Week One | Fieldwork & Site Analysis *

“Mapping is a fantastic cultural project, creating and building the world as much as measuring and describing it.” - James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention”

In the first week, students will begin with a first-person observation of the Bay Area that will involve fieldwork in the cities of Sausalito and San Francisco. This will include an exploration of architectural precedents, the present and historic shoreline of San Francisco, and the Bay itself. Students will conduct fieldwork through analysis of their project sites along the Embarcadero. Working in teams, students will document site conditions through photography, sketching, and written notes. 

Fieldwork documentation will result in a geo-referenced Psychogeographic Mapping of observed site factors. Combining on-site observations along with research conducted utilizing Internet databases and library resources at UC Berkeley, teams will create a Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis of their site, identifying the risks and potential of future development. The SWOT Analysis will compile site information, written descriptions, data, and images together for a presentation and discussion.

Week Two | Speculative Futures *

“San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful.” -  Frank Lloyd Wright

During the second week, the program will explore the power of speculative futures. Each student will be asked to travel to the year 2124 and send a Postcard from the Future describing how the San Francisco waterfront has changed. To do this, students will create a representative image using Adobe Photoshop starting with a photograph of the present and creating a futuristic reality through digital photomontage. The image may also be a .gif that shows change over time. The postcard will contain a written story of the future and how things have changed.

With each possible future scenario come multiple outcomes with its winners and losers. How can the best policy and design be selected and tested? How will distinct communities learn about different options and strategies for adaptation and be empowered to act? To understand who lives in the city and what their perspectives are, students will be asked to develop a minimum of (4) Stakeholder Cards, each a character study of a different community member. Each card will contain a graphic image of the stakeholder and character biography. What is their name? Age? What do they do for a living? What are their desires for the city? What kind of power or influence do they have, if any? Create a diverse mix of stakeholders that may have some difference of opinion and values. Consider how they may have conflicting visions of the future and at the same time find common ground for collaboration. 

Each team will select a Case Study from the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge. Similarly, these projects are speculative proposals for sea-level rise adaptation, developed by interdisciplinary design teams, and sited around the San Francisco Bay Area. Do a “deep dive” into the project to explore the site context, key challenges, design process, and final proposal. Who were the firms on the team and what did each of them do? Explore the competition brief, project background, proposal, process, and final documents. Synthesize the most important and interesting information to share. From this project, teams should identify the main resilience strategies that were proposed.

Week Three | Urban Resilience *

“Most of our housing and city planning has been handicapped because those who have undertaken the work have had no clear notion of the social function of the city.” - Lewis Mumford, “What Is a City?”

Teams will work together to create Urban Design Scenario Plans for the Embarcadero waterfront in San Francisco for the year 2124. This will involve defining resilience and sustainability objectives. Utilizing the framework of an iterative design and creative discourse, teams will investigate the site-specific built environment, community stakeholders, and development scenarios leading to speculative designs that are rooted in a place-based narrative. Design proposals will be tasked with addressing issues of affordable housing, infrastructure, transportation, social inequity, ecology, climate change, technology, and livability, etc.

To develop the Urban Design, each team will create an Urban Simulation Model to test various development strategies to determine scenarios and their outcomes, which affect stakeholders. The physical model will serve as a primary platform to test out different strategies and create discussions with team members and instructors of the benefits and drawbacks of each plan. The project site will begin to take on three-dimensional form through physical hand modeling and digital modeling with Rhino software. The 3D digital and analog model will be translated to a 2D graphic poster, representing the design process that will also incorporate work from week one and two.

Reflecting on the Case Study research and New York Urban Waterfront Adaptation Strategies each team will create a Resilience Strategies Toolkit containing various methods to tackle the wicked problems related to Urban Health, Social Equity, and Climate Change. These strategies may be top-down change led by the government or ground up community projects. It might be a small-scale tactical urbanism approach or large-scale infrastructure development. Students will develop graphics and a description of each. The resilience strategies will then be applied to the site area in specified locations and along a Timeline from 2024 to 2124. How might these strategies respond to housing demands of a growing population, rising sea levels, or re-purposing streets? How are the strategies going to combat climate change and adapt to technological advancements and shifting social customs? What would your stakeholders think of the changes caused by your resilience strategies?

Lastly, students will create Chance Event Cards representing potential external factors related to the Environment, Politics, Economy, and Technology. What unexpected events might happen in the future? Increased global warming, natural disasters, new government policies, recessions, global pandemics, war, self-driving cars, etc. How can you plan for different scenarios to design in the present that will apply to an unknown future in 2124? How might your Stakeholders respond or adapt to these Chance Events?

Week Four | Design & Representation *

“The waterfront isn’t just something unto itself. It’s connected to everything else.” - Jane Jacobs

Week four will focus on finalizing the Urban Design, creating compelling Architectural Drawings, and developing an Augmented Reality installation. Guidelines will be provided for the project poster containing architectural illustrations and written narrative of design proposals. Final posters will include a combination of axonometric, master plan, perspective rendering, and section drawings, which should visually convey how the design proposals address the core challenges of urban health, social equity, and climate change. 

The final Urban Design proposal will be informed by testing out different development scenarios, through conversations within team members, and informed by feedback from the teaching team. Within the context of the team urban design strategy, students are encouraged to individually focus on a particular aspect for further development. This should be a part of the project that you are most interested in, whether it be design, planning, policy, etc. It can be at the scale of the master plan to the human scale and may take the form of building design, infrastructural systems, landscape and ecology, public policy, human interface, etc.

Utilizing Adobe Aero software, students will create an Augmented Reality Installation that will be part of the final project and an installation of the San Francisco Embarcadero waterfront using a mobile device. The AR installation will include updated Postcards from the Future, Urban Design Axonometric, and written content that show the viewer how the San Francisco waterfront might transform in the year 2124. 

Week Five | Refinement & Presentation *

“Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things.”

 - Peter Zumthor, “Thinking Architecture”

During the last week of the program, the focus will be on completing work for the final presentation and project documentation. Students will install their final work in the Wurster gallery and present it to invited guest critics. By week five, the bulk of the design work should be done. Students will be tasked with refinement of graphic content and practicing for the oral presentation. 

DISC 2024 will culminate with a gallery exhibition, Final Review Presentation and DISC Graduation Celebration Party! In addition to the exhibition and presentation of final work, Studio Project Documentation will be important for the DISC blog and your portfolio.