Blog — BAC journal

Fall 2023 Arc 3 Course Offerings

Instructors Jessica Wolff & Lily Wubeshet

The 50 acre site is located in the Great Valley Corporate Center and Valley Creek Park in Malvern, Pennsylvania. This is a suburban site located approximately 35 minutes northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Part of the site is located on the former site of a restaurant and corporate building. Students will repurpose this part of the site for either outdoor programming or a new building program. The rest of the site is part of Valley Creek Park and includes a playground, open fields, picnic pavilions, tennis courts, a historic building as well as a creek and forested area. The area is surrounded by a mix of residential uses, a mix of retail and institutional uses and a mix of business types. The site is near main access roads and train lines into Philadelphia.

Instructor: Thomas Sterling

Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS) was first coined by French marine biologist Daniel Pauly to describe our general inability to perceive environmental degradation because we do not know or are unable to remember what the natural environment looked like in the past. As our ‘baseline’ shifts with each successive generation, so does our ability to register how the environment has been transformed through anthropogenic, human forces. What we see today as “natural” would likely seem alarmingly unnatural to someone from just a century ago. In a sense, SBS describes a crisis of recognition and comprehension brought on by the instability of our collective, cultural memory.

The difficult task of recognizing the potential impact of the climate emergency requires a commensurate recognition of the deep entanglements between architecture, culture, the landscape, and the larger ecological systems that mediate their interactions. Shifting Baselines | Rising Seas asks students to deploy architecture in the service of mending this crisis of recognition by calling attention to and keeping a record of the many dynamic and often contradictory thresholds that we use to define our relationship to the environment. Students will identify and interrogate the physical, temporal, and conceptual thresholds that reinforce this crisis of recognition: human and non-human, land and sea, earth and sky, weather and climate, hot and cold, wet and dry. Through the design of a climate change observatory, students will design an architectural intervention that measures, transcribes, and preserves the next two centuries of ecological volatility, planetary transformation, and cultural evolution.

Instructors Karl Pops and Allan Delesantro

Boston is in a housing crisis. Boston is now the third most expensive rental market in the United States. The city has an estimated shortage of 38,000 housing units. At the current pace of housing production, that number will increase to 90,000 by 2030. The city’s economic growth has not been met with proportionate housing growth and the mounting crisis is now impossible to ignore.

Meanwhile, resistance to new housing production is strong and coming from diverse political and cultural groups. Enfranchised communities put pressure on political representatives to restrict development rights, protect open space and enshrine single family housing with exclusionary zoning. Disenfranchised communities fear new infrastructure and housing development will negatively impact neighborhood authenticity, culture and affordability.

This studio explores the tension between two major pressures weighing on cities like Boston - the dire need for affordable housing, and the legitimate and well-meaning concerns of communities who view new housing production as undermining the quality of the urban environment. Where in the city can we build more housing, and how can we balance that with the need for an authentic, livable city full of ecosystem services and climate resilient green space?

Instructor Sungwoo Jang

"Synergy" originated from the Greek "synergos," which means "working together."1 Hence, the emergence of new buildings amidst existing and/or new structures inherently generates "synergy." This urban byproduct can reinforce the existing neighborhood characters, unveil concealed patterns, or even redefine the spatial identity of a city. Through thoughtful configuration, arrangement and geometrical deformations of buildings, this studio aims to maximize the positive synergistic effect for the community's and broader ecology's proliferation.

This studio will delve into wide design scales, encompassing from site planning to the unit design, with a central focus on maximizing synergistic effects. While designing a mixed-use residential block for "live+work+interact" on a 2.9-acre land, students will gain proficiency in recognizing visible and latent urban patterns and devising formal and thermal tactics that seamlessly integrate cultural, ecological, and economic priorities with their individual creative visions.

Incorporating site conditions that are visible and tangible, such as urban edges and site topography, as well as the invisible and sensory, such as sunlight, heat flow, and noise from the street, the studio aims to produce multiple zones with different spatial and climatic characteristics to host a broader range of programs and activities. Students will cultivate "gradient" conditions, spanning from; public to private instead of demarcated separation between spaces; hot to cold instead of all-encompassing thermal wraps that isolates humans; diverse unit mixes for various family types instead of targeting a particular group; hard to soft to mitigate the urban landscape's dichotomy between inside and outside.

Instructor Megan Gallahue

As a social paradigm, the prototypical golf course runs counter to the idea of democratic public space through explicit racialized, gendered, and class-based exclusion. As an aesthetic form, it is both keenly aware of site aspects such as terrain and viewsheds, and yet made sterile, endlessly replicable, and devoid of environmental context. Similarly, living centers for older adults are highly privatized, restrictive, and alienating, rendering human processes of aging invisible, and disempowering older adults. The re-invigorated ecology of the golf course demands a rigorous approach to “natural” phenomena such as topography, water, plant and animal life, while insisting that the social phenomenon of aging must be equally integrated into new spatial formations for living.

Instructors Tara Pearson and Devon Miller

This semester you will approach the site through the lens of identity. How can you design and develop a site in response to the identity of the area in which it exists? Every design decision you make needs to consider identities perceived on site as well as the local and regional identities the site is impacted by.

Asking the following questions will begin to set the framework for your approach this semester.

What is identity? What is the identity of a space? Who defines it? How much does it depend on physical characteristics, and how much on local history and current use? Adding further complexity to the question of how one identifies a place’s identity, you will be tasked with doing so without being able to visit the site in person. For The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch interviewed locals to ask how they saw parts of their cities and then catalogued what physical characteristics he saw in those areas to see how they compared. You will be challenged to do this without the conversation. To approach this, one of your first tasks this semester will be to identify and walk an area in your locality that is roughly the size of the studio site. This will act as a scale study; it will also require you to carefully catalog the elements that make the area you chose unique, why you chose it, and what you believe is its identity. This will give you a baseline for what to look for in the local area of the studio site when trying to determine its identity. This identity catalog will be overlaid with several layers of data—geographic, demographic, climatic, et cetera, throughout your initial research phase. This research will build the foundation for your design approach throughout the semester.

Instructors Mateo Yang and Stefan Di Leo

No building exists in a vacuum, devoid of contextual relationships with its surrounding physical, ecological, economic, and social fabric. Rummaging through and synthesizing the various narratives influencing a building is key to developing not only a physical form, but a body that enmeshes itself into the unfolding narratives of the city. In this course, we will have ongoing conversations on what it means to build a structure that is culturally and historically significant. Do we break with the past or harness embodied energy to create a hybrid creature? How do we consider material lifespans and temporal occupation into our nascent designs? The designs for this studio will consider flood resiliency and carbon neutrality at the core of our design strategies, while employing a deeper reading of site history and cultural narratives to direct design toward unique, site-based and culturally sensitive interventions. How might a new public architecture along the waterfront serve to bridge these stories of both present and latent site histories? What better, possible trajectories can be set in motion with architecture? How can we re-invigorate natural systems to ameliorate climate change that was caused by these cultural and economic influences? Can we embrace and engage these cultural and economic influences in novel architectural design and program?

Instructor Santiago Mota

Site! studio continues operations within the domains of Harvard Forest, situated in Petersham, Massachusetts. This expansive forest, spanning 4,000 acres, is an integral part of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, home to various research facilities, and the Fisher Museum. Research conducted at the forest covers a wide array of subjects including biodiversity, conservation, environmental change, and the complex interactions within Earth system science. Significantly, since 1988, the Harvard Forest has been recognized as a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) location, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF ) and has served as the Northeast Core site for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) since 2011. The continuous documentation of environmental transformations found at the Harvard Forest offers an unrivaled setting for students to study and comprehend a site, both from a historical viewpoint and within the context of the design disciplines. Students are highly encouraged to tap into the rich history and wealth of data available for this unique location.The Fisher Museum's Diorama collection , for example, serves as a remarkable starting point for reflection. It underscores the importance of long-term documentation in observing landscape changes, as captured in highly detailed models that illustrate the land's patterns and mosaics at various points in time.

Yoonjee KohJuly 20, 2023

Spring 2023 Arc 3 Course Offerings

ARC 1003 B/ARC 3308 D: Dreamy Estates

by Lasse Rau

On May 6, 1886, Hermann Obrist, a young medical student and botanist, fainted while hiking in the hills of Heidelberg. Reminiscing the dream-like episode years later, Obrist describes seeing “a clear vision of a strange, unknown city with towers and temple-like buildings and buildings such as he had never before seen, and never again would see to this day, whether in real life or in pictures. The city seemed to be translucent and was perpetually in motion, disappearing and then reappearing.” Instead of a meaningless “fata morgana,” Obrist’s chimerical vision recollects architecture’s broader implication with dream, imagination, and speculation.

Modern-day real estate operates on this relationship of instantaneous investment and towers and temples “disappearing and then reappearing” as if dreamed up. In development brochures and posters, rendered buildings glimmer promising never-before seen spaces of retail, residence, and recreation. Through text, plan, and image, real estate projects market fictions of inclusive, green, smart, and communal property investments. Its sales pitches tout the impact of the “mixed-use, transit-oriented” “neighborhood” with “community greens” on the broader city life. While often neglected, these palimpsests of architectural practice reveal architecture’s role in promoting property and financial speculation. Further, the American Dream, as a globalized liberal goal, has become synonymous with the aspirations of real estate and home loan ownership.

As part of the ARC 3 research and design studio, we will take as a point of inquiry the forking paths of architectural and real estate fiction. Structured into two separate episodes, we will use role-play and fictional narrative–tools commonly associated with management and its strategies–as premises for a design process. We will learn how to think like a private planner, using the tools of real estate poetry, rendering and collage, as well as how to reclaim them as tools in the repertoire of insurgent designers. Throughout, the goal will be to redeem dream and speculation as architectural vocabularies to propose “anti-real” or dreamy estates: Speculative proposals that resist architecture’s role in the production of spaces for capital accumulation. We will question the use and abuse of the terms “community” and “green” in financial imaginaries of real estate and techniques of insurgency against void claims. We will dissect the mouthfuls of Public-Private Partnership, Air Rights, Community-Land-Trust, Privately Owned Public Spaces, and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Throughout, we will not be critiquing the architecture end product, but its sales package as a multi-medial, narrative device.

ARC 1003 A Landscape Play: Hybrid Ecologies for Aging in Suburban Boston

by Megan Gallahue, Jena Tegeler

Recreation spaces are one of our primary access points to the New England landscape. At current, such green open spaces as sports fields, golf courses, and conservation lands are suggestive of a passive consumption of landscape views. They remain separate from daily life, inaccessible to many, and maintained as static backgrounds for exercise regimes, or restored native habitats sequestered from most human activity. In the imagining of a post-wild, climate-changed future, it is clear that designers must look beyond these binary forms in search of a spatial language encouraging meaningful new ways of inhabiting the landscape alongside others in the world. Using the golf course as a site to reflect on and draw from, the studio will develop proposals for community living centers for older Boston residents. As a social paradigm, the prototypical golf course runs counter to the idea of democratic public space through explicit racialized, gendered, and class-based exclusion. As an aesthetic form, it is both keenly aware of site aspects such as terrain and viewsheds, and yet made sterile, endlessly replicable, and devoid of environmental context. Similarly, living centers for elders are highly privatized, restrictive, and alienating; rendering human processes of aging invisible, and disempowering older adults. The studio will propose a future ecology of the golf course by taking a rigorous approach to “natural” phenomena such as topography, water, and plant life, while insisting that the social phenomenon of aging must be equally integrated into new spatial formations for elder care and living.

ARC 3308 A: Extractive Archipelago - Granite Haven

by Sonny Xu, Joe Kennedy

One of the hardest and most commonly available forms of stone in earth’s crust, granite has been a widespread construction material throughout human history. However, the building industry has largely shifted from a reliance on granite to concrete due to the convenience and labor cost savings. The history of Vinalhaven granite started around 400 million years ago, when the bedrock batholithic granite cooled under a volcanic micro-continent known as Avalonia. In this studio, we look 250 years into the past to investigate the history and enduring legacy of Vianlhaven’s granite industry and its contribution to cities across New England, specifically Boston. Beyond the design of an architectural form, the goal of the studio is to cultivate a greater awareness of where those building materials come from. Projects will investigate how conventional industrial processes and material supply chains can be leveraged to enable a building that is both well designed and environmentally sensitive. Throughout the semester, students will analyze and design for consecutive phases of raw material extraction, curation, refinement, relocation, construction and erosion.

ARC 3308 B/ ARC 1003 C: Resiliency - Designing for Change

by Tyler Hinkley, Jacob Werner

The studio will be taught in parallel with the Academie van Bouwkunst (Academy of Architecture) at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. The two studios will focus on a common theme and explore design interventions on sites in the Fort Point Channel district of Boston, MA. This studio explores “Metropolitan Materials” for work and life in and beyond the Anthropocene – the epoch in which humans have influenced the earth. Boston – one of the oldest cities in the new world and a future oriented innovation hub – is our tool to research, visit, and conceptualize urban, landscape and architectural materiality and development in a changing world.

ARC 3308 C: Conceptualizing a Framework for Spectrum

by Sungwoo Jang

Once a designer delineates building outlines, the relationship between the built and unbuilt emerges. Since constructing a structure(s) simultaneously constructs the space(s) around it, an identical building can create drastically different built environments depending on its location within site and surrounding contexts. Hence, site design, or site plan, is a designer's active engagement with the surrounding context, decisively inserting each program based on the designer's proclivity and agenda. When developing a new site, site planning efforts have often followed a model that facilitates separation between private and public space. One effective way to prevent this dichotomy and foster a sense of community is to insert a framework that generates a wide range of spectrum that scales from the most public to the most private, blurring the boundary between public and private. The landscape design can become an extension of the building, or the building could share the language of the landscape in the way that the structure and landscape fuse intrinsically to promote interstitial spaces and accommodate a variety of uses. In response to the climate and ecological emergencies of our time, the site design should also address strategies that reduce environmental impacts and improve the quality of people's life. Rainwater runoff management, heat island effect reduction, and light pollution reduction must be considered in tandem with creating exterior open space that encourages interaction with the environment, social interaction, passive recreation, and physical activities.

ARC 3308 1D: Reimagining Urban Infrastructure

by Dan Lu, Matt Gindlesperger

A city is composed of interlaced strata and the prosperity of its urban ecosystem is sustained by the integration and the holistic contribution by different three-dimensional layers. Infrastructure plays a pivotal role in enabling this urban ecosystem, but it too often performs as a rather mono-programmatic layer narrated by inflexible political, social, economic, or utilitarian missions. Transportation infrastructure such as freeways and rail tracks are primarily dedicated to connecting destinations but can form demarcation and cause disintegration in its surrounding urban fabric. This phenomenon can be further exacerbated overtime as the neighborhoods along it develop gradually whereas the transportation infrastructure remains in its fidelity to the original mission. Rather than approaching infrastructure as a stagnant physical entity, the studio envisages it as a heterogeneous urban form that can evolve and revitalize to stay pertinent to the ever-changing urban environment. As another significant layer in the urban ecosystem, landscape is conventionally perceived as the amenity or beautification in a cityscape defined by buildings and infrastructure. Learning from the theory of Landscape Urbanism, this studio frames the designed landscape as a cultural expression, a flexible agent for urban organization, a temporary response to urban uncertainty and a living system for climate change mitigation. In many cases, landscape in a city can also be contemplated as an infrastructural matter. This studio asks students to investigate the efficacy and the multiple roles of landscape in the evolution of a piece of infrastructure and how these two layers might integrate with each other and contribute to the larger urban ecosystem. Students will speculate on the future development of the MBTA Orange line and propose co-op housing as urban infills along it. Although a light rail is usually considered as a “line” in terms of its organizational principle, this studio encourages students to explore this piece of transportation infrastructure as a plane, a zone, and a field to take on a layering and compositional approach towards its future development. How might we embrace the light rail as an urban asset instead of avoiding or denying it as an undesirable form of infrastructure? How might an urban infill along the light rail extend, transition, or contrast with its surrounding neighborhoods and reconfigure urban continuity across the suppressed track? How might we re-interpret and transform a piece of transportation infrastructure from both social and ecological dimensions towards its renaissance?

ARC 3308 2RMT: Revitalizing Sunset Park Waterfront

by Jessica Wolff, Lily Wubeshet

Situated near the Gowanus Canal, Sunset Waterfront Park is undergoing a number of exciting development proposals. As a former brownfield site, the area needs to be evaluated for EPA requirements. Its history as a busy industrial waterfront draws valuable interest as well as its potential to be a thriving adaptive reuse node. Students will need to address important adjacencies such as Gowanus Canal, Views to the Statue of Liberty, Ferry connections and Greenwood Cemetery. Students will also research various master plans underway for this site and its larger framework. The program is shared between the landscape intervention, an urban masterplan, and the architectural project. Every proposal should touch land and water through creative programming and thoughtful spatial design in order to bring the waterfront to the community in balance with the continued industrial future of the site.

ARC 3308 3RMT: TOPOS - Identity as Driver at the Confluence of Port and Community

by Andrew Leonard, Tara Pearson

What is Identity? What is the identity of a space? Who defines it? How much does it depend on physical characteristics, and how much on local history? How much depends upon the viewer, and how much depends on local opinion? Asking these questions will begin to set the framework for your approach this semester. Adding further complexity to the question of how one identifies a place’s identity, you will be tasked with doing so without being able to visit the site in person. For “The Image of the City” Kevin Lynch interviewed locals to ask how they saw parts of their cities and then catalogued what physical characteristics he saw in those areas to see how they compared. You will be challenged to do this without the conversation. To approach this, one of your first tasks this semester will be to identify and walk an area in your locality that is roughly the size of the studio site. This will act as a scale study; it will also require you to carefully catalogue the elements that make the area you chose unique, why you chose it, and what you believe is its identity. This will give you a baseline for what to look for in the local area of the studio site when trying to determine its identity. This identity catalogue will be overlaid with several layers of data—geographic, demographic, climatic, et cetera, throughout your initial research phase. This research will build the foundation for your design approach throughout the semester.

ARC 3308 4RMT: Meatpacking District - A Waterfront Destination

by Stefan Di Leo, Mateo Yang

ARC 3308 5RMT: Site!

by Santiago Mota, Danniely Staback

The studio will engage with sites selected by the students in and around the Harvard Forest to propose a catalog of timber architectures of different typologies by taking advantage of the documented history and the wealth of data produced, curated and assembled for this geographic location, as one of the first Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites. We are especially interested in expanding the designer´s notions of place into "deeper" considerations of time and space, convinced that the Harvard Forest is the perfect site to accomplish this through engaging students with, as William Cronon describes, the long term documentation of the changes in the land, both before and long after an architectural intervention. To learn more about the Harvard Forest, please visit the website or read their Biennial Report here. The Harvard Forest and by extension all of the studio work and potential proposals are located within the unceded land and ancestral home territory of the Nipmuc people. This studio is aligned with the Harvard Forest in the commitment of remembering the violent past and continuing to support the relationship building efforts with the tribe to ensure that the land and its benefits are mutually accessible and sustaining.

Yoonjee KohJanuary 12, 2023

Fall 2022 Arc 3 Course Offerings

**Credit:** *Warren S. Parker, Granite Railway Quarry Quincy Norfolk Co MA USA - 1923*

Extractive Landscapes: Granite Motions

with Sonny Xu and Joseph Kennedy

One of the hardest and most commonly available forms of stone in earth’s crust, granite has been a widespread construction material throughout human history. However, the building industry has largely shifted from a reliance on granite to concrete due to the convenience and labor cost savings. The history of Quincy granite started around 400 million years ago, when the bedrock batholithic granite cooled under a volcanic micro-continent known as Avalonia. In this studio, we look 250 years into the past to investigate the history and enduring legacy of Quincy’s granite industry and its contribution to the city of Boston. We will examine the bi directional material flows between Quincy and Boston, from the granite quarried in Quincy that was used to construct Boston’s buildings and monuments, as well as the earth excavated from the Big Dig that was used to fill in the holes of many of the Quincy quarries. The title “Granite Motions” refers both to the movement of this material, as well as the traditional term used to describe a small informal stone quarry.

The studio is split into two equal halves, material sourcing and infrastructural assembly. The studio follows consecutive phases of raw material extraction, curation, refinement, relocation, construction and erosion. The instructors and students will together investigate solid-void relationships that give equal emphasis on both subtractive and additive building processes at a one to one scale. The goal of the studio is to bring students a greater awareness of where building materials come from, and not just that of a final built architectural form. The studio aims to shed light on how conventional industrial processes and material supply chains can be leveraged to enable a building that is both more well designed and environmentally aware.

Harbor Side Artists in Residence Program

with Farah Dakkak and Mary Shoufan

Our desire for spaces that celebrate openness, wandering, exploration, and social interaction have grown. Artists, architects, writers, theorists, and other professionals need space to create, discuss ideas, attend workshops, and sell their art.

Directed to artists interested in having an experience of total immersion in the making of contemporary art overlooking the harbor and within the thriving historic neighborhood of East Boston. Harbor Side Artists in Residence Program will be the center of contemporary culture open to the community that promotes research and artistic production. Artists will get the chance to live for a 3- month period while connecting with fellow artists, collaborating, creating, and selling their art on site.

The integration of climate resilience is critical to the future of the East Boston community. Open space, in conjunction with new waterfront development, must meet and exceed the resiliency goals set by the Climate Ready Boston initiative, to protect the neighborhood for years to come. Additionally, this project seeks to strengthen the connection to the waterfront and protect communities in East Boston from the burden of flooding. Studio designs will consider existing site condition constraints, urban context, flood pathways, and magnitude of flooding while seeking to create open space and equitable access along the waterfront.

Spatial Democracy

with Ignacio Cardona and Adrian Fehrmann

SomerVision is a comprehensive plan for the City of Somerville for the period 2010-2030. The document envisions a sustainable urban infrastructure that promotes diversity and community ties. However, the extension of the Green Line Transportation System - first through Union Square, later through East Somerville, Gilman Square, Magoun Square, and Ball Square- has aroused fears of undermining social networks with imminent risks of gentrification while emerges the need to consider the impact of transportation on the environment.

This course explores the framework of Spatial Democracy, which promotes an urban development that maximizes access to the opportunities offered by the city for all its residents. Spatial democracy can be trickled down into various design strategies, including economic, environmental, social, and governance.

First, urban agglomerations incentivize individual and community economic development. But, Spatial Democracy understands that urban development could promote sustainability by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the urban heat islands effect. Additionally, the right to the city, understood as a framework that enables equitable access to urban resources, supports the social perspective of Spatial Democracy. Finally, this framework promotes design strategies in overlapping management tools, urban design, architecture, and landscape, which facilitate urban governance.

To sum up, Spatial democracy emerges from the overlapping and hybridization of urban development, environmental adaptability, social inclusion, and urban governance. In this context, the anticipation of the impact of the Green Line on the city of Somerville is not only an ideal case but an urgent one to achieve a more democratic city space.

Resiliency: Designing for Change

with Tyler Hinckley and Rob Adams

This studio will seek to address these questions at multiple scales (macro to micro) and from various points of view (social, economic, environmental). To do so the studio will focus on a waterfront site in Portland, Maine which is threatened by climate change. We will apply planning strategies developed for similar cities like the recent Coastal Resilience Solutions for South Boston as a framework for the studio, focusing on applying resilient strategies to the redevelopment of the Portland waterfront. After researching and analyzing the environmental and socio-economic conditions of the area, students will test the potential for resilient design by developing a community sailing center project on a waterfront site in downtown Portland.

Local [ECO]nomics: Reinvigorating the Local through Ecology

with Andrew Leonard and Ruben Segovia

Ecology is defined as the interaction of an organism and its environment. Ecology, therefore, is the essence of what local is, it only exists as an interaction in a place. It is through the lens of ecology that you will make all decisions this semester. We will not be distracted by the tropes that place ecology as something that is of “nature” and is not “human”, on the contrary we will look at how both the human and the non-human interact with the spaces that are created. The “urban” environment is just as much an ecology as “nature”, organisms interact with their environment in each and it is through these interactions that you will approach your design for the site.

The site, located east of Assembly Square in Somerville, MA, sits between a rail line and the newest train stop on the T, and the Mystic river, immediately south of the Mystic River Locks. The City of Somerville is one of the densest cities in the area with over 19,500 ppl/sq mi compared to Boston's less than 14,500 ppl/sq mi, and has one of the lowest percentages of open space at ~6%, compared to Boston’s generous ~20%. East of the site is Assembly Square, a new development that has all of the hallmarks of a developer driven approach including a lack of human scale, no sense of place and a tilt towards gentrification. To the east, across the Mystic River is the newly built Encore Cassino, a completely internalized facility that caters to those who come into the building, ignoring the locality where it is situated. This local juxtaposes the rest of Somerville which is known for a series of squares in different neighborhoods, each with their own identity, created by and serving the local community. It is in these dichotomies that this studio will situate itself. The intersection of natural and urban systems and infrastructures, and the impacts of out of scale, inward looking development in a City defined by localness.

This semester you will explore novel approaches to urban design, landscape architecture, and architecture. You will test all of your moves and intentions against ecology, open space, localness and urban functionality. Natural and human system will receive equal importance in all design moves, both landscape and architectural, and the health of the local community, in all aspects, will encompass your design. This will be done in a forward thinking and pragmatic way that will explore how architects can play an integral role in developing healthy, equitable, and vibrant places.

EVOLVING EASTIE: East Boston’s Piers Park Phase 3

with Mateo Yang and Amanda Foran

A large volume of data is often collected through public engagement to ensure that all the voices of individuals and stakeholders are heard in the making of spaces and programs. Environmental data and climate projections are also informing how the future of urban waterfronts must be developed to mitigate disaster. However, our collective memories and understanding of ‘place’ are often vague, shifting, and, as with all memories, retain a dreamlike quality and emotional connection to land that is less quantifiable, but just as significant. How can we simultaneously reach forward for a better future while understanding and engaging the past? How might architectural interventions, informed by both present and latent landscape narratives, strengthen public architecture and open spaces?

This studio will test ideas of designing for the public life of the city through the dual lenses of cultural and ecological narratives. Through mapping, we will explore alternative ways of seeing and interpreting the past and designing for the future. Design has the capacity to create meaningful connections to its human and non-human inhabitants, our collective past, and a range of systems - this studio will aim to design unexpected futures that arise from new understandings of these overlays.

Revitalizing Sunset Park Waterfront

with Jessica Wolff and Lily Wubeshet

To propose a design intervention at Sunset Waterfront Park in Brooklyn, NY which is responsive to context and human occupation based on the specifics of the program. The proposal must address at least one social and one environmental issue - to be developed from your critical and detailed site analysis. The intervention is to be established at two scales with clear concepts: (1) an urban/landscape intervention and (2) an architectural one.

(Post-) Industrial Renaissance: Near-future Redevelopment of an Oil Terminal in a Clean Energy Era

With Dan Lu and Matthew Gindlesperger

Landscape is conventionally perceived as the amenity or beautification in an urban environment defined by buildings and infrastructure. Learning from the theory of Landscape Urbanism, this studio asks students to investigate the agency of landscape as a significant urban form. As a piece of green infrastructure, landscape unfolds its efficacy as it mitigates sea level rising and urban heat, combats coastal erosion and manages stormwater. Its flexibility and temporality can address the ever-changing urban conditions in a more effective way than permanent built forms. It can also be described as “a salve for the wounds of the industrial age” as it remediates and revitalizes post-industrial sites in a city. The studio will speculate on the post-industrial life of an oil terminal along Chelsea Creek in the Boston Harbor area. As the country strives to achieve a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions by 2050, fossil fuel industries will be confronted with a gradual drawdown. The decommission of those facilities, especially oneswithin urban context, will provide exciting opportunities for post-industrial renaissance. The studio will explore the multiple roles of landscape when imagining the near-future redevelopment of the oil terminal. In the recent decade, many underutilized industrial sites have been transformed and revitalized to accommodate non-industrial, mix-use developments. Despite their economic success, many of the redevelopment projects, such as the Hudson Yards in New York City and the Seaport District in Boston, are criticized for their lack of diversity (who are they serving?), inclusivity, and unique identity. To steer away from proposing a generic post-industrial project, the studio asks students to approach the site from the following perspectives: How might we deploy different demolition, preservation, reconstruction, or adaptation strategies for the industrial remnants that belong to the legacy of the oil terminal? How might we create an integrating relationship between the redevelopment and the larger working-class neighborhood to tackle issues such as environmental injustice and affordability to improve equity, livability and resiliency? How might we use this project as a prototype for other waterfront oil terminal redevelopments beyond the site in a clean energy era? Students will take on an interdisciplinary and cross-scale design approach to addressing these subject matters.

Site!

With Snatiago Aurelio Mota and Stefano Romagnoli

The Architecture Studio 3 :: Site!, led by Santiago Aurelio Mota and Stefano Romagnoli, introduces graduate students within the BAC ́s Master of Architecture program to the complex dynamics of the site. We argue that thinking through a site necessarily means approaching sites from different disciplines, domains and lenses, such as landscape and urban ecology, adaptive ecosystem management, energy and material flow studies, and more. Ultimately, the studio work will be developed in a transdisciplinary fashion as an attempt to ground the overarching considerations of human activities, through design, as a major disturbance force within ecological dynamics.

The Harvard Forest and by extension all of the studio work and potential proposals are located within the unceded land and ancestral home territory of the Nipmuc people. This studio is aligned with the Harvard Forest in the commitment of remembering the violent past and continuing to support the relationship building efforts with the tribe to ensure that the land and its benefits are mutually accessible and sustaining.

This studio will heavily rely on the information repositories available online at the Harvard Forest webpage, specially the Data & Archives website section. Students are required to familiarize themselves with the existing datasets in order to take full advantage of this unique opportunity.

Yoonjee KohAugust 17, 2022

Spring 2022 Arc 3 Course Offerings

*Fort Ruckman*, 1924. Nahant Historical Society.

APOCATOPIA: A Climate Research Center for the End of the World as We Know It

ARC 1003 1Z with Kira Clingen and Mark Bavoso

Defensive construction can be read across the United States landscape from colonization to the present. Since before the nation’s birth, its military and citizens have developed a toolkit of landforming strategies to mitigate specific, localized threats from known enemies: war, hunger, weather, and so on. This defensive ideal is rendered (quite literally) concrete in underground bunkers left over from the WWII-era militarization of the Boston Harbor Islands. Such fortifications, intended to defend against specific wartime threats of naval and aerial assault, involved construction techniques that leverage landscape as both contextual camouflage from above and defensive fill from below. There is no doubt such buildings—bunkers and garrisons and gun batteries—were designed to be both imperceptible and indestructible. Unlike military invasion, climate change is a different type of threat—diffuse, complex, global, intergenerational—which fortification and camouflage cannot fully mitigate. This studio seeks to contextualize the weighty obsolescence of fortified buildings against the lively shifts in the landscapes which envelop them. In anticipating and designing for specific forces of ecological apocalypse, including storm surge, winds, sea level rise, and erosion, students will work to reimagine part of Nahant’s decommissioned Fort Ruckman as a learning landscape. In the design of an oceanographic research center, students will propose forms of citizen science and engagements with place that foreground the beauty of loss and change. Thinking across scales and temporal horizons, we will develop a methodology and vocabulary for building provisionally upon the unsteady ground of a climate-changed world.

Quinnipiac Quandary

ARC 1003 A with Craig Borkenhagen and Danica Liongson

As a neighborhood within the city of New Haven, Fair Haven’s failures and fortunes are shared with, and fl ow naturally from, the larger metropolitan area of which it is a part. Many of the issues facing New Haven are especially pronounced within this piece of the city, from poorly maintained physical and social infrastructure to a distinct lack of affordable housing, to the need for a more robust plan to address the sea level rise that will inevitably alter the city’s landscape. New Haven is indeed addressing these issues as it positions itself for a more resilient and equitable future. This particular neighborhood bears a past that is uniquely important in the city’s ongoing narrative. For millennia, various Native American tribes, beginning with the Paleo-Indians approximately 10,000 years ago and followed by the Quinnipiac Tribe (a subset of the Algonquins), used the Quinnipiac River as a source of hunting, agricultural production, and symbiotic living. Following the arrival of colonial settlers from England, the Quinnipiac people endured signifi cant periods of forced migration, causing their collective population to dramatically decrease. The now-established town of Fair Haven was built on this landscape, with an economy centered on the extraction of oysters from the mouth of the Quinnipiac River, farming that once abundant food source out of existence. Bringing in fresh stocks of oysters saw that economy temporarily revitalize, only to diminish once again following the onset of industrialization in the 1930s. This period of industrialization saw Fair Haven’s coastline and residential streets become engulfed by factories, pollution, and unsatisfactory living conditions. How can the present recognize and reconcile with these past chapters? Like many coastal towns and cities in New England, Fair Haven’s evolution (past, present, and future) is inextricably linked to the water. The Quinnipiac River, a 45-mile-long body of water stretching from the Connecticut hinterland to the Long Island Sound, has played a pivotal role in the city’s formation and history, and will necessarily fi gure heavily into its future as well. How will the Quinnipiac River and neighborhood of Fair Haven function and what will it look like 25, 50, or 100 years from now?

ARC 3308 2Z with Burcu Kutukcuoglu and John Frey

TBA

ARC 3308 1Z with Ronald Lim and Cari Alcombright

TBA

High Rise Studio

ARC 3308 A with John Wagner and Alina Nazmeeva

The course focuses on students developing a clear conceptual design proposal on architectural and urban scale, with the site located in Downtown Boston. The studio uses the decline of the office tower typology as a challenge and an opportunity to reimagine the urban form and the purpose of the Downtown in North American Cities. The studio will devote a portion of time for students to create a comprehensive research report, including urban analysis of Downtown Boston, urban trends and needs, and a collection of case studies. Through their design proposals, the students will respond to their findings as indicated in the research report, investigate possible solutions, and develop speculative scenarios.

Yoonjee KohJanuary 14, 2022

Fall 2021 Arc 3 Course Offerings

EXTRACTIVE RESILIENCE: Hole in the ground, Line on the water

Instructors: Joseph Henry Kennedy Jr, Sonny Meng Qi Xu

One of the hardest and most commonly available forms of stone in the earth’s crust, granite has been a widespread construction material throughout human history. However, the building industry has largely shifted from a reliance on granite to concrete due to the convenience and labor cost savings. The studio between timescales: from the geologic formations to the anthropocentric. The history of Cape Ann granite started around 400 million years ago when the bedrock batholithic granite cooled under a volcanic micro-continent known as Avalonia. In this studio, we look 250 years into the past to investigate the history and enduring legacy of Cape Ann’s granite industry and its contribution to the architecture and streetscape of the city of Boston and its surrounding areas. From that material context and cultural backdrop, we project 250 years into the future to create a lasting infrastructural scale intervention that may persist and continue to address issues affecting the region caused by the changing climate and sea-level rise.

The studio is split into two equal halves, material sourcing, and infrastructural assembly. The studio follows consecutive phases of raw material extraction, curation, refinement, relocation, construction, and erosion. Students will investigate solid-void relationships that give equal emphasis on both subtractive and additive building processes at a one-to-one scale. The goal of the studio is to bring students a greater awareness of where building materials come from, and not just that of a final built architectural form. The studio aims to shed light on how conventional industrial processes and material supply chains can be leveraged to enable building that is both more well designed and environmentally aware.

The studio also works on many physical scales: from the scale of a hand-sized rock in Act 0, to the scale of human, structure, and industrial ruins in Act 1, to the scale of resiliency infrastructure and the city of Rockport in Act 2. The studio asks the students to think about the human experience on the ground and the relationship of the industrial or infrastructural sites to the human figure. How can designers intervene in a post-industrial site to make it become a beautiful and programmable space? Can we plan for the extraction in such a way as to allow space for occupation? Can a resiliency infrastructure become a space that is poetic, and offer a unique experience for the people who are protected by it?

Digital Collections, New York Public Library

NEWTOWN CREEK

Instructors: Ryu Kim, Ben Hochberg

The urban landscape is constantly reshaped by changing natural, built, and social environments. Every new intervention is a response to who and what was there before and its longevity is dependent on who and what comes after. Through the examination of a site on Newtown Creek in New York City, the studio explores the topic of resiliency in architecture and landscape as it pertains to memory, identity, and adaptation.
Newtown Creek, which acts as part of the border between Brooklyn and Queens, is one of the Nation’s oldest continually used industrial waterways. Over the centuries, the creek and its surrounding area have been physically transformed from marshland to service apple orchards, barge transportation, the oil industry, storage yards, factories, film studios, waste management, and wastewater treatment facilities.
The incessant and diverse use of the waterway has resulted in long-standing heavy pollution and contamination of the water. Recently, new residential developments are altering the demographic landscape of the surrounding area, and the Creek and surrounding sites have become more susceptible to the changing climate.
Students will design and develop an architecture and landscape program that responds to the existing and rapidly changing issues facing Newtown Creek by projecting a future scenario based on its complex history. In addition, the studio will require intensive research and interpretation of emerging topics such as waterfront restoration, resiliency, floodplain management.

Sketch of the Golden Horn, Le Corbusier, 1911

HARBORING HISTORY

Instructors Burcu Kütükçüoğlu, John Frey

Istanbul is a city shaped by a unique coastal morphology and numerous layers of human settlements dating back millennia. Branching off of the Bosphorous Strait, the Golden Horn is considered one of the largest natural harbors in the world and has defined how people arrive, live, view, and move around the city. But like many other urban areas during the 20th century, industrialization and urbanization polluted the waters and the Golden Horn became an obstacle rather than a connective tissue. However, through intensive reclamation projects over the past 30 years, the health of the Golden Horn has rebounded, and the waterfront is rapidly transforming.

This studio focuses on the shores of the Golden Horn with the aim of understanding the historic and programmatic complexity they host and to discover potential areas where connections with water can be enhanced. Urban programs that have historically occupied the coastline of the Golden Horn, such as leisure, sports, transportation, crafts, and industrial production will be reconsidered along with others like education, environmental studies, and scientific research to formulate architectural and landscape design proposals that may reshape these open areas and parts of the shoreline.

Students will begin researching with a wide lens in order to understand the place of the Golden Horn within the physical, ecological, and cultural networks of the metropolitan region of Istanbul and its historic evolution. They will then zoom into the area to define its sub-regions and define potential sites. As site-visit is not possible, and the majority of the classes will be held online, maps and digital tools will have key roles in both research and design stages. Readings and online lectures by experts will support the students’ understanding of the context as well. The expected outcome of the studio is a well-articulated and presented design proposal that 1) enhances the relationship of the urban space with the Golden Horn through relevant programs, and 2) utilizes architectural and landscape elements as a means of reshaping the shoreline.

Image credit: “Fair Haven, With its Dignified New Name,” Daily Nutmeg New Haven, 3 August 2021, http://dailynutmeg.com/2016/08/11/doris-b-townshend-fair-haven-journey-through-time-excerpt-dignified-new-name.

LONG WATER LAND

Instructors: Craig Borkenhagen, Natasha Harkison

As a neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut, Fair Haven’s failures and fortunes are shared with the larger metropolitan area it is a part of. Many of the issues facing the region are especially pronounced within this piece of the city, from poorly maintained physical and social infrastructure to a distinct lack of affordable housing, to the need for a more robust plan to address the sea level rise that will inevitably alter the city’s landscape.

The Fair Haven neighborhood bears a past that is uniquely important in the city’s ongoing narrative. For millennia, various native American tribes, beginning with the Paleo-Indians approximately 10,000 years ago, and followed by the Quinnipiac Tribe (a subset of the Algonquins), used the river as a source of hunting, agricultural production, and symbiotic living. Following the arrival of colonial settlers from England, the Quinnipiac endured significant periods of forced migration, causing their collective identity and cultural presence to dramatically decrease and eventually disappear altogether.

The Quinnipiac River, a 45-mile-long body of water stretching from the Connecticut hinterland to the Long Island Sound, has played a pivotal role in the city’s formation and evolution, and will figure heavily into its future. Given the onset of industrialization beginning in the 1930s, Fair Haven’s coastline and residential streets have become engulfed by factories, pollution, and unsatisfactory living conditions. Like many coastal towns and cities in New England, Fair Haven’s past, present, and future are inextricably linked to the water.

This studio will focus on a 6-acre segment on the southern edge of Fair Haven abutting the mouth of the Quinnipiac River. Bordered by Lloyd Street to the west, River Street to the north, and Ferry Street to the east, the broader 15-acre area will compel students to consider surrounding neighborhoods and landscapes as design drivers in conjunction with moments of architectural expression. Students will be tasked with creating a grounded vision and key design element that addresses present cultural and socioeconomic issues while bringing respect to forgotten histories. The studio will engage with concepts of affordable living and/or public programs that promote urban inclusivity, reconciling nature and the built environment.

Map of The National Mall, Washington D.C. Google Maps

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC: The National Museum of the American Latino

Instructors: Sarah Bolivar, Tim Nawrocki

TOPOS: Identity as Driver in the Redevelopment of Weymouth Landing

Instructors: Ruben Segovia, Andrew Leonard

What is Identity? What is the identity of a space? Who defines it? How much does it depend on the physical character, how much on the history? How much is the opinion of the viewer, how much the opinion of the local? Asking these questions will begin to set the framework for your approach this semester.

Adding further complexity to the question of how one identifies a place’s identity, you will be tasked with doing so without being able to visit the site in person. For “The Image of the City” Kevin Lynch interviewed locals to ask how they saw parts of their cities and then catalogued what physical characteristics he saw in those areas to see how they compared. You will be challenged to do this without the conversation. To approach this one of your first tasks this semester will be to identify and walk an area in your locality that is roughly the size of the studio site. This will act as a scale study, but also take the time to catalogue what makes the area you chose unique, why did you choose it, what is it’s identity. This will give you a baseline for what to look for in the local area of the studio site when trying to identify it’s identity. This identity catalogue will be overlaid with geographic data, demographic data, climatic data, etc. through your research phase. This research will build the foundation for your design approach throughout the semester.

Google image of Sunset Park Waterfront and extents

REVITALIZING SUNSET PARK WATERFRONT

Instructors: Jessica Wolff, Lily Wubeshet

To propose a design intervention at Sunset Waterfront Park in Brooklyn, NY which is responsive to context and human occupation based on the specifics of the program. The proposal must address at least one social and one environmental issue - to be developed from your critical and detailed site analysis. The intervention is to be established at two scales with clear architectural concepts: (1) an urban/landscape intervention and (2) an architectural one.

PERFORMING ARTS CENTER & COMMUNITY PARK

Instructors: Enno Fritsch, Sang Cho

All online Arch 3 studio consists of two equally weighted components: an architectural studio and an associated landscape studio on the project site and its broader contexts that investigates various building-site relationships and explores the design opportunities for the larger context. This course focuses on translating a concise conceptual statement into design, that is conceived as a response to the surrounding physical, social, and cultural context.

In order to enable all participants to observe a site and its context in person, the studio does not prescribe a mandatory studio site. Instead, everyone is tasked to identify a site near their homes where this direct observation is possible and where the program can reasonably be realized. The mandatory program is reduced to two core elements providing flexibility in the programmatic response through adding program elements that are specific to the site and context. All participants are encouraged to engage with local stakeholders and institutions that may inform the project in terms of site, program and design.

Yoonjee KohAugust 3, 2021

Spring 2021 Arc 3 Onsite Course Offerings

Image Credit: Water and Power Associates. (1888). Devil's Gate [Early view of Devil's Gate showing the Arroyo Seco at its most narrow point]. Retrieved January 12, 2021, from https://waterandpower.org/museum/Early_Views_of_Pasadena_5_of_8.html

Arroyo Accessories by Elaine Stokes and Sam Naylor

Cities today confront a myriad of challenges that operate across scales, infrastructures, and demographics. This studio will address two such urban issues: linear ecologies and affordable housing. These two design drivers operate primarily from their respective disciplines of landscape and architecture, but also must be viewed in relation to each other. Each must be analysed and understood at various urban scales in order to arrive at promising proposals on the ground. Unlike the normative architectural project that works towards a discernable object, this studio will push students to produce systems and field conditions, foregrounding landscape and context as drivers for site-specific architectural design. Rather than designing one-off forms, this studio takes replicability as the impetus for architectural imagination.

Site
The studio will focus on the Arroyo Seco river and its adjacent neighborhoods in Northeast Los Angeles, California. In close proximity to the better known Los Angeles River, the Arroyo morphs and transforms along its 25 mile length. While some parts of the river are fully channelised into a concrete chute, other stretches of the river are fully ‘naturalized’ with lush vegetation bordering a meandering river path. Its temporal stream of water is sometimes inaccessible behind tall metal fences, and at other times adjacent to biking pathways. The housing, parks, and infrastructure that abut it on either side vary, but almost unilaterally turn their backs, assuming an attitude of dismissal and ally-like demeanor.

Students will work, through bi-weekly assignments, on drawings that examine a specific site along the Arroyo Seco. The work will begin with analysis, then transition to various design moves that cascade in scale from the territorial to the architectural. Understanding and critically probing what demographic, ecological, and infrastructural forces are most pertinent to the project will be critical.

Program
The studio will push each student to engage two main program areas: river infrastructure and accessory housing. In the context of this studio, the design of river infrastructure will explore landscapes that are both operational (responding to needs of water flow control, water collection, water filtration, and so forth) and occupiable (responding to the needs of people and surrounding communities for recreation and gathering space). The river infrastructure should serve as a testing ground for new patterns and landscape maneuvers that change how people see and use the river. This design will encompass a linear swath of the Arroyo Seco and will be developed in tandem with the housing strategies.

The second program area, housing, will be addressed through the design of accessory dwelling units along the river's edge. Importantly, these additions must critically and specifically interface with the river and adjacent residential properties. The recent policy allowance of ADU’s across the state of California will provide the legal and urbanistic framework for students’ design proposals. Projects will consider the multiplication of these small structures as a patchwork solution to slightly increase urban density — in addition to consideration of the unit as a cultural artifact within a diverse demographic millue. While only the start to a more comprehensive affordable housing solution, we will take the ADU (and its legal limitations) as the departure point for students to experiment in an architecture which works as a field, i.e. it is systematic, flexible, and highly site responsive.

Fourier's Phalanstère as interpreted by Charles Daubigny

Living in Common by Justin Kollar and Thomas Nideroest

When it comes to housing there is a fundamental question of where to draw the line between what is private and what is public. Throughout history the line between the two has been contested and has forced architects to come to terms with Architecture’s fundamental place in social and political life. Living in common is not just the collection of individual inhabitants in one place, but the potential cohabitation—of lifestyles, backgrounds, beliefs, and means of living—in many ways extending beyond the traditional unit of the family. What housing is produced and the form it takes is also a reflection on the values of society—at least those that finance or otherwise control its construction.

New models of collective living require us to reflect on ownership and the relegation of ‘privacy’ below the ideals of ‘community.’ However, this comes not without challenges. Even with the attempts to cultivate a social acceptance of ‘publicness,’ privacy still remains a foundational aspect of law and economics. Additionally, cultural expressions of privacy should not be ignored as the COVID-19 era has brought renewed consideration to life in isolation. In this studio, students will need to navigate a range of opinions, research, precedents, and examine their own experiences to arrive at a position for how ‘living in common’ might be achieved today. The examination of planned infrastructure expansion with the need for public facilities to accommodate Boston’s growing population provides ground for programmatic speculation and potential alternative public-private partnerships. Students will begin to reflect on the spatial implications of privateness and publicness, the history of collective living, and what a commons might look like at multiple scales: from the city to neighborhood and the site to the interior.

Imagine a World without Ice by Arlen Stawasz and Tyler Hinckley

Iceland is a country where glacial ice and volcanic lava meet hand in hand. Rising temperatures are drastically reshaping Iceland's landscape due to melting glaciers. Businesses and the government are spending millions for survival to stay afloat, signaling the dire need for resilient design thinking. This Spring, 2021, the BAC will be partnering with the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture in the Netherlands for an online parallel studio session focusing on the challenging future of Iceland. The studio will also share research with Lund University of Sweden. This is a unique opportunity to connect with colleagues across the globe, and learn the unique conditions of a landscape that is constantly changing due to climate change.

Now for Later - Designing Memory by Lyu Kim and Ben Hochberg

In Designing Memory Studio, we will design an art center to be home to a collection of art created in the last year. But art that is contemporary to the present becomes something different in the future. The same is true for the architecture and landscape that house it. Even when form remains static, foliage grows and dies, materials weather, and ultimately people’s experience and interpretation of architecture, landscape, and art changes. The studio will revolve around the contradictory nature of designing an architecture and landscape project for the future while taking cues from the present. It is 2021, and 2020 was last year. With 2020 in hindsight, Designing Memory Studio focuses on the relationship of a fixed moment in recent memory, the year 2020, how that year is reflected in the art that was produced and ways in which it can be reflected in architecture and landscape. Through careful analyses of site, art, precedent, and material, students will design their projects looking both towards the future and the recent past developing attitudes regarding how their projects transform over time.

Yoonjee KohJanuary 16, 2021

Fall 2020 Arc 3 Course Offerings

Photograph: Zbigniew Bzdak, taken Jan. 23, 2020 — Photograph: Zbigniew Bzdak, taken Jan. 23, 2020

Archipelago Automata

by Elaine Stokes and Sam Naylor

Landscape sites carry within them a palimpsest of embedded histories that occupy a spectrum from the tangible to the invisible. In the United States of America, certain histories have been prioritized and memorialized, leaving others to haunt our landscapes, unrecognized yet nestled within native ecologies and oral traditions of particular cultures. However, these invisible histories are not lost. By studying ecological contexts and bearing witness to alternative histories, we as designers can share a more complex and layered reading of a place through architectural expression. This studio tasks each student with envisioning an invisible history and translating it into a tangible architecture.

Signal Hill postcard c. 1926, courtesy of the Werner Von Boltenstern Postcard Collection, Loyola Marymount University library archive. — *Signal Hill postcard c. 1926,* *courtesy of the Werner Von Boltenstern Postcard Collection,* *Loyola Marymount University library archive*.

Hybrid Fields

by Adam Strobel and Anna Darling

“Architecture is situated between the biological and the geological - slower than living beings but faster than the underlying geology.” 1

This studio will use landform buildings as a means to investigate the integration of the dynamic processes and varied timescales that shape both landscape and architecture. Landform buildings challenge typical (often hierarchical) relationships between landscape and architecture by dissolving the assumed figure-ground binary. By blurring the distinction between envelope and occupiable surface, they host complex programs while providing enticing slopes for all manner of explorers. Through this collapse of interior and exterior sequencing, they also act as culminating moments within larger landscapes. Often, however, their conceptual and physical blending of landscape and architecture ends there; it is literally skin-deep. This studio, therefore, proposes the integration of landscape and architectural processes as a way to move towards more thorough landscape/architecture hybrids.

Although not always visible to the naked eye, architecture is a collection of processes just as landscape is. Erosion, sedimentation, ecological succession, rainwater infiltration, seed dispersal - all these processes and more act on and shape landscapes, both natural and artificial. In the same way, the daily rhythms of inhabitants, the life cycles of materials, flows of energy, and more shape the built environment. Exploring the ways in which these processes might align, overlap, or influence one another over time will be the basis for our studio’s creation of hybrid “landforms.”

This hybrid type will allow us to explore possible futures for the Inglewood Oil Field in Los Angeles. The field is the largest urban oil field in the country and is surrounded by a diverse set of residential neighborhoods. Given the field’s dwindling reserves and it’s latent potential as one of the few large, contiguous vacant spaces remaining in the city, students will imagine the near- and far-term future for the (hypothetically) decommissioned field and it’s conversion into an urban park. Each student’s project will focus on developing a proposal and site plan for a visitor center and community archive that will anchor this transformation.

Throughout the semester, focus will be placed on developing methods for representing time. We will make use of the necessity of digital presentations by introducing simple techniques for animating drawings. Students will be asked to work quickly through iterations and develop their own styles of combining hand and digital drawing. Through these representational methods, each student will explore the site and building through the short, mid-, and long term timescales that constitute landscape and architecture.

1 Stan Allen and Marc McQuade, ed., Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University School of Architecture, 2011), 22

Last Mile / Next Mile

By Ryu Kim and Benjamin Hochberg

The urban condition is shaped and reshaped by perpetual changes to the built environment. Every new intervention carries with it the record of who and what was there before and affects who and what comes after. By studying pasts and imagining futures to inform interventions in the present, the studio will investigate the relationship of architecture and landscape to the history and future of a site on Newtown Creek in New York City.

Newtown Creek, which acts as part of the border between Brooklyn and Queens, is the most heavily industrialized waterway in New York. It has been physically transformed throughout its human occupation by agriculture, transportation, and industry. Historically, the creek and its surrounding area have serviced apple orchards, film studios, barge transportation for the oil industry, storage yards, factories, waste management, and wastewater treatment facilities. Now, Newtown Creek is facing a new potential tenant industry: E-commerce shipping.

Students will design a last-mile shipping facility paired with a privately-owned public park and explore the ever-changing relationship between the industrial site, inland waterway, and urban fabric over time. The studio will challenge students to also design how the facility and surrounding landscape evolve as they contend with changing transportation methods, industrial obsolescence, rising sea levels, and a transforming city—simultaneously addressing the past and the possible, tying Newtown Creek's historical landscape to its future.

Throughout the semester, students will work in partnership with the Newtown Creek Alliance to better understand the challenges that the waterway and surrounding area have faced, are facing, and will face.

Commonalities - Defining the Commons as a Collective Architectural Project

By Justin Kollar and Wendy Wang

The identification and development of a ‘site’ involves a combination of economic, social, and environmental imperatives often beyond the control of the architect. These imperatives have been colored by a broader political discourse and have become increasingly central in the consideration of “the commons,” or the natural cultural and resources that are accessible to all members of a society. This studio will ask students to critically consider these imperatives as essential ingredients into the design process and address critical notions of ‘commonality’ in today’s diverse (and sometimes divisive) context. In consideration of recent events, students will look to leverage the Green New Deal (GND) which outlines a set of economic, social, and environmental imperatives for investment in communities across the nation in light of systemic racial injustice, the threat of climate change, and ongoing economic struggle. The GND resolution outlines an approach, but not concrete solutions. Instead, students will contribute to a broader collaborative effort to explore and illustrate architectural responses in service of the resolution’s objectives. Students will investigate their own communities, highlight the challenges and opportunities for collective space, identify a site, and devise a programmatic and architectural response as part of a larger program of intervention rather than a singular, bounded instance of design.

Jean Canneel-Claes (1909–1989), an Belgian landscape architect who advocated the theory of functionalist gardens to meet the needs of the modern society in creating a healthy living environment.

Healthy Living Indoor/ Outdoor

By Vivan Kuong and Charity Cheung

Over the past few decades, the growing public awareness around healthy living has motivated numerous projects geared towards improving our living environment by making cities more sustainable, buildings greener, and landscapes more productive. While these projects offer an abundance of frameworks addressing the notion of health, many of them are no longer applicable to our imminent needs amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic. This studio will frame the shifts in our everyday life as twofold: First, the conditions of living and working in the age of the pandemic have inevitably changed our spatial perception in terms of enclosure, scale, and distance. Second, the pandemic has underscored the importance to provide a safe living environment through spatial design. How can designers address the multifaceted and complex issues of health through architecture?

The design of a truly healthy environment does not solely rely on spatial planning for the comfort and pleasure of the individual; such an environment should also cultivate the collective potentials of long-lasting sustainability and self-sufficiency. The balance and play between the individual and the collective, the indoor and the outdoor, architecture and landscape, and nature and technology are fundamental questions for designers to explore when constructing their definition of healthy living.

The studio site is located in Downtown Los Angeles and adjacent to the Los Angeles River. The current Los Angeles River has lost its ecological, economical and social value to the city due to urbanization and industrial development around the river. The studio takes the potential to revitalize the long abandoned Los Angeles River as a way to re-engage its landscape to the city that connects and provides healthy habitats for humans, wildlife and other ecological systems.

Experimenting on the concept of a self-sustainable community, students will propose a new program of interest for the site that takes into consideration the needs and potentials of the immediate surrounding and the Greater Los Angeles Area. Proposals might include -- but are not limited to -- interventions that consider the scale of the building, interventions at the neighborhood or public space scale, and technical detail that facilitate the integration between landscape and architecture. All proposals will introduce new programming and connections that establish engagement between people and their surroundings.

The studio aims to simultaneously refine and expand our current understanding of health in the context of the current pandemic through proposed urgent reforms to the design of our environment.

Performing Arts Center & Community Park

By Enno Fritsch and Sang Cho

This Arch 3 studio consists of two equally weighted components: an architectural studio and an associated landscape studio on the project site and its broader contexts that investigates various building-site relationships and explores the design opportunities for the larger context. The course focuses on translating a concise conceptual statement into design, that is conceived as a response to the surrounding physical, social, and cultural context.

In order to enable all participants to observe a site and its context in person, the studio does not prescribe a mandatory studio site. Instead, everyone is tasked to identify a site near their homes where this direct observation is possible and where the program can reasonably be realized. The mandatory program is reduced to two core elements providing flexibility in the programmatic response through adding program elements that are specific to the site. All participants are encouraged to engage with local stakeholders and institutions that may inform the project in terms of site, program and design.

Cordage Park, Plymouth, MA: Resilient Exploration in Old North Plymouth 41 58’50.2 N, 70 41’12.7” W

By Andrew Leonard and Lily Wubeshet

This studio course will explore ideas at the intersection of the urban, landscape and architectural scales through the design of an adaptive intervention that takes into consideration contemporary and historic context, contemporary social trends, pandemic influences, neighborhood needs, connectivity, and sea/land conditions through integrative site and architectural strategy located at the Cordage Park in Plymouth, MA.

Historically known for lobster and fishing industries, today Plymouth Bay hosts multiple commercial Oyster farms. The importance of Plymouth’s connection to, and dependence on the ocean can not be understated in the town’s history, identity, commerce, and contemporary life.

The site program will focus on connectivity, usability, resilience and inclusion. Parking and transportation, for example, should align with the needs of the building users and their modes of circulation to, from and around the building. The site should interact with the architecture, and vice versa, the interior and exterior should connect with and complement each other. Grading, drainage, hard and soft scapes should reflect an understanding of climate change, and storm surge and tidal impacts, as well as more complex issues of community involvement, civic engagement, and inclusion, in conceptual and technical drawings. Both landscape and architecture should be sensitive to current civic unrest and respond to impacts from the ongoing pandemic.

Maverick Mills - Moving from a Brownfield Site to a Progressive Site-Sensitive Vision

By Jessica Wolff and Gabriela Baierle

This studio calls to propose a design intervention at Maverick Mills which is responsive to context and human occupation based on the specifics of the program. The proposal must address at least one social and one environmental issue - to be developed from your critical and detailed site analysis. The intervention is to be established at two scales with clear architectural concepts: (1) an urban/landscape intervention and (2) an architectural one.

During the colonial era, the area that would become East Boston was comprised of five islands in Boston Harbor: Noddle’s, Apple, Governor’s, Bird, and Hog Islands. Development of the area for homes and businesses began in 1830 by connecting the islands with infilling operations. East Boston’s harbor location enabled it to become a center for shipbuilding and other marine industries, triggering industrial development activities. In the early 1990s a new redevelopment of the zone took place converting abandoned industrial spaces into housing. Today, East Boston is an extremely diverse neighborhood with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents of any Boston neighborhood. The site is located in the lowest point of the surrounding watershed, and houses the existing building of the Maverick Mills, a former cotton manufacturing company and one of the first mills built in reinforced concrete in the United States. The neighborhood faces two great challenges: sea level rise and a rapid process of gentrification.

The program is shared between the landscape intervention, an urban masterplan, and the architectural project. It should be augmented with activities that are specific to each student’s individual approach. The architectural project will be an adaptive reuse of the existing Maverick Mills building, which gives opportunities for full reuse, partial reuse, and addition(s) to the existing structure.

Yoonjee KohJuly 28, 2020

Let's Talk

Hope you are well.

This typically banal opener seems to carry more weight these days. The unresting series of events of COVID-19 and George Flloyd’s death have catalyzed today’s society to expose systemic issues - of healthcare as well as socio-economical, racial, political divides throughout our everyday lives. So, we really hope that you are well in these times.

We still hope these tumultuous months will provide a unique opportunity for reflection on our role as designers. We also hope that our collective reflection will shape the next generation of thinkers - across diverse backgrounds and perspectives to address issues that are widely pertinent today.

In these next series of posts, the Journal will ask for your contributions - thoughts, questions, perspectives on the current situation. What have you been going through - as a student, faculty, staff, or alumni? How have you been coping with the current situation?

Please feel free to share one-liner comments, images, writings, or of any other sharable medium that deliver your perspectives, thoughts, and questions.

Send via email bacjournal@the-bac.edu or via Instagram DM @baclogue!

Here are some questions to get started as well. We will update this list as additional food for thought comes through:

What have you been going through? Perhaps personally?
How are you coping with the current situation?
What has changed?
What has stayed the same?
What have you noticed from the world in the recently?
How could the recent events be a catalyst for positive change?
How could designers take a stance in face of racism and/or the pandemic?
How will you emerge from today’s circumstances?

Final Reviews Week = time for #conversation #dialogue #feedback #inclusion #responsible_liberty

How would you enable conversation, dialogue, discourse at the BAC through a print (or digital) publication?
Final Reviews at #criticaldiscourse #sp18

This Wednesday, 4-7pm, at the Beehive.
An open review on publication iterations put together by your friends and colleagues at the BAC. Come and join on a dialogue on academic journals and frameworks for platforms of discussion.
#criticaldiscourse

Happening Wednesday, April 25th, 6pm at the Loft! Join to discuss FEEDBACK as we approach finals week.
#conversationattheloft #feedback

Preview - Works in progress. Please join Wednesday, May 2nd 4pm at the Beehive to see publication iteration efforts being put together by your fellow colleagues #criticaldiscourse

Keep them coming! Drop in your #postloft postcard at our mailboxes, located on the first floors of 320 Newbury and 951 Boylston

Join us on Friday, April 13th, 7pm at the Beehive for a conversation with Rahel Shawl, Founder of Raas Architects, on the topic of Gender and Inclusion. #conversationattheloft. Please dm for topics that you’d like to see arise! Also collecting

Currently in development. Publication frameworks are explored to question notions of curation, content, audience, and matter in the context of the BAC. #criticaldiscourse @marijo0306

Keep those thoughts coming. Send notes on current projects, class work, and extracurricular explorations via PostLoft. Mailboxes on the first floor of 320 Newbury and 951 Boylston. #postloft

Join us for the second installment of the Conversation at the Loft! We will discuss issues on responsible liberty and its relation to your design learning.
Happening Wednesday, April 4th, 6pm at the Loft
#criticaldiscourse #conversationattheloft

Yoonjee KohJune 24, 2020Comment

Spring 2020 Arc 3 Course Offerings

Instructors: Nelson Byun & Yufan Gao

Urban Nature: The Sublime, The Picturesque, and The Beautiful

The Studio challenges the oversimplified binary relationship between landscape and architecture, natural and artificial environment. Students will learn to recall, recognize, and re-interpret diverse perceptions of landscape into architectural spaces that induce curiosity and engagement. Principal landscape concepts dating back to the 18th century - the Sublime, the Picturesque, and the Beautiful - will guide site observation and exploration. Rather than emulating these landscape themes in a traditional way, the studio focuses on distilling the qualities of nature, the emotions it provokes and imaginations it exerts, and re-interpreting them in the downtown cultural district of North Adams, MA. The final proposal will be a multi-purpose gateway and visitor center as framing device and participant in establishing the Sublime, the Picturesque and the Beautiful of the City.

Instructors: Christine Wilson & Adam Himes

FILLING THE VOID: Creating spaces of encounter over I-90 in Boston’s Chinatown and South End

Twentieth-century planning in the United States has left a legacy of highways and other urban transportation infrastructure that define hard boundaries between city neighborhoods and often induce disinvestment and decay along their edges. In Boston, Chinatown and the South End were divided by a trench, first for rail lines and later the Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90), creating a physical and perceptual gulf between them. The neighborhoods on either side of the trench have, to varying degrees, endured parallel histories of overcrowding, urban renewal, disinvestment, and, more recently, gentrification, as their proximity to now-desirable areas like Downtown and the rest of the South End has attracted upscale development amidst Boston’s ongoing construction boom.

The ‘New York Streets’ neighborhood of the South End was wiped out during Boston’s first urban renewal project in the 1950s, and the newspaper plants built in its place were in turn pulled down for the Ink Block development and other adjacent luxury condo buildings. Meanwhile, Chinatown has faced consistent development pressure from both the adjacent medical center and more recent condo developments. Between 2010 and 2015, the percent of affordable units in the neighborhood dropped nearly 10 percent, and for the first time in more than 100 years, residents of East Asian descent were no longer the majority. Today, Chinatown and Ink Block represent two quite distinct communities separated by the single block of the MBTA/I-90 trench.

This studio will explore air rights development over two blocks of the MBTA/I-90 trench as a means to investigate the capacity for open space and multi-family residential development to mediate and feather the hard boundary line between the two existing neighborhoods into a more porous border area that is inviting to the communities on either side. Students’ projects will address fundamental issues of urban design, including the articulation of street edges, the definition of block corner conditions, and the relationships between built and open space and between public and private space. Through the introduction of open space and green roofs students will consider how their designs can reduce stormwater runoff, mitigate the urban heat island effect, and create wildlife habitat. Through a series of introductory exercises and independent studio projects, students will also explore architectural and landscape typology, density, and public programming as they relate to larger socioeconomic issues such as affordability, gentrification, identity, and equity.

Image from “House in a Bag?” Chicago Magazine, December 16, 2008.

Instructors: Justin Kollar & Elaine Stokes

Angst! Climatic Responses to the Human Condition

“Stop calling me resilient!” exclaimed posters in New Orleans after the city published its resilience master plan in the aftermath of Katrina. Put up by a prominent grassroots activist, the posters explain the perspective a bit more: “Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient,’ that means you can do something else to me. I am not resilient.” Such a statement problematizes the language designers often use to discuss climate change. It requires a re-evaluation of the relationship between environmental hazards caused by climate change, as well as the social and economic inequalities embedded in the urban environment and, often, in the design process itself. What should architects do with such complex situations? Do we not also endeavor to understand the structure below the problem’s facade? Should we not strive to understand all of the forces that create space: environmental, social, and political that manifest in physical space? Aren’t our anxieties surrounding climate change not also marked by a shift in our social and political climates as well? Architecture must strive to look at the context of the issue rather than just learning to cope. It is here that the human dimension needs to be elevated----the anxiety, fears, and insecurity that typically lie beneath the architectural interventions that seek to protect from the worst of disasters.

This studio will focus on the impact that climate change will have on the human and natural environments along the Mystic River at the borders of Somerville, Boston, Everett, and Medford. Students should consider ways to embed flexibility in architecture that responds to ever-changing site conditions while addressing the psychological dimensions of change felt by communities. How can communities adapt to changing circumstances? Alternatively, how can urban environments change to enable these communities to thrive? Will we recede from or resist the forces nature confronts us with or will we find a way to live with them?

As a human with special knowledge and interest in the human condition, each student will drive the design program and project thesis by setting their own parameters during the first week of the semester. Design explorations will then be tailored by each student to work towards their own goals. Drawings and models will be an iterative process, with students working and re-working each drawing/model throughout the semester in order to hone the design, reflecting the continued working and re-working of the site over the course of several years to reimagine an architecture of resilience in more human terms.

Instructors: Tyler Hinckley & Rob Adams

RESILIENCY: Designing for Change

Resilience is defined as the ability of something to spring back into shape, or redefine its elasticity after a major transformation or event. So, how can the idea of resilience apply to the built environment? How can planning and design decisions impact the way a community responds to a natural disaster or sea level rise? How can buildings contribute to a more resilient society? This studio will seek to address these questions at multiple scales (macro to micro) and from various points of view (social, economic, environmental). To do so the studio will utilize the recent Coastal Resilience Solutions for South Boston as a framework for the studio, focusing on applying resilient strategies to the redevelopment of South Boston – a location threatened dramatically by sea level rise. After researching and analyzing the environmental and socioeconomic conditions of the area, students will test the potential for resilient design by focusing on building types such as a community center, library, and/or gallery.

The semester will be broken into two sections – Site Analysis / Program Development / Concept Design (8 weeks); and Site Design / Design Development (8 weeks). Emphasis will be placed on the process of design through the use of multiple methods of representation and study. Students will be expected to explore varied design techniques (physical modeling, virtual modeling, hardlined drawings, and sketches), and will be required to work at multiple scales.

Yoonjee KohJanuary 6, 2020

Fall 2019 Arc 3 Course Offerings

*New York City captured from 7500 feet in the air, photography by Vincent Laforet.*

Night Rises 2

by Instructors Nelson Byun & Yufan Gao

The studio will explore landscape and architecture at the turn of night. The time between dusk to dawn where our perception of the natural and built environment transforms into an abstract entity - trees and hills into dark silhouettes, a building a lantern, a window a scene, a distant light a refuge. The darkness of night provides a blank canvas where landscape and architecture can be merged as a continuous stroke, an expansive field, and agglomeration of light. Furthermore, it alters material and sensorial hierarchy enlivening new spatial interpretations and acts of rearranging the order of reality that we experience at daytime.

The studio project will be situated in Central Park, New York City. About a century and a half ago, the Park, a naturalistic void at the heart of the congested city, was a radical response to the lack of open public space. Today, its status quo can no longer satisfy dwellers of a sleepless city. As a critique, what role could the “void” play at night? How could it become the opposite of the absence of happenings?

The course will begin with analysis and conceptual studies of Central Park. Students will research its history, geology, ecology, infrastructure, programs, etc. Furthermore, they will examine the park through the perspective of night, searching for new readings and potentials that will inform the design of a Nocturnal Building integrated within its intricate plan and diverse landscape. It will feature (5) public spaces (exterior or interior, for individual contemplation or gathering) that observes/frames the following: CITY; SKY; DARKNESS; FAUNA FLORA; and TIME.

Historic American Engineering Record, Creator. Mississippi River 9-Foot Channel, Lock & Dam No. 1, In Mississippi River at Mississippi Boulevard, below Ford Parkway Bridge, Saint Paul, Ramsey County, MN. Documentation Compiled After. Photograph.… — Historic American Engineering Record, Creator. Mississippi River 9-Foot Channel, Lock & Dam No. 1, In Mississippi River at Mississippi Boulevard, below Ford Parkway Bridge, Saint Paul, Ramsey County, MN. Documentation Compiled After. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/mn0384/>.

Kinetic Architectures: Retrofitting the Landscape Along the Mississippi River

by Instructors Justin Kollar & Elaine Stokes

This course will consider architecture as a modifier of regional socio-economic and ecological processes in the context of hydrological infrastructure along the Mississippi River. Infrastructure like locks and dams modify and support fundamentally ‘kinetic’ processes: the flow of water, material, energy, and wildlife. Students will be challenged to approach multiple sites near Minneapolis, MN, engaging with the riparian infrastructure and manipulating or augmenting the existing flows of the site. Students will learn about the role of hydrological infrastructure in the context of a watershed and local habitat, as well as the importance of locks and dams in support of manufacturing, power generation, and material transportation. Whether viewing these sites primarily as a catalyst for ecological change or as key socio-economic infrastructure, students will propose an intervention to reframe the infrastructural character of the sites. Scale will also be an important aspect of study. Students will look at both the large-scale systems that the locks and dams support as well as the local context in terms of program, access, and adjacency. Students must also consider how existing kinetic flows might change and what future ones may look like; in other words, how their interventions might modulate and change the context (both large-scale and local) over time.

Sinking Ships: Reclaiming East Boston’s Waterfront

by Instructors Jessy Yang & Christine Wilson

How much does the future owe to the past? Recent heated debates over the appropriate reconstruction of Notre Dame’s roof, for example, suggest the future must be tethered to the past. Often, designing the new is energized by remembering the old. While Boston is typically a city that remembers its past through the preservation of historic buildings and landscapes, East Boston’s former shipyards have instead been undergoing active and aggressive erasure. Today, new waterfront condos and apartments boast coveted views of downtown Boston yet represent a form of urban development largely disconnected from East Boston’s people and its past.

This studio will interrogate the relationship of architecture and landscape to memory, searching for new coastal urban models that recall the waterfront’s industrial past while simultaneously addressing contemporary issues, such as housing and flood resiliency. The selected coastal site is one of few remaining with existing historic buildings, viewed here not as annoyances but as assets. Experimenting on the concept of creative reuse, students will compose housing and cultural space in tandem with a public waterfront design that also completes another critical link in the Boston Harborwalk.

The studio begins with weekly exercises on the fundamentals of housing typologies, landscape architecture, urban design, and mapping. After which, students will work independently to propose their own projects across a range of scales. This studio schedules lectures, software tutorials, and a site visit throughout the semester to inform presented materials and expected deliverables.

Resiliency

by Instructors Arlen Stawasz & Tyler Hinckley

This studio will seek to address these questions at multiple scales (macro to micro) and from various points of view (social, economic, environmental). The studio will also be taught in parallel with the Academy of Architecture at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. The two studios will focus on a site in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a region known for innovative flood protection and resilient design. After researching and analyzing the environmental and socio-economic conditions of the area, students will test the potential for resilient design by focusing on various building types.

The studio will include a week-long trip to Amsterdam for a site visit and workshops with the students from the Amsterdam Academy. The two studios will engage with members of the community in workshops and reviews to inform potential design solutions and will share progress throughout the semester.

Yoonjee KohJuly 2, 2019

Spring 2019 Arc 3 Course Offerings

Resiliency: Designing for Change

ARC 1003A /3308 D, Spring 2019
Instructors: Arlen Stawasz, Tyler Hinckley

Resilience is defined as the ability of something to spring back into shape, or redefine its elasticity after a major transformation or event. So, how can the idea of resilience apply to the built environment? How can planning and design decisions impact the way a community responds to a natural disaster or sea level rise? How can buildings contribute to a more resilient society?

This studio will seek to address these questions at multiple scales (macro to micro) and from various points of view (social, economic, environmental). To do so the studio will utilize the recent Climate Adaptation Master Plan of South Boston as a framework for the studio, focusing on applying resilient strategies to the redevelopment of the South Boston – a location threatened dramatically by sea level rise. After researching and analyzing the environmental and socio-economic conditions of the area, students will test the potential for resilient design by focusing on building types such as an affordable housing complex, a community recreation center, and a supermarket.

The semester will be broken into two sections – Site Analysis / Program Development / Concept Design (8 weeks); and Site Design / Design Development (8 weeks). Emphasis will be placed on the process of design through the use of multiple methods of representation and study. Students will be expected to explore varied design techniques (physical modeling, virtual modeling, hardlined drawings, and sketches), and will be required to work at multiple scales.

underline600_The Real Deal_Jhila Farzaneh.jpg

Corridor as Catalyst: Integrating Housing Types and Open Space on the East Boston Greenway

ARC 3308 Section C, Spring 2019
Instructors: Becky Rupel, Jessy Yang

This studio will focus on how the introduction of new housing and open space along the East Boston Greenway can be imagined in synergy with the redesign of a section of this public trail. Formerly the Conrail train line, the East Boston Greenway is a multi-use linear park that intersects several vacant and underused sites well-suited for new and much needed housing. As such, this urban-scale project builds upon the lineage of “rails to trails” post-industrial conversions and other linear urban systems that serve as catalysts for housing, development, and public space, such as the Community Path in Somerville, the High Line in New York City, and the Underline in Miami. Furthermore, recognizing that the success of today’s urban developments depends on meaningful public-and-private partnerships, this studio seeks to blur otherwise rigid property boundaries and invites students to propose urban compositions that integrate diverse housing with public amenities and ecosystem services.

The studio begins with weekly lessons on the fundamentals of housing typologies, landscape architecture, urban design, and mapping. After which, students will work independently to propose their own holistic urban projects that address a spectrum of topics, such as contextual connections, site access, open space design, adaptations to climate change and sea level rise, and material expressions, among others. Lastly, this studio schedules lectures, tutorials, and a site visit throughout the semester to inform presented materials and expected deliverables.

Night Rises

ARC 1003 Section B, Spring 2019
Instructors: Nelson Byun, Yufan Gao

“I’ve always felt that night doesn’t fall. Night rises.” - James Turrell

Students will examine the city through the perspective of night, searching for new readings and potentials of urban scenes, activities, ecology, topography, seasonality, and materiality that will inform the design of a ‘Night Market’ situated in the eastern portion of the Innovation District of Boston, MA. The course will begin with the study of a collection of films, paintings, photos, and writings, where artists depict/approach the essence of ‘night’ in unique ways. This will serve as a basis for a series of conceptual and analytical exercises - crafting dioramas, storyboards, montages, collages, maps, etc. - in pursuit of comprehending and distilling phenomenal and technical elements to be applied in siting, programming, and designing. Physical or non-physical in-form, the ‘market’ will activate the remote areas of the district with public activity/engagement when night rises.

House, Home[land], and Climate [In]security

ARC 3308 Section A, Spring 2019
Instructors: Justin Kollar, Seokmin Yeo

The design of a domestic unit is the physical manifestation of a culture’s definition of a household. Since the GI Bill, the single-family house has unquestioningly become the predominant model of housing throughout the US, establishing this architectural typology as an essential ingredient in the American Dream’s nuclear family and deconcentrated model of living. However, present social and environmental changes have brought renewed scrutiny to this model of living. The desire for a more responsive architecture have brought out terms like “sustainability” and “resilience” that have both social and physical implications for strategies addressing a vastly changed context since the 1950s. This studio seeks to challenge predominant mass-produced housing types that address changing demographics, lifestyles, and architectural adaptability to diverse climates.

With nearly 3 million employees, the US Department of Defense is the world’s largest employer. Stretching across the US territory and present in over 70 countries, the US military operates over a thousand bases scattered across the Earth. It’s extensive administration and technological sophistication makes it home to some of the world’s foremost scientific and practical expertise on climate change and adaptation. The historic role of US military planning has greatly influenced the production of architecture and patterns of housing across the US making it an apt organization to push innovation in housing forward, albeit in a provocative way.

While the housing development for military personnel faithfully exports the ideal American suburban home across the globe, no matter the climatic and social context, this studio will question this aggressive ubiquity through the physical, social, and climatic parameters of various sites across the US. Students will interrogate the history of mass-produced residential architecture and the prevailing responses to their historic successes and failures. Through this, each student will develop a new prototype housing that responds to particular climate conditions of each site and proposes innovative models of future living of the collective.

Water Border: The Colorado River

ARC 3308 Section B, Spring 2019
Instructors: Yoonjee Koh, Poshan Chang

The Colorado River winds 1,450 miles through the U.S. and Mexico. As a drinking and irrigation resource, the river and its tributaries presents a crucial water system for both countries. However, in recent years, the river has changed its course. The Morelos Dam at the U.S.-Mexico border controls water delivery levels to the adjacent farmlands by a man-made river route separate from the natural turns of the Colorado river. While these “pulse flows” secure a more steady flow of water to sustain wetlands south of the border, the tight control has also endangered natural habitats native to the river basin. This complex site calls for environmental awareness of the river system and its surrounding habitat, mindfulness towards political cooperation surrounding the border, as well as conscientiousness to embrace multiple environmental, political, cultural sectors of living.

This studio works with the Colorado River site south of the Morelos Dam as a base ground to test out ideas in architecture and landscape. Through a series of design strategies, the studio will examine spatial conditions of the River site while exploring border situations of dichotomy. Lessons will integrate fundamental contextual understanding of water systems, site design, and climate through mapping, modeling, and material expressions. The studio will work through a series of desk-crits, pin-ups, lectures, and reviews to better understand and propose alternate ways of living with river bodies in border contexts.

Yoonjee KohNovember 29, 2018

Conversation at the Loft

Conversation at the Loft aims to create an open forum for in-depth discussion on topics encompassing our spheres of learning, creating, and living. Each installment revolves around a changing topic with a guest moderator and an active participatory group (that's you!) that collectively question, examine, and imagine terrains of thought and thought-making. Join to lead, propose, or simply partake in a conversation session today!

Yoonjee KohJuly 16, 2018

Call for Submissions

Call For Submission Title No Body Text 11x17.jpg

Submission Deadline: September 1st, 2018

We'd like to feature your work for the upcoming first edition of the Boston Architectural College Journal!

Submission of design projects and essays made at and beyond the Boston Architectural College coursework are invited. Images must be submitted at 300 dpi as jpeg, tiff, or pdf files with accompanied text with the following information: project’s title, project description, your name and names of any collaborators, your degree program, course name, instructor, and semester produced. Essay submission should be in English, under 3,000 words, and formatted in accordance with the MLA Manual of Style. Text should be submitted in MS Word.

Please share files larger than 4MB to bacjournal@the-bac.edu via any cloud-based storage service – Google Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer, etc.

Questions? Write to bacjournal@the-bac.edu

Yoonjee KohJuly 9, 2018

Editorial #1: On the Need for Dialogue

Students created their own publication frameworks as part of the Critical Discourse I course offered in the Spring 2018 semester. As part of the process, ideas on curation, audience, and dialogue were explored. Here some responses to questions. Here is what they have to say:

Why were you interested in partaking in the effort of - making publication frameworks, presenting to an audience beyond the scope of the class, generating wider dialogue?

Hamze Machmouchi: In the past three years at the school, I was not really involved in curricular activities. So in joining on this effort and conversation, it provided an opportunity for me to get to know other students better, not just my surroundings. That was my first motivation - to get to know the work of the BAC. I have a strong belief that there are interesting projects and theories happening in people’s work here, and I was curious to see more.

There is a need for people to know more about the BAC. There is more to the BAC than practice. Of course, practice is an essential component, but the real aspect of the BAC is not exposed enough. And besides the architectural community in Boston, little of the public knows about the BAC. For me, for example, I’ve been in firms and I’ve seen how things are built. I feel comfortable starting my own projects, and I am very adaptable as a person. And the BAC has taught me this. You have to search and create your own zones of learning.

And the publication is an opportunity to promote an image, that our school offers many different explorations as design thinkers and doers. Here, there are multiple ways to engage in learning, through practical application grounded upon deep thinking rooted in theory. And from that literal practice, something sparks that we are able to deliver both sides of the study. This publication is an opportunity to ask the school to re-think about how we learn.

Komila Rakhimova: The importance of a platform where thoughts are collected and stored for reference is undeniably powerful. That is inaccessible before information becomes public. It sparks improvement in skill. I think I became more aware of the quality of my work when I would see or share with my peers. To me publication is a connecting link that creates synergy between separated entities. We started having discussions, conversations leading to a newly uncovered shift in viewing architecture and beyond. We work collectively. So why not have a platform that exposes work and naturally creates a collective culture.

How was the process of creating an iterative publication? Exciting moments that drove the process of making? Challenges that could be further taken as lessons?

Hamze Machmouchi: I think that was the most interesting process.. You’re learning how to get to know a person. Everyone here is so secretive about their project. Each time I sit at someone’s desk and ask “what are you working on?” they respond “oh, it’s nothing” and I think ‘what, no talk to me, what is happening here?’ And I think it’s mostly due to confidence and the fact that you don’t feel comfortable sharing the work. You’re just exposed to someone older than you, and it is intimidating. I also was like this in the beginning. But I changed later on because I felt that I could learn from people who had been here longer. So for me the first thing that I had to learn in asking questions was how to make them comfortable. For me, it went beyond architecture. A conversation that made them comfortable enough for them to respond in a passionate manner. So the one that I chose was, “What work have you done since being at the BAC? What has helped you along the process?” It could be anything that best explained that person’s transition from early stages of learning to more advanced stages. It was great; I got many beautiful approaches to ways of working.

When I was looking through people’s work, I was very excited by a couple of things. So remember my publication framework was about the conscious and unconscious ways of working? I’ve seen so many works that indirectly relate to another. For example, a student shared her photographs that she made in Hong Kong, and she also shared her BAC work that she was most comfortable sharing with me. And when I saw it, I saw a parallel. The way that she was describing her project was very similar to the way that she perceived space and photography. The fact that I was able to correlate this and notice this was a special moment. And I think that was one of the most exciting moments that I had while at school.

Also, new ways to address the public - the fact that there was an augmented reality component to the publication, and the fact that it could go beyond just the physical and become virtual was also a very exciting moment for me in creating my publication. There is a silent conversation between the reader and the author of the work, but the author is not there. So all that is left is the interpretation. For my project, this is where AR technology comes in to present a wide dimension in order to understand the work more closely. I like to investigate all sorts of design, and think that books could go further beyond the physical.

Alexandre Costa: This publication endeavor pushes you outside of your limits as a member of the student body. In the curation process, for instance, one is required to be in touch with students in order to collect materials and/or to simply explain the essence of this effort - as simple as it sounds, some students have difficulty grasping the broad spectrum of possibilities given by the publication, mostly due to the fact that it was never implemented beforehand. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges was to engage the body of students into a cohesive dialogue that spans throughout all disciplines. Only through this synergy, one is capable of fully understanding the inherent importance of vulnerability, intercommunication, and a culture of sharing. Conversation Series, born out of Critical Discourse I course taught by Yoonjee in Spring 2018, provided an informal platform that allows students to discuss contents relevant to not only architecture, but also design as a whole.

An exciting moment that highly influenced the process of making was the opportunity to create deeper and stronger bonds with the community of students and faculty. The class’s weekly reading assignments also instigated thought and investigation that went beyond the boundaries of a print publication. From concepts of the auratic aspects of a work of art, the notion of authorship, the repercussions of mass-production in the Industrial Revolution, to architecture in itself as a medium for propaganda, students had the opportunity to dive into topics and methods that expand beyond the world of design.

How do you imagine this effort to impact the body of students, faculty, and communities encompassing the College or the wider Boston network?

Alexandre Costa: I’ll speak from a personal perspective. During my first six semesters or so at the BAC I hadn’t yet have the opportunity to engage more deeply with my peer classmates or the community as a whole. Classes as Architecture Studio 3 taught me the importance of giving and receiving constructive feedback, also making me realize that I’m learning as much from my classmates as from my instructor when taking a course. The energy, excitement, and cross-pollination that happened in class made me understand not only who I am as a young professional, but also why I love and want to pursue architecture as a career. I’ve always wondered if that opportunity could be given to all students at the BAC. A place, a platform, and mindset where individuals can share, inspire and similarly digest or get inspired by work produced by others. After a couple of years at the BAC, you inevitably feel a strong sense of community, belonging, and acceptance through diversification. Sadly, the vast majority of these members are not provided with a space where they can leave their ‘marks’, and some members are simply buried into graveyards of obliteration, not leaving a legacy or any traces behind.

Hamze Machmouchi: I wanted to start, and of course all of us in this class, wanted to start dialogue. I think this is very important. And this is why I joined in this effort. For us to publish our own work, there is a possibility of the majority of the students to get their work out and seen by a wider community. And this is what the BAC had been lacking thus far. Design is so vast. I want all students to know that Architecture is not just about making buildings. And this publication is one way to see all the different explorations underway beyond the architectural realm, and perhaps even develop something that would take architecture further in the future. There needs to be way to encourage people to try things and to share what they’ve done.

The BAC was founded by people who were first of all not just technicians or practitioners, but they were thinking how to make this profession better. And that is why we had so many great individuals pass through the School like Gropius, Buckminister Fuller, Bjarke Ingles, Snohetta.. All these people came in! And that is because they thought that the School needs to address the dialogue with students. If the students are fed about Architecture in a static manner, they are never going to learn about how to expand their learning in other things. It is important to learn how to make a building. But the design process involves so much more than that. All students here are curious people. They are fascinated by things that each of us are making. You are an idea generator. Ideas come by association. This publication could be the spark.

Yoonjee KohJuly 2, 2018

PostLoft

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You may have noticed a set of these blue postcards located on the first floors of our 320 Newbury and 951 Boylston street buildings. These PostLoft postcards were created for a very simple reason: to collect thoughts on current exploration at the BAC. With a wide range of departments offering a multitude of different courses across Architecture, Landscape, Interior, Design Studies, and Liberal Studies, the BAC is packed with projects that deal with all sorts of exploration and experiments.

Over the course of the Spring 2018 semester, 91 postcards were received with fascinating responses. We hope to continue to ask questions, and hear from you as well! Here is how:

Step 1. Take a PostLoft postcard located by the first floor security desks on 320 Newbury and 961 Boylston Street buildings

Step 2. Fill it out. Tell us what you are currently exploring!

Step 3. Drop it in one of our PostLoft mailboxes, located right next to where you find the postcard

Yoonjee KohJune 29, 2018 Comment