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

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? A telescopic view is essential as we study landscape interplay with the building and vice-versa. Through a convergence of landscape and building, each student will situate and propose an American Latino Museum that inscribes a bold chapter into the national dialogue of American culture and heritage.

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.

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 Prospect Park, 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.

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.