Materials

This course explores the science of stuff. How do we classify stuff? How do we build with stuff? What are the energy, health, and societal implications of stuff? And what does the future of stuff look like? The goal of this course is to enable students to understand the near- and long-term implications of architectural materials and how to leverage this knowledge in environmental building design. The course is lecture- and discussion-based with a series of hands-on exercises and design workshops.

This course is the fourth of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6126) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture and the Master of Design in Energy and Environments.

Building Simulation

This course is the third of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6125) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture and the Master of Design in Energy and Environments. 

Objective: The best intent does not always lead to the best performing design, as intuition and rules of thumb often fail to adequately inform decision making. Therefore, high-performance architecture increasingly utilizes simulation tools to eliminate some of the guesswork. Simulation is the process of making a simplified model of some complex system and using it to predict the behavior of the system.In this course, state-of-the-art computer simulation methods for ventilation (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and thermal/energy analysis will be introduced. 

Innovative techniques for using these models in the architectural design process will be explored.

The course will provide students with:
1. An understanding of building simulation methods and their underlying principles
2. Hands-on experience in using computer simulation models to support the design process
3. An increased understanding of high-performance environmental design strategies in architecture

Content: In this course, students will acquire skills in computerized building performance simulation for architecture while simultaneously using these skills to explore fundamental design issues such as building massing and envelope design. The course includes discussion of the benefits as well as the limitations of these methods. Topics include fundamentals such as modeling strategies, underlying physical principles, understanding simulation assumptions, and interpreting results with an emphasis on developing the ability to translate the analysis into design decisions. Through practice with the software tools, students develop a better understanding of physics in architecture and hone their own design intuition.

Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II

Developing and implementing good solutions to real problems facing human society requires a broad understanding of the relationships between technology innovation, science, manufacturing, design thinking, environment, sustainability, culture, aesthetics, business, public policy, and government. Various frameworks for understanding these complex relationships within the context of real-world problems will be explored and discussed.  Coursework will be based on assigned readings, case studies, research assignments, exercises, and class discussions.

GSD PRO 7231 and 7232 and ES 236a and ES 236b are equivalent courses. They are part of a two-course sequence. This course is for students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering (MDE) graduate program. A small number of other students may be allowed to enroll by permission of instructor.

This course is held at SEAS. This course meetings 4pm-6pm Tuesdays in Pierce Hall 100F and 4pm-6pm Thursdays in MD 119.

Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment

This lecture/workshop course studies and analyzes processes and expressions of power in urban form and design in the North American built environment. Focusing on the topics of identity and differentiation that are expressed in spatial interventions across history, this course surveys historic and contemporary cultural conflicts that have emerged from regulatory processes, many of which result, intentionally or unintentionally in patterns of spatial exclusion.

This course explores the underlying power networks behind the transformation of the Los Angeles River and the development of its adjacent urban fabric. The story of who benefited from the water of the Los Angeles River initially expressed the power to control its distribution. From irrigation ditches for agriculture to aqueducts for the domestic water systems critical to a growing city and then to the reduction of the river to a flood control channel to ensure flood-free development, whoever controlled the river infrastructure shaped Los Angeles and the development in the river’s flood plain. We will investigate two zones relating to the river at the extreme ends of the 110. At the northern end—the Arroyo Seco—in affluent Pasadena and Altadena issues arising from the Devil's Gate Reservoir Restoration project have produced a conflict between dredging a reservoir to maintain flood protection and the destruction of habitat. At the southern end, in less affluent Wilmington and San Pedro—areas of heavy industry, oil production and one of the busiest container ports in the world— issues of water and air quality, sediment and pollution have produced conflicts between conservation and market forces creating a situation of environmental discrimination.

The course will develop cognitive methodologies (ways of thinking), research methodologies (familiarity with original historical sources and databases) and analytical means (modes of interpretation) associated with places where power and politics play critical and often undisclosed influence in shaping the built environment. The goal of the course is to foster an understanding of urban ethics and political awareness that can be applied to different parts of the built world, leading to a broader understanding of the dimensions of the cultural ecology of a place over time.

The limited enrollment course lottery will select 12 students to travel to Los Angeles, CA. Critical Conservation students will have priority for enrollment for travel. Travel will take place during spring break, March 23-31, and students who travel in this course will be term billed $200. The limited enrollment lottery is only to select the students who will travel on the trip. After the selection process for the trip this course will be changed to unlimited enrollment and students may enroll as they would any other lecture course.  Students may enroll in only one traveling course or studio in a given term, and are responsible for the cost of all meals and incidentals related to the trip, including visas and any change fees related to modifications to the set flight itinerary.

Architecture’s Bodies: Agency and Biopolitics

The aim of this seminar is to think carefully about how bodies engage with architecture and the built environment. In examining relationships between ideological constructions of the modern “subject” and the physical constructions that house those subjects, we will explore how architecture mediates between the body and the body politic. We will look at how the philosophical project of bio-politics necessitates an understanding of architectural space, and how differences in built space necessarily results in differences in how political power is able to lay claim on the body. Concurrently, we will be paying special attention to the ways in which architecture can allow for individual agency, and produce resistance to embedded structures of power. Topics within this broad frame will include civil rights and rights discourse, theories of race and gender, citizenship, and technologies of life and death. Our historical focus will cohere around select episodes in the Atlantic world from the 18th to 21st centuries.

In an explicit departure from architectural discourses that have perhaps framed the human experience as homogeneous, we will begin from the premise that the human body’s relationships with architecture cannot be reduced to a singular idealized frame. A particular aim of this course will be to attend to the ways in which differences in race, gender, class, age and ability affect access to, and the experience of, the built environment. Through theoretical and historical texts, we will consider the lived-experience of subjects and the ways in which subjects are governed and guided by their world. The semester will be structured around a series of spaces in the built environment of varying scales. These will include: the ramp, the elevator, the hold; the bathroom, the kitchen, the plantation; the examination room, the field, the office campus, the public park. Throughout, we will aim to think about these spaces and their associations with bodies in multiple ways. We will ask: what role has architecture played in the transformations of biological bodies into political bodies? And, concurrently, by what means does the built environment allow for, encourage, or preclude individual agency?

This is a reading seminar, focused on in-class discussions of assigned texts. In addition, each week will focus on one or more primary documents related to that week’s architectural object—ie, the ADA Accessibility Code; a broadsheet describing slave ship; recent “bathroom bill” legislation, etc. Assignments will be structured as short progressive writing exercises, culminating in a final research paper or annotated bibliography.

Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies

Infrastructures play a decisive role in urban development and in the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical perspective. History proves especially useful when dealing with the political dimension of urban infrastructures. From fortifications to smart technologies, infrastructures are inseparable from political intentions and consequences. This political dimension will constitute one of the threads of this lecture course. Other themes dealt with in the course will include the relation between cities and their hinterland, the progressive dematerialization of infrastructures, from walls or bridges to the invisible electronic networks that organize contemporary urban life, the rise of environmental concerns and their impact on infrastructural thoughts and practices, the need to conceive differently infrastructures when dealing with informal settlements.

Topics will include:

Evaluation will take into account participation to the class discussions. Students will be asked to produce a final paper on a topic related to the course.

Making Sacred Space

This course addresses the current crisis in church design by an in depth consideration of the ideas, images, concepts, and legislation that inform the creation of sacred space. We consider the conceptual, theoretical, and aesthetic foundations of contemporary church design and review specific examples of how those ideas can be and have been implemented through lectures, readings, discussions and an individual design project. The course aims to enable designers to build better religious buildings by proposing new solutions and becoming leaders in the controversies.

For almost 2,000 years church commissions have been the largest, most prominent, and most artistically and intellectual challenging that engage architects. No other commission poses equal demands for the realization of ideas in built form, and none draws on so rich a heritage of images and metaphors requiring visible shape. Recent projects by Rafael Moneo, Renzo Piano, SOM, and Richard Meier, among others, show this is still true today. Yet many recently-built churches are banal, generic or, in searching for novelty, ugly or weird. Others, while aesthetically or technologically admirable, function poorly and fail to meet the needs of the users.

Christian belief isn’t necessary in order to design a church, but knowledge of Christian culture and tradition, of the liturgy, and of what sacred space is and is not, is essential. In this course we approach Christianity as culture, not creed. Since in designing a church the expectations and needs of the client (both clerical and congregational users) are paramount, these will be explored in depth. Two of the programmatic requirements – that the church be beautiful and that it inspire wonder – will receive particular attention as aspects for which the designer is especially, perhaps solely, responsible.

Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871-2036

Visual constituents of high adventure since the late Victorian era, emphasizing wandering woods, rogues, tomboys, women adventurers, faerie antecedents, halflings, crypto-cartography, Third-Path turning, martial arts, and post-1937 fantasy writing as integrated into contemporary advertising, video, computer-generated simulation, and private and public policy.

Note: This course is offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as VES 167.

Prerequisites: GSD 4105, GSD 4303, and GSD 4304, or permission of the instructor.

Jointly Offered Course: FAS VES 167

Modernization in the Visual United States Environment, 1890-2035

Modernization of the United States visual environment as directed by a nobility creating new images and perceptions of such themes as wilderness, flight, privacy, clothing, photography, feminism, status symbolism, and futurist manipulation as illustrated in print-media and other advertising enterprise.

Note: This course is offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as VES 160.

Prerequisite: GSD 4105 or permission of the instructor.

Jointly Offered Course: FAS VES 160

Histories of Landscape Architecture II: Design, Representation, and Use

This course introduces students to relevant topics, themes, and sites that help us understand the conception, production, evolution, and reception of designed and found landscapes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It aims at building an understanding of landscapes as both physical spaces and as cultural media that sit at the nexus between art and science and that contribute knowledge about humankind’s relationship with non-human nature. Landscapes are the result of social, political, artistic and intellectual endeavors. The topography, soil and climate of a site also condition their designs, use and habitation. As much as designed and found landscapes are a product of their time, they have also contributed to shaping history, both through their physical materiality and through the mental worlds they enable. Embedding found and designed landscapes into their social, political and cultural contexts, the course also pays close attention to the role of expert knowledge and the professions that have contributed to creating them. Using a variety of sources including texts, illustrations, and film the course offers insights into the development and transfer of ideas between different cultures, countries and geographical regions, and time periods. Course readings that will accompany every lecture will be made available on Canvas. Student assignments for this class will include reading response papers and one final paper.