Teaching Assistant to Professors Andrew Scott, Sheila Kennedy & Cristina Parreno, MIT
Student work by Matt Bunza and Li Huang
This architectural design studio was designed to offer an integrated and comprehensive design experience in which the student was asked to synthesize design concepts across building systems and sub-disciplines – building technologies, theory and culture, and computation. Architectural design exercises address sustainability, structural and environmental responsiveness, construction potentials of digital fabrication and the interrogation of an integrated building system. This studio completed the design sequence core at MIT.
Located in the New Market industrial area, the Boston Ice Storage facility became the site for MIT’s Core 3 studio in the fall of 2010. The cast in place concrete structure provided an ideal framework for the studio, as it possessed valuable significance as a historic icon, but was also in need of structural and cultural renewal.
The business of being cool, the energy expenditures of refrigeration, refrigeration truck idling, and lax environmental standards raise questions about this industrial landscape of service, and preclude any easy ‘green’ responses. Instead, designers must recognize the ecological paradoxes presented by the site and the Boston Ice Storage Building and take positions within the larger debate on energy expenditures in architecture. In this way, the specific locality of this site serves as a kind of mirror that reflects the larger global conditions in which the discipline of architecture finds itself.
siobhan rockcastle 