Harvard GSD Studio Melds BMW Technology with Affordable Housing
Project is one of the programs funded by RMJM’s $1.5 research donation

by Tracy Ostroff
Contributing Editor

Summary: UK-based RMJM and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design last year announced the launch of a $2-million initiative to establish the “RMJM Program for Research and Education in Integrated Design Practice.” The RMJM Program helps fund a variety of courses, from practical business-oriented graduate and doctorate classes that help familiarize students with good business management principles to the futuristic, in which a design studio considered how BMW prototype technology could be translated from concept car to affordable housing.

Design follows technology
The inspiration for one of the sought-after design studios funded by the RMJM grant came from a collaboration of Berlin-based architect Frank Barkow, and the team at BMW Group Design Munich. Barkow says the “idea of looking outside of the discipline of architecture for new ideas, new technologies, new forms of know-how, and seeing how that could possibly have a bearing on architecture,” helped drive the formation of the studio.

BMW had been developing the prototype car for 10 years, before former top designer Chris Bangle unveiled the GINA Light Visionary Model, last June. The concept debuts a car that has a surface made of elastic fabric, rather than sheet metal. The surface can move, is lighter, and uses less energy to make.

“Last summer,” Barkow says, "as oil was approaching $150 a barrel and the mortgage meltdown was in full swing, it seemed to us that this issue of suburbia and the idea of design following technology were quite interesting.”

Barkow along with partner Regine Leibinger, make the synergy of design and research, along with teaching, the way of their many striking materials-based projects. They received an AIA Institute Honor Award and many other accolades for their firm’s TRUTEC Building in Seoul, Korea, which introduced an office and factory building clad in mirrored fractal glass, where the patterns refract light and images, rendering the façade as a fragmented abstract surface. Any contextual image—buildings, traffic, pedestrians, or weather will be fragmented (like a kaleidoscope)—on its surfaces.

The Ultimate in Affordable Housing
Barkow’s firm, Barkow Leibinger, had worked with Bangle on a competition to design a concept house in Munich on their BMW campus. The building went on hold because of the recession and the state of the car industry in general, Barkow says. Still, he and Bangle maintained connections. “He had visited our studio and was interested in some of the fabrication things we were doing, so we were looking for a way to continue to work together. Chris was always interested in architecture. I think he has said how it took him about five years to get Bilbao into a car. He really sees architecture as a leading discipline for the design areas.”

“It is a concept car; it is not about to go into production. But the idea is of a car with an elastic fabric skin over a lightweight steel frame, which can move. The idea is like a kinetic architecture, but also has implications for economy of materials that can be done very light, very effectively, very efficiently. He can skin a car in two hours.”

Diverse range of proposals
Bangle and Barkow introduced the design studio to challenge the class of 14 students to rethink suburban housing as a prototype informed by GINA technology. The lecturers asked their class to determine how the technology could begin to answer issues of energy use, sustainability, the relationship between the car and the house, and the identity of suburbia, Barkow says. It delved into suburbia’s transition from a commuter culture to a destination in itself, with work-life issues of its own.

The studio generated diverse proposals. “Every project had to embody the ideas of movement and change. That means that the buildings could move and adjust, for example to daylight or climate, spatially, or programmatically based on demographics or use so to address all these kinds of issues.

A few of the designs can be viewed on YouTube. They are presented with videos, computer-generated images, and physical models.

“It’s quite interesting the things they came up with. Chris liked one where if you were consumer oriented the house would get fatter, and if you gave up things the house would shrink. There was a design by Ignacio Gonzalez Galan that was a series of tent-like structures that could move based on the room as a kind of incremental or interchangeable piece and those could move independently–almost like Buckminster Fuller orientation. Other projects operated as movement of an infrastructure scale, large pieces that can move and respond to roadways or highways. There’s one project that would telescope both horizontally and vertically and adjust and get bigger or smaller.”

Back to reality
While the students’ designs are futuristic, Barkow’s materials-based practice is a real manifestation of a focus on research and design. “For us it’s a kind of empowerment. “We do not have to rely on things like building catalogues, building standards, or past precedent. We can go to a place like Korea and invent a completely new façade system, and they’ll be keen on it and go to bat for us and teach themselves how to produce it. There was always this interest in material-based design practice, but I think it has given us a lot more momentum and it has accelerated in the last few years that we have been able to do that.”

Barkow says he sees the technology trickling down to become available on more projects. “We’re not doing Prada boutiques. These are everyday office building and factories and factory cafeteria buildings. These aren’t bare bones budgets, but I like the idea of these things spreading across a wider base in terms of the kind of programs and clients we’re working on. We just won a large urban planning competition here in Berlin, and we’re even interested in how some of these things could operate in a large city corridor.”