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 math and physics.

Objectives:

Topics:

We will be placing a copy of “Structures” (7th Edition): Daniel Schodek, Martin Bechthold on reserve in the Loeb Library. This text is NOT a course requirement but will be on reserve as a reference for those seeking additional background information on course topics.

Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II

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, geomorphology, and the act of grading and contour manipulation, and then introduces the conventions of grading representation, terminology and communication in the construction industry, as well as accessibility codes.  The flow of water is inherent in all grading activity, thus we will include techniques used to calculate the amount of water flowing over a site and the various ways that the topography can be manipulated in order to convey, filter, collect or disperse water in order 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.

Learning Objectives
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.  

Pedagogical Structure
Asynchronous, flipped, with in-class workshops:  The course is taught as a series of lectures and individual, in-class short-term exercises that focus on core competencies.   Most lectures will be recorded in advance and available for asynchronous learning.  The course will use a “flipped” classroom approach in which stu-dents will review lectures independently in many cases, and use class time for questions and assistance on the assigned exercises.  Select lectures will be live and recorded, or played live, with instructors available to answer questions during the lecture.

2 class sessions per week: Each week will include two class sessions:  one dual session attended by both MLA I and MLA I AP students, and one session dedicated to a smaller group of students, per the schedule de-scribed at the beginning of this syllabus.  The smaller group sessions will be primarily work sessions on the short-term “techniques” exercises, during which students can request assistance from the instructors.  The exercises will require additional out-of-class time in order to complete them.  

Digital and hand work:  Early core competency exercises are completed by hand, and grading in AutoCAD is introduced during the second week, in order to help provide students with few shifts in media types during the pandemic.

Tools
The following tools should be brought to each class:  engineering scale, architect’s scale, calculator, trace, drawing implements, computer.  Computer programs incorporated into this course will include:  AutoCAD, Excel, Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, InDesign and other graphic programs.  

Grade Evaluations
Grades will be based on submitted exercises and participation in class as follows:

In-Class Exercises: 85%
Participation: 15%

Work submitted late will be marked down accordingly.  Attendance will be taken in class and absences will be noted.

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.
 

Design Teaching Lab (DTL)

This course teaches design teaching for those interested in pursuing parallel paths in design and education.   Starting from an understanding of design as a culture of critique and iteration, this course will serve as a laboratory for the critical examination of how we learn about and through design.   Through a series of interactive workshops, we will collaboratively redline design education, closely reading its typical terms, media, and practices while simultaneously analyzing and annotating the pedagogical spaces and formats within and around which design learning usually takes place.  The aim is to develop projective possibilities for design education that can be directly applied to GSD Early Design Education (EDE) teaching positions as “field work” extending the research of the course, as well as to design teaching engagements beyond the GSD.  

Products of Practice: From code to plan to code

A research seminar that critically mines historic systems of representation, instrumentation, and the product (or media) of the architect in relationship to the evolving societal role of the discipline, practice, and profession. Our goal is to understand design practice as a dynamic and ever-changing pursuit in order to imagine practice futures; to use this research to create a bridge between discipline and practice.

Within the cacophony of contemporary media, under the pressures of financial instruments, and with an expectation of artificial intelligence, this practice seminar looks to the past to explore the product of the architect as an artifact of circumstance, framing and projecting practice potentials now and into the future. Critically tracking the development of our practice, we will research design context, instruments of service, and representational formats as cultural and temporal constructs that limit or expand the role of the architect in practice. Our collective goal is an exploration of the relationship between – and the limits of – discipline, practice, and profession to better understand their structural potentials.

Course content will be organized thematically, exploring the origins of contemporary practice and its products at any given moment – from built form to model to drawing to code – as the architect evolved from master builder to author to project manager. The work of Vitruvius, Baldassarre Peruzzi, Leon Battista Alberti, Peter Cook, Cedric Price, Christopher Alexander, Peter Eisenman, and New Urbanism, among others, will be assessed within their cultural context. Legal and technical issues, client types, and structures of fee and control, will be considered. Students will develop critical positions on the renewed debate between empirical vs. cultural practice, on mediatic production and instruments of service for single projects vs. systems of design deployment and process design.

Synchronous class time will be focused on discussion and debate. Guest panels from practice and related sectors will be assembled to add perspective to specific topics, particularly around the issue of emerging modes of production and instrumentation. Asynchronous formats will include pre-recorded lectures and one-on-one or small group research charrettes.

Working individually or in pairs, students will research a specific type of architectural production in relationship to its evolution within the discipline and practice. Students will synthesize their topical research within a shared research framework to yield a collective research publication. Final course output will aggregate and draw from this collective knowledge to speculate on the future product of the architect.

There are no prerequisites for this course, which is intended as an interdisciplinary discussion. While this course is focused on the evolution of the product of the architect, the emergence and co-evolution of the related disciplines of landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design are essential to the conversation.

 

 

 

Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones… it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences”
       – Herbert Simon, Sciences of the Artificial

In the spirit of Herbert Simon, Frameworks engages diverse but complementary disciplines, perspectives and techniques to help identify, diagnose and constructively address consequential social challenges. The disciplines – or 'frameworks' – explored include (in no order and to varying degrees) systems analysis, industrial design, scientific methods, behavioral and organizational dynamics, law, economics, risk management, manufacturing, culture, aesthetics, health sciences, history, branding, anthropology, statistics, public policy, ecology and the like. While individual frameworks are presented, the teaching goal over the two semesters is to help students: a) identify problems that are both consequential and tractable; b) select and apply the suite of frameworks best suited to addressing the problem at hand.

Frameworks I & II are designed both to complement the Collaborative Design Engineering Studio by offering conceptual support for applied solutions and to prepare students for the second year Independent Design Engineering Projects by focusing on problem definition, diagnostic techniques and the challenges of translating ideas into action. Frameworks II differs from Frameworks I by engaging outside experts – especially practitioners – to explore particular situations and experience in greater depth.

 

 

This course will be held in room LL2.223 at the Science and Engineering Complex in Allston.

Resilience Under New Water Regimes: The Case of Monterrey, [MX] Day-Zero

Globally, the world is experiencing a period of unprecedented drought, the worst in 1200 years according to NASA. With rising global average temperatures, water is evaporating at high rates, with cities around the world, including in Monterrey in northern Mexico, coming dangerously close to reaching sustained Day-Zero scenarios where millions of taps could run dry. While drawing on global trends and discussions, this research seminar will use Monterrey’s water crisis as a paradigmatic example where the drought is exacerbated by extreme resource depletion and policies facilitating socio-economic and territorial desiccation, both embedded within widespread pro-growth logics.

Monterrey is a dry-climate city of five million, where challenges in governance and infrastructure have led to a long-brewing crisis that has now been pushed to the brink by six years of decreased rainfall patterns triggered by La Niña. Some citizens are receiving only two hours of water per day, while others rely on water distribution trucks. Industry has largely been allowed to continue extracting water from the aquifer. But the reality is more complex than a “good citizenry” vs. “bad industry” narrative. Through readings, writings and/or mapping exercises, we will examine the many forces that are contributing to water crisis in Monterrey, (MX), and study different initiatives that–in the fields of landscape architecture, architecture, urban planning and design—are trying to foster wetness in water-scarce and desiccated territories.

The course is open to students in all programs at the GSD, with the hope that a transdisciplinary dialogue will foster more innovative strategies toward water resilience across scales. The class will meet once a week, structured around a visiting speaker, readings, and discussion on a range of selected topics intended to generate new knowledge as well as critical questions about a future with more uncertain regimes of water.

The Architect as Producer

In 2020, the interconnected crisis of racist violence, environmental collapse, and the global pandemic prompted profound changes in how we understand what architecture is and what it does. These and other events from the past few years have brought to the foreground the role of architecture in the rise of wealth inequality, 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 Tafuri’s challenge by considering architecture’s position within the relations of production through four interrelated topics: land, materials, labor, and knowledge. We start by questioning where architecture happens, the land we stand on, the ways in which this land is transformed into real estate and architecture’s role 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 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.

Urban Design Contexts and Operations

The course focusses essentially on modern, including contemporary, contexts and operations that have emerged during the past 100 or so years. Here urban design is broadly regarded as a concern for the ‘thingness’ of constructed environments above the scale of singular buildings and in response to resolving competing claims brought to bear through design. Contexts refer to particular situations and orientations taken in urban design, whereas operations refer to actions involved in specific work and practical applications. It is a seminar class where participation will be prioritized to those in the Urban Design Program of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, though students in other programs will be welcome. It is intended to satisfy this program’s curriculum requirement in ‘History-Theory’. Students will be assigned to make presentations of selected reading materials and one or more urban design projects beginning in the second week of class. The aim is to introduce them to important developments and literacy about the field, along with matters of on-going and current speculation. What follows is an outline of weekly topics along with a short reading list for each that forms a background for the lectures and later discussion. Apart from making specific assigned presentations in a given week, all students are expected to prepare and participate in seminar discussions. All lecture components for each week’s theme will be available to the enrolled class in asynchronous pre-recorded illustrated form.

First year Urban Design students have prioritized early enrollment in 4151 and 4496. The Histories and Theories of Urban Design lottery (HTUD lottery) will open on Tuesday, January 10 at 9 AM and close on Friday, January 13, at 9 AM. First Year UD students must submit selections by the deadline to ensure enrollment via this lottery.

Natural Histories for Troubled Times, or, Revisiting the ‘Entangled Bank’

This seminar looks at our (troubled) times, its toxic landscapes and eco-unfriendly townscapes, through the lens of natural history. By “lens” we can think immediately about optical instruments that bring the world into view, from the first microscopes that revealed legions of minute beasties and beauties, to scanning electron microscopes, which create their own phantasms of visual mastery. What makes this materiality of vision so inviting is that intrinsic to the craft, practice, and indeed the science of natural history are the techniques of observing, representing, writing, drawing, modeling, collecting, sorting, naming, and knowing that are consistent with our own work as architects and landscape architects. The natural history tradition—which at one point in its own history shifted from a descriptive to a historical art—long promoted the notion of the kingdoms of nature: mineral, vegetable, animal. Living amidst their ruins, we will attend to the ways in which the social, political, and especially economic (i.e. ecological) ideas and ideals that supported these kingdoms fell apart, producing far more curious and complicated affiliations and entanglements. For the sake of focus (see the discussion of lenses above), the narrators and objects of this seminar will be drawn mainly from two large phyla: Arthropoda  (insects, arachnids, crustaceans) and Annelida (segmented worms). That said, some other sorts of creatures will inevitably crawl, wing, or wiggle their way into our discourse. These relatively small beings, all of them “spineless,” play a tremendous role in our lived and inhabited world, which we will examine through the art, language, craft, and literature of natural history. In these troubled times we need natural history more than ever to explain to ourselves, while looking out for, peering back from, or projecting onto our environment, what nature has become and/or where it has gone.