Scales of Environment

The Advanced Architecture Studio IV framework looks at the varied scales of the environment through the lens of a specific geographic context. During the Spring 2020 semester, studios focused on the fragmented “rural” geography of upstate New York (Mid-Hudson Valley region), unpacking its environmental history and its relationship to the city of New York. Each of the eight studios defined its own territorial boundaries and sites, resulting in a range of investigations that reconsidered the relationship between architecture and “nature.” The studios examined and speculated on: agriculture and food production systems; extractive, infrastructural, and logistical sites; lumber forests; parks; man-made and natural bodies of water; and settlements formed by intentional communities. The interrogation of this range of topics resulted in the development of a variety of incisive approaches that re-imagined the “rural” in a new light.

Throughout the semester, students engaged in rigorous quantitative and qualitative research and pursued design strategies operating at multiple scales. This entailed mapping exercises; experimentation with innovative, renewable material and methods of constructions; manipulation of topographic terrain; exploration of water flows and water holdings strategies; the study of the impact of seasonal cycles on built forms; and an understanding of the performative capacities of architecture and landscape through the lens of social and environmental stewardships.

The current extraordinary circumstances imposed on the student body and faculty by COVID-19 have had a deep impact on studio culture this semester. Despite this, the Advanced IV community exhibited a true resilience and a strong will to support each other, turning the semester into a genuinely meaningful experience that resulted in a remarkable group of design projects. The student work is rigorous, intelligent, and daring. The studio concluded with exciting experimentations with online presentation tools coupled with healthy debates on the mandates of architecture studios, repositioning both the contemporary responsibilities of architecture and the agency of the architect.

Based on a critical understanding of the urban park as a type, this studio has investigated the interrelationship between architecture and landscape, the relative autonomy of each discipline, and the possibility for translations of techniques, forms, and materials from landscape to architecture and vice versa. Operating within Downing Park, located in Newburgh, New York, a 35-acre landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. and Calvert Vaux according to the late 18th and early 19th century theory of the Picturesque, students proposed additional programming and landscape adaptations to revitalize the park and catalyze larger social and economic changes for Newburgh.

The studio explores the concept of dual futures that require designing for two building types that transform from one to another. In our societies of continual change, an intended program is often outlasted by the building itself, raising questions about how we define architectural completion. The studio’s near futures involve building types that are common today but are hypothesized to become obsolete in the future. The distant futures require adapting the original types to a future program of education. Students select sites along a high voltage power corridor in the rural areas surrounding Newburgh and imagine a future in which the above-ground transmission lines will be replaced by below ground lines and the corridor will be developable. They imagine that sites along the corridor can be designed to meet the current needs of their communities while transforming over time to the needs of future communities.

The city and the countryside have been often placed at the opposite poles, dynamic and densely populated vertical metropolises with maximum productivity on one side, and the timeless and restful countryside that promises simple lives surrounded by pristine “nature” on the other. The studio centers its investigation on the “elsewhere,” on the space beyond the dramatic binarism of the bucolic (or alternatively hyper-futuristic) hinterland and the endlessly growing city. Engaging the complex geographies of the mid Hudson Valley region and its entanglements, the work of the studio investigates the concept of “R/Urban,” or the idea of the multitudes of open relationships between, or beyond, the imaginaries of absolute rurality and absolute urbanity, and more comprehensive notions of “Ecologies” of new and networked nature, to explore the often inscrutable yet expansive territories, of spectra, of in-betweens, overlaps, and intersections. Programatically, the studio explores the new spatial formats of knowledge in the territory, in the context of increasingly extra-territorialized knowledge institutions and their typological proliferations. Tying the concerns of knowledge and territory together, the studio aims to reconsider the false divide between culture and nature, the man-made and the natural, human and non-human, and the social and the technical, and envision the possibilities of a new spatial framework of knowledge within our extremely intertwined bio-techni-socio-political and environmental milieu.

The studio scope consists of an investigation of the architectural and programmatic capacity of forms of rural settlement developed by religious communities in upstate NY. The aim is twofold. First, the studio maps and studies the physical architectural and territorial typologies of rural religious settlements. In the context of the studio, these settlements are understood as exemplars of a type of “intentional community” and as a potential form of resistance to the increasingly commodified and fragmented territories of the countryside. Second, the studio identifies sites and proposes physical interventions in the Muslim community hamlet Islamberg, Delware County, NY. These interventions are proposed only after having first critically unpacked Islamberg’s historical evolution and probing the hamlet’s architectural and territorial relationships to its environment.

This studio proposes a Newburgh Regional Boat Association that only includes the existing Newburgh Rowing Club but also expands its mission to include boat repair and new boat construction. It also roughly triples its size to include nearby rowing and boating clubs as well as high schools and colleges. The new construction has many uses: storage, river access, a workshop for boatbuilding and repair, and rowing fitness. The proposed program is understood as a way to return the environmental uses of the Hudson River to a tactile, physical one. The former uses, primarily industrial, have been supplanted. A recreational, athletic, and craft use is proposed. It is hoped that the new uses enhance an appreciation of the river as a natural resource to be protected and appreciated.

This joint Urban Planning and Architecture studio is part of a series focusing on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. The studio focuses specifically on the neighboring island of Culebra and the Main Island at the Municipality of Ceiba—all three sites share problems related to transportation and general developmental issues. This studio continues to engage the study of infrastructure, building, and livelihood futures begun in Vieques while expanding the scope of architectural design to include planning, policy, and implementation issues. The core concerns of infrastructural development remain. An overriding concern of the studio is exploring the developmental advantages of infrastructural improvements in maritime-related infrastructure.

Tomkins Cove Quarry in Stony Point NY is a 199-acre limestone quarry to the north of the Stony Point Battlefield on the Hudson River. It is one of a network of abandoned stone quarries in the Hudson Valley - former sources of construction materials for the development of New York and other cities in the region.The site is currently unused and public access prohibited. In the seven years since the suspension of extraction activity in Tomkins Cove Quarry spontaneous ecological succession has already begun. This studio takes this form of ecological restoration as a partial given and considers possible futures for the site and its vast crater. The interplay of three time scales direct the enquiry and govern the speculations: the geological, the ecological, and that of human activity. Architects are engaged in an energy economy usually confined to the thermodynamics of materials and bodies in space. The studio expands this view to encompass the reality that every encounter with the environment, every sense, movement or decision be it at the retina, neuromuscular junction or cortex, is a constant transfer from one form of energy to another. To Vernadsky’s biogeochemical we will add the prefix neuro. The program of a residency or a retreat is the starting point for proposing low impact/low density occupation of the site.

Building from the 2018 Timber Innovation Act and the forthcoming 2021 IBC Engineered Timber update, the studio considers the future of engineered timber, working landscapes, and the subsequent built environment in the Hudson River Valley. Here, most trees are privately owned, growing on land at the fringe of urban development, designated Wildland Urban Intermix (WUI). Under these conditions, a diverse local timber economy is one way to incentivize private landowners to keep forests as forests; and to care for new forests, potentially increasing our capacity to sink carbon. Through the design of a regional Timber Flow and a Living Laboratory, projects explore cultivation and harvest, manufacturing and automation, species driven design and new ways of life. By designing sites of extraction and sites of consumption in tandem, reciprocal and cyclical relationships are formed, blurring obsolete boundaries and advocating for a more aptly scaled future.