STUDIO AGENDA
“Perimeter projects”
Ours was one of seven studios sharing the following brief: “Perimeter” invites you to rethink where architecture is found. Let this word stand for all that which is necessary to “the city” but not necessarily part of it: remote sites, unnoticed programs, far-reaching resource channels, forgotten industrial residues, emergent edge effects, and their many unintended consequences. We will designate the Great Lakes watershed as a site for inquiries such as these: What if the city is not where you expect to find it? When, amid unprecedented flows of materials, goods, and people, when do our regional infrastructures and their access points become architecture? How, under American tastes for frontier mentality and Arcadian desire, have distinctions between nature and artifice been distorted and abused? Where, far beyond figurative building on the city block, do you see what architecture can do? The goal of this “perimeter” studio is to help you to observe the cultural landscape critically and to propose built form effectively on the basis of those observations.
At first glance, the work from this studio, as from most student projects, may appear unfeasible or even impossible. We have been quick to suspend disbelief about all sorts of things. And yet that is our role. Project-based learning has become a preferred format throughout much of the university. Objects of work become props for the kinds of interdisciplinary inquiry and reflection-in-action that are necessary when problems must be addressed with strategic propositions rather than reductive analysis. Design is not just about solving known problems, but also about discovering them. Other disciplines can reduce and analyze a situation as it is; our role is to propose what does not exist. To change an existing situation into a preferred one is to court not only discovery but also reorganization. The architect hopes to translate cultural observations into spatial configurations.
"Information, please"
Since learning how to put together a building is still part of what we do in architecture school, many projects here propose a building. Since making sense of information glut is increasingly a part of all work in the university, many projects here propose some new interface to the representation of complex subject matter, in this case the Great Lakes. And since information technology is so rapidly moving beyond the desktop or screen, some of these projects focus on embodiment of interactivity in ambient or tangible technologies.
WHAT WE DID...
The work of this studio has aimed to give visibility to the intrinsic value of the Great Lakes. We have proposed a model, which in most projects is a physical/virtual hybrid, as a means for engaging the unknowable qualities of the lakes, and a building to house it. We have worked with Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratories (GLERL), which is based here in Ann Arbor, and used their field station at the harbor outlet in Muskegon as our site. (We visited twice as a group stayed overnight in the field station once). This is the place from which instruments are sent out into the Great Lakes Observing System (GLOS), which increasingly provides realtime environmental forecasting, not only of weather but also of water quality, species management, and more. Thus we have paid consistent interest to the ambient properties of our own projects, as well as the symbolic and embodied properties of the interactions with the information there. Many of the projects address daily, seasonal, or even geological cycles. Most have been very communicative about site selection. Some function as instruments themselves. In sum, we have observed observation, and represented representation, of our most basic Perimeter, the Great Lakes.
"Taking into account"
According to the philosopher Bruno Latour, much of the current impasse between society and nature comes from an overeliance on value-free facts. You might sense frustration with this epistemological flaw, for instance, when whoever comes to the political table with the hardest numbers wins. Lay citizens, uneducated in the assumptions behind the sciences, are unable or unwilling to challenge what they see in the as singular as Science. (Finance, despite its notoriously short time horizons, is often billed as such a Science.) As a remedy, Latour proposes less quest for certainty (under whatever assumptions are necessary to achieve it) and more quest for pattern among multiple versions of any issue, which he calls “taking into account.”
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