Advanced Design Studio, Balmori and Sanders

INTERFACE: IT Campus, New Delhi

While a book could be written about how architects have resolved the line where a building meets the sky, this studio will look instead at a similar defining line that until recently has received very little attention: the Interface where building and land, architecture and landscape meet. We will interrogate the issue of Interface through a real scenario—an IT campus in New Delhi. The Rai Foundation plans to build an IT Campus on a 28 acre site formerly occupied by abandoned textile mills on the outskirts of the city. This parcel will be transformed into a Free Trade Zone, a temporary home for a constellation of international telecommunication companies who will lease space for seven-year periods. The mixed-use program must meet the needs of a new breed of globe-trotting professionals: how to create a vital enclave that integrates state-of-the art office and research spaces with housing and recreational facilities in a campus-like setting that forges links with the local urban context.

But in addition to requiring innovative thinking about the nature of the contemporary global workplace, the design problem raises even broader issues, an opportunity to reconsider green architecture through the design of a sustainable interface between landscape and architecture. Rather than conceive of this as a place to which you apply a laundry list of Leed certified materials and techniques hidden in the walls or applied to the surfaces of conventional structures, this studio will conceive of environmental concerns as a catalyst for inventing new spatial and programmatic strategies for integrating building and landscape, indoors and outdoors, natural and synthetic.

Scales:

Our work this semester will require us to shift back and forth between two scales—the comprehensive scale of the Site and the smaller scale of the Building that articulates the juncture where nature, enclosure and the human body meet. The studio will require students to create concrete proposals that identify a strategy for using sustainable design principles to weave together structure and materials with the goal of staging provocative ways that human activities can unfold in the interface between interior and exterior, nature and architecture.

Travel Schedule:

The studio will travel to India from September 20 through 28. In addition to becoming familiar with the site and its environs in New Delhi, our itinerary will include relevant examples that show how Indian architects deal with the interface of nature and architecture. We will be going to Agra (Taj Mahal) and its environs including Fatepuhr Sikri, and some major gardens in this area as well as New Delhi.

Readings:

Interface

Corner, James. Operational Eidetics. Cambridge: Harvard Design Magazine. 1998. Pages 22-26.

Hughes, J. Donald. Mosaic Landscape and the Human Organization of Space. Routledge: Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 2005. Pages 77-83.

Indian Architecture and Landscape

Bhaat, Vikram. After the Masters. University of Washington Press. 1991.

Hosagrahar, Jyoti. Indigenous Modernities: negotiating architecture, urbanism, and colonialism in Delhi. Routledge: 2005.

Volwahsen, Andreas. Imperial Delhi. London: Prestel. 2002.

New Media

Manovich , Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2001. Chapter 1: What is New Media pp.18-61 and Chapter 2: The Interface 62-115.

B.N. Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2004. Tim Lenoir, “Haptic Vision: Computation, Media and Embodiment in Mark Hansen’s New Phenomenology,” “Between Body and Image: On the “Newness” of New Media Art”.