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
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?
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.