Topology and Imagination: Between Chinese Landscapes and Architecture
This course deals with landscape architecture and architecture in contemporary China. Its purpose is twofold: to articulate new perspectives on the challenges facing designers, and to demonstrate the pertinence of issues to a broader range of international discussions.
There are three major aspects involved:
– An expanded vocabulary for understanding design challenges in both urban and rural settings. We shall discuss a range of terms, taken from local Chinese discussions and from Western contexts, that can enable a more precise grasp of issues. In particular, the understanding of Chinese gardens in terms of topology (from the work of Zhu Guangya) shows a way for going beyond the idea of static “composition.”
– Detailed case studies that draw on a broad range of images documenting both design process and construction process. Our goal is to go beyond the usual presentation of design projects in six- or eight-page magazine articles and to attend to process and contingency. The main topics will include: redundant precision versus apparent precision in construction (from the work of Francesca Hughes), hi-fi versus lo-fi architecture (from the work of Jeremy Till), perspectival and aperspectival effects, and proactive intervention in the chain of supply of building materials.
– Cultural dimensions relevant for the understanding of architectural and landscape experience. This part of our study will involve both reading texts (in English translation) and analyzing extant gardens. The main topics will include: long-term and short-term memory, the pitfalls of thinking in dualistic dichotomies, the opportunities presented by different kinds of clientele, and the limitations of various kinds of regionalism.
Course format:
Includes attendance at lectures, seminar presentations, responses to readings, and a final research paper.
Prerequisites: None. Course materials and discussions do not presume previous knowledge of Chinese topics.
Building Conservation and Renewal: Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the spatial, material, and broad cultural values inherent in a building or site that must be understood to craft interventions and additions that will complement, sustain, and enhance the original work while addressing both architectural and technical integrity? This course will introduce architecture students to the functional, technical, legal, and environmental principles of working with existing buildings to ensure their continued technical and programmatic viability. Designed specifically to ground the participant in the methodologies of building conservation and renewal and to introduce the tools necessary to successfully approach working with existing buildings, the course will include lectures, guest lectures, discussions from readings, and local field trips.
Globally, roughly 35 percent of construction activity is devoted to work on existing structures. This percentage is steadily rising, making the sustainability mantra “the greenest building is the one already built” increasingly relevant as we seek strategies to minimize the impact of construction on the environment. Maintenance, repair, and renewal are therefore fundamental components of contemporary architectural practice increasingly requiring facility in techniques of rehabilitation, adaptive reuse, and where required, conservation or historic preservation.
We will look critically at the development of the international charters and standards employed in working with historic structures and how they impact our approach to modifications to any existing building from a technical, design, and regulatory standpoint. As these standards continue to evolve and adapt, we will particularly address the question as to how the apparatus of conservation is changing to best complement the legacy of modernism and the recent past—by far the largest component of the contemporary built environment.
We will review the fundamentals of performing a building assessment, including field documentation, analysis, and evaluation. While this course will not address building physics and materials conservation in detail, participants will gain familiarity with a broad range of both traditional and contemporary materials through case studies and the Harvard GSD Materials Collection within the Frances Loeb Library.
While interventions must include sound technical solutions, any modification from conservation treatments to renovation and addition designs must address the full complement of values necessary to enable an economically viable, socioculturally relevant rehabilitation. We will examine a range of intervention design case studies on both traditional structures such as Stanford’s Richardsonian Romanesque Old Chemistry Building, Harvard’s Widener Library, and modern buildings including works by architects such as Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn and Eero Saarinen. Though geared to students in the MArch curriculum, the course is open to all interested students.
Course format:
Short student presentations on assessment and evaluation, an intervention design exercise, and a final exam.
Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common
This lecture course examines selected cities between the 5th century BC and the 17th century AD, beginning with ancient Athens and ending with the rebuilding of London after the great fire in 1666 and the founding of Boston. It is not, however, a survey. Rather, the lectures take up one city at one “golden moment” of its development and propose a theme or themes for discussion. The course, therefore, is both chronologically and thematically structured.
The first half of the semester addresses the ancient and late antique city, beginning with Athens and continuing with Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch. This section concludes with a consideration of the effects of Christianization on urban form, the widespread decline of urban habitation in the early Middle Ages, and the rising importance of ideal or symbolic “cities of the mind.” The second half of the semester looks at selected instances of Renaissance and Baroque urban interventions, beginning with Florence, returning again to Rome, and then moving to Venice, Madrid, Paris, London, and Boston.
Course format:
Lectures, lecture/discussions, and discussions. Each lecture is normally devoted to one city. It covers urban layout and topography, infrastructure, patterns and types of housing, and typologies of the major monuments and treats in more depth those features relating to the themes for the week—the relation of the city to countryside, for instance, or the city as center of cultural activity, the city and ideas about space, and so on. The lecture/discussion sessions introduce additional material (sometimes a new city, sometimes a more in-depth treatment of one of the assigned readings) and then move to discussion of the lecture and readings. The discussion sessions sometimes compare two cities and sometimes deepen or amplify the themes and ideas covered in the lecture(s) and readings. Students are required to prepare for the discussions by reviewing the relevant lecture(s) (PowerPoints are on the course site), doing the readings, and thinking about how the readings relate to the weekly topic.
Throughout the semester, you will be working on what will become a final research paper of 12 pages of text plus endnotes, illustrations, and a bibliography on a city of your choice during its “golden age.”
Authority and Invention: Medieval Art and Architecture
This course covers masterworks of art and architecture in Western Europe from the decline of Rome to the dawn of the Italian Renaissance. It explores the creative tension between the impulse to originality and the authority of classical models in the search for new art forms. Emphasis is placed on representative works considered in their totality (architecture, painting, sculpture, and minor arts) as experiential wholes and on the plurality of geographical and cultural contexts (Italy, Germany, France, England, and Spain). It explores the forms, types, styles, intellectual, theoretical, and cultural contexts of paradigmatic monuments from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages (approximately 300–1300 AD).
Course format:
It is intended for both graduate and undergraduate students. Both groups attend the two weekly lectures but have different weekly sections. Site visits on the syllabus are primarily for undergraduates; the content of section for graduates varies according to the interests of participants. Requirements include: quizzes on images, lecture materials and readings; short papers and prepared discussion topics; and a final research paper. Design students may substitute a design problem of their own devising for the research paper.
Jointly offered course: FAS Medieval Studies 107.
Prerequisites: None. ?
Jointly Offered Course: FAS MdvlStd 107
Buildings, Texts, and Contexts I
This course is structured as a dialogue between the historical and theoretical frameworks that have shaped the formulation of architectural principles—what the architectural historian Rudolf Wittkower called the “apparatus of forms”—by means of selected case studies. The organizing principle here is thematic as opposed to chronological, and synoptic rather than merely factual. We treat a selected range of concepts developed by philosophers and historians to explain the Classical and the Baroque as dialectical systems of thought that arise in history but transcend this history to mark modern and postmodern practices.
History and Theory of Urban Interventions
This course uses historical and analytical readings and case studies to address several major theoretical questions concerning the aims and outcomes of urban interventions. The overall theme is the relationship at a given historical moment between conscious public policy and the spatial, economic, social, and political framework in which it operates and which it affects. To what extent are planning, design, and policy simply the resultant of social forces and to what degree do they shape those forces? Where do planners and policy makers derive their goals? What is the relationship between the goal-setting process, the quality of policy, and the character of cities and regions? What are the values that should govern practice? How can planners enhance their control over social outputs, and, in turn, by what mechanisms should the public control them? Who benefits from urban and regional planning? What is the relationship between race and gender and urban outcomes?
Topics include: the history of urban planning and its relationship with the history of urban development; a comparison of American, European, and Asian examples of urban interventions; development theory; social construction; neoliberalism; cities and social inequality; technological possibilities; and environmental quality.
The course is of general relevance to anyone entering the design and planning professions or interested in urban studies as well as to doctoral students in these fields. It connects theories, histories, and debates about planning to contemporary urban transformations and to the challenges presented by emergent urban problems, crises, and struggles.
The course aims at helping students build critical capacities for understanding and contributing to efforts to shape and reshape urban life through the professional methods and ethics of the planning, design, and policy disciplines through research, scholarship, and political participation.
Course format:
The course will be a mix of lecture and discussion. In addition to the lectures, there will be required section meetings every two weeks. Written work consists of two short and two longer papers.
Prerequisites: None.
An Unsentimental Look at Architecture and Social Craft
Designers of the built environment have had an on-again, off-again relationship with social agency. Progressive design and social outcomes were closely linked in early modernism. These interests realigned again under much different circumstances in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, we are again witnessing an elevated interest in their linkage. To date, however, we lack the ability to articulate what forms of social impact are actually within the architect’s scope. The majority of the praise given to projects of perceived societal value is limited to the project’s social benefit program or its underserved community context. The problem with these critiques is that they reveal little about how the architect’s design decisions have created any greater or lesser social value. This course will have you move beyond program and context to speculate how you can address social impact opportunities within mainstream practice.
Because this area of knowledge is so nascent, we will use dialogue as the exploratory tool and final products of the course. The challenge of this course is to develop your own inquiries into social agency and learn to leverage your agency as a student to influence the discourse within the school. Working in small teams, your final deliverable is to curate an action that influences the conversation concerning the social agenda within the Harvard GSD and beyond. You will choose the focus of the discourse and you will have room to pursue both conventional and unconventional methods of engagement. Projects could include, film, open letters, installations, online campaigns, or dinner parties.
Throughout the semester, you will meet with me or the TAs to discuss the development of your project. Success will be determined by the quality of debate you are able to generate around the issue you are raising. Classes will explore different approaches and tools for negotiating our agency through case studies and guest speakers. You will be required to read short case studies and brief weekly readings. Once over the semester, you will each be asked to analyze a particular project and present it to the class. The task is to evaluate the options available to the designers as well as the choices they made. While this course is within the architecture program, we will consider design interventions at many scales and I welcome students from all disciplines to join the course.
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, has seen the rise of the idea of resilience as a measure of intervention.
This class explores the environment through six forms by which it is imaged and imagined, defended and critiqued, planned and designed. Each gathers distinct modes of representation, means of visualization, and measures by which they are engaged, planned and designed.
The six forms of environment are:
– Geographic Space: maps and plans, Apollo’s Eye, and the measure of space/time.
– Urban Infrastructure: cities and regions, Geddes’s “Valley Section,” and the measure of solution/failure.
– Cultural Context: histories and texts, “Reflective Gaze,” and the measure of meaning/difference.
– Development Trajectory: needs and economies, homo economicus, and the measure of growth/sustainability.
– Ecological Relations: natures and systems, Thoreau’s Walking, and the measure of dependency/autonomy.
– Temporal Dynamics: seas and rivers, aqua fluxus, and the measure of complexity/resilience.
The course is designed as a lecture, seminar, and workshop. Each class will begin with a presentation by the instructor that situates the idea of environment in an argumentative framework. It will serve to frame a class discussion informed by readings, life experiences, and design possibilities. The last hour will be spent critiquing and developing students’ projects on articulating particular risk environments toward resilience.
Evaluation:
Contribution to class discussions, biweekly contribution to workshop, and final project presented in an exhibition/review format.
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 required for MDes Critical Conservation 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.
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. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and case study projects, students will be introduced to a reading of 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.
Members of the course will be invited to contribute to discussions, prepare brief response papers, and complete an extended essay 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 Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology concentration of the Master in Design Studies program.