Typologies of Liberation

Building codes and policies have always been a civil rights issue. Essential forms of land use control, zoning, federal and municipal codes, as well as environmental restrictions, have been weaponized throughout history, facilitating racial discrimination and the policing of residential, commercial as well as public spaces. These systems’ devastating effectiveness in the destruction of entire communities has been further revealed by the recent health and climate emergencies, which exacerbated the already acute American housing crisis, disproportionately affecting people of color.

In this seminar we will explore the impact of specific policies on neighborhood cohesion in different cities in the US, by working with local planners, community leaders and activists. In creating an autopsy report for neighborhoods, building codes and regulations are challenged for their direct effect. This in turn allows to counter such policies with new typologies of liberation.

The seminar is taught in collaboration with the Stanford Legal Design Lab.

 

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Publics Domain students.

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

 

Homes on Fields

"How can one understand the towns without understanding the countryside, money without barter, the varieties of poverty without the varieties of luxury, the white bread of the rich without the black bread of the poor?" Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism- 15th-18th Century, vol. III: The Limits of the Possible (London: Book Club Associates, 1981), 29.

"How might we privilege the social uses of property and resist the real estate developers and mortgage lenders that prey on vulnerable communities in their drive to accumulate as much capital as the law encourages and permits them to do?"  Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 183.

A paradoxical question is raised by affordable forms of residential urbanization:

On the one hand, cheap housing settlements across the world devours thousands of hectares of arable fields at the periphery of growing cities. On the other hand, housing is a human need (and right). This research seminar investigates the spatial characteristics of housing development on agrarian land, and the mode of production at work in the transformation of fertile, cultivated plots into urbanized settlements. As we face the climate emergency, is it sustainable to keep on chipping at our food sheds, and what are the alternatives? How dramatic is this phenomena in reality and what are the political economies behind such modes of development? From tenure laws and land reforms to agriculture policies and development strategies, from so-called informal areas to massive real-estate developments, “Homes on Fields” is a research seminar investigating the urbanization of agrarian land globally.

Set on researching:
1) contemporary residential forms of the built environment constructed over agrarian land anywhere (i.e. self-initiated and affordable housing, speculative schemes),
2) the social, economic, or political forces that have facilitated, allowed or affected these modes of development—at times historically grounded, and
3) what are their impacts on selected topics (food systems, real estate, infrastructures, construction materials markets, communities, electoral results, etc.), the aim is to uncover, understand and communicate this urban growth phenomena.

Drawing the architecture and urban form of these urbanizations shall be deployed as a tool to understand the re-organization of territory and complex issues of regimes of land ownership, land use policies, and property laws, to in turn inform how the accumulation and transfer of land as capital is materialized in the competition for land between housing and cultivation.1 Via readings and guest lectures, we shall dwell into these perspectives and adopt them as ‘useful knowledge’ for our own investigation (Confirmed speakers: Ana María León& Andrew Herscher, Swarnabh Ghosh, Paulo Tavares, Sai Balakrishnan).

In this seminar, we shall seek to articulate a mixed methodology of research in which drawing emerges as a valid research method, in parallel to classical forms of investigation (primary and secondary literature, media, archive, field-work, etc.) to enhance our capacity to critically reflect on spatial conditions while using representation tools available to designers and planners to do so.

Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.

William Cronon, "A World of Fields and Fences," in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003).

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

Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment

The aim of the class is to learn how to depict and express the presence and appearance of people in natural and built environments.

This class objective will be achieved through three projects:

Each of the assigned projects will be realized in a different, specifically selected technique:

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.

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

Off: On a Tangent

This course uses the tangential as a formal, rhetorical, and mathematical framework to interrogate the relationship between the part and the whole, between the thick and thin, the complex and contradictory. Working with forms like cones and cylinders (amongst others), we will investigate formal tangential relationships and their implications on bringing programmatic spaces closer together or farther apart.

Conceptually, a tangent implies the permutation of an existing idea into a completely different line of thinking. A tangent articulates a moment where one thing diverges into two or, inversely, where two things merge into one: the moment they kiss. In Kissing Architecture, Sylvia Lavin teases out this tension between the discipline of architecture and new types of art practices. We will focus our exploration within the discipline at a more intimate scale: two mediums, two masses, two surfaces, or two curves. This tension — a version of are ‘they’ or aren’t ‘they’—is further activated by moving between the precise and the imperfect. This seminar will explore the role that image creation plays in articulating these tensions. We will engage in a rigorous investigation of rendering and drawing techniques to study the material, tectonic and spatial implications of tangential forms. At what scale does the tangential relationship build excitement?

 

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.

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

Responsive Environments: Poetics of Space

The course introduces students to the tools and design methods for creating responsive environments and technologically driven experiences in the built environment. By putting the human experience at the center and forefront, from the immediate body scale to the larger environment, encompassing buildings and the urban spaces, the course examines new and emerging models and technologies for the design of innovative architectural human interfaces and technologically augmented physical environments.     

The class addresses fundamental questions including: What are new and emergent ways of understanding the digital and physical environments? How can we create responsive and interactive experiences that augment the person’s experience of the physical space? What are the consequences of creating technologically augmented environments? What are the psychological, social, and environmental implications of creating such hybrids? And what are the criteria to measure successful responsive environments?  

These questions of analyzing, understanding and designing responsive environments will be tackled through both class discussions and also hands-on designing and prototyping of interactive, responsive installations. Readings and discussions will explore current and historical examples, theories of phenomenology, psychogeography, multisensory experience of architecture, body-centricity, proxemics, interaction design, installation design, and human-machine interface. Informed by this discourse, the first part of the course will engage students in measuring and quantifying the ephemeral and invisible qualities of space and human experience of space. This will form the foundation for students to design spatial and interactive interventions at various scales, ranging from wearables, interactive objects, to large-scale architectural installations. In the process, students will become familiarized with technologies that can change and augment our physical environment such as biometric sensors, electronics, processing, projections, and others.

The course will culminate with an exhibition of the students’ responsive and interactive installations of varied scales using the tools and methods discussed in class. The course will take advantage of the resources and the ongoing research at the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab.

No specific prerequisites are needed. Students from any background and concentration are encouraged to apply to the lottery.

Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Mediums Domain students.

 

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

Digital Media: Writing Form

This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the essential pursuit of writing form.

Setting aside the better-known paradigms of sketching, 3D modelling, scripting or coding, writing –in this context– refers to the application of parametric formulations to visual design. This is not only a technology offering, but a place for designers to expand their understanding of architectural typology, and form in general, by taking on the new, sneaky types which emerged during the past 20 years.

The course fulfils a distributional requirement of Core in the area of Digital Media.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday,This course will meet in person on February 9, 11; March 2, 4, 23, 25; April 13, 15 and for the final exam. The course will be held via Zoom on all other Wednesdays and Fridays.

Digital Media: Neural Bodies

This course considers the building as body from a computational and critical perspective. The friction between the building as a quasi-biological organism on the one hand and a precise geometric construct on the other has long been conceptually and formally productive. We will interrogate the reciprocity between architectural, biological, and mathematical form through the contemporary lens of datasets, AI, and geometry. In particular, we will develop techniques that draw on hybrid architectural-biological datasets to generate ambitious multi-material prints of speculative proto-architectures.

The course will look at both large architectural datasets—for example, beaux-arts plans—as well as large biological datasets—such as skeletal scans of comparative anatomy—and ask how the biological data might be understood architecturally and vice versa. Beyond available image and 3d-scan datasets certain representation and imaging techniques, such as tomographic scanning, will be critical. Through AI techniques such as volumetric neural networks and fabrication processes like multi-material printing, students will explore bio-architectural generative spaces in a spatially sophisticated way.

Students will develop three sequential exercises related to (1) planmaking, (2) intricate double, triple, and quadruple staircases, and (3) a quasi-architectural proposal that negotiates the first two assignments. A key aspect of the class will be the development of productive workflows that leverage disparate tools for novel effect. Students will use AI tools like Google Colab, Stylegan, and Shapenet as well as a range of surface modfication, analysis, and discretization tools in Houdini, Meshmixer, and Grasshopper. Students will also be introduced to a range of more procedural processes to discretize and resolve their proposals into constructible forms.

The ambitions of the course extend beyond techniques of form making to critical perspectives on architecture as body and broader ideas of morphological analysis and classification. The course thus engages ways of thinking about and measuring bodies generally, and considers these practices as constitutive of a rich mode of architectural production.

 

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Mediums Domain and Technology Area students.

 

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

Landscape Representation II

Landscape Representation II examines the relationship between terrain and the dynamic landscape it supports and engenders. The course explores and challenges the representational conventions of land-forming and supports a landscape architecture design process that posits the landscape as a relational assemblage of dynamic physical and temporal forces. It investigates the making of landforms through its inherent material performance in relationship to ecological processes that describe its connectability to the ordering and making of the landscape that is a reciprocation of forces between itself and its context at specific scales.

Measures of time will be utilized to describe and design the landscape through a comparison of sequence and event, and their intervals, rates, and duration in relationship to spatial forces and flows. Time infuses the material reality of the landscape through states of formation: from those that signify stability, through sequences that are predictable and observable processes of change, to those that are uncertain and instantaneous.

Representation is approached as an activity of thinking and making in which knowledge is generated through the work. This facilitates an iterative process of reflection in action, enabling testing in which new knowledge informs subsequent design decisions. The course will introduce methods of associative and generative modelling, and quantitative and qualitative analysis visualized through multiple forms of media. These are decision-making models conceived to imbue interaction between evidence-based variables and design input.

Precedent studies will accompany an engagement in digital media with fluid transitions between documentation and speculation, 2-D and 3-D, static and dynamic, illustrating time-based processes.

This course will be taught in person beginning the week of January 24th.

Collaborative Design Engineering Studio II

The spring studio builds upon theoretical and technical concepts already introduced in the MDE program with the emphasis on creative and critical thinking, observational and experimentation-based evaluation, and context-aware communication strategies essential for complex problem-solving activities.

The human mind excels in rapidly identifying patterns and establishing associations that simplify the complexity of the world and habituating thinking processes to minimize its own energy use. The term “creative and critical thinking” points to the need to consciously overcome our innate limitations to design solutions that are impactful and responsible.

In this studio, students are challenged to identify, propose, prototype, test, evaluate, and refine problems and solutions around the studio theme of waste.  The semester is organized around two projects that invite students to consider two achievement-oriented scenarios: a call for developing a research funding application and a call for a design award entry. We introduce this framework to heighten student awareness in connecting their own ideas to the “real-world” objectives, by facilitating the notion of objectivity, empathic analysis, multifaceted evaluation and professional communication. While the first project will be highly structured, the second will be self-guided full-blown design project in preparation for the IDEP.

This Studio is limited to first-year students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering Program, a collaborative degree associated with Harvard GSD and SEAS.

This course will be held in room LL2.220 at the Science and Engineering Complex in Allston.

Landscape Architecture IV

Near-Future City

Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change

This is the fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence. It questions ways in which we can design urban assemblages for the city during moments of deep and rapid transformation. The assemblages are explored as a basic “DNA” of the city in which urban, landscape and ecological elements are intertwined to imagine new ways of habitation for both human and non-human constituencies. 

This is an opportunity to speculate on a ‘Near-Future City’ that considers the city as a thick ground condition, one that describes a set of complex systems characterized by gradients between the static and the dynamic. Students will develop an understanding of the city and how it can adapt to future conditions.

The semester is structured around three phases of work: 01. metabolic flows and material processes, 02. urban assemblages for the near-future city, and 03. deployment and disposition of the assemblages.  The semester will begin by interrogating a particular set of systems at play in the urban environment and identifying key constituencies to be addressed. From here, the development and encoding of an urban assemblage is rigorously explored as an intertwined agglomeration of urban elements. Finally, in the last phase, students negotiate the formation of their assemblages in a sector of Boston.

The work will be guided by workshops, lectures, readings, discussions, and presentations. It will operate as a design laboratory through which different models will be tested and iterated. The work over the semester will culminate into a final exhibition and conversation surrounding the immediate proposals and the directions necessary for the responsible and ethical making of the Near-Future City.