Fall 2017
Urban Design Studio — Cities by Sea
Instructor: Rafi Segal, Alan Berger, Jonah Susskind
https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/fall-2017-4163
Coastal areas have been urbanizing for centuries. The expansion, building and retrofitting of urban waterfronts must confront the urgent challenge of how to adapt to increasing floods, storms and sea level rise. In the age of sea level rise, the sea has become a threat or risk to citizens, a thing to protect and defend against, or retreat from. Waterfront urbanism now carries a heavy burden of damage, loss, and vulnerability. The studio will combine research and urban design around the theme of ‘rising seas in the age of climate change’ for the city of Boston and its surrounding neighborhoods. The first part of the studio is a collective research effort that will analyze selected cities and contemporary projects around the world that address these challenges.
Spring 2017
Urban Design Studio: Urbanism After Extraction — Housing, Landscape, and Infrastructure in the Katowice Agglomeration, Poland
Instructor: Rafi Segal, Marie Law Adams
https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/spring-2017-4163
Despite the general decline in the industry, increased operational costs in old and deep mines, and an aging power plant infrastructure, Poland continues to be heavily reliant on coal for energy today. As the European Union and much of the world set targets for transitioning to renewable energy, Poland and the Katowice agglomeration in particular face a twofold challenge: how to reclaim a highly degraded post‐coal landscape for the future, and how to transition to a new energy paradigm. This urban studio addresses both the environmental and social aspects of this problem. We seek a comprehensive approach that calls to combine design projects and landscape strategies with processes of policy, zoning, financing and investment structures
Fall 2016
Urban Design Studio — Terra-Sorta-Firma: Urbanism in the C-11 Basin
Instructor: Miho Mazereeuw, Fadi Masoud
https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/spring-2017-4163
With nearly 20 million residents, Florida is one of the country’s fastest growing states. Its ubiquitous suburban landscape is enabled by the continued manipulation of a dynamic estuarine environment and a pervasive real-estate-driven housing pattern. Thirty-five miles of levees and 2,000 hydraulic pumping stations drain 860 acres of water per day, resulting in the ‘world’s largest wet subdivision’ and $101 billion worth of property below sea level by 2030. Teams of students will design projects that cover many scales ranging from large-scale landscape infrastructural systems to the design of housing prototypes of varying densities. Students will work to develop a systemically driven approach that takes the hydrological extremes and ecological resonance of the context as the foundations of their formal proposition.
Spring 2016
Urban Design Studio — The Meadowlands Studio: Urban District around Regional Park?
Instructor: Alexander D'Hooghe, Alan Berger
https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/spring-2014-4163
The Meadowlands is a large (former) marsh and flood zone just west of Manhattan. Over the last century, the basin has collected an impressive quantity of critical infrastructures (port, utilities), while partially crumbling under an increasing pressure for regular residential and urban development. As a result, the natural marsh system has been severely reduced. Most of the stakeholders agree that development and ecology should have the capacity to reinforce each other’s value. Recent efforts by the Meadowlands commission have stabilized the eco-system, but overall there is no vision about how to address the continuing pressure for further urbanization.
The studio will assume a pressure for 15,000 multi-story residential units, most often in proximity to a continuing (and growing) presence of distribution centers for logistics and supply chain; as well as near newly defined regional park Meadowlands. You will aim to arrive at a 2-3 distinct overall visions for the Meadowlands, elaborated at different scale levels. Because of the scope of the problem, we will recommend that groups will develop the proposals; there will be ample time for every student to design their individual contribution into the overall plan.
Spring 2016
Architecture Design Option Studio (D'Hooghe/Grauer) — Bogota, Colombia Studio: Designing Public Spaces and Urban Typologies based on flows of Water, People, and Goods as related to Infrastructure
Instructor: Alexander D'Hooghe, Oscar Grauer
https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/spring-2016-4154
The objective of this studio is to reconceptualize the interrelation between water and mobility infrastructures in urban environments as a means to reshape urban development patterns, first by studying the logics of water and development at a territorial scale, and second, by focusing on the opportunities to achieve a more balanced, equitable, eco-friendly, prosperity-inducing development pattern. A deeper understanding of the relation between supply, distribution, and recycling of water and infrastructures fueling urban growth, will lead to a redefinition of urban infrastructure layouts, aimed at how to make the best use of existing bodies of water, how to maintain and replenish those in need, and to envision ecologically friendly means to treat used water.
Spring 2016
Urban Design Studio — RENACIMIENTO: Reviving Mexico’s Abandoned Towns
Instructor: Rafi Segal, Brent Ryan
https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/spring-2016-4163
Mexico’s rapid urbanization of the past decades, housing deficit, and its ambitious housing policy to provide affordable housing to its poorer populations has led in many cases to the building of ex-urban isolated housing estates, some of which have gradually been emptied out. The building of affordable housing on cheap land outside the city boundaries, often lacking in infrastructure and public services, and disconnected from work places, has created a growing problem of families abandoning these homes. This joint urban design studio, will engage interdisciplinary, planning and design thinking to apply to this pressing urban problem, utilizing the lens of design to generate novel housing, infrastructural, and settlement forms that can be implemented in selected areas.
Fall 2015
Urban Design Studio — Terra-sort-Firma: Coding Resilient Urbanism in South Florida
Instructor: Adèle Naudé Santos, Alan Berger, Fadi Masoud
https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/fall-2015-4163
With nearly 20 million residents, Florida is one of the country’s fastest growing states. Its ubiquitous suburban landscape is enabled by the continued manipulation of a dynamic estuarine environment and a pervasive real-estate-driven housing pattern. Thirty-five miles of levees and 2,000 hydraulic pumping stations drain 860 acres of water per day, resulting in the ‘world’s largest wet subdivision’ and putting $101 billion worth of property below sea level by 2030. The overall structure that defines Florida’s cities emerges from the combination of hard infrastructural lines, developer driven master plans, powerful reductive normative zoning, and rigid form-based codes. Taken together, they dictate everything from the use of the land, to its subdivision patterns, and from building heights, setbacks, densities, street widths, and open space ratios, all the way to roof pitch angles, and fence hues.
By recognizing that it is exactly in the process of physical planning and design that we may be the most operative and strategic agents, this Urban Design Studio puts front and center the agency and efficacy of urban designer’s tools as they deal with issues of 21st century urbanism. It starts by accepting the “third condition” as a space for urban development. The “third condition” refers to the constantly influx hydrological state — that is neither wet nor dry but always shifting — as the starting point of a novel and contextual “process-based” language for coding the future of Floridian urbanism.
Fall 2015
Introductory Urban Design Studio
Instructor: Miho Mazereeuw
https://architecture.mit.edu/subject/fall-2015-4162
Project-based introduction to urban observation, research, analysis, and design. Focuses on urban elements, urban and architectural interventions, and landscape in existing cities. Emphasizes city form, sustainability, and social conditions. Projects require both conventional and digital techniques.
