Optimizing Facade Performance: A Deep Dive on Design Decisions

Building envelopes are at the intersection of design, performance, and occupant experience in architectural design. Facades influence many aspects of building performance, from energy usage to comfort, daylight, natural ventilation, and connections to the exterior. How does one balance these sometimes competing priorities while trying to realize a design vision for a project? This course is a deep dive focused on the performance of building envelopes based on in-depth discussions of the drivers for performance and recent research in building envelopes. Examples of research topics covered in the course range from thermal bridging and its impact on building energy usage to glazing design and selection and its effect on occupant thermal comfort. The course will utilize case studies of facade designs to explore the interplay between these performance goals and how they may get translated and applied in a building design. It will also explore the application of tools and simulations such as climate analysis or heat flow simulations of details that can be utilized to inform envelope design decisions. 

Class format: A balance of lectures, case studies, workshops, and design discussion as the vehicles to explore these issues. The coursework will primarily entail case study explorations and a design project where students will develop a building envelope design for a project selected through a discussion with the professor, such as a studio project or research interest. 

Students from all GSD disciplines are encouraged to participate. 

Prerequisites: None, however prior experience in energy modeling and daylight simulation or current enrollment in 6125, “Building Simulation,” is strongly encouraged. 

Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology

This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources. Emphasis will be placed on both the science and the application of this science in designs for projects involving a wide range of interactions with water including coastlines, inland rivers and lakes, and urban stormwater. With ongoing global changes in climate, urbanization, and the use of water for energy and food production, the relationship between humans and water will continue to grow and evolve. Students will come away from this course with a better understanding of this evolution and how designs can account for hydrologic change and adaptation. While many varied case studies from around the United States and internationally will be discussed throughout the semester, much of the course content and assignments will involve hydrology, stormwater, and sea level rise in the Charles River and Boston Harbor, river and wetland restoration in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and stormwater and low-impact design in Washington, DC. 

Discussion of these focus areas will include design challenges, social issues, permitting, and the implementation process. Students will come away with a better understanding of how projects go from conceptual design to a constructed site. Students will be encouraged to bring water and ecology-related challenges from other courses, studios, or projects to the class for an open discussion. Hands-on exercises include watershed delineation, hydrologic calculations to estimate runoff and groundwater infiltration and flow, design exercises developing recommendations for stormwater management best practices and low-impact design (LID) for a neighborhood in Washington, DC, and research and design exercises for river restoration projects. 

Attendance at two field trips with hands-on field sampling will be mandatory: a two-day weekend field trip to Plymouth and an in-class fieldtrip to the Alewife stormwater facility. Assignments focused on the restoration sites in Plymouth will culminate in a conceptual design of a river and wetland restoration project. 

Evaluation: Based on class attendance and participation (including field trips), short written assignments, quizzes, focused design exercises, and a semester-long project. 

Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation

Maps do not represent reality, they create it. As a fundamental part of the design process, the act of mapping results in highly authored views of a site. By choosing what features, forces, and flows to highlight—and implicitly, which to exclude—the designer first creates the reality into which their intervention will be situated and discussed. Furthermore, the usage and materiality of space is increasingly measured, categorized, and circulated by all manners of institutions; these competing data representations often become the primary way of understanding and responding to a site. Designers are in the difficult position of approaching these geographic datasets critically while simultaneously employing them in their work. It is not enough to represent complicated networks of site forces and interactions as a neutral backdrop to one's design; we are tasked with actively shaping them. 

It is within the framework of a highly authored design process that this course presents the fundamentals of geographic analysis and visualization. 

Over the course of a semester, students will work extensively with techniques of geospatial analysis in GIS. Using ESRI's ArcMap software, we will explore data sources, data models, topological overlays, map algebra, spatial statistics, terrain analysis, and suitability modeling, among others. 

Students will learn how to embed these techniques within larger design workflows. We will address the visualization of spatial analysis in its various forms using Illustrator, Photoshop, and physical modeling. We will also treat mapping as an active part of the design process—where the speculative use of spatial data provides the context for 2-D and 3-D design proposals in Rhino. These designs will then feed back into the GIS environment as additional layers for analysis and modeling. 

Lastly, a portion of the semester will be devoted to visualizing geospatial data using the Processing language. The basics of coding with Processing will be taught with a specific focus on representing analysis produced by students in the GIS environment. 

Course format: Each week will consist of a skills workshop devoted to a technique or workflow, and a lecture that situates these techniques critically in relationship to design. Students will be expected to complete weekly mapping exercises and short reading assignments in preparation for the class. During the semester, there will be two main projects combining advanced mapping techniques with a student’s own research interests. 

Prerequisites: None. No previous experience with ArcMap or Processing is assumed. Confidence with Rhino, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop is preferred. 

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Construction Systems

This course introduces students to construction systems with the ambition to shape the perception of a designer’s agency in relationship to them. An overview of construction systems will be provided including an overview of wall, roof, envelope, and foundation systems. Students will discover construction systems through lectures and by applying methods of dissection, drawing, and fabrication of selected systems. Construction systems are further defined when they are formed through regimes of governance, labor, logistics, energy, carbon, geology, tools, and time. 

Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society I

Developing and implementing good solutions to real problems facing human society requires a broad understanding of the relationships between technology innovation, science, manufacturing, design thinking, environment, sustainability, culture, aesthetics, business, public policy, and government. Various frameworks for understanding these complex relationships within the context of real-world problems will be explored and discussed. 

Course Format: Assigned readings, case studies, research assignments, exercises, and class discussions. 

Prerequisites: This course is for students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering (MDE) graduate program. MDE students should enroll in GSD PRO 7231. A small number of other students may be allowed to enroll by permission of instructor. 

GSD PRO 7231 and 7232 are the same as FAS SEAS ES 236a and ES 236b. These courses are a two-course sequence.

This course is held at SEAS, room MD 119. 

Foundations of Practice

For students in the fifth semester of the MArch I degree program, this course examines models and issues that define contemporary professional practice. Requiring students to examine a broad range of legal, financial, organizational, and ethical topics, the course prepares students to engage and lead in the production of the built environment. The course takes advantage of the multidisciplinary programs of the GSD, bringing a wide breath of experienced professionals to share insights and develop the tools necessary for productive collaborations within the complex space of specific professional, practical, and disciplinary obligations. 

Each week the course explores professional practice through a critical reading of primary texts that frame key concepts and models, as well as relevant case studies and applications for stress testing the boundaries of these models. 

Course format: Combination of lectures, guest lectures, and workshops. Each subject area contains supplemental material that provides standard references and supplemental case studies that highlight the boundaries and thresholds of practice. This is intended to provide students with an exposure to critical aspects of practice—from accounting to contracting and from project delivery to professional ethics. In addition, students will explore the wide-ranging roles of respective professional associations in shaping contractual relationships, public policy, and the parameters of practice itself. In more immediate terms, students will explore: 

– Client communications and engagement; 

– The drafting and execution of standard AIA contract series; 

– The interpretation and due process considerations of local government regulations; 

– The strategic advancement of public design reviews or public procurement opportunities; and 

– The financial economics of operating a practice. 

Connecting each of these dimensions of practice are the codes of professional ethics and various elements of statutory and case law that collectively define the professional standard of care. The intent is for students to develop a reflexive understanding of their duty to clients, third-party consultants, and the general public consistent with their obligations as design professionals and community leaders. This course serves as a foundation from which students may develop further interests and skills in the GSD’s professional practice distributional elective course offerings. 

 

  

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

This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci 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 visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, and 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. 

Proseminar in Landscape Architecture

The proseminar introduces MLA II students to a range of theories and methods in landscape architecture and their implications for practice and research. The focus is on developing a critical perspective that comes from a deeper understanding of landscape architecture theory, methods, and speculation. The proseminar provides a foundation for further course and studio work at the GSD and upon completion of the seminar participants will have articulated a specific research question to pursue in the coming semesters. 

Classes will typically consist of a presentation by landscape architecture faculty followed by a discussion of assigned readings and a tutorial on a specific skill, resource, or research question. Each student will develop and present their own research interests within the context of the topics discussed in the seminar. Evaluation will be based on weekly response papers, participation in class sessions, a seminar presentation, and final research paper. 

Participation in the seminar is limited to MLA II students. 

Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD

This seminar is intended to provide the theoretical and methodological foundation for completing a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a solid thesis proposal and have the necessary intellectual foundation to complete their thesis by the end of the academic year. Over the semester, students will identify and refine their thesis topic, solidify their relationship with a thesis advisor, and produce a thesis proposal. Weekly sessions will involve discussions of relevant readings and exploration of emergent student work. As a forum for the exchange of work in progress, the seminar will allow students to share their ideas and get feedback on the development of their thesis from their peers, visiting critics and reviewers, and faculty. 

The seminar will begin by introducing the thesis as a conceptual frame and by identifying the key elements that cut across the different types of theses that might be produced by students, whether textual, design-focused, or based in some other medium, such as film. It will then address the following issues, among others: topic and question identification, research methods, case selection, the craft of thesis production, managing the student-advisor relationship, and techniques for verbally defending a thesis. 

Students will complete weekly assignments relevant to their thesis and present in class on most weeks. Since the seminar will be run as a graduate seminar, students will be expected to provide critical and thoughtful responses to their peers’ work and engage in informed and mature discussion of the issues found in the readings. The course will include a midterm and final review of students’ proposals, to be attended by faculty and critics. 

Art, Design and the Public Domain Proseminar

This seminar is intended to serve as a theoretical and practical laboratory for the development of student ideas and concepts toward their artistic, design, and research projects. The course will explore artistic and design methodologies that aim at bringing new meaning to public space, contribute to the lives of people in an urban environment, and inspire the democratic process. The course will focus on informed review and discussion of contemporary art and design practices and related larger theoretical and critical discourse enhanced by students’ own project proposals and explorations. The seminar will also be a discussion forum for further development of the GSD’s MDes program in Art, Design, and the Public Domain. 

Student interests and instructor suggestions will become a base for assigned readings, presentations, and projects. Some seminar sessions will include appearances and participation by invited fellows, researchers, artists, and curators, as well as film screenings and field visits. 

In the course of readings, discussions, presentations and in the process of working on their own artistic and design project proposals, the students will explore issues and concepts of public domain, public space, public sphere, public place, the inner public, the political, “Agonistic Democracy,” the event, parrhesia, “Feminine Law”, the avant-garde, urban intervention, spatial practice, memory, memorial and monument, conflict transformation, trauma and recovery, public testimony, the “stranger,” site specificity and audience specificity, relational aesthetics, theater and pedagogy of “the oppressed,” epic theater, psychogeography, nomadology, interrogative design, strategy and tactics, transitional object, “good enough mother,” participation, responsiveness and interactivity, cultural prosthetics, and others.