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Case Studies in Architectural Design | Instructor: Nicholas de Monchaux

The design of buildings or communities of advanced complexity. Each section deals with a specific topic such as housing, public and institutional buildings, and local or international community development. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips.

Extended Course Description

When we say that 98% of buildings are designed without an architect (see Bell et al), what we are really saying is that 98% of buildings are not designed for the place that they are built. From air  conditioning to prefab construction, from irrigation to illumination, the tendency of new building technologies has been to loosen the relationship between space (what we make) and place (climatically, culturally or ecologically described).

New methods in architectural design provide what may be a crucial opportunity to reverse this trend. Through the functional integration of urban- and building-scale digital techniques (specifically, GIS queries and CAD scripting), the studio will research and propose new modes of design thinking, and, potentially, urban and ecological change.

Background

Apart from vernacular building, the customization of building for climate, locality, available resources -- or even whim -- has, in the last century, become a luxury. An important alternative to this state of affairs (which will be explored by the studio) arises from the convergence of two recent trends in the digitally mediated description of space.

On the one hand, recent work in architectural design research, as well as theory, has emphasized the 'parametric' approach to design and fabrication. In this, systems-base approach, a unit or 'monad' of structure is modified by software to suit itself to various environments internal to a design scheme, stretching, transforming, and even disappearing based on contextual parameters; (such an approach draws on, and mirrors, the ability of natural systems, skin and bone, to shape themselves locally according to global adaptations (see Chu, Hensel, Goulthorpe et al.).

On the other, far external to the scale of the building, the digital definition of urban space through "Geographic Information Systems," or GIS, has broken into popular consciousness with ready applications like Google Earth, Yelp, and Trulia (each of which use a GIS framework to deliver information selectively, based on location). These two propositions -- parametric design and place-based urban information -- will be used by our studio to suggest a third; that of a systematically local, digitally derived architecture that, like many marvelous things, happens at the delirious intersection of building and city, defining cosmopolitan space.

The Studio Problem

In 1973, Gordon Matta-Clark used the information technologies of his own era -- filing-cabinets, zoning maps, and aerial photography -- to unstintingly document dozens of "gutterspace" sites in Queens and Staten Island, New York City. Having purchased the sites, Matta-Clark intended to make the sites home to amenities that would in their own way critique a modernist view of the city; ("form," he commented in a manifesto before his death in 1978, "fallows function"). Our own studio will find within the current urban information system of the city of San Francisco a parallel and related site; the more than 1,600 "unaccepted streets" belonging to the city yet eschewed by San Francisco's Department of Public Works.

Connecting GIS queries with scripting techniques (a process which will be taught in the technical portion of the studio, see below), the 1625 database records forming the city's enumeration of 'unaccepted streets' will be integrated into architectural procedures such that independent and unique architectural proposals may be designed for some, or all, of these sites. Both the intellectual, and literal structure of such an exercise -- exploiting and exploring the overlap between local and global digital tools -- will be the center of the studio's research.

Technique and Technology

While a previous 201 research studio (fall 2007) focused on the study and typology of San Francisco's urban leftovers, the current studio will be focused specifically on the techniques involved in directly connecting the sorting and analysis of place allowed by digital mapping to the parametric structure of scripted, computer-assisted, architectural techniques. These techniques have been researched and prototyped for the studio's use, and will be rigorously taught and supported both by the University's Geospatial Innovation Facility), a studio assistant focused on Rhino and Rhinoscript technique -- as well as by the studio's critic. While knowledge of GIS or Rhinoscript is not assumed, a working knowledge of Rhino itself is strongly recommended.

John McGill