Classes

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.

The fourth edition of Amazonia Studio is located — one more time but with a more specific approach — in Manaus, the largest city in the region with 2.5 million people. Located at the border of Rio Negro, right before its junction with Rio Solimoes to become the Amazon River, Manaus has a hydrological condition that make it 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 the same time.

The city of Manaus represents an extremely rich cultural amalgamation that produces artists whose work has been more and more recognized in their own voice, bringing the possibility of a horizontal intercultural dialogue.

Note: we will have detailed descriptions of all sections posted with instructor names right before the term begins.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

AFTERSTUFF
We have made too much stuff. The pervasive production model of more, faster, cheaper has created a counterproductive muchness of simultaneous material excess and environmental precarity. This persistent push for newness makes what is culture today, product tomorrow, trash the next and is contributing to social inequity and climate crisis alike. From sites of extraction to storage units to distribution centers and Pinterest boards, architecture is implicated at all scales of this saturation.

AFTERSTUFF begins from this context of material excess, experimenting with tools and methods that point designers towards less extractive material paradigms, ones that divert resources out of existing commercial loops and towards an approach where resources are gathered, not purchased.

AFTERSTUFF proposes to design by rearranging what we have already made, by putting it towards different uses; by looking at the existing through a lens of newness rather than producing new. Instead of turning culture into a commodity we will use existing commodities and their sites towards the production of culture.

Throughout the term, each student will research the multiscalar world created by a commodity of their choice. From the Commodity itself (object scale) to Container (architectural scale) to Context (landscape scale) to Commerce (economic scale) and finally to Culture (socio-aesthetic scale). Students will pay equal regard to the material as well as the immaterial factors that affect it and our observations will span from the technical and the architectural to the aesthetic and the personal. Students will then design an intervention on a select scale of that research, by rearranging its components to point them towards more culturally beneficial outputs.

To do this, AFTERSTUFF proposes a specific 2 part formula for design which will divide the semester along 2 big exercises: First one titled ‘X1: Arranged (AS IS)’ which will serve mainly as the research portion and the second one titled ‘X2: Rearranged (AS IF)’ which will serve as the design portion.

1. X1: Arranged (AS IS): This phase will focus on mapping out how things are currently. Students will engage in creative research, accumulating not just information but gathering visual content, material samples, anecdotes, building components etc. Each week students will move up a scale with the goal of completing a fuller picture of the forces, sites and architectures that organize the circulation of this commodity. The exercise will ultimately take the shape of an amateur desktop documentary about their learnings, which will require them to develop a number of scenographic and animation skills. Students are expected to use this exercise as a prompt for research, as a time for representational skillbuilding, as a way to find new interests and unlikely sites of intervention towards meaningful change.

2. X2: Rearranged (AS IF): In the second half of the semester, students will select a scale upon which to intervene by rearranging the world of their commodity to serve less predictably commercial ends and instead pointing these resources towards more cultural outputs. Some students might choose to introduce a new way of distributing this commodity, some might choose to resassemble a building’s components while others might choose to introduce a new program to the site. Students may nudge the project towards their existing interests in design by choosing the scale and character of this intervention as long as it follows the commodity pointing towards the culture logics mentioned above. The output of this second exercise will vary from student to student but will all be required to make use of the animation / scenographic tools from the ‘X1: Arrange (AS IS)’ exercise, making the work of the semester cumulative. In addition to the research and design, we will develop a number of ‘low hanging fruit’ XR techniques to augment and further immerse the audience into the student’s final productions.

AFTERSTUFF will foreground designers and thinkers who set their practices in this moment of material reckoning and proposeother modes of operating within material culture. From adaptive reuse projects to those creating recycling tools to those advocating for a commercial antagonism. All in all, AFTERSTUFF focuses on developing creative architectural reuse strategies while using research as a way to get designers away from common sites of intervention and towards less likely candidates for architect’s design efforts.

This cumulative research and eventual design proposals will be published in a multi-year public website.

On Vessels is a studio concerned with architecture as an act of subtraction and the articulation of voids, rather than a process of addition and the making of objects. Space-making will be conceptualized as acts of removal, displacement, carving, sculpting, excavation, and erosion of material in contrast to the more typical methodologies associated with building; those oriented toward the assembly and orchestrations of parts, products, and constructions systems. The studio will find inspiration outside of the western cannon of architectural precedents in order to ground the studio’s research in, for example, industrial designed objects, works of land-art, and subterranean spaces not typically deemed “architectural.” At the outset of the studio, we will explore the “vessel” as a conceptual model for the containment of space, that will expand the way we imagine the shaping of space at an architectural scale.

The emphasis on the designing of voids is, in significant part, a pedagogical apparatus to draw focus to, and bring new modes of formal/figural rigor to, a relatively yet-undisciplined (this term to be unpacked and debated throughout the semester) realm of form-making in subterranean architecture. Historically, underground space-making has been informed by industrial, utilitarian, militaristic, apocalyptic, and sacred motivations. The studio will eschew programs that are deterministic and/or singular in their means to generate underground space, and instead identify programs that are more more pliable, ambiguous, and enigmatic in order to prompt students to develop new forms of discipline/guiding principles for the designing of voids.

Another important aspect to the pedagogical apparatus of the studio is the aim to distill the architectural problem to fewer, yet-more-fundamental, layers of consideration within architecture studio pedagogy. On Vessels is a studio intended to focus students’ attention and effort on the conjuring of form, light, experience, atmosphere, and the engagement with myriad modes of representation that will aid in bringing students’ imaginations to life. Although this studio is one which is ultimately concerned with voids, the studio will be heavily invested in the modeling of objects as a way to depict the voids students are conceptualizing, designing, and developing. The reciprocal relationship between the making of casts and the making of molds/formwork will provide a conceptual space within which students will revel during the testing of, the rehearsal of, and the refining of underground worlds.

Studio Focus
Carbon Cycle , Bio Systems, Dwelling, Hydrogen, Composite Production, Energy/Climate Policy/Principle, Carbon Nanotube, Carbon Foam, Numeric Command Machining, Finite Element Analysis, Life Cycle Analysis, Parametric Modeling, Automated Production, Integrated Services, Anti-Tectonics, More from Less

CarbonHouse is an on-going research initiative funded by ARPA-e (the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Dept of Energy) that involves MIT and 9 groups of international scientists, researchers, composite fabricators, all focused on emerging forms of Carbon for their holistic use in benign, high-performance buildings. The lead MIT architecture team is tasked with inventing a new material/production potential as a means to supplement hydrogen production at vast scale: only the building sector is held to be able to absorb carbon at the scale of C21 projected global energy production, with renewables seen as falling well short of global demand. 

In Towards a New Architecture, le Corbusier gave vision to steel and concrete buildings, evidenced in elegant pioneering prototypes (Villa Savoie, Phillips Pavilion, etc). The studio will be tasked with imagining a now-carbon material paradigm, similarly learning from boats and planes, but deploying the brilliant 6th element for its full architect potential, uniquely polyvalent and vividly polyfunctional. 

The site will be the arctic coastline of Norway's stunning but desolate Lotofen archipelago, recently subject to a government moratorium on exploratory drilling for oil owing to the environmental activism of young Norwegian activists, yet poised atop the vast oil and gas reserves that have supplemented the enviable lifestyle of the small Scandinavian populace. The history of the region is animated by successive commercial exploitation of natural resources, from fish to timber to whales and now to hydrocarbons, each time facing economic hardship as reserves have been depleted, often being forced to innovate to remain competitive. Here we seek innovation well in advance of depletion in response to the looming environmental threat posed by hydrocarbons: we seek to build-with rather than burn the precious organic legacy.  

You will devise a research institute, akin to the Aspen Institute (humanitarian issues), the Rocky Mountain Institute (Energy/CO2 Policy) or the Salk Institute (Biomedical Research) — all serene research retreats that have exerted profound influence on their respective fields. But this will be a Center For Biogeochemistry In The Anthropocene (CBA), looking to instantiate a carbon architecture as a means to lock carbon in solid form to help restore the magisterial but increasingly fragile carbon cycle described by the Norwegian biologist, Dag Olav Hessen, who heads the CBA Center. It is poignantly sited in an evidently fragile and despoiled ecosystem.  

A more detailed description will be posted here before the term begins.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

The fall studio seeks to analyze the location and through the #mattertodata methodology develop an architectural project for artist residences in La Illa del Rei, Menorca. The analysis of traditional materials and building practices in conjunction with experimental #mattertodata techniques will allow the student to explore and push the boundaries of architectural design.

The program of Artists' residences will form part of the creative process. The student after a thorough analysis of referential material and context will propose the relation with Hauser Wirth gallery beside.

#mattertodata is a space for experimentation. A testing ground that seeks to connect our head with our hands and our hands with the materials that build architecture. It is through this intimate encounter that we can understand, learn and unlearn, maybe then innovate. A space for  Action. 

#mattertodata explores the extraction of valuable creative resources from the manipulation of matter, and the exposure to the common forces and energies that constitute the spatial event, to be transformed into data, source to engineer, detail, and prescribe architecture documentation. This reverse process of design will allow students to explore the immense complexities of play with matter, the observation and analytical outlook that architects develop to read the spaces that the game generates, and how to transform them into architecture.

Location
The location will be in Illa del Rei, Menorca. An Island situated within the bay of Mahon with a rich history that reflects the complexity of Menorca’s history and culture.

Started as the first touching point of King Alfonso III of Aragon during the Christian conquest of the island, then moved on to be a British naval hospital, passing to the French and Spanish. Finally, in the 21st century, it has since 2021 become a cultural hotspot where the Spanish branch of the art gallery Hauser and Wirth is located.

This rich cultural baggage that is carried on to contemporary culture is an indicator of how any intervention should be consequential in its nature.

Mandatory lottery process.

"Architecture is sometimes polarized between two disciplines - art and technology. We try to apply this
expression towards the architecture of the earth. We are now in the era of the ‘tabula pronta’ - where the
earth is ready and there is no need for a blank canvas; we just have to live with it.”

ARCHITECTURE OF THE EARTH is a space to bring in harmony. A testing ground that seeks
to connect new emerging technologies with nature to create a distinct yet familiar architecture. It
is through this intimate encounter that we can understand, learn and unlearn, maybe then
innovate.

Architecture of the Earth explores the creative resources that are shaped by the environment we
inhabit. We need to learn to manipulate the existing ground with common forces and energies
that constitute the spatial event, without causing irreparable damage. This will give rise to art
and experiments that can be transformed into a new standard language of building across the
world. This process of design will allow students to explore the immense complexities that are at
play. It would also develop skills of observation and analytical outlook that architects need to
develop to read the spaces that the principle generates.

15 minutes southeast of MIT (a short trip on the #1 bus plus a bit of walking) is a Roxbury neighborhood of mostly small residential houses, white and pastel colored—­wooden New England triple-deckers and some single-story, single-family homes—as well as a few brick apartment buildings. At the time when other parts of Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester were hit hard by the housing and market crisis in 2007-2009, the area around Dudley Street fared well. Here, in the urban triangle governed by the Dudley Street Land Trust (Dudley Neighbors Incorporated-DNI) and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), relative resilience to the housing market dive was secured by the existence of over 200 “permanently affordable” housing units provided in the form of those single-family (as well as multi-family) structures. They are owned in a particular way, as stipulated by the Dudley Street Land Trust, such that the Trust continues to own the land underneath them in perpetuity, while the equity to owners accrues more slowly than elsewhere. Both mechanisms enable the land trust and DSNI to develop the neighborhood without displacing its inhabitants and thus (with their collective involvement) stave off gentrification. There is also a lovely park, a community green house, an urban farm as well as commercial and non-profit spaces. It might be hard to grasp the importance of all this from street-view, but the “radical imagination” convened for the formation of DSNI and DNI in 1984 is legend for a reason—important not only for what it has already achieved, but also for what it continues to effect.  

From the 1950s to 1980s, this part of Roxbury, the heart of Boston’s African American community, suffered the dire consequences of redlining, the Federal Housing Administration’s discriminatory mortgage insurance policies, swindling contract mortgages, widespread vacancies, and neglect. In response, this trailblazing campaign, led by the inhabitants of this corner of Boston and the sustained political organization (and commitment) that followed, seeded and now maintain this particular US model of social ownership and urban stewardship.

The Collective Architecture Studio will work to understand, internalize, and celebrate this model as we begin to work alongside DSNI and its partners: The Food Project and The Boston Plan for Excellence.

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 two years into the global pandemic that has locked us down, the cliché seems to have grown teeth and started biting. Thankfully, alternative models like Dudley Street do exist, and it is precisely within the logic of capitalist realism to ignore them, but each of them is—like Dudley Street—real, tangible, specific. We, and by “we” I mean members of the discipline of architecture, who want to transform the status quo, look for ways to sidestep the naturalizing force of “capitalist realism” (and of the market). Those of us in the Collective Architecture Studio need such alternative models to fuel the rewriting of architectural and pedagogical values. These values are vital precisely because they are not merely figments of an imagination, though they had to start that way.

Architecture has had (and will continue to have) an important role in the work of DNI and DSNI, always constrained by the financial realities of DNI and its partners. The Food Project and the Boston Plan for Excellence are considering different ways of expanding their activities and collaborating on a food and neighborhood social hub, and we will work with them to offer architectural proposals and systemic hacks that support their missions.

We will begin by constituting an archive of alternative modes of city- and architecture-making out of the Dudley Street experience and history, as well as from other US land trusts, including among them lessons from cooperative ownership and living elsewhere. With these we will consider architecture’s role in various forms of commoning, caring and surviving. Like in its first edition, the Collective Architecture Studio will experiment with forms of group authorship. For this, too, we will tap into important local examples. Collective authorship is not easy, the studio will both study it, and perform experiments (on itself) about it.

Every student will participate in the constitution of our studio’s own archives, work and broadcasts. We will read, plan and play together. Everything we make (including our building proposals) will also function as critical broadcasts, catalyzing discussion and/or revelation among our projected audiences. 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.

1. Deep dive into the history and archives of DNI and other land trusts, which we will share in the form of interactive broadcasts.
2. Research on Collective Authorship in Architecture and production of (physical and digital) tools for working together.
3. The Food Project (mission, operation, and context) research and production of Architectural Proposals for the Dudley Miller Park site, as well as for Adaptive Reuse sites that we identify.

If you are thinking about this studio, or have time for and interest in reading some SciFi novels before the semester kicks off, here are some recommendations:

• Octavia Butler’s: The Parable of the Sower (1993), The Parable of the Talents (1998)
• Kim Stanley Robinson: The Ministry of the Future (2020)

• Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)

See reference article.

“Perhaps our largest challenge [as teachers] is to overcome the fear of disequilibrium – our own and that of our students – and trust that those instances in which the bedrock of our assumptions and understanding begins to waver mark the edge of new understanding” Naomi Mulvihill. How Do You Say Twos in Spanish, If Two is Dos? Language as Means and Object in a Bilingual Kindergarten Classroom. 

This is an intensive studio with an emphasis on experimentation and production. There is no pre-determined or expected solution to the problem; students will delve deep into the intersection of pedagogy of dual-language learning, architectural form, and daylight, and take calibrated risks to produce new and extraordinary outcomes. As practicing architects, we synthesize detailed information and multiple ideas in the design of buildings. The studio will promote programmatic and formal invention through an iterative design process that is grounded in deep engagement with how people use and experience architecture. How do we gain new understanding of the relationship between the child and the community through design?  

The program will be a dual-language lab school, of approximately 22,000 square feet, located in Roxbury, MA. The school will serve students from kindergarten through second grade and provide spaces for the broader community. Dual-language schools are grounded in an approach to teaching young children their home language as well as English, in parallel. Beyond the classroom, this school model supports families within diverse immigrant and indigenous communities. We will engage directly with teachers from the community who specialize in dual-language learning, to better understand the nuances of the neighborhood and complexities of teaching multiple languages to young learners.  

The studio’s methodology will synthesize four areas of exploration sequentially: Within the classroom unit, how will engaging the specific pedagogy of dual-language learning lead to innovative design? How is the rigorous study of daylight integrated with the performative and programmatic design of the classroom and the entire building? How does the aggregation of classrooms create a larger organizational strategy for the building that supports the community of teachers and students? How does the identity of the building relate to the larger community of the neighborhood and city?  

Daylight conditions will be modeled using both Climate Studio software and physical models. The small size of the project will enable each student to study multiple design alternatives and variations for the program, site, massing, and envelope, using feedback gained from both analog and digital tools. 

The studio will meet twice weekly, Tuesdays and Fridays (50% virtual, 50% in person). The studio will be taught primarily by Stephen Cassell and Kim Yao. Their partner, Adam Yarinsky, will attend key pin-ups and reviews. There will be a studio trip to New York City to visit relevant projects and Architecture Research Office (ARO).  

Note: we will have detailed descriptions of all sections posted with instructor names right before the term begins.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

On Vessels is a studio concerned with architecture as an act of subtraction and the articulation of voids, rather than a process of addition and the making of objects. Space-making will be conceptualized as acts of removal, displacement, carving, sculpting, excavation, and erosion of material in contrast to the more typical methodologies associated with building; those oriented toward the assembly and orchestrations of parts, products, and constructions systems. The studio will find inspiration outside of the western cannon of architectural precedents in order to ground the studio’s research in, for example, industrial designed objects, works of land-art, and subterranean spaces not typically deemed “architectural.” At the outset of the studio, we will explore the “vessel” as a conceptual model for the containment of space, that will expand the way we imagine the shaping of space at an architectural scale.

The emphasis on the designing of voids is, in significant part, a pedagogical apparatus to draw focus to, and bring new modes of formal/figural rigor to, a relatively yet-undisciplined (this term to be unpacked and debated throughout the semester) realm of form-making in subterranean architecture. Historically, underground space-making has been informed by industrial, utilitarian, militaristic, apocalyptic, and sacred motivations. The studio will eschew programs that are deterministic and/or singular in their means to generate underground space, and instead identify programs that are more more pliable, ambiguous, and enigmatic in order to prompt students to develop new forms of discipline/guiding principles for the designing of voids.

Another important aspect to the pedagogical apparatus of the studio is the aim to distill the architectural problem to fewer, yet-more-fundamental, layers of consideration within architecture studio pedagogy. On Vessels is a studio intended to focus students’ attention and effort on the conjuring of form, light, experience, atmosphere, and the engagement with myriad modes of representation that will aid in bringing students’ imaginations to life. Although this studio is one which is ultimately concerned with voids, the studio will be heavily invested in the modeling of objects as a way to depict the voids students are conceptualizing, designing, and developing. The reciprocal relationship between the making of casts and the making of molds/formwork will provide a conceptual space within which students will revel during the testing of, the rehearsal of, and the refining of underground worlds.

This joint urban studio will focus on one of the most urgent climate, environmental, and urban challenges we face today: heat and urban growth.  

Combining research and design, the studio presents a pedagogical model that brings together designers  - SMArchS Urbanism  (ARCH) and planners (DUSP students) to work together around a shared urban challenge where professional lines are blurred.  

The City of Phoenix, and its Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, have asked us to consider three wicked problems facing sunbelt cities as they continue to rapidly grow: affordable infill housing, heat island effects,  

and better access to multiple modes of transportation. Students will conduct group planning research as well as site analysis and urban design to comprehensively innovate around the nexus of urban heat--intergenerational housing--autonomous mobility  

and universal access design. The goal is to create a new set of block and streetscape typologies for cooler, intergenerational, autonomous living in Phoenix’s South Central neighborhoods.