Classes

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.

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.  

The fourth edition of the Collective Architecture Studio 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. S25 Collective Architecture Studio will thus actively study and self-experiment with forms of coauthorship. We will focus on the architectural repair of existing, as well as the invention of new modes of cooperative housing in this context. Everything we make (including our building proposals) will also function as critical broadcasts, catalyzing discussion and/or revelation among our projected audiences.

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.

“Architecture is an art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being.”

“I don’t divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one”

- Luis Barragan

Architecture of the Earth is a space where innovative thinking meets the environment, fostering a unique and harmonious design language. By immersing ourselves in this connection, we can learn, unlearn, and innovate, leading to a new understanding of the built environment. The studio explores the creative resources that are shaped by our surroundings, aiming to manipulate the existing ground with common forces and energies that generate spatial events. Through this approach, we can develop a new language of building that is adapted to the local context, taking into account the specific climate, culture, and geography. This will enable architects to design buildings that not only minimize environmental impact but also enhance the well-being of occupants. By developing observation and analytical skills, students can navigate the complexities of spatial design and create innovative solutions that transform the built environment.

Mandatory lottery process.

assemblies for collective life & work 
in Argentina’s rural landscape 

The Argentinian Pampas is a vast territory, widely known for its agricultural fields and productive infrastructures. This huge portion of the country is populated by hundreds of small towns—once vibrant centers of collective life that blossomed in the late 19th century and became home to many migrants.

Today, many of these towns are facing a slow but persistent exodus, leaving behind a hybrid landscape of tiny villages suspended in the middle of expansive crop fields.

What does it mean to inhabit this rural landscape in contemporary times? Are there possibilities for new collective forms of work and life in this extraordinary ecosystem of farms, ponds, rivers, migrant workers’ heritage, warehouses, and factories—all coexisting under the presence of an infinite horizon?

Learning from La Pampa is an invitation to discover this land located in the south of Córdoba, and to propose subtle architectural interventions aimed at rethinking the role of the Argentine countryside and the social and economic life of its historic towns.

The studio will be structured around two design exercises: a small rural infrastructure, or “a shadow,” and a cooperative with collective housing.

A Small Rural Infrastructure
Or, a shadow on the fields.

This first exercise is an approximation to the territory. It has the intention to understand the technological landscape of the countryside and the artifacts that populate the fields.

We will approach the exercise through a curated selection of remarkable Argentine films, literary texts, and photographs that reflect our rural culture and history, allowing us to explore together the beauty and complexity of the site.

Students will analyse a series of popular and local architectures that can be found when driving or walking in the campo (field) and propose an architectural intervention that could establish some dialogue with one or some of them.

The space will not have a specific program and has no prescribed size; it could be very small or extend up to 100 meters. Its scale will be determined by the idea and logics of the project. The technology, details, and structure of this infrastructure will emerge from a close study of the existing elements on the site: windmills, water ponds, silos, billboards, factories, and more.  

The shadow will be conceived as a place to rest within the vastness of the rural landscape. It could be nothing more than a simple roof or remain entirely outdoors. It could also include an interior—a room, a place to spend a night while traveling, perhaps a small bathroom, or a space to store a few belongings, the essentials one might wish to have when finding oneself in the “middle of nowhere.”

For this project students will produce a ¼ scale model, plans, sections, elevations, axonomtrics, collages and a 300-word text.

A Cooperative & Housing for the town 
Or, a second chance to live & work in the countryside.

Cooperatives have long been and continue to be key to life in Argentina. In the late 19th century, small neighborhood cooperatives emerged in areas where the State did not reach, enabling the construction of essential infrastructure such as electricity, telephone lines, potable water, and local employment.

Housing cooperatives helped families build homes collectively. Agricultural cooperatives allowed small farmers to store and sell crops and purchase supplies at fair prices. Educational and cultural cooperatives created schools, libraries, and community centers that became hubs of learning and social life.

n rural towns, cooperatives were especially crucial, fostering solidarity, community participation, and social cohesion while providing basic services and meeting spaces.

During the 2001 economic crisis, many companies went bankrupt or were abandoned by their owners. To save their jobs, workers took control of these businesses, turning them into worker-run cooperatives or recovered factories, where employees collectively manage operations and share profits. This model preserved jobs, sustained local economies, and promoted self-management.

Today, Argentina has approximately 30,000 active cooperatives across a wide range of sectors.

This second and final exercise of the studio will focus on the design of a cooperative in one of the rural towns located in the south of Córdoba, along provincial routes 4, 6, 11, and 8. Each student will select a town and place their project on a vacant lot, on the edge of the village, or in the surrounding rural fields.

The purpose of each cooperative will vary: some will be linked to the region’s agricultural production, others will be educational, cultural, or sports-oriented, and some may promote new productive activities that could benefit the people that live in the town. The specific program will be proposed and defined by each student.

As part of the proposal, each cooperative will include collective housing for its members, most likely those working within the cooperative itself. This introduces the dimension of living and working together, and invites a rethinking of how communal life in the Argentine countryside might be imagined today.

All cooperatives will be owned by the town’s neighbors and envisioned as spaces that strengthen community life, foster social ties, and contribute to the growth of these small urban centers.

The projects should be both rigorous architectural proposals and strong utopian visions, capable of resignifying the beauty of collective living in the Pampas.

Students will produce models at different scales, plans, sections, elevations, axonometrics, collages, and a 500-word text.

As a collective outcome, the studio will develop a small publication in the form of a book and host an exhibition for the final review at the Long Lounge.

Learning from La Pampa is an opportunity to enjoy architectu-re through a sensitive and slow understanding of the site and the culture of the rural Argentinian landscape. It is an invita-tion to look closely, to value the knowledge embedded in simple things, and to find pleasure in designing places that can intro-duce subtle, yet meaningful, changes in the lives of those who live here and those who may come.

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.

When designing for the child, architects must attempt to put themselves in the mind of their younger selves with invention, imagination, investigation, and exploration serving as primary drivers. The classroom becomes an experiential space where children are encouraged to discover and understand their relationship to the world around them. The focus of this intensive studio is the design of educational spaces for children culminating in a public K-2 dual-language primary school in Boston.

Students will delve deep into the pedagogy and process of dual-language learning through architectural form, daylight, and environment. Dual-language schools are grounded in an approach to teaching young children their home language as well as English, in parallel. In addition, they provide essential resources, serving as de-facto community centers to families within immigrant communities. This is especially important today, as populations of refugees and migrants seek asylum in cities like Boston.  

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 create architecture that bridges the relationship between the child and their community?

“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).  

KIT FOR A BIT: Architectural Assemblage and Leisure is part of a series of studios interested in flexible architectures that are adaptable to programmatic changes. The studio will ask students to design future-ready architectural kits that incorporate material temporalities in both ecologically responsible and culturally rich ways.

Materially, KIT FOR A BIT: Architectural Assemblage and Leisure will be looking at flexible architectures, paying particular attention to the assemblage techniques, the tectonic approaches and construction systems that make a built environment that is adaptable, reconfigurable, reprogrammable… our precedents will range from readymade building systems, to long span warehouses, to open plan buildings, to flat pack systems and other parts-thinking architectures.

Programmatically, KIT FOR A BIT: Architectural Assemblage and Leisure will focus on public recreation and exercise, looking into the relationship between our bodies and all scales of the material and digital environments in which we leisure. We will be designing spaces for physical enjoyment, whether indoor or outdoor, collectively or alone, spaces where the bodily and the architectural come together through materials, objects and social protocols.

To this end, we will be visiting gyms, sporting clubs, recreation centers, public parks, courts and fitness studios. Spaces that 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 flexible material and programmatic strategies that allow for their use and future reuse.

Architecturally then, this studio will look closely at the material intelligence and equipment required to create polyvalent spaces. In KIT FOR A BIT, we will favor assemblage, layering, modularization, long spans and open plans to design architectural kits with a disposition towards flexible programming and material reconfiguration. Given the program, a distinct design challenge will be to imbue these utilitarian kits with social appeal, body readiness and engagement.

In addition, leisure environments often combine the physical and the digital, with immersive sound systems, remote workouts, digital trainers, point-of-view track shots, obstacle course simulations or interactive technologies. The studio will dedicate a small but distinct portion of the semester to incorporating these mediums to the projects. Students enrolled in this studio will have access to the media production equipment, from greenscreen systems to XR gear, available through the faculty’s Lab.

The studio is not interested in team evangelism, in body exclusionary fitness paradigms, in gargantuan stadiums for global attraction, nor is it interested in elite performance oriented training but rather in the design of spaces and protocols for physical activity, public play, collective well-being, inclusive embodiment and just feeling good.

KIT FOR A BIT: Architectural Assemblage and Leisure will be traveling to Governors Island in New York City, per invitation from the Institute for Public Architecture (IPA) where we will be staying for 4 nights / 5 days. The IPAs Headquarters and residences are located on the Block House which is a historically landmarked building in the exceptional context of Governor’s Island. Also a historically landmarked island which is within 5 min. Ferry distance from NYC yet undeveloped. The island is a national park whose only tenants are a spa, a dance club and luxury camping ground and the only full time tenants are the guests and residents of IPA. Students will have the unique opportunity to be, in addition to the luxury campers, the only overnight residents of this protected island. Governor’s Island will also serve as the site for the studio projects this semester.

We will be meeting Tues + Thurs from 1-5pm and a few scheduled Fridays. The course welcomes SMarchs students.. 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.

“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. 

When designing for the child, architects must attempt to put themselves in the mind of their younger selves; with invention, imagination, investigation and exploration serving as primary drivers. The classroom becomes an experiential space where children are encouraged to discover and understand their relationship to the world around them. This will be an intensive studio about the design of educational spaces for children culminating in a public K-2 dual-language lab school in East Boston.  

Students will delve deep into the pedagogy and process of dual-language learning through architectural form, daylight, and environment. 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 create architecture that bridges the relationship between the child and their community?

The program will be a dual-language lab school, of approximately 30,000 square feet, located in East Boston, 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 communities. We will engage directly with teachers, who specialize in dual-language learning, to better understand the nuances and complexities of teaching multiple languages to young learners. 

The studio’s methodology will synthesize several areas of exploration sequentially: Within the classroom unit, how can the specific pedagogy of project-based dual-language learning lead to innovative design? How can daylight integrate with the performative and programmatic design of the classroom and the entire building? How can the aggregation of classrooms create a larger organizational strategy for the building that supports teachers, students, and their families? How can the school relate to the larger East Boston neighborhood and the city beyond?

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

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.

WHAT WOULD WOOD is the second installment of the multiyear ODDS & MODS research and design initiative at MIT on material circularity in architecture. The WHAT WOULD WOOD option studio and adjacent fabrication workshop will explore experimental and innovative approaches to the use of wood in the design of collective worker housing for US Forest Service firefighters and community service providers. Our partners in this venture will be representatives of the US Forest Service and Washoe first nation sawmill start-ups and stewards of the Palisades Tahoe Forest region of what is now called California.

Studio and Workshop will explore experimental wood construction with two unconventional and seemingly opposite typologies of wood. Messy Mass Timber (MMT) is our term for irregular pieces of dimensional lumber and CLT offs cuts harvested from factory waste streams. Extracted as commercial crop in industrially cultivated soft wood forests, mainstream CLT production is based on a modern era system of standardization and wood waste. The abundant by-product supply of ‘waste’ wood cut-offs can be stacked and assembled, inspired by design imagination to create new forms of un-wholly wood – thick beams and floor slabs that can resist large forces in compression.

At the other end of the industrial-forest spectrum, Wild Wood is our term for minimally processed, small diameter logs with varying branch geometries that retain wood’s unique mechanical properties as an orthotropic material. Wild Wood encompasses small-diameter hard wood tree species and tree forks of varying branch geometries that can be harvested to support forest regeneration. In natural varying forms, the junction of forking branches conserves much more strength in tension than if it were cut and sliced. Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood can be utilized independently or together to create regenerative wood building systems that respond to forces in tension and compression.

Students will travel to local forest land in New Hampshire or Maine where we will immerse ourselves immediately in all things forest to discover and represent its many spatial qualities and diverse aesthetics. Our departure point will be the design of a bird blind—a small, stealthy structure that can disappear into the landscape of woods. Working with digital design toolkits, students will draw inspiration from a design inventory of specific wood pieces that they choose to work with. With intelligent design visualization and assembly protocols, the studio will explore a fundamentally new relationship of part to whole in architecture. Our approach moves away from the traditional value accorded to physically continuous, uniform wood in favor of a transformative ‘alchemy’ where diverse sets of small wood pieces, considered in the mainstream as ‘waste’, can be aggregated and designed to take on high value spatial properties and structural capacities.

Over Spring Break we’ll travel to Washoe first nation forest lands to visit and document collective housing sites and sawmills. There, we’ll converse and share design ideas with artisanal wood knowledge keepers, forest fire fighters, community leaders and industrial wood manufacturers. At MIT and at the legendary UC Berkeley Wood Lab, students will fabricate models and large-scale wood components of their design proposals for collective worker housing.

Against the visible context of ongoing forest fires and climate crisis, students will study the different histories and ways of thinking about the forest to stake out a range of design positions on the utilization of wood in architecture.  Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood are undervalued, provocative and increasingly combustible parts of a fragile, and fast disappearing ecological commons. WHAT WOULD WOOD asks a fundamental question: how could building with wood – and the architectural discourse around design with wood— be redefined and reimagined to enable wood circular materiality and envision possible futures for wood in architecture.

 Mandatory lottery process.

Territory as Interior — Economies and Ecologies in the Barbanza Peninsula aims to link architectural and territorial design. We have a dual objective: to propose economic and productive activities which contribute to revitalize the Barbanza peninsula in Galicia (Spain), and to investigate technologies of construction that use local material resources. Students will initially research and map the area's key economic sectors and resources and then they will propose a building that combines the productive activity they find most crucial with the use of critical local materials.

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.

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. 

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.