Ecosystem restoration

Given the current speed of habitat and species loss caused by human development, the restoration of degraded ecosystem is one of the greatest challenges humankind is facing. For this reason, the United Nations declared 2021-2030 as the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. This global effort will need from experts on ecosystem science, management and design to have a deep understanding of how ecosystems recover from human disturbance and how we can use this knowledge to increase the currently limited performance of restoration practice. This course is particularly suited for students with interests in nature conservation, the natural component of landscape architecture, or ecosystem management in a broad sense. In this course, we will create a multidirectional learning environment where we all will learn from the others to address real world restoration cases in all kinds of habitats, from forests to marine ecosystems. Students will have a particular real case assignment where the student will dig to the deepest possible level to increase biodiversity and ecosystem functionality through an understanding of the complexity that structures ecosystems. We will have key inputs from guest lectures coming from restoration companies with many years of experience restoring ecosystems worldwide. They will help us find targeted tools to support and design ecosystems both in urban and natural environments. We will increase our understanding of what nature is for humans and the Earth system and will increase our connection to it through field trips. In the fields trip, we will explore ecosystem complexity in New England’s recovering forests (like the Harvard Forest) and discuss with mangers the keys for restoration success and failure on the ground. Evaluations will be made through a combination of assignments, essays, and discussion participation. Basic previous knowledge on ecology is required. This course will arm students with one of the most important tools to work with and for nature in the coming decades.

Book Project Number Zero

1. Architecture is inseparable from bookmaking. Ever since Sebastiano Serlio discovered the potentials of the printing press, no cultural project in the field of architecture has escaped publishing and so thematising a possible reading of buildings—regardless of present or past, big or small, real or invented.

2. Even in the context of the extreme wealth of media available today, books are still the main instrument of architectural propaganda. The internet did not kill the architecture book. More likely, the internet increased the book’s value for an architect’s career.

3. Books are projects, as well as buildings. Books are imagined, sketched, designed and executed.  

4. Students will develop a project for a book on architecture. The choice of topic is open, as well as the format.

5. The final output of the seminar is a “book” that will include a written introduction, an index, an atlas of images, and a graphic design scheme. 

6. The imaginary book may be projected and assembled as long-form or short-form, text-based, image-based or composite. Students may realize their book using different media, but the final deliverable should be “book-alike” and printed.

7. Usually, when authors write a book, they A) first write the index and introduction, B) then write the actual book, C) then re-write the introduction. The seminar will stop at point A.

8. Instructors will present two case studies on bookmaking in fine detail. Pier Paolo Tamburelli will discuss his ongoing project of a (long-form) book on Bramante; Thomas Kelley will present his recent (short-form) treatise on vision. The seminar will consist of lectures, discussions with external guests, and a final review of the individual book projects.

9. And while the seminar will afford multiple strategies for ideating architecture through the medium of a book, each project will question how the essence of communication in architecture is informed, for better and for worse, by how a book (or any publication) relates to building.

Notes on schedule: 

Thomas Kelley will be in residence on January 30-31, February 6-7, 20-21, March 26-27, April 23-24, and for the Final Exam in May.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli will be in residence on January 30-31, February 27-28, April 9-10, and for the Final Exam in May.

 

 

 

Affordable and Mixed-Income Housing Development, Finance, and Management

Explores issues relating to the development, financing, and management of housing affordable to low and moderate income households. Examines community-based development corporations, public housing authorities, housing finance agencies, private developers, and financial intermediaries. Identifies, defines, and analyzes development cost, financing, operating, rental assistance, tax credit, entitlement, and project-generated cross income subsidy vehicles. Assesses alternative debt and equity funding sources for both rental and for-sale mixed-income housing and addresses the now common practice of aggregating multiple subsidies into a single financial package. Reviews other aspects of the affordable housing development process, including assembling and managing the development team, preparing feasibility studies, controlling sites, gaining community support, securing subsidies, establishing design objectives, coordinating the design and construction process, selecting residents or homeowners, providing supportive services, and managing the completed asset. Historically, almost all students in this course have participated in the Affordable Housing Development Competition (AHDC) sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston and others. As part of this competition, teams of multidisciplinary graduate students primarily from Harvard and MIT prepare detailed affordable housing proposals working with real sponsors on real sites in the Greater Boston area. These AHDC proposals serve as the final project for this course. The course includes lectures, cases, exercises, site visits, guest lectures, and student presentations. No prior real estate development or finance experience is expected or required.

Also offered by Harvard Kennedy School as SUP-666

 

Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-666

Note: Shopping Day Schedule for SES-5490/SUP-666 at HKS: Thursday, January 23rd from 1:15-2:30 pm in Littauer 230. There will be 2 sessions: 1:15 -1:45 pm and 2:00-2:30 pm.

Public health in an era of epidemics: from the camp to the building

We shouldn’t conceive anymore architecture projects and urban planning interventions that disregard their impact on public health. The way we design buildings, neighborhoods, and cities impact the health outcomes of the population. Urban development is at the core of new epidemics and pandemics, and the growth of urban settlements (including refugees) will likely increase the health gap between people of different socioeconomic status.

We will review existing studies and empirical evidence at the nexus of these fields, and through a scale approach (BUILDING-NEIGHBORHOOD-CITY-GLOBAL), we will study and evaluate different interventions, aiming to dismiss myths and reinforce those initiatives that can potentially improve population health. 

The goal of the course is to build awareness of the importance of incorporating robust public health facts and considerations in the early stages of an architectural or urban design project, but also to equip students with the skills needed to:
• Identify health issues that can potentially be tackled through design interventions
• Use robust evidence (through epidemiological studies) to propose and defend health-oriented solutions in design projects 
• Examine, asses, and design interventions taking into consideration a wide variety of aspects of public health
• Develop health-related interventions in complex public health settings (epidemics, refugees, etc.)

Course format: Interactive and dynamic classes with invited public health experts and presentations by the instructor (topic introduction), students (topic discussion), and a semester-long team exercise.

Developing for Social Impact

How can real estate development advance social purpose while accounting for development feasibility?   

With increasing urgency, those involved in shaping the built world are converging in their desire to harness real estate development for positive social impact.  Community development corporations and other mission-focused non-profits are increasingly entrepreneurial, as the philanthropists and public agencies that support them expect them to be.  Governments increasingly leverage surplus land and deploy development exactions and incentives to shape private investment to serve social policy goals.
 
To fulfill rising expectations to be responsible civic actors, real estate developers have become de facto city-builders, seeking ways to achieve social impact, from housing affordability and climate resilience to food security and job preparedness that goes beyond their project boundaries. Yet there is no established method to reconcile social impact with financial feasibility. 

To address this vexing gap, the course will serve as a social impact development workshop, with two interwoven strands. Through research assignments and class discussion in corporate social responsibility, social impact investing, risk management, enterprise philanthropy and equitable planning, we will work to devise a model for incorporating social impact into market-oriented real estate development. 

We will also apply this model to active Boston development sites. With its strong development climate, sophisticated development community and high public aspirations for development, Boston is an excellent—and easily visited—social impact development laboratory. Real estate developers will visit the class to present projects that seek to align financial and social returns, and will be available outside of class to guide student explorations. 

For their term project, student teams will set financial and social return objectives for a Boston development site of their choosing and propose a method for harmonizing them.  For their mid-term and final reviews, they will make an investment pitch for their case study site to a panel of social impact investors. 

Artificial Intelligence in Contemporary Design Practice

Unprecedented issues, such as climate change, challenge the standard hyper-specialized approach to problem-solving. Within this context, there is a need for professions able to creatively bring together skills from various disciplines and imagine solutions to tackle such crises.

According to the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, architects are “the last humanists” because they are trained in comprehensive, interdisciplinary, problem-solving methodologies. This applies broadly to other design disciplines, such as landscape architects, who occupy a unique place in society, enabling them to undertake leadership positions in the future, both within and outside of traditional design practice boundaries. In order for this to happen, design tools must support and enhance the design workflow. This seminar will look at one such tool, Artificial Intelligence (AI), from the point of view of the practitioner, or in software development jargon, the user.

As a research field, Artificial Intelligence originated after World War II to convert machine learning for ballistic and aircraft trajectory prediction into civil use technologies. Traditionally pursued as an academic theoretical effort, AI is now gaining widespread attention due to the enhanced computational capability of commercial computers, and the emergence of pervasive sensing supported by Internet of Things devices and high-speed Internet connections. AI, in its various forms, is becoming increasingly more embedded in the design practice through digital design tools.
This innovative technology is fascinating and stimulating. However, the application of AI to the “humanistic” design process poses epistemological questions that are at the core of this seminar. Understanding, even if at a non-specialist level, the functioning of such tools is key to enabling creative and innovative applications.

During the first module “Foundations” students will become familiar with the concepts of complex systems, ecology, mediality, network analysis, and AI, through a series of curated readings and interdisciplinary guest lectures in the fields of mathematics and philosophy. During the second module “Applications and Interfaces” the students will explore innovative applications of AI and their interfaces through a series of interdisciplinary guest lectures in the fields of computational creativity and generative design. 

During the semester, each student will develop a personal research project agreed upon with the instructor. The research will be presented in the context of these two modules and formatted as an academic article for final submission.

There are no prerequisites and the seminar is open to all GSD and MIT students. 

A SELF-INTERSECTED WRAP AROUND COIL

A SELF-INTERSECTED WRAP AROUND COIL

Mingxuan Qin (MAUD ’20), Jichao Sun (MAUD ’20) and Jiayi Wang (MAUD ’20)

This project is a form exploration through mathematical functions. Using periodic function, with “sin” and “cos”, we “write” a wrap around coil as prototype. This coil origins from one 2-dimensional strip, which transform into a 3-dimensional cylinder-like volume. By adjusting the vertical gap on each period and making the coil swing horizontally periodically, self-intersections appear. These intersections give the form a special structural character, which makes the coil able to support itself. Eventually, a 2D stripe becomes random stacked volumes, aesthetically.  The width of the strip is set to be increasing from the bottom to the top, which makes it closer to human scale at the bottom and larger at the top to fit the visual perspective.

The structure is tested through the physical model. The “walls” are composed of museum boards on exterior and plexi in the middle, which are bolted together. Three types of joints are applied. First, at the exterior corners. An “L”-shape metal plate is inserted into the middle of the “walls” on each side and bolted together. Some of the interior cross-intersections are also joined together in the same way. Others are free standing notches that are not fixed to adapt the whole structure to the shear forces. This project explores both the aesthetic and structural character and their relationships to a certain form.

The Tropical Arboretum of Vegetal Dwelling: Fabled Treehouse Phylogenies

The Tropical Arboretum of Vegetal Dwelling: Fabled Treehouse Phylogenies

Joshua Stevens (MLA I ’19)

The institution of the arboretum emerged from a tradition of using landscape as a tool for exerting power through knowledge-based systems. The classification and naming of plants oversimplify vegetation as known, and therefore controllable, elements in the world. Additionally, the collection of tropical plant specimens and their containment in foreign greenhouses reinforce the colonialism of temperate imperial powers.

Arboreta may be described as houses of trees where diversity dwells and is systematized for human use. But the inversion of this system is critical to the interrogation of this flawed institution. Rather than a house of trees, its reverse, the treehouse, is a powerful tool for exploring landscape design by virtue of its extreme versatility. The treehouse, as an integrated system of human dwelling and vegetal growth, may be perceived as an intersection of attributes: it is both artificial and organic, detached and integrated, terrestrial and aethereal.

This thesis proposes a networked arboretum of treehouses that challenge traditional methods of classification and the institution of the arboretum itself. The arboretum is created through the design of 23 treehouses, each of which seek to explore the habitation through the innate characteristics of a particular “tree” species. By employing the idea of tree architecture as described by Halle, Oldeman, and Tomlinson, The Tropical Arboretum of Vegetal Dwelling explores the intersecting notions of morphology and dwelling through hybridized vegetal and animal systems.

Questions

TAISHAN: Designing the Rural Cosmopolis in China

Cosmopolitanism and its vibrancy are commonly associated with urban life; rural life by contrast is often seen as static, disconnected and monocultural. China’s rapid urbanization over the past two decades has led to a decline of its countryside, outward migration, an increasingly poor standard of living and a vanishing rural community. However, an emerging population of returning rural emigrants who have experienced and lived cosmopolitanism in their host cities have been transformed through the everyday negotiations of cultural differences. Taishan, in the Pearl River Delta region, experienced China’s earliest emigration in the 19th century and today retains a distinct diaspora community sustained by the clanship network. As a result, the culture is rooted in ancestral history coexisting with transnational mobility and openness to difference.

This studio will explore tourism as a catalyst for rural revitalization in Taishan. The aim is to support existing social capital while stimulating new development through stakeholder collaboration and local empowerment. The project demands strategies to incentivize returning migrants and small to medium scale entrepreneurs to settle in rural areas that provide an alternative lifestyle for economic and social mobility. Within rural revitalization, thematic tensions are considered: heritage and development. The challenge in defining what is heritage in an urbanizing rural context and how heritage is inherited and integrated into future developments will be of central importance.
 
Students will work in interdisciplinary teams focused on two tasks: 1) at the macro scale – a territorial design for Duanfen Town; 2) a built-form intervention for Tingjiang Village. Within these scales, strategies will be developed in parallel with tangible outcomes. The studio addresses revitalization issues examining the macro to the micro, tangible and intangible, in a dialogue that informs the whole process. Taishan’s cultural background and socio-economic restructuring creates an opportunity to recuperate the social capital between the ancestral clanships and local governance in facilitating the regeneration of the region. The complexity of issues requires concepts born out of the intersection of planning, architecture and landscape architecture. 

The overarching goal of the studio is to facilitate Taishan’s transition from traditional agrarian to a new rural economy, from traditional farmers to cosmopolitan ‘rural’ residents along with the spatial transition from villages to contemporary rural settlements. The studio poses the following:

• How can new development transform the local residents from passive beneficiaries to active stakeholders? 
• What urban qualities can be introduced without threatening the positive rural qualities?
• How can the existing clanship network be maintained in the context of a transforming marketing system? 
• How can new agricultural enterprises be sustainably integrated economically with Taishan’s rural community? 
• What can new development learn from the existing villages at the urban and architectural scales?

The studio is in collaboration with local universities, organizations and government agencies. The outcome of the studio will culminate into a set of design strategies and policy recommendations for action and implementation presented to the People’s Government of Duanfen Town.

Note: This studio will meet on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Elaine Kwong will be in residence for all classes. David Rubin will be in residence on February 4, 5, 18, 19; March 10, 11, 24, 25; April 7, 8, 21, 22; and the final review on either May 1, 4, or 5. Kathryn Firth will be in residence on January 28, 29; February 11, 12, 18, 19; March 10, 11, 24, 25, 31; April 1, 14, 15, 21, 22; and the final review on either May 1, 4, or 5. This studio will travel to Taishan, China. 

Palladio and Raphael: An Innovative Learning Experience

Two leading scholars of the architecture of Andrea Palladio, Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza, will offer workshops exploring Raphael (1483-1520) and Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), two of the most influential architects of the Renaissance, and the relation between them. Though they had different backgrounds – Palladio trained as a stone carver, whereas Raphael was the son of the court painter in Urbino – they are similar in their view of history, their concern with architectural drawing and representation and commitment to the study and imitation of ancient Roman architecture. Raphael must have been a major source of inspiration for Palladio, who in Rome made a survey plan of his masterpiece, the villa Madama. He also adopted elements of Raphael’s architectural language. He would have noted Raphael’s skill in creating personalized palaces for high functionaries in Pope Leo X’s inner circle.

 The fall session Faking Palladio will introduce students to Palladio’s world, requiring them to produce a fake Palladio drawing. This requires in-depth knowledge of both the material character of the work to be imitated and also the cultural background of the architect imitated. Students will not be invited to produce an exact copy of an existing drawing but to invent a drawing that has never existed. This sort of exercise is made possible because Palladio developed an architecture that he conceived as a language, based on standard elements (such as rooms, stairs, doors, and columns) with proportions governing the relations between the various components. Palladio's treatise, The Four Books on Architecture (Venice, 1570), is essentially a manual with instructions referring to his architecture. Among Palladio’s drawings we find drawings for unbuilt buildings: many of them are plans without the corresponding elevations. To make a fake Palladio drawing, a good starting point is a Palladio original plan from which to imagine a possible development. The students will be asked first to design the elevation, or part of it, then to make a fake, focusing on the materiality of the drawing as an object (the paper, ink, stylus drawn lines, etc.) and on Palladio’s drawing conventions, which are close to those used today.

This spring session Anticipating Palladio will be dedicated to Raphael, always considered as one of the greatest painters. However, he was also a brilliant and innovative (and still little-known) architect, whose approach anticipates Palladio’s. The spring session will consist of lectures, workshops, and seminars on the buildings to be visited during the trip. Topics to be covered include Raphael’s architectural formation (in Urbino, Perugia, Florence and Rome), his writings and ideas, drawings, painted architecture, buildings and design methods, as well as his social world of friends, collaborators, patrons, and rivals, including Michelangelo. Students will explore the complex relation in Raphael between study of ancient Roman architecture and the design of modern buildings, and his revival of Roman constructional techniques and modes of interior decoration. Unbuilt, unfinished or destroyed works by him will be reconstructed in drawings and models. Raphael will also be approached as a “proto- film director”, creator of marvelous single-shot still “movies.” The seminar will offer an exceptional educational and architectural experience and will have a specific goal and outcome: generating ideas and prototypes for virtual and physical models for the exhibition IN THE MIND OF RAPHAEL, Raphael as Architect and inventor of architecture, to be held at the Palladio Centre in Vicenza (Oct. 2020 – Jan. 2021).