Post-Professional Architectural Design Studio

Over the past several years the post pro studio has explored the problem of ‘Temporal Urbanism.’ The term “Temporal Urbanism” seems to imply a neutral architecture sufficiently open to any given situation in order to provide a suitable container for content. While the standardized solution may seem to be the most flexible, much of the banality of our contemporary built environment is a product of this concept. The infinitely flexible is not necessarily a desirable agenda for architecture; neutrality is the undesirable outcome of modernism's universal aspirations.

Recently the State Treasurer of Massachusetts called for cities to cut costs for their school building programs. Taking the example of Florida and the southwest, the Treasurer requested that prototypes be developed in order to better track costs and speed up construction time. Local communities have questioned whether the difficult sites of New England are conducive to this kind of investigation. One can also assume that pre-fabrication and prototyping a community building would meet with resistance in neighborhoods that value the identity and unique programmatic aspirations of their public schools.

While the problem of pre-fabrication has been an ongoing investigation in the modern period, recent work in this area, spurred on by advances in digital technology, has reopened and redefined the problem. The exhibit currently on at MOMA will be a useful point of departure for examining the problem and possibilities of pre-fabrication. Though the exhibit focused on housing, the areas of investigation, including examples that explore simple construction methods, affordable sustainable technologies, minimum envelope, flexible connections would all be applicable to school construction.

We also realize that a school’s pedagogic program changes over the lifespan of any building. We will examine and analyze examples of school projects within the historic canon that physically embody the ideologic values of various educational paradigms and evaluate the potentials and limitations of program driving the architectural solution. The sites for the project are in downtown Boston and we will test preliminary prototypes against three sites and two programs to explore the potential for this methodology and to test the efficacy and ideology in prefabrication in architectural and urban form making. A flexible or mutable prototype that addresses the specificity of site but also the development and variability of program, challenges the precept that form necessarily follows function.

The studio course will be partially coordinated with the course in digital representation and fabrication required for incoming post-professionals. Exercises in that course will help inform your projects. Students will do work individually but research and analysis in the beginning of the semester will be done in teams.