Constructed Ecologies 2023

Fall 2023
Instructors: Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda

This seminar focussed on the threshold where nature [exterior] and building [interior] meet. This zone is commonly understood as a controlled border engineered to exclude natural systems and species to prioritize and maximize human comfort. “What does it mean to rethink this relationship? Is there be a more symbiotic relationship with living systems? Does the reframing of this duality impact the relationship of architecture in unexpected spatial and material ways? Furthermore, can we create an architectural interface which is part of a circular regenerative living system operating at multi-scales and with multi-species? As participants of the Biodesign Challenge held yearly in New York City, this course looked at biological processes of growth, self-assembly and adaptation, to uncover inventive methods of fabrication which can expand human construction to integrate living systems.

Constructed Ecologies seminar, Fall 2024:
Henry Obeng Asare
Alia Brookshire
Yuxi Chen
Daisy Downs
Jared Elizares
Jesus Macias Franco
Kianoush Hamedi
Negar Hosseini
Chizumi Kano
Vishesh Naresh Khetwani
Hannah Leathers
Miti Chetan Mehta
Manthan Rosal
Conrad Scheepers
Natalie Schtakleff
Vicky Sindac
Hannah Lee Sun
Jhostine Chalen Ulloa
Andrew Justin Villanueva

ReGeneration

Fall 2023
Integrated Studio
Instructors: Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda

The agricultural promise of work in California was a central draw for many immigrants throughout the twentieth centuries. The valleys of California constitute one of the largest areas of fertile soil on earth coupled with an ideal temperate climate. Successive cultural migrations created a legacy of communities scattered throughout the rural valleys, made possible by their abilities to work the ground, leaving a cultural impact still visible today. While the midwestern grain fields are called “America’s breadbasket” California is sometimes known as the “salad bowl”. With its many microclimates and ecological zones, the state produces over 400 different crops. Equally diverse are the cultures who have been able to settle here and create community. The studio will profile one of these communities in the Arroyo Grande Valley. The site is unique in that it is a communally owned two acre piece of land within an orchard which historically housed a school, community center and kitchen and was the central gathering space for a marginalized group of Japanese immigrants in the 1920s. During World War II when increasing restrictions were imposed on Japanese-Americans in terms of living on the coast, the land became a refuge. After the US imposed relocation of the entire community to incarceration camps, the property acted as a place to which community members could return to as they transitioned back into an area which still looked at them as the ‘enemy’. With the passing of generations and the integration of the Japanese American community into the extended culture of the city, the key question is how to develop the property for the benefit of the greater community without erasing the integrity of the site and the legacy of its activity?

The interaction of the ground (living systems, soil), the cultural history (agriculture, settlement, culture) and the economic future (architecture, building systems) are three equally important factors to be weighed in this studio. Like the traditional game of “rock, paper scissors” each of these elements can be thought of as operating simultaneously on the site, with no one aspect overwhelming the other. Game theorists look at this type of arrangement as self-balancing. 

The community center, the last surviving building, which operated as a boy scout meeting hall and Judo dojo was burned down to the ground by arson in 2011. As part of a larger general plan project involving the suburban tract home development of an eleven acre agricultural field to the west, the land was incorporated into a new set of guidelines allowing for greater uses and densities previously prohibited. The studio will work within these guidelines to give form to the complex histories and future potentials for the fourth generation of this still cohesive community. Working within the integrity of the land, history and future forms, the studio will explore how these three scales of time can be brought together on site to suggest flexible and evolving buildings moving forward. Programmatically the site will need to provide an archive, a commercial gathering space, housing and a retail space that support an agricultural educational garden.

The studio will draw on the resources of an existing archive of local documentation and recorded oral histories, will look at regenerative agricultural practices and architectural strategies that are adaptive and promote ecological awareness. As one of the few remaining parcels of city land in the alluvial valley untouched by asphalting and development, the site becomes a strategic location to critically assess the potential of an integrated approach to ecological stewardship and regenerative agricultural practices. While the studio may be highly specific and localized, the questions it addresses are more universal: How can you materialize a past that can ground a regenerative (sustainable) future?

ReGeneration Studio, Fall 2023:
Henry Obeng Asare, Angelica “Mona” Carinugan, Jared Elizares, Luis “Arturo” Gomez, Arjay Jimenez, Chizumi Kano, Vishesh Naresh Khetwani, Hannah Lee Sun, Zion Lewis, David Locon, Daisy Porras, Manthan Rasal, Negar Sadat Hosseini Ebrahimabad, Conrad Scheepers, Vicky Sindac, Joshua Van Heidrich

Urban Ecotones at Islais Creek II

Spring 2022
Instructors: Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda

Biologists define an ecotone as a region of transition between two biological communities. In nature these two communities create edges that are legible but equally capable of growth, adaptation and change.

The historical settlement of the San Francisco Bay shoreline, like many urban estuaries, has been one of modifying naturalized edges in favor of fixed vertical surfaces engineered for specific hard infrastructures like piers and seawalls. Islais Creek, the largest watershed in the San Francisco peninsula, over time was gradually channelized and filled in to create new land for development. These types of infrastructural projects have created physical shoreline boundaries, marginalizing communities like Bayview Hunters Point from water access and leaving a legacy of polluted soil, underemployment and urban segregation. The pandemic has only exacerbated these economic and historical inequalities.

The mantra of UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities Initiative is, “Every child has the right to grow up in an environment where they feel safe and secure, have access to basic services, clean air, and water, can play, learn and grow and where their voice is heard and matters”. San Francisco is part of the first cohort of cities taking on the initiative since August of 2020. The studio built upon this Initiative and collaborated with the local elementary school at Malcolm X Academy (MXA). The 5th grade students who live in Bayview Hunters Point had specific ideas and visions of what their neighborhood needs. This studio collaborated with these students to amplify their concepts through speculative visions of legacy projects possible at their school. The studio worked with a multidisciplinary team (MXA teacher and principal, CCA AEL & Benthic Lab, Y-PLAN, Kulima, and SF Planning) to elevate community solutions while implementing environmental justice fundamentals, using a multi-generational strategy for long term resilience.

Bayview Hunters Point is a former military, industrial, and isolated area of San Francisco, with a long history of being a food desert with lack of access to grocery stores and fresh produce. The studio was sited within Bayview, on the southwest bank of Islais Creek and focused on San Francisco Planning’s June 2021, Islais Creek Adaptation Strategy Final Report. The studio projects addressed the need for food security and supportive housing and offices. Working with modular housing manufacturer Factory OS, and Urban Farming group Top Leaf Farms, the studio synthesized the technical constraints of these systems into a comprehensive projects which were capable of adaptation to flooding and sea-level rise.

Buoyant Ecologies: Urban Ecotones at Islais Creek, SP 2022:
Lucas Cornejo, Venessa Davidenko, Mason Denton, Jason Gonzalez, Hsiao Chun Hou, Jung Yong Kim, Woohyung Kim, Caine Knuckles, Nicole Kuo, Claire Leffler, Savannah Lindsey, Yitian Ma, David Rege, David Rico-Gomez, Ashley G Rodriguez, Rebecca Velasquez

Ecological Tectonics

Spring 2022
Instructors: Adam Marcus and Alex Schofield

This Building Technology seminar explores ceramic material assemblies as a locus for expanding architecture’s ecological performance. The seminar focuses on the digital fabrication of modular ceramic systems that can serve as ecological habitats for a variety of species. Specifically, the course utilizes robotic equipment to 3D print ceramic modules that vary in form and texture. Building upon existing work at the CCA Architectural Ecologies Lab, the course integrates ecological research into non-human species, their habitats, and how artificial substrates might benefit a more biodiverse ecosystem.

Students, Spring 2022: Brandon Adan, Ahmad Alajmi, Yating Bai, Kimia Bam Farahnak, Jason Gonzalez, Saina Gorgani, Kushaal Jhaveri, Woohyung Kim, Julianna La Mantia, Claire Leffler, Maryam Liaghatjoo, Anbin Liu, Leonel Miranda, Colin Murdock, Ki Schmidt, Amy Spanos, David Rege, Ashley Rodriguez, Weisheng Zhong

Materialities of Care: Domestic Entanglements Across Species

Fall 2021
Instructor: Adam Marcus

This advanced architecture studio explores innovative material assemblies as a site for reconsidering contemporary domesticity in the context of ecological change and climate adaptation. The studio looks to principles of mutualism and cohabitation as a way to imbue architecture with a renewed ethos of care at multiple ecological scales. We study models of both human and more-than-human habitation as precedents and inspiration for how architects might re-conceptualize and re- materialize domestic space. Central to this inquiry is a focus on techniques of design computation and digital fabrication, and how such tools can be leveraged to open up new material strategies for domestic habitation across scales and species.

The intent is to consider how potential entanglements among beings and species may offer new possibilities for productive coexistence and ecological care.

Students, Fall 2021: Suvin Choi, Gerardo Garcia Juarez, Alden Gendreau, Wing Kiu Ho, Hsiao Chun Hou, Kushaal Jhaveri, Woohyung Kim, Hongjie Kuang, Yitian Ma, Colin Murdock, Amalia Pulgar, David Rico-Gomez, Wan Yan

Constructed Ecologies III

Fall 2020
Instructors: Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda

For the third Constructed Ecologies seminar participating in the BioDesign Challenge, a more complex investigation into natural materials was undertaken. Under remote online conditions, locally sourced materials became the focus for creating new processes for gathering, growing and engineering various types of new materials and assemblies. Final projects speculated about new ways of synthesizing ecological habitats into human constructions.

Constructed Ecologies seminar, Fall 2020:
Abigail Rockwell
Maro Han
Nidhi Patel
Steven Ramirez
Anbin Liu
Elmer Wang
Geetika Rohra
Helena Cardona
Jennifer Jimenez
Kaichen Lu
Lina Kudinar
PIetro Carini
Shih Ting Huang
Yihan Wang

Urban Ecotones at Islais Creek I

Videos

Fall 2020
Instructors: Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda

Biologists define an ecotone as a region of transition between two biological communities. In nature these two communities create edges that are legible but equally capable of growth, adaptation and change. This idea was a launching point for the exploration of speculations about Islais Creek and the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood as well as thinking about overall issues of coastal flooding and adaptation.

The historical settlement of the San Francisco Bay shoreline, like many urban estuaries, has been one of modifying these natural ecotones in favor of fixed vertical edges engineered for specific hard infrastructures like piers and seawalls. Islais Creek, once the largest watershed in the San Francisco peninsula, was gradually channelized and filled in by real estate speculators. Currently, the location where Islais Creek visually begins (daylighted) is a major outflow for a wastewater treatment plant that handles 80% of the city’s solid waste. The edges are mostly truncated, paved and covered with non-functioning piers and silos, but also commercial shipping that brings in piles of building materials, sand, concrete and aggregate, essential for the construction of the city which rises in the background. These large infrastructural projects have created physical shoreline boundaries, marginalizing communities like Bayview Hunter’s Point from water access and leaving a legacy of polluted soil, underemployment and urban segregation. Yet intertwined with these material staging areas are novel approaches to material salvage, landscape businesses, and creative reuse. We will look to these approaches to suggest potential avenues for new economic development as an alternative to top-down approaches. As historical inequalities are being brought to light in the public discourse and as the economic fallout of the pandemic impacts poor communities disproportionately, this studio will explore how architecture can begin to synthesize ecological and urban remediation with practical and inspired architectural actions. 

This studio worked with longtime AEL partners at the Benthic Lab, Kreysler & Associates, and Autodesk Technology Centers. As well as with agency input from the Port of San Francisco, the City of SF Planning as well as BCDC, the major governing bodies tasked with regulating Islais Creek shoreline area. Teams of predominantly two students worked to understand these high level policies in conjunction with a more fine grain reading of the community, the ecology, and the infrastructure potential of the site from the ground up. The teams worked with CCA faculty Julia Grinkrug and CCA alumni D’Sjon Dixon, through Y-Plan to engage with local 4th graders at Malcolm X Elementary school to understand environmental justice issues facing the community. Each team leveraged the opportunity to integrate systems that tap into site resources like wastewater, renewable energy collection, transport hubs, and food production.  Looking ecologically at the site, in conjunction with collaboration with restoration biologists and urban farmer Ben Fahrer, the projects explored how their architectural propositions facilitate growth and regeneration of human and non-human communities. 

The studio is registered in the Green New Deal Superstudio which looks at giving vision to how social justice and climate change can be manifested in specific regional proposals which demonstrate principles of Decarbonization, Justice and Jobs. The studio work will be exhibited as part of this national effort in September of 2021.


Buoyant Ecologies: Urban Ecotones at Islais Creek, Fall 2020: Mariajose Anguita, Mitsuko Balarezo, Michelle Boyd, Roxana Yaquelin Breceda, Javier Breceda, Pietro Carini, Dev Chand, Aljune Drequito, Jennifer Jimenez, Cristian Laurent, Maria Ramirez Perez, Steven Ramirez, Valeriya Velyka, Elmer Wang, Yuyi Zheng

Spatial Genealogies

Spring 2020
Instructor: Chris Falliers

The MAAD Proseminar: Spatial Genealogies is a seminar/workshop in which post-professional students with the Master of Advanced Architectural Design (MAAD) program explore the network of influences, connections, and tangents that inform advanced design practice. Leveraging previous or on-going work in one of three MAAD concentrations, History+Theory+Experiments, Urban Works, or the Digital Craft, students trace the lineage of a topic in formal, historic, and conceptual terms. Students research precedents and disciplinary context, building a deeper academic and professional understanding of one aspect of their own MAAD work.  Individually or in groups, students develop a speculative artifact that communicates knowledge to, and provokes discussion with, a larger audience.  This ‘device’ or ‘platform’ to communicate research in a public/institutional space is seen as an act of design.   

For the spring 2020 class, students chose to work collectively on the heightened understanding of, and engagement with, non-human subjectivities.  This brought a fourth perspective focused on themes of urban ecologies, social organizing, and collectivity.  The collective design is seen as a call to action and provocation on how to live with, and for, non-human species.

MAAD Proseminar, Spring 2020: Jiries Alali, Leandra Burnett, Donna Mena, Kurt Pelzer, Sharan Shivkumar Sboji

Local Timber

project by Alma Davila and Hannah Jane Kim

Spring 2020
Instructors: Mark Donohue and Lisa Findley

This Integrated Studio explores reasons (environmental + contextual + ethical + ideological + historical + pragmatic), strategies (theoretical + spatial + formal + collaborative) and techniques (process + material) for making architecture that is explicitly Local. Like Local Food, Local Architecture is highly specific in response to place and climate, in material, local supply chains, construction craft and technique, and in capacity building and sustainability (environmental, social, economic and cultural). 

While the approach of this studio can be applied wherever in the world an architect is working, we will be using the Bay Area (and northern California) as an ideal place to carry out our research. Its location as the western edge of the North American continent and the eastern edge of the Pacific Rim, along with its history of development independent of East Coast influences, has resulted in ongoing specific and robust architectural dialogs and work from several generations of architects. These are unique to this place, its climate, its history and its way of life. However, we are not interested in nostalgia. This studio looks to the future to seek new forms of Northern California architecture that respond to current opportunities and challenges while anticipating the impacts of climate change, shifting demographics and the inevitable “Big One”. 

Of specific interest to our studio is the intensive use of a locally available building material that is currently seeing a renewed focus among architects everywhere: Wood. Warm, beautiful, sustainable, adaptable, and a material long sourced and used in Northern California buildings, wood will be the material focus of this studio. We will be looking at numerous new wood manufacturing technologies reflected in a wide range of contemporary buildings, using these as inspiration, touchstones and precedents. 

Site 

The project is situated on the Scribe Winery, just a few miles east of Sonoma, California. The vineyard slopes up very gradually from south to north for the first ¼ mile, then ends as grassland rises more quickly up to a wooded ridge. Our site is located in the lower portion of this steeper land, where a copse of mature oak trees shade a piece of flatter ground and overlook the vineyards below. This part of the winery land is accessed by a dirt road that is almost entirely hidden from view from the site. 

Program

To explore the above issues, the studio will immerse students in a lively combination of research (theory + precedents + technological), making (full-size explorations of wood connections), and innovative applications of wood in the design and development of a medium-sized, carefully crafted wood building for a winery. Located on a rich, highly specific, classically NorCal wildland-urban-interface site, the project is home to a barrel room, a tasting room/kitchen, and lodging for visiting artists.

Local Timber studio, spring 2020: Alma Davila, Craig Dias, Dev Chand, Geetika Rohra, Hannah Jane Kim, Iana Giarca Gimena, Jose Rodriguez Trujillo, Marion Rosas, Mohamed Dirbas, Samuel Kilpatrick, Shih Ting Huang, Taamara Rath, Yihan Wang, Yuze Deng

Buoyant Blueprint

Fall 2019
Instructors: Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda

Maldives is a territory made up of 1% land and 99% ocean. Approximately 200 of its 1200 islands are inhabited. High-end resorts lease about 90 islands, offering a remote island experience with white sand beaches and unique coral reef dives for thousand dollars a night rates. This is the nation’s main economy, along with fishing, specifically for Skipjack tuna. For the local Muslim citizens, the extreme pressures on their nation (the lowest lying in the world), with the closest neighbor Sri Lanka, located over 600 miles away, are glaringly obvious. Sea walls protect its capital where a third of its population live, desalination and bottled water is the primary source of fresh drinking water, diesel is its main source of fuel, trash is burned, staple food is almost entirely imported. On paper, this is a recipe for long-term disaster. Yet, our visit and immersion into the Maldivian culture this summer revealed a crucial underpinning to all that is dire to this nation – a history of living with an everyday 360 degree view of the ocean with no inland. In a sense, they are already floating. And this lived understanding of being an isolated nation of islands in the Indian Ocean gives them the cultural expertise to teach those of us around the world about resilience. New to this semester’s studio will be our collaboration with citizens in the Maldives. They welcome Buoyant Ecologies’ interest to investigate ways to develop infrastructure for a community adapting to the changing climate that focuses on the health of their ecosystem as a key driver. This type of proposal offers an alternative to the ecologically destructive process of land reclamation that has been the development practice over the last decade. The studio will have conversations with architectural students from The Maldives National University (MNU), Maldivian policy makers, architects and engineers as we develop a project for a local island called Dhangethi. The studio projects will learn how to integrate five sustainable infrastructural systems (renewable energy, fresh water collection, anaerobic waster-water treatment, food production and recycling) that support the local island culture. The goal of this studio is to offer a BLUEPRINT for resilience designed for Maldivians, but one also adaptable to other coastal communities.

Buoyant Blueprint students, Fall 2019: Sayer Al Sayer, Vishnu Balunsat, Hardik Bhimani, Jiaqi Cao, Vaidehi Davda, Jiaqi Deng, Jeycy Diaz, Daniela Granillo, Thomas Krulevitch, Yuchen Li, Zixuan Liu, Jingyi Luo, Carlos Miranda, Duy Nguyen, Marina Rosolem, Cera Yeo, Chuan Zhu

Mechanized Natures

Fall 2019
Instructor: Adam Marcus

This seminar explores the overlaps between two persistent threads in architecture: technologies of mechanization and the representation of the natural environment. These topics are explored through readings, seminars, case study research, and a series of drawing projects that engage with processes of automation and ecological thinking. The course focuses on techniques of architectural drawing and representation as one way to explore and develop attitudes towards machines and nature. In particular, students employed CNC and robotic drawing machines in conjunction with procedural, parametric software to produce a set of experimental drawings that blend aspects of automation and risk in their production.

Students: Ireny Abrahim, Laksh Agrawal, Jiries Alali, Aidan Atman, Vishnu Balunsat, Alma Davila, Cynthia Escalante, Iana Gimena, Yue Liu, Zixuan Liu, Kyle Matlock, Ronak Patel, Marina Rosolem, Ting-Kai Wang

Constructed Ecologies II

Fall 2019
Instructors: Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda

Constructed Ecologies investigates the design and deployment of habitats to benefit marine animals. Currently, these hard surfaces are not optimized for marine animal communities; they are engineered to protect human communities. We rethought this hierarchy by integrating coastal infrastructure and marine life in a way that taught us about the interconnectedness of systems that ultimately benefit both the city and its inhabitants. To investigate these solutions we continued to engage collaboratively with ecologists, other schools and digital design fabrication specialists. We will also expanded our area of research to focus on ecologically safe materials for ocean application and the integration of sensors to record, inform and represent ecological phenomena. For the second year in a row, this seminar developed one project for entry in the BioDesign Challenge.

 

Constructed Ecologies seminar, Fall 2019:
Alhakam Alaedh
Celdin Fajardo
Yitian Ma
Lili Mao
Marc Northstar
Keehyun Ryu
Daniel Ramirez
Sharan Shivkumar Saboji
Joshua Van Heidrich

California City: Urban Composites of the Productivity Landscape

Fall 2019
Instructors: Nataly Gattegno and Hugh Hynes

The landscape of California’s inland region is characterized by dispersed settlements formed for the extraction, management, and exploitation of material and energy resources, a productive terrain amplified by technology. Dotted with obsolete remnants of industrial detritus and the abandoned company towns that once fueled them, these composite systems of urbanism and productivity exhibit a range of dormancy, activity, and latent potential. At the same time, technological innovations and shifting patterns of productivity/consumption suggest pathways to the re-population of California’s desert interior. This studio exploited those pathways, and developed versions of the new “company towns” that may result.   

California City studio, fall 2019: James Ayling, Aljune Drequito, Dina Elattar, Jessica Grinaker, Chiang-An Huang, Mithila Jagtap, Asa Maas, Kyle Matlock, Donna Mena, Jose Olazabal, Kevin Pham, Keehyun Ryu, Sharan Shivkumar Saboji

ECOPOESIS: Creative Responses to Climate Chaos

Fall 2019
Instructors: Chris Falliers and Leslie Carol Roberts

From contemplation to advocacy, the symposium asked students to interrogate the materiality of ecologies, from messaging with language to messaging with form through the creation of artifacts. The class explored how systems of language, making, and representation engage emerging ecological change, a condition some call global warming and some call climate change -- and some completely deny as a condition at all. 

Situated in the Graduate Writing Program, and co-taught by instructors from Writing and Architecture, graduate students from multiple programs experimented with short form writings and collaborated on group projects, developing both internal dialogues and speculative artifacts for external communication. Presented in an interactive exhibition setting, the projects explored the production of ​visual/spatial/physical/written representations​ ​of environment developed as a ‘compelling’ communication/position on a contemporary ecological situation(s). In short, through research and speculation, each group produced a designed artifact as a collective message​.  The class revolved around a thought: ​Humans have the power to come together to create ideas and to use these thoughts and ideas to shape the world into the way they want it to be -- not to wait to see what the world is telling them to be.

Ecopoesis Seminar, fall 2019: Slade Gottlieb, Edith Friedman, Grace Galletti, Hannah Lamb-Vines, Jamie King, Jingyi Qiu, Joseph Holsworth, Margot Becker, Olga Gonzalez Latapi, Palak Japlot, Rob Bailey, Sean Nishi, Sonal Ravi, Sydney Mondry, Thais Derich, Almer He, Yohannes Tesfamichael

Fluvial Commons

Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020
Instructors: Shalini Agrawal & Julia Grinkrug
Upper Division Interdisciplinary Studio (UDIST)

In the time of environmental and political instability, the fixed boundaries between private and public, natural and artificial, land and water – become uncertain. This course invites students to envision a possibility of fluid and dynamic relationships that embrace change and adaptability. The course examines people’s responsibility to water as a “common” resource, including the ways we use water, how or how not it is accessible, the dynamics of flow, and the social-natural ecologies of the watershed.

Students imagine, explore, and prototype water related scenarios, while addressing the multiple scales of reciprocal relationships between people and water – from molecular and micro-organic, through skin and body, to regional and potentially global. The outcome of the course are a series of responses, implemented as tangible prototypes that represent various imagined possibilities of how we interact with water.

In previous semesters students engaged in in-depth sensorial observations and interactive workshops that were geared to identify and to represent various components of site-specific cultural and environmental conditions. The core exposures of the course included conversations with experts, artists, activists, and community members combined with site visits and field trips. 

As a result, students produced experiential and participatory installations that prompted deep interrogation of some of the fundamental premises in cultural-environmental imperative. Some of the questions asked where: What is nature? How and why do we care? How can we activate our memory? What is the reasoning behind our behaviors?

Constructed Ecologies I

Spring 2019,
Instructors: Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda

This Building Technology elective engaged in a focused design research investigation about architecture’s relationship to nature through a unique platform for student collaboration with scientists called the BioDesign Challenge. The class looked broadly at the philosophical distinctions between natural and constructed systems, examining case study projects and AEL research operating at the intersection of architecture, biology and technology. Building upon selected precedent projects, the seminar sought to understand the ecologically detrimental effects of human coastal interventions in the San Francisco Bay and suggest new scalable strategies for designing with living systems. Working collaboratively with biologists and manufacturers, design proposals strove to catalyze and foster new marine habitats by integrating advanced material and manufacturing logics. Resulting prototypes were fabricated with an interest in onsite testing in the San Francisco Bay.

 

Constructed Ecologies seminar, spring 2019:
Cristian Laurent
Joshua Eufinger
Lori Martinez
Maria Ulloa
Mithila Jagtap
Pete Pham

ReefScape

ppham_ARCHT-540-01_BoardTwo.jpg
ppham_ARCHT-540-01_BoardOne.jpg

Mussel City

Mussel BOARD 1
Mussel BOARD 2
Mussel BOARD 3

Vertical Shore

HERRING BOARD 1
Herring BOARD 2
Herring BOARD 3

Cloud Cities, and other possibilities

Spring 2017, Spring 2019
Instructors: Chris Falliers (2019); Chris Falliers & Joseph Becker (2017)

Utopian or dystopian speculation often champions, or warns of, the potential for current/near future technologies to trigger societal or environmental transformation.  Artists and designers have engaged in this work by constructing polemic objects or speculative representations to spur public discourse.  As we consider the possibilities of social exchange and environmental transformation within today’s technological milieu (open-source communities, ubiquitous algorithms, biological simulations, sensor-saturated environments, etc.), what are today’s artifacts for utopian/dystopian speculation/critique?

Exploring the speculative artifact as a polemical statement, the two versions of the class balanced analysis and speculation.  The seminar explored readings and case studies by artists, architects, writers, and scientists that leveraged advances in science and technology to posit spatial forms of human interconnectivity and environmental explication.  The class engaged with curators and works from Bay Area exhibitions on art + design’s relationship to science or environmental idealism, BAM’s Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein and SFMOMA’S The Sea Ranch, Architecture, Environment, and Idealism, SFMOMA’S Stillness in Motion, as well as an SFMOMA Collection Study Center session to discuss student-selected works.  The 2017 class had the opportunity to launch artist Tomas Saraceno’s Aerocene Discovery Kit.  Joined by members of Antfarm, colleagues from other universities, and kids in park, an outdoor class mixed flying 20’ solar energy-filled balloons with a discussion on contemporary environmental thought.

Using understandings gained from an analysis of speculative work, students developed a speculative artifact of their own, one that engaged in a dialogue between technology, environmental, and/or societal exchange.

Cloud Cities, 2019: Victor Chang, Kshitija Hagarkar, Karol Horr, Mamdouh Khogeer, Marwan Mohammed , Caroline Randall, Elsy Zhang.

Cloud Cities, 2017: Jennifer Brandel, Paulina Buchcik, Madeline Cunningham, Mai Yamada Duellman, Eric Fura, Sean Gentry, Pearce Gillespie, Bonny Guo, Antuanette Holder, Kow Kao, Manasi Kshirsagar, Xenia Mosley, Pete Pham, Nicholas Schribner.

Buoyant Ecologies Maldives

Fall 2017, Fall 2018
Instructors: Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones

This studio focused on the Maldives, a nation averaging only 1.5 meters above the current sea level. The Maldives consist of over 1100 islands arranged in 26 atolls famous for their pristine coral reefs and resorts. Less photographed are their more populated islands where many smaller villages subsist on fishing and tourism, both of which are in danger of devastation from erosion, warming oceans and rising seas. The studio recognized this mutual dependence of ecology and economy and speculated on an adaptive architectural prototype capable of providing the Maldivians with a way to live independently of the land and self sufficiently on the ocean. Building upon previous research work testing digitally fabricated marine substrates in ocean water, the architectural studio scales up this research to investigate the formation of a floating community built upon a symbiotic relationship between housing, tourism, and research.

Informed by established collaborators including marine biologists at Benthic Lab at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and fiberglass fabricators at Kreysler & Associates, the studio sought to synthesize ideas about making and performance at a variety of scales. The conservation of resources as it pertains to ecology, energy and materials was of central interest in a place historically dependent on imported resources. The studio was able to consult with local Maldivian residents to gain insight and understanding of their daily rituals, culture and environmental landscape.

Relevance of the work in the studio was further informed by engaging with an additional collaborator, The Hydrous, a local non-profit organization whose mission is to create “open access oceans”. Providing years of local monitoring and research into coral reef ecology in the Maldives with a network of scientists, divers, designers, filmmakers, and technologists, their documentation work provided a critical resource for understanding the local context and visualizing new forms and spaces for living on the water.

As an integrated building design studio, the students met with naval, mechanical and structural engineers at regular intervals to develop their projects into realizable propositions whose narrative included the process of assembly, adaptability and resilience. The process of the studio moved quickly and was driven by an iterative process of physical and digital modeling, integrating research and culminating in a set of comprehensive drawings rich in both technical specificity and inspired speculation.

 

Buoyant Ecologies Studio, Fall 2018: Marwan Bamasood, Sean Cunningham, Isha Fathmath, Vivi Isnata, Cassady Kenney, Elena Lazaretnik, Jennifer Pandian, Sabrina Schrader, Carlos Edgardo Serrano, Eric Soifer, Jen Tai, Maria Ulloa

Buoyant Ecologies Studio, Fall 2017: Georgia Came, Mai Yamada Duellman, Eric Fura, Sabari Gopakumar, Clare Hacko, Rachel Hammond, Justine Humble, Joaquin Tobar Martinez, Alexander Pardes, Rosa Ramos, Nicholas Scribner, Justin Smith, Samantha Villasenor, Yumeng Wang

Pattern Mechanism Form

Fall 2016 - 2018
Instructor: Michael Bogan
Stanford Collaborators: Jolyn Gisselberg, Michelle Davison, Adam Idoine, Claudia Vasquez, Jacqueline Carozza

In this Upper Division Interdisciplinary Studio (UDIST), students created works of design using living organisms, under the mentorship of Stanford Biology Postdocs.  Design via the Scientific Method (hypotheses formation and testing) was the core of the studio.  The course consisted of four parts. 

Part I: Algorithmic Imitations of Life Patterns (Pattern).  Students learned that biological patterns are woven of blind, bottom-up mechanistic processes.  An understanding of this was developed via algorithmic (rule-based) drawings, in which the rules were either sentences or mechanical operations.  Variations on prevalent cellular growth and aggregation patterns were explored to investigate the parameters of the biological design-space at the cellular scale.

Part II: Diagramming.  Methods of diagramming were taught in the second module, with a focus on bio-motion.

Part III: Cellular Aggregation.  Slime mold, bacteria, and fungi were grown in environments architected to produce art.  This module explored growth and design Mechanisms. 

Part IV: Living Art.  We often teach students to bring aspects of ‘nature’ into their work, but rarely is this based on a real understanding of the biological forms that often move us deeply.  In the final module of the course students were able to deploy actual living systems, and learn about their affordances, inertial tendencies, will, habits, etc.  These organisms became co-authors of the studio projects.  The goal was to create a work of living art or design relevant to the student’s discipline.  (Form)

Local Fiber Incubator

Spring 2018
Instructor: Amy Campos
Upper Division Interdisciplinary Studio (UDIST)

This interdisciplinary class explores the range of local fibers found within a one and a half hour radius of San Francisco, the processing of them into proposals and artifacts, and the documentation and presentation of these resources.  Students connect directly with ranchers and farmers, hand spinners and fabricators and have instructional making time in a studio environment. Projects are arranged around field trips to gather fiber, research and information, and studio time to develop material form studies and prototypes, guided by a series of cumulative projects throughout the semester, which build upon each other to bring the students from small scale material studies to developed, marketable and functioning prototypes, exhibited publicly at the end of the semester. The course develops primary research skills, documentation in hard copy, photographic and video form, as well as hands-on workshops, including felting, dying as well as working in the soft lab and wood and rapid prototyping shops on the CCA SF campus, and finally and exhibition curation and installation. This course partners with a number of entities to enrich and contextualize the students’ making. These include: Fibershed, Black Rock Ranch, Coyuchi, Peace Industry, Stinson Beach Library, Mann Family Farm, and Janice Arnold.

Students develop a strong sense of materiality and place as well as a ‘globalocal’ perspective - on a small scale, by following and documenting fiber from its source through to final products; and on a large scale, by experiencing the economic pressures of small farmers and ranchers working in the larger economic systems of trade and commerce.  Students also develop an understanding of the relationships between rural and urban, local and global, rancher/farmer and designer, and slow and fast cycles.  In the studio, students are expected to gather intermediate skills in felting and will be exposed to potential augmented manufacturing techniques and to become adept at transforming fiber into final products through physical prototyping and development using CCA's labs.  

RECOGNITION: