Otherness and Canon: Episodes of a Dialogic Reading of the History of Architecture.

In contrast to the debate in other areas such as art or literature – for the explanation of which capitalist expansion is a crucial factor – the canonical narratives of modern architecture ignore the existence of colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism. In recent decades, voices have been raised against these Occidentalist narratives that either oppose the very existence of the canon, or have successfully raised the need for its expansion from regional, ethnic or gender perspectives. However, the history of architecture has continued to have a monological character, that is: the gestation of the canon continues to be attributed to factors of exclusively Western origin.

Through the use of alternative theoretical notions and the study of a set of episodes, in this course we will try to verify the possibilities of a dialogic reading of that history as a constant dispute between identity and otherness.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Global Leadership in Real Estate and Design

In today’s increasingly connected urban centers, shifts in cultural preferences, design thinking, and spatial significations often reflect and parallel transitions in capital forces and economic realities, locally and across the globe. This course begins with the premise that globalization imposes forces and tensions that directly impact the formation and production of the urban built environment, and that future real estate and design professionals will have a competitive advantage if they are well-prepared to understand, navigate, and lead amidst cultural and economic disequilibrium and disruptions of the global realm.

This project-based course encourages a forward-looking examination of and exposure to complexity in today’s real estate design, development and investment process. The course integrates domestic and international field studies, lectures, and class discussion, and encourages students to rethink, anticipate, and reinvent practice paradigms in both the real estate and design fields that respond to exigent and projected transformative environmental, market, economic and cultural changes, while fully leveraging highly-interactive, semester-long engagement with accomplished real estate and/or design leaders.

The pedagogical focuses of this course are two-fold: to provide practice opportunities in an academic setting for students to sharpen their professional skills required to traverse global contexts as culturally sensitive and professionally savvy practitioners, and, to establish an intellectual framework for students to understand and embrace the interrelationship between real estate and design so that creativity and design thinking become a value-adding and differentiating component in real estate thought leadership and development.

The interrelationship between real estate, design, and their underlying conceptual and production process are explored thus through thematic analysis of cultural underpinnings, artistic formal deliberations, economic activities, real estate market performance, ownership structures, private and public joint venture, as well as the efficacy of public financing.

 

Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to REBE Area students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Creating Real Estate Ventures: a Legal Perspective

This course examines, through the lens of the legal documents involved, how a complex commercial real estate deal moves from conception to completion.  We will review the major stages of commercial real estate development including securing control of land, sourcing and raising equity, completing predevelopment steps such as agreements for design and construction and obtaining governmental permits, securing construction financing, leasing and other aspects of operating the project, and realizing capital returns from refinance and/or sale.  We also will consider steps which may be taken in the legal arena when the unexpected happens and a deal goes sideways, such as lease or loan modifications, bankruptcy and litigation.
 
For each stage, we will analyze core concepts in actual negotiated agreements, including purchase and sale contracts, joint venture agreements, construction and design contracts, construction loan agreements, tenant leases, and permanent loan documentation. The course will include a mix of lectures, discussion of transaction documents and other course readings, individual exercises, guest appearances by experienced attorneys, panel discussions with real estate professionals involved in major projects in the greater Boston area, and a site visit (in-person or virtual) to a project recently completed or under construction. A highlight of the course will be team mock negotiations and role-playing exercises relating to securing control of the land, formation of a joint venture, construction loans, and leasing.

The course goal is to enable students to get deep inside the series of transactions–and their legal documentation– that produce development projects, to understand key business and legal issues embedded in the legal documents, to gain familiarity with how these issues are commonly resolved, and to recognize how to manage legal risk and the risk/reward calculation. There is no prerequisite for taking the course or any need for prior legal experience.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Bangkok: New Landscapes of Equity and Prosperity

This studio will bring together faculty and graduate students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to imagine how Bangkok can be designed for the future as a ""city for all,"" for greater social mobility and resiliency, and for ecological integrity. The site, in the Khlong Toei district, is located on the banks of the Chao Phraya River. It is currently mostly a container port facility, and is also occupied by an informal settlement on the north edge.  This community, at risk of eviction, has been there since the 1950s and has a population of approximately 100,000 people. Suggested research topics include infrastructure, informal and market-rate housing, institutional functions, ecology and landscape structure, as well as alternative forms of public space. The studio will critique the segregation of socio-economic classes and will explore integration through the equal distribution of life-enhancing resources and services, a landscape of equity and prosperity for all.

The studio will be led by Anita Berrizbeitia and Alejandro Echeverri, with regular participation of Rahul Mehrotra and other faculty from Harvard and Bangkok.

Anita Berrizbeitia will be in residence every week. Alejandro Echeverri will be in residence on the following days February 10-17, March 1-18, and April 21- May 1.

Studio instruction will be regularly supplemented by regular participation of Rahul  Mehrotra, Bing Wang, faculty in the Thai Studies program at Harvard, and other faculty and colleagues in Bangkok. Irving Fellow Zhao Sheng and Kiley Fellow Tomas Folch will be also part of the teaching team.

Houston: Extreme Weather, Environmental Justice and the Energy Transition

This multidisciplinary studio will use the lenses of climate adaptation, climate mitigation and climate justice to explore the design opportunities that could come with a wholesale reconfiguration of the Houston Ship Channel area, where sites left empty by the drawdown of fossil-fuel industries can be re-imagined as sites for clean energy, logistics and natural systems. This transition, so is the studio’s hypothesis, creates the opportunity for the communities near the Downtown end of the channel to reconnect, remediate and regenerate.

After the group research phase, interdisciplinary teams of 2 will design individual projects based on a self-formulated brief. Taken together, these designs form a catalogue of responses that can stimulate the conversation about the Houston’s transformation to a climate robust and just city in a post-fossil world.

For these types of complex questions, design can play a powerful role as a convener and synthesizer. The aim of the studio is to use design to visualize the challenges and opportunities, to develop strategies, and to innovate and envision the future environments (neighborhoods, landscapes, facilities and buildings) that a just transition to a climate robust city can bring, in a feedback-process with stakeholders and experts. The mid-term, which will also take place in Houston, will be used for local validation of, and feedback on, the initial design concepts.

The studio will use a pedagogy that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, multi-scalar thinking, and an awareness of the relationships between physical and social environments in the face of uncertainty. Within this format, we will explore how climate change and the energy transition and migration intersect with social, economic and environmental justice. In the process, we will leverage digital technology to help with analysis and projections.

This studio is the first of a series of studios sponsored by AECOM, who will also support the studio with subject-matter expertise. Focusing on ‘tropical resilience’, the studio series will span the globe looking at the unique conditions  of the tropics, many of which we also find in Houston, such as rapid urbanization and weak planning instruments, with no strong separation between functionalities in urban areas; intense climate conditions and risks – storms, wet bulbs, extreme seasonal variability-; histories of colonialism, segregation and extraction, often combined with a lack of appreciation for local knowledge and agency. As part of the series, each studio will result in a publication and an exhibition, combined with a symposium.

Friday 2:00 – 6:00, with additional desk crits during the week at mutually agreeable times.
Instruction will be in person.

Quo Vadis, Addis?

The design studio Quo Vadis, Addis? addresses the question of how to integrate manufacturing in the textile and garment sector within the socio-spatial fabric of Ethiopia’s capital city Addis Ababa. The objective is to challenge the predominant tendency in the country to treat workplaces as monofunctional enclaves isolated from their context.

Ethiopia is currently considered the new frontier of the garment industry, with clothes “Made in Ethiopia” being the cheapest to produce globally. In fact, large-scale factories have been built all over the country, particularly around Addis Ababa, producing for foreign markets and global brands, while exploiting the young labor force seeking to make a living.

Taking its clues from a long tradition of craftsmanship in textile-making and that of artisans being organized in small-scale co-operatives, the studio sets out to explore modern-day alternatives to current low-wage, precarious production arrangements. In seeking to identify strategies for empowering people via locally embedded forms of economic development, solutions are sought for incorporating the labor force and the workplace into the civic realm – socially and spatially.

The studio asks how design could improve the quality of the habitats that inhabitants collectively inhabit – habitats that are equitable, sustainable, and spatially sound.

Tuesday 2:00 – 6:00, with additional desk crits during the week at mutually agreeable times.
Instruction will be in person.

LATIN AMERICA IN TRANSITION: Imagining Infrastructures for Climatic Migration

The world is facing a moment of growing climate and migratory uncertainty. The accelerated intensity of natural and humanitarian disasters is giving rise to new and more complex forms of vulnerability. Migration has acquired an unprecedented dimension, while the infrastructure that will respond to climate displacements remains unanswered. Before the pandemic, projections indicated that the share of migrants in the total global population would increase from 2.8% in 2010 (190 million people) to 3.5% in 2050 (334 million people)—today, projections are higher and anticipated to grow. Furthermore, predictions signal that in following decades, there will be migratory displacements of up to 200 million additional people because of environmental factors. Rising sea levels, changes in rainfall distribution patterns and in ocean chemistry will strongly affect coastal cities, where 77% of the at-risk global population resides. In the years to come, a more vulnerable migration landscape will increase the demand for rapid response settlements, which poses a new set of challenges for destination cities.

These unprecedented projections have casted doubts over the true capacity of cities to absorb the impact of future climate migrants. Therefore, a reframed design imagination is needed to prepare cities for the consequences of climate change, and especially for cities to absorb human displacement. In response to this challenge, this studio will be a space to speculate about the required urban infrastructure needed to strengthen the capacity of destinations to take in climate migrant flows. We will focus on the case of Chile, planning and designing infrastructure for future extreme climate migration, testing potential solutions, and framing urban interventions in the most vulnerable contexts. The group will reflect on how to, on the one hand, anticipate climate migration, and on the other, adapt the urban fabric taken up by those most heavily exposed to climate risk.

The studio will be divided into four modules. The first module, “Anticipating Scenarios”, will focus on developing climate scenarios for 2050 and methodologies for visual representation, forcing us to speculate about extreme weather conditions contextualizing the landscapes of intervention. The second module, “Understanding Sites”, will focus on understanding places of operation; we will use the 2021 cadaster of informal settlements and its projections to frame the intervention scenarios. As a way to design for the effects of climate change in diverse geographies, sites will be located in 4 geographically distinct cities that have faced massive migration fluxes in the last years and which are projected to intensify: from the northern Antofagasta region to the central Metropolitan region. The third module, “Defining Strategies”, will focus on defining domains of engagement and the scale of the design interventions. Finally, the module “Designing Transitions” will focus on defining and developing proposals at various scales. We will test innovative strategies at the intersection of architecture, landscape, urban planning, and design.

The studio is open to students across all departments and programs. As a collective project, the work will be showcased in an exhibition called Latin America in Transition. We will also collaborate with DRCLAS Art, Film, and Culture Program from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies in a parallel symposium that will inform the work of the class, gathering experts on the topic across Harvard University and Latin America more broadly.

This course will meet weekly on Thursdays and Fridays.
Felipe Vera will be in residence on the following days: January 27, 28; February 10, 11; March 3, 4, 31; April 1, 14, 15, 28, 29; and for final reviews.
Soledad Patiño will be in residence on the following days: February 17, 18; March 24, 25; April 7, 8; and for final reviews.
Class will be held via Zoom on all other Thursdays and Fridays.

Transversal Grounds: Engaging Infrastructure, Landscape and Heritage for Lima’s New Urban Commons

In developing countries, heritage sites in urban settings often collide with urban growth and economic expansion.  Lima has more than 385 archeological sites within its urban tissue, the capital city with the most pre-Columbian heritage sites in the Americas.  However, their sacred significance and historical value have been lost, neglected, and enclosed by walls; these endangered sites appear as urban black holes, gravitationally attracting the encroaching urbanization.

What we see today as huge mounds of earth and dust were part of a unique diffuse city built over an articulated system of canals, agroforestry, ceremonial centers and settlements, connected by an efficient road network, which composed a built sacred landscape articulated to ecological and social processes. Today, these places, called Huacas, are evenly distributed in the megacity: they embedded in a huge catalog of urban complexity and they can potentially trigger systemic changes in the city: a perfect laboratory to explore design issues where heritage is an opportunity for reimagining the future of an entire city.  

How can these ancient sacred sites be reimagined as woven into the fabric of community life, preserving their legacy while reducing Lima’s public and green space deficit and mitigate Lima’s critical food and water insecurity?

The Maranga complex is one of the biggest heritage sites, located in what is now the geometric center of the megacity, and a perfect opportunity to investigate how to deal with multi-scalar complexity, blurring boundaries between architecture, landscape, and urban design. The case study research will focus on the transformation of obsolete urban programs like zoos and enclosed urban university campuses with no student housing.

We will learn from the diffuse, ancient underlying city to reinvent the 21st Century commons through innovative, hybrid urban infrastructures, productive landscape and architectural spaces, intensifying city life, and ensuring an urban food hub system in this ever-growing megacity.  A field trip to Washington DC is planned to allow to see how food deserts have been created in the US and learn from the people who are fighting them with urban food hub systems.  Workshops with students and teachers of the College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences at the land-grant UDC will take place as part of the studio.

The studio will start right away with design research, complemented by discussions with renown experts about the many issues of the project. We’ll have an immersion in essential topics as Heritage, Housing, ecological infrastructure and Food Hubs through readings and lectures by an environmental economist, a preservation architect, a scientist, a biologist, an NGO leader, a Peruvian leading urban designer and a water infrastructure expert.

Students in the Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Planning programs are welcomed.

This course will meet weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The instructors will be in residence on the following days: January 24-27; February 22-25; March 21-May 4.
Class will be held via Zoom on all other Tuesdays and Thursdays.

A Moratorium on New Construction

“We need to stop constructing in order to start building.”
— Menna Agha

Back in March 2020, everything stopped. Or so it seemed. Worldwide, construction sites largely kept operating. The pause that offered to question our societal model proposed by philosopher Bruno Latour, touting that “if everything is stopped, everything can be questioned, bent, selected, sorted, interrupted for good or accelerated,” did not happen. Critical questions about the contribution of the building industry to the ongoing environmental and social crisis remained unaddressed. Responsible for 40% of carbon emissions worldwide, construction and the expansionist enterprise of extraction it fuels goes on unabated. Yet we know construction material’s extractive practices (i.e. building materials and all ancillary facilitation technologies) are physically impacting entire regions: micro-climates, water resources, fauna, flora, with gendered and racialized populations most affected. What Donna Haraway calls “the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture” and the commodification of the Earth for the expansion of the built environment are mirrored in today’s global neo-colonial modes of extraction capitalism. Furthermore, global material use is expected to rebound with post-pandemic economic policies, and to double by 2060— a third of this rise attributable to construction. While decarbonizing the industry is an urgent task, a drastic change to building protocols is necessary. Beyond the provocation around the suspension of new building activity, the studio seeks to articulate a radical thinking framework to work out alternatives: What happens if we stop building anew for a moment?

It is easy to argue against what may be perceived as a polemical call: Who is to say what and where should one construct as housing is a human right? A pause should allow for complex questions to be addressed: How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction? How much of the thousands of new units built every year everywhere are accessible to those who need it most—while office and retail space lay vacant? Beyond moral confines and neo-Malthusian indictments, how to discuss sustainability as a contested concept, legacies of degrowth theory, green capitalism and problematic Co2 reductions policies becoming the stuff of riots? (Peter Marcuse) Moreover, how to face the complicit role that design disciplines play in environmental degradation, social injustice, and climate crisis, and challenge the current modus operandi of global construction?

Starting with investigating existing laws as tools to regulate the built environment, we will explore precedent alternatives to building new—from rent control to reuse, before crafting and redacting our own moratoria specific to self-chosen sites. The studio hopes to then test the moratorium in a series of locations globally beyond the build-more diktat, questioning the standard claim of ‘building right,’ predatorial real-estate, high-tech-heavy solutions, and the archetypical assumption that architects must build anew rather than practicing methods of prolonging structures and redistributive modes of ownership and commoning. Moving forward, a design vision for a material future relying on our current built stock emerges.

Airport Urban Districts for a New Age

Rethinking airports in the context of environmental crisis challenges for exploring efficient intermodal transportation nodes as new frontier for developing the future.

The right combination of transportation modes can ensure the high-level accessibility that innovative economy is demanding and reducing the negative impact of unnecessary long-range travelling.

Dynamic capacity of the airports can then produce sustainable Districts where new major urban centralities can be deployed at different scopes.

Studio will explore how these models can be implemented acknowledging different factors that determine the urban form of the airports and its districts,  in different cultures and its complementarity role with other high performance mobility systems.

Research will select key paradigmatic real examples from different scopes -international; regional or local- to understand its urban influence. Later, Studio will test few urban design strategies to explore the construction of exciting urban Districts for working, living and new forms of exchange.

Dingliang Yang will serve as Teaching Fellow