The workshop will include travel to local mills to choose hardwood pieces.
Students work will be showcased at the 2022 International MassTimber Conference.

WARM WOOD is an experimental, hands-on workshop where students will work with solid wood manufacturing processes and hardwood ‘thinnings’—small diameter trees and logs that are typically cleared and left to waste in forest clearing. This workshop will investigate a thermal paradigm shift in architecture, where heating (and cooling) may be provided through and integrated into solid wood (mass timber) radiant surfaces. Foreshadowed perhaps in Archigram’s 1961 proposal for an electric “plug-in” log, we will explore the aesthetics, thermal performance, and possible forms of hydronic, radiant WARM WOOD. This may include—designing the mass plywood Stack as a wood/form composed of layers and densities of hardwood species, pushing the boundaries of what Knot/Not wood can be, and exploring Effective/Defective wood.

The workshop will conduct research on cross-laminated timber (CLT) and mass plywood panel (MPP) manufacturers to understand sustainable forest management best practices and the automated production processes used in these mass timber industries.  Our shared objective will be to engage critical thinking and creative design to explore radiant heating/cooling in mass timber construction as a comfortable, tactile and embodied system with significant aesthetic, energetic and environmental benefits. Students in the WARM WOOD Workshop will create, test and fabricate small-scale wooden ‘hot-objects’ and design proposals for WARM WOOD furniture/infrastructure elements that can be installed for energy retrofits in public housing. Tools will include drawing in section, 3D modelling, heat imaging (thermography) and physical prototyping with local hardwoods and Mass Plywood panels.

This workshop will provide local hardwoods, mass plywood panels, material supplies, hydronic radiant technologies, fittings, and tools to support prototype fabrication by participating students.

We will start with gathering individual research interests per student in the realm of computation with an emphasis on prototype-based experiments, then develop a hypothesis from it, create a preliminary precedent review, derive a design-based experiment to test the hypothesis, evaluate the experiment and summarize the method and results in a technical paper. The process is accommodated by labs that support the development of the computational approach bridging digital and physical using electronics and fabrication to develop prototypes in the sense of embodied computation.

Specific expectations and/or deliverable product resulting from course:

An experimental physical prototype and a technical paper reporting on the design experiment.

The impacts of climate change on World Heritage—from floods in Venice Lagoon to extinction in Galápagos Islands—have garnered attention in a world that has mostly otherwise failed to respond to the urgency of the climate crisis. In UNESCO reports, climate change has emerged as a top threat impacting the conservation of hundreds of heritage sites, with an array of risks including rising sea levels, wildfires, extinction, droughts, air pollution, melting glaciers, material vulnerability, unchecked tourism and the massive displacement of communities.

What world and heritage are possible through the climate crisis? Heritage sites are designated for their natural or cultural significance, considered to be of outstanding universal value, and protected for the benefit of future generations. However, the climate crisis renders it unclear what that future is and how to curate a world with inherent uncertainty and disaster. At a moment when the promises to arrest or reverse further decay are unsustainable in the face of planetary destruction, what are other possible experimental preservation practices—material and semiotic—both to live on a damaged planet and, to imagine other worlds that are possible, urgent, and necessary? How to devise a plot, how to give it a certain direction or intent of meaning, when climate change actively eludes, confounds, and evades narrative closure?

How do designers inherit a world in crisis?

“Climate Inheritance” is a design research and speculation workshop that investigates how to conceptualize, visualize, project and narrate the impacts of climate change on World Heritage.

The work is along the three axes below;

1. Construct: interdisciplinary conceptual framework and experimental design practices; including Caitlin DeSilvey, Rodney Harrison, David Gissen, Lucia Allais, Superstudio, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Amy Balkin, DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti), Azra Akšamija, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Bryony Roberts.
2. Represent: visual atlas of World Heritage and Climate Change from UNESCO reports and data sets. Diagrams, and architectural chart primary climate factors affecting such properties and existing adaptation strategies. [Collaborative. See WORKac, 49 cities]
3. Project: Each student selects and researches an existing World Heritage site impacted by climate change (its history, mediatic “aura”, etc.) to propose a speculative future narrative in three drawings. [Individual. See DESIGN EARTH, Climate Inheritance]

Augmented Historical Pedagogies: Tiergarten’s Hidden Urban Narratives is a collaborative workshop bringing together three institutions: the MIT Department of Architecture, the Institute for Architecture at TU  Berlin, and The Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. The collaboration will foster a VR- and AR-based, interdisciplinary study of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest park and a site which has undergone unique historical transformations. Because of its complex history, not just in field of architecture and urban planning, but also within the history of film, literature, politics, zoology, hydrology, and botanics, Tiergarten is an exemplary location for a critical exploration of the ways through which urban history is written and produced.

In addition to engaging with the site’s history through readings and archival research, students will use advanced simulation techniques–such as environmental sensing, laser scanning, and photogrammetry–as well as game engines, and produce immersive representations of Tiergarten. These projects, virtual- and augmented-reality installations, will be conceived as digital spaces that present the multiplicity of the park’s historical narratives through a variety of mediums, techniques and materials. The aim is not to make a passive reconstruction, but to use these digital spaces as the sites for insightful historical investigations. The final results, a collection of virtual tours and ‘incisions’ through the layers of knowledge and representation, aim to provoke discussion not just about Tiergarten’s past, but also about a re-envisioned future.

Merely to think about cities and get somewhere, one of the main things to know is what kind of problem cities pose, for all problems cannot be thought about in the same way.
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 22, “The kind of problem a city is.”

While we have begun to understand the interconnected properties of our cities, we still lack the tools and methodologies to engage cities as designers along the grain of these insights. This has consequences not just for the inclusion of physical factors at different scales, but also to the lack of influence of those most affected by climate change on design for resilience in their communities.

In this workshop we will explore digital tools and methodologies to conceive distributed, environmentally validated design proposals, connecting principles behind urban networks with systematic design and evaluation of a large number of distributed design interventions. We will introduce Local Software, a set of tools and workflows to imagine, evaluate, and implement networked urban designs by connecting GIS and parametric CAD software.

The course will provide a critical introduction to computational tools and approaches for urban design. Students will familiarize themselves with design workflows that integrate geospatial information, parametric modeling, and geospatial modeling to develop networked urban proposals. We will also discuss the conceptual, social, and political framework for such networked action in urban environments.

In the workshop, we will be engaging with Green City Force, an AmeriCorps program that engages young adults from New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) communities in environmental service. The workshop will begin to prototype a set of distributed interventions – ‘eco-hubs’— across NYCHA properties. NYCHA sites represent a distributed landscape throughout New York City whose population approaches that of Atlanta, and which are in areas of the city most vulnerable to the effect of climate change. Participating students will have the potential to apply to join this ongoing collaboration after the conclusion of the workshop as well.

Open to DUSP and Architecture students, others by instructor permission as well.

For more information email Carlos Emilio Sandoval Olascoaga.

The design of urban environments. Strategies for change in large areas of cities, to be developed over time, involving different actors. Fitting forms into natural, man-made, historical, and cultural contexts; enabling desirable activity patterns; conceptualizing built form; providing infrastructure and service systems; guiding the sensory character of development. Involves architecture and planning students in joint work; requires individual designs or design and planning guidelines.

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

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

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

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

“The 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.