Erasing the Line While Drawing

. . . la «chora» platonicienne est à la fois matrice et empreinte, notre milieu est à notre égard dans un état de mouvance passive et active: il est le domaine dans lequel nous agissons, et qui porte les marques de cette action, mais il est aussi le domaine qui nous affecte, et auquel nous appartenons de quelque manière . . . —Augustin Berque Ecoumene 

This seminar will explore the capacities of rule-based design in landscape architecture. The goal of the seminar is to challenge the design processes of contemporary practice with the goal to find new methods to approach the inclusion of the logic of the biophysical world in our proposals. Through a series of short weekly exercises, we will introduce a series of living elements, such as water, soil, plants, and animals, and we will visualize different scenarios based in their interactions according to their performance and physiology. We will discover the active and passive qualities of those materials, their physicality, and their capacity to change in relation with other elements. We will introduce limiting factors as a tool of design according to their origin. We will also define the limits of their interchange capacities as potential for design. 

The main goal of the seminar is to establish a clear methodology to apply parametric thinking in landscape architecture and a clear distinction of the different steps of design and workflow between levels of abstraction. We will focus on the difference between the geometrical precision of the parametric and relational language, and the organic nature of the physical result due to the behavior of its elements. 

This collaborative endeavor between our abstract way of thinking and the complex dynamics of natural systems will define a new partnership between humans and nonhumans and will prove that the only possible and fruitful collaboration will happen by erasing the line. 

Domestic Architecture: (Groups of Residences)

The categories listed below do not imply any particular order. I tend to teach everything every time.

Theories in General
Theories with Adjectives
Residential versus Corporate Architecture
Cheap and Expensive Residential
Footprints and elevations
Description as category (bungalow, duplex, etc.)
Description as math
Description as poetry
Description as history
Description as phenomenology
Description as fit and misfit
Description as fenestration.
 
This course is about drawing fast without a ruler or computer—drawing as
thinking. See Richard Serra and Charlie Rose conversation.

FALLOWSCAPES, Territorial Reconfiguration Strategies for Arles, France

On a promontory on the left bank of the lower Rhone River, just before it reaches the Mediterranean Sea, the city of Arles presides over vast plains that, until fairly recently, were characterized as wastelands destined to remain permanently uncultivated. Once a thriving Roman outpost, built almost entirely from limestone quarried nearby, the city retains its original configuration. However, high unemployment for the past several decades calls for a renewed destiny beyond its high-end cultural and historical profile. By contrast, modernity radically changed the city’s hinterland, separating—in the Camargue Delta—salt from fresh water, and from sea, and redistributing fresh water from Alpine rivers into a filigree of canals that turned the arid Crau plain into a productive landscape. In the seams that formed between waterways, orchards, rice fields, quarries, logistics sites, infrastructures, and drainage ways, a fallowscape lies in a weird state of neglect. This studio will reconsider the interactions between systems and landscapes according to different scales, limits, time, and material, advocating for territorial reconfiguration strategies that investigate the existing and the potential, in order to face dramatic ecological threats and an enduring social crisis. All these issues and more will be brought together in the format of a libretto, articulating mapping, narratives, time-planning and designs in an open, interdisciplinary form.

The Landscape We Eat

“A recipe is more than the food it is made of: the geography of our dinner spills off of the plate.”

“The Landscape We Eat” seeks to explore the relationship between food systems and their geomorphology, climate, infrastructure, time, and culture.

During the 20th century, the transformation of global food production and its processes have homogenized most of the earth’s productive landscapes, diminishing their complexity and impoverishing their ecosystems. This transformation has been so thorough and pervasive that it is increasingly difficult to imagine how things could be any other way.

In order to think more creatively about this problem, we will focus our attention on La Camargue, an agricultural region of Southern France. In La Camargue, a complex system of canals moves fresh water from the delta to the Mediterranean Sea, which mediates between the conflicting requirements of the region’s primary products, such as poultry, asparagus, rice, and salt. By “thinking through drawing,” this seminar will explore the metabolic relations that construct both landscapes of production and landscapes of consumption in order to better understand the parameters of the problem that global food production confronts us with.

The course will be structured in five parts. In the first exploration, landscapes of production for selected ingredients will be drawn through geomorphology, climate, and soil in order to situate ingredients in their nonhuman milieu. In the second part, we will expand this lens to include the technical milieu of tools and infrastructure that constructs specific landscape relations in La Comargue. In the third “zoom,” we will test our insights in relation to time, thinking historically about the economic and cultural forces that have shaped the territory, and that connect it to the globe. If in the third zoom we have moved outward, the fourth zoom will move radically inward, considering the genetics, chemistry, and microscopic configurations of specific ingredients in order to, again, rethink the time and space of food production. Finally, each student will choose a recipe that distills and reveals their research over the course of the semester. Each recipe will be a heuristic device we will use to teach each other what we have learned, to see what is on the plate in a new way, and to better understand the geographies that overflow.

Curatorial Practice: Curating Contemporary Art

Today, everybody is a curator—we supposedly curate our meals, our social media feeds, and our outfits. But what does it mean to curate exhibitions of contemporary art today? This course examines the working processes of organizing exhibitions within the field of contemporary visual arts and the context of art institutions. The aim is to familiarize students with various aspects of exhibition-making ranging from conceptual development to the physical realization of exhibition. This course introduces to and engages students in a broad spectrum of exhibition presentations and institutional contexts, with a focus on different exhibition typologies, ideas of audience engagement, curatorial responsibility, working with artists, questions of history and the contemporary moment, and risk-taking. 

This course offers an opportunity for students to learn the basic theoretical and practical parameters of curating exhibitions. The course will be organized around case studies of major exhibitions organized by both Eva Respini and Dan Byers at a broad range of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, ICA/Boston, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, as well as those curated by select guest lecturers. Together, we will explore?various curatorial methodologies and strategies for a variety of exhibitions typologies including monographic, thematic, collection presentation, biennial, performance, media-based and interactive projects, artist residencies and new commissions, performance, and nontraditional sites for exhibitions including the public realm and publications. We will also look at social practice and alternative or artist-run spaces. Through readings and discussion, viewing assignments and journals, field trips, and guest lectures, we will critically analyze the role of curators and art institutions, and examine the ways contemporary art and its reception in exhibition engages with broader social, cultural, and political issues.

Throughout the semester, students will develop ideas and parameters for an exhibition proposal culminating in a final group presentation that will include a proposal, preliminary list of artists, an exhibition design, and work plan. Instructors will alternate teaching classes, with a few key sessions taught together. Additionally, some sessions will take place at Boston-area museums and arts organizations.

 

Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning in the Developing World

This course starts from the premise that urban politics and governance arrangements shape the definition, form, and practice of planning, and therefore its outcomes. Using a focus on cities in the developing world, the course examines an array of governance structures (centralized versus decentralized institutions, local versus national states, participatory budgeting, etc.) and political conditions (democracy versus authoritarianism, neoliberal versus populist versus leftist party politics, social movements) that are relatively common to cities of the global south. In addition to assessing the impacts of these structures and conditions on urban policy formation and implementation, the course asks which governance arrangements and/or political contexts are more or less likely to produce equitable, inclusive, and sustainable urban environments. To address these questions, the course is structured around a comparative analysis of theories and cases that give us the basis for documenting the ways that politics affect urban policy and the built environment of the city more generally. The course’s critical approach to case studies and policy prescriptions will also prepare students to formulate relevant planning strategies in the future. Among a range of policy domains, special attention is paid to transportation, housing, megaproject development, municipal financing, and disaster mitigation, with most examples drawn from Latin America, South Asia, and East Asia. 

Market Analysis and Urban Economics

This course examines contemporary real estate trends and cycles. It introduces students to the concepts, models, and methods used to analyze how economic forces impact (re)development processes, land values, and locational patterns in urban property markets. The course is structured as lectures and workshops. Readings draw from classic, recent, and current works in urban economics, planning, and academic real estate literatures to link contemporary real estate dynamics to their historical and theoretical foundations. In-class workshops develop technical skills used to analyze project feasibility, map changing demographic patterns, identify new markets, and measure investment opportunities. Guest lectures by active real estate professionals will offer students the opportunity to learn from practitioners currently operating in the marketplace. 

Major themes of the course include: 

– Core economic concepts such as rent, agglomeration, and externalities, as well as their spatial correlates; 

– The relationship between the global economy and local property markets; 

– The impact changing demographic, environmental, political, and economic patterns have on cities; 

– How equity and debt influence leasing and capital markets for commercial, industrial, retail, and residential properties; 

– State regulation, incentives, and intervention into real estate markets; and 

– Quantitative and qualitative techniques used to evaluate the impact of the above processes. 

Evaluation: Based on weekly problem sets, take-home assignments, an in-class midterm, and a final project/paper. 

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to: 

– Measure, evaluate, and understand real estate market forces that shape and influence urban planning and design, and determine the success or failure of an architect’s/designer's/urban planner’s vision or project; 

– Analyze how urban land and real estate markets function and compete in the global economy; and 

– Evaluate markets with regard to the macro and micro aspects of a specific project. 

The course assumes no previous economic knowledge or training. There will be $45 fee for software licensing. 

Modern Housing and Urban Districts: Concepts, Cases and Comparisons

This seminar course will deal with “modern housing” covering a period primarily from 1990 to the present. It will engage with “urban districts” in so far as housing projects under discussion contribute to the making of these districts or are shaped by the districts in which they are placed. Examples will also be drawn from different cultural contexts with emphases on Europe, North America, and East Asia, although also including examples from Latin America, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Course format:

The course will begin with discussion of several broad topics germane to design issues in contemporary housing, including ideas of community and what constitutes a dwelling community from various cultural perspectives; territories and types dealing with underlying urban conditions that play host to contemporary housing; interior and other landscapes that chart the diversity of contemporary living; and expressive and representational issues particularly concerning place-specific and inherently situated aspects of dwelling alongside dynamic, perennially future-oriented dimensions of living.

This broad topical discussion will be followed by case studies, roughly combining underlying urban conditions and characteristics with architectural projects. Within each case study, two particular contemporary examples will provide the primary focus, although others will be introduced to flesh out necessary historical circumstances and lineages of housing development.

Along with some selected textual readings, these topics will include:

1. Urban block shapers;

2. Housing and landscapes;

3. Superblock configurations;

4. Tall towers;

5. Big buildings and submultiples;

6. Infrastructural engagements;

7. Indigenous reinterpretations;

8. Infill interventions;

9. Housing of special populations; and

10. Mat buildings.

Concluding discussion will examine various dimensions across projects and urban conditions, in part to identify strengths and weaknesses, but also to set contemporary housing aside from that of modern housing in prior eras. Student participation will be by way of attendance, discussion, and especially case study presentation and documentation.

Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design

Minneapolis Riverfront & Medford Urban Mixed-Use Redevelopment

This field study course is designed to provide students with an understanding of the dynamics and complexities of real-world development challenges that create contemporary urban physical environments. The course emphasizes the integration of design and financial feasibility with development aspects of projects that respond to realistic market demand and political, environmental, and other regulatory constraints—how financial implications affect planning and design, and vice versa. The course is intended for real estate professionals, architects, urban planners, urban designers, and landscape architects to broaden their understanding of urban development issues and public-private development implementation strategies, as well as to improve their skills in design and financial analysis. This year there will be two field studies: Minneapolis and Medford, Massachusetts.

In Minneapolis, students will work on redeveloping the riverfront and riverfront park at St. Anthony Falls. The park design and development will be a highly programmed urban space with trails, pedestrian bridges, parking, restaurants, and small retail. The falls are adjacent to downtown where students will also work on rethinking uses that will enliven the entire area, which includes a large soon-to-be vacated post office and other buildings with historic interest. Students will work closely with the University of Minnesota Urban Design Center and alumni who are active in Minneapolis planning and development.

In Medford, students will focus on redeveloping a large shopping center site at the intersection of Route 16 and Route 28—a transit-oriented intersection serviced by the Orange Line and visible to 200,000 cars per day. The site is close to the new casino in Everett and down the street from new mixed-use development along the Mystic River. Students will work closely with the owners of two of the shopping centers as well as the city to produce financially feasible and politically viable redevelopment plans.
 

Travel note:

The enrollment for this course is unlimited, but 10 students will be selected to participate in a Minneapolis, MN trip via the limited enrollment course lottery. Other enrolled students will participate in the Medford, MA field study. Students traveling to Minneapolis, MN will be term-billed $150 and travel September 30 – October 4. Students waitlisted in the limited enrollment course lottery will be considered for the travel spots if the initial 10 students opt out of traveling. After the lottery to determine, this course will be changed to an open enrollment lecture course.  Students may travel in only one course or studio in a given term and should refer to traveling seminar policies distributed via email.

 

 

 

 

Transformable Design Methods

Architects have long imagined a built environment that is fundamentally dynamic. Portable buildings, retractable coverings, kinetic facades, and spaces that morph: these transformable structures are part of the lexicon of architectural possibilities. Yet despite this persistent interest, examples of dynamic buildings are few, and architectural design remains focused on static objects. 

This course is intended for students interested in how to create products, buildings, and environments that utilize physical transformation to realize enhanced performance and engagement. We will cover the theory, methodology, and application of “transformable design.” In this course, you will learn how transformation itself is a design parameter that can be shaped, crafted, and optimized. 

Creating a mechanism that converts a simple push or pull into an overall metamorphosis of its size and shape is based on kinematics—the foundation of mechanical design. Using these techniques, students will learn how to program an object’s behavior by designing its form. 

Building on this design foundation, we will explore how to take this new discipline into the real world. From my own practice, we will draw on a series of pioneering projects for public art, stage sets, deployable shelters, adaptive facades, and retractable roofs. We will learn how these projects were developed and also look at case studies of historic and contemporary practitioners in this field. 

It is an exciting time to practice this new discipline. New technologies are enabling us to implement transformable strategies in unprecedented ways. We will learn about parametric algorithms to simulate physical movement, digital fabrication techniques for mechanisms, use of inexpensive actuators and control systems, and building mechanical function through multimaterial hybrids. 

Course format: Our emphasis goes beyond technology, and we will apply these practical methods to your creative designs. As a seminar/workshop, course assignments will be staged in two parts. For the first part, students will create a series of mechanism studies to reinforce understanding of lecture topics and provide a hands-on familiarity with mechanical interaction. During the second half, students will form groups to organize final projects that demonstrate physical transformation. Past projects have included deployable pavilions, dynamic facades, and other interactive installations. These projects are exciting opportunities not only to think about but actually demonstrate new possibilities for transformable architecture.