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Michael Bell

Associate Professor
mjb92@columbia.edu
+1 212 854 3414
Michael Bell is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. Bell chairs the Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials and is also Director of the Master of Architecture Program Core Design Studios.  Bell’s design work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Venice Biennale; The Yale School of Architecture; The University Art Museum, Berkeley; and at Arci-Lab, France. Bell has received four Progressive Architecture Awards, and work is also included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  Books by Michael Bell include Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Glass; 16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House; Michael Bell: Space Replaces Us: Essays and Projects on the City; and Slow Space. Bell has taught at Berkeley, Rice University, MIT and the Harvard University. He has also been a visiting professor at University of Michigan as the Saarinen Professor of Architecture. His recently completed Binocular House is featured in Metropolis, Casabella, and in Kenneth Frampton’s American Masterwork Houses.     

http://www.visibleweather.com/
http://www.michaelbell.tel/



Advanced Studio IV: Post Ductility: The Persistence of Architecture

The studio will design a new small public building to be added to the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner House, and Study Center in the Springs at East Hampton, New York.  The site, located on the northern side of the South Fork—the East Hampton peninsula—is located in what was a once rural area known as the Springs. The site includes the original house, and studio that Pollock and Krasner, used as their home, and studio, and also several small out buildings that support the offices for the Center.

LISTED UNDER: Advanced IV Architecture Bell Studio

New Spaces of Housing: Re-Structuring the Development and Design of Public Housing

New Spaces of Housing:Re-Structuring the Development and Design of Public Housing is offered to fulfill both Planning and Architecture degree requirements. The seminar will be co-taught by Michael Skrebutenas and Michael Bell. New Spaces of Housing combines course materials from the previosly offered course Planning 6563, "Affordable Housing Development." The seminar will address the financial and development aspects of public housing development. The seminar will also cover and also prepare materials that offer an in-depth analysis of present and historic low income and poverty housing policy in the United States. All work will be done in the form of case studies applied to the city of Bridgeport, Ct. and to the Bridgeport Housing Authority.

LISTED UNDER: Courses Housing Public Housing

Torsion and Bearing

Torsion and Bearing
Theories of a Structure and Frame in Modern Architecture

During the 1930’s Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri produced a set of photo-elastic stress analysis models while designing the Palazzo Littorio. Terragni’s work in photo-elasticity links themes of transparency, material and memory in terms that link this work to post-war work on memory by Rafael Moneo, Aldo Rossi and the theorizing of phenomenal vision in the writing of Robert Slutzky and Colin Rowe. The photo-elastic process literally presents a materialist mode of vision: as optic experiments these tests translate material stress into a mode of visual/material duration. Eyes witness technical heat—and a humanist project of vision is survives as a technique of industrial and material science.

LISTED UNDER: Courses Torsion and Bearing

Advanced Studio VI: Deceleration, Air Pressure, and Centripetal Force: Managing Energy in Houses and Cars as a Combined Entity

This studio explored the possible relationships between energy and data management in hybrid cars and interconnected this with houses to examine energy management in relation to wider systems in urbanism and building. This was carried out by transcribing and re-writing the Eames House and the Toyota Prius as newly linked instruments, seeking new prototypes for energy management in architecture. The focus was on how these implications impact local urban design and enable new forms of building. The work examined two moments in our recent history during which architecture and design were cast against and within the public imagination of innovation in computing and technological efficiency. Imagined as overtly benign-concepts of efficiency in building systems were leveraged against this imagination.

LISTED UNDER: Advanced VI Architecture Bell Studio

Core Studio III: Five Sites Imagined

Re-Imagine these four sites; project a future housing site and develop a prototype that can survive there.

LISTED UNDER: Architecture Bell Core III Housing Studio