The School of Architecture is pleased to share Other Ways of Living Together, a housing study by NADAAA, as part of an ongoing series highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with How Will We Live Together, the Venice Biennale’s 17th International Architecture Exhibition curated by Hashim Sarkis. 

NADAAA’s study addresses housing in four environments—urban, suburban, industrial, and rural—across the greater Boston area. These studies have been guided by three strategies: using the ethic of Existenzminimum, or the minimally acceptable elements required for healthy dwelling, to improve the social and environmental performance of residential buildings through enhanced density, flexibility, and efficiency; reconsidering typological and code conventions to enable these performance improvements; and leveraging cross-laminated timber and stud framing, both derived from naturally renewable mass timber, as interdependent building systems. 

Vertical Row House | Boston, MA

Sited on Washington Street in Boston’s South End, this study explores opportunities for building in urban centers where nearly all infill sites have already been developed. More specifically, it focuses on rewriting zoning by-laws and acquiring air rights for urban corridors, typically with preexisting tall buildings, that could benefit from higher density. An innovative approach to the study’s fire stair is key to its efficiency: through up-zoning and hybridizing, the fire stair also becomes a communicating stair between two units or two floors of the same unit, affording a design that triples the number of bedrooms in the building.

Suburban Mat | Revere, MA

This housing study addresses the inefficient use of space on suburban, residential lots by drawing on the mat-building strategies of high-density, repetition, and modular organization. Referencing the work of Israeli architects Nahum Zolotov and Danny Havkiv for their model neighborhood in Be’er Sheva, Israel, the study positions U-shaped apartment units—interlocked in plan and section with individual courtyards facing in opposite directions—around a central skylit corridor, running the length of the block, from which all units are accessed. With an emphasis on densification, this study eliminates unused lot spaces while optimizing circulation and ensuring that every unit has its own private outdoor room.

Big Box Adaptations | Greater Boston Area

In response to the ongoing shift from big-box retail to web-based delivery, this adaptation study introduces a microcosm of the city into a converted industrial shell. A second floor comprised of efficiency units is inserted into the big-box envelope while keeping the first floor open for light industry. Composed of small businesses, artist studios, and fabrication workshops, among other possible work spaces, the ground level is maintained as is, with large lofts that can easily be subdivided and reconstituted as larger and smaller units at will. This programming hybridization also includes re-zoned neighboring lots, allowing for the development of new streets, transportation systems, public spaces, and supporting sites.

Rural House/Apartment | Ayer, MA

Located just outside the village center of Ayer, the rural house/apartment study integrates our current understanding of the need for social distancing, the possibilities of working productively online, and the dynamic nature of the family unit. In response to this complex array of programmatic possibilities, the project questions the conventional relationship between urban and rural living. It employs several innovative design strategies, including a peripheral, wrap-around stair; a poché zone above and below the stair; flexible living arrangements; and the use of cross-laminated timber panels with traditional stud framing.

Project Team

Principals: Nader Tehrani, Arthur Chang 

Project Coordinator: Alexandru Vilcu 

Project Team: Christian Borger, Nicole Sakr, Harry Lowd, Phoebe Cox, Adrian Wong



Printing and Graphics Installation: Arteurbana

Installation photographs by Roland Halbe

As part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with the Venice Biennale’s current 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the School of Architecture is pleased to share Geoscope 2: Worlds, a project by Jesse Reiser (AR’81) and Nanako Umemoto (AR’83) of RUR Architecture.

Geoscope 2: Worlds is a split-sphere, multimedia installation showcasing over a dozen (and counting) contemporary voices inside and outside architecture, from Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima to radical ecologist and philosopher Timothy Morton. Visitors to the installation find themselves enveloped in a pneumatic, panoramic environment where projections on 42 individual facets generate a complex, kaleidoscopic ecosystem—a tableaux of world-thinking on the edge. Inspired by Daniel López-Pérez’s provocative and luminous book R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern Thinking (Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), Reiser, Umemoto, and their team were challenged with displaying the breadth and quality of its content for an exhibition at Princeton University in February 2020. The result was the first iteration of Geoscope 2, a continuation of Fuller’s original geoscopes reimagined through contemporary means. The project’s second iteration is now on view at the 2021 Venice Biennale. 

 

The first geoscopes, constructed by students of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) 60 years ago, were conceived as embodiments of the world looking at itself, and a means of comprehensively understanding one’s relationship to the world. In response to the Biennale’s question “How will we live together?” Geoscope 2 flouts the idea of a single world body in favor of “many worlds”—chaos generated by multiple bodies interacting with each other—by literally splitting the sphere in half and opening it up to multiple contributors and perspectives.







As López Pérez and Reiser note:

Fuller’s geoscopes, while conceptually ambitious, were technologically limited by their times: literally analog vinyl spheres covered in decals in the shapes of the continents. The way we see it, new technologies and advances in how we view the world have allowed us to simultaneously reimagine and challenge Fuller’s original project. We believe that disunity, disjunction, and dissensus—‘worlds’—are to be celebrated as evidence of true diversity in how we think, act, and interact with one another. This is our critical take on how will we live together: spirited agon as opposed to polite relativism.

Photos and video by Princeton University’s School of Architecture.

 

Team


Mission Control: Daniel López-Pérez & Jesse Reiser


Geoscope 2 Design: RUR Architecture, Reiser+Umemoto


RUR Architecture Team: Julian Harake, Katherine Leung 


Inflatable Design: Pablo Kobayashi / Unidad de Protocolos


Inflatable Fabrication Team: Lucía Aumann, Ernesto Falabella, Emilio Robles, Pablo Kobayashi / Unidad de Protocolos


Experience Design: Jan Pistor - Bureau 314 / for iart with support from Denim Szram


Exhibition Manager: Kira McDonald / Princeton University School of Architecture


Partnerships & Communications: Lukas Fitze / iart 


Trailer Video: Onome Ekeh / Futurezoo  

 

As part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with the Venice Biennale’s current 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the School of Architecture is pleased to share The Zayandeh-rud River Basin, a project by Dean Tehrani’s office NADAAA.

This project is NADAAA’s contribution to Future Assembly—a curatorial initiative developed in response to Hashim Sarkis’s invitation, as the curator of the Biennale, “to imagine a design inspired by the United Nations—the current paradigm for a multilateral assembly.” Future Assembly invited all Biennale participants, more than 50 of whom participated, to address the following prompt: 

“The Assembly of the future we envisage consists not only of humans but also of animals and plants, the ephemeral traces and voices of multiple species, and of the air, the water, the trees, the soil. How do we, as spatial practitioners, imagine giving standing to these more-than-human voices in a vision for our shared future?” 

The Zayandeh-rud River Basin weaves together an aerial view of Isfahan—a city in central Iran—with a planimetric scan revealing various institutions that populate the city’s urban fabric in confrontation with its larger river watershed. The animation draws on the Beaux-Arts tradition of the Analytique, a composite representational technique, which here has been critically reinterpreted through seamless, kinetic montage sequences that synthesize divergent representational methods—including photographic, planimetric, and perspectival elements—toward a shared narrative.

The delicate balance between cities, historic preservation, and social ecologies is commonly overlooked, especially when questions of energy policy and larger territorial legislation are involved. At the same time, key historical examples help to frame these possible connections in poignant ways. As a critical hydrological conduit that overcomes the commonly held divide between rural and urban cultures, the Zayandeh-rud river basin serves agricultural lands as much as it gives birth to the city of Isfahan as we know it. In 1972, in the name of progress, the Shah Abbas Dam recalibrated its water flow, leading to the “dehydration” of the very river that gave life to this historic city. Isfahan’s viaducts, left to wither in this new landscape, have lost the waters that once gave them a reason to bridge. The Zayandeh-rud, the iconic Sio-se-pol bridge, and the entire river basin are the “more-than-human” voices NADAAA nominates for this narrative dedicated to the United Nations Assembly of the Future.

The School of Architecture is pleased to announce that this year’s 17th International Architecture Exhibition of the 2021 Venice Biennale, on view through November 21, features work by several of the School’s faculty and alumni. Curated by the architect and scholar Hashim Sarkis, the exhibition invites participants and exhibitors to consider the question: How will we live together? Notes Sarkis, “We need a new spatial contract. In the context of widening political divides and growing economic inequalities, we call on architects to imagine spaces in which we can generously live together.” 

For the next few weeks, the School of Architecture will highlight faculty and alumni projects featured in the Biennale, beginning with Microcosms & Schisms, a project curated by Associate Dean Hayley Eber AR'01 and Architecture faculty Nora Akawi, Lydia Kallipoliti, Lauren Kogod, and Ife Vanable. With generous support from the IDC Foundation, the curators worked closely with faculty member Austin Wade Smith, fabricator Chris Otterbine, and several graduate and undergraduate students to build and install the exhibition. 

The following curatorial text provides an overview of the project:

The selective unification and segregation of people in space—the demarcation of boundaries—has always been fundamental to architecture. Architecture also has the capacity to register transgressions that might subvert or escape these differentiations, such as those between public and private uses, between entry to civic and commercial programs, enjoyment of indoor and outdoor amenities—even access to safe or dangerous neighborhoods. When are exclusions more (or less) likely to be enforced and architecturally registered? How are our very climates more (or less) controlled? The question, “how will we live together?” is our challenge to consider the ideologically slippery meanings of “we.” Communal identifications are provisional and situational, and rarely more so than in the multi-class, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual metropolis. In some contexts, “we” unite; in others, a sense of place-and-kin is withheld or cancelled. In the latter case, “we” are faced with an “other”—often one of our own making. 

Our team understands the urban as a constellation of simultaneous and incommensurate realities best represented by the autonomous block-islands of Madelon Vriesendorp’s “City of the Captive Globe.” In these remarkable images, Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas made visible the multiple microcosms—worlds with ideological interiority—that co-exist within the urban experience. Guided by that image’s framing of a portion of the infinite distension of urban blocks/realities, we eschew any singular principle or vision, and choose, rather, to present four such New York City interiorities, with respect for the schisms among them: 1: sites of sanctuary and transnational solidarity; 2: a politics of the segregating façade envelope; 3: spaces of climatic control and their waste stream; and 4: the parallel play and unified isolation of the un-natured public park.







The collective scope of our project is to examine how spatial contracts are formed and sustained, as well as what forms of living they engender, in New York City:



1: Sanctuary Spaces 

Present-day resistance to deportation has been led in large part by faith organizations, and cultural or academic institutions that draw from a long tradition of granting sanctuary. Urban sanctuaries today constitute the spatial instances where the city dissociates itself from national policies and is activated to work against violations of immigration and refugee rights. While sanctuary spaces are spaces of enclosure, they are motivated by the granting of access: to safety, resources, and belonging. While creating protected spaces for persecuted undocumented groups, sanctuary spaces undermine fortifications of national borders and the distributed networks of the police state.

2: Deep Segregation 

Through readings of the subtle and deeply embedded particularities of the facade, as architectural production and materiality, discourse, reality, and mythologies of difference, convention and assembly are implicated as pre-existing and ongoing modes of architectural interference and effect. What might a reckoning (both historical and speculative) with fenestration ratios, or window-to-wall ratio, generate in terms of the recognition of the politics of the envelope, and reveal who constitutes the “we” in terms of who we are and how we live?

3: Microclimates  

Living 90% of our lives indoors has proliferated as a modality of living and in corporate office environments in New York City since the early 1980s. The “Dome Over Manhattan” is no longer a lost utopia. It is a profitably real proposition for a climatically controlled interior that reflects the hubris of late-modern capitalism in the heightened combination of entertainment and ecology within a place of work. Designing, monitoring and managing indoor climates is not only a key engineering project, but also the revival of a postwar utopian project to temper and fabricate the environment as a site of architectural production. The voluntary containment of bodies and psyches inside exhibits new forms of urbanization and collectives enabled from the economic and societal structures of uninhibited energy expenditure. The intention is to monitor, analyze and speculate on the indoors that reproduces fully controlled sections of the natural world, and further to critique where we are placed within broader histories of environmentalism, urbanization and politics, as well as to allow civic agency to enable new forms of economic and political relations.

4: Parks and Recreation 

“Living together” cannot turn to housing for its model. By neighborhood, school district, building type and even floor level and orientation, housing segregates by class, race, ethnicity; it is perhaps only outdoors where differences truly coexist. A section of Riverside Park provides topographic, geological, and infrastructural information and images provide micro-narratives of its simultaneous use and inhabitation by varieties of humans, flora, fauna.







The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Curatorial Team: Nora Akawi (Palestine, 1985); Hayley Eber (South Africa, 1976); Lydia Kallipoliti (Greece, 1976); Lauren Kogod (Washington, DC, 1961); Ife Vanable (New York City, 1981).

Photos by Taryn Kosviner.