also operating as an entertainment district, inciting the city of Santa Monica.
CRITIC: Thom Mayne
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STUDENT: Yihui Gan, Taeseo Park, Joanne Meng SILICON BEACH Silicon Beach Hybrid Campus consolidates and expands existing collaboration between tech startups and content producers in Los Angeles—enhancing Los Angeles as one of the top four dominant tech startup ecosystems in the U.S. The project reclaims the air space of the Santa Monica highway for development so as to sustain the growth of Santa Monica in facing of space shortage. The campus purports the cross-pollination of tech startups directly with creative content production industry in the collaborative work space. The design took a combinatory approach of integrating different autonomous systems to create a differentiated urban fabric that redefines the place. The scheme recognizes the urban forces that shapes the built environments and guides the distribution of the proposed open space, housing and office to contextualize itself and restitch the city that is separated by the highway.
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ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF DISRUPTION RESIDENTIAL HIGH-RISE IN BARCELONA CRITIC: Sulan Kolatan & William Mac Donald -P rincipal of New York-based KOL/MAC LLC (1988) -R eceived a M.Arch and Building Design degree from Columbia University -H olds a Dipl.Ing. Arch. degree from the RWTH Aachen, Germany -H er work has been published worldwide, notably, at MoMA, Cooper-Hewitt, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Barbican Art Gallery London.
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DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION First coined by Clay Christensen in 1995, the term has since become a popular way of describing significant innovation. It is important to note that disruptive innovations are not breakthrough modes that make good products better. Rather, for an innovation to be disruptive, it needs to replace an established type and shake up the industry. ARCHITECTURE AND DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION Can we replace the established type of residential high-rise and shake up the status quo in architecture and real estate by shifting the locus of value and reframing the notion of luxury in light of post-humanist, post-natural and neo-materialist theories? The goal of this studio was to test the concept of disruptive innovation in the context of architectural design. The disruption was aimed in particular at one or more of the following architectural concerns: natural, artificial, and synthetic building material design; combination of an esthetic program with ecological affordances in the building envelope; residential amenities programming beyond the tired formats of commercial and fitness activities; selective acceleration of emergent lifestyles through design; and, last not least, inclusion of non-human biological systems into these architectural concerns. TYPOLOGICAL CONTINUITY AND DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION Simultaneous with the theoretical inquiry, the students examined typological precedents. These were selected both from historically significant housing type examples as well as current residential high-rise projects that demonstrate new ecological, social, and technological approaches. Informed
by these two points of reference, students developed their own attitudes and positions toward the disruption of this type. BARCELONA: GAUDI AND MODERNISME AS DISRUPTIVE FORCES AGAINST THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT Barcelona with its largely intact historic architecture of Modernisme and Catalan gothic, offers a unique opportunity to imagine an alternative history for modern architecture in the 20th century. The studio referred to Juan Jose Lahuerta’s “Antoni Gaudi_ Ornament, Fire and Ashes,” as a lens through which to view Gaudi’s work and the Modernisme Movement as a competing model to Corbusier and the Modernist Movement that prevailed to become the adopted international standard throughout the century. In light of the studio’s agenda, students have studied this work in situ and to gain deeper knowledge about Gaudi’s unorthodox approach to contemporariness, his meshing of industrial production, with traditional craft and Baconian scientific techniques; the “flat” materialism demonstrated in his mixed use of precious materials together with damaged materials and waste; and his persistent invention and application of unconventional tools and methods instrumental toward the achievement of his goals. HISTORY AS PROLOGUE TO DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION NOW Students were encouraged to seek affinities between their contemporary attitudes toward disruption and the above-mentioned disruptive re-framings of Gaudi’s work to position their projects.
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STUDENT: Leetee Jane Wang, Marianne Sanche By Connecting to the body and not to an outside space, AR intimately reveals the slippery boundaries between space and matter. Their spaces bring about conditions that contradict the natural, compelling the viewer to reassess their interactions with the physical space. New relations between virtual dimensions and the physical world lead to the design of culture and ritual for a richer discourse on our shared environment. AR in the building acts as a filter allowing residents to experience streams of information in ways they can spatially identify. Simple moves, like controlling the shadows in these spaces, can add a temporal dimension to high-rise living, and residents can find different moments of calm and activity in them.
CRITIC: Sulan Kolatan William Mac Donald
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STUDENT: Yijun Wu, Jun Cui Our project not only depicts a low/lux residential tower for both locals and tourists of different staying period, but also serves as infrastructure of water circulation connected with neighboring recycling center, provide various water-related programs to both residents and outsiders, such as sauna, swimming pool, spa center, etc. The overall concept transfers the idea of the residential tower into a multiple-use infrastructured skyscraper. While still fulfilling the needs of existing incumbents, it develops new business model by making full use of its contexts/resources/spaces. The disruptive model provides people of different interests flexibilities to choose what they need in the city of Barcelona, fully utilizing water as a key element to fulfill high quality, healthy lifestyles.
CRITIC: Sulan Kolatan William Mac Donald
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The Architecture 704 Design Research Studio is an in-depth exploration of various architectural themes through conceptual rigor, advanced technological methodologies, and overall design skill. The primary goal of this final design studio of the Master of Architecture program is to equip the outgoing students with the ability to engage in the discipline with a specific research project. The interests and skills developed in this studio extend beyond graduation and provide the students with the necessary tools to become successful leaders in the field of architecture. The challenges for architects today are unprecedented with multiple diverse trajectories defining the territories in which we operate. From global economic markets shaping our cities to the ecological realities of the anthropocenic age, we are entangled in forces that are seemingly elusive, yet have a profound impact on our profession. In addition, new technologies provide us with powerful tools for design and representation, while constantly altering our work-flow and adding to a growing formal/structural repertoire. Since architecture is positioned at the intersection of culture, technology, and nature, we must continuously improve our knowledge to be able to provide sensitive visions for today and the future. Each generation of designers needs to find adequate material expressions for the pressing issues of their time. These expressions cannot be simply rooted in prior models of design, but must progressively and unwaveringly engage in the now, and engage the most current paradigms of thought. The Design Research Studio takes on this challenge and explores— through the individual expertise of leading architects in the field—various strategies and speculations that actively shape our environment, present and future. In this context, we view design-research as the indispensable element through which we critically reflect on our world, as well as the laboratory where complex design solutions are developed, tested, and applied.
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CONTEMPORARY DETAIL CRITIC: Ali Rahim
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- 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 studio examined the relation of the electric car to the office space by creating a Headquarters building for the electric supercar. We studied the contemporary automobile, its display and office space and mined each for its potential to re-invent a hybrid between working, selling, and servicing the automobile. New norms of detail emerged through the development of large scale physical models of facades using real materials that translated into wall sections, building sections and finally the overall form of the building—turning the design process inside out.
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The electric super car was selected because the automobile industry has traditionally been at the forefront of cutting edge technologies, new manufacturing practices, and material sciences. The industry’s leadership in these fields seems to be ever increasing. Over $100 billion dollars are spent on research and development annually. This far overshadows even the defense and
aerospace industry’s $22 billion annual spending on research. Over half of companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average profit from the automobile industry. There are approximately 5000 auto industry patents filed globally each year which accounts for three to five percent of all patents; this is truly the vanguard of industrial and manufacturing research. The auto industry has also been leading the charge in terms of material innovation, developing next generation nanotechnology that can impact many industrial fields. Nono-tubes for fuel systems, ever lighter and more durable nano-composites, graphene which is 200 times stronger than steel and as thin as an atom—these are all examples of material innovations which could have mas sive impacts well beyond the auto industry. We researched, documented and speculated on architecture using these innovations and paid particular attention to the detail.
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STUDENT: Yuanyi Zhou, Wenjia Guo, Mu Qiao We use faceted surfaces to create a faรงade with continuous edges, different elements and various materials. Different surfaces are adjoined to make seams, are stacked to make depth, are divided to make openings. And we use continuity of seams, boundaries, edges in two directions to make the whole faรงade integrated. Then we let the different layers of the faรงade stretch into spaces to wrap our three Jewels inside the whole envelope. The objects are main exhibition spaces, the surfaces are floors, and we also designed a continuous lane for supercars to run upstairs so that customers inside the building will see or drive them through, appearing and vanishing with various light and sound effect. Therefore, the exhibition rooms, the lanes and even the building itself become the space for exhibition and advertisement. We use matt steel plates as the main surfaces, and aluminum structures between surfaces to support the whole architecture. Carbon fiber are also used between the frame and the opening. As you can see in the plan, concrete is used as the material for the floors. Steel, marble, and light are also used on the floor to make the whole space vivid and contemporary. In the 1:1 physical model, structures are used between layers to create depth in faรงade, which can be used to let cars or humans pass by, which is shown in the wall section.
CRITIC: Ali Rahim
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STUDENT: Zhuoqing Cai, Zehua Zhang When we look at the Tesla car, we choose three aesthetic features from the car body, they are: layering, nesting, and interlocking. Then we use these three aesthetic features to design the headquarters with contemporary details. Firstly, we use these three aesthetic features to build a real 3:3 foot-faรงade model to research how to combine these qualities together by using contemporary technologies, and then how we can assemble these different details together. After we find the way to assemble the faรงade model, we just use the same method to design and build the overall project. The project shows a transition from the straight line to curve, also from the sharp part to the smooth part with many layers. We also design the interior road inside the building so that people can experience different space when they test drive in the project. With many contemporary details within the project, we just find a new solution to combine aesthetic features with contemporary technologies in architecture.
CRITIC: Ali Rahim
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CONTEMPORARY DETAIL CRITIC: Florencia Pita
FLORENCIA PITA
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-P rinicpal of FPmod. -S he graduated in 1998 from the National University of Rosario, Argentina, School of Architecture. -H er work has been widely published and received many awards. -H er work has been exhibited in numerous museums, galleries and biennals.
In the documentary B rillo Box (3¢ Off), when Andy Warhol is asked why he turned a common Brillo box into sculpture, he casually responded “because it’s easy to do.” He may have been referring to the ease in the ability to quickly make many screen printed boxes, but it’s safe to assume that Warhol was referring to how an everyday consumer item is replicated, compositionally stacked and is easily appropriated as art (fig. 1). Appropriation yields irony which is easily interpreted, but is paradoxically difficultto attain without an alignment of particular social, economic, and cultural forces at play. Architecture today struggles to produce easiness. While on the one hand it is operatively easy to make new architectural forms, complex geometries, and provocative representations, producing visual immediacy that simultaneously allows for unexpected readings and interpretations is difficult to realize. As a broader disciplinary discussion, the studio will engage with the topic of “easy” and “difficult.” Unlike Warhol’s boxes that work with the signification of a consumer brand, Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment (fig. 2) installation of blank boxes makes references to the constructive approaches to space and scale, disengages with signification, while also producing a false simplicity and easiness in its arrangement. The studio will look closely at Rachel Whiteread’s works as examples of ways to enact new readings of materialized constructs. The project will be the design of an office building or “easy office.” The studio will look at deferring the exterior formal agenda of the building to an instance of an interior condition. The studio will research the history of the office space, from the
pre-technological to the hyper technological office of today. We will look into the evolution from cubicle subdivision to the “home style” of today’s office environments. This shift from highly repetitive cubicle allotments to the domesticized interiors of the current times will yield studies on multiple scales, from the “open office” arrangements to furniture design. Rather than take on the subjectivity of the work space as a proliferation of individualities, the accumulation and assemblage of interior “stuff” will question norms of shared spaces and how a the interior is interpreted from its exterior. The studio will engage in a recursive 2D to 3D process where a banal arrangement of interior “stuff” yields descriptive flatness as a way of expressing an interior condition on the facade and form of the building. The project will be located in Culver City, where the fast urban transformation from a light industrial zone to one of mayor creative office spaces and also the headquarters of highly recognizable brands, has yielded an intriguing case study about the merging of the urban and the private space into an intricate singularity.
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STUDENT: Lillian Marie Candela Individual spaces form and denote themselves through texture. Textures are inspired from tin ceiling tiles and through extrusion and manipulation become floor pattern, furniture, or rooms in themselves. In some offices the floor pattern rises up to become lounge chairs, desks, and built-in furniture pieces. In other offices the floor pattern remains in the background while more traditional furniture sits atop. The rigid patterns informed by the tin ceiling tiles contrast against the amorphous forms of the sponges and mops. Inspired by the collages, the individual office spaces are densely and orthogonally clumped to one side of the office while the rest of the building is sparse—an area for reflection and relaxation. The density and rigidness of one half of the building contrasts against the amorphous sparseness of the other half. These two halves speak to one another and inform each other—creating a dialectic between one another. The pattern of the tin ceiling tiles as well as the nebulous shapes of the mop both crawl up the walls, timidly and discreetly. For the most part the walls remain unaffected by the drastic landscape transformation of the floor condition. Through floor conditions, textures and patterns spaces read individually without walls or typical architectural interventions.
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STUDENT: Andre James Stiles The Easy Office is a woven interrelationship of communication, productivity and inspiration. Within this fabric are interactions with accreted layers of successful and failed ideas, forming a sturdier, easier foundation from which the office can propagate and adapt its industry. By understanding and experimenting with collapsing techniques, the intricacies of the individual form begin to hybridize and create topographical anomalies; completely unique and difficult to replicate. In this idiosyncratic ruined landscape of staircases, inspired by the stacked layering of compressed bristle brush that express compact rigidity and delicate fluidity simultaneously, the office is defined by anastylosis fragmented cast monumental stairs and deep stepped crevasses which capture the elegance of the new dynamic whole. The stair is the key defining feature of the easy office, derived from the precedent of the We-Work office where a central staircase is the unifying entity of the many varied industries that utilize their spaces. Within this hyper-real environment, the stair takes place of all desks, chairs and office space, conveying the message of collaboration and many types of both formal and informal communication. The resulting and unexpected spaces between, above and under the staircases create a constant movement with a perceived notion of continual growth and progression.
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ALTERNATIVES TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF GLOBAL CITIES: A CONJECTURE ON THE CULTURE OF CONGESTION CRITIC: Hina Jamelle
HINA JAMELLE
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-A rchitect 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].
“The idea is not to live forever; it is to create something that will.” – Andy Warhol This studio examined pop art and its relation to the formulation of architecture by using digital techniques in an opportunistic fashion for the generation of growth and evaluation of patterns in the development of form. Digital techniques allow us to deal with the full complexity of material syste that lead to effects that are greater than the sum of their parts. Pop Art utilized imagery of the modern world; copied from magazines and other media, these images exposed Pop Art to the greater public. Pop Artists were very interested in the synthesis of the borrowed symbols, images, and characters into a new stylistic image narrative. The studio researched the ability to study and investigate which artistic techniques are useful to formulating innovative systems for architecture.
The artistic technique’s usefulness is determined by their eventual formation that includes material, space, atmosphere, program and social interaction. The ability to identify spatial potentials in buildings and developing innovative formations provide a more nuanced and architecturally sophisticated understanding of form. The goal for each student has been to evaluate the potentials of artistic techniques in designing architecture that flows from topological surfaces and spatial arrangements, and to apply these to a range of familiar architectural issues. The final proposal of each student merged out of an interrelated working method between artistic techniques, program, space, atmosphere, and materials tested via large hybrid material physical models that combine to develop an innovative new museum formation.
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STUDENT: Alina Mairaj Ahmad, Joud Saleh Baothman, Shatakshi Sharma The Infinity Room diagram operates by allowing the grid to behave as regular, repetitive, and precise—gradually fraying into irregularity. This allows pieces to swarm together—transitioning to a more figural surface or volume. We learned that in order to understand one of these conditions, the other must exist—that is, we cannot understand irregularity without regularity. This works on a compositional, spatial, and programmatic level both on the exterior and within the building. Additionally, this is also one of the ways in which pop art operates—creating something beautiful and thoughtprovoking through the mundane. For our museum proposal we developed three main programs: Artists Studio’s, Galleries and each operating on an independent grid and interrelating with one another. The result allows for innovation at the compositional, spatial, and programmatic levels both on the exterior and within the museum. On a programmatic level, given the importance of Miami as a hub for contemporary artists, we were very driven to more closely tie artist residency programs and gallery spaces—where there seems to be a programmatic gap. This, coupled with our interest in figural versus normative gridded space led us to conceive of a variety of studio and gallery types— some that respond to the grid more heavily, aligning themselves with the glazing behind the grid, others inhabiting more irregular space.
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STUDENT: Yuwei Wang, Qiaoxi Liu Warhol believed that the most common objects could be part of the artist's palette. Warhol’s thesis of taking everyday objects across the threshold to art inspires our Museum design—techniques of which was studied carefully through diagrams of his art works. Our Museum proposal connects two distinct experiences: a series of fluid, interlaced gallery spaces together with tightly interlocked volumes that serve as educational areas and offices in the museum. The threshold between these two extreme experiences appears both on the façade and the interior of the museum in two distinct ways: A high contrast between a black form on the walls, floors and façade with natural light from three interconnected atriums. The fluid interconnected gallery spaces not only allows a three dimensional viewpoints of Warhol work but also offers a “seen and be seen” set of spaces for art enthusiasts—that is part of today’s “selfie” society that Warhol forsaw. The galleries are designed as social gathering spaces breaking down the typical formal museum experience.
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ALTERNATIVES TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF GLOBAL CITIES: A CONJECTURE ON THE CULTURE OF CONGESTION CRITIC: Homa Farjadi
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-P rincipal of Farjadi Architects (1987) -R eceived a Graduate Diploma from the AA School of Architecture in London and an M.Arch with distinction from Tehran University -T he work of her office has been exhibited and published internationally.
With Koolhaas’ Delirious New York at hand and Banham’s Los Angeles to visit, the studio will consider alternative methods for the projection of Manhattanism in L.A. Why, you might ask, such displacing overlap of ideas and realities? and why now? 1 Manhattanism formulated in Delirious New York offers a structural prototype for research into Culture of Congestion, a potential blue-print in America for matrices and alternatives to Modernist architecture’s Internationalism brewing at the time in Europe. 2 Contemporary Global cities mushrooming from East to West, have created major transformations of matrices of the metropolis, its architecture and its life style. L.A. can be seen as next in line to transform what Banham described its Architecture of Four Ecologies to accommodate the architectural breeze from the across the ocean. 3 By posing the four ecologies to bear on the Culture of Congestion our project asks what will be the focus question for such an urbanism for L.A. if it is to avoid the mere reproduction of architecture of global cities. DELIRIOUS NEW YORK – MANHATTANISM In 1978 with his now classic Delirious New York Rem Koolhaas remapped Manhattan’s architecture to offer a theoretical ground for Manhattanism. He called it a “retrospective manifesto” formulating a theory for Manhattan’s urbanism produced through the revolutionary life style he called “culture of congestion at all possible levels.” The text analyzed the history of how new technology, island geography, and high finance propped by ferocity of competition, delirium of cultural pleasure and bottom line generated the fabric of the new metropolis. Through its metaphoric planning, the architecture and the psychological make up of such cultural desirables such as Lobotomy, Schism, the Elevator, Auto-monuments, City within the city, Venice system of solitudes, etc. are articulated in the urban components and architecture of the city. Bottom up and Top down city intersect in the development of chapters on Coney Island, The Grid, Central Park, the Skyscraper, the 1916 Zoning law. Projects for Downtown Athletic club, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, The Empire State building, the Rockefeller Center, the Lincoln center, the United Nations are identified as key blocks of his text for the city. Key figures and projects engendered primary components of the new metropolis are identified in the work of Hugh Ferris, Harvey Wiley Corbet,
Raymond Hood, Wallace Harrison, and later interjections of Europeans in Le Corbusier and Salvador Dali for the roles they played in the formulation of primary concepts and configurations of the city. In Delirious New York, we have a research whose textual building blocks mirror the building blocks of the city. For our project the strategic makeup of the book is as important as the makeup of the city it describes. His textual method partly employs the surrealist “critical paranoid method” whereby the montage of desired projections is glued together through critical analysis in the formation of each project where commercial intentions and metaphoric desirables accumulate to set up independent worlds between inside and outside of buildings, or between infrastructure, technology and symbolic desirables. This is not just a city of planning good intentions but one which accumulates metaphoric ideals and commercial bottom line in the same stroke. LOS ANGELES – THE ARCHITECTURE OF FOUR ECOLOGIES Explored through specific functioning of a geographic formation and economies of use in the beach, the palisades, the highways, the foot-hills, and the agricultural plains Banham’s Los Angeles and the four ecologies of urban form is re-described as an architecture. Calling them ecologies, he is looking for the new organization of space, new performative architecture of the city that can be found within the metropolis generated by the use of car. Random change, stylistically un- predetermined, functionally open, formally loose, un-democratic, pop sensibility propped by life style choices of the city form is under scrutiny. Against the prevalent historical dismissals of the random form of the city, he is out to find alternative yard sticks with which to gauge the architecture of L.A. as a megalopolis under formulation of its four ecologies. He recognizes the vast economies necessary to enable the development of such a metropolis, and despite its apparent undemocratic formations in the enclaves of Hollywood and the social exclusivity of its institutions, he is interested in the new, “organic” formations it creates and the openings it generates when the city is serviced by car.
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STUDENT: Joung-Hwa Kim, Chae Young Kim We brought the freeways into the site making “Autopia” like circulation inspired by Disneyland where driving itself become amusement. Cars, not people, become the units which can experience the space. Elaborate freeways can create topography of the site which can be led to the beach. And along the freeway there are elements that represents LA freeway culture including large parking lot where tailgate party happens and drive-in theather. And then the abstract grid is cast on them like abstract grid is cast on manhattan regardless of its natural terrain. Grid is placed side by side with no node and hierarchy. It represents democracy of city. But the grid is deformed and distorted by freeway road. This deformed grid becomes the road and parking lines and it becomes Manhattan island as a car parking building. Our design makes it possible to connect the flow of people to beach. Palisade Park, Freeway, Cliff, Pier, Sewer System are important environmental elements on the site. Sewer system passes underground and we use this water as agricultural water using purification system inside of the building. farming place and farmer’s market are arranged to attract people from the Palisade park and also neighbors. The freeway passes through the building, making elaborate circulation so that visitors can experience the whole building from inside the car.
CRITIC: Homa Farjadi
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STUDENT: Liangqi Song, Mengyue Wu The research and design of the project was guided by the concept of “Multiplied infinitum” and “The cities of Tower.” “Multiplied infinitum” is a theorem from 1909 that describes the ideal performance of the Skyscraper. Under the terms “The cities of Tower,” the Raymond Hood ’s proposal, would coincide with the highest possible tower on the smallest possible site. At the same time, the 1916 Manhattan Zoning Law transformed the envelope of the new skyscraper’s massing, generating chance for better sunlight and ventilation. Through skyward stacking each blocks in Watts district, bringing back the history of the orchards and farms in this area, to the city and intersecting it with the reconstructed high-rises. The green land is not some Corbusian of nature but an engaged work space for the citizens. Moreover, a new group community was created, showing a vertical repeatable space subdivided by roads and farmland, surrounded by residential housing and filled with yards and garages. Those pieces of productive agriculture land are brought inside the artificial world.
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ALTERNATIVES TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF GLOBAL CITIES: A CONJECTURE ON THE CULTURE OF CONGESTION CRITIC: Karel Klein
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-D irector of Ruy Klein -2 011 Emerging Voices Award, The Architectural League of New York -M .Arch from Columbia University -B .S. in Architecture and Civil Engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. - Donna Haraway Though some are panicking that AI is eventually going to replace human judgment, the more likely scenario is that human judgment will simply be altered and modified by the presence of AI “partners.” Partners, perhaps, because the technology currently classified as AI does not comfortably fit our ideas of what a tool is. Because AI technologies seek to simulate our own capabilities, to say that AI is nothing but a tool would imply that we are also nothing but a tool. So, counter to this idea of AI being just a new kind of tool would have to be the premise that AI is like us. Therefore, potential collaborators. This studio is taking the gamble that a new kind of formalism might emerge from the incorporation of machine vision and machine learning. Using a new class of AI software for combining and seamlessly blending images (convolutional neural networks), the studio will experiment with developing new architectural compositions and expressions that appear through an automated process of “seeing.” Though much of the initial experiments in AI research studying machine vision (such as Google Deep Dream) have been motivated by tool-making and applications, these new paradigms of vision are revealing an entirely new kind of visuality. That
is, a new visual style. Machine vision and learning appear to misalign or misinterpret precedents in an entirely novel way—setting up strange new questions about the role of historical influence on the production of new objects. With regard to this mechanized misinterpretation, or misprision, this studio has the ambition to extend theories of artistic estrangement via new technological regimes. The recent renewal of interest in Viktor Shklovsky and Harold Bloom suggests the ongoing relevance of the premise that creative expression is the result of a process of defamiliarization. In Art as Technique, Viktor Shklovsky argues that great works of art do their work by defamiliarizing normal reality and slowing down habits of perception in the beholder. Similarly, but with regard to difficulty of authoring great works, Harold Bloom asserts in The Anxiety of Influence that masterpieces are nothing more than creative misinterpretations of previous masterpieces. The new question, however, is how these theories of estrangement are to be understood when it is not the human author doing the reading or the writing, or the seeing or the imaging, but the machine? Or even more convoluted is the same question relative to a hybrid humanmachine author. The weird question of the studio is, how might a cyborg design architecture? This question should not be taken as a preposterous scenario of becoming a bionic designer as kitsch science fiction might like to imagine. As Donna Haraway points out, we are all already cyborgs. The studio will only ask you to recognize this and actively collaborate with our machines.
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KAREL KLEIN
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STUDENT: Amy Yuwei Sun I started my project by exploring the possibility of combining organic forms and mechanical parts. Generating from Neural Network image software, the results merged the two features seamlessly and give the result its own unique feature. The final image has a quality of layers and depth, and it also has the architectural potential, indicated by the horizontal strips that run across the image. The neural-network image was deconstructed to different parts and reconstructed digitally to restore some of its original quality. Those parts were manually merged and populated together to mimic the subtleness and potential of the image. The redesigned components become boney-like structures and keep the details and horizontal strips from the result image. To recreate the space, the original image was modeled and sliced into different layers, where the aggregation progress happened again and formed negative pocket-shape spaces inside. Instead of standing by its own, the new structure is merged into a historical building facing the street. The historical building gradually transfers into the new structure. Its ornaments become the details in the new structure and start to twist the floor levels in the middle.
CRITIC: Karel Klein
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KAREL KLEIN
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STUDENT: Joanna Ptak The following project explores the potentials of new formalisms within architecture generated through a collaboration between human creativity and AI technologies. Through the analysis of typologies produced through AI imagery—in this case the gothic and the industrial—aspects of estrangement and defamiliarization were explored: a program of a heat exuding thermal spa along the Schuykill River produced through the interweaving components and piping outputs of the machine vision. The interiors interlace similarly, resulting in interweaving horizontal and vertical planes that trickle down towards and into the water. The consequence of AI design produced a structure that simultaneously looks heavy and light, familiar and strange, grotesque and sublime.
CRITIC: Karel Klein
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HIGH PERFORMANCE: Staging a New Cultural Infrastructure CRITIC: Marion Weiss GUEST CRITIC: Michael Manfredi
MARION WEISS
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- Graham Chair Professor of Architecture - Cofounder of Weiss/Manfredi - Recipient of an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Architectural League of New York’s “Emerging Voices Award,” and the New York AIA Gold Medal.
As the demographics of theater, concert audiences, and museum members are changing, so too are the identities of musical performance and the visual arts, which are increasingly enriched through overlapping agendas. Simultaneous with this cultural evolution is the unfolding global impact that climate change has on coastal communities within the flood plain and near the water’s edge. If theater and music performance halls present ever-changing art forms in a cultural setting, climate change should affect the way we think of the interplay between the infrastructures of coastal resilience and the structures for performance and cultural resilience. High performance, a term associated with performance spaces that calibrate the simultaneous volumetric, acoustical, and visual demands of musical and theatrical presentations, is also often used to refer to highly resilient landscapes and infrastructures. While traditional expectations for high performance cultural spaces focused on distinct divisions across the arts, contemporary research notes that the interests and attentions of cultural audiences are changing. Audiences are defining culture in terms that are more elastic and casual, with less regard for the distinctions between high and popular art, or between for-profit and not-forprofit pursuits. New cultural complexes must now include new criteria for design and question what contemporary audiences—and artists—want in spaces for the arts. The alchemy we associate with our experience of the arts is also a lens we can utilize to recast the design of structures that address climate change. The typically hermetically sealed worlds of performance spaces and museums are
now directly impacted in coastal areas by the cumulative risks emerging from wind, water, and fragile infrastructures. On September 10th, 2017, Naples, Florida, located on the southwest edge of the state, was overwhelmed by Hurricane Irma’s 145-mile winds and torrential rains. Artis-Naples, southwest Florida’s premier cultural institution, is located in the heart of Naples and sustained moderate damage from the storm, impacting the operation of the museum and stimulating the institution to develop more ambitious plans for both its physical and cultural resilience. While the current campus is characterized by a cluster of buildings surrounded by parking lots, Artis-Naples aspires to illuminate the dual obligations of high performing infrastructures and a high performing cultural center that welcomes a broader audience. This transformed cultural center will include two new performance halls, a museum expansion, and an inspired car park. This studio proposes that the seemingly oppositional demands of high performing resilient landscapes and high performing cultural institutions can present a series of contemporary design opportunities. Without predetermined answers, the creation of this new hybrid raises critical questions: How can recasting the ambitions of performance spaces, museums and parking garages inform a new form of infrastructure dedicated to advancing culture? What are the systems that inform the performance, surface, and silhouette of this new hybrid? The studio will develop new design paradigms that explore symmetries between fully protected performance worlds and emergent ideas for culturally resilient infrastructures.
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MARION WEISS
242 [704] ADVANCED' MARION WEISS
STUDENT: Julianna Haahs, Pingle Li, Yisha Li This project explores new possibilities of high performance architecture by combining infrastructure, culture, and architecture. Naples, Florida as a site presents unique environmental and cultural challenges, including storms, hot sun, and isolation in private neighborhoods. To tackle these problems, we drew inspiration from past precedents of high performance architecture such as the Sydney Opera House, Khaju Bridge, and Carpenter Center, and came up with three site specific solutions: berming (earthwork) to form fortification against flooding, giant roofs to protect against blazing sun and heavy rain, and shared public spaces of different scales including courtyard, podiums, and roof top amphitheaters to introduce a sense of community. The project consists of four pedals housing three theaters and one museum, one central courtyard/lobby to connect all four major programs, giant staircases cutting through the site along two main axes to provide connection to surrounding neighborhoods, and semi open-air rooftop terraces to honor the tradition of sunset watching. The pedal roofs and wide podiums form an iconic silhouette that compliments this exciting new cultural and recreational destination in Naples.
CRITIC: Marion Weiss
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MARION WEISS
244 MARION WEISS
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STUDENT: Xiaoyi Gao, Haozhou Yang Located on the gulf area in Naples, Florida, there are two things that are abundant on site: the striking sunshine and the heavy rainfall. As well, the site is under the threat of being flooded from rising sea-level. In order to provide people with a space to protect them from the sun and rain, and provide a guarding edge of the rising water, we looked to two case studies: Berliner Philharmonie for its curved roof line along with its heavy platform base and Cheonggyecheon as a study for its carved space and various sectional typologies located in the urban environment. As a result, we came up with the idea of nesting a carved landscape space and high-performance roof together on the site to provide a journey for people to experience the combination of theater spaces and aquatic nature. As a result, walkways of various heights lay in the landscape to provide layers of experience with the water and the building, while also protecting the building from being flooded. Various theater spaces sit on a large ramp that connects them together, providing a sequence of performing spaces under the protection of the fluctuated rhythmic roof shade.
CRITIC: Marion Weiss
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HIGH PERFORMANCE: Staging a New Cultural Infrastructure CRITIC: Dr. Masoud Akbarzadeh
DR. MASOUD AKBARZADEH
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-D irector of the Polyhedral Structures Laboratory -P hD from the Institute of Technology in Architecture, ETH Zurich -M .S. in Architecture Studios (Computation) and an M.Arch from MIT
In the most recent assessment examining current infrastructure conditions of the U.S., needs, capacity, and safety, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) graded the overall quality of the U.S. infrastructures as D+, rated from A to D where A is exceptional and fit for future and D is poor and at risk. Most of the infrastructural projects in the U.S. were built in the '50s and '60s and were aimed to serve almost 50 years. Those projects need to be replaced immediately including half of the existing bridges in the country (The Economist, June 17th, 2014). The ASCE grade for the aviation infrastructure is D. Although aviation industry uses technologically advanced aircrafts, their receiving airport infrastructures heavily suffer from the lack of the equivalent facilities and organization systems to handle large passenger traffics. The most recent major airport in the U.S. was built almost 20 years ago in Denver and stays in the 28th place in the annual ranking of the top 100 airports in the world together with Boston Logan airport in 89th place according to Skytrax. Crumbling infrastructures will limit the U.S. ability to contribute to the evergrowing global economy of the future. Thus, reconstructing/replacing the deteriorating infrastructures is unavoidable. PROBLEM STATEMENT AND OBJECTIVES Indeed, architects should play a significant role in designing and rethinking the future of infrastructures. In response, this studio aims to research the formal and organizational configuration of the next generation of infrastructures specifically airports. The architecture of the future will be positively affected by technology: the technological advances in the transportation industries such
as drone taxis and Hyperloop will change our perception of commuting, transitional space, and the so-called terminals. The terminals will be the interstitial spaces occuring at the intersection of multiple transportation modes, and therefore pose an interesting architectural question for us: what is the terminal of the future? Designing such architectural spaces requires utilizing specific structures. In fact, the studio will concentrate on the development of non-conventional architectural structures that can respond to the needs of such spaces and programs more succinct than the conventional solutions. Therefore, the main research objectives of the studio can be summarized as follows: • formal structural explorations of the efficient structural typologies suitable for infrastructural design; • material computing research including tectonic studies on the design of structural forms using various construction materials and prefabrication techniques including as wood, stone, brick, concrete, steel, carbon fiber, etc; • programmatic studies of the future airport terminals including the integration of high-speed ground transportation station with drone port; and, • and finally the architectural design of the space to manifest the research.
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DR. MASOUD AKBARZADEH
248 [704] ADVANCED' DR. MASOUD AKBARZADEH
STUDENT: Mingxin He, Yangchao Ni The Philadelphia Airport Terminal E has 19 gates along three flexible branches, which increase surface area and have the potential to aggregate and expand in multiple directions to meet future needs. In the structure design, through a series of exercises about force and form diagram, a rule of subdividing surfaces in force diagram is found to transform a simple line into tunnel, which makes up main architectural space in the airport. Based on this rule, the form diagram of airport is simplified as three branches and transformed into intricate spaces. The overall idea of the airport is to provide a temporary dwelling space and a public space for people staying in the airport. Elevating arrival and departure circulation opens the lower level for airplane to be parked. The structure of gate is designed to accommodate different size of airplanes. With the up and down movement of structure, different leisure spaces with seats are designed to provide unique waiting experience along gates. In addition, the airport keeps transparency with courtyards, so people could have visual interaction with airplanes and the whole airport. Besides, the fluidity of the form is highlighted by linear faรงade system with lighting. In the meantime, courtyards could also be converted into interior space, occupied by restaurant or retail, to increase commercial value of the airport.
CRITIC: Masoud Akbarzadeh
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DR. MASOUD AKBARZADEH
Exploded Force Diagram
DR. MASOUD AKBARZADEH
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Force Diagram
Form Diagram
STUDENT: Yiwei Gao, Linnan Yu, Wen Zhu Flow-in is a reimagination project for Terminal E of the Philadelphia International Airport. The studio explores form finding through 3D graphic statics and creates unconventional structures that are in equilibrium. The specific structure merit of our module is the absence of vertical members and thus affords a continuous and spacious corridor surrounded by individual pods that are good for boarding. The overall ideas are to increase efficiency at security and baggage claim as well as to create a central axis that is activated both spatially and visually by activities and movement. Specifically, the overall site plan represents an aggregation of two module clusters, one as domestic terminal and the other as international. Each module cluster has its own security checkpoints connected by air train. Passport controlled passengers flow into the central corridor space which interconnects first level commercial spaces, second level waiting and, lounges on the third level, and air-train and administrative spaces on the top level. Passengers enjoying all levels are provided with views to the airplanes and boarding gates. Independent luggage conveyer system is below grade and is connected to each boarding gate.
CRITIC: Masoud Akbarzadeh
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DR. MASOUD AKBARZADEH
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ARCHITECTURAL AUTOMATIONS – A UTOPIAN PROJECT fully automated luxury communism and other contemporary tendencies. CRITIC: Sandra Manninger & Matias del Campo -C o-Founders of SPAN -W inning competition entry for the Austrian Pavilion of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo -S olo exhibition at the Fab Union Gallery in Shanghai, China, 2017
SANDRA MANNINGER MATIAS DEL CAMPO
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"In the absence of images of progress, there can only be reactivity, defensive battles, local resistance and a bunker mentality‌..Meanwhile, in the halls of academia the utopian impulse has been castigated as naive and futile" Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams Inventing the Future How can the architectural discipline engage in a conversation about automation in our contemporary world? In the last decade, the conversation on automation and robots in architecture has been primarily dominated by a discussion about the capabilities of the tool to facilitate procedures or to create novel formal vocabularies. Conferences on robots and automation in architecture profoundly focus on the technological
achievements, and the many variations of material formations that can be accomplished using a robotic setup. From stacking exotic figurations of bricks to fiber winding panels inspired by biological phenomena to the meticulous and precise forming of metal sheets with robots, the research essentially focuses on the technological agencies. These predominantly technical conversation just rarely touched on the larger issues at hand, as to how automation might change aspects of cultural, social, and political discourse. The studio Architectural Automations presents itself as an opportunity to critically investigate the role of robots in a future world of building, including the conversations on the impact as a cultural technique for the production of an architectural utopia.
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SANDRA MANNINGER MATIAS DEL CAMPO
254 [704] ADVANCED' SANDRA MANNINGER MATIAS DEL CAMPO
STUDENT: Leetee Jane Wang, Marianne Sanche In confronting the possibilities of an open-ended AI, contemporary fantasists hail the rise a cybernetic deity that can only be influenced through prayer and worship. A system capable of sensing and reacting to humans, other actors, and contextual changes in a continuous feedback loop. The Church of AI will no longer prioritize human experience, driven rather by autonomous subjectivity. Worship in this context would be the discovery and dialogue between the human actor and this process of building and unbuilding—to articulate transient formalizations of space. The church is a context disinclined towards utilitarian functionalism, its construction is instead meditation and communion with god. This show of devotion through craft is followed here in the church of AI. While automated assembly dominates the future urban fabric, in the church, it can be undercut by human craft. No-longer a waste of time and labor—the ultimate automation and subjectivity of the robot supports the ultimate customization and objectivity of the craftsman. Both working at the natural pace of the craftsman, ornamentation now becomes “conductor”—a way to unearth voids in this turbulent architecture.
CRITIC: Sandra Manninger Matias del Campo
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SANDRA MANNINGER MATIAS DEL CAMPO
256 [704] ADVANCED' SANDRA MANNINGER MATIAS DEL CAMPO
STUDENT: Mariana Righi, Sarah Elizabeth Nicole Davis If the use of ornament has been abandoned due to a lack of resources and the ability of artisans to produce it, then the emergence of fully automated work allows the design and the production of ornament in a quantity and quality that could not be conceived of before. Moreover, the shortening of the work week into three days and the creation of a universal basic income allow people to have more free time to develop their own creations and skills. We believe that the consequence of this process is the opulence and abundance of culture production in which ornament creation would belong. Spatially, we are proposing a centered and axis-symmetrical composition that contains small support spaces in the border of the plan and a flexible main space in the center. Aesthetically, we understand the contemporary ornament as a traditional, decorated and culturally rich object that can gain new significance when hybridized with machinic properties. The significance of ornament is no longer tied to financial wealth, but rather cultural opulence. Ornament now has a subject in the post-work human, and its political meaning rests in the post-work political program.
CRITIC: Sandra Manninger Matias del Campo
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AUTONOMOUS AMERICA: Towards a New Typology for Living and Driving CRITIC: Volkan Alkanoglu
VOLKAN ALKANOGLU
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-F ounding Principal of Volkan Alkanoglu | DESIGN LLC -S tudied architecture at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, Peter Behrens School of Architecture in Düsseldorf -M .Arch from Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK.
This course re-imagines the “futures of our dwellings” in the United States and is in search for new allies, territories, objects, and technologies which have either been dismissed, abandoned or never fully embraced thus far in architectural history. In search of new typology, it is mandatory to question current elements of domesticity, understand new social structures, discover innovative spatial alliances, apply new materials and project advances in technologies. A programmatic part of the typical single-family house, the garage, has always been an eyesore, or an architectural misfit to any comprehensive layout and parti. Stuck on the side, hidden behind brick veneers, disguised as an extension of the housing mass, the garage is the polemic of many residential dwellings. A car garage, when utilized as a multi-purpose room has proven to become places for invention (i.e. Nirvana or Apple) yet it takes on the role of a love-hate relationship; we do not want to live without it, however, we do not fully embrace it either. Part of the reason on defying the car garage is the automobile itself, or rather its technologies. A stored automobile with all its sounds, exhausts,
and heat conduction is considered loud, smelly and dirty. All parameters we reject inside our homes and environments. Yet, the car also showcases value, status and functionality which are expressed in the desired immediate adjacency of the car to the house. With new developments in the automobile industry pushing technologies towards electric and autonomous vehicles, we have now the unique opportunity to rethink the troubled relationship between car, garage and house. This studio introduces students to historic and contemporary dwelling and vehicle concepts and encourages to present innovative new designs across typology, program and technology. Students will be asked to reinforce the idea of research by speculating on potential living and driving scenarios. It is our ambition to introduce critical proposals towards new homes hybridizing automobiles and architectures.
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VOLKAN ALKANOGLU
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STUDENT: Alyssa Brooke Appel The autonomous vehicle of the future is a mobile space with architectural significance and programmatic potential, since the act of driving is no longer necessary. This vehicle design has room to sit and stand, and is controlled by a few touch screens that project images onto the glass. Really, it functions much like a mobile living room, rather than a car—you’re no longer interacting with the vehicle any more than you are your television remote. With this type of future autonomous vehicle design, the design of a house is changed by the need for a new type of threshold between house and car. Architectural airbags are elements of the home that inflate much like car airbags, connecting the autonomous vehicle to any room of the home. When your vehicle becomes a socially central part of life—the mobile living room—you should enter your home directly from the vehicle. Architectural airbags is collapse the typically understood experience of entry from car to home, and it more seamlessly reconstruct the actual function of future autonomous vehicles as a central part of the home. The vehicle of the future is functionally synonymous with the iPhone, and will dock on the home just the same.
CRITIC: Volkan Alkanoglu
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VOLKAN ALKANOGLU
262 [704] ADVANCED' VOLKAN ALKANOGLU
STUDENT: Xueyan Sabrina Li This project attempts to blend the boundary between the stability of a house and the nomadic culture of vehicles as well as the threshold of living and moving. The autonomous car is regarded as an extension of the living function, and is transformed into a movable device that houses different domestic function. Seeing the car as a room of the house, the project intends to build up the module system between the unit and the whole. The house consists of several rooms that are all relative size with the car in order to represent the idea of the part to whole relationship. The two cars that can be docked into the structure of the house function as two work station that the owner can also work while the commute. The language of the entire form grows from the framework of the car, using the framing technique to wrap every single rooms as if the car is also part of the facade. Overall, the car becomes an accessory that the owner can take it out as if they could bring each function of the house with them depends of their desire, thus living always equals moving, and moving becomes part of living in the form of architecture.
CRITIC: Volkan Alkanoglu
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DEXAMENI–ATHENS CRITIC: Cecil Balmond
-F ounder of Balmond Studio -S erved as Chairman of Arup’s European Building Division and ran the critically acclaimed design group, AGU (Advanced Geometry Unit) -B .S.C. from University of Southampton -M .S.C. from Imperial College of Science, London -D octor of Science from University of Southhampton
CRITIC: Ezio Blasetti
CECIL BALMOND EZIO BLASETTI
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- Co-Founder of Ahylo - His work has been exhibited and published internationally and is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou - M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design form Columbia University
This research studio investigates non-linear systems at both a methodological and tectonic level. The exploration takes the form of design research, which is 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. This semester, in collaboration with the Athens Water Supply Company, our studio investigated Dexameni Square, which is a complex urban public space at the center of Athens. The site has a deep history, with geological, infrastructural, material and cultural layers. It includes the archeological ruins of a Hadrian Aqueduct, multiple water tanks with rich architectural elements, an open air theater, cafes and other open spaces. This complex space acted as a kind of nymphaeum, as a settling, and as a distribution basin. The
project is concerned with the relationship of art and architecture, formation, and sculpture. The studio proposed a hybrid program between a public plaza, an open air theater and a museum gallery. Key elements of the programmatic narrative are internal to the development of each project and emerged from the dialogue between the artistic component and the architectural intention. Architecture is a singularity in the confluence of matter with time. The studio is in search of a new fundamental logos at once analytical and generative, immersed within and emerging from an environment through interference. Our speculative condition is that computation is not solely digital but omnipresent. With geometric sources from Plato and algorithmic from Aristotle, the project manifests as archeological fragments of possible futures.
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CECIL BALMOND EZIO BLASETTI
266 [704] ADVANCED' CECIL BALMOND EZIO BLASETTI
STUDENT: Khondaker Muhibur Rahman, Hasan Caner Uretmen Warnsdorf's rule is a heuristic for finding a knight's tour. The knight is moved so that it always proceeds to the square from which the knight will have the fewest onward moves. When calculating the number of onward moves for each candidate square, we do not count moves that revisit any square already visited. It is, of course, possible to have two or more choices for which the number of onward moves is equal; there are various methods for breaking such ties, including one devised by Pohl and another by Squirrel and Cull. The heuristic was first described in Des Rosselsprungs einfachste und allgemeinste Losung by H. C. von Warnsdorf in 1823. A computer program that finds a knight's tour for any starting position using Warnsdorf's rule was written by Gordon Horsington and published in 1984 in the book Century/ Acorn User Book of Computer Puzzles.
CRITIC: Cecil Balmond Ezio Blasetti
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CECIL BALMOND EZIO BLASETTI
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STUDENT: Shicheng Shen, Jung Jae Suh “The interference between a reality of Athens and mathematical instruments can present hidden features in present-day.� Hedrian aqueduct used to present part of the reality of Athens as a landmark, significant city infrastructure and secret dynamics underneath. Nevertheless, the antique infrastructure has been buried underground for decades and have lost its interference with the modern Athens: the well is caped, the swimming pool is filled and the ancient aqueduct is replaced by metallic pipes. The project would bring back the unperceivable aqueduct to the modern life of Athens, not only on the surface of the city but also enrich the civic and cultural for Athens. INTERFERENCE is desired to transfer the unperceived object onto ground through digital experiments and algorithm approaches. The project would go through three components: interference, media and noise. The interference defines perceivable and unperceivable, the media is aimed to search the container for the interference, and the noise is about how to generate, choose and utilize the interference as an architectural language.
CRITIC: Cecil Balmond Ezio Blasetti
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706 [THESIS]
Independent Thesis
In the final semester of the Master of Architecture program, each year a small group of honors students elect to pursue the thesis as an opportunity to undertake critical and speculative exploration of their own making. Building an independent topic or set of questions, they work closely with an advisor and collegial group of students and faculty. By framing and developing a project and methodology through independent research, the thesis project initiates a set of issues and methods that students may continue to develop as they embark on their professional or academic careers. (They often do so, immediately.) But while the thesis project is oriented toward defining students’ future, it also reflects on their past. By instigating their own project outside the realms of the more typical studio, students ultimately confront the scope of their education and choose to extend or alter directions in which they have been taught. The thesis at PennDesign is a self-reflective moment for both students, and the institution and its curriculum. The thesis project at PennDesign is conceptualized as an open work, that is, its scope is limited only by the parameters of the questions posed. The question, the thesis topic, is necessarily always a disciplinary challenge, establishing a relationship to ideas formally or popularly identified as architectural, whether belonging to the realm of building or the multiple discourses embraced within the discipline. The thesis project is also essentially timely: questions are posed to address current issues and crises in which architecture is implicated, even while often drawing on historical matter. Through the year-long thesis process, these questions are concurrently researched, elaborated, edited, and finally manifested in a work of architectural dimension. A thesis project is a work of craft, building a set of ideas into a final statement and set of conclusions.
advanced"
Annette Fierro Professor
706
271
M.ARCH
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272 706 [THESIS] STUDENT: Alexander Bahr
KUTAN AYATA
advanced"
PLAY OF PARTS THE WHOLE IS NOT ALWAYS GREATER THAN ITS SUM When it comes to the conception of architecture and buildings, architects constantly question its nature of and the reality in which it lives. Good architects conceive of, design and represent their works that challenge the preconceived notions of how a building functions, sits within its site and contexts and looks aesthetically. If this is true, then why do architects continually stop questioning the individual parts that make up their architecture, by which I mean mundane objects that surround us everyday. Simultaneously, as the proliferation of the digital is expanding the resolution and the traditions of tectonic expression, the relationship of the parts of architecture and the scale in which it is represented is becoming ultimately blurred. Along with that, the expansion of thought as “architecture as object” both present great potentials and great difficulties when it comes to the conceptualization of architecture and its parts. This thesis will explore these questions by looking at the most accessible and mundane details within contemporary architecture and exploit them to create new architectural opportunities. These architectural details or moments, such as gypsum wall connections, floor base connections, crown moldings, door hinges, as an example, will be given new meaning through an exploration of simultaneity in architectural form, perception, function and tectonic. More than just a pure hybridization of function, how does an architectural detail perform when architecture has qualities of two different systems but can’t be fully categorized as either?
ADVISOR: Kutan Ayata
273
706 [THESIS]
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KUTAN AYATA
274 706 [THESIS] STUDENT: Kat Engleman
EDUARDO REGA
advanced"
BLACK AUTONOMY A STUDY ON DESIGN & POLITICS In political spaces we often talk about the moments that “politicized” us. For many in and around my generation those moments came as a result of national wide issues such as the anti-war movement in the early 2000s, the 2008 economic crisis or cases like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in 2012 and 2014 respectively. My own politicization process, however, was a much smaller event tied to my family being evicted from our apartment in 2003 when I was 11 years old. Suddenly my understanding of space and the built environment had dramatically changed as we moved from motel to motel on the outskirts of town. What was a home? What did it mean to have space, enough space for yourself and your family? I would spend my days after school in the local library looking over architecture books trying to pull together floorplans for a dream house for our family, understanding in those moments that design could play a very critical role in changing people’s lives. When we moved from Southern Indiana to Baltimore City later that year, I began developing a deeper understanding that what we had experienced was a larger systematic problem. I began attending middle school in a building with no available drinking water due to lead in our water. We left school when it was too hot because we had no air conditioning in our classrooms, the buildings had exposed heating pipes, always were dirty and lacking in the same resources my school in Indiana, despite being the poorest in our area, always had. The more I saw, the more I started to piece together that the conditions of my surroundings were purposeful results and while I strove to eventually become an architect, I joined a community advocacy group in the meantime. I joined a local organization in 2007 and have been engaged in community organizing ever since, even while obtaining a bachelor degree in architecture and while in school for my masters. Currently, I have been working with a group in North Philly who organizes around educational justice issues and is beginnig to move into a larger place based organizing effort around electoral issues and community decision making. This thesis is an attempt at pulling the two strands of my life together via one final project in school.
ADVISOR: Eduardo Rega
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706 [THESIS]
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EDUARDO REGA
276 706 [THESIS] STUDENT: Gary Polk
SIMON KIM
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SYNTHETIC CULTURES This thesis aims to tackle the sphere of nonhuman culture within the realm of architecture. Nonhuman is a hypernym used to describe all entities, or objects, that are not human beings—be they architecture, animals, matter, forces, organic or inorganic. Simply put, nonhuman agency—the ability for these nonhuman entities to make decisions or to contribute to narratives—is a notion rarely harnessed in architectural design. However, in today’s world of environmental catastrophe, limited resources, and all consequences pertinent to anthropocentrism—the ideology centering the world around humans—there is now a pressing urgency to understand and invest into the idea that humans are, in fact, one of many. To this end, this thesis explores design from the ontology of nonhuman objects—harnessing the behaviors, mechanisms, and new spatial realms that can occur from human, nonhuman and all hybrid interface. Furthermore, it will explore the cultural repercussions of these objects—whether it is their influence on human society, or their ability to manifest their own culture or society by derivatives that develop beyond our control. The thesis will investigate the potential of interwoven synthetic ecosystems and the frameworks that evaluate these ecosystems, urbanisms of compound and hybrid beings, and study architectural homonculi with the potential to posses qualia, senstate properties and motives. Ultimately, it will suggest answers to the following question: Through what narratives and design strategies can humans co-exist with a culture of autonomous architecture—irreducible to people or to machines, but one that serves itself while interfacing with humans and the environment to create mutually benefiting hybrid realms?
ADVISOR: Simon Kim
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SIMON KIM
GALLERY
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GALLERY
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STUDENT: Alina Mairaj Ahmad, Jesus Fernando Elizondo Gonzalez This proposal brings together two typologies which cannot be more opposite in the social, cultural and political realm. It removes preconceived ideas of the authority associated with the fortress, redistributing it to areas outside.
CRITIC: Georgina Huljich
280 M.ARCH advanced" STUDENT: Jin Woo Lee, Irena Persis Patricia Wight The slipping and sliding phenomenon between solid and void is further realized through facade and structure. Sun shades provide a continuous and harmonious surface of the solids, obscuring program distribution and circulation.
CRITIC: Homa Farjadi
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M.ARCH
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STUDENT: Yi Yan, Siqi Wang
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GALLERY
An automated textile conveyor system, hybridized with structures of elevated highway and lighting system, was engaged to deliver goods. Systems begin to express how infrastructure can affect vendors and customers.
CRITIC: Ferda Kolatan
Reference. page 204
CRITIC: Sulan Kolatan William Mac Donald
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STUDENT: Leetee Jane Wang, Marianne Sanche
GALLERY advanced"
284 GALLERY advanced" STUDENT: Tian Ouyang, Jasmine Ya Gao “The ribbon,� features a spine that houses all the program, and a gate system that engulfs the spine. Passengers enjoy a direct transportation to the gates via the speed route system, but can also take time to stop.
CRITIC: Masoud Akbarzadeh
285
GALLERY
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286 GALLERY advanced" STUDENT: Yi Yan, Yiqun Chen We challenge the idea that faรงade, instead of just a single layer of skin, could it become an inhabitable space; the seams and patterns, instead of just visually satisfying, could it drive the design of novel interior space.
CRITIC: Ali Rahim
PROJECTS
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WHARTON CHARITY FASHION SHOW The Wharton Charity Fashion Show brings together world-class designers and student models for a night of fierce looks and playful struts down the runway. Models walked the runway wearing Michael Kors, Theory, Anthropologie, Uniqlo, Bloomingdale's, Warby Parker, and more. We are also excited to showcase work of talented PennDesign students enrolled in Danielle Willems’ course, The Function of Fashion in Architecture. All event and raffle proceeds go to YouthBuild Philadelphia, a local charter school focused on providing education and support to underprivileged young adults.
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M.ARCH
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Advanced'' 703 [MSD IN AAD]
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Advanced'' 708 [MEBD]
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Advanced'' [IPD]
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Doctoral Degree Program
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Introduction by director Ali Rahim
Introduction by director William W. Braham Introduction by director Sarah Rottenberg
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ADVANCED'' NEW YORK CITY GATEWAY Passenger and Cargo Terminal, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Airport, Queens, New York.
ADVANCED"
703 [MSD IN AAD]
This 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 Airport/ Distribution Center Hub for New York City. NEW YORK CITY FINANCIAL LEADERSHIP CHALLENGED In times of immense growth in capital due to economies in China, India and the Middle East including the UAE and Qatar there is more capital than ever in the world today. While monetary capital has always played a significant role in determining the built environment, recent shifts in the character of global finance have resulted in a new relationship between investment practices and buildings. This fact has resulted in 14 pencil towers that are planned or under construction in Manhattan. The fact that Manhattan has served as the receptor of global capital has maintained its status as a global leader. Now the city is exhausted with an oversupply of new condominiums. An example is 53 W 53rd Street designed by Jean Nouvel that came to market in September 2015, and is only 55 percent sold today. With its financial leadership being challenged by other cities including London, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo how will New York respond to this challenge? Financial capitals need strong economies and economies are changing rapidly across the world. The triumvirate of easy money, cheap imports and strong confidence catalyze growth in Western economies. New York City’s financial global leadership has been sustained by the culmination of all three. Today these are coming to an end, interest rates are increasing, low cost retailers such as American Apparel and Radio Shack have filed for bankruptcy, and an uncertain political climate have shaken confidence in the U.S. economy. All three components have threatened New York City as the Global financial capital. AIRPORTS More specifically, this studio speculates that a new airport typology can help sustain New York City’s financial global leadership in the world. To maintain its leadership, export opportunities to and in developing economies are more likely to fuel growth. In addition there are new opportunities driven by technology and growth opportunities in the emerging markets. Long haul flights are needed and there is an increased demand from travelers flying to Asia and other emerging markets. Airports should negotiate these growth opportunities with more luxurious and efficient travel experiences. At the same time the rise of a technologically driven retail giants such as Amazon uses distribution networks that channel materials and goods to remote locations that are delivered through existing delivery networks including DHL, USPS, UPS and FedEx. Price Water-house Coopers indicates that currently 90 percent of global trade flows through 39 airports and states that global trade is set to increase rapidly. The cities that become the most important of these gateway regions will thrive. U.S. retail will benefit with an efficient hub accessible directly from New York City establishing it as the leader of cargo nationally and internationally. Currently JFK is ranked 16th in the world with the number of travelers that move through the airport each year and 21st in cargo traffic. Other cities vying for global leadership are ranked much higher in passenger and cargo traffic. Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Dubai are all in the top eight in both passenger and cargo traffic. The airport terminal that deals with passengers and cargo will contribute towards reducing the disparity between cities vying for financial global leadership and New York
703 CRITICS: Ali Rahim Ezio Blasetti Brian Deluna Nathan Hume
SITE VISITS TO NEW YORK CITY We will tour New York four times during the semester to gain familiarity with the issues that New York must negotiate at an urban scale as well as tour its architectural development and facility tours of distribution facilities if possible. These tours will be supplemented by lectures on airports by leading structural engineer’s as well as people in finance and development of the city.
ADVANCED"
A GATEWAY FOR PASSENGERS AND CARGO, JAMAICA, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY The site is at John F Kennedy Airport. In particular we are designing a new Gateway Hub which is the entry sequence to the airport and combining it with a cargo terminal developing a new typology for New York City’s airports. JFK is uniquely equipped to speculate on the Gateway Hub into a precise and novel architecture and urban proposal that are unprecedented that links global and local conditions.
703 [MSD IN AAD]
ARCHITECTURE: TWO HISTORIES, NEW YORK CITY AND LONG SPAN STRUCTURES In the history of the development of Manhattan with the growth of the city, by means of laying a grid over vast territory, architecture becomes the expression of capital due to its increase of land value. The land value of Manhattan was generated by modes of densification of building mass. Within the beginning of "the liberal city" architecture becomes the outcome of vertical expressions based on its relationship to its land. The hypothesis of the studio is to speculate on the idea that architecture incorporated elements of the city in order to increase its value. In the 19th century the incorporation of the land into the building by the repetition of floors and in the beginning of the 20th century an interest in aesthetic styles into order to express the building as a mode of commerce, then within the '30s the Skyscraper incorporated the whole city under one roof. In order to search for a new typology, it will mean that we turn the building away from its means as solely for human inhabitation and understand the project as a means of generating capital through the exchange of goods. The thesis taken within the studio is that the Architecture of the airport strengthens New York City’s value by fusing urban elements into a new form of architectural interiority, while strengthening the financial leadership in the world. As we re-think the typology of the airport we will also explore the four types of long span structures that use tensile and compressive forces. The four types we will investigate through the course of the term are form that include cable and pneumatic structures, sectional that include framed and slab structures, vector that include multi-dimensional splitting structures and surface that includes folded and shell structures. The history has been an extensive one that started with single level spaces the Pantheon being one of the earliest (118-128), the Hagia Sophia (532-537) St. Peters Cathedral (1506-1615). Crystal Palace was built in 1851 that used cast iron and plate glass. Later in 1870 the first passenger elevator was used in the Equitbe Life Building in New York City which propelled the typology of the skyscraper. With the invention of the skyscraper, the long span structure took on a different form that intersects the history of the long span structures with capital pushing towards the limits of engineering. In the same manner we will investigate the long span typology to form the basis of our understanding to invent new structural and spatial typologies that are appropriate for the new typology of the Gateway.
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City. The new terminal will increase the relevance of JFK as a business and logistics hub making a stronger connection to global centers and strengthening development locally.
294 703 [MSD IN AAD] ADVANCED" ALI RAHIM
STUDENT: Yuanyi Zhou Wenjia Guo Qingyang Li Our project is derived through the analysis of sectional structural systems. Traditional structural systems based on sections use a series of two-dimensional profiles arrayed and connected to one another to produce space. Through our analysis of one such system, that of the Crystal Palace, we identified the potential transformation of these sectional profiles as a generator of space and form. By modifying the sectional profiles we can take a single line of continuity within the structure and bifurcate it to produce surface. Furthermore, a surface generated in this way can be bifurcated to produce three dimensional space, and volume. These bifurcations create a merging or splitting of spaces—they become thresholds, windows, skylights, elevators and corridors. This sectional three dimensionality produces a tightly interconnected series of spaces allowing programs to at moments slip past one another and at other moments to intermix. It is becoming clear that the airport of the future must take on much more than just the needs of the air traveler. Increasingly, world class airports must manage a large volume of material goods being shipped as cargo. In fact, there is the potential that the passenger will become more of secondary focus of the airport, as it is more financially profitable for airlines and airports to focus on cargo and logistics. Within our airport proposal we have enlarged the spaces dedicated to cargo and logistic systems. Trucks can pick-up and drop-off goods at bays in the airport, cars can transport luggage to the plane, and drones can move small packages to and fro. Passengers are surrounded by these mechanistic systems that support the logistic side of the airport. The passenger is invited to participate in what is traditionally concealed and hidden, it is rare for a consumer to be able to encounter these global material flows and in fact to participate in this future vision of what the airport will become. The largest central space of the project, seen in plan and section is the primary space dedicated for passengers. On either side of this main passenger space, the peripheries of the building are dedicated to logistics and cargo spaces which allow them to more easily engage with trucks and aircraft. The smaller spaces that surround the main atrium are support spaces, offices, security, and restrooms. The bifurcation of these spaces allows for connection between them. The bifurcated volumes also intersect the exterior of the building, creating skylights. This creates a light and illuminated atmosphere even though the passengers are deep within an interconnected network of spaces, surrounded by layers of automated cargo systems.
CRITIC: Ali Rahim Ezio Blasetti Brian Deluna Nathan Hume
703 [MSD IN AAD]
295
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ALI RAHIM
296 703 [MSD IN AAD] ADVANCED" ALI RAHIM
STUDENT: Zhuoqing Cai Zehua Zhang Joung-Hwa Kim We focused on the scalar shifts of truss systems inside the smooth surface structure while we studied Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Center. Different dimensions and densities of each truss system connected to each other and nested together creates various spatial quality that leads to elaborate and interesting sectional space. This multi-density structure is suitable to the airport that has the complex cargo system. Big scale truss contains overall programs and small-scale truss supports the whole airport lifting the big truss, and mid-scale truss gradually links the two different sized trusses supporting elaborate circulations inside the airport. We are proposing an airport mainly for the machines. The cargo system becomes the first thing to consider and human circulation can pass through or go along cargo systems experiencing the logistic movement. Our proposal inverts the airport by revealing cargo and luggage systems on the interior and exterior developing a machinist nature as an aesthetic for airports in the near future. In this case, the airport will be able to generate maximum profit based on large amount of cargo capacity. On the other hand, the passenger circulations are secondary focus that are occupying the interstitial space. These layers of walls and narrow spaces contain machines for logistics and it continues to the outer surfaces that is totally robotic finishing the logistic system inside out.
CRITIC: Ali Rahim Ezio Blasetti Brian Deluna Nathan Hume
297
703 [MSD IN AAD]
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ALI RAHIM
298
ADVANCED'' ASSOC. PROFESSOR: William W. Braham
- B.S.E. from Princeton University - M.Arch and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania - 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)
LECTURER: Brian Philips and Mingbo Peng
WILLIAM W. BRAHAM
ADVANCED"
708 [MEBD]
- Founder of Interface Studio Architects - B.S.E. from University of Oklahoma - M.Arch from University of Pennsylvania
BIOCLIMATIC AGENTS: 4 TEAMS, 4 CLIMATES Contemporary buildings are inherently hybrid, combining the traditional, bioclimatic elements of buildings—walls, windows, doors—with increasingly intelligent technologies for delivering modern services. These systems of power and control have mostly been used to compensate for the inadequacies of building envelopes, but when they are successfully hybridized, innovative and powerful new forms of building emerge. Within the broad category of Design with Climate, the work of the studio focused on the design of responsive or intelligent envelopes that selectively enhance the performance of the building-as-a-shelter. This was largely achieved through the careful selection of material properties and the thoughtful configuration of building form, as well as through the design of openings that can sense their environments and change their properties accordingly. Taken together, we called them the building’s bioclimatic agency: “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power,” whether that is the power of human or nonhuman action. Climates (and weather) are inherently variable and difficult to predict, even more so with the uncertainties of global climate change, and bioclimatic agents mitigate those uncertainties by their design and by different modes of response and adaptation. From the opening and closing of venetian blinds to the tactics of machine learning routines coordinating multiple modes of environmental exchange, environmental buildings must adjust their capacities to enhance their performance as shelters. Enhancing the bioclimatic agency of building enclosures remains the foundation of any approach to environmental modification, and also provides the elements of architectural expression. Responsive building elements bind human and nonhuman actors together in new configurations that have to be fit into social and cultural contexts, raising critical questions about the appropriate degrees of autonomy and human engagement for each process and device. The project for the studio was The New Chautauqua Institute, an international research and development corporation, leading the transition to a prosperous, renewable economy. The Institute was inspired by the travelling Chautauquas of the late 19th and early 20th century, which Teddy Roosevelt called, "The most American thing about America." Institute buildings were designed for sites in four different climates: Cold, Temperate, Hot & Dry, and Hot & Humid. The studio employed multiple forms of advanced performance simulation —comfort, energy, daylight, and air flow—primarily through the parametric interface of Ladybug and Honeybee, and explored the design methods with which they become effective. William W. Braham
708
299
708 [MEBD]
ADVANCED"
WILLIAM W. BRAHAM
300 708 [MEBD] ADVANCED" WILLIAM W. BRAHAM
STUDENT: Kirin Kennedy and Graham Nelson The EndoCircuit building stands on the northern bank of the Truckee River— the downtown of Reno, Nevada. From a geological and hydrological perspective, this location is particularly unique due to the nature of the Truckee River’s watershed. The area constitutes a portion of the endorheic Great Basin, a closed hydrological system wherein water precipitates, flows the course of the Truckee River, and ultimately evaporates without ever flowing to the oceans. Likewise, the water made use of in EndoCircuit circulates in a closed system while serving several essential functions. The water in essence becomes a defining tactile architectural feature of the building, providing consistent cooling and ambient sound while serving simultaneously serving several vital systemic functions. Encircling the façade of the EndoCircuit building are a series of pipes through which water may pass along the building’s western, southern, and eastern exposures. These pipes course within a gap between the building’s primary envelope and a secondary offset glass skin. Where the façade receives more solar radiation the pipes densify and subsequently they disperse as they move away from the southern exposure. By cycling this water along its façade the building accomplishes several goals. First, solar heat is absorbed in the thermal mass of the water and carried away before it can overheat the façade. The energy absorbed can then be used to augment the building’s hot water supply or—in winter—cycle through a system of radiant floor heating coils. Additionally, the pipes function as an integrated solar shading system, reducing glare and heat gain within the building’s envelope. When cooling is desired, a system of natural-draft cooling towers on the northern face serve to discharge this heat back into the environment. The northern towers are part of a secondary cooling system which takes advantage of the consistently dry atmosphere in Reno with a series of evaporative cooling pools and water features. In addition to the evaporative cooling and chilled beam systems used to condition the air in EndoCircuit, a solar chimney is integrated into the building’s northeastern corner. This chimney allows for consistent airflow through the structure, and air-intakes on the façade may be opened or closed as conditions dictate. Additionally, the façade pipes re-enter the building within the solar chimney augmenting the temperature delta and thus its effectiveness. Taken in total, water and its physical properties are the defining systematic and experiential architectural features in EndoCircuit. Water drives the transfer of heat through the building, and excess heat’s conveyance away from the façade. It provides vital evaporative cooling which consistently enhances comfort levels in the building while providing a unique sensory experience. Furthermore, while the primary aqueous system of pipes is a contained and recirculating loop, its effects propagate significantly within and around the structure.
CRITIC: William W. Braham Brian Phillips Mingbo Peng
301
708 [MEBD]
ADVANCED"
WILLIAM W. BRAHAM
302
West Elevation Helpful radiation NOV-MAR
East Elevation Harmful radiation APR-OCT
East Elevation Helpful radiation NOV-MAR
ADVANCED"
708 [MEBD]
West Elevation Harmful radiation APR-OCT
WILLIAM W. BRAHAM
STUDENT: Youngjin Hwang, Yunqian Li, Silmi Farah The proposal is to design a new headquarter for the New Chautauqua Institute, an international research and development corporation. The performance goal is bioclimatic hybridization, a building that keeps itself comfortable without explicit conditioning equipment, but with responsive modification of its envelope. The climate in Tucson is extremely hot and dry in summer, but a little cold in winter. The diurnal temperature variation is huge. Thus, a shading device is the key design element to help the whole building to achieve passive comfort. The design proposal is to build an operable shading all over the site, preventing direct solar radiation during summer, and introducing some solar radiation in the winter, at the same time providing distributed daylighting.
CRITIC: William W. Braham Brian Phillips Mingbo Peng
303
708 [MEBD]
ADVANCED"
Open Parasol
Closed Parasol
WILLIAM W. BRAHAM
304
ADVANCED" EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, IPD PROGRAM: Sarah Rottenberg
ADVANCED"
IPD [M & MSE]
- Directing Associate at Jump Associates, a growth strategy firm - Received a M.S. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago (1997) and a Bachelor's in Foreign Service from Georgetown University (1995) - Prior to her career in consulting, Sarah worked as an assistant to the Cultural AttachĂŠ at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC.
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. There are few programs like it in the country and none that place equal emphasis on all three disciplines. We bring in students from design, engineering, and business backgrounds and teach them to understand and integrate the other disciplines. Our graduates go onto become design engineers, corporate innovation leaders, product designers, 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 instrategic 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. IPD 551, DESIGN PROCESSES This studio is structured for IPD students as an intensive, interdisciplinary exploration of Design. The goal of the studio is to give students a firsthand experience of various processes involved in creating successful integrated product designs. Students will go through various stages of the design process including problem definition, concept development, ideation, prototyping, and idea refinement. The purpose of the IPD design studio is to offer options of ways to approach and resolve larger design objectives. This year, students were asked to conceptualize, iterate, and build a toy for a child. They were first introduced to the child through a watching videos of their client telling stories about themselves, including explaining what he or she likes to snack on, or what superpower she or he would want. In the middle of the semester, students visited their client at home to get feedback on their prototypes. Finally, they refined the implementation of their ideas. Sarah Rottenberg, Mike Avery IPD 799, FINAL PROJECT The last two semesters of the IPD studio sequence consist of the IPD Final Project. Students are given the opportunity to work on design problems that follow their passion or to work on 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 different disciplines. Final Projects provide students with ample opportunity to learn leadership and collaboration skills that are invaluable in today's workplace. Sarah Rottenberg, Peter Bressler, JD Albert.
IPD
305 IPD [M & MSE] ADVANCED"
Jackets & Coats
Pants
Hamper
STUDENT: Liad Yamin TBD Many people wear their clothes multiple times before washing them. But putting semi-clean clothes back in the closet feels odd. With this daily dilemma, the bedroom can easily become cluttered with piles of clothing that exist in limbo between hamper and closet. TBD is an innovative fusion of hamper and hanger that lets you postpone the decision of where to put your lightly worn clothes. With a brass form designed to complement your laundry rather than hide it, TBD is both the focal point of the bedroom and what helps you keep it clean and tidy. TBD was the First Prize winner of the 2017 Collab Design Competition.
CRITIC: Sarah Rottenberg Mike Avery
306 IPD [M & MSE] ADVANCED" SARAH ROTTENBERG
STUDENT: Zhiyi Gan, Julian Mickelson, Grace Moore OUT OF SIGHT Technology is transforming the world around us and today, the average American spends four hours a day on our phones. Increasingly, Americans say that they want to put down their phones, yet they struggle. Out of Sight is a family of products designed to encourage people to put down their phones. Chime is a bedside alarm clock. Flow is a grandfather clock designed for the living room and Count is a timer designed to help families and people at work put their phones away for a set period to focus on other tasks. Market demand was highest for Count, so the Out of Sight team developed a robust prototype and packaging for that product. They plan to market it to workplaces and families with multiple devices.
CRITIC: Sarah Rottenberg Peter Bressler JD Albert
307 IPD [M & MSE] ADVANCED"
STUDENT: Michael Lytle, Kevin Martin, Chelsea Meyers, Xi “Leon� Xu
SARAH ROTTENBERG
WEATHERLIST Despite warnings online and on TV, many people do not prepare for big storms. They are often forced to evacuate at the last minute and suffer from devastating property and personal losses. Weatherlist hopes to change that with a system of products designed to help people in hurricane prone areas prepare for, survive, and recover from dramatic weather events. It is a combination of a connected in home device that displays the weather and alerts of upcoming weather events and an app that provides checklists, guides, and document storage.
CRITIC: Sarah Rottenberg Peter Bressler JD Albert
308
DOCTORAL DEGREE
ADVANCED"
Doctoral Degree Program [Ph.D.]
CHAIR OF THE GRADUATE GROUP IN ARCHITECTURE: David Leatherbarrow For many years, scholarship in Penn’s Ph.D. Program has operated under a double constraint: the development of knowledge that is both descriptive and productive. Although dedication to productive knowledge may not be common in other fields, it is entirely relevant to architecture. Marx’s dream for philosophy—to change, not merely interpret the world—is nothing special in architecture; rather, it is a fairly obvious commonplace. Architecture is a form of engagement par excellence, aimless if not oriented toward given conditions, intent on their transformation. The particularity of architecture’s productive sort of knowledge, that it gets its hands dirty in the actual transformation of the environment in which we live, has been and remains a central concern of Penn’s architectural scholarship. Dedication to both descriptive and productive knowledge may be apparent in the titles of some of the books published by Ph.D. graduates. Among the recent books are: Jin Baek, Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space; Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, Medici Gardens: From Making to Design; Thomas Beck, La Villa; Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture; George Dodds, Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion; David Haney, When Modern Was Green: Life and Work of Leberecht Migge; Zhongjie Lin: Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement in Japan; Alex Anderson, Modern Architecture and the Commonplace; Claudio Sgarbi, Vitruvio ferrarese De Architectura, la prima versione illustrate; William Braham, Modern Color/ Modern Architecture; Judith Major, To Live in the New World: A.J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening; Harry Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century; Gevork Hartoonian, Ontology of Construction; and Cornelis van de Ven, Space in Architecture. These books clarify developments in a number of periods and investigate a range of subjects related to architecture, landscape architecture, building technology, and urbanism. Concepts are examined—space, style, or surface color, for example—but also particular figures: Le Corbusier, A.J. Downing, Gottfried Semper, and Mies van der Rohe. This range indicates the real possibility of striking a balance between architecture’s disciplinary identity, ultimately based in practice, and its engagements with several subjects and dimensions of scholarship in the university at large. Yet more than balance is at issue here, for we have learned that neither scholarship nor practice in architecture can be realized fully without reference to the other, that neither drawing nor writing can realize its potential when pursued in isolation. In reciprocity, though, they can help us know the world by productively engaging in its transformation.
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LUBETKIN AND THE TECTON GROUP, 1932-1948
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While it is generally accepted that the architecture of Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton architectural partnership (1932-1948) was chained to the fate of progressive socialism in England, it is also true that this explanation overlooks their lesser-known works which contradict the unbending theoretical framework of this movement, i.e., an etiological framework characterized by the concepts of “overcoming” and “returning.” This dissertation argues that a broader interpretation of Lubetkin and Tecton’s drawings and buildings, within the disciplinary context of architectural practice in England during the interwar period, indicates an alternative form of integrity that is distinguished by the weakening of the progressivist theoretical framework. The interpretation of a “weak architectural theory” within the history of the Modern Movement is the object of this dissertation, which argues that weakening creates a clearing for architectural invention. This dissertation asks two questions: How does the practicing architect define his or her discipline and agency within the context of a weakened theoretical framework? And how do topics in the discipline, as indicated by the work and not by the architect’s intentions, provide a hermeneutic structure for indicating and establishing a weak architectural theory? These questions are pursued in four parts: Part One introduces the notion of weak theory by way of a pair of drawings by Lubetkin. Part Two reviews these notions in the history of group architectural practice. Part Three proposes a topical approach to the domestic work of Lubetkin and Tecton through the consideration of Lubetkin’s often overlooked Whipsnade Houses and associated Manifesto, which identified seven topics within the discipline of architecture: distribution, orientation, proportion, elevation, structure, enclosure, and contrariety. These topics coordinate and connect Lubetkin’s unique position in the history of architectural theory to perennial questions in the discipline of architecture. Finally, Part Four concludes with a case study on the Bevin Court Estate and argues that contraposition—or contrapposto—is the sublimation of this approach in the postwar period.
SUPERVISOR: David Leatherbarrow
Doctoral Degree Program [Ph.D.]
STUDENT: Andrew Reed Tripp
310 Doctoral Degree Program [Ph.D.] ADVANCED"
STUDENT: Eric Bellin DETAILING WORLDS: A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURAL PARTICULARS, 1755-1899 This dissertation offers an account of the history of the many meanings of “detail” as a disciplinary concept, specific to practices of building. It locates the term’s origins in the French language and describes the processes by which it was appropriated by the building professions as an item of disciplinary terminology by 1755, transferred from French into English-language discourse and practice, and by 1899 had evolved a collection of rich and divergent yet interrelated meanings. Each chapter is centered on a historical episode of particular importance and coherence in the history of the term “detail,” and is structured around the “world” of a particular actor or group of actors, for which each chapter is titled: The Academic, The Technician, The Student, The Engineer, and The Architect. Each of these chapters describes a specific facet of the building professional and their practice, and the ways in which their particular “world” conditioned the emergence of some new meaning of the term “detail,” a meaning shaped by bodies of knowledge and ways of thinking specific to that time, place, and individual or group. The dissertation’s conclusion employs this history of “detail” as a disciplinary specific concept to contextualize our contemporary understandings of detail in all their diversity, and it offers an account of the “practice of detailing” on which they all are based.
SUPERVISOR: David Leatherbarrow
311 ADVANCED"
The research objective of this dissertation is to develop a method to optimize the building performance during their post-retrofit period in the future climate. The dissertation is organized in three major steps: a) Develop a datadriven method for the hourly projection of energy use in the coming years, taking into account global climate change (GCC). Using machine learning algorithms, a validated data-driven model is used to predict the building’s future hourly energy use based on simulation results generated by future extreme year weather data and it is demonstrated that GCC will change the optimal solution of future energy conservation measure (ECM) combination. b) Develop a simplified building performance simulation tool based on a dynamic hourly simulation algorithm taking into account the thermal flux among zones. The tool named SimBldPy is tested on EnergyPlus models against DOE reference buildings. Its performance and fidelity in simulating hourly energy use with different heating and cooling set points in each zone, under various climate conditions, and with multiple ECMs being applied to the building, has been validated. This tool and modeling method could be used for rapid modeling and assessment of building energy for a variety of ECM options. c) Use a non-dominated sorting technique to complete the multi-objective optimization task and design a schema to visualize optimization results and support the decision-making process after obtaining the multi-objective optimization results. Generated non-dominated solutions are rendered and displayed by a layered schema using agglomerative hierarchical clustering technique. The optimization method is then implemented on a Penn campus building for case study, and twenty out of a thousand retrofit plans can be recommended using the proposed decision-making method. The proposed decision making support framework is demonstrated by its robustness to the problem of deep retrofit optimization and is able to provide support for brainstorming and enumerate various possibilities during the process of decision-making.
SUPERVISOR: William W. Braham
Doctoral Degree Program [Ph.D.]
STUDENT: Pengyuan Shen
LECTURE
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MARCH 22ND, 2018 STRENGTH THROUGH GEOMETRY Philippe Block is Professor at the Institute of Technology in Architecture at ETH Zurich, where he directs the Block Research Group (BRG) together with Dr. Tom Van Mele. The BRG focuses on equilibrium analysis, computational form finding, optimization and fabrication of curved surface structures, specializing in unreinforced masonry vaults and thin concrete shells. Prof. Block is also the director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication. Within the NCCR, the BRG develops innovative structural design strategies using bespoke prefabrication, pushing construction innovation.
M.ARCH LECTURE SERIES
314 LECTURE SERIES
CENTRO Constituyentes Mexico City, Mexico
Museo Amparo Puebla, Mexico
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JANUARY 22ND, 2018 THE WARREN W. CUNNINGHAM LECTURE Enrique Norten, Principal, TEN Arquitectos.
LECTURE SERIES
316
FEBRUARY 5TH, 2018 PEOPLE, PLACE, PURPOSE
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Francine Houben, Creative Director and Founding Partner of Mecanoo architecten.
Palace of Justice, Cรณrdoba, Spain
Maritime and Beachcombers Museum Oudeschild, Texel, Netherlands
St. Gerlach Pavilion & Manor Farm, Valkenburg Aan De Geul, Netherlands
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MARCH 14, 2018 THE EWINGCOLE LECTURE Wolf D. Prix, Co-Founder, Design Principal and CEO, COOP HIMMELB(L)AU
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Ice World and 5 Star Hotel Star, Dawang Mountain Resort. Changsha, China
Dalian International Conference Center. China [Photography by Shu He]
319 LECTURE SERIES
Arvo Pärt Sound Cloud, Laulasmaa Estonia
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MARCH 28, 2018 AS I SEE IT Thom Mayne, Founder and Design Director, Morphosis; Cret Chair Professor of Practice, PennDesign
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7132 Hotel & Arrival, Switzerland
Salick Healthcare Administrative Headquarters, Los Angeles
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APRIL 11TH, 2018 CURATING IGNORANCE, OR A THEORY OF THE ARCHITECTURAL EXHIBITION Hyungmin Pai is Professor of Architecture at the University of Seoul.
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Course Descriptions
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A = Spring Summer B = Summer Semester C = Fall Semester
ARCH 511 History and Theory I
Joan Ockman — 2017C The century between the Crystal Palace and Lever House witnessed the emergence of a dramatically new building culture with far-reaching consequences. In this overview of international architecture from the second half of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth, we will situate the icons and isms, the pioneers and hero figures within a broad technological, economic, sociopolitical, and cultural context. The thirteen lectures will move both chronologically and thematically, tracing architecture’s changing modes of production and reception; its pivotal debates, institutions, and tendencies; and its expanding geography, highlighting the ways the culture of architecture responded to and mediated the unprecedented experiences of modernity. We will also reflect on modernism’s legacy today. The objective of the course is not just to acquaint students with seminal buildings and their architects but also to foster a strong understanding of history and of architecture’s place in a modernizing world. Readings drawn from primary and secondary literature as well as a recently published text that is among the first to place modern architecture into a global perspective will supplement the lectures and provide a rich introduction to the historiography of the hundred-year period.
ARCH 512 History and Theory II
Daniel Barber — 2018A This course examines the history of modern architecture since World War II, with an emphasis on relationships between architectural practices and increasing knowledge of the environment. Buildings, projects, and texts are situated within the historical constellations of ideas, values, and technologies that inform them through a series of close readings. Rather than presenting a parade of movements or individuals, the class introduces topics as overlaying strata, with each new issue adding greater complexity even as previous layers retain their significance.
This course analyzes the intensive and extensive properties at the scale of the city through a series of mapping exercises. Computational strategies of transformation are deployed to create explicit formations, by utilizing the analytical methods as generative procedures. The resulting systems become the basis for experimentation with computer aided manufacturing tools of the school. In parallel to the development of modeling skills, exercises in visualization emphasize both the analytic and affective possibilities of computer generated imagery.
ARCH 531 Construction I
Philip Ryan — 2017C This lecture course explores the basic principles of architectural technology and building construction. Focus is placed on building material, methods of on-site and off-site preparation, material assemblies, and the material performance. Topics discussed include load bearing masonry structures of small to medium size (typical row house construction), heavy and light wood frame construction, sustainable construction practices, emerging and engineered materials, and integrated building practices. The course also introduces students to Building Information Modeling (BIM) via the production of construction documents.
ARCH 532 Construction II
Franca Trubiano — 2018A Lecture and digital modeling course exploring the basic principles of architectural technology and building construction. The course is focused on building materials, methods of on-site and off-site construction, architectural assemblies, and the performance of materials. A continuation of Construction I, focusing on light and heavy steel frame construction, concrete construction, light and heavyweight cladding systems and systems building.
COURSES
COURSES
ARCH 521 Visual Studies I
Nathan Hume — 2017C Visual Studies I is the engagement of graphic and visual information found in the world and in media, and its ability to contain—and more importantly, to convey—meaningful information. Intelligence in visual information is deployed to transfer cultural values, to educate and influence, and to create new relationships not easily expressed through mathematics, linguistics, and applied science. One of the challenges in the course is the re-invention of a means of assessment, the development of notations and techniques that will document the forces and the production of difference in the spatial manifestations of the generative systems. Tactility, material, scale, profile, shape, color, Architecture works primarily in the assertion of these modes, and the meaningful production and control of these modes of communication are imperative for all designers.
ARCH 522 Visual Studies II
Nathan Hume — 2018A Visual Studies II extends the use of the computer as a tool for architectural representation and fabrication by engaging in digital three-dimensional modeling. Modeling is approached first of all as a set of techniques for exploring and determining design intent and direction. Attention is given to precision and detailed modeling, paralleled by the development of the critical understanding for the constructive translation between physical and digital working environments.
ARCH 535 Structures I
Richard Farley — 2017C Theory applied toward structural form. The study of static and hyperstatic systems and design of their elements. Flexural theory, elastic and plastic. Design for combined stresses; prestressing. The study of graphic statics and the design of trusses. The course comprises both lectures and a weekly laboratory in which various structural elements, systems, materials and technical principles are explored.
Richard Farley — 2018A A continuation of the equilibrium analysis of structures covered in Structures I. A review of one-dimensional structural elements; a study of arches, slabs and plates, curved surface structures, lateral and dynamic loads; survey of current and future structural technology. The course comprises both lectures and a weekly laboratory in which various structural elements, systems, materials and technical principles are explored.
ARCH 611 History and Theory III
sign. While production is traditionally viewed as an explicit and final act of execution, the course explores the potential for all 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, physics-based simulation, and robot motion planning. A design research project will be undertaken through a number of discrete assignments that requires a design synthesis between form and material considerations alongside robotic production constraints. The course will explore design as the outcome of materially formative processes of computation and production.
ARCH 621 Visual Studies III
Nathan Hume — 2017C The final of the Visual Studies half-credit courses. Drawings are explored as visual repositories of data from which information can be gleaned, geometries tested, designs refined and transmitted. Salient strengths of various digital media programs are identified and developed through assignments that address the specific intentions and challenges of the design studio project.
ARCH 631 Tech Case Studies I
Lindsay Falck — 2017C A study of the active integration of various building systems in exemplary architectural projects. To deepen students’ understanding of the process of building, the course compares the process of design and construction in buildings of similar type. The course brings forward the nature of the relationship between architectural design and engineering systems, and highlights the crucial communication skills required by both the architect and the engineer.
ARCH 634 Environmental Systems II
ARCH 636 Material Formations
Robert Stuart-Smith — 2018A Material Formations introduces robotic production and material dynamics as active agents in design rationalization and expression. The course investigates opportunities for designers to synthesize multiple performance criteria within architecture. Technical theory, casestudies, and practical tutorials will focus on the incorporation of simulation, generative computation, and robot fabrication concerns within de-
ARCH 712 The New Materiality
ARCH 671 Professional Practice I
Philip Ryan — 2018A ARCH671 is the first of a three-course sequence that discusses the issues and processes involved in running a professional architectural practice and designing buildings in the contemporary construction environment. ARCH 671 will begin by briefly outlining the overall course sequence in order to locate the first section in the context of the next two courses, ARCH 672 and ARCH772. From there the course will describe the methods involved in getting, designing, and constructing a building project. 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. The second half of the semester will build on the understanding of the project execution process to then shape how an office is formed and managed. This foundation will set up the segue to ARCH672 which will delve into more detailed analysis of legal, financial, and risk/quality management practices.
ARCH 708 Bioclimatic Agency
William Braham — 2018A Within the broad category of Design with Climate, our work will focus on the design of responsive or intelligent envelopes that selectively enhance the performance of the building-asa-shelter. This can be achieved through the careful selection of material properties and the thoughtful configuration of building form, as well as through the design of openings that can sense their environments and change their properties accordingly. Taken together, we can call them the building's bioclimatic agency: "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power," whether that is the power of human or nonhuman action.
Manuel Delanda — 2018A This lecture series introduces students to the basic philosophical concepts needed to understand morphogenesis, or the Birth of Form, both as it occurs spontaneously in Nature, and as it takes place under human guidance. Morphogenesis is one of the basic concepts in what has come to be known as the New Materiality. Many important architects (Lebbeus Woods, Jessi Reiser, Achim Mengues, Monica Ponce de Leon and several others) have already embraced the basic ideas of this new philosophy, and entire issues of architectural magazines have been dedicated to it. This class introduces students to the New Materiality using case studies relevant to architects: the fields of structural engineering and materials science and engineering, as well as the field of computer simulations, from the ones routinely used in CAD to those (genetic algorithms, neural nets) slowly making their way into architectural practice.
ARCH 712 Articulate Building Envelopes: Construction and Expression
Ariel Genadt — 2018A In the 20th century, building envelopes have become the prime architectural subject of experimentations and investments, as well as physical failures and theoretical conflicts. This seminar examines the meaning of performance of 20th-century envelopes by unfolding their functions and behaviors in salient case studies, in practice and in theory. While the term performance is often used to denote quantifiable parameters, such as exchanges of energy, airs and waters, this seminar seeks to recouple these with other, simultaneous performances, which can be grouped under the term articulation. Albeit numbers cannot describe articulation, its consideration is key to the interpretation of quantifiable performances. Ultimately, the articulation of envelopes’ polyvalence is the measure of their civic pertinence.
COURSES
William Braham — 2018A 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 such as 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 man-made environments in which they are placed.
Ariel Genadt — 2018A Towards what kind of city do architects design? In the 21st century, responses to this question have hovered between two poles: one sees the city as a collection of visually and economically autonomous objects, free from ground and history; the other—as a subset of a realm where all things are connected through topography, air, water, energy flows, cybernetics and economy. In all cases, for designers, questions remain open as to the degree to which architecture should represent or resist mimicking its autonomy from, or continuity with its ecological and social milieus. Since architecture’s singularity and connectedness are perforce linked to the vicissitudes of sociology, politics, economy and ecology, the city is a perpetually changing reflection of culture. Though it often appears that a chasm separates singularity and connectedness in urban architecture, their current cohabitation within the same environment indicates that both respond to human needs. This seminar aims to foster conversations around a variety of approaches to these questions. It takes its cues from imaginary visions of cities and future lifestyles, from the late 20th century and first two decades of the 21st, both built and imaginary as some extreme scenarios presented in science fiction films and speculative drawings. The seminar does not aim to provide a historic survey of urban theories that have been covered in other courses. It focuses on architects’ contributions to future cityscapes through the design of urban buildings and landscapes.
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Alexandra Quantrill — 2017C This is the third and final required course in the history and theory of architecture. It is a lecture course that examines selected topics, figures, projects, and theories from the history of architecture and related design fields during the 20th century. The course also draws on related and parallel historical material from other disciplines and arts, placing architecture into a broader socio-cultural-political-technological context.
ARCH 712 Visible Cities: Urban Architecture of Tomorrow
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ARCH 536 Structures II
326 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS COURSES
ARCH 712 Detroiters’ Spatial Imagination, Vol.2:
ARCHITECTURAL TRANSLATIONS OF GRASSROOTS NETWORKS Eduardo Rega Calvo — 2018A Recently designated as City of Design by UNESCO, Detroit has become a key protagonist in American architecture discourse through events like the 2016 US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Contesting the uncritical premises of such events, the Detroiters’ Spatial Imagination seminar aims to reflect and develop collective architecture research on contemporary Detroiters’ visionary architectural and urban activist practices that refuse capitalist exploitation vis a vis the city’s economic transformation, from top-down disinvestment to bottom-up self-provisioning and organizing. Through reading discussions and mobilizing various tools of inquiry on the city, the seminar will investigate those involved in the long-term and grassroots processes that have been redrawing the limits of socio-political organization and revitalizing communities in Detroit using spatial practices, art and design to facilitate people’s participation in the production of their built environment. The work produced in the seminar will included in the Architectures of Refusal platform which brings to focus the emancipatory spatial practices of social movements that oppose the neoliberal oligarchical status quo. The work will be part of an exhibition that will open at the beginning of the fall semester of 2018, a publication and will be featured in UrbanNext, an online platform by Actar Publishers.
ARCH 712 Baroque Parameters
Andrew Saunders — 2018A Deep plasticity and dynamism of form, space and light are explicit signatures of the Baroque Architecture; less obvious are the disciplined mathematical principles that generate these effects. Through art historians, Rudolf Wittkower, Heinrich Wolfflin, and John Rupert Martin in addition to philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (via Gilles Deleuze), Robin Evans and the history of mathematics by Morris Kline, the course will examine how geometry and mathematics were integral to 17th-century science, philosophy, art, architecture and religion. The new revelation of a heliocentric universe, nautical navigation in the Age of Expansion, and the use of gunpowder spawned new operative geometry of elliptical paths, conic sections and differential equations. The geometric and political consequences of these advances are what link Baroque architects Francesco Borromini and Guarino Guarini to other great thinkers of the period including Decartes, Galileo, Kepler, Desargues, and Newton. Through the exploitation of trigonometric parameters of the arc and the chord, Baroque architects produced astonishing effects, performance and continuity. Generative analysis by parametric reconstruction and new speculative modeling will reexamine the base principles behind 17-century topology and reveal renewed relevance of the Baroque to the contemporary.
ARCH 714 Museum as Site: Critique, Intervention, and Production
Andrea Hornick — 2018A 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. Students will visit, 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 and performance, as well as attention to con-
servation, 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 and an online exhibition.
ARCH 717 Philosophy of Urban History
Manuel DeLanda — 2017C The seminar is based on the thesis that "the Architecture of the City" is not only the work of an individual architect or a company but also the product of the city itself. The intention of the seminar is to demonstrate the creative architectural production of the city of New York and particular of Manhattan. The seminar is a build up by the progressive transformation of the architecture of the city within the 20th century until today. This process of transformation of the architecture of New York starts with the moment architecture was formed by the underlying subdivision of the cities grid, continues with the transformation of architecture becoming the city itself and ends with today's architectural production of the city as the production of a new ground for the city. There will be eight sessions in Philadelphia and five sessions in New York City which will provoke a discussion with New York City Leaders, Inter-disciplinary thinkers, cultural leaders and financiers.
ARCH 721 Designing Smart Objects
Carla Diana — 2017C 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 Technology in Design: Immersive Kinematics/ Physical Computing: Body As Site
Simon Kim — 2017C The aim of this course is to understand the new medium of architecture within the format of a research seminar. The subject matter of new media is to be examined and placed in a disciplinary trajectory of building designed and construction technology that adapts to material and digital discoveries. We will also build prototype with the new media, and establish a disciplinary knowledge for ourselves. The seminar is interested in testing the architecture-machine relationship, moving away from architecture that looks like machines into architecture that behaves like machines: An intelligence (based on the conceptual premise of a project and in the design of a system), as part of a process (related to the generative real of architecture) and as the object itself and its embedded intelligence.
ARCH 724 Technology in Design: The Mathematics of Tiling in Architectural Design
Joshua Freese — 2018A Repetition and difference in geometric tiling patterns produce visual complexity, intricacy, economy, and articulation. From textiles and ceramics to architectural design, the tradition of tiling has culled from mathematical systems that inscribe two- and three-dimensional geometric conditions, ultimately yielding cultural effects that are unique to their time. By examining this tradition across time and disciplines, this course will explore a range of mathematical systems, tools, and media, as well as how they advance contemporary architectural topics such as parametrics, optimization, fabrication, and implementation.
ARCH 724 Technology in Design: Data and Adaptation
Mark Nicol — 2018A The aim of this course is to understand the new medium of architecture within the format of a research seminar. The subject matter of new media is to be examined and placed in a disciplinary trajectory of building designed and construction technology that adapts to material and digital discoveries. We will also build prototype with the new media, and establish a disciplinary knowledge for ourselves. The seminar is interested in testing the architecture-machine relationship, moving away from architecture that looks like machines into architecture that behaves like machines: An intelligence (based on the conceptual premise of a project and in the design of a system), as part of a process (related to the generative real of architecture) and as the object itself and its embedded intelligence.
ARCH 725 Design Thinking
Sarah Rottenberg — 2018A 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 among 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 727 Industrial Design
Peter Bressler — 2018A Industrial design (ID) is the professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimize the function, value and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer. Industrial designers develop these concepts and specifications through collection, analysis and synthesis of user needs data guided by the special requirements of the client or manufacturer. They are trained to prepare clear and concise recommendations through drawings, models and verbal descriptions. The profession has evolved to take its appropriate place alongside Engineering and Marketing as one of the cornerstones of Integrated Product Design teams. The core of Industrial Design's knowledge base is a mixture of fine arts, commercial arts and applied sciences utilized with a set of priorities that are firstly on the needs of the end user and functionality,
ARCH 728 Design of Contemporary Products
ARCH 730 Techniques, Morphology, and Details of a Pavilion
Charles Jay Berman — 2018A This seminar seeks to expand a framework of understanding enclosures as integral to the student’s architectural intentions. We will seek to move beneath the numerical facts of what is accepted as facade design (criteria, codes, loads, forces and consumptions) to seek a deeper understanding of the generative process underlying these physical criteria in order to evade the mere acceptance of these external facts to the intentions of the Architect. The nature of enclosures will be explored through methods of analysis and interrogation of materials, their attributes, and their forms of assembly and the natures of their manufacture. The vehicle for this interrogation will be the act of drawing and assembling. Case studies of new materials, new processes and new applications will provide the basis gaining this dissecting /cutting ability (Frascari). In addition, the students will engage in generative detailing exercises, at simultaneous scales, to analyze and apply these decontextualized results to reveal their nature manifest in facade.
ARCH 732 Tiny House: Design to Production
Masoud Akbarzadeh — 2018A The course intends to address the challenges in the design development process and fabrication of the Tiny House concept developed in the Fall 2017 studio. The primary objectives include ensuring the structural integrity of the prefab systems, sealing strategies and the necessary foundation for the structure, meticulous detailing the interior and exterior of the house, overcoming the fabrication challenges, and defining the assembly logic/sequence to complete the house. To achieve these goals, the students will design the assembly mechanisms for prefab systems and the junction between the glazing and the concrete. Also, they will investigate on the material transition from exterior to the interior and will provide solutions to include furniture, equipment, and embedded lighting within the modules. The outcome of the course will consist of the complete construction document for the whole house and a one-to-one scale prototype of minimum three assembled modules to reflect the solutions for the challenges of building the tiny house.
ARCH 731 Experiments in Structure
Mohamad Al Khayer — 2017C 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
ARCH 732 Deployable Structures
Mohamad Al Khayer — 2018A 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.
Jessica Zofchak — 2018A 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 Principles of Digital Fabrication
Mike Avery — 2018A 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 explore hybrid approaches to digital fabrication in which multiple techniques are utilized within the same work. During all of these exercises we will discuss the development of 3D printing and its place in the digital fabrication dialogue.
ARCH 732 Heavy Architecture
Philip Ryan — 2018A 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 734 Ecological Architecture: Contemporary Practices
Todd Woodward — 2018A Architecture is an inherently exploitive act—we take resources from the earth and produce waste and pollution when we construct and operate buildings. As global citizens, we have an ethical responsibility to minimize these negative impacts. As creative professionals, however, we have a unique ability to go farther than simply being "less bad." We are learning to design in ways that can help heal the damage and regenerate our environment. This course explores these evolving approaches to design—from neoindigenous to eco-tech to LEED to biomimicry to living buildings. Taught by a practicing architect with many years of experience designing green buildings, the course also features guest lecturers from complementary fields—landscape architects, hydrologists, recycling contractors and materials specialists. Coursework includes in-class discussion, short essays and longer research projects.
COURSES
Mohamad Al Khayer — 2018A The course will develop through hands-on workshops and will focus on acquiring knowledge through making (Techne), understanding the morphological transformation of a given geometic packing, and building using readily available materials. The process consists of building and testing physical models that simulates the actual pavilion. In addition to digital simulation sessions to realize the desired design, which answers to the program developed by PennDesign faculty. The second half of the semester will focus on using lightweight construction materials to fabricate the pavilion's actual components, including structural elements, molded components, and joints, which are required for pavilion's final assembly. Additionally, students will learn to organize design and fabrication teams, control design and production schedules, and work with set budget, which requires keeping track of construction cost and forecast for required procurements, including material quantities takeoff, ordering and schedule deliveries and receiving.
ARCH 732 Advanced Enclosures: Techniques and Materials
ARCH 732 Daylighting
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Mario Gentile — 2018A Personalization is quickly becoming the norm for mass production in a variety of consumercentric industries. From retail to food, the idea of designing and making custom-made products tailored to fit one’s lifestyle will be our exploration. Utilizing digital design innovations, we are able to incubate ideas, prototype, test and be entrepreneurial in design to create these individualized products. Cues from these industries will be used to shift both cultural and experiential product design from a regional discovery to a global focus. This course will embrace digital design and utilize its engagement with manufacturing solutions for a physical output. Through research and a series of design exercises, the approach will be built upon several strategies including adaptability, materiality, fabrication, modularity, and human-centric design. The final project will interpret the research and result in the creation of a design strategy for a mass customized product or system.
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.
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then the market and manufacturing criteria. This course will provide an overview and understanding of the theories, thought processes and methodologies employed in the daily practice of Industrial Design. This includes understanding of ethnographic research and methodologies, product problem solving, creative visual communication, human factors / ergonomics application and formal and surface development in product scale. This course will not enable one to become an industrial designer but will enable one to understand and appreciate what industrial design does, what it can contribute to society and why it is so much fun.
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ARCH 736 Building Acoustics
Joseph Solway — 2018A This course covers the fundamentals of architectural acoustics and the interdependence between acoustics and architectural design. The course explores the effects of materials and room shape on sound absorption, reflection and transmission, and demonstrates how modeling, visualization and auralization can be used to understand acoustic and aid the design process. The course includes a lecture on the history and future of performance space design, a visit to the Arup SoundLab in New York and two assignments, one practical (Boom Box) and one theoretical (Sound Space).
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ARCH 736 Speculative Methods on How Product Design Informs Architecture
Aaron Pavkov — 2018A Innovation in product design is evolving rapidly, with high customer expectations for product aesthetics, performance, intelligence, and connectivity. How does this relate to architecture? What can architects learn from product design to improve design and detail in their work? How can human-centered design, product design methodology, and innovations in the physical and digital product space inform architecture? This is a project course that will teach about product design processes and tools and will be structured according to Human-Centered Design Methods developed by the LUMA Institute. Lectures will provide insights and tools from product design that support the project. One class session will be offsite at Bresslergroup, and there will be some in-class time for project work. The final project is a synthesis of the learnings in the course.
COURSES
ARCH 736 Building Envelopes: The Enclosing Detail
Charles Jay Berman — 2018A This seminar seeks to establish a framework of understanding enclosures as integral to the student’s architectural intentions. We will seek to introduce the numerical facts of what is accepted as facade design (criteria, codes, loads, forces and consumptions) in order to seek a deeper understanding of the generative process underlying these physical criteria. The intent is to evade the mere acceptance of these external facts to the intentions of the Architect. The aim of this seminar is to arm the student with a guided understanding of the materials and assemblies available to them to form building enclosures.
ARCH 736 Water Shaping Architecture
Stuart Mardeusz, Jonathan Weiss — 2018A This course is an investigation of the ways that architecture is informed by the water resources and availability of each specific project region. We will cover a range of subjects including; the physics of water, the systems to gather, distribute, supply and treat potable water, grey water, waste water, including the correlation to energy and recycling that are integrated into the architecture of buildings. 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?
ARCH 736 Architectural Workflows in the Design and Delivery of Buildings
Richard Garber — 2018A This seminar in design and technology would 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. The synthesis of 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. Beyond design intent and process, 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 736 BIM (Building Information Modeling): Virtual Construction and Detailing with BIM
Franca Trubiano — 2018A Building Information Modeling (BIM) has become the lingua franca of building. During the past decade, significant changes have taken place in the nature of design and construction practices which has transformed the very nature of architectural representation. Architects no longer draw depictions of that which they intend for others to build; rather, they model, code, simulate, data-scape, and integrate that which they virtually build alongside their colleague and collaborators—engineers and builders. The production of information rich virtual BIM models is the ground upon which all construction activities for advanced and complex multi-story buildings takes place. BIM is also at the origins of contemporary innovations in Integrated Design, the creation of collaborative platforms which aim to maximize the sustainable outcomes in the project delivery of buildings. Moreover, being able to collaboratively produce, share, and query a Building Information Model renders possible the global practice of design and construction. The course will familiarize students to this important field of architectural practice.
ARCH 737 Semi-Fictious Realms
Christopher McAdams — 2017C 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.
ARCH 741 Arch Design Innovation
Ali Rahim — 2017C 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 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 so as to achieve elegant aesthetics within the formal development of projects.
ARCH 742 Function of Fashion in Architecture
Danielle Willems — 2018A The Function of Fashion in Architecture will survey the history of fashion and the architectural parallels starting from Ancient Civilization to Present. The focus will be on the relevance of garment design, methods and techniques and their potential to redefine current architecture elements such as envelope, structure, seams, tectonics and details. The functional, tectonic and structural properties of garment design will be explored as generative platforms to conceptualize very specific architectural elements. One of the challenges in the course is the re-invention of a means of assessment, the development of notations and techniques that will document the forces and the production of difference in the spatial manifestations of the generative systems.
ARCH 743 Form and Algorithm
Cecil Balmond and Ezio Blasetti — 2017C 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 organizatio, 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 746 Cinema and Architecture in Translation
Danielle Willems — 2018A Cinema and Architecture in Translation is a seminar that will survey key cinematic moments and techniques within the history of film and find new intersections between architecture and narratives. The focus will be on the relevance of mise-en-scene, the background and building figures of architecture and future speculations of the city, yet in relation to narrative dynamics. One of the challenges in considerations and techniques that will affect both conceptualization and the production of spatial manifestations using potent visual platforms. Current pre and post-production techniques in film making methods are converging with architectural digital representation. This is an opportunity that provides fertile ground for architects to
Hina Jamelle — 2018A The seminar will define and elaborate on the following topics for the digital discourse- the contemporary diagram, technique, structure, architectural systems and aesthetic projections. 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. Reinvention can come through techniques that have already been set in motion. 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.
ARCH 750 Parafictional Objects
ARCH 751 Ecology Tech and Design
William Braham — 2017C 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 and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now characterized by the powerful concept of the complex,
Mostapha Sadeghipour — 2017C The course provides students with an understanding of building design simulation methods, hands-on experience in using computer simulation models, and exploration of the technologies, underlying principles, and potential applications of simulation tools in architecture. Classroom lecturers are given each week, with a series of analysis projects to provide students with hands-on experience using computer models.
ARCH 754 Performance Design Workshop
Michael Esposito — 2018A 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 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. Lectures will be given on specific topics each week. A series of analytical class exercises will be assigned to provide students with handson 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.
ARCH 814 Idea of the Avant-Garde
Joan Ockman — 2018A No historian of architecture has written as intensely about the contradictions of architecture in late-modern society or reflected as deeply on the resulting problems and tasks of architectural historiography as Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994). For many, the Italian historian's dismissal of "hopes in design" under conditions of advanced capitalism produced a disciplinary impasse. This in turn led to call to oublier Tafuri-to move beyond his pessimistic and lacerating stance. The seminar will undertake a close reading of one of Tafuri's most complexly conceived and richly elaborated books, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture form Piranesi to the 1970s. We shall also read a number of primary and secondary sources on the historical contexts under discussion and consider a number of important intertexts that shed light on Tafuri's position. The objectives of the course are at once historical and historiographic: we shall we shall be concerned both with actual events and with how they have been written into history. Finally, we shall reassess the role of an avant-garde in architecture and compare Tafuri's conception to that advanced in other disciplines. Is the concept of an avant-garde still viable today? Or should it be consigned to the dustbin of twentiethcentury ideas?
ARCH 762 Design and Development
Paul Sehnert — 2017C This course provides an introduction to the relationship between architectural design and real estate development. Following a discussion of fundamentals, examples focus on commercial building types, and illustrate how architectural design can contribute to real estate development. Topics include housing design commercial buildings, adaptive reuse, downtown development, mixed-use projects, and planned communities.
ARCH 765 Project Management
Charles Capaldi — 2018A 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 — 2018A This course evaluates "ground-up" development as well as re-hab, re-development, and acquisition investments. We examine raw and devel-
COURSES
Kutan Ayata — 2018A The reality of the discipline is that architecture is a post-medium 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 753 Building Performance Simulation
oped 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.
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ARCH 748 Architecture in the New Elegance
self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the first principle of design and organization.
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re-examine the “digital” in a variety of scales in relation to impactful narratives and visualizations. These tools, specifically the technique of “matte-painting” will be explored in this course. There is a rich history in constructing images, speculative worlds and scenes for the film industry. We will explore the parallels between the tools and strategies of cinematic visualization as it relates to advanced architectural image making. Students will have the opportunity to analyze filmic scene making, learn advanced representation and techniques in matte painting and zbrush. Above all this course will engage students in the conceptual as well as practical complementarities of architecture and cinema, while watching some of the best films ever made and the most provocative and insightful books to help process them. An important aspect of this course will be to explore the differences between “real” architecture and the cinematic architecture. The expansive Space and Time in which cinematic architecture is located, creates an incubator where true innovated speculation can occur. This is an advanced representation course that produces 2D images and narrative texts.
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COMMENCEMENT This year, 295 graduate degrees were awarded to 285 graduating students. The degrees included 89 Master of Architecture, eight Master of Environmental Building Design, two Master of Science in Architecture, 43 Master of Science in Design with an Advanced Architectural Design concentration, and three Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture. Fifty-four students earned certificates, and ten earned dual degrees. The commencement speech was delivered by David W. Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College. Orr, who earned a PhD in International Relations/Political Science from Penn in 1973, previously headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years.�
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AWARDS PennDesign Graduate Architecture students were recognized for their outstanding work at the 2018 Awards Ceremony on Saturday, May 12th. Over 25 students received awards presented by Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture Winka Dubbeldam. Distinguished teaching awards were given to Eric D. Bellin, a PhD candidate in Architecture, and Ben Krone, a lecturer in Architecture. Billie Faircloth, an architect, former PennDesign faculty member, and partner at KieranTimberlake, gave the keynote address for the awards ceremony. The full list of recipients is below.
THE KANTER TRITSCH PRIZE IN ENERGY AN ARCHITECTURAL INNOVATION New for 2018, this prize is awarded annually to a second-year student pursuing a Master of Architecture degree at PennDesign who demonstrates transformational thinking on the built environment and innovation in his or her approach to energy, ecology, and/or social equity. Awarded to: Alexandra Mae Adamski
demonstrated excellence in design in the Master of Architecture professional degree program. Awarded to: Gary Polk
AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS HENRY ADAMS MEDAL The first-prize medal is awarded to the top-ranking student in the professional degree program with the highest record in all courses. First Prize: Marianne Sanche The second prize is awarded to the student in the professional degree program with the second highest record in all courses. Second Prize: John Patrick Hilla V
WARREN POWERS LAIRD AWARD Named for Warren Powers Laird (1861-1948), the first Dean of the School of Fine Arts (now School of Design). Awarded to a student with the highest standing in all courses in the first year of the professional degree program in architecture. Awarded to: Jianan Dai, Karen Toomasian, Karen Anne Vankovich, and Xinyu Wang
JAMES SMYTH WARNER MEMORIAL PRIZE
ARTHUR SPAYD BROOKE MEMORIAL PRIZE Established in 1900 in memory of Arthur Spayd Brooke, a graduate of the School of Architecture (now School of Design), and awarded to graduating architecture students for distinguished work in architecture and design. Former winners include Julian Abele, Louis I. Kahn, and Jenny Sabin. Gold Medal: Adam George Schroth Silver Medal: Alina Mairaj Ahmad
PAUL PHILIPPE CRET MEDAL Founded by the Architectural Alumni Society in 1946 and awarded to the graduating student who has consistently
Established in 1938 by Professor George Walter Dawson for a second-year student in architecture with the highest record in required studio courses. The award is to be used for a trip to see and study American architecture. Awarded to: Kurt Alexander Nelson
FRANK MILES DAY MEMORIAL PRIZE Named for the Towne School graduate and architect of Penn’s Houston Hall, University Museum, Weightman Hall, and Franklin Field. Awarded to the architecture student submitting the best essay in courses in the history and theory of architecture. Awarded to: James Andrew Billingsley
MARIO J. ROMAÑACH FELLOWSHIP Established in 1984 in memory of one of Penn’s most beloved teachers, the fellowship is awarded to a student entering the final year in the professional degree program, for demonstrated excellence in design, a love for architecture, and the determination to develop as an architect. MarioJ. Romañach served as Professor Architecture from 192 until his death in 1984. He was Chairman of the Department of Architecture from 1971 to 1974. Awarded to: Daniel Silverman
were Penn professors Paul Philippe Cret, Walter P. Laird, John Harbeson, Jean Hebrand, and Norman Rice. Awarded to: Patrick Danahy and Caleb Ehly
SAMUEL K. SCHNEIDMAN FELLOWSHIP Established in memory of Samuel K. Schneidman and awarded to second- or third-year students in the professional degree program on the basis of demonstrated excellence. Awarded to: Ariel Cooke-Zamora
WILL M. MELHORN SCHOLARSHIP Established in 1989 through a bequest by Will M. Melhorn (BFA’30), former architectural editor of House and Garden. Awarded to the students who have done the best work in the theory sequence.
MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE PROFESSIONAL DEGREE FACULTY PRIZE Awarded to students who have demonstrated exceptional growth and development. Awarded to: Alexander M. Bahr and Ryan McChord Barnette
First-Year Students First Prize: Lichao Liu Second Prize: Karen Anne Vankovich Second-Year Students First Prize: Ariel Cooke-Zamora Second Prize: Uroosa Ijaz
PH.D. ARCHITECTURE First Prize: Evan Oskierko-Jeznacki Second Prize: Ana Maria Roman Andrino
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE Awarded to: Michael Toste
THE DONALD PROWLER MEMORIAL PRIZE Established in 2002, the Donald Prowler Memorial Prize is awarded annually in memory of Donald Prowler (M.Arch’75), a dedicated teacher of environmental architecture at PennDesign. Awarded to the student with an outstanding record in required environmental courses with a desire to further sustainable architecture. Awarded to: Uroosa Ijaz WALTER R. LEACH II FELLOWSHIP Established in Memory of Walter R. Leach II (M.Arch’67), the fellowship is awarded on the basis of academic merit to students entering the third year. Awarded to: Kurt Alexander Nelson T-SQUARE CLUB FELLOWSHIP Established in 1984 and awarded annually for excellence in design to a student who has just completed the first year. Among the patrons and members of the T-Square Atelier
AAD PRIZE IN DESIGN EXCELLENCE This prize is awarded annually to a student in the Master of Science in Design: Advanced Architectural Design concentration degree program whose work is judged by the design faculty to be excellent, in consideration of the GPA and design portfolio. Frist Prize: Angeliki Tzifa Second Prize: Bosung Jeon
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HARLAN COORNVELT MEMORIAL MEDAL Established in 1975 in memory of Harlan Coornvelt, who served as an Associate Professor of Architecture at the School of Design from 1968 until his death in 1973. Awarded to the student who achieved the most outstanding record in required architectural structure courses. Awarded to: Yujie Li
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CREDITS
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