Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE

Integration is the agenda for the third semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems and processes into a synthetic whole. Structural systems, envelope design, and environmental and thermodynamic processes will be systematically addressed in the development of a single project during the course of the whole semester. The building type consists of a multi-program urban building, requiring careful consideration of access and exchanges (circulatory, visual and energy), between programs. During that time students will work in consultation with engineers and scientists. Design exercises will be addressed through team and individual study. Prerequisites: GSD 1101 and GSD 1102, or advanced standing in the MArch I program.

First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio

The first semester core studio of the Master in Urban Planning program introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to create research, analyze, and implement plans and projects for the built environment. The studio operates in conjunction with VIS 2129: Spatial Analysis and Representation, which introduces students to the theoretical underpinnings and spatial analysis of representational techniques to speculate upon and communicate urban planning concepts.

The studio will use the City of Boston as the students’ planning laboratory and students will be expected to understand the city through the lenses of planning elements such as demographics, economic attributes, market forces, character and built form, and public and private stakeholder interests, all of which shape the city and inform decisions about land use, development, and infrastructure.

The studio is organized into four parts, representing fundamental stages of the urban planning process.

Exercise 1. Ideas for Planning: Reading Influential Urban Plans
This exercise considers a set of “classic” and influential urban plans as a way to engage and critique the fundamental ideas that inform contemporary planning.

Exercise2. Observe, Collect, Compile, Listen and Convey
Using Boston neighborhoods, this Exercise introduces research skills used by urban planners to understand and analyze the built environment. Reporting investigations for public audiences. Generating graphic and written materials.

Exercise 3. Make Plans
Based on skills learned in the previous exercises, students conduct research to better understand planning issues in the Roxbury neighborhood. Students will analyze existing housing, economic, transportation and land use policies and initiatives in the City of Boston that impact the Dudley Square neighborhood. Students will create an individual plan. Students will be exposed to lectures and workshops that support the effort. This section will provide the students with an opportunity to consider different aspects of a plan in more detail.

Exercise 4. Communication + Representation
In this Final Exercise, students will present their findings regarding the Dudley Square neighborhood based on knowledge obtained during the semester’s work.

Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio

This studio course problematizes issues of orientation and experience, scale and pattern, topographic form, climatic and vegetative influences, and varied ecological processes that help define urban public space. As the first of a four-term sequence of design studios, the course helps students develop spatial literacy and proficiency in diverse modes of inquiry in landscape architecture. The beginning studio exercises investigate a set of typological models rooted in historical and contemporary urban landscape precedents. These undergo sequential transformations aimed at devising hybrid solutions to common conceptual design problems: conditions of stasis and movement, material composition and expression, conditions of solidity and porosity, and change over time. Later in the semester, these studies advance to greater specificity on an urban waterfront site in Boston. A one-week workshop during the semester focuses on specialized analogue techniques of surface description. Students also participate in workshops built around focused interventions through the school’s Sensory Media Platform. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on the design studio as a performative venue for conceiving, interrogating, and elaborating concrete ideas about the role of the biophysical landscape in shaping urbanization and urban life. 

First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT

Project is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, Project may refer to fundamental modes of architectural representation, the mapping of the subject in the larger objective context, or a conceptual foray into territory unknown.

A series of focused and intense design exercises requires students to investigate fundamental disciplinary issues of architectural thought, practice, and representation. As the introductory studio in the first professional degree program, the curriculum addresses the varied educational backgrounds of incoming MArch I candidates. Specifically, students are encouraged to leverage their varied expertise in the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines to find provocative and perhaps unexpected motivations of architectural form. Techniques of representation and iterative development across various mediums will be required.

Prerequisites: Enrollment in MArch I program

Mark Lee will oversee and coordinate this studio. Working alongside section instructors, he will also occasionally be involved in providing instruction, crits, and feedback to students across all sections of this studio.

The Spatial Politics of Land: A Comparative Perspective

This course focuses on the deeply contested and political processes of land-use planning, i.e. of allocating land amongst different, often competing uses, and the distributional outcomes of these decisions. Land-use allocations are fraught with conflicts and trade-offs, and some would argue that these allocative decisions form the very bread-and-butter of urban planning. In this course, we bring the analytic of space back into these land-use debates, and ask how a spatial analysis can deepen our understanding of, and intervention in, land-use planning. The course is organized around key spatial concepts – such as territory, location theory and land rents, global flows, scale, density – that highlight not just the politics of land, but the spatial politics of land.

The course has three main objectives. First, it will enable students to grasp the inherently political nature of land-use planning, and to cultivate their own value-positions on these debates. Second, we will explore how the spatial analytic underlies the most common and mundane planning tasks and practices, and what is to be gained for both planning researchers and practitioners in making these implicit spatial assumptions explicit. Third, the readings and discussions will bring into conversation the space/land question in Western/non-Western and already urbanized/rapidly urbanizing countries. This comparative gesture will support students in understanding how land-use ideas and practices are transposed across different transnational contexts.

The course is in a seminar format, with evaluations based on two exercises (one linked to practice, and the other research-oriented) and class participation. It has no prerequisites and is open to graduate students across different disciplines.

Form+Finance: the Design of Real Estate

This course exposes students to tools, instruments and strategies for design thinking and the mechanisms of finance and market forces that shape and impact built form.  The class bridges the disciplines of real estate finance, development and design by highlighting the ways in which the perspectives intersect, inform and negotiate with one another.  For students with a design background, the imbedded logics of real estate finance and market dynamics will impact their understanding and constructs of physical form.  For students with a background in finance and economics, exposure to the processes by which designers conceptualize design proposals and how to visualize space and understand building typologies at a variety of scales will be reinforced.  An underlying objective of the course is to amplify the synergies between how one spatializes development and how real estate dynamics shape and influence buildings and spaces.

Through in-class lectures, case studies, course readings, group exercises and assignments, participants will learn fundamental principles of real estate dynamics as they relate to various building typologies.  Students will also learn the processes by which developers, investors, architects and urban designers and planners conceptualize various frameworks for real estate development.  The class provides the skills to visualize and communicate concepts about a site and enable the assessment of a project for its development potential and value proposition, understanding the myriad of factors that influence a project’s form and character.  This course operates between design aesthetics and economic viability, demonstrating how design creates value for investors, owners and tenants of real estate and how finance influences the shape of our physical environment.

Various computer programs will be introduced in the course through periodic evening tutorials.  Each program presents a technique to visualize the development and design characteristics of a project and communicate that information in a variety of modes of representation.  While some students will be familiar with design and financial workflows, this class does not presume that they are familiar with them.  More complex considerations in combining financial analysis and form-making will emerge towards the end of the term.

This course in 2016 is for students enrolled in the MDes Real Estate and the Built Environment (REBE) graduate study. A small number of other students may be allowed to enroll by permission of the instructor.

Experimental Infrastructures

Infrastructure is an encompassing term that can refer to anything from railroad ties to social media to ecosystems, and one which has been enjoying a renaissance in planning and public discourse. We are inundated by rhetoric about green infrastructure, social infrastructure, global infrastructure, and so on. Yet, as is evident in recent promises about fixing the nation’s infrastructure, infrastructural work can often in practice seem to be as much about reinforcing the status quo as about building new connections or enabling new ways of living.  

This seminar will explore infrastructures as cultural objects and culminate in the design of “experimental infrastructures” that can interject new narratives into society through the built environment. The class will start with a survey of critical infrastructure studies, an interdisciplinary approach that questions how infrastructure has been designed, built, and maintained in ways that reinforce (often problematic) social structures. “Infrastructure” is a term with a specific history, though it has come to encompass a wide range of networks, systems, and tools, and we will use this critical infrastructure approach to map out the political life of the term and its subsequent expansion. After building a theoretical framework around the argument that “infrastructure is social structure” as our foundational premise, we will then attempt to reimagine infrastructure as a tool for radical social change. What, for example, might an explicitly feminist infrastructure look like? A queer infrastructure? A decolonizing infrastructure? An infrastructure of degrowth? To engage in this rethinking, it will be necessary to confront the complicity of infrastructure within historical projects of global economic growth, nationalism, urbanization, natural resource extraction, and other world-ordering projects positioned as necessary public goods, but which have in practice led to gross injustices and inequalities around the world.  Class assignments will ask students to consider infrastructural work and infrastructural subjectivity at different scales, from the individual to the global, and will culminate in a final project focused on designing and/or researching a critical anti-hegemonic infrastructure and imagining its implementation.

Economic Development Planning

This course will look at the theory and practice of economic development at the local and regional level, mostly in the context of cities and regions in the United States. It will consider policies, strategies and programs for dealing with the decline and revitalization of neighborhoods, communities, cities, towns and regions.  The course will focus on forces that create change in communities and the tools and best practices that are available to address these forces.  The course will focus on both theory and case studies, and will explore strategies and solutions in an interdisciplinary fashion. 

Economic development typically involves the strategic use of pubic funds and programs to enable private investment to succeed.  At its best, economic development creates a triple bottom line solution, benefiting business, the community and the environment.

The course seeks to understand, through case studies, the economic and political challenges to developing an economic development strategy, and the application of technical skills and planning knowledge to ensure that economic development strategies are successful. 

 

The course is broken into three segments:

 

The course will include individual analytical work on the case studies as well as a team client project, where students will work to address a complex economic development challenge in a local community. 

Metropolitics: Comparative Metropolitan Governance

More than 50% of the world population lives in cities, and will reach two thirds by 2060. Almost half of the urban population lives in cities above 500,000 people, and 12% in Megacities beyond 10 million. These large cities extend from densely populated urban cores towards a wider number of jurisdictions and ecosystems, including suburbs, villages, towns and cities, on what is known as Metropolitan Areas. 

Rapid metropolization is adding pressure in local governments to cope with deteriorating infrastructure, air and water pollution, stressed ecological networks, transportation gridlock, rising poverty, immigration and social inequities while providing sound public services such as water, sewage, energy, transit, social services, education and health. 

Metropolitan Areas are also sources of opportunities and prosperity, providing the critical mass required to become engines of national economies and centers of global trade and investment; sometimes challenging traditional federal or unitarian government structures, hegemony and restrictions.

In a context of emerging national populism and protectionism, 21st century metropolises are no longer playing by conventional top-down rules of the 20th century. Political and economic power is shifting and devolving: downward from national governments to cities; horizontally on new platforms of public-private and civic collaboration; and globally along networks such as C40 or 100 Resilient Cities. A new metropolitan leadership is emerging by necessity to solve the grand challenges characteristic of modern cities.

This course will identify a range of current governance innovations and mechanisms to provide efficient and equitable urban services, develop sustainable megaprojects and improve policy coordination.

We will define metropolitan governance and its implications, describe its various models around the world and study emerging metro drivers such as: Innovation, Infrastructure, Inclusion, Urban Mobility, Security, Environment, Risk Management, Economic Development and Technological Change, exemplified by cases of cities that have moved from planning to implementation.

The course is in a lecture-seminar format, with evaluations based on a research-oriented paper and class participation. At the end of the semester we will present the findings as part of the Santiago de Chile Metropolitan Government devolving plan.

Critical Perspectives in Environmental Planning

What is the relationship between the natural environment and the design of successful places? How do we know? And how can we mobilize these ideas as planners and citizens? This class will explore environmental planning as an inescapably political and ideological practice and will give you tools to contextualize environmental planning methods in time and place. Starting with a brief survey of the history of environmental planning and its alternatives, we will explore recent planning perspectives that focus on empowering communities to shape their own environmental conditions, including Environmental Justice, Political Ecology, democratic resource management, and other methods of community governance and environmental activism. We will consider how environmental planning ideas spread, how they work in different contexts, and how they have been disruptive and disrupted. We will question the relationship between environmental protection and community empowerment. Finally, we will explore our own politics as planners and designers, in order to be more aware of the assumptions and values that drive the work we do, and to figure out how we can most fairly and equitably live in and with the natural world.

This class will be intellectually omnivorous, combining perspectives from planning, environmental history, anthropology, political science, and other fields. We will therefore occasionally interrogate how different fields produce knowledge and use these varied perspectives as data to explore how people experience nature and the built environment.