Being a small state has advantages in terms of consensus-building, decision making, a sense of connectivity and shared purpose. Being the smallest state, makes superlatives of those advantages. Rhode Island, for example is BOTH the second most densely-populated state (after New Jersey) AND one of the most heavily forested. It has the second highest percentage of coastline to land mass, behind Hawaii – which is 100% coastline, after all – but above Florida, strangely. Rhode Island developed the country’s first offshore wind farm, and it recently joined Washington, Hawaii and California as the four greenest states in America, taking into account energy, waste recycling, natural beauty, and racial justice and access to outdoor space.
With a single large city, Providence, and a generally unified political outlook, it can also be understood as America’s only “city-state.” This studio will take a deep dive into the State of Rhode Island and the ways in which it can be transformed into a kind of ecotopia – taking the tools of architecture and urban design and applying them to the entire state in order to find out what it would take to transform the state into a carbon-neutral prototype for the rest of the country.
We will be looking at transportation systems, energy production and distribution, climate resilience, sewage treatment, recycling and waste management, food production, biodiversity, and other factors. We will be looking at potential economic impact, water resources, housing, quality-of-life and racial and economic justice issues.
By examining the history of the state, its current conditions and potential and possible futures, we will create a blueprint for its transformation into a new model of ecological living. Students will meet with state officials, historians, chefs, farmers. fishermen, developers, civil servants to gain a better understanding of the state. We will together create a booklet of our research and the blueprint as the culmination of the first part of the semester.
The travel week will be spent in Rhode Island. We will take a carbon-neutral trip, traveling by rail, electric bus and catamaran to visit Rhode Island’s wind farm, beaches, islands, cities, farms, and forests. We will visit its infrastructure, including shipyards, railway stations, wastewater treatment facilities, recycling centers and parts of the grid. Every meal will focus on local produce, seafood and meat and some of the most innovative chefs will prepare private meals for us. We will stay in historic hotels and homes and visit its best architecture, from McKim Mead and White’s dome to Newport mansions to Pietro Belluschi’s Modernist campus buildings in Portsmouth to homes designed by WORKac, Ultramoderne, Briggs Knowles, and Andrew Bernheimer.
The focus of the remaining nine weeks of studio will be on individual design projects, each student imagining the new iconic instritutions and infrastructure of Rhode Island Ecotopia on a site of their choosing. Whether the project is an offshore kelp farm-slash-wind substation for a new sea community of aquatic farmers, a statewide transportation hub elevating bus and high-speed rail travel to the level of the international airport, new vertical farm-housing in the city of providence or new public spaces created from hurricane barriers…each student will create their own fully-realized project in drawing and physical model. Assembled the projects will provide a pathway to a more equitable and sustainable future society.
