Designing the Architect

I think the architect of the future both has a greater responsibility and if you wish also uh a greater opportunity to be a creative Leader by understanding cultures uh political social conditions and both reflecting those but also perhaps leading what the next step might be there's a two-way process one is echo of what you you see and what you feel but it also is a is a slight bleeding and that's a different view of an architect than what we've had in the past some would argue that architecture is about designing beautiful buildings or creating monuments or spaces that speak about the ideas of the designer architecture has often times been about mimicking a particular style with little regard to the culture or the people in which it is placed Jan wamper recognizes some of the shortcomings of this Nar Nar view of architecture Jan uses his Studio as a way of teaching students that the purpose of Architecture is not only to design beautiful spaces but to design these spaces while remembering the people the history of the place the color and the music then architecture becomes a process of embracing what is there and transforming it into something new and useful without discarding the old it's about creating spaces for the community those who will live and work in these places it's about understanding and working with the people to co-create space Jan Wampler is a professor of architecture in the School of Architecture and planning at at MIT Jan has been teaching architecture to both graduate and undergraduate students at MIT for almost 30 years Jan not only teaches but he is also a practicing architect with his own private projects these projects range from something as small as the design of a stained glass window to elaborate multif family housing projects combining teaching and practice allows Jan to help students understand what being a successful architect means finding projects that help students understand the multi-dimensional aspects of this new understanding of architecture can be difficult a site must offer a challenge to a student in terms of size structure charm community and Beauty yet at the same time these site challenges can't overwhelm the student also the site needs to be manageable so that the students who only have a limited time to visit the site can survey the buildings talk to the people and absorb the culture in a few days time for his spring 2004 Studio Jan chose a site located in Cuba a country off limits to US citizens who do not have business or academic interests in the country Jan chose to work in Cuba because of its Rich architectural history that has been preserved as a result of the US embargo against Cuba Jan had to secure a license from the US government to travel to Cuba with students and Jan had to find local Architects to work with in the area the site Jan chose is valat Cuba an area within the city of Havana valat is located near the old city of hav close to many historic buildings but unlike the old city vat has some of the most dilapitated housing in the vicinity in short valat is a residential neighborhood that is falling apart valat needs both new and rehabilitated housing public space educational facilities and work centers physically uh the site was the joint between two different uh architecture Styles the law of Indies and the new style it was as you know it was IR regular um so it was chosen for that point of view the larger area was chosen because I wanted students to think of the area like a big house if you wish or a house as a small community as opposed to one building I wanted students to have the opportunity to think not just about a building but the life of the place totally and that's why I chose a bigger area which was complicated uh I also chose a site that had Clues the water some buildings that they had to keep um views Etc I was purposely setting them up in a complicated site situation which I Do by the way all my projects are so-called difficult sites water and green space comes into this area which is kind of a natural valley here providing which is a big issue that you're going to have to deal with ventilation into this and open space and at the same time they suggested that something be built here to protect from storms from the north this is North the malakan which is the most beautiful uh waterway in the world we're fronting on the malacon here and it's a part of a site that we had used before but not the same part we have a new Frontage of water and green and you jump across to the Evergreen space and then in this site there are some buildings that need to be kept a couple three there's a big one somewhere here um but a lot of it's deteriorated and so the program for this is this idea of new micro Village in the city how do we design housing and public space that can connect to this green space first assignment we're running right no time asking students to begin designing for the site without having visited the site is a critical piece of the architectural process students are asked to look at the site map a two-dimensional drawing of the site and then build from it three distinct models a physical three-dimensional model of the site a digital image of the site and a weather and climate model this exercise prepares the students for the moment when they will step into the actual site and experience it as a living and breathing space the main problem with this area in spite of this is a lack of open space within the texture whereas the old city you'll find one Plaza after the another that sort of lead in but in the new cities or so-called new there's not very much public space you you have a frontage here on the malacon in this Park which is very powerful um and then a lot of this is going to be up for grabs in terms of what you do with it but you're probably going to keep this because it's in good shape that part might have been originally a courtyard that size and then got built in all over the world this is typical uh it's a very important issue of how do you control how do you make something that uh provides light and air but most people then will use it eventually everywhere in the world it's the same issue people build in it I've never been accused of uh teaching a light loaded Studio it's always a lot of work because I'm a uh basically um I'm a worker and I believe in work as the vehicle for understanding the world and then we talk about it some people talk fce and then work I work fce and then I talk now that students stud have presented the three site models they move on to their attitude models attitude models help the students explore their ideas about the site in terms of the culture the color and any misgivings they may have without any constraints in other words the attitude model challenges the students to find and translate into abstract form how they feel about the people in the neighborhood before actually visiting the site the sketch modeling can be made with uh any kinds of materials I given an exercise which I call found objects which they call junk models where I ask them to go around the halls of MIT and find uh whatever people have thrown out and then use that and I do that purposely so that they're working with materials that they have no connection with uh and they have to invent if you wish I was always thinking about like this sort of Public Market outdoor space shaded but so that's I mean that's what this thing was there's just I think a higher degree of interaction than anywhere you can I mean I think a market setting me more so than like than a mall or other shopping areas I guess because I don't know exactly what it's because of but maybe um just because it's a little more informal in its setup and relationship that um it tends to have a greater sense of community involved it's equally very powerful um in terms of this Garden idea um Superman going up the sides of the building stuff growing up the side of the buildings Terrace is in my mind I'll be happy to work on this one you go home if you like because there's all kinds of images that it conquers up I think of the notion of going over something still being public that's so it's a simple but very powerful kind of notion I'm sure we're going to see more the the challenge was that this notion of micro economies how they could make a life in the uh Community was uh part of the spirit of the attitude so somebody uh as an example thinking about uh how car parts could be used and uh restoring old cars because the Cubans are so wonderful at that but then became the lifeline of the community and then person reflects that in architecture one of the things in my research about what Cuba is or may be uh and my own interests is of course is in cars and in these junk models that we've been doing for Jan I was very struck by these parts which are very much not architectural uh and they I that I found a challenge in that in trying to create architecture out of something that wasn't architectural I had lots of openings here and I had or oriented them in different ways and and I completely not thinking about it and then coming back and looking at it trying to figure out what I had um and so it got me thinking about orientation of openings in terms of Courtyards letting in light and passages letting in people in light and air the same day the junk models are presented the class also prepares for Cuba with only a day to go the class packs a suitcase filled with items such as medicine clothing and candy for the people they will meet on the site these items are great demand because of the US embargo against Cuba what I'm trying to teach is for students to become aware and sensitive to people and what people have built and have done um and what I call Fresh eyes looking at uh another culture for the first time and taking in absorbing in what that culture uh offers and sometimes by not speaking the language is a great Advantage because words sometimes will get in the way and confuse what you're actually seeing whereas if you don't have the words um then you start looking around and you sort of try to understand the people even more and I've been all over the world and worked all over the world and I don't speak UE and I don't speak Chinese but I've never had any problems with communication um there's always another form of communication that takes place and I try to teach that Cuba is located just 90 Mi off the coast of Florida and is roughly 44,000 square miles about the size of Pennsylvania with a population of roughly 2.2 million Cuba declared its independence from Spain in 1902 with the help of the United States from the time of its independence until the 50s Cuba had a number of different leaders that would change in the 1950s with the help of the United States Castro came to power in 1959 shortly after Castro's rise to power relations with the United States began to deteriorate Castro nationalized all the islands industrial and major commercial Enterprises and made the country a communist state other well-known incidents in Cuban American history including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs led the US to break off relations with Cuba and to Institute the US embargo against Cuba which remains in place today yet because of the US embargo Cuba has remained isolated from major development and from American influence as a result of this isolation Cuba in many ways remains untouched preserved and intact allowing students to access Cuba's Rich history through its architecture has the US embargo then been a blessing for Cuba what will happen if the US embargo against Cuba is someday lifted will Cuba be able to preserve its Rich AR architectural history and cultural distinction in a world of globalization one of the things about these trips is people traveling together you eat together and do all these things together in the middle of a dinner there may be uh beginning of a uh discussion which might lead into something much more exciting than anything I could do in the studio I remember one night in Cuba that we were sitting there and somehow I don't even know how we started but we were talking about the project and I was starting the sketch on on uh afin you were there um and it was a very I think uh for me very important discussion I couldn't have uh necessarily programmed that in the classroom this is the first day that students will visit the V site students must work hard during this visit not only to get a real sense of the site but also to absorb the culture and feel of this Cuban neighborhood seeing is not the idea but the idea of looking which means you just don't see something but you look and try to understand why it is the way it is so that maybe you transform that architecturally into something else because if you come back and imitate something that's here architecturally I don't think it's good architecture because it have may have a different reason and secondly it may be here for a reason that has nothing to do with a reason now so it makes no sense well most of the not all the buildings in this area are reinforced concrete however and most of the buildings if not all are also deteriorated because of the here you can see the saltwater has deteriorate the concrete and that's why this building is probably condemned I sort of try to set the pace by talking with people and I have a kind of a sense to know when I can uh feel welcome and when I'm not which is rare than I back off and in a very quick way I sort of remember the first day we were there there it was within minutes that I think we were in a house uh talking with people in Spanish and you know back and forth English Spanish broken English broken Spanish um and I think by me doing that then they realized they could do that from his roof can he get a view of the water and you can see all the the the sea from his roof can we get up to his roof yeah do you want to go yes the living conditions of the houses or the apartments are not in good shape compared to other places inside the conditions are bad very bad yeah very bad yeah yeah the buildings are broken you know uhhuh because sometimes sometimes you can see the structure of one building that is broken like you know complete the living conditions of these people are clearly not very good yeah and so that's an area for sure that going to be awfully jealous when we fix this block in front of them but this is an area that move into our thing then we would probably uh eventually replace so our site again is just is this area mhm so you think it's smaller than you expected which is always the case yeah but that's always the case yeah I think it's a lot smaller than I expected yeah but I mean it makes I mean it makes sense that this was 110 M and that's like a you know that's a football but as Architects when we see things we always make them bigger in our mind than what they actually are it's kind of difficult because you you come here with sort of romanticized eyes and you see see things that are like decaying and you you have a sort of romantic notion of like the Decay is somehow like this great thing and it should be preserved and I think you always have to keep in the back of your head like what's what's worth preserving and what's you know what you can let go of for me I just started thinking about you know making making art and showing art and selling art and how that might you know you might be able to build a community around that idea um and then I was kind of thinking about just how people would work and how they would live and how those two things things would relate visiting some homes I realized that maybe turning them down in a oldfashioned urban renewal way is not really the the way to go maybe many of them need to be preserved um we we spoke with a lot of people and they actually like where they live uh even in the the what we consider tenaments they they like their environment they like the interaction with other people at all the time students visit a number of other sites in Cuba including an artist community the Pan-American Village a small fishing Village and old Soviet cement block housing by exposing students to a number of different types of housing they can begin to consider alternatives for their own site as students explore these different styles of housing they bring their sketchbooks along sketching is a quick way for a student to record ideas to capture a first impression of an area or to note a single detail of a building having a Sketchbook in hand while on site is essential to every student during the the Cuba visit for me starts uh in two parallel ways one is sketching and I do what I call Airplane sketches CU I'm on the airplane a lot so a lot of my work has done little sketches on napkins or whatever or my little Sketchbook as a way of shaping if you wish the ideas and it's a kind of a visual uh Board of your verbal Notions or or your thought processes after less than a week in Cuba students are back in the studio they haven't just studied a site in Cuba they've made friends traded email addresses and even shared meals with the people of V now students must integrate these new impressions of Cuba with their original designs and perhaps their old outdated ideas as they sort through and compare new to Old they must decide what is worth keeping and What needs revising you've done some abstract work of the junk models and the space between in the first pass before you went to Cuba and now we've had a dose of Cuba and I think we know the the site and the people as well as we could in some ways maybe better having gone to Cuba than in Somerville because in Somerville you think you might know the people in Cuba you know you didn't so you might actually have a better understanding of this site than you would of one around the corner so we have that and uh sometimes um you can get too much of the site information which I don't think is going to be the case today which can also affect what you do but having the context the people the site which is the basis and having some abstract if you wish intellectual I don't call it that but just abstract ideas about what you want to do today is kind of the merging of those two previous strains despite the flu that passed from one class member to the next the work doesn't let up projects are starting to become more defined cadus has added Hanging Gardens to her Terraces that permeate the site these Hanging Gardens will add new dimension to her project including shade for the street life below that she finds so prevalent throughout Cuba use this cut in the water feature I to create a Terrace sort of edge where the the Green Space could um sort of could interact with the actual uh concrete type uh pedestrian ways and so that um and through this terracing the the elevation between the street level and the water could be um mediated a little bit so that it's not a canal that's just cutting into the site and um also I was thinking in this tering I was envisioning the uh the wall on the molone where people sit and play music so maybe on these these edges that are created by the change in level things like that could begin to happen thinking about how in the creation of new housing people could have more privacy but at the same time maybe if they choose to keep that extended family you know closely knit that there's a way that they can still live in close proximity to each other so uh this began as a design for one unit and then sort of evolved into two and I think it's possibly somewhere in between a twostory courtyard space that is shared by both units um so that this space is exterior and then this one also has this balcony that connects with there so that in this this could be sort of a prime exterior living shared between the two and it would be a very family like setting although they still have their privacy beginning of the '90s when things were really really bad for us regarding know food and you know itcy was really bad architecture is architecture that is what I call on liners it's very simplistic in its concept which the modernists were um and you see it once and that's it and you don't need to see it twice and it's uh has no real effect on you it's it's kind of like being in a neutral environment I had I'm trying to throughout the studio Jan critiques the students projects these critiques happen formally during the presentation of models and during design Pinups but also informally through desk side critiques where Jan evaluates the students projects using a one-on-one technique by sitting beside the student Jan can help a student through an impass or start a student in a new direction that the student may not have considered and it's amazing process um by the way you look at it and you have to absorb what's going on in the sketch and then you have to to quickly decide what to sketch or what to say to the student that will help them in the next piece and often you have about 60 seconds to do this and so teaching is not about what you teach it's deciding what you don't teach CU you could teach everything I started to think about how you know how this might be divided up and this notion of well is this one thing and then these are five other things in other words are the is this housing in this you know in this an art school or is there more of a blurring and it seemed like the the ladder was really the way to go my problems with it is the size of things so if that's 6 M maybe it could be 4 and a half or 5 m so the scale this is not square but more rectangular we talked before way back here about this being kind of a central thing and not integrating and then the other day we talked about this being more of a linear thing with things coming off of it but it seems to me that you could do that stronger if you have housing here if in this band somewhere there might be housing above it in addition to the classrooms and if that were the case for instance let's just say this and not the whole thing by the way but pieces of then the housing uh would add another use in here which might be might be artist housing but it might be ever housing but more importantly it would start to help to break the scale down and maybe make it more of a connection so I mix it up just when they are working on one scale or one way of thinking I give another project and they find it alarming sometimes but the point is that maybe we're uh doing the overall concept and then I'll ask him to do a little elevation study so that they'll start to understand what the materials are and more importantly this the human scale so that I can continually give this it's it's more of like a spiral you keep uh moving around it the elevation model exercise shows the human perspective of the project students show for example the detailed facade of the building as a passer by might see it once again students are expected to move from one exercise to another in order to consider their projects from a different perspective at first I didn't want to do the elevation study because I felt like I wasn't ready to design an elevation CU my buildings had to change but then I just used it to figure out how the buildings would change and so it was kind of it was really nice for me to work at that detail to figure out like how the interior spaces would begin to work with the uh those walkways in the buildings that I've I mentioned before like the ones that would connect the different spaces and sometimes when you get too close to it you can't see what you're doing Jan asks students to stretch their thoughts and ideas about their work in one of the more controversial exercises students exchange projects and go to work this means rearranging revising and sometimes cutting into another students's project at the end of this exercise students present their proposed changes to each other and to the class this exercise is yet one more way students are forced to take a fresh look at their own work through the eyes of a partner you just inherited this mess that this other person has done now your job is to make it better um and you can do anything you want you can change it boy that froze them you know the somebody else is going to work on my model you going have a revolution over that sometimes if cadis decides and she might that this thing should be about this high and this wide no that's not I'm not looking for that major of an intervention but but maybe that is what K decides and I think in it that might be valid and it's not it's a huge change to the model it may not be a huge change to what I am doing on the site but it might be really better to show that as a drawing so that you can two knife well it's just that the model you can work faster as all without thinking I I have to disagree I mean I draw a lot of but what I do the reason I do that is so they can both see their own work in somebody else's eyes it's the same thing as going to the CU fresh eyes um and for an afternoon they can uh think about somebody else's project and they Amaze themselves first of all within three hours often they do more work than they do in a week because it's fast and they don't think about it and they just do it maybe an idea about breaking up the blocks you want to start with that one yeah no I'm not going to take it all down and that makes sense I understand like you know it's kind of hard to just impose in someone else's work but I think it's it's nice to kind of step away from what you've been immersed in for weeks and take a look at someone else's it's I think like the fresh eyes idea is probably probably valid this is how you learn you do something new and do something different do it someone else's way otherwise you get stuck in the same thing the intervention I chose to do was to um to activate this this Edge and just bring the so think about the activity that's happening in the car repair and bring that idea up into the building so um I I increased the amount of exterior spaces and uh thought of these as other places of working not on carair obviously but on other sorts of uh hand type work and um there's then passage between these because he already has um half levels incorporated into the housing so it was easy to sort of expand Terraces on different levels to create a connection between them that was a little more Dynamic than just a core down the center my attempt uh with working with what cadus had done was to take some of these units that that she had and and shift them and try and rearrange the the um Courtyards that the twin units share and also in a series of half levels uh bring these Terraces down to the ground and actually incorporate the the what is currently the ground as Garden as well so this can all be garden and you can move up actually into the housing through Terraces of garden and then bringing this area out and didn't quite make it uh over the this water is being brought in uh from the sea which is over here and so this this Terrace can come out over the water and be a a way to create views both out to this Straits of Florida and into the city behind and also by having Gardens up here and Gardens which need to be watered um all the the runoff can come and drip down into this Basin and create you know hanging creepers and maybe a nice space in here where it's cooled by all the greenery and the water coming through the plants the whole Pro whole notion of the rooftop gardens is much stronger here in this time than it was in the other and her beautiful unit that's not here that we love so much is going to have to be adjusted I assume there's one up here but there's going to be a new unit here it is now been broke which is good I mean you still got it but you got maybe three instead of one so it seems to me that she has you have done for her what she wants to do even more so now why couldn't you do that for yourself I was working with the same thing forever and it was it was hard to make myself break away from that I think that's the point and there are no consequences for doing it for someone else no yeah you don't think about everything that you've been agonizing over for months you just do it we have a final review and that's a that's a I joke with them I I said you know you're just starting and uh it's a good start um because I do believe it's a good start it's not it's not the end and that may be frustrating sometimes I like to think that they've finished something and they have and then and this year I was very pleased when when in that room to see the work on the walls that we had reached a place but just the beginning in the traditional model of teaching architecture students were required to present only their final designs before a panel of nine or 10 critics these critics or jurors as they were called would comment criticize and lecture students about the problems and inadequacies of their work the comments to students were sometimes helpful but many times demeaning this process created a tense situation where students were forced to defend their design decisions contrary to this outdated technique Jan has his students present to a small group of critics this smaller group creates a more intimate setting where the student can converse with the critics the less formal setting allows the students and the critics to share ideas thoughts and perspectives in a non-confrontational process the building over time is a richness that I think we all appreciate the time factor in architecture is very important and you've in by virtue of a design studio and the fact that you only had a limited amount of time have been able to include this richness in one project and we very attracted to it but it it it is missing the rigor of understanding literally how one would get from the public room to the very top of this unit and how associative that experience would be would it in fact be like needing to climb a spiral staircase or a fire pole or something to get up there in which case then the richness of what you've shown as a plan Arrangement starts to fall apart a little bit because of the dimensions that are going to be needed to actually get somebody's groceries up and down into the top of this one next step to me is to say okay look at your elevation along the main front and look at what's existing and see whether you can distill from even a longer stretch of the neighborhood some vocabulary that is more not sympath sympathetic but also like picking pieces up back and see even this uhhuh could work with your two story module and there's certain things I think you you can work with it's a student's job just as in my own work to sort out the criticisms that they get and how that can modify their project it's not a yes or no thing as that often is in the jury system either you did it right or you did it wrong that's not the way it is there's no Rights and Wrongs I totally agree with you that I can see as as a way of linking these that like like you're saying here like using this idea to then like reexamine what's down here and and draw those connections I I think it would actually help a lot because it it was something I had a dilemma with was the fact that I was knocking everything down but at the same time I had a really hard time picking between you know this and this seeing as they're all so those are really valuable comments I think the premise of Studio allows one to rethink at a very kind of radical core basis how these daily activities that we partake in really do form the world that we're in and how we could be advocates for rethinking how they affect our daily lives from a large scale intervention Mi case to something that that developed a very human scale and detailing and and and seem very believable or or or starting at something that very much from from very Natalie's very close observations of of the human scene but building up something in the neighborhood scale that had a rhythm and a consistency and a pattern to it that was that was also very believable so see these different starting points but but coming all coming together um to to uh um to to work very well there's a difference between designing a building and designing a building for for people knowing people's hopes and desires and understanding the culture are the critical elements that Jan teaches his students to bring to their designs this attitude is one Jan hopes will start to influence the world of architecture that the world is made up of uh cultures people who have identities and that it's important that as an architect you reflect that um um that you're not a technician only you're a leader in a way of cultures a proponent of people's rights identities the putting together of materials to Echo that is very very important that there's a sensitivity and respect to all people in the process whereever it be the Builder on the side or the client uh um and a process that I teach not so much to Pride and I would hope they would leave uh well the purpose of education is to open doors I hope they would leave with a new attitude about life and what they can do and I would finally that uh as an architect they can do more than just make beautiful buildings which I want them to make but they can uh help people in the process for Fore for hey for