Werewolf: Architectures of Change
While the figure of Vitruvian man has long served as a metaphorical reference for an architecture evolved through design, but fixed in its own lifetime, this seminar considers an architecture where shape-shifting, changes of state, mutation, reskinning, and decomposition are not only anticipated, but celebrated. Dethroning the human figure, the seminar proposes more animalistic, if not monstrous, figureheads for the discipline.
Typically considered to be a singular, solid, and fixed entity, architecture has one perfect state, from which it will inevitably deteriorate. Occupation, movement, additions, and weathering are often considered a sad but inevitable fate. They mutilate and disfigure the ideal form of the building as conceived by the architect, transforming it into something flawed. At the same time, culture, climate, and technology are all dynamic and evolving systems with which a building must interface. In a world where stasis and ideals reign, this seminar will explore an architecture of corresponding to and guided by the ceaseless forces of evolution, extinction, nature, and the machine.
Through examination of both assigned and found texts, as well as key works of architecture, students will develop their own drawn and written brief manifestoes of change using key texts and examples from the built world.
Cyclical City: Landscape and the Longview
Cyclical City is a seminar about the evolution of cities.
Cities are enticingly rich and complex. They are entropic and unpredictable places with long histories of development. They are by definition in constant flux, responding to economic, social and environmental trends, alternating between periods of sprawl and periods of spatial concentration. This dialectic is evident within a region as a whole, a single city and even an individual block or built structure, and it is these juxtapositions that the richness and complexity is born and nurtured. What results is an interwoven repository of what might be called hybrid cityscape, a layering of built fabric and open space tied together by waterways, rails, roads, utilities and other systems.
In this course, we will investigate these long histories of development and un-development through landscape-driven lenses with the aims of debunking typical urban myths. Cities develop reputations that are subjective and often damaging. Our goal is to understand sites with nuance and specificity. We will do this through lecture, reading, case study, discussion, drawing and critique. The main work of the course will be cartographic, towards a collective atlas of numerous cities and spaces around the world. We will draw at multiple scales from the territory to the site to the individual material. The drawings will be accompanied by short texts. Through a set of common investigations, students will interrogate a city of their own choosing.
The course is open to all, without prerequisite.
Spaces of Solidarity
‘Spaces of Solidarity’ aims at examining community-driven spaces and spatial processes that pool and share resources to build social cohesion in times of crisis or absence of government, at a variety of scales, places, and contexts. ‘Spaces of Solidarity’ attempts to explore environments of community formation and open up a dialogue on the agency of design in enacting and facilitating actions of solidarity.
Solidarity is equally a product of imagination and pragmatism. One must be able to imagine forms of human coexistence but must also be able to produce spaces and to coordinate actual processes for distributing resources and creating access to services. Production of solidarity involves all spatial scales of human communities: one can have solidarity with his or her peers, a society can demonstrate collective solidarity towards those in need and states can show solidarity towards each other or the natural world.
Values of solidarity extend beyond survival; they enable us to build relations with multiple communities and with strangers, develop cultures, a commons, economic or ecological systems, and designs.
‘Spaces of Solidarity’ will look at individuals and communities coming together and generating new forms of mutual support. Examples include the Women’s March, Sanctuary Cities, support for refugees along the shores of Greece, Tent Cities, Hotel Walmart, Boston's Methadone Mile, and more.
The primary goal of this course is to explore the built environment from the perspective of solidarity: accumulating showcases, sharing methods and forming design tools to make visible and enact spaces and imaginaries of solidarity. We will examine and propose Spaces of Solidarity from multiple perspectives and disciplines, and in a variety of scales and territories. At the end of the semester we will produce an online publication at: www.spacesofsolidarity.org.
An Unsentimental Look at Architecture and Social Craft
Designers of the built environment have had an on-again/off-again relationship with social agency. Progressive design and social outcomes were closely linked in early modernism. These interests realigned again under much different circumstances in the 60’s and 70’s. Now, we are again witnessing an elevated interest in their linkage. To date, however, we lack the ability to articulate what forms of social impact are actually within the architect’s scope. The majority of the praise given to projects of perceived societal value is limited to the project’s social benefit program or its underserved community context. The problem with these critiques is that they reveal little about how the architect’s design decisions have created any greater or lesser social value. This course will have you move beyond program and context, to speculate how you can address social impact opportunities within mainstream practice.
Because this area of knowledge is so nascent, we will use dialog as the exploratory tool and final products of the course. The challenge of this course is to develop your own inquiries into social agency and learn to leverage your agency as a student to influence the discourse within the school. Working in small teams, your final deliverable is to curate an action that influences the conversation concerning the social agenda within the GSD and beyond. You will choose the focus of the discourse and you will have room to pursue both conventional and unconventional methods of engagement. Projects could include, film, open letters, installations, online campaigns, or dinner parties. Throughout the semester, you will meet with me or the TAs to discuss the development of your project. Success will be determined by the quality of debate you are able to generate round the issue you are raising.
Classes will explore different approaches and tools for negotiating our agency through case studies and guest speakers. You will be required to read short case studies and brief weekly readings. Once over the semester, you will each be asked to analyse a particular project and present it to the class. The task is to evaluate the options available to the designers as well as the choices they made.
While this course is within the architecture program, we will consider design interventions at many scales and I welcome students from all disciplines to join the course.
The Idea of Environment
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations and actions that calls them to intervene – i.e., to make a plan, solve a problem, create a product, or strategize a process. They use various measures to assess and project their interventions from beauty and efficiency to systems and sustainability. Increasing volatility and uncertainty of the environment, however, alongside a growing sense and presence of crises and disasters has seen the rise today of the idea of resilience as a measure of intervention.
This class explores the environment through six forms by which it is imaged and imagined, defended and critiqued, planned and designed. Each gathers distinct modes of representation, means of visualization, and measures by which they are engaged, planned and designed. The six forms of environment are:
1. Geographic Space:
maps and plans; Apollo’s Eye; and the measure of space/time
2. Urban Infrastructure:
cities and regions; Geddes’ Valley Section; and the measure of solution/failure
3. Cultural Context:
histories and texts; Reflective Gaze; and the measure of meaning/difference
4. Development Trajectory:
needs and economies; Homo Economicus; and the measure of growth/sustainability
5. Ecological Relations:
natures and systems; Thoreau’s Walking; and the measure of dependency/autonomy
6. Temporal Dynamics:
seas and rivers; Aqua Fluxus; and the measure of complexity/resilience
The course is designed as a lecture + seminar + workshop. Each class will begin with a presentation by the instructor that situates the idea of environment in an argumentative framework. It will serve to frame a class discussion informed by readings, life experiences, and design possibilities. The last hour will be spent critiquing and developing student's projects on articulating particular risk environments toward resilience.
Evaluation: Contribution to class discussions, biweekly contribution to workshop, and final project presented in an exhibition/review format.
Culture, Conservation and Design
This proseminar addresses issues of Critical Conservation, an evolving discipline that illuminates the bridge between Cultural Meaning, Identity and Context as part of the design process. Critical Conservation explores the multiple forces that underlie contemporary life and the creation of places. The field addresses issues of social justice as applied to the design of places: whose history is being told; whose future is being created; who benefits; who is included and excluded by the process of creating new designs in an existing context? The goal of the course is to broaden the student’s understanding of the cultural dimensions of a place and to understand how we use / misuse the past and how we value the present.
The course is organized around three topics. The Dynamic Present addresses the inherent dynamism of modernity and tradition in creating personal and group identities. It investigates questions about the past, history, permanence, temporality, obsolescence and authenticity and applies them to understanding the identity of places. Place & Cultural Identity addresses the social construction of meaning associated with group identities, places, artifacts and history. Issues include history, heritage, nostalgia, authenticity and their intersection with regulatory agencies and preservation standards that are used to attempt to control context by design and identity narratives. Conservation Uses & Abuses addresses how conservation is used to create, control, and transform places. The roles of ancestor worship, government use of racial zoning, urban renewal, creation of tourist destinations, the stigmatization of the other, and private use of exclusionary amenities will be examined to understand how groups use underlying agendas to manifest power, shape and enforce group identity and exclude the other. The seminar is open to all GSD students and required for Critical Conservation students. There are no prerequisites. Course work includes a one-page synthesis of weekly reading assignments, three case study presentations with short papers and a paper / presentation of a final research project framed in the topics explored in the seminar.
Theories of Landscape as Urbanism
This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics describing landscape’s embeddedness in processes of urbanization as well as economic transformations informing the shape of the city. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and case study projects, students will be introduced to a reading of landscape through the lenses of capital, labor, material, subject, and environment. The first half of the course revisits the origins of landscape in response to the societal and environmental challenges of industrialization and the attendant transformations in industrial economy shaping the modern metropolis. The second half of the course repositions recent discourse on landscape as urbanism in relation to the economic and territorial transformations associated with ongoing urbanization at the planetary scale.
The first quarter of the course introduces the origins of landscape as a genre of painting and the invention of the ‘new art’ of landscape architecture as responses to urbanization and their attendant social, economic, and cultural transformations. This portion of the course describes the material and cultural contexts in which landscape was conceived as well as the sites and subjects it invoked. The second quarter of the course describes the emergence of city planning from within landscape architecture and the subsequent impoverishment of the field in the absence of its urban contents. This portion of the course introduces the aspirations and implications of ecologically informed regional planning in the 20th century, as well as the ongoing ideological effects of that agenda in the context of neoliberalism.
The third quarter of the course introduces the discourse and practices of landscape urbanism over the past two decades. This portion of the course surveys the discursive and projective potentials of an ecological urbanism, as distinct from those of ecological planning, and speculates on the recent formulation of projective ecologies, among other discursive formations shaping the field. The final quarter of the course follows the transition from region to territory, and from regional urbanization to planetary urbanization. This portion of the course describes landscape’s role as a medium of cultural production and critical revelation in relation to the increased scale and scope of anthropogenic impacts across the planet.
The course meets weekly on Friday afternoons in small groups for discussion sections (12:00-1:00 or 1:00-2:00) and as a group for class lectures (2:00-5:00). Members of the course will be invited to contribute to discussions, prepare brief response papers, and complete an extended essay on a topic attendant to the course content at the end of the term. The course invites candidates from the Master in Landscape Architecture Program as well as candidates in the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology stream of the Master in Design Studies Program.
Proseminar in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology
This proseminar is intended for Master in Design Studies (MDES) candidates entering the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology (ULE) stream as well as Master in Landscape Architecture candidates entering the post-professional (MLA II) Program.
The seminar advances design research as an emerging and innovative form of knowledge production to inspire both new practices of making cities and to initiate diverse forms of theoretical and empirical scholarship. After defining design and design research as contrasting and complimentary ways of thinking, the seminar introduces various modes of research on urbanism and urbanization and surveys a range of discursive and disciplinary models for the production of knowledge on cities.
Discussions and presentations of the theories and methods of design research will lead to the building of a critical research question in response to current challenges facing urbanization and the making of cities.
The seminar meets weekly for three hours, beginning with a presentation and seminar discussion, followed by individual student presentations and tutorial skill sessions. A fundamental task of the seminar is to introduce students to the research on urbanism and urbanization across the pedagogic and disciplinary agendas of the school. Individual GSD faculty will be invited to introduce and discuss their work. From seminar discussions, student presentations, and external input from the faculty, individuals will begin to fashion their own agenda for research at the GSD. By the end of the term candidates will present an initial draft proposal for their research topic at the school.
Urban Design Proseminar
The proseminar is a forum for conversation on contemporary urban design. It is structured around three overlapping discussions: the formation of the discipline, critiques of urban design, and projections and speculations on the future of the discipline. Theory and practice are contextualized in a way that is not limited to the study of the physical city but includes operations made on the city as well as topics in related fields. The course examines the contested terrain of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, with engineering, geography, sociology, and scientific, cultural, and historical disciplines. Although all the mechanisms for considering the city cannot be covered within the constraints of the proseminar, the focus will be on developing a critical perspective that comes from a deeper understanding of theory, practice, and speculation. Presentations by guest GSD and Harvard faculty, together with site visits, will contextualize urban design today and its range of opportunities and potential. The proseminar requires active engagement with discussions and assignments, and provides a foundation for further course and studio work at the GSD.
Expectations: The emphasis of the course is on engagement: with the readings, the guests, and with the discussions.
Grading: Class participation (30%), Response Papers (40%), Assignment 1 (10%), Assignment 2 (20%). Late assignments will not be accepted unless agreed in advance with the instructor or, in the case of illness, accompanied with a medical certificate.
MArch II Proseminar
This course provides a forum for critical discussion of contemporary design practices that is exploratory and speculative in nature. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and debate and prepares students to develop research interests and to formulate positions in architecture.
Through inquiries based upon readings, analysis of architectural projects, and presentations given by the instructor, faculty of the Department of Architecture, and visitors, the course seeks to expand the student’s understanding of the cultural context that informs the production of architecture and the development of critical interpretations of site, program, service, and research.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in the MArch II program.