Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices
The Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar investigates art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of contemporary culture and the city. As artists and designers respond to global magnitude and local impact challenges, engage with cross-cultural and often conflicting conditions, and operate in disparate economic and societal realms, the need for increased engagement and collaboration is paramount. The complexity present in the context of action—economic, social, political, cultural, and ecological— frequently requires interdisciplinary approaches accompanied by cross-pollinating knowledge and skillsets.
Socially engaged art, relational aesthetics, and activist and emancipatory design practices challenge disciplinary boundaries not only in the art and the design worlds but as they crossover and interact with communities, policymakers, and various experts. They lead to expanding professional vocabularies, tools, and imaginaries and cultivates new forms of interdisciplinary knowledge.
As art and design practices move from art in public space to art in public interest (Miwon Kwon), their participatory and relational makeup can generate platforms and agencies that question dominant culture, construct new practices, establish new subjectivities, and subvert existing configurations of power (Chantal Mouffe). Historical examples of such approaches include Dada, the Situationists, and other avant-garde movements, as well as contemporary art and design practices such as the Silent University, Philadelphia Assembled, Superflex, Critical Art Ensemble, Pink Bloque, Yes Men, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, or the Arctic Cycle. Such disseminated practices challenge the boundaries of art and design and their environments.
The seminar will navigate the evolving interdisciplinarity of art and design practices by engaging with the city, its communities, and the art world and addressing contemporary urgencies and societal concerns. Practice-oriented, the seminar includes lectures, workshops, and assignments dedicated to exploring artistic tools and methods as well as the context in which they perform.
Fundamental goals of the seminar are:
– to expose students to methods, techniques, and positions of interdisciplinary art and design practices;
– to explore how art and design practices can engage with the public domain;
– to creatively explore the potential of mediums in the realization of ideas; and
– to raise relevant questions and to test them through the development of projects;
– Student evaluation is based on assignments, participation in class, and the final presentation.
This semester, the seminar will focus on the theme of survival and survivalism in times of socio-economic, environmental, and institutional crises. The seminar will incorporate lectures and conversations with various practitioners and experts, including artists, curators, activists, and policymakers—priority enrollment to ADPD MDes students.
Course structure: The class will meet synchronously for 2 hours on Thursdays from 12 to 2 pm EST. Asynchronous presentations or open workshops will complement the synchronous teaching throughout the semester.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
Digital Media: Not Magic
According to folklore, Michelangelo fell to his knees upon seeing the Florentine fresco Annunciation, went silent, and eventually concluded that the image of the Virgin must have been made through divine intervention since its brushwork surpassed human talents. When the computer graphics company Blue Sky released its commercial for Chock Full o’Nuts in 1994, The New York Times called the rendering of a walking and talking coffee bean “computer magic.” It was the best way to explain the video’s special effects. What else would one call using lines of code to give an inanimate object life? Or the transfiguration of mere paint into saintly likeness?
Esoteric processes have long imbued artforms with power, rendering audiences speechless, awestruck, and affected. In the nineties, anthropologist Alfred Gell proposed that mundane things can be construed as “enchanted forms” when differences exist between an audience’s technological expectations and an object’s facture. This contradiction gives rise to a belief that artifacts and artisans can possess otherworldly faculties. In reality, everyday forms become enchanted not through magic, but through precise construction methodologies.
This course seeks to articulate what aesthetic categories are at play when technology is perceived to be magical. A working theory for the class is that more nuanced descriptions for the transformations found in computational and craft traditions are good frameworks for understanding architectural effects. We will explore these ideas in synchronous lectures and case studies, and asynchronous workshops. Readings include texts by Alfred Gell, Walter Benjamin, Beatriz Colomina, and Felicity Scott. Case studies include projects by Anne Holtrop, Ensamble, Junya Ishigami, and examples from imperial architecture.
Prerequisites: none
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
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.
This crash course in indexical modelling (the deployment of variable analytic surfaces to parametrically define the space, boundaries, structure, and tectonic texture of a three-dimensional construct) will be organised around synchronous weekly lectures and applied workshops in parametric design, punctuated by three to four design sketches, and a final design project. The deliverables will include virtual instances of physical models —presented via AR (augmented reality) as well as traditional drawings and diagrams.
On the theoretical side, the course will introduce participants to the notion of form both practically (mathematically) and theoretically through a series of semi-monthly reading precepts (group readings) of seminal texts from Erwin Panofsky to Rosalind Krauss.
On the practical side, generative design tools will include PTC MathCAD 15, Rhino 6 /Grasshopper, and the proprietary, third-party Grasshopper plugins Surf_TM, Millipede, and Weaverbird. No experience is necessary, just open-mindedness. Participants will be issued powerful software templates to work with on a weekly basis.
Course structure: During the two, one-hour-long live sessions, we will cover the lectures material, hold one directed reading, share feedback on the assignments, dispense some technical content, and touch on any other matter of group interest. The bulk of the technical workshops will be pre-recorded and released asynchronously every week in digital video form.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
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.
GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Option Studio Presentations
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions
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.
GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Option Studio Presentations
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions
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.
GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Option Studio Presentations
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions
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.
GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Option Studio Presentations
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions
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
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions