Contingent Grounds: Contextual Analysis as 21st Century Project

Designers of the built environment must both understand the context of our work and utilize architectural intelligence and intuition to imagine its future. In an increasingly digital world, balancing quantified, data-informed site analysis with qualitative understanding and local knowledge is a complex and open-ended challenge. This course reframes “context” as a shifting construct in an era of complexity, shaped by human and non-human relationships, collaborative intelligence, and path dependencies across social, ecological, and infrastructural systems. Through historical and theoretical inquiry alongside contemporary methods–including layered geospatial analysis, counterfactual reasoning, and agent-based modeling–the course examines visible and invisible dimensions of site, revisiting traditions from Ian McHarg to contemporary spatial theory while engaging questions of climate risk, new forms of nature, and the meaning of the social in computational environments. Contingent Grounds positions site analysis as an active architectural project, equipping students to critically and creatively operate within uncertainty and contingency in design and research practice.

Architecture’s Audience

What is the purpose of exhibiting architecture? One difficulty of curating architectural exhibitions is the impossibility of exhibiting buildings themselves. Instead, exhibits often focus on drawings, models, photographs, correspondence, and publications. However compelling, this material rarely holds the same interest for people outside our discipline as for those within it. Even a floor plan may be illegible to the uninitiated. Any exhibition must wrestle with the question of audience: of who we communicate with, and why. 

This course makes that question concrete. The setting is the Branch Museum of Design, a small institution house in a Tudor Revival mansion in Richmond, Virginia. The subject to be exhibited is a trove of archival materials related to Best Products, a retail company that commissioned a series of experimental big-box showrooms in the 1970s. Our objective is to interrogate the contemporary significance of this material and to explore how, why, and to whom it should be shown. Students will investigate the history and current conditions of architectural exhibitions, and contribute to the curation of a show on Best Products to open at the Branch in May 2026. We will engage with this subject not only through archival materials, but by meeting directly with the designers behind the work, including James Wines, Malcolm Holzman, and Tom Geismar. We will also gain insights from prominent architectural curators.

Beyond buildings, how does the discipline of architecture communicate with the public? Beyond niche publications, how do we record and share our history? What is the role of a design museum in stimulating civic discourse in an American city today? Together, we will not only ask questions but posit answers and imagine strategies with the potential to impact a real-world institution. This course will include a sponsored overnight trip to the Branch Museum of Design.

AI and the Physical Imaginary

“We are interested in — if not fascinated by — the two-way relationship between humans and technology. Humans create inspiring and empowering technologies but also are influenced, augmented, manipulated, and even imprisoned by technology, depending on the situation and the interpreter.” 
   – Pertti Hurme, Jukka Jouhki, in “We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us” in Human Technology 13(2).

Generative AI is currently impacting architectural and design workflows, offering new possibilities for ideation, visualization, and formal exploration. Builders of these tools promise to accelerate creative processes, democratize design, and expand the space of formal possibilities, yet this promise obscures several major issues. For example, many current generative AI systems generate forms that often misunderstand gravity and physicality of materials. It lacks understanding of embodied, tacit knowledge through which designers actually work. And, AI systems, more than prior computational tools such as CAD or parametric modeling, act with a degree of independence that challenges designers’ agency, process, and the nature of design knowledge.

Architecture and design are embodied practices. Designers think through making, learn through material experimentation, and generate knowledge through haptic feedback and proprioceptive awareness. As Polanyi observed, “we know more than we can tell”: much of design expertise remains tacit knowledge, resistant to explicit formalization. How can we then design with AI in a way that preserves the material intelligence, tacit knowledge, and embodied awareness that are central to architectural and design practices?

This course interrogates two questions: (1) How do we move AI processes out of the 2D screen into the 3D physical world; the realm of bodies, materials, and fabrication? (2) How do we integrate information about physical reality and tacit/tactile knowledge into design workflows using AI? We will explore these questions through three modules:

Module 1: AI and Physical Making — Students fabricate architectural models and 3D artifacts that demonstrate meaningful integration of human creative process and AI capabilities, and move beyond prompt-based image generation.

Module 2: Interaction Paradigms — Exploration of human-AI interaction models (one-click, real-time, incremental, non-linear, and more) through experimentation. Students develop their own methods of interaction.

Module 3: Multimodal, Human and Tacit Intelligence — Investigation of how tacit knowledge and embodied intelligence can be integrated into AI workflows through methods such as material sensing, gesture, touch, spatial positioning, etc. Students use such methods to design.

We will discuss topics such as computational design thinking, embodied cognition, comparisons between human-AI interaction and human-robot interaction, participatory design, ethical and critical AI humanities approaches, and meta-design (designing the design process). Workshops introduce students to generative AI tools, creative coding with ml5.js/TouchDesigner, and LLM-assisted development of custom AI tools. Projects will engage in physical prototyping, digital fabrication, and model making through emerging AI technologies. We will ask: What roles should AI play in architecture and design? What types of interaction enable meaningful human control? How might we incorporate physicality, material feedback, and evolving intentions into human-AI interaction? 

Spatial Intelligence: Designing the Future of Work

The average adult spends one-third of their life working. Can workspaces be designed to reduce stress, strengthen social connection, or improve focus in real time? As organizations adopt sensors, digital platforms, and AI-driven analytics, workplaces are evolving into complex, data-rich environments that continuously capture patterns of behavior. Designers have new tools to understand spaces of work — and to leverage data to reimagine environments that better support human performance and well-being.

This course investigates how spatial conditions — light, sound, temperature, biophilia, and layout — shape cognitive functioning, creativity, comfort, and communication, across a range of work environments (including traditional and home offices, studios, classrooms, and service and healthcare spaces). Students will collect, analyze, and visualize data, using surveys, sensors, and computational tools, including machine learning, to quantify how spatial factors influence work outcomes. The course emphasizes “micro-interventions,” where students design and evaluate small-scale changes in real-world environments.

Hands-on work is central: students will complete exercises and mini-projects that progressively build towards a final project. By exploring emerging AI trends and hybrid work patterns, students will develop designs that re-envision the future of work. Throughout the course, students will also critically examine the ethical, social, and technical implications of intelligent environments. Using workplaces as a case study, this course aims to illustrate how design, technology, and human outcomes intersect in practice.

By the end of the semester, students will be equipped to collect and interpret multimodal data, design and evaluate evidence-based interventions, and articulate how AI, sensing, and data analytics can shape the future of work.

The course is intended for students from architecture, urban design, MDes, and MDE programs. Non-GSD students are welcome. Prior programming experience is recommended, but not required.

Animated Architecture: Signals, Data, and Psychophysiology

Cross-disciplinary seminar at the intersection of architecture, physical computing, and psychophysiology.

This course examines how designers can create environments and objects that sense and respond to bodies, context, and ambient conditions. As ubiquitous sensing (biosignals, environmental data, spatial tracking) becomes embedded across scales, from wearables to materials to rooms, how can designers meaningfully integrate and interpret these signals, and how should they critique their use? In this course students will learn the technical foundations of sensing, instrumentation, signal processing, and system integration, while pursuing design experiments that probe the limits, ambiguities, and ethical stakes of affective artifacts.

In collaboration with faculty and researchers in psychology and neuroscience, the course introduces principles of experimental design and empirical inquiry. Students learn how to structure, conduct, and analyze small-scale studies that connect physiological and behavioral data to questions of perception, emotion, and experience, bridging technical prototyping with research methodology.

Over the semester, students move through three scaffolded assignments:
Sensing and Visualization: Collect personal or environmental data through one or more sensors and develop a novel method or platform for communicating or translating that data.
Experiment and Design: Conduct a small empirical study introducing experimental design principles.
Affective Assemblies*: Synthesize the semester’s technical skills and critical perspectives into an interactive prototype, material investigation, or spatial exploration.

*Students may integrate the final project into their studio work, provided it is approved by their studio instructor and discussed with Prof. Richter-Lunn.

No formal programming or electronics experience is required; students from all backgrounds are welcome.
 

Modeling Light

The invention of Skiagraphia by ancient Greek painter Apollodorus left an indelible mark on western civilization. Applying shade and shadow to drawn work, or ‘rendering,’ fundamentally transforms 2-dimensional drawings from abstractions to representations of phenomenal experience. It prefigured an explosion of exploration into the qualities of light and perspective during the Renaissance, inspiring the scientific revolution’s quest for a philosophical and physical understanding of light, and the engineering science of illumination.

Modeling Light investigates how light is designed, represented, and communicated in architectural spaces–tracing methods from analog and linguistic approaches to physically based, real-time digital simulation using ray-tracing and virtual reality to push beyond the limits of human sensation. Grounded in historical context and theoretical frameworks, the course examines how visualization tools simulate perception to illuminate design intent and further sustainability outcomes. Through lectures, discussions, and hands-on experimentation, students will work across multiple modes of modeling light –including drawing, physical prototyping, notational and mathematical systems, and a range of digital workflows for daylight and electric lighting analysis and design.

By engaging directly with luminous phenomena, students will cultivate an intuitive and critical understanding of the language of light. Assignments will cover fundamental methods and tools, while a comprehensive term project will integrate both physical and digital techniques to communicate luminous experiences in a fun and low-stakes learning environment. This will establish both a strong conceptual foundation and technical fluency in contemporary lighting practices, offering concrete opportunities to incorporate learned techniques into their studio and future professional work.

While there are no explicit prerequisites, a solid foundation in digital modeling tools is recommended. Specific digital tools will include Climate Studio in Rhino, and 3ds Max.

 

Origin Stories: The Migration of Material Practices

Landscape regions are conventionally defined through a set of interrelated logics: deterministic (geology, biogeography, climate), administrative (governance, policy), functional (markets, logistics), and projective (planning, development, colonization). Together, these logics stabilize landscapes into discipline specific, coherent, and generally contiguous–if contested–regions. This seminar examines a more elusive register: the ways modern landscape regions are defined through a constellation of distributed material practices–including the instruments of monitoring and forecasting, the technical operations of cultivation, building, and maintenance, and the labor that underwrites physical intervention–and, in turn, how these definitions circulate through the globalized industries of design, construction, and engineering.

From Jersey barriers to Cape Cod berms, Arizona crossings to the Rikers (Island) soil series, Chicago caissons to Portland cement, Stockholm tree pits to the Missouri gravel bed method–place names in material practices and techniques proliferate throughout the making of the built environment. However, how and why these techniques emerged from (or refer to) specific cultural and climatic conditions–and how they circulate to new geographies through social and professional networks, rather than through marketing–is relatively underexamined. Countless other techniques and materials–gootee propagation, barbed wire, tile drainage–arose from highly specific environmental contexts before they were disseminated or appropriated globally. In tracing these operative practices–and deliberately bracketing off narrow economic explanations of market segmentation–the seminar investigates alternative modes of landscape regionalism that have emerged between standardization and craft, between a globalized industry and the situated particularities of matter, ecology, and culture.

The course is organized into three units. The first unit will survey key scholarship from the design fields and labor geography that theorizes how place influences what people intentionally make (e.g., critical regionalism and its critiques). In parallel, we will draw on frameworks from science and technology studies and material culture studies to think about how to examine specific things in relation to the wider worlds they inhabit. Lectures and in-class discussions will be the primary activities.  

In the second unit, we will develop a collective index/atlas that documents the political ecology of place-based instruments, operations, and labor. In this unit, students will identify a preliminary research topic, starting with a geographic region or a specific practice/technology. A list of possible topics will be provided; however, students are also welcome to propose their own. In-class workshops and guest lectures will offer methods and resources for contemporary and historical research. A guided set of prompts for writing and diagramming will guide our work; we will focus on the work of the seminar as a collective, comparative effort, learning from differences and deviations in practices that originate from various places.  

In the third unit, we will assemble a new “chorography” of landscape practices–a systematic, qualitative description of a region–through a shared format for developing and disseminating research, culminating in a collective exhibition or publication. In-class peer-to-peer workshops and presentations will facilitate the development of the chorographic study.  

 

Healthy Buildings (at HSPH)

The way we design and operate buildings plays a central role in our health, due to both the time we spend indoors and the climate-impact of the energy used to power our buildings. This course, cross-listed between Harvard Graduate School of Design and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, seeks to leverage the science and approaches from each discipline to find building-related solutions to the public health challenges of our time. Students will explore building strategies that can improve indoor air quality, help prevent the spread of airborne infectious disease, reduce exposure to toxic materials, improve thermal resilience, and support overall well-being, while also examining the role buildings play in our energy system, the cascading health impacts of associated air pollution and climate change, and building design and technologies that can support climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and climate resilience. Through a mix of lectures, case studies, hands-on workshops, real-world building assessments, and a final project pairing students from each school, students will engage deeply in a solutions-focused course at the intersection of public health, environmental health, architecture, and design.

Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation Building II (at HKS)

This community based research course focuses on some of the major issues Native American Indian tribes and nations face in the 21st century. It provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to native development issues, including: sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, leadership, health and social welfare, tribal finances, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, and education. In particular, the course emphasizes problem definition, client relationships, and designing and completing a research project for a tribe, tribal department, or those active in Indian Country. The course is devoted primarily to preparation and presentation of a comprehensive research paper based on work with a tribal community. In addition to faculty presentations on topics such as field research methods and problem definition, students will make presentations on their work in progress/near-ultimate findings.

This course is offered by the Havard Kennedy School as DEV-502, and is also jointly listed with the Graduate School of Education as A-102, and the Faculty of Arts and Science as EMR-121, and the Chan School of Public Health as ID-248, and the Graduate School of Design as SES-5427. For students interested in additional courses on Native America please also see HKS DEV-501M “Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation Building I” (Joseph Kalt and Angela Riley) and GSD SES-5513  “Native Nations and Contemporary Land Use” (Eric Henson).

This course meets at HKS in room Wexner 330. Please see the HKS website for information regarding first class meetings. 

Building Equitable Cities: Policy Tools for Housing and Community Development (at HKS)

An introduction to policymaking in American cities, focusing on economic, demographic, institutional, and political settings. It examines inclusive and equitable economic development and job growth in the context of metropolitan regions and the emerging “new economy.”  Topics include: federal, state, and local government strategies for expanding community economic development and affordable housing opportunities, equitable transit-oriented development and resiliency. Of special concern is the continuing spatial and racial isolation of low-income populations, especially minority populations, in central-city neighborhoods and how suburbanization of employment, reduction in low-skilled jobs, and racial discrimination combine to limit housing and employment opportunities. Current federal policy such as Opportunity Zones and tax credit initiatives will be examined relative to policy goals of addressing communities that have historically been discriminated both by the public and private sectors.  During the semester, students will complete a brief policy memorandum, and participate in a term-long group project exploring policy options to address an urban problem or issue for a specific city.

See the HKS website for shopping period and classroom information.