Building Conservation and Renewal: Assessment, Analysis, Design

What are the spatial, material, and broad cultural values inherent in a building or site that must be understood to craft interventions and additions that will complement, sustain and enhance the original work while addressing both architectural and technical integrity?  This course will introduce architecture students to the functional, technical, legal and environmental principles of working with existing buildings to ensure their continued technical and programmatic viability.   Designed specifically to ground the participant in the methodologies of building conservation and renewal and to introduce the tools necessary to successfully approach working with existing buildings, the course will include lectures, guest lectures, discussions from readings, and local field trips. 

Globally, roughly 35% of construction activity is devoted to work on existing structures. This percentage is steadily rising, making the sustainability mantra “the greenest building is the one already built” increasingly relevant as we seek strategies to minimize the impact of construction on the environment. Maintenance, repair and renewal is therefore a fundamental component of contemporary architectural practice increasingly requiring facility in techniques of rehabilitation, adaptive reuse and where required, conservation or historic preservation. 

We will look critically at the development of the international Charters and Standards employed in working with historic structures and they impact our approach to modifications to any existing building from a technical, design and regulatory standpoint. As these standards continue to evolve and adapt, we will particularly address the question as to how the apparatus of conservation is changing to best complement the legacy of modernism and the recent past – by far the largest component of the contemporary built environment.

We will review the fundamentals of performing a building assessment including field documentation, analysis and evaluation. While this course will not address building physics and materials conservation in detail, participants will gain familiarity with a broad range of both traditional and contemporary materials through case studies and the GSD Materials Collection within Loeb Library.  

While interventions must include sound technical solutions, any modification from conservation treatments to renovation and addition designs must address the full complement of values necessary to enable an economically viable, socio-culturally relevant rehabilitation.  We will examine a range of intervention design case studies on both traditional structures such as Stanford’s Richardsonian Romanesque Old Chemistry Building and Harvard’s Widener Library, and modern buildings including works by architects such as Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn and Eero Saarinen.  Though geared to students in the M. Arch curriculum, the course is open to all interested students.  Course requirements include short student presentations on assessment and evaluation, an intervention design exercise and a final exam. 

Signal, Image, Architecture III: The Automatic Present

“I know well enough what time is, provided that nobody asks me; but if am asked what it is, and try to explain, I am baffled.”
                             -St. Augustine, Confessions

This seminar, the last in a series of three, will explore the technical composition of the present. If traditional (orthographic) media established a delay between lived life and its representation—producing both an historical record and an historical consciousness, through and against which the present was understood and experienced—electronic media appear to have eliminated that temporal separation. This apparent elimination lies at the heart of the logic of “real time,” which by its very name suggests its equivalence with the time of lived life. In strictly technical terms, however, the opposite has occurred: what outwardly appears to be an elimination is in fact a displacement and intensification, wherein the delay between the present and its past is displaced beneath the threshold of unaided perception, and reestablished in an electronic elsewhere, so that the present may be composed anew. This technical displacement and recomposition has had dramatic implications, radically altering not only the internal working methods of the design fields (their ways of thinking and making), but also the larger cultural conditions in which those practices hope to meaningfully intervene.

The course readings—drawn from philosophy, media theory, cybernetics, engineering textbooks and manuals, anthropology, and the history of technology—cover a period ranging from the nineteenth century to the present. Taken together, they mean to show that what at first appear to be merely technical issues are in fact political, psychosocial, and ultimately existential conditions, which bear immediately on contemporary life.

The course has no prerequisites, but some foundation in continental philosophy and media theory will be useful. We will be joined by Bruno Latour for one seminar session in October.

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Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common

This lecture course examines selected cities between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., beginning with ancient Athens and ending with the rebuilding of London after the great fire in 1666 and the founding of Boston. It is not, however, a survey. Rather, the lectures take up one city at one “golden moment” of its development and propose a theme or themes for discussion. The course, therefore, is both chronologically and thematically structured.

The first half of the semester treats the ancient and late antique city, beginning with Athens and continuing with Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople and Antioch. This section concludes with a consideration of the effects of Christianization on urban form, the widespread decline of urban habitation in the early Middle Ages, and the rising importance of ideal or symbolic “cities of the mind.” The second half of the semester looks at selected instances of Renaissance and Baroque urban interventions, beginning with Florence, returning again to Rome, and then moving to Venice, Madrid, Paris, London and Boston.

The course format includes lectures, lecture/discussions, and discussions. Each lecture is normally devoted to one city. It covers urban layout and topography, infrastructure, patterns and types of housing, and typologies of the major monuments and treats in more depth those features relating to the themes for the week – the relation of the city to countryside, for instance, or the city as center of cultural activity, the city and ideas about space, and so on. The lecture/discussion sessions introduce additional material (sometimes a new city, sometimes a more in-depth treatment of one of the assigned readings) and then move to discussion of the lecture and readings. The discussion sessions sometimes compare two cities and sometimes deepen or amplify the themes and ideas covered in the lecture(s) and readings. Students are required to prepare for the discussions by reviewing the relevant lecture(s) (powerpoints are on the course site), doing the readings, and thinking about how the readings relate to the weekly topic.

Throughout the semester you will be working on what will become a final research paper of twelve pages text plus endnotes, illustrations and a bibliography on a city of your choice during its “golden age.”

Michelangelo Architect: Precedents, Innovation, Influence

An exploration of Italian Renaissance architecture and urbanism through the persona of Michelangelo as witness, agent, and inspiration. We look at architecture and urbanism in Florence, Rome, and Venice from about 1400 to 1600 as it formed, articulated, and reflected the creative achievements of this Renaissance genius. The course engages building typologies such as the villa, the palace, and the church, explores the theory and practice of urban space-making, and evaluates the authority of the Classical past in the creation of new work. Particular emphasis on Michelangelo’s creative process and on his drawings.

We begin with Medicean Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent and with the Early Renaissance legacy of Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, and Giuliano da Sangallo. Following Michelangelo’s footsteps, we move to High Renaissance Rome, with the achievements of Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo himself. Returning to Florence, we investigate the Mannerist experimentation of Michelangelo and others in the 1520s and consider the acceptance and rejection of this idiom by Giulio Romano in Mantua and Jacopo Sansovino in Venice. Michelangelo’s mature and late styles in Counter- Reformation Rome and the principles of Renaissance space-making at the urban scale conclude the course.

Four class meetings will be discussions of the material presented in lectures. Students should prepare for these by reviewing the lectures and images and reading the relevant sections in Ackerman (see below). Additional readings for each discussion will be presented (no more than ten minutes each) by participants on a rotating basis, and students will also facilitate the discussion by proposing topics within the given theme. For some discussions, a reading will be assigned to the whole class: these appear in bold on the syllabus.

In addition, a final paper or project is required. If a paper, it should have a text of 12 pages plus images, notes and bibliography, on any topic relevant to the course. A project could take any form desired with the consent of the instructor, but would most probably be a digital reconstruction of an unfinished or altered project by Michelangelo or another Renaissance architect.

North American Seacoasts and Landscapes: Discovery Period to the Present

Selected topics in the history of the North American coastal zone, including the seashore as wilderness, as industrial site, as area of recreation, and as artistic subject; the shape of coastal landscape for conflicting uses over time; and the perception of the seashore as marginal zone in literature, photography, painting, film, television, and advertising.

Note: Offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as VES 166.
Prerequisites: GSD 4105 and GSD 4303, or permission of the instructor

Jointly Offered Course: FAS VES 166

Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture

Note, the first meeting on Wednesday, August 31, will take place in Stubbins, room 112, rather than Piper Auditorium.

This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci (see week one) in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a conspectus, a survey of the field, but one in which the underlying nature (made and found), boundaries, contours, and texture of this field—in fact several disparate fields—is made the object of close scrutiny. We will define landscape architecture as we survey it. In pursuing an intermittent chronological narrative, the lectures will place site-specific emphasis on a number of cognate disciplines (hydrology, forestry, geology, agronomy, geography, hunting, inter alia), in the context of endemic and transplanted (see week seven) visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, cities we will be attentive to surrounding formations of discourse (the pastoral, the picturesque, the emblematic, the Adamic and Edenic) that have and continue to imbue them with meaning.

The first meeting of this course, on Wednesday, September 5th, will take place in room 112 (Stubbins) in Gund Hall. The course will meet thereafter in Piper Auditorium.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts I

This course is structured as a dialogue between the historical and theoretical frameworks that have shaped the formulation of architectural principles – what the architectural historian Rudolf Wittkower called the “apparatus of forms” – by means of selected case studies. The organizing principle here is thematic as opposed to chronological, and synoptic rather than merely factual. We treat a selected range of concepts developed by philosophers and historians to explain the Classical and the Baroque as dialectical systems of thought that arise in history but transcend this history to mark modern and postmodern practices.

History and Theory of Urban Interventions

This class provides a high-intensity introduction the history and theory of urban planning practice under modern capitalism.  Building upon an interdisciplinary literature drawn from planning theory and history as well as urban social science (geography, sociology, political science, history), we explore the emergence, development and continual transformation of urban planning in relation to changing configurations of capitalist urbanization, modern state power and sociopolitical struggle.  We also explore (a) the changing sites and targets of planning intervention, from the neighborhood, city and regional scales to those of the metropolis, national economy and beyond, and (b) the evolution of political and institutional struggles regarding its instruments, goals and constituencies.  The course is organized in three main parts.

 

 

 

 

Previously offered as 5101.

This course will meet in Piper Auditorium for its first class meeting on 9/4.

Studies of the Built North American Environment: 1580 to the Present

North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs, and as depicted in fiction, poetry, cartography, television, cinema, and advertising and cybernetic simulation.

Jointly Offered Course: FAS VES 107

 

Selected Current (and Recurrent) Topics in Architecture Theory and Design Practice

A research seminar consisting on assigned readings, presentations, discussions, and design experiments on current (and some ever re-current) topics in architectural theory and design practice.

Anchored on an in-depth reassessment of the role of typology in the process of design, its history, its many reincarnations and its present renewed interest, the seminar will aim to address and explore issues, problems, and questions – some old and some fresh – which will emerge from our inquiries but have also been latent yet unanswered or unexplored.

It is our present understanding of typology, that any attempt at its reformulation within the current architectural discourse will inescapably require a considered response and integration of these interrelated issues: thus Image, figura, wholeness, fragmentation, diagraming, etc. will be specifically explored and played in conjunction with typology in an attempt to achieve a new synthesis and understanding of the architectural design process. Invited guests will visit specific seminars to amplify on the readings and the instructor’s presentations, and to participate in the discussions.

Assignments: a mid-term short paper, an oral presentation to the class and a final short paper or experimental design.  

Students enrolled in this seminar will be expected to have already acquired a broad and solid knowledge of the overall arch of Western Architecture history, from Classical Antiquity to the Present.

Successful performance on this seminar will fulfill M Arch II distributional electives requirements in the area of Theory/Discourse.

Prerequisites: Students must be: a) Second year M Arch II students, b) post-Core M Arch I students, and c) students that have had prior study of Renaissance and Western modern architecture or waved all Architecture Core Program’s Building Texts and Contexts courses.