ARC3015YF
Fall 2024 Option Studio
Instructors: Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu
Meeting Section: L0104
Tuesdays, 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m., 2:00-6:00 p.m.

In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben recounts the following tale, as told by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch: "The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different."

Architecture may have been a little lazy. First, its long-held infatuation with newness – new forms, new media, new materials, new images, new desires, and even new crises, has created a convex lens that often magnifies superficial elements and obscures that which persists underneath. At the same time, it has perfected the art of copy-pasting through best practices, standardization, and efficiency. Repeated enough times, the mundane becomes best-of-class. As a result, we have forgotten the wonderous world of kintsugi, spolia, and metamorphosis, where what has passed and what is to come to engage in an alchemic dance of co-creation. The old makes meaning and purpose possible for the new, thrusting it into being.

The Coming Community studio turns away from tabula rasa and earnestly examines the relics of architecture. It refrains from producing complacent architectural objects varnished in a thin layer of newness. Instead, it takes “disdained'' architectural elements – their outdated forms, overlooked (mis)uses, obsolete programs, (dis)functional parts, expiring materials, antiquated systems, and forgotten desires, and embeds within, bonds together, traces over, and transform them to engender new life. We observe the liminal moment where the past transgresses into the coming through attention and imagination. As the world becomes increasingly atomized and siloed, capitals increasingly consolidated, and unbridled material and energy extraction increasingly unsustainable, a more empathic attitude towards the past might bring worthy profit, such as the fortune Venice experienced in Simone Weil’s play Venice Saved.

The Big Little Village

The studio explores this idea in the context of domesticity and community. Long before home ownership became an economic tool for accumulating personal wealth and a vehicle for neoliberal development and housing, which was fundamental for social transformation towards modernity, the kaleidoscopic varieties of domestic architecture across different cultures reflected myriad forms of community. Siheyuan (Chinese courtyard houses) and rumah adat (elaborately evolved longhouses in Indonesia) alike, where generations after generations gathered in harmony as well as in distress, have woven a rich web of rituals, customs, and social relations around the care for our kin under one roof. The Japanese machiya, the French maison, or the English mansion socialized craft, commerce, family traditions, and quotidian life together as interdependent blocks. Nomadic structures such as pao, teepee, and igloo, enablers of humans’ embedded existence in nature, are Indigenous “primitive huts”, reintegrating us back to the Earth where we came from.

Domestic architecture did not only govern our ethics of care for ourselves and others. They also defined our happiness and belonging.

In this studio, we imagine a community that operates in a co-op model, with ownership being renewed on a 12-year cycle. In this model, the value created is retained; simultaneously, it introduces new energy. The community is initially set into motion by the intentions of its original owners, i.e., a creative one, a reproductive one, or an aging one. As culture evolves, the intentions evolve together with its new members, much like the evolving missions of a nonprofit organization.

Community, care, and creation will be the three tenants of its architecture.

We imagine such a community will inherit and be indebted to a post-capital site, transforming it slowly over time without the infusion of external capital. It will care about its neighbors as much as itself, as by lifting everyone else around you, you also lift yourself. Its owners will actively engage in the value creation and the community's well-being rather than being passive landowners, shifting the common notion that production happens outside of homes. Therefore, its architecture should encompass bedrooms and bathrooms, communal kitchens, social spaces, spaces for creation and production, and other functions specific to the community's intentions.

The design process will also be physical and iterative. At the beginning of the semester, the group will make an accurate model of the existing site and structure. Each week, the transformation will occur digitally in the computer and physically in the model. Thinking through phasing and how design should adapt to a slow, time-based process is also crucial, avoiding excessive alterations to the original structure and disturbance to the existing ecologies.

Design Process

The design process will be collaborative. At the start of the semester, the studio will be introduced to its “clients,” who will set its first intention into motion. Together with the “client,” each group will create a “charter” for the community. The “charter” will define its programmatic requirements and architectural desires. Your “clients” will be involved and act as your collaborators and interlocutors throughout the semester.

At the same time, each group will research the site to understand its history and ecologies. The site will come with a derelict structure that you will collaborate with. Therefore, each project will engage at least two building systems and material realities in a dance of co-creation.

Site

Google Maps

Schedule

The schedule can be found here, which is an active document. We will meet in person and online. You can see when either both or one of us will be at the school in person.

Resources 

Studio resources can be found here, which is an active document.

Trip

The optional three-day trip will take place during Fall reading week October 28 - November 1. We will welcome you to Detroit, and tour the site as well as a number of projects.

• Monday: Fly/drive in the morning; 1:00 p.m. Site Visit
• Tuesday: All day tour Detroit / dinner
• Wednesday: In Detroit until 1:00 p.m.; fly/drive back in afternoon
• Estimated cost $1,000.00 (Travel: $350; Hotel +/- $200/night (share or stay at a friends); Meals))

All students who travel will have the opportunity to apply to a bursary with ORSS for partial reimbursement depending on how many students apply that cycle.

Format and Procedures

Part 1: Huts
The first part of the semester will be focused on immersion into a diversity of practices and thinking about ‘nature’. Students will create a series of fast-paced conceptual visualizations accompanied by text statements that respond directly to the readings, films, and discussions. Reading, watching, and researching beyond the required resources will be expected. Classes will be held as discussions using the visualizations as springboards to in-depth conversation and debate. 

Part 2: Camp
The second part of the semester will engage directly with the Art OMI organization and site to develop a framework plan for a new section of their arts center. Working in groups, students will research the history of Art OMI and the Hudson Valley, bring in research and concepts from Part 1 discussions, and propose a plan strategy and mission statement. 

Part 3: New Nature
Students will work in pairs but also within the group’s framework plan to develop a thesis statement and structure that responds to the themes developed in the class. Structures will be detailed with chosen systems and materials and visualized with large models and a film.