Abstract:

International Boulevard in Oakland California was originally a native tribe north-south route through a rich riparian habitat crossed by the many creeks flowing westward from the hills to the shoreline wetlands nearby. The city’s rapid urbanization during the 1920s and 1930s absorbed the greenbelts, and the creeks were undergrounded or converted into flood control channels. In recent years, Oakland has experienced considerable economic growth and job creation has far outpaced the available housing supply. To redress the imbalance, the city has implemented a development plan to increase residential densities along the old route, now named International Boulevard, transforming it into a Bus Rapid Transit corridor with a dedicated high-speed bus lane down the street.

An architectural studio (the traditional setting in which architectural design is taught) conducted in the Fall of 2019 posited that the higher housing densities planned for International Boulevard also required the provision of more open recreational community space and created the opportunity to recover part of the original creek ecosystem that used to cross it. Thus, while the International Boulevard, studio followed the City of Oakland’s mandate to increase housing densities along the corridor, the final goal was to provide a generally enhanced designed environment for the people that would be living along it. To achieve this objective, it became imperative to identify the local hydrology, flora and fauna, topography, socio-economic configuration, the boulevard’s relationship to the rest of Oakland and the region and survey the communal facilities in the area. As all the previously mentioned issues are traditionally outside the research topics conducted within the confines of an architectural studio, we needed to structure a studio that received input from many different fields of knowledge to meet our objectives. In the rare instances in which interdisciplinary studios are set-up in architectural schools, specialists from different disciplines teach students in the same space simultaneously. This non-hierarchical setting in which different specialists demand equal attention, creates a confusing environment for students that when confronted with huge amounts of new information, lack the experience to make effective design decisions. We therefore decided to create an alternative interdisciplinary model by inviting professionals to set up small workshops, lectures and critiques in their specialized fields and asked students to design with modified precedents rather than create their housing anew.

Educational models that incorporate the knowledge of other disciplines are imperative, if architects are to remain vital to the built environment and broaden their political, social and material influence. This paper will present an alternative structure and working methodology to the traditional interdisciplinary studio, set up for the International Boulevard project and show design samples, to argue that the best and most effective setting is one that is structured similarly to the building design process in which the architect leads and coordinates a team of professionals with different sets of skills to achieve a holistic solution.

Keywords:

Housing, Pedagogy, Architecture, Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology, multidisciplinary.