Fall 2023 Vertical Studios Tackle Climate Restoration, Drawing as Analog for War

This fall, SCI-Arc resumed its renowned biannual vertical studio offerings, kicking off its series of engaging and exciting Vertical Studio Lottery presentations. Gathering in the institute’s W.M. Keck Hall, students established and newly enrolled listened to SCI-Arc faculty recount their briefs, which would bring together diverse groups of individuals from across the school’s undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate programs to convene over a presiding design studio conceit, in order to develop a research-based, architectural response to topics ranging from AI and AR technologies to climate catastrophe; from to international military operations to theater sets as an analog for the natural landscape.

Through vertical studios each semester, participating students are presented with the opportunity to interface with SCI-Arc’s esteemed faculty, visiting experts in various creative and technical fields, and academics from across the architectural spectrum, to envision and devise well-rounded, interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary design problems.

This semester’s presentations included those from Liberal Arts Coordinator Anna Neimark, whose studio Tour de force asks students to consider the employment of line work and rendering in both the process of architecture as well as military strategy. Referencing, among others, French military engineer, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, who developed scaled models to bring the rendered drawing surfaces to life through the technique of the plan-relief, the studio will propose the construction of forts, in terms of how they behave as markers of national heritage, to reimagine the role that they play in our political landscape.

In the background of Postgraduate Programs Chair David Ruy’s vertical studio, entitled Some Other Place (aka, Heterotopia) were looming questions concerning how we represent nature and our place in it. The studio began with revisiting Michel Foucault’s seminal essay, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in which Foucault famously puts into critical focus spaces in modern society that operate much like the imagined space seen through a mirror. The primary focus of the studio was to develop novel representational strategies in relationship to design problems of exteriority, “not at all an ambition to mirror society, but to shape it.”

Faculty Jennifer Chen in her vertical studio Blue Skies framed design exploration as a global imperative as we reach a point of no return in the ongoing battle for climate salvation and stability. Throughout the semester, students investigated planetary scaled geoengineering systems and explored their design consequences through speculative fictions and worldbuilding, conferring with top solar geoengineering scientists as advisors, culminating in the crafting of climate films as their final output.

Full list of Vertical Studio Lottery Fall 2023 presenting faculty is below:
Dwayne Oyler
David Ruy (EDGE)
M. Casey Rehm (EDGE)
Anna Neimark
John Enright
Coy Howard
Peter Testa
Jennifer Chen
Darin Johnstone
Andrew Zago
Elena Manferdini
Eric Owen Moss
Hernán Díaz Alonso