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.