Place-Based Design Inquiry

This workshop will critically and imaginatively engage design that is already embedded in the language of place—in maps, ecologies, histories, films, policies, plans, and everyday conversation.

We will focus on elements bound in their constitution to a dominant identity: the informal tied to formal, the invasive opposed to the indigenous, water contained by land, and waste that is not a resource. These ‘nonplace’ elements have come to disrupt and undermine habitation today in what are generally seen as problems that design is tasked to solve. However, before they become problems to solve, these nonplace elements must be seen for what they really are, namely, products of design, a design that tends to pass unquestioned in the ordinary and every day. This workshop will investigate this tacit design. What is its language and how does it operate to create the informal along with the formal, the invasive along with the indigenous, water with land, and waste with resource?

Each student will take a ‘lateral look’ at an informal, invasive, water and waste of their choice in a place of their choice, a place they are vested in exploring. They will enhance this looking through the pursuit of four simple ideas/crafts: splicing, layering, weaving, and folding. Inspired by incongruities and dissonances in the operation of nonplace elements and working with texts, images and materials like paper, wood, metal, and fabric, students will make analogous instruments that promise readings and sightings of new relations, identities, and languages of place.

The workshop will operate through discussions and making. Students will produce work that responds to ideas and prompts discussed in class in relation to their place of choice. The work itself will generate further conversations and trajectories of inquiry. These trajectories will take students to the archives, field, and back to their ‘work station’.

Designing the American City: Civic Aspirations and Urban Form

The course is an interpretative look at the characteristic patterns of settlement and attitudes towards cities and urban life that are identified with American urbanization. It introduces the American city as a culturally meaningful form and presents a body of historical and social material relevant to its study. The course seeks to foster an understanding of the cultural processes, policies, planning and design actions, which have influenced American urbanization.

The course chronicles the “love-hate” attitude that Americans have shown toward their cities across history, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts to reconceive how and in what shape cities and urban regions should grow. While not abandoning long-standing precedents of urban organization, Americans have consistently sought alternative ways to form communities. This search for alternatives generally proceeded in concert with a body of ideals that became fundamental to the European Enlightenment, and soon after to the explosion of urban growth brought about by the Industrial Revolution.  Just being conceived, rather than as European cities needing to adapt (with considerable difficulty) to the cultural, political and technological transformations of the 17th through the 20th centuries, American cities heralded the arrival of the modern world. This is key to their appreciation.

The course also seeks comparisons and contrasts between periods of rapid American urbanization, and the even more rapid urban growth currently taking place in regions around the world.  As American cities grew in emulation off and in contrast to older European counterparts, so today many cities, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions, seek inspiration from and attempt to improve upon the American urban experience.

This course is a lecture in the College’s Program in General Education, with a weekly graduate section for GSD. Enrollment is limited to 20 GSD students.

Offered as United States in the World 29 in FAS. Jointly Offered Course: FAS US-WORLD 29

Jointly Offered Course: FAS US-WORLD 29

Discourse and Research Methods

Research conducted in the Doctor of Design Program (DDes) at the GSD spans a broad range of topics and areas of investigation that not only represent the disciplines of the three departments at the GSD, but expand into domains such as art, culture, science, engineering or sociology, to just name a few.

GSD 9691 ‘Discourses and Methods’ is a required course for first year DDes students. It involves a close collaboration with the primary advisors, and for that reason the course is only open to DDes students. There are two primary learning goals:

All students will work on their own research design and, as the outcome of the course, produce a draft prospectus in written and in presentation format by the end of the semester. The overall goal is to provide all students a broad foundation in terms of discourses and methods, and contribute to preparing them for leadership roles in the academy or in other areas of society.

Discourse and Methods I

This course is open only to Ph.D. students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design (Ph.D. students from other departments may participate with instructor’s permission). This year’s course focuses on major theoretical and historiographical issues and themes that still structure scholarly discourse today. Students will confront these issues and themes by relating them to key methodological concerns and horizons in their own emerging research agendas.
 

Independent Thesis for the Degree Master in Design Studies

(Previously "Open Projects”) Prerequisites: Filing of signed "Declaration of Advisor" form with MDes office, and approval signature of the program director. A student who selects this independent thesis for the degree MDes pursues independent research of relevance to the selected course of study within the MDes program, under the direction of a Design School faculty member.

Tirana Freescape: Reconstructing Socialist Space

Tirana Freescape: Reconstructing Socialist Space

Tirana Freescape: Reconstructing Socialist Space

William Baumgardner (MLA I ’18)

Tirana, Albania is a city where voices are silenced and identity remains opaque. Through a tumultuous and dark history, the political landscape inherent to public trust has been fractured. How then can the public realm be reconceived to better express the voices of the individual and the collective? This thesis explores how cultural forms of identity, memory, and voice, as found in Albanian textiles can be interpreted at the urban scale. The recently completed master plan the city is implementing does little to recognize public space and the landscape of the capital city while allocating new “poly center” developments. Grounding the thesis in one of these “poly centers,” a derelict textile factory built at the inception of the Communist regime, cultural memory is interpreted, extracted, and manifested in a multi-faceted urban development which aims to operate as a business incubator, housing and public space, community agriculture, and transit-oriented development. By excavating history through the processes of soil remediation, new forms of labor, and community development, the project aspires to reposition the city’s history. Like the textiles that have prevailed in the country for centuries, each thread, each pattern, serves a purpose and frames a larger whole. Unlocking this memory and restructuring its texture will inform the shape of a liberated public realm, one that is vocal and free.

Baumgardner_Freescape

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.

Structural Design 1

This course introduces students to the analysis and design of structural systems. The fundamental principles of statics, structural loads, and rigid body equilibrium are considered first. The course continues with the analysis and design of cables, columns, beams, and trusses. The structural design of steel follows, culminating in the consideration of building systems design. The quantitative understanding of interior forces, bending moments, stresses, and deformations are an integral part of the learning process throughout the course. Students are expected to have completed all prerequisites in mathematics and physics.

Course Objectives:

Topics:

Course Requirements:
Reserved text: Schodek, D., Bechthold, M. Structures (Prentice Hall, Latest Edition)
Scientific calculator capable of calculating exponents, trigonometric functions, etc.
Note: The use of smartphones and/or computers will not be allowed during class or examinations

Design Teams:
Students will assemble themselves into teams of 3 persons each. Weekly homework assignments are to be completed by those teams; single submissions of each assignment will be accepted per team. These teams will remain intact for the duration of the semester. Weekly quizzes, a Mid-Term Examination, and a Final Examination will be taken individually (i.e. not in teams).

In addition to the regular Tues/Thurs afternoon schedule, this course will meet in room 109 from 9:30-11 on the following Fridays: 2/8, 2/15, 3/1.    

Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II

Module 1
Topography—the land—is a basic medium and tool of landscape architecture. Grading is both precise and conceptual; the core mission of this module is for students to understand the technical underpinnings for grading and the influence that shaping the land has on human experience. The precision of grading will be learned through the concepts of land surveying, characteristics of contours, formation of spot elevations, universal grading terminology and formulas, calculating cut and fill, drainage patterns, and accessibility. Experiential qualities such enclosure, framing, prospect, concealment, scale, reinforcement, and comfort will be explored. Problem-solving in grading will be combined with discussions about the physical experiences of topography and every exercise will provide opportunities to use technical mastery to achieve design goals. Using this approach, students will strengthen their technical facility with grading while expanding their visual resources for expressing their design thinking about the landscape.

Module 2
Stormwater management, the focus of this class module, is one of the most pressing development issues of our times because it is tied to every aspect of world-wide health, safety, and welfare. As city, suburb, and town have developed, the need to address water quantity and quality has intensified and contemporary landscape architecture is uniquely positioned to find the intersections between management, performance, and experience. This course will examine the technical foundations of closed stormwater systems (structures and pipes), developed in the 19th Century, and the best practices of contemporary stormwater management systems that use over land conveyance, infiltration, retention, and natural systems as the basis for intelligent environmental site development. For closed drainage stormwater systems, lectures will cover calculations for watershed volumes, effects of ground surface on water flow, and sizing and layout of piping, swales, and ponds. This information will support the study of the latest methods and approaches for designing and calculating open and engineered natural drainage systems such as wetlands, bioswales, forebays, seeps, cisterns, rain gardens, permeable pavement, and underdrainage.

In both modules subjects will taught by lectures, case studies, and assignments, all supported by desk critiques of exercises. The final grade for the combined modules will be determined by six to eight assignments (65%), one final project due during the final exam week (25%), as well as class participation and attendance (10%).

The first meeting of this course on Wednesdassy, January 30th, will take place  in Gund Hall 111 from 8:30-10 AM. The course will move to three different locations from 10-11:30: Gund 121, 122, and 110.