Chongming Island School of Design

Option studio project at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), instructors Hu Li and Wenjing Huang of Open Architecture

with Ryan Han

This proposal for a school housing five majors (furniture, industrial, communication, textile and fashion design) located on the frontier of Shanghai’s urban expansion is developed around the possibility of ecology as social agenda. This prompt forced us to look critically at what ecology really means, despite its ambiguous ubiquity in contemporary discourse. By recasting ecology as a method for understanding how groups of people, meteorology and even other species interrelate, the project refashions architecture not as a static mass of materials but as a facilitator of the spatial ebbs and flows which define when and where these various agents in our environment relate by mere adjacency, intersect or entangle.

Early research focused on the structure of design education itself. How does the organization of a curriculum suggest a particular spatial arrangement of design, particularly as it relates to the entanglement of various disciplines?

Constructed on an artificial wetland site amid a new campus masterplan, the project envisions the inherent constraints of an unideal ground (too wet) and strict climatic considerations (Shanghai’s hot, wet summers and surprisingly cold winters) as fundamental aspects in establishing design prerogatives: massing is shaped to permit sunlight to pass through, façade systems regulate heating, pilotis carry the weight of the foundation without sinking into the porous earth. The building thus functions akin to a spatial filter between the center of the campus and an adjacent public canal.

By evaluating the constituencies of students, faculty members, academic departments, other schools on the campus, the public and even natural forces (wind, light, wildlife et cetera) on site, the project considers the role of architecture in a cultural moment defined by an increasing complexity in our understanding of both natural and human systems, especially as they begin to enmesh with one another. The school therefore speculates on architecture not as an a priori element responsible for defining relationships without external context but rather as a stage on which the machinations of life between various participants – be they human, thermal, floral/faunal – may play out.

Prerogatives for a New Design Education

We propose a design education for which both a curriculum and an accompanying building design refocus the prerogatives of academia. For this, we suggest five critical components:

Work cross-disciplinarily between majors. It’s about more than taking a class together.
Advocate for entanglement between curricula and concentrations
Facilitate independent work supported by the resources and expertise of the institution.
Engage communities and local practitioners to bring knowledge into the institution and resituate student work out into the world in meaningful ways.
Recast architecture as an active participant in education, not a neutral backdrop.

A multifunctional lecture hall expands the operation of otherwise seldom used spaces to the broader school and campus beyond. Operable panels and a monumental curtain afford a space which not only hosts lectures but creates a space for informal gatherings both academic (e.g. a study group) and social (e.g. lunch with a friend).

Plan drawings, from the open ground plane which descends below the building to an interstitial level of workshops and collaborative spaces. Above, a series of "towers" hold studio spaces and dorm rooms.

Manifesto for a New Design School

Approaching the development of the project before any architecture whatsoever, we articulated a series of intentionally abstract design objectives to structure both our process and disciplinary outlook:

Start very simple. Identify what is most fundamental, let complexity emerge in its realization.
Architecture is a total experience — it is the sound of rain on the roof and the feeling of a building swelling in the heat. Every aspect of a building has potential to be meaningful.
All buildings are global. Even the simplest buildings embody a wide history of materials and ideas from across the globe. Be aware.
Everything makes a statement, even if you don’t mean for it. Know what your architecture is saying, for whom, and why.
Material is everywhere. Concrete, glass and steel are materials. But so are air, water and sound. History is a material, too.
Sites exist before and building. Recognize who came before and who will arrive after.
Architecture bears witness to everyday life, but by itself it cannot speak.
Form creates space, ideas organize form.

Ground as Territory, Ground as Ecology

When researching Chongming Island, what shocked me was the realization that the island is always coming and going, that its ground at any moment has, until very recently, been merely the state of sediment suspended in the Yangtze River.

I find this idea of ground provocative. After all, ground is the horizontal space that facilitates connection. Even if sloped, ground is still in a sense horizontal. Ground is the plan, even if it operates in section. The section of the ground in a cartographic sense is, of course, arbitrated by topography.

This notion of a ground which is porous, shifting and largely conceived of as held in a state of constant flux is what lead me naturally to the idea of circulation and movement, and the question of movement begets a question of subjectivity: Who is moving? Where are they moving from?

I want this project to be about more than just circulation, because circulation is only a means towards an end. What does circulation do? It connects things, spaces, people. This project is about understanding how a school is connected, about how students and faculty encounter one another, intentionally or by chance.

How does this connection happen? Circulation is one answer, but there must be something more. I think the larger question here is asking to determine what facilitates circulation and movement? Again, this is the ground.

The ground defines more than just circulation. Conceptually, it is expansive and totalizing. Circulation simply represents particular alterations of a ground which entangle its planes.

Though we think of ground as vast and horizontal, it can also be thin and tenuous. Form brings ground its meaning. How ground is connected, divided, composed: these questions bring significance to our inhabitation of space. This is of course influenced not only by how we shape the ground itself but how we situate ourselves to it ideologically.

There’s a gut impulse to respond to this site by raising the building, to literally free the ground from the sheer volume of architecture, if not its weight. After all, gravity tells us that all weight becomes force, and all force must somehow return to the Earth. But it is too simple to just lift a building up on pilotis.

Modernism taught us that you can raise your building above the ground, but you cannot escape the ownership, ecology and social history of that ground. Architecture is beholden to the ground, whether we like it or not.

Ground defines the space in which we gather, but this gathering is seldom neutral. Ground is territorialized. Ground is always political. Though it has not always been acknowledged as such, we are increasingly aware that ground is ecological.

The employment of ground as territory specifies ground to be the space in which humans come together or are divided apart. Its subdivision into parcels of ownership or jurisdiction provides a conceptual framework of demarcation under property and law. The ambiguities of human borders have long revealed the things that slip through the cracks in this definition. Migrants frequently traverse ostensibly impassable separations of nations. The transience of geological features, shifting rivers and eroding shorelines, has long posed a challenge to the authoritative view that land is to be partitioned and controlled by the state.

How does ground become political within architecture?

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