Graduate Studio III Summer 18/19
Kent State University | College of Architecture and Environmental Design
ARCH 60150: PROJECT PROGRAMMING + ARCH 60103: GRADUATE DESIGN STUDIO III—SUMMER 18/19
Animate Ecologies | Cleveland Rowing Foundation
SKIN & BONES | new frameworks for vertical inhabitation
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
– Buckminster Fuller
“We don't go into the future from zero; we drag the whole past in with us.”
– Syd Mead, Curbed Interview (2015)
“The adaptation of a large building to human habitation seems to imply the multiplication of individual spheres of living. Implicit in the skyscraper, then, is the notion of the human module, be it home, an apartment, an office, workstation or, in some cases, a form of specialized furniture.”
– Scott Johnson, Tall Building: Imaging the Skyscraper
Pretext | Aerial Speculations
This graduate design studio asked students to speculate upon the next generation of high-rise residences. Students investigated the social, spatial and material implications of ‘verticalism’ across a variety of scales, and within the context of a distinctive (and well-defined) research agenda. Ideologies of skyscraper as: 1) advanced technological product, 2) economic enterprise and 3) cultural (‘iconic’) expression framed studio discussions, and served as a discursive backdrop for students’ positioning of a distinctive design polemic.
As an instrument of private enterprise, and contributor to the public sphere, high-rise structures hold a unique position within the contemporary city and its support of vertical cohabitation. Of future vertical living Scott Johnson writes the following.
Today this continuing examination of the details of a life individually lived now thrust into a world of higher technologies and global exposure has made possible a union of the most intimate domestic detail with the most public forms of visual expression. Many artist and architects have explored this dialectic of the domestic artifact and its relationship to public examination writ large, frequently transforming the meaning of the large building, or skyscraper, in the process.
It is within this context that this studio probes a range of topic (and scales) regarding vertical living, lifestyle and urban territory. How might we live 15 year from now, and what might be the social, environmental and programmatic implications for high-rise dwellers? What are the visions of their daily/monthly/annual routines, and what types of aerial spaces, experiences and materialities contribute to these practices?
The studio exploited opportunities for vertical world making. Students paid particular attention to methods of surfacing, tectonics and programmatic combinations in ways that contribute to the development of new urban territories for the city of Chicago in the year 2034 and beyond.
