COURSES
DESIGN STUDIO COURSES
HOUSING
SOUTH END/CATHEDRAL SITE, BOSTON
The South End/Cathedral area is undergoing an urban rebirth.
No place brings the quality of living for inhabitants and neighborhoods into greater focus, as does the quality of the street. The street not only provides the interrelationship of habitants to each other and to their city, but is also the expression of the inhabitants’ sense of belonging, bringing into its space, form, history, and architecture, the elements brought together to complete it as a “place”.
Students work on the creation of a street and work on the design of housing that shapes the street, provides for the interaction of the inhabitants, and defines it as a place.
The South End is characterized by streets, both residential and industrial, formed as public spaces by its buildings with their walls and entrances. Between the streets are gardens, also formed by the buildings, offering the inhabitants a sense of connection to nature.
The Boston South End site for the fourth year architecture studio housing project is located in the historic Washington Street, Harrison Avenue, and Holy Cross Cathedral area. Washington Street was the first entrance street to Boston from the mainland, and in addition to its historical importance, it has been the focus of new cultural, economic, and residential redesign. This neighborhood is one of great diversity in population. Holy Cross Cathedral is the central dominant building surrounded by the historical brick row houses, typical of the South End, located along Shawmut Avenue, Waltham Street, and Union Park, and the historical brick and stone warehouses, now being restored as loft space housing and studio space for artists, located along Harrison Avenue and Wareham Street.
The program for the housing design responds to the neighborhood analysis of inhabitants, activities and uses, open space, and architectural context, both in the buildings and in the patterns of urban and block structure. Design emphasis includes understanding and working with the architectural context of row house and warehouse building types, underlying urban fabric of streets, blocks, and open space in the South End, and the architectural metaphors inherent in this historical area. The interconnection of diversity in population, activities, and cultural influences of people’s lives with the potential of creative design for urban dwelling is explored.
URBAN DESIGN
STREET STUDIES:
ARCHITECTURE AS URBAN MODIFICATIONThe Urban Design Studio concentrates on the study of streets, both historic and present, and the consideration of how architecture and design modification are applicable to the urban design of the streets. In the 4th year Urban Design studio at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, the focus of the term is ARCHITECTURE AS URBAN MODIFICATION. The projects undertaken for part of the term are STREET STUDIES. These projects are explorations by the students into the analysis and documentation of the physical, historical, cultural, and architectural characteristics of selected streets. The results of the street studies establish the criteria for the proposed designs of individual buildings on sites along the selected streets.
For the STREET STUDIES portion of the term, students work in several teams. Each team works on a historic street and a Boston street. Historic streets located in Europe are analyzed and documented through models and drawings. These included streets in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, Helsinki, Hamburg, Barcelona, London, Vienna, Venice, Florence, Siena, and Rome. Following the study of the historic streets, this process of analysis and documentation is applied to significant streets in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline, Massachusetts.
City drawings and analytical drawings of the European and Boston streets are prepared. Figure ground drawings are prepared. Major plan drawings are prepared at 1”=100’ which show the massing of the buildings along the streets and the massing of the surrounding city fabric. Following this, models are built of each street at 1”=50’ depicting not only the massing, but also the major architectural features of the buildings along the street. The analysis of these historical streets include the historical evolution from conception to present, the cultural significance, and the architectonic features characterizing the space and walls of each street. Of special significance is the understanding of the architectural layering evident in the buildings, from the street to the inner spaces, from the ground to the roof, as well as the architectural sequences of building modules, massing, and spatial configurations along the street. The drawings and models of the streets illustrate the underlying grid and block structures and the architectural layering of spatial and massing configurations evident in the streets.
The intentions of the Street Studies are to understand aspects of urban design theory which are evident in the architecture of streets and to visualize the history and evolution of the streets that result in their present spatial and architectural design. Following the Street Studies, the students develop designs for individual buildings on specific sites along the Boston streets, using the urban design criteria which they discovered in their research and documentation. The construction of the models at the same scales, offers valuable comparisons of history, context, and architecture on the streets.
DIRECTED STUDIES
Contemporary architectural culture is pre-eminently concerned with the visible aspect of architectural built form. This concern reveals itself in the interest in architecture as image, as an aesthetic object, and the tendency for architecture to be formulated according to a stylistic framework. The purpose of this studio is to attend to not only the visible in architecture, but to penetrate what is underlying and invisible in a design or design strategies to fully understand the complexity of the discipline of architecture.
As a strategy for developing an understanding of the invisible influences, which affect architecture, the studio studies the ideas, which underlie the work of 20th Century architects. The studio exercise explores these ideas though a technical understanding and development of the architecture. The two reasons for using this strategy are to emphasize the dependence of architecture on technology-based designmethodologies, and to reveal the relationship between the broader cultural influences and the technologies necessary for the construction of architectural built form.
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
This course focuses on the social theory, cultural history, and the implementation and design of affordable housing in the urban community. Students focus on the sociology and design of precedent communities, both past and present, and undertake research and studies in political factors, community programs, and economic feasibilities that influence and determine the potential and the realization of affordable housing in the urban culture and city.
This building type is a complex architectural and planning task, bringing together all the elements of sociology, economics, politics, community relations, neighborhoods, living patterns, design, and construction.
This course includes the general topics of:
Culture and Sociology of Housing Project
The Concept of the Village
Urban Neighborhoods and Living Patterns Precedent Examples in Boston
History of Public Housing
Urban Planning, Economics, and Politics
Financial Programs for Implementation
Design and Technology of Housing
All Images and Text © Weldon Pries 2017
