Everything Must Scale has been a working title organizing a series of six design studios that have explored a realm where architectural design is enacted at scale – in the economic sense of the term where commodities or services or even architecture are replicated over entire territories and as construction blocks of commerce and social organization.

This studio returned to a program previously engaged in two prior studios: the future of the “truck stop” in an era of electrification and new forms of advanced transportation.

The studio asked each designer to seek new boundaries between what we call High and Low in design. This included asking about the use, structure, commodities, and devices and even signage and imagined scale and capital investment. Is a technologically advanced new truck and truck stop High or Low art — or are these terms newly obsolete?

Disability often appears as a threat to modernization, and the character of a modern city’s buildings and spaces expunge those qualities associated with it: Transparency confronts darkness, smoothness overcomes occlusions, and solidity stands against frailty. Contemporary strategies to improve disabled “access” within cities cannot fully confront the above biases, as they often sublimate impairment within modernist aesthetics. To enrich architectural and urban physiology, this studio explored more critical approaches to impairment while being cognizant of disabled demands for more accessible spaces.

Our explorations of disablement, architecture, and urban modernity were situated within a city central to their historical inter-relationship: The Mitteleuropean capital of Vienna, Austria. Vienna is the origin site of medicalized and hygienic visions of modern architecture and planning, and it is a city that now houses one of the largest percentages of disabled people of any European capital.

Our work in Vienna was divided into two phases: In the first part of the semester teams of students developed urban plans for three different sites in Vienna that are currently under study by the city government. After traveling to Vienna and reviewing their plans with city officials, students developed more individual projects within their urban designs.

The promise of renewable energy that ensures the viability of capitalism beyond fossil fuels is based on a double myth: On the one hand, the apparent inexhaustibility of its natural sources, and on the other, the lack of agency of the “natural environment” understood as a mere background for human activities. But the reality is different. Neither the intensive (and extensive) plantation of soybeans for biofuels or the extraction of silicon for the manufacture of photovoltaic panels is renewable, nor the alteration of human and non-human ecosystems produced by the construction of hydroelectric dams, wind farms, or solar thermal power plants is insignificant.

The post-oil future will make the massive installation of renewable infrastructures essential, hence the need to study its social, political, and ecological implications while we still have time.

The studio proposes the intervention in a renewable energy infrastructure based on socio-environmental justice parameters.

The project focuses on studying the renewable energy infrastructures of the Capitalocene, not only from the point of view of “sustainable” energy-monetary profitability but also as possible sources of socio-natural imbalance and environmental injustice in the ecosystem where they are inserted.

Our studio is called Layered Urbanism because it is centered on the premise that cities exist as sites of constant and overlapping change. The building our studio will consider was built in 1962 and replaced a majestic building built in the 1800s as the city’s central market of Buenos Aires, which in turn was built over a colonial monastery.

Most global cities face urban inadequacy, hosting empty buildings for long periods of time in a slow process of natural decay. In our case, Edificio Mercado del Plata, a large building of approximately half a million square feet, 11 stories above ground, three underground, lies unused in the center of Buenos Aires. This presents an opportunity to consider a new life by redefining the value of this place within the larger city.

The building is too big to be ignored and not loved enough to be restored. What to do, then? Demolish it and build a new one? Demolish it partially? Restore it fully? Let it be an art site? Let it become a ruin on its own? The symbolism of an unused building in the city’s center cannot remain. It is untenable.