Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II

Integrated Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II engages diverse yet complementary disciplines, perspectives, and techniques to help identify, diagnose and constructively address consequential social challenges. The disciplines — or ‘frameworks’ — explored are sectioned into four modules.

The modules include:
– Business, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship
– Product Design
– Design of Social Innovation
– Product Management

The course aims to foster interdisciplinary learning and critical thinking, and provides student with a deeper examination of topics that build off Frameworks I.
 

Modules take place on Tuesday or Thursday, 2:30-5:30 PM. See the canvas page for details.

Note: A limited number of non-MDE students will be permitted to enroll in this module pairing: Design for Social Innovation (Spring 1) and Product Management (Spring 2). This two-module sequence must be taken together and occurs on Thursdays, 2:30-5:30 PM. The other listed modules (Business, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship; Product Design) are not open to enrollment.

Fight or Flight: Space Colonization and the Future of Landscape Architecture

This seminar will examine the future of landscape architecture concerning the two forces that are likely to shape it well into the future: an increasingly uninhabitable Earth, and the evolution of humanity as a space-faring species.

The parallel tracks of space flight, colonization, and environmental protection and conservation will be analyzed and discussed. The former is about FLIGHT: the search for territory and resources beyond the confines of home, region, nation, and planet; the latter is about FIGHT: the counterforce to stay in place and “tough it out” in the face of peril, namely climate change, loss of biodiversity, zoonotic pandemics, and the disruptive advent of artificial intelligence.

Spacefaring will be addressed first: how it has existed in our imagination and how it has been translated into programs and associated technologies. The concern and care for the natural environment under anthropocentric and biocentric impulses will follow. Lastly, the seminar will examine how the flight-fight dichotomy informs the practice of landscape architecture, i.e.: how it should be aligned with a survival ethic and methods.
 

CONTESTED Landscapes + COUNTER Narratives

Land is not a stage on which history takes place, it is not a neutral site for becoming human or building community. Imperial histories are not intended to understand place but to legitimate the taking of place. No place holds one, singular story. Every place, every site is contested, complex, layered, and full of both histories and futures. Our purpose in this seminar will be to interrogate how we might frame and define practices of place-making including landscape architecture, and in turn, how might re-imagine potential futures of design as a practice and as a way of thinking.

We will explore how a critical place-based inquiry shapes readings of complex landscape histories. Places hold contested narratives and histories, from lands of deep meaning to that of quick extraction, from sites of enslaved labor to mining operations, from reservations to internment camps, from places of violence to those of resistance, among others. We will study critical place theories in the context of land/place-based sources, methods, and tools (including archives, walking, drawing, thick sections, texts, maps, oral histories, poetry…) for identifying, revealing, interpreting, and sharing narratives that may collide, upturn, deny or erase one another.

Drawing from a selection of places primarily in the United States including the Harvard campus, we will consider how narratives of identity, race, gender, and indigenous sovereignty have shaped place; the approaches designers might employ when taking on the responsibility of design and making; and the sources from which historians might draw in curating histories of place.

We frame this seminar as an inquiry, grounded in an interrogation of ways of knowing in order to build alternative bodies of knowledge. Our readings will engage with studies of the constructions of identity, race, and gender as embedded in and emanating from land and place, and in particular through the practice of designing landscapes. We will center on how communities have made place in order to survive and thrive. We will interrogate resistance in the landscape. Our work will draw from George Lipsitz’s essay on the racialization of space and spatialization of race to consider counter narratives of place and community. As we extend our discussion through the work of Tiffany Lethabo King, Lisa Prosper, Andrea Roberts, Anna Tamura, Ken Lustbader, and a richness of other scholars of land, landscape, and place. Our purpose will be to interrogate how we engage with history, to question how we have come to frame and define practices of place-making, including landscape architecture, and in turn, how might re-imagine potential futures of design and our community places.
 

The Architect as Producer: Theory as Liberatory Practice

In Teaching to Transgress, theorist, educator, and social critic bell hooks reclaims the word theory and challenges us to produce theory as a liberatory practice. hooks affirms that in the production of this theory “lies the hope of our liberation, in its production lies the possibility of naming all our pain–of making all our hurt go away.” Such a form of theory, hooks concludes, is necessary to build a mass-based resistance struggle: one in which there is no gap between theory and practice.

The past few years have brought the necessity of theory as liberatory practice to the foreground of discussions on architecture. The interconnected crisis of violent war, mass enforced migrations, global warming, precarity, and structural inequality have changed how we understand what architecture is and does. These and other events have highlighted the role of architecture in the rise of wealth accumulation, racism, patriarchy, land dispossession, labor struggle, and environmental disaster. In this course we examine how architects further these processes and how they might contribute to counter them by turning to the role of architecture within the relations of production.

In his essay “L’Architecture dans le boudoir,” architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri concludes by wondering what might happen were we to shift the focus from what architecture wishes to be or say, to the role the discipline plays within the capitalist system. Citing Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer,” Tafuri proposes that instead of asking about the attitude of a work to the relations of production, we should ask: what is its position within them? By keeping this central question in mind, he concludes, many of the so-called masterpieces of modern architecture come to take on a secondary or even marginal importance, and many debates are relegated to peripheral considerations.

The course responds to hooks and Tafuri’s challenges by thinking about architecture’s position within the relations of production through four interrelated topics: lands, materials, labors, and knowledges. We start by questioning where architecture happens, the land we stand on, the ways in which lands are transformed into real estate, and the role architects play in this process. We then move on to the materials, resources, and objects that architecture is made of, as well as the processes of extraction they are imbricated in. We address the bodies that participate in the making and maintenance of architecture, from building labor to the role of the architect as worker. We conclude by reflecting on the motivations that animate the discipline and its teaching, and the ways in which it is being unlearned and reimagined.

Students will be evaluated on class participation, discussion facilitation, short writing assignments, and a research project. This course is planned as a “lecture” with many small group activities and other alternative pedagogies. It qualifies as a BTC Distributional Elective.
 

Cotton Kingdom, Now

In 1852, the New York Daily Times commissioned a 31-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to conduct an immersive research journey through the Southern slave states. The country was headed toward civil war, and the paper dispatched young Olmsted for his ability to reveal the cultural and environmental qualities of landscape in a narrative voice. Today, landscape architecture, urban design, and planning—disciplines Olmsted helped to shape—continue to grapple with the economic, political, and ecological conditions rooted in systems he documented so vividly 165 years ago. This seminar will investigate the relationship between a host of major contemporary issues with the documented conditions in Olmsted’s 1861 book, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom. The seminar positions Olmsted’s journey not only as source material but also as methodological proposition, in reflection on the significance and methods of research and representation in design practice.

The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of an Architectural Idea

One of the most arresting ideas in the philosopher Michel Serres’s Rome: The Book of Foundations (1983) is that history is “a knot of different times”–a knot most visibly reified by the tangible traces of past civilizations. Such a knot speaks as readily to stratigraphic accumulations in urban space as to the composite aesthetics of ruin pictures. Artifacts, fragments, vestiges, rubble, debris, detritus, wreckage: all this has prompted a venerable body of writings and objects that work the metaphor of ruin into everything from a philosophical template for the Sublime to a mechanism for iconoclastic violence.

The subject of the ruin stems from the interconnection of themes crucial to the history of architecture. These include the vexed legacy of the Classical tradition well into Modernism and Postmodernism, changing attitudes towards past and patrimony, the relationship of architecture and archaeology, the adaptability of architectural form through and despite time, and the politics of collective memory: what does it mean to be, as it were, forever “building on ruins?” The subject of the ruin also stems from a theoretical discourse on the function of decay in architecture, which was inaugurated by thinkers such as the German sociologist Georg Simmel. As he wrote in an essay published in 1911: “The ruin strikes us so often as tragic–but not as sad–because destruction here is … the realization of a tendency inherent in the deepest layer of the existence of the destroyed.”

The seminar will begin with architecture and the vision of the past in the early modern period. We will consider a range of examples such as the Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity, the plates of antiquarian treatises, and the polemical stance of architects such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi with regards to architecture’s origins. We will then consider how the cult of the ruin has come to shape notions of nostalgia and dystopia in modern and contemporary contexts. Examples might include the Heideggerian concept of Ruinanz, the adaptive reuse of industrial ruins, or the reflection of absence in such examples as the National September 11 Memorial. Our broader aim will be to gain an understanding of a multi-faceted discourse, which sets architecture into relation with time, memory, and forgetting.

The seminar is based on intensive reading, writing, and conversation, and participants should be ready to engage critically with the assigned readings on a weekly basis. Requirements include active participation, reading responses (1-2 pages), a paper proposal, a short presentation, and a final research paper (15-20 pages). Students should have background in the history and theory of architecture. Those in the doctoral and MDES programs as well as professional students exploring related thesis topics are especially welcome.

Archived Landscapes

The course explores design methodologies for evaluating archives as evidence of material, spatial, and cultural change in constructed landscapes. Because archives seek comprehensiveness (distinct from the discretionary aims of a curated collection), they can contain undeclared evidence of the fleeting and sometimes unwelcome behaviors of living systems and human inhabitants in official accounts of the built environment. Using collections at Harvard and beyond, we will analyze scientific, technical, cultural, and commercial images for spatial configuration, composition, visual patterns, and references; evaluate the relationship of medium (film, specimens, flyers, digital media, etc.) to the subject matter; and critically assess these findings through writing as well as analytical and projective image-making.

In the seminar, we will mine archives of institutional records. Guest speakers and workshops will engage narratives that have been typically excluded from institutions: emerging archives (in retroactive formation) and those that are now accumulating (in real-time). Case studies presented will focus on infrastructure and designed landscapes in North America, but students will develop their own subjects for independent research on an environmental history—broadly defined as the mutual interactions of human society and the natural world—in relation to design history. This work will be guided through a series of prompts, culminating in a final proposal for the dissemination of archival research.

Course meetings will consist of: lectures by the instructor, guest speakers, interactive workshops, student research presentations, and visits to local archives. The seminar welcomes all disciplines.

Cities, Infrastructure, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart and Sustainable Technologies

Infrastructure plays 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 infrastructure. From fortifications to smart technologies, infrastructure is inseparable from political intentions and consequences. This political dimension will constitute one of the threads of this lecture course. Other themes of the course will include the relation between cities and their hinterland, the progressive dematerialization of infrastructure, 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 key part played by infrastructure in social and racial inequality, the need to envisage infrastructure differently when dealing with informal settlements. Also of interest will be the changing relationships between cities, nature and infrastructure. More than ever, urban nature appears today as inseparable from infrastructure.

'Cities, Infrastructure, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies' suggests an alternative way to read cities and their evolution. Historical analysis will systematically serve as a basis to envisage contemporary issues such as the challenges of rising inequality and climate change. Since it aims to chart new territory, class discussions will be regularly organized after the presentations.

Readings related to the course content or expanding its perspectives are provided for each of the lectures and will be available on Canvas in pdf format. In addition to required readings, suggested readings are also provided for some of the weeks. Course evaluation will be based on class attendance, the conception of a couple of prompts related to topics of interest to students to be run on a generative AI program such as ChatGPT (more detailed explanation will be given at the beginning of the semester), as well as a final paper.

Rome: Art, Architecture and Urbanism from Antiquity to the Baroque

A seminar on the art, architecture, and urbanism of Rome where the layering of material artifacts from successive historical periods provides an uninterrupted record of more than two thousand years. Development of the urban site establishes a continuous framework and contextualizes the cultural, artistic, and political aspirations and values of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque city.

The course has lectures on selected topics by the professor (both asynchronous and synchronous), prepared discussions, and student reports on their research. Some lectures are organized around historic spectacles – the Emperor Augustus’ funeral (14 A.D.), Constantine the Great’s triumphal procession (312 A.D.), and the consecration of New St. Peter’s (1626) – imagined as walks through Rome highlighting the city’s evolving cultural and urban character. Other lectures and lecture/discussions consider a single topic in depth, such as Vitruvius’ theory of design, or a single building, such as Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. The first half of the course covers Antiquity to the Renaissance while the second looks in greater detail at specific Renaissance and Baroque projects. Topics in the first part include the growth and decline of the ancient Roman city, the creation of new architectural forms and urban meanings in response to the Christianization of Empire, and competing theories of beauty. The second part focuses on the style and meaning of those works of art, architecture, and urbanism which distinguish Rome today such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, Bramante’s design for New St. Peter’s, and Bernini’s architecture and sculpture for the rebuilt basilica.  

Course Structure: The structure is that of a “flipped” course where students are responsible for learning the materials provided on Canvas and class meetings are devoted to their discussion. Two or three lectures of one hour each are posted on the course site for each week: students watch these at their convenience. There are also assigned readings. Each week you will submit a thought, observation, or question (just a few sentences, not a full response) based on the lectures and reading: these are the basis for class discussion. In weeks 1 through 9, class will meet in person for discussion and short lectures on special topics. In weeks 10, 11 and 12 students will present their research in reports of about ½ hour (depending on class enrollment).  

Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871-2036: Seminar

Fantasy opens portals to new life forms. It prepares us for supranatural humans, genetic adjustment, non-electronic novelty. It forms the core of natural-world reverence, maybe worship, the religion of the green future. It cherishes solitary, low-tech adventure in natural and neo-natural environments, typically northern forests and fashion-magazine imagery. It is a genre, a haphazard collection, a force as amorphous as blowing leaves, a western-European device born about 1900 and now global, but always quasi-imperialist, always of the north. It scares public-school teachers who loathe Hogwarts, the Old Religion, the never-ending ancient tradition so deeply rooted in the European cultural past that it shapes contemporary propriety. Holly and other evergreens bedeck churches at Christmas, but not mistletoe, the evergreen that killed the Norse sun god, Balder, the sky-tree Druids brought west from the Danube and grafted onto oaks, the Yule sovereign that permits kisses forbidden at all other seasons, part of the merry (not happy) in Christmas. Quality fantasy teaches that every tree species once had individual character (willows walk, sometimes assault: the Whomping Willow behaves naturally) and that the most powerful (mistletoe included) once named the letters of the alphabet, that the year had thirteen lunar months marking the earth-mother menstrual cycle, that the seasons proved weird to those in the know, witches especially. Out of the great northern arc from Finland to Ireland (stabbed by the westward-moving Celts and the Albion wraiths) originates quality contemporary fantasy, much of it written by British writers schooled in Latin from childhood.  It comprises a grimoire of irresistible power. As climate change melts Arctic ice and opens new sea lanes, as Canada hurriedly builds a large navy, the north becomes more important politically, economically, and militarily – but its emerging conceptual importance orders this course this term. Cold, discomfort, swimming in the winter ocean, trusting to quality attire, knives, and open boats, seeing sideways in the winter dark, finding what one must find in the arboreal forests, all fuses into the meaning of north. Already fantasy slides past materialist and leftist ideology.  It prepares children for authentic change.

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