Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II

This course is required for all first-year MLA I and MLA I AP students.

Topography is one of the primary and most powerful elements of landscape architecture, forming a foundation for plant growth, habitat, the flow of water and energy, and human experience. This course is dedicated to developing students’ facility in reading the land and manipulating topography and water flow through a variety of representational tools with a focus on plan drawings of contours, slopes and spot elevations, models, and section drawings. Students will learn techniques that cumulatively build toward an ability to resolve difficult grading problems with many layers of complexity.

The course begins with reading the land and understanding the relationship between the ground surface and water flow. Topics move on to geomorphology; the process of grading and contour manipulation; the conventions of grading representation, terminology and communication in the construction industry; as well as accessibility codes. The second part of the course focuses on water quality and quantity, introducing techniques used to calculate the amount of water flowing over a site and the various ways that the topography can be manipulated to slow, convey, filter, collect or disperse water to help improve its quality and control water flow emanating from a range of storm events. The case studies and precedents presented throughout the course help to illustrate a broad range of approaches to problem solving and the act of sculpting the land.
 

This course focuses on the agency of landform and water flow in the creation and design of landscape. At the end of the course, students will be able to manipulate contours toward a given intention and will understand the factors that contribute to stormwater volumes and flows and ways to embrace and incorporate those factors toward a desired design intent. 
 
During this course, students will learn to:
– Read the land and water, manipulate contours and become familiar with conventions for drawing and communicating intents
– Design topography for human experience
– Collect and clean stormwater
– Support living systems.

The course is taught as a series of lectures and individual, short-term exercises that focus on core competencies, and one longer-term design exercise.  Live lectures will be supplemented with asynchronous resources such as pre-recorded lectures, recordings of select class lectures, and written primers. Instructors anticipate that some shifts may be required during the term to respond to yearly shifts in student needs.
 

Each week will typically include two class sessions of 1.25 hours each (2.5 hrs total), consisting of one lecture session attended by all students, and one ‘section’ session dedicated to a smaller group of students. Section sessions typically will be dedicated toward questions and deeper dives into the ongoing assignments, and some time to work on assignments. MLA I and AP students will be divided equally into each section. Assignments will require additional time outside of class. Assignment deadlines are focused on the first half of term, and sections toward the end of term are more focused on lectures and visiting lecturers.

Prerequisites: Experience drafting 2-dimensional plan and section drawings to scale in Autocad or Rhino.

Materials

This course explores the science and design of materials. How do we classify materials? Why do we build with certain materials? What are the energy, health, and societal implications of materials? And what does the future of materials look like? The goal of this course is to enable students to understand the full systems ecology of materials and how to leverage this knowledge in building design.

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

Designing Critical Practices

Today, landscape architecture is a field in active transformation. At a broad scale, the climate crisis is transforming the built and natural environment surrounding us—putting frontline communities at risk of warming, expanding oceans, inland flooding, and pollution, scorching our cities and open spaces, destroying the foundation of global biodiversity, threatening agricultural production, and entirely reconstituting what it means to design for places in the midst of profound and uncertain change. At the same time, shifting market forces, supply chain crises, technological advancements, diversifying client pools, and evolving societal attitudes toward open space are reshaping practice as we know it, rapidly expanding the reach and scope of design services while grappling to value them appropriately.
 
The ground has shifted beneath us, and the way we have practiced landscape architecture for the last century is no longer applicable. Our context requires a new approach, affecting both the work of design and the structure of the business itself. For too long, self-regard and siloed competition across the design fields have prevented us from looking elsewhere for inspiration—but today, emerging professionals and leaders alike have much to learn from the business models, operational structures, and management structures of firms in creative industries, technology, manufacturing, and beyond.
 
The central premise of this course: to prepare students for a changing market, we will honestly examine the current state at play in the design industry, analyzing a wide cross-section of firm typologies and scales, while also looking beyond the field for inspiration. We will investigate these ideas through detailed case studies, guest lectures, workshops, discussions, assignments, and student-led research.
 
The course is divided into two sections (1) Contemporary Landscape Architecture Practice Today and (2) Looking Outside the Field. The first examines methods and structures for practicing landscape architecture today and the second looks outside the field. Students will use the ideas shared during the two modules to imagine alternative frameworks for practice. Throughout the semester, students will be asked to consider both the broader forces affecting design today and real, actionable ways to meet these challenges through practice, culminating in a final project that will be shared and presented to the class for discussion.
 
In-class participation is essential for this seminar. Each section will begin with an in-person workshop designed to orient students with strategies, terminologies, and goals for the content to follow.

This course assumes entry-level familiarity with the basics of professional practice in landscape architecture—including business types, design phases and processes, RFP/Q processes, and other essential elements of contemporary landscape architecture firms. At the beginning of the semester, we will briefly review these fundamentals of practice, including workplace culture, systems, norms, and team hierarchies, in order to set the stage for examining new modes of practice.

Building Simulation

This course is the third of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6126) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. 

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.
 

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

This seminar aims to examine the future of the profession of landscape architecture in relation to 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.

We will review the historical and largely parallel tracks of space flight and colonization and that of environmental protection and conservation. One is about FLIGHT, the search for territory and resources beyond the confines of home, region, nations, and planet; the other 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.

Through readings, videos, lectures, and class discussions, the seminar will examine the Flight-Fight dichotomy as dual survival strategies and pose critical questions as to what such strategies might means to the mission and practice of landscape architecture.

Spacefaring will be addressed first: how it has existed in our imagination and how it has been translated into programs and associated technologies. How concern and care for the natural environment has paralleled the advent of space flight under anthropocentric and biocentric impulses will follow. Lastly, the seminar will examine how the flight-fight interlacement might—or should—affect the practice of landscape architecture, i.e.: how closely should it be aligned with a survival agenda, on Earth and/or in outer space.

Seminal sources will be used to gain insight on the above questions: books, articles, movies, and documentaries. Lectures, presentations by invited guests, and discussions will supplement the research. The product will be a bibliography of the source material, and annotated timeline of the Earth-Space narrative.

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

Architecture: Histories of the Present

“Poets and prophets, like magicians, learn their craft from predecessors. And just as magicians will invoke the real or supposed source of an illusion as part of their patter, or distractions from what his hands are doing, the most ambitious poets also take some stance about sources in the past, perhaps for an analogous purpose.” John Hollander 1973    

This seminar investigates the role of architectural practice and thinking both geographically and thematically since WWII. The focus of the seminar will be on the work of architects as well as the ideas/writings that have helped shape contemporary practice. Why do you practice the way you do? What are the forces (architecture, concepts, texts) that have inspired and influenced the direction of your work? These are among the questions that we will be asking of ourselves as well as a diverse group of contemporary architects from divergent geographies. The seminar will discuss significant projects/buildings and ideas/theories from the 1950’s to the present. In the process, seeking to make discoveries about the work of figures both remembered and seemingly forgotten. The tension and the relations between the present and the past will be discussed through specific architectural projects. How did an earlier generation of architects imagine the future of the discipline and the promise of its outcomes? How have the conceptual and practical operations of terms such as history or culture influenced contemporary architecture and the way it is practiced? What role does precedent play in the work of an architect?

The structure of the seminar is organized according to a series of case studies that compare and contrast the work of different figures and their ideas—from Africa to Asia, from Latin America to Europe and beyond. In addition to weekly lectures and presentations, the seminar will include class discussions with a diverse range of contemporary architects. The aim will be to study the role and value of site-specific contributions and yet to unravel the nature–even the burden- of influence and its porosity beyond geographical boundaries. How and what should the future of practice learn from its past?

Students with interests in architecture, urbanism, landscape, as well as the analytical and visual capacity of cinema are welcome.

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.

 

Urban Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative-Historical Origins and Applications

This course takes as its point of departure the historical and national origins of planning as a discipline, assesses its evolution over time and across developmental contexts, and situates our understanding of what has come to constitute “planning theory” in a deeper understanding of the political, economic, and social specificities and constraints on planning action. In understanding what might be referred to as planning praxis, we not only examine those social structures and economic as well as political power relations that enable or constrain preference for certain policies and processes of decision-making. We also examine the history of ideas about cities, debates over how the built environment should be designed and/or governed, and address longstanding conflicts over who should have the legitimacy or authority to undertake such decisions. The time span that we examine during this course begins in the late-19th and early 20th century and ends in the contemporary era. 

Appearance

This seminar will focus on architecture’s appearance, how architecture is grasped by its public. We will explore the sources, significances, and receptions of our work’s expression and posture. Our aim will be to develop better understandings and instruments through which to exploit how architecture is made both legible and actionable to its audience.

The labels attached to architecture’s visual bearing speak to its fickle nature across schools of thought: envelope, enclosure, façade, elevation, composition, index, form, representation, symbol, skin…the list is long and points in disparate directions. For an architect, pausing over questions of what architecture looks like can induce an unease about architecture’s perimeter that may nudge us toward the safe haven of impartial or veiled expression, specious as that may or may not be.

And yet, architecture’s appearance tantalizes. With reason.

In both literal and cultural senses, appearances tender architecture’s most immediate entry point. What a building looks like trades on the extremes of a building’s physical and metaphysical demands. Appearance is at times the result of something akin to pure science (as in building construction or optics) and at other times marinated in various combinations of significance, beauty, and appropriateness…the wooliest of architectural pursuits.

Regardless of what we may want to do with it, architecture gives us no choice: it will appear. We will see our architectures as objects and look into and past their literalities in search of what they might signal. We will take hold of them as exteriors and interiors. And we will react to them in ways that are visceral. Our buildings don’t just appear. They entice, loom, defend, and evaporate.

Two corrective lenses, related to each other, will be important to our semester.

Lens One – Appearance and Action
We will spend the semester discussing architecture’s appearance. With no desire to temper or sidestep that conversation, we will also take up a re-aligned version of Hannah Arendt’s “space of appearance,” in which she poignantly lays out “the various forms in which the public realm can be organized.” With Arendt’s evocative thoughts as background, this seminar might be thought of as centering on the ‘appearance of space,’ an easy rearrangement of Arendt’s phrase meant to stay close to her assertion that “the only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people.” Architecture may well be our only hope vis-à-vis what she called “the potentiality of being together.”

Because architecture’s appearance reaches into the very nature of public life, and because both architecture and public life thrive on possibilities more than certainties, we will begin with the hypothesis that architectural appearances are particularly well suited to cajoling public life. Another way to put this: Public life ought to exist because of architecture’s appearance…and never despite it.

Lens Two – Time to Move Along
Occasionally, I’m skeptical of architectural postmodernism’s appearance/re-appearance in our discipline. On all other days, I’m hostile to it. Anyone interested in this seminar should be aware that we will not take up postmodernism other than to establish a parallel conversation that might, on some days, dip into being complementary.