Studies of the Built North American Environment: since 1580
North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs, and as depicted in fiction, poetry, cartography, television, cinema, and advertising and cybernetic simulation.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Interpreting an Archive
A seminar/workshop addressing current issues on the practices of architectural archiving and the curation of architectural exhibitions.
A series of lectures from the instructors and from several distinguished visitors (museum curators, archivists and architects whose work has been the subject of exhibits and content of archives), followed by class discussions, and organized visits to local museum and collections if conditions permit. Besides classes that follow the seminar format there will be workshops in which actual archival material (flat work and models) will be inspected, handled and discussed. We will meet twice a week in the afternoon (schedule tbd), one two hour session for presentations and one hour session for discussions. Students will be required for their final assignment to curate and design a small architectural exhibit in Gund Hall of selected materials from one of the GSD Frances Loeb Library Special Collections Archive.
Enrollment in this course is limited to twelve architecture students. Six spaces are reserved for MArch II students and six for MArchI students who select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Course 3487 Interpreting an Archive, will be taught on Tuesdays 12:00pm to 2:00pm and Fridays 12:00pm to 1:00pm. Tuesday sessions will be taught in person while Friday sessions will be on zoom with some exceptions when the course will visit local exhibits, collections, archives, etc. A complete list of Fridays visits will be confirmed on first day of classes.
Original Misunderstandings: Latin American Architecture and Some Genealogies
Tropicália was a Brazilian movement founded in the 1960s by musicians, poets, and other artists. Immersed in the Latin American polarized discussions about the meaning of identity, which pendulated between extreme expressions of nationalism and an international outlook, these artists wanted to be “just like the Beatles” while remaining faithful to their roots and traditions. This kind of syncretism was also a distinctive feature of Latin American Modernisms in general. When it comes to architecture, local renditions were manifested by specific responses to the environmental and climate conditions, a relationship to landscape, poetics, the incorporation of political art and traditional crafts, and the porosity and openness of the object. Modern buildings were meant to be performative and experiential, not because of any theoretical mandate but just as a representation of the new “Latin American way.”
Latin American architecture has since been recognized by its modern pioneers—even though their real impact in the triangle of influences that included them, Europeans, and North Americans, has often been underestimated abroad. Yet, their local effect was such that it persisted over time, even coming to complicate a theoretical renewal or the constitution of other significant narratives that later production could build upon. Suffering from the preconceptions conditioned by a modern aesthetical-political ethos, most of the referential postmodern production in Latin America remained reductively categorized as "Critical Regionalism" or understood as a shallow result of later capitalism. Lately, a big trend of criticism falls into the alarming fetishization of poverty that not only raises moral questions but also undermines the chances of learning from the disciplinary contributions that architecture in the South has to offer.
This course intends to address those contributions and the interpretative void that began with postmodernism in Latin America through the critical analysis of its contemporary architecture. While maintaining a playful, bold, and very committed approach to possible modes of making theory today, taking risks, trying ideas, and the creation of concepts—in the Deleuzian sense—will be encouraged. Lectures, guests, readings, discussions, the study of cases, drawings, and collective interviews will be used to help students develop new cartographies and taxonomies that can be used as tools of representation, analysis, and communication of the design and theoretical genealogies explored.
The seminar will be divided into three parts. In the first part lectures, readings, and discussions will focus on the Modern heroic period and the expansion of the canon. Differences and similarities throughout the continent will be debated and historically problematized in a global context. Students will prepare reading responses to participate in the discussions following the lectures.
In the second part, the class will interview guest speakers while researching and discussing case studies. Works by Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Camilo Restrepo, adamo-faiden, Productora, Carla Joacaba, Angelo Bucci, Felipe Mesa, Ana Smud, and Emilio Marin, among others, will be discussed.
The final part of the course will be devoted to the collective production of graphic analytical cartographies and taxonomies, focusing on the exploration of possible new tools and uses of media for a contemporary theory of architecture. These discussions will conclude in a public event with guest speakers.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Mapping Urbanization: Forms, Processes, and Systems
Urbanization is often framed in terms of human agglomeration. The opening line of the most recent United Nations population dynamics report states that 60% of global population will live in urban areas by 2030, with one in three living in cities with populations exceeding 500,000. While revealing, such metrics positioning urban vs. rural limit the scope of urbanization to the creation, expansion, and densification of cities for human dwelling. Human impact on the world abides not by administrative boundaries. On the contrary, agricultural land – land directly or indirectly devoted to human sustenance – outsizes land devoted to human dwelling 50 to 1.
Urbanization, as material upheaval supporting human metabolism, therefore defies any single notion of boundary, scale, or material composition. Rigorous study of urbanization should capture the dynamics and forms that animate urban life. This includes the temporal encounters and frictions with architecture, nature, mobility systems, legal and political structures, material surfaces, service flows, and more. Drawing the built form of cities is a first step to capturing these interrelationships, but unraveling deliberately opaque dynamics that produce urban life is the true goal.
Mapping Urbanization equips students with the skills to visualize both the ever-changing composition of cities and their metabolic annexes. Through technical workshops, lectures, and spirited reading discussions, students will learn to unpack and draw the aforementioned processes from specific points of view with intended audiences in mind. Moreover, students will develop an intuition for the multiplicity of data. Arguments about the city can be made in either direction, depending upon how data is harnessed. Mapping is therefore both analysis and possibility – making it an indispensable tool to understand and communicate the multi-scalar forms, processes, and systems comprising urbanization.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Dynamic Digital Landforms
The course will explore nascent digital techniques of modelling, simulation, analysis, and visualisation of the landscape as a dynamic system, and speculate on the role of emerging sensing and responsive technologies to generate recursive relationships between computation and ecology. The intention is to examine and frame new approaches to land-forming, and the making of new environments not prioritised as extensions of humans, but rather as new configurations that include, and re-value, non-human agents.
The landscape, considered as both form and process, is a palimpsest of conditional processes and properties, one that is open-ended, flexible, and adaptable, displaying a self-organizing uncertainty and dynamism. It is defined and shaped by a collection of material processes that reflect dynamic ecological, economic, social, and technological conditions. The resultant formal composition of these phenomena inherently describes the forces that have shaped them, and that will continue to do so, in which form translates the material registration of force as ‘a network of enveloped material processes.’
The sensed landscape creates reciprocal relationships between dynamic material conditions that shift the perception of matter to information. Questions that will be pursued include; how might the agency of this technology inform new ways of shaping the morphology of the landscape in response to issues of climate change; what generative sequences that shape the land and its processes can be developed; and what conceptual shifts might this propagate?
Experiments with digital techniques and methods will build on these concepts to generate innovative, imaginative, and measurable digital representations for the translation and visualisation of landscape systems as landform, process, and phenomena. This will be conducted as an iterative design process interrogating how we might perceive change in a landscape system and consequently new ways to engage with it. This investigation will be defined through the constraints of space that examine material and form, in relationship to modalities of time.
This is a project-based seminar framed through 3 parts. In part 01 we will explore the agency of sensor and responsive technologies through lectures, guest lectures, readings, precedent studies, and class discussion. The intention is to define new conceptual frameworks of the dynamic landscape. Digital simulation techniques will be explored in part 02 through demonstrations that explore the visualisation and representation of change over time. In part 03, we will develop a final project that brings together the conceptual positions developed in part 01, and the techniques of part 02, as a digital model that describes the structural design of a complex landscape system.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
From Fallow: Equitable Futures for Landscapes of Injustice
Property abandonment is prevalent in places of disinvestment, where vulnerable communities bear the burden of untended land alongside structural racism, unjust policies, uneven capital distribution, and an inability to access education, healthcare, and municipal services.
There is a relationship between the socio-economic and political well-being and the physical attributes of the land, the practices of its care, and its ownership status. The United States often privileges models of individual property ownership, where there are systems in place for acquisition and economic growth but not disposition, collectivity, ecological work, and potential.
It is no secret that vacant lots have long vexed cities—especially the architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, and citizens living and working in them. In the past few decades, hundreds of design ideas for abandoned property have emerged. Some remain purely speculative, while others have been tested and implemented. Meanwhile, neither the preoccupation with nor the accruement of abandoned property has abated.
Now, there is an urgency for propositions for how we can address the inequities of our urban environment, for visions for the city moving forward. Amidst so much negative attention, designers play a fundamental role in developing ideas that bring hope as well as other means of property distribution and care.
In this course, we will construct the American landscape of property investment and abandonment—and engage this landscape to form alternative models for the care of these complex spaces.
We will look intently at the present lived condition, as a reflection of a complex past, in order to imagine equally rich and varied futures. In many of these examples, it is a matter not so much of making drastic change to the sites themselves, as drastically reimagining how we approach them.
Students will tackle particular contexts and themes towards a collective body of work.
This course is open to all students but requires a basic understanding of urban development history and a willingness to draw.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
The Idea of Environment
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations, and actions that calls them to intervene—that is, to make a plan, solve a problem, create a product, or strategize a process. They use various measures to assess and project their interventions from beauty and efficiency to systems and sustainability. Today, increasing volatility and uncertainty of the environment, however, alongside a growing sense and presence of crises and disasters, compels us to reconsider how we have imaged and imagined, defended and critiqued, planned and designed the environment. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.
This class is a seminar focused on reading and discussion. Course participants will be required to submit weekly reading responses, to contribute to discussions online and in class, and to develop an original research and/or design project over the course of the semester.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Culture, Conservation and Design
This proseminar addresses issues of critical conservation, an evolving discipline that illuminates the bridge between cultural meaning, identity, and context as part of the design process. Critical conservation explores the multiple forces that underlie contemporary life and the creation of places. The field addresses issues of social justice as applied to the design of places: whose history is being told; whose future is being created; who benefits; who is included and excluded by the process of creating new designs in an existing context? The goal of the course is to broaden the student’s understanding of the cultural dimensions of a place and to understand how we use/misuse the past and how we value the present.
The course is organized around three topics:
1. The Dynamic Present addresses the inherent dynamism of modernity and tradition in creating personal and group identities. It investigates questions about the past, history, permanence, temporality, obsolescence, and authenticity and applies them to understanding the identity of places.
2. Place & Cultural Identity addresses the social construction of meaning associated with group identities, places, artifacts, and history. Issues include history, heritage, nostalgia, authenticity, and their intersection with regulatory agencies and preservation standards that are used to attempt to control context by design and identity narratives.
3. Conservation Uses & Abuses addresses how conservation is used to create, control, and transform places. The roles of ancestor worship, government use of racial zoning, urban renewal, creation of tourist destinations, the stigmatization of the other, and private use of exclusionary amenities will be examined to understand how groups use underlying agendas to manifest power, shape and enforce group identity, and exclude the other.
The seminar is open to all GSD students and is a distributional elective for MDes Publics students. There are no prerequisites. Course work includes a one-page synthesis of weekly reading assignments, three case study presentations with short papers, and a paper/presentation of a final research project framed in the topics explored in the seminar.
DES 3333 is a Discussion-Based Seminar limited by lottery. The readings and discussions provide a theoretical framework to support advanced research. It is a required course for the MDes Critical Conservation area, and a distributional elective for the MDes Publics Domain. Lottery preference given MDes students who select the course first in the lottery, with highest priority given to MDes Publics Domain students.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 1st. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Theories of Landscape as Urbanism
This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics describing landscape’s embeddedness in processes of urbanization as well as economic transformations informing the shape of the city. The course introduces students to landscape as a form of cultural production, as a mode of human subjectivity, as a medium of design, as a profession, and as an academic discipline. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and case study projects, students will be introduced to landscape through the lenses of capital, labor, material, subject, and environment. The first half of the course revisits the origins of landscape in response to the societal and environmental challenges of industrialization and the attendant transformations in industrial economy shaping the modern metropolis. The second half of the course repositions recent discourse on landscape as urbanism in relation to the economic and territorial transformations associated with ongoing urbanization at the planetary scale.
The first quarter of the course introduces the origins of landscape as a genre of painting and the invention of the ‘new art’ of landscape architecture as responses to urbanization and their attendant social, economic, and cultural transformations. This portion of the course describes the material and cultural contexts in which landscape was conceived as well as the sites and subjects it invoked. The second quarter of the course describes the emergence of city planning from within landscape architecture and the subsequent impoverishment of the field in the absence of its urban contents. This portion of the course introduces the aspirations and implications of ecologically informed regional planning in the 20th century, as well as the ongoing ideological effects of that agenda in the context of neoliberalism.
The third quarter of the course introduces the discourse and practices of landscape urbanism over the past two decades. This portion of the course surveys the discursive and projective potentials of an ecological urbanism, as distinct from those of ecological planning, and speculates on the recent formulation of projective ecologies, among other discursive formations shaping the field. The final quarter of the course follows the transition from region to territory, and from regional urbanization to planetary urbanization. This portion of the course describes landscape’s role as a medium of cultural production and critical revelation in relation to the increased scale and scope of anthropogenic impacts across the planet.
Course readings, prerecorded video lectures, and supplementary multimedia materials are made available for asynchronous review via Canvas. Weekly discussions sections are led by the Teaching Fellows (13:30-14:45 or 15:00-16:15). All-class meetings are scheduled weekly live via Zoom to discuss questions and comments arising in discussion sections (16:30-17:45). Critical questions address issues of racism and resistance, capitalism and climate, among other topics of contemporary import to landscape architecture. Students are invited to contribute to discussions, prepare brief response papers, and complete a design research dossier on a topic attendant to the course content at the end of the term. The course invites candidates from the Master in Landscape Architecture Program as well as candidates in the Ecologies domain of the Master in Design Studies Program.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Proseminar in ECOLOGIES: Interrelated, In-between, Dynamic
Our aim in the proseminar is to explore the inherent inventedness of ecology as a field of inquiry, its distinctly relational nature, and the potential breadth of it social, cultural, political, environmental, economic, and urbanistic implications. The work will draw on the social sciences, design research, material culture, urban theory, climate and energy studies, and public policy. Through reading, presentation, and discussion, we will explore various situated understandings of and attitudes toward nature and environment, across cultures and including inter-species and non-human lenses. We will touch on issues of planetary and atmospheric change and dynamics; resource cultivation and extraction technologies; production, distribution, and consumption networks, and their regulatory frameworks; forms of collective living at the scale of the city, region, and territory; and questions of to whom and for whom these networks, policies, and regulations are established (and who they exclude). Case studies will embody contemporary discourses and research methods, including reading and writing, visualization, simulation, projection, and communication.
ECOLOGIES + Cultures
– Land, Landscape, Environment, Nature
– Non-Human Lenses
ECOLOGIES + Atmospheres
– Climate
– Energy
ECOLOGIES + Resources
– Cultivation Techniques and Technologies
– Extraction, Production and Distribution Networks
– Material Culture
ECOLOGIES + Collective Society
– Territory, Infrastructure, Urbanism
– Regulatory and Policy Frameworks
ECOLOGIES + Social Life
– Public Health, Equity, Justice
– Human Behavior
Prerequisites: Enrollment in the MDes ECOLOGIES program.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 1st. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.