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.