Fall 2020 Arc 3 Course Offerings
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.
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.