I/O HABITAT: Hacking the grid

In the wake of an unprecedented recession, how can architecture help stabilize and improve the fabric of communities impacted by the recent housing crisis? This project proposes rehabilitating both vacant housing and vacant infrastructure as a means to designing an alternative future development model.
This project -- a conceit, speculation, alternative future -- explores ways of breaking traditional suburban development by hacking "virus-infected" systems which promote degradation and community instability. Hacking allows a new stream of code to supplant and ward off the virus -- an architectural antidote which can provide a framework to build community.

Frame and Matter: Six Floors of God Knows What at the California Building

CONDITION:
This is a place of production. The art and artifacts being produced behind gypsum walls are tested against all surfaces from within the corridor. Hung from ceilings, mounted on walls and positioned along the floor like furniture, this art commands little more attention than the communal piano or sofa. This is not gallery. It is overflow storage mixed with purposeful display for the one day per month in which the public is encouraged to engage the "six floors of God knows what" at the California Building in Northeast Minneapolis.

INTERVENTION:
Perhaps influenced by the ad-hoc existing conditions of the California Building's internal corridors, the programmatic strategy for a new architecture focuses on an interface of a new public circulation space with new and old programs. Circulation is cinema. An increasing trend of the production and showing of independent film in the North East Arts District calls for the introduction of cinema space into, out of and adjacent to the California Building.

Work of Urban Design Studio Students (Fall 2011)

Each year the M. Arch Graduate Urban Design Studio (Arch 8255) selects a complex, and often controversial, urban site within the Twin Cities region as a topic to analyze and redesign. The site chosen during Fall 2011 - the St. Anthony Main District - lies within the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood and is considered the birthplace of the city of Minneapolis. The site borders the Mississippi River and combines issues pertaining to development, preservation of historic buildings linking the community to the waterfront, and competing approaches for infill development - all of which makes for a perfect urban design studio topic. The work of several students participating in this Urban Design Studio appears below.

1st + 1st Produce/Exchange

The 1st + 1st Produce/Exchange is a renovation of the former Jeune Lune Theater located at 1st St. and 1st Ave. in Minneapolis's historic warehouse district. Originally a produce exchange consisting of two adjacent masonry buildings, Cass Gilbert was hired in 1895 to design an additional concrete frame structure and consolidate the three independent buildings into a single warehouse facility by wrapping them in an imposing facade. In 1992 a portion of the complex was converted into a performing arts space for the now defunct Theatre de la Jeune Lune, leaving an historically rich but exceptionally introverted building without an adequate program for 21st century. My proposal relies on a strategy of vertical incisions to expose this exceedingly anti-public building to daylight, public circulation, and updated mechanical equipment which together will allow it to be resuscitated with a contemporary program appropriate to the current neighborhood revitalization. By combining its most recent performing arts program with its original market function, the new 1st+1st Produce/Exchange brings together the productive, consumptive, educational, and social components of the culinary and performing arts while simultaneously allowing for a greater understanding of the building's intrinsic volumetric, structural, and material characteristics.

1st and 1st: Weight, Space, and Light

The 1st and 1st Arts Center project is a renovation to the old Jeune Theater building in the North Loop Warehouse District in Minneapolis. The building, which originally functioned as a warehouse, grew overtime and was later wrapped in a Cass Gilbert facade which is to be preserved. The context is defined by a collection of old warehouse buildings, which are massive masonry containers with a minimal amount of ornamentation. This project takes that existing typology and heightens people's ability to perceive and appreciate it. Most of the existing floors are hollowed out and the load bearing masonry walls are kept creating large volumes of space. Visitors then begin to perceive the weight of these massive walls, the large volumes which they create, and the light which reveals these volumes. As the visitor leaves the building their perception of the neighborhood will have dramatically changed. In revealing the unique characteristics of the building the project hopes to provide a background and inspiration for the arts which is unique to this particular place.

Architecture as Catalyst: Design Systems: Identity, Information, + Environmental Graphics

Students in this workshop combined their architectural perspectives with various graphic design principles, processes, and practices employed in designing visual systems. Throughout the week, they explored aspects such as color palettes, icon design, mood boards, typography, gestalt principles, photographic mock-ups, and layout.

In teams of two or three, they applied this learning to the development of graphic components for a hypothetical farmers' market site in Minneapolis: the former train shed at The Depot (at the corner of 5th Ave S and S Washington Ave). Students were invited to realize their design solutions in any medium (or multiple media), and they were advised that a thorough conceptualization phase would entertain components both on-site (interior and exterior) and off-site (physical, virtual, or otherwise). Successful design solutions to this challenge demonstrated the following: an understanding of the multiple contexts in which a farmers' market (and, in particular, a farmers' market in this locale) operates; an understanding of the multiple systems (such as cultural, economic, and social) in which this site resides; consideration of how people might approach, view, and use this site both when the market is happening and when it is not; intentionality in the relationships between form, material, siting, and communicative function; and the potential to inform, inspire, educate, or otherwise engage the public with the site and the temporal happenings of a farmers' market.

Architecture as Catalyst: Nested Scales

This workshop proposes an approach to architecture predicated on the notion of nested scales of form, assembly, and texture. Students designed and prototyped a porous architectural surface conceived at three scales: the scale of overall building form, the scale of the building components, and the scale of the surface textures. The prototypes were fabricated from both planar frame elements and surface-milled components produced using the Digifablab's CNC router. Pattern, porosity, texture, and other attributes were tested and controlled using parametric design software. Students constructed both scale models of their proposed systems and 1:1 prototypes milled from solid hardwood. The workshop prioritized intensive use of the CNC router and developing methods of using the machine to produce unexpected material effects.

Architecture as Catalyst: Bodies In Formation

This workshop investigated the material practice of architecture through an intensive design cycle that focused on the integration of form, fabrication, and performance. Specifically, the workshop researched the design and assembly of thrust surfaces or structures in which the form of the structure is determined through a close alignment with structural vectors. During the 20th century, architects and engineers such as Guadi, Otto, and Isler have developed these types of structures through physical form-finding techniques. A number of contemporary design researchers such as Axel Kilian and Daniel Piker have continued this line of research into the digital realm through the creation of custom digital tools that simulate physical forces. Using Piker's Kangaroo Physics plugin for Grasshopper and other parametric digital tools that allow for a quick feedback loop between design and fabrication, student teams tested their designs through digital and physical prototypes and proposed a design for a larger structure to be further developed and built by the entire group. Working together, the group produced a comprehensive presentation documenting the design and fabrication of the full-scale structure.

Architecture as Catalyst: Third Nature

We have been conditioned over time to view 'nature' as something pure and immutable, distinct from and therefore somehow 'exterior' to architecture and urbanism. With industrialization, infrastructure became so ubiquitous and so seemingly 'natural' to the city that its presence was taken for granted constituting a kind of second nature that is set against the utopian construct of a 'pure' nature.

The work of the THIRD NATURE Catalyst Course challenges this position, by exploring instead the uncanny cross-overs and hybrid conditions that characterize a third nature, where computationally generated form and technology in architecture are integrated by design with ecological materials and natural processes. Here, nature is not 'pure', easy or predictable--it always retains the provocative primal aspects of wild beauty, unpredictability, and strangeness and cannot be easily domesticated.

The Workshop considers the industrialized north edges of the Upper Mississippi River, between the BNSF Railway Bridge and Lowry Bridges, one of the key focus areas of the RiverFIRST initiative where a set of pedestrian bridges and trails are designed to provide public access to--and along--the Mississippi river. This extensive area has been widely de-treed and most of the ground is covered in non-asphalt and other non-pervious materials.

As David Gissen has argued, certain environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects have been historically seen as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about 'sustainable ' and 'green' design revolves around efforts to clean or filter 'out' these elements, as if architecture could be bounded from impurities that surround it in the larger urban territory. It is clearly impossible to try to re-create a 'purely' natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature.

Taking this a-biotic industrialized riverfront territory as a site, students in the Catalyst Workshop worked in teams to explore, design and construct full-scale third nature cladding systems for selected sections of the pedestrian bridges. Unlike conventional cladding, these systems are designed as 'hosts' that invite and sustain the presence of insects, volunteer vegetation (weeds) and insectivore birds species to boost the bio-diversity and future carrying capacity of this stretch of the Upper Mississippi River.