Classes

Studies design as an interrogative technique to examine material sciences, media arts and technology, cultural studies, computation and emerging fabrication protocols. Provides in-depth, theoretical grounding to the notion of 'design' in architecture, and to the consideration of contemporary design methodologies, while encouraging speculation on emerging design thinking. Topical focus varies with instructor. May be repeated for credit with permission of department.

Provides a practical hands-on introduction to digital fabrication, including CAD/CAM/CAE, NC machining, 3-D printing and scanning, molding and casting, composites, laser and waterjet cutting, PCB design and fabrication; sensors and actuators; mixed-signal instrumentation, embedded processing, and wired and wireless communications. Develops an understanding of these capabilities through projects using them individually and jointly to create functional systems.

Provides a practical hands-on introduction to digital fabrication, including CAD/CAM/CAE, NC machining, 3-D printing and scanning, molding and casting, composites, laser and waterjet cutting, PCB design and fabrication; sensors and actuators; mixed-signal instrumentation, embedded processing, and wired and wireless communications. Develops an understanding of these capabilities through projects using them individually and jointly to create functional systems.

Explores the foundations of design through a series of bracketed methods of production. These methods exercise topics such as form, space, organization, structure, circulation, use, tectonics, temporality, and experience. Students develop methods of representation that span from manual to virtual and from canonical to experimental. Each method is evaluated for what it offers and privileges, supplying a survey of approaches for design exercises to follow. First in a sequence of design subjects, which must be taken in order.

Explores the foundations of design through a series of bracketed methods of production. These methods exercise topics such as form, space, organization, structure, circulation, use, tectonics, temporality, and experience. Students develop methods of representation that span from manual to virtual and from canonical to experimental. Each method is evaluated for what it offers and privileges, supplying a survey of approaches for design exercises to follow. First in a sequence of design subjects, which must be taken in order.

Core 2 provides students with conceptual tools and practical skills to address contemporary social and environmental issues with architecture’s means of operation. Considering various temporalities while designing an intervention in the Strand Theater in Dorchester, the studio aims to address diverse subjectivities and ecological practices through the organization of movement and flows of subjects and material. As a pedagogical strategy, the studio will distinguish three main systems of organization (program, circulation and structure) and encourage students to consider how they could overlap, be integrated, or remain differentiated as they relate to issues of order, choreography, tectonics, form, space, event and experience.

Builds on Core I skills and expands the constraints of the architectural problem to include issues of urban site logistics, cultural and programmatic material (inhabitation and human factors), and long span structures. Two related projects introduce a range of disciplinary issues, such as working with precedents, site, sectional and spatial proposition of the building, and the performance of the outer envelope. Emphasizes the clarity of intentions and the development of appropriate architectural and representational solutions.

Builds on Core I skills and expands the constraints of the architectural problem to include issues of urban site logistics, cultural and programmatic material (inhabitation and human factors), and long span structures. Two related projects introduce a range of disciplinary issues, such as working with precedents, site, sectional and spatial proposition of the building, and the performance of the outer envelope. Emphasizes the clarity of intentions and the development of appropriate architectural and representational solutions.

Interdisciplinary approach to design through studio design problems that engage the domains of building technology, computation, and the cultural/historical geographies of energy. Uses different modalities of thought to examine architectural agendas for 'sustainability'; students position their work with respect to a broader understanding of the environment and its relationship to society and technology. Students develop a project with a comprehensive approach to programmatic organization, energy load considerations, building material assemblies, exterior envelope and structure systems.

Interdisciplinary approach to design through studio design problems that engage the domains of building technology, computation, and the cultural/historical geographies of energy. Uses different modalities of thought to examine architectural agendas for 'sustainability'; students position their work with respect to a broader understanding of the environment and its relationship to society and technology. Students develop a project with a comprehensive approach to programmatic organization, energy load considerations, building material assemblies, exterior envelope and structure systems.

In memory of co-creator Virgil Abloh 

Studio trip: during Spring Break

“To be truly visionary, we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.”
bell hooks

“A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing — “the” revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask “what is revolutionary action?” We could then suggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power, would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything.”
David Graeber

This studio explores the structural frameworks and spatial implications of the climate crisis in its various manifestations, as well as, crucially, the role of the architect within the climate movement. The ambition is to ask , as Denise Ferreira da Silva writes in Difference Without Separability, “..what sort of ethical opening can be envisioned with the dissolution of the grip of the Understanding and the releasing of The World to the imagination”.

The environmental crisis is not a question of scientific advancement, or innovation and just as little a design problem. It is a political crisis: we know what we should do, we know what we could do, we even know how to. Yet we don’t.

Predicated on the idea that "justice" does not have a clear definition or measure, the studio will be working closely with the Stanford Legal Design Lab to map and challenge political structures - historic and current ones, raising questions of policy, code and laws in direct relation to the environmental crisis.

With a sober yet imaginative sense of what is possible, the studio will identify and propose a range of projects at various scales, ranging from tactical strategies (Extinction Rebellion’s use of tensegrity structures being a prime example), to questions of managed retreat (specifically looking at the program recently launched by the Biden administration, the first of its kind, to fund the relocation of communities) and as far as A Global Moratorium on New Construction, questioning the architect’s very own role.

The studio will be working closely with marine biologist, policy expert and co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, as well as journalists, activists and community members.

“We are all projects of collective self-creation. What if, instead of telling the story about how our society fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
David Graeber & David Wengrow

“The birth of the body in the 17th century also marked its end, as the concept of the body would cease to define a specific organic reality, and become instead a political signifier of class relations, and of the shifting, continuously redrawn boundaries which these relations produce in the map of human exploitation.”

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch

Half a century ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion, a landmark decision known as Roe v. Wade. Throughout the past 50 years the decision has been challenged continuously, a tug o' war between different actors, instead of being firmly cemented as a human right and health care issue, culminating in the last decade in a particularly effective political tool. Today Texas, the second largest state and home to 30 million people (a size equaling half the population of Italy), succeeded in banning abortion. There are six additional bans that have been signed into law but are not currently in effect in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio. Yet According to the WHO (World Health Organization) restricting legal access to abortion does not decrease the need, but increases the number of womxn seeking illegal and unsafe abortion. Nearly a fourth of womxn in America will have an abortion by age 45, yet 6 states have only one abortion-care provider, an emergency situation which falls especially hard on people with low incomes. 

What does Space have to do with it?

Given Roe v. Wade, politicians have been seeking round-about ways of banning abortion, as they were unable to do so directly. Space became a primary weapon in the Texas Omnibus Abortion Bill, known as HB 2, signed into law in 2013, which required all abortions to be done in ambulatory surgical centers. Essentially mini-hospitals, these spaces have very specific code requirements regarding width and size of spaces, mechanical equipment and others. This automatically disqualified most if not all Planned Parenthood and other clinics. The entire established medical profession, both in Texas and nationally, disagreed that such provisions were necessary. The law faced immediate legal scrutiny, and in July 2016, the United States Supreme Court held some parts of the law to be unconstitutional in its decision on Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. 

“When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners. ... Laws like H. B. 2 that 'do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion' cannot survive judicial inspection.” 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt

In addition to codes, the clinics have become a quite literal battle ground and both people seeking healthcare services, as well as healthcare providers are harassed and attacked by protesters who disagree with one’s choice over their own body. What should be a routine gesture in any developed country, let alone the richest in the world, that of seeking medical care, is more dangerous before one makes it to the door of the clinic, then anything happening inside. Nobody should be persecuted for seeking medical care, and nobody providing care, either. This results in added costs, stress or outright inability to access medicare care to those most in need and with the least resources, as well as severely limiting the day-to-day activities of abortion clinics and in time require them to shut down.

The studio will be working in partnership with sexual health care clinics in the US that struggle to exist within the restrictions in order to examine how law and space interact, understanding the ways in which space is being weaponized against the body.

With the proposed de-orbiting of the International Space Station in 2030 and the coinciding rise in commercial space flight operations, it is clear that human habitation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) will dramatically increase, stimulating the design of human environments beyond earth. With NASA’s Artemis program, the surface of the Moon will once again harbor human activities, over fifty years after the final Apollo mission. It is imperative that we design the future of space architecture with not only the best technology and functional performance but also with a primary focus on the human dimension: social, cultural, ecological, and aesthetic values. Up to now, very little of the environments of space exploration have been designed primarily for human experience; rather, they are focused purely on performance and safety. Yet how, and even why we live in space is now a question open to the design fields in collaboration with engineering and others.

MIT has been home to innovation and a leader in human space flight since the 1960s; its graduates have provided over 15% of US astronauts, and its labs and workshops have constructed key technologies from the Apollo era to the present day. At the intersection of this experience and MIT’s current values lies essential work on how we will live in the future – in space and on earth.

The Space Architecture Options Studio will pilot a new undertaking in interdisciplinary design for space habitats by bringing together students from across MIT to imagine, design, prototype and test the future of Space Architecture. This studio will be run in parallel with Architecture/MArch, Aero/Astro Space Systems Engineering class and the Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative’s Operating in the Lunar Environments class. There will be shared lectures and activities, with the goal of bringing together students with varied backgrounds to create a synergy that will hopefully lead to new ideas about human habitation and activities on the Moon.

It is at the edges of the possible where we find important lessons for what we need to do here on earth. 

Mandatory lottery process.

Islands are examples of landscapes, ecologies and communities on the delicate and leading edge of sustainability and the imminent challenges brought about by climate change. The Galapagos are a prime example. Often challenged but sustained by consequences of tourism, they tread a fine line between economic and cultural viability on the one hand and the impacts of environmental and climatic vulnerability on the other. In such scenarios, island communities, such as Cuttyhunk, work hard to survive and become resilient- but with a concern around the policies they need to implement in the future to achieve a new form of ecological balance and real sustainability.  

The delicacy of this ecological balance is also subject to an understanding of the ‘flows’, in and out / to and fro, that sustain this native island and its culture - and perhaps provide a framework for understanding interactions over variable time scales that create strategies towards a more resilient future. As an example, many smaller-scaled islands such as Cuttyhunk, have flows and changing seasonal cycles of people, resources, goods, waste, climate variations, animals, vegetation and beaches to name a few of the most obvious. Also these flows and cycles can be traced and mapped through history to reveal a palimpsest of physical responses by earlier generations that have inhabited the island. Set against this scenario, the studio for the semester will work with the island of Cuttyhunk in southern Massachusetts, to consider how as architects we must engage with such issues in considering how to impact change on an island through design and architecture. 

While the nearby twelve-mile-long Elizabeth islands are unique as they are mostly uninhabited for the purposes of preservation, Cuttyhunk is the exception and grows from a population of only about twelve people in winter to several hundred with summer visitors, in addition to the regular day-trippers and significant numbers of visiting boaters from July to September. The island is about 1.5 x 0.75 miles and is accessed by a daily ferry from New Bedford. 

The southern half of the island is wild in nature and is still is farmed with oyster beds, while the northern end has a protected boat basin surrounded by mostly moderately-scaled summer homes and a network of roads. During three summer months the island is busy and active with flows of people, boats, resources, waste and fuel, but quietens down as it faces the winter months when essential repair and infrastructural work is completed and the people disappear. As mentioned, Cuttyhunk is in a balancing act as it questions whether it is a community that can exist outside of the short summer months for visitors - and if so it will need to figure out how to survive while preserving the island's culture and ecology, flora and fauna, and the future impacts of a changing climate. The thesis of the studio is that in times of climate change, sea level rise and a more-volatile climate, the island can retain positive outlook on its future as a year-round community, including being a laboratory for observing changes to the land, landscape and ocean and fishing, while also being a resource for learning and testing new ideas that enable it be exist sustainably. 

The studio will use Cuttyhunk as the context for making architecture as a strategic and physical act on the island. We will consider two projects: a short project that consider show to rethink the summit ‘destination’ and high point on the island (with 360 degree views) that is in need of new design thinking; and a longer project that is a modestly-scaled residential ecological education center that poses the possibility of new directions for public engagement on the island’s future. The idea is for the center to be a resource for visitors of different ages and backgrounds to spend time experiencing and researching the island and to express this through a non-invasive, resilient and adaptive form of architecture.  

‘Sites’ (as different landscape profiles, orientations and microclimates) will be determine from a larger consider of the island climate and ecology, together with the ability to support specific architectural concepts. Such concepts will look for a formal clarity as typologies together with a tectonic language of material and assembly appropriate for building on an island (including the notion of all timber prefabrication for transportation) with a variable climate that suggest different modes of openness and privacy. It is anticipated that design projects will have to be climatically resilient and self-sufficient in terms of energy and resources. The studio will aim to visit Cuttyhunk relatively early in the semester for experiencing the island and making specific studies to enhance and understanding of the inherent ‘ecological flows’. 
 

capitalist realism
There was a saying, I want to call it an “old saying” the way science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson did recently in his The Ministry of the Future, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. This notion, now part of Leftist folklore, attributed alternatively to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žizek, was also important for Mark Fisher’s framing of “capitalist realism”. Fisher was concerned with the “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” What he calls “capitalist realism” is precisely the naturalization of this notion; that the politically mutable has become immutable. A few years after Fisher’s (2009) writing on the topic, many cataclysmic climate events later, and three years into the global pandemic that had brought us to a previously unimaginable hard stop globally, the cliché seems to have grown teeth and started biting. 

1989
Now consider the year 1989 beyond its common “capitalist realist” characterizations. This annus mirabilis of Eastern European peoples, was understood widely as the triumph of democracy, finally also, east of the Elbe. Philosopher Francis Fukuyama thought the events of 1989—also known as “the fall of the wall,” or “the fall of communism”— had marked the “end of history” itself. From then on, there would simply be nothing to motivate history’s forward movement, just perpetual present (global capitalism) and no alternatives to it. Another philosopher, Jürgen Habermas thought the historical events of 1989 had finally placed Eastern Europe on the right path, back on track to becoming proper liberal democracies. In his view, the events of 1989 were a form of “compensatory revolution.” He was not the only one, of course, his position represented the widespread colloquial understanding of the historical implications of efforts by Eastern European people to rid themselves of their oppressive regimes. 

More recently, Croatian philosopher Boris Buden, one of the most important commentators on the post-socialist transitions, proposed a different reading. Buden offered that this conception of Eastern European revolutions of 1989 as “revolutions in reverse” infantilized the subjects of post-socialism everywhere. It also decisively and swiftly sent all of the then “freed” countries straight into transitions towards global capitalism without any assessment of what their socialisms had achieved, or what might happen if the link between centralized planning and important and functioning public infrastructure was severed. Imagining 1989 to have been in the service of Eastern Europe’s catching up to the West also allowed the West not to question its own historical moment and trajectory.

architectural archives and retro-utopian work
This studio will begin by rethinking the archives of Yugoslavian socialism and architecture from the opposite posture, alongside Buden and with help from a number of local activists and historians. We will look to those archives—equipped with important historical hindsight and in light of dire future prospects—as a resource of tests and lessons of vital importance today. Our planned dive backward into the archive and forward into the future is constitutive of the logic of Retro-utopia as described by the curator Inke Arns and by Boris Buden, following her. Arns applied it optimistically to the 1990s art in the context of the Soviet Union and Slovenia. Buden extrapolates it to all cultural production in post-socialism. Mourning the loss of historical knowledge, Buden proposes that cultural knowledge, which appears in its wake, is an instrument of retro-utopia. Buden warns that retro-utopian products record not the truth of the past, but instead the truth of the retro-utopist’s relationship to that past and her belief in a specific future. We will self-consciously embrace this possible outcome precisely for what it can also tell us about our own imaginations, and with a hope that a radical and self-conscious, retro-utopian activity might also open up new horizons of possibility. 

The studio hypothesizes that by engaging in retelling the pertinent aspects of historical (architectural and political) heritage and by offering urban and architectural alternatives from the position that values socialist heritage in the context of Belgrade (ex-Yugoslavia’s capital), the fruits of its labor could have a critical function on both sides of the former Cold War divide. 

common good and forms of coauthorship
Similarly two its previous iterations, Collective Architecture Studio 3 will foreground and explore two key registers on which the concept of the common, collective good played out in Yugoslavian, and specifically Belgrade, architecture: first, the production and conception of urban and architectural space for the common good (with an emphasis on the material and architectural effects of Yugoslavia’s constitutional “right to housing”), and second, the conception of self-managed, group authorship and ownership that was implemented and performed through self-managed architectural enterprises. Important historical caveat: group authorship in such structures did not automatically mean no authorship. Collective Architecture Studio 3 will thus actively study and self-experiment with forms of coauthorship. Everything we make (including our building proposals) will also function as critical broadcasts, catalyzing discussion and/or revelation among our projected audiences. Every student will participate in the constitution of our studio’s own archives, work and broadcasts. We will read, plan, and play together. Commitment to the collective (in the studio organization and as a topic of investigation) and architectural follow-through are critical components of each individual student’s, as well as the Collective Architecture Studio’s, success. 

Travel:
We will travel to Belgrade over Spring Break at the end of March. There, we will interface with historians of architecture and urbanism, and contemporary actors engaged precisely in trying to revive and understand the links between their socialist heritage and contemporary forms of commoning. 
 

Fencing is both the act of collective recognition and appropriation of a portion of land or physical space: it is the act of its delimitation and separation from the rest of the world-nature. It establishes the two topological, imaginary, geometric, technical regions of outside and inside. It formulates the problem of the mental or physical constitution of the limit, of the boundary and its violation. An act of architecture par excellence, the enclosure is what establishes a specific relationship with a specific place and at the same time the principle of settlement by which a human group proposes its relationship with nature-cosmos. But the enclosure is also the form of the thing, the way it presents itself to the outside world, through which it reveals itself.

In the opening editorial of Rassegna, published in 1979, Vittorio Gregotti proposes a theme that can be considered the manifesto of both a way of understanding the discipline and of questioning its boundaries. Architecture is primarily understood as the effort of a multitude. While evoking a primordial act of territorial conquer, the emphasis is on the collective and ritual nature of the gesture. Both act and form, the enclosure doesn't produce a solitary figure nor an abstract, generic principle. Its presence is always in relation to a particular place. It establishes a new order and generates a new equilibrium within a given territory. Further on, the editorial argues for the need to redefine the notion of enclosure at the highest possible level of abstraction, recognizing how its definition in terms of pure function (that of preventing the crossing of a body, a gaze, a law...) is what allows apparently disparate objects to be brought together under a single notion. The catalogue of examples that follows is actually rather heterogeneous and incomplete. Its limitation is also its generosity: we feel entitled to expand it and pick up Gregotti's discourse where he left off.

Enclosures is a studio focused on the architecture of the perimeter. It intends to stimulate an in-depth research into the possibilities generated by the fundamental act of delimitation. The project will be explored as a selective device, producing certain conditions of inclusion and exclusion, creating and erasing connections, sustaining acts of separation and suspension, enabling detachment and otherness. Opposing the dominant conception of architecture as production of singular — self centered — objects, the studio will stress the dialectic nature of the enclosure in relation to an underlying notion of context. The activity of the studio — ideally conceived as an appendix to Rassegna 1 — will be organized around three main tasks: a collective work of iconographic collection, the construction and manipulation of an organized taxonomy of case studies, and the development of site-specific proposals.

This past century we have seen skyscrapers proliferate throughout cities worldwide. The realities of climate change, the global pandemic, the drive for renewable energy and their corollary in high-performance, energy efficient electrified buildings has precipitated a massive unprecedented movement towards the comprehensive repositioning of skyscrapers. Whether necessitated by obsolete and failing mechanical systems and building envelopes, by structures that require remediation and augmentation, by spaces and environments that are outdated and fail to meet contemporary market expectations — there are now powerful cultural, technical and economic forces that have catalyzed the need and desire for the radical transformation of existing tall and large-scale buildings. A global design and construction industry has emerged around the world to meet these fascinating opportunities.

KIT FOR A BIT: Architectural Assemblage and Leisure is part of a series of interrogations at the intersection of architectural materiality and temporary pleasures that looks into how architecture adapts to changing programmatic motivations and how we can devise architectural techniques that incorporate those temporalities in ecologically responsible ways while maintaining cultural complexity. This semester we will focus on the relationship between our bodies and all scales of the material and digital environments in which we leisure, with particular attention to the design of exercise and recreation. We will be designing spaces for physical enjoyment, whether indoor and outdoor, collectively or alone, spaces where the bodily and the architectural come together through materials, objects and social protocols. Gyms, sporting clubs, courts, parks, these spaces are designed to withstand wear and tear, sweat, friction, impact, heavy equipment or exposure to the elements, often requiring the use of durable and robust materials, making it all the more important to design them through responsible material strategies that allow for their use and reuse. Architecturally then, this studio will use assemblage, layering, found materials and modularization to design futureproof architectural kits. Given the program, the design challenge will be to imbue these kits with social appeal, with body readiness and engagement.

In addition, leisure environments often combine the physical and the digital, with their immersive sound systems, remote workouts, digital trainers, Point of View track shots, obstacle course simulations or interactive technologies. The studio will dedicate a generous portion of the semester to incorporating these mediums to the projects.

The Ghost House Studio breaks the 30-year timeline of residential architecture into two modes: temporal and eternal. The existing model is sold through a false idea of permanence, one that is shored up by societal constructs such as settling-down, land-ownership, and capitalism financed by 30-year mortgages. While we suggest homes are built for forever, the reality of construction tells a different story. In North America, we build homes in 90 days: fast for forever. Not only does construction mis-align with the use proposition, but the suggestion that nuclear families purchase land, build a house, and hand that house down to their children is also a misnomer. The average homeowner lives in their home for only 8 years before selling. Whether it be through necessity of climate migration, or through societal shifts, we are a nomadic civilization. 

Alternatively, North America’s foundational architecture is arguably mound-building: eternal structures created by nomadic civilizations. These enigmas upend the assumption that nomadic architecture is dedicated to light-weight, deployable, temporary structures. Therefore, this studio will explore how alternative models of architecture can shift residential timescales. It requires students to design homes to last a short amount of time, while leaving a legacy behind for future residents, community, and society. By designing for two timescales: immediate and eternal, students will confront the societal constructs that have shaped our default approaches to residential architecture. 

Travel: The Ohio River Valley contains many of the most well-preserved mounds in North America. These range from ring mounds to conic, constellation clusters, and effigy mounds. Over the course of 4-5 days, students will experience the relationship between these multi-thousand-year-old mounds, their sites, and the impact they have beyond the immediate occupation of the grounds as well as the societies that created them. The goal of this experience will be to impart the students with a better understanding of scale and legacy that come naturally with these mound sites.

Mandatory lottery process.

The proposal of the studio builds upon Amazonia Studio 1, carried out last year, which engaged the archaeological site of Monte Alegre in the State of Pará in the Amazon region. That previous studio relied on the participation of archeologist Edithe Pereira, who has been researching Monte Alegre for three decades, and Raoni do Vale, who researches rupestrian inscriptions (rock markings) with an anthropological lens and indigenous researchers. In addition, we had the support of the University of Manaus, through Professor Marcos Cereto.

The accumulation of information gathered in the last year, primarily through our guests' lectures, as well as the collection of projects developed by the students during the studio for the Monte Alegre site, combined with the wealth of archaeological information organized by the Museu do Homem Americano, FUMDHAM in Serra da Capivara, make it now possible to advance the elaboration of architectural propositions in this significant frontier between artifacts and landscape, architecture and geomorphology, between the vastness of archaeological time and the immediacy of our environmental urgencies.

Site

The Serra da Capivara National Park — created in 1979 and expanded in 1990 — is located in the south of the state of Piauí, on the eastern margin of the Brazilian Amazon, just outside the Amazon biome. With an area of 135,000 hectares, the park is surrounded by the municipalities of São Raimundo Nonato, to the south, Coronel José Dias, to the southeast, João Costa, to the northeast, and Brejo do Piauí, to the northwest. The park is located between two important hydrographic basins, 100km north of the Sobradinho dam lake, on the São Francisco river in state of Bahia and 250km south of the Nova Esperança dam lake, on the Parnaíba river on the border between the states of Piauí and Maranhao.

When the Balfour Declaration was signed on November 2, 1917, its promises echoed across the globe, ultimately shaping the world we have inherited today. These echoes resonated more loudly in one particular room than in any other, bouncing across its arches of black basalt quarried from the surrounding volcanic landscapes. For this was no ordinary room, but the military headquarters of Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, the future Lawrence of Arabia, during his mission to arm Arab Forces against the Ottoman Empire. His promise of Arab independence, of course, would later prove short-lived. Lawrence’s chamber was situated within the ancient al-Azraq fortress, originally built by the Romans in the third century, and later expanded by the Umayyads, the first Muslim dynasty, in the seventh century. The al-Azraq fortress is among the many desert castles either constructed or modified by the Umayyads across Greater Syria. And our focus in this studio will be on a tight cluster of seven castles located in present-day Jordan. 

These castles, known as qusur in Arabic, are connected today by a multi-lane highway originally designed to unite them. But it has, paradoxically underscored their isolation, effectively severing them from the broader history of the Arabian desert. This sense of isolation has been further deepened by the architectural typologies employed to engage with them—a combination of parking lot and an air-conditioned visitor center, deployed either in the middle of the desert or awkwardly adjacent to other towns or large-scale infrastructures. Amidst increasing global temperatures, these visitor centers have become customary, enabling the occasional tourist to comfortably capture images of the qusur.  But while this inability to imagine alternative forms of engagement with the qusur has been worsened by the highway and the effects of climate change, its underlying cause is different. Although we are well-informed about the events surrounding the castles in the last century or so, the original motivations behind their construction and operation remain mysterious. 

Scholars have put forward several theories about the origin of the qusur. Some have argued that they served as hunting retreats for the Umayyad aristocracy, private havens where princes could indulge in the pleasures of intimacy, music and wine amidst the arid wilderness. Others suggest that the qusur are best understood as part of a network, particularly serving as waystations to facilitate desert travel, with locations on major lines of communication that existed between Syria and Arabia. Other interpretations propose that the qusur served as fortified residential settlements, with a typology reminiscent of earlier Roman fort plans or villas. This typology features a portico surrounded by apartments, all part of a larger complex for individual leaders and their extended families, militaries, and employees. Others have positioned the qusur as extensions of pre-Islamic buildings and economies, or as temporary residences to control tribes in the Syrian and Jordanian deserts. Others have even declared them as prosperous centers for agricultural exploitation, with evidence of extensive irrigation systems, canals, and aqueducts, as well as storage and distribution cisterns, all aimed at generating a surplus of marketable crops. The conflict among these theories is substantial, yet it is also remarkably rich with potential, especially for architecture and its allied fields.

Our studio is organized into three main parts. In the first part, our goal is to test the various theories concerning the function of the Umayyad qusur. This will involve employing methods such as drawing and model-making, as well as combining archival research with building simulations to construct a compelling argument. Moving on to the second part, we will embark on a journey to Jordan to collaborate with colleagues and students at the University of Petra. During this visit, we will have the opportunity to explore the different castles firsthand and work towards identifying commonalities and intersections among their seemingly conflicting origins. Finally, in the third and central section of the studio, our focus will shift towards imagining alternative futures for the qusur, integrating both technical and historical arguments into the design proposals. This studio, then, follows the tradition of ‘cross’ studios in our department, with the primary objective of building connections among various discipline groups. The Umayyad Route represents a joint effort between AKPIA and A+U. It is also dedicated to establishing links with the BT group and exploring responses to the climate crisis that encompass technological, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions—at both the architectural and the urban scales. To fortify these connections, the studio will run concurrently with a seminar led by Professor Nasser Rabbat, who serves as the director of the AKPIA program, and will draw upon the insights of Professor Christoph Reinhart, director of the BT group.

Mandatory lottery process.

- in collaboration with Marcos Cereto, UFAM, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil

The third edition of Amazonia Studio is in Manaus, the largest city in the region with 2.5 million people. Manaus is situated at the border of Rio Negro, right before its junction with Rio Solimões to become the immense Rio Amazonas, the Amazon River. The hydrological condition of Manaus also made the place a cultural hub for ancestors and outsiders, as if it was a metropolis for native peoples well before its modern cosmopolitan incarnation after the arrival of post-Colombian colonizers. Today it remains a metropolis for two worlds at same time. The city of Manaus represents an extremely rich cultural amalgamation that can be perceived in works, music, clothes, food and architecture.

More than this, it imprinted a unique spatial culture defined by people living on the water, on the ground, and in the huge range of situations in between. Specifically, this studio will be focused on two related topics: a two-kilometer-long stretch of waterfront facing the Rio Negro and two remarkable igarapés: Mindu and Educandos.

Waterfront
This stretch of the waterfront corresponds to the harbor of Manaus, formally established in 1899. The port is quite active and plays a crucial inner and outer role, both connecting different regions inside Amazonia and linking the Amazon with the rest of the world. Historically, after the decline of the rubber market in the region, a floating city was settled there, growing up to an estimated population of 12,000 people. Then, in the end of the 60’s, it was destroyed. More than haunted by a wrecked city, the rim of Manaus faces a tough task: 14m is the average seasonal changing of the Rio Negro’s water level. Exploring the possibility of a floating waterfront for Manaus aims at establishing a consistent configuration between historic and fluvial conditions. 

Igarapés

An Igarapé designates a branch of river going into, originally, a piece of forest. Although many Igarapés have been drained and built over, several of them remain inside the urban area of Manaus. Historically, the relationship between the constructed landscape and the typical geomorphology of an igarapé was marked by the use of a local architectural typology: the palafittes, usually for housing. More and more, an environmental agenda has changed common understanding about the crucial role of Igarapés in mediating water and land conditions. A public program entitled PROSAMIM — Programa Social e Ambiental dos Igarapés de Manaus — was established in 2003 targeting two types of actions. The first is environmentally oriented, aimed at developing urbanization and affordable housing. The second, is socially and institutionally oriented. Both the Educandos and Mindu igarapés were partially redefined by this program. Igarapés suggest a delicate and fine relationship between water, park and constructions. It could represent, as an essay, the relationship between river with forest, and between both of them — forest and river — with architecture.

Work in partnership / design in dialogue
The studio will be in touch with people from Manaus. At a first glance, we will receive as guest lecturers, Marcos Cereto and Isabella De Bonnis, faculty at the School of Architecture at the Federal University of Amazonas, UFAM, and Roberto Moita, a renowned architect in Manaus. A studio trip, during spring break, will further our connection with local people and institutions. 

Although Chicago has been popularly known as the Windy City since at least 1876, its nickname has not always been invoked in reference to the natural movement of air across the city. In fact, local legend alludes to an early rivalry with Cincinnati and social smear campaigns as having first propagated the moniker. With both cities vying to become the capital of the Midwest, Ohio-based journalists remarked that Chicago’s weather was as notoriously windy as its “conceited, self-endorsing citizens.” This reputation carried over to articles written by New Yorkers ahead of the nationwide competition to host the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Journalists similarly cited the bloviating personalities of Chicago’s residents and politicians and accused them of being “full of hot air.” Despite the criticism, Chicago eventually won the bid to host the fair and has since gone on to become one of the country’s most prosperous metropolises. Incidentally, citywide development means the nickname has only grown truer over time. Chicago’s many closely clustered towers have created various pockets of atmospheric pressure that, unforeseen by their designers, now frequently incite extreme wind activity across the city streets. This frenzy of artificial wind-making, paired with the frigid breezes known to blow off Lake Michigan, has helped positively assimilate the nickname over time.

Today though, when the breeze blows especially cold and swift, some locals know it as the Hawk. The term is common to the African American vernacular and is referenced in songs like “Dead End Street” by Lou Rawls. As an introduction to the 1967 song, Rawls sings: “I was born in in a city that they call The Windy City. They call it the Windy City because of the Hawk. The Hawk, almighty Hawk. Mr. Wind.” In Chicago, he explains, “the Hawk not only socks it to you, he socks it through you, like a giant razor blade blowing down the street.” Elsewhere, in other lore, the Hawk is the face of the famed native resistance to white settlement in and around Chicago. When an indigenous Sauk leader by the name of Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kia) led a battle to safeguard Potawatomi native land in1832, nearly seven thousand American soldiers retaliated in what was both the first military conflict and cholera epidemic to sweep the Upper Great Lakes region. A century later, the legend of Black Hawk was resurrected by the very ideologies that had murdered the Sauk leader. Rather than live on as a symbol of native resistance to colonial forces, his name became eponymous with the expansion of the United States’ military interests across the modern world. By 1978, the Sikorsky UH-60 four-blade military helicopter, more famously known as the Black Hawk, was transporting soldiers, and facilitating aerial assaults in dozens of combat zones controlled by the United States Army worldwide. The Black Hawk, now an unprecedented model of airborne violence, would be employed by the United States and its allies to advance their political interests across the Middle East.

Despite its complexity, the Hawk is just one example of how Chicago’s air challenges the absence it is often made out to be and acquires a cultural and material sovereignty. More importantly, it is a testament to how natural phenomena shape, and are ultimately shaped by, planning and design regulations that have geoengineered air in service of political ambitions. That the quality of air has decreased dis-proportionately across Chicago cannot but find its origins in the city’s history of redlining, which decreased the value of land in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods and encouraged the construction of heavily polluting industrial zones. So laden with pollutants is the air in some of these communities that it increases temperature (given the absence of shaded public spaces) and respiratory illnesses. Rawls himself, a former resident of the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Bronzeville, would tell of these conditions through songwriting and literary production. In this studio, we will engage with air as a critical lens of design and observation, and foreground, not only how historical policies and contemporary practices shape Chicago’s ‘natural’ airscape, but also how dwellers today devise ways to challenge them. In doing so, we will test the possibilities, limitations, and agency of architecture—marked by its boundedness—in addressing the boundlessness, character, and complexity of air.

The studio will unfold in two distinct parts, both of which will draw on three considerations of air: (1) Air as Commodity, and its operation as a real estate currency, (2) Air as Commons, and its function (or malfunction) as a collective space, and (3) Air as Climate, and its transformations historically and today. The first part of the studio will work towards the creation of an Air Atlas of Chicago. The stories it recounts, invisible though they may at first seem, will magnify the practices of those forging new realities out of planned or unintended relationships with the air around them. The atlas will read between contemporary data of onsite pollutants, existing or future architectural and urban projects, zoning and building regulations, as well as historical representations of air mined out of literature, archival records, oral histories, and the like. The second part of the studio, which we will launch with a trip to Chicago, will concentrate on the neighborhood of Little Village on the city’s southwest side—one of the communities most affected by industrial contamination. On April 11, 2020, and after decades of extreme pollution, the Crawford coal plant adjacent to the neighborhood collapsed due to a planned implosion that ended up blanketing Little Village in a cloud of brown dust. The property owners responsible for the demolition, Hilco Redevelopment Partners, had purchased the land to build the city’s largest (LEED certified!) distribution warehouse, which has brought hundreds of diesel-fuel trucks to the neighborhood. Within this context, we will build on the collective atlas and the culture of Little Village to envision and design new alliances between air and architecture—ones that center design on those whose bodies (and airs) have for too long been deemed disposable.

This studio will design audio-focused building interventions, focusing on sites near or around the traditional territory of the Wampanoag Nation. We will consider site and landscape as narrative mediums. In the same way that we think of museums, galleries, monuments and archives as vessels of knowledge, we will equally acknowledge the stories that exist outside of them. We will inquire into the existence of counter-narratives in the land around us that require new forms of interpretation, display, and communication. This studio will emphasize site analysis, the development of building drawings, and the expression of an architectural character that intervenes in the physical environment, while incorporating an education in the fundamentals of electronics and acoustics. Students will learn how sound reproduction works, how to build circuits, and design and build loud-speaking architectural models. The studio will be divided into weekly topics including soundscape ecology, acoustic epistemology, oral history, digital materiality, and others. Screenings, readings, and discussion are supported by hands-on workshops in capturing, manipulating, and reproducing sound for integration into architectural models. The live remix, as both media state and storytelling technique, will be employed as a presentation methodology as the studio will culminate in a listening party of architecture’s ghost stories.