Spatial Analysis and the Built Environment

Urban planners engage in many complex processes that defy easy representation. This course provides first-semester urban planning students with the graphic and technical skills needed to reason, design, and communicate these processes with geospatial data. This knowledge will be embedded within a larger critical framework that addresses the cultural history of categorization, data collection, and cartography as tools of persuasion for organizing space. 

Visual expression is one of the most compelling methods to describe the physical environment, and students will learn techniques specifically geared toward clarifying social, political, and economic dynamics and how they relate the structuring of spaces. The class will introduce fundamentals of data collecting, data formatting, and data importing into a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment. 

Students will gain familiarity with the technical tools essential to GIS for making maps and exploring relationships in the physical, regulatory, and demographic dimensions of the landscape. Within GIS, students will learn the basics of geospatial processing to produce new forms of knowledge in support of ideas about urban planning and design. Desktop publishing tools, including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will be used to distil ideas into effective graphic presentations. The class will also advance techniques for representing form and space through diagramming and three-dimensional modeling programs. 

Students will be introduced to workflows that demonstrate how to move effectively between data from these platforms and modes of representation. Class lectures will be complemented with technical workshops. 

Objectives: 
1. Establish a conceptual framework for critically engaging the practices of mapping and data visualization. 
2. Provide a basic understanding of tools and techniques needed to reason, design, and communicate with geospatial data. 
3. Develop students’ skill and confidence for visualizing the complex processes, flows, and dependencies unique to the planning discipline. 

Prerequisites: Enrollment in the Urban Planning program. 

Architectural Representation II

Architectural Representation II: Projective Disciplines

This course examines the history, theory, and practice of projective and descriptive geometry. Invented as techniques to draw form, these discourses are the basis of the intractable reciprocity between representation as technique (not merely style), and three-dimensional space. The objective of this course is to uncover the centuries-old and still ongoing relationship between representation and construction. Students will apply techniques of projective systems to translate architectural thought and mediums into an experimental formal language that exhibits relationships between three-dimensional form and flatness.

Through the study of principles of parallel (orthographic) and central (perspective) projection, students will develop literacy in primitive and complex surface geometries—their combinatory aggregation, subdivision, and discretization—as they relate to the most reductive of architectural forms: the planar surface. Ultimately, these techniques will be placed into a productive dialogue with architectural and programmatic imperatives. Students will be introduced to the system of Mongean Double Projection as the exemplary construct that historically organized the architect’s spatial imagination, and understand its influence on contemporary modes of representation and fabrication. Projective systems have developed relationships between masons, carpenters, engineers, industrial designers, mathematicians, cartographers, painters, and architects.

Composed of both lectures and hands-on drawing workshops, the course is equal parts theoretical and technical. Exercises will involve two-dimensional digital drawing, digital modeling, and physical modeling. Additional conceptual and technical texts are provided for optional reading. The course will involve close formal reading of buildings and will introduce students to the practice of reading, drawing, and writing architecture.

This course is required for all first-year MArch I students.  

Architectural Representation I

Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality

Architectural representation is an ideology—a source of ideas and visionary theorizing that has a set of origins and qualities. As such, it’s prudent to study the origins of conventional techniques of architectural representation to be informed about their intentions and the specific contexts that conditioned their development.

Representation is not a conclusive index of an architecture already designed and completed, in the past tense. Rather, representation is integral to the design process and the production of architecture—it is present and future tense: an active participant in exploring and making. It occurs in multiple instances and forms along a project’s evolutionary path. Though not deterministic of the architecture, representation techniques selected to visualize ideas influence the evolution and outcome of the work.

The course initiates with an analysis of conventional representation techniques and their intentions. Using this knowledge as a platform, the class pivots to consider representational riffs emerging in response to the contemporary context—those that explore the limits of our “origin arsenal” and question what each offers for the present. Possible paradigms of architectural spaces generated from representation (rather than the other way around) will be presented and discussed.

“Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality” will involve readings, lectures, and discussions framing the backstory on conventional techniques as well as contemporary critical stances in relation to these techniques. Students will be required to complete weekly representation exercises in relation to each course topic by experimenting with new representations of their design work being produced in parallel courses. These design exercises will be presented to and discussed by the class.

The final project will involve isolating a representation from concurrent studio work and critically evaluating the architectural possibilities that extend from its close reading and revision. The final project will require articulation of the goals of the original representation technique and the specific aims toward originality in the tweaking of this technique, as suited to the design project.

 

Feeding Boston

The development of postindustrial food supply systems parallels the explosion of the modern city. This studio will deal with an ordinary matter whose future impacts every one of the world’s citizens. On the one hand, how we eat is related to global challenges as inequalities of distribution, climate crisis, or cultural sovereignty. On the other, attempts of healthiness in the production, sustainability, on chain distribution, or responsible comestibles consumption, often become individual and solitary actions against a system that responds to structural rules of economy.

Focusing on Greater Boston, the studio will analyze temporal, spatial, and relational patterns of food production, transportation, storage, and sale. The first part of the studio will consist of a thorough analysis in order to set Boston’s foodprint, understood as the complex web of both static and dynamic infrastructures between buildings, urban space, policies, and personal attitudes toward food. We will investigate the capacity of food supply systems to trigger social cohesion, to create local centralities, and to foster urban transformation processes.

At the start of the studio, students will select one of the following topics to develop: 

– Food in central places/food as a commodity; 

– Food in the suburbs/food deserts in Boston; 

– Ethnic food versus luxury imported edibles; 

– Farmers markets, local producers, and locavorist consumers; 

– Food justice, gleaners, ugly food, and freeganism; 

– Mobile food, takeaway, kitchen incubators, and dark kitchens; 

– Food supply infrastructures, warehouses, and coldscapes; 

– Food processing or the loss of freshness in raw foods; and

– Organic and inorganic food waste processing.

This research work will overlap with a continued design process to identify programs and research sites. Three sites with their respective programs will be proposed at the beginning of the course, but alternatives emerging from the analysis developed and equivalent in the ambition of the objectives they raise, will also be encouraged. Representations, both at urban and at detail scales, are posed as the main research and design tools.

Facing a reality in postindustrial metropolises in which food has become a commodity, and in which most people have settled into a passive relationship with edibles as consumers, designers are called on to be actors and to change the rules of future urban food systems.

 

 

 

Novi Sad ? The Agency of the Urban Ensemble: Community ? Action ? City

The main objective in this studio is to critically explore Novi Sad, Serbia, the European Capital of Culture 2021. In Novi Sad, we will research future spatial scenarios for upgrading a series of defunct factory complexes into“civic social districts.” These post-manufacturing districts have been in danger of becoming more victims to rampant commercialization and pressure to sell-out government’s property. Many of the defunct factories date from the time period between the two World Wars. They were nationalized by Socialist Yugoslavia and brought cultural programs to the workers. Today, decades after the collapse of socialism, the factories operate as loose, semi-legal, self-regulated, informal spaces for art and music, pop-up bars, clubs, and government organizations such as youth culture clubs and other administration. The challenge is to explore future civic design for these complexes via visionary urbanism, art, and design culture; finding a balance between government ownership and that of the private or informal sectors. The studio will be held in a lively “research architecture” manner, experimenting with typologies from small to large in synchronic ways.

Affordability Now!

The United States is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. Over the last two decades, rents have risen far faster than renters’ incomes, resulting in record-breaking numbers of families being unable to afford decent homes. The statistics are staggering: according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, in 2016, nearly one-third of all US households paid more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing (for renters, the cost-burdened share is 47 percent). In no US state can a full-time minimum wage worker afford to rent or own a one-bedroom dwelling. Fewer than four affordable and available rental homes exist for every 10 deeply poor renter households nationwide. To put the demand for affordable housing in perspective, consider that a recent development in Brooklyn received over 87,000 applications for 200 affordable units. 

Despite apathy at the highest levels of government, this crisis has engendered a wave of activism and experimentation that has brought architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and urban designers together with tenants fearful of displacement, community-based groups organizing against gentrification, and local policymakers across the political spectrum. The resulting coalitions have resulted in some bold new affordable housing initiatives. From policies like universal rent control, to bottom-up initiatives for cooperative developments, community land trusts, and other communal environments that attempt to decommodify land, to architectural experiments with “tiny homes,” modular and prefab construction, and other types of low-cost housing, to a renewed push for municipally-constructed public housing, the present is an exciting time for bold new experiments in affordable housing production. 

This interdisciplinary studio, offered in conjunction with Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, invites students from all departments to experiment with these—and many other—new weapons in the affordable housing arsenal. Our site is the Los Angeles region, where the affordability crisis is particularly dire (housing costs in Los Angeles eat up an average of 47 percent of residents’ income—more than any other major US city). After a field trip to the frontlines of Los Angeles’s most prominent affordability battlegrounds, students will work with tenants, community-based organizations, and city officials to imagine how we might creatively deploy cooperative developments, community land trusts, low-cost housing prototypes, and other weapons to help build a more equitable region. As there are a myriad of ways in which architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and urban designers can intervene here, studio projects are expected to be very diverse and range in scale from the individual building to the block to the neighborhood to the region. 

Housing & Infrastructure in Yucatán: Beyond the Mayan Train

The Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico has been described as “one big flat slab of limestone gently slanting into the sea.” It is a place where urbanization and environmental preservation have always been in delicate balance due to its particular geological conditions: a medium to low tropical rainforest on water-soluble limestone. An underground water system produces sinkholes called cenotes, despite the lack of major rivers.

In the 1840’s John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, influenced by explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, traveled to the Yucatán Peninsula and documented some of the most important archeological sites in the region. Catherwood’s litographs and Stephen’s book, ‘Incidents of Travel in Yucatán’, were instrumental in sharing with the world the relevance, breadth, and impact of Mayan culture in the region

From Tulum and Bacalar in the east to Celestún and its mangroves to the west, from the archeological site of Calakmul in the middle of the rainforest to Rio Lagartos on the northern coast, and from centuries old cities such as Campeche and Mérida to recent tourist territories such as Cancún and the Mayan Rivera, the Yucatán Peninsula is a territory in constant flux.

In recent months, the new federal government in Mexico announced the construction of the Mayan Train, an ambitious work of infrastructure, which will connect an important number of cities and towns in the region including Campeche, Mérida, Chichén Itzá, Cancún, and Palenque. Highly polemical due to its environmental implications and its lack of clear objectives, the projects seek to address the historical infrastructural shortcomings in the region while also laying the groundwork for networked economic growth and new forms of housing and employment across the territory.

This studio will look at the region in its historical and contemporary shifts and develop more productive, sustainable, and inclusive models for territorial transformation. We will critically engage tools of environmental and hydrological restoration, cultural heritage preservation, housing, as well as infrastructure and tourism, as ways to think about connectivity, form, inhabitation, and development in the Peninsula at large.

Note: 

This course has an irregular meeting schedule. 

Thursday and Friday Bi-Weekly: August 29-30; Sept 12-13; October 10-11, 24,25; November 7-8, 21-22; and for final reviews.
The instructor may arrange for skype sessions between visits.  

Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.

Social Operative Infrastructure: Sustainable Water Models in Chile

According to the World Bank, countries need to invest 4.5 percent of their GDP in infrastructure to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2030. In order to do that, we need to start thinking about building new infrastructure and transforming the existing one. We must then question the actual operative infrastructure: How could we start recalibrating it to make them operate not solely as functional systems, but as a social and ecological tool for improving people’s quality of life? The scale of the infrastructure in cities is massive, making any change or improvement a profound impact at the metropolitan scale.

The studio seeks to explore operative water infrastructure in Chile as a way to start a discussion about networks beyond monofunctional operation, with the goal of bringing social, environmental, and functional upgrades to the city. The ubiquitous network built under the surface, with hundreds of nodes emerging in different parts of the city, will be the starting point for a contemporary discussion about infrastructure, including its obsolescence and the role it may play in improving people’s lives in the future.

Hundreds of operative sites throughout Santiago, historically isolated or in dispersed urban fabric conditions, are now surrounded by city growth. The infrastructure contained only utilize a small part of the surface, producing negative externalities in the surrounding area and having no positive relation with their context. The studio will work from the city to the site, objects and processes, opening up different approaches and scales of problems and solutions.

Starting from the urban scale of the water network, students will work specifically on one of multiple sites, looking for emergent processes of urban renewal in the most segregated and low-income areas of Santiago de Chile.

The Immeasurable Enclosure

This option studio explores the ability of a single enclosed space to be the spatial expression of that which is immeasurable.

The garden and the room can be considered the fundamental spatial expressions in the constitution of a culture and consequentially many consider them to be the essential spatial constituents of the designed environment. These single-space environments—outdoors, indoors, or in-between—are defined by enclosing and containing only a small part of the world and precisely because of this condition, they have traditionally been perceived as the means for designing coherent singular identities.

Due to their powerful but singular nature, the progression toward social plurality and cultural diversity seems to diminish the relevance of these fundamental spaces. As the inability of a single space to encompass and synthesize complexity becomes apparent, alternative spatial conceptions emerge as expressions and vehicles for multiple sensibilities and identities. Land mosaics, spatial fields, or network societies, just to name a few, have become the new spatial paradigms to accept and encourage plurality and diversity. Arguably, while these paradigms and the values that they represent have enabled the design of rich environments, their expansiveness has also enabled the appearance of multiple urban pockets, each of them behaving as nothing more than echo chambers of narrowly defined values and views.

As an alternative to these expansive spatial paradigms, this studio aims to reframe the discrete space as the mechanism for containing and expressing the world. Due to their confinement, single-space environments are places where one has to invariably acknowledge the other. Therefore, enclosures can contain the multiplicity which by its own sociocultural definition and value is apparently uncontainable. Through this paradoxical condition, these basic enclosures can transcend their fundamental nature to become comprehensive and holistic sociocultural expressions.

Through the design of a single-space environment, this studio proposes reframing the design technique of the enclosure and infusing landscape and architecture’s primordial roots with the ambition of holding the immeasurable. Students in this studio will work individually and each student will be responsible for selecting a physical and cultural context wherein to design an immeasurable enclosure.

Manifestos for Building the Utopia

The continuous ground movements that happen in Mexico City, specifically those that have occurred during the last 40 years, demonstrate the territory’s frailty due to its radical landscape transformation. The basin that originally held a 110,000 hectare lake is now home to the largest urban fabric in Latin America, where water occupies less than 5,000 hectare. The studio will focus on designing with such movements. Just as the Mexicas proved that inhabiting the lake was possible by constructing a utopian city, we believe in the potential of geological incidents as triggers for diverse forms of inhabiting a place.

Our focus will be ground-cracks, products of excessive water extraction, ground subsidence, and earthquakes. We are interested in their effects on the landscape and the urban fabric, and the possibilities they enable when considered as intrinsic elements that will shape the contemporary Mexico City.

Participants will express their positions toward these extreme conditions through a space manifesto. These statements will provide enough critical matter to define a sensitive vision for the site as well as its complex social and economic conditions, which will be expressed through drawings and physical models capable of showing divergent possibilities for inhabiting the current and distorted landscape of southern Mexico City, where memory and landscape come together.

Requirements:

– Modesty and openness when getting to know and understand a distant reality.

– High sensitivity and imagination to reframe the conditions in a specific territory permeated by culture and tradition. 

– Compromise and passion to produce high-quality models, drawings, and texts that explain divergent visions of a specific land. 

– Inquisitiveness to rethink the opportunities presented by a vulnerable territory.

Note: 

This course has an irregular meeting schedule. 

Thursday and Friday Bi-Weekly: August 29-30; Sept 12-13; October 10-11,17-18,24,25; November 7-8, 21-22; and for final reviews.
The instructors will alternate weeks of instruction and may arrange for skype sessions between visits. 

Click here for trip/travel information related to this studio.