4.155 Graduate Design Studio
Instructors:
__ Mark Goulthorpe, Plymouth Rock Film Studios Design
_ Nondita Correa-Mehrotra, Nature and Artifice in the City
Ana Miljacki, Restarting the Future 1: ASSEMBLY
Units: 0-10-11
Level: H
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor
Plymouth Rock Film Studios Design
Instructor: Mark Goulthorpe
Room:10-461
Phone: 617-452-3061
mg_decoi@mit.edu
The studio for Fall 2009 will design the theatre hub of Plymouth Rock Film studios in Plymouth, MA. This is a real-world project that aims to bring Hollywood to the east coast by establishing a major film campus with 24 sound stages and ancillary support structures on a 1000 acre site - by far the most ambitious break-out of the film industry from its California stronghold. It is located in Plymouth, the 'first' settlement town, since it aims to be pioneering in being a showcase sustainable development and community, offering a vivid new context in which to make films, and as a model to other developments worldwide - so the 'first' of a new type of settlement. The project is currently undergoing strategic design, which involves engineers and architects from Arup in London, who are laying out an 'ecological' blueprint for what an entirely benign development might entail, involving a 30-year plan for driving towards an entirely renewable operability.
The theatre hub is the centerpiece of the complex, where film premieres and events will take place, with a great diversity of use. Of necessity, it must establish a decisive image and identity for the entire studio complex, as well as being seen as a manifestation of its sustainable ideals. Plymouth Rock has reached out to MIT and other centers of research excellence with the idea of championing decisive game-changing technologies in pursuit of zero carbon strategies. I've established the link with Arup, and I've also brought leading boat-building technologies into play, drawing from the world-renowned industry in Rhode Island (Goetz Technologies), suggesting new CAD-CAM fabrication techniques that might offer a legitimate vernacular architecture with a distinctive new look and feel, redolent of contemporary local skill.
The studio will be immersed in the quite radical and holistic 'flows' that Arup have outlined, where waste, energy, food, etc become drivers of architectural form; but most crucially we will pursue the client's expressed interest in establishing a vital new architectural beacon through inventive use of prescient building technologies drawn from sophisticated related fields of design/fabrication. We will engage with some of the leading engineers, urbanists and architects from Ove Arup, as well as with the legendary boat builder Eric Goetz (several Americas Cup yachts), and the charismatic film producers that are the driving force of Plymouth Rock - David Kirkpatrick and Earl Lestz (Paramount/Disney).
NATURE AND ARTIFICE IN THE CITY: A Conservatory on the Rose Kennedy Greenway
Instructor: Nondita Correa-Mehrotra
Room: 9-224
Phone: 617-324-5643
ncorrea@MIT.EDU
The studio is premised on developing a project that focuses on Architecture creating urban space. Our site is the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a spine of public land in Boston that was created by the submersion of the central artery. The program: a Conservatory for the Massachusetts Horticulture Society.
“In the long chronicle of our American distrust of the city, two names stand out above the rest: Jefferson and Thoreau. One sought to destroy the city by political means; the other, fleeing it for the wilderness, wrote and preached to alert others to the city’s danger. Each established a distinct anti-urban tradition, still honored by many who know nothing of its origin”. – J. B. Jackson
The Studio will examine American attitudes towards Nature, and the consequences of these attitudes – how they come to bear on Architecture, the City, and the constructed Landscape. What is America’s attitude towards Nature? In this Studio we will read J. B. Jackson and others who have written extensively on the American landscape with the perspective of history, and how the constructed landscape reflects social values and cultural patterns. We will discuss the effect of Jefferson, and the eloquent Thoreau, who through their actions and writings influenced the country’s relationship to Nature, and therefore to the City as well.
"Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu" – Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses. – Thomas Aquinas' Peripatetic Axiom
The process of design will be structured on making. We will work with glass as a material, designing at 1:1 scale.
“Eventually everything connects . . .” – Charles Eames
We will look at the Greenway and the City as a continuum. As in the Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of 10, we will scale up and down, from the macro to the micro level. From issues at the level of the City, to the tectonics of the structures we design. As we work, we will strive to achieve a coherence of the ideas at all scales.
Students will initially work in groups, developing an understanding for the site, which is the entire length of the Greenway. This site reading will help students select specific site/sites on which they would like to situate the Conservatory. From then on, students will work independently, developing a palette of materials, building prototypes and designing their projects.
Architecture in the city will be the focus of the studio.
Restarting the Future 1: ASSEMBLY
Instructor: Ana Miljacki
Room: 10-481M
Phone: 617-252-2023
miljacki@MIT.EDU
Here are a few things that we will do:
We will look for ways to induce historical imagination, which does not mean revamping styles or even using historical lessons as contemporary alibis, but rather, it involves a cultivation of abilities to imagine long term and short term effects of architecture.
__ Why? Because the real disciplinary crisis is not so much the financial one that just engulfed us, but the evacuation of historical imagination from the discipline. (These two are arguably related, but that is a longer story).
__How does one imagine architecture’s effectiveness, it’s symbolic dimensions, and it’s meaningful tectonic solutions while embracing uncertainty?
We will think in terms of previews and retroactive evaluations. Previewing will involve more than the usual anticipatory mode of design - think of it as making the movie trailer before there is a movie to describe.
__ Why? Because sometimes imagining and re-imagining the effects of and the context for design is the best type of design research.
We will paint many realities of the project.
__ Why? Because design needs reality to be design at all. We want the effects we imagine for architecture to be possible and plausible.
We will use cartoons and animations to tell the story of the project.
__Why? Because storytelling is one of the few ways we can edit together both a description of the object we are making and a thick account of its effects and affects. More importantly, given the current context in which our ability to ‘compute’ complexity has ensured that the representation of the world and the world are nearly 1:1 (both nearly equally complex), we need to isolate stories and narrate our architectural ambitions anew. (And, of course, what better tool to test our historical imagination than linear storytelling?)
We will learn from history and keep a log of our lessons.
__Why? Because we need to learn how to leverage our synchronic society in which knowledge (past, present, and future) is everywhere instantly available or simulated. We need to both access lessons relevant to our architectural design and we need to hold on to a form of radical anamnesis in order to simulate historical thinking from within the synchronic world.
We will work on a contained site that requires architecturally scaled proposals, in New England (maybe, New York).
__Why? Because architecturally scaled proposals will ensure that we imagine the future through organizational, formal, spatial, tectonic and representational possibilities (and not the “mere narration of stories”).
We will read and discuss articles and architectural projects.
__Why? In order to construct a shared ground, to play out positions, and to cultivate pleasure in engaging disciplinary discourse through design.
The rest of the details are coming in the Fall…
