Architecture and Environment

In Advanced Architecture Studio VI, each of the 17 studios creates its own world—each with its own intersection of social, cultural, formal, material, economic, and environmental concerns. This Spring semester, these worlds ranged from infrastructure in the Amazon to rural experiments in Spain, from cultural interventions in Cape Town to domestic settings in Lima, and from mega-buildings in Tokyo to micro-schools in Texas.

At the same time, the various students and faculty of Advanced VI engaged in a shared discussion about the most interesting research, designs, practices, and ideas related to the built environment. They addressed the theme of “Architecture and Environment” and fortified the hypothesis that climate change is ground zero for a shared discussion about architecture’s engagement with the world. Responding to climate change requires attending not only to technical matters like energy consumption and carbon footprint, but also social and political issues, such as inequality and public policy. In this context, the Advanced VI studios were framed as a unique and multifaceted opportunity to tackle climate change at the scale of the building and to address climate change through design.

Over the semester, faculty and students responded to COVID-19 by quickly and creatively reinventing the studio format with virtual meetings, new working methods, and experimental representation strategies. Confronting these pedagogical shifts with determination and ingenuity, they used the new constraints to create architecture with the urgency, flexibility, and creativity that our new era demands.

This studio Havana Micro X: Modernist City Planning Model in a Post-Modern World proposes urban hybrids to question inherited cultural, economic, environmental, and technological assumptions. Modern precedents assist participants in re-interpreting historical efforts and ideologies and, hopefully, proposing an alternative urban discussion capable of addressing contemporary issues. Students examine four tissue samples of Havana modernist fabric and study their development under the current conditions of a weakened state. The result is an urban proposal for the selected areas and a zoomed-in examination of a single hybrid building.

The studio Everything Must Scale 3: Architecture and the Teacher-less School follows a series that have looked at architectural building types increasingly being challenged if not made obsolete. This edition explores what will become of schools as education is increasingly automated, achieved without the same type or number of on-site teachers and in the realms of software and media as education becomes less place-specific and can occur almost anywhere. The studio addresses issues of architecture and scalar realms of economy, energy, and the forms of power or authority that shape the built world. This includes examinations of how the expanded presence of automation, renewable energy, new forms of mobility meet older forms of settlement, architecture, and place.

This studio addresses the massive global construction and rapid urbanization that will occur in the same ten years in which it is critical to drastically cut carbon emissions. We explore a new type of design. We simultaneously design materials, typologies, prototype buildings, forests, and supply chains. We explore architecture as an open system. We explore the use of engineered wood in buildings and the idea of mass timber as a system. We take a critical look at the farm-to-table movement—as well as at some of the past models of architecture as a system—and we develop new kinds of open systems for architecture.

China Miéville’s novel The City & The City serves as the site, program, and universe of the studio. Beginning with close and rigorous reading, analysis, deconstruction, and re‐composition of the text through analytic drawings/models, each student enters and re‐constructs the implied geographies, styles, and site conditions on their terms and in their visual language. The studio progresses from this projective cartography into the iterative exploration and design of a 3D formal language that enables the novels’ inhabitants to negotiate two opposing and intertwined cities.

The studio engages and explores the formal and programmatic possibilities of invented large-scale architecture in the city. In a back-and-forth process with key historic projects, the studio develops a series of design-based scenarios that leverage specific qualities of the city and seeks to mine these scenarios for their formal possibilities. With the addition of infrastructure, the studio posits that architecture can be both/and—it can be both about growth and about the environment—through the manipulation of form and the tactical deployment of social and ecological systems.

The studio is informed by the history of radical thinking about architecture in the 20th century yet looks beyond to the Afro-Imaginary to present an experimental curriculum deploying techniques culled from the visual arts as well as design theories of geography, infrastructure, engineering, and architecture to initiate dialogues about geography and spatiality in an era of global crisis due to human-induced climate change. More specifically, the studio investigated the cultural topographies of water informed by the line from colonialism to climate change in consideration of forced-migration, resource extraction, environmental degradation, and water scarcity.The studio investigates filmic techniques of narrative, fragment, and structure as analytical and generative tools to speculate towards the design of architectural interventions upon either the land or the sea.

What is the role of architecture in an environment that needs to invest a lot of energy to get a significant transformation? Where are the limits of scale, amount of architecture and Technification of the territory? What are the pertinent typologies, construction systems, and preservation protocols? The studio Infrastructural Geography: Water, Leisure, and Every Policies imagines a new generation of low-impact clean industry nurseries, research centers, pedagogical institutions, and residential complexes that bring new ways of living to re-equip this geography in an endeavor to redefine its character. This studio wants to design and build a new “rural-urban culture” that takes advantage of dualities such as isolation-connection, natural-artificial, hybridization-specificity, individual-collective, sophisticated-elementary technologies, density-porosity…to create new forms of living, working, leisure and socialization.

Students design an urban factory complex that creates collective spatial structures for the manufacturing of artifacts and the shaping of exchanges. The work requires critical engagement with the many historical, social, economic, and technological contexts influencing the design of factories; the studio asks students to re-frame these conditions as innovative spatial formats for manufacture in their architecture. The site is the Bush Terminal; the studio reconsiders this entire complex and envisions a future for it as a center for new industries. The studio considers how each project connects to or informs others in the studio as the semester unfolds—ie. an exquisite corpse, collage, or as part of a master plan—to define the unifying and anomalous criteria of each project in relation to the whole.

The studio makes a typological analysis of 12 different halls presented by student teams. Based on a musical fragment from a composer (Dvořák, Pärt, Saariaho, Feldman, Ravel, Cage) the students build a model in 20”x20” cube of space focusing on interior geometry with acoustic potential for midterm. Driven by their composition and language experiments each team then designs a 1200 seat concert hall sited in Prague.

The Makergraph Studio is a personal, actual, material, and physical investigation of how materials become things, how things make places, and how places shape people. Operations like forging, molding, weaving and stitching are metaphors for how we invent and discover ourselves as people. By paying attention to how you make things, you will understand more about how you make yourself—as a designer, and maybe even as a person.

In late Modern city planning, street design was almost entirely driven by traffic planning parameters with moderate consideration for vegetation. Today, from the homeless population in LA’s Skid Row and London’s tunnels, to the surveillance system deployed via street cams in Beijing and Hong Kong, from Google’s much-contested Sidewalk Lab pilot in Toronto to the pink pussyhats and the yellow vests, the street in the new millennium is nothing short of the new frontier of cultural expression, public discourse, and technological transformation. Thus in the streets around the world, along with the apparent as well as latent fault lines of social fabrics and technological apparatuses, profound fractures can be seen everywhere. This studio researches the new players in the street, rediscovers past experimentations that might still offer relevance, and studies possible new typologies that might be constitutive of contemporary discourse.

This studio looks at the contemporary reality of the city of Lima as a radical trial-and-error urban and architectural experiment. Studying the current community kitchens as a starting point for architectural speculation, the studio researches and understands how these urban infrastructures operate to imagine possible futures for the city of Lima. As a response, the students speculate and design a contemporary domestic landscape where homes rather than being isolated entities are part of a complex whole of shared infrastructures. The students understand the home not simply as an isolated space but as a part of a wider system where the boundaries between public and private, urban and domestic spheres are blurred, but also understand the kitchen as a tool able to redefine preset social, political and economical systems.

In 1982, Werner Herzog went to Amazonia to shoot Fitzcarraldo. The character decides to make a shortcut and transport his ship up a muddy hill to avoid water streams. The scene illustrates the clash between the time of the river and western civilization. Five hundred years after the first European expeditions, the forest, its populations, and cultures are still understood as enemies to be defeated and exploited. In this context, what does it mean to design for Amazonia? In the studio, students investigated networks and systems at a local and global scale and proposed alternative development scenarios through buildings, infrastructures and public spaces.

This studio investigates the qualities of “large scale public spaces contrasting with the small private-scale patterns required within.” Given a generic structural grid and nondescript facade, that signals an architecture that is adaptable in the future. This studio researches, examines, and designs a new paradigm for social spaces within a proposed mixed-use program. Staircases, passageways, and associated vertical circulation elements can be rethought as interconnected social collective circulation space(s) instead of discrete, or residual spaces. This studio explores the intersection of the social, technological, and cultural practices within the discipline of architecture. The final design problem is a set of connected, collective circulation spaces, stairs, elevators, escalators, ramps, landings, handrails, walls, etc… that propose a paradigm for reimagining the interior life of a building.

The studio’s mission is to design Something of Value. The students design for an assumed “client,” who is in charge of the “X” company, comparable to Related or SL Green in the US, that is headquartered in London. The “X” company owns millions of square feet of real estate around the world, the majority of which is commercial office space. With commercial office space currently shifting towards sharing types, the client wishes to experiment with new hybrids that combine work, art, commerce, and education, but not residential use. The project is to design a building(s) as a “gift”, Something of Value, for the city of London, which would give the “X” company additional development rights in return, with the exact program to be defined by each student or team.

This studio addresses three open-ended buildings in Japan, namely: Masato Otaka’s Sakaide Artificial Ground, Sachio Otani’s Kawaramachi Housing Project, and Kenzo Tange’s Dentsu Headquarters Building. The studio brief is simple. Each student joins a team, is assigned to a building, and is asked to double its surface. Do you endorse openness, and observe, refine, or redefine the original script? Do you argue against it, and monumentalize? What is at stake is to design in conversation with, and take a position on, a building and the arguments it advanced, and to tackle a longstanding question within the field, again, half a century later.

With the Vietnam war and its legacies as persistent reference, in light of Vietnam’s new antagonisms with China and other neighbors, and with the intertwining of culture and environment at stake, this studio worked through the architecture and cultural agency of concentrations. Through concentration the studio analyzed and reconceived cultural institutions, archives, and processes that assemble artifacts, objects, and bodies. It also studied Agent Orange, carpet bombing, and other elements of the chemical war that so drastically altered the Vietnamese environment and that continue to communicate their histories and effects. Hence, for this studio, concentration served as a marker of environmental contamination and alteration, cultural institutions, political histories, and their architectural and spatial manifestations.