Princeton University School of Architecture
Workbook 2016
About the Work—Academic Year 2015–2016 The design and research included within this book reflect our pedagogical values: we believe in the importance of providing an interdisciplinary architectural education that balances design, technology, history and theory. The School intertwines these disciplines seamlessly, allowing faculty and students to fluidly work across them. We generate work which embodies ideas that have legs and thus can travel, so this workbook was designed to be taken apart and disseminated. Postcards, posters, and booklets are all up for the taking. We invite you to tear out your favorites and pin them to the walls in your workplaces, send them to friends, or take them along for a good read.
Workbook 2016 2 7 77 87 93 97 117 131 135 141
2016
M.Arch Degree Programs M.Arch Studios M.Arch I Thesis Projects M.Arch II Thesis Projects Undergraduate Program Undergraduate Studios Senior Thesis Projects Faculty Course Descriptions Ph.D. Program Collaborative Research Projects Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts
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Professional and Post-Professional
M.Arch Degree Programs
Master’s Program
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The Master of Architecture degree (M.Arch), accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), is intended for students who plan to practice architecture professionally. It qualifies them to take the state professional licensing examination after completing the required internship. PREREQUISITES Not required for admission but should be completed before matriculation: One year of college level math One year of college level physics One year of architecture and art history course work
3-Year Professional Program Students in the professional M.Arch program must take a minimum of 25 courses, typically four per term, including one design studio each term and the independent design thesis in the final term. The studio sequence, required technology and professional practice courses, and courses in history/theory and urbanism constitute a core that represents the foundational knowledge of the discipline. In addition to these required courses, each student must complete distribution requirements within the areas of history and theory, and building technology. In order to encourage the development of an individual program of study, each student may select up to four elective courses that can be taken throughout the University with the approval of the Director of Graduate Studies.
PROGRAMS OF STUDY The master’s degree program is structured around a rigorous sequence of design studios. Studio work is complemented by courses in technology, history, theory, analysis, and representation. Each student constructs an individual program of study to meet course and distribution requirements. Students are also eligible to take elective courses in the School and in other departments of the University.
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I. Design Studios and Seminars A. ARC 501: Architecture Design Studio, fall B. ARC 502: Architecture Design Studio, spring C. ARC 503 or 504: Integrated Building Studio, fall or spring D. Two vertical studios (ARC 505A-C and/or ARC 506A-C) E. ARC 508: M.Arch Thesis Studio F. ARC 547: Introduction to Formal Analysis G. Design seminar elective II. History and Theory A. One course with a focus in 18th/19th century architectural history B. One course with a focus in 20th century architectural history C. One course with a focus in urbanism and landscape architecture D. Three additional History and Theory courses III. Building Technology A. ARC 509: Integrated Building Systems B. ARC 510: Structural Analysis for Architecture C. ARC 511: Structural Design D. ARC 514: Environmental Engineering of Buildings, Part I
Master’s Program
E. ARC 515: Environmental Engineering of Buildings, Part II F. One additional Building Technology course IV. Legal and Business ARC 562: The Professional Practice of Architecture V. Thesis Prep ARC 530 VI. Electives Three courses (any department)
Advanced Standing in the Professional Program Students with extensive and sophisticated undergraduate architectural education may be granted advanced standing in the Professional M.Arch Program at the discretion of the Admissions Committee. Because of the differences in the educational backgrounds of students entering with advanced standing, the required number of courses in the areas of distribution is determined by the Director of Graduate Studies after reviewing each student’s transcript and experience.
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I. Design Studios and Seminars A. ARC 503 or 504: Integrated Building Studio, fall or spring B. Two vertical studios (ARC 505A-C and/or ARC 506A-C) C. ARC 508: M.Arch Thesis Studio II. History and Theory A. One course with a focus in 18th/19th century architectural history B. One course with a focus in 20th century architectural history C. One course with a focus in urbanism and landscape architecture D. Two additional History and Theory courses III. Building Technology A. ARC 511: Structural Design B. ARC 515: Environmental Engineering of Buildings, Part II C. One additional Building Technology course
2-Year Post-Professional Program A post-professional master’s degree is available to those who hold the degree of Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) or its equivalent from an international institution. These are students who have successfully completed a professional program in architecture and have fulfilled the educational requirements for professional licensing in the state or country in which the degree was granted. Students typically complete this program in two years. This degree is not accredited by the NAAB.
I. Design Studios and Seminars A. Two studios (503, 504, ARC 505A-C and/or ARC 506A-C) B. ARC 507, 508 (year-long thesis) II. Proseminar ARC 531
IV. Legal and Business ARC 562: The Professional Practice of Architecture
III. Electives Nine courses
V. Thesis Prep ARC 530 VI. Electives Two courses
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NATIONAL ARCHITECTURAL ACCREDITING BOARD STATEMENT In the United States, most state registration boards require a degree from an accredited professional degree program as a prerequisite for licensure. The National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), which is the sole agency authorized to accredit U.S. professional degree programs in architecture offered by institutions with U.S. regional accreditation, recognizes three types of degrees: the Bachelor of Architecture, the Master of Architecture, and the Doctor of Architecture. A program may be granted an eight-year, three-year, or two-year term of accreditation, depending on the extent of its conformance with established educational standards.
Princeton University School of Architecture offers the following NAAB-accredited degree programs: Master of Architecture non-pre-professional degree + 108 graduate credit hours Master of Architecture pre-professional degree + 72 graduate credit hours Next anticipated accreditation visit: 2023
Doctor of Architecture and Master of Architecture degree programs may require a pre-professional undergraduate degree in architecture for admission. However, the pre-professional degree is not, by itself, recognized as an accredited degree.
Master’s Program
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ARC 501 Architecture Design Studio— Assistant Professor Michael Meredith with Assistant Instructor Alfredo Thiermann
medium (technical support) + convention (artistic genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture
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Medium is how we conceptualize and work through a project (“technical support” i.e. form, function, material, program, context, and so on). Convention is how we situate and evaluate the work within the discipline. Play is something else. History has proven these elements to be highly unstable, of course every generation tasked to rewrite them and each of these with their own specific outcome or emphasis in mind. While convention may offer some protection against the anxiety generated by change, medium continually produces new enthusiasms and frictions which exacerbate the improvisation of play. This introductory course presents the discipline of architecture through a series of interrelated discrete exercises. These problems are not meant to represent the synthetic totality of the discipline, rather an overview of a few important aspects, points of architecture that help construct a self-conscious framework, allowing for the students to individually connect the dots, providing a foundation for further development.
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Michaela Friedberg ARC 501—Fall 2015 medium (technical support) + convention (artistic genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture
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SITE PLAN 1” = 70’
PLANTERS
CARTESIAN GRID (ROOF GARDEN) LIGHT OCULUS FOR UNITS
COLLECTIVE PATIO FURNITURE
COLUMN & BEAM DIAGRID POLAR GRID (STUDIO APARTMENTS)
COLLECTIVE LIVING ROOM
COLLECTIVE INTERIOR GARDEN & LIGHT WELL COLUMN DIAGRID (COLLECTIVE LIVING ROOM) STUDIO APARTMENT (APPROX. 650 SQ. FT.)
A LOT OF THINGS, ALL AT ONCE! (or; the architectural compromise) A LAYERING OF COMPETING ORGANIZATIONAL SYSTEMS PRODUCES THE GROUNDWORK FOR A NEW COLLECTIVE LIVE/WORK SPACE IN PRINCETON. EACH OF THESE SYSTEMS SUPPORTS AN ORGANIZATIONAL LOGIC DISTINCT FROM ITS NEIGHBOR’S. WHEN THESE SYSTEMS INTERSECT, A NEGOTIATION IS MADE BETWEEN CONTRASTING ORGANIZATIONAL SCHEMES FORMING AN ARCHITECTURAL COMPROMISE. THESE COMPROMISES PRODUCE A VARIETY OF ARCHITECTURAL EFFECTS WHICH ANY ONE SYSTEM WOULD BE INCAPABLE OF ACHIEVING. KIDNEY SHAPED STUDIO APARTMENTS ARE ARRANGED ON A HIGHLY REGIMENTED TEN FOOT COLUMN DIAGRID WHICH NECESSARILY INTERRUPTS AN OTHERWISE REGULAR CIRCULATION PATH THROUGH THE COLLECTIVE LIVING ROOM. SIMILARLY, WHILE THE COLUMNS ARE NOT PRESENT IN THE UNITS THEMSELVES, THE BEAMS ABOVE PASS THROUGH THE UNITS WITH LITTLE TO NO REGARD FOR THEIR POINTS OF INTERSECTION THROUGH THE UNIT’S WALLS. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF THESE SYSTEMS FORM UNIQUE SPATIAL CONDITIONS WHICH BEGIN TO SUGGEST OPPORTUNITIES FOR PECULIAR USER SCENARIOS. ONE CAN IMAGINE A RESIDENT WHOSE DESIRE TO ESCAPE HIS PARTNER LEADS HIM TO A PLACE OF RESPITE ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE BUILDING, HIDDEN AWAY IN A REMOTE NICHE BETWEEN TWO STUDIO APARTMENTS. MORE PRAGMATICALLY, THE INTERSECTION OF BEAMS WITHIN THE STUDIO UNITS PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES FOR NEW CREATIVE USES OF SPACE SUCH AS HANGING OBJECTS, UNIQUE LIGHTING CONDITIONS OR THE FRAMEWORK FOR A NEW EXERCISE ROUTINE.
IN THIS WAY, THE
INTERSECTION OF SYSTEMS CREATES BOTH AN ACTIVE AND PASSIVE CONDITIONING OF SPACE FOR THE USERS, WHERE INDIVIDUALS ARE ENCOURAGED TO BOTH CREATIVELY INHABIT THE BUILDING AS WELL AS BE DIRECTED THROUGH THE SPACE IN WAYS UNIQUE TO THESE ARCHITECTURAL COMPROMISES.
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Jacob Comerci ARC 501—Fall 2015 medium (technical support) + convention EXPLODED AXONOMETRIC 1” = 15’ (artistic genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture
ARC 503 Integrated Building Studio— Associate Professor Paul Lewis with Visiting Lecturer Nat Oppenheimer and Assistant Professor Forrest Meggers with Assistant Instructor Cyrus Dochow
Representing the Black Maria
In West Orange, NJ, there are two peculiar constructions at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park. One is a tar paper covered shack that floats above the ground, able to rotate on small wheels along a wooden circular track. The other building is mostly submerged, a concrete bomb shelter and a basement for a museum building that was never built. These two constructions and the tension between them are 2016
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the catalysts for this studio. The tar paper covered building is a 1954 replica of the 1893 Black Maria, the first motion picture recording studio, named for its resemblance to police wagons of the time. Hundreds of short films were shot here, feeding a brief public fascination with the Edison Kinetoscope, a peephole film viewer arcade device. As the film recording technology evolved, the Black Maria was torn down in 1904, rendered obsolete by a larger glass covered studio, closer to actors, on 41 East 21st Street in New York. The challenge for the studio was to represent the Black Maria. To design a building around the replica of this first film recording studio, which at the most pragmatic level needs to produce a thermal and protective skin for a building whose original pragmatic motivations were focused on altogether different intensifications of natural forces. The program was simple: in addition to enclosing and (re)presenting the Black Maria, it needed to house a screening room for about 30 people (a school class) and a flexible, passively conditioned, event space for about 80 people. The event space could be outdoor, weather permitting. Master’s Program
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Kayla Manning, Ryan Roark ARC 503—Fall 2015 Representing the Black Maria
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Kayla Manning, Ryan Roark ARC 503—Fall 2015 Representing the Black Maria
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N
0
0
10m
10ft
NORTH-SOUTH SECTION 1:50
0ºc / 32ºf
10ºc / 50ºf
20ºc / 68ºf
30ºc / 86ºf
THERMAL FUNCTION In Summer and Winter
Jedy Lau, Miles Gertler ARC 503—Fall 2015 Representing the Black Maria
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0
3m
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10ft
Justin Davidson, Weiwei Zhang ARC 503—Fall 2015 Representing the Black Maria
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Lily Zhang, Rennie Jones ARC 503—Fall 2015 Representing the Black Maria
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Lily Zhang, Rennie Jones ARC 503—Fall 2015 Representing the Black Maria
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ARC 505a Architecture Design Studio— Professor Jesse Reiser with Assistant Instructor Michael Overby
Tokyo Olympic Park
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The studio set up a retroactive scenario, designing an Olympic Park with respect to its postOlympic inhabitation, the afterlife of a short-term event with far-reaching consequences for the city. Forming a compelling notion of what the future Park could be, the project investigated the potentials latent in the adaptation of Olympic programming, confronting the challenge of facilitating a transition from present to future uses in strict architectural terms. This transformation entails diverse issues of formal legibility, fitness, accommodation, and affordance in conjunction with concerns of materiality, ecological change, and infrastructural systems. Seizing the historical capacity of Olympic planning to reveal preexisting tendencies as well as the more recent bids’ efforts to enact deliberate urban agendas, the project suggested that the built form of the Park can prefigure future patterns of development. Overall, it hoped to exploit the concentration of difference inherent to an overprogrammed site, extending its various possibilities into a definite proposal. It remained invested in the initial Olympic role, but asked what this infrastructure could mean to the city, to the local inhabitants, and for the site after its symbolic appeal has worn off. Master’s Program
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Laura Salazar ARC 505a—Fall 2015 Tokyo Olympic Park
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Velodrome
Athletics Field
Canoe Slalom
Gymnastics Arena
Basketball
Benjamin Vanmuysen ARC 505a—Fall 2015 Tokyo Olympic Park
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ARC 505b Architecture Design Studio— Assistant Professor Axel Kilian with Assistant Instructor Jeffrey Anderson
Architectural Robotics— Embodied Computation
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The studio was motivated by the questions: What can architecture become with the influx of autonomous systems in robotics and everyday objects? What do architectural robotics look like and what are possible scenarios for their development? Three scenarios served as starting points for the studio: 1. Robots building architecture with and for humans—influence of robotic processes on design and construction processes. 2. Humans living in robotic buildings that are based on the integration of feedback, control, sensing, prediction, and actuation into architecture extends the possibilities of architectural design and raises questions of control, authority, privacy, and accountability. 3. Cohabitation of robotic constructs and humans in buildings—new social human-machine scenarios are developing with the cohabitation of autonomous and intelligent machines and humans that affect program and architecture, cities and many aspects of life. The architectural ambition was to develop an architectural robotic body as an alternative to the anthropomorphism so dominant in robotics today and develop design scenarios through physical experimental architectural robotic prototypes using sensing, fabrication and programming. Master’s Program
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LATION
ARC505B Final Presentation | 2015/12/15 | Ji SHI
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ROOM B
ROOM A
Human State 02 Half Open
Door State 02 Half Open
Door State 01 Close
Human State 01 Close
Human State 02 Half Open
Door State 02 Half Open
Human State 01 Close
Door State 01 Close
Human State 02 Open
Door State 02 Open
Human State 02 Open
Door State 02 Open
INTERACTION CRITERIA OBJECT OF STUDY: A CORRIDOR THAT CONNECTS TWO ROOMS WITH PEOPLE
Ji Shi ARC 505b—Fall 2015 Architectural Robotics— Embodied Computation 9 possibilities
9 possibilities
ARC505B Final Presentation | 2015/12/15 | Ji SHI
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B
A
9*9=81
Kevin Pazik ARC 505b—Fall 2015 Architectural Robotics— Embodied Computation
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ARC 505c Architecture Design Studio— Visiting Lecturer Junya Ishigami with Assistant Instructor Yuko Sono
Design a Mountain
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This studio challenged the students to think about how to design the space beyond a human scale. Commonly, an architecture is shaped based on the man’s scale and it is designed for them. However, in the present world, what is necessary for us to think of is not setting human beings in the center of the world, but to consider them as a part of a global circle. We do not only construct a structural object for people, but also it is necessary to design for every other living being. Therefore, we should be curious to see how the space can exceed the ordinary architectural scale. For example, think of the space with the magnitude of natural landscape. Think of the space with the magnitude of the weather. Think of the space in the global magnitude. The mountain is part of the landform, yet it is also a structure and creates various different spaces depending on its volume. It can be considered as an enormous architecture. We will design “a new environment as mountain”. We will draw the scenery that we have never experienced and extend our study to approach the issues that occur on a global level. In doing so, we could bring our ideation to the next level. Master’s Program
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5000
6000
7000
8000
8000 7000
6000
I-15
8000
0
1000
0
1100
5 1205
Cross Pass
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Three Points
E
ID
L
TA
EN
DIV
5
1122
AIL TR
IN
NT
CO
Tic-Tac Lake
I-15
N Peaks/Ridges
Lakes/Low Points
Suggested Backcountry Hikes
Marked Hikes
CDT
Upper Sonoran
Transition
Canadian
Hudsonian
Artic-Alpine
0
0.5 mi
1 mi
Jessica Colangelo ARC 505c—Fall 2015 Design a Mountain
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N Low Elevation Figure
High Elevation Figure
0
0.5 mi
1 mi
Andrew Percival ARC 505c—Fall 2015 Design a Mountain
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ARC 502 Architecture Design Studio— Visiting Lecturer Hayley Eber with Assistant Instructor Igor Bragado Fernandez
Pavilions: Perusings and Provocations
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Throughout history, pavilions have acted as paradigms of innovative design. Often without a program or the necessary regulations of a conventional building, the pavilion has yielded some of the most adventurous and influential works of modern architecture. It is precisely because pavilions do not need to subscribe to conventional architectural rules and regulations—be weather tight, enduring or pragmatic—that they are able to become experimental investigations of the built environment and embody an event or place. Their scale, mobility and comparatively short lifespan allow them to exist as temporary, unfinished laboratories. The studio will examine how these experimental projects, often lightweight and temporary, are intrinsically linked to our current state of continuous crisis, both economically and environmentally. Simultaneously, they allow architects to test ideas in increasingly contemplative ways: by researching fundamental ideas of time, movement, structure and program. Unlike follies with no utilitarian purpose, our work will examine their intersection with issues of contemporary culture.
Master’s Program
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Michaela Friedberg ARC 502—Spring 2016 Pavilions: Perusings and Provocations
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ACT I THE COCKTAIL PARTY
The pleasure of your company is cordially requested June 21, 2016 at 7:30pm. Set in the historical Princeton Battlefield, this special evening celebrates the opening of “The Louvre in six Seconds”, a pavilion made possible by the generous donations of UBS and Princeton University. The pavilion seeks to discover the architectural opportunities associated with contemporary media, in this case, Vine. A six second clip documenting the Louvre was deconstructed into a series of plans, and these plans were superimposed to create the pavilion you see. Dinner and After-Party tickets are available via reply form or online. After-Party performance by Future. Cocktail party attire required. If you have further questions, please contact the Department of Special Programming and Events at (331) 826-9131 or e-mail specialevents@TLI6S.org
ACT II SCULPTURE SHOW
The Louvre in 6 Seconds, sponsored by UBS, is pleased to present Peter Coffin's It Chooses You, the artist's first solo exhibition in New Jersey. The show is a conceptual installation of photographs and sculpture. The show is in part a study of modernism, taking it from exclusivity and elitism, and rendering it playful and informal. Through abstractions of invisible thought processes and reinterpretations of iconic artworks, the artist invites a dialogue which considers the interplay of interpretation, memory and association. It Chooses You will be on view from June 21 – November 2, 2016. The pavilion is located adjacent to the Princeton Battlefield monument at 500 Mercer Rd, Princeton, New Jersey 08540. The show is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10AM to 6PM.
ACT III CHANGING HANDS
At the end of September 2016, The Louvre in Six Seconds will be deconstructed and shipped to UBS headquarters in New Jersey for permanent display. UBS has long been a patron of the arts, and as a part of the “1% for Art” initiative, UBS has agreed to sponsor the pavilion’s construction and transportation in exchange for collecting the piece in their corporate headquarters’ plaza after its initial months in Princeton. UBS’s art collection team, headed by Mary Rozell, ensures that the UBS Art Collection remains one of the preeminent collections of contemporary art in the world. The curators liaise with the art community and lead the acquisition and sale of works of art. They work with their colleagues in the art collection team to implement the broader strategy for managing the collection and displaying it in UBS buildings worldwide.
Jacob Comerci ARC 502—Spring 2016 Pavilions: Perusings and Provocations
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0
1
2
5m
Akira Ishikura, Sharon Xu ARC 502—Spring 2016 Pavilions: Perusings and Provocations
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ARC 504 Integrated Building Studio— Visiting Lecturers Mark Lee and Sharon Johnston with Assistant Instructor Alfredo Thiermann
Museum Islands
2016
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The studio will investigate variations on the theme of “island” and “archipelago” organizations—mono-use spaces and their subsequent agglomeration—in architecture and their generative potential in urban design through the design of a new building for a Robert Rauschenberg Museum on the campus of the Menil Foundation in Houston. The studio will selectively mine the architectural history of speculative endeavors and case studies of dispersed campus models and temporal art events (i.e. biennales) as points of departure. With this initial research on various incarnations of island organizations, the studio will test the findings with the design of a 25,000 sq. ft. building for a Robert Rauschenberg Museum on the campus of the Menil Foundation in Houston.
Master’s Program
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Emma Benintende ARC 504—Spring 2016 Museum Islands
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Ryan Roark ARC 504—Spring 2016 Museum Islands
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Ryan Roark ARC 504—Spring 2016 Museum Islands
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ARC 506a Architecture Design Studio— Professor Alejandro Zaera-Polo with Assistant Instructor Jeffrey Anderson
The Imminent City: New Urban Technologies
2016
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The purpose of the studio is to collectively investigate and understand the principles of emerging urban technologies, to produce a technical survey of their current and future potentials, and to generate a series of proposals which turn them into new forms of urbanity. Every member of the studio will be responsible for investigating one of these technologies in depth, and devising an urban startup, prototype, or infrastructural proposal with their technology of choice. The proposal may take various scales of operation: it can be the design as a wearable item, it may be a building prototype which takes advantage of a new technology, or it can have an infrastructural scale. The collective investigation on emerging urban technologies and the startups will be compiled in a CAUI publication at the end of the term.
Master’s Program
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Weiwei Zhang ARC 506a—Spring 2016 The Imminent City: New Urban Technologies
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Shujie Chen ARC 506a—Spring 2016 The Imminent City: New Urban Technologies
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ARC 506b Architecture Design Studio— Visiting Professor Andrés Jaque with Assistant Instructor Rennie Jones
HIGHENDRACY
High-end living might be a new regime, and one in which architecture plays a key role. HIGHENDCRACY’s goals were: 1. To interrogate “How is it constructed?”, “What does it mobilize?”, and “What are the conflicts, instabilities and subversions that could shape its evolution?”; and 2. To explore the capacity of design to make its discontinuities pop up, to make the 2016
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best of its leaks and to empower its specific forms of subversion. High-end living is not luxury—it is not an uprated version of circulating commodities. Neither is it the innovative or avant-garde leading-edge of mainstream design. It is not just cities affected by growing inequality. It is in itself a differentiated form of urbanism, as much as a differentiated political regime. Renderings of on-sale condominiums for billionholding portfolios are the best representation of high-end living. At a time when many forms of architecture are being eroded, high-end condo towers keep multiplying. High-end condos are both fiercely desired and attacked. Loved for their capacity to stabilize value and of delivering “uniqueness”; hated for their role in producing and reflecting inequality, concentrating power and promoting stereotypes and cultural stagnation. They remain vacant offline, but inhabited in the images of them that circulate online. They are irrelevant as devices for daily inhabitance, but radically effective in mobilizing change and producing trends, shared knowledge and design. Master’s Program
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v
Ryan Barney, Jedy Lau, Kevin Pazik ARC 506b—Spring 2016 HIGHENDRACY
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Lixing Feng ARC 506b—Spring 2016 HIGHENDRACY
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Myles McCaulay ARC 506b—Spring 2016 HIGHENDRACY
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Mercedes Peralta ARC 506b—Spring 2016 HIGHENDRACY
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2015–16
The Thesis
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Each semester, thesis students are challenged to make an architectural response to a general thematic question. The theme is explored in workshops, stated as a written proposition and elaborated as a design proposal during the students’ final semester. Thesis topics are agreed upon by the faculty that serve as a hinge point between architecture and questions of politics, culture, technology or society. The thematic organization of the final semester’s independent design research creates a shared point of departure for students, faculty and visiting critics.
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M.Arch I Thesis Projects
Sanger Clark and Stephen Froese, Formwork; Advisor: Michael Meredith Justin Davidson, (refor)matting the suburb; Advisor: Paul Lewis Melissa Frost, These Utopian States; Advisors: Michael Young and David Reinfurt Miles Gertler and Igor Bragado Fernandez, The Architecture of Everyday Death; Advisors: Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Andrés Jaque Joanna Grant, Overly Attached Cute; Advisors: Michael Meredith and Sylvia Lavin Julian Harake, Plasticity, Nonlinearity, Chaos; Advisors: Guy Nordenson and Jesse Reiser Lauren (Rennie) Jones and Abigail Stone, No Vacancy: Refugee Crisis and Urban Absorption; Advisor: Axel Kilian Van Kluytenaar, The Transit Zone: Heterotopic Islands of Exception; Advisor: Paul Lewis Zhi Rui Lim, A Latitude of Darkness; Advisor: Jesse Reiser
2016
Le Luo, House I; Advisor: Mario Gandelsonas Kayla Manning, erosion, obsolescence and wear; Advisor: Axel Kilian Marc Maxey, Owning up to Architecture: Materials, Mortgages, and the Agency of Financial Instruments; Advisor: Andrés Jaque Vincent Meyer-Madaus, Rewiring La Grande Borne; Advisor: Andrés Jaque Matthew Schneider, Cognized Aberrations; Advisor: Axel Kilian Regina Teng, The Light, the Heat: Architectural Transparency and Thermo-Spatial Aesthetics; Advisor: Michael Young Nickolas (Sasha) Urano, Hot Models, Cold Buildings; Advisor: Jesse Reiser Yshai Yudekovitz, Iteration Computation; Advisor: Hayley Eber Lily Zhang, Collective Clutter: The Stuff of Buildings; Advisor: Jesse Reiser
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M.Arch II Thesis Projects
Jeffrey Anderson, Gesture and the Threshold of Meaning: Designing (with) Interpretive 3D Modeling Systems; Advisor: Axel Kilian Kendall Baldwin, Unbuilding: Preservation as Pathologic Construction; Advisor: Guy Nordenson Igor Bragado Fernandez and Miles Gertler, The Architecture of Everyday Death; Advisors: Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Andrés Jaque Cyrus Dochow, The Flat Institution: Architecture for 2 ½ Dimensions; Advisor: Michael Meredith Daniele Profeta, Princeton Highlands—The Spatial Structure of a Community; Advisor: Alejandro Zaera-Polo
Master’s Program
Paul Ruppert, (Mis-)Assembling (Mis)Attention: Modern Management, Aesthetics of Logistics, and the De-habitualization of Attention; Advisor: Michael Meredith Alfredo Thiermann, Timescraper: A housing typology for the Neo-Industrial City; Advisor: Axel Kilian Bowen Zhang, Alternative Landscape; Advisor: Paul Lewis Zhenru Zhou, Recarving the Dunhuang Grottoes; Advisor: Jesse Reiser
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Julian Harake
Advisors: Guy Nordenson and Jesse Reiser
Plasticity, Nonlinearity, Chaos Plasticity is the propensity of a structure or material to permanently deform under a given load. In ductile materials, plasticity occurs once a material has ‘yielded’ under a certain load, like a wire that will no longer spring back after a significant load has been applied. Typically (and for good reason), the plastic range of materials is something that is meant to be avoided in structural engineering, and plastic deformation (or a material’s ‘yield point’) is often synonymous with structural failure. Therefore, the traditional goal of structural engineering is to ensure that materials never enter the plastic range of deformation and instead remain in the material’s ‘elastic range,’ such that the form, strength, and stability of the structure remain more or less constant. If architecture is popularly associated with strength, stasis, and control, it is surely due to the fact that it has existed comfortably within this elastic range. Furthermore, if materials exist within the elastic range and are never subjected to plastic deformation through excessive loading, then they can more easily be subjected to geometric rationalization. Thus, that a material or a structure can maintain its shape has informed not only architecture’s symbolic functioning but also its formal generation during the process of design. This thesis posits that the elastic range of material deformation has limited architecture in terms of its structural potential, symbolic functioning, and formal possibilities. On the other hand, the architectural and structural potential within the plastic range of material deformation remains unfulfilled. For example, metals typically reach their ultimate strengths through plastic hardening, and an architectural vocabulary stemming from plastic deformation and nonlinear material behavior manages to subvert architecture’s more typical associations of stasis and control. Accordingly, the project seeks to position itself between the laboratory and the studio, between engineering and architecture, between design and chance operations, and between stasis and dynamism to produce something which can be described by none of the above.
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Kayla Manning Advisor: Axel Kilian
erosion, obsolescence and wear Erosion has many definitions and connotations, including: environmental weathering, transformations caused by wear and maintenance, and even the deterioration of social relationships and values. Often seen as a form of failure, erosion is reassessed in this body of research as a form of production within the design, construction, and use of architectural material assemblies. Socially and programmatically, the research embraces evolving domestic timescales and notions of ‘unrootedness’ within today’s residential landscape. The methodology of investigation utilizes physical models to study the embodied potential of a loose assembly of material—a loose assembly that can be reorganized to respond to evolving environmental conditions and spatial needs. With erosion acting as an agent of design, the illusion of a linear trajectory in material assembly is challenged. A singular moment of ‘completed construction’ is never reached. Rather there is an understanding of material as a product of deep geologic time, and matter is arrested into different moments of architectural assembly. The primary assemblies reassessed in this research include rammed earth construction, green roof construction, and timber construction. One line of investigation looks at the potential of a green roof system to yield to environmental forces and through erosion, reshape its surrounding context. The composition and form of the roof is therefore programmed with its own means of failure. Another line of investigation explores programming the volume of rammed earth construction through density differentiation. When subject to erosional forces, the form morphs to reveal new architectural details and spatial programs and counters inclinations towards preservative maintenance and restoration. Collectively, the experimentations carried out embrace material redundancy, depth, and reorganization as strategies for responding to erosional forces both natural and occupant imposed, aiming to embrace a temporality within architecture that already exists in nature and modern daily life.
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Lily Zhang
Advisor: Jesse Reiser
Collective Clutter: The Stuff of Buildings
SUBURB 10,000 PEOPLE
SUBURB 20,000 PEOPLE
SUBURB 15,000 PEOPLE SUBURB 30,000 PEOPLE
We have too many objects—too much stuff. Our inhabitable spaces are endangered by our stuff, and architecture is vulnerable. Carefully composed spaces are disrupted and functionality compromised by items that stray out of place. This thesis aims to reconcile the antagonistic relationship between architecture and stuff by provoking a productive dialogue between the objects within a building and the materials that constitute it. The personal storage unit emerges as a new kind of cultural platform, one that uses stuff not to fill space but instead to make space. In contrast to the self-storage facility that privileges individual ownership and the concealment of objects, this thesis proposes a shared storage space of collective clutter where the public can enter, people can gather, and storage becomes a valuable resource for all. Every object brought into storage is tagged, coded, and documented to make up an inventory of what is stored at any given moment. Objects are transported through the space by bots and humans, and revolve in continual circulation based on different uses and queries by people in the space. Different tiers of storage and enclosure are offered as options within the contract, allowing for varying degrees of protection vs. shared usage. Zones of organizing objects guide the space, and the architecture of the enclosure corresponds to these scenarios of objects to calibrate the standardized building typology of the ex-urban single story interior conditioned storage warehouse. Within this system, any number of configurations can be queried and requested by the people in the space. Storage becomes a new mode of habitation, a new pastime. In this space, we find that objects and architecture become one and the same, intertwined and codependent for making up various environments. Unexpected coincidences and contingencies arise in this shared storage space where consumption is turned into production, different objects form unlikely neighbors, and stuff begets its own architecture of little infrastructures.
SUBURB 40,000 PEOPLE 5 MILES
10 MILES
URBAN 200,000 PEOPLE
5 MILES
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8 MILES 3 MILES
11 MILES
11 MILES SUBURB 20,000 PEOPLE
SUBURB 10,000 PEOPLE
SUBURB 10,000 PEOPLE
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Jeffrey Anderson Advisor: Axel Kilian
Gesture and the Threshold of Meaning: Designing (with) Interpretive 3D Modeling Systems The project explores the possibility of controller-free gestural modeling. Using commands similar to sign-language, the user is able to develop complex 3D models which are editable from a single control point. By layering successive meaningful gestures and captured motion, elaborate spaces and models can be easily achieved. By developing a gestural language which balances the sensing capabilities of the Leap Motion Controller with intuitively meaningful and natural hand motions, this project serves as an immersive 3D modeling program which does not depend on the use of cumbersome controllers. Using specific gestures to “drive� the character controller, draw geometries, array objects in space, and combine groups of objects into assemblies, this program is able to quickly generate massive environments and complex models. Additionally, the ability to toggle physics and gravity effects on and off allows the user to generate free-form models without constraints and then test their performance with simulated forces, balancing purely expressive qualities with specifically defined restraints. An integrated training program allows users to develop fluency in the modeling language as well as generate their own gestures for specific commands, thus customizing the program to each user’s specific needs or gestural idiosyncrasies. Originally designed as an architectural modeling program, this project has focused on the real-time generation of spaces to be explored and edited, a quality which distinguishes it from many other purely object-based immersive modeling programs. As this research project continues to develop, it will incorporate the creation of active design agents which are programmable during runtime to serve as modeling aids, provide inspiration and generate annotations to add additional layers of richness to created spaces and objects.
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Igor Bragado Fernandez and Miles Gertler Advisors: Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Andrés Jaque
The Architecture of Everyday Death Broadly speaking, death is a wasted effort. Decades of technological progress have distanced the material business of death from everyday life. Sanitization, disease-control, and body processing have kept death neat and tidy, and out of sight. The rising price of urban real estate and the drive for high-rise density have obviated many of the urban typologies that once played host to the social activities surrounding death. Massive processing infrastructure has been built to address the rising numbers of the urban dead and relegated body disposal to spreadsheets and itineraries. But all this came at a loss. The last half-century of architectural discourse too, has contributed to the distancing of death from the urban, elaborating the metaphysical poetics of death as an island, apart from the everyday. In contrast to the post-modern, Sigfried Giedion’s chapter on death in Mechanization Takes Command might be the first architectural account of the techno-social implications of the development of industries around death. He is arguably the first architectural historian to acknowledge the role of death industries as critical contributors to the construction of the modern city, as was the case with nineteenth century Paris. New technologies in meat processing and the assembly line necessitated new forms of connectivity that spanned city and countryside and shaped entire neighborhoods. The biological end of life is no longer the end of your existence. Death exerts itself in home décor, in your fitness regime, and in virtual space, yet architecture has so far failed to acknowledge the potential posed by the latent social situations and infrastructural networks around death, and failed to recognize these entities as a site for action. Today, the complexity of the urban ecosystem has made the sites of death ubiquitous yet less evident. What we lack is the architectural and urban protocol to engage the body whose very subjectivity is shaped by, yet extended beyond, biological death. How can a greater embrace of death’s potential as body and city builder yield a more productive, socially active, urban ecology, at the scale of the everyday? How might death be evolved as an architectural technology to more fully serve society? How do we equip the ceremonial and material business of death with an urban platform?
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Cyrus Dochow
Advisor: Michael Meredith
The Flat Institution: An Architecture for 2 ½-Dimensions In 2011, Asher Durand’s American masterpiece—Progress (The Advance of Civilization) (1853)—was sold to an anonymous buyer. Its current whereabouts are unknown. The sale follows a twenty-year trajectory of renewed financial speculation in nineteenth-century American landscape painting, with wealthy individuals replacing institutions as the primary proprietors of the genre. The revaluation by private collectors of these national treasures has inevitably limited their accessibility to the general public. Likely out of boredom, I googled “progress durand” only to be confronted by an array of sources, dimensions, proportions, colors, and formats ( jpeg, pillow case, coffee mug, mouse pad, book cover…) I realized, as many probably have, that it is more or less impossible to discern the likeness of the painted Progress from a digital Progress, a comparison that is complicated by the deaccessioning of Progress (the threedimensional referent) and the continuous reformatting of Progress (as an image) for the two-dimensional screen. The gulf between Progress (A) and Progress (A�, A��, A���, A����, . . .) is the space we find ourselves inhabiting in today’s screen-based world. With this gulf in mind, this project has two primary intentions that exist in productive tension with one another. The first is to collect and present a historically significant genre of painting, one marked by the coherence of its conventions and historical convictions of its purpose. The second is to present that collection in ways—arrangements, sites, and collective experiences—that destabilize the legitimating function of the authentic work of art and fragment the historically closed narrative of nineteenthcentury landscape scenes. The Flat Institution is a traveling museum of nineteenth-century American landscape reproductions designed for the repetitive sites of the Land Ordinance grid. It is a modular system composed of a series of parallel walls with frames looking onto images and surroundings. Each image-frame pair is separated by an eight foot corridor, such that visitors pass through images and frames repeatedly as they move through the museum. Each module consists of two parallel walls, roof,
floor, and light fixtures. Five full-scale prototype modules were constructed in front of the School of Architecture in April 2016. www.flatinstitution.org
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A.B. Degree in Architecture
The Undergraduate Program
2016
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DEPARTMENTAL REPRESENTATIVE Mario Gandelsonas
Undergraduate Program
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The undergraduate program at the School of Architecture is known for its rigorous and interdisciplinary approach to pre-professional education. The four-year undergraduate program leads to an A.B. with a concentration in architecture and offers an introduction to the discipline of architecture within the framework of a liberal arts curriculum. In addition to architectural design and the history and theory of architecture and urbanism, undergraduates study a range of disciplines that contribute to an architect’s knowledge and vision, including courses in architectural analysis, representation, computing, and building technologies. Such a broad academic program also prepares students for a graduate program in architecture and other related disciplines such as landscape architecture, urban planning, civil engineering, art history, and the visual arts.
2016
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Program of Study The undergraduate program provides a foundation for graduate professional study in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and related fields of study. In particular, the program prepares students for further study at the graduate level in design and the history and theory of art or architecture. In addition to the general prerequisites and the requirements for independent work, each student is required to complete ten courses in three cognate areas: the History and Theory distribution; the Technology distribution; and the Design Seminar distribution, which requires two courses. All students are required to take ARC 403 Topics in the History and Theory of Architecture in the fall semester of their senior year. This course covers methodologies of historical analysis and research, the literature of the field, and the varieties of architectural writing. All students are required to enroll in ARC 404 Advanced Design Studio in the fall semester of their senior year. The advanced design studio presents a challenging independent design project in which the knowledge of previous studios is synthesized and new techniques of representation are employed. Each student completes a senior thesis, a rite of passage for all Princeton students. More information about the thesis as well as recently completed senior thesis projects can be found on page 117.
Undergraduate Program
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ARC 404 Senior Independent Work/ Advanced Design Studio— Professor Mario Gandelsonas with Assistant Instructor Kendall Baldwin
The Fluvial Metropolis
2016
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For most of our students, the Fall 2015 senior urban studio will be their first opportunity to travel to São Paulo, Brazil. Travel to Brazil offers our students exposure to a unique mix of the urgent issues associated with urbanization and globalization, while at the same time introducing them to Brazil’s rich historical and cultural past. The 2015 Senior Joint Studio has been developed in conjunction with the Faculty of Architecture of the University of São Paulo. The site for the studio is the central food market in São Paulo, located on the right bank of the Pinheiros River, between the railroad bridge downstream (north) and the Jaguaré Bridge upstream (south) nearby Vilallobos Park. The site is part of the Hidroanel, a major urban infrastructural project, a 170 km. water ring in São Paulo. The program will be the design of a water park as a new cultural and entertainment “device” for the São Paulo metropolitan region.
Undergraduate Program
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PLANT CLEANSE
OBSTACLE COURSE
PIPES
MACHINERY
Sandy Bole ARC 404—Fall 2015 The Fluvial Metropolis
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- Due to accumulation of football pitch segments, the center will be closed today save for the football events - Teams 1 and 2 will play first, starting at 9 AM; the rest will follow as time allows - Please watch your children closely, as there will be a crowd for some of the matches and people have been known to fall into the lagoon - Center will remain open until last game is completed, and will promptly close
Regional Inter-Mural Football (semi-finals)
Monday, May 9th, 2016
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Other visitors are welcome to use tennis courts and basketball courts, so long as they mind the track Women’s events will start at 10 AM; men’s at 2 PM Refreshments will be available for purchase at either end of the canopy, at the Demimonde Cafes Center will remain open until 8 PM as per usual
(mile, 2 mile, 1000 meter, 5000 meter)
Long Distance Track and Field
Tuesday, May 10th, 2016
Luke Hamel ARC 404—Fall 2015 The Fluvial Metropolis
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ARC 981 Junior Independent Work Studio — Professor Gisela Baurmann with Assistant Instructor Paul Ruppert
MICRO // MAX //
SUPER-EFFICIENT MICRO DWELLING: PROTOTYPE Proponents of super energy efficient construction propose buildings with energy uses around 10–20% of typical constructions through passive means. So far the fundamental shift in construction methodology has not generated an adequate architectural response. This design studio aims at proposing a radically new architectural language for super energy efficient dwellings. 2016
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To achieve extreme energy efficiency through passive means, there exist two schools of thought: One concept believes in super insulation. Le Corbusier formulated this principle around 1929 with his “mur neutralisant” 1: perimeter walls strive to actively neutralize the effect of exterior conditions on the building’s interior. The other concept takes the opposite approach: the envelope maximizes solar and thermal gains, buffer zones mitigate the changing exterior conditions and filter desirable energetic gains towards the building interior. Buckminster Fuller developed with “Skybreak” 2 building envelopes based on this concept—a predecessor of today’s solar facades. Studying these precedents, as well as efficiency models found in nature, the studio develops profoundly new expressions of efficient micro housing units that reflect their maximized energy performance and resiliency. 1 “Precisions sur un etat present de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme”, Le Corbusier 1930 2 “Skybreak”, Buckminster Fuller 1949
Undergraduate Program
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pressure T =140 °F common area
thermal conduction
Apartments are an aggregate of four apartments Junior around a central common area. Our project draws inspiration from Sharon (Xizuan) Deng, Aaron Yin T = 70 °F a series of thread models and plant cell studies to propose new Instructor:the Gisela Baurmann pipe system keeps room pressure, humidity, and expressions of efficient energy performance and resiliency. Fall 2015 temperature constant for maximum comfort Princeton SoA temperature Studio
The Breathing Apartments Sharon (Xizuan) Deng, Aaron Yin
ventilation The Breathing
private corridor shared kitchen
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Sharon Deng, Aaron Yin ARC 981—Fall 2015 MICRO // MAX //
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Natural Precedents Blended Pattern_Isabella Douglas
Isabella Douglas, Francesco Di Caprio ARC 981—Fall 2015 MICRO // MAX //
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ARC 981 Junior Independent Work Studio— Professor Jesse Reiser
Architecture 1:1
2016
109
Workbook
Throughout the history of modern architecture, furniture has served as the most concise representation of an architect’s design principles. While these principles could be applied to projects at any scale, the social, material, geometric, and aesthetic forces underlying an architect’s disciplinary project here find their most poignant resolution. This course will focus on a number of specific design techniques in a highly regimented manner. The theme of this semester will be the relationship between geometry and matter in the development of a piece of furniture. We will explore the nature of these complex surfaces and the effects of a limited but continuous enclosed environment on human functions. We will elaborate our skills in model-building, with particular emphasis placed on the value of accurate representation both by fostering craft and by exploring novel techniques of fashioning and representing precise geometries. Representation and material logics will not be seen as separate in this studio, instead we will seek to unify the two by learning to exploit precise techniques to extract 2D drawings from 3D surfaces, to deploy varied typological arrangements, and to manipulate models systematically. Undergraduate Program
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Hiba Elbuluk ARC 981—Spring 2016 Architecture 1:1
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Ning Loh ARC 981—Spring 2016 Architecture 1:1
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Mariana Medrano ARC 981—Spring 2016 Architecture 1:1
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2016
Senior Thesis
2016
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The senior thesis is a detailed project, presenting a well-argued piece of research on a precise architectural theme, and may include a substantial amount and variety of visual materials (including any of several forms of representation: architectural drawings, models, video, photographs, and computer-generated images). The relative proportion of written to visual material for each student is agreed upon with the advisor and thesis committee. The final presentation and oral defense of the senior thesis in the spring constitutes a section of the departmental examination.
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Sandy Bole
Clean Resources, Old Land, and New Typologies: Adapting Urban Planning to New Opportunities for Solar, Wind and Geothermal Power Advisor: Alejandro Zaera-Polo
As efforts to curb global warming become more publicized globally, there is an increasing pressure to invest in carbon-cutting initiatives. In the United States, this social influence coincides with the continuous decline of renewable energy costs, offering opportunities to exploit solar, wind, and geothermal resources as alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas. As clean electricity progressively acquires market share, the country will inevitably reach a threshold where dispersed electricity generation will become the primary form of energy. Yet, stimulating this transformation requires a thorough revision of the urban design practices prevalent in the country. As utility grids switch from highly concentrated and transportable fuels to scattered electricity generation, analyzing local environmental resources become of critical importance to the fulfillment of a zero carbon society. While architecture and infrastructure have historically been standardized as a nationwide model, the advent of unevenly distributed renewable electricity requires location-specific urban planning to optimize the yield of these relatively inefficient resources. This thesis presents an overview of potential renewable resources and demonstrates the importance to examine the climatic and geographic context of urban developments before inferring organizational solutions. While the contiguous United States are analyzed as a whole, this dissertation reveals the regional disparities of this enormous nation, and predicts the effects of renewable electricity on the infrastructural organization of buildings and people. Architecture and infrastructure can no longer be designed according to idealized national standards. Instead, modern planning in the emerging carbon-neutral economy will be prescribed by local resources and their inherent boundaries.
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Luke Hamel
Backyard Forgotten, Terrain Vague: The present and future development of the Eleonas of Athens, Greece Advisor: M. Christine Boyer
This thesis addresses the urban terrain vague of Eleonas, in Athens, Greece by exploring its developmental history and future. The site of interest is a large tract of land in the center of Athens with limited access to the surrounding city and a significantly smaller population than adjacent areas. This population is largely comprised of Roma, immigrants, and other fringe groups. The area has been deemed a ghetto by the Athenian authorities and left largely untouched until recently, when it hosted the country’s first refugee camp for those fleeing persecution and violence in the Middle East. Eleonas has also been vetted for top-down development as a corridor of finance and entrepreneurship. By analyzing and addressing the master planning and literature that has been written about Eleonas, this thesis aims to present a new image of the area. Rather than depicting it as an urban void, rife with crime and decrepitude, it argues that Eleonas is a redoubt of social and economic security for marginalized populations and hard-scrabble industries. The document also addresses issues of monumentality in architecture; problems of photographic representation and value judgment in stigmatized spaces; and structures of urban informality where formal systems cannot accommodate human needs. Combining the studies of architecture, the modern Hellenic world, and the urban experience, this text also touches on incidences where race and class preclude access to the resources of the city. Relying heavily on Greek sources to gain more local insight into the economic and urban landscape of Athens, this thesis attempts to transcend theory to find a practical solution that can address the real problems of Eleonas while leaving its positive qualities intact. The text culminates in a proposal whereby Eleonas becomes a permanent haven for refugees who cannot leave Greece, rather than a playground for moneyed elites.
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Angeline Jacques
“Where are your waters?” Recontextualizing São Paulo’s Rivers Advisor: Mario Gandelsonas
This thesis focuses on São Paulo, Brazil, as a case study in the shifting role of urban rivers in large contemporary cities and their potential as generators of accessible public space, especially within a country with urgent and pressing conflict over water rights and control. It aims to redefine central São Paulo as a waterfront city in a time in which its rivers have been neglected and forgotten as leftover assets from the industrial age. This introduces a new logic by which to examine São Paulo’s unprecedented and overwhelming growth. As a post-industrial river-oriented city, São Paulo demonstrates recognizable urbanization trends that can be found in other similar cities of its size. The thesis emphasizes the historical roles that three of São Paulo’s rivers, the Anhangabaú, Tamanduateí, and Pinheiros, have played in the founding, rapid growth, and industrialization of the largest city in the Americas. It also explores the parallels between shifting spatial dynamics of class within the city and the distribution and representation of its public space. Then, São Paulo is placed into a wider discourse of new methods of waterfront development. Using contemporary theory and globalized precedents such as Los Angeles and Seoul, as well as exemplary public areas that already exist in São Paulo, the thesis proposes how new understandings of river development could be applied to São Paulo to generate public space solutions like greenways and parks. The thesis imagines three design interventions that draw on both local and global examples in order to revitalize three sections of river-oriented land in São Paulo. As issues of environmentalism and landscape urbanism in design become increasingly important in cities around the world, reintroducing an urban water narrative can allow designers to understand a city’s history through a new lens and propose more sustainable public spaces for the future.
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Patrick Konttinen
Education in America: Learning from the Casino Advisor: Jesse Reiser
The purpose of my research is to enhance the educational experience in the United States by improving classroom architecture. This will be accomplished by employing tactics found in non-educational establishments which utilize highly sophisticated methods. The primary establishment of my research is the hyper-capitalist gambling casino. I contend that casinos should be further studied in order to identify strategies that can be duplicated into the classroom. The goal of such strategies is to encourage students to be more attentive, which will resultantly help them learn. While casinos are far from a public good, they have proven success achieving their goals which are simply maximizing monetary gains. To do this, casinos are relentless in their endeavors to attract, stimulate, and keep gamblers gambling. By looking further into casino architecture, the monotonous and ineffective school classroom of today can be improved and ultimately benefit the educational system, and eventually, will benefit society as a whole.
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Jeffrey Liu
A Hierarchy of Simultaneous Temporalities: Negotiating Stasis within an Architecture of Continual Transformation Advisor: Jesse Reiser
Though architects conventionally conceive buildings as static, postoccupancy observation reveals architecture to be constantly undergoing physical and functional transformations in reflection of unforeseen physical, social, and economic processes. These continual and unpredictable post-occupancy deviations are best described by Sanford Kwinter’s conception of novel time, which presents time as a nonlinear, erratic, and incessantly evolving entity. In response to the inability of static architecture to engage with the inevitability of change, this thesis reevaluates architecture within the temporal framework of novelty to propose an architecture of continual transformation in engagement with the changing physical and socioeconomic forces of the site. The model of “animate form” in parametric architecture is an early embodiment of novel time that posits a means of form making as influenced by the changing physical forces of a site. Emergent theories of landscape urbanism further embody this notion of time in conceiving design as the orchestration of a perpetually unfolding process rather than the creation of a finished product. In translating this landscape model to architecture, however, one must address concerns of permanence in structure, verticality, and enclosure: three fundamental discrepancies between the two mediums that obstruct a direct translation. These concerns of stasis ultimately reveal the simultaneous presence of multiple temporal experiences operating at different speeds. In recognition of the gradient of structural distribution amongst the elements of a building, the experience of architectural time operates within a
hierarchy of temporality: stratifying the architectural experience of time into multiple temporal speeds, ranging from the slow speed at the layer of inherently structural forms, to the fast speed at the layer of the nontectonic and mobile forms. Ultimately, this thesis investigates MVRDV’s Villa VPRO as a building that engages with time on multiple speeds to fully embody the conception of novelty, addressing issues of verticality through surface manipulation, as well as concerns of enclosure through its thermodynamically reactive envelope.
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Maria Yu Choreographing Architecture, The Body and the Building Advisor: Hayley Eber
Site specific choreography is a conditional art which responds to the environment by providing an intimate and physical reading of the site by both the artists and the audience. Placed among alternative performance spaces, rather than traditional proscenium stages, site-specific choreography expands outside the frame, thereby introducing observers within the same context as the cues determining the creation of the performance by the choreographer, ultimately making art that can be readable by the viewer the way site-specific choreography is writable by the choreographer. In a break from traditional modes of dance and performance, site-specific choreography reimagines a space by contemplating the historical program versus the newly contemporary activation of a place, rethinking audience perspective, amplifying material and texture of a place, and reframing the ambient noise and natural light which permeates a space. From dimension to materiality to physicality and the form of gesture, site-specific choreography is the collaboration of moving bodies with an established site to render a new reading of an architectural space. Site-specific choreography allows the mechanics and tectonics of a place to be rendered through the bodily form and its expression through physicality and biological aesthetics. The significant impact of site-specific choreography lies in the art-form’s capacity to reach beyond its immediate context of a traditional theater audience, to become more relevant to people in quotidian, accessible spaces populated by a public society. Site-specific choreography overcomes the conventionality of a building or an established program to engage in an ephemeral experience sustained between the choreographer, dancer, and audience member in a layered performance experience. As a bodily response to architecture’s physical and invisible qualities, site-specific choreography operates as a vehicle for architectural investigation. Understanding the spatial sensibilities of a choreographer’s responses to a site’s given qualities serves to delineate and emphasize elements of architecture and space. Through the close reading analysis of three distinct cases of site-specific choreography, this thesis aims to prove that the interchange between choreography and dance, by employing site-specific choreography as an innovative representational technique, is able to provide a new lens in which to read and register the experience of the built environment.
MUSEUM SITE RENDERINGS IN DANCER LOCATION PERSPECTIVE A
Getty Museum, Cactus Garden terrace
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Getty Museum, West Pavilion roof
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Getty Research Institute, terrace
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2016–17
Architecture Faculty
2016
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Visiting Professors Sylvia Lavin Anthony Vidler
Dean M贸nica Ponce de Le贸n Associate Dean Paul Lewis
Visiting Assistant Professor Michael Young
Departmental Representative Spyridon Papapetros (fall) Mario I. Gandelsonas (spring) Directors of Graduate Studies Paul Lewis, M.Arch II Program Forrest Meggers, M.Arch I Program Beatriz Colomina, Ph.D. Program Professors Stanley T. Allen M. Christine Boyer Beatriz Colomina Elizabeth Diller Mario I. Gandelsonas Guy Nordenson M贸nica Ponce de Le贸n Jesse Reiser Alejandro Zaera-Polo Associate Professors Paul Lewis Spyridon Papapetros Assistant Professors Lucia Allais Axel Kilian Forrest Meggers, also Andlinger Ctr for Energy & the Environment Michael Meredith
Faculty
Visiting Lecturers Sandy Attia Frank Barkow Annie Barrett Hayley Eber J. Robert Hillier Sameer Kumar Andrew Laing Regine Leibinger Nat Oppenheimer Peter Pelsinski Mahadev Raman Julian Rose Matteo Scagnol Aaron Shkuda Gia Wolff Lecturers Manuel DeLanda Ryan Johns Jaffer Kolb Affiliated Faculty Sigrid Adriaenssens, Civil and Environmental Engineering Eduardo Cadava, English Bruno Carvalho, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures
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Esther da Costa Meyer, Art and Archaeology Brigid Doherty, German and Art and Archaeology Hal Foster, Art and Archaeology Rubén Gallo, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures Maria Garlock, Civil and Environmental Engineering Thomas Levin, German Douglas Massey, Woodrow Wilson School and Sociology Anson Rabinbach, History Former Faculty/Professors Emeriti Robert Geddes Visiting Researchers and Fellows Patricio del Real, PLAS/ Princeton-Mellon Fellow (2016) Elsa Devienne, Princeton-Mellon Fellow (2016) Ayala Levin, Princeton-Mellon Fellow (2016–17) Sarah Lynn Lopez, PrincetonMellon Fellow (2016–17) Eyal Weizman, Tung Global Scholar (2014–16)
2016
CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE, URBANISM, AND INFRASTRUCTURE Program Director Stanley T. Allen Executive Committee Stanley T. Allen, School of Architecture D. Graham Burnett, History Douglas Massey, Woodrow Wilson School and Sociology Guy Nordenson, School of Architecture Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Woodrow Wilson School and Economics James Smith, Civil and Environmental Engineering Alejandro Zaera-Polo, School of Architecture Associated Faculty Jeremy Adelman, History Sigrid Adriaenssens, Civil and Environmental Engineering Lucia Allais, School of Architecture Bruno Carvalho, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures Michael Celia, Civil and Environmental Engineering Miguel Centeno, Woodrow Wilson School and Sociology Esther da Costa Meyer, Art and Archaeology Hal Foster, Art and Archaeology
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RubĂŠn Gallo, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures Hendrik Hartog, History Axel Kilian, School of Architecture
PROGRAM IN MEDIA AND MODERNITY Co-Directors Beatriz Colomina Hal Foster, Art and Archaeology Executive Committee Lucia Allais, School of Architecture Eduardo Cadava, English Beatriz Colomina, School of Architecture Brigid Doherty, German and Art and Archaeology Hal Foster, Art and Archaeology RubĂŠn Gallo, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures Thomas Levin, German Spyridon Papapetros, School of Architecture Anson Rabinbach, History Irene Small, Art and Archaeology Associated Faculty Stanley T. Allen, School of Architecture Rachel Bowlby, Comparative Literature M. Christine Boyer, School of Architecture
Faculty
D. Graham Burnett, History Zahid Chaudhary, English Angela N. Creager, History Esther da Costa Meyer, Art and Archaeology Rachel Z. DeLue, Art and Archaeology Elizabeth Diller, School of Architecture Paul J. DiMaggio, Sociology and Woodrow Wilson School Devin Fore, German Diana Fuss, English Mario I. Gandelsonas, School of Architecture Daniel Heller-Roazen, Comparative Literature Axel Kilian, School of Architecture Anne McCauley, Art and Archaeology Michael Meredith, School of Architecture Alexander Nehamas, Philosophy and Comparative Literature Jeff Nunokawa, English Rachel Price, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures Jesse A. Reiser, School of Architecture Efthymia Rentzou, French and Italian Emily Thompson, History Alejandro Zaera-Polo, School of Architecture
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FALL 2015 ARC 501—Architecture Design Studio Michael Meredith ARC 503—Integrated Building Studio Paul Lewis ARC 505A—Architecture Design Studio Jesse A. Reiser
ARC 547—Introduction to Formal Analysis Michael B. Young ARC 548—The “Work” of Architecture: History, Theory, Criticism, and Design Anthony Vidler
ARC 505B—Architecture Design Studio Axel Kilian
ARC 562—Introduction to the Architecture Profession J. Robert Hillier
ARC 505C—Architecture Design Studio Junya Ishigami
ARC 571—Research in Architecture Beatriz Colomina
ARC 507—Thesis Studio Elizabeth Diller
ARC 573—Pro Seminar: Computation, Energy, Technology in Architecture Axel Kilian, Forrest M. Meggers
ARC 510—Structural Analysis for Architecture Guy J.P. Nordenson
ARC 574—Computing and Imaging in Architecture Ryan L. Johns
ARC 514—The Environmental Engineering of Buildings, Part I Mahadev Raman
ARC 575—Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture: Architecture in/as Photography Jean-Louis Cohen
ARC 530—M.Arch Thesis Seminar Elizabeth Diller
ARC 577—Topics in Contemporary Architectural Theory: Building Postmodernism Sylvia Lavin
ARC 531—Proseminar for PostProfessional M.Arch Michael Meredith ARC 545—The Philosophy of Urban History Manuel J. DeLanda Graduate Courses
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SPRING 2016 ARC 502—Architecture Design Studio Hayley Eber ARC 504—Integrated Building Studios Mark Lee ARC 506A—Architecture Design Studio Alejandro Zaera-Polo ARC 506B—Architecture Design Studio Andrés Jaque ARC 508—Thesis Studio Elizabeth Diller ARC 509—Integrated Building Systems Peter A. Pelsinski ARC 511—Structural Design Nat Oppenheimer ARC 513—Contemporary Facade Design Sameer Kumar ARC 515—The Environmental Engineering of Buildings, Part II Mahadev Raman ARC 519—Climate Change, Adaptation and Urban Design Guy Nordenson ARC 520—Questioning Post-Medium Specificity in Architecture Michael Meredith
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ARC 538—Exhibition-Making in Architecture Sylvia Lavin ARC 563—Founding, Building, and Managing an Architectural Practice: Business and Legal Issues in Architectural Practice J. Robert Hillier ARC 572—Research in Architecture M. Christine Boyer ARC 576—Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture: The Perversions of Modern Architecture Beatriz Colomina ARC 584—History and Theory of Architecture and Climate Daniel A. Barber ARC 588—Dynamical Logics in Architecture Jesse A. Reiser ARC 594—Topics in Architecture: Colonial Cities Zeynep Celik ARC 596—Embodied Computation Axel Kilian
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FALL 2015 ARC 203—Introduction to Architectural Thinking Julian M. Rose
SPRING 2016 ARC 204—Introduction to Architectural Design Paul Lewis
ARC 300—Urban Studies Research Seminar Bruno M. Carvalho, Aaron P. Shkuda
ARC 206—Geometry and Architectural Representation Michael B. Young
ARC 311—Building Science and Technology: Building Systems Nat Oppenheimer
URB 201—Introduction to Urban Studies M. Christine Boyer
ARC 374—Computational Design Axel Kilian ARC 380—The Arts of Urban Transition Judith Hamera, Aaron Landsman, Aaron P. Shkuda ARC 401—Theories of Housing and Urbanism Andrew Laing ARC 403—Topics in the History and Theory of Architecture Alejandro Zaera-Polo ARC 404—Advanced Design Studio Mario I. Gandelsonas
ARC 208—Designing Sustainable Systems: Demonstrating the potential of sustainable design thinking Forrest M. Meggers ARC 308—History of Architectural Theory Tamar Zinguer ARC 385—Mapping Gentrification Aaron P. Shkuda ARC 423—Ecologies of the Envelope Alejandro Zaera-Polo ARC 424—Networks and Ecologies: An Interdisciplinary History of Environmental Design Daniel A. Barber ARC 492—Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure: Environmental Challenges of Urban Sprawl Mario I. Gandelsonas
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Princeton University School of Architecture Architecture Building Princeton NJ 08544-5264 Main Office 609–258–3741 Programs 609–258–3641 Fax 609–258–4740 E-Mail soa@princeton.edu Site soa.princeton.edu Design: Omnivore Managing Editor: Laurie Zazenski Printed in Iceland Spring 2017
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Doctoral Degree in Architecture
The Ph.D. Program
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The Ph.D. program consists of the history and theory track and the computation and energy track. The interdisciplinary nature of the program stresses the relationship of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and building technologies to their cultural, social and political milieu. Supported by strong affiliations with other departments in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, the program has developed a comprehensive approach to the study of the field. Students interact with their peers to sustain individual projects in a context of collective research. The fields of study are normally, but not exclusively, selected within the history and theory of one of these primary areas: architecture, urbanism, landscape, and engineering/ building technology, or within the scientific study of computation and technology.
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PROGRAM COMMITTEE Beatriz Colomina, History and Theory, Chair Director of Graduate Studies, Ph.D. Program Lucia Allais, History and Theory M. Christine Boyer, Urbanism Axel Kilian, Computational Design Forrest Meggers, Energy and Environment Spyridon Papapetros, History and Theory
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History and Theory Track The Ph.D. Committee sets the course requirements for each student according to his or her previous experience, specialized interests, and progress through the program. For the first two years, each student engages in coursework and independent study and is required to complete a minimum of four classes each semester, including required language, audited courses, and independent reading courses, for a total of sixteen courses, at least nine of which must be taken for a grade and result in a paper. After their first year of doctoral study, students are encouraged also to apply for assistantships in instruction, which are considered an intrinsic part of a scholar’s training. Computation and Energy Track The computation and energy Ph.D. track, initiated in 2014, develops research in the field of embodied computation and new systems for energy and environmental performance. Through associated faculty, it is linked to the School of Engineering and Applied Science, particularly with Computer Science and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. A proseminar for the Ph.D. track supports the initial methods and processes for this research. The applied research component of the track is supported by infrastructure for research such as the extension of the Architectural Laboratory with the Embodied Computation lab, an industrial robotic arm, as well as the Andlinger Center research facilities.
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Affiliated Faculty Sigrid Adriaenssens, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Eduardo Cadava, Professor of English; Master, Wilson College Bruno Carvalho, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures Esther da Costa Meyer, Professor of Art and Archaeology Brigid Doherty, Associate Professor of German and Art and Archaeology; Director, Program in European Cultural Studies Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology; Co-Director, Program in Media and Modernity Ruben Gallo, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures; Director, Program in Latin American Studies Maria Garlock, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Director, Program in Architecture and Engineering
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Thomas Y. Levin, Associate Professor of German Douglas Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School; Director, Office of Population Research; Director, Program in Population Studies Anson G. Rabinbach; Professor of History
Supporting Faculty for the Computation and Energy Track Elie R. Bou-Zeid, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Adam Finkelstein, Department of Computer Science Barry P. Rand, Department of Electrical Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment Dan Steingart, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment Claire E. White, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
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Recent Visiting Faculty Daniel Barber Fall and Spring 2015–16 Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities, Princeton University; Assistant Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania School of Design Zeynep Celik Spring 2016 Distinguished Professor, School of Architecture, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Distinguished Professor, Federated History Department, NJIT-Rutgers University Jean-Louis Cohen Fall 2015 Sheldon H. Solow Chair for the History of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Sylvia Lavin Fall and Spring 2015–16 Professor of Architectural History and Theory and Director of Critical Studies and MA/PhD Programs; Department of Architecture and Urban Design, UCLA
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Anthony Vidler Fall 2015 Professor, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York; Vincent Scully Visiting Professor in Architectural History, Yale University
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Recently Completed Dissertations The wide range of possible research topics is illustrated by the following dissertations.
Daniela Fabricius, Calculation and Risk: The Rational Turn in West German Architecture (2016) Daria Ricchi, From Storia to History (and Back): Fiction, Literature, and Historiography in Postwar Italian Architecture (2016) Luis Aviles Rincon, Rhetoric Matters: Image, Textures, and the Discussion around Modern Ornamentation (1932–1961) (2016) Jasmine Benyamin, Towards a (New) Objectivity: Photography in German Architectural Discourse 1900–1914 (2015) Leonardo Diaz Borioli, Collective Auto-biography Building Luis Barragán (2015) Zvi Efrat, The Object of Zionism: Architecture of Statehood in Israel, 1948–1973 (2014) Alicia Imperiale, Alternate Organics: The Aesthetics of Experimentation in Art, Technology & Architecture in Postwar Italy (2014) Molly W. Steenson, Architectures of Information: Christopher Alexander, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte & MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (2014) Craig Buckley, Graphic Apparatuses: Architecture, Media, and the Reinvention of Assembly 1956–1973 (2013) Mark Campbell, A Beautiful Leisure: The Decadent Architectural Humanism of Geoffrey Scott, Bernard and Mary Berenson (2013) Anthony Fontenot, Non-Design and the Non-Planned City (2013) Lisa L. Hsieh, ArchiteXt: The Readable, Playable and Edible Architecture of Japanese New Wave (2013)
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Lydia Kallipoliti, MISSION GALATIC HOUSEHOLD: The Resurgence of Cosmological Imagination in the Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s (2013) Diana Kurkovsky West, CyberSovietica: Planning, Design, and the Cybernetics of Soviet Space, 1954–1986 (2013) Daniel Lopez-Perez, SKYSCRAPEROLOGY: Tall Buildings in History and Building Practice (1975–1984) (2013) Enrique Ramirez, Airs of Modernity 1881–1914 (2013) Irene Sunwoo, Between the ‘Well-Laid Table’ and the ‘Marketplace’: Alvin Boyarsky’s Experiments in Architectural Pedagogy (2013) Els Verbakel, Of Voids, Networks and Platforms: Post-War Visions for a European Transnational City: 1952–1958 (2013) Gina Greene, Children in Glass Houses: Toward a Hygienic, Eugenic Architecture for Children during the Third Republic in France (1870–1940) (2012) Karin Jaschke, Mythical Journeys: Ethnography, Archaeology, and the Attraction of Tribal Cultures in the Work of Aldo van Eyck and Herman Haan, (2012) Joy Knoblauch, Going soft: Architecture and the human sciences in search of new institutional forms (1963–1974) (2012) Paul B. Preciado, Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopolitics of Architecture from the Secret Museum to Playboy (2012) Sara Stevens, Developing Expertise: The Architecture of Real Estate, 1908–1965 (2012) AnnMarie Brennan, Olivetti: A Working Model of Utopia (2011) Branden Hookway, Computational Environments of the 20th Century (2011) Lutz Robbers, Modern Architecture in the Age of Cinema: Mies van der Rohe and the Moving Image (2011)
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Rafael Segal, A Unitary Approach to Architecture—Alfred Neumann and the ‘Humanization of Space’ (2011) Shundana Yusaf, Wireless Sites: Architecture in the Space of British Radio (1927–1945) (2011) Joaquim Moreno, From a Little Magazine to the City: Arquitecturas Bis (1974–85) (2010) Ingeborg Rocker, Evolving Structures: The Architecture of the Digital Medium (2010) Romy Hecht, The Attack on Greenery: Critical Perceptions of the Man-Made Landscape, 1955–1969 (2009) Sarah Deyong, Archigram and the City of Tomorrow (2008) Roy Kozlovsky, Reconstruction through the Child: English Modernism and the Welfare State (2008) Stephen Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler’s Mobile Space Enclosures (2008) David Smiley, Pedestrian modern: modern architecture and the American Metropolis, 1935–1955 (2007) David Snyder, The Jewish question and the modern metropolis : urban renewal in Prague and Warsaw, 1885–1950 (2007) Ernestina Osorio, Intersections of Architecture, Photography, and Personhood: Case Studies in Mexican Modernity (2006) Emmanuel Petit, Irony In Metaphysics’s Gravity. Iconoclasms and Imagination in the Architecture of the Seventies (2006) Tamar Zinguer, Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys, 1836–1952 (2006)
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Ph.D. Collaborative Research Projects Over the last fifteen years, the Ph.D. program has added new dimensions to traditional academic training by developing major collaborative scholarly research projects generating polemical publications, exhibitions, films and other multimedia platforms. Two years of proseminars in the fall are followed by workshops in the spring that also act as one of the hubs of the interdisciplinary Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton, positioning architectural research within a wider field.
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Modern Historiography: Latin American Architecture Research Seminar, 2012–13 and 2013–14
Professor Beatriz Colomina with students Lluis Casanovas Blanco, Michael Faciejew, Justin Fowler, Evangelos Kotsioris, Matthew Mullane, Victoria Bugge Øye, Masha Panteleyeva, Clelia Pozzi and Nicholas Risteen
Historiography is as much an analysis of historical method as it is a means of identifying blind spots in the historical record. As a vehicle for critical self-correction, the historiographic turn often appears in moments of generational transition or disciplinary introspection. Seeking to generate new contemporary practices through alternative readings of the past, this proseminar addressed the brief period from the 1930s to the early 1960s in which historians of modern architecture, architects, journalists, institutions, and governments from around the world trained their sights on Latin America. Beyond merely reevaluating past efforts, the seminar devoted attention to those aspects of historical practice that might constitute a “modern” historiography. Students explored the use of new media in exhibitions, governmental funding of architectural publications for purposes of cultural influence and exchange, and other modes of historical transmission. Deviating from canonic histories through the notion of “miradas cruzadas” (crossing glances) they investigated how the idea of a Latin American modern architecture was produced through negotiations, misunderstandings and collaborations between the historians, architects, institutions and publishing houses around the world. The case study of the construction of modern Latin American architecture is one where historiography converges with the future-oriented notion of the architectural project.
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Student research from this seminar was presented at the 2013 São Paolo conference ARCHITECTURAL ELECTIVE AFFINITIES: correspondences, transfers, inter/multidisciplinarity, as well as in workshops at the University of São Paolo in 2014. In 2015–2016, under the direction of Beatriz Colomina, Ph.D. students Masha Panteleyeva (School of Architecture) and Miguel Caballero (Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures) ran a yearlong workshop in preparation for a publication in collaboration with the University of São Paolo. In spring 2016, the School of Architecture research group organized a public lecture and a seminar by Claudia Shmidt, a Professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, titled Francisco Bullrich and the New Directions in Latin American Architecture (sponsored by the Program in Media and Modernity and the Program in Latin American Studies).
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Radical Pedagogies Research Seminar, 2010–11 and 2011–12 Exhibition, 2013-ongoing
Professor Beatriz Colomina with students Anthony Acciavatti, Juan Cristóbal Amunátegui, Jose Araguez Escobar, Joseph Bedford, Vanessa Grossman, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister, Esther Choi, Britt Eversole, Daniela Fabricius, Ignacio Gonzalez Galan, Federica Soletta and Federica Vannucchi
“Radical Pedagogies” is an ongoing multi-year collaborative research project led by Beatriz Colomina with a team of Ph.D. students from the School of Architecture at Princeton University. It has so far involved three years of seminars, interviews, archival research, guest lectures and almost 80 contributors from more than two dozen countries. In this, and similar research projects conducted by the Ph.D. program at Princeton, architecture history and theory are taught and practiced as an experiment in and of themselves, exploring the potential for collaboration in what is often taught to be a field of individual endeavor. “Radical Pedagogies” investigates a series of intense but short-lived experiments in architectural education that profoundly transformed the landscape, methods and politics of the discipline in the post-WWII years. As a challenge to normative thinking, they questioned, redefined, and reshaped the postwar field of architecture. These experiments are radical in the literal meaning from the Latin radix (root), the basis or foundation of something. Radical pedagogies shook foundations and disturbed assumptions, rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. They operated as small endeavors on the fringes of institutions but had long-lasting impact. Much of architectural teaching today still rests on the paradigms they introduced.
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The “Radical Pedagogies� exhibition has been presented at the 3rd Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2013), the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014, Special Mention), and the 7th Warsaw Under Construction Festival (2015). On this last occasion, the exhibition opens up new directions and a new density of global interconnections. Eastern Europe, Africa, East Asia and Australasia become the protagonists, opening new insights into pedagogical experimentation after 1945. Conceived as an interactive platform, the exhibition incorporates take-away texts, facsimiles, original publications and teaching documents, archival films, and implements interactive features through augmented reality. www.radical-pedagogies.com
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Playboy & Architecture: 1953–1979 Research Seminar, 2008–09 and 2009–10 Exhibition 2012–ongoing Professor Beatriz Colomina with students Pep Avilés, Joseph Bedford, Marc Britz, Britt Eversole, Daniela Fabricius, Gina Greene, Vanessa Grossman, Margo Handwerker, Joy Knoblauch, Yetunde Olaiya, Enrique Ramirez, Daria Ricchi, Molly Steenson, and Federica Vannucchi
The research seminar was dedicated to the study of Architecture in Playboy: 1953–1979. The thesis of this seminar was that Playboy played a crucial yet unacknowledged role in the cultivation of design culture in the USA. Through a range of strategies, the magazine integrated state-of-the-art designers and architects into a carefully constructed vision of a desirable contemporary lifestyle. The seminar explored the ways in which Playboy was ahead of professional and popular magazines in promoting modern architecture and design. The collaborative research seminar analyzed the magazine, secondary literature on Playboy and related archives; interviews with protagonists were also conducted. The research led to a large traveling exhibition: Playboy Architecture, 1953–1979. The exhibition showed how modern architecture—buildings, interiors, furniture, cities and product design—was mobilized to shape a new sexual and consumer identity for the American male and how architectural taste became critical to success in the art of seduction. It opened in September 2012 at the Bureau Europa/NAiM in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and then traveled to Amsterdam in 2013. It was redesigned for a February 2014 show at the Deutsche Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany and for the Elmhurst Art Museum in Chicago where the exhibition opened in May 2016. Students’ research was published in a 2012 special issue of Volume dedicated to architectural interiors. 2016
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Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts The following dissertation abstracts offer examples of the scholarship that is presently underway within the Ph.D. program.
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Gustave Gridaine, Arènes Nautiques (Paris, 1885)
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Juan Cristóbal Amunátegui
Wonderful Wholes
We are well acquainted with the features that made Haussmannization thrive: an array of systematically defined boulevards, squares, and “disengaged” monuments, supported by an unprecedented financial apparatus that made apartment houses and urban speculation bourgeon hand in hand. This dissertation adds a new element to the machinery of artifices mobilized by the Baron: it investigates the spaces of commercialized entertainment produced by a group of architects, engineers, entertainers, and financiers in the 1870s and 80s. Circuses, hippodromes, ice-rinks, velodromes—the myriad alterations to which space, matter and audiences were put through the alliance between mechanical artifacts and circular space made the buildings themselves into attractions, veritable commodities offered to counteract the pressures of the city with interiors that produced cohesive worlds all their own. I argue that these buildings’ involvement with bodily and mechanical movement was part of the intense transference established between artistic practices, entertainment, and the sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century—fields that saw in movement less a factor of perceptual dissolution than the key to the subject’s reorganization of phenomena.
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José Aragüez
The Architecture-Engineering Hybrid and the Formal Domain, 1957–2002 As social, environmental and political concerns became increasingly pressing over the course of the twentieth century, the question of form in architecture kept taking on more and more forms. The understanding of form in nature, form as the reification of power structures, the psychology of formal perception, the quest for form’s “interiority,” form as the catalyst of participatory processes, the phenomenology of form, the relationship between form and formalism— the ubiquity of form in our field cannot be taken but as a marker of its significance. Though everywhere, however, “form” in architecture is far from having been sufficiently theorized. Rather, it tends to remain in the background of other narratives that are built into spheres peripheral to architecture. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to develop a new conceptualization of architectural form centered around questions of three-dimensional configuration and internal spatial arrangement—as opposed to those relating to external envelope, volumetric outline or mass, which I make correspond to the domain of shape. I hypothesize and show that the medium through which to make this contribution in the realm of form is a particular lineage within the tradition of the architecture-engineering hybrid. This tradition is, in fact, older than that of the figure who falls unambiguously in either of the two categories, architect or engineer. Within it, the lineage my study delineates is one which, I argue, appeared only during the second half of the twentieth century. Three case studies are examined— Italian Vittorio Giorgini (1926–2010), Israeli Michaël Burt (b. 1937), and Sri Lankan-born, London-based Cecil Balmond (b. 1943). Instead of each separately being regarded as architect-engineers in any customary sense, it is their work that I read together as featuring Ph.D. Program
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distinctive aspects within the architecture-engineering hybrid. Those have to do primarily with an approach to design which, while deeply inflected by an engineering valance, nevertheless yields the full range of spatial articulations that are characteristically architectural. Overlooked in the scholarship, the work of Giorgini, Burt and Balmond is thus examined here in its capacity to induce the platform from which to extend the bounds of possibility of the concept of architectural form. In that regard, the idiosyncratic character of their formal production is essential for the purposes of this project, for it allows one to access such a concept beyond received formulations, most of which revolved around so-called “canonical” architecture instead. As I illustrate the engineering valance of their design procedures cannot be separated from the fact that, despite their obvious differences—Burt closer to being a geometer, Giorgini to an artist, and Balmond embodying a stronger intellectual inclination— their work can be jointly discussed as featuring a self-defined rigor underlying the apparently capricious. Giorgini’s general hypothesis entailed that, whether a point, a segment, a triangle, a parallelogram or a symmetrical mesh, any geometric unit can be taken through a deformational sequence in such a way that an asymmetrical structure would be obtained similar to those existing in nature, where only curved lines and surfaces, he believed, could be found. Burt’s research gravitated chiefly around the study of systems of space subdivision based on polyhedra with double-curved surfaces— so-called “saddle polyhedra”—with incidental reference to analogous cases with planar surfaces. Balmond conceived abstract principles in such a way that opportunism, instinct and the capacity to seize the immediate became central to make any one contingent condition along the form-thinking process into another order. Thus, whether through periodical continuity (Burt), geometrically controlled, topologically sound transformations (Giorgini) or sequences of relational templates (Balmond), all three sought to establish a consistent structure or logic originating what otherwise comes across as whimsical, random or just plain weird. It is in the negotiation of these two aspects, and therefore as an index of that 2016
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which sets apart the production of each author in terms of such a negotiation, that the question of disposition will be posited as central—if composition emphasizes fixity and visual considerations, disposition will be taken here to release a sort of open order. As a result, this dissertation will capture form’s patterned idiosyncrasy, viz., a qualitative realm of form that is defined within the liminal space between the idiosyncratic and the lawful, or in other words, between that which falls outside received ways of grouping resemblances and differences, and that which is rule-governed.
Vittorio Giorgini with students from the Pratt Institute. House for a community in Liberty, NY (1977–79)
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Esther Choi
The Organization of Life: Architecture, Biotechnics, and the Life Sciences in Great Britain, 1929–1950 In the decades between the two world wars, a group of modern architects, planners, and biologists were faced with the dilemma of how to redesign Great Britain. Reconstruction, and planning in particular, adopted an acute sense of urgency in the 1930s, as the exigencies of the economic collapse and the prospect of another war intensified the degeneration of a “civilization in crisis.” For the architects, planners, and biologists who sought to rebuild Britain, scientific concepts offered a vision for national regeneration that held allegiance to the epistemic virtues of truth and scientific objectivity. Translating biological order to all scales of life—from bodies and buildings to cities and nations—presented a rational template for the dominance hierarchy of social, political, and economic structures, while rendering a singular vision of history, growth, and civilization that could be understood by all. This dissertation focuses on the collaborations that took place between these architects, planners, and biologists to reconstruct Great Britain as a scientifically ordered world after the economic crash of 1929. Desperate for the nation to recoup, a number of scientists associated with the neo-Darwinian synthesis surmised that just as environmental control could be used to alter micro-evolutionary patterns amongst plant and animal life over time, so, too, could the behavioral patterns of the British citizenry be redesigned through everyday interactions with their environment. Using practices borrowed from principles of Scientific Management, scientists collaborated with modern architects to develop metrics for human needs and behavior, which, in turn, informed the design of functional objects, buildings, and cities. 2016
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Spanning twenty years, the case studies in this dissertation are examined from the vantage of biotechnics: Patrick Geddes’s latenineteenth-century biologistic theory that the products of technological production civilize humanity by molding and choreographing human activity. Applied by architects and planners in compositions ranging from experimental furniture design to city planning, these projects fulfilled what Geddes (and later, Lewis Mumford) prophesized as the “biotechnic period” of the Anthropocene: a moment of technological development that would enable forms of eugenic optimization for humankind and set new normative standards for existence. Unlike previous Vitalist instantiations of biotechnical design, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which merged genetics with evolutionary biology, mobilized architecture to act as both a symbol of and dispositif for biological management and engineering. With living conditions seen as a matter of evolutionary survival, architectural projects commissioned by scientists like Julian Huxley and Solly Zuckerman became the loci for sociobiological experiments. Evolutionary biology was used to understand cooperative social behavior and applied to modern housing projects in the reconstruction of London. Likewise, the design of modern village colleges and health centers aided sociobiological experiments that sought to reform the rural citizenry by cultivating standards of taste and habits. City planning schemes, proposed by scientists and architects alike, used the rhetoric of scientism to mitigate the subjugation of individual will to standardization and organization. These concerns also filtered through architecture and planning projects for the British Empire, particularly in West African nations. Unified by an interest in standardization, rationalization, and scientific progressivism, architects and biologists aspired to mold uniformity in an otherwise unstable world. Yet after World War I, belief in the possibilities of engineering adopted a science-fiction pitch, assigning architecture a crucial role: The built environment became a space onto which nascent fantasies of a collective identity based on evolutionary humanism could be projected. Though many largerscale biotechnical proposals were never realized, they adopted an Ph.D. Program
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increasingly totalitarian tenor as the shadow of World War II loomed, unearthing Britain’s history with biologism, imperialism, eugenics, and Social Darwinism in unsettling ways. The case studies demonstrate that architectural production participated in the scientific aim to reconstruct the British populace by reorganizing and reconditioning the patterns of human activity. But they also suggest that a new aesthetic regime emerged through the biotechnical experiments in this interwar period, one that positioned modern architecture as a symbol of a scientifically derived, humanistic worldview, while reifying the image of Britain as a civilization of sovereign power, resiliency, and progress. Although architecture could never quite realize the utopian aspirations of these scientists, its entanglement with science catalyzed an important shift in the notion of subjectivity—from innate and uncovered (Vitalmystik or élan vital) to a model that could be radically altered and engineered. Likewise, although science seemingly conferred authority and calculation to the design process, freeing the architect from the responsibility of authorial will, it also granted architects the power to anticipate and shape the future form of life itself. These examples explore the discipline’s often contentious encounters with the inescapable ethical and bio-political considerations attached to the technologies of life as architecture struggled with its ability to nature and de-nature the human subject. 2016
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Michael Faciejew
A World Within the World: Architecture and Documentation, 1895–1939 The emergence of a science of documentation at the end of the nineteenth century gave rise to a number of internationalist projects which made the radical claim that to organize information was to organize the world. Classification tables, halls filled with filing cabinets, projects for “world cities,” and other self-proclaimed “modern” spatial strategies and instruments became especially prized by transnational actors and proponents of “intellectual labor” who believed that global space was a continuum that could be systematically managed and governed from a centralized position. A new world would be produced from material already found in it, through permutable acts of organization. This dissertation examines how this new idea of the document as a universal medium infiltrated modern architectural discourse and came to inform its spatial operations and epistemological claims. Using case studies in which architects and planners are shown to themselves adopt the technical protocols and conceits of “intellectual labor,” the dissertation asks two questions: what is an architecture of the document, and how is architecture productive of a world? I argue that architecture became an instrument for helping to navigate— and therefore govern—a world that was assumed to be too hetero geneous to be comprehended or managed by a single inhabitant. Documentation science, which led to the development of information science in the period following World War II, was invented by the Belgian bibliographer, lawyer, and internationalist Paul Otlet. While Otlet is best known in architectural history as the client and instigator of Le Corbusier’s 1927 proposal for a Mundaneum in Geneva, his oeuvre was the site of a much broader encounter between modern architecture and the document. Over the course Ph.D. Program
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of several decades, Otlet gradually negotiated a role for the document against emergent theories of modern space, collaborating with planners such as Patrick Geddes, Louis van der Swaelmen and Raphaël Verwilghen; architects such as Huib Hoste, Victor Horta, and Victor Bourgeois; and designers such as Otto Neurath. Initially derived from bibliography to manage humanity’s growing intellectual output, documentation evolved into a vast social instrument known as the “Universal Book”—a synthetic and continually expanding knowledge apparatus made up of various technologies, techniques, institutions, and spaces. The dissertation examines documentation— and its universalizing rhetoric—as a distinctly Belgian product, one that mobilized the principles and techniques of modern town planning that proliferated across Brussels’ sociological institutions, the technological optimism of new movements like art nouveau, and the expansionist ambitions of King Leopold’s Belgium. In the wake of World War I, the formation of governing bodies like the League of Nations anchored the document as the elemental component in a global system of cultural and political organization. The diverse entries for the 1927 competition for the League of Nations, Otlet’s and Le Corbusier’s counterproposal for the “world city” of the Mundaneum, and other projects like Ivan Leonidov’s Lenin Institute of Librarianship offered competing models of paperwork and internationalism. Though these schemes spawned an enduring controversy among architects and critics about the place of symbolism and monumentality in modernism, their politics of form were played out at the juncture of bureaucratic and architectural protocols. In a period that witnessed the institutionalization of modern architecture itself—for instance with the first CIAM at La Sarraz in 1928— the mechanics of transnationalism asserted modern architecture as a vehicle for the continual administration of the world “as it was” into the world “as it should be.” In the 1930s, a second generation of documentalists working primarily in France collaborated with architects to transform cultural institutions like museums and libraries into active documentation centers participating in a global information economy. Taking cues 2016
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Institut International de Bibliographie, Brussels, 1910
from the Corbusian discourse of équipement, buildings like the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris—originally designed by Henri Labrouste and completed in 1875—were modernized through the integration of spaces and systems that optimized intellectual productivity. These transformations, located primarily beyond the patron’s view, challenged the academic typology of the library, whose public spaces were meant to “represent” a legible totality of knowledge. This covert modernization of academic architecture— borne from organizational and documentary practices—provides a counterpoint to histories that address architectural modernism through the lens of aesthetic and industrial rationalization. Coinciding with the development of small-scale technologies such as micro-film and initiatives for the standardization of intellectual labor (such as the first World Congress of Universal Documentation held in conjunction with the Paris World’s Fair of 1937), the new relationships of scale and proximity advanced in the architecture of knowledge institutions contributed to a debate over increasingly complex aesthetics and prosthetics of information. Ph.D. Program
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Ignacio Gonzalez Galan
Circulating Interiors: the Logics of Arredamento and the Furnishing of National Imaginaries, 1922–1945 This dissertation examines the transformation of architectural interiors in Italy throughout the fascist period, considering the changing forms of articulating domestic spaces both at the scale of the home and at that of the nation. Throughout this period, Italian discourse on interiors conceptualized its object of concern primarily as “arredamento”—a term meaning both furniture and the ensemble of elements that furnishes a livable space. While the word “interni” was also used at the time, the emphasis on “arredamento” signaled a distinct interest in the material elements that construct an environment, different both from the association between interior and interiority of the German philosophical tradition and the insistence on social control of French modern practices of the interior. Italian discourse transformed the interior from a unified and enclosed realm, as it was hitherto understood, into an ordered arrangement of elements that moved beyond stable boundaries: curated displays of furniture and interior ensembles were shaped by the transfers of objects in the market, reconfigured by processes of information circulation, and articulated in relation to the movement of people throughout the territory. A number of architecture and design practices articulated their work with different agents, institutions, and technologies leading these circulatory operations, and consequently put in motion the transformation of domestic interiors throughout the nation. Rather than being dependent on the fascist government as a unified center of power, or being the result of the isolated work of any single author, the interiors of the nation were shaped in heterogeneous platforms in which architects and designers participated together with an array of political, commercial, and cultural agents and institutions. The 2016
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from top: Albergo sul Mare, Gio Ponti, 1939; “Ambienti in Transformazione”, by Gio Ponti in Il Corriere della Sera, 1933
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culture of arredamento consolidating throughout the fascist period was manifested in the regime’s programs addressing the household, the concerns of different institutions with the market for applied arts, and an increasing number of exhibitions aiming at the development of the modern interior for bourgeois audiences. At the same time, films and magazines particularly featured domestic interiors, including modern designs that opened the Italian population to the possibility of lifestyles beyond those promoted by the regime. Concurrently, other agents promoted arredamenti that became essential to the simultaneous constructions of locality and foreignness supporting colonialism and tourism. Within this context, the role of architects and designers went beyond the realization of a single piece of furniture or an interior ensemble, becoming instead the key to the mediation of distinct interests and their effects upon different constituencies, markets, and audiences. Gio Ponti was central to this constellation of actors and interests, concerned both with the changing styles for the design of interiors as much as with their dissemination: his impetus to contribute to the Corriere was not an isolated initiative, but one among many that characterized his activities throughout the period, including his role as editor of magazines such as Domus (and later Lo Stile) and his collaborations with the department store La Rinascente. Other significant figures articulated the relation of interiors with different media technologies and circulatory processes: Milanese architect Carlo Enrico Rava simultaneously engaged in the design of arredamento for film, as well as with the furnishing of the colonial expansion. The networks in which these architects performed included a significant number of entrepreneurs related to the fascist regime such as the aforementioned Aldo Borelli, as well as Guido Marangoni (organizer of the first Monza Biennali exhibitions, later transformed into the Triennale di Milano), Senatore Borletti (founder of La Rinascente with Umberto Brustio), and Luigi Freddi (promoter of the film studios Cinecittà ) among many others. The diverse activities and interests of these different actors resulted in ensembles of disaggregated elements (both cultural and material) 2016
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including chairs in exhibitions, lamps for sale, and couches on film stock. These elements consequently manifested themselves (both conceptually and formally) in hybrid assemblies and were sustained by a sort of analytical “limbo,” as the architecture critic Rafaello Giolli described it). But this lack of framework (this placeless limbo) appealed not only to the lack of stylistic or critical coherence, but also to the changing relationships between spaces, objects, images and locations, in a way that is embedded in the very term arredamento: an interior exclusively defined as the ensemble of its constitutive elements, struggling to secure any form of rooted permanence, stable identity, or clear enclosure. And, still, it was as spaces, objects, and images in motion, and as characteristically hybrid arrangements, that the interiors spreading throughout the nation (including film stages, specialized magazines, and commercial showrooms) resulted not in increasing diversity, but rather in the consolidation of the nation’s interior—that is, the homogenization, management, and articulation of Italian society. Despite being crossed by different networks and exploded within different circulatory operations, interiors continued to gather and manage different constituencies and to organize territories, and resulted in systems of inclusion and exclusion beyond the material definition of their boundaries. The culture of arredamento mediated these opposing economic, cultural, and social processes, negotiating the unfolding of modern forms of circulation with the simultaneous (and contradictory) efforts of control and stabilization developed by the fascist regime. Pieces and ensembles of arredamento—through their dissemination in processes of broadcasting, exchange and territorial expansion—were entangled in processes and narratives of national formation and, eventually, in their international propagation. By considering the changing typologies of architecture interiors, their technological and aesthetic definitions, I unveil the underlying logics of their transformation and its consequences in the arrangement of the house and in the consolidation of the nation.
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Evangelos Kotsioris
Komp’iuter Architecture(s), 195X–198X This dissertation will attempt to compose an architectural history of computerization during the Cold War, by focusing on the introduction, dissemination and use of the digital electronic computer in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. In doing so, this study will investigate the imbrications of architecture and computerization through three major binaries: the United States/Soviet Bloc, materiality/immateriality, and publicity/ secrecy. In this study, computerization, and its different modes of intersection with architecture during the Cold War, will provide the main vehicle to investigate and interpret a series of spatial phenomena and design practices that took shape between the 1950s and the 1980s. Computerization, as a process that increasingly characterized societies on both sides of the Iron Curtain after World War II, will be used as a lens to scrutinize and undermine the hierarchies between well-known oppositions of Cold War architectural culture, including: materiality and immateriality, perceivability and imperceivability, sitedness and sitelessness, publicity and secrecy. The non-human protagonist of this story—the digital electronic computer—played a decisive role in bringing the long-enduring problematics of these oppositions to the fore: its enigmatic ontological duality of hardware and software posed serious challenges to designers in both communicating its twofold nature and representing its operation to the wider public. For the United States and the Soviet Union, computerization became a site of contestation and a new benchmark of technological supremacy. Initially associated with the operations of the military, scientific institutions and the Space Race, the digital electronic computer was progressively considered as an omnipotent tool that could be utilized in multiple areas of governance, particularly ones which involved the co-processing of large amounts of data, such as statistics or the economy. The geopolitical, ideological and socio-economical dichotomy of 2016
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IBM employee working on the AN/FSQ–7 Maintenance Console of the SAGE System, the first computerized air surveillance system developed against Soviet attacks, 1957
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the East and the West—thus—became the battleground for the development and application of computer technologies. Even if these technologies were implemented at a different pace in these two contexts, groups of scientists, bureaucrats and designers on both sides increasingly shared a particularly intense confidence in its multifarious capacities. The programmable electronic computer was progressively understood as an incredibly flexible tool that could serve military defense, scientific research, governance, and—ultimately—design purposes. Computing power—a power of the “electronic age”—relied on the intricate coupling of both physical and non-physical elements. Its dissemination and use by governmental institutions was anticipated to render manual decision-making, and with it traditional notions of governmentality, obsolete. In this context, the development (or acquisition) of computing power on both sides of the Atlantic instigated a competition that resulted into a vast array of new systems for the collection, processing, storage, and retrieval of information, as well as an unprecedented number of data technologies, such as magnetic-core memory, real-time computing, data networks and electronic satellites. As a true product of the Cold War, the “computerization race” was a competition that was carried out simultaneously in public and secretly. The antagonistic situation of this race was nurtured by a reciprocal demonstration of technological competence and a shared uncertainty of the enemy’s true might: on the one hand, computerization of one’s nation became an accomplishment for public showcasing and exhibition; on the other, the development of computing power by the enemy created a field of undisclosed monitoring and espionage. Not unlike the computer itself, architecture was asked to operate like a “black box”; that is, to selectively make certain information available, while simultaneously keeping its inner workings to itself; to communicate the processes it housed to civilians and the enemy, without disclosing their security-sensitive content. And it is precisely between these two modes of operation that architects, city planners and industrial designers were called to operate: to provide a physical environment for the secretive institutions that manufactures or used computers, and at the same time crystalize a powerful image of computing power that could be disseminated through media. 2016
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Anna-Maria Meister
From Form to Norm: the Systematization of Values in German Design 192 X–196X The search for form was a driving concern of architectural theorists in 19th century Germany. As a new nation-state sought a coherent aesthetics to represent its political unity, “good form” was presented as a reflection of “good ethics.” With the advent of full mechanization in the early 20th century, however, architecture underwent a scale change: once a public art devoted to representing the state, it became part of the new discipline of industrial design, and buildings came to be seen as objects among others. At the same time, large industrial machinery was scaled down to household appliances, which became objects of design as well. The mass-production of those objects provoked the regulation of their shape, form and physical appearance. Standards were set, tolerances were defined—negotiated by an ever-growing set of technical norms. Formerly relying on principles derived from nature, good form was now to be prescribed by absolute quantities. The search for “the good” gradually migrated from aesthetic theory to the design of (and with) technological specifications. My dissertation addresses “the norm” as design project in mid–20th century Germany, identifying it as a shared concern of bureaucratic authorities and creative producers who sought to bind together aesthetics and morals. Beyond their task of regulating object-producing machines, norms manifested and communicated desired social values. Whereas form-finding in the 19th century had been an individual undertaking, institutional frameworks became the primary sites for the production and implementation of 20th-Century aesthetic norms. Norms were both a designed project and design endeavor— conceived, administered, and disseminated by industrialist groups, state administrations, schools or art magazines. Design as authored by these institutional agents was not mere shaping or styling, but Ph.D. Program
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rather a way to extend the reach of aesthetics from a quest for “good form” towards a search for the “best format.” Institutions of different backgrounds and motivations partook in this agenda of formatting society—the norm was their shared tool. The first attempt to standardize norms on a national level came from the German Institute of Norm (DIN), founded in 1917. Originally conceived to coordinate Germany’s military and industry, this technocratic organization soon broadened its ambitions to regulate the future for the “benefit of all of Germany.” The DIN created the Normenwerk to normalize German production—a system that broadly disseminated moral and aesthetic values, materialized as technological specifications. Under the rhetoric of economic optimization, norms provided the instrument to streamline the momentum of industrial progress, which was seen as the gateway to a betterment of society. Norms proliferated and regulated more and more objects, boosted by the desire for social reform through technological growth. Schools soon followed suit. The Bauhochschule Weimar under Otto Bartning pushed towards a “new architecture” through typological method. The Dessau Bauhaus under Hannes Meyer educated the modern architect as a scientist who would operate through standardized processes, while dismissing “form-finding” as “purely artistic.” The logic of the norm both amplified and altered the disciplinary drive for new forms; German committees, programs and councils were created not only to disseminate normed objects, but to approve and administrate the values they embodied. The growing collection of norms mediated between large scale industrialization and the individual. Processes of homogenization and reduction left the consumer with only one available option— the screw, or the window. Idealized definitions of every-thing were circulated as parts of objects, buildings and cities. Where the A4 formatted administrative processes, the norming of a window was to format one’s view of the world. The norm prescribed behavioral codes by establishing specific relations between object and subject, and negotiating “tolerable errors” in things and people alike. The dynamic between production and reception of norms became 2016
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reversible: curricula were standardized, while in turn normalizing students, and the normed door handle was both the physical manifestation of values and a normative object in German homes. The dissertation traces the dissemination and reception of objects both normed (such as the A4 paper format or the serialized window) and normalizing (such as Ernst Neufert’s Bauordnungslehre and Maßordnung) through three different German political systems, from the Weimar Republic Man as Normed Measure in Ernst Neufert’s through the Third ‘Bauentwurfslehre,’ 1936 Reich to postwar reconstruction. I will take the norm as an ontological model: its multiple temporalities of documentation and prescription, its material status as reproducible object defining reproducible objects, its respective role in the larger Normenwerk, its definition of tolerable deviation and minimally necessary precision. The operations of the norm system, designed to facilitate mass produced objects, will then be traced in the production of knowledge, of institutional values, and of politics. My case studies will span from the 1920s, when the first DIN-designed objects reached mass-consumers, to the 1960s, when the self-proclaimed morality instilled in “good objects” at the HfG Ulm was superseded by the design of processes and environments.
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Although aesthetic discourses surrounding the norm revolved around technological and economic advancement, the norm inspired strikingly vivid spiritual fantasies of moral virtue, embodying what Walter Hellmich, the DIN’s first director, called Idealistische Sachlichkeit (idealistic objectivity). The norm served as medium for re-enchantment, offering its reliable systematicity as projection screen for a new morality. Hellmich saw as one aspiration of the norm the creation of a Gewissensgemeinschaft (community of conscience), and Walter Porstmann called the A4 paper format he invented “the carrier of the spiritual traffic of the world.” Bruno Latour has argued that the advent of industrialization encouraged a delegation of ethics to machines. In Germany, however, what was regulated were not only tasks, but the very desire for codification: as if precision, tolerance, and the elimination of flaws could be outsourced to bureaucracy itself. Reform was seen as the necessary step to societal change on a national, and ultimately global, level—and it was communicated, disseminated and imagined through the norm. This dissertation aims to trace the progression from form-finding to norm-defining and its investment in moral and aesthetic values beyond the rhetoric of economic and technological advancements. I hope to embed the norm in the history of German design, scrutinizing tropes associated with Modern architecture (such as rationality, order and normativity) in relation to qualities often assigned to the norm as “rational” tool (such as neutrality, technocracy, efficiency). This dissertation as part of a larger intellectual project wants to undermine the assumed distinction between an enlightened rationality of technology and a re-enchanted ideology of aesthetics and morals. I pose the analysis of (literal and material) normalization processes as necessary for an understanding of Germany’s attempt to (re-)create values through design by reading the norm as the origin of both the design of information, and the design through information.
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Matthew Mullane
“Worthy Objects”: Architecture and Histories of Observation in Meiji Japan Nineteenth century architectural history and theory was suffused with the language of observation. Influenced by new epistemological values drawn from science, a strong positivism and institutionally reinforced by an international array of polytechnic schools, the expectations of observation governed how a building could be described, historicized, designed and fundamentally known. To observe the world well meant designing buildings that could likewise be considered observable, a quality that was tantamount to structures being respected as architecture. The inverse of this proposition left large swathes of the world’s buildings excluded from consideration, reinforcing European standards of what constituted culture and civilization. For example, James Fergusson, one of the first modern world historians of architecture, refused any Asian cultures as a “building race,” claiming that the region lacked any “worthy object” that could be called architecture because its wooden buildings repelled the kind of observation that stone encouraged.1 However, by the 1870s, the supremacy of this observational regime began to flex under the weight of new objects, architectures and ideas from non-Western regions of the world. Japan was at the forefront of this movement; bolstered by Meiji bureaucrats eager to perform aptitude in Western ways of thinking, European architecture pedagogues were brought in who were convinced that architecture was taught through close observation. Students were instructed to observe the world, not experience it, in order to make Japanese architecture synchronize with a Western epistemological system. This transformation was not complete and seamless however; Meiji architectural practice emerged out of a negotiation of imported techniques and texts along modes of observation (kansatsu) typical of Japanese art, Ph.D. Program
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Interior shot of the Imperial College of Engineering, c. 1870s
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religion and science. In this zone of commingling ideas, seemingly contradictory tactics of observation were brought together and synthesized towards knowing architecture in its new guise as “architecture” (kenchiku). The dissertation charts this relationship through four case studies, beginning in the classrooms at Japan’s first modern school of architecture established in 1873, the Imperial College of Engineering, and ending with the designer and historian Itō Chūta’s (1867–1954) novel theorization of observation used to rebuff exclusionary European histories and argue for Japan’s worthiness in a world history of architecture. Throughout, I am particularly interested in architecture as a unique disciplinary zone of epistemological negotiation where Western empiricist models of observation were enmeshed with Japanese values drawn from Buddhism, naturalist study, antiquarianism and folklore. 1 James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (London: John Murray, 1876), 710.
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Masha Panteleyeva
The Socio-Spatial Turn: Soviet Experimental Architecture During the Thaw This dissertation examines the relationship between architectural form and social theory through the work of the Soviet unofficial architectural group NER (New Element of Settlement) who began their careers in a conflicting atmosphere of control and liberation during Khrushchev’s Thaw. Stalin’s death prompted not only a restructuring of the political and economic spheres in the Soviet Union but also a radical change in its architectural culture allowing NER to bring Soviet architectural production back to the world stage of architectural experimentation. However, NER’s drawings—despite their experimental and oppositional ideological nature—represent a complex layering of political, social and stylistic references to socialism that are impossible to read without understanding socialism as a state-sponsored political system. This dissertation will address the paradoxical question of how the supposedly apolitical experience of formal freedom was in fact a mediation through architecture of highly politicized themes that were meant to organize the entire society, correlating to the needs of the state and national production. I hypothesize that this balance was only possible due to NER’s ability to combine two elements intrinsic to a socialist program that have been long believed to fundamentally clash: namely the idea of freedom of form and the political notion of the urban. Each of the elements had been previously addressed through various formal vocabularies, stylistic beliefs, and economic programs of architecture, yet the two have never been connected directly. I argue that by doing so NER outlined a radically new function of architecture, a new formal paradigm of socialism itself, defined as a hierarchical stratification of society that stood through form of urban space—a provocative idea that went against many socialist beliefs— while preserving their ideology-compliant reputation with the state. 2016
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from top, left to right: the NER group after their diploma defense, Moscow Architectural Institute, 1960 (MARKHI); Urban Center Proposal, NER group, 1968 (Milan Triennale); Center of communication in development, model, NER group (E. Rusakov, V. Yudintsev), 1968
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While in most architectural histories post-Stalin change in architectural culture is examined from technological or economic perspectives, the question of experimentation in urban form is one aspect that has not been sufficiently investigated. When Khrushchev’s new policy of capitalizing on scientific and technological progress led to the rehabilitation of social sciences, the return of a neo-Kantian approach as well as the intellectual rediscovery of architecture’s sociological function, these conditions produced specific forms of creativity that implied a certain duality of production: a firm belief in the communist future and unrestricted experimentation. Situating NER’s work in their historical and immediate context of both Soviet and Western architectural theories and practices, one can argue that their formal experimentation occupies a particular place in the long-standing discourse of formalism in architectural practice. If the founder of Russian literary formalism Victor Sklovsky’s theory of estrangement influenced the function of the avant-garde object as an intellectual challenge emphasizing the perceptual experience of form, during Stalin’s regime this approach was dismissed as too abstract and disengaging architecture from its social function and form’s meaning and perception was subjected to ideological control on a subconscious level. Yet in NER’s work, the city itself became a mediator and an allegory of formal freedom and ideological determination, lending itself as a site for unlimited formal experimentation. This dissertation argues that despite historical connections with constructivist “formalisms” and common misleading comparisons with their Western radical counterparts of the 1960s, what made NER stand out in their immediate and historical context was precisely their ability to give a recognizable form and an aesthetic charge to the collective space of the city, thus consolidating form and the socialist agenda of architecture. Structured around a close formal analysis of NER’s work, the dissertation examines the group’s complex treatment of architectural form as a political allegory, a representation of a particular kind of collective urban space as well as a delineation of their own freedom as architectural professionals.
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Clelia Pozzi
“Old Forms Recast As New”: Restauro, Its Techniques and the Modernization of the Italian Built Environment The history of Italian architecture in the first half of the 20th century is typically told as the emergence of a modern profession out of diverse practices which shared a concern for the artistic and literary past. Insofar as Benedetto Croce and his 1902 Aesthetics established historical interpretation as the task of all modern intellectual endeavors, modern architectural knowledge in Italy has been presented as driven either by the cultivation of ties with the humanistic tradition or by nation-building processes pursued through confrontation with the past. Against the grain of these narratives, and with an eye to filling an important lacuna about the place of science in this period of Italian history, the dissertation addresses the development of restauro and the unique technical and scientific kind of “knowing” that it contributed to architecture. The dissertation seeks to expose restauro as an apparatus, a complex of scientific and cultural techniques through which architectural pedagogues, practitioners and historians extracted and imprinted architectural knowledge into the built environment. In this context, to “build” architectural knowledge meant not only to encode historical and spatial information into built forms, but to transform architecture into a vehicle for educating the modern subject’s perception, spatial comportment and emotional response to the past. Focusing on these techniques and the institutional and discursive systems built around them, the dissertation examines the growth of restauro as a scientific practice and the ways in which it insinuated itself in the disciplining of 20th-century Italian architecture. While the scientific ethos was integrated with ease into architectural education,
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and preservation practices became a legitimate part of the profession, the policing of what did and did not qualify as architecture to be preserved made restauro a site of contestation and a powerful agent in the definition of modernity. Modernity was a driving concern for restauro theorists and practitioners in early 20th-century Italy. Whereas the parallel traditions of French restoration and British conservation attempted to seal off the built environment in the historical past—respectively, by returning it “completeness” and intervening with minimal maintenance— restauro sought to imprint it with a mark of modernity. Through oft-transformative procedures that bore the technological stamp of their time, restauro complicated the dense historical stratification of the Italian built environment. And more, by integrating old objects in the lives of contemporary viewers, restauro mediated historical change at a time when the Italian built environment and society were being refigured by infrastructural, industrial and political transformations. With a temporal focus on the expanded first half of the 20th century, the dissertation addresses the modernization of the Italian built environment by studying the experimental apparatus of techniques, institutions and materials through which restauro theorists produced and externalized scientific knowledge about architecture, from Camillo Boito (1836–1914) to Gustavo Giovannoni (1873–1947) to Cesare Brandi (1906–1988). This process entailed an intense technical effort to capture data about the built environment, circulate them in a shared vocabulary, manipulate them in laboratories, and eventually graft them back onto the built environment by means of design. Through this orchestration, the Crocean work of historical interpretation morphed into a Latourian technoscientific enterprise. In fact, the dissertation argues that out of the apparatus of restauro emerged a scientific practice that is part of the history of Italian architectural modernity just as much as other phenomena conventionally described in technological terms, such as the Futurist “cult of machines” or the industrial design of the 1960s.
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Camillo Boito, Porta Ticinese after its restauro, Milan, 1890s
Paolo and Laura Mora work on fragments of the Mazzatosta Chapel at the Istituto Centrale del Restauro, Rome 1946
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The dissertation addresses this transformation in architectural practices and epistemic strategies by dissecting the apparatus of restauro and interpreting its long-term effects on the configuration of architectural knowledge. This task will involve considering a wide range of restauro techniques affiliated with material science, such as: structural consolidation with reinforced concrete and epoxy glues; the cleaning of patinas with chemical compounds; or the reintegration of lacunae with the aid of Gestalt psychology. Educational institutions played a fundamental role in developing these techniques because they provided laboratories for testing methods and diagnostic tools, from Zeiss microscopes to X-ray machines. But more importantly, precisely because these institutions addressed the problem of aesthetic enjoyment through science, they also fostered critical faculties that rendered restauro techniques stable through political change. The 20th-century scientific eye of restauro was not neutral nor apolitical, but rather it was an interpreting eye, and thus armed with aesthetic judgment and adaptable to change. In the case studies of restauro techniques and schools I consider, a discussion of their judgment-inflected science also allows for problematizing the history of Italian modernism. Whereas previous literature emphasizes shifts in architectural and urban practices across the republican, Fascist and post-Fascist years, the dissertation stresses instead that techniques of restauro procured significant spatial and epistemological continuities. Techniques of urban demolitions, juxtaposition of old and new architecture and calibration of city streets endured throughout the early 20th century precisely for accustoming the modern eye to the effects of historical change, and teach city dwellers to recognize the past as consistent with modern needs. By equalizing the relation between past and present, restauro experts not only affected the understanding of what qualifies as “modern,” but transformed the built environment into a “training manual” for navigating historical change.
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Nicholas Risteen
After the Disaster: Architecture and Emergency in Extraordinary Time
Within a brief forty-year period of the twentieth century, the city of Tokyo underwent a series of dramatic re-inventions. In 1923, the Great Kantō Earthquake and its subsequent three-day fire laid waste to much of low-city Tokyo as well as the bustling port city of Yokohama to the south; wartime firebombing in 1944 and 1945 burned huge swaths of the rebuilt urban fabric once again, eradicating over fifty square miles of Tokyo (along with over sixty other Japanese cities targeted by countless waves of B29s); in the city’s run-up to the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, massive infrastructure and urban planning projects re-wrote the underlying composition of historic Tokyo through the layout of new expressways, the introduction of the Shinkansen “bullet train” and the excavation of numerous new subway lines. The circumstances of Tokyo’s continuous rebirth in this period was mirrored in Japan’s shifting international image: first through international sympathies elicited by natural disaster, then by its pariah status as an Imperial aggressor, and finally in its triumphant re-emergence as an Olympic host and post-war economic success story. By exploring this unique period of Japan’s history, this dissertation details a narrative of evolving architectural theory and practice in Tokyo’s post-disaster response and its lasting consequences on Japan’s urban environment. By focusing on Japan’s reactions to the sequence of major disasters in the wake of its massive modernization projects of the Meiji period (1868–1912), the findings of this study will elucidate the reciprocal advances in architectural thinking, technological culture, and governmental practice deployed under the specter of emergency. Ph.D. Program
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Collection of Tokyo Air Raids Photographs, dated March 10, 1945
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While the event of each disaster itself is easy enough to inscribe within conventional history, the subsequent transformations in Japanese architecture, urbanism, culture, and politics are far from so simply contained. Though moments like the Great Kantō Earthquake or wartime firebombing were catastrophic enough, the extended periods of reconstruction after each episode proved equally destructive in their way. Efforts to rebuild were met with calls to extensively reform, leading to indecision and stagnation. While a propulsive infusion of industrial and cultural modernity continued to move in from abroad, it was met with a rising mix of nationalism, militarism, and cultural anxiety which subsequently called into question Japan’s Meiji-era reforms and contemporary relation to history. Under the duress of defeat and occupation, the need not only to re-build but re-conceive the nation while under the constant gaze of a destroyerturned-provider formed an economic and cultural crucible, a gaze which, post occupation, would attune the national—and international—project of a peaceful Japan. Beyond the episodic, this dissertation argues that a unique concept of time permeates this periodization, encapsulated by hijōji, a term commonly rendered in English as “emergency time.” Embedded within hijōji, however, is the countervailing notion of “extraordinary,” as hijō operates as an adjectival amplifier unencumbered by any specific qualitative valence (hijō ni yoi, “extraordinarily good,” as well as hijō ni warui, “extraordinarily bad”). By embracing that duality, this dissertation poses this analytical fissure of critical reappraisal of post-disaster response as one operating between the poles of “progress and fear.” 1 That operational space (progress— fear) defined by such a specific temporal designation (emergency— extraordinary), I argue, positions hijōji as a kind of architectural chronotope. Initially conceptualized by Mikhail Bakhtin as a means of investigating literary forms, the chronotope articulated here moves beyond the description of a formal object to more fully engage the chronotope’s creative potentials. While architecture is naturally attuned to spatial and temporal conceptions, the utility of positioning hijōji as an “architectural” chronotope designates “emergency
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time” as an intrinsic component to this period of architectural production. Such a designation implies a temporality not just visible as architectural/urban form, but responsive to and generative of recognizable effects. Though the potentials of capitalizing on catastrophe to propose unprecedented reform are far from unique to Japan, the increasing imbrication of technological advances in construction and design, overburdened by a growing anxiety about rapid change and its relation to history, make the Japanese case—and in particular Tokyo as the political center of an increasingly centralized modern state—a unique example of hijōji’s chronotopic power. Developmental evidence appears in urban and architectural form across the city via reformulated urban connections, radical reconfigurations in housing and the domestic interior, and extensive infrastructural development. Alongside, an evolving relationship to concrete as a preferred building material permeates this repetitive cycle of disaster, as each successive destruction necessitated recalibration within architectural and urban design. Anti-seismic, impervious to fire, and ideal for multi-story construction, concrete as it developed into the 1960s and beyond projects a conflated reminder of “never again” and “always remember,” with the rāmen-kōzō (rigid-frame structure) developing into the ever-present structural strategy of post-war urban Japan. 1 Minami Orihara and Gregory Clancey, “The Nature of Emergency: The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Crisis of Reason in Late Imperial Japan,” Science in Context 25, no. 1 (2012): 103–26.
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Kaicong Wu
Developing Artificial Cognition of Architecture through Robotic Learning
The architectural applications of robotics and sensing technologies brought in new design paradigms of materiality, constructability, coding and tooling. Designers discovered those paradigms by designing the control policies and supervising the resultant forms introduced by the new technologies. Typically, the control rules are hand-designed to specify the desired relationships between materials, robotic tool paths and feedbacks from sensors. In the contradiction, deep learning (DL) research in artificial intelligence (AI) made breakthroughs in realizing object detection, speech recognition and solving many complex tasks without relying on hand-designed programs (Bengio, Goodfellow, & Courville, 2015). Deep learning is looking for methods that can automatically learn the patterns from raw data to solve problems that are difficult to define the rules. The goal of this dissertation is to solve design problems with robotic learning concepts. By learning from the experiences of solving assembly tasks, an artificial cognitive model is proposed to explore the possibilities of generating artificial design intentions. Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler initiated the first architectural application of an industrial robot in the well-known project “Gantenbein Vineyard Facade� in 2006. Since then, industrial robotic arms have become interesting to architects and designers for their precision and multi-functionality (Brell-Cokcan & Braumann, 2012). With robotic fabrication, the formal differentiation that used to conflict with constructability can now be integrated, because the designer can control the design and construction simultaneously (Gramazio, Kohler, & Willmann, 2014). But during the establishment of such a new relationship between design and construction, Ph.D. Program
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The transformation of fitting pre-defined components to generated components with the minimum alterations previous page: Robotic assembly of EPS foam board by automatically fitting found material pieces into an already built structure
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the understanding of materials, joints, data and tools remain as what were empirically acquired. Many design problems were solved within the known material constraints such as stacked bricks, solidified sand molds, layered timbers or interlocked sticks. Except the differentiated material positioning, the design cognition of architecture was not equally expanded or augmented. It is important to challenge those cognitive paradigms of architectural design. The dissertation is to build an artificial cognitive model for generating design intentions which used to be a difficult process to explain. The contribution of this work is to illustrate the limits of empiricism-centered knowledge of human designers and is to discover novel design solutions beyond the existing cognitive domain of architecture. I want to answer two major questions in this research: how is the robotic learning process established and implemented iteratively through various assembly problems; and can the cognitive information learned by architectural robotics be interpreted as design intentions? As the supervised learning techniques often require big datasets for the pre-training process, it is difficult to prepare them for real-time architectural robotic tasks. Reinforcement learning (RL) is thus a promising direction of developing an autonomous learning process through trial and error. It is applied in computing the desired relationships between the states of the environment and the actions of the robot. The method is processed according to reward functions through artificial neural networks (ANNs) to find the behaviors that can maximize the total rewards (Bengio et al., 2015). This method enables the robotics to build up the preferences of behaviors from experiences without explicitly programming the control policies. But architectural tasks are different from the widely researched locomotion skills of robotics as the sequences of actions are more important. It is necessary to translate the learned information in formal disciplines as convincing design criteria. As a result, neither learning exclusively through RL algorithms nor data analysis is enough to fully interpret the learned memories. Instead, we develop parallel studies of comparing the robotic behaviors under the control of the learning model with the ones under the control of
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hand-designed programs to explain the different design decisions made in solving identical problems. To control the scale of the dissertation, I chose robotic assembly as a core system to be trained in solving design and construction tasks. It is a fabrication process based on the combinations of fabricating and spatial joining materials within structural stability. There are several subtopics of reinforcement learning: 1. Establishing Reinforcement Learning Process: The primary concern is to define the state representation for fundamental assembly problems. Then reinforcement learning algorithms are developed to search the policies between the states and the parameters of controlling robotics 2. Training by Trial and Error: The second step is to discover the artificial fabrication awareness through reinforcement learning. Rather than pre-training with big datasets, I train the robotics through trial and error to discover the operations of materials with real-time sensory data. 3. Adaptiveness: One character of realizing artificial awareness of construction is the adaptiveness to new tools and environments. I switched the learning process to the robots with a low degree of precision and to the robots within a noisier environment. Moreover, the adaptiveness is examined by using collaborative robots. The control policies are not only learned from trial and error in one system but also learned from the states caused by other systems. 4. The Existence of Artificial Design: The final hypothesis is to propose the generation of artificial design intentions from the learning experiences of exploring artificial fabrication awareness. I develop comparison studies of robots under the control of the proposed learning system and the ones controlled by explicit programming to parse the different decisions made on solving identical problems. Bengio, Y., Goodfellow, I. J., & Courville, A. (2015). Deep learning. An MIT Press book in preparation. Draft chapters available at http://www. iro. umontreal. ca/~bengioy/dlbook. Brell-Cokcan, S., & Braumann, J. (2012). Rob| Arch robotic fabrication in architecture, art, and design: Springer, Vienna. Gramazio, F., Kohler, M., & Willmann, J. (2014). The Robotic Touch: How Robots Change Architecture: Park Books.
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Doctoral Degree in Architecture
The Ph.D. Program
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Workbook
This workbook reflects our emphasis on design grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration. The small size of the School encourages close interaction and collaboration between students and faculty. Leaders in the field comprise our core faculty. All our design professors maintain thriving architectural practices while our history/theory faculty intensely disseminate their scholarship through publications and exhibitions, and our technology faculty are at the cutting edge of research. As a result, our undergraduates receive a well-rounded liberal arts education and a strong basis for additional studies in architecture while our graduate students gain a comprehensive understanding of the field, preparing them for a career in practice and/or academia.
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CUT-AWAY ISOMETRIC Locating detail isometric segments