New Geographies
GSD 3421, Fall 2006

Geography is a dominant but latent paradigm in design today and we need to articulate it and bring it to effectively bear on the social role of design.

Increasingly designers are being compelled to address and transform larger contexts and to give these contexts more legible and expressive form. New problems are being placed on the tables of designers (e.g.: infrastructure, urban systems, regional questions). Problems that were confined to the domains of engineering, ecology, or even regional planning alone are now looking for articulation by design. This has opened up a range of technical and formal repertoires that had been out of reach for designers. The need to address these 'geographic' aspects has also encouraged designers to re-examine their tools and to develop means to link together attributes that had been understood to be either separate from each other or external to their disciplines. (For example, in the past decade, different versions of landscape urbanism have emerged in response to similar challenges). Yet embracing the geographic does not only mean a shift in scale. This venture has also come to affect the formal repertoire of architecture, even at a smaller scale, with more architects becoming interested in forms that reach out to engage broader realities, bridging between the very large and the very small. (e.g.: continuous surfaces, elaborate frameworks, environmentally integrated buildings are all signs of this new paradigm.

Curiously, most of the inquiries into these attributes have tended to be quite intense but disconnected from other parallel attributes. For example, the discussion about continuous surfaces in architecture ignores the importance of continuity of ground in landscape ecology. The seminar does not propose that a common cause is driving these different geographic tendencies but it does insist that a synthesis is possible, even necessary, in order to expand on the formal possibilities and therefore social role of design. This makes the need to articulate the geographic paradigm all the more urgent because the role of synthesis that geography aspired to play between the physical, the economic, and the social is now being increasingly delegated to design.

The aim of the seminar is to expose the workings of this latent paradigm and to help articulate and direct them towards a more productive synthesis.

Developing Worlds: Planning and Design in the Middle East and Latin America After WWII
GSD 4343, Lecture, Spring 2006

The course examines the impact of different models of social and economic development on architectural and urban design. It focuses on Latin America and the Middle East after WWII. The models range from financial and technical assistance to sustainability and micro-credit. The case studies cover reconstruction and preservation, new towns, housing and institutions.

Premises:
Even before the 1947 Marshall Plan for European reconstruction, the United States had already been involved in aid and in development experiments in the Middle East and in Latin America. The Truman Doctrine ratified the process of assistance for the developing world and set the stage for international agencies like the UNDP, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation and other organizations to develop aid packages that would help in the social and economic advancement of allied nation states. Invariably, these aid packages tied the promises of modernization to the application of specific democratic political processes and free market economic models. They also came with particular conceptions (often authored by international planners and architects) of how modern cities, houses and institutions should be designed. From post-war reconstruction programs, to technical assistances, to sites and services, to sustainability, and micro credit, these models have had a significant impact on design throughout the developing world. Even when the development projects were locally self-generated, they were often planned and designed along the international development models.

The course aims to highlight this link between the procedures of development and design in the recent history of developing countries. It uses the comparative approach in order to understand at once the particularities of the locations and the general impact of the development models.

This course follows the Practices in Democracy (1 and 2) sequence in investigating the ways in which design confronts the challenges of social change. While PD1 focuses on the United States and PD2 primarily on Europe, this course draws its examples from Latin America and the Middle East.

Content:
The course first covers the different concepts of development, their historical origins and their evolution from the Truman Doctrine to the present. It then focuses on their consequences on buildings and design in four main domains: reconstruction, new towns, housing, and institutions. Reconstruction and preservation cases include Turkey and Greece after WWII, Beirut after 1990, and Caracas after the recent floods. New Towns will include Brasilia, Islamabad, and Sert’s projects for Latin America and Ciudad Guayana. Housing includes John Turner in Peru, John Habraken through SAR, Christopher Alexander in Mexico, and Balkrishna Doshi in India. Institutions include Richard Neutra in Puerto Rico, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier in Baghdad, and the Ford Foundation schools.

Green Modern: A History of Environmental Consciousness in Architecture from Patrick Geddes to the Present
GSD 4324, Lecture, Spring 2004

The main themes of the contemporary ecological movement in architecture are often presented as responses to the environmental damage that modern architecture and urban planning have caused. Yet many streaks of the modern tradition displayed both a very strong awareness of the environment and its problems and a possibility that architecture and planning could meaningfully engage the environment at the technical and aesthetic levels. The aim of the course is to examine the urban and architectural ideas of contemporary design ecologists by taking them to task for what they criticize in modern architecture. In parallel, the course will also reassess the environmental consciousness of modern architecture. The course examines specific case studies from the present and from modernism around the themes of: nature, sustainability, climate control, the vernacular, organicism, and technology. The moderns include Patrick Geddes, Le Corbusier and CIAM, Hugo Haring, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jean Prouve, and Buckminster Fuller. The contemporaries include Peter Calthorpe, Sim van der Ryn, Ian McHarg, Thomas Herzog, Ken Yeang, and Renzo Piano. The course will rely on texts from a variety of sources including ecological philosophy and theory in order to elucidate the debate. Authors include Rachel Carson, Arne Naess, Aldo Leopold, Luc Ferry, and Ulrich Beck.

The course includes guest lectures by specialized architects and scholars including two by Prof. Peder Anker (History of Science 139, Ecology and the Human Condition). Course requirements include section discussions, readings, and a final paper.

Constructing Vision
GSD 4323, Lecture, Spring 2003, Fall 2006

The course considers the application of means of representation, primarily perspective, in architectural design. It examines how architects have used these means of representation not only to represent their work but, more importantly, to construct architecturally based visual worlds. In that sense, architecture becomes the means by which models of representation are transformed into habits of seeing.

The course proposes that a diversity of such "visual constructs" has been developed throughout the history of architecture. These constructs utilize perspective and other means of representation in composite ways. They also confound the components of perspective with those of the architecture in order to produce specific types of spaces and types of seeing. Such visual constructs as the picturesque, the panoramic, the prospective, the field, the cognitive, and the virtual, are studied at their origins (with Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Humphry Repton, Louis Sullivan, Le Corbusier, Kevin Lynch, and Paul Virilio) and are then observed as they travel and develop from one setting to another and across time (e.g., in the work of Mies van der Rohe, Richard Serra, Superstudio, Steven Holl, and Bernard Cache, among others).

The course consists of 18 lectures and 6 seminars. The lectures focus on the six constructs as illustrated by twelve main cases. The seminars focus on studying and reinterpreting some of the central themes of representation in design (geometry, optics, perception, and cognition). Readings from architectural history, perceptual psychology, history of art, and aesthetic philosophy are assigned per construct on a bi-weekly basis. In addition to the readings and class participation, each student are required to present either a paper or a design or drawing project.