Architecture

Final Assignment: Case Studies of Micro/Macro Contingency, and Back Again We began by looking at contingent issues and circumstances from last semester’s studio project to get an overview of what contingency encompasses. From there, we reviewed how both autonomy and contingency play a role in architecture by looking at how we see, how we remember, how spaces make us feel. We touched upon how contingencies embodied in the city, and how humanitarian crises are shaping the architect’s priorities. Ultimately, the focus relies on comprehending the human and the personal/social realms. This assignment will be an opportunity to look at the semester’s work through the lens of human contingency, and to find ways that seemingly disparate contingent aspects of design connect, overlap and recombine to create an informed architecture from small to medium to large — and large to medium to small. Small: New discoveries in neuroscience (brain) and our haptic involvement (body-brain) is a rapidly evolving field that is shifting our comprehension of how we encounter space and place, what we remember, what is frightening, what is delightful, and why. Medium: Place attachment theory as well as the psychology of place expands the intimate, individual experience to that of the family, the collective. Not only do haptic stimuli play a role, but communal and phenomenological experience arise as meaningful anchors for inhabitants (embodiment, perception, memory, common experience). Large: At the urban scale, how cities thrive, fail and are reborn lay many ideas about top-down vs. bottom-up design, boundaries vs. borders and edges with sociologist Richard Sennett’s Open City vs. Closed City as the overarching theme. The backdrop for this sociological perspective is found in the work of Jane Jacobs’ and Kevin Lynch’s writings. As we wrap up the semester, begin to propose ways that architecture is informed by contingent conditions based on human dwelling and evolution of the thinking behind PID. You will have three choices on how to approach the larger question of overlapping conditions.

Wentworth A3700 04 Concentration Studies Adaptive Interventions Spring 2017 Note that for each choice, you will need to write 5-plus pages, and need to support the writing with visual analyses. These analyses can be abstract models, timelines, images/photos, diagrams—you decide how best to represent your research/argument for your choice. If you use imagery from some of your research, remember to cite or credit the author of the image.

1. Large: Continue your research into the city as a case study, but individually this time. You can use the shared work that you created, but be sure to cite your partner in the images you co-created. See how much data you can find that begins to tie all of the contingent elements together: from the intimate haptic experience to the urban scale, how do architecture, the city and the citizens connect? Can you find and identify Lynch’s or Jacobs’s physical features of the city to your specific study, and what are its social implications? How does the prospect of increasing environmental stressors begin to reshape the city? How might you tie the more intimate yet universal contingent elements that Pallasmaa writes about to a way to understand the experience of the city? Can you follow an individual’s experience through a city? You may need to focus on a neighborhood or district in order get some depth. For this option, you MUST dive deeper into the research and take it beyond what was required for the first round.

2. Medium:

For the medium scale, conduct research into a Public Interest Design project. For this, your case study of a particular project will be at the housing or community amenity scale. This will put you in the center of the “large/small” range; work out in both directions to try and capture what the larger scale means in the context of PID, and down to the level of the haptic or personal embodiment of a space. You may choose from the following:

Rural Studio— Auburn University, Alabama • Perry Lakes Park • The Lucy House

Make It Right, Brad Pitt, New Orleans, LA Michael Maltzan Architecture; Inner-City Arts, L.A., OR

New Carver Apartments or Star Apartments. A case study from Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism. On hold in the library.

A case study from Small Scale, Big Change, on hold in the library. Note: you

may not use Estudio Teddy Cruz’s case study or the Meti Handmade School, as it was posted as a reading.

A case study from “Spatial Agency”. You can research one the website or from the book by the same name, on hold in the library.

I will put a few books on reserve at the library for your use. For this option, you might want to try and map out all of the participants: neighbors, volunteers, designers, community groups, donors, politicians, etc. in all of its complexity. I will also post some

Wentworth A3700 04 Concentration Studies Adaptive Interventions Spring 2017

mapping examples from the book, Mapping Controversies in Architecture by Albena Yaneva, which will also be available on reserve in the library.

3. Small:

Go deeper into the intimate experience that design can offer. In this choice, the haptic, the psychological, the visual all conjoin to generate experiential architecture, usually defined by a sense of place in the environment. Find an architectural case study of your own choosing that you feel captures the many nuances of experience that these contingencies afford, and research/identify all of the ways in which those nuances occur. Be sure to look into the architect’s intent for the project: does she/he describe a desire for someone to feel or remember the space in a particular way? Is the work tied to symbolic meaning in some way? Can you scale it to the experience of the city? Or to the scale of dwelling, working? Survival?

See how and if you can tie the three scales together. If you have an independent idea based on the above theme(s) that you’d like to research, please contact me.

Deliverables: A 5-page minimum, single space paper (not including images or bibliography) with accompanying graphics, images and/or abstract models that support your findings. Remember to fully cite your sources, images and quotes. Due Thursday, April 13, 2016 on NuVu at 12 p.m.(noon).

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