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Joe MacDonald
Associate Professor Department of Architecture |
Courses
Entrepreneurship Talent, ingenuity, determination, and skill are all characteristics required of an architect to maintain a successful contemporary practice given the realities of a competitive global marketplace and the definitional vagaries of that elusive qualifier: “success.” An invariably indeterminate term, the objective of this seminar is to gain a critical understanding of its meaning as it applies to several key operative principles within professional architectural practice. Nine early- to mid-career principal architects practicing at the highest level of recognition in their field and demonstrating a wide range of praxis present their firm’s identity, philosophy, history, client contexts, working methods, strategic platforms, and examples of their work in this seminar. Visiting practitioners are scheduled to present during the first half of the semester and serve as case studies for student research. Class attendance and participation are mandatory. Q&A sessions with visiting practitioners, independent research, assigned readings, and final case study presentations constitute the basis for this seminar. Enrollment is limited to 20 students. Prerequisite for first professional degree students: 3rd semester standing or above. Tadashi Kawamata: Boston Project, Part I Instructor:
Kawamata likens his art-making to "visual terrorism." He builds uncannily beautiful, open, scaffold-like structures that act on the architecture of a particular city. "Our societal system is very tight and strictly structured into a grid that represents the mentality of the majority… Art is like a 'noise'." (TK) Kawamata's structures are always dependent on the history and habits of a particular subset of a given urban milieu, but the specific sites he targets vary greatly. His working process is collaborative, requires extensive preliminary research, and ends in a ritualistic dismantling of whatever gets built. This seminar offered students of architecture an opportunity to collaborate with an internationally recognized artist and participate in the planning and design process of a major urban art installation in the Boston area that year. Tadashi Kawamata was be in-residence at Harvard on two occasions that semester. Prior to his first visit, we investigated Kawamata's working methodology in order to develop an understanding of what Kawamata means when he describes his work as a "bridge between categories". In pairs, students researched recent Kawamata projects and presented a critical analysis to the class. We also began the process of researching and archiving information about the Boston area in order to solicit possible sites for the project. Emerging digital cartographic techniques for urban analysis based on the recent proliferation of urban geographic and demographic data through web-based sources were investigated. Our findings were then presented to Kawamata for discussion. The seminar met in the Sert Gallery at the Carpenter Center. The Gallery was transformed into a "research lab" for the investigations. We used this space as a meeting place and a kind of home base throughout the semester. The Sert Gallery remained open to the public during this time. On February 26th, Tadashi made an informal presentation to familiarize students with his working methods. At this time students had an opportunity to meet with Tadashi individually and determine subjects for research and design tasks based on each student's own skills and interests. Also during that week the Sert Gallery installed drawings, photographs and video documentation of earlier Kawamata projects. Kawamata made a more formal presentation of his projects and planning processes on March 1st at the GSD as part of the Rouse Visiting Artist Program lecture series. Students were in regular contact with Kawamata in Tokyo between residencies via email. The seminar had regular meetings to discuss the progress of your research and was joined by curators, art historians and artists familiar with Kawamata's work. Ultimately, designs emerged from individual and collaborative research as students participated in an ongoing dialogue with Kawamata and others in the class. Kawamata's second visit took place during the week of April 16th at which time students were finalizing project proposals in drawings and models. At the end of April, plans for the Boston Project were finalized and unveiled publicly. Course objectives and semester sequence are summarized below:
Digital media skills, wood model-making skills and knowledge of wood construction was required of students enrolled in this seminar. Pedagogical Objectives Art historian Yves-Alain Bois characterizes Kawamata as "…the only artist to inscribe convincingly the history of a site into his work …the quintessential traveler… he always finds, in whatever city he happens to be invited to work, a knot of memory and forgetfulness, a place whose disjunctiveness, grounded in history, has gradually become invisible to its daily beholders… (he) calls upon our collective memory… he underscores the deficiencies of our private memory and he commemorates without building a monument." The relationship between art and architecture is perhaps nowhere more aggravated than in the work of Tadashi Kawamata. His work is characteristically at once combative, political, tectonic, and temporarily present. The seminar explored contemporary artistic production within the urban realm, the manufacture of social space through critical practice and the recapitulation of urban histories related to site through temporary built interventions. |