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.

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

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.

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. 
 

2/9/23 note: Schedule change:

Lecture: M 2-5 in N52-399
Lab: F 2-5 in N52-399

This design-research and fabrication workshop invites both students with research interests and those with fabrication skills to join in the design development of an installation in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The class will travel to Venice to install over spring break.

The approved installation design proposal combines two-dimensional line drawings of maps and timelines of the African diaspora into a three-dimensional space-time field centered on the diasporic settlement of diasporic working women.

For a brief historical period during the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic workers were recognized as “essential workers,” however, the period of honoring them for the risks they took so that the privileged class could remain safe at home was brief and eclipsed by the rush to normalcy. Domestic workers are essential to the functioning of capitalist economies, yet most receive low wages and lack access to critical services.

The workshop will consist of interrogation, development, and fabrication in two tracks: one for the development, and material fabrication of a design concept; and one for research on women in the African diaspora, cities, settlement, and labor. Both tracks are essential to the installation and development of the design components. Students may opt to focus on one or the other.

Workshop participants will continue the development of an approved design concept and material studies from the 2023 IAP on the same subject. The goal is to produce a full-scale woven construction that concretizes linear drawings and maps in explorations of cord (lengths of thread, filament, and rope) held in tension by an armature supported from above.

The BLACK City explores the dynamics of race, housing segregation, and Black community building in American cities over time. The BLACK City Editions explore both general and specific conditions of Blackness in America by representing socio-spatial phenomena that reflect customs, laws, and events at the national and local scales from gentrification to restrictive covenants to racial expulsions and sundown towns to the enduring topographies of segregation and integration.

This workshop extends research on the Black City through the lens of gender.

The intent of the workshop is to spatialize the systems that produce racialized female identities while also revealing female agents and moments of transactional agency within architectural and urban contexts. The installation as an architectural object will reveal hidden systems and provide a setting for participants to explore the process of tracing pasts, situating presents, and projecting futures.

Undergraduates welcome.
 

2/7/23: Note: Recitation room changed to 9-450A

This class is a pre-approved Architecture + Urbanism elective for Spring 2023.

The Drawing Together Practicum is a social and ecological resilience effort in New York City that explores new methods to scale community participation in urban design. Bringing together Green City Force (GCF), NYC public housing residents, MIT faculty, students and researchers, this practicum will demonstrate a community-led planning and design process for the siting, co-design, and operation of community spaces, Eco-Hubs, using new digital platforms. GCF’s Eco-Hubs align local green services for food, water, waste and energy behavior change and neighborhood transformation strategically with local, city, state, national and global goals for climate and equity.

Alongside building a digital framework to scale-up community engagement in existing and future Eco-Hubs, we will engage in conversations about the role of technology and digital skills in workforce development training. Expanding on GCF’s capacity-building strategies and through guest lectures from experts in workforce development, and green economy employers, students will discuss the potentials for creating a sustainability-focused, data science curriculum that supports farm development and operations as part of GCF’s workforce training program.

Introduces a range of practical approaches involved in evaluating and planning sites within the context of natural and cultural systems. Develops the knowledge and skills to analyze and plan a site for development through exercises and an urban design project. Topics include land inventory, urban form, spatial organization of uses, parcelization, design of roadways, grading, utility systems, off-site impacts, and landscape strategies.

Focuses on the synthesis of urban, mixed-use real estate projects, including the integration of physical design and programming with finance and marketing. Interdisciplinary student teams analyze how to maximize value across multiple dimensions in the process of preparing professional development proposals for sites in US cities and internationally. Reviews emerging real estate products and innovative developments to provide a foundation for studio work. Two major projects are interspersed with lectures and field trips. Integrates skills and knowledge in the MSRED program; also open to other students interested in real estate development by permission of the instructors.

Examines ways that urban design contributes to distribution of political power and resources in cities. Investigates the nature of relations between built form and political purposes through close study of public and private sector design commissions and planning processes that have been clearly motivated by political pressures, as well as more tacit examples. Lectures and discussions focus on cases from both developed and developing countries.