4.124 - OMNIBUS: A CROSSING FOR EVERYONE
Instructor: Ana Miljacki
Telephone: (617) 253-7494
Office:
10-461M
Send e-mail: miljacki@mit.edu
Units:
Level:
Prerequisites:
The M.Arch Level 1 Spring Studio will engage the constraints of program relationships, movement logics, structural systems, and site parameters, as a catalyst for architectural invention at a public scale. Students will be asked to re-examine and re-imagine the terms of engagement between architecture and infrastructure to create a new public hub in the city. Negotiating the complex systems of public movement, public gathering and social activity, the studio will focus on performative criteria as a generator of architectural form. Hybridizing a bus terminal and a YMCA, the studio will examine these highly specific programs to mine the spatial possibilities within their independent and inter-related logics.
Within the urban context, transportation nodes and community centers have been key components of the modern city. The bus terminal was once the center of commuter life and emblem of mobility accessible to all. The word bus comes from Latin Omnibus, meaning “for everyone, for all.” The bus terminal and station are second tier civic structures, overshadowed by other transportation hubs and public architecture. Similarly, the YMCA, an institution founded as a recreational and community center capable of social transformation, seems today to have experienced a decline in stature and use. Despite the public and socially all-inclusive evolution of the Y and the continued need for local transportation, the bus terminal and Y have become marginalized in the cultural imaginary. They are public programs in need of architectural reinvention.
Mass transit, has in recent years experienced a renewed interest amongst diverse groups as issues of energy use and efficiency become increasingly urgent. While Mass transit may serve networked urban city centers, the gap between the transit network and the diffuse residential suburbia presents a condition that Bill Mitchell has called the “last mile problem.” The transportation issue requires the rethinking of all its components, the network, the infrastructure, the vehicles and the hubs. Bill Mitchell’s Smart Cities project is an example of the wholesale rethinking of many of these components, some of which we will draw on in the studio.
The Young Men’s Christian Association, founded in 1844 as a community center for of social reform through recreation and transformed into an anthem by the Village People – continues to serve as a vital mixed-use social activity space in the city. No longer an exclusive religious, gendered, ageist institution, the modernized YMCA functions as a community center, gym, and classroom. The programmatic diversity of the YMCA is the ultimate social condenser.
The first portion of the studio will focus on circulation systems, environmental systems, and structural systems as derived from the specificities of public systems of transit and recreation. Students will be asked to rethink span, enclosure and ground, in order to configure and reconfigure the architecture as a conduit for movement and activity through a transformative process. A series of criteria and constraints will be given sequentially at multiple scales in order to develop the abilities to work with the complex and comprehensive process of architectural design.
The ultimate goal of the studio will be to hybridize two distinct building types (bus terminal and a YMCA) and produce a unique urban structure, capable of serving as a conduit for movement and activity: a new urban hub housing a diverse ecology of programs and activities. The studio will challenge students to reconsider the programs of public transit and community recreation to find opportunities for urban and architectural forms and formulations. The design methodology will require an imaginative yet precise engagement with restrictions to renegotiate complex networks, generating new spatial logics from internal and external constraints. Rather than an arbitrarily generated formal strategy retroactively stuffed with program, we will explore architectural methods that operate inventively within the logics and limits of given systems and parameters to imagine new spatial possibilities.
