Structures in Landscape Architecture, Joint & Detail

Summary

This class explores how to design and make physical landscapes that are both rationally constructed and expressively convincing. This search is focused through the lens of structural understanding. This lens clarifies how a working knowledge of structural principles guides the tectonic development of made landscapes from the overall material configuration of, for example, footbridges, pavilions or walled enclosures, to the evolution of specific detail and jointing vocabularies for these and other site elements.
 

Topics

– Understanding structural principles using a visual, non-mathematical format.
– Designing and applying structural principles to physical making using the categories of: to span, to frame and to enclose.
– Exploring the rhetoric of detail and material making. 
– Exploring the role of techniques that cause specified changes in the characteristics and shape of materials.
– Exploring the future of the craft of joining in a digital design, fabrication, and construction/assembly future.

Course Objectives & Outcomes

– Understand how to structurally shape and detail material landscape forms.
– Be able to explore the structural, material, and constructional aspects of landscape expression. 
– Be able to engage in a productive dialogue about landscape making with other design professionals.

Course Format

– Lecture/Workshop.
– Lectures explaining structural/detail principles accompanied by in class workshops applying these principles. 
– Case studies of landscape structures presented and critically discussed in class.

Method of Evaluation

– In-class participation in discussions
– A graphic case study of an existing landscape structure
– The design of a landscape element – a part of a current or previous studio or professional project

 

There are no prerequisites for this class. Students of all GSD disciplines who are interested in the physical design of landscapes are welcome.

MLA 1 and MLA 1AP students can take this class concurrently with GSD 6242.

Pre- and Post-

Pre- and Post- is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods in digital design, with a focus on processes of translation between digital media and material artifacts. Beyond an exploration of novel form and its reading, this course is a critical inquiry into how digital tools can extend beyond visualization and fabrication to change the way we view architectural projects from the past, present, and future.

Today, digital representation and fabrication methods are primarily used in the production of new projects, rarely finding application in the analysis of historical precedents. Restriction of contemporary tools almost exclusively to contemporary architecture limits the knowledge these methods can help us glean from projects built before the digital era. By analyzing pre-digital precedents through a post-digital lens, we can begin to reconceptualize these precedents and situate these new tools within architectural history at large.

The course is organized into two sequential areas of inquiry. In the first phase, each student will research a different architectural precedent, considering how new digital tools could allow us to reconsider the project’s design and representation. Students will fabricate each precedent’s primary volume/massing with an articulation of the underlying geometry and tectonic logic. Students will also reconstruct analyzed information in the form of digital data which will then be represented through a series of animated projection mappings. This process will speculate new possibilities for perceiving and conceiving architecture, challenging established conventions of representation. 

During the second half of the semester, each student will develop a critical stance towards the precedent’s forms and will suggest a radical modification/manipulation of it. In this phase, students will also speculate on the capacity of digital technologies to assign new or alternative readings to physical form. Through a series of animated projections used against physical models, we will explore how time-based modes of two-dimensional representation can activate three-dimensional form. In this process, animation will transcend its role as a method of visualization, subverting the conventions of metrical geometry and becoming a design tool itself. Here, design will manifest a dynamic environment of forces in which form and matter can be manipulated by ever-moving, ever-changing sets of data and digital information. 

This framework allows the conception of a variable architecture, capable of representing not only static forms but the very conditions of formalization and the embodiment of dynamic variables. The line between physical objects and digital creations blurs as projections alter architecture in real-time. These projection mapping projects create a liminal zone between real and virtual space and question the relationship between perception and representation. In this series of design exercises, the course explores how new processes of manipulation—namely, techniques in digital fabrication and representation—can facilitate new ways of thinking about architecture, both pre-digital and post-digital. 

Course format: Offered as weekly three-hour sessions of lectures, discussions, and workshops, the course will address the content described above. Instructor-led workshops will include a rigorous introduction to scripting (a pre-modeling tool) and a set of post-modeling tools for the advanced representation of projects. Lectures and readings will situate these digital tools into the contemporary discourse on the status of representation and abstraction in architecture. There are no prerequisites for this course.

Enactive Design: Creative Applications through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction

Enactive Design is an advanced research seminar on human-machine interaction. We will explore the role of real-time, bidirectional communication between human and digital agents in a design context, and leverage the potentials of this interactive relationship to establish new creative domains. 

Digital interfaces provide computational frameworks for creative exploration in disciplines such as architecture, design and art. However, in many instances, such as traditional 3D modelling environments or numerically-controlled machines, the machine is subservient to the orders of its human counterpart. While this model might be a convenient human-machine relationship for production-oriented scenarios, in the case of design environments, a higher degree of machine agency could generate new models of creative exploration and design through human-machine collaboration. Our investigation is structured around the concept of enactivism, a philosophy which argues that cognition arises from the interactions of an agent and its environment. Rather than an abstract intangible, knowledge and learning are derived from situated, embodied interaction. 

To fully harness the potential of computational design and robotic fabrication, we must fundamentally rethink how we design – and how our designs are realized – with the help of these technologies. Collapsing the distinction between the typically disparate, unidirectional processes of designing, creating and executing a program can create new design opportunities, and generate questions about the nature of the design and fabrication process. What kind of outcomes would an interactive 3D printer yield, one that allows modification of its toolpaths in real time? How can the power and precision of industrial robots be amplified by the decision-making capacity of humans-on-the-loop? How might technologies such as augmented reality supplement human capacity for creative making and fabrication? What are the potentials of mixed and virtual reality environments as mediators between humans and machines? Can design be conceived as the human curation of the suggestions of an artificial intelligence? Is this a new form of collaborative art?

We will address these questions, and many others, through the design of concurrent human-machine interactive platforms, with a particular focus on the computational aspects of the system. Exercises will experiment with real-time robotically-controlled fabrication techniques, interactive installations and/or artistic interventions, and the course will integrate empirical studies with digital modeling and simulation techniques. The creative outcomes of these new platforms for collaboration may reach much farther than the combination of its separate participants.

Offered as a single weekly 3-hour session of literature review, lectures, discussions and hands-on workshops, the course will address the content described above through a combination of hands-on assignments and a semester-long final project. This advanced research seminar will support a high degree of student independence and autonomy. Students are encouraged and expected to pursue their independent interests within the pedagogical framework established in the class, with close guidance from the instructors.  

For the final project, participants will leverage the workflows presented in class to develop a complete design project which addresses the topics described above, as well as the particular interests of the project team.  The results of each project will be documented in the form of an academic research paper.

Prerequisites: 
Demonstrated experience in computer programming via GSD6338, CS50 or similar. Students should have reasonable proficiency with Rhinoceros/Grasshopper. Experience in numerically-controlled fabrication, microelectronics, and robotics is encouraged though not required. 
 

Thermal Monocoques: An Energy Systems Laboratory

In this seminar, students learn to design energy systems that can orchestrate the flow of energy through buildings in novel ways. For these systems, the key to reducing carbon intensity lies in the design of heat-exchanging components in close thermal contact with freely available energy, found in the environment. What's an energy system in architecture? Broadly, it's an element that contributes to the transfer or conversion of energy from one state to another. In this course, examples of new energy systems may include a personal comfort system, facade element, or the design of a building section. 
 
The seminar is centered on design-led learning with lectures and hands-on workshops. Through semester-long projects, focused on practical building applications and proof-of-concept experimentation, teams will explore topics related to building performance, material extraction, embodied carbon, and experimental methods. Each team will couple their designs with whole-building energy flows, to understand the atmospheric, social, and life-cycle potential of their chosen energy systems. 

Overall, students will gain an advanced understanding of heat transfer in buildings, experimental methods, prototyping, as wells as analytical and computational modeling techniques for early design decisions. Likewise, teams will learn how the thermal performance of energy systems can be a catalyst for design in the built environment.  

** Note, this year's seminar will team up with Mass Design Group to develop solutions for real-world problem spaces.

CLIMATE CRISIS – BEYOND ADAPTATION & RESILIENCY: A Designer’s Geoengineering Toolkit for Mitigation

Currently, education of how landscape architects, architects and planners can address climate crisis (CC) impacts are focused on resilience (the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties) and adaptation (addresses impacts of CC). This seminar will explore mitigation, which goes to the root cause of CC, and what our role as professionals, in mitigating climate change can be. 

Many people are aware of CC but have neither deep knowledge of how it is caused nor what they can do about it. This seminar will introduce students to the basics of CC, its complexities and effects. The seminar will then explore solutions which go to the source of the problem: anthropogenically induced greenhouse gas which has been put up into the atmosphere, thereby inducing global warming, the cause of most of the effects we will face in the near future. We address the immense issue of global equity and the "Global South", which is now experiencing the worst effects of CC, many countries that have less economic resource and were not causal to climate change. These are ethical issues that we, from the "Global North", must address. 

In order to fully understand mitigation and its scope in climate change solutions, our seminar delves into the topic of geoengineering (GE), defined as "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth's climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming." The portfolio of GE tools ranges from biological solutions to physical and chemical solutions.  Furthermore, there is a high probability that, as a global community, we will not make necessary changes or meet deadlines in time to avert the worse-case scenarios of climate impacts. Thus, we will also study Solar Radiation Management, which increases the Earth's albedo by reducing its temperature to create "breathing space", or time, while we transition to renewables, new practices and technologies that can stabilize the earthsystem and avoid climate catastrophe. 

This is a weekly seminar focused upon required readings, instructor presentations and lectures from leading scientists in the climate community. Students will participate in lively and provocative conversations and debates, synthesize information, critique and evaluate arguments from texts by experts to create so to construct and formulate a personal position about CC and geoengineering solutions. Ultimately, students will shape their own "project" that will address the climate crisis.

By the end of the seminar, students will be able to engage the climate crisis discourse and, with a fuller understanding of solutions, can actively contribute to the challenges ahead.

Student Evaluation
50% Class attendance
30% Class participation
20% Complete Assignments

Building Human Interaction

This course investigates the interactions between humans and buildings with a focus on environmental sustainability and health. The exploration will fall into three categories:

Too many architecture projects that are “green” on paper, fail to live up to their predicted performance once occupied by real people. A better understanding of how occupants interact with buildings could help reduce the uncertainty associated with building performance upgrades, and remove this barrier preventing investment in better building design. 

In this course, students will also explore how architects can influence occupant behavior. This is an elusive yet weighty goal in terms of mitigating climate change and improving public health. Finally, students will investigate design concepts that encourage physical activity, improve indoor air quality, and impact other aspects of health, such as sleep quality and circadian rhythms. In short, students will seek to answer the question: how can we build positive human interactions with the spaces we design?

Cartographic Audition

Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest for sound within numerous sites academic and cultural production. With new environmental imperatives, researchers and practitioners have used sound to challenge conventions of spatial representation—both visual and conceptual—and provide evidence of spatial processes that otherwise escape easy documentation.  This ‘sonic turn’ has been expressed most clearly through numerous exhibitions of sound-based art practices; writings on the sonic aspects of cities and landscapes; and site-driven research projects that hope to communicate the dynamics of a changing biosphere through its changing soundscape.

With few exceptions, designers have engaged listening sporadically and superficially, and yet, would strongly benefit from a critical engagement with spatial listening, and reciprocally, contribute to the general understanding of the relationship between sound and space. In this regard, Landscape Architecture’s engagement with cartographic techniques and theories is instructive. By informing cartography with a design mentality, we have seen how spatial categories shape our expectations of what things populate a city or a landscape. This seminar will explore how a similar approach might inform our understanding of listening.

A number of questions are implied by the synthesis of sound-based practices with design-inflected cartographic theories. For instance, how might designers use listening as a rigorous method of urban and ecological research that is distinct from other modes of spatial inquiry? Or, how might we highlight nuanced questions about representation and forms of a priori spatial knowledge, through listening? 

In response to the above questions, this seminar will build a theory of Cartographic Audition with readings, class discussion, listening examples, and sound-based research exercises. Specifically, we will explore two parallel lines of thought within the environmental sound studies literature: On the one hand, that listening is an unmediated and non-representational practice that operates independent of spatial categories; and, on the other, that sound is evidential of urban and ecological through which a listener may detect important changes.  In the first half of the semester, we will focus on foundational sound studies texts that address these dual understandings of environmental sound. Alongside these texts, students will also read contemporary cartographic theory. During the second half of the semester, the topic of Cartographic Audition will be explored through student-derived research projects where practices of environmental sound recording will be informed by techniques of data-driven spatial analysis. 

Pre-requisite: SCI-6322 Mapping: Geographic Representation + Speculation, or permission of the instructor.

Urban and Town Ecology

Wildlife, vegetation, soil, air, water, and aquatic ecosystems, together with their human uses, are related to the distinctive, especially spatial, attributes of suburban and urban landscapes. Topics addressed with ecological emphasis include: urban region; suburbanization, growth and sprawl; planned community and city; suburban town; greenway and greenbelt; large and small open-space types; rail line and trail; road and vehicle; fire and flood; groundwater, wetland, stream, river, and shoreline; commercial and industrial areas; development and neighborhood; house lot; building; and tiny green spaces.

Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV

The fourth and final course in the Ecologies, Techniques and Technologies core sequence, GSD 6242 continues to develop an understanding of, and promote skill in, the discipline and practice of landscape architecture. Through the topic of soft engineering as it relates to landscape design, site construction and technological imagination class members will be required to learn both traditional core techniques and the creative and skillful reordering of these techniques.  Soft Engineering is broadly defined here as the application of landscape construction and management techniques as the actions of both design and implementation. It should be noted that the term soft engineering is unique to the medium of landscape, a medium that is constantly weathering and morphologically changing yet still needs to be shaped by a practical and rigorous logic. In this, landscape technology differs from architectural technology and other design arts at the GSD as it deals with the indeterminacy of the landscape medium relative to a particular context and site yet within desired performative and aesthetic configurations.

The ambition of the course is to advance in each class member an understanding of soft engineering through both core and emerging current practices of detail design and implementation in landscape architecture, address the interdependence between site, design, ecology, craft, imagination and innovation in the making of landscape architecture and how this can inform function, form and design expression and identity in landscape architecture at a range of scales from that of the region to the individual detail. Classroom presentations and in-class workshop and research demonstrations will be augmented in the second half of the semester by guest lectures by landscape researchers in technology and field visits in the South Boston area.

Class members will carry out a series of technology assignments throughout the semester related to the concurrent STU 1212 Landscape Core Studio IV.

 

 

Cases in Contemporary Construction

As the final component in the required sequence of technology courses, this professionally-oriented course develops an integral understanding of the design and construction of buildings and their related technologies: structural, constructional, and environmental. Building on fundamentals covered in GSD 6123: Construction Systems, the course looks in detail at examples of innovative construction techniques in wood, steel, and concrete structures. Building design and construction will be evaluated within the context in which technological innovation takes place by exploring the relationship of the principal project participants, such as designers, contractors, building product manufacturers, and the owner(s). On this, the course will introduce the fundamentals of managing design and construction projects as well as the principal project delivery methods and scheduling techniques. Aspects such as risk management and environmental and social impacts on projects will be introduced, as well as topics related to facilitating innovation and developing talent.

Class meetings concentrate on case studies of recent buildings, which students are expected to study prior to class meetings. Each main course theme will be introduced by a lecture, and certain cases may have participants from the project team as guest speakers. Detail drawings as well as issues of project and construction management are introduced for discussion. Computer applications on structures, construction, environmental control systems, and techniques and decision-making frameworks on managing projects and teams are an integral part of the course.

Prerequisites: GSD 6123, 6125, and 6229, or equivalent.