Wild Ways: Thinking, Relating and Being with/in Wilderness, Wild-ness and Nature in the Anthropocene
This seminar interrogates changing ideas of nature on an urbanizing planet under the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Grounded in transdisciplinary research across the humanities, ecology and design, the course will use visual-spatial analyses, critical reflection and artistic media to engage diverse ways of thinking and knowing about, relating to and being in wilderness and wild-ness. Seminar contributions will facilitate and encourage un-learning colonial myths of wilderness through exploring intersectional and intercultural epistemologies of nature, and the primordial human connection to the wild through interrogating ideas of wilderness, and wild-ness on an urbanizing planet.
Up to six seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Ecologies Domain and ULE Area students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Independent Study by Candidates for Doctoral Degrees
9502 must be taken for either 2 or 4 units.
Under faculty guidance, the student conducts an independent reading program and formulates a thesis proposal. The course is intended for doctoral students.
In addition to enrolling in the course, students must download and fill out the independent study petition, which can be found on my.Harvard. Enrollment will not be final until the petition is submitted.
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?
Course structure: the course will meet online on Tuesdays from 10 am to 12 pm EST to discuss visual and reading material presented by Mohsen Mostafavi and guests (practitioners or scholars). Pre-recorded interviews with design practitioners/scholars or films (60 min on average) will be included as required materials for some weekly sessions. Students can watch these recordings in their own time prior to the class meetings.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
The Spectacle Factory
The Spectacle Factory examines the modern history of immersive theater, entertainment, and media spaces from the standpoint of the history of architecture and design. It is concerned with how such spaces have been shaped by the interplay of cultural needs and fantasies, technological possibilities, political ideology, and architectural tradition and invention. All built spaces are immersive in the some sense of the word. So by emphasizing the immersivity of a small subset of architectural spaces, modern and contemporary culture has assigned to these a distinctive functions that go beyond the ordinary meaning of the word immersive: functions that encompass liminal domains of perception, sensation, and experience associated with the sacred (hallucination, ecstasy, trance, psychosis, transcendence) as well as with new forms of recreation and play.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Local Government Solutions to America’s Affordable Rental Housing Challenge
There are 10.9 million renters who are severely housing cost burdened – spending more than 50% of their income on shelter. The solutions to this national crisis are varied and involve all levels of government, but local governments are closest to the particular housing challenges in their communities and arguably have the widest range of levers to apply to the problem. This course will challenge students to create new and innovative approaches to the affordable housing problem that can be implemented at the local level. These approaches will include a mix of strategies to raise additional funds for subsidies, reduce regulatory constraints, and encourage new forms of housing and new methods of housing construction. Students will be offering advice and solutions directly to mayors and housing professionals of three cities from different regions of the nation that have volunteered to serve as laboratories for the course.
Students will receive a package of information about their cities in the first session of the class and will hear from representatives of each of the cities early in the semester. Students will also have access to important local actors as the class proceeds. All three cities will return for presentations of the students final reports providing a comprehensive strategy for the cities to adopt that will substantially resolve the cities’ current need for housing affordable to severely cost-burdened residents.
The course will be limited to 15 students who will be divided into teams that will serve as “consultants” to the mayors and housing professionals of the participating cities. While there are not explicit prerequisites, this course will work best for students with some experience, either academic or professional in the housing sector.
The class will meet in a seminar format for three hours each week. Classes will include a mix of lectures, presentations and discussions with invited guest experts, and will often include presentations by student groups. Grading will include class participation, periodic presentations, and the final comprehensive strategy.
Students will have an opportunity to travel to Miami, Albuquerque, or Mt. Vernon, NY. Costs will vary depending on destination and will range from $100-200 (term-billed), plus meals and incidentals.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Modernism and Its Counter-Narratives
Modernism has fundamentally to do with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events and, at the same time, new conceptualizations of their appearance, of changing event structures and temporalities, and of the relationships between objects, their producers and maintainers, and their audiences and consumers. A history and theory of modernism, then, must involve the category of the producing, using, viewing subject as well as the object, which itself includes buildings and projects, texts and discourses, and the contexts of their production and reception.
One of the most significant, sustained attempts to thematize the changed conceptualization of subjects and objects in modernity in a systematic aesthetic and critical theory is found in the body of work generated by Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, which is also related to the earlier writings of Georg Simmel and the later work of Manfredo Tafuri and Fredric Jameson. Theirs is a vivid diagnosis of the everyday life of the subject and object under industrial capitalism, as well as the specialized work of art and its necessary contradictions. At the same time, Martin Heidegger’s understanding of technology and his concern with the nature of working and production provided the basis for further work by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and a later generation of theorists of the modern and the postmodern. This course will use these texts to generate theories of modern architecture. Our question is not “How does modern architecture reflect the conditions of modernity,” but rather, positioned in modernity, “What can architecture (as subject, as object, as technique) do?’
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Architectures of the New Silk Road – Spaces of Transnational Infrastructure-led Urbanization
The aim of the seminar entitled “Architectures of the New Silk Road” is to devise pathways for making emerging spaces of urbanization along New Silk Road corridors sustainable for all attendant stakeholders. In view of the rapid pace and unwieldy processes of urbanization catalyzed by large-scale infrastructure works, the question is whether such projects will improve the quality of life for local populations or, on the contrary, will only exacerbate poverty, poor governance, and environmental degradation already afflicting regions affected by transnational development.
Whereas all eyes are on China’s Belt and Road advances in Africa, Eurasia, and Southeast Asia, many other players are just as eager to strengthen their presence on these regions via multilaterally orchestrated development projects. But the projects themselves, regardless of who initiates them and where they are implemented, seem to follow a generic formula by now familiar worldwide. Even more, for all the planning know-how invested in a new port, data center, special economic zone, health facility, or smart city, what remains neglected are the collateral spaces of urbanization generated by selective economic growth agendas.
Drawing on expertise from a broad range of disciplines, we will examine infrastructural projects underway in specific corridors along the so-called New Silk Road. These corridors are undergoing the kind of rapid urbanization that accompanies transnational development, thus making them exemplary sites of settlement constellations still in the making. The significance of the research lies in its multi-local approach to studying proto-urbanization processes in progress. Examining individual projects as well as clusters of infrastructural interventions, we will not only determine urbanization processes and patterns throughout the regions of study but will also projectively ask how to make infrastructure-led development – usually treated as a financial and technical issue alone – a contextually responsive driver of sustainable urbanization.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Housing and Urbanization in Global Cities
Housing and Urbanization in Global Cities examines housing policy and planning in urban societies around the world and especially in the Global South. Through slide presentations, discussions, guest lectures, texts, and exercises, we examine the dynamic growth of cities; the ideological impulses to combat slum conditions and provide mass housing; the resulting anti-slum and housing programs; the means of financing such programs; and the effects of design and planning on people and their communities.
The first part of the course is devoted to the history and theory of housing and urbanization. We examine the effects of intense urban growth in Europe, especially the emergence of the twin problems of slums and housing; the export of Western housing and anti-slum policies to the developing world; the furious debate over the nature of informal settlements in the Global South; and the fundamental concepts of land use and housing policy.
In the second part of the course, we take up the practical application of housing policies in different national environments around the globe. Using the cases of Bogotá, Mumbai, Johannesburg, and Beijing, we study the ways private developers, planners, designers, non-government organization officers, and government officials work within local systems of land use, law, and finance to respond to informal settlements and produce homes for people. Working in teams, students evaluate specific housing programs in Bogotá, Mumbai, and Johannesburg, and propose a planning strategy to improve particular sites in the outer section of Beijing.
This course helps prepare students for international planning and design studios, housing studios, and courses on housing or social policy in general. It will appeal to graduate school designers, planners, and public policy students interested in social engagement and the diverse methods of producing low-income housing in global cities. There are no prerequisites.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-662
Thesis Extension in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Thesis extension in satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Thesis in Satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.