Digital Media: Design Systems

The course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, methods, and practical techniques in design computation with emphasis on a systems perspective. We take a view that computational design requires the designing of systems instead of forms/geometries directly and that the quality of such systems reflects the success of the design outcome.

A system can be understood as a set of detailed procedures to achieve a specific objective, which takes input data/signal and transforms it into output/feedback. To design a computational system, it is necessary to adopt a particular way of thinking: identifying, abstracting, and decomposing a design goal. In addition, the data and procedures to achieve the goal require the use of logical and numerical constructs. On the contrary to such a reductionist approach, it is important to note the output of a design system needs to be accessible to human thoughts for holistic and intuitive evaluation. In other words, the system perspective helps elucidate the different modes of thinking embedded within the use of the digital medium for design.

The course will be comprised of three learning segments: (a) computational and geometric notations, (b) data organization and algorithms, (c) data flow and design control; introduced through a series of asynchronous lectures and exercises as well as synchronous workshops. Students will create, analyze, and evaluate computational and geometric constructs within the design-as-a-system thoughtparadigm. Simultaneously, the course provides students with the basis for developing critical thinking towards computational tools through working on a series of design exercises and a final project. We will use Rhino, Grasshopper environment, and C# where we expect the students to be familiar with 3D modeling in Rhino. It is designed for architecture students with little programming experience who are interested in understanding the underlying principles of computational tools and customization of design processes using the tools.

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.

Xiamen Studio. Merging urban development and natural landscape.

Merging urban development and natural landscape: Searching for “spectacular or regular” projects?

The Studio Option focuses on the capacity of large-scale projects to direct the growth and transformation of open territories in big metropolises. It takes the example of Xiamen and its different extensions to investigate their potential for creating one or several centralities or leisure resorts well connected to the natural territory and provide new positive input to the local economy.

Simulation field. The region of Xiamen-Zhangzhou (China) seeks to diversify its economic base by revitalizing Xiangshan Bay, its seafront and natural landscape by capitalizing on the inherent qualities of its culture and traditions. Its position on mainland China and the monumental value of the historical centre of Xiamen present major potential for mobilization.

The gradual diversification of the economy of the great megalopolises of East Asia allows us to imagine the increase in free time of the new middle classes, interested in enjoying a cultivated natural landscape and taking part in sport and free-time activity, as has happened in other developed countries. In this potential field -of tourism and transitional residences-, it can be very attractive to simulate recreational and leisure uses in contact with nature and a reconsideration of the primary uses of the land: like the aquatic activities and fishing, among others. 
The enhancement of water as a spa, leisure and recreational space by means of the creation of various forms of water urbanisms has developed in all cultures: Southern Europe, the USA, later in Asia and more recently in the Middle East. Ways of approaching water have been very different and brought about major changes in the organization of pre-existing or newly created settlements, offering some truly paradigm models that offer a valuable range of experiences.

Relaunching these projects, with the twenty-first century well under way, requires us to take into account environmental commitments—natural space, energy use, etc.—and the great social challenges—inclusive development—that require local demands to be combined with the recreational needs of visitors in order to achieve a more just society. Those are the principles for the Urban Project to be developed in Xiamen-Zhangzhou area; it may simulate a multiple scale strategy including urban architecture and large landscape on its testing capacities.

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Option Studio Presentations
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Building Respect on San Francisco’s Third Street

In the past decade (prior to the presence of the Coronavirus), San Francisco’s economy experienced its most substantial growth in nearly a century.  Two factors — the preferences of millennials and baby boomers to live in central cities, combined with the explosive growth of technology companies – created the perfect storm to fuel this growth.

The subsequent job growth and high salaries paid by tech companies, along with an acute housing shortage, begat the most expensive housing costs of any large city in America.

These economic benefits did not reach the city’s most vulnerable communities.  Fifteen percent of the city’s population remain below the Federal poverty level.  The city’s two historically African American neighborhoods, the Bayview and the Fillmore are greatly impacted by displacement pressures. In 2010 the City’s African American population was 6% of the city’s total, from a peak of 17%; it is likely to be less than 5% today.  

Third Street is the city’s primary urban corridor on the eastern edge of the city, along the Bay.  It extends seven miles from the downtown to the City’s southern boundary.  The southern half of Third Street is the core of the Bayview and the subject of this studio.  The booming northern half of this corridor and the more challenged southern half in the Bayview is separated by the City’s largest industrial zone, both a source of important jobs and the subject of environmental justice concerns.  

This studio invites students from all disciplines to work with members of the Bayview Community and the city of San Francisco, to envision a revitalized and unique future for Third Street, respecting the African American heritage.  After analyzing the corridor as a whole, students will work in teams on strategic areas of intervention to be defined with and by the community.  While considering a future for Third Street, it is the hope that the studio, with the community, will develop a new paradigm for a planning and community design process.

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SHADING SUNSET: Reimagining the Streets of Los Angeles for a Warmer Future

This studio reimagines the contemporary public realm of Los Angeles by reconceptualizing its streets as venues for social life in relation to sunlight. This work is occasioned by the recent acquisition of Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive by the Getty Research Institute. In partnership with the Getty, the studio will utilize the vast digital record of tens of thousands of Ruscha’s photographs of major LA boulevards taken between the 1960s and 2010s. This vast digital image archive will inform the development of machine learning processes that will allow students to extrapolate potential alternative futures for the city’s contemporary public realm.

Ruscha’s deadpan photographs of Los Angeles’s iconic streetscapes and automobile-based architectural typologies were appropriated by Denise Scott Brown as a graphic language applicable to the analysis of the Las Vegas strip as published in Learning from Las Vegas. Ruscha’s photographs were equally influential to Reyner Banham’s conception of the city’s Four Ecologies. In both cases, the postwar American city was seen through the lenses of limitless solar plentitude, extreme illumination, and the legibility of information at speed.

This image of the city seems ill-suited to the contemporary challenges of a warming climate, increasing heat island effects, and the disproportionate impact of heat events across class and race. The City of Los Angeles recently launched two urban design initiatives focusing on these topics. The design competition for a new streetlight standard invokes themes of illumination, security, and surveillance. The city’s initiative on street cooling suggests themes of shade, insulation, and refuge. In contemporary Los Angeles the modern goal of universal illumination is now more often associated with a loss of privacy, state surveillance, and policing. On the other hand, a more just, socially equitable, and environmentally desirable future seems to lie in the curation of a relatively more obscure public realm, a realm of shade and shadow.

The studio will convene a series of conversations with leading voices across a range of topics including the role of Ruscha’s image of the postwar American city, the shift from universal illumination to solar refuge in urban thought, and the potential for machine learning as a generative process for urban projects. These conversations will be informed by contributions from Harvard curator Dr. Jennifer Quick, as well as Eric Rodenbeck/Stamen, Andrew Witt/Certain Measures, and Eric de Broche des Combes/Luxigon, among others.

The GSD Office for Urbanization has worked in collaboration with Prof. Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez and the GSD Laboratory for Design Technologies to develop digital workflows based on the Ruscha archive. These workflows deploy StyleGAN generative models to project a limitless number of potential future LA’s extrapolated from the evidence of Ruscha’s images. Students will learn to curate these “machine hallucinations” in their development of potential design projects. Students will be invited to research topics of illumination, security and surveillance as well as shade, shadows, and privacy on the other. From this research students will be invited to develop unique street-specific thematic design projects at the scale of the street, sidewalk, park, building, block, or larger landscape.

The studio welcomes candidates from all departments and programs. It welcomes students with little or no experience with computation, as well as those with more experience. The studio forms part of the GSD’s Future of the American City Initiative sponsored by the Knight Foundation and supported by the GSD Office for Urbanization.

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Option Studio Presentations
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Away…Offshore…Adrift… Shifting Landscapes, Unstable Futures

Nantucket, meaning "faraway land or island" or "sandy, sterile soil tempting no one” in Algonquin, is an island 30 miles off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts, formed through glacial processes and ice melt, and continuously re-shaped by strong ocean currents, winds, storms, and human constructions and impacts. It served as seasonal farming and fishing grounds for the Wôpanâak tribe (meaning "People of the First Light") and it came to be a haven for an extensive Black community, whose members could find stable work around the wharves, far from mainland racist attitudes and laws.  It has since become a summer playground for the elite—but this simplistic characterization denies the substantial year-round and seasonal workforces, racially and ethnically diverse, who power the robust service-sector economy.

Climate change is already bringing rising seas, regular flooding, and coastal erosion to many parts of the island, and threatening areas in and around the main harbor town that are low-lying, close to eroding bluffs, and to shifting sands.  While many are asking questions about how to protect, this studio will ask how to work with the dynamics that are in play—environmental, social, cultural, and economic—and will explore alternative futures for the island.  How can a re-thinking of the relationships between stability and instability lay new fluid grounds for more adaptive solutions? How can we render invisible processes and people visible and central to the conversations about land occupation, landscape and cultivation dynamics, and sustainable work practices?

This studio is part of the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge, a design initiative that will include interdisciplinary studios at Yale, UMiami, UFlorida, and Northeastern.  We will have access to live and recorded interviews /presentations by climate experts and local residents, and will collaborate with partnering institutions.  Work will be presented on Nantucket this summer. We will also participate in the Green New Deal SuperStudio to envision a “10-year national mobilization” of strategies centered on jobs, justice, and decarbonization.

This is a design-oriented, interdisciplinary studio focused on physical and social/cultural processes of making and re-making at various scales.  Landscape architects, architects, and urban designers are welcome to participate.

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LANDSCAPES OF THE VOID: URBAN PROJECTS ON RESIDUAL TOPOGRAPHIES.

Instructor: Danilo Martic

I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. 
– Edward Burtynsky

The built city has left a deep scar somewhere close; a negative space, a void equivalent to the extension and the proportions of the city, its materiality and its shape, invisible to most of those that inhabit it and that ignore the dynamics that have shaped the land. Immersed in the urban fabric of Santiago there are a number of sites that have been altered by extractive activities, such as gravel mines, large-scale sand pits and small-scale copper mines that remain dissociated from the city. These constantly changing landscapes generate an impact on the surface of the land comparable to that of a crater, and nonetheless, we still don’t know what to do with them once their productive life is over.

This studio’s work will focus upon developing skills and creative sensibilities with regard to project design in altered urban conditions. Specifically, we will develop, through formal design, landscape architecture projects for urban sites that have been affected by extractive activities; sites that have been subject to profound topographical transformations while in turn gravely deteriorating the city that enfolds them. We will specifically consider the ground as the fundamental material with which to operate, designing and modeling it to incorporate programmatic intensities, urban flows, ecological relationships, and occupation densities, with the intention to instigate the development of new urban ecologies.

The objectives of the studio are to advance the disciplinary bases of landscape architectural design and to develop a critical approach toward conceptualization and project design. We will navigate between theory and practice, with the intention of merging theoretical thinking with the practical aspects of design and project development. In this sense, intellect will not be privileged over technical competence, nor pragmatism over imagination. Rather, there will be a complete articulation of the many considerations that arise while developing a landscape project.

Students’ evaluation will be based on expositive meetings, case studies and their application to design problems, practical design exercises, and weekly reviews of their progress. 

GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Option Studio Presentations
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TAR CREEK REMADE

TAR CREEK REMADE: Environmental Legacy, Toxic Terrain and Re-Imagining the Future in the Tri-State Mining Area, Ottawa County, Oklahoma, USA.

TAR CREEK REMADE will explore technologies of toxic land reclamation and their agency in creating environmental and social equity within a critical practice of landscape architectural design and making. The studio site is the Tar Creek Superfund Site- the oldest, largest and most dangerous polluted land impacted by former mining activities in the United States. The intellectual question of the studio concerns – how does a tribal and non-tribal culture express itself through design in environmental form in a time of devastation and recovery?.

The studio will imagine alternative design futures working with the local Quapaw Nation as well as non-tribal communities living on and in the vicinity of Tar Creek as part of the Tri-State Mining Area of North-Eastern Oklahoma, USA. The site area of 40 square miles was formerly characterized as prairie and woodlands prior to mining activities that started in the 1900’s following the discovery of the largest subterranean deposits of lead and zinc in the world. A vast mining operation employing 11,000 workers in 250 mills was established that excluded the tribal communities and ran until the 1960’s when it closed down leaving a devastated landscape of polluted mining waste (chat), tailing ponds, sinkholes and tainted orange-yellow streams and riverways. The study area consists of the remaining principal towns of Quapaw, Commerce and North Miami. Two towns, Picher and Cardin have already been abandoned due to the extent of environmental hazards.

This area is contaminated by the residue of lead mining extraction resulting in an environmental legacy for the residents and the land and waterways of the region. Children under the age of six exhibit highly elevated levels of metals in their bodies causing neurological damage and serious health issues. The land and riparian ecology of the region has been devastated by acid mine drainage, land settlement of former mine shafts creates dangerous subsidence across the terrain affecting buildings, infrastructure and open space, waste ‘mountains’ of mining spoil and airborne lead dust pervade the area.
 
The studio will address how practices of landscape site design and environmental engineering can productively address the social, ecological and environmental realities of this toxic terrain. Class members working in groups and individually, and importantly through local tribal non-profit organizations and a range of experts will give spatial organization and advance detail design proposals for the remediation of, for example – the mining waste mountains and the intense pollution of local riverways including Tar Creek as well as reimagining the critical engineering of land subsidence and future form of the Superfund Site. Class members will be assisted by Rebecca Jim and Early Hately co-founders of Local Environmental Action Demanded, Inc. (LEAD), Quapaw Tribe in Miami, OK The studio is open to students in all GSD degree programs.

GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Option Studio Presentations
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Temporary and Ephemeral Structures [M1]

In light of recent global turbulence generated by a series of crises – environmental, economic, political, social, and medical – architecture is once again challenged with an increased need for flexibility and adaptability. These crises require architecture to nimbly respond to rapid change as its user-communities learn to do the same. Although we tend to think of crises as temporary, many have become chronic issues, requiring a reevaluation of traditional design solutions. Additionally, some building types are nearing obsolescence in the face of an increased desire for the built environment to accurately reflect contemporary understandings of intersectional identities, cultures, and lifestyles. Although such reevaluations have been needed for a long time, recent upheavals have brought them to the forefront of social conscience. Increased attention must be paid to designing strategic and tactically responsive ephemeral structures that work to combat the complex and highly mutable problems that we now face. As our world changes with increased rapidity, it will become necessary to contend with the element of time to create viable responses to large-scale issues. Instead of conceiving of architecture as obstinate and static, is there a way to invent a new model of resilient, flexible, and adaptable structures that can respond to unforeseen needs as they arise?  

Each student will be asked to select a site and program around which to design a flexible temporary structure, with consideration given to the logistics of its assembly and disassembly, materiality, fabrication method, and life cycle including possibilities for coexisting programs and combined usages. In addition to producing architectural solutions to ephemeral problems, the studio will study the effect of the resultant temporary structures on user experience and identity. Inevitably, the notion of lightness in terms of visual and physical weight as well as lessened ecological footprint will become a core advantage of these structures over traditional “slow-build” architecture. These ephemeral structures have the capacity to bridge traditional practice with contemporary innovation to become a new and more equitable hybrid architecture of the future.

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Option Studio Presentations
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Small institutions

Inspired by Louis Kahn's passionate and enigmatic interest in institutions and their origins, the aim of this studio is to investigate the possibility of a primordial architecture. A search for a “small” but essential architecture able to define the character of an institution. What is substantial? What is really defining a theatre, a library, or a school? We are looking for a new approach that transcends the functionality of pre-established programs and discovers their hidden nature, the invisible condition that characterizes each type of space and institution.

We aim to redefine and rediscover the architecture of the institution, “an organism that carries out a function of public interest” (according to the dictionary), “a world within the world”, “a center around which existential space is organized” (according to Kahn).

The Studio will take place in a specific location in Barcelona:  a small plot between party walls, empty, with an irregular geometry, cohabitating with neighboring buildings that surround and condition it. 
Each student will be assigned one of these possible institutions:

Library – Museum – School – Temple – Town Hall – Market – Theatre – Hospital – Swimming pool – Courthouse

The chosen site is voluntarily small – smaller than could be expected. The lack of space must be a positive condition, forcing us to take radical decisions. Necessary steps to discover the essence of the space: what is a priority, far from inherited or pre-established solutions.

To design the primordial (what really defines the place and the institution) we will need to go back and free ourselves from a part of what we have learned. To re-investigate the genesis of human activities, the sources and origins of what has historically set architecture.

This research requires a critical positioning. A confrontation with the established form, what could be a convention or just a trend. A fight against the status quo to allow us to redefine our values and our priorities, to discover the indispensable that qualifies as architecture.

We propose to deconstruct the great institutions, extracting the insubstantial and unnecessary to find their most elemental definition, their substance.

In the design of a new "small" institution, as in a good poem, it will be necessary to synthesize, reconstruct and retain only the fundamental. To find what awakens the most emotional dimension of architecture. What is necessary and unnecessary. What supports its meaning, its form, and its character. How is it built. What is it made of. How it behaves. It will be a precision exercise: learn to prioritize.

The reduction to the essential does not mean giving up ambition. It is an opportunity to find the most decisive expression of architecture (where nothing is superfluous or missing). A unique architecture that remains convincing over the years. Architecture that transforms inert matter into something vivid and extraordinary.

We will look for architecture that activates these processes from a pragmatic and polyhedral approach. From thermodynamics and interactions with the environment to the structure and tectonics of construction techniques. From space composition to social behaviors. Everything necessary to design and calibrate exceptional spaces. Spaces of inspiration and precision. Pre-institutions (or small primordial institutions) that redefine our priorities. A soft but radical plot twist, that perhaps can show us a different understanding of the architectural space.

GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Option Studio Presentations
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions