Architecture, Infrastructure, and the City focused on the design of urban environments. We explored urban design as an integrative and pluralistic practice that draws from architecture, landscape architecture, and planning, and engages with the physical and social dimensions of the city beyond the limits of a single building, landscape, stakeholder interest, or design vision.
Through the study of a local place, we learned to detect, represent, and interpret patterns, episodes, and interrelationships in the urban environment across scales. Using the tools of urban design, we will test how interventions in built form, ecological networks, infrastructure, and public space productively engage with the intersecting challenges of the climate crisis and social injustice facing contemporary society.
As the first step to this Urban Design Studio, each student analyzed a different layer of the neighborhood through mapping and photography. I examined the buildings of Mission Hill.
This map helps tell the story of a historic Mission Hill that has slowly been encroached upon by surrounding institutions.
The oldest areas of Mission Hill correlate with the shortest areas of Mission Hill.
The aforementioned correlation between age and height is largely due to Mission Hill's historic housing type: the Triple Decker.
The historic Mission Hill has been slowly encroached upon by surrounding institutions like hospitals and universities.
Tremont Street serves as Mission Hill's main commercial corridor.
The site is surrounded by a myriad of materials.