Making the American City: Form and Society

This course examines major episodes in the history of American urban growth, design, and planning to understand the urgent social, environmental, and development issues of today.  

It traces the growth and elaboration of North American cities in four major periods of urban history from the early European settlement to the present, with an emphasis on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through the study of plans, physical projects, and material conditions, Making the American City investigates specific topics, such as the downtown; homes and housing; public parks and landscapes; planned communities and civic spaces; homes and housing; transportation systems; environmental threats and disasters; the provision of infrastructure; racial and ethnic settlement patterns; slums and ghettos; bohemias and art districts; urban renewal and revitalization; gentrification; public landscapes and spaces; and suburbia in all its diversity.

The objective of the course is to use history to inform the thinking and practice of contemporary designers, planners, and policy makers. Students enrolled in the course will gain a fundamental knowledge of the major events that have contributed to the form and character of modern American cities. The format of the course will be lectures and class discussions. The method of evaluation will be short student papers on projects or subjects chosen from different periods of the history of the American city.  There are no prerequisites.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets on Mondays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.  

Digital Media: Power Tools

This course aims to leverage collective and DIY-knowledge-building as a representational technique and a tool of power. It begins with the premise that a site – as it is physically and conceptually constructed – is more than a geometric abstraction or geolocation but an aesthetic, sociopolitical, and programmatic provocation. Our ability to read a site via representational tools is intrinsic to our ability to design. This course explores how we might invent and adapt our own tools.

The majority of the built environment is not celebrated in architectural culture. Purposefully exploring programmatic misfits, margins, and in-betweens of architecture while valorizing urban form, informality,  and everyday spatial practices allows us to operate critically from a different center. We will recast the site and building beyond its physical parameters to underline other dimensions of meaning. Privileging the relationship between buildings and inhabitants (as opposed to the building as an object) strengthens a feedback loop between a site, its inherent spatial strategies, and an emergent design agenda. We will draw upon Levi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage, Kon Wajiro’s modernology, and Momoyo Kaijima’s Behaviorology, amongst others. Instrumentalizing time, communality, ritual, adaptation, and indeterminacy may nurture aesthetic instincts and unearth new approaches that are sociocultural, textured, and multivalent.

Students will collectively select a set of sites to record, translate, and project upon. Building a communal repository of knowledge and technique is proposed as a transformative model of self-education and a way to advance new readings of the city. Students may import a site from a concurrent studio brief or research project and export materials produced throughout the course. The semester will unfold around three thematic sections – pixel city, machine city, and collage city – structured around digital presentations of texts, images, and references, weekly internal and invited lectures, and informal pin-ups and critiques. Work is open to revision until the final presentation. Representational formats and methodologies within and outside of architecture will be a primary focus. Students will sample from visual cultures, countercultures, and each other’s work to subvert or extend disciplinary protocols. In so doing, the course aims to expand and enrich the site as a locus for research, design, and establish future forms of practice.

The (New) Image of the City

In this course we will attempt to visualize cities as the outcomes of urban design. Through a reflexive method of visual and narrative investigation, each student will uncover and demonstrate a variety of experiential and structural characteristics of their chosen city. Acknowledging contemporary urban design as a decentralized practice, we will develop perspectives that cut across the various disciplines involved in shaping cities while addressing the many tangible and intangible dimensions that define any given city.

This course investigates how society perceives cities, their landscapes and architecture, and the designer's role in mobilizing imagery to digest existing conditions and project new urban possibilities. Part historical dive, part technical workshop, the class moves between investigations into the historical development of cities through image and instruction on the fundamental two and three-dimensional representational techniques involved in visualizing the vast array of inevitably convoluted and undetermined aspects of urbanity. The class will review how the city's evolution has been represented over time in urban design, landscape architecture, architecture, art, politics, and culture while developing new techniques and methods for representing latent urban conditions and uncertain futures.

Structured around participatory lectures, discussions, and creative exercises, the course necessitates students' abilities to consume, interpret, and produce. The majority of the work for the course goes towards developing a series of exercises that visualize a chosen urban condition at a series of scales and correlated perspectives. These exercises break down the process of image conception and execution over several weeks. Each scale builds on top of the previous and forms a composite image of a particular city when assembled. The final assignment will be curating the work produced to form a visual atlas through a whole class exhibition.

Designers with a robust representational repertoire will be those best suited to communicate their ideas and impact change in the coming generation. Students should take this course because they will learn how to maximize the potency of the images that they create. They will learn to integrate image crafting into the design process. They will learn the fundamentals and basis for harnessing the power of the image to supplement their intellectual and design ambitions. Students will create impactful visual content structured by meaning, beauty, and emotion. They will develop an eye for strong images and understand how individual details such as composition, tone, texture, and light strengthen the larger picture. A student who successfully engages with the course content will emerge with the conceptual and technical capacity to create compelling images that challenge the conventions of representation while also speaking to a broad audience. Simultaneously, by representing cities at various scales, students will come away with the ability to read various urban conditions and engage directly with contemporary pluralistic urbanism.

The course is for designers of all types. While we will use the term 'urban' to connote the ecological complexity of our contextual focus, designers from various disciplines are encouraged to bring their expertise to the group. Rendering techniques, both in engine and post-production, will be covered extensively and expertise is either is not a prerequisite. However, a strong foundation in 3D modeling with Rhino will be helpful, as is a curiosity and determination to test and acquire new skills and perspectives.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. The course will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 7th and will meet regularly thereafter.

Entrepreneurship and the Built Environment

How do you transition from a concept and idea into a built reality? How to initiate a new venture and ensure its success in today’s city? How do you balance financial risk and reward with design and purpose?

This course equips students with a deeper comprehension of the dynamics and complexities involved in the design and creation of new ventures related to the built environment – mostly housing and real estate projects but not limited to them, as real estate is only a subset of the potential ventures dealing with the built environment.

By learning to think like a real estate developer – understanding their interests, incentives, and concerns that drive their decisions – students will enhance their ability to communicate, negotiate, and design projects that ultimately see fruition. Developers and investors often shape urban development decisions. While developers typically select the designer and influence the design, it's not always for the best. As with any venture, different metrics influence the decision of whether a project materializes.

This course will explore various frameworks and methodologies that guide a leader's journey from conception to realization, navigating through physical, market, financial, and stakeholder constraints. We will apply these frameworks to multifamily housing typologies placed in various contexts to explore what it means to reach for different goals. To understand the creative process of development, we will utilize real case studies of adaptive reuse and social housing projects, primarily located in Latin America and Europe.

We will study certain components of a business plan, not as a finalized product but as a continually evolving prototype used for communication, negotiation, and trust-building to secure support to materialize a vision. Students will design and construct simplified economic models to comprehend the risks and rewards associated with a project. They will learn to discuss financial tradeoffs in conjunction with design dilemmas, under the premise that we always operate within the bounds of limited resources and varying constraints.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets only on Tuesdays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Building Resilient Communities

The extent or ability to bounce back to normalcy after a disruptive event is perhaps the simplest definition of Resilience.

Human society and all it entails is constantly subject to disruption, be it social, economic, structural, climatic, etc. These can be, to name a few, acts of nature, occurrences of wars, fires, political instability, and financial crisis. Different societies prepare for these onslaughts differently, given the resources available, political will, economic condition, etc.

Climate change and disasters, as a consequence of the former, or not, threaten human settlements in various ways and extents. The ability of community to withstand such events and revert to normalcy vary given their level of preparedness. Preparedness in turn varies according to ability, economic conditions, conditions of infrastructure, social structure, structural conditions and importantly political and collective will.

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) defines resilience as: In the context of disaster risk, the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management.

Which is perhaps more relevant to the way this course will look at resilience.

This seminar course will examine the resilience of communities to disasters, particularly natural disasters. It will do so with an objective of finding ways to create resilience in communities that are apparently ‘weak’. Many communities in the world today are vulnerable to threats posed by natural and man-made disasters. In many cases there is not sufficient help from governments and organizations to create resilience. In such instances people must rely on their own strengths and abilities to create this resilience. The course will emphasize the ability of people to develop resilience with the skills and knowledge they possess with some support from technical inputs. The key being self-sufficiency in developing this resilience.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets only on Tuesdays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Policy Analysis: A Tool for Evidence-Based Decision Making

Policy analysis is problem solving.  It involves making systematic comparisons across a set of alternatives to address a particular policy or planning problem, usually in the face of time and resource constraints.  Typically, policy analysis is done to provide advice to a client, organization, or another decision-maker in the face of a public problem or crisis.  It involves rapid response, quickly orienting yourself to new and changing topics that often are complex and controversial.  How to develop doable solutions that target the core problem at hand? How to weigh the many competing trade-offs among diverse stakeholders?  How to balance innovation with pragmatism?  In this class we will develop strategies to address these, and other, challenges. 

While the course will emphasize the development of a stage-based analytical approach, we will also discuss alternative models of policy analysis and consider critical perspectives from political science, behavioral science and design fields.

Based largely on case discussions, the class will explore the choices facing decision makers in the public and nonprofit sectors in the US and abroad with regard to a wide range of issues, including public health, environmental protection, urban development, transportation and infrastructure.  We will also have a unit on cost benefit analysis and how to incorporate it into this analytical toolbox.  We will approach CBA from a critical perspective and consider its limitations in the face of scarce information and equity concerns. 

This is a methods course: we will use a variety of cases to practice and become nimble in the logic and techniques behind policy analysis, rather than becoming an expert in any one subject area.  Students will develop their own analyses and learn how to communicate them in written memos, oral argument, and visual presentations. The course will culminate in a team project in which students conduct a simulated policy analysis exercise on a current issue.

 

Up to four seats will be held for MDes students. 

Housing Matters

This seminar investigates the politics of housing by focusing on the relationships between spatial, material, and typological decisions architects make when designing housing and the most pressing issues confronting 21st-century households.

Designing housing is about the way people live, the way they relate to one another, and the kind of cities they aspire to be part of. Purpose-built housing today is disconnected from these issues. It responds to the diversity of lifestyles in cities by partitioning citizens through different sectors, such as luxury housing, social housing, student housing, housing for the elderly, affordable housing, or housing for the homeless, rather than addressing them in an integrated and inclusive way. Housing for each of these ‘sectors’ is also frequently provided in different areas of the city, amplifying the segregation of members of society from one another, instead of fostering interdependencies and a sense of community. Regardless of which sector it is designed for, it provides a standard, inflexible type of apartment, conceived around the ideals of a nuclear family, which denies the existence of diverse households in the city. Moreover, the standard apartment is based on the idea that a home is a place away from work, which is no longer the case since many people work from home following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Subjects covered by the course will include community, difference, flexibility and appropriation, and wellbeing in relation to 21st-century households.

Students enrolled in Professor Moussavi's studio, 1308, who select this course first in the GSD Limited Enrollment Course Lottery will receive priortized enrollment.

Philosophy of Technology: From Marx and Heidegger to AI, Genome Editing, and Geoengineering (HKS)

Technology shapes how power is exercised in society, and thereby also shapes how the present changes into the future. Technological innovation is all around us, and new possibilities in fields like artificial intelligence, genome-editing and geoengineering not only reallocate power, but might transform human life itself considerably, to the point of modifying the essence of what it is to be human. While ethical considerations enter prominently, the philosophy of technology is broader than its ethics. It aims to interpret and critically assess the role of technology for human life and guide us to a more thoughtful integration of technology in our individual lives and in public decision making.  This course aims to teach you to do just that, starting with basic stances and key figures in the field and then progressing towards a number of challenges around specific types of technology as they arise for the 21st century. At times it is tech optimism that dominates these debates (sometimes even techno-boosterism that sees technology as key to heaven on earth), at other times it is more low-spirited attitudes from romantic uneasiness to doom-and-gloom Luddism and technology-bashing. A closer look at these attitudes – alongside reflection on how technology and power are intertwined — will help generate a more skeptical attitude towards all of them and contribute to more level-headed debates, which is badly needed.

This course is jointly-listed with HKS as DPI-207.

This HKS course will meet for the first time on Wednesday, August 30th.

Students may attend class in person on August 30th but HKS will stream all elective classes for the first three days. These lectures will be recorded and included on the course's Canvas site.

Course lectures will take place in Belfer Hall, room 200, Starr Auditorium. The Friday session will take place 1:30pm – 2:45pm in Littauer Bldg L230 at HKS.

Link to HKS shopping and exam schedules.

 

 

Architecture on Screen

From the dystopian visions of Fritz Lang to the midcentury world of Jacques Tati and the stylized universe of Wes Anderson, this course
examines the evolving representation of architecture, urban environments, and landscape over the course of film and television history. The course will also examine how the development of social media platforms is remaking the way architecture and urban space are presented. Students will be instructed in basic filmmmaking techniques, explore different modes of storytelling, and write and direct their own short film projects.

Each session of the class will explore a specific theme in screen history, among them: the representation of the architectural profession; forms of documentary storytelling from conventional narrative to cinema verite and other experimental approaches; the history and design of opening and credit sequences; the evollving depiction of the American landscape, with an emphasis on the American West; the role of the auteur in shaping perceptions of space; the changing representation of suburbia in popular film and tv; dystopian and utopian environments in drama and science fiction; the domestic space, and in particular the modern house, as a locus of fear; social conflict, race, colonialism and contested urban environments; and representations of Boston and the Harvard campus. Running as a through-line through these sessions will be an examination of the representation of the idea of modernity. The class will also look closely at the films of select directors who have made architecture and the form of the city a consistent theme of their work.

Screenings of essential films will be supplemented by readings and occassional guest speakers. All students are required to have a smart phone.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices

The Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar investigates art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of contemporary culture, the city, and the world. As artists and designers respond to challenges of global magnitude and their local impacts, engage with cross-cultural and often conflicting conditions, and operate in disparate economic and societal realms, the need for increased engagement and collaboration is paramount. The complexity present in the context of action—economic, social, political, cultural, and ecological— frequently requires interdisciplinary approaches accompanied by cross-pollinating knowledge and skillsets.

Stemming from socially engaged art and design practices, and relational aesthetics, this seminar aims to develop artistic tools and approaches that challenge disciplinary boundaries that crossover and interact with communities, policymakers, institutions, and various experts and help cultivate new forms of interdisciplinary knowledge.

As art and design practices move from art in public space to art in the public interest (M. Kwon), their participatory and relational makeup can generate platforms and agencies that question dominant culture, construct new practices, establish new subjectivities, and subvert existing configurations of power (C. Mouffe).

This semester, we will explore the theme of survival in times of an endangered and uncertain future. As humans have become dangerous not only to themselves but also to the whole biosphere (H. Jonas), we need to reimagine strategies, pragmatic processes, effective assemblies, and spaces of collective survival that may release us from the "dead hand of the past that clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change." (K. S. Robinson, The Ministry for the Future). Throughout the semester, we will engage in a series of conversations with the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs while examining nuclear energy sites, including uranium mines, power reactors, testing sites, and all sorts of exclusion zones in various geographies, and their complex multitemporal implications on human, nonhuman life, and the planet.

Practice-oriented, this seminar at the intersection of art, design, and activism includes lectures and assignments dedicated to exploring artistic tools and methods and the context in which they perform.