Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment

The aim of the class is to learn how to depict and express the presence and appearance of people in natural and built environments.

This class objective will be achieved through three projects:

Each of the assigned projects will be realized in a different, specifically selected technique:

Making Participation Relevant to Design

By trying to understand how participation can make design more relevant to society, we can create more socially just cities. This course starts from the premise that it would not be ethical to design cities without creating meaningful conversations with different stakeholders. Our main challenge is to improve the quality and ethics of design work by staying in close contact with the city and its residents.

Participation is a way of confronting our preconceptions, revealing our blind spots, and/or supporting our intuitions in a context where architecture, urbanism, and other design-related fields are becoming more and more complex and multilayered. Participation is not an end, it is a means: a powerful tool that establishes new connections and boosts both creativity and the production of new ideas. Likewise, participation allows the construction of a collective dialogue that will engage people in different ways, formats, and temporalities. Participation is a method to enable the creation of more democratic, inclusive and open ended environments, redefining the very concept of citizenship. 

How can designers reimagine participatory decision making processes?
How should design participation unfold in an ever changing reality?
What improves communication and enhances creative dialogue?
Can participatory design lead to open ended processes or outcomes? 

Among other strategies deployed to answer these questions, the class will focus on the potential contribution of digital technologies as a means for linking participation to design. Technology opens new opportunities for revealing multiple layers of meaning. It also allows the exchange of information and creation of new possibilities that together can transform the way we behave. Technology, in short, enables us to better relate and interact with each other and our surroundings, thus lowering the barriers for citizen engagement.

Throughout the semester we will look for alternative means and untapped opportunities to identify and develop socially and technologically innovative approaches, methodologies, and tools. Students will be asked to combine technical skills and knowledge production with a social sensibility so as to access the direct experience of reality while also producing forms of empowerment that come from involving the relevant actors in transformative processes. 

The course has no prerequisites and is open to graduate students across the different departments.

NOTE: This seminar runs in parallel with Option Studio Designing atmospheres and technologies for Social Interaction, sharing information and having common sessions on Fridays.

Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar

Enrollment in this course was pre-selected.

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).

Enrollment in this course was pre-selected.

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

This Course is for students in the Toyko Study Abroad Program. 

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.

International Humanitarian Response (at HSPH)

This course offers practical training in the complex issues and field skills needed to engage in humanitarian work. Students will gain familiarity with the concepts and international standards for humanitarian response. While providing a solid theoretical foundation, the course will focus on practical skills such as conducting rapid assessments, ensuring field security, and interacting with aid agencies, the military, and the media during humanitarian crises.

The course culminates in a required three-day intensive humanitarian crisis field simulation during 26-28 April 2019. Students will camp for two nights in the forest as part of an aid agency team responding to a simulated international disaster and conflict. Student teams will carry out rapid assessments, create a comprehensive humanitarian aid plan, and manage interactions with refugees, officials, and other humanitarian actors. Students will face challenges that test their subject knowledge, team skills, creativity, and grit.

Topics covered: Humanitarian response community and history; International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Law; Sphere standards (shelter, water and sanitation, food security, health); Civil-military relations, media skills, logistics, and budgeting; Monitoring and evaluation, accountability; Personal security, mental health, stress, and teamwork.

Lecture location: Harvard Yard, Cambridge. Course Fee: $300 to cover camping gear hire, food, and other equipment costs. Field Simulation: 8am, Friday, April 26 through 3pm, Sunday, April 28, 2019.

Course Note: This course is based at the Harvard Chan School as GHP 515 and GHP 518. This course is the equivalent of 3 GSD units, not 4

This course will be held in Fong Auditorium in Boylston Hall (Boylston Hall 110) on Harvard’s Cambridge Campus.

Thesis project / Project Thesis

As the culminating requirement of the Master in Architecture degree, “Thesis” entails multiple expectations. It is a demonstration, not only of competency and expertise but of originality and relevance. It requires the ability to conceive and execute work that is both a specific project (delimited in scope, a specific set of deliverables) as well as the indication of a wider Project (possessing disciplinary value, contributing to the larger discourse). The class will address both valances of the Thesis project. In a series of lectures and workshops, students will study the theory and practice of the architectural thesis by examining its institutional history at the GSD and its development in the field at large in order to understand the conventions and possibilities of the format. In preparation for their own thesis, students will, in a guided series of exercises, produce definitive statements (“what is the topic?”), relevant research (“what is the position?”), and studies of implementation (“what is the method?”). With this preparation, students will be equipped to undertake a thesis “Project" in every sense of the word.

The course consists of a lecture and a series of workshops to structure the production of research and initial design exercises.
The course is intended to complement any arrangements already made with thesis advisors. Thesis advisors are welcome to review progress in the course and suggest individually-tailored topics for the research work that each student will complete as part of the course.

Eligibility:
This course is intended for second semester MArch IIs, fourth semester MArch I APs, and sixth semester MArch Is.

Information for MArch Is and APs:

Information for MArch IIs:

The Landscape We Eat

“A recipe is more than the food it is made of: the geography of our dinner spills off of the plate.”

“The Landscape We Eat” seeks to explore the relationship between food systems and their geomorphology, climate, infrastructure, time and culture.

During the 20th century, the transformation of global food production and its processes have homogenized most of the Earth’s productive landscapes, diminishing their complexity and impoverishing their ecosystems. This transformation has been so thorough and pervasive that it is increasingly difficult to imagine how things could be any other way.

In order to think more creatively about this problem, we will focus our attention on La Camargue, an agricultural region of Southern France. In La Camargue, a complex system of canals moves fresh water from the delta to the Mediterranean Sea, which mediates between the conflicting requirements of the regions primary products, such as poultry, asparagus, rice, and salt. By ‘thinking through drawing,’ this seminar will explore the metabolic relations that construct both landscapes of production and landscapes of consumption in order to better understand the parameters of the problem that global food production confronts us with.

The course will be structured in five parts. In the first exploration, Landscapes of production for selected ingredients will be drawn through geomorphology, climate, and soil, in order to situate ingredients in their non-human milieu. In the second part, we will expand this lens to include the technical milieu of tools and infrastructure that constructs specific landscape relations in La Comargue. In the third ‘zoom,’ we will test our insights in relation to time, thinking historically about the economic and cultural forces that have shaped the territory, and that connect it to the globe. If in the third zoom we have moved outward, the fourth zoom will move radically inward, considering the genetics, chemistry, and microscopic configurations of specific ingredients in order to, again, rethink the time and space of food production. Finally, each student will choose a recipe that distills and reveals their research over the course of the semester. Each recipe will be a heuristic device we will use to teach each other what we have learned, to see what is on the plate in a new way, and to better understand the geographies that overflow.

Demographics and Population Processes

Many of the important challenges that our communities face today, from the persistent racial and ethnic disparities and human rights violations, to climate change and community resiliency issues, and opioids crises and healthcare coverage, are related to demographics and population processes. This course offers an introduction to the substantive areas of inquiry in demographic research -at the intersection of sociological, community, and population research- to understand the causes and consequences of demographic changes in communities. Understanding these demographic concepts can help students integrate a socio-ecological perspective into the study of communities’ social, economic, environmental, and political issues.

Course objectives and outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, students should be able to:
Understand population processes and apply relevant concepts and measures into community decision-making, design, and planning.
Use key concepts related to demographics and population processes to describe a population.
Describe how demographic patterns are intertwined with health and environment.
Identify sources of demographic data.

Course format
This course is a seminar. Class meetings will entail discussion and the exchange of ideas by individuals who have read the assigned materials and thought about the topic at hand, as well as occasional (and limited) lecturing by the instructor.

Method of evaluation
Class attendance and participation (30%)
Weekly discussion questions (20%)
Discussion leadership (30%)
Critical essay (20%)

Designing with the Urban Stack: A Practice Course for Designers of the Built Environment

The seminar will investigate critical issues of the Urban Stack for the Kendall Square District, Cambridge, MA. The first half of the term entails teams researching various elements of the Urban Stack as they relate to conditions in the study area, followed by a charrette to identify key issues and problems of built-environment that may be productively addressed in the second part. Teams for the second half of the seminar are tasked with developing a range of considered speculations/proposals to improve the performance of built-environment for an inclusive spectrum of publics and constituencies. The work of the seminar will be conducted primarily in team format throughout the term. A core group of guest lecturers and visitors will provide additional perspectives and content for the work of the class. Students should anticipate a significant level of effort devoted to research and project development outside of the class meeting hours. The seminar is open to all graduate programs at the GSD. Pre-requisite: MAR I and MLA I students must have completed core.

Pre-requisite: MAR I and MLA I students must have completed core to enroll, otherwise no program restrictions.