During Seminar Week, students will travel to Mumbai as an integral part of the studio. This trip will be an opportunity to further research and understand the city and the Back Bay site; it will be an opportunity to expand analysis, challenge conventional understandings, and test architectural and conceptual proposals. This week will serve as a vital step in the conceptual development of the project thesis.

The Seminar Week research trip to São Paulo is an integral component to the Plug In São Paulo studio. This trip will promote a broader yet more critical understanding of the situations and context in which the projects will be inserted. The history and development of the city will be explored through examining its architecture and urbanism. Each site will also be explored in-depth through its morphology as well as its social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. This will generate a comprehensive knowledge of how each project can operate within the city of São Paulo – as an intersection between the Formal and the Informal.

Navigating São Paulo

Teaching

Imagine you are a family looking for affordable housing in the center of Zurich ? Imagine you are an immigrant arriving in Switzerland with little means and a great interest to live and work in a community environment instead of the anonymity of suburbia ? Imagine you grew up in Wiedikon but can no longer afford increasing rent-prices in your neighborhood, for yourself and your business?

In this studio we would like to put you in this position. We would like you to develop an affordable mixed-use housing community on the Geroldareal in the heart of Zurich. We will ask you to develop concepts for those groups of society that cannot afford the rents of Europaallee and Niederdorf.

Since recent years, Zurich continues to show an average vacancy rate for housing close to zero. The demand for housing has been outgrowing its supply by far while the exodus of the middle and upper class during the 1950s is being inversed. Those who can afford living in the center are taking advantage of short commutes and a great supply of public amenities. Low-income households are increasingly forced to exit the city to find cheaper housing on the city’s fringes or in suburban agglomerations. Meanwhile, in South America, Asia and Africa, the long-term consequences of urban expulsion are manifested in the expansive informal settlements located on the fringes of every larger city. At the same time, informal settlements such as the urban villages in Shenzhen and Torre David in Caracas represent surprising examples of vertical communities with a great sense of solidarity and spatial inventiveness. Zurich is not Caracas or Shenzhen, but is there something we can learn ? In this studio, we would therefore like to investigate whether these examples are applicable for a more saturated and developed context such as Zurich.

Throughout Zurich there are only few examples at the building scale that have attempted to counteract market pressures. Cooperative housing projects such as the Kraftwerk 1 and Kalkbreite appear to be courageous oases within Zurich’s treacherous desert of rent inflating housing markets. What kind of spatial, economic and process-oriented strategies are needed to conceive housing alternatives for underprivileged households? What kind of structural systems and typological layouts are necessary to provide flexible structures for changing uses?

This studio would like to tackle these pressing issues in order to provide constructive visions for increasing demands.

Designing Open Housing for Zurich's Geroldareal

Open Village

During the last several decades, central Athens has been defined as an area of urban decline, understood as a long series of negative set-backs. Densely populated areas in or near the center of the city (products of uncontrolled densification) that once used to be middle and upper middle class areas increasingly downgraded. Many areas support high immigrant populations. Some of these areas harbor contradictory processes of solidarity and conflict, some developed particular forms of socio-spatial hierarchy, and others are still thriving in terms of daily activity and movement. The old housing stock, mostly built in the 60s and 70s, and the current lack of financing intensify complexities. The city has lost its center to decay, and in view of today’s socio-economic crisis, abandonment, visible everywhere, seems irreversible if confronted with traditional planning models.

The serious decay progressively attacked even the emblematic axis of Panepistimiou Street, where the Parliament and most of the nation’s administrative, financial, and commercial headquarters and institutions are located. Panepistimiou Street connects areas that have not been heavily affected by decline, traditionally occupied by the upper class, with a very different social reality at its opposite end. It is a challenge for the future of the city to successfully address the union of these two realities, a challenge that has been addressed through RE-THINK ATHENS* – a proposed intervention for Panepistimiou Street at the core of the city’s new regulatory plan. The results of this proposal have been set for implementation, and the studio will use these results as an existing condition – one of the many layers that constitute the urban context. However, the project does not adequately address the complex issues facing central Athens, and therefore the studio will engage, enrich, and activate this proposal with critical social design strategies.

While urban decline, or urban crisis, is often related to a state of decay, here it can also be understood as a set of new potentials – spatial, social, economic, ecological – for alternative urban futures. As such, it is the task of the research and design studio to discover and engage the latent problems and potentials of the city in order to create an alternative strategic vision consisting of new prototypes (processes, policies, and tools) for central Athens. The design studio is an effort to provide a strong, multifunctional centrality, regenerate central Athens by re-programming the existing, and manage traditional and new activities without giving in to leisure-led gentrification.

In order to address existing urban phenomena, studio participants will critically analyze the site(s) through socio-geographic mapping in order to develop a new framework within which to read and act in the city. This framework will re-engage the social dynamics and cultural diversity of central Athens and serve as the basis for the overall strategic plan. The new city will be built onto and with the old.

To develop an overall strategic vision, participants will generate new processes and identifiable tools that engage specific sites in central Athens as well as each other. Together these projects will form the strategic vision – a transferable urban toolbox with a strong transformative capacity. Each design will be the result of combining top-down and bottom-up processes – utilizing the territory between formal and informal as a new point of contact for architecture and social design in the city. Each tool is a catalyst to reprogram, reactivate, and integrate specific areas within central Athens and to create new urban qualities. In order to develop potent ideas, participants will work closely with local stakeholders, experts, NGOs, and institutions.

Kostenrahmen	F
Location	Mumbai, India
Team	Prof. Alfredo Brillembourg & Prof. Hubert Klumpner, Lindsey Sherman, Michael Contento, Marielly Casanova

Contested Waters Fieldtrip