Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture

This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a conspectus, a survey of the field, but one in which the underlying nature (made and found), boundaries, contours, and texture of this field—in fact several disparate fields—is made the object of close scrutiny. We will define landscape architecture as we survey it. In pursuing an intermittent chronological narrative, the lectures will place site-specific emphasis on a number of cognate disciplines (hydrology, forestry, geology, agronomy, geography, hunting, inter alia), in the context of endemic and transplanted visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, and cities, we will be attentive to surrounding formations of discourse (the pastoral, the picturesque, the emblematic, the Adamic and Edenic) that have and continue to imbue them with meaning. 

Proseminar in Landscape Architecture

The proseminar introduces MLA II students to a range of theories and methods in landscape architecture and their implications for practice and research. The focus is on developing a critical perspective that comes from a deeper understanding of landscape architecture theory, methods, and speculation. The proseminar provides a foundation for further course and studio work at the GSD and upon completion of the seminar participants will have articulated a specific research question to pursue in the coming semesters. 

Classes will typically consist of a presentation by landscape architecture faculty followed by a discussion of assigned readings and a tutorial on a specific skill, resource, or research question. Each student will develop and present their own research interests within the context of the topics discussed in the seminar. Evaluation will be based on weekly response papers, participation in class sessions, a seminar presentation, and final research paper. 

Participation in the seminar is limited to MLA II students. 

Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD

This seminar is intended to provide the theoretical and methodological foundation for completing a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a solid thesis proposal and have the necessary intellectual foundation to complete their thesis by the end of the academic year. Over the semester, students will identify and refine their thesis topic, solidify their relationship with a thesis advisor, and produce a thesis proposal. Weekly sessions will involve discussions of relevant readings and exploration of emergent student work. As a forum for the exchange of work in progress, the seminar will allow students to share their ideas and get feedback on the development of their thesis from their peers, visiting critics and reviewers, and faculty. 

The seminar will begin by introducing the thesis as a conceptual frame and by identifying the key elements that cut across the different types of theses that might be produced by students, whether textual, design-focused, or based in some other medium, such as film. It will then address the following issues, among others: topic and question identification, research methods, case selection, the craft of thesis production, managing the student-advisor relationship, and techniques for verbally defending a thesis. 

Students will complete weekly assignments relevant to their thesis and present in class on most weeks. Since the seminar will be run as a graduate seminar, students will be expected to provide critical and thoughtful responses to their peers’ work and engage in informed and mature discussion of the issues found in the readings. The course will include a midterm and final review of students’ proposals, to be attended by faculty and critics. 

Art, Design and the Public Domain Proseminar

This seminar is intended to serve as a theoretical and practical laboratory for the development of student ideas and concepts toward their artistic, design, and research projects. The course will explore artistic and design methodologies that aim at bringing new meaning to public space, contribute to the lives of people in an urban environment, and inspire the democratic process. The course will focus on informed review and discussion of contemporary art and design practices and related larger theoretical and critical discourse enhanced by students’ own project proposals and explorations. The seminar will also be a discussion forum for further development of the GSD’s MDes program in Art, Design, and the Public Domain. 

Student interests and instructor suggestions will become a base for assigned readings, presentations, and projects. Some seminar sessions will include appearances and participation by invited fellows, researchers, artists, and curators, as well as film screenings and field visits. 

In the course of readings, discussions, presentations and in the process of working on their own artistic and design project proposals, the students will explore issues and concepts of public domain, public space, public sphere, public place, the inner public, the political, “Agonistic Democracy,” the event, parrhesia, “Feminine Law”, the avant-garde, urban intervention, spatial practice, memory, memorial and monument, conflict transformation, trauma and recovery, public testimony, the “stranger,” site specificity and audience specificity, relational aesthetics, theater and pedagogy of “the oppressed,” epic theater, psychogeography, nomadology, interrogative design, strategy and tactics, transitional object, “good enough mother,” participation, responsiveness and interactivity, cultural prosthetics, and others. 
 

Public Projection: Projection as a Tool for Expression and Communication in Public Space

The class will focus on the development of original projection projects that can inspire and facilitate artistic expression and cultural communication in public space. 

In their projects students may consider (but not be limited to) experimenting with two kinds of projections: 

1. Projections-installations that transform and assign new meaning to specific architectural and sculptural urban sites; 

2. Wearable, portable, or mobile projections that engage bodily performance in public places. 
Students will learn cultural, technical, and ergonomical aspects of such projects. 

The projects may require relevant cultural research and invite a creative use of software, hardware, and physical modeling. Students will be encouraged to experiment with video projectors and micro-projectors in connection with media devices, such as smart phones, speakers, monitors, sensors, and other input and output components, as well as the use of unconventional materials and sites as projection “screens.” 

The class meetings will include experimentations, development and realization of site-specific and performative projections in public space, presentations, and discussions on relevant artistic and media work, as well as visits to research groups and labs at Harvard, the MIT Media Lab, and in the Boston area. 

Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf Life in the Supermarket Landscape

We tend to assume that supermarkets are static, neutral spaces where little of significance ever happens. The supermarket shelf is actually a highly volatile, hyper-competitive dynamic market landscape. On this shelf, products struggle to maximize every possible advantage, all in a ruthless effort to lure consumers away from competitors. However, what may have once been merely an issue of attention-grabbing graphics applied to packaging has quickly become much more complex. The contemporary consumer in today’s strained economy demands tangible value from the products that he/she consumes. To survive, brands must wrestle with new issues that include the ergonomics of the hand, the complex geometries of the refrigerator, and even sustainable material innovations that determine a product’s afterlife and its impact on the environment. These are multi-scalar, spatial life problems that designers are uniquely suited to address.

This seminar will ask students to operate as brand strategists. However, rather than invent new products, students will instead innovate upon existing brands. Outdated supermarket products will be reconsidered from the top down (brand identity, consumer target, logo, tagline, packaging, etc.). Students will also be required to study their product’s shelf competitors and will learn by presenting their observations through visual arguments rather than those that are explicitly verbal.

Each seminar will open with multimedia presentations on topics such as conducting demographic research, global color psychology, brand architecture, case studies in product launch failures, creating brand touchpoints, crafting a visual argument, and making an effective pitch. These conversations will be supplemented by readings from the business and financial sections of several newspapers, magazine articles, and blog interviews with brand experts.

The deliverables for the seminar will be presented in final review format in front of a cross-disciplinary jury of business luminaries. The output will include a full-scale 3-D print of the product redesign supplemented by graphical data, renderings, and digital animations. Ultimately, the seminar’s ambition is to make real a scenario that finds designers sitting at multiple tables, tackling issues of economics, technology, politics, and media at macro and micro scales.

 

Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation

The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers and an expressive, playful supplement to computer-based labor.

This course will master techniques in hand drawing, refining sensitivity to all details of what one sees and developing capacity to articulate it in a visually convincing and evocative form. The class projects will include work in outdoor and indoor situations and places as well as drawings of live models. In the process of drawing, students will focus on the world of lines, textures, shapes, light, shade, and values. We will use various tools, materials, and artistic techniques including pencils, vine charcoal, markers, ink, and other wet and dry media, later combined with the use of camera, computer renderings, etc.

Throughout the duration of the course, students will complete several larger drawing projects. In addition, a special short assignment will be given at the beginning of each class session. There will be field trips to draw in city interior and exterior places and public settings.

In one nonrepresentational drawing project, students will focus on the formal articulation of emotional life experience. In another project, we will explore the performance of the human body in interaction with elements of the architectural environment. In a final project, students will experiment with the use of wall drawing to visually transform the perception and meaning of specific architectural space.

Work on studio projects will be supplemented by museum visits, presentations, and discussions of relevant examples from art history and contemporary art. Guest artists will be invited as reviewers for the presentation and exhibition of final projects.

For the first class session, please bring soft vine charcoal and a large kneaded eraser. 

Communication for Designers

"The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings. In the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem of what to say and how to say it."
—Edward R. Murrow

This course will survey and critically discuss precedents and techniques for clear and effective communication of design ideas. Throughout the semester, we will study the process of developing, distilling, and articulating a project from initial idea to final presentation.
We will look at examples from within the disciplines of landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design, but will also draw from the fields of graphic design, journalism, narrative nonfiction, advertising, exhibition design, politics, and public speaking.

We will explore the expanded potential of storytelling and how narrative techniques are employed by some of the masters of contemporary design and culture. We will discuss the importance of positioning a project with a particular argument and will develop techniques for effectively researching and communicating this position through written thesis statements, descriptive writing, and the combination of word and image. We will also discuss available media and its uses and limitations, editing and ordering visual material to tell a story, telegraphing a message quickly, public speaking techniques and styles, and constructing images for maximum communication impact. We will study this material with an ongoing critical discussion of several influences on communication including gender, culture, language, and power.

This course is specifically designed to address multiple disciplines, and enrollment is encouraged for students from the landscape architecture, architecture, and urban planning and design programs. Non-studio students are encouraged to join the course.

While the communication principles covered in the course are applicable to all communication platforms, the material we cover in the course focuses specifically on the communication of design ideas—generating clear ideas, describing projects, and making proposals and presentations for design work. The material in the course is delivered via lectures, class discussions, and a series of short, practical assignments and presentations. Assignments, presentations, and in-class discussion require excellent command of spoken and written English. 

 

Landscape Representation III: Landform and Ecological Process

“Landscape Representation III” examines the relationship between terrain and the landscape it supports and engenders. It aspires to explore and challenge the representational conventions of land-forming, and support a landscape architecture design process that posits the landscape as a relational assemblage. It explores a description of the making of landform through its inherent material performance in relationship to ecological processes that describe its connectability to the ordering and making of the landscape that is a reciprocation of forces between itself and its context at specific scales.

Measures of time will be utilized to describe and design the landscape through a comparison of sequence and event, and their intervals, rates, and duration in relationship to spatial forces and flows. Time infuses the material reality of the landscape through states of formation: from those that signify stability, through sequences that are predictable and observable processes of change, to those that are uncertain and instantaneous.

Representation is approached as an activity of thinking and making in which knowledge is generated through the work. This facilitates an iterative process of reflection in action, enabling testing in which new knowledge informs subsequent design decisions.

The course will introduce methods of associative and generative modelling, and quantitative and qualitative analysis visualized through multiple forms of media. These are decision-making models conceived to imbue interaction between evidence-based variables and design input.

Precedent studies will accompany an engagement in digital media with fluid transitions between documentation and speculation, 2-D and 3-D, static and dynamic, illustrating time-based processes.

Lectures and lab exercises will provide the foundation for exploration and discussion and exposure to a set of digital techniques for analyzing and generating landform processes to advance technical and conceptual ability as well as to provide a point of departure for an in-depth awareness of landscape precedents and representational techniques.

Landscape Representation I

The rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture is inextricably intertwined with the concept of representation. The first in a three-semester sequence, this course introduces students to the unique relationship between landscape architecture and representation through an overview of its history, techniques, and conventions. Emphasizing experimentation and fabrication, this course embraces representation as a highly generative process in the act of designing.

Weekly tutorials, presentations, and discussions reinforce a collaborative space to investigate new skills, strategies, and workflows. Through a series of exercises, students will develop their own iterative representational approach that incorporates both analog and digital methodologies. Coursework will include digital software such as AutoCAD, Rhino, and Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign), as well as physical modeling and hand drawing techniques.

Prerequisites: None.