[Editors] SA+P News: December 2014

[Scott R Campbell]

  One of the Year’s Best Inventions

  Tehrani’s New Building

  Making the Invisible Visible

Media Architecture Winner

  A Font from Satellite Imagery of Buildings

 	
SA+P NEWS: December 2014

On Mass Ave, across the street from the Nuclear Reactor, there is a small concrete block building, the High Voltage Research Lab, with the letters 'hvrl' written on its side.

This rather ungainly building houses an important part of MIT’s history: its interior is cluttered with dusty, odd-looking machines, blackboards with equations, and shelves with decades’ worth of boxes, wires, tubes and what I presume are models of uranium molecules.

A corner of the building is now the temporary housing for Antón García-Abril’s workshop. There you will find his model for a mega structure that he built with the students. And in the parking lot outside, visible through the chain-link fence from Mass Ave, you will see his mock-up of another structure, built out of lightweight foam blocks.

It is all part of his fascination with material, mass and scale, a fascination that is at the core of his firm, called Ensamble Studio. We hope that one day we can secure a more permanent work place for such experiments.



Antón believes firmly that architecture, and more specifically structure, can be an instrument of social change. But he does not mean by structure the standard, modernist column grid and slab. Take his work with gigantic blocks of foam: they are good insulation and structural in their own right, and they can be easily moved. There are limits of course, but anyone who has met Antón knows that he thinks a bit differently than most.

To see his arguments in the context of the real thing, so to speak, go to NYC, where Ensamble’s ideas are featured in an exhibit at MoMA called ‘Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities’, on display until May 10, 2015. In this exhibition, Ensamble – together with URBZ, an experimental urban research and action collective – propose alternatives to the standard redevelopment strategies in Mumbai. Instead of tearing down the slums and building anonymous, off-the-shelf housing, they propose to let the local community ‘regrow’ their urban spaces by supplying a range of materials and techniques.

Antón has only been here a few years, but he is clearly already generating a lot of buzz. Hopefully, one day we will have our own indoor/outdoor research space where we can build all sorts of experimental architectures.

__________________________________
Mark Jarzombek
Interim Dean 
MIT School of Architecture + Planning
77 Massachusetts Avenue 7-231
Cambridge MA  02139 
sap-info at mit.edu 

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QUOTES OF NOTE

I don't think defining what is urban is clear anymore.

Hashim Sarkis arguing that we need to think of the entire world as one big city with varying degrees of density; ‘using the term “city”’, he said, ‘misses the fact that you can be in the most remote town outside of Edmonton, Canada and still be very connected. You’re still living an urban life.’ Global Post, November 7.
We can reveal the invisible in a city, the underworld we don't see every day.

Carlo Ratti talking about the ‘Underworlds’ project at the Senseable City Lab, using the underworld of sewers to open up a new world of information on human health and behavior; his team is designing smart platforms that collect sewage, filter it and analyze it using computational techniques, providing insight into the diseases circulating in a community before the people affected know for themselves. CNN Health, October 30.
It doesn’t seem very safe.

Miguel Rosales (SMArchS’87) talking about the Mass Ave bridge that connects MIT to Boston, famously calibrated in ‘smoots’ – the height of Oliver Smooth in 1958, when his fraternity brothers used him to measure the bridge’s span (364.4 smoots and one ear); Rosales has been commissioned by an anonymous donor to light the bridge with LED bulbs and roadway lights 30 smoots apart. Boston Globe, October 14.
Historic areas seem to be more regulated.

Albert Saiz commenting on the fact that left-leaning metros tend to have worse income inequality and less affordable housing, even after adjusting for income; ‘Democratic, high-tax metropolitan areas tend to constrain new development more,’ he said, presumably in part to preserve historic continuity. The Atlantic. October 29.
The world would certainly be a better place if we had more women entrepreneurs.

Cynthia Breazeal, part of Fortune’s 2014 class of Most Promising Entrepreneurs, talking about what it means to be a female entrepreneur; ‘women are going to bring a different angle to startups,’ she said, ‘because of their unique perspective.’ Fortune, November 19.
 

NEW FEATURES ONLINE

SA+P at Work in the Field
Internships in Tanzania, Ghana, Colombia, Canada and the US

 

SELECTED PRESS CLIPS

Full Listing available here.

And the Best US Architecture Schools for 2015 Are: (Arch Daily) MIT is listed fourth among the country’s best graduate schools.

The Top 25 Inventions of 2014 (Time Magazine) The list includes SA+P’s Copenhagen Wheel, a standard-size wheel – it can be attached to the back of most bicycles – boasts a rechargeable, battery-powered motor.

NADAAA’s New Building Down Under (Architect Magazine) For the University of Melbourne’s design school in Australia, Nader Tehrani’s NADAAA and John Wardle Architects have created a new building that wears pedagogy on its well-appointed sleeve.

Security is transforming public space (The Conversation) An essay by Lecturer Susan Silberberg about the effects of counter-terrorism measures on our urban experience.

MIT maps most popular Austin neighborhoods for children (Culturemap Austin) SA+P researchers analyzed population trends from 1970-2010 to determine where kids live; the result is a map that reflects the ebbs and flows of Austin as she changes, adapts and grows.

 

NEWS FLASHES

Cristina Parreño Alonso has been named one of Europe’s 40 most important and emerging young architects by The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design; she currently teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios at SA+P.

Isabelle Anguelovski (PhD’11, Urban Studies and Planning) has published a new book with the MIT Press, Neighborhood as Refuge: Community Reconstruction, Place Remaking and Environmental Justice in the City; Anguelovski is Marie Curie Fellow and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Tarry Hum (MCP’87) has published a new book with Temple University Press: Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park – ‘an in-depth look at some of the major issues and trends affecting urban areas in the United States’ according to Leland Saito, author of The Politics of Exclusion: The Failure of Race-Neutral Policies in Urban America.

Ana Cristina Vargas (SMArchS’14) has won the Dubai International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living Environment, for her thesis ‘Tracing Public Space, Mumbai, India’; her thesis advisor was Miho Mazereeuw. Vargas will receive a cash prize worth $30K.

Digital Matatus, a collaborative project run by Sarah Williams' Civic Data Design Lab, took the prize in the Participatory Architecture and Urban Interaction category at the Media Architecture Biennale Awards in Copenhagen; the awards recognize outstanding projects at the intersection of architecture, media and interaction design.

The Displacement Research Action Network, headed by Balakirshnan Rajagopal, has announced a partnership with the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva on a new project to focus on adequate housing solutions and tenure security for populations that are displaced to urban areas; the study will document and draw lessons from the policies, programs and projects which have proven most successful so far.

The New England Climate Adaptation Project has completed a series of role-play workshops in four coastal towns of New England, focused on climate adaptation planning strategies; the effort resulted in statistically significant shifts in participants’ concern about local risks and responsibilities, confidence in local efforts and appreciation of the need for collective action. The results are presented in the final Case Study reports for each town.

 

EXHIBITS

Programming Materials: Customized for Self-Folding
Through December 19, 2014, Keller Gallery, Room 7-408.

Industrial Urbanism
Through December 19, 2014, Wolk Gallery.

Three Pioneers 
Through December 31, 2014, Media Lab.


EVENTS

Many of our regular lecture series are in various stages of planning. Our full online calendar is always available here.

December 1st
Justin Lee with Richard Aeck 
9:30am, 7-429

December 1st
Scholars, Policymakers, and International Affairs: Finding Common Ground. 
12:00pm, E40-496

December 2nd
Conditions of violence in Central America and their effects on emigration from that region 
4:30pm, E40-464

December 2nd
Film Screening: ART21 "Fiction" (2014) 
7:00pm, E15-070

December 3rd
Disappearance: Violence & Urban Governance in Mexico 
12:30pm, 7-429

December 3rd
MIT-India Info Session 
5:00pm, E40-496

December 8th
French-American Innovation Day 2014, Day 1 
8:15am, E14-674

December 8th
Industrial Urbanism in Africa 
12:00pm, 9-450

December 8th
Daniela Perez & Patrick Charpennel | Gustav Metzger's Dome(s) Project
7:00pm, E15-070: Bartos Theater

December 9th
French-American Innovation Day 2014, Day 2 
8:45pm, E14-674

December 19th
CRE & AACRE Holiday Party 
5:00pm, Lucky's Lounge

 

STAY CONNECTED

          



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