Experiments in Dwelling

The University of San Diego, Department of Art, Architecture + Art History ARCH 301– Architectural Design Studio II, Spring 2011

Experiments in Dwelling: The Case of Las Palmas, Tijuana, Baja California
Daniel López-Pérez Camino Hall C043 [email protected] (619) 260 7415 (609) 651 3133 Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:05AM-12:15PM Camino Hall 043 Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:15PM-1:15PM

Course Overview: This design studio course explores architecture as cultural practice that structures both the physical and social environment. A number of exercises will introduce the student to questions surrounding a wide range of scales of inhabitation, from the scale of the body to that of the campus, city and region. Addressing the inherent material, environmental, cultural and social issues that form these questions is a central concern of the studio. Students can also expect to reach technical competency in a full range of design media, including drawing, model-making, and computer aided design. The goal of this design studio is the critical exploration into the inherent material, environmental, cultural and social questions that surround any architectural intervention, in this case the typology of public housing. The Rise of the Endless City: Throughout history, the design and development of public housing has been a fundamental concern for the discipline of architecture. Since 1900, industrialization in all of its phases has led to the migration of vast amounts of the world’s population from the rural to the urban environment. This shift has caused a change in the world’s population that lives in urban areas from 10% in 1900, 50% in 2007, to a projected 75% in 2050. Cities continue to grow at an unprecedented pace giving rise to the ‘Endless City’, or ‘Megalopolitan City Regions’ comprised of multiple cities that form continuous urban and transportation corridors that exceed 10M in population.1 In the face of the transformation of the contemporary city into a vast and growing megalopolis, the need for innovation in the design and implementation of public housing has never seemed more urgent and full of potential. ‘Bajalta California’ is one of these Megalopolitan City Regions, a continuous urbanized area that includes San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Mexicali with a population of over 42 million. The ongoing staggering growth of the city of Tijuana eastward, until it meets the state boundary with Tecate, becomes an opportunity for this design studio to face the question of public housing as a fundamental building block of the city and its future. The latest front in this growth is in the San Pedro Valley, a master plan of 7,000 hectares called Las Palmas with a projected population of 1.2 million. The density characteristic of Tijuana is very high in extension yet low-rise in floor to area ratio, averaging 2-3 stories in height. The average
Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic Ed., The Endless City, The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, 2010
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development is very densely populated and continuous block formations 2-3 stories high, and hundreds of meters long. The brief of the studio proposes to study the terms that form the basis for the entire master plan for the Las Palmas project in the San Pedro Valley, study the existing residential typologies that are being proposed, and to test alternative types in a very small sector of the plan, one the size of a single urban block. The purpose of the research is to propose designs that integrate the typological intelligence of the types that are being implemented in order to explore their social, cultural and environmental flexibility; finding alternative and more sustainable modes of urban inhabitation from within the scale and terms of the existing project. Facing the constant growth of cities, architects have always been concerned with the question of large scale public housing, devising new plans that would be able to regulate this growth while proposing with each new generation, new modes of inhabitation. Given the social, cultural and political implications of public housing, these models can be understood as urban manifestos aiming to reshape the city and the relationship between the individual and the collective. In line with the general ‘low-rise’ ‘high-density’ development of Tijuana, it is useful to study a number of low-rise and high density mass-public housing projects developed in the past as catalysts to launch the research: Le Corbusier’s Mass-Production Houses and the projects developed for CIAM Congresses from the 1930s to the 1950s (Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), Team X and the Smithsons during the second half of the 1950s, the Metabolist and Structuralists projects of the 1960s and 1970s, including Ricardo Bofill, Moshe Safdie, and the more utopian proposals of Yona Friedman, Ron Herron and Peter Cook of Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, Cedric Price, Andrea Branzi of Archizoom…

Le Corbusier and the ‘House-Machine’ ‘A great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit. Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on towards its destined end, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this new epoch, animated by the new spirit. Economic law has unavoidably governs our acts and our thoughts. The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch, the Equilibrium of society today depends upon it. Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house. […] If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the houses and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the ‘House Machine’, the massproduction house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful. Beautiful also with all the animation that the artist’s sensibility can add to serve and pure functioning objects.’ ‘Mass-Production Houses’, Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier, 1931 The prototypes developed by Le Corbusier’s ‘Mass-Production Houses’ can be understood as some of the earliest results from his famous manifesto where the house is a machine for living. Stemming from the Maison Dom-Ino reinforced concrete patent, Le Corbusier develops a number of low-rise and high-dense housing schemes that explore a whole array of dwelling units, and their combination into a whole set of differentiated wholes. The relationship between the dwelling units and how they form the whole, and their flexibility was at the forefront of these projects. Flexibility was paramount, both in terms of the arrangement between the units, as well as that of the units themselves, offering open areas with open and reconfigurable ways of occupying them. A fluid relationship between the interior and exterior was also at the center of these projects, where interior spaces flow seamlessly to the exterior, and where the line between landscape and building becomes almost indecipherable. 2

In the project of ‘Mass-Production Houses in Reinforced Concrete’ (1915), the flexibility in the inherent arrangement of the plan, similar to the growth of a domino set, and its placement on the site, appear as a landform. This flexibility in the site’s placement coupled with a more synthetic relationship to the surrounding landscape would become core concepts that Le Corbusier would develop across a number of projects. In the case of the ‘Citrohan’ House (1921), named to resonate with the mass-produced automobile Citroen, Le Corbusier focused inwardly in the organization of the rooms and all the parts that form the building envelope (windows, doors, etc) proposing that they should be consistent. In addition, he argued that even though the house could be designed primarily in functional terms, the aesthetic value should also be considered, and emphasized the importance of ‘proportion’, or a modular logic that would relate the proportions of each part with regards to the whole. In the ‘Freehold Maisonettes’ (1922) an effort to blur the relationship between the inside and outside can be seen, one where the duplex units are given a very generous amount of exterior space, rendered and described as hanging gardens. In these, the relationship between interior and exterior space, and building and landscape begins to dissolve, where the trees grow seamlessly into the cavities of the terraces. The indeterminacy of modes of inhabitation in terms of functions, inside or outside, is also crystallized by a rendering that depicts ‘boxing in the hanging gardens’. In the housing projects of ‘Bordeaux-Pessac’ (1924) and The Honeycomb Planning Principle (1925), through different combinatory strategies, the arrangement of the units begins to be shuffled, causing a differentiated form for the whole, and the production of a number of different unit types. In this sense, the capacity for the overall field to be capable of complex repetition proposes a deeper and a more complex relationship between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’. Finally, the ongoing effort to reach a more synthetic relationship between the building and the landscape culminates in the Plan Obus in Algiers (1932) which is in itself a landform, a topographical formation with a highway on top and a field of differentiated dwelling units made porous by hanging gardens following the contours and topography of the Mediterranean coast line. The largest and perhaps most famous realization of these concepts is the Unite D’Habitation in Marseille (1947-52). A building composed of the stacking of two mirrored duplex units, a hotel, and an elevated public street with shops. In this case, the relationship between the building and its environment is mitigated by a deepened and complex building envelope (brise-de soleil), and a large public deck on the roof. In this deck, artificial rock formations are introduced to complement the pools and common public areas, proposing a space similar to a ship deck to look out to the land forms around one, but one that begins to resemble the features and qualities of those very landforms within it. Finally, le Corbusier’s efforts to make the buildings more porous, vegetated, shaded, and closer to landforms in figuration, can be understood at the most basic level as augmenting their relationship to the environment, or in other words passively sustainable. In contrast to the modern notion of the tabula-rasa, these low-rise-high-density projects as in themselves embedded in the landscape and inseparable from it, proposing a number of techniques to make the relationship between environment and building more passively sustainable, robust and inseparable.

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From the ‘House-Machine’ to the ‘Appliance-House’ 1. The idea of modern architecture includes the link between the phenomenon of architecture and that of the general economic system. 2. The idea of ‘economic efficiency’ does no imply production furnishing maximum commercial profit, but production demanding a minimum work effort. 3. The need for maximum economic efficiency is the inevitable result of the impoverished state of the general economy. 4. The most efficient method of production is that which arises from rationalization and standardization. Rationalization and standardization act directly on working methods both in modern architecture (conception) and in the building industry (realization).’ ‘La Sarraz Declaration, Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, 1928 Form the 1930s to the 1950s, and in light of the periods of reconstruction after WWI and WWII, the concern with exploring and defining the relationship between large-scale housing and how it builds up the urban fabric was at the center of all of the CIAM conferences. This relationship was illustrated in the form of a number of ‘grids’ or ‘scrolls’ that were meant to be distributed to all of the CIAM members. Eventually CIAM shifted from a German dominated congress in its early stages, to a more English and Dutch make up by the time of CIAM’s dissolution and creation of Team X. A decisive moment in this transition has been traced to the CIAM IX Congress Grid (1953), where the abstract terms of the Athens Charter, Dwelling, Work, Recreation and Transportation where changed to: House, Street, (Relationship) District, City, in search of better understanding not only the material characteristic of the built environment, but also the emotional needs of its people. The physical terms in which the relationship between dwelling and the urban fabric had now been critically extended by the group that would become Team X; in an effort to understand the relationship between physical form and the ‘socio-psychological’ dimension of the city’s inhabitants. Identity, Association, Cluster and Mobility became the concepts that would structure the CIAM X Scroll (1956), which described the relationship between the individual and the collective as well as that of the collective to its environment. 1. It is useless to consider the house except as a part of a community owing to the interaction of these on each other. 2. We should not waste our time codifying the elements of the house until the other relationship has been crystallized. 3. ‘Habitat’ is concerned with the particular house in the particular type of community. 4. Communities are the same everywhere: 1. Detached house – farm, 2. Village, 3. Towns of various sorts (industrial / admin/ special), 4. Cities (multi-functional) 5. They can be show in relationship to their environment (habitat) in the Geddes valley section. 6. Any community must be internally convenient – have ease of circulation; in consequence, whatever type of transport is available, density must increase as population increases, ie. From least dense to most dense 4

7. We must therefore study the dwelling and the groupings that are necessary to produce convenient communities at various points on the valley section. 8. The appropriateness of any solution may lie in the field of architectural invention rather than social anthropology. ‘Doorn Manifesto’ (1956), Team X primer, 1962 Throughout the 1950s, the British architects Allison and Peter Smithson led an effort to define ‘identity’ and ‘association’ as the basis of the term ‘relationship’. This in turn gave rise to the development of a number of residential arrangements at different scales adopting low-rise and high-density solutions. As a continuation of Le Corbusier’s fluid relationship between building and landscape, the village-infill projects developed by the Smithson’s in the 1950s (Fold Houses, Close houses, Terraced Houses) can also be described as following an ‘ecological’ argument, where ‘habitat should be integrated into the landscape rather than isolated as an object within it’.2 Those projects were illustrated in a set of boards developed for the tenth CIAM congress in Dubrovnik. If Le Corbusier had proposed the house as a ’machine’, Allison and Peter Smithson would further develop that concept through a number of prototypes that now understood the hose as an ‘appliance’. Starting with The House of the Future (1956), built as a stage for the Scottish Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibition that same year (and was supposed to represent a house twenty-five years later, or 1981) the Smithsons trajectory spans from the visionary to the pragmatic. The House of the Future proposes a sealed environment where the figure ground condition has been reversed, leaving a void that they described as ‘un-breathed air’ in the middle, surrounded by a tightly sealed and seamlessly compartmentalized continuous interior. Appliance House and Cubicle House (1956-57) explore the transformation from a courtyard layout to one where functional cores or cubicles are floating freely throughout the plan, and begin to take multiple shapes and heights. Similarly, the Rumble Villa and the Retirement House (1959) explore two different figure ground plan configurations, one that develops a triangular interior courtyard space that divides the living spaces along its three faces; and the second where the living functions become discreet volumes that float freely in an open plan. Both solutions aggregate in radically different ways, resulting in linear versus irregular arrangements in search of a strict parceling system.

Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, a Critical History, Third Edition, ‘This critical awareness was amplified at the time by the Smithson’s own village-infill projects of the mid-1950s – their ‘close’ and ‘fold’ houses – and by their insistence, following the ‘ecological’ argument of their Doorn Manifesto of 1954, that ‘habitat should be integrated into the landscape rather than isolated as an object within it.’, 1980, p.273

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From Spatial to Ecological Urbanism 1. The future of towns: they will be centers of leisure, of entertainment, centers of public life, centers of organization and of decisions of public interest. The other functions (work, production) will be more and more automated and consequently less linked to the great agglomerations. [… ] 2. The new society of towns must not be influenced by the town planner. Social distinctions between the different quarters must be spontaneous. […] 3. The big cities must be able to contain, in place of industry, agriculture. […] 4. Towns must be air-conditioned. The air-conditioning of towns permits a greater freedom and a greater efficacy as to usage: the streets become centers of public life. 5. The buildings which collectively form the physical town must be on a level with modern technology (today’s bridges, for example, are often several miles long). 6. A new town ‘risen from the desert’ is not generally viable. Big cities come into existence through the development of former small towns: the big city must be an intensification of existing towns. 7. The three-dimensional technique of town planning (spatial town planning) permits the grouping of quarters both juxtaposed and superimposed. 8. The buildings that make up towns must be skeletons that can be filled at will. The fitting out of skeletons will depend upon the initiative of each inhabitant. 9. We do not know the optimum size of a town. […] 10. Foreseeing a tendency for the population to gravitate towards the cities, it is no exaggeration to estimate that in the near future cities will contain 80-85% of humanity (instead of 50% as present). Hence the large agglomeration that has the advantage socially (entertainments) and technically (air-conditioning, transport) will win the day over other types of agglomeration. Yona Friedman: Ten Principles of Space Town Planning, 1962 If by the start of the 1960s urbanism followed primarily two models, the vertical city and the horizontal garden city; a third model emerged in the form of a spatial garden city. The spatial theories of Yona Friedman along with the structuralist and metabolist project gave rise to a new urban manifesto, and in turn a whole series of projects that formalized it. If Yona Friedman’s spatial manifesto from 1962 arrived at the same time as the Utopian projects of Fuller in Manhattan (1960), Ron Herron’s ‘Moving City’ (1964) and Peter Cook’s ‘Plug-In City’ (1964); two projects were realized formalizing the terms of spatial urbanism. The first project is Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67 in Montreal (1967); where a very porous and highly differentiated spatial aggregation of living units is achieved from a limited set of standardized prefabricated units. The difference between the very large structural columns and beams that give support to the whole while providing the primary circulation routes (both for people, electricity, water, sewage) and the light prefabricated living units is incredibly consistent with Friedman’s three-dimensional town planning. The second project is Ricardo Bofill’s Walden 7 Complex in Barcelona (1972-75), where once more an aggregate of standardized units are assembled around a 6

hollow interior to form an enormous public plaza from which smaller exterior streets lead to each of the units. Once again, the strategic combination of the different units dissolved the reading of any order, turning it into a kaleidoscopic and crystalline space. The fragmentation of the overall figure through a consistent reshuffling of all of its parts creates an environment closer to a natural formation, augmenting the environmental performance of the building and the spatial quality of the public spaces both through their sheer scale and apparent randomness. As homage to the Unite, the roof top is also a large public plaza where pools, air vents and amorphous rock formation co-exist with the inhabitants. In parallel to these two projects that seek to ‘formalize’ the ‘informal’ field of spatial urbanism, a more radical solution appears in Andrea Branzi’s ‘Non-Stop City’ of Archizoom Associates (1968-71), dissolving the field altogether. Non-Stop City becomes a radical manifesto in the non-figural, opting to represent an experiential, rather than a formal or figural, alternative reality. Varying flows of information and products create an open and perceptive field based on sensorial and affective networks, rather than discreet typologies. In this model, both the figure ground, nature and artifice, house and garden have been dissolved into a single synthetic vibrating surface deepened by its network of sensorial and cognitive connections.

1. Urban Refunctionalization. Foster the reuse of the existing estates, to fit the present city to the new need of diffuse work, of mass enterprise, of creative economy, and of cultural production and consumption. 2. Great Transformations through Microstructures. The quality of the city is made by the quality of its domestic objects, tools, facilities, products shown in the shop windows, people, flowers in their vases. […] 3. The City as a high-tech favela. Avoid rigid and definitive solutions and foster reversible facilities that can be dismantled and transformed, allowing the interior space to accommodate new activities that are unforeseen and not programmed. Thus a city that considers as a value the integral liberalization of the urban system. 4. The city as a personal computer every 20 square meters. Avoid specialized typologies, rigid facilities, and identification between form and function; create interior spaces similar to functionoids, that can host any kind of activity in any place, changing their function in real time. 5. Cosmic hospitality. Realize (as in the Indian metropolis) the conditions for a co-habitation between man and the animal kingdom, technologies and divinity, alive and dead people. A metropolis less anthropocentric and more open to biodiversities, to the sacred and to human beauty. 6. Weak urbanization models. Create threshold areas between city and countryside, through hybrid territories, half urban and half agricultural; productive territories, horizontal, hospitable (but without cathedrals), following seasons and weather, allowing conditions of flexible and discontinuous housing. 7. Shade borders and fundaments. Realize architectural facilities with crossable perimeters, to create an urban texture where the difference between interior and exterior, public and private, is intended to disappear, creating an integrated territory without specializations. Andrea Branzi, ‘For a Post-Environmentalism: Seven Suggestions for a New Athens Charter’, Moshen Mostafavi ed., Ecological Urbanism, 2010, p.110-11

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Thirty years after Branzi’s Non-Stop City, the exploration into formalizing the informal in search of deciphering the fluid genetic make-up of the urban fabric returns with NoMad’s winning Europan Scheme for the city of Barakaldo (1999). NoMad’s Barakaldo proposes an extreme hybridization that operates at a number of levels: within a rigid catalog of the residential types themselves, within residential commercial and cultural programs, and finally, within the figural properties of the buildings, turning the figure-ground condition of the project into a synthetic, expandable and overall irreducible aggregation. A second contemporary example of extreme hybridization is BIG’s MTN Mountain Dwellings (2008). In this project both an upper green landscape, an intermediate set of residential units, and a lower multiple story car park are mixed to form quite literally a mountain. Once again the figural conditions of what would normally be two or three different urban programs are amalgamated into a single irreducible field where urban patterns of inhabitation are radically reconsidered. The ambitions of Branzi’s NonStop City and Safdie’s Habitat ’67 can be argued to re-emerge in these two contemporary projects. After a decade of focusing on iconic projects whose virtue lied in their uniqueness, figures, the discipline of architecture returns to focusing on systems that can reconstruct the urban fabric, background. Taking into account society’s collective renewal in search of a deeper social, financial, and environmental consciousness, this reconstruction has never seemed more urgent, and full of possibilities. The potential to arrive at a more synthetic relationship between urban populations and the environment, breaking down and hybridizing the categories of the ‘natural’ and the ‘man-made’, promises to be the first collective step towards the reconstruction of our endless and growing cities, becoming the focus of research for the studio.

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Phase I: From the Unit to the Block From the outset, each member of the studio will be asked to write their own urban manifesto, and to compile a number of images in the form of a collage, that illustrates the concepts behind it. Each student will develop this text and set of images throughout the term, using it as a device from which to assess the ambitions of their individual project. In the first phase of the semester, each student will be asked to choose a residential case study from the collection documented in Total Housing, Alternatives to Urban Sprawl, published by Actar, 2010. Each member of the studio will be encouraged to buy the book treating it as a textbook or manual in residential design, and to consult the web site http://www.actar.com/totalhousing/ which collates additional information on the projects covered and the different architectural office that designed them. Each project will then be analyzed, both with respect to the living units, and how they aggregate to form the whole. All of the analysis of the projects will be standardized and collated into an internal document that the studio can share in the development of the second and third phases of the project. Phase II: Prototypical Flexibility and Transformation In the second phase of the term, each student will be asked to develop their own prototypical living unit, and aggregation. The scale and diversity of the prototypical systems developed will be within the scope of the units analyzed in the first phase. The individual prototypes will be assessed in term of the qualities of their individual unit types as well as their capacity to aggregate into complex wholes. Similarly to the projects analyzed, the capacity for the system to accommodate different users, programs, populations, unit types, infrastructure, and a whole range of public spaces in accordance to the ambitions of the urban manifesto, will be some of the terms in which the projects will be assessed. A strong emphasis will be placed on the concepts set out by Total Housing including connectivity, efficiency, and flexibility. Please refer to the glossary for a paraphrased description of the sub-terms that form each of these concepts. Phase III: From the Block to the City: The Case of Las Palmas, Tijuana, Baja California The third and final phase of the project will propose to deploy the residential prototypes developed in the second phase, onto a specific site, which in this case is an urban block that is part of the project of Las Palmas, located in the San Pedro Valley, Tijuana’s final 7,000 hectare extension eastwards to the border with Tecate. Working closely with the planning and development agencies of the project, the studio will design a number of residential alternative models, respecting the distribution of the master plan that already exists, and adopting the scale of units and mixture of programs that is being proposed for the project. A site trip will be scheduled to the site at some point during this final phase of the project.

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Student Learning Outcomes Students will demonstrate competency in reading and producing architectural drawings; making physical models; and/or producing 2D and 3D digital models. They will demonstrate proficiency in communicating their ideas using techniques and conventions of architectural representation. From a selection of sketches, diagrams, drawings, models and oral presentations students will demonstrate an understanding of the interplay of form, structure and function in 3D space; an ability to analyze architecture by dividing it into its organizational, structural, functional, and experiential components; an understanding of sites and contexts of architecture in scales ranging from that of human body to the city. Students will be introduced to the production of a creative project responding to a specific or typical program. The project may consist in a design solution or an original contribution to disciplinary knowledge. The creative project should demonstrate a synthesis of student’s learning and competencies; and take risks by considering alternative solutions. Students will demonstrate an ability to take responsibility for their design choices and judgments; to articulate a critical claim and defend their project in front of a public of peers, professors and/or invited jurors.

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Students will demonstrate an intermediate competency in the skills of reading and producing digital drawing and modeling, both in two and three dimensions, through the use of several CAD software packages. Students will demonstrate an intermediate competency in the skills of model making across a number of scales, and in a range of different materials from paper to wood and plastics. Some of these models will be produced from the information extracted from their digital models. Students will demonstrate a critical understanding of architectural forms and systems, through the drawing and modeling of their project as described by the exercises assigned throughout the term. Students will demonstrate a critical understanding of the potential inherent in the flexibility of architectural forms and formal systems, through the iterative drawing and modeling of variations stemming from their project. Students will demonstrate a critical understanding of the synthesis between the spatial potential inherent in architectural forms and systems and their formal and technical realization; synthesizing the relationship between architectural form and its function. Students will learn to critically research architectural precedents, and will acquire proficient knowledge of some important examples in the history of architecture. Students will demonstrate critical skills in analyzing the physical and social aspects of an architectural site. Students will demonstrate a critical understanding of the scales of intervention in architecture, from the scale of the body to that of the city, as well as the corresponding set of questions related to each of them.

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Expectations Students are expected to keep all of their models and periodically photograph them as a record of their design process, as part of the materials to be submitted for evaluation at the end of the semester. Students are expected to keep all of their digital files and periodically print drawings from them. Students will be asked to turn in their digital files at key moments throughout the term, such as midterm and final reviews, in order to evaluate the progress and evolution of their project and as part of the materials to be submitted for evaluation. The design studio will be a place for exploration, a lab for experimentation. The method of work will move across physical and digital drawings and models, setting up a feedback loop. This process of translation across these will in itself be seen as a form of exploration and design. In addition to individual discussions, the studio will often hold group presentations and discussions where the students are expected to participate. Throughout the term, there will be a number of public presentations where guests from outside USD will be invited to review the work of the studio. Grading A number of exercises throughout the term will together add up to 70% of the overall grade. The grading for each will be determined by the documentation provided for each pin-up, public presentation and included in the final submission. The remaining 30% will be divided equally between attendance (15%), and general class participation (15%). Attendance is imperative for the successful completion of this course. If you foresee not being able to attend class, please NOTIFY me in advance through email. Every absence MUST be substantiated by a serious personal reason such as illness, etc. Each unexcused absence will result in a direct deduction of your grade, at the rate of 5% each. More than three unexcused absences can result in receiving an incomplete grade for the term. Design Studio Lab Requirements Each of the studio sessions will start with a roll call and brief group meeting, so please do not be late. If there are no pin-ups scheduled, each student is expected to be working on their individual project at their assigned desk. During that time, a list of tutorial times will be passed around, and the instructor will come around and speak with each person individually. You are required to speak with the instructor about the progress of your project at least once per week. You are also highly encouraged to take advantage of the available office hours for additional discussion. Periodically, a number of readings will be distributed to the studio and we will have reading discussions on them in the following session. The students are required to be in the studio during ALL of the assigned class hours. Unexcused absences, failure to participate in group and desk discussions, ‘pin-up’ and public reviews will result in grade loss. Students who are absent more than three times without an acceptable excuse, or fail to present in the Midterm or Final public presentations will be asked to withdraw from the class. The studio rules are as follows: no music or cell phones during studio hours; no spray painting; no disruptive behavior or excessive traffic, no discussions outside of the work of the studio that will become a distraction for others; please try to make an efficient use of your time in order to complete the assigned work within the time frame of the studio.

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ARCH 302, Calendar, Spring, 2011:*
Week 1: Tue. Th. Jan. 25 Jan. 27 Studio Introduction

Phase I: Analysis
Exercise 1: Urban Manifesto Case Study Dwelling Units (2D)

Week 2:

Tue. Th. Tue. Th. Tue. Th. Tue. Th. Sat.

Feb. 1 Feb. 3 Feb. 8 Feb. 10 Feb. 8 Feb. 10 Feb. 15 Feb. 17 Feb. 19 Exercise 2: Case Study Flexibility and Aggregation (3D)

Week 3:

Week 4:

Exercise 3: Physical Model

Week 5:

Phase II: Prototype and Manifesto
Exercise 4: Prototypical Dwelling Units, Flexibility and Aggregation Can Bilsel Lecture (Attendance Highly Encouraged) Friends of San Diego of Architecture, New School of Architecture, 9:30am Exercise 5: Urban Manifesto 2.0

Week 6:

Tue. Th. Tue. Th. Tue. Th.

Feb. 22 Feb. 24 Mar. 1 Mar. 3 Mar. 8 Mar. 10

Week 7:

Week 8:

Mid-Term Review
Peter Tolkin Lecture, 5PM (Mandatory) Spring Break

Mon. Fri. Week 9: Tue.

Mar. 14Mar. 18 Mar. 22

Phase III: Las Palmas, Tijuana, Baja California
Exercise 6: Scaling and Deployment of Prototypical Units and their Aggregation: Building up the Urban / Parametric Block Site Visit

Th. Week 10: Tue. Th. Tue. Th. Tue. Wed. Week 12: Tue. Th. Mon. Week 13: Tue. Th. Tue. Thu. Tue.

Mar. 24 Mar. 29 Mar. 31 Apr. 5 Apr. 7 Apr. 12 Apr. 14 Apr. 19 Apr. 21Apr. 25 Apr. 26 Apr. 28 May 3 May 5 May 10

Week 11:

Abalos & Sentkiewicz Lecture, 5PM (Mandatory) Exercise 7: Diversifying the Parametric Block

Rafi Segal Lecture, 5PM (Mandatory) Easter Break

Week 14:

Final Review
* Dates are subject to change

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Glossary: Fernando Maza and Neus Moyano in conversation with Yona Friedman, ‘Walden 7, City in Space, Experience number 3, Ricardo Bofill, taller de Architectura’, Quaderns d’Arquitectura I Urbanisme, December, 2004, p.25 Mobile Architecture: Mobile architecture is one that adapts to the inhabitant instead of the inhabitant having to adapt to architecture Mobility: Social transformations and those of daily life are unforeseeable in the lifespan of a building. Buildings and new cities should be able to easily adapt to the will of a future society that will occupy them, they must allow for transformation to occur without resorting to demolition Mobile Urbanism: Mobile Urbanism is a technique that allows for different groups of inhabitants to change their neighborhood, its massing, dimensions, etc… every time it is desired and within reasonable means. Infrastructure: Infrastructure is the technical elements of a city, necessary for daily life, not specifically used by its inhabitants: for instance the networks of provisions, sanitation, circulation… the inhabitants use only those tools that are connected to these networks, in other words, toilets, electrical tools, cars, and even those insulating devices such as pavement, walls and floors… The principle of mobility takes into account the rigidity of infrastructure (neutral elements) and the mobility of those tools connected to that infrastructure. Spatial infrastructure: Spatial infrastructure is a three-dimensional grill, elevated on columns, placed above the level of the ground. The light-weight uses (housing, offices, and community rooms) inscribe themselves in the holes of this structure and in the elevated parts. The heavy-weight uses (circulation, gathering halls, and industry) would occupy the surface of the ground under the three-dimensional grill, and between the supporting columns. Those columns would house circulation, and provisions which move vertically (lifts, stairs, and vertical ducts) Spatial Urbanism: Spatial urbanism is spatial infrastructure. The residential and office volumes would find themselves in the holes of this infrastructure. Their grouping and re-grouping would take place in accordance to their inhabitants. ‘Keywords’, Total Housing: Alternatives to Urban Sprawl, Actar, 2010, p.5 Connectivity: Mixed-use Development: Being a fundamental component of an urban fabric, a residential project has the ability to link and integrate multiple other used: workspaces and leisure and service facilities. Multiple Users: The city comprises a heterogeneous mixture of inhabitants, with increasingly diverse life styles and family models that need to be accommodated in a residential project. Urban-suburban: Suburbanization is often encouraged by its offer of an alleged greater quality of life. Residential projects allow this quality of life to be compatible with the efficiency of urban infrastructure and the opportunities this provides.

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Building-landscape: The compatibility between urban and suburban conditions is also translated into the possibility of connecting indoor and outdoor space, the built and the unbuilt, and of understanding the residential project itself as the construction of a landscape. Community Space: The residential project links the home space with the city through communal spaces where exchange and socializing can take place. Efficiency: Density: This is the main feature of an urban fabric and the key to its success as a model of human settlement. Residential projects contribute to qualify density beyond the necessary optimization of land use and the multiple relations and activities they can accommodate. Compactness: The geometry and arrangement of living spaces can contribute to optimize the relation between the different programs accommodated by a residential project. Economy of Resources: Aside from density and compactness, the choice of construction and environment comfort systems contributes to reducing material consumption and energy use. Individualization: Despite repeated claims indentifying multi-family residential complexes as uniform and impersonal, these projects can respond to the growing requirement to articulate each occupant’s individuality. Flexibility: Adaptability: Built space can facilitate and accommodate a great number of requirements and activities, both predictable and unpredictable, for known and unknown users. Openness: Space is endowed with flexibility through the removal of traditional associations between functions and rooms in favor of the indetermination of fluid space. Spaciousness: The real luxury (and the platform for the effective development of multiple activities) is space. Unit Variety: Residential projects no longer tend to respond to a single standard program and user. The diversity present in society is also translated into the spatial complexity of the project.

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Bibliography: Total Housing, Alternatives to Urban Sprawl, Actar, Barcelona, 2010 Manuel Gausa, New Alternatives, New Systems, Birkhauser, Basel, Actar, Barcelona, 1998 -Moshen Mostafavi, Gareth Doherty, Ecological Urbanism, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Lars Muller Publishers, Baden, 2010 Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, The Endless City, the Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics And Deutsche bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, Phaidon Press, London, 2007 Andres Lepik, Small Scale, Big Change, New Architectures of Social Engagement, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010 -Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1971 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, Dover Publications, New York, 1986 (orig. 1923) Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, a Critical History, Third Edition, Thames and Hudson, London, 1992 Marco Vidotto, Allison and Peter Smithson, Works and Projects, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 1997 ‘Walden 7: taller de Arquitectura’, Quaderns d’Arquitectura I Urbanisme, December 2004 Andrea Branzi, Weak and Diffuse Modernity: The World of Projects at the Beginning of the 21st Century Skira, Milan, 2006 -Teddy Cruz and Anne Boddington, ‘The Architecture of the Borderlands’, Architectural Design John Wiley and Sons, London, 1999 Fiamma Montezemolo, Rene Peralta, Heriberto Yepez, Aqui Es Tijuana!, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006

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