Throughout its modern history, architecture’s attention has oscillated between the ordinary buildings that make up the fabric of the built environment and the singular buildings that stand as exceptions within it. Today, confronted with mutually-reinforcing crises in our social and physical environments, the field is once again focused on those building typologies – everyday spaces of domesticity, labor, consumption – in which these crises are most acutely manifest. We are simultaneously confronted with the hegemony of the basic spatial and material types of modern architecture, and the need to imagine their transformation.
Considering the architecture of the past century and a half, an ur-type of building becomes apparent: arrays of columns supporting slabs of flexible space, organized by mechanical circulation and environmental systems, and sheathed in a continuous shell. Most plainly expressed in the factory loft building, this is also the generic structure of office buildings, multi-family residential buildings, shopping centers, research and educational facilities, even museums, etc. Today, as prefigured by the cultural and material evolution of the light industrial loft over the past century of urban de-industrialization, each of these building programs is in a state of flux. And amidst this change, architects are re-imaging the materials and spaces of the modern building in order to work towards more equitable and sustainable social structures. On the one hand, existing modern buildings are creatively adapted through the selective use of demolition and reconstruction, transforming their programmatic and aesthetic potentials; on the other, new buildings are developed using alternative material and spatial logics. In both instances, a commitment to material economy produces spatial generosity, and an aesthetic of directly-expressed construction assemblies.
This studio takes up the subject of the generic modern structure, seeking to develop models of both adapted and new buildings that respond to environmental crisis and the unceasing flux of contemporary life. Students will develop spatial and structural prototypes, and elaborate them through the reinvention of the basic elements of the modern building. From the column to the slab, the partition wall to the curtain wall, the elevator to the air conditioner, students will imagine and test alternative possibilities for the mass production of ordinary buildings, and the social and physical environments they construct. These experiments in the material structure of architecture will be carried out with careful consideration of their potential to support alternative means of living and working together.
Like many major cities, San Francisco is in fact only a node within a vast megalopolitan region. More unusually, San Francisco is a city that is often overshadowed economically and culturally by its suburbs, particularly those of Silicon Valley. The Bay Area is therefore a unique context in which to investigate the basic typologies that comprise the (sub)urban environments in which the majority of people in the country live and work. This studio will work within the context of a Silicon Valley office park, one of many anonymous accumulations of late modern buildings, parking infrastructures and landscapes at the “center” of the local, and global, economy. Students will consider the means by which these generic building types and environments of the suburb can be adapted through re-use and new construction–considering the means by which architectural speculation can challenge the cultural, material and spatial norms of American life in the 21st century in one of the most economically segregated places in the country.
- Instructor: Martin Hitch
- Instructor: Emmett Zeifman