MIT School of Architecture and Planning 11.338 Shrinking Cities Urban Design Studio

Spring 2013

Instructor: Brent D. Ryan TA: Kristen Zeiber

Studio hours: T Th 2 - 7 PM, Room 7-402

Course stellar page: stellar.mit.edu/S/course/11/sp13/11.338/ Course Athena locker: \\afs\athena.mit.edu\course\11\11.338

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Studio Introduction

While architecture often seems to have mastered the art of the polemic, urbanism often seems only to have mastered the art of the compromise.

Urban proposals seems to oscillate between two types of compromises. The first is a compromise between different versions of what already is: historicism, landscape, infrastructure. The often-promised novelty of ‘hybridity’ is just as often unmasked as a simple combination of normalities, such as the Tate Modern, a seemingly radical but ultimately conventional luxury museum reinhabiting a historic structure (below)

The second compromise is that between formal novelty and programmatic banality. Standard building programs representing conventional real estate wisdom adopt new architectural skins in order to sell or rent space faster than the competitor. The novelty of this urbanism is limited to the shock value of their renderings, usually intended for quick perusal via the Internet. But the projects themselves are conventional luxury apartments or office blocks, as in Singapore projects under construction by OMA (left below) and ZHA (right below.)

With such polemical designs, why is the resulting urbanism such a compromise? Is the strange conservatism of these projects the result of formal over experimentation at the expense of programmatic or conceptual innovation? It is this soft spot that BALTIMORE INVERSIONS will probe and ideally address.

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Baltimore: Inverted City

The Spring 2013 studio BALTIMORE INVERSIONS will question the current peculiar condition where urbanity is outmatched by reality. Taking a former petroleum refinery site whose owners themselves wish to invert the site’s history as an oil refinery and its reputation as a source of neighborhood blight, the studio will investigate Baltimore’s current condition in order to generate formal, programmatic, and socioeconomic reversals of that condition.

Baltimore, Maryland is a city of 619,000 that has lost approximately 300,000 people during the past 40 years. It is a paradigmatic shrinking city, characterized by deindustrialization, population loss, abandonment of its housing and commercial building stock, and associated social, economic, and institutional problems.

Like many shrinking cities, Baltimore has a weak land market and struggles with the challenge of reusing much of its vacant land. The city’s largest land problem is its thousands of vacant housing units, but empty commercial buildings downtown and vacant and polluted industrial land (such as our site) are also substantial problems.

At the same time Baltimore is a clearly atypical shrinking city. Not only is it located on the prosperous Northeast Corridor, but the city has a substantial tourism industry centered around its famous Inner Harbor. The role of this tourism in the city’s ‘revitalization’ is much disputed, but no one disputes the crowds that come to enjoy themselves on sunny weekends.

Baltimore is a city characterized by peculiar inversions at multiple scales.

At the regional scale, the city is an island of poverty in a prosperous region- perhaps the most prosperous in the nation. But little of Washington DC’s wealth and activity has reached Baltimore. The region is growing, but Baltimore is shrinking.

Within the city itself, the traditional relationship of urban fabric and property value is also inverted. What were in the nineteenth and early twentieth century the most valued parts of the city, with some of the finest historic urban fabric, are today some of the poorest; these areas constitute a ring of poverty around the center of the city. And what were historically low-income, industrial waterfront districts are today the location of the city’s highest-value areas, and the site for much new residential development.

Our site, a former oil refinery and tank farm still partially owned by Exxon-Mobil, is in its own process of inversion. Like most EM properties, the site has been cleared of all historic structures and displays little of its former character. When environmental remediation is complete, the site will be a ‘blank slate’ ready for transformation into whatever the owner, the market, or the city deem appropriate. It is this transformation that the studio will theorize and, in proposal form, realize.

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Studio Agenda

BALTIMORE INVERSIONS is the fourth in a series of shrinking cities studios. Broadly considered, these past studios focused on new forms of neighborhood design (Buffalo); reappraisals of Baltimore’s relationship to its region (AFTERCITY); and new forms and programs for industry (PRIVATOPOLIS).

INVERSIONS is motivated by the paradox that urban realities are often more provocative than urban proposals, and that the American city is often characterized by an abandonment and reversal of historic conditions. Particularly in the laissez-faire American city, the casual, brutal realities of market action and public inaction result in shocking and occasionally absurd juxtapositions. Baltimore has many examples of urbanism both intentional and unintentional that would surprise even the most jaded European:

x abandoned streets of grand rowhouses, such as Fulton Avenue on the West Side; x a highway, now closed, dug in a vicious trench through the same neighborhood; x not far away, a warehouse ‘reactivated’ as the wall of a baseball stadium; x and a harbor used as the bed of a highway interchange.

Americans are either accustomed to these strange contrasts or choose not to see them at all, but to urbanists elsewhere in the world, American cities like Baltimore are filled with odd and fantastical juxtapositions of abandonment, activity, purposeful action, and almost unbelievable neglect. Our perversely mistreated cities are a source of fascination.

By the opposite token, the cultural and economic features that draw Americans to cities; sports, tourist attractions, and commerce, are generally designed with a banality and inattention to detail that hardly merit the designer’s notice. Baltimore’s Inner Harbor is from a designer’s perspective little more than a collection of wide roads and insubstantial decorated sheds, and the residential developments in the area are, with few exceptions, unsurprising.

Is urban design doomed to be either formally exhibitionist and programmatically banal, as in the Singaporean examples shown earlier, or unintentionally extraordinary, as in the Baltimore examples above? Can urban design learn from the American city’s casual ability to produce the most unconsciously surprising juxtapositions of use, form, scale, and content? Can urban design embody and own the polemicism of America, rather than attempting to suppress or ignore it? Such proposals might, oddly enough, be as or more realizable than conventional proposals.

The spirit of BALTIMORE INVERSIONS is to investigate our site’s potential to invert its history, meaning, esthetic, and perception with design that embodies the surprising juxtapositions, unconscious polemics, and casual extraordinariness of the American city.

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A Micro Manifesto for Shrinking-City Urban Design

Shrinking regions such as Baltimore present a number of opportunities and challenges to urban design.

On the largest scale, long-term population and housing loss result from macroeconomic and macrosocial factors that cannot be easily reversed. Baltimore has lost population to suburbs and the Sunbelt, but even if these migrations stopped, much of the city’s infrastructural and economic obsolescence would continue. Exxon-Mobil’s refinery has closed for reasons that go well beyond the city of Baltimore’s particular problems, or assets. In other words, Baltimore’s population, housing, and economic decline is likely to continue.

While some critics see shrinkage as eventually leading to a disappearance of the city, this apocalyptic scenario will never apply to Baltimore. The city’s population loss is substantial but much smaller than that of Midwestern cities like St Louis and Detroit. Most inhabitants will stay whatever happens, and Baltimore’s peer cities- Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston- all seem to have stabilized at lower population levels.

Shrinking regions cities offer many possibilities for urban design. The largest is the wide availability of vacant land and vacant buildings in formerly dense neighborhoods. Adjacent to EM’s refinery site is a depopulated and deurbanized waterfront, as well as a reactivated one. Some Baltimore neighborhoods have up to 30 or 40 percent vacant land. Vacancy frees the urban designer to consider new scales and activities without the constraint of existing buildings.

Shrinking cities have substantial redundant infrastructures and open spaces as a result of their decline. Large industrial areas open up the possibility for new integrations of housing, landscape, and infrastructure. Our site has large areas of fallow industrial land along former railroad corridors, and is located adjacent to major highways.

Despite their high levels of vacancy, shrinking cities often retain a fractured urban fabric and heritage of significant buildings and sites. Our site is empty, but the nearby neighborhood has impressive industrial and residential structures from the past. Heritage gives our site a meaning and sense of time absent from typical suburban sites.

Baltimore has a strong motivation for change. For very different reasons, both EM and Baltimore would very much like to see the site returned to active use. EM would like a positive contribution to the public realm, while Baltimore would like a positive return to the city’s finances. These imperatives make innovative design easier to achieve.

At the city scale, one might project a reimagined urban pattern as areas increase or decrease in density. At the neighborhood scale, available land, unused infrastructure, and new green spaces hold promise for new types of community and public life. At the site scale, the clear obsolescence of past uses indicate a clear imperative to reimagine new uses, programs, scales, and organizations of urban activities.

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Studio Schedule 2013

Week Month Date Weekday Details 1 Feb

4 5 6 8 10

Mon Tues Wed Fri Sun

Architecture Department lottery Kickoff studio meetin @5PM in 7-402 STUDIO TRIP to Baltimore. Leave Wed PM, meet EM Thu AM, tour site, city Thu PM and Fri. Optional trip extension Sat and Sun.

2 12 T Studio meeting 14 Th Studio meeting 3 19 T No studio- Monday classes held due to holiday 21 Th No studio- BDR out of country 4 26 T Exercise 1 (XXLines) due 28 Th Studio meeting 5 Mar 5 T Studio meeting 7 Th Studio meeting 6 12 T Pinup: Baltimore Sketches 14 Th Studio meeting 7 19 T Studio meeting 21 Th Midterm Review: Baltimore Sketches 8 25 T No studio- Spring Break 27 Th No studio- Spring Break 9 Apr 2 T Studio meeting 4 Th Studio meeting 10 9 T Studio meeting 11 Th Pinup: Baltimore Projects 11 16 T Patriots’ Day- no studio 18 Th Studio meeting 12 23 T Studio meeting 25 Th Studio meeting 13 30 T Review: Baltimore Projects May 2 Th Studio meeting 14 7 T Studio meeting 9 Th Studio meeting 15 13-17

M-F Final Presentation: Baltimore Synthesis

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Studio exercises (more detailed versions will be handed out during the semester.) XXLines. Review on February 26 Tuesday. Analyze and diagram Baltimore as a single ecological, economic, infrastructural, historical, and spatial unit. Map patterns relating to twenty “lines” relating to building types, urban networks, industrial economies (past or present), natural systems, historic patterns of housing and population loss, recent development patterns, community capacity, market failure, and political activities, extreme programs, and other issues. Scale: variable. Baltimore Sketches. Midterm Review on March 21 Thursday. Posit 3 ‘sketch solutions’ for the site and area. Each sketch solution should be informed by information gathered during the XXLines phase. Project three different potential programs with accompanying configurations of open space, roadway and infrastructure conditions, and structures in two and three dimensions. Describe your programs’ relationship to the surrounding spatial conditions. Scale: circa 1: 2500. Baltimore Projects. Review on April 30 Tuesday. Develop an ‘ideal project’ for the site and area. Each project should reflect an in-depth, three-dimensional understanding and resolution of the requisite esthetic, functional, procedural, and developmental issues associated with the proposed program. Scale: 1: 2500 to 1: 1000. Baltimore Synthesis. Final presentation week of May 13 to 17 (exact day to be determined). As a single entity, the studio will create a physical and multimedia presentation for the Exxon-Mobil client group. This presentation, to last approximately one hour, will summarize the XXLines research on Baltimore, and show the Baltimore Projects in comparative perspective, together with preferred courses of action and timelines for the client group.

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Studio Guidelines

Studio meetings last from 2 to 7 PM twice a week. Studio participants are expected to be present at all times during studio meetings. Studio time is not for research outside studio, trips to the library, group meetings, etc. Such preparatory work is expected to occur outside studio hours.

Missing regular studio meetings, and being more than reasonably (15 min) late, is not permissible except under extraordinary circumstances, and at all times any absence, whether for part or all of studio, must be cleared with the instructor in advance. Students with an unexcused studio absence, or who are unreasonably late more than once, should expect to have their final grade marked down. Missing studio pinups and reviews is not acceptable under any circumstance. In all cases where a students’ attendance may impact a grade, the instructor will notify students before any decision is made.

Studio is an iterative and cumulative process without the specific benchmarks typical of academic courses. Participants will receive a grade at mid-semester and after the final review when all studio work has been handed in as per instructor guidelines. While studio performance is generally not an issue, students whose work is persistently not meeting expectations will be asked to meet with the instructor and academic administrator for their degree program.

Urban design, even more than architecture, is a collaborative discipline, and urban design studio work can occur in both individual and group settings. Participants should expect to be responsible for individual work as well as for the collaboration and partnerships, etc. typical of group dynamics. Grades will be based upon the perception and reality of contribution to group work and ‘readability’ of individual contributions to all efforts.

The teaching assistant is available, sometimes outside of studio hours, to address questions related to studio logistics, presentation issues, and design development. Teaching assistant advice is in all cases additional to, not substitutive of, instructor advice, so please ensure that the instructor is appraised of all substantial decisions made as a result of TA discussions.

In any case where participants have questions about any of the above, please consult with the instructor. Studio is almost always a smooth, though extremely challenging, process, and both the instructor and TA are committed to making your studio semester as fulfilling as possible, and expect that students are equally committed.