An annual publication showcasing the work of our faculty and students
6.5 × 9.5 in. Published Spring 2024
Editorial Team:
Winka Dubbeldam, Miller Professor and Chair, Michele Saunders, Associate Director of Events and Communications, Veronica Moore
Library of Congress data available upon request.
World Rights: Available
An annual publication showcasing the work of our faculty and students
Dubbeldam
Dear Colleagues and Friends of Weitzman Architecture,
We are happy to share with you Pressing Matters XII, our latest annual publication 2022-23, which was also my last year as Chair after 10.5 years! It has been a great pleasure and honor to serve as Chair and I am grateful for the trust our faculty, students, and leadership have given me in this period. I know I leave the Department in the capable hands of our acting Chair Andrew Saunders and soon our new chair Rossana Hu, and of course with our staff, a team of dedicated, enthusiastic, knowledgeable experts that together run our large department with its Master of Architecture program, three MSD programs, an MS and PHD program, and not to forget: our interdisciplinary IPD program.
In these years which were a great period of innovation & collaboration, we recognized our profound obligation as a school to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Weitzman community and the professions we help sustain. We continue to focus on promoting this, as an integral part of excellence in architectural education. We promote a study plan where we have integrated expertise and content from our Technology, History & Theory, Professional Practice and Visual Studies courses into our Design Studio’s. This follows our Design-Research concept, an integral approach of critical thinking, rigorous research, and a deep understanding of the complex layers of architecture. In this time of resource scarcity, and environmental and climate challenges, we train our students to be ready for the challenges of the future and to be active participants in the global discourse towards a better, safer, and cleaner world.
The Anthropocene has changed our concept of how architecture relates to nature, our advanced design-research studios took this on this year. For example a project called “Carvings and Aggregates“ with professor Ferda Kolatan, asked student to design new prototypes for Cappadocia’s rock architecture in Turkey, Richard Garber and my studio “Strange Natures” researched how the highest point in Denmark “Mons Klint”, a 128m high cliff that holds 70-million-year-old fossils, can be protected as a culture & climate center under World Heritage protection, the proposed building learns from nature’s behavior
and creates oxygen and absorbs carbon, creating a different life for its inhabitants. Cret visiting professor Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen studied with her students robotically printing biomatter transformed into organically shaped shelters and landforms, and Marion Weis’ students transformed the Los Angeles tar pit into a museum area.
We also pride ourselves on the inclusion of diverse external experts, not only in our sponsored 3r year design studios, but also through annual symposia, weekly lectures, and design reviews. But also our in-house standing faculty has grown from just 8 [2013] to now 19 standing faculty members, who support a fast-growing number of research labs. Recent hires include Daniela Fabricius, whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the political, intellectual, and aesthetic histories of 20th-century architecture and urbanism, Fernando Luiz Lara, who works on theorizing spaces of the Americas with emphasis on the dissemination of architecture and planning ideas beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries his field of interest lies in Latin American Architecture and Urbanism, the dissemination of Architectural Knowledge, Informal Settlements and Decolonial theory, and Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, our new Cret visiting professor from Denmark, her research centers on the inter-section between architecture and computer science. Her focus is on the profound changes that digital technologies instigate in the way architecture is thought, designed and built. Also a recent hire is Rashida Ng (MArch‘01), an alumni of our program, she is now the Chair of our undergraduate architecture program, her research lies at the intersection of social equity and environmental justice, and is focused on housing insecurity.
We are proud to have hosted the Acadia conference last Fall 2022 with over 300 participants. ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture) was formed for the purpose of facilitating communication and critical thinking regarding the use of computers in architecture, planning and building science. They are committed to the research and development of computational methods that enhance design creativity, rather than simply production, and that aim at contributing to the construction of humane physical environments. Organized by conference chairs and Weitzman faculty members Masoud Akbarzadeh, Dorit Aviv, Hina Jamelle, and Robert Stuart-Smith, the 2022 conference takes as its theme
Hybrids & Haecceities, which sought novel approaches to design and research that dissolved binary conditions and inherent hierarchies to embrace new modes of practice. Haecceities describe the qualities or properties of objects that define them as unique. Concurrently, Hybrids are entities with characteristics enhanced by the process of combining two or more elements with different properties. In concert, these terms offer a provocation toward more inclusive and specific forms of computational Design. We thank them and our staff and faculty for all their amazing efforts creating this inspiring and educational event!
To conclude, this and much more is what you will find in this issue of Pressing Matters. We hope to host you soon at Weitzman Architecture.
— Winka Dubbeldam, Ella Shafer Miller Professor and Chair Department of Architecture, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
The Summer Architectural Studio offers an intensive drawing, modeling, and design experience to candidates for admission to the Graduate Program in Architecture who have not completed the necessary prerequisites or who are required to have additional design experience to qualify for acceptance into the Master of Architecture Program.
The course will develop both analog and digital methods of architectural representation and modeling skills, as well as, visual thinking essential to the formation of the architect. The intent of the drawing component of the course is to familiarize the student with primarily black and white mediums (pencil, charcoal, etc.). Exercises are designed to sharpen the student’s ability to see selectively and to transform image to paper through both line and tonal renditions in both analog and digital forms. Exercises will also familiarize the student with basic drafting skills necessary for architectural communication and provide application of computer-aided design programs first introduced through intensive Rhino, Key Shot and Illustrator tutorials taught in the second part of the course – Digi-Blast 1.
The design components of the course present a rhythm of basic three-dimensional design studies and simple architectural studio investigations addressing the relationship between body, space, and setting. These are intended to build fundamental skills and acquaint the student with the architectural issues of form/space, process/conceptualization, measure/ transformation of scale, mapping/surveying the human body, orientation/view and the architectural promenade, simple functional and constructional problems, including sensitivity to context.
Faculty: Larry Mitnick
Teaching Assistants: Irene Dole
The first project of this course will explore the relationship between the two-dimensional image(elevation, plan, section, axonometric, perspective) and its corresponding threedimensional interpretation and the relationship between the three-dimensional object and its corresponding two dimensional representation (elevation, section, plan, axonometric, perspective) within the context of a situated human body. The continuous movement back and forth between these dimensions is the first step toward the development of a working design method. Visual structure of both 2D patterns, and 3D form/space is investigated through design processes that include spatial subdivision, spatial aggregation, and additive/subtractive form/space generation. Ordering space through formal strategies that include serial repetition, gradients/progressions, transformation/metamorphosis, composition/proportion (centralized, linear, field), as well as figure/field ambiguities.
Faculty: Andrew Saunders
Teaching
Assistants: Irene Dole
Building on concepts learned in the first and second summer studio components, the project will expand into design concepts for site, exterior, interior and the spaces of the inbetween. Students will learn to become agile moving back and forth between digital and physical modes of architectural representation through disciplined three-dimensional geometric principles in both realms. Complex formal relationships will be built slowly and precisely allowing for full ownership over every point, line and surface through advanced digital surface modeling techniques in addition to physical fabrication guided by digital projections and description.
The studio project is a new built addition to the Morris Arboretum for the exhibition and archive of the work of Robinson Fredenthal. The new project will mark the location of the original demolished Compton Mansion of John and Lydia Morris. As the highest point of the property, the design should include a roof terrace to view Wissahickon and or the Whitemarsh Valley. With adjacency to the existing parking lot, the site will provide vehicular parking and access to the new galleries. The design criteria for the project stipulates that the governing geometry must be in dialogue with the elemental Euclidian geometry that informs the work of Robinson Fredenthal. Featured Student
Danielle Willems
The 501 studios are part of the core sequence within the Masters of Architecture Design Studios at the Weitzman School of Design. In its pedagogical approach, this first-year studio introduces students to the critical methodologies of design essential for both discourse and practice within architecture. In this first semester, a methodological framework is introduced as a means to develop a set of fundamental elements of design for a professional architect. These elements span from understanding material properties and tectonics to mastering geometric craft and architectural drawing notation. The Weitzman School of Design believes in the importance of design research as a practical and conceptual tool that prepares our students for how architecture will evolve over the next 25 years. We believe that architecture will progress in a manner that critically evaluates and redefines materiality, tectonics and fabrication, components and part to whole relationships, that constitute foundational elements of any architectural language.
The 501 studios titled ‘Hyperlapse’ introduce and research digital techniques of design and fabrication for the production of architectural details and tectonics, with a focus on ‘learning through making’. Currently within the contemporary design paradigm, digital fabrication has opened up a fertile space to experiment, explore and conceptually redefine the role of the detail beyond standardization. During the studio, through a series of design exercises each student learns and utilizes methods, strategies and techniques in design production. Engaging with both analog and digital realms, students acquire skills in digital modeling and precision-crafted fabrication. Within the scope of the studio course, two main projects guide students towards their final architectural proposals. These projects constitute a continuous body of research, developing higher design resolution at each step. Project 1, is the design and build of a small pavilion using digital manufacturing and is developed in the first half of the semester. This pavilion project titled ‘Hyperlapse Chambers’ uses digital methods and explores part-to-whole fabrication techniques. The initial point of departure of this project looks at the productive dialogue between hybrid and digital materials, solid versus void conditions and carefully crafted tectonic elements that come together with designed details.
In the second half of the semester, Project 2 further expands and evolves these initial concepts into an architectural proposal for a Museum Gallery and Public Boathouse. Each studio section critic presents their own take on ‘how’ the Museum Gallery and Public Boathouse can be decolonized. We begin with closely reading the history of the site and surrounding areas, and the development of “public space” in the form of municipal infrastructure such as the Fairmount Water Works project and Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). In addition we study the development of the Schuylkill River edge, and Boathouse Row. This gives us an opportunity to examine the implied politics of public space and the design language of municipal and institutional architecture. Each student designs a full-scale architecture proposal for the hybrid program of Museum Gallery and Public Boathouse within our site at the edge of the Schuylkill River. This nine week project builds on ideas, strategies, details and techniques developed in the first half of the semester in order to produce fully resolved architectural spaces, forms and concepts.
Faculty: Danielle Willems
Teaching Assistant: Courtney Ward
In our current social political paradigm shift, designers have an important role in questioning the constructed historical narratives and spatial practices of institutions and communities that we engage with. This role translates into crafted speculative architectural spaces and forms that might facilitate a corresponding social change. The studio researched the cultural values and historical significance of specific archaeological and anthropological artifacts through the lens of Decolonization as a spatial and institutional practice. As spatial and institutional practices shift, it has created new opportunities for students to develop alternative models of public spaces, building spaces, and new hybrid programs.
The studio methodology consists of three feedback phases: the generative diagram, prototyping /iterative modeling and formal /spatial animations. The first exercise starts with the generative diagram phase, which operates as the abstract machine of assembly. The prototyping and iterative modeling phase is a method of rapid and recursive generation of form and materials experiments. The final phase experiments with new mediums of digital representation. The studio interrogated new mediums of contingency through hybrid digital and material experimentation and behavioral systems analysis.
Hybrid Ontological Formations is an investigation into the multi-scalar definition of computational constructs. The focus of this studio is to develop innovative fabrication techniques using composite materials, in order to rethink and re-examines the typology of the museum.
Featured Student Work:
Sahil Shah ..................................................................... 30,74
Regina Gonano .................................................................. 32
Urban Labyrinth encapsulated a juxtaposition to the Philadelphia urban fabric by reintroducing the natural into the taken and builtover environment. Through a figural reconstruction, a series of winding and weaving, elevated and sunken pathways were created. These are a means to transverse the labyrinth’s fantastical biomes that have been dispersed through the site and diffused by Callowhill’s viaduct. These
biomes include heavy forests, lakes and pools, prairies and grasslands, and swamps and marshes concentrated on the main site. As one keeps exploring they happen upon themselves other wide expanses of nature such as cliff faces, streams, deserts, etc. In this sense, this world’s fair has become a horizontal takeover seeping into center city’s grid system and creating a parasitic relationship with it. In another sense, just as how urbanism has taken over our natural landscape, Urban Labyrinth will begin to take it back. This world’s
fair desires to bring light to our growing environmental concerns over habitat loss coupled with mass pollution. Our vast horizontal takeover has fragmented many ecosystems causing extinction rates to exponentially rise. The reason for these specific environments on this site is to highlight the beauty of nature that we have taken away and to begin a reclamation.
The project began at the contextual level, studying the old waterworks piping system on a visit to the site. The waterworks used to pipe water to the city in the 1960s. Putting this historical context into a contemporary light, the PMA site is still a crucial part of the Philadelphian community, though it now provides Philadelphia with art. My proposal seeks to combine the historical context with the contemporary, with a museum and boathouse proposal featuring a pipe framework. The pipe framework serves a multitude of functions. They take on the role of heating and cooling the building, creating custom furniture and art, dividing space as pipe becomes surface, and they create exterior spaces in flux.
These ephemeral moments of pipe help to displace the natural frame of the building, and the shifting creates a new depth of space. Depth is further developed in the project through the use of tectonics and apertures. The rounded design language was developed earlier in the semester in the chambers project and was continued in this project to expose the infrastructure of the building with a unique design language. The tectonics were clad in a fluted concrete pattern and linear metal paneling work to further blur the lines between facade and infrastructure while dividing space. The program was organized processionally to follow the descent of the site. Views through the museum portion of the building are unobstructed and gaze straight through the building to see both art and the boathouse at the lower level. A tunnel
was cut through the site to allow public access to the boathouse without making a museum ticket purchase necessary. The boathouse itself features an extended view beyond the confines of the site thanks to an extensive dock for boat launching and river gazing. Coming from the other direction of the site, the building extends upwards from the existing historical waterworks below ground.
Faculty: Anthony Gagliardi
Teaching Assistant: Clayton Monarch
Monumentality surrounds us. It is distinct and ubiquitous, yet difficult to visualize. It is present in all facets of daily life including the environment (fires, hurricanes, and flooding), the economy (inflation and inequity), and our social relationships (racial, gender, and class-based persecution). This studio intends to investigate monumentality (as opposed to the monument) in architecture to address how we can respond in a fitting and persistent way to the monumental events occurring around us. As a fundamental initial approach towards visualizing monumentality, this studio will analyze existing works by architects and artists for their proportion, siting, mass, articulation, blankness, procession, boundary, geometry, and materiality. We will take cues from contributors such as Louis I. Kahn, Tadao Ando, Nanette Carter, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Claes Oldenburg, Stuart Davis, and Sigfried Gideon. Moving from the conceptual to the physical, the studio will then be asked to reconsider historical construction methods, specifically “centering,” a technique often utilized in the building of large, public, monumental structures.
20th century monumentality is one-dimensional. Its success balances on the need to minimize intersections, projecting a singular figure, group, or idea. This project deploys the formal device of intersection as a contemporary means to understand monumentality. By multiplying and condensing many intersections, architecture may include numerous
interpretations while still creating a collective whole.
The main form illustrates this language by illustrating intersection in every move the form grows in. In plan, these intersections create long axes conveying a notion of intersection; these axes reference the icons around the site, spewing itself in four distinct directions, which become another element of intersection. What is read as intersection in plan also reads similarly in elevation; the long, tall lightwells highlight how the structure seems to pierce the elevational space.
Additionally, these lightwells stagger in height, mimicking the Philadelphian skyline. A juxtaposition to those lightwells is reflected downwards, where forms similar to the shape of the lightwells also pierce into the ground. This idea of using the intersection in many representations or even directions, all create complexity but with one form; the complexity created then highlights the inclusivity of many interpretations, completely contrary to the monumentality of the 20th century.
“ The word monumentality should be eliminated from the architectural vocabulary as a characteristic desirable for buildings in a democratic society ” — Gregor Paulsson
Is Gregor correct? The statement implies that monumentality has been coined as a self-serving gesture that holds no place in modern society, a permanent and immovable expression of autocratic purpose. Inversely, systems of motion and autonomy are called to mind as a logical subversion to this position. Rather than a standpoint of direct opposition, the promenade offers an opportunity for the co-existence of strengths within both – the static and the dynamic. Here, place and purpose, permanence and motion, simultaneously occur to generate alternative readings of monumentality. Rather than spotlighting a singular intensity of purpose, monumentality can now be understood as both fixed and fluid. This project exemplifies
how both contrasting elements work in tandem with one another to highlight movement as both circulation and destination. The sensation of movement within its overall form is expressed through the grand gesture of a promenade that is reflected in both the exterior and the interior. The dynamic language of push and pull between the elongated forms operates concurrently with the solidity of each singular mass and their postured forms. Their top heavy qualities suggest not only static subordination, but dynamic instability as well, all of which visitors can experience when enveloped by the building. Rather than organizing circulation as transitional space, the promenade of the interior continues as a visual experience in which viewers are confronted with a sensation of tension as they are carried through an overlap of large atriums and condensed pockets of space, each mode of circulation just as exciting as the quality of any space. The façade is made of a bright, polished limestone which implies weight through its materiality, but this solidity of the exterior is disrupted through the application of a
perforated screen, allowing for an abundant amount of light to infiltrate each space, thus generating another method of subverting the static nature of monumentality. All things considered, Gregor Paulsson was correct, but only in the argument that monumentality is historically deemed a singular, self-serving gesture. Its place in society is entirely relevant as an expression that operates using both static and dynamic language to convey both place and purpose.
Faculty: Daniel Markiewicz
Teaching Assistant: Yuexin (Echo) Ma
Our stories are told on the surfaces of our sarcophagi. We use color, graphic relief and bold form to help us remember the victories and losses of our dearly departed container projects. Our reaction to these deaths—whether joyful or grief-stricken— has been captured in full color carvings akin to the artists we have studied (KAWS, Jessie & Katey, Louise Zhang among others). But not satisfied with our color reliefs alone, we have allowed our discussions about Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair to encourage us to cage our colored coffins in metal pipes, and thus enhance our stories’ reliefs with a delicate play between mass and framework.
In this extension project, we were asked to design a facility with kayak-related program and exhibition space. To me, the kayak-related program is about the communication, is about the present. While the exhibition space is more about the history, is about the past. I tried to frame the past and present with architecture itself. In the case of the past, I tried to create a cave-like space to stimulate the past
feeling, to offer visitors the feeling of archaeology. Compared with regular exhibition space, I believe the cave-like space could give people a feeling of exploring instead of just watching. The interaction between the exhibition and visitors could be strengthened. For the kayak-related program, the regular box space is the main design strategy. To connect two programs and show the continuity between the past and the present, the continuity between cubic and organic space, I chose to use the
twisted form. Meanwhile, I want this project to be vibrant and controlled, so my building grows from the ground with façades wrapped on the top. The relationship between the façade and the vibrant form are just like the relationship between frame and massing, which is we keep exploring during the semester.
More than most sites, the site in which the building is situated, is a representation of man’s manipulation of nature.
Formally diverting the river with the construction of a dam. Buildings to shelter man from the environment and gazebos for entertainment. These are all examples of man artificially manipulating nature.
This project Inorganic
Fusion goes against the notion of man manipulating nature and allows nature to manipulate architecture. The form is exclusively influenced by the natural path of the river and its coastline. Allowing nature to manipulate the trajectory of the architecture.
As the form is an extension of the existing infrastructure, the grain of the building is inspired by growth. Combined with the growing landscape, the building becomes seamless with the ground, harmonizing the two worlds, natural and artificial. The relief is emphasized in the interior
spaces allowing users to flow through the space and experience the building. The basement, where the exhibition space is situated, uses grain to create cuts on the walls and floors. These cuts contain water, and as light penetrates the interior space, the light reflects off the water to project on the interior, allowing nature to introduce its properties into the architecture.
Faculty: Laia Mogas-Soldevila
Teaching
Assistant: Grace Infante
With a site close to the Philadelphia Museum of Art PMA and on top of the historic Waterworks, right next to the Schuylkill river, students curated a building containing a boathouse, community outreach spaces, and an art gallery with the constraint to relate all programs via a single strong building concept. The theme and intention was to generate a “beacon building”, an inclusive structure, decolonizing the traditional museum, widely rethinking the gallery towards more accessibility and art types not covered by the PMA’s collection
Connecting directly to the water with a free-for-all boathouse and boat launch, and metaphorically to the ecologies of the river and the PMA as powerful bodies of attraction and discussion. Our research on Translucency, Pattern, and Glow continued from previous 501 object and chamber projects and was up for reinterpretation as was each student’s take on the “beaconness” of their beacon building. We followed an incremental research process starting with site forces diagram, program relation collages, and material effect of beaconness.
What once served in the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia with PMA must be reconceptualized in the twenty-first century. museums as potential cultural institutions should reinvent how to immerse their users in a remarkable artistic experience and give room for participation. The 501 project defines the museum as a space where art and invention interlock. For that reason, Encapsulating
Dynamism proposes an inhabitable sculpture that uses human motion as a fuel to feed the building, and the remaining energy serves the city. The strategy to become the building alive is through piezoelectricity embedded in the architecture. In the building proposal, human motion is perceived by piezoelectric sensors that capture vibration and pressure to create electricity. The energy is collected through the exploratory gallery and innovation lab capsules. Then, the energy is transferred to central energy storage during
the day. At night, the harvested energy is magnified through the piezoelectric devices, and the primary energy storage lights up! During the day, the museum becomes a mechanical energy playground, and at night, it becomes an interactive light playground where each step can produce 10 watts. Finally, Encapsulating Dynamics understands architecture’s performance as an educational element to create art, informs the public about renewable energy solutions, and continue Philadelphia’s innovation trajectory.
Located by the Schuylkill River, and being right next to the historical Fairmount Water Works, the building is visually displaying and physically narrating a story about the water. It is a water beacon growing from the solid of darkness. Responding to the heavy industrialization and pollution of the river, the building acts as a huge machine which takes in the dreadful water from the river and purifies it into a resource
for consumption, art, and education within its own system. Besides, the building is a porous organism which merges into the landscape with the threading of the water it has purified.
Connecting the three anchor points of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fountain of the Sea horses, the eastern edge of the dam on the site, the building projects the sliding down and lifting up tendency of the topography onto the geometry.
Furthermore, the play of materials with forms indicates the sequence of the tour for
visitors as well as the gradient of the interior lightness from dark to bright bottom up. The building standing as an art of water itself brings a magnificent water festival, leading people to vision a utopian future of decontamination.
Faculty: Ryan Palider
Teaching Assistant: Yi Ting Zhang
The title “Industrial Park” is a play on words meant to reference both an area zoned and planned for the purpose of industrial development, and a literal park such as the one proposed by the city to cover the abandoned rail viaduct that runs through the site. The studio questions the way we think about the interconnectedness of the means of production and the role the reintroduction of industrial buildings into an urban context can play a role in creating new forms of public space. Historically Philadelphia was never reliant upon one industry like other major cities. Instead, the city was populated with a vast network of workshops linked together by supplying goods or services to each other as well as to the world. The studio’s designs for a market for exiled industries reexamines Philadelphia’s history as the “Workshop of the World” by envision the market as an incubator for small enterprises rather than for a single use. To explore the urban potentials of a market for exiled industries the studio uses three different types of relief to generate building forms and landscape forms to make an urban landscape that engages with Philadelphia’s rich industrial, cultural and architectural histories.
The goal of this project is to create an architecture of in-betweenness and codependency. One that marries seemingly opposite ideas of massiveness and lightness, solid and void, public and institution, object and field and uses these contrasting elements to create a new composition that can be interpreted in multiple ways to provide mixed readings. The importance of public space to architecture is emphasized by its central role in the project. A dynamic public space intercedes between the differing programmatic elements of the project and occurs at their collision point so that occupants may experience the offerings of contrasting programs through visual and spatial exchange. This public space not only acts as a point of spatial exchange between the different programs but also allows public access to the waters edge that is deprived elsewhere on the river bank. The project’s materiality aims to help tear down the preconceptions of what a museum is. The rough corten steel demystifies the institution and invites people of all backgrounds to feel welcome.
Corten steel also reflects on the city of Philadelphia’s history of steel production and celebrates the material as an homage and tool of democratization. Holistically, this project is an amalgamation of opposites that unite contrasting ideas of program, space, and mass to create a new composition. Public space and traditional institutions are merged together to create a new hybrid spatial configuration. Seemingly opposite spatial, formal, material, and programmatic elements merging together to create something that cannot be perceived only one way. This project exists uneasily between programmatic differences and spatial inbetweens.
This project is a bid to make conditions that lie outside of human perception, a project that employs novel representational strategies and a multi-scale approach to design.
This is a project that is neither a suburb nor a particular singular structure, but rather a process that blends programmatic instability with architectural distinctiveness, traits, and niches that prove to craft a testing ground for exurbian
boundaries. A test to push the limits of Philadelphian memorialization of not the familiar exterior, but of the specifics and intimates of Philadelphian Architecture. A storehouse of daydreams and a theatre of our memories. It is about challenging your perceptions through challenged and juxtaposed when you step inside, you begin to inhabit the inverse quality of the familiar, places that begin to feel unfamiliar, paired with defining arts works that help redefine what you perceive this space to be, its not the elephant in the room, it’s the
mouse in the house – something so small, but memorable and impactful that redefines the way we approach the space and most importantly, the way it changes our perceptions – it’s a fluid space dependent on the arts – a continuous tabular rasa that is a local frame for art. A homogenous relationship that both helps redefine the space, and the perceived art work.
A structure that is part mausoleum, part testament to a bygone way of life that captures the vanished rhythms and resonances of gentrified Philadelphia.
Faculty: Eduardo Rega
Teaching Assistant: Jun Lee
Museums like the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), and universities like the one we’re in, have been (and still are) key institutions and tools for the advancement of capitalist-colonial modernity. Representations of modernity, have shaped empire and capitalist globalization. A western imperialist project for progress and global supremacy, modernity, has been used to erase histories and narratives that might challenge white western supremacy and reveal its crimes while prefiguring alternative futures. The PMA is one of many monuments to modernity, this makes it an excellent site to rehearse spatial imaginations that break the bounds of its capitalist-colonial order, imaginations of futures after- or-post-modernity that are decolonial, anti-capitalist and ecofeminist. During the semester we’ll discuss and collectively imagine futures after-or-postthe PMA, after it’s dismantlement, after workers, artists, activists and communities have taken control over it, after the oligarchs leave. Framed as institutional critiques and in line with this art movement , the various projects of our studio (from1 containers and pavilions to building extensions) will aim to be politically conscious, critical and radically imaginative: at once challenging the museum’s structures of power and offering visions of rebellious aesthetic spatial strategies. Featured
Traditional museums are impersonal, as art is often presented as an object separate from the artist by curators. when curators address specific topics, they fall flat in their attempt to generate conversations between and viewers. This project investigates the potential outcome from artists seeing the public’s reaction art by directly placing artists inside the museum. The building has workshop spaces for artists to have residencies, which allows for new communications both with the public and between artists. The of gallery and makers space will create an active workshop, a collaborative space that encourages replacing or reworking the art that is being exhibited. Both formally and conceptually, the building space, with a roundabout circulation, in between levels, and inward facing viewports creating a space creation on display. This newfound connection between the artist and the museum allows for new connections to flourish, which reinterprets the museum as a personal, rather than impersonal, space.
Traditional museums are impersonal, as art is often presented as an object separate from the artist by curators. Even when curators address specific topics, they fall flat in their attempt to generate conversations between artists and viewers. This project investigates the potential outcome from artists seeing the public’s reaction to their art by directly placing artists inside the museum. The building has workshop spaces for artists to have extended residencies, which allows for new communications both with the public and between artists. The collision of gallery and makers space will create an active workshop, a collaborative space that encourages adding to, replacing, or reworking the art that is being exhibited. Both formally and conceptually, the building is a fluid space, with a roundabout circulation, in between levels, and inward facing viewports creating a space that put creation on display. This newfound connection between the artist and the museum allows for new ideas and connections to flourish, which reinterprets the museum as a personal, rather than impersonal, space.
Yuandao Yang, Unmute
Museums should not have the right to decide which artwork can be put on a show and whichcannot, and they should not be given the right to force an ideology on the public by muting thevoices of the minority; A museum should no longer be safe that stores artworks meant for thepublic. Art pieces reflect cultures, thoughts, social movements, and history of whom? People,the protagonist of the book of history, the narrator of
the essay. What I wish to achieve isredefining the museum as a distribution center of voice. A medium that helps tell stories, anunbiased neutral platform that allows differences.
My museum runs under a system of two-way position feedback loop. On one hand, multipletransportations deliver arts and art tools to the communities and letting them have equalopportunities to explore and have fun with art at home without having to physically travel to themuseum. On the other hand, transportation collects people
and artworks made by the publicback to the center and lets everyone have equal chances to share their own voices.
Faculty: Na Wei
Teaching Assistant: Marjorie
Tello Wong
Volume is one of the fundamental qualities of Architecture. Volumes are embodied in both materiality and spaces defined by material. Our studio’s theme, ‘Suffused Volumes,’ highlights this intertwining of tangible material and intangible space, encouraging a deeper architectural understanding that goes beyond static structures to dynamic spatial compositions. Under the ARCH501 umbrella, we embark on three projects, each escalating in scale: a container, a chamber, and finally, a building. Striving for a progressive continuum in learning, we thread a coherent narrative around porous materiality through cycles of reading, creating, and reflecting. This exploration fosters an evolving understanding and application of porous materiality with each subsequent project.
Our journey starts in the material library, immersing students in various porous materials, laying the foundation for their semester projects. The design process initiates with the discovery of found objects from diverse cultural, natural, virtual, and physical environments. This exploration stimulates students’ environmental awareness and connection. The potential of these objects triggers the transformation for Project 1A, ‘Container.’ Here, students use aggregation, kitbashing, and hybridization techniques to create an assemblage defined by porous materiality.
Building upon their individual comprehension of volume and space, students coalesce for Project 1B to scale up their work. They collaborate in teams, converging their collective artifacts into a more expansive ‘Chamber.’ Every team adopts unique fabrication methods for partitioning and assembling their design. Through this joint effort, they construct an interlocking pavilion composed of three chambers, each defined by porous blocks and attuned to human scale. This final pavilion is not merely a static structure but an invitation to continuous exploration, prompting interactive engagement with the built environment.
In the semester’s latter part, we delve into Project 2,
integrating a Museum Gallery and a Public Boathouse. The design methodology shifts to a building-scale perspective. Students transcend artifact usage, establishing unique formal languages by incorporating AI generation and earlier assembly techniques. This encourages the development of their distinctive architectural expressions.
Our studio, comprising ten diversely talented students, celebrates uniqueness within a shared framework. Their final projects, while showcasing creativity and understanding, also illuminate architectural expressions through building massing and chunk designs. Featured Student Work:
How can an extension of an institution married with the lineage of colonialism- the Philadelphia Museum of Art, attempt to decolonize the land it resides upon? This question may seem counterintuitive at face value- it is. That said, any extension of a colonial system under the guise of decolonizing intentions acts as a wolf wearing sheep’s clothing. This project takes the advice of
“make the invisible, visible,” and employs it to reveal the wolf. The design nods to the relevance of movements like structural expressionism, which celebrate and expose utilitarian building components often hidden behind walls. This project offers a slight departure from that legacy. While the use of these specific kitbashed objectsthe components of a camshaft pulley, engine block, drive belt, and piston- pay homage to Philadelphia’s industrial relationship with the Schuylkill River, they also work to symbolize the
legacy of imperialism which accompanied these periods of industrialization- part of that history resulting in works of art found in the PMA. This extension serves its role as a monument of questioning. That is- questioning its own purpose and- in applying the transitive property- the intentions of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as an agent of decolonization.
The primary focus of the project is on assemblage. Procedurally generated masses are arranged to fit a series of criteria including alignment with the axes of the site, maintaining the walkability of the area, and view-making. The second operation fractures the mass based on the programmatic needs of the museum and boat house.
This approach of 3-dimensional spatial planning isn’t antithetical to the raumplan however the fragmentation of these spaces directly articulates the exterior. This estranges the initial aggregation and allows for a more dialectical relationship between the interior and exterior. I chose two primary materials: concrete panels that are more artificial, and unpolished concrete that appears more natural and monolithic. The perforated copper which shares a similar language to the geometry of
the building wraps specific portions of the extension. This serves the dual purpose of covering the apertures in the building in order to maintain its monolithic quality and also to filter light into the museum.
Coordinator: Hina Jamelle
The M.Arch Urban Housing Studios propose new contemporary modes of living in urban society.
In a world of increasing demand on existing resources there is newly focused attention on adaptive reuse and the expansion of existing facilities. Each Urban Housing studio section positions the housing project relative to an existing structure. The student proposals are required to engage with this existing building condition - with 1/3 of the proposed project interacting directly with the existing structure while the remaining 2/3 to be new construction. A goal is to encourage the production of hybrid forms, programs, and architectural conditions that interrogate relationships between new and existing conditions. All studio sections develop housing projects of 50,000 sq. ft. on an urban lot with a minimum of two facades. The housing project is designed as a hybrid form of housing/dwelling with a commercial or cultural program that can co-exist with housing. Other key objectives include the study of a building’s massing and the physical impact it makes on the city with a highly detailed façade.
Across all Urban Housing studios there are three separate event weeks: Plan Week immediately precedes the mid-review and addresses unit design, clear divisions of public and private spaces, building circulation, and preliminary documentation of life safety, egress, and ADA requirements. The Section and Façade Week immediately follows the mid-review and addresses an understanding of vertical and horizontal circulation, building program distribution, façade design, and documentation. Public Common Space Week Development Week culminates the coordinated weeks with a focus on how to design and develop architectural solutions that address concerns of equity, inclusion and justice. Public Common Space Week is also supported by a lecture series from key thinkers in the field. Starting with the 2020-21 academic year the Urban Housing studio’s at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design take as a shared theme Public Common Space. Public Commons has become a term used for shared, equitable access to resources such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as to social creations such as libraries, public spaces, scientific research etc. Public Common Space for the 2nd Year Architecture studios will be a catalyst to study the confluence of equity and inclusion through thoughtful inquiry. Each student will engage
in architecture’s agency to format spaces of equity and proactively develop new modes of ground, landscape, thresholds, and spaces that provide for safe assembly and freedom from harassment.
The Urban Housing faculty are practicing architects of note: Jonas Coersmeier and Gisela Bauerman of Buro NY, Scott Erdy of Erdy McHenry Architects, Philadelphia. Richard Garber of GRO Architects, New York. Hina Jamelle of Contemporary Architecture Practice, New York and Shanghai. Ben Krone of Gradient Architecture, New York. Tina Manis of White Box, New York and Brian Phillips of ISA Architects, Philadelphia.
Taught concurrently are Professional Practice by Phillip Ryan and Environmental Systems by X which use the Urban Housing Studio Project as a basis of investigation. Professional Practice augments the studio project to bolster the student’s understanding of their project through the lens of budgeting, team formation, scheduling, articulating a design vision, and formulating a hypothetical design practice ethos. The Environmental Systems course considers the impact of building designs on the environment and human comfort via three topics: Daylight and Solar Gain, Façade Thermal Performance, and Water and Energy Harvesting. Through drawings and numerical analysis of multiple proposed iterations, the students learn about their studio project’s façade performance in relation to material conductivity, insulation, and condensation.
Faculty: Hina Jamelle
Teaching Assistant: Zihua Mo
The adaptive re-use of buildings has several advantages over demolition and reconstruction. It can support and benefit local culture, especially in cases where a building is rooted in city or neighborhood identity, history, and culture and offers inspiring spaces. It can be used as a tool for leveraging and streamlining investment, particularly if there is support from vocal community groups. Additionally, new buildings require tremendous amounts of energy and resources to construct. Re-use is often a more environmentally friendly solution, or as a 2005 National Trust for Historic Preservation campaign put it, “the greenest building is the one that is already built.” Finally, re-use can strengthen a community by positively linking a city or neighborhood’s past to its future.
Despite its many benefits, adaptive re-use projects are often criticized for hastening gentrification. Urban development can displace longtime residents, particularly when it does not include affordable housing. However, repurposing an existing building can act as a catalyst for attracting and retaining a diverse mix of households through unique spaces and structures and can be critical to the character of a neighborhood. Re-using a beloved local building also usually requires and brings with it a great deal of local support necessary for the building’s ultimate success. When combined with the principles of inclusionary housing, re-use has the potential to stave off criticisms while enhancing its acknowledged positive aspects.
The Corbin Building is a historic office building at the northeast corner of John Street and Broadway in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. It was built in 1888–1889 as a speculative development and was designed by Francis H. Kimball in the Romanesque Revival style with French Gothic detailing. The building was named for Austin Corbin, a president of the Long Island Rail Road who also founded several banks.
The studio reimagines the beloved venue as the site of a new residential building. Engaging inclusionary housing within
the context of adaptive re-use, the project leverages the building’s unique historical qualities to ensure and create added property value while procuring additional space through new construction. One third of the project engages directly with the historic Corbin Building, and the other two-thirds are devoted to newly constructed residential units.
Our Studio will be joined at key junctures by Martha Kelley from Goldman Sachs. Her division-the Real Estate Principal Investment Area [REPIA] makes direct, opportunistic equity and credit investments in real estate assets and portfolios around the country.
Each student will refine the particular program and strategy for market rate and social housing during the course of the semester. Also to be developed is a Public Common Space as a catalyst to study the confluences of equity and inclusion through thoughtful inquiry. Each student will engage in architecture’s agency to format spaces of equity and proactively develop new modes of ground, thresholds, and exterior and interior spaces that provide for safe assembly and freedom from harassment. The goals are for each student is to deal with a range of familiar architectural issues- how to turn a corner, multi-room configurations and circulation patterns for example. The intended result is a project exhibiting innovative architectural organizations and strategies for market and social housing using topological surfaces, unit arrangements and patterns scaling from an individual room to the entire building with different spatial and material qualities contributing to the development of architecture.
Featured Student Work:
The Corbin Building, with its intricately crafted façade embellished in terracotta carvings and rich cast-iron formations, stands as a beacon of historic complexity on the corner of 13th and John St. This street corner that once possessed an ordinary, modern caliber, now delightedly wears and flaunts the bright jewel that is this newly restored structure, awing pedestrians with its striking contrast to the surrounding context. In efforts to expand this extravagant revival, this
project proposes a mixed-use development that peels New York City’s corner open while embracing the existing structure’s timeless materiality and iconic techniques. In its ornate expressions, the new housing units dissolve from the corners of the existing structure, forming sculpted playscapes of public space below. This process results in a synergistic permeation of furling iron formations and grafted overhangs which seep onto the site’s streets, sidewalks, and transit connection as a permeating landscape, forming the project’s public commons program. Through
an embracing of craft and fabrication, the project forms public spaces for creative makers to come sell, trade, or exhibit their crafted works, from wearable art to home decor and goods. Because this marketplace dissolves into the streets, sidewalks and subway connections, filling New York city’s public realm, the method of unfurling space-forming represents a powerful resurrection of New York City’s crafting industry. The project invites public participation by opening corners and blurring the barriers and understandings between public, private, and facade.
The Corbin Building’s historic facade has a bounty of brick and terracotta detailing that is regulated by a rhythmic bay organization. This proposal interfaces with these building aspects and the existing structural grid through the technique of fusing. The proposed and existing become aligned, subdivided, wrapped, and convoluted until the rhythms and detailing are indistinguishably linked together yet discrete for their material and spatial contrast. Ground level openings, and double height windows on the 5th floor engage the public, both serving as borders between the complete dissolution of the new from the old and functioning as public commons levels.
The intervention provides 60 housing units broken into three types: approximately 30 - 500sqf studios, 15 - 800sqf one-bedrooms, and 15 1200sf two-bedroom units. Each unit interlocks into the next to form a party wall. Studio apartments interlock their living space to allow a one-bedroom to extend into them and one-bedroom units extend their balcony space to allow a two bedroom to expand their living space. This logic creates specific and mutable spatial assets like balconies, and cantilevered bedrooms for each unit configuration.
Using Washington Square Park as a case study, the project hosts a “park” rotunda on the roof of the Fulton building. Through adding improved routes of access and a direct link to the gallery spaces within the Corbin, a network of porous space affords mass gathering and viewing.
The gallery space is an open exhibition space for rotating events, artwork, and gathering. By collocating open exhibition and leisure space the project achieves fluid public engagement as witnessed in Washington Square Park.
Faculty: Gisela Baurmann
Teaching Assistant: Yiran Zhao
MICRO // MAX proposes novel modes of comfort through cohabitation housing, asking to think through the concepts and consequences of including living organisms beyond humans to coexist and productively thrive in a proposed inner-city housing environment. The studio discusses the notion of comfort and domesticity in the context of human and non-human habitats, and proposes built environments for various living organisms to flourish in. It is invested in matters of social justice while exploring the idea of integrating human housing systems with other ecological processes. The housing complex includes outdoor habitats for the cohabitants, communal spaces and a community court for the Center of Court Innovation.
The multifaceted living communities, different in range and scale, may operate in parallel and independently from one another, yet intended and unexpected forms of symbiosis beyond the hierarchical master-servant relations of human/pet, human/décor or human/nature are favored. The search for such new relations may lead to novel cross- species and cross-community interiorized urbanities. Ideas of wellness, safety and responsibility in the context of dense urban living are redefined, while primary housing considerations such as light, air and circulation are reexamined through the lens of two species and multiple scales.”
Featured Student Work:
This project develops an apartment proposal for the co-habitation of humans and non-humans, specifically bat dwellers, in one development in Queens, New York. This proposal gives equal developmental agency to all inhabitants and aims to create a symbiotic relationship between the two. This is done by introducing public garden areas in which the bats act as pollinators as well as pest control for the space. The bats
would not disrupt daily life and can be seen as an attraction for the Queens neighborhood. The bat spaces are influenced by the typology of the historic Texas bat roosts, in which large-scale bat housing was introduced to regulate pests within the Texas farming fields. These bat roosts were influential formally as well as an inspiration for the materials used throughout the structure. The bat spaces are categorized by slanted paneling systems in which the bats can crawl into the spaces and roost. The apartments are developed by
a series of towers in which each tower has a different interaction level with the bat roosts.
Danny Jarabek, apis(MELLIFERA)
A proposal speculating on the cohabitation of humans and bees in an urban housing setting with the intention of recontextualizing the interface between the human and nonhuman at the scale of high-rise housing in Queens, NY. The human-honey bee relationship is one of great significance for the bee’s responsibility in maintaining the agricultural industry in the face of existential climate threats that have decimated global hives, colonies, and populations. The proposal examines this relationship by adopting a non-anthropocentric position, defining user profiles as fluid roles of pollinator, fertilizer, and germinator. The building is not a fixed architectural operation, but rather an organism in its own capacity of equal consequence to the human and nonhuman users. The “organism” acts to support these user profiles in a self-sustaining system capturing energy stored in the honeybee byproducts with a surrounding network of interchangeable units that transform into human composting chambers upon death, recycling all components of the organism’s life cycle. As a scalable proposal of adaptable, interchangeable components, APIS MELLIFERA seeks to propose new ideological conditions for a non-anthropocentric model for living, dying, and recycling the components of its internal food economy to provide greater long-term environmental and agricultural security.
Faculty: Jonas Coersmeier
Teaching Assistant: Kyle Troyer
LoLux design studios develop hybrid typologies for low-income and luxury housing and propose new kinds of public common spaces in New York City. In the 2022 fall semester, LoLux Care proposes an integrated housing community within the Farragut estate in downtown Brooklyn. This community provides homes and services for children that are cared for by people who are not their biological parents.
The disciplinary project LoLux discusses socio-economic and political issues in urban housing and how they relate to the architectural mandate. It takes the position that architecture provides cultural content, creates spatial, material, and aesthetic value, and thus holds the potential for improving human coexistence in a more just society.
The studio introduces Material Urbanism as a design method and a disciplinary position for urban design. It is invested in the materiality of the urban condition and promotes a reading of the city as an organism of living matter. It points to urban atmospheres and sensations as material effects that cannot be produced by purely rational operations of the topdown planning method. It rejects the idea of the master plan, not only as a potential authoritarian instrument, but also as an inefficient method of dealing with the complexities of massive global phenomena (global warming and urbanization) and frequent challenges to the very idea of social urban space (quarantine and social distancing.) At the same time, it gives value to design coherence at the scale of urban structures. It does so by ascribing design intelligence to matter itself.
Material Urbanism as a design method gives agency to material behaviors in physical models. Its projects are based on organizational and aesthetic principles found in the study of aleatory material expression.
Located on a section of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE), this project was once social housing provided by NYCHA in the 19th century. However, the BQE’s capacity for large vehicles has caused significant pollution, earning it the “Monster” nickname. The government and developers aim to transform the BQE into a multifunctional space, incorporating education, economics, employment, and entertainment, to turn it into a “beauty”. This project aims to enhance residents’ quality of life at the urban level by providing additional housing units. Green areas from the expressway will be integrated into the community, creating
a convenient pathway to a city park. The project hybridizes new tower and mat housing typologies with existing buildings to create healthier living conditions through amplified sunlight conditions while simultaneously exploring alternate densifying strategies. Meanwhile, the expressway will become a city park, extending into existing buildings and densifying the site with towers and mat buildings.
At the housing level, the project focuses on two living types of units: units for foster care and units for the grand family model. Foster-care units feature comfortable bedrooms and extended larger spaces to play and study as well as expanded kitchens with better views for caregivers to provide guardianship. While grandfamily units have all bedrooms in one area and a separate courtyard
to encourage interaction and prevent isolation, children’s bedrooms are larger to accommodate their privacy as they grow. Partition walls between children’s bedrooms are interchangeable, providing flexibility. Overall, the housing design prioritises comfort and safety for children and caregivers, improving residents’ quality of life.
Focusing on the urban scheme of the Farragut Houses located in Brooklyn, New York – this project aims to provide essential amenities that is drastically needed by the Farragut community. By extending the existing buildings upwards with the addition of a bridging connection, Substance Exigency offers diverse apartment units for families, foster care children,
and single individuals. Furthermore, amenities such as libraries and food resources are offered to residents to give back to the community and provide additional job opportunities. The neighborhood suffers from food isolation. Residents must travel more than 3 miles to stock up on food due to the gentrification and the high costs of DUMBO and Vinegar Hill. Hence, the proposal of integrating a grocery store and food bank into the residential blocks. Furthermore, there tends to be a massive cultural difference
between foster children and their takers (as well as a lack of education). To combat this issue, libraries are located at the top of each tower. These libraries would provide free sources to not only the children there but also the other residents.
Faculty: Scott Erdy
Teaching Assistant: Joseph Depre
Philadelphia has a unique history in using music for social change. The songwriters and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s Black-owned label Philadelphia International Records turned a city’s aesthetic into a movement that reverberated around the world. Beginning shortly after the Civil Rights protests of the late 60s, the Philadelphia songwriters began putting together a music empire that later became known as Philadelphia Soul. They became a contemporary of Barry Gordy Jr’s Motown Sound from Detroit and, unlike Motown, Gamble and Huff challenged the commercial norms of apolitical subject matter in their songs.
The Enterprise Center has a rich and diverse practice supporting minority entrepreneurs and under-resourced communities spanning more than three decades. In 1994, the Enterprise Center purchased the then-dilapidated WFIL Studios building at 46th and Market Streets—the original home of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand - a music-performance and dance television program that opened the door to a broader acceptance of multi-cultural music in the late 1950’s.
The semester began with the design of a mobile single occupancy dwelling to provide a compact, self-sustaining shelter to accommodate the basic needs of a resident DJ. This analytical study provided the conceptual basis for the development of a living module that was adapted for the specific needs of the program. The building project reimagined the Bandstand as part of a Public Common Space methodology, both on site and as pop-up phenomena. Within the confines of a 50,000sf building project, students developed more inclusive modes of housing centered around the study, creation, production, distribution and performance of music.
The Enterprise Center, the original home of the show American Bandstand in 1950s, was culturally crucial to West Philly communities. The show was firstly established here in the building, and the recording studio has witness and recorded the moments of the neighborhood, symbolized as the heart of the community.
Lining up at the gateway, people were waiting to get in to celebrate as the TV show started in the 1950s. The entrance was sacred to the community, connecting to the recording studio as the gathering center. The satellite was the discharge point to the outer world. The project aims to cherish the history and the culture, with the help of the intermedia of recording studio.By translating time into architecture, it is able to communicate not only professional people from music industry but also give back to the community itself.
The project takes circulation as the starting point. By taking the original pathway into the studio, the circulation design expands the circulation and wraps it above the Bandstand. The entrance next to the gate, creating a sacred experience.
Muqiao Lei, Tuplet Tower:
Drawing inspiration from the musical concept of ‘tuplet’, this architectural project bridges more than just physical spaces—it unifies cultures and communities. Poised between a high-rise residential zone and the iconic original bandstand, Tuplet Tower stands as an embodiment of harmony, fusing urban
fabric from both sides. Within its walls, musicians find their residence, seamlessly integrated with the broader musical ecosystem. A physical bridge allows them to effortlessly traverse to the America Bandstand, and further, descend into an expansive concert hall, complete with a dedicated DJ stage. Beyond mere performance and residence, the tower facilitates a continual flow of creative dialogue. Musicians, emerging from their home, immerse themselves in public spaces, fostering communication, and birthing melodic innovations.
Post-creation, they retreat, only to present their masterpieces to the world. Mirroring the tuplet, which binds individual notes into harmonious chords, Tuplet Tower coalesces diverse spaces, turning them into a singular, resonating composition.
Faculty: Richard Garber
Teaching Assistant: David Perrine
So much of urban housing is based on the premise of economy, manifested through ideas of affordability and efficiency. How might architects find a way to work with ideas of efficiency, which many times translates into a “lowest common denominator” attitude. The studio seeks to reconsider economy via the engagement of the unit – unit as voxel, dwelling unit, and modular unit within part-to- whole aggregation schemas – to challenge this notion so that new ideas of economy may arise from architectural novelty. The studio began with the development of a series of modules, or voxels, forming a taxonomy for the creative aggregation of building proposals that are at least partially attained through an offsite fabrication process. Prefabrication and modular construction are exposed as increasingly viable means to achieve dense and novel urban housing through dimensional constraints and aggregative logics of the unit, and is also historically significant on this Operation Breakthrough site in Jersey City. An attitude about the commons, and ideas about amenity and public space with respect to housing are further diversified through the engagement of the library. Specifically, a 20,000 square foot branch library added to the site in 1975 is being adaptively reused to address 21st century media while functioning as a bridge between publicly accessed grounds, the existing housing structures, and our proposals. Student proposals are being developed with the stakeholder participation of both the Chief of Staff and Assistant Director of the Jersey City Free Public Library.
BOTH/AND is a modular housing project that seeks to meet the housing needs of Jersey City’s community while celebrating the spirit of the library as a center of communal outreach and engagement.
Looking to the library as a hub of resources, residents are invited to share resources through various hybridized programmatic installments within the building’s circulatory paths. This includes a vertical track system integrated within the columns that allows residents to share resources with non-residents and vice versa. Every part of the building then becomes an opportunity for engagement amongst neighbors, not just within the halls but across the neighborhood.
The modular construction process follows a partto-whole logic to maximize efficiency while allowing flexibility for future changes. Units are able to adapt to the evolving needs of the occupant while minimizing construction waste. BOTH/ AND is an attempt to give BOTH public AND private moments, permanency AND flexibility, time outside AND inside, opportunities for giving AND receiving.
The concept of light and shadow, along with its unceasing association with religious and philosophical references, often signifies its significance in our daily lives. By default, our homes and the spaces we inhabit are dominated by shadows. However, when we allow light to enter these spaces, it creates a multitude of dimensions through the interplay of brightness
and darkness. This balance of light and shadow not only sets the mood of the space, but also gently integrates our emotions and spirit into it. This project aims to showcase the harmonious interplay of light and shade in our living spaces by utilizing spatial divisions and a combination of opaque and transparent elements. In the context of a modular housing project, the arrangement of space divisions, assemblage of volumes, and their relationships are carefully designed to enhance
the smooth and ambient conditions of the interior lighting. The room divisions and volumes are created through a simple composition of geometric objects. The unconventional and independent nature of the room taxonomies allows for distinctive and unique stacking and assembling at each level
Faculty: Ben Krone
Teaching Assistant: Rhea Nayar
Housing for lower income groups is an enormous issue nationwide. Upscale and profitable development often undermines efforts to sanction land use to house families at or below the poverty line. For decades cities have been trying to figure out ways to deal with the issue. Early attempts included failed experiments in large-scale low-income housing developments that lead to a host of socioeconomic issues. As cities have evolved these traditionally poor neighborhoods have been endangered by the rapid expansion of market rate development in neighboring areas. In recent times an assortment of new innovative urban growth policies have been put to the test.
A new trend in market rate development of both permanent and temporary housing has moved much closer to the models set up by transient housing of the past. Market rate hotels and apartment rental developments are offering alternatives to traditional unit typology with many shared basic amenities like kitchens common living areas, and even in some cases shared bathrooms. Cost is not always the driving factor in the choice to live in these developments. Millennial tendencies are toward the social space, viewing housing as more of a necessity rather than a luxury, where the opportunity to socialize and mix with others is more important than larger privatized spaces.
The studio will propose a solution for integration of existing red hook creative community programs and housing into the existing Liberty Warehouse. The building will provide a diversified type of living units as well as an integration into the Red Hook community by incorporating local vendor and artist spaces in the podium level (public common spaces).
Featured Student Work: Alexa Rojas
112,130
In times of crisis, the Red Hook community is a resilient force founded by immigrant families and traditional values. Obstructionium views this as an opportunity to showcase how the Rood Hook community faces adversity. By observing how this community reacts to crisis, we can discern that what is seemingly disparate and ‘disorganized’ becomes self-organized against external forces. Thus, the project becomes
an embodiment of responsive action – one which consists of a plethora of roles, opinions, and movements, yet these relationships are innate and fall into place. Pushing Red Hook’s New York traditional communities and values, this projects develops separate subgroups, little communities, or even families within a larger scheme. While these housing clusters are separate, they are united by program. A centralized caretaker unit is placed within a housing cluster to provide care and support for other families, couples, or single members.
Additionally, these clusters are interlocked transversely with shared community spaces such as laundry rooms, gyms, and a business center. The idea of community through adversity has translated into an architecture that seems innate to the site yet is broken into separate clusters – hosting mini identities throughout the housing project.
Coastal Custodian uses the notion of erosion and reconstruction as a ritually resilient practice to act alongside Red Hook’s dynamic landscape of urban-water interface. These rituals of reconstruction are superimposed onto each housing module and the wider context of liberty warehouse, blurring the boundaries between performance, restoration, and construction. The housing module was developed through an iterative process that preserved the language of tessellations, in-fill, and fill to create a multi-level apartment unit with public/open terraces and rooftop spaces for collecting rainwater for irrigation and simultaneously cultivate native plant species and provide spaces for urban farms. Selective removal of parts of liberty warehouse offers a more long-term approach to flood defense within Red Hook (a coastal A Zone) through embracing coastal erosion and flooding to generate wetland creation and rewilding.
Faculty: Tina Manis
Teaching Assistant: Harsana Siva
The premise of this studio is embedded within the idea of a ‘commensal’ relationship — a rigorous exploration of the discrepancy between vacancies of the ubiquitous office building and the critically increasing need for sustainable workforce housing within the radically shifting communities in New York City. By 2021, Brooklyn housing demands grew by 78,300 while the population increased by more than 230,000. Current office vacancy rates in NYC, post pandemic, still hover around 40%. The majority of them sit within the boundaries of Manhattan while in contrast, Brooklyn’s vacancies currently account for 18.3% of the city’s total. Companies — established and upstart — are rapidly moving to Downtown Brooklyn taking advantage of low rents and addressing employee demands to work closer to home. Downtown Brooklyn is home to over 8000 new businesses with more migrating over from Manhattan. The borough is now reemerging as a creative nucleus of tech, digital strategy, architecture, retail, engineering and commercial business in sizes ranging from 100 to 25 employees of whom over half live in Brooklyn.
Initiated by the 2014 rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn, development of ‘BK2’ is occurring fast; a swath of old neighborhoods has been removed to make way for new mixed use developments. Here is our opportunity of ‘Infrastructural optimism’ which you will utilize to define an infrastructure that prioritizes sustainable and equitable architectural pursuits for the benefit of the city’s workforce population. The overtly missed opportunity is the reuse of existing office structures that have been the core of Downtown Brooklyn for decades. Now rezoned, BK2 can be reinvented as sustainable opportunities to build a new hybrid model for efficient housing communities centered upon a community program that will directly support the residents.
Featured Student Work:
Jenna Arndt ..................................................................... 118
Siyu Gao ........................................................................... 120
“Sentient Hub is about anchoring a self-sustaining textile recycling center and housing proposal into the existing urban complexities of the BK2 district. This proposal seeks to aid in community sustainability and rejuvenation through the process of collecting locally used and discarded textiles, processing this amalgam of fiber products through a series of transformative systems, and fabricating recycled
goods by demand of the local community.
The extensive catalog of potential commodities to be produced from this hub includes disaster-relief resources, building system materials, and beyond depending on the product demand of the community feeding the initial recycled materials. Residents in the housing proposal are encouraged to engage in this transformative cycle of textile reclamation in one of many facility workshops and laboratories. The Sentient Hub operationally redirects
local waste and accumulated textile remains back into a system of creation and use while promoting community resilience through financial gain and entrepreneurial ownership.”
“Buffered Sanctuary” is a housing project in the B2K area of Downtown Brooklyn. It takes the existing structure and builds a new typology of mixed-use housing for the residents of this area.
This adaptive reuse opens up the opportunity to pay homage to the existing infrastructure of the neighborhood, while expands new forms and possibilities for the community. With the recently
developed complex on top of the previous establishment, it offers a sanctuary, a place of peace and respite, away from everything happening on the street level.
Faculty: Brian Phillips
Teaching Assistant: Lachelle Weathers
Housing has never been more unaffordable across American cities than it is today. Part of the reason is that markets tend to emphasize the easy money of single-family homes and high-rise luxury buildings that both of fit into clearly established investment categories. Everything in between, where most people fit into the housing market, is messier to define, finance and promote. In response, this studio will unapologetically focus on everyday “middle scale” housing. Often defined by what it is not (a single house or a high-rise tower) it is the mid-rise, walk-up density that defines great neighborhoods from Brooklyn, to Paris, to Philadelphia. It is typically defined by a strong connection to street edges and frontages, ample outdoor space (stoops, terraces, and accessible roofs), limited interior circulation, and often reliant on wood frame construction techniques. Among planners, this “gentle” density is considered just the right balance of units and cost that allows for walkable, convenient communities without promoting an over-heated real estate market. It remains an under-explored and undervalued component of the urban housing dossier and provides incredible opportunities for shaping an inclusive and attainable urban future.
The Frankford neighborhood is characterized by Rowhouse blocks that have the shape and scale of courtyard buildings. However, these blocks look outward to the street rather than inward to a common shared space. This project looks to invent a hybrid Rowhouse courtyard typology that achieves the density, circulation. And social advantages of both. Between the rowhouses, are mini courtyards for informal activities and bigger open
courts be between clusters for recreation and landscape. This project has established three rowhouse types on the site linked together by common design elements that make the variety a coherent whole. The project also picks up on the mixed program history of the neighborhood fabric by including shopping and commercial activities. A specific unit type that faces James Street connects a dwelling unit with a street-level storefront creating a “Shop house” typology. Other existing building spaces of the old factory become neighborhood amenities.
The row home has proven to be a resilient and ever-evolving housing typology for centuries- before, during, and after industrialism. The construction and density of this typology in urban centers has signified economic opportunity providing close proximity to places of work. Over time, the row house fabric has proven its resilience by continuing to organize daily life and the social networks of communities despite economic shifts and decline. The neighborhood around the former Blumenthal Chocolate Factory in Northeast Philadelphia is a fitting example because century old row houses remain the dominant places of dwelling, despite scattered vacancy and neglect.
Regardless of the chocolate factory’s abandonment, the high level of activity from neighbors and children on front porches and sidewalks is an important defining characteristic of the neighborhood. Residential backyards also revealed a high level of informal activity with a significant presence of barbecues, above-ground pools, child playhouses, sheds, and other ad hoc amenities. These findings and observations of the neighborhood’s existing environment in combination with the rowhome’s previous association as a place of opportunity has led to the question of recreating desirability in the community through the transformation of the abandoned site and James Street by amplifying and repositioning the most successful features of the existing neighborhood fabric.
The historical transformations of large cities around the world, from modern metropolises to postindustrial megacities, have radically altered our urban environments and how we live within them. Globally networked markets have produced new economic and political realities leading to unprecedented forms of regulatory frameworks, urban growth, and densification. Infrastructural and technological innovations have changed the ways we build, move, and communicate in the city. Ecological pressures are expanding our understanding of design as an organic and symbiotic endeavor that must consider and incorporate nonhuman actors and agencies. Recent crises triggered by infectious diseases and social unrest remind us of the dual meaning of the term ‘city’ as both a physical place and a community of citizens. The architecture of the city is always also the staging ground for individual self-expression and collective political action. These transformations -which are mostly co-dependentimpact profoundly the dynamic material and cultural systems we casually refer to as the city. Familiar territories dissolve, contradictions flourish, and novel situations emerge. In this
constantly shifting urban landscape new opportunities arise, not only for architecture’s latest design ambitions (be they pragmatic, experimental, or speculative), but also for a fundamental reexamination of the contemporary city, its meaning and definitions, its politics and aesthetics, its potentials and challenges.
Each studio section of 701 focuses on a design problem in a domestic or international urban area. Research includes travel and detailed study of the specific circumstances of the chosen city and the design problem. While this studio is concerned with the future of cities, it is not an urban design or a planning studio. The projects are selected to operate on a large architectural scale, such as mega-buildings, city-blocks, infrastructure, urban parks, etc. The future of cities relies on our capacity to develop robust visions that foster new forms of societal participation, ecological collaboration, technological innovation, and ultimately inspire and captivate through exemplary architectural design.
Faculty: Ferda Kolatan
Part-time Faculty: Caleb
Ehly
The ancient settlements in the Cappadocia region of Turkey present a compelling contrast to our own fast-paced times. For approximately 4000 years, the soft volcanic tuff in the area has served Hittite, Persian, Greek, and Turkic peoples as the base material from which to carve out their homes, animal shelters, and spaces for social gatherings, cultural activities, and religious worship. The adaptation and utilization of rock in architecture has resulted in intriguing typological variations with a unique aesthetic. The cave dwellings are also examples for a resource-efficient and environmentally sustainable approach to construction as the volcanic tuff provides natural cooling during the hot summer months and warmth during the harsh winters. While Cappadocia has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985, many of the cave dwellings are still being used by the local community, primarily used as hotels, restaurants, and shops.
The studio explored the unique geographical, historical, cultural, technological, material, and aesthetic circumstances that define the region and devised prototypes for a contemporary rock architecture for Cappadocia and beyond. Ancient iconography, such as those seen in the frescoes of early rock churches, were combined with mundane cultural expressions inspired by current practices such as tiling, patternmaking, and weaving to create novel architectural hybrids that defy strict disciplinary boundaries. The ultimate goal of these architectural hybrids is to demonstrate the compelling and versatile capacity of rock dwellings for today. Featured Student Work:
Kyle Troyer & Jorge Couso, Pigeons
Carving techniques have historically been a facet of producing unnatural surface treatments while provoking sectional spatial relationships within thick amounts of poche. Emphasizing the shear as a primary carving technique, our proposal interrogates how the oblique can be deployed to reveal unlikely material and programmatic affinities and to suggest architectural space within the Pigeon Valley of the Cappadocia region. This deployment of a new aesthetic language combines the habitation of pigeons and humans into a self-sustaining model, where the collection of pigeon guano is interrogated for its agrarian role in the fertilization process.
Expanding on the rich histories of egg whites, murals of a rich blue Iznik color are covered in a high-gloss finish and span across programmatic spaces deep within the mountain. Throughout the region, the mural has long been understood as a cultural device that communicates what is often a ritualistic space to its inhabitants. By reshaping conventional thoughts on what a mural is, we begin to reassess the role of ritual in architecture as something that is less involved in religious order and instead highlights the confounding of unlike mediums to produce sensational volumetric vignettes throughout the project.
Rhea Nayar & Sarah Johnson, Tile Valley
While a common architectural material in many cultures, tile became a widespread cladding material in Turkey during the Ottoman period as it evolved from a decorative element to a durable construction method for roofing. This project seeks to investigate large format Iznik tiles as a new reinforcing method and aims to showcase the ecology of its machine-like process at different scales along our site in Goreme, Cappadocia. In order to address areas most prone to drastic winds and pyroclastic flows, we identified a site that lies on the cusp of the table-like plateaus and steep valleys, subject to unpredictable and intense levels of erosion. When thinking about modern
interventions in rock architecture we were interested in how our site could take on a new visual character by acting as a large depository for discarded tiles. The harshly eroded slope creates a unique opportunity for us to repurpose the discarded tiles with a high stiffness geotextile netting to cap and safeguard the landscape.
Throughout the interior spaces of the imagined hotel, large pixelations of tile plaster the formations creating a feeling reminiscent of the cave churches of the region. While a different purpose, meaning and space, the colors and carvings create a space that is both novel and familiar.
Faculty: Homa Farjadi
Part-time Faculty : Chang Yuan (Max) Hsu
This semester we extend our research into speculative constructions of sense in contemporary architecture. We explore potential for architectural sense framed under the concept of the sublime asking how this concept can be relevant to our relationship to the environment around us, in nature as well as in the city; whether, and how it can articulate and affect processes of design in architecture now. The work of Konrad Wachsmann (1901-1980) as a design text in our pairing, will focus our analytic attention in the way it aims at the disappearance of architecture. In Mark Wigley’s account ‘Wachsmann sees architecture weighing people down with inherited frozen forms rather than engaging them with the new fluid networks of energy formation, where solid immobile buildings need to give way to something as delicate, mobile and ephemeral as the smoke of his ever-present cigarette’ intending to create a form of antiarchitecture. We shall learn of Wachsmann’s passion for factory made buildings with elegant 3 directional design joints; of his will to create an infinitely self-generating architecture. His project for US Air Force airplane hangars, are elegant examples of the material lightness, scalar expanse of the horizon enabled by the 3d joint. His Grapevine structures explore the continuum of horizontal and vertical structural forces which enmesh the elemental joint within a 3d network. We will explore his design in collaboration with Walter Gropius of the packaged house. And we shall consider what he called LOM, Locatory Orientation Mobilator. His so called negative concepts relative to the authorial position, in the design of Networks, anti-monument, infinite extension, self-generation and the immaterial, interests us as we look at them as strategies for a sense formation to intersect with our text 2 on the concept of the sublime.
Featured Student Work: Li Yang & Weiwei Gao .............................................. 144,168 Joao Freitas & Emily Shan ............................................. 146
Sublime Hinge is a research project about proximity, fold ing, and forming. The project derived from the 9 Hinge by Wachsman and the Sublime study about transcendence. Folding a hinge element three-dimensionally can create a modular space with infinite variations. Meanwhile, challenging the quantity and scale of repetitive
single-modules have the potential to explore a spatial experience of transcendence. Therefore, the project design starts from the discrete single-module, folding and forming hinges in characteristic angles (60 and 90) for structural stability. One module could create spatial moments, but merging and repeating will alter the visual understanding of elements from a discrete stage to a continuous one. Merging a single spatial moment in a set of 3 or 4 generates the basic programmatic modules. These modules create an expansive hinge
system extending in site, the Fairmount Park responding to the slope. The layout of the discrete moment and the continuous spatial line is broken by each other. At the same time, specific module aggregations are challenged in scale to create another layer of transcendence experience in the program. Cross-laminated timber is the key structural material for the folding Hinge. The inclusive and flexible spatial design ultimately embraces an experimental transition between integral massing and discrete moments.
In Unbounded Oscillation, Konrad Wachsmann’s Mobilar Structure, a space frame mechanism, and Julia Kristeva’s written work Approaching Abjection meet to create abject architecture. Kristeva writes “subject and object push each other away, confront each other, collapse, and start over again – [they are] inseparable, contaminated, condemned … [therefore] abject.” The Mobilar Structure is redefined - the subject acts with structural and spatial efficiency whereas the object generates redundancy. The push and pull of the two define transformations of the abject. Using a constructed landscape as the parti allows
existing edges to merge seamlessly with the new and for formation of selective relationships between the subject, object, and abject. In some instances, the landscape is deformed by structure, while in others it obscures it completely. Strategies of embedding create a wide range of scalar and spatial conditions that become occupied by predetermined programs such as recreational, performance, and educational services that join the University with the local neighborhood across the river. The margins around these preset programs act flexibly, able to take on functions that suite the present needs of both communities.
Unbounded Oscillation explores interpretations of the value of architecture across multiple scales that challenge what is perceived versus reality.
Faculty: Simon Kim
Part-time Faculty : Logan Weaver
This semester, architecture is charged with the city as a Worldbuilding exercise. Worldbuilding is not a new term but has found its way into our work with the use of active imaginaries, Foucauldian heterotopias, Afrofuturism, and other strategies whereby the vessel of architecture is an agent within a much larger narrative of ground, human and nonhuman cultures, weathers, and ecosystems.
There needs to be a paradigmatic shift in how we sort and measure the environment that Worldbuilding portends. Our humancentric tools and our umwelt, or capacity in how we understand everything, are no longer capable of dealing with the critical manner in how other agents and systems apply their own sovereignties. Essentially, architecture can no longer be seen as an elitist human ark for which our capitalist and supremacist signs and signifiers apply only to our endeavors. This is how we have come to be an unsustainable industry. Architecture, like a body turned inside out, must also afford occupancy for more than just humans.
This studio will look at our own nonhuman version of artificial intelligence. AI – free and untethered – promises a synthetic intelligence liberated from human prejudice and capable of self-learning that surpasses its programming. It possesses the capability to self-govern, learn, change, and surprise.
We are also working with award-winning screenwriter Jon Spaihts, writer of Dune 2022, Prometheus, and other films, to produce new worlds and narratives. The site of the studio is in Los Angeles. With its panoply of strange ecologies (tar pits, oil fields, wetlands, coastlines) and weathers, LA is an ideal site for worldbuilding.
Project Rock and Roll offers a unique world-building approach in the heart of Los Angeles. It thrives on a distinct non-human centric model, celebrating biodiversity and synthetic nature. The project incorporates two homunculi, the Rocker and the Roller, symbolizing a symbiotic relationship of opposite characteristics. The Rocker, a robust structure formed of concrete and metal, extracts
moisture from the air and documents its environment. The Roller, light and organic, releases seeds as it moves, simultaneously eroding and growing. Four transformative architectural characters are developed from the behaviors and characteristics of the two homunculi, each fostering different organisms. The Manimal breeds and nurtures hybrid fauna. The Putant grows mutated, pollutant-purifying plants, which spread throughout the site. The Fungle decomposes organic matter, nourishing the soil with fungi, and the
Outsect, a hovering entity, controls material exchange throughout the site, deploying mechanical insects for various tasks. In essence, Rock and Roll is an audacious attempt at reconstructing the Inglewood Oil Field ecosystem, transforming it into a flourishing synthetic nature site. The project encourages new species to thrive, emphasizes the importance of co-existence, and redefines the relationship between architecture and the natural world.
There is an architecture that travels Los Angeles. The building has two states: it collects and it curates. The following series of referenced works are formulated solely by this homunculus. Its emergence in the landscape of Los Angeles’ urban fabric began its role as a collector. As it traverses across disparate environments, it collects human waste materials that makes up its own body and functioning system. The body is an incubator for a new world. As it accumulates material, new hybrid environments are created until it longer has the capacity for it. When it reaches this state of death, it deposits new hybrid environments where novel natures are ultimately curated. This cycle repeats itself for as long as civilization persists. Through the lens of a homunculi, we are reminded that we must find new, critical ways to reflect on the architecture and monuments we have inherited and to imagine those we have yet to build.
Faculty: Karel Klein
Part-time Faculty : Reem Abi Samra
Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, was full as recently as 2000. However, this year will mark the 23rd year of a severe drought, matching the duration of the longest known mega-drought, and the driest period the region has experienced in the past 1,200 years. In 2018, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power proposed a $3 billion project to use solar and wind energy to pump downstream water back into the reservoir, thereby turning the dam into a giant battery. This studio will use this proposal as an opportunity for the re-imagining of Hoover Dam and its abutting landscape. Utilizing several AI network types, we will experiment with the ways in which training, and particularly mis-training artificial intelligence can produce something akin to an externalized and augmented imagination—an intelligent and creative autonomy not fully within our control.
Featured Student Work:
Willhoit
The Colorado River, on which this project sits, is over accounted for. The seven basin states that receive a share of the water are in constant conflict, when rainfall does not meet expectation, which it consistently fails to do. A 1968 resolution prioritizes some areas, like California, over others. This project is situated literally on the edge of the upper basin and lower basin of the river, and
straddles two states and time zones, Arizona and Nevada. The Hoover Dam, representing the cross-roads of all of these borders is the perfect place for diplomacy in water policy. Half Empty creates neutral ground for resolution. A future resolution will not be a one-time policy, but will be in constant flux, responding to projections and changing societies. The project will be a re-occuring place of assembly, with visitors returning frequently to discuss these issues.
By utilizing AI imagery, this project envisions a radically
new intervention embedded within the dam. Employing GAN software in a feedback loop process allowed us to read spaces and details flat images. The space unfolded in dreamlike flourishes, as procession from a world of noticeable political boundaries, to an alien enclosure of neutrality.
Junyi Zhou & David E. Perrine, Genesis
The studio’s brief provoked us to explore possible futures for the Hoover Dam by training Style_GAN models to explore new aesthetic techniques and registers. Through various biological, chemical, and geological image libraries, we were able to general Style_ GAN models whose images possessed uncanny attributes. Our project then worked from speculations of “The Accursed Share” by George
Bataille. In the text, Bataille puts forward a theory of economics that focuses on how surplus energy is expended. The theory claims that as society progresses and produces its necessary means of iteration, a residual excess of energy builds up until its inevitable purge through luxurious expenditure, warfare, non-reproductive sexual activity, or art production.
The project interprets the Hoover Dam and surrounding landscape as a possible site for such expenditure. We envisioned a crack piercing through the Hoover Dam
allowing excess water to flow through. A seed bank and a bio-lab that produces new organisms are nested in the opening. As excess water flows through the aperture, new, engineered organisms are released, which serve to exert their influence downstream. The result is an additive and subtractive intervention that provokes a genesis through the harnessing of excess resources.
Faculty: Barry Wark
Part-time Faculty : Maria
Sofia Garcia
The studio speculated on new ecological aesthetics for architecture that moved beyond the sweetness and comfort of ‘naturedesign’, instead celebrating and promoting awareness of the interconnectedness of all matter in the built environment. The proposals view buildings not as pristine monuments but as assemblies of ‘vibrant matter’ coexisting and entangling with all biosphercial agents. To aid in that endeavour, and avoiding the building trending solely towards ruin, the students designed projects as an assembly of open and adaptive parts, operating over large timescales with multiple lives and post lives of both occupants and fragments. Projects developed their own taxonomy of parts with different qualitative and quantitative properties considering their use and post use, viewing weathering and degradation of buildings not as a passive inevitability but as an active design project that architects and designers should engage with to curate and develop desired effects. Inherent in this idea is the perpetual degradation, rearranging and construction of various parts over time. This in turn allows for the building to be experienced as a ruin and a new construction simultaneously, thus providing the primitive role of architecture to mitigate our environment whilst allowing its inhabitants to engage with new forms of spatial experience in our cities. Students designed spaces that provided a form of public utility for Fish Island, in Hackney Wick, London. The projects are conceived as not quite a park and not quite a building but a new spatial territory in our cities where urban inhabitants’ consciousness and experience of ecology can manifest in a novel way.
Featured Student Work: Joseph Depre & Lachelle Weather ......................... 162,170 Sumeng Chen & Xinlei Liu ............................................. 164
The project speculates on the future of public space in London where the effects of climate change could produce an environment that frequently sees temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius. It is conceived as a series of permanent, passive cooling elements combined with a reconfigurable assembly of parts designed for thermal mass and to display the buildings enmeshment with it’s environment.
The buildings form is generated by the shadows of designated vertical cooling elements, acting as seeds in a procedural design system based on iterative solar analysis . The urban mass developed within the shadows generate large canyon like volumes that are inhabited by many spatial and atmospheric conditions. The stepped zones and the facades of the building consists of parts using 3d printed sand that have varying thickness based on their solar exposure. The north facing side is more porous, textured, and vegetated while the south facing is more solid for thermal mass.
Sumeng Chen & Xinlei Liu, District Heating Park
Over time, our infrastructure has become more hidden and moved further from our consciousness. Historically, power stations were prominent landmarks in our cities, especially in London with both Bankside and Battersea power station occupying sites on River Thames. However, due to development and health problems associated
with these buildings, they were eventually moved out of the city.
The project provides an infrastructure park where people can appreciate the enmeshment of energy and environment in the city through a district heating and cooling plant.
Conceived as an assembly of parts, the project is designed to be rebuilt over time, allowing for new technology to be installed and the building reconfigured to meet the needs of the community. Working with 45 degrees slopes, the building attempts
to simultaneously create temporal ambiguity by emulating the language of the adjacent Victorian warehouse buildings and angled surfaces that slow down water run off to accelerate weathering and the display of the building’s enmeshment with its environment.
The project rejects the notion that our infrastructure should be removed from the city and instead speculates on how it might be integrated within the city to promote the awareness of the relationship between the ecology, infrastructure and systems that governs our life.
ARCH 5110
History and Theory I: Recitation
Faculty: Joan Ockman
Between the opening of the Crystal Palace in London and the construction of Lever House in New York City a century later, a modern culture of architecture emerged around the world. This historical overview places the evolution of architecture from the middle of the nineteenth century through World War II into global perspective, taking into account not just transformations in building practice and architectural aesthetics, but the broader sociopolitical, economic, technological, environmental, and intellectual forces that contributed to them. We trace modern architecture’s changing modes of production and reception, its disciplinary and institutional
innovations, the debates that animated it, and the global interchanges that circulated a culture of modernism worldwide. Going well beyond iconic buildings and canonical “isms,” we pose the following questions: In what ways did architecture respond to, participate in, and mediate the unprecedented experiences of modernizing societies? How did urban and environmental crises, colonial ambitions and devastating wars, social crises and technological advances affect architects’ understanding of the spaces they were called upon to design? How, in turn, did new buildings and projects reflect societies’ self-images and their aspirations to become modern? What can architecture’s manifestations over the course of this hundred years tell us about the meaning of modernity itself? In attempting to answer
these questions, we take note of shifting historiographic paradigms and reflect on the genealogical relationship and relevance of this formative period to architectural thought and practice today. The course aims to foster a strong understanding and appreciation of architectural history. The weekly lectures move through the century under study both chronologically and thematically. They are augmented by focused discussions in recitation sessions and by readings from a rich variety of primary and secondary sources.
ARCH 511 is the first half of a two-part sequence continuing in spring 2023 with ARCH 512, which picks up the narrative in the mid-twentieth century.
ARCH 5210
Visual Studies I
Faculty: Nate Hume, Daniel Markiewicz, Brian De Luna
The coursework of Visual Studies will introduce a range of new tools, skills, and strategies useful for the development and representation of design work. Drawing and modeling strategies will be investigated for ways in which they can generate ideas and forms rather than be used solely as production tools. Control and the ability to model in an intentional manner will be highlighted. Likewise, drawing exercises will stress the construction of content over the acceptance of digital defaults in order to more accurately represent a project’s ideas. Documents will be produced which strive to build on and question drawing conventions in order to more precisely convey the unique character of each project. The workflow will embrace a range of software to open up possibilities to achieve intended results and resist constraint of a single program’s abilities. The course will be separated into three modules each focusing on a different set of topics which are related to the work in studio. These modules will be in a sequential consolidation of techniques and methods. Each exercise must therefore be complete before progressing to the next. The exercises will have specific requirements and be presented by the students, as well as submitted for grading, before the next exercise is introduced.
Construction I
Faculty: Philip Ryan
This is the first of two courses explaining Construction Technology. The first course will introduce the student to the relationship of design and construction in the creation of buildings. The early lectures will trace the evolution and innovation of construction technique throughout history. It will then be followed by a primer describing how design and the act of drawing establishes a vocabulary that architect’s use to describe the construction of buildings. This will look at how conceptual design and communicating intent aids in the creation of a great building. The remainder of the semester will build a “light scale” building from the ground up, examining the fundamental material and construction concepts related to construction starting with excavation and ending with interior finishes. The labs will complement the lectures with site visits and more focused lessons.
ARCH 5350
Structures I
Faculty: Richard Farley, Masoud Akbarzadeh
The Structures courses serve multiple purposes within the program. Fundamental structural principles of systems, elements and materials are related to the study of morphology of structure. Methods are taught to develop skills, knowledge,
and intuition for the application of structures to architectural design, including form-finding. The students are propelled to apply analytical and digital skills directly to architectural design and to pursue structural optimization in subsequent seminars and design studios, carrying out into the profession. The Structures I course introduces structural principles, morphology, form-finding, and material science, complemented with digital analysis techniques that are verified with standard calculation techniques for selecting and sizing structural elements. This then becomes an increasing resource in the students’ architectural design process with consideration for physical dimensions, span, materiality, and construction determinants.
ARCH 6110-001
History and Theory III
Architecture and Labor Faculty: Daniela Fabricius, Miranda Mote
This section of History and Theory III will consider the relationship between architecture and labor across a number of contemporary topics. We will examine how architecture has shaped the spatial organization and distribution of labor in buildings and cities, but also what the economies and conditions of labor in architectural design and construction are today. More specifically, we will discuss the gendered and racialized aspects of labor, how labor is distributed across domestic and public spheres, the globalization, migration, and precarity of labor, immaterial and care labor, and potential alternative models. Students will discuss and write on theoretical texts on labor in conjunction with an analysis of case studies in urbanism, architecture, and the visual arts.
ARCH 6110-002
History and Theory III
Rebellious Architecture: On Social Movements for Spatial Justice
Faculty:
Eduardo Rega Calvo, Katherine Engleman
The module offers an introduction to some theoretical tools to explore a rebellious mode of practice for architecture, one that acknowledges its relations to the structures of power, and stands in solidarity with movements for justice. Through weekly readings, class presentations, and discussion, students will be introduced to the tools with which to navigate architecture’s entanglements with the social and political processes that produce space. They will become familiar with key concepts like the rebel, refusal, and spatial justice; expand their exposure to the roots of structural injustice (capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy), and their inscription in space and architecture; and learn from social movements for justice (autonomist, feminist, decolonial and post-capitalist) as they refuse the status-quo and construct other, more equitable worlds. Covering a wide range of essential theoretical texts, the class positions architecture in relation to other fields of study, including geography, anthropology, political theory, and beyond.
ARCH 6110-003
History and Theory III
Faculty: Ariel Genadt
This theory course explores the concept of resilience in architecture as it unfolds in the Japanese context in various moments. It begins with the preindustrial vernacular and continues into key moments from the 19th century to the 21st. It raises questions on the capacity of
design and construction to support a community’s resilience, that is, its ability to recover from major disruptions to its organization and achieve a state of equilibrium and /or growth. An architecture of resilience is here understood as the combination structural-technical and cultural-aesthetic aspects, considered jointly. Japan’s climatic and geological particularities have provided architects and urbanists many occasions to rethink their designs’ relation to its environment, long before the globalization of climatic instability has made resilience a burning issue. The discussion of Japanese case studies is meant to trigger critical thinking about parallel practices in the world, and to inspire creativity in dealing with the uncertainties societies face in the current climatic transition.
ARCH 6210
Visual Studies III
Faculty: Nate Hume, Daniel Markiewicz, Brian De Luna
The third and last in the series, Visual Studies 621 is taken by second year MArch students in their Fall semester.
621 integrates more dynamic modeling, texturing, and rendering applications to synthesize and propel work from the earlier modules. To avoid tropes and the inherent biases of the tools, the courses serve to help comprehend not only the technical and aesthetic but also the
theoretical and political implications of representation.
ARCH 6310
D3: Detail + Data + Delivery
Faculty: Franca Trubiano
This course is focused on advanced subjects in the project delivery of buildings: subjects inclusive of Building Organically with Carbon Responsive Materials and Details, Resiliency and Fossil Fuel Free Building Systems Integration, Construction Robotics and Advanced Prefabrication, and Artificial Intelligence, Digital Delivery, and Building Simulations. Students study complex, integrated, and sustainably determined buildings seeking their systems based, technological, and labor-based innovations.
Cultivating critical decision-making skills in service to the means and methods of building delivery remains an essential aspect of the architect’s work. Having advanced knowledge of project delivery material technologies, systems, and digital interfaces facilitates the translation of one’s design ideas into building; it also encourages a more ethical response to their use. D3 Detail + Data + Delivery asks students to critically assess the responsibility that we have as architects to define, use, and deploy technology in the building of our projects.
ARCH 6330
Environmental Systems I Faculty: Chenyang Lu
An introduction to the influence of thermal and luminous phenomenon in the history and practice of architecture. Issues of climate, health and environmental sustainability are explored as they relate to architecture in its natural
context. The classes include lectures, site visits and field exploration.
ARCH 6999-600
Technology Lab Faculty: Mohamad Al Khayer
The structural simulation component of the course is designed to help architecture students think visually about structural performance. It helps one assess the structural implications of morphological and geometric design decisions. Students are introduced to structural modeling, its terminologies, and components. Simulation software (VisualAnalysis) is introduced to visualize the structural behavior of a building and to gain instant feedback related to structural components’ geometries and properties.
ARCH 7710
Professional Practice II
Faculty: Philip Ryan
The second in a two-course sequence that discusses the issues and processes involved in running a professional architectural practice and designing buildings in the contemporary construction environment. Further study of the organizational structures of architectural practices today, especially those beyond the architect’s office. The course is designed as a series of lectures, workshops and discussions that allows students and future practitioners the opportunity to consider and develop the analytical skills required to create buildings in the world of practice.
ARCH 7110-001
Modern Architecture in Japan
– Culture, Place, Tectonics
Faculty: Ariel Genadt
This seminar explores the diversity of forms and meanings that architecture took on in Japan since its industrialization in the 19th century. With this focus, it poses wider questions on the capacity of construction, materials and their assembly to express and represent cultural, aesthetic, climatic, social and political concerns. Rather than an exhaustive survey, the course demonstrates salient topics and milestones in Japan’s recent architectural history, as a mirror of parallel practices in the world. It examines drawings, images, texts and films about architects whose work and words were emblematic of each topic. Topics include: an introduction to the geography and climate of Japan; preindustrial
canonical public buildings; domestic architecture and teahouses; a visit to Shofuso House and Garden; the establishment of architecture as a profession; technology and styles under Meiji; local and global modernism; Le Corbusier’s Japanese disciples; tradition and creation; Metabolist architecture - parts and wholes; formal expression and meaning in postmodern architecture; abstract, non-referential architecture; architectural articulation and reappraisal of tradition; ‘weak architecture’; architectural resilience; technology-enabled visual dematerialization.
ARCH 7110-002
Housing Insecurity: Intersections of Climate Change and Race
Faculty: Rashida Ng
Situated at the intersection of climate change and racial
equity, housing insecurity demands urgent attention. The United Nations predicts that the world population will exceed 11 billion people by the year 2100, increasing demand for food, water, and other essential resources, especially housing. As the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters (e.g. floods, storms, wildfires, and heatwaves) continues to rise, the provision of safe and resilient housing remains a critical need. In the United States, nearly one-third of all homes are highly vulnerable to climate disasters. At the same time, black, indigenous, and other households of color shoulder disproportionate impacts of climate change while facing systemic disparities in disaster relief assistance. As demonstrated most recently by the COVID-19 pandemic, the quality of people’s homes and communities is a key contributor
to racial health disparities. This seminar will examine historical and present-day frameworks of racial discrimination within housing and urban design, including redlining, infrastructural neglect, flood vulnerability, and urban heat and pollution. We will consider the impending threat of climate change to housing security in the United States and around the world. Engaging leading scholars and practitioners, the course will highlight actionable strategies that prioritize environmental justice and promote housing equity. Through readings, documentaries, and topically themed lectures, we will first explore the historical frameworks that precipitated housing inequities. Using Philadelphia as a model, students will prepare a timeline of historical events that are critical in understanding the sociocultural, economic, legal, and physical contexts of housing policy and design in the United States.
Design Research, Writing, and Critical Methodologies
Faculty: Matthew Shaw
This course is an introduction to critical discourse and experimental modes of criticism for designers. It will use contemporary examples from art, technology, and design to demonstrate how architects and designers can incorporate a theoretical or critical project into their work, as well as how to excel in a work environment. The course will focus on two types of workshops. The first will be a series of in-class exercises to develop writing skills, and the second will be a set of medium-form written assignments that will utilize and further strengthen those skills. This workshop is
meant to provide students with an introduction to the skills to write short and medium-form articles and treatises that communicate well-informed ideas clearly and in an engaging manner. The most important thing to take away is the ability to take a stance and espouse an opinion comfortably and clearly. This type of critical writing allows emerging designers and educators to engage with the communities around them and with current discourse by understanding the deeper issues surrounding specific objects or situations.
Designing Smart Objects for Play and Learning Faculty: Assaf Eshet
Today’s children enjoy a wide array of play experiences, with stories, learning, characters and games that exist as physical stand-alone objects or toys enhanced with electronics or software. In this course, students will explore the domain of play and learning in order to develop original proposals for new product experiences that are at once tangible, immersive and dynamic. They will conduct research into education and psychology while also gaining hands-on exposure to new product manifestations in a variety of forms, both physical and digital. Students will be challenged to work in teams to explore concepts, share research and build prototypes of their experiences in the form of static objects that may have accompanying electronic devices or software. Final design proposals will consider future distribution models for product experiences such as 3D printing, virtual reality and softwarehardware integration.
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Design Thinking Faculty: Violet Whitney
Creating new product concepts was once a specialized pursuit exclusively performed by design professionals in isolation from the rest of an organization. Today’s products are developed in a holistic process involving a collaboration amont many disciplines. Design thinking - incorporating processes, approaches, and working methods from traditional designers’ toolkits - has become a way of generating innovative ideas to challenging problems and refining those ideas. Rapid prototyping techniques, affordable and accessible prototyping platforms, and an iterative mindset have enabled people to more reliably translate those ideas into implementable solutions. In this course, students will be exposed to these techniques and learn how to engage in a human-centered design process.
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Design of Contemporary Products: Design for Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Faculty: Sarah Rottenberg
The power of design to shape the world we live in is increasingly obvious, as is the responsibility of designers to challenge our assumptions about who designs, who is included or marginalized by our designs, and how we can make sure that all design is inclusive design. This course will address issues around designing for equity, inclusion and accessibility and co-design. We will ask, What is inclusive design? Who does it serve? What should it look like? To answer these questions, we will engage with the current discourse around designing for equity, inclusion
and accessibility, with a particular focus on accessibility. We will engage with disability justice frameworks and critical disability studies to challenge our assumptions about disability and engagement. And we will connect with members of the disability community and co-design along with them. This course is intended for anyone who considers themselves a designer: of physical or digital products, places, or services who wants to prioritize inclusion in their practice.
Experiments in Structures
Faculty: Mohamad Al Khayer
This course studies the relationships between geometric space and those structural systems that amplify tension. Experiments using the hand (touch and force) in coordination with the eye (sight and geometry) will be done during the construction and observation of physical models. Verbal, mathematical and computer models are secondary to the reality of the physical model. However, these models will be used to give dimension and document the experiments. Team reports will serve as interim and final examinations. In typology, masonry structures in compression (e.g., vault and dome) correlate with “Classical” space, and steel or reinforced concrete structures in flexure (e.g., frame, slab and column) with “Modernist” space. We seek the spatial correlates to tensile systems of both textiles (woven or braided fabrics where both warp and weft are tensile), and baskets (where the warp is tensile and the weft is compressive). In addition to the experiments, we will examine Le Ricolais’ structural models held by the Architectural Archives.
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Technology Designated
Elective: Daylighting Faculty: Janki Vyas
This course aims to introduce fundamental daylighting concepts and tools to analyze the daylighting design. The wide range of topics to be studied includes site planning, building envelope and shading optimization, passive solar design, daylight delivery methods, daylight analysis structure and results interpretation, and a brief daylighting and lighting design integration.
ARCH 7320-002
Technology Designated
Elective: Material and
Structural Intelligence
Faculty: Sameer Kumar
Founded on a materialist ontology, Material and Structural Intelligence will explore the genesis of architectural form as informed by natural forces and material behavior. The course aims to utilize methods of thinking and making that are informed by these inherent forces and which would allow for the emergence of formal solutions that are inherently in equilibrium with their context and nature. The course relies on building sophisticated digital and physical models that parameterize real world metrics related to structural behavior and material performance.
The course will challenge students to develop physical, digital, and graphic tools to communicate complex ideas about form, structure and materiality. Special emphasis is given to the use of graphic representation, model making, simulation, and technical documentation as analytical tools.
ARCH 7320-003
Technology Designated
Elective: Geometric
Structural Design
Faculty: Masoud Akbarzadeh
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to novel geometric methods of structural design based on 2D and 3D graphical statics. The primary emphasis of the course will be on (i) developing a general understanding of the geometric representation of their internal and external equilibrium forces; and (ii) designing material tectonics based on the flow of forces in the system. Considering both force flow and material methods are necessary for designing efficient and innovative architectural structures. This semester, special consideration will be given to material and computational methods for the detail design of joinery and assembly process of spatial node. An appropriate fabrication technique needs to be studied to construct the entire complex geometry of the structure.
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Technology Designated
Elective: Matter, Making and Testing: Designing with Next Generation Precast Concrete Faculty: Richard Garber
This seminar will focus on precast concrete and specifically it’s history, materiality – how it is manufactured and the logistics of its assembly - and cultural affects through both its traditional uses within the urban environment
as well as new approaches to building typologies such as housing. Through a strategic partnership with Northeast Precast (NEP), based in Millville, NJ, students will gain access to places where precast concrete is made, formed, and put into action. The class will be organized as a seminar, with a group of 18 students. The course is being run in a “hybrid” context, meaning lectures will primarily be remote, however, physical access to materials and methods is an important aspect of the class. In addition to readings and case studies via remote delivery, students will have access to Northeast Precast’s state-ofthe-art facility where they will learn about the precast concrete manufacturing process and produce panel prototypes for wall assemblies that respond to structural, thermal, and water-proofing performance. Students will develop a delivery workflow utilizing digital tools to communicate with and transmit panel assembly and formwork concepts to NEP staff, fostering a collaboration opportunity for students that are not regularly experienced in architecture school.
Northeast Precast is our industry partner on a fouryear grant awarded by the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI) totaling about $330 K in financial and in-kind support.
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Technology Designated
Elective: Parametric Life Cycle Assessment for Buildings
Faculty: Kayleigh Houde
The environmental impacts of the built environment are staggering. Buildings are currently responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions, when both operational and
embodied carbon are taken into account. Architects have a vital role to play in responding to the current climate emergency, but we can only make substantial progress when we are equipped to evaluate decarbonization strategies and the effects of design decisions. This course brings together an introduction to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the industry-standard method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a building over its whole life cycle, paired with discussion on broader industry trends and technologies aimed at radically decarbonizing the built environment. In the course, students will receive hands-on experience building comparative LCA models, while also exploring material life cycles, industrial processes, supply chain dynamics, and political and economic dimensions of environmental impact data. We will also discuss current innovations in materials manufacturing and policy changes that focus on embodied carbon, which will transform construction practices. The overall goal of the course is to increase carbon literacy and to empower students with a working understanding of climate change, life cycle assessment, and the many strategies by which designers can immediately reduce the carbon footprint of their projects. This course does not require any previous modeling or software experience.
ARCH 7320-006
Technology Designated
Elective: Inquiry Into Bio Materials
Faculty: Laia Mogas-Soldevila
Traditional building materials are environmentally - and economically - expensive to extract, process, transport or recycle, their damage is non-trivial to repair, and have
limited ability to respond to changes in their immediate surroundings. Biological materials like wood, coral, silk, skin or bone outperform man-made materials in that they can be grown where needed, self-repair when damaged, and respond to changes in their surroundings. Their inclusion in architectural practice could have great benefits in wellbeing and the environment defining new tools and strategies towards the future of sustainable construction. Crucial projects describing future biomaterial architectures are emerging in the field. In this seminar, students will review their potential through lectures followed by case studies and propose future developments through a guided research project with special attention to functional, industrial, environmental, and aesthetic dimensions. The course is structured to foster fundamental scientific literacy, cross-disciplinary thinking, creativity, and innovation in biomaterials in design.
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Semi-Fictitious Realms Faculty: Jeffrey Anderson
The pursuit of immersive digital experiences has long been a goal of the computing industry. Early wearable displays designed in the 1960s depicted simple three-dimensional graphics in ways that had never been seen before. Through trial and error, digital pioneers reframed the relationship between user and machine, and over the last five decades, have made strides that advanced both the input and output mechanisms we are so comfortable with today. As a field, architecture has been reliant on these advancements to design and document buildings, but these tools still leave the
architect removed from the physicality of the design, with their work depicted as 2D lines or 3D planes alone. This course will study the evolutionary advancements made that now allow us to fully inhabit digital worlds through Virtual Reality. Using the HTC Vive and Unreal Engine, students will generate immersive, photorealistic models of unbuilt architectural works and explore digital/physical interactivity. From the terraces of Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway to Boullee Cenotaph for Newton, the goal of this course is to breathe new life into places and spaces that have, until this time, never been built or occupied.
New Approaches to an Architecture of Health
Faculty:
Mikael Avery
Health care is taking on a new role in our society - with a refocusing from episodic care for those who are ill or symptomatic to providing life-long care geared towards maintaining wellness. These changes are evident across numerous areas of design, from wearable technologies that track and analyze, to large scale building initiatives that aim to create healthier environments and improve lives through strategic planning initiatives. A concrete, physical representation of this paradigm shift can be found within the hospital building itself and in the new manner in which hospitals are looking to serve their patients and care for their clinicians. Simultaneously both public and private spaces, hospitals are complex systems in which sickness, health, hospitality, technology, emergency, and community share space and compete for resource. In order to frame our present day
understanding of the role of architecture (and design) in fostering health for individuals and within communities, this seminar will begin with an exploration of the historical and contemporary perspectives on the role of the architect and built environment on health.
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Form and Algorithm
Faculty: Ezio Blasetti
This seminar focuses on the potential of nonlinear computational generative systems to analyze and generate space for architectural design. It provides a comprehensive introduction into algorithmic design research. Design research is not defined here as a linear scientific process with objective outcomes, but rather as the iterative, non-linear and speculative process with the ability to reassess and shift our disciplinary discourse. This research focuses on the inherent potential of computation to generate space and of algorithmic procedures to engage deeper levels of organization in the design process. We look at the structure of geometric datatypes and of simple algorithmic procedures. Students get introduced into coding through the precise definition of vectors, coordinate systems, surfaces and polygons. In parallel, we introduce elementary algorithmic objects and systems which, through specific examples, build diagrams of adaptivity and collective intelligence. The critical parameter is to explore the spatial potential beyond finite forms of explicit and parametric modeling towards nonlinear algorithmic processes.
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Introduction to Real Estate Development for Architects
Faculty: Richard Garber
The course introduces students to the participants and components to the development process, as well as specific development strategies and design tools for engaging them. Design in this sense is not simply a vision, or a concept utilized for obtaining approvals, it is understood as an encompassing set of procedures that both allow for and ensure that goals are being met at all stages of a project, from early conception through the approval process and building construction. Students will learn how to engage municipal land-use laws and regulations, produce strategies for geometric development based on land-use and environmental constraints, and use simulation to perform value-adding operations to a development proposal. Through lectures and exercises, students will have the opportunity to analyze a building and the redevelopment procedures surrounding it and develop a geometric response and then parse data from that model to drive a series of documents relating to project cost, funding, and schedule. These documents will be analyzed against a variety of construction means and funding models so time-and cost-effective basis that meets design intentions can be developed.
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Project Management
Faculty: Charles Capaldi
This course is an introduction to techniques and tools of managing the design and construction of large, and small, construction projects. Topics include project
delivery systems, management tools, cost-control and budgeting systems, professional roles. Case studies serve to illustrate applications. Cost and schedule control systems are described. Case studies illustrate the application of techniques in the field.
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Real Estate Development Faculty: Alan Feldman
This course evaluates “ground-up” development as well as re-hab, re-development, and acquisition investments. We examine raw and developed land and the similarities and differences of traditional real estate product types including office, R & D, retail, warehouses, single family and multi-family residential, mixed use, and land as well as “specialty” uses like golf courses, assisted living, and fractional share ownership. Emphasis is on concise analysis and decision making. We discuss the development process with topics including market analysis, site acquisition, due diligence, zoning, entitlements, approvals, site planning, building design, construction, financing, leasing, and ongoing management and disposition. Special topics like workouts and running a development company are also discussed. Course lessons apply to all markets but the class discusses U.S. markets only. Throughout the course, we focus on risk management and leadership issues. Numerous guest lecturers who are leaders in the real estate industry participate in the learning process.
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Theories of Architecture: Environments, Techniques, and Expressive Means Faculty: Ariel Genadt
This theory seminar provides an in-depth review and discussion of key architectural texts on the topics of space, place, climate, networks, form, tectonics, surface, materiality, craft, technology, and digital landscapes. It unfolds the ways in which ideas condition and inspire the practice of architecture, and how architectural creation contributes to the way one thinks discursively about the world. The seminar equips those embarking on careers in teaching, scholarship, and research in architecture with the practices and methods of scholarly inquiry that are typical in the field. Students will read various texts on each topic, respond to the readings, present them, lead discussions, and write a research paper.
Bernard Tschumi is widely recognized as one of today’s foremost architects. First known as a theorist, he drew attention to his innovative architectural practice in 1983 when he won the prestigious competition for the Parc de La Villette, a 125-acre cultural park based on activities as much as nature. The intertwining concepts of “event” and “movement” in architecture are supported by Tschumi’s belief that architecture is the most important innovation of our time. Tschumi often references other disciplines in his work, such as literature and film, proving that architecture must participate in culture’s polemics and question its foundations. Since then, he has made a reputation for groundbreaking designs that
include the new Acropolis Museum; Le Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts; the Vacheron-Constantin Headquarters; The Richard E. Lindner Athletics Center at the University of Cincinnati; two concert halls in Rouen and Limoges, and architecture schools in Marne-la-Vallée, France and Miami, Florida, as well as the Alésia Archaeological Center and Museum among other projects.
A graduate of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Tschumi has taught architecture at a range of institutions including the Architectural Association in London, Princeton University, and The Cooper Union in New York. He is a Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of
Architecture, Planning and Preservation where he was dean from 1988 to 2003.
Tschumi’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, the Pompidou Center in Paris, as well as other museums and art galleries in the United States and Europe.
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Sept. 12: The Ewing Cole Lecture: Stephen Holl: Porosity/Fusion
For this talk, Stephen Holl revisited Questions of Perception, the 1994 text he co- authored with Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Juhani Pallasmaa, in which Holl explores the phenomenology of architecture through eleven “phenomenal zones”: enmeshed experience; perspectival space; of color; of light and shadow; spatiality of night; time, duration, and perception; water: a phenomenal lens; of sound; detail: the haptic realm; proportion, scale, and perception; site, circumstance, and idea. Incorporating recent projects by Steven Holl Architects realized after the book’s publication, Holl recasts the “phenomenal zones” and connects new built works with these original concepts. Holl was born in 1947 in
Bremerton, Washington. He graduated from the University of Washington and pursued architecture studies in Rome in 1970. In 1976, he joined the Architectural Association in London and in 1977 established Steven Holl Architects. Considered one of America’s most influential architects, he is recognized for his ability to blend space and light with great contextual sensitivity and to utilize the unique qualities of each project to create a concept-driven design. He specializes in seamlessly integrating new projects into contexts with particular cultural and historic importance. Holl has realized projects both in the United States and internationally including the Chapel of St. Ignatius, Seattle, Washington (1997); the
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland (1998); Simmons Hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2002); the Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (2007); the Horizontal Skyscraper, Shenzhen, China (2009), the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning, Denmark (2009); the Linked Hybrid, Beijing, China (2009); Cité de l’Océan et du Surf, Biarritz, France (2011); Reid Building at the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland (2014); the University of Iowa, Visual Arts Building, Iowa City, Iowa (2016); and the Lewis Arts complex at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (2017).
Anna Dyson is the Hines Professor of Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture (YSoA) and Environment (YSE). She is the founding Director of the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA), a research initiative that integrates interdisciplinary labs across campus to collaborate on the research, development and deployment of novel architectural systems that are focused on the challenge of metabolizing energy, water and materials within architecture in radically new ways.
At the YSoA, Dyson has established a new model for PhD-level design research in Architectural Sciences which has received multiple honors for pedagogy, including the award for most innovative academic program from the
Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) and an Award of Excellence from the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). Recipient of the Innovator Award from Architectural Record, Dyson holds many international patents on building systems innovations for the collection and distribution of clean energy, water, air quality and material life cycle.
In 2007, Dyson co-founded the ground-breaking Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE) with Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM LLP) and RPI. Multiple systems are being deployed within scaled up building test sites: with SOM, the AMPS system was installed into the Public Safety Answering Center (PSAC II) in Bronx,
NY and was included in the Best Architecture of 2017 by the Wall St. Journal, as the first full-scale test of the production of fresh air from within a building through plant-based air handling systems. In 2019, Yale CEA’s Ecological Living Module, demonstrating a nexus for on-site energy, water and agricultural production, was named as the #1 World Changing Idea, by the UN News.
This lecture is sponsored by the Abend Family Endowed Lecture Fund.
Nov. 9: Abel Perles/PRODUCTORA: Series of Detours
For his talk, Perles presented Series of Detours . As a starting point, our architecture always tries to resume itself into one single gesture: one simple set of rules that can orchestrate a building. The main goal in our architecture is to establish a fruitful clash between our personal interests (our own stubborn will) and the will of the assignment (this is the latent possibilities embedded into the site, context, program, budget, client, etc.). Only when we can establish here an intense and meaningful relationship of conflict, then a new, unknown and surprising set of architectonic axioms can arise. Since we believe that the key to resolve a problem cannot be found within the material of the puzzle itself, we use our own
interests and playful try-outs as a trick to focus on something completely outside the real problem, and so - through a detour - to come up with a fresh and powerful solution to the problem (although maybe not always the most logical one). Perles is one of the four partners of PRODUCTORA, the architectural studio founded in 2006. The studio’s work is distinguished by an interest in distinct geometries, the production of clearly legible projects with limited gestures and the search for timeless buildings. PRODUCTORA has been awarded by the Architectural League of New York with the Young Architects Forum (2007) and the Emerging Voices (2013). Its work has been presented in the Architectural Biennials of Venice (2008, 2012, and
2018) and in the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015, 2017), and has been featured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2009) and in the National Art Museum of China in Beijing (2015, 2017). Among the many publications of the office, their first feature by Arquine (2010) and their issue of 2G Architecture Magazine (2014) stand out. Their book, Being the Mountain, was the result of research initiated after winning the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Practice at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The studio has developed a wide variety of designs in Mexico and abroad, from residential projects to public buildings and corporate spaces.
Roland Snooks presented his lecture, Behavioral Tectonics . Roland Snooks directs the architectural practice Snooks + Harper and the RMIT Architecture | Tectonic Formation Lab where he is an Associate Professor. His design research explores the generation of intricate tectonics through behavioral processes of formation and robotic fabrication. Prior to his current position at RMIT University, Roland taught widely in the US, including at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, SCI-Arc, and the Pratt Institute. He holds a PhD from RMIT University, and a master’s in advanced architectural design from Columbia University where he studied on a Fulbright scholarship. Roland’s work
has been exhibited widely and acquired by collections including the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the FRAC Collection. His work is the subject of a recent monograph, Behavioral Formation, published by ACTAR, Barcelona.
Researchers including Weitzman’s Robert Stuart-Smith have made a swarm of bee-inspired drones that can collectively 3D print material while in flight, allowing unbounded manufacturing for building and repairing structures.
A new approach to 3D printing using flying robots, known as drones, has just been developed that uses collective building methods inspired by natural builders like bees and wasps.
The system, called Aerial Additive Manufacturing (Aerial-AM), involves a fleet of drones working together from a single blueprint. It consists of BuilDrones, which deposit materials during flight, and quality controlling ScanDrones, which continually measure the BuilDrones’ output and inform their next manufacturing steps.
Weitzman Assistant Professor of Architecture and Penn Engineering GRASP Lab-Affiliated Faculty Robert StuartSmith, through his Autonomous Manufacturing Lab at Penn and its sister lab in University College London’s Department of Computer Science, contributed to the project.
Yao Lu, a PhD student in the Department of Architecture, who works with the Polyhedral Structures Lab (PSL), has won the Hangai Prize at the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures Annual Symposium. Lu is the lead researcher on PSL’s recent paper, “Multi-Layer SheetBased Lightweight Funicular Structures.”
Lu shows how sheet-based structures are advantageous over conventional space frame systems. However, not all sheets are necessary as long as the load paths are preserved, and the system does not have kinematic degrees of freedom. To find a reduced set of faces that satisfies the requirements, this paper incorporates and adapts the matrix analysis method to calculate the kinematic degree of freedom of sheet-based structure. Built upon this, an iterative algorithm is devised to help find the reduced set of faces with zero kinematic degrees of freedom.
Nadine Nashef, first year student in the Department of Architecture, has been awarded the American Association of University Women International Fellowship.
The program provides support for women pursuing full-time graduate or postdoctoral study in the United States to women who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and who intend to return to their home country to pursue a professional career. The scholarship is based on statements, bio, past activities in and for the community and recommendation letters. Recipients are selected for academic achievement and demonstrated commitment to women and girls.
Nashef is Palestinian and moved to the U.S. for her studies. Prior to coming to the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, her pursuit has mainly been photography. Her most recent work is a series of portraits, “1991/2021”, of Palestinian women born in 1991, the same year she was born.
The complex that now houses the Middletown Free Library started as a small schoolhouse, built in the 1920s to serve the students of Media, Pennsylvania, a western suburb of Philadelphia. In the 1950s, it was expanded, with a large additional west wing. It closed in the 1980s, and by 2015, Middletown Township was seeking to buy it back, with plans to renovate it for a new community center.
To design a new home for the library, the township turned to Middletown resident Scott Erdy, a lecturer in graduate program of the Department of Architecture at Weitzman and principal at Erdy McHenry Architecture in Philadelphia. Working on a tight budget, Erdy and other designers at his firm, including Elena Mangigian, sought to renovate the space for a 21st-century library while respecting and elevating the building’s original modernist style.
Erdy’s team added a new cladding at the top of the building and left its footprint largely intact. The layout needed to incorporate stacks on the first floor, a children’s library, community rooms, and a second-floor “maker space” where young people experiment with design, robotics and fabrication using a variety of digital resources and tools like 3D printers.
Month 2022: SENSBIOM Installation 1.0 at the ICA by Assistant Professor
DumoLab Research for Biodegradable Architecture at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design, led by Assistant Professor of Architecture Laia Mogas-Soldevila, and Slovak circular material and design research studio crafting plastics! presented, SENSBIOM, Sensible Materials for Healthier Habitats, a temporary installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), for the ACADIA 2022 conference, that brought together biomaterial-driven and computer-controlled manufacturing of aroma-active lattices.
Ribbons of lightweight aroma-infused lattices are 3D printed with two types of bio-based materials and can help purify the air with its pharmacological antimicrobial activity. Fabricated in Slovakia, most of the 3D-printed lattices are made from commercial bioplastics that are industrially compostable, and an experimental subset is made naturally biodegradable from chitin and cellulose, some of “the most abundant biopolymers on earth,” and strengthened with silk.
When Scott Erdy, a lecturer in architecture at the Weitzman School of Design and principal at Erdy McHenry Architects, took on the renovation of the Middletown Free Library, he had originally planned a relief wall for an area next to the stairway from the first floor to the maker space, depicting shelves with a few stray books. It had to be cut because of budgetary constraints. But it opened up an opportunity to collaborate with the Advanced Research & Innovation Lab in the Department of Architecture at Weitzman.
The relief was designed and fabricated by Andrew Saunders, associate professor of architecture and director of the MArch program, and students in the MSD-RAS program. Saunders led and managed the project over the course of two years as part of his research on autonomous design.
The wall is a foam construction designed using artificial intelligence and fabricated by a robot in the Robotics Lab at Meyerson Hall. The project team included students pursuing a Master of Archtecture, Master of Science in Design with a concentration in Advanced Architectural Design, or Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in architecture. In addition to Riley Studebaker (MSD-RAS’21) and Claire Moriarty (MSD-RAS’21), who were in the first class of MSD-RAS graduates and worked on the relief wall as PennPraxis Design Fellows, Matthew White (MSD-RAS’21), Caleb Ehly (MArch’20, and Benjamin Hergert (MArch’22) contributed to the project as PennPraxis Design Fellows. Yujie Li (MArch’20), Macarena De La Piedra (MSD-AAD’22), Jesse Allen (MArch’23), and Cecily Nishimura were research assistants.
The 502 studio is the second studio in the MArch core sequence. The studio takes advantage of Philadelphia as a vehicle to explore architecture’s relationship to the urban condition. To design in the city requires a reading of the layered and complex material morphology of Philadelphia made up of houses, businesses, industries, streets, rivers, parks, natural features, and many other kinds of infrastructures. Additionally, a deep reading reveals less visible relationships and patterns that govern and shape its daily activities including politics, demographics, economies, climates, and all the complex histories. The project for the semester is a public market for the 21st century.
Callowhill Neighborhood of Philadelphia Callowhill is one of several center city neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Named for the second wife of William Penn, Hannah Callowhill Penn the neighborhood is currently defined by boundary streets South at Vine Street North, South at Spring Street, West at Broad Street and East at 8th Street. Historically, the neighborhood was
defined by Callowhill Street that runs from east to west across Philadelphia and especially its proximity to the Delaware River, where it had its most early development as a market space and eventually the “red light” or “tenderloin” district of Philadelphia.
The studio will take a nonlinear approach to the development of a public market for Philadelphia by constantly evolving critical concepts simultaneously throughout the semester. This will require the development and arrival of three essential and autonomous concepts for the project by midterm that could generally be categorized as form, program, and material. More specifically: 1) the development of the three types of relief, 2) research on exiled industries of Philadelphia and 3) identifying and defamiliarizing specific material conditions of Philadelphia (either existing or from the archeology of the city).
Faculty: Andrew Saunders
Teaching Assistant: Courtney Ward
The design of a public urban market for Philadelphia requires the development and arrival at three essential and autonomous. More specifically, an approach to form will be through the development of relief , approach to program will be through research on exiled industries of Philadelphia and a material approach will includes identifying and defamiliarizing specific material conditions from Philadelphia (existing or from the archeology of the city).
As a formal organization logic, the studio will engage the concept and design of reliefs. Unlike typical building relationships of figure / ground in opposition to one another. The studio will explore the potential of figure / figure relationships through relief where difference is determined by calibrating between extents of two-dimensions and three-dimensional expression. Reliefs present basic abstract formal compositional properties that are present and incredibly formative in urban morphologies at a range of scales including corners, edges, foreground, background, thresholds, divisions, and overlaps.
The program of the market will be defined individually by each student – a market for what? Building on the previous rich history of 19th and 20th century industrial development in Philadelphia, students examine previous industries exiled from the city center and propose their reinsertion through the lens of the fourth industrial revolution. This involves a renegotiation of complex relationships of land value, labor practices, environmental and health standards and general economical shift to globalization and free market capitalism.
In his essay “Art as Device” Viktor Shklovsky outlines a literary trope of defamiliarization as a technique for bring awareness to aspects of culture that have been taken for granted or automatically perceived. In architecture, defamiliarization can be a compelling way to actively engage context without simply mimicking it or ignoring it. By slowing down perception and making “strange” the familiar, a refreshing perception renews the familiar and draws attention to the artistic procedures operating on it.
Featured Student Work: Yuju
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The market design is developed with three essential aspects:
1. Urban Relief: After working with bas, high and figural reliefs using models of Callowhill artifacts, the concept of project began with having different “bubbles”, occupying specific areas with distinct frames around them. There is a solid bracket or frame that holds the courtyards (“bubbles”), which give different spatial experiences.
The overall concept of the relief progressively changed from “merging” to “spilling” then to “leaking”, as following the studies of AI reliefs.
2. Industries for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The market is specifically for the bakery industry, differentiating from ordinary industry with advanced programs such as cellular agriculture lab, food 3d printer rooms and so on.
3. Material Defamiliarization: The main material is highly related to the program, which is “yeast”. These diverse “yeast gardeners” from material defamiliarization, are not only visually pleasing to attract and bring people to the market, but also can be used for research labs for high tech programs.
Ultimately, different elements bring the exiled program to life again.
1. Yeast gardens; visually attract people from the city as well as provide resources.
2. High-tech/advanced programs which differentiate from previous market industries.
3. Most importantly, leaking language from AI that sets the circulation and brings people from the city to the market.
This project is a creative endeavor that involves the creation of three reliefs inspired by Louise Nevelson’s bas high and figural relief. These reliefs were then used in an ai neural network to create the structure and ground scape. The project’s layout is carefully planned to complement the surrounding context by following the existing grid system and incorporating AI-generated
pieces for organization. It aims to promote the algae industry, a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.
To this end, the project incorporates large bars that house algae tanks or bioreactors. Algae can eliminate CO 2 in the air, provide electricity through photosynthesis, and create a range of products such as shoes, 3D print filament, and medicine.
At the ground level, an algae garden is introduced to offer visitors a personal interaction with the algae. The market’s interior features various bioreactors cladding the
bars and is green-lit, creating a unique and immersive experience for visitors. To showcase the natural beauty of the site, stone was chosen as the primary material for the project. The project is expec ted to have a positive impact on the community, allowing individuals to immerse themselves in the algae gardens and purchase algae-based products.
Faculty: Viola Ago
Teaching
Assistant: David Perrine
Form, in its basic sense of the word, has been a critical aspect of architectural production. A highly contested term, form has maintained a strong presence in our discipline because it is an elementary component of the material world and because it has been able to support different cultural, philosophical, and visual agendas. In our section, students challenged their initial formal and compositional desires with program, site, material, and tectonics in order to develop architectural proposals. It was imperative that we thought of these aspects not as linear processes, but more as intelligent feedback loops (heavily based on repetition and seriality) where an alteration, or rather defamiliarization, in form (or geometry, material, object, etc) was informed by perceptual conditions that the students developed over the semester.
Our position recognized our fragmented disciplinary state through the lack of coherent and communal thoughts on the problems that architecture needs to respond to. With this in mind, we looked at the formal and visual tropes of architecture over the last five decades and understood them within the contextual pressures of their times. We looked at this survey with a critical eye, learned from it, and used it as a point of departure in assessing how we, during this fragmented moment, can respond to our current social and cultural pressures with an architectural programmatic proposal of exiled industries (per our shared syllabus).
Building on this survey of architectural form, our section used digital deformers, physics engines, stereotomy, profiling, figuration, and geometrical assembling in an attempt to construct conceptual and material thesis for final studio projects. Understanding that these processes are not strictly (or inherently) digital, we discussed the complex nature of digital tools and the visual and aesthetic disciplines that they produce.
Featured Student Work:
Koltun-Fromm, Gideon
If our body’s defensive mecha nism for the trauma of death is a certain numbness, this intervention dares the mourning to feel through acts of site estrangement. Estrangement of form, abs tracted lines and parallels intersecting, slipping, and slicing in an uneasy universe of their own. Estrangement of material, unsuitable bold blues, uncomfortably chalky
whites, uncanny graphic projections, seemingly unfit for this context. Estrangement of motif, familiar objects and conditions repeated in eerie fields, slumping sagging and drooping with Dali irony. But while this structure may be conceived as an emotional landscape, it is not a hollow shell. Instead, housed within its walls are support services for the care of those in mourn ing. This includes clinical psychiatric care and therapy facilities. There are chapel-like spaces of various sizes for group
activity of any or no religious denomination and from the mass scale to the highly intimate. There is a marketplace of services catering to those in mourning, providing basic necessities like cooked meals as is man dated by certain traditions, to vendors of flowers and candles, to other comforts aimed at the bereaved. While the building complex may rip off the emotional bandage of grief, it then tends to the wound.
Split cognizance is a mausoleum where its form promotes a flowing movement within the plan of the space, where the entire space within is concealed from the outside. Within the space, various sarcophagus line the walls in the maze-like space, making one feel lost within the labyrinth. This all becomes contrasted by a projected “split.” This split becomes a device that disrupts the flowing movement as the split
seems to have an axis that is separate from the form’s logic. Furthermore, the vibrant color of the split itself contrasts with the cool tones that the rest of the form illustrates. The split then acts like a metaphor to remind the people within the space that disruption is to be unexpected and not seemly too predictable.
However, in top view the projection and split spills into the Callowhill neighborhood, ensuring that the mausoleum here influences more than just its footprint. This projection further contrasts the
form, yet still uses the same cool colors and materials, ultimately creating an ambiguous reading of the entire area. All of these ideas then contribute to the multiple “split cognizance’s” the project creates for the mausoleum.
Faculty: Ezio Blasetti
Teaching Assistant: Bohan Lang
Our section will focus on generative computational methods in architectural design. The students will investigate non-linear systems at both a methodological and tectonic level. The exploration will take the form of design research, which will be tested through an architectural proposal. The studio will research and generate a multi-dimensional terrain of data, which will attempt to capture and compress the various infrastructural, environmental and architectural parameters of the site of Callowhill Neighborhood. Design will operate as a feedback tool of navigation and adaptation. The studio will focus on the progression and transformation of the urban morphology over time. Students will collect various data from the neighborhood and create custom high-dimentional Data Models and representations. Similar to Steven Shaviro’s ‘Discognition’, we will ask what does it mean to be “Thinking Like a City”?
The studio’s objective will be to provide a high-resolution synthetic architectural prototypes that engage the urban landscape of Philadelphia. Inherent in our building parts are a multiplicity of programmatic, tectonic, material and computational dimensions. Central to the studio agenda is the exploration of complex systems and their application to design in a synthetic method, by utilizing machine learning algorithms such as Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, Neural Radiance Fields, Photogrammetry, Depth Estimation, etc. This will involve extracting the processes that operate within the city as well as developing new models of organization with the aid of machine learning and their own architectural intelligence. Students are encouraged to engage closely with algorithms and other computational processes in order to develop an aesthetic and intuition for designing with complexity, balancing the intentional design decisions with the emergence of unexpected formal and organizational characteristics.
Featured Student Work: Andreina Sojo ................................................................... 210 Yinong Zhang .................................................................... 212
Construction and demolition waste makes up approximately 17.5 percent of Pennsylvania’s municipal waste stream, and over 2.25 million tons of C&D waste are disposed of in C&D landfills. Knowing urban waste’s impact on the environment and Callowhill industrial precedent on the construction materials industry; for 502’s final project, I am interested in creating a recycling center and cultural space that will inform visitors about sustainable solutions in construction. Moreover, the proposal addresses industrial remains and scrap as a design generator for architectural expansion and explores possibilities to innovate architecture. The strategy for Industrial
Palimpsest consists of collection, processing, and remanufacturing of metal, concrete and plastics. Therefore, I propose a recycling facility that collects scrap and industrial remains from the surrounding neighborhoods and trucks bring them to the site through the existing vehicular circulation. Then, the materials are classified around the landscape and introduced to the plant to be treated; simultaneously, visitors can access the processing spaces while the metals, concrete, and plastics are being processed. Last, after the materials are transformed, the user can participate in the geometries for the architectural expansion, and technological devices help to distribute the materials along the Reading Viaduct. In this case, scrap is transformed to steel for the architectural skeleton, then
the recycled concrete is poured over the structure to create an enclosure, and last, the plastics can be used as an aggregate and finish for the architectural façade. As a result, the recycling center is a magnet for visitors and waste materials. Finally, Industrial palimpsest highlights the importance of structural and material optimization and environmental considerations by reducing waste sent to landfills and incinerators and opens possibilities for civic engagement through new technologies in a post-industrial site; such as Callowhill.
The Honeybee Town serves as a place where citizens can closely observe the behavior of honeybees and interact with the bees in an urban area. Honeybees are quite crucial to our world, most plants cannot exist without bees’ pollination. Also, honey and beeswax are important daily products. Thus, the honeybee town is aimed to find a better managing way for beekeeping, enhancing the production of honey and also sparking the interaction between the bee community and the human community with the help of AI tools and equipment.
My proposal is composed of a honey and beeswax production factory, a honeybee research lab, a bee farm, and a visitor center. Since the
spaces in the proposal serve very different users, I was trying to design different structures and forms with diverse materialities to better meet the users’ requirements.
For instance, the factory spaces are mostly solid, which can make the factory and lab safer places for the staff’s daily needs. In terms of the spaces for visitors and bees, they are built up with specific pipe structures. This makes the spaces more open so that humans and honeybees can easily access them. Shown in the chunks. The density of the pipes varies on different parts. More pipes for visitor-using and plants-growing, and fewer but thicker pipes for honeybees to build beehives. Also, floor and green wall structures. A layer of the hexagonal structure is added over and supported by the normal pipe wall. Offers better conditions for flowers.
What is more, there are three circulations in the proposal. One for the visitors, one for the factory staff, and one for honeybees, which is guided by AI monitors and simulators. As shown in the program diagram, staff, visitors, and visitors can observe the honey bees and how the honey and beeswax production processes. Staff can directly collect honey and beeswax from beehives.
A separate building for administration and research labs.
Faculty: Anthony V. Gagliardi
Teaching Assistant: Clayton Monarch
In a symposium held by the Architectural Review in September of 1948 titled, “In Search of a New Monumentality,” it was suggested that:
“The modern idiom as we find it at present, being based on functionalism, can express little except utilitarian ideas…The architect cannot remain an unquestioning vehicle…the architect as a member of society has [a] contribution to make…towards some visible expression of [the] collective consciousness.”
Although almost 75 years ago, the sentiment above holds true today. This studio proposes that one expression of the collective is through an investigation and combination of - the urban - and - the spectacle. Each student will create a proposal for a World’s Fair to be hosted by the city of Philadelphia in 2027. The World’s Fair will act as a specific lens through which to learn about Philadelphia’s history as the host of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, its failed bid for the 1976 Bicentennial Exposition, and its deep-rooted and interwoven relationship with the textile industry.
Featured Student Work:
This World Fair proposal highlights emergent agricultural technologies through the production of a locally distilled rye whiskey in Philadelphia, creating a spectacle of agritech. There is simultaneously a desire for regional identity and expression of heritage within our food and drinks, yet the established options we presently have do not reflect this. To address this gap, the world’s fair distills whiskey
that is grown, distilled, and aged within the city limits, establishing a unique connection to the locality that is missing in other contemporary rye whiskeys. The newly gained ability to precisely control the temperature and humidity within the malting process has brought about highly nuanced and reproducible flavor pallets. This has spurred brewmasters to create more with less, creating very complex whiskeys from very simple mixtures of grain. The single malt process allows for the creative reimagining of whiskey, which builds
upon the legacy brews of the past while also reinforcing the forward-thinking theme of the World’s Fair. Visitors that drink the rye whiskey will be able to experience how agritech allows us to reinvent classic drinks while simultaneously reviving an exiled industry and local food culture.
Lost in Textility is a special expo on the fashion in the future. Here , the city of Philadelphia has a long history of textile industry and innovation. Back in the mid 19th century, the textile industry grew rapidly in city thanks to the access to the transportation routes and large labor forces. In 1864, Philadelphia produces 10 percent of nation’ textiles. However, the industry declined significantly post World War 2 due to a number of social and economical factors. This expo is supposed to pick up the tradition to provide an alternative for the process and engagement for fashion. One of the biggest issues in this industry nowadays is the over- production of clothes due to fast fashion, which leads to pollution and
waste of resources. To address the issue, the spaces along the viaduct in the large context is a inventory and production chain that are engaging with bio-textiles, eco-friendly dye products, upcycling, textile computing, and personal tailoring through 3D sampling, and etc. On site, the main buildings are small exhibition pavilions to display products from other site and climax at the designer’s market to show off the fruits of inventions.
The urban design itself was inspired by the construction method of textiles and and an art work by Robert Burle Marx. The weaving technique was projected onto the site to thread main buildings together through runways and trails with plazas, planting areas and water features dotted along the way. Besides, The color palette of red, pink, blue and beige learned from
the artwork were translated into different defined areas on the site of buildings and landscape in different scales to form a pattern of quilting that is supposed to stage the fashion in the future.
Faculty: Jacqueline Martinez
Teaching Assistant: Monte Reed
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” - Archilochus
Situated within the critique of urbanism, there lies a base dichotomy between two schools of thought; known as the Fox and the Hedgehog, dating back to the Greek poet Archilochus and expanded upon by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin addressed in “Collage City” by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter. The basic position is the difference between a singular, universal organizing principle-- the monumental hero approach—understood as the Hedgehog; and the Fox representing multiplicity, the tangential and sometimes contradictory stimulus colliding at once. The critique of the Hedgehog as an approach to urbanism, for our purposes, is the top down, single author object-ness in the sense that it has been asserted on the city, controlled, and authored by someone other than you the populous. The Fox approach on the other hand, is innately more inclusive due to the conglomeration of the many, the aggregate of the heterogenous elements that contribute to a dynamic whole, as there appears to be multiple authors through multiple timescales, operating in a dynamic state; it is not static, it not complete, you the populous are invited to participate and are welcomed to the growth. This studio takes on the role of the Fox and explores the entropic dynamic state; the heterogenous collage, burrowing into the realm of the multiple- the delicious collisions, the intersections, the tensions, playing with our complex context in Callowhill and the public market as the iconic composite of the private and public collaged together.
Featured Student Work:
Conrad Tse ................................................................ 222,238
Brennan Flory .................................................................. 224
Is it possible to create a city with no centre?
A proposal to imagine a totemic industrial edifice within Philly suburbia, transformed into an opera, a metropolis - an urban protest for the Philly attitude of domestic resilience and adaptability. This is the test of suburban adjacencies – the facade, street corner, and domestic behaviors are deployed and defamiliarized to make inhabitants tinker,
discover and wander new models of regulations, resistances, and distractions. This is a dive into the uncertainties of the 21st-century, a journey of the urban ennui that explores the boring and the overlooked - a derive to understand the site as our city by discovering vignettes of moments, both inside and out, that have been damaged, diminished, or forgotten. It’s a discovery for potentials that supports new cultural, natural and spatial resources for all. This is powered by “Anemoia”, a feeling of nostalgia - a craving for a time that we
never belonged to.
This place is an abstract construct of shared language, knowledge, and interpersonal connections. A place that moulds society and its intuitions. Whether in its physical or metaphysical manifestations, this remains at the core of human experience. A celebration of the of Philly attitude. Its saliency is about creating a sense of familiarity, not a taxonomy of urbanistic rules, this is a familiar derive. This is the anemoia for Philly.
In the heart of the city, there exists a unique interstitial relationship between humancontrolled urban space and unhuman- controlled space. It’s a relationship that is constantly evolving, shifting, and adapting to the needs of the natural environment. At the threshold of this relationship lies a space of transition, a space that is both a gateway and a buffer zone between the two worlds.
This is a condition found in urban contexts is created by formal multiplication paired with the negative ground around. In context to the site, the viaduct exists as a buffer between the urban sprawl an unintended space left for nature to inhabit. It’s a space that is neither fully human nor fully unhuman, but rather a hybrid of the two, a place where the boundaries between the built environment and the natural environment blur.
An assemblage of contextual components forms a relief occupying that left without human intervention. At the heart exists a gathering space, unexpected in nature, a result of the collision of assemblage a true interstitial condition. Resting on the viaduct humans touch on nature invades what was left for nature to populate. A space that celebrates the relationship between human-controlled urban space and unhuman-controlled natural space. It’s a space that honors the relationship and encourages a moment of reflection withing a super imposed condition on within an existing fabric.
Faculty: Ryan Palider
Teaching
Assistant: Lucy Luxin Zhong
This studio will use the opportunity to design a market for exiled industries to reexamine Philadelphia’s rich history as the “Workshop of the World”. Historically Philadelphia was never reliant upon one industry like other major cities. Instead, the city was populated with a vast network of workshops linked together by suppling goods or services to each other aa well as to the world. Building upon this history, each design proposal will be developed around a primary industrial program and two additional support programs that play a role in supplying goods and services to each other as well as to other consumers.
The studio title “Industrial Park” is a play on words meant to reference both an area zoned and planned for the purpose of industrial development, and a literal park such as the one proposed by the city to cover the abandoned rail viaduct that runs through the site. The studio will question both the way we think about the interconnectedness of the means of production and the role the reintroduction of industrial buildings into an urban context can play in creating new forms of public space.
The QRY is a natural stone, masonry, and clay market and studio space where the market and work areas merge into a single location. It aims to bring the factories, quarries, and workshops from the peripheries of the city to the center, creating a hub of trade and production. It represents a type of architecture that has largely been absent in the fabric of American cities, an architecture that combines industry and market.
The design is conceived by bringing the remnants of a stone quarry into a plot of land in the center of Philadelphia, thus, creating a formalized “negative” of a quarry. The rocky exterior of the western edge of the form is an open market covered by a shell aimed to simulate the rocky textures of the quarry prior to excavation. As the building continues eastward, slow transitions in texture represent the progression of stone as a material, from its more monolithic crude forms to its more intricate potential. The plan, in consequence, follows
the same approach transitioning from crude stone markets and warehouses to masonry and finally clay sculpture studios to the east.
Yang, C haraphileo
The CHARAPHILEO philadelphia market project aims to promote the city’s local industries, particularly distilleries, bakeries, and artisan glassware, by creating a dynamic and engaging space that showcases their products and processes. The project incorporates indoor and outdoor retail spaces, as well as large green areas for community gatherings and events. The three industries elements are carefully
integrated into the overall design, with each space featuring its own unique aesthetic and functional requirements. The design language of the project draws inspiration from the dripping pattern of liquor, creating a visual contrast between static and dynamic elements. This formative language also contributes to material defamiliarization, transforming familiar materials like bricks and Béton brut concrete into something new and exciting. The result is a space that not only celebrates the products and processes of
these industries, but also encourages visitors to engage with them and learn more about their importance to the local economy. In all, the project represents a bold and innovative approach to promoting the city’s real economy, providing a space for residents and visitors to connect with local businesses and artisans in a meaningful and engaging way.
Foundation 502:
De-Gentrified Futures: Architectures of Commoning v4
Chinatown North’s Commonspoly Stage.2
Faculty: Eduardo Rega
Teaching Assistant: Emily Shaw
Defamiliarization is a rupture of an established order, estranging the world is an avenue to encounter the world anew. Estrangement as an aesthetic vehicle, renders the bureaucracies, rules and techniques of governance that we’re subjected to, often absurd and sometimes cruel. But estrangement also opens our perception to the beauty of the world, and to the beautiful realization that the world can be otherwise. Like art and literature, architecture can be a tool for estrangement. But while the moment of estrangement is a moment of awareness of the world and of the absurdity of its rules, routines and bureaucracies, seeing the world for the first time is also a form of awakening which is followed by a need to act on the world. Upon an awakening to the absurdity of life, Albert Camus proposes the only viable response is revolt, with again that hopeful realization that the world can be otherwise.
Shklovsky’s “making strange” was a way of shaking ourselves out of our collective numbness to the world as-it-is.
Numbness that’s a product of pre-existing patterns of thought, and I would add of pre-existing authoritarian techniques of governance, these be soviet or neoliberal. In our studio we aim to shake ourselves out of the cruelties of real estate speculation and it’s resulting evictions, disposession due the most recent waves of gentrification in Chinatown North.
The studio is part of a series called Architectures of Commoning and it prompts students to understand and be estranged by the hegemonic forms of urban development based on profit and work as a collective to learn from the spatial impacts of the work of activist organizations, worker cooperatives, and movements for social justice working in Philadelphia. Through the game Commonspoly we learn and design from the point of view of those struggling to advance social justice in
Philadelphia by commonizing the land and its resources, developing cooperatively, through direct democracy and principles of mutual aid. Commonspoly is a gameboard through which we exit the rigidity of our own brief through play.
The board game Commonspoly is the pedagogical backbone of the studio which broadly educates on the general dynamics of urban development and questions current regimes of property. In 2020, our studio developed an architectural and site-specific version of Commonspoly for Chinatown North. This spring of 2023, we begin where the class of the spring of 2020 left it.
As participants in the studio play their collectively edited version of Chinatown North’s Commonspoly, they also experience and record different narratives of urban development and spatial transformation having to constantly navigate economic, political and social processes that produce space. The outcomes of the game are narratives that are then developed further using text, spatial visualizations via maps and diagrams in teams of two or three and that will end up framing individual design projects. In parallel to these narratives of urban development and “exiled program”, we develop Reliefs by remixing diagrams of spatial organization taken from architecture precedents.
In this project, our team developed three different stages for the community constructing. My task is the third stage, which has developed a permanent For the third phase of our project, a Self-consistent ring system was developed. We envision a permanent building with three core purposes: production, education, and connection.
The community is facilitated by a balcony situated in a strategic location to provide a panoramic view of the surrounding areas. This project not only creates a cultural and artistic center, but it also integrates the existing educational resources in the surrounding area, making the entire community as a cohesive and organic whole. The balcony wanders through the existing buildings, which facilitates transportation and weaves existing community resources, thus activating the cultural vitality of the community. Enclosed
spaces in turn forms the courtyard. According to different architectural attributes, the courtyard is also divided into different tendencies to serve different activities. In the end, a system of Ground, Balcony, Building, Courtyard can be formed.
An elderly Chinese immigrant who had recently arrived in the United States expressed, “I am new to this country and cannot understand English. I require Chinatown to buy essentials, seek medical attention, and translate English mail.” As a first-generation immigrant, They need a place to call home, where they feel a sense of belonging. The hardships of homelessness, poverty, and displacement that immigrants often face can have a significant impact on their mental health, and they frequently lack a support system to turn to for even the simplest things.
To address these challenges, there is a critical need for public education workshops that support the well-being of multigenerational and multicultural communities. These workshops can focus on strategies for cultural adaptation, healthy parenting, and stress management to provide resources and support to those who need it most. To create an
environment conducive to these goals, a three-zone self-generated island design can be implemented, specifically designed to address and resolve the issues faced by new immigrants.
Furthermore, the railway can be transformed into a green belt that connects each segment of the island. The central focus of this design is the establishment of a main local health center and legal services on a consolidated island. This island can be accessed through a series of ramps and walkways, providing people with a pleasant and serene environment for relaxation and meditation. Each level of the island can incorporate gardens or playgrounds, ensuring that the elderly can enjoy a fulfilling life without having to leave the railway area. The ramps and meditation spaces will also serve as connections between people and the programs that support their health and well-being. This design not only promotes accessibility and convenience but also enables organizations offering these services to do so efficiently and effectively.
Furthermore, PCDC has partnered with the Philadelphia Education Fund to create
educational facilities for immigrants, providing them with English classes and social events for increased community participation. PCDC has also developed a health and wellness messaging and outreach strategy, along with public education programs, to promote multigenerational and multicultural wellness. Public spaces and recreational programming have been designed to encourage health and social interaction, all in the effort to ensure the well-being of the community.
Arch602 (fourth semester core studio) aims to develop students’ understanding of building design through the coordination, negotiation, and feedback of multiple constituents and consultants. The integration of site, structure, mechanical systems, envelope, and material are key to the development of the work. The organization of the semester works to give an understanding of how critical input from a host of expertise serves the design process. The students work alongside engineers, material specialists, and other consultants to gain new insight into building and construction constraints, processes, and opportunities.
The projects, sited in urban contexts, are 50,000 sq ft buildings which engage with the 600 studio wide theme of the Public Commons - a term used for shared, equitable access of all communities to natural resources such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as to social creations such as libraries, public spaces, technology and scientific research. Public Common Space for the 602 studios serves as a catalyst to study the confluence of equity and inclusion through thoughtful inquiry. Each student engages in architecture’s agency to format spaces of equity and proactively develop new modes of ground, landscape, thresholds, and spaces
that provide for safe assembly and freedom from harassment. At stake is how to design and develop architectural solutions which address concerns of equity, inclusion and justice.
The students work in teams of 2-3 in order to reach the resolution of work required of the studio. With the meetings of specialists and consultants from the allied disciplines it is expected that the projects demonstrate a high level understanding of the proposed structural system and envelope assembly. There are two shared exercises across 602 which highlight these goals. Structures Week and Cladding/Envelope Week culminate in studio wide pinup discussions of the project’s proposed strategies as evidenced through drawings, details, models, and diagrams.
The consultant team for each studio is chosen by the studio’s instructor. These teams complement the structural, material, system, and programmatic investigations of the studio. The students meet with them throughout the semester working toward the key dates of Structures Week, Midterm, Cladding Week, and Final Review. Mohamad Al Khayer offers a session before Structures Week introducing structural analysis tools to aid in evaluating and developing the work.
The Master Lecture series will occur throughout the semester bringing in additional experts to discuss their research and work in a range of disciplines aiding in the conception and construction of buildings. These consultants work at the highest levels in teams to support an architecture of the highest ambitions. The assembly and management of the team one puts in place around a building’s production is as important as the construction itself. This series as well as the curation of the studio consultants supports this belief and is foundational to achieving the goals of 602.
Faculty: Nate Hume
Teaching Assistant: Kyle Troyer
The studio was interested in looking at the envelope as an inhabitable mediator bringing the exterior in and interior out. These liminal zones have the potential to house public spaces which resist traditional solutions such as static ground floor lobbies or inert atriums but instead forge dynamic zones laminated, embedded, and suspended in the envelope. The buildings looked to produce new relationships between volumes and enclosure through understanding them as an ensemble of things and denying the reading of a single mass and wrapper. The stuffing engaged the expanding palette of building materials which break down the traditional distinction between the natural and the artificial. Historically, building materials have either been sourced from nature or produced artificially, with natural materials being conceived of as ones that come from raw, organic matter, and artificial materials being produced from chemical or factory processing. Today’s material culture exists largely in a fuzzy territory between the two states. Composite materials hold multiple properties of the raw and the processed, not only questioning what is natural but also producing new natures and aesthetic effects. The hybridization of these materials are formed through several means including laminating, embedding, and compressing organic and inorganic matter. The strategies are extracted from the composition of the materials to be mined for spatial and tectonic strategies. Banding, stacking, and clean delineation give way to patches, peeling, embedding, growing, and accumulating in all directions. The material effects move form the zoning of the cladding to re-conceiving the spaces of the building as the projects look for inhabitable rustication. The wall becomes not just a traditional division between what is conceived of as the interior and exterior but as a mediator between slippery notions of the public domain of the city and the private as well as nature and the constructed inner world of buildings. The strategies developed through looking at material composition serve to find provoke relationships in the mediation that exist between these binaries
to arrive at new architectural conditions.
To explore these notions the studio designed a headquarters for a food center dealing with shortages and surpluses. These ranged from companies combating depleted food sources through alternative products to organizations developing food from waste. As more of the planet becomes inhospitable for farming and urban populations continue to rapidly expand, there is intense need for new means of producing food whether it is through artificial lab grown items or natural foods produced in new ways. A plethora of startups exist which are tackling these problems as well as plugging into a growing interest in the culture around food sourcing and preparation. Similar to the loosening of the distinction between artificial and natural building materials in the construction industry, these food companies are working with methods, techniques, and ingredients which shift between the two states. Tastes and textures get mixed and recalibrated to produce seemingly contradictory items such as plant based shrimp, bacon made from mushroom roots, animal free eggs, or insect burgers. The origins and compositions of the food become quite different from the expected as items are produced through new processes. Architecture can produce environments to complement the synthetic worlds of these new food production spaces. This project will investigate the ramifications of these developments on material form.
“Solid, Clear, Fuzzy” aims to challenge the relationship between the interior and exterior within traditional architecture has been established through the poche. The fuzzy posits an alternative scenario in which the poche begins to slip and escape from the interior to the facade. Here a boundary is addressed, in which the poche reveals the interiority through a clear massing slipping over its edges, and allowing the envelope to react. Rather
than punching the envelope to divide the interior from the exterior. The project employs techniques of tumbling the facade that allows for gaps and seams that create an interplay between objects. The multiple facade layering began to divide spaces and demonstrate intersections between previously separate volumes. This allows for flexibility of spaces as well as interconnection between the interior exterior.
The project is a an urban fish farm works as a source of fresh fish for the neighboring communities, and through traditional processes of drying fish, can offer preserved
fish for the food bank. This allowed for the tumbling objects to become processing spaces as well as community spaces. The project started to manipulate traditional building materials such as shingles, polycarbonate, and reeds and brought them to the urban context. We took the material qualities and started to distort them through scale, color, and layering. These elements, working to distort the original clarity of the volume, wrapping elements of the frame, questioning how structure can be used as a framework rather than a container, and manipulating surfaces based on their suggested physicality.
Dongjoo Jo,
Frustum aims to integrate a meat cultivation center into the urban landscape while prioritizing human interaction and experiences. It provides an integrated solution for food production in an urban environment, while also offering a welcoming space for people to gather and enjoy the many experiences it has to offer. The building features a blend of functional spaces for meat cultivation and public spaces for visitors to enjoy. The design achieves a seamless transition between these different spaces by organizing the operational areas within cone-shaped structures, referred to as frustums, which also serve as a striking visual feature of the building. These three primary structures generate unique spatial qualities within the urban context and ensure that all areas of the building are optimally conditioned and semi-conditioned for their intended use.
Faculty: Masoud Akbarzadeh
Teaching Assistant: Yao Lu
The architecture and construction industries are major contributors to global waste problems. The construction process generates significant waste and debris, ranging from the demolition of existing structures to make way for new buildings, to the waste produced during material processing and preparation for new construction. Addressing this issue and eliminating waste requires a shift towards a design process that emphasizes the continuous use and reuse of resources.
To achieve this, architects must carefully select construction materials and analyze construction methods and material preparation techniques to minimize waste and enable future reusability. Additionally, building design and usage characteristics should also be taken into consideration. By incorporating these elements, a circular design process can be established, which integrates material properties with building design and usage. This approach prioritizes the creative and distinctive use of materials over their sheer quality. Recycling and reusing construction materials from existing sources of waste or demolition are considered viable design approaches. However, it is important to note that materials recovered from previous construction may not always fully meet the material and functional requirements of new construction. Furthermore, this approach is only applicable if the materials can be effectively recycled. The emergence of new construction technologies, such as prefabrication, offers the potential for more efficient construction processes with reduced on-site waste and debris. However, it is crucial to carefully consider the waste of energy and resources involved in the pre-production of materials for prefab construction during the design process.
In this studio, our aim is to explore innovative design methods for the assembly and disassembly of prefabricated parts in the construction of mid-rise buildings. By doing so, we strive to minimize waste and promote sustainability in the architecture and construction industries.
The inspiration behind the project stemmed from the curve folding technique, which served as the catalyst for the entire endeavor. A multitude of parameters were instrumental in driving the project forward, such as the circle profile’s dimensions, the number of division points required to form the arc profile, and the angle of oscillation planes. In addition, the orientation of the wood grain demonstrates the possible design strategies, which have the direct impact on the angle and magnitude of the curvature of the wood to bend through specifying wood fiber orientations.
The lattice cell structure formed the foundation of the structural grid, which provided endless possibilities for configuring the spatial conditions and ceiling heights. This project showcased three distinct configurations, namely X-shape, Y-shape, and V-shape, each with its own unique characteristics. The X-shape configuration, for instance, presented the opportunity to create lofting conditions and multipurpose auditorium seating arrangements. The Y-shape configuration offered the prospect of double-height spaces, areas for spiral staircases and elevators. The V-shape configuration had the potential to generate vast, open-plan spaces. By keeping two fundamental concepts in mind, namely the primary circulation around the parameters and the central atrium, the overall organization was established by utilizing these three configurations and distorting the original lattice grid to create an intriguing branching condition from the street corner.
Xiayu Zhao, CULTURE
This design project explores the possibilities of cross-influences and decision-making through a series of experiments with the construction method, structure efficiency, digital structure simulation tools, form-finding, and spatial qualities. Moreover, the studio aims to use pre-fabrication and modular production to bridge the design and fabrication processes better, reducing construction waste. Our team focuses on using structural-analysis software Karamba and Fusion360 to generate parametric slab to reduce the material waste of conventional post and lintel structures, utilize spatial depth that the manifold strategy creates to increase the structural performance of concrete slabs, and develop modular columns and slab systems to be quickly assembled on site and available for future expansion and reuse.
Faculty: Dorian Booth
Teaching Assistant: Cherie Wan
Assemblage as a concept within the visual arts dates to the early 20th century, as artists began to experiment with techniques for developing three-dimensional, spatial compositions of found objects. As an extension of the assemblage within the field of art, this studio will explore the idea of the assemblage as an architectural technique for form and space making. Purposebuilt industrial structures will act as the medium from which these architectural assemblages will be constructed. Embedded within many of these structures are fundamental platonic geometries that, once stripped of their original context and use, have great potential to act as the basis from which new three-dimensional compositions can be produced. Through an analysis, dissection, and recombination of such industrial objects, the goal is to arrive at inhabitable, composite forms that can expand beyond the functions of the original structures. Far from empty shells, these assemblages will then develop rich networks of interconnected programmatic and mechanical space.
The studio focused on the design of a clean water access center located in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. Access to clean, drinkable water continues to be a pervasive issue globally despite significant developments in the technology surrounding its filtration and distribution. Some of the earliest or most successful examples of the Public Commons in Western society deal directly with access to drinkable water, those being the system of aqueducts and fountains in ancient Rome and the public drinking fountains installed throughout Paris in the late 19th century. Positioned on the border of heavy industrial, commercial, and residential urban fabric, the center needs to negotiate between the specialized equipment and forms of water filtration systems while also creating accessible and engaging public space. The Industrial Assemblage will be reconsidered in the context of the program, hybridizing the infrastructural systems with a public facing community-based program.
Shiyi Qi & Yujia
The overall intent of the project is to engage the public by creating an interactive and accessible water filtration process. The proposal suggests the use of wells to pump water to a higher level, storing it in a water tank before allowing it to flow through the filtration processes. To enhance the visitor experience, the design incorporates educational, exhibition, and event spaces that are integrated with the building’s
circulation, allowing visitors to witness and understand the entire water filtration process. To provide an engaging and immersive experience, the main entrance is descended with a gentle slope, allowing visitors to enter the building easily while being greeted by a prominent skylight. The interior features a grotto-like atrium, adding texture and visual interest.
Additionally, the southeast corner, which is most visible from nearby streets, is marked by a giant water tank, serving as an anchor for the site. The design incorporates
contrasting elements by using found objects alongside fluid forms created for the building. The assembly concept is further emphasized on the facade, where two systems are represented on top of each other. Natural and industrial materials are selected to create a transition throughout the building. The combination of contrasting materials and the manifestation of the assembly concept adds visual interest and enhances the overall design.
Wei Wang & Wen Qin, AQUAWORKS
Located in Flushing, Queens, along College Point Boulevard, the project site sits adjacent to a vibrant industrial hub near Flushing Creek. This area has grown significantly in the residential and commercial sectors recently. While initially inhabited by the Canarsee and Rockaway Lenape groups, it has now evolved into a diverse landscape characterized by various structures and functions.
The core objective of this design is to delve into the concept of assemblage as a means of creating form and space, drawing inspiration from its artistic applications. Purpose-built industrial structures will be employed as the foundation for constructing these architectural assemblages, allowing for the seamless integration of elements. Inspired by Eduardo Paolozzi’s print, this design project’s primary concept involves using offset language to depict fundamental components such as arcs, lines, and curves. By incorporating this
offset language into the initial industrial assembly model, the design process enables the exploration and refinement of multidimensional offset techniques. Additionally, a pattern language will be extracted from geometric pattern studies to inform and guide design decisions, resulting in a unique and sophisticated final product.
By leveraging these techniques and drawing upon these inspirations, the project aims to deliver an exceptional architectural outcome that harmoniously blends artistry and functionality.
Faculty: Kevin Cannon
Teaching Assistant: Lachelle Weathers
This studio focused on two primary ideas and the relationship to each other.
First, the studio explored the idea that architecture is always seen as an act of addition, which is to say that there is always an opportunity for meaningful experience in how our projects are situated within their context; where new form transforms the environment that it engages. As Vittorio Gregotti noted, the act of making (architecture) is a transformative one, urban form is full of signifiers, which reveal opportunities for the transformation of meaning through the addition of new built form.
Secondly, we took on a discussion of the idea of assembly, the assembly of program as well as the assembly of materials, structure and building systems. This is a critical discussion on the language of architecture and the legibility of urban form. Functions like threshold, bridge, joint, hinge, deflection, porosity or flexibility can be used to signify connections between assemblies whether we are talking about building components or spaces or even cities. Techniques of assembly become techniques for composition. Techniques for joining or connecting assemblies often become critical signifiers of the larger design intention.
The task of the studio was to design a new addition to The New York Historical Society located on Central Park West in Manhattan. The existing Beaux-Arts building is somewhat imposing, described by one of the students as a rather bunker like. Though somewhat subtle the existing building is itself the result of a number of renovations, additions and transformations. The students began work by undertaking an examination of the surroundings materiality, scale and urban composition in order to understand the traces and modifications of previous architects and other stimuli. The students were also encouraged to research the public details and history of the planned expansion for priorities, opportunities and programmatic points of view.
Chen
Huang
Located on 76th street next to Central Park in New York City, the New York Historical Society (NYHS) houses archives, a library, and museum spaces. The new elevated massing floats above the existing NYHS building, and touches the ground through its “legs.” This project aims to become a continuation of Central Park by generating green space both on the ground and on the rooftop. This establishes
a small urban footprint for the building, which as a result gives public space back to the neighborhood.
The building exhibits both a harder shell like structure on the top and a softer “belly” at the bottom and on the inside. The structural elements of the building are expressed on its facade through a system of exoskeleton. Furthermore, the design utilizes a series of pins that connects to the existing building, employing the NYHS’ existing structure to support its mass. The carefully curated mullion and sun shading system frames
a sequence of dynamic views to the cityscape and central park.
Muqiao Lei,
An addition to the New York Historical Society intended to house the American LGBTQ Museum.
The project views the existing Beaux Arts building through a lens that’s critical of its aesthetic composition, drawing upon the history of the Harlem ballroom scene to understand its phsical facade as one of carefully selected ornaments that are intended to communicate sophistication and grandeur. The facade of the addition deconstructs the form of the ionic column into the folds of a dress, translating the imposing and cold granite blocks into a warm and vibrant sandstone fabric. The notion of fabric informs the internal logic of the building as well, creating overlapping corridors and gallery spaces for patrons to weave through, as though passing through many layers of curtains.
“To dream that you are undressing represents the shedding of inhibitions; you may be giving up certain beliefs or attitudes. Undressing may also reflect a revelation of your true feelings or beliefs toward others.”
Faculty: Brian DeLuna
Teaching Assistant: Harsana Siva
The Studio aims to instill an understanding of the building process, building technologies, and materials, with a focus on coordination and collaboration as we engage with various components such as site, existing typologies, precedent, building systems, and materials. The studio will apply these principles to the design of a theatre, exploring the relationship between the theatre and the city. The Theatre has been used to speculate on the direction of civic arrangements along with formal / spatial configurations, dealing with public and private space to reinforce the theme of “Public common space.” Specifically, we will explore the layering of translucent and transparent envelopes, while also utilizing mass timber (CLT) as the primary structural system to create innovative environments and atmospheres within the theatre. Through this approach, we will seek to develop a deep understanding of the ways in which materials and construction techniques can be used to shape the built environment and create unique and engaging public spaces that contribute to the cultural and social life of the community.
This project explores and redefines the traditional theatrical experience with the innovative use of glass tubes as the primary material. The main concept of the project is to create a unique visual effect that reflects the vibrancy of the urban context of New York while maintaining an opaque yet welcoming relationship with the Broadway Street view.
Situated on a prime
location on Broadway, the project seeks to incorporate the light and liveliness of the city as an integral part of the “show.” The translucency of the glass material is designed to reflect and evolve its appearance throughout the with the changing light and weather conditions, creating an ever-evolving spectacle.
The “New Theater” design, inspired by the film “Birdman,” seeks to embrace the complex dynamism and authenticity of theatrical arts. A pivotal element of our vision is the use of glass tubes with mass timbers (CLT) as a primary building material. This choice reflects the project’s themes of transparency, interconnectedness, and multifaceted experiences. The glass tubes, akin to the
continuous, meandering circulation in the theater, serve as a visual and spatial conduit, connecting spaces and people, while revealing the theater’s inner workings to the city. Like the camera in “Birdman,” these transparent structures invite public engagement, offering glimpses into the theater’s off-stage activities and the intricacies of performance creation. The inherent fluidity of the glass tube design also facilitates the seamless integration of public and private spaces, resonating with the project’s objective of exploring new cultural and
spatial alignments in urban architecture. In essence, the glass tubes and CLT system become a medium for embodying and materializing the dynamic creativity both on and off the stage.
Faculty:
Ben Krone
Teaching
Assistant: Rhea Nayar
A signal is a gesture, action, or sound that is used to convey information or instructions; an electrical impulse or radio wave transmitted or received.
With advancements in solid state microprocessors and digital technology, as humans we have shaped a new trajectory based around convenience, portability, and disposability. The analog has been upended by the digital, and entire facets of everyday life have been altered due to the emergence of autonomous, automatic systems. Only recently has there been a qualitative reevaluation of this trajectory that extends beyond the fringes of societal norms. This reevaluation has largely been limited to a subset of technological counter cultures that are weighted more toward forms of art than science.
Whereas art can look freely towards the past, present, or future with little obligation to fix, correct, manipulate, or perform, science is based on strict boundaries and quantifiable parameters. Science must work at a pace to keep up with manmade external threats whether it be disease, conflict, or the degradation of our environment. Science must solve problems while art is expected to comment, consider, and reflect them back to society. Through creative expression, art inherently contains flexibility and freedoms that do not prevail in science. However, despite these distinctions, innovation often results from non- linear thinking, requiring a more nuanced, iterative, and even intuitive approach of theorizing in often impractical ways. It must consider quality, repetition, and exposure over convenience. It must look backwards and forwards in equal parts. In other words, innovation results from facets of both art and science as processes of inquiry.
This semester the studio will consider this intersection through the development of a ‘Signal Space’, a laboratory which brings time-based media artists together with scientists and researchers. The primary structure of the laboratory will be largely singular but driven by each team’s focus into a particular area of physics and/or technology.
Anna Bruce & Jessica Wong, FrameLab
Situated in a hillside along the Hudson River in upstate New York, this project aims to hybridize the themes of artist Anicka Yi and the research of monarch butterfly expert Stephen Reppert to bring attention to the fragile systems of nature that are often affected by human intervention. FrameLab was derived from early analog model studies that extracted the geometries of monarch butterfly roosting patterns and the encapsulation of natural phenomena explored by the artist. The interior and exterior systems are comprised of intersecting planes and frames that are the positive and negative infills of the same geometry. The programmatic organization of the project is laid across the long bar-like form, with the artist spaces located near the entry and laboratory and butterfly enclosure located near the cantilevered portion. Glazing, channel glass panels, and solid retaining walls were used to establish a material gradient to signal the program.
The project revolves around a psychological neurology lab featuring a sensory meditation space situated in Upper State New York, adjacent to the tranquil Hudson River. It draws inspiration from the research on memory in Neurology and collaboration with the esteemed artists’ group known as Numen/For Use. By abstracting the intricate processes of memory—constructing,
deconstructing, and reconstructing—into a captivating three-dimensional realm, we unearthed a remarkable sandwich structural system, encompassing the ground, ceiling, and floating spaces between floors. This vertical system incorporates steel columns for compression and cables for tension, harmoniously blending these forces to create an enchanting cloudlike environment, where one can experience a sensation of hanging and floating. To implement this system on a larger scale, we opted for a single form, the circle, as our
primary architectural element due to its ability to evenly distribute forces and eliminate any structural dead ends. By adjusting the density, slope, and orientation of the cables and columns, the structural system seamlessly transforms into space dividers, giving rise to unique environments tailored to specific programs.
Faculty: Daniel Markiewicz
Teaching Assistant: Jamaica Reese-Julien
“When Smithson went to see Shift” Serra tells us, “ he spoke of its picturesque quality and … one of the common places of the theory of the picturesque garden: not to force nature, but to reveal the “capacities” of the site, while magnifying their variety and singularity.”
— Alan-Yves Bois “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara
In this studio, we designed a Bath House. We engaged with concepts of the picturesque as described by Yve-Alain Bois in “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara”, as well as the relationship between cultural excess and formal erosion, or in other words: decadence and degradation. We examined the problematic historical role of the public restroom and aimed to propose forward looking public space projects. While the weight of these concepts were available to students to either pursue or resist, each group was charged with developing a building for construction , with real-world fabrication details in mind.
Nothing epitomizes decadence like a bath house. And nothing signals societal decline like excessive decadence. Rituals of bathing have wide ranging cultural roots from Turkish Baths, to Scandinavian Saunas, to Japanese Onsens and Rotenburos. Notions of excess and hedonism have in certain cases signaled the decline of empires: there were 856 baths in ancient Rome by the 5th century just before it fell. The Bath House is also in many ways a flexible program, whose intent is primarily the production of pleasure through relaxation.
The communal importance of bath houses was examined through a close understanding of the fraught history of the public restroom. Restrooms are a critical element of any bath house and historically are one of the clearest examples of how design has been used to assert socio-political control over certain minority groups. Restrooms have been used in the past to compartmentalize, segregate and alienate groups of people from one another. From 19th century Victorian era gender
Daniel Markiewicz
divides, to the civil rights movement, the AIDS epidemic, to the more contemporary Transgender Rights Movement, restrooms have been used as spatial constructs for the oppression of marginalized groups.
We began our Bath House explorations with an examination of the picturesque, which is most commonly associated with the 18th and early 19th century discussion of pictorial values of architecture and its relationship to landscape. The picturesque was born out of a reaction to neoclassical order and rigidity and a desire for a more fluid experience of architecture through the embrace of nature. Yve-Alain Bois’ engages with the picturesque through the work and discourse of the sculpture Richard Serra. Specifically, he cites Serra’s own working method as particularly appropriate for the picturesque due to the artists’ resistance to orthographic plan drawing. As described by Bois, Serra’s preference for the elevation, as opposed to the plan, is a characteristic inherent to the picturesque movement which with rolling landscapes is itself “a struggle against the reduction ‘of all terrains to the flatness of a sheet of paper’”. This studio however loved the plan. And we refuted the positions of Bois, Serra and others by using the plan to engage with central notions of the picturesque, with inclusive public space planning and with contemporary bath house design.
Focusing on the contemporary discussion of mental health, our intent with this proposal is to service the bathhouse programming with a psilocybin therapy initiative. Specifically, the physical and psychological effects of mushrooms as well as the visual effects of steam served as main concept drivers to
develop the architecture both in massing and plan. As a project, we aspire to normalize the usage of psilocybin in a controlled way but break down preconceived notions of the therapy spaces through visual connectivity with intentional lack of accessibility. Through the dynamic use of materials, playful landscapes and sensory atmospheric qualities, we purposefully created a bathhouse environment that highlights the duality of mentally stimulating headspace with a calming, relaxing pool scape. The juxtaposition of natural
vs. manicured landscapes, controlled vs. flowed tiling, deep vs. flat material, is all shown within the parti diagram of the therapy wing – becoming an all-encompassing manifestation of the inaccessible resource.
Inspired by the organic yet strategically meditated forms found in rice paddies, The Aquatic Winery is derived from a series of curvilinear forms that allow for picturesque moments throughout the building and site. The bathing experience is enhanced with the incorporation of an artisanal rice winery that is meant to compliment the social and relaxed atmosphere associated with
bathhouses in the past. The building and landscape is holistically designed to create seamless moments of the picturesque. Bathers follow a circulative flow that allows access to the indoor and outdoor pools, connected by a lazy river that weaves through the building and across the site as a way to engage with nature. The upper-level pool offers a vertical visual connection to the surroundings while the rooftop bar offers a serene experience from above. The building is supported by a hybrid concrete and steel system consisting of concrete
cores and gridded-steel facades, which is sandwiched between translucent stone, that allows connection to the outdoors. Opaque and translucent cladding materials enhance the building’s form, with light concrete panels and copper metal accents forming the main structure. Overall, The Aquatic Winery is an oasis that blends architecture, nature, and relaxation seamlessly.
Faculty: Danielle Willems
Teaching Assistants: Michael Willhoit & Joseph Depre
“In the chimera, we summon the trickster of the natural order, both mythical creature, and genetic phenomenon. Drawing upon chimerism allows us to broaden the concept of “artificial intelligence” into “synthetic cognition” – an approach that highlights the duality of “artificial” and “authentic,” amplifies non-human methods of cognition, and anticipates modes of symbiosis between imposed dichotomies.”
— Anna Engelhardt & Ilan Manouach
The design research of the studio will examine the intersections between spaces of leisure/recreation and water/data infrastructure. Our studio will speculate on the future of the Pier typology. The contemporary paradigms of robotic manufacturing, augmented reality, blockchains, and artificial intelligence, are going to have profound repercussions for our discipline. Our world is increasingly being understood as an emergent outcome of complex systems. Similarly, both analytical and generative tools for the definition of spatial and architectural complex systems have been established within our discipline. This studio will focus on the development of a Sports/Entertainment and Data Center as an exciting opportunity to rethink the architectural typology of Infrastructure and Leisure Space.
Data Center – Currently data is exchanged internationally at an astronomical rate, and the need for its physical embodiment grows. In addition to this, concerns of the energy consumption of big data and the intensification of natural disasters, set the stage for architectural data infrastructure to take sharp focus on its importance in our everyday existence.
Leisure Space – In the history of our discipline, the gradual accumulation of excess leads to moments of change. There are many of these examples, and they happen at multiple scales all
over our architectural landscape. One could say that Central Park in Manhattan is an excess of the urban grid that defines a moment of leisure, or Thermal Vals are prime examples of events of excess. This could be traced back to the Thermaes of Ancient Greece/Rome and to the architectural advancements in the Greek/Roman Gymnasia, which developed into the first Olympic Games in Olympia, and in each of these examples there is a cycle of excess that produces a reciprocal typology of leisure.
‘Machinic Chimeras – perceives architectural formation as part of a larger, self-organizing, adapting, material process. Our studio will begin with reconsidering the “composite hybridity” of the Chimera, as a generative point of departure to re-conceptualize machinic and leisure spaces. “Chimeras are synthetic – i.e. produced through synthesis, a combination of parts forming an entity rather than artificial – a copy from the authentic model defined by its opposition to the original. Their unique nature positions chimeras in radical opposition to an imitation or a fake. Even though the terms “synthetic” and “artificial” are casually used interchangeably, there is a difference in the precise ways they refer to “unnatural” or “manufactured” phenomena. The composite hybridity within chimeras makes that difference evident.” While engaging in the production of ontological architectural axioms through the generative capacities of machine learning, one focus will be the relationship between computation and ai/stable diffusion. “To solve a problem on a computer, we need an algorithm. An algorithm is a sequence of instructions that is carried out to transform the input to output. – Machine learning, enables computers to learn from large data sets, and is the basis of numerous developments from speech recognition to driverless cars.” Conceptually, the Sports/Entertainment and Data Center of the studio will operate as a platform to explore post-human and machinic architectural space. Featured Student Work:
The city of New York uses water for thermoelectric power generation throughout the city and the largest supplier is currently located on Pier 98, our site. The current issue is that the utility company is taking all of the residual hot water and dumping it back into the river, negatively impacting the marine life. Tasked with hybridizing a data center and another program, this project aims to propose a solution to the hot waste water caused by the cooling of the city, and the steam waste that is typically prouduced from data storage facilities.
This project challenges the typology of the pier, by hybridizing infrastructure and leisure spaces through nesting, wrapping and intersecting space, program, and function. The city of New York produces hot water waste, and data centers produce an abundance of heat waste, so this proposal aims to be a solution that could utilize both. By hybridizing a data center and bathhouse, the hot water is filtered and used in the pools before being cooled and released back into the Hudson, while the heat waste from the data servers is moved into the bathhouses and naturally heats the pools.
The relationship between the data servers and the bathhouse plays a crucial role in our design and our aim was to challenge the typical relationships of these programs. The data makes its way into the public space of the building in the form of towers and also in the mineral spirits in the walls. The organization of the building was derived by the intersection of different geometries. These interstitial spaces became the main attractions of our building: the data and the pools.
Kirah Cahill, Ruiqi
Cirrostratus hybridizes two infrastructures - the data center and water filtration plant - into one cohesive and aesthetically exuberant pier structure located on the Hudson River in New York City. Typically, data centers are designed with closed, windowless rooms and boring rows of servers. These facilities are usually closed to the public, with high levels of security throughout.
Cirrostratus challenges this typology by using a renewable source for its cooling - the Hudson River. Water is pumped from the river into the building on the west end, where it then passes through water-chilled precast concrete slabs and a series of tanks
located adjacent to the data servers. Beyond this new cooling method, Cirrostratus challenges the typical data center typology by opening itself to the public. Data is still secure in locations unreachable to guests but offers a unique experience where New Yorkers can observe the beautiful light show of the data servers as their lights filter through transparent rods and the water tanks, flickering and reflecting the motion of the waves onto the ceiling and walls. Users will feel like they are underwater, in a quiet and meditative retreat from the loud and busy streets of New York City. Cirrostratus is a new type of infrastructure project, combining both data center, leisure, and educational programs for users in an exuberant and resilient design.
We educate our students for the next 25 years to come, and we live in a new world. The definition of design research has expanded significantly in recent times. The global effects of economic markets, th eenvironmental realities of the Anthropocene, and the socio-political and DEI related challenges of our dayare profoundly reshaping the discipline. The design research studios examine such conditions and envisionand develop architectural responses that reflect our contemporary circumstances in sensible and productive ways. The Spring 704 Advanced Design-Research Studios are an in-depth examination and exploration of critical architectural topics through rigorous conceptual thinking and advanced design methodologies similar tothesis. These elective studios are taught by a selection of leading professionals in the field who share and further develop their own research expertise with the students over the course of the semester. All studiotopics and project briefs are devised in ways to support the various objectives of each research subject. The semester will have an option to travel in the Americas, Canada and / or Europe. A research travel budgetwill have to be submitted to
the Chair with a specific research proposal for the trip and a detailed budget.
The primary goal of this final design studio of the Master of Architecture program is to equip all graduating architecture students with a rigorous and robust knowledge base (encompassing research, design, theory, and technical skills) necessary to participate in the field of architecture at the highest level. The ability toformulate, develop, and conclude a design research project based on a set of specific parameters is a crucial step for achieving this goal. In addition, digital and media technologies are providing us with unprecedented tools, new types of knowledge, and increasingly complex technical skills. The cultural, societal, and aesthetic ramifications of these ever-accelerating technological developments need to be examined and explored just as rigorously as their performative and material properties. Only in the synergy of the two can we articulate constructive and sustainable design solutions.
Our unique disciplinary ability to express physically and conceptually the dynamics of our world, to analyze and synthesize, to evoke and provoke, to seize the past and to imagine the future, is largely contingent onthe successful integration of research-oriented thinking into everyday practice. In this spirit, the 704 Design Research Studios promote a progressive and experimental approach to architectural thinking and making.
Faculty: Winka Dubbeldam & Richard Garber
Teaching
Assistant: Merrick Castillo
The Studio is researching and proposing a Net- Zero Geological Research Center dedicated to study fossils & climate change within a series of naturally formed limestone and chalk cliffs 90,000 years ago located along the eastern coast of the Danish Island of Møn. The goal of the Geological Research Center is to create HYBRIDS, to develop architectural interventions that coincide with, and support the interconnectedness of the social and ecological systems located among the cliffs. Students will create a “sedimentary architecture” that variably engages the cliffs and the processes that bore them, proposing structures that integrate literally within them. Topics of spatio-temporal transformations like mobility, pollution, and resource extraction will be looked at through human and non-human lenses to inform future-oriented design projects.
Featured Student Work: Jorge Couso & Zihua Mo ......................................... 304,326 Rhea Nayar & Cherie Wan .............................................. 306
The rugged cliffs of Mons Klint are subject to constant erosion by rainwater and waves. Upon these cliffs, micro ecologies have facilitated unique phenomenon which create vibrant, synthetic natures. Using water as a medium, these buildings reverse the erosion process and enable the growth of new terrain, hosting a range of plant and animal life. The structures serve as a
catalyst to these processes, reflecting the region’s history while looking toward its future. Additionally, the project takes advantage of chalk deposits extracted from the cliffs themselves within its concrete, minimizing the carbon footprint of the buildings. The concrete surfaces facilitate plant growth and habitats for local birds through a gradient of porous openings. Micro Ecologies extends from the mountaintop to the beach, with pathways cutting through the rock connecting them all. Visitors are encouraged to create their own
unique experience, engaging with the sky, cliff, and sea. With this approach, Mons Klint is transformed into a dynamic and sustainable environment, highlighting the importance of coexisting with nature.
Rhea Nayar & Cherie Wan,
Our project is an investigation into the range of porosities that exist within the vertical section of our site, and their resultant degrees of occupation and permeability. Building forms are negotiated with the staggering nature of the site, bringing new ways for humans to experience the cliff’s material ecologies, where both porous and dense rock formations are intercepted by flint horizons. Due
to the range of densities, the cliff develops cracks and fissures as a result of erosion over time. Chalk extractions from the cliff are incorporated into the bacteria-based healing agents to recover water tightness upon cracking and minimize waste generated through construction. The geological center incorporates a research lab and batch plant dedicated to the study and production of self-healing concrete.
Faculty: Ferda Kolatan
Teaching Assistant: Caleb Ehly
The ancient settlements in Cappadocia present a compelling contrast to our own fast-paced times. For approximately 4000 years, the soft volcanic tuff in this region has served Hittite, Persian, Greek, and Turkic peoples as the base material from which to carve out their homes, animal shelters, and spaces for social gatherings, cultural expression, and worship. The studio will examine the material conditions in Cappadocia and design new architectural prototypes by synthesizing digital tools with the traditional methods of rock carving. The main objective for the studio is to build on the deep cultural and geological histories of the site, maintain a sense of local continuity, but also speculate on the potential of new material and object theories for contemporary architectural strategies. To this end, the studio will discuss current conceptual topics of thing aesthetics, object-oriented thinking, vital materialisms, oddkin design, and nonlinear history.
Yasmin Goulding & Michaela Dawe,
Architecture is a form of material organization, one that is dynamic and changing. Ruins are an example of that evolution; they continue to adapt to changing circumstances, long after their original design intent. The exploration of materials and techniques highlight the beauty and uniqueness of imperfections and
irregularities. The broken pieces of stone tumble down the whitecaps to create new aggregate at the bottom of the valley, painted and polished to pay homage to the cultural heritage of central Anatolia.
Contemporary architectural design creates new types of affinities between old and new elements in buildings. Through coloration, breakage, and ornamentation to create a sense of continuity and coherence between different parts of our intervention.
Nana NtiriwaaBerkoh & Lachelle
Our research focuses on the traditional building industry in Cappadocia, particularly the tools and methods of construction that have become the regional standard. We investigate how far one can push these tools in generating a new process of space-making and experience.
In this project, the quarry acts as a representation of sites of long-term material operations. These are typically places that are left to be worn away over time when their contributions to the industry are done. In our research, we seek to understand how we can further the timeline for this contribution and how pushing traditional methods of extraction and casting can generate a new process for the creation of enclosures. The overall methodology yields a structure that is not a clear cause and effect of the process but becomes something that stretches beyond the mere sum of its parts.
Faculty: Mette Ramsgaard-Thomsen
Teaching Assistant: Julianna Cano
The Advanced Biomaterial Design Poetics studio examines how bio-based materials can challenge and change the way architecture is conceptualized, particularly during environmentally unstable times. Architecture, the way it is designed and produced, is under pressure to rethink its practices in order to address its responsibility and agency in the era of the climate crisis. A particular aspect of this crisis lies with the current rampant over consumption of resources. Bio-based materials are facilitating a departure from current linear “take-makedispose” models of production into renewable, regenerative and restorative methods. With the use of bio-based materials and new means of production come new constraints and material imitations regarding strength ratios, durabilities and behaviours that we as designers must adapt to.
Bio based materials can be understood as metabolistic . As instances of biomass, bio-based materials are essentially cyclical as they pass through cycles of growth and decay at different intensities and temporalities. As such, the bio-based material paradigm presents three key challenges to industrialisation. Firstly, it posits that materials are part of systems of return in a closed loop planetary system and that further life cycles of materials must be considered as part of design. Secondly, it presents a new sense of agency as it positions us as part of the silvi-and agricultural practices of growing and harvesting renewable materials. Thirdly, it challenges us to find means of incorporating the fundamentally transient temporality of bio-based materiality .
The studio asks how architecture can engage the limited timespans of bio-based materials. By taking a point of departure in robotic 3D printed cellulose biopolymers , we explore what an architecture of frequent and constant erosion might look like. As a studio, we designed our own site-specific bio-polymer recipes and strategized different additive
construction methods on site to investigate how logics of material composition, rheology and print path can allow for new ideation.
The island of Læsø served as our site to test how environmentally conscious material interventions and local ecology interact with one another in a time-based continually constructed process of making. Each team explored varying methods of continual construction to develop a symbiotic relationship between a metabolistic architecture, its ecology and environment as well as the agents both human and nonhuman, biotic and abiotic, that care for and maintain it.
Featured Student Work:
Janover & Jun Lee ..........................................
316,330
Xu & Yiran Zhao ............................................ 318
“According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and Deltares, sea levels are projected to rise by 1.6m in a high emission scenario by 2050, along with a global increase in frequency and severity of extreme coastal surge and storm events. This jeopardizes much of the fragile ecosystems and conditions present on the island of Læsø,
Denmark which have already been subjected to manmade externalities.
Our intervention seeks to leverage natural ecological systems native to the island of Læsø and Denmark, along with continual robotic fabrication and biomaterial research, as a way of building maintainable and adaptable resilience tactics against impending climate risks that threaten the ecology of the island. Utilizing strategies including LIDAR scanning, indigenous floral ecosystem engineers, targeted biomaterial recipes,
and continual manned and automated construction, the proposal guides and optimizes the sediment deposition and coastal terraforming inherent to Læsø in order to buffer inland ecosystems. The culmination of these tactics results in an intimate network of care and stewardship between the overall system and its actors, each supporting the other to create an adaptable coastal ecotone comprised of nutrified and stabilized biomass, protecting inland ecosystems from coastal floods, sand drift, and sea level rise.”
Changzhe Xu & Yiran Zhao,
Weave-in aims to preserve a unique bogged lake ecosystem on the island of Læsø in Denmark using 3D printed biomaterials and robotics. The raised bog, a type of peatland, plays a crucial role in the environment by storing vast amounts of carbon. However, it is gradually disappearing due to human intervention and natural progression. To maintain the bog water level and prevent
carbon release, we propose a long-term intervention by building up sediment levels along the lake’s periphery. Our approach is to install prefabricated stations forming a network of stations and bridges, which will gradually erode and be repaired or replaced over a decade. The stations, made from biomaterials derived from invasive species found on the site, will degrade and thus accelerate sedimentation at the lake’s edge while providing access for humans and robots to maintain the bog ecology.
The project envisions a cyclical strategy, adapting to seasonal water level fluctuations. During summer, stations are installed by humans, while robots perform maintenance and repairs in the winter. Over time, the station network will extend around the entire lake, contributing nutrients and sedimentation, fostering the growth of native plants and the formation of a new topography and ecology.
Faculty: Marion Weiss
Teaching Assistant: Nicole Bronola
La Brea Tar Pits is the largest urban paleontological research site in the world and is located on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles’ “Miracle Mile.” Over the past century, the La Brea Tar Pits/Hancock Park site, originally 27 acres, has ceded space to allow for the creation of the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art and most recently the Academy of Motion Pictures. Now focused on 13 acres, the Tar Pits and the nearly 50-year-old Page Museum reflect the impact of constant active on-site excavation and research and the wear and tear of visitation that continues to grow as it serves both metropolitan and international communities.
The discovery of the La Brea Tar Pits, a sticky petri dish for research, emerged from the Los Angeles oil industry that excavated oil and tar for the thousands of miles of roadway that pave the expanse of Los Angeles Valley. The site was donated by oil industrialist George Allan Hancock to Los Angeles County in 1923 under the strict condition that the fossils discovered in its tar pits would be forever protected, archived and exhibited. Since then, more than 5 million exceptionally well-preserved prehistoric specimens, from the very large mastodon skeletons to the smallest paleo-botanical pollens, have been discovered.
In 2018, The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles announced a competition to develop a master plan to reimagine the La Brea Tar Pits and museum. While the competition focused on the evolution of the 13 acre park and a refreshed museum, this studio is focused on the creation of a new, international research center on climate evolution, informing a paradigmatic transformation of the Natural History museum into a place that can also expand its scientific mission to engage the urgent questions climate change provokes.
Featured Student Work:
Han Gao & Jiacheng Huang .................................... 322,328 Ruijie (Jesse) Xu, Yukuan (Kiki) Guo ............................ 324
The project is located at La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, where fossils reveal characteristics of the epochs of climate change and the evolution of Earth’s life, as well as evolving insights into our own climate era. The shape of the entire building is not yet completed and is still in progress. Scaffolding and a grid system
provide fluidity and adaptability to accommodate evolving research and time. To alleviate the shortage of public space in Los Angeles and meet the needs of fossil excavation and research, the project connects the existing Page Museum and the climate research center with a grid system. This not only creates a large amount of movable public space, allowing visitors to walk on the tar but also meets the researchers’ need for continuously changing excavation sites. The excavation site is open to the public, allowing visitors to witness the outdoor work site
of the personnel while enjoying the outdoor space, and gaining a clearer understanding of Los Angeles’ past and the future of climate change. The climate research center, museum, and park will provide a new mixed venue for science, culture, and entertainment. The contaminated scaffolding is inspired by mammoth fossils, becoming hooks to support the researchers’ tents. The public and researchers will share this space. In the contaminated scaffolding, we have a new connection with history, and the climate change era will be revealed.
Ruijie Xu, Yukuan Guo,
The New Climate Research Center is designed to connect the past, present, and future of La Brea Tar Pits. The center utilizes fossil records from the past to predict future climates, while also creating continuity between climate centers and local communities. The goal is to create a low, accessible, and seamless structure that is open and transparent, yet still shielded from direct sunlight.
The center is designed in the shape of an L, with two main elements fused together into a single entity. Programs and structures extend into the park, creating an open and inviting space for visitors. The building’s two linear sequences house the Botany Collections and the Animal Collections. The vertical structure provides research facilities and observation platform.
To make the building more permeable and inviting for visitors, the first floor is non-ticketed. Visitors can enjoy the excavation site, green plaza, fossil collection, and botany garden free of charge. The center is an extension of the park, offering gradual transitions from the outside to the inside and from the street to the art of science.
The new climate research center provides a comfortable public space for daily life, making it an ideal location for visitors to learn about climate research, as well as to relax and enjoy the beauty of the park. The center’s design encourages visitors to explore and engage with the natural world, while also providing a space for researchers to conduct important climate research.
ARCH 5120
History and Theory II
Faculty: Joan Ockman
How do architecture, urbanism, and the environment reflect the dominant social, economic, and political changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how did its vast geopolitical shifts such as Imperialism, Fascism, the Cold War, Neoliberalism, the “War on Terror,” and Nationalism reshape architecture culture? How might architecture culture respond and help construct its resistant variants, anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, decolonization, and making “quieter places” in Donna Haraway’s sense? How do critical frameworks to rethink positivism, efficiency, standardization, and even utopian thinking become revised through the lenses of queer, postcolonial, critical race, and eco-feminist theory in postwar
architectural production? And how do these frameworks allow us to conceive of more equitable ways of being in the world while thinking with a varied past? This course provides twelve discursive and theoretical frameworks to rethink architectural history in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Through twelve lectures the course traces critical questions confronting architectural modernity from the violence of settler colonialism to the possibilities of making kin. While we will trace instances of architecture, city planning, landscape and infrastructural developments that corresponded to dominant ways of conceiving modernity and its analog progress narratives, the course is mainly interested in considering resistant paradigms that elide attempts to speak of a unified or homogenous notion of modernity. The course will be active
and interactive and will include building a collaborative dictionary of architectural terms.
ARCH 5220
Visual Studies II
Faculty: Nate Hume
The third and last in the series, Visual Studies II is taken by second year MArch students in their Fall semester.
This course integrates more dynamic modeling, texturing, and rendering applications to synthesize and propel work from the earlier modules. To avoid
tropes and the inherent biases of the tools, the courses serve to help comprehend not only the technical and aesthetic but also the theoretical and political implications of representation.
ARCH 5320
Construction II
Faculty: Franca Trubiano
Construction Technology II is an advanced course in building technology that informs, instructs, and demonstrates the extent to which industrialized building systems and innovative building technologies impact and guide the architect’s design process. The course focuses on multi-story buildings whose complexities require the adoption of varying material, constructional, and informational technologies; all which are never standard, typical, or obvious.
ARCH 5360
Structures II
Faculty: Richard Farley and Masoud Akbarzadeh
A continuation of the equilibrium analysis of structures covered in Structures I. The study of static and hyperstatic systems and design of their elements. Flexural theory, elastic and plastic. Design for combined stresses; prestressing. The study of graphic statics and the design of trusses. The course comprises both lectures and a weekly laboratory in which various structural elements, systems, materials and technical principles are explored.
ARCH 5990
500 Technology Lab
Faculty: Richard Farley, Franca Trubiano, Ryan Palider, Patrick Morgan, Masoud Akbarzadeh
A required lab/workshop to accompany the core technology sequence in the March program. This ungraded course will offer additional instruction, workshops, lab time, and other support to the first-year technology courses (Structures I & II and Construction I & II).
ARCH 6340
Environmental Systems II
Faculty: Eric Teitelbaum
Considers the environmental systems of larger, more complex buildings. Contemporary buildings are characterized by the use of systems such as ventilation, heating, cooling, dehumidification, lighting, communications, and controls that not only have their own demands, but interact dynamically with one another. Their relationship to the classic architectural questions about building size and shape are even more complex. With the introduction of sophisticated feedback and control systems, architects are faced with conditions that are virtually animate and coextensive at many scales with the natural and man-made environments in which they are placed.
ARCH 6360
Material Formations
Faculty: Robert Stuart-Smith, Ezio Blasetti, Jeffrey Anderson
Material Formations introduces robotic production and material dynamics as active agents in design rationalization and expression. The course investigates opportunities for designers to synthesize multiple performance criteria within architecture. Theory, Case-Studies and practical tutorials will focus on the incorporation of analytical, simulation, generative computation and robot fabrication concerns
within design. While production is traditionally viewed as an explicit and final act of execution, the course explores the potential for all aspects of building production and use to participate within the creative design process, potentially producing performance and affect. Students will develop skills and experience in computer programming, physics-based simulation, and robot motion planning. A design research project will be undertaken through a number of discrete assignments that require the synthetization or structural performance along with material and robotic production constraints. The course will explore design as the outcome of materially formative processed of computation and production. Structure: the course will commence with weekly lectures and computer- based tutorials, and culminate in a series of intensive incremental learning, and prepare groups to work on a final assignment which involves the robotic fabrication of a small design prototype.
6710
Professional Practice I Faculty: Philip Ryan
The course consists of a series of workshops that introduce students to a diverse range of practices. The course goal is to gain an understanding of the profession by using the project process as a framework. The course comprises a survey of the architectural profession - its licensing and legal requirements; its evolving types of practice, fees and compensation; its adherence to the constraints of codes and regulatory agencies, client desires and budgets; and its place among competing and allied professions and financial interests. The workshops are a critical
forum for discussion to understand the forces which at times both impede and encourage innovation and leadership. Students learn how architects develop the skills necessary to effectively communicate to clients, colleagues, and user groups. Trends such as globalization, ethics, entrepreneurship, sustainability issues and technology shifts are analyzed in their capacity to affect the practice of an architect.
600 Technology Lab Faculty: Robert Stuart-Smith, Ezio Blasetti, Efrie Escott
A required lab/workshop to accompany the core technology sequence in the MArch program. This ungraded course will offer additional instruction, workshops, lab time, and other support to the second-year technology courses including Environmental Systems (I and II), Case Studies, and Material Formations. All students enrolled in any of those courses must also enroll in the 600 Technology Lab.
ARCH 7121
Topics in Arch Theory II: Architectural Envelopes: Technology and Expression
Faculty: Ariel Genadt
This theory seminar focuses on architectural envelopes: building surfaces that perform climatically and / or structurally, while using technology, materials and their assembly to expressive ends. Such envelopes may be culturally meaningful when conveying a society’s relationship to place, to climate, to art, to technology or to tradition. Adopting a topical approach, the seminar examines the theoretical questions that emerge from the applications of technologies and the varying degrees of their exposure in envelopes. It identifies architectural principles in case studies from around the world, from the 19th to
the 21st century, built in a range of techniques and materials. Lectures topics include: Structure, Construction, Tectonics, “Skin and Bones”, Masking, Integration, Delamination, Situating Technology, “Structural” and Power-operated approaches to Climatic Mediation, Green Technologies, Material Transformations, Cultivated Materials, Discreteness. All topics link historic and 21st century considerations, with the environmental and cultural impact of specific technologies. The seminar develops students’ critical thinking towards contemporary practice, where understanding the reciprocities between construction, technology and expression is essential for creatively tackling architecture’s impact on the environment and sustaining its civic agency.
ARCH 7122
Topics in Arch Theory II: Baroque Parameters
Faculty: Andrew Saunders
This course will provide an overview of the debate surrounding the term Baroque and its contemporary implications. The term Baroque is the subject of many debates ranging from its etymological origin, to disputes on the emergence of an aesthetic “style” post Council of Trent in the seventeenth century by historians such as Heinrich Wölfflin, and the more crrent
and most broad application of the term as a recursive philosophical concept suggested by Gilles Deleuze to “Fold” through time. Although illusive and as dynamic as the work itself, students will become familiar with how the term Baroque has been associated with specific characteristics, attitudes and effects or more specifically the architectural consequences it has produced.
Faculty: Mikael Avery
Like architecture, furniture exists at the intersection of idea and physical form. Due to the specific scale that furniture occupies, however, this physical form relates not only to the environment in which the furniture is set, but also intimately to the physical bodies that interact with and around it. Additionally, as a manufactured product, often specified in large quantities, furniture must also address not only poetic considerations, but practical and economic ones as well. Instead of being seen as one-off objects, the furniture created in this seminar focuses on furniture development as a strategic design process where the designer’s role is to understand the various responsibilities to each stakeholder (client/ manufacturer, market/ customer, environment) and the additional considerations (materials, processes,
manufacturability, etc.), and ultimately translate these points into a potentially successful product. In order to approach furniture in this manner, the course will be structured around specific design briefs and clustered into three distinct but continuous stages. First, through focused research into stakeholder needs and potential market opportunities, students will craft tailored design proposals and development concepts accordingly. Next, students will work toward visualizing a concept, complete with sketches, small mock-ups, scale- model prototypes, technical drawings, connections and other pertinent details in order to refine their proposals and secure a real world understanding of the manufacturing processes and the potential obstacles created by their decisions. From insights gained and feedback from these steps, students will ultimately develop a final design proposal for a piece, collection, or system of furniture that successfully leverages their understanding of a thoughtful and deliberate design strategy.
ARCH 7320
Tech Elective: Enclosures: Selection, Affinities, & Integration
Faculty: Charles Berman
This seminar seeks to establish a framework of understanding enclosures in this sense of the revelatory detail. We will seek to counterpoint the numerical (external) facts of what is accepted as facade design (criteria, codes, loads, forces and consumptions) with an understanding of the generative processes underlying these physical criteria. The aim of this seminar is to arm the student with a guided understanding of the
materials and assemblies available to them to form enclosures. The underlying intent is twofold. In a generative role as architects, the course intends not for an encyclopedic overview of the elements and calculative methodologies of envelope design. Rather we will endeavor to investigate concepts of enclosure through assemblage of elements, mediated by details, in the service of the architectural intentions of the student. In a execution role as architects in practice, the investigation into methodologies of deployment and execution of enclosure, materials and assemblies is intended to arm the students to engage proactively in their future practices with the succession of consulting engineers, specialty facade consultants, manufacturers and facade contractors that they will encounter during the execution of their work.
ARCH 7321
Tech Elective: Deployable Structures
Faculty: Mohamad Al Khayer
The objective of this course is to introduce the rapidly growing field of deployable structures through hands on experiments conducted in workshop environments. Students develop skills in making deployable structures. The course provides an introduction to the history, theory and application of deployable structures. ARCH 7322 Tech Elective: Daylighting Faculty: Janki Vyas This course aims to introduce fundamental daylighting concepts and tools to analyze the daylighting design. The wide range of topics to be studied includes site planning, building envelope and shading optimization, passive solar design, daylight delivery methods, daylight analysis
structure and results interpretation, and a brief daylighting and lighting design integration.
Tech Elective: Principles of Digital Fabrication
Faculty: Mikael Avery
Through the almost seamless ability to output digital designs to physical objects, digital fabrication has transformed the way designers work. At this point, many of the tools and techniques of digital fabrication are well established and almost taken for granted within the design professions. To begin this course we will review these ‘traditional’ digital fabrication techniques in order to establish a baseline skill set to work from. We will then utilize a series of exercises in order to explore a hybrid approaches to digital fabrication in which multiple techniques are utilized within the same work. With the advent of 3D printing technology in the late 1980s and the current wave of widespread adoption as a design tool—found in design schools and offices across the world—the immediate testing of complex digital models has never been quicker, clearer, or more immediate. Despite this formal freedom to test and print, the installations and buildings generated from these complex digital models rely on much more traditional building techniques for their construction. By combining various digital fabrication approaches, we seek to
challenge and reframe the often-reductive geometries that currently supports much of this work and bring with it a new way of approaching aesthetics, structure, and construction based on the possibilities inherent in these digital tools and techniques.
Tech Elective: Heavy Architecture
Faculty: Philip Ryan
Heavy Architecture is a seminar that will examine buildings that, through their tectonics or formal expression, connote a feeling of weight, permanence, or “heaviness”. Analysis of these buildings and methods of construction stand in relation to the proliferation of thin, formally exuberant, and, by virtue of their use or commodified nature, transient buildings. The course is not a rejection or formal critique of “thin” architecture, but instead an analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of the “heavy” building type in terms of a building’s financial, environmental, symbolic or conceptual, and functional goals. The course will parse the alleged nostalgic or habitual reputation of “heavy” architecture within the context of architecture’s ongoing struggle to be the vanguard of the built environment even while its relevancy and voice is challenged by economic, stylistic, and social forces.
ARCH 7325
Tech Elective: Inquiry into
Biomaterial Architectures
Faculty: Laia Mogas-Soldevila
Traditional building materials are environmentally - and economically - expensive to extract, process, transport or recycle, their damage is non-trivial to repair, and have limited ability to respond to changes in their immediate surroundings. Biological materials like cork, coral, silk, skin, shell, or bone outperform man-made materials in that they can be grown where needed, self-repair when damaged, and respond to changes in their surroundings. Their inclusion in architectural practice could have great benefits in wellbeing and the environment defining new tools and strategies towards the future of sustainable construction. Crucial projects describing future biomaterial architectures are emerging in the field. In this seminar, students will review their potential through lectures followed by case studies and propose future developments through a guided research project with special attention to functional, industrial, environmental, and aesthetic dimensions. The course is structured to foster fundamental scientific literacy, cross-disciplinary thinking, creativity, and innovation in biomaterials in design.
ARCH 7340
Ecological Architecture
– Contemporary Practices
Faculty: Todd Woodward
Architecture is an inherently exploitive act - we take resources from the earthand produce waste and pollution when we construct and operate buildings. As global citizens, we have an ethical responsibility to minimize these negative impacts. As creative professionals, however, we have a unique
ability to go farther than simply being “less bad.” We are learning to design in ways that can help heal the damage and regenerate our environment. This course explores these evolving approaches to design - from neo-indigenous to eco-tech to LEED to biomimicry to living buildings.
ARCH 7360
Tech Elective: Building Acoustics
Faculty: Avi Bortnick
This six-week lecture-based course covers the fundamentals of architectural acoustics. It investigates the relationship between sound and space and encourages the Architect to think more about how their buildings sound. The course explores the effects of materials and shape on sound absorption, reflection and transmission, and demonstrates how modeling, visualization and auralization can be used to understand acoustic and aid the design process. The course includes a lecture on the history and future of performance space design, a (virtual) visit to the Arup SoundLab and two assignments.
ARCH 7361
Tech Elective: Virtual Construction & Detailing with BIM
Faculty: Patrick Morgan
Building Information Modeling (BIM) has become the standard of building construction, design, and operation. During the past decade significant changes have taken place in the nature of design and construction practices which has transformed the very nature of architectural representation. Architects no longer draw 2D deceptions of what they intend others to build, but they instead model, code,
simulate and integrate the final built product virtually, alongside their colleagues and collaborators, architects, engineers and builders. The production of an information rich BIM is the ground upon which all construction activities for advanced and complex buildings take place. BIM is also the origins of contemporary innovations in Integrated Design, the creation of collaborative platforms which aim to maximize the sustainable outcomes in the project delivery of buildings. Moreover, being able to collaboratively produce, share and query a BIM makes possible the global practice of design and construction. The course will familiarize students to this important field of architectural practice.
ARCH 7362
Tech Elective: Healthy Buildings: Science & Application Faculty: Jie Zhao
This course examines the scientific evidence of how different elements of the indoor environment impact human health and well-being, and discusses practical design and technology examples for offices, homes, schools, and other living spaces.ARCH 7363 Tech Elective: Seeing Architecture: Technology, Ecology, Practice Faculty: Richard Garber The course will ask students to consider how we see architecture from both a technological and ecological basis – that is how we understand buildings within the larger global environment we co-habit; as well as how we can learn from booth our past as well as the earth itself – from “the ever nonobjective to which we are subject” to “an object that stands before us and can be seen” (Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, 1950). The
implications of design, and more specifically the future work of architects. Through a series of lectures and readings, students will have the opportunity to consider building, both as a subjective act and an objective consequence of architectural workflows within the larger framework of built ecologies and ecologies of thought.
ARCH 7371
Remixed Realities
Faculty: Jeffrey Anderson
This course will introduce students to workflows for authoring VR content in the Unity 3D Video Game Engine, teach them skills in developing custom interactions with the C# coding language, and challenge them to create speculative mixed reality scenarios. Students will explore several forms of mixed reality in a series of exercises leading up to a final narrative-based VR experience. We will speculate on the occupation of physical/digital hybrids by using a calibration routine to align digital geometry to physical spaces in VR; create volumetric documentary experiences using reality capture techniques to record existing spaces and objects; and develop rich VR experiences using remixed volumetrically captured geometry, digital geometry, and physical spaces.
ARCH 7420
Function of Fashion in Architecture
Faculty: Danielle Willems
The Function of Fashion in Architecture will survey the history of fashion and the architectural parallels starting from Ancient Civilization to Present. The focus will be on the relevance of garment design, methods and techniques and their
potential to redefine current architecture elements such as envelope, structure, seams, tectonics and details. The functional, tectonic and structural properties of garment design will be explored as generative platforms to conceptualize very specific architectural elements. One of the challenges in the course is the re-invention of a means of assessment, the developmentof notations and techniques that will document the forces and the production of difference in the spatial manifestations of the generative systems.
Form and Algorithm
Faculty:
Ezio Blasetti
The critical parameter will be to develop the potential beyond finite forms of explicit and parametric modeling towards non-linear algorithmic processes. We will seek novel patterns of organization, structure, and articulation as architectural expressions within the emergent properties of feedback loops and rulebased systems. This seminar will accommodate both introductory and advanced levels. No previous scripting experience is necessary. It will consist of a series of introductory sessions, obligatory intensive workshops, lectures followed by suggested readings, and will gradually focus on individual projects. Students will be encouraged to investigate the limits of algorithmic design both
theoretically and in practice through a scripting environment.
Design and Development
Faculty:
Alan Razak
This course provides an overview of the real estate development business looked at in relationship to urban design, city planning, and architectural design. It provides exposure to the many real-world considerations of private sector development as well as an introduction to the language of real estate. The class focuses on various commercial building types and product offerings with examples of how planning, architectural and other design professions fit into creation of real estate value and the development process. This will cover the practical considerations and typical trade-offs of commercial business practices and real estate investment parameters and how these influence the ways developers and designers work. Industry sectors may include housing (single, multifamily and affordable), office, retail, hospitality, and industrial, with project types ranging from greenfield, adaptive reuse, downtown development, mixed- use projects, and planned communities. Through exercises, lectures and case studies, we’ll address what drives the decisions designers and non-designers make in the development process and provide insight to help designers understand what makes developers tick.
Project Management
Faculty: Charles Capaldi
This course is an introduction to techniques and tools of managing the design and
construction of large, and small, construction projects. Topics include project delivery systems, management tools, cost-control and budgeting systems, professional roles. Case studies serve to illustrate applications. Cost and schedule control systems are described. Case studies illustrate the application of techniques in the field.
ARCH 7680
Real Estate Development Faculty: Asuka Nakahara
This course evaluates “ground-up” development as well as re-hab, re-development, and acquisition investments. We examine raw and developed land and the similarities and differences of traditional real estate product types including office, R & D, retail, warehouses, single family and multi-family residential, mixed use, and land as well as “specialty” uses like golf courses, assisted living, and fractional share ownership. Emphasis is on concise analysis and decision making. We discuss the development process with topics including market analysis, site acquisition, due diligence, zoning, entitlements, approvals, site planning, building design, construction, financing, leasing, and ongoing management and disposition. Special topics like workouts and running a development company are also discussed. Course lessons apply to all markets but the class discusses U.S. markets only. Throughout the course, we focus on risk management and leadership issues. Numerous guest lecturers who are leaders in the real estate industry participate in the learning process.
ARCH 8120
Methods in Architectural
Research
Faculty: Franca Trubiano
Methods in Architectural Research is a seminar aimed at first year, second semester PhD and MS students in Architecture who aim to develop their field definition (biblio + statement) and/or research proposal in pursuit of their advanced research degree. The course is also of interest to MArch students interested in advanced forms of academic research. The course will cover the full context of research methods in both the humanities and sciences attendant to architecture. Students will be tasked with identifying and naming a field of study, an initial research question to investigate, a methodology they will employ, and a value proposition for their work.
The Concept of an Avant-Garde Faculty: Joan Ockman
No historian of architecture has written as intensely about the contradictions of architecture in late-modern society or reflected as deeply on the resulting problems and tasks of architectural historiography as Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994). For many, the Italian historian’s dismissal of “hopes in design” under conditions of advanced capitalism produced a disciplinary impasse. This in turn led to call to Oublier Tafuri - to move beyond his pessimistic and lacerating stance. The seminar will undertake a close reading of one of Tafuri’s most complexly conceived and richly elaborated books, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture form Piranesi to the 1970s. Initially published in Italian in 1980 and translated
into English in 1987, the book represents the first effort to define and historicize the concept of an avant-garde specifically in architecture. Its content centers on the radical formal and urban experiments of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet Tafuri surprisingly begins his account with the eighteenth-century inventions of Piranesi, and he concludes with an examination of the “neo-avant-garde” of his own day. In addition to traversing The Sphere and the Labyrinth chapter by chapter - starting with the extraordinary methodological introduction, “The Historical ‘Project’”-we shall also read a number of primary and secondary sources on the historical contexts under discussion and consider a number of important intertexts that shed light on Tafuri’s position. The objectives of the course are at once historical and historiographic: we shall be concerned both with actual events and with how they have been written into history. Finally, we shall reassess the role of an avantgarde in architecture and compare Tafuri’s conception to that advanced in other disciplines. Is the concept of an avant- garde still viable today? Or should it be consigned to the dustbin of twentieth-century ideas?
Moving away from the focus on capsule architecture that dominates discussion of Japan’s Metabolist architects, the book Digesting Metabolism: Artificial Land in Japan 1954–2202 (Hatje Cantz, 2022) investigates the impact on Japanese housing of Le Corbusier’s idea of “artificial land.” Long buried by the term “megastructure” that it inspired, artificial land joins the individual and collective, envisioning housing as stacked platforms of plots for building freestanding homes of all variety. First introduced to Japan in 1954 by Le Corbusier’s protégé, Takamasa Yosizaka, artificial land is an essential concept for the Metabolists who debuted in Tokyo in 1960. Yet it has had a hold on Japan’s metabolic imagination well beyond the
’60s, promising domestic satisfaction and environmental resilience from the postwar period to today’s government policies. Drawing on texts not previously translated, the book will be discussed in terms of influences on its conceptualization and key projects showing artificial land ’s diverse interpretations for an infrastructural approach to housing. Casey Mack is an architect and the founder of Popular Architecture in Brooklyn, New York, an office combining simplicity and innovation in design work across multiple scales. His book Digesting Metabolism was awarded “Best Publication in Architecture” for 2022 by Juanzong Books in Shanghai, selected by an international jury comprising
of scholars from the ETH an Tongji University. The panel discussion was moderated by Dr. Ariel Genadt (Weitzman School of Design) in conversation with Casey Mack and Ivan Rupnik (Northeastern University).
Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Paul Philippe Cret Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture at Weitzman and Professor and Head of CITA Centre for IT and Architecture presented her lecture, New Visions: Conceiving Time in a Bio-based Architecture . In this talk, Mette discussed a bio-based material paradigm for architecture. With examples from CITA’s research portfolio, Mette outlined a new position for architecture seeded in idea of fragility, instability and the temporalized. With reference to the extensive work in advanced computational design and the extended digital chain, she asks how new departures of ethical resource thinking, material cascading and ideas of continual construction can
act as models for a larger reconsideration of architecture’s foundations. Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen examines the intersections between architecture and advanced computational design processes examining the profound changes that digital technologies instigate in the way architecture is thought, designed and built. In 2005 she founded the Centre for IT and Architecture research group (CITA) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Design and Conservation where she has piloted a special research focus on the new digital-material relations that digital technologies bring forth. In 2022, she was appointed Cret Chair at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.
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March 1: Matias del Campo: Book Launch and Conversation with Mario Carpo
Matias del Campo, Professor, Taubman College, presented his book, Neural Architecture: Design and Artificial Intelligence . A discussion was held with Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory, Bartlett School of Architecture.
In his lecture, Neural Architecture – Design and Artificial Intelligence, del Campo provided an opportunity to survey the emerging field of Architecture and Artificial Intelligence and to reflect on the implications of a world increasingly entangled in questions of the agency, culture, and ethics of AI. The main goal of Neural Architecture is to understand how to interrogate artificial intelligence–a technological tool–in the field of
architectural design, traditionally a practice that combines humanities and visual arts. Matias del Campo, the author of Neural Architecture, is currently exploring specific applications of artificial intelligence in contemporary architecture, focusing on their relationship to material and symbolic culture. AI has experienced explosive growth in recent years in a range of fields, including architecture, but its implications for the humanistic values that distinguish architecture from technology have yet to be measured.
Matias del Campo is a registered architect, designer, and educator. He is an Associate Professor at the Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan,
Director of the AR2IL, The Architecture and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AR2IL) at UoM, and an affiliate faculty member of Michigan Robotics, Computer Science, and Data Science. Matias is also the co-founder of the architecture practice SPAN.
Mario Carpo is the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and Professor of Architectural Theory, Die Angewandte (University of Applied Arts), Vienna.
Franca Trubiano, Graduate Group Chair of the PhD Program in Architecture and Associate Professor, presented her book, Building Theories - Architecture as the Art of Building
Building Theories speaks to the value of words in architecture. It addresses Trubiano’s fascination with the voices of architects, engineers, builders, and craftspeople whose ideas about building, however faint, have been captured in text. It discusses the content of treatises, essays, articles, and letters by those who have been, throughout history, committed to the art of building. In this, Building Theories argues for the return of a practice of architectural theory that is set amongst building, buildings, and builders.
Dr. Franca Trubiano is Graduate Group Chair of the PhD Program in Architecture and associate professor in Architecture at the Weitzman School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania. A licensed architect with l’Ordre des Architectes du Québec, she received graduate and post-graduate degrees from McGill University and a PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Previous publications include Women [Re]Build: Stories, Polemics, Futures (ORO, 2019) and Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice (Routledge, 2013). She teaches and conducts research on forced labor in the built environment,
emerging materials and human health, tectonic theories, integrated design, and architectural ecologies
March 29: The Jeffrey Fine (C’76, March’78) and Andrea Katz
The call for sustainability has never been louder. When we talk about cities of the future, we often think of them as sustainable and smart but according to Winy Maas, they are much more than that. “I advocate for denser, greener and more attractive and livable cities, with an approach to design that centers around user-defined, innovative, and sustainable ideas for the built environment, regardless of typology or scale .”
The ‘M’ of MVRDV, Founding Partner and Principal Architect Winy Maas (Schijndel, NL - 1959) has received international acclaim for his broad range of urban planning and building projects, across all typologies and scales. These are often self-generated, innovative,
experimental, and theoretical.
Maas challenges colleagues, clients, as well as students and collaborators at TU Delft’s The Why Factory - an internationally engaged think tank Maas established in 2008 - to challenge the boundaries of established standards to produce solutions that reimagine how we live, work, and play. Aside from his dedicated leadership role at MVRDV and professorship at TU Delft and elsewhere, Maas is widely published, actively engaged in the advancement in the design profession, and sits on numerous boards and juries, including the Spatial Quality Boards of Rotterdam, Eindhoven, and Barcelona.
The Grand Canal Sports Park, a multifunctional park and sports venue for the 19th Asian Games Hangzhou, China, has recently been awarded the China Construction Engineering Luban Prize, the top award recognizing construction quality in China. The park was designed by Archi-Tectonics, the New York based firm founded by Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture, Winka Dubbeldam.
Gongshu Canal Sports Park is designed for fitness.
The “eco-park” has two primary stadiums connected by a “valley village” pedestrian mall and five other buildings covered by green roofs. The stadiums will hold events, such as, field hockey and table tennis. The park is meant to be incorporated into the daily life of Hangzhou, one of China’s fastest-growing cities after the games are over.
February 2023: Almost Studio Wins Times Square Arts’
Almost Studio, the Brooklyn-based design practice which includes Weitzman Faculty members, Anthony Gagliardi and Dorian Booth, as part of its team, has produced the winning entry, Love’s h|Edge, for Times Square Arts’ Love & Design competition.
Love’s h|Edge proposes a playful family of four heartshaped hedge rows that invite visitors on their own journeys of love and discovery. Within the garden, three “Heart Pitter-Patios” of differing shapes and sizes represent a rewriting of the “Code of Love.” Generated from ADA building code dimensions, the spaces are fundamentally inclusive, and assert the breadth and possibilities of an expansive compassion for one another - one without edges.
This public artwork was on display in Times Square through the month of February 2023, when visitors were welcomed to “Fill-up the Heart” by adding artificial roses to the mesh seating and trellis of the “Pitter-Patios.”
February 2023: Albert F. Schenck – Henry Gillette Woodman Scholarship Prize for First-Year MArch Students Announced
This year for the annual Schenck Woodman competition first-year MArch students were charged with creating a new gateway for the Callowhill neighborhood of Philadelphia. The site for intervention was an historic warehouse adjacent to the viaduct, an abandoned elevated railway soon to be converted to a new Rail Park.
Students were assigned previous 19th and 20th century exiled industries of Philadelphia and asked to reintroduce them to the city on 21st century terms considering new ethical and environmental dimensions as well as the impact of the current fourth industrial revolution representing a series of significant shifts in the way that economic, political, and social value is being created, exchanged, and distributed.
Winners:
1 THREa-D: Qinming Hou, Yuwei Yang, Simone Yang
2 Elevated Grazing: Sahil Pranay Shah, Joyce Zhang, Harris Hao
Honorable Mentions:
3 Guidled Garbage: Nathan Nhan Huynh, Haley Simone Tavares, Breland Marie Land
4 The Voice Billboard: Ruoxi Li, Tianqi Han, Austin L. White
5 Porcelain Resurgence: Regina Nicole Gonano, Benjamin Scott Oliver, Holly Nicole Smithberger, Loopz Lopez
March 2023: Penn Student Work Exhibited at
Weitzman School of Design Student work was exhibited at the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute’s (PCI) annual conference and Precast Show in Columbus, OH.
All of the work was produced in Richard Garber’s fall seminar Matter, Making, and Testing: Designing with Next Generation Precast Concrete, in which they worked with their industry partner, Northeast Precast (NEP) in Vineland, NJ to design, develop, fabricate and pour precast concrete panels using UHPC-ultra high-performance concrete. Each student group was given one 1/8” 5x10 piece of sheet steel, which was processed on a CNC plasma cutter at NEP for the formwork of the panels. Students produced all digital content and fabrication tickets, and milled foam and used 3D printed parts in their formwork to create the panels on their boards. Each student group worked with a project manager assigned by Northeast Precast. TA: Drew Busmire. Group 2 is composed of students in Weitzman’s MSDRAS program.
The boards were organized for the exhibition by Lixue Cheng, a third year M. Arch candidate who participated in the fall seminar.
March 2023: Weitzman Students Win the 2023 HOK Futures Competition
Three groups of Weitzman MArch students placed 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in the 7th Annual Philadelphia HOK Futures Design Challenge. This competition was open to Philadelphia-area architecture and interior design students.
First place: “Coordinated Scatter” by Taely Freeman and Regina Gonano. Clustered townhomes surrounding a central courtyard use native Philadelphia materials and defamiliarize preexisting colonial roof geometries to provide each resident with their own unique building and floor plan, thus inducing a sense of agency and individuality within the overall whole.
Second Place: Binding Dialects by Jorge Couso and Clayton Monarch. The Residential Building and Refugee Center project is a unique approach to provide a supportive living environment for refugees through architecture. The design of the building prioritizes the concept of dissolving borders and promoting unity and integration, which will be achieved through the use of natural and locally sourced materials, surrounding context, and community focused features.
Third Place: Woven Souls by Sharlene Yulita and Rachel Seto. Inspired by the rich history of Philadelphia and Old City, maps of the site were overlayed over the course of history, beginning with the birth of the US in 1776 and ending with a very different context in 1942. A grid system was created based upon these maps to create the massing (inspired by the precedent of pavement lot lines at Independence Mall). In essence, the history of the site is woven into the design.
Sarah Johnson and Jamaica Reese-Julien are the two Weitzman MArch students who were selected for the 2023 Future100 by Metropolis Magazine. Each year, Metropolis sets out to designate the top graduating architecture and interior design students in the United States and Canada. Nominated by their instructors and mentors, these 50 interior design and 50 architecture students were chosen by the Metropolis team. The program, sponsored by Armstrong, Daltile, Formica, Interface, Kawneer, Keilhauer, SherwinWilliams, and Yabu Pushelberg, invited the most talented students from the class of 2023 to apply.
Weitzman has selected Rossana Hu to join the faculty as a tenured professor and chair of the Department of Architecture, effective January 1, 2024. Hu is co-founder of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, the widely acclaimed interdisciplinary architecture practice based in Shanghai, and professor and chair of the Department of Architecture in the College of Architecture & Urban Planning at Tongji University. Hu began her career at the Architects Collaborative in San Francisco before working for Ralph Lerner and Michael Graves, and in 2004 co-founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office with Lyndon Neri. Best known for breathing new life into historic sites, such as the Waterhouse at South Bund in Shanghai, Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat in Yangzhou, and Nantou City Guesthouse in Shenzhen, the firm has completed numerous commissions spanning master planning, architecture, product and interior design, and branding. Alongside her design practice, Hu has been deeply committed to architectural education and has lectured at universities and professional forums throughout Europe, Asia, and the US. She has taught at the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard Graduate School of Design; Yale School of Architecture; University of Hong Kong; and others. Hu earned her Master of Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton and her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from University of California, Berkeley, with a minor in music.
The E. Lewis Dales Traveling Fellowships are awarded each year to select students of the second-year class in the Master of Architecture program for travel abroad in the summer before their final year of study. Students are selected for the Fellowship through an anonymous portfolio competition judged during the first week of the spring semester by a committee comprised of standing and core studio faculty. The Dales Fellowships enable the Department to encourage students to begin the documentation and presentation of their work, a process that is integral to the development of a design ethic and to interviewing for a job.
The Weitzman Architecture Faculty Jury evaluated 60 anonymous portfolio submissions. They were asked to score each portfolio and submit short statements on what they valued while assessing each portfolio. The 2023 Dales Fellowships were awarded to the highest scoring submissions.
2023 Winners:
Courtney Ward – Messy Vitality
Marjorie Tello Wong – Infinite Whereabouts
Francisco Anaya – The Coloring Book
Grace Infante – Unbuilt Realities
Khang Truong – Define Connection
Bohan Lang – Interobjectivity of Architecture
Clayton Monarch – Selected Works
Cheuk Ming Ng – Selected Works
Daniel Lutze – Unrelenting Beauty and Ever-shining Sun
Pinghui Zhang – Selected Works
Danny Jarabek – The Uninhabitable Earth
Jessica Wong – Common Grounds
Kirah Cahill – Simulacra
Jiayu Huang – Possibilities in Urban Existence
Alexa Rojas – Selected Works
The Master of Science in Design: Advanced Architectural Design is a three-semester post-graduate program that is focused on design innovation and material practice grounded in real-world application. The discipline of architecture is foregrounded, and issues Including building assembly, structure, and organization are fore fronted and combined with the latest technology and techniques to rethink architectural precedent. Technology has matured with in architecture over the last 25 years. Through the process of maturation, key issues of the discipline were neglected in favor of creativity enhancing abstraction. Abstract experiments were fundamental to rethinking the design process, and material form was sidelined for virtual analogues. This was counterintuitive, as the centrality of buildings and their construction in the discipline was left behind.
The AAD program recenters the building in architectural pedagogy. Contemporary Theory studies theory since the digital turn in architecture in the early 1990s, considering a broad spectrum of conditions including labor, as, for instance, studied through the floor plan and section of Zaha Hadid’s BMW factory and office building in Leipzig, Germany. Design Innovation
explores the narrow use of Artificial Intelligence directed at material assembly and building facades. Visual Literacy makes a bridge between architecture and representation techniques within contemporary culture, foregrounding their usefulness in addressing disciplinary issues. Reinvigoration through narrow applications of technology has the potential to continually open up the discipline to contemporary culture, allowing it to affect and inflect the techniques that we use in more critical ways. This enables a richer and more rigorous architecture engaged with intersectional cultural issues including climate change, racial justice, and the non-human. The robust nature of the program empowers students to think creatively and gives them the tools and knowledge necessary to make incisive buildings with material impact.
This studio speculates that a new typology can help sustain New York City’s financial global leadership in the world. New York cannot solely rely on import and export economies with the uncertainty of political pressures that affect the prices of goods and services. New York and other cities need to re-invent existing networks to be able to compete with trade barriers that are cumbersome and willfully destroying the growth of the global economy while having ramifications on New York City. The MSD-AAD studio speculates upon New York City continuing its financial leadership in the world and simultaneously having the the local economy of the city thrive. The center of the US and global economy is the stock market which started as an exchange for goods and developed into a marketplace that exchanged shares of American companies. The stock market over time has amassed international companies which have been attracted because of increased liquidity, diversified investors, more analyst coverage and the shares trade in US currency, and gain access to 27% of the world’s consumers.
Due to uncertainty in global relations, some foreign Governments are pressurizing their own companies to de-list from the New York Stock Exchange adds volatility to the financial market. The uncertainty affects stock prices, and the amount of capital companies have access to for growth and Research and Development. In the long term the withdrawal of these substantial global companies will affect the NYSE adversely. To continue its global leadership the NYSE needs to expand its core business.
Yihong
The facade of our New York Stock Exchange Addition Program revolves around vertical division and dynamic light and shadow. On the facade, 10 dynamic upward columns serve as the main structure, with the connecting leaves in the columns transitioning from dense to loose, creating a sense of lightness and transparency at the top. Following the columns, rotating arched blades are employed to establish varying relationships between transparency and opacity, as well as light and shadow, fostering dynamism and disrupting stability. Regarding the internal space, the vertical division of the facade guides our approach, emphasizing two distinct scale relationships. In the middle, a spacious area for human use is formed through a substantial structural column, while on the sides, a dense server section takes shape with the aid of a tightly woven grid. The curved, overlapping massive columns fulfill dual roles as both air conduits and structural elements, visually representing the airflow by showcasing the convergence of air from the server areas on both sides, culminating in its release at the top. Acting as the primary thoroughfare for individuals, the central section seamlessly connects the lower spaces, the upper viewing deck, and the central technical room amidst the server section, converging between the massive columns. Simultaneously, the dense structures on either side create circulation space, facilitating human access into the server area.
The concept of our project is the multiple layer intersection.
Firstly, the most important and fundamental form in our project is the vertical layers. We try to make full use of every element in our project to conform to the structure and the space design, us ing structure to define the space. We regard the whole
project as a function or a program. The initial part is the I beam layers, which are the constants in this program. The other elements are the variables of each layer . On one hand, these elements change in 2 dimensions and quantities; on the other hand, the elements themselves also have continuity and intersections between each other. Wh en chang ing the parameters of each variable , the space varies . The program could cr eate thousands of possibilities and avoid homogenization. Our design could be a frozen view in a flow of possibilities.
Also, the technique we used in the circulation system is that we put stairs and paths to connect between layers and floors. W e make hyb ridizations each layer is attached to another one, and several of the layers interact with others. D ifferent parts merge and transit with each other while human space and non human space interact.
Haoran Luo & Sicheng Chen,
The idea is to create a heterogenous mix of physical elements- curves and grids as a way to respond to the heterogeneous character of its environmental context and its new program – cryptocurrency mining. For the context, Lower Manhattan is like a heterogenous mix of monuments where every building has its own way to achieve
monumentality, say it is the Greco-Roman style of the NYSE that makes it monumental. In the light of cryptocurrency mining, there might be quite different kinds of cryptocurrency that may require varied sizes and spatial characters.
Considering the Deleuzian Rhizomatous connection, which means an organism of interconnected living fibers that has no central point, no origin, and no particular form or unity or structure, a heterogenous mix can be seen as distinct elements remain its character but co-present
within a composite mixture. In order to respond to the heterogeneous character of external and internal forces, we use a series of relatively small, self-similar parts to build a differentiated whole. Furthermore, a differentiated whole can really respond to the contemporary society where everyone pursues their own personality while sharing with a similar principle.
This project emphasizes the importance of rediscovering ornament in urban artifacts during the digital revolution. Situated atop the New York Stock Exchange, the project creates the contrast with the NYSE neoclassical façade and serves as a prominent platform for expressing social and cultural value. The building envelope extends beyond architecture itself, revealing discipline and establishing a natural and social connection to the present time.
The project design integrates various elements— giant-scale circular gears, screens, woven textures, and interior circuitry—forming a partial screen that highlights the significance of the bitcoin economy. The building envelope transcends mere superficiality, providing an alternative “smoothness” and “pliancy” that celebrate differences and generate unaligned complexity through blending and mixing. The layered envelope creates complexity and evokes a sense of blurring and ambiguity. The design seamlessly combines open and enclosed areas, formal rigor, and diversity. Brilliant materials and monochromatic white hues are integrated internally and externally, preserving the distinct characteristics of cultural context and architectural form.
Faculty: Carl D’Apolito-Dworkin
Teaching Assistant: Miguel Matos
The program for the studio was a hypothetical Boston branch of Ballet Hispánico, consisting of an 800–1000 person theater with a full fly tower paired with a school for dance. The projected site was in East Boston, a neighborhood with a majority Latinx/Latine/Hispanic population, at a complex spot where a 45’ grade change meets the water, two public parks, housing, factories and the ICA expansion.
This studio sought to develop a reciprocity between the detail and the whole by asking the question: what if one detail in a building was of such importance that changing it would require changing the whole building in response?
To establish that reciprocity, we undertook to design buildings that appear caught in a state of change or frozen in the moment of becoming. We called buildings that produce such an impression Animated Buildings. An Animated Building can be thought of as a device that manifests relationships between multiple scales of detail, from material to spatial intersection, and registers their impact throughout a building.
A finished building appears as though it had to be one way. Negotiations between economic, urban, geometric, and functional motivations are apparent while a building is still being designed, during the process of change. Six pedagogical components each contribute to setting the stage of change.
Students investigated typology in theaters and schools as a frame for the projects. They used the lens of dance to propose social ambitions for performance space. They studied the geometry of projective surfaces, developable and ruled, to discover formal constraints. They learned about the technical and programmatic requirements of theater design to establish functional constraints, visiting front and back-of-house spaces for fifteen performance spaces on the studio trip.
Featured Student Work: Fangchao Yang & Shiyu Ma .................................... 376,398 Rhys Zhang & Dylan Yang .............................................. 378
Fangchao Yang & Shiyu Ma, Revolving
Revolving is a dynamic of animation, which aims to connect the spaces and people located around the building, becoming a “social cohesive device” in East Boston. The project is built around three concepts: animation, typology and social narrative. Animation informs the connections, changes, divisions and interactions of space through
the revolving of multiple spatial blocks, and also becomes the source of geometric forms of space, embodied in both planes and three dimensions. Based on two architectural precedents: 1. the centripetal layout of the Glyndebourne Opera and 2. the fusion of the indoor and outdoor spaces of the Open Air School, the strip space (school) and the circular space (theater) form a combination. Based on the analysis of the site surroundings, the building brings people from all directions into the same building, and finally
leads them to different areas through the traffic guidance and functional division of the internal space. The project aims to explore the significance of animation in shaping architectural space and to consider how the combination of two functions (school and theater) can create a more whimsical and storytelling space compared to a traditional performance center.
Rhys Zhang & Dylan Yang,
Different from a traditional container of performance, it is a theater as well as an architecture. In the performance, the subjects, audience, are static while the objects, dancers, are dynamic. In architecture, on the contrary, visitors, as subjects, are dynamic, seeing the static spaces as objects. This project emerged between the two conditions. One figure eight loop connect the whole theater vertically and horizontally, letting the audience travel and feel the theater as an organic space. Then the loop grows outward, flowing on the hill and connect other parts of school and backstage, Learning by animation, we clarify the relationship among all functions and geometry elements, simplifying vertical transportations and making them efficient in order to present this theater-school system in the most powerful and clearway.
The Contemporary Arabesque: A New Aga Khan Museum of Islamic and Contemporary Art for Dubai
Faculty: Hina Jamelle
Teaching Assistant: Madison Green
Since the discovery and study of the Topkapi scroll in 1986 there has been a renewed interest in the geometric and mathematical underpinnings of Islamic architecture and its ornament. While there is a rigorous mathematically driven logic behind these quasi-crystallin geometries, the aesthetic they produced is much more far reaching and has transformed into a cultural touchstone for Islamic culture. The colorful intricate tile patterning and vaulting can be seen in the ancient religious architecture of Iran, Iraq, the greater Middle East and even into Spain and other parts of Europe. The aesthetic has been more largely referred to as “The Arabesque”, a stylistic category referring to the intricate floral pattern and calligraphic filigree found in the ornament of Islamic architecture, painting, ceramics, and textiles.
The aesthetic and techniques found within the Arabesque are an underexplored and fertile ground for architectural design research. The techniques found in the Arabesque contain sophisticated transitions from two-dimensional pattern to two and a half dimensional relief, to fully three-dimensional and spatial formations. There are also embedded disciplinary questions of projection, drawing, and representation in architecture.
The ability to study, research and investigate which artistic techniques are useful is key to formulating innovative systems for architecture. These innovations are accumulative and are subject to changes that shift in type and/ or in kind. In addition, the artistic technique’s usefulness is determined by their eventual formation that includes material, space, atmosphere, program and social interaction. The ability to identify spatial potentials in buildings and developing innovative formations provide a more nuanced and architecturally sophisticated understanding of form.
The goal for each student is to evaluate the potentials of artistic techniques in designing architecture that flows from topological surfaces and spatial arrangements, and to apply
these to a range of familiar architectural issues. The final proposal of each student will emerge out of an inter-related working method between artistic techniques, program, space, atmosphere, and materials that combine to develop an innovative new museum formation. One of the central lines of inquiry in the studio will be the implication of this design research to the contemporary architectural detail. While this is always a central question in this studio’s work, the precedent material is particularly rich within this discourse.
The program for the studio is the design of a second Agha Khan Museum of Islamic and Contemporary Art to be located in Dubai. U.A.E. His Highness the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of Shia Ismaili Muslims, has planned to build a number of major museums around the world for Islamic art, artifacts and contemporary art that align with the Ismaili community’s mission to offer new perspectives into Islamic civilizations by weaving together cross-cultural threads throughout history. The Aga Khan Museum offers visitors a window into worlds unknown or unfamiliar: the artistic, intellectual, and scientific heritage of Muslim civilizations across the centuries from the Iberian Peninsula to China. Its mission is to foster a greater understanding and appreciation of the contribution that Muslim civilizations have made to world heritage.
Featured Student Work:
Chengzhi Zhang & Panjing Zhu ..................................... 382 Chengkai Zhang & Yiqing Zhu ................................ 384,400
We use circular arcs of different radii to translate the decorative pattern on the outside of the Arabic Muqarnas, and gradually enlarged circles to translate the relief in the middle, thus producing our two-system diagram, which the two patterns contrast but also merge with each other and shows strong hierarchy. In the massing design, we use diagram to
organize the plan layout and elevation design of the building space and surrounding landscape. The whole museum is formed around the main gallery with triple-floor height in the middle, so the overall circulation is a loop, connecting smaller galleries, and the traffic core is set at both ends to guide people to complete the tour. Architectural details also follow the rule of diagram, which is embodied in the contrast and transition of solid and void. A large area of solid becomes a beautiful concrete structure composed of curved creasing,
and the area of void becomes the skin, doors and windows of the building. This contrast and combination are reflected in the space as a concise sense of flow in the exterior wall and sophisticated delicate gallery spaces, allowing the building itself to become part of the art exhibition.
Our initial research was inspired by the similarities we saw between the Arabesque muqarnas and cellular formations, which informed our diagrams.
Using machine learning, we used the diagrams combined with our original photo of the arabesque to transform the image based on its cellular pattern and then regenerated gaps, breaks, and barriers
among the various units to connect them.
This led to the use of carving as a strategy to create new ways of thinking about connection and circulation. At the scale of the building’s details and structure, we explore the continuity of solid and void and their discontinuity at the scale of the overall building. This creates a new spatial experience in the museum, in which volumes of solid and void interweave as one experiences the exhibition.
The voids are designed to allow soft indirect sunlight to
filter in and give visitors unique visual connections between various spaces in the museum and frame views of neighboring attractions in Dubai. The design aims to show how solid and void can be combined to create novel spaces and experiences that are both functional and awe-inspiring.
Faculty: Florencia Pita
Teaching Assistant: Maria Sofia Garcia Perez
This studio will focus on ‘Fragments’ or pieces, as we will begin with the minor architectural elements, namely the Brick. The Brick is a fragment of architecture; it carries such a rich and profound history and therefore represents a powerful potential for space, material, and landscape. We will research its history, advance it to its future, and find design innovations that will spring from this ancient fragment.
The class project will be a mid-rise building in the city’s center. Mexico is lush with nature, where every sidewalk acts as a linear park, with myriad planters, trees, patios, etc. Our project will engage this notion of urban nature by connecting the landscape with the architecture. We will begin by researching the scale of the wall and then move to the scale of the building, in order to address elements of architectural details and tectonics as well as program typologies.
The focus on the terra-cotta Brick will also refer to Mexico’s long history with this material. Brick construction can be found in the most humble of dwellings and historical temples; therefore is a 1material engrained in the culture. Our class will research various case studies, from historical to current work, and students will learn the building craft by creating detailed section models of their projects. These models will inform the formal attributes of the project at large.
The class will begin from the smallest fragment, the brick, and will move onto a large building, a conceptual bottom-up approach. This design process will create an accumulation of elements in order to present an architecture that is build up from micro to macro. Here the brick is not just a construction material but rather an abstract unit, one that can carry on myriad permutations and variations.
Featured Student Work:
Qinyu Wang & Yiyue Zhang ..................................... 388,402 Jiamin Zhang & Xiaojun Zhouu ..................................... 390
Qinyu Wang & Yiyue
For the foundation of our project, we designed around very specific bricks. We choose square-shaped and curved bricks for our building block elements. The horizontal and vertical geometric arrangement is constructed mainly of square bricks, and then they are integrated through curved bricks. The green and brown colors are inspired by the nature of Mexico City. We
wanted to integrate the building in a natural form with the urban environment of Mexico. In the preliminary façade design, we were interested in the curves created by the curved brick arrangement, so this irregular arrangement of curves guided us through the various phases of the design, from block to part to whole. In the section drawings, this curve appears in 3 main sections: the edges of the façade, including the junction of the building with the ground and the edge of the roof. Similar curves also
connect the roof to the core, the shape of the space, such as the walls and the ceiling, and interior local design which combined with renderings. The spiral staircase is located in the core circulation to gather the curved edges as they spread across the building. And the green and orange bricks serve as a place where nature and architecture intertwine into each other.
Focusing on ‘Fragments’ and emphasizing the profound study of Brick, this studio examines its historical significance and envisions the potential for individual brick craftsmanship within Mexico’s natural landscape and urban identity. The hotel addition project, with a focus on “fragments,” aims to elaborate on the natural elements, infusing vitality, and brightness into the building’s overall experience. The double-layered brick arrangements and patterns, featuring one with a rigid and solid configuration and the other with a transparent diagonal pattern, aim to create an interplay between traditional façade design and the potential of individual bricks to generate dynamic and occupiable spaces, such as windows, balconies, and skylight roofs. This challenges the conventional notion of walls in architecture, highlighting how people can interact with and experience the immersive qualities of materials, arrangements, and colors of bricks. The project aims to craft immersive spatial experiences carefully shaped by layered brick materials and the resulting interplay of light and shadow. Drawing inspiration from Mexican architect Luis Barragan’s iconic project, Casa Gilardi, the use of a bright yellow color draws attention, enriching the dynamic and ever-evolving context of Mexico City. Casting shadows and rendering the interplay of shadows with the surrounding trees, the combination of rough and smooth textures in the brick walls, created using resin and plaster materials,
generates irregular and vivid patterns, emphasizing the tactile dimensions that fragments, in this case, limited shapes and colors of bricks, can offer for an overall poetic experience. This quality of light enhances the pleasure of a comfortable spatial strategy and manipulation of light, as yellow opaque bricks filter light throughout the public and private sectors, thereby enriching the immersive experience.
Faculty: Barry Wark
Teaching Assistant: Katarina Marjanovic
The studio focused on the exploration of ecological aesthetics that move architectural design beyond the disciplines ongoing nature – architecture dialogue. Rather than see the two as separate entities, students were tasked with developing architecture that purposefully displays and celebrates buildings enmeshment with their environments. The projects conceived architecture not as a static whole, fixed at the date of its initial construction, but as an assembly of matter constructed and reconstructed where its qualities and configurations are perpetually changing and being regenerated, part by part. In this way, building can possess both qualities of ‘dirtiness’ and pristineness simultaneously as different parts will display different levels of environmental enmeshment, thus avoid trending purely towards obsolescence and ruin.
Moorish & Mudejar
The proposals explored the notion of part to whole relationships through studying the Moorish and Mudejar architecture of Andalucía, Spain. Informed by a travel week to the region, students speculated how detailed tectonic assemblies that are designed to accelerate the display of environmental interconnectedness could be informed by the regional architecture towards the creation of a new taxonomy of architectural elements, spaces and part-to-whole relationships.
Programme: Hypostyle
These agendas were investigated through the design of a Hypostyle that rejected giving privilege to the façade and focused on the areas of interior inhabitation. Inspired by the grand halls characterized by its columns and arches, the projects similarly aim defy interior/exterior dichotomies and offer stable environmental conditions through their mass. The result is the proposal of novel, civic spaces, characterized not by void but by matter, that aim to engage urban inhabitants in new forms of ecological engagement within the city.
Inspired by the intricate geometries of the Moorish architecture found in the Alhambra, the project reimagines the hypostyle as a space still focussed on immersiveness and interiority but characterised by its ceiling rather than its columns.
The proposal is articulated with numerous serrated surfaces throughout. When viewed in plan, they appear organised in a series of overlapping symmetrical
configurations, but when experienced spatially, the legibility of the organisational logic disappears, creating a similar effect to those of the murqarna vaults.
The serrated detail is further employed in the development of the parts system, creating friction across the joints of the assembly. These serrations also direct water over the walls into channels that run across the site, providing evaporative cooling and weathering effects through erosion.
The building explores the notion of an ‘open form’ where parts can be added or taken away without significantly effecting its identity, in turn exploring new part to whole relationships. In this vein, the building is comprised of a series of elements, operating at different scales with different temporal presence. This ranges from in permanence from structure to frame to ornament. Inspired by the Muqarna vaults and domes of the Moorish architecture, the building explores ideas of recursiveness and fractal details as it moves through these elements, all possessing the same geometric qualties. The smallest details of the building are employed at the entrances thresholds,
rooflights and ceilings and are designed to accelerate the display of environmental enmeshment. They do so by providing porous zones for non-determinate plant growth and weathering effects. Water, seeds and other non humans are trapped within and are shaded from the Andalusian heat.
ARCH 7100
Contemporary Theory Faculty: Ariane Harrison
A chronological overview of the approaches and attitudes adopted by architects, theorists and inter-disciplinary writers from 1993- today that have helped shape the current discourse of architecture. This course will introduce and contextualize key projects, and polemics over the last 25 years. Central themes in this course include the impact of digital technologies and methods of design, production and materiality. These are explored through texts, movements, projects and buildings that help form an overview that has shaped the contemporary condition that we live in. There have been a myriad of different approaches and through a select set of readings and lectures students will be
exposed to crucial texts, projects and buildings making students versatile and knowledgeable in the important concepts that shape our current discourse. A focus will be the organization, configuration and articulation of buildings and the conceptual and cultural arguments they are associated. Formal, organizational and material characteristics of this period will be explored. This class will develop students’ knowledge and provide a platform from which they can continue the discussions surrounding architectural thought and practice.
ARCH 7410
Architecture Design
Innovation Faculty: Hina Jamelle
The mastery of techniques, whether in design, production or both, does not necessarily
yield great architecture. As we all know, the most advanced techniques can still yield average designs. Architects are becoming increasingly adept at producing complexity & integrating digital design and fabrication techniques into their design process - yet there are few truly elegant projects. Only certain projects that are sophisticated at the level of technique achieve elegance. This seminar explores some of the instances in which designers are able to move beyond technique, by commanding them to such a degree as to achieve elegant aesthetics within the formal development of projects.
ARCH 7100
Contemporary Theory Faculty: Ariane Harrison
A chronological overview of the approaches and attitudes adopted by architects, theorists and inter-disciplinary writers from 1993- today that have helped shape the current discourse of architecture. This course will introduce and contextualize key projects, and polemics over the last 25 years. Central themes in this course include the impact of digital technologies and methods of design, production and materiality. These are explored through texts, movements, projects and buildings that help form an overview that has shaped the contemporary condition that we live in. There have been a myriad of different approaches and through a select set of readings and lectures students will be
exposed to crucial texts, projects and buildings making students versatile and knowledgeable in the important concepts that shape our current discourse. A focus will be the organization, configuration and articulation of buildings and the conceptual and cultural arguments they are associated. Formal, organizational and material characteristics of this period will be explored. This class will develop students’ knowledge and provide a platform from which they can continue the discussions surrounding architectural thought and practice.
ARCH 7410
Architecture Design Innovation Faculty: Hina Jamelle
The mastery of techniques, whether in design, production or both, does not necessarily
yield great architecture. As we all know, the most advanced techniques can still yield average designs. Architects are becoming increasingly adept at producing complexity & integrating digital design and fabrication techniques into their design process - yet there are few truly elegant projects. Only certain projects that are sophisticated at the level of technique achieve elegance. This seminar explores some of the instances in which designers are able to move beyond technique, by commanding them to such a degree as to achieve elegant aesthetics within the formal development of projects.
In order to confront the task of reducing carbon emissions, environmental building design must be integrated in the disciplinary practices of architecture. MEBD/MSD-EBD are post-professional degrees created to teach architects to innovate in the field of energy and environmental design, training them for a low-carbon economy. The two programs share a common first year, with the MSD-EBD program continuing for a third semester of innovation and prototyping.
The program’s pedagogy is based on theories of ecology and sustainability, building science and performance analysis, and their integration into design workflows. The challenges of low-carbon construction demand practices and/or practitioners that can reconcile the divide between design and engineering, recognizing that architecture has to directly address environmental problems and also make the results visible and intelligible to its occupants. Five guiding principles organize the program: 1) make visible the invisible, 2) many simple models, not one complex simulation, 3) design for comfort and specific climates, not energy, 4) find the architectural narrative, not the energy score, 5) innovate through modelling and prototyping.
MSD in Environmental Building Design: Movable and Immovable
Bioclimatic adaptations for the climate emergenc
Faculty: William Braham and Billie Faircloth
Teaching Assistant: Max Hakkarainen and Surya Prabhakaran
With knowledge of the soil and subsoil of human nature and its potentials, we shall raise our heads over the turmoil of daily production and command views over an earth which we shall have to keep green with life if we mean to survive… — Richard Neutra, Survival Through Design.
Adapting to the climate emergency requires buildings and people to be flexible, agile, or even sacrificial. Buildings are durable but immobile, in contrast to the easy mobility of people and their accessories, such as clothing, furniture, and interior fittings. Inspecting the form and performance of our buildings and things poses an urgent query: What can designers do to disrupt the same old repertoire of structures, systems, and behaviors to demonstrate a radical approach to climate adaptation? The estimated 2 billion buildings we inhabit and maintain globally contribute significantly to planet-killing emissions, especially those in developed countries and cities (H. Davis). This built fabric also represents significant investments made by people, communities, institutions, and companies. A building’s site, infrastructure, and materials embody a substantial portion of spent impacts that should not be ignored or abstractly categorized as waste. If the greenest building is the one that already exists, then focusing our attention on adapting what we have could be one of the most radical forms of architectural disruption. This is especially true when we recognize that adaptation occurs at many spatial and temporal scales involving our bodies, things, whole buildings, and nomadic mobility.
The 2022 EBD Research Studio followed a radical approach to the climate emergency, developing bioclimatic adaptations for people and their existing habitats. Strategies were tested using Sansom Place West, a UPenn residence hall designed by Richard and Dion Neutra. After more than 50 years of use, this 16-story, double-loaded corridor building will undergo renovation. Over sixteen weeks, student teams
410 MSD: EBD W. Braham, B. Faircloth
collaborated on proposals for bioclimatic interventions that modify the building’s systems and people’s accessories and practices.
Featured Student Work:
Ali Hashem, Shuqin Li, Thamer Al Salem, Mickey Chapa ....................................................................... 412
Xiaoxiao Peng, Xiaowen Yu, & Zhen Lei ........................... 414
Li, Thamer Al Salem, & Mickey Chapa, Circular Economy
CELL is an experimental living facility in the renovated Sansom West dormitory and is host to ongoing research and development of a circular economy in Philadelphia. Roughly 45% of annual global carbon emissions are a result of material use decisions, which can be reduced drastically by radical recovery and reuse. A circular economy
provides the framework for material and fiscal agility in the ongoing climate crisis, as shortages, shocks, and uncertainty threaten current modes of living.
The CELL structure emphasizes the importance of building reuse and adaptation in the circular economy through the addition of multi-functional exterior buffer spaces for every dorm suite. The building features high-performance yet low-tech deconstructable assemblies made from carbon sequestering, dry-fit, or recoverable materials such as mass timber, simple metals, and salvaged single pane glazing. Spaces and details were
analyzed to tune building performance.
Through careful programming, the university becomes an active participant as new site-based utilities and renewables make the building itself a resource. Further, students are critical partners with on-site, local, and package-free services to help proliferate the circular economy in greater Philadelphia. Through the living lab, the building becomes an armature for the school, residents, and other stakeholders to renegotiate our relationship with materials and associated environmental impacts now and long into the future.
Xiaoxiao Peng, Xiaowen Yu, & Zhen
Lei, Live Long and Prosper
The project is renovating a 16-story residential building on UPenn campus in Philadelphia to adapt to future climate emergency. While unpredictable climate emergency will largely impact built environment is certain in the future, integrated systems including district energy system, modular façade, vertical farming, and stormwater
management are tested to explore the limited passive survivability capacity of this high-rise residential building, and are demonstrating one prototype for future passive thrivability buildings. This social-technical proposal indicates an intention to not only focusing on one building but to expand the design boundary upstream to district network and downstream to individual participation, which will benefit both Sansom residents and the university.
MSD: EBD
Faculty: Aletheia Ida
Teaching Assistant: Tyler Kvochick
The wellness center is becoming a more prevalent service in cities across the world. As we enter a post-pandemic era with heightened conscientiousness towards health and well-being, the demand for wellness centers is increasing. The science around how to address health and well-being is also shifting. New knowledge is constantly being formed on topics of bio-sensing and bio-hacking, mindfulness practices, holistic wellness, integrative and functional medicines, and other general physical and mental health developments. As our understanding of human and societal wellness deepens, the range of techniques, strategies, and environments to support the practices and new lifestyles broadens. Wellness centers, as an emergent typology, range from urban day spas to luxury wellness retreats, from non-profit holistic health centers to private bio-optimization facilities. Wellness centers may provide a range of services depending on the specialization and clientele – such as fitness and nutritional programs, herbal gardening and medicinal recipes, sleep therapy and analysis, beauty treatments (non-invasive and surgical), meditation and yoga courses, optimized light therapies, as well as saunas and spas, amongst others.
The objective for the Bioclimatic Urban Wellness Center will be to successfully integrate the concept of human and health and well-being with the challenges of an urban environment and climate. The first part of the objective requires a deep understanding of the human physiological functions and phenomenological experiences. The second part of the objective requires both a careful study and analysis of the urban microclimate and the regional ecological systems. Your work in studio this semester will evolve by sequence of analysis and development for human environments to resolve in a synthesis with urban and natural environments through the spatial and material conditions you establish for your building designs. The bioclimatic approach will facilitate and enable passive design solutions for the majority of the wellness center functions you
incorporate. An emergent building typology for the Urban Wellness Center will ensue to inform new models and ways of constructing habitats and material systems for the integration of human, urban, and natural environments.
Our urban wellness center is located in Minneapolis, MN, USA. The city’s climate is classified as humid continental, with four distinct seasons. Summers in Minneapolis are warm and humid; Winters are cold and snowy; Spring and fall are transitional seasons, with mild temperatures and frequent rainfall.
The wellness center targets obesity as the main wellbeing issue in Minneapolis. Several factors have contributed to the high rates of obesity in Minneapolis, such as the lack of access to healthy food options and sedentary lifestyles. Therefore, our design aims to provide more opportunities for physical activities and food choices via the ramping system and vertical farming system.
The ramping system runs through the whole building, it starts from the ground level and coils around the building as a fitness trail for people to pass through. By employing hydroponic technology, the vertical farming system cultivates crops and creates green walls along the south-facing wall. In addition, our design uses concrete thermal mass to ensure the basic insulation of the building. We also used sawtooth roof, zig-zag east and west facade, and slanted south façade, all of which are designed to maximize the absorption of solar energy and reduce the building’s own energy consumption.
‘Aspirar’ is an urban wellness center in the heart of LA serving two of the highest environmental health issues in the city: asthma and cardiovascular diseases. With restorative and cardio-based physical exercise, public family-oriented programs, leading air quality research, and hearthealthy nutrition, this center invites individuals seeking guidance through asthma and cardiovascular disease challenges. Winding pathways through beds of landscaping and carbon-eating olivine sand adorn the concourse inviting the passing public to take respite. The soaring pathways above created by pulling the form apart at the site’s street corner make a visible note of the emphasis
given to activation and movement; both things are incredibly crucial to integrate into lifestyle choices for individuals with asthma or cardiovascular disease.
While internal programs cater directly to air quality studies and curate spaces for individuals with respiratory and cardiovascular health issues, the building, ‘Aspirar’ (Inhale) itself represents attention to air quality in LA as well. The structure lends itself to serving the microclimate in which it resides.
The translucent textile fins not only kinetically shade the interior spaces from harsh incoming sunlight, but they are also coated in titanium dioxide for photocatalytic ambient air purification. The system is designed to intake outside air at the concourse level above the carbon-eating olivine sand and push it through the internal organic
trombe wall system. While this system works to supply air, the tall atrium acts as a solar chimney and pulls air upwards through buoyancy effectively circulating fresh air constantly through the interior.
The systems and programmatic layout of the center work together to curate a revitalizing space on-site. While the interior focuses on breathing at the human scale, the structure focuses on facilitating an effective and pure ‘inhale’ within the microclimate.
ARCH 7510
Ecology, Technology, and Design
Faculty: William Braham
This course will examine the ecological nature of design at a range of scales, from the most intimate aspects of product design to the largest infrastructures, from the use of water in bathroom to the flow of traffic on the highway. It is a first principle of ecological design that everything is connected, and that activities at one scale can have quite different effects at other scales, so the immediate goal of the course will be to identify useful and characteristic modes of analyzing the systematic, ecological nature of design work, from the concept of the ecological footprint to market share. The course will also draw on the history of and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now charachterized by the powerful concept of the complex, self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the
first principle of design and organization. The course will also draw on the history and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now characterized by the powerful concept of the complex, self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the first principle of design and organization.
ARCH 7520
EBD Research Seminar
Faculty: William Braham
Environmental building design is a process of discovery, of understanding what to work on, before it ever becomes a matter of design or of performance analysis. This means tackling questions large and small, considering both technical details and architectural possibilities, and establishing a position in a continually evolving field. The work of the seminar is to develop methods of research for this complex field, to develop tools, information, and concepts to guide design. The course will help students
establish research habits and agendas to support their work in environmental building design, both in design studios and in practice. That work will be developed in stages through the semester. Based on case studies of exemplary environmental buildings, students will explore specific topics in building science as they contribute to architectural projects, developing bibliographies of current work and a final research report, summarizing the state of the field and current tools and practices.
ARCH 7530
Building Performance Simulation Faculty: Jeeeun Lee
The course provides students with an understanding of building design simulation methods, hands-on experience in using computer simulation models, and exploration of the technologies, underlying principles, and potential applications of simulation tools in architecture.
ARCH 7510
Ecology, Technology, and Design
Faculty: William Braham
This course will examine the ecological nature of design at a range of scales, from the most intimate aspects of product design to the largest infrastructures, from the use of water in bathroom to the flow of traffic on the highway. It is a first principle of ecological design that everything is connected, and that activities at one scale can have quite different effects at other scales, so the immediate goal of the course will be to identify useful and characteristic modes of analyzing the systematic, ecological nature of design work, from the concept of the ecological footprint to market share. The course will also draw on the history of and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now charachterized by the powerful concept of the complex, self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the
first principle of design and organization. The course will also draw on the history and philosophy of technology to understand the particular intensity of contemporary society, which is now characterized by the powerful concept of the complex, self-regulating system. The system has become both the dominant mode of explanation and the first principle of design and organization.
ARCH 7520
EBD Research Seminar Faculty: William Braham
Environmental building design is a process of discovery, of understanding what to work on, before it ever becomes a matter of design or of performance analysis. This means tackling questions large and small, considering both technical details and architectural possibilities, and establishing a position in a continually evolving field.
The work of the seminar is to develop methods of research for this complex field, to develop tools, information, and concepts to guide design.
The course will help students
establish research habits and agendas to support their work in environmental building design, both in design studios and in practice. That work will be developed in stages through the semester. Based on case studies of exemplary environmental buildings, students will explore specific topics in building science as they contribute to architectural projects, developing bibliographies of current work and a final research report, summarizing the state of the field and current tools and practices.
ARCH 7530
Building Performance Simulation Faculty: Jeeeun Lee
The course provides students with an understanding of building design simulation methods, hands-on experience in using computer simulation models, and exploration of the technologies, underlying principles, and potential applications of simulation tools in architecture.
The Master of Science in Design: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS) is a one-year, post-professional degree program. The MSD-RAS is relatively new addition to the Department of Architecture’s MSD programs, with the exceptional projects presented here already leading to exciting career opportunities for our second year of graduates! The MSD-RAS aims to develop novel approaches to the design, manufacture, use, and life-cycle of architecture through creative engagement with robotics, material systems, and design-computation. Completing its third year, the program launched in a period where the building industry is adopting robotic approaches to prefabrication and on-site construction at an accelerating rate. Industry is motivated by the opportunities these technologies afford in improving abysmal productivity and quality levels compared to other manufacturing sectors, while reducing the time, cost and safety hazards of building work, also addressing a skilled labour shortage in construction workers. These greater levels of automation are also creeping into architectural software and practice, challenging established means of design production, while offering opportunities for us to think
differently about the way we conceive, develop and materialize architecture. The MSD-RAS aims to address this shifting and increasingly automated approach to architecture and construction through a fusion of creative, practical, and speculative means of design that aim to expand the agency of architecture and the architect to develop innovative and alternative means of engagement with the world at large.
The degree fosters integrative design thinking, allowing students to gain skills in advanced forms of robotic fabrication, simulation, and artificial intelligence, to develop methods for design that harness production or live adaption as a creative opportunity. Going beyond automation, the MSD-RAS explores how varying degrees of autonomy can offer sensitive, situated, and adaptive relations between design, production and the our experience of the built environment, that enable designer’s to re-think social, environmental and ethical considerations not only within design outcomes, but also in the conception and making of architecture. The MSD-RAS runs over two semesters. In the Fall semester students participate in two half-semester design studios each supported by a technology course (in algorithmic design and cyber-physical systems), a theory course taught by MOMA curator Evangelos Kotsioris, and an elective within either the design or engineering school. In Spring, students focus on the production of a single project developed within semester length courses including a design studio, industrialization, materials and tooling course, advanced RAS programming (coding for AR/VR and real-time robotics), and a course in scientific research and writing. Throughout both semesters, design is explored primarily through the hands-on production of experimental robotically fabricated prototypes, and the synthesis of knowledge gained in theoretical and technical courses. Continuing the success of last year, two of this year’s Spring semester teams’ have a paper accepted for publication in the ACADIA 2023 Proceedings and Conference. These publications demonstrate that MSD-RAS student projects are competitive with world-leading research undertaken byfull-time faculty and PhD students, yet these projects were undertaken in a single sixteen-week spring semester! We are excited to see the diverse, technically challenging, and ambitious research-led-design projects our students have achieved being shared with the broader
academic and professional communities, and to see our graduates transition to alumni as they embark on careers in innovative design, fabrication and technology-driven industries and practice!
Faculty: Andrew Saunders
Teaching Assistant: Riley Studebaker & Claire Moriarty
The studio focuses exclusively on working with an industrial robotic arm and a large-scale hot- wire cutter end-effector to cut foam. This relatively simple robotic extension quickly introduces students to the robotic lab, robot interface and ultimately produces tangible results quickly, yet also highlights the designer’s need to develop designs within geometrical constraints that are tightly related to specific manufacturing processes – in this case, the hot-wire cutter’s production of ruled surface geometries. The architectural project for the studio is a speculative ceilingscape re-design for one of the large galleries in Meyerson Hall that currently features a ubiquitous hung acoustical tile system.
Students begin by analyzing the ruled geometry of the sculptures by Constructivist Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner. The ruled geometric principles are endemic to architecture (see early 20th century concrete masters, etc - although often not as extremely hyperbolic) and embedded in the fabrication process of cutting with a single line (also able to be used as an additional rotational axis).
Through the introduction of deep learning, a recent and rapidly developing branch of artificial intelligence, students will identify and introduce local geometric signatures of their original Gabo and Pevsner analysis into a neural network process. Students generate iterative variations as a novel method to deploy the original local geometric signatures at the global scale. The new AI compositions are used to generate new ceilings for a gallery. As a critique to the Fordist tendencies of the existing standardized dropped ceiling, each proposal will be motivated by the autonomous latent space operating between the geometric rules learned in the first phase of analysis. The new ceilings will embody completely unfamiliar part-to-whole relationships, resisting familiar tropes including Vitruvian, Fordist, Collage or Parametric.
Featured Student Work:
Nick Houser, Jeff Liao, Xinlin Lu, Tinghui Mo, Mahsa Masalegoo. ......................................................... 442
Shunta Moriuchi, Franklin Wu, Joey Luo, Shane Su..444
Nick Houser, Jeff
Liao, Xinlin Lu, Tinghui Mo, Mahsa Masalegoo
This project investigates the interplay between realworld fabricated panels and the geometric principles of single-ruled curvature, drawing inspiration from Gabo & Pevsner’s sculptural forms. By inputting known single-ruled surfaces into a StyleGAN, an AI-generated configuration emerges, embedding the underlying geometric logic of the input style image.
The resulting digital designs are then physically realized using advanced fabrication techniques. Specifically, 6-axis robotic arms, equipped with industrial straight-edge heated wire
foam cutters, translate these AI-constructed forms into tangible objects. This process explores the potential of 2D AI as a tool for rapid, bespoke production in the physical realm, bridging the virtual and material worlds.
The methodology not only reinterprets Gabo’s aesthetic and structural principles but also pushes the boundaries of computational design and robotic manufacturing. By leveraging AI to generate complex, curvature-driven forms and employing precise robotic execution, the project demonstrates a novel workflow for creating customized, sculptural panels.
Ultimately, it highlights how AI can serve as a creative partner in design, enabling innovative production techniques that merge digital experimentation with realworld craftsmanship.
Shunta Moriuchi, Franklin Wu, Joey
The project envisions a speculative ceiling for Meyerson Hall’s Upper Gallery, drawing inspiration from the sculptures by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner. The design integrates distinctive geometric elements—coneshaped forms and twisted tear-shaped voids—extracted from the original sculptures and distributed hierarchically across the ceiling landscape. A convolutional neural network (CNN) was employed to translate these sculptural forms into a three-dimensional composition, which was prototyped through scaled resin and 3D prints before being fabricated in
high-density Styrofoam using a 6-axis robotic arm. The resulting ceiling evokes the imagery of an infinite mushroom forest, carving out dynamic zones below that invite exploration. Integrated lighting responds to gallery occupancy, enhancing the spatial experience.
Through iterative variations generated by bespoke rail profile manipulation, deep learning applications, and the deployment of local geometric signatures at a global scale, the composition achieves a striking balance between complexity and cohesion, defining the ceiling’s immersive and ever-evolving presence.
Faculty: Ezio Blasetti
Teaching Assistant: Sophia O’Neill & Yuan Mingyang
Collaborators: Via Domani, TCR Composites, & Lemond Carbon
The second half of the semester, the Material Agencies Studio will focus on robotic fabrication of composite fiber materials and generative algorithmic methods in architectural design. The students will investigate non-linear systems at both a methodological and tectonic level. The exploration will take the form of design research, which will be tested through an architectural proposal.
The project of the studio will be the design of a hybrid programmable structure that supports an Autonomous Public Garden. The project will manifest as a lightweight endoskeleton providing envelope and support for the growth of an organic structural and ephemeral system. This semi-structural composite scaffold (Robotic 3D Weaving of Continuous Carbon Fiber + Composite Materials) will support the internal growth of the garden: synthetic environments of high definition. Over time the two systems - organic and inorganic – will merge into a single ecology.
The studio will focus on the progression and transformation of the design proposals over time. The ephemeral nature of the project will require a strategy for its spatiotemporal manifestation in relation to its environment. The specificity of the placement for each design will be opportunistic in regards to the possibilities of transformation of the existing situation. Our attempt will be to map spatial and temporal patterns and speculate on the computational infrastructure that would allow for real-time sensing and processing of the data.
The project will be concerned with the relationship of art and architecture, formation and performance. Historically, the space of the Garden is a hybrid gradient of public and private, a territorial buffer that interfaces with the commons and the environment. The Garden acts as a design space for the care, metabolism and aesthetics of a variety of species with various degrees of domestication. In this studio we operate under the conceptual framework for architectural space as a form-of-life
MSD: RAS Ezio Blasetti
itself: a living nexus operating in a multiplicity of material, biological, technological and economic domains. Studio projects will attempt to map spatial and temporal patterns and speculate on the computational infrastructure that would allow for real-time sensing and processing of the data of the Garden. Participants will learn to apply principles of computational thinking into an architectural proposal. They will develop their own generative evolutionary design strategy through algorithmic techniques for the analysis and generation of form. Participants will internalise the potential and constraints of robotic fabrication in the design of their architectural building elements and proposals. Students will learn to work with composite materials and how to integrate their use in Architectural Design. They will explore and document the relationship of material behavior and digital simulation. Participants will synthesise this knowledge into a robotically fabricated adaptive architectural proposal that responds to environmental and other external inputs.
Featured Student Work:
Chunze Li, Yidan Wang, Matt Ward, Amber Chen, & Sihan L. .................................................... 448
Jeffery Liao, Masalegoo Mahsa, Nicholas Houser, Xinlin Lu, Tinghui Mo ............................... 450
Wang, Matt Ward, Amber Chen, & Sihan L, Aqua Transitoria
Our project explores the use of space frames and the various ways a tetrahedron can be aggregated and subdivided over the course of a structure. We are aiming to create a public space that provides visual interaction with people from many different perspectives highlighting various geometric patterns and progressions. Additionally we are able to generate a range of weaved
surfaces that can be used to provide canopies, house plant life, and serve the community as an interactive scaffolding. Using a lightweight strong material like carbon fiber, we were inspired by other space frame structures created in bamboo. We wanted to create a modular system that could be arranged in unique ways to create different space frames, at the same time we also looked at the work of Robert Ricolais and wanted to produce a lightweight structure with the potential of making large spans and cantilevers in the overall form. Aside from the structure itself, we also wanted to integrate different materials, and explored the
use of fabrics stretched in tension across the carbon fiber surfaces.
The structure here is not permanent what we’re hoping to do is create a dialogue for different means of water conservation, Philadelphia has the Schyuklil river but other potential sites for a structure like this don’t require the presence of the river, we hope to store and collect water and harvest it in a generative way. This structure is an example of sustainability, and its modular nature allows it to be reconfigured and made larger or smaller depending on its function.
Liao, Masale
goo Mahsa, Nicholas Houser, Xinlin Lu, Tinghui Mo, Bespoke Grotto
The site chosen best illustrates many conditions to be exemplified. Located next to the waterworks, near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a marshy pool on the bank of the Schuylkill river houses a small uncovered board walk. By defining a series of CA spawn points, the CA begins to generate and grow around and over the board walk,
creating an enclosed partially shaded space, that should, with time, become inhabited by vegetation, creating a small micro climate underneath the CA grotto.
The CA grotto demonstrates the multiplicity of utilizing carbon fiber as a fabrication material and its ability to adapt, through its opportunity to create bespoke pieces with minimal changes to a jig, its structural integrity when cured, site specificity through implementation of a CA, and its resilience to house secondary artificial and natural additives.
MSD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems: Material Agencies: Robotics & DEsign Lab II
Faculty: Robert Stuart-Smith
Teaching Assistant: Hadi El Kebbi, Sophia O’Neil, Matt White
Material Agencies questions the role of the designer and their relationship to materials and means of production, exploring varying degrees of design-production agency that allow the designer to engage with the physical world in profoundly different ways. Robotic fabrication can extend production beyond automated routines with degrees of autonomy that enable sensitive material engagement to drive alternative forms of material expression. Robotics and Al technologies also support industrially scalable approaches to bespoke design for manufacture (DfMa) that might address material waste, cost, expand user or site customization, and can respond to a wide range of other design criteria all the while exploring aesthetic opportunities. In Material Agencies, speculative design proposals are developed through fabricated prototypes, and the parallel development of a design-to-production workflow that is explored and demonstrated through computer simulation, modelling and robotic workflows. As such, Material Agencies seeks to engage with robotic fabrication and material production as generative contributors to creative design outcomes, enabling design agencies to also operate through materials and robot platforms. Qualitative design character is curated through the parallel development of custom approaches to conceiving, manipulating, and responding to matter. Where possible, successful design outcomes aim to exhibit bespoke character intrinsic to their design and production workflow. This year was the final year in a three-year investigation into architectural ceramics, with students developing a fullscale prototype of a multi-part ceramic assembly for a façade screen together with a larger-scale digital building-scale façade design. Projects were undertaken within all RAS spring semester courses. Developed outside of a traditional architectural brief or site constraints, projects were primarily focused on research and development of a material manufacturing process, and strategies for robot programming and generative/computational design that facilitated the realization of each
prototypical design proposal. These prototypical proposals speculate and demonstrate diverse opportunities related to facade performance, fabrication, use, and aesthetics.
Featured Student Work:
Renhu (Franklin) Wu, Shunta Moriuchi, Yinglei (Amber) Chen, Sihan Li ............................................................... 460
Haohan (Jason) Tang, Jingyu (Joey) Luo, Shuoxuan (Shane) Su, Bentian Wang, Pouria Vakhshouri ......... 462
Renhu (Franklin)
Wu, Shunta Moriuchi, Yinglei (Amber) Chen, Sihan Li
Slip-cast ceramics can produce unrivalled formal complexity and geometrical precision compared to other ceramic manufacturing approaches. While it is the preferred production approach to fine porcelain and sanitary ware products, its limitation in producing variable components without unique molds presents
challenges for the method’s integration into architectural practices where variability is often advantageous. This research develops a method to support the production of geometrically varied slipcast parts from a common mold, through the robotic rotation of the mold during the slip solidification process. Challenges arising from the method such as slip formation and edge quality, are addressed through the incremental injection of slip during manufacturing on a custom end-effector tool, and the development of simulation software to predict slip formation in real-time. The simulation software is also used to generate robot manufacturing instructions in relation to a design input and serves as a design visualisation
tool. The capacity for the approach to produce geometric variation within an automated slip-casting process is demonstrated in a full-scale prototype façade screen assemblage comprised of 28 parts cast using four different molds, and an overall architectural façade screen design comprised of thousands of pieces that uses the same four variations of mold. Altogether, the research demonstrates an approach to the design and manufacture of geometrically varied slipcast parts for architectural ceramic façade screens that integrates design and manufacturing activities whilst reducing waste and cost associated with the production of unique one-off use molds.
Haohan (Jason)
Tang, Jingyu (Joey)
Luo, Shuoxuan (Shane) Su, Bentian Wang, Pouria Vakhshouri
Ceramic Forest
Extrusion is a well-established industrial production technique commonly used for making architectural ceramic clay parts in high-volume for façade cladding and other applications. In mass production, an auger pushes clay out of a reservoir through a die profile onto a conveyor belt. While the method enables elaborately profiled
extrusions, the extrusion and die allow for no degree of variability across the production of several parts. Ceramic Forest explores how robotic fabrication and clay extrusion techniques can be integrated into a variable production process by mounting an extrusion system and die on an industrial robot endof-arm tool. Experiments exploring fabrication parameters including the clay body water content, die geometry, air pressure, and a robot’s motion trajectory informed the development of a hexagonal die-cast extrusion part that supports the ability for several parts to be bundled together to form a spatial
façade screen system. The research is demonstrated in the production and bundled assembly of a full-scale partial façade screen prototype comprised of geometrically distinctive parts, and a larger architectural façade screen design proposal. A computational design method was also developed for the architectural façade that incorporates the research’s established fabrication constraints. Together, these developments illustrate an approach to variably formed die-formed ceramic extrusion and a computational design approach to the manufacturing method’s application in architectural façade screens.
Algorithmic Design and Robotic Fabrication
Faculty: Ezio Blasetti
This seminar will teach students computer and robot programming skills that will be utilized to deliver a complimentary and integral aspect of design-prototyping and fabrication work. Topics will vary in application to suit the studio brief. Participants will be introduced to the Robotics Lab and will learn to set up ABB Industrial Robot tasks. Design algorithms will be developed that establish a conceptual relationship to the manufacturing process and attempt to leverage it for creative forms of design expression whilst addressing material and production performance constraints. Examples include computer programming that simulates a material placement and
robotic manufacturing process such as additive manufacturing, filament winding or weaving, and utilizes these tasks in a generative design methodology, where design character, variation in material organization is evaluated relative to performance criteria such as material quantities, production time, etc.
Intro to Cyberphysical Systems
Faculty: Jeffrey Anderson
This seminar will teach participants to design and assemble electronic circuits using sensors/actuators and micro-controllers, and to program digital and analogue means of data exchange. Students will develop a closed or open loop reactive system that consists of embedded sensor systems that will
operate within the Design Studio project prototype, and utilizes feedback from sensors to drive designed affects (E.g. kinetic, lighting, variations in porosity.). The course will consider degrees of control, feedback, energy and force in relation to interactions of matter, space and active bodies (human and non-human). Participants will learn how to design electric circuits, solder and weld these and to integrate circuits with micro-processors, sensors and actuators. Exact equipment and methods will vary over time as these technologies evolve rapidly. At present possible micro-controllers utilized include Arduino, Raspberri Pi, Odroid, Intel Nuc, Atom and others. Sensors such as flex, pressure and proximity sensors will be utilized. Possible forms of actuation include servo and stepper motors, linear
actuators, NiTinol muscle wire, pneumatic actuators. A Programming Language will be utilized to for the writing of simple control algorithms that clarify how input and output data is processed and acted upon, with a particular focus on leveraging physical world actions within a designed control loop where possible.
RAS Theory: Architecture in the Age of Thinking Machines Faculty: Evangelos Kotsioris
Robotics, autonomous systems, advanced methods of fabrication, AI — are all terms that seem to have become common-place among architects. Yet their origins, evolution, and philosophical underpinning often remain obscure. This seminar is intended as a historical and theoretical introduction to a series of key concepts that are central to the MSD Robotics and Autonomous Systems program. Using contemporary discourse and concerns as a jumping-off point, the course (re)constructs an archaeology of interdisciplinary knowledge central to design computation, machine intelligence, and automated fabrication. The intellectual origins of these areas, and their profound consequences for architecture, are traced back to the fields of technology, communication theory, cybernetics, systems theory, developmental biology, robotics, network theory, aesthetics, psychology, and artificial intelligence, among others.
The combination of historical sources and contemporary texts provide students with a common lexicon and set of references that will allow them to articulate and critically assess their own conceptual and
material explorations in robust ways. Particular emphasis will be put on the philosophical, socio-political, environmental, and ethical extensions of existing and emerging digital technologies — including the adverse effects of profiled surveillance, automated decision-making, and algorithmic bias, among others. Weekly readings will provide the basis for discussions but also serve as interpretative lenses for the analysis of case study projects. Supplementary sources will enable students to deepen their literacy on specific topics beyond the completion of the seminar.
ARCH 8040
Advanced RAS Programming Faculty: Jeffrey Anderson
This course will support ARCH 8020 Material Agencies Il with a greater level of technical competency and detail. More ambitious functionality will be developed that will enable student’s greater degrees of freedom and creativity in their engagement with design and production processes. While students will not engage in science/engineering development, research and software developed in such disciplines will be applied within design, fabrication and user occupation orientated scenarios. Topics will vary in application to suit studio briefs and shifting capabilities within industry and academia.
Examples include mechanical and electrical design for
bespoke robot tooling, use of Coming in ssin or rariain appiano s, e darenga matian ion, machine communication and control (E.g., Linux ROS Robot programming framework).
ARCH 8060
Experimental Matter Faculty: Jonathan King
This course aims to extend knowledge into state-of-theart materials, material applications and fabrication methods and contribute research and experimental results towards ARCH 8020 Material Agencies Il course prototypical projects. Operating predominantly through research and controlled physical experiments, students will develop a material strategy for their ARCH 8020 Material Agencies I work, investigating scientific research papers, industry
publications and precedent projects in order to develop know-how in materials and material applications. A material application method will be proposed and experimented with to evaluate and develop use within a robotic fabrication process. Submissions will incorporate experimental test results, methods and precedent research documentation.
ARCH 8080
Scientific Research and Writing Faculty: Billie Faircloth
Following a framing of architectural design-research and theory in Semester 1, this course aims to provide students with knowledge of state-of-the-art robotics and design taking place in the research community and to introduce methods to evaluate and demonstrate
academic research that encompasses both creative and technical work. Submissions will include a technical written statement related ARCH 8020 Material Agencies Il work, which will be produced by participants under direction within this core seminar. This will train students for additional technical career opportunities and raise the level of discourse and prospects for further research from the program and its participants to a level suitable for continuation within PhD studies.
ARCH 7100
Contemporary Theory Faculty: Ariane Harrison
A chronological overview of the approaches and attitudes adopted by architects, theorists and inter-disciplinary writers from 1993- today that have helped shape the current discourse of architecture. This course will introduce and contextualize key projects, and polemics over the last 25 years. Central themes in this course include the impact of digital technologies and methods of design, production and materiality. These are explored through texts, movements, projects and buildings that help form an overview that has shaped the contemporary condition that we live in. There have been a myriad of different approaches and through a select set of readings and lectures students will be exposed to crucial texts, projects and buildings making students versatile and knowledgeable in the important concepts that shape our current discourse. A focus will be the organization, configuration and articulation of buildings and the conceptual and cultural arguments they are associated. Formal, organizational and material characteristics of this period
will be explored. This class will develop students’ knowledge and provide a platform from which they can continue the discussions surrounding architectural thought and practice.
ARCH 7410
Architecture Design Innovation Faculty: Hina Jamelle
The mastery of techniques, whether in design, production or both, does not necessarily yield great architecture. As we all know, the most advanced techniques can still yield average designs. Architects are becoming increasingly adept at producing complexity & integrating digital design and fabrication techniques into their design process - yet there are few truly elegant projects. Only certain projects that are sophisticated at the level of technique achieve elegance. This seminar explores some of the instances in which designers are able to move beyond technique, by commanding them to such a degree as to achieve elegant aesthetics within the formal development of projects.
The PENN Ph.D. Program in Architecture is committed to the productive creation of critical knowledge in Architecture that brings value to the built environment. Architecture as a discipline has, since the first century AD, had its own theory, codex, and principles that have guided its craftspeople, scientists, builders, designers, theorists, and architects. For centuries, architects have published essays, treatises, and research on topics material, topographical, technological, political, and aesthetic. Amongst the many questions our students explore today are those which actualize the discipline’s hundreds of years of recorded and vernacular knowledge, and which leverage our ever-increasing desire to invent and mobilize emergent, innovative technologies in service to making, fabricating, building, and research. The PhD program in Architecture activates the intellectual space between disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies, envisioning new opportunities for those committed to enquiry, debate, critical thinking, invention, added value, and justice in the built environment. Whether in the production of ideas, words, data, scripts, systems, material studies, or fabrications, our students advance knowledge in service to living better, more equitable, and ethical lives.
The dissertation aims to identity, describe, and define three genres of architectural theory that are situated; they are autotheory, the dialogical dialogue, and site-theory. As opposed to architectural theory that aims for objectivity or universal applicability, situated genres are written in a way to expose the circumstances of their creation and the contingency of their relevance upon those circumstances. Those circumstances, or situation, include the life of the author, the discourse surrounding the author, and the place the theory was developed. The argument is that such situated theory— though by definition neither perfect nor ultimate—allows for ways of studying architecture, its discourse, and theory-making itself that are unavailable with other genres.
The dissertation first makes this case generally, explaining the advantageous qualities of all situated genres, such as being clear about their limits, heuristic, and revealing of their inner dynamics. Then, in each of the three chapters, more specific value arguments are made in relation to individual genres. This is done using short and long case studies, where single texts or entire oeuvres are closely read and analyzed for their content and form. The longer case studies focus on the following architects: Rifat Chadirji, Peter Eisenman, Suad Amiry, and Rem Koolhaas.
The dissertation engages a well-established topic that demands reconsideration, the meanings of the architectural orders as they emerged and were used in ancient Greece during the Archaic and Classical periods. The research seeks to offer a comprehensive understanding of the role and meanings of the three orders, with a particular focus on their use in Greek temples. A basic premise of this study is that there were several dimensions of significance for the orders, evident in the buildings, but
also articulated in ancient Greek myth and ritual, cosmology, and philosophical thought, and informed by the polis’ unique relation with its productive territory and ancient Greeks’ understanding and relation to Nature as Kosmos. The narrowly conceived anthropomorphism of the orders’ columns is reconsidered by demonstrating their analogical and metaphoric relation both to the anthropic body and to the arboreal world. Likewise, it is shown that the orders were compatible and complementary, tied through the overarching theme of seasonality.
The latest iteration of the Department of Architecture’s Pavilion Project, Hyperlapse Chambers is an installation of designs by first-year graduate architecture students that took place in Meyerson Hall on Wednesday, October 12, and Thursday, October 13, from 2:00pm–6:00pm.
The studio brief notes that the “501 studio Hyperlapse Chambers will explore and re-examine digital techniques in regard to details and tectonics. Our discipline has a
long and rich history of architectural details and of our contemporary digital tools’ relationship to technology, art, science, material and structural innovations as well as their implied politics. The multi-scalar and often infinite zoom, in and out, allows us to design objects, spaces and forms at the micro to the macro scale in a continuous and fluid method.”
Each Hyperlapse Chamber is designed by a team of three or four students under the guidance of a studio critic. Each studio section explored a specific material research, digital fabrication technique,
and formal methodology as it relates to the Hyperlapse theme. “The Hyperlapse technique attempts to capture conditions that are beyond our perceptibility and require new modes of representation and multi-scale design thinking in order to make them comprehensible,” notes Lecturer in Architecture Danielle Willems.
The 501 studio is coordinated by Danielle Willems with critics Anthony Gagliardi, Daniel Markiewicz, Ryan Palider, Eduardo Rega, Laia Mogas-Soldevila, and Na Wei.
The Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design hosted the annual Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) conference from October 24 through October 29, 2022. ACADIA was formed for the purpose of facilitating communication and critical thinking regarding the use of computers in architecture, planning, and building science.
The conference theme, “Hybrids & Haecceities,” asks how technology enables, reflects, and challenges
established disciplinary boundaries and design practices. Haecceities describes the discrete qualities or properties of objects that define them as unique, while Hybrids are entities with characteristics enhanced by the process of combining two or more elements with different properties. In concert, these terms offer a provocation toward more inclusive and specific forms of computational design. The conference invites contributions on how hybrids & haecceities pose new ideas and approaches to design – be they computational, material, aesthetic, robotic, genetic, biological, environmental, or theoretical.
The conference leadership included a team of dynamic
Penn faculty from the department of Architecture under the leadership of Miller Professor and Chair Winka Dubbeldam. Conference Chairs include Dorit Aviv, Masoud Akbarzadeh, Hina Jamelle, and Robert Stuart Smith. Andrew Saunders served as Workshop Chair, Nate Hume as Media Chair, and Ferda Kolatan as Exhibitions Chair.
ACADIA’s three-day workshops commenced on Monday, October 24th and preceded the panels and keynotes of the conference, which began on Thursday, October 27th. An exhibition of Weitzman faculty work was on display at the Annenberg Center lobby for which there was an opening reception on the evening of October 27th.
The Weitzman School of Design hosted Housing Justice Futures: Philadelphia Forum on Design, Race, and Climate Change, spearheaded by Presidential Associate Professor and Chair of Undergraduate Architecture, Rashida Ng. The symposium was held over two days, March 16 and 17, 2023, gathering together an engaging panel of researchers, practitioners and community stakeholders who examined the historical inequities that precipitated
the housing crisis in Philadelphia and other US cities while considering actionable strategies for housing justice in the future.
On the evening of Thursday, March 16th, the keynote speaker, Sheryll Cashin gave her lecture with a welcome from Miller Professor and Chair of Graduate Architecture Winka Dubbeldam, and an introduction from Rashida Ng. Sheryll Cashin is an acclaimed author who writes mainly about the U.S. struggle with racism and inequality. She is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown, where she teaches Constitutional Law, and a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Over the course of the day
on Friday, March 17th, three sessions were held in Meyerson Hall, Plaza Gallery featuring the guest speakers, moderators, and respondents. Session 1 discussed Housing and Environmental Justice and included guest speakers Janette Kim, Gabriel Díaz Montemayor, Dahlia Nduom, and Shawhin Roudbari. Session 2 dealt with Housing Policy and Design and guest speaking were Nadia Anderson, Sara Bronin, Wanda Dalla Costa, and Jonathan Evans. Session 3 considered Health Equity, Housing, and Community with guest speakers Janet Abrahams, Karen Kubey, Marc Norman, and Theresa Hyuna Hwang.
Also included in the symposium was an exhibition in Addams Gallery and a Community Workshop.
The spring brings a long-standing tradition at the Weitzman School of Design: The Ideal Beam Competition. Students in Richard Farley’s Structures class gathered in the Plaza Gallery to test their entries. The goal of the competition is to design a beam to support a concentrated load at midspan that has the greatest ratio of weight of load to weight of beam. One by one, the students installed their beams, cranked the weight and destroyed their work.
“Often an entry will linger while it twists and bends to carry load and defy failure. Others will fail under a minimal load due to an unaccounted cause from circumstances that was missed in the design or construction process. ALL of the entries will teach us something about structure.”
-Richard Farley, Adjunct Professor of Architecture
Presented annually, the Weitzman Year End Show brings together work by graduating students from across the School to capture new directions in architecture, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, historic preservation, and urban spatial analytics. This year’s exhibit took place from May 13th through June 14th and displayed projects from all programs in the Department of Architecture. Final presentations from 701 and 704 studios hung in the Lower Gallery, while large renderings from multiple programs were on show in the Upper Gallery. The exhibit continued in the Weitzman School’s basement space where rows of amazing models were arranged in rows and bust forms with outfits designed by students in the fashion seminar. The in-person show was open to the public and served as a backdrop to Commencement and Alumni Weekend.
Copyright © Stuart
Weitzman
School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, 2023
Text and Images © Stuart Weitzman
School of
Design,
University of Pennsylvania, 2023
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