Advanced Introduction to Robotics (at SEAS)

Also offered as Engineering Sciences 259: Advanced Introduction to Robotics

Introduction to computer-controlled robotic manipulators. Topics include coordinate frames and transformations, kinematic structure and solutions, statics and dynamics of serial and parallel chain manipulators, control and programming, introduction to path planning, introduction to teleoperation, robot design, and actuation and sensing devices. Laboratory exercises provide experience with industrial robot programming and robot simulation and control.

Prerequisite: Computer Science 50, and either Engineering Sciences 125 or 156.

Jointly Offered Course: SEAS ES 259

Please check the FAS course listing for questions about schedule and location.
 

Queer Spaces

How do queer populations form communities and locate those communities in urban space? How do urban governance structures support and/or regulate these communities? How do these communities intersect and interact with the rest of the city? What might be more radical queer futures, including those more inclusive of trans communities, or communities of color, or a more global perspective?

The course focuses on the ways in which queer space—seen broadly–intersects with the work of planners, designers, and policy makers. It draws on a variety of sources including urban planning, queer geography, law, and history to examine neighborhood formation, housing and homelessness, community safety, nightlife and cruising culture, tourism, and preservation.  The course will be primarily a discussion-based seminar that also includes guest speakers, a tour, film, and video. Grading will be based on short reading responses and a final project/research paper inspired by the topics discussed in class.

By the end of the course students will be able to:
– Identify the range of issues and theories relevant to understanding queer spaces.
– Appreciate the strengths and limitations of current research and practice related to queer spaces.
– Understand how planners, designers, and policy makers can make a difference.

This is a student-initiated course

Tectonic Tradition in Japan

In Japan, design, both traditional and contemporary, is inseparable from materials and how they are constructed together. There is a long history of fruitful collaboration between architects and structural engineers in creating innovative architecture, such as Yoyogi Gymnasium and Sendai Mediatheque. In this seminar, variety topics related to either structure and/or material relevant to the design and making of the built environment of all scale are discussed.  The seminar consists of classroom lectures and laboratory workshops:

– Material Workshop (Kanshitsu): Kenji Toki (Miyagi University) will introduces the traditional material of Urushi which has been used over 3,000 years from small accessory to large scale architecture. He will demonstrate the traditional fabrication technique. Lecture and demonstration will take place at Tokyo University of the Arts.
– Material Workshop (Concrete): Hands on workshop to cast concrete of various texture. Workshop will take place at Tokyo University of the Arts.  

Enrollment in this course was pre-selected.

Products of Practice: From code to plan to code

A seminar that critically mines historic systems of representation and the product (or media) of the architect in relationship to the evolving societal role of the discipline, practice, and profession with the goal of projecting practice futures. 
 
Within the cacophony of contemporary media, under the pressures of financial instruments, and with an expectation of artificial intelligence, this seminar looks to the past to explore the product of the architect as an artifact of circumstance, framing and projecting practice potentials now and into the future. Critically tracking the development of our practice, we will research design context and representational formats as cultural and temporal constructs that limit or expand the role of the architect in practice. Our collective goal is an exploration of the relationship between – and the limits of – discipline, practice, and profession to better understand their structural potentials.

The course will be organized thematically, exploring the origins of contemporary practice and its products at any given moment – from built form to model to drawing to code – as the architect evolved from master builder to author to project manager. The work of Vitruvius, Baldassarre Peruzzi, Leon Battista Alberti, Peter Cook, Cedric Price, Christopher Alexander, Peter Eisenman, and New Urbanism, among others, will be assessed within their cultural context. Legal and technical issues, client types, and structures of fee and control, will be considered. Students will work in small research cohorts to develop critical positions on the renewed debate between empirical vs. cultural practice, on mediatic production and instruments of service for single projects vs. systems of design deployment and process design. 

The class format will include presentation by the instructor and guests followed by discussion and debate, led by a pre-assigned group of students with topically relevant research for each class. Working in pairs to analyze oppositional perspectives in history and theory, students will be expected to produce a short mid-term paper or presentation and a corollary oral argument around a topical historic position on the role of production in relationship to discipline and practice. Students will summarize topical research within a shared course research framework. Final course output will draw from this collective knowledge to speculate on the future product of the architect in text, drawing, or code-based formats. Guest lecturers from practice and related sectors will occasionally be invited to add perspective to specific topics, particularly around the issue of emerging modes of production and media. 

There are no prerequisites for this course, which is intended as an interdisciplinary discussion. While this course is focused on the evolution of the product of the architect, the emergence of the related disciplines of landscape architecture, urban planning and urban design are topical to the conversation.

Architecture as an Urban Issue: Challenges & Inventions in the Practice in Tokyo

Tokyo today is in a dilemma of urbanism. As a post-growth phenomenon, abandoned houses are increasing in number, especially in the old residential-commercial mix belt occupied with timber structures surrounding the central zone, exacerbating the physical and social vulnerability of living condition. Yet at the same time, as if to revive the bygone growth, massive investment backed up with deregulation is being made for integrated urban redevelopment in the central zone, generating ever more floor areas.

Tokyo’s population is expected to stop growing and begin shrinking in 2025. After the long struggle with chronic overconcentration, which has made the city the most populous in the world, Tokyo is finally slowing down and also due to the aging of the population. This gear change will increasingly give impact on the economy and the urbanism, although there is no sign of will as yet of the national or the local government to control the imminent paradox. Meanwhile, the market of high-end apartment units and small individual houses continues to thrive.

In the Tokyo seminar of Spring 2020, we will take a close look at some of the attempts being made by architects to challenge the current forces of urbanism in the mindset of “cultivating new potential of architecture out of the existing soil.”*

We’ll begin by taking an overall view of Tokyo’s current urban condition and the driving force behind it: the political, economic and social factors forming the backdrop of the urban or architectural phenomena. We will then take a closer look at two contrasting situations – the mega-scale urban redevelopment in the central zone, and the shrinking neighborhood in the periphery – through research, presentation and discussion.

In the second half of the seminar, we will meet several of the aforementioned architects and discuss with them their works addressing the situation and how these works may offer new experiences of living in the city, or give impact on the behaviors and relationships of those using or inhabiting in and around them.

As the final task, everyone is asked to present his/her idea proposal for facing the challenge in the shrinking zone in the periphery. There is no mid-term submission but continuous research by each individual is required throughout the semester, based on which small presentations will be asked for from time to time.

*Kazuhiro Kojima and Kazuko Akamatsu (Coelacanth)

Enrollment in this course was pre-selected.

Neuralisms Shenzhen: Fictions of Type and Territory

Shenzhen is China’s city of the future, a manufacturing and product development hub unlike any in the world. It is a place where innovation in the material world is increasingly enabling an entirely new vision of culture. Perhaps there is no better place to anticipate the lifestyle of the future—and how the city is integrated with the countryside—than the place where that future is being manufactured. 

This studio will consider AI, data science, remote sensing, and other new modes of encoding and representing landscape and architecture as the raw material for a fictional and imaginative lifestyle futurism emerging in Shenzhen. Leveraging technologies of deep learning, neural imagination, and recombinant gaming, the studio will also draw on speculative fictions to imagine types and territories for the lifestyles of Shenzhen’s coming golden age.

Shenzhen is a planned city par excellence, created almost ex nihilo forty years ago from a framework of overlapping national and local mandates and policies. The result of this strict and fastidious planning logic is an archipelago of architectural, urban, and landscape monocultures, blocks of single types set in surprising juxtapositions to each other. Taking these individually homogenous and collectively diverse blocks as fuel, we will embrace ways to recode, remix, and recombine these strict distinctions into hybridized and interleaved inter-territories and between-types. 

The project should consider the unique relationship of Shenzhen to the larger Pearl River Delta region, playfully rethinking near and far, locality and territory. In a sense, each project may become a network of territories shrunk to a microcosm, a specific view of the entire region distilled to an intensified block.

From our menagerie of mutant types and territories, we will speculate on the rules of life in Shenzhen’s coming golden age. Drawing inspiration from but moving beyond computational precedents, we will use gaming engines to develop logics of mutating and recombinant urbanism grounded in a projection of leisure and culture. Here we will anticipate a future in which innovation, industry, leisure, and agriculture are all intensely local and densely intermixed, a state in which dozens of territories are interdependently stitched together through electronic and biological technology. 

These speculations will be represented in media appropriate to them—using dynamic projection mappings, film, and advanced simulation—in preparation for a major public exhibition of the studio’s work in Shenzhen in the fall of 2020.

Bramante is better than Alberti

A seminar, in the manner of a forum, devoted to the practice of architectural critique and evaluation.

Twelve significant and comparable pairs of architectural works (individual’s full oeuvres, singular buildings), selected from different periods in the history of Western Architecture will be analyzed, discussed and evaluated in class (i.e. Alberti/Bramante; Rossi/Venturi; OMA/Herzog & de Meuron; etc). 

There will be required selected readings for the preparation of each class discussion, which will be structured in two parts: approximately a one hour and a half presentation by the instructor followed by an open discussion led by a pre-selected team of students in the class. A number of distinguished invited guests will visit specific seminars to present their views on the day’s topic and participate in the discussions. Students enrolled in this seminar will be expected to have previously acquired a broad and solid knowledge of the overall arch of Western Architecture history, from Classical Antiquity to the Present. 

Assignments: a) A mid-term short paper, b) students’ team presentations of selected cases during the last seminars of the semester, and c) a final individual paper to be based on an elaboration of each student’s contribution to the team presentation in assignment b). 

Prerequisites: Students must have had a prior study of Renaissance and Modern Western architecture as demonstrated by a copy of transcript or course syllabus.

Note: 15 spaces are reserved for MArch II students who select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery (the course fulfills Techniques and Discourse requirement). 

Please note that the video is from the the last semester in which this course was offered. 

Material Innovation in Precast Concrete

Estelle Yoon (MArch I ’20)

The project proposes a design innovation in the fabrication process of precast concrete components and an amplification of their aesthetic and atmospheric quality. It takes advantage of the high level of precision in manufacturing and ease of reproduction inherent in the pre-fabrication process as opposed to on-site casting, and suggests an alternative material effect to a more normative impression of cold and gray presence of exposed concrete.

When poured into a mold at different times, separate layers of concrete mix are registered within a single part, allowing for distinct colors or textures of mix to remain visible. This method had already been discovered and employed by many architects including Studio Gang, ESTUDIO Tatiana Bilbao. and Peter Zumthor, but solely for in-situ concrete or rammed earth, limiting the striation to be relatively large in scale and horizontal, as the pouring process depends completely upon gravity.

By displacing the process from on-site casting to prefab, the striation technique could be conducted in a highly controlled environment. The prototypes of the project are casted in several different angles with layers of distinctly pigmented mixes. When erected in their intended position, the reading of the layers of the precast components are liberated from the orientation of gravity, suggesting an unanticipated visual effect. The use of texture and color for each concrete layer could be extensively used in exposed parts of the prefab elements for both interior and exterior, ranging from columns to walls and facade.

Emptiful: Changing the paradigm in a post-oil landscape

Aiysha Alsane (MLA I AP ’19)

Through common language, we describe the desert as empty space: a void without substance due to loss.  Across several languages, “desert” is associated with feelings of abandonment, scarcity, and death. Characterized in this manner, the desert is rendered to a worthless and uninhabitable state. This thesis concerns itself with the desert’s fullness, from its material and ecological being to its social and cultural agency.

The static nature of conventional drawings does little to depict the desert’s transient properties and the multiplicity of ways that it supports occupation. The project redraws the arid desert of Kuwait depicting its innate qualities to redefine its perceived value. Since life in the desert relies on the precious existence of water, the selected sites are within an ephemeral watershed. These sites are of burned oil fields from the First Gulf War and their intersection with Kuwait Oil Company’s “released lands.” Those lands were a symbol of wealth due to petroleum, an inextricable part of this desert’s geology. Then, they became a symbol of destruction and loss. Today, petroleum exploration has seized and the land released for development. Using methods to capture, amplify, and extend a new fullness, the design intervention repopulates this desert in a catalytic manner. Reacting to a unique geological composition steeped in a history of emptiness and fullness, the project draws on novel ecosystems to introduce controlled plant succession and the consequent flora and fauna ensued to repopulate these barren lands. All the while, the resulting ecosystem reveals this desert’s innate fullness.

Urban Politics, Planning, and Development (at HKS)

In the face of failures and dysfunction at the national level, there is growing excitement about the welfare- and democracy-enhancing potential of cities. Yet, not all cities are able to realize their promise as engines of economic growth and human development. Why some fail, while others succeed depends crucially on the politics and governance practices that shape cities and metropolitan regions. Understanding the politics of urban planning and development is therefore fundamental to unlocking the potential of our cities to boost the wealth, health, and well-being of citizens and communities. This course focuses on urban politics in the United States and Europe. Key topics include U.S. and European urban politics viewed in the large, and more specifically the politics of land-use, economic development, housing, water, policing, and transit. Cross-cutting themes include: the role of business and non-profits in local governance; citizen participation and urban social movements; the importance of race, ethnicity, and class in shaping group conflict and co-operation at the local level; as well as the costs and benefits of local government fragmentation. The course involves in-class exercises, group work, and simulations, as well as guest lectures. Most class sessions build off single-city case studies, including written and multi-media cases on Stuttgart, New Orleans, Atlanta, Naples, Seattle, New York, Portland, Chicago, Detroit, London, Boston, and Copenhagen.

The course purposes are twofold: (1) to enhance your sophistication in thinking about and analyzing the factors and conditions that shape political and planning processes at the urban level and what their consequences are; and (2) to hone your skills in thinking strategically about how to exercise influence in and on these decision processes.

Note: Shopping Day Schedule for SES-5201/SUP-601 at HKS: Friday, January 24th from 11:45-1:00 pm in Wex332.