Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation Building II (at HKS)
This community based research course focuses on some of the major issues Native American Indian tribes and nations face in the 21st century. It provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to native development issues, including: sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, leadership, health and social welfare, tribal finances, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, and education. In particular, the course emphasizes problem definition, client relationships, and designing and completing a research project for a tribe, tribal department, or those active in Indian Country. The course is devoted primarily to preparation and presentation of a comprehensive research paper based on work with a tribal community. In addition to faculty presentations on topics such as field research methods and problem definition, students will make presentations on their work in progress and ultimate findings.
Please see schedule information for the HKS course shopping period, taking place Thursday, January 20th and Friday, January 21st.
Interrogative Design: Cultural Prosthetics
The course is open to students interested in pursuing artistic, design and research projects that critically interrogate and proactively respond to the existential, communicative and survival needs of the estranged, marginalized and excluded persons and social groups, while addressing, through these designs, the unacceptability of such needs-and of the conditions of life that produce them-in a civilized world.
In Rosalyn Deutsche’s words, the “utopia” of such interrogative design projects should be based on “the hope that their very function will render them obsolete”.
The course will be focused on readings, discussions, and presentations related to the fields and methods of interrogative, critical and speculative design, cultural prosthetics, ‘scandalizing functionalism’, forensic design, monument projection-animation and other, as well as – and most importantly – on the ideation, practical experimentation, development and presentation of students’ original designs and research projects.
After a short introductory assignment the students -individually or in the teams- will work on one selected project, that will be advanced and discussed in class during the semester, presented at the midterm and at the final review, with the participation of the guests critics.
The course is open to all GSD and Harvard students and especially welcomes these from the MDes Areas and Domains.
Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Talking Architecture
This seminar is intended to contribute to the Public Events Program at Harvard GSD.
Students will team up to produce questions for two live-video interviews with visible and emerging figures in the field during this interactive course. These interviews will be spin-offs of two Architecture Department-sponsored public lectures held during the semester. They intend to extend the conversations between these guests and the GSD community.
Students will work in groups to craft questions for each of the two live conversations. A third private interview will be developed at the beginning of the term to practice before going live, with roughly one interview at the middle of every month after that. Students will publicly ask questions at each event, with the opening and closing remarks conducted by the instructor.
Teams of students will also be in charge of setting the stage for video recording the in-person events, testing new ways to represent these conversations. Students will also experiment with editing the interviews before they are published on the GSD YouTube channel.
Asynchronous time will focus on question formulation and interviewee background research, done through formal (Frances Loeb Library) and informal sources (the Internet). Students in charge of stage production or edition will also prepare their proposals during asynchronous time. This hybrid course will have consecutive modules of two online sessions followed by two in-person sessions until the end of the term.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Domestic Logistics
Modern domestic spaces are embedded in networks of goods, labor, media, and technology that shape their functions, capacities, and cultural role. They sit in federated supply chains, crisscrossed by networks of dependency and autonomy that extend to the city, countryside, and globe. The flows of materials and consumables, as well as data and labor, situate the home in a larger technosocial complex. Technology thus acts as an indispensable and mutating interface between domestic spaces and the territories around them.
The class will consider the bright and dark alternate futures of domestic space through the lens of its cultural representations and technological augmentations. Framed through the last 100 years as well as the next 100 years of domestic architecture, it will plumb the actual and fictional ways in which the space of the home has registered anxieties and optimisms around the social, ecological, and economic implications of technological futures. Specific technologies – spatial augmentation, telepresence, sensory expansion and deprivation, robotic farming, home droids, AI, drone tourism, and more, will be catalysts for critical discussions about what the home was, is, and could be.
While we unpack these dynamics we will also consider how the future of domestic space has been represented with respect to technology, and how we might inflect those representations and networks for the better. The historical and future representation of the interior will be a key lens through which we will examine domestic logics, from lavishly rendered Beaux Arts interior elevations to developed surface drawings, from meticulously arranged interiors of the Dutch golden age to the dioramas typical of theatre productions. More recent attempts to quantize and optimize interiors through motion studies and comprehensive sensing will comprise an analytic counterpoint to narrative modes of understanding domestic space. Particularly critical will be the relationship between animation, domestic robotics, and the diurnal rhythms of inhabitation.
The house as capsule will be a recurring theme, encompassing critical concerns related to safety and isolation, but also mobility, freedom, and the fraught line between autonomy and collectivism. Threads of the 1970s autonomous house movement will be interwoven with histories of nuclear shelters, continuity of government facilities, and the notion of the home as a cultural and technological bulwark against catastrophe and a last redoubt of civilization in ruins.
The class will also examine a number of themes the organically emerge from domestic logistics, including: the farm at the scale of the living unit, houses as micronations, how the domestic ritual of the dinner party may be transformed and reformatted through new food and media practices, recombinant and robotic furniture and the new political, social, and implications of houses that think.
Throughout these themes, there will be a cross-cutting interest in the notion of counterfactual history, particularly as it applies to domestic architecture. Actual and fictional precedents will be equally relevant, as the class embraces the full range of paths toward speculative domestic futures.
The content of the class will be primarily cultural, historical, and speculative, with some discussions of technical systems underpinning current innovations in the domestic sphere.
Students will develop a research topic affiliated with the themes of the class, articulate a speculative future that interrogates the topic through a paper and presentation, and venture a unique new video representation for that future.
Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Cities and the Urban Informal Economy: Rethinking Development, Urban Design and Planning
This interdisciplinary course, led by an urban designer, an urban planner, and a leading global advocate for the urban working poor, intends to scrutinize the different theories and their applications, since the early 1970s, to better understand and influence the informal economy. The objective is to transcend conventional disciplinary approaches with innovative, multidisciplinary thinking regarding how to valorize and enhance the contribution of the urban working poor to good city form, equitable city planning, and democratic urban governance.
This course will meet for the first time on Monday, January 31st and taught online through February 4th.
This course is jointly offered by the GSD, HKS, and MIT. Please see the course logistics website for more information.
The Shape of Things to Come
‘The Shape of Things to Come’ was the title of the 1971 Newsweek article which explored the role of the architect to help shape the built environment for the future. Coming off the heels of the World Exhibition in Montreal in 1967, there was the message that we must aim our efforts towards solving the challenges of humanity. The writer Douglas Davis wrote in the piece “Today for the first time in history, we are at the point where we can build exactly what we want for every human and social purpose. In that sense, architecture is now at the very frontier of our consciousness, at once the most practical and visionary of the arts.” Expo ’67 was the first World Exhibition to transcend pure nationalistic promotion with national pavilions and the like, and rather positioned focus on humankind and the planet and how we could make it better, through our collective use of innovative modern technology and design. To follow Expo, there were many speculations and built prototypes tackling this challenge. Examples included works by Team 10, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Rudolf and Kenzo Tange, and the continued study of the Habitat building system, setting a career-long interest on the topic of an industrially produced housing design with the mission for everyone a garden.
A few years later, in 1974 the Saturday Review published “The City in 2024 A.D.” The premise- a probe into the future- what will the city, the environment be like in the year 2024?
In this studio, we will engage in a thought experiment which will position us into the future, with a commission to design a mixed-use high-rise development in downtown Boston on the waterfront. The client has requested that the project represent the latest in ‘all season design’ in that it must transform completely for the hot summers and frigid winters. In addition, the designs will follow the latest Boston Planning and Development Agency Resiliency and LUSH greenery incentives programs. What will be the lessons learned from the Pandemic of 2020 where we learned to work from home and improve archaic mechanical ventilation systems? How will we uphold the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals and related professional design guideline circulars? How will our life be transformed by the move to compulsory electric and shared-car usage?
Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation
Maps both represent reality and create it. It is in the context of this contention that this course presents the fundamentals of mapping, spatial analysis, and visualization. In a design process, the act of mapping selectively narrates site conditions. By choosing what features, forces, and flows to highlight—and which to exclude—the designer creates the reality in which their intervention will be situated. This is only becoming more true, as urban space and populations are ever-more pervasively measured, monitored, and categorized by innumerable institutions. Such representations are often a designer’s primary means of responding to a site. Designers are in the difficult position of approaching spatial datasets critically and as sites of contestation while also employing them in their work.
Over the course of a semester, students will work extensively with techniques of spatial analysis. Using desktop GIS software, we will explore data sources, data models, overlays, map algebra, spatial statistics, terrain analysis, and suitability modeling, among other techniques of spatial representation. Students will learn to embed these techniques, recursively, within larger design workflows. Lastly, a portion of the semester will be devoted to visualizing spatial data, programmatically, using the Processing language.
Course format: The course will combine workshops showcasing techniques, and lectures that place these in conversation with design and other forms of spatial inquiry. Students will complete short exercises and reading assignments, as well as two larger projects in which students will deploy mapping techniques to further their own research.
Each week, the two course sessions – in many weeks, a lab and a lecture – will be held synchronously, and students will be encouraged to attend when possible. However, recordings of all sessions will be made available for students who are unable to join synchronously. Furthermore, the instructor, the student TAs and the course TF will be scheduling office hours intentionally to ensure that even those who cannot join class sessions have ample opportunities for face-to-face virtual instruction
Prerequisites: None. No previous experience with GIS is assumed. Familiarity with standard modeling and visual design software is preferred.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Building and Urban Conservation – Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the values inherent in a property, site or district that must be understood to craft conservation policy and interventions that will reveal, complement, sustain and enhance the original work while appropriately addressing socio-cultural, aesthetic and technical integrity? This course will introduce students to the functional, technical, regulatory and environmental principles of working with existing buildings and districts to ensure their continued technical and programmatic viability.
Globally, roughly 35% of construction activity is devoted to work on existing structures – making the sustainability mantra “the greenest building is the one already built” increasingly relevant as we seek strategies to minimize the impact of construction on the environment. Repair and renewal are therefore fundamental components of contemporary practice increasingly requiring facility in techniques of conservation planning and execution, rehabilitation and adaptive reuse.
Designed specifically to ground the participant in the methodologies of conservation and renewal and to introduce the tools necessary to successfully approach working with existing buildings in established precincts, the course will include lectures by the instructor and guest experts, and in-class discussions from readings. While interventions must include sound technical solutions, any modification from conservation to renovation and addition designs must address the full complement of values necessary to enable an economically viable, socio-culturally relevant rehabilitation. We will examine a range of conservation and intervention case studies at the building and urban scale for both traditional structures and modern buildings.
We will look critically at how the international Charters and Standards employed in working with historic fabric impact our approach to modifications to any existing building or site from a technical, design and regulatory standpoint, and will particularly address the question as to how the apparatus of conservation is changing to best serve both underrepresented constituencies and the legacy of modernism and the recent past.
Evaluation will be based upon regular participation in discussion of readings, submission of a short analytical paper and a final project that will develop and present an assessment and intervention design exercise on a property of the student’s choosing.
The course is open to all interested GSD students.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Artifacts as Media: Signals, Data, Information and Technology
Media is the way we understand the world. Our consciousness is technologically extended, connecting us to the entirety of humankind through media interfaces. Content, information and message blend seamlessly into the nature of the medium, for the medium is the message, and the message in any medium is another medium by its very nature.
In this course, we will unfold the technological basis of media as an instrument of information transfer, and exploit its meta-nature as a medium of media in itself. Participants will gain an understanding of the computational representations of modern forms of digital media, such as meshes, images, shaders and video, as well as the technical tools for their creation, parsing, manipulation and analysis. Yet ultimately, the goal of this course is to challenge the assumptions of the nature of the "messages" these mediums can carry, explore them as vessels of other forms of information, and propose novel forms of trans-media artifacts of polymorphic meaning. Can meshes be used as graph representations? How can data be encoded in an image? Can voxel fields be decoded from video or shaders? What stories can be extracted from databases? In this course, we will explore creative mappings between and in between mediums to create new informational systems.
The content of the class will be predominantly technical, and taught through a combination of high-level lectures and hands-on technical workshops. Demonstrated experience in computer programming, such as SCI-6338, CS50 or similar, is a pre-requisite for this class. Additionally, a semester-long book reading will be assigned at the beginning of the course, and a discussion session around it will be held by the end of the semester. Student work will consist of three preparatory assignments, culminating with a personal final project of the student's choice.
This course is the second installment of a three-part course series on Computational Design preceded by SCI-6338: Introduction to Computational Design (Fall), and continued by SCI-6365: Enactive Design, Creative Applications Through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction (Fall), taught by the same instructor.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
On Architecture and Property
Most generously, property can be understood as a relational term. A property defines that which is characteristic, or unique, to a given thing vis-à-vis another. Etymologically at its core, it is also a spatial term (pro, prae) – ‘in front of’, ‘what stands before’; or, more divisive, perhaps, ‘that which separates me from you.’ And of course, modern capitalist property regimes rest on the often-violent separation between those that wield power, and those that are subject to it. This seminar course will explore the intersections of architecture and property, with a particular attention to how they come together in law. Not only will we ask who wields properties’ power, and to what end? But also how is that power put into play, what tools (however banal) are necessary to enact it, and how can it be resisted or practiced differently?
The semester is structured in two parts. In the first four sessions, we will explore major themes in contemporary property theory, with special attention to how these themes relate (however loosely) to architectural form. In the second half of the semester, these themes will be expanded through specific topics that allow a deep dive into the relationship between law and architecture. Each week a legal case is paired with secondary texts that help contextualize that week’s topic. We will spend class time unpacking the legal case together, with the aim of understanding how architectural knowledge, either implicitly or explicitly, is at play in the construction of its arguments. The legal cases here are chosen with specific attention to the ways in which they conjure up questions about the relationship between architectural form and social form. Some are landmark decisions (Lawrence v. Texas), some are very much not (Stambovsky v. Ackley). All speak to how architecture and law, together, have historically structured concepts of property and ownership that underlie the modern political world.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.