Public Projection: Projection as a Tool for Expression and Communication in Public Space

The class will focus on the development of original projection projects that can inspire and facilitate artistic expression and cultural communication in public space. 

In their projects students may consider (but not be limited to) experimenting with two kinds of projections: 

1. Projections-installations that transform and assign new meaning to specific architectural and sculptural urban sites; 

2. Wearable, portable, or mobile projections that engage bodily performance in public places. 
Students will learn cultural, technical, and ergonomical aspects of such projects. 

The projects may require relevant cultural research and invite a creative use of software, hardware, and physical modeling. Students will be encouraged to experiment with video projectors and micro-projectors in connection with media devices, such as smart phones, speakers, monitors, sensors, and other input and output components, as well as the use of unconventional materials and sites as projection “screens.” 

The class meetings will include experimentations, development and realization of site-specific and performative projections in public space, presentations, and discussions on relevant artistic and media work, as well as visits to research groups and labs at Harvard, the MIT Media Lab, and in the Boston area. 

Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf Life in the Supermarket Landscape

We tend to assume that supermarkets are static, neutral spaces where little of significance ever happens. The supermarket shelf is actually a highly volatile, hyper-competitive dynamic market landscape. On this shelf, products struggle to maximize every possible advantage, all in a ruthless effort to lure consumers away from competitors. However, what may have once been merely an issue of attention-grabbing graphics applied to packaging has quickly become much more complex. The contemporary consumer in today’s strained economy demands tangible value from the products that he/she consumes. To survive, brands must wrestle with new issues that include the ergonomics of the hand, the complex geometries of the refrigerator, and even sustainable material innovations that determine a product’s afterlife and its impact on the environment. These are multi-scalar, spatial life problems that designers are uniquely suited to address.

This seminar will ask students to operate as brand strategists. However, rather than invent new products, students will instead innovate upon existing brands. Outdated supermarket products will be reconsidered from the top down (brand identity, consumer target, logo, tagline, packaging, etc.). Students will also be required to study their product’s shelf competitors and will learn by presenting their observations through visual arguments rather than those that are explicitly verbal.

Each seminar will open with multimedia presentations on topics such as conducting demographic research, global color psychology, brand architecture, case studies in product launch failures, creating brand touchpoints, crafting a visual argument, and making an effective pitch. These conversations will be supplemented by readings from the business and financial sections of several newspapers, magazine articles, and blog interviews with brand experts.

The deliverables for the seminar will be presented in final review format in front of a cross-disciplinary jury of business luminaries. The output will include a full-scale 3-D print of the product redesign supplemented by graphical data, renderings, and digital animations. Ultimately, the seminar’s ambition is to make real a scenario that finds designers sitting at multiple tables, tackling issues of economics, technology, politics, and media at macro and micro scales.

 

Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation

The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers and an expressive, playful supplement to computer-based labor.

This course will master techniques in hand drawing, refining sensitivity to all details of what one sees and developing capacity to articulate it in a visually convincing and evocative form. The class projects will include work in outdoor and indoor situations and places as well as drawings of live models. In the process of drawing, students will focus on the world of lines, textures, shapes, light, shade, and values. We will use various tools, materials, and artistic techniques including pencils, vine charcoal, markers, ink, and other wet and dry media, later combined with the use of camera, computer renderings, etc.

Throughout the duration of the course, students will complete several larger drawing projects. In addition, a special short assignment will be given at the beginning of each class session. There will be field trips to draw in city interior and exterior places and public settings.

In one nonrepresentational drawing project, students will focus on the formal articulation of emotional life experience. In another project, we will explore the performance of the human body in interaction with elements of the architectural environment. In a final project, students will experiment with the use of wall drawing to visually transform the perception and meaning of specific architectural space.

Work on studio projects will be supplemented by museum visits, presentations, and discussions of relevant examples from art history and contemporary art. Guest artists will be invited as reviewers for the presentation and exhibition of final projects.

For the first class session, please bring soft vine charcoal and a large kneaded eraser. 

Communication for Designers

"The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings. In the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem of what to say and how to say it."
—Edward R. Murrow

This course will survey and critically discuss precedents and techniques for clear and effective communication of design ideas. Throughout the semester, we will study the process of developing, distilling, and articulating a project from initial idea to final presentation.
We will look at examples from within the disciplines of landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design, but will also draw from the fields of graphic design, journalism, narrative nonfiction, advertising, exhibition design, politics, and public speaking.

We will explore the expanded potential of storytelling and how narrative techniques are employed by some of the masters of contemporary design and culture. We will discuss the importance of positioning a project with a particular argument and will develop techniques for effectively researching and communicating this position through written thesis statements, descriptive writing, and the combination of word and image. We will also discuss available media and its uses and limitations, editing and ordering visual material to tell a story, telegraphing a message quickly, public speaking techniques and styles, and constructing images for maximum communication impact. We will study this material with an ongoing critical discussion of several influences on communication including gender, culture, language, and power.

This course is specifically designed to address multiple disciplines, and enrollment is encouraged for students from the landscape architecture, architecture, and urban planning and design programs. Non-studio students are encouraged to join the course.

While the communication principles covered in the course are applicable to all communication platforms, the material we cover in the course focuses specifically on the communication of design ideas—generating clear ideas, describing projects, and making proposals and presentations for design work. The material in the course is delivered via lectures, class discussions, and a series of short, practical assignments and presentations. Assignments, presentations, and in-class discussion require excellent command of spoken and written English. 

 

Landscape Representation III: Landform and Ecological Process

“Landscape Representation III” examines the relationship between terrain and the landscape it supports and engenders. It aspires to explore and challenge the representational conventions of land-forming, and support a landscape architecture design process that posits the landscape as a relational assemblage. It explores a description of the making of landform 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.

Lectures and lab exercises will provide the foundation for exploration and discussion and exposure to a set of digital techniques for analyzing and generating landform processes to advance technical and conceptual ability as well as to provide a point of departure for an in-depth awareness of landscape precedents and representational techniques.

Landscape Representation I

The rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture is inextricably intertwined with the concept of representation. The first in a three-semester sequence, this course introduces students to the unique relationship between landscape architecture and representation through an overview of its history, techniques, and conventions. Emphasizing experimentation and fabrication, this course embraces representation as a highly generative process in the act of designing.

Weekly tutorials, presentations, and discussions reinforce a collaborative space to investigate new skills, strategies, and workflows. Through a series of exercises, students will develop their own iterative representational approach that incorporates both analog and digital methodologies. Coursework will include digital software such as AutoCAD, Rhino, and Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign), as well as physical modeling and hand drawing techniques.

Prerequisites: None.

Spatial Analysis and the Built Environment

Urban planners engage in many complex processes that defy easy representation. This course provides first-semester urban planning students with the graphic and technical skills needed to reason, design, and communicate these processes with geospatial data. This knowledge will be embedded within a larger critical framework that addresses the cultural history of categorization, data collection, and cartography as tools of persuasion for organizing space. 

Visual expression is one of the most compelling methods to describe the physical environment, and students will learn techniques specifically geared toward clarifying social, political, and economic dynamics and how they relate the structuring of spaces. The class will introduce fundamentals of data collecting, data formatting, and data importing into a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment. 

Students will gain familiarity with the technical tools essential to GIS for making maps and exploring relationships in the physical, regulatory, and demographic dimensions of the landscape. Within GIS, students will learn the basics of geospatial processing to produce new forms of knowledge in support of ideas about urban planning and design. Desktop publishing tools, including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will be used to distil ideas into effective graphic presentations. The class will also advance techniques for representing form and space through diagramming and three-dimensional modeling programs. 

Students will be introduced to workflows that demonstrate how to move effectively between data from these platforms and modes of representation. Class lectures will be complemented with technical workshops. 

Objectives: 
1. Establish a conceptual framework for critically engaging the practices of mapping and data visualization. 
2. Provide a basic understanding of tools and techniques needed to reason, design, and communicate with geospatial data. 
3. Develop students’ skill and confidence for visualizing the complex processes, flows, and dependencies unique to the planning discipline. 

Prerequisites: Enrollment in the Urban Planning program. 

Architectural Representation II

Architectural Representation II: Projective Disciplines

This course examines the history, theory, and practice of projective and descriptive geometry. Invented as techniques to draw form, these discourses are the basis of the intractable reciprocity between representation as technique (not merely style), and three-dimensional space. The objective of this course is to uncover the centuries-old and still ongoing relationship between representation and construction. Students will apply techniques of projective systems to translate architectural thought and mediums into an experimental formal language that exhibits relationships between three-dimensional form and flatness.

Through the study of principles of parallel (orthographic) and central (perspective) projection, students will develop literacy in primitive and complex surface geometries—their combinatory aggregation, subdivision, and discretization—as they relate to the most reductive of architectural forms: the planar surface. Ultimately, these techniques will be placed into a productive dialogue with architectural and programmatic imperatives. Students will be introduced to the system of Mongean Double Projection as the exemplary construct that historically organized the architect’s spatial imagination, and understand its influence on contemporary modes of representation and fabrication. Projective systems have developed relationships between masons, carpenters, engineers, industrial designers, mathematicians, cartographers, painters, and architects.

Composed of both lectures and hands-on drawing workshops, the course is equal parts theoretical and technical. Exercises will involve two-dimensional digital drawing, digital modeling, and physical modeling. Additional conceptual and technical texts are provided for optional reading. The course will involve close formal reading of buildings and will introduce students to the practice of reading, drawing, and writing architecture.

This course is required for all first-year MArch I students.  

Architectural Representation I

Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality

Architectural representation is an ideology—a source of ideas and visionary theorizing that has a set of origins and qualities. As such, it’s prudent to study the origins of conventional techniques of architectural representation to be informed about their intentions and the specific contexts that conditioned their development.

Representation is not a conclusive index of an architecture already designed and completed, in the past tense. Rather, representation is integral to the design process and the production of architecture—it is present and future tense: an active participant in exploring and making. It occurs in multiple instances and forms along a project’s evolutionary path. Though not deterministic of the architecture, representation techniques selected to visualize ideas influence the evolution and outcome of the work.

The course initiates with an analysis of conventional representation techniques and their intentions. Using this knowledge as a platform, the class pivots to consider representational riffs emerging in response to the contemporary context—those that explore the limits of our “origin arsenal” and question what each offers for the present. Possible paradigms of architectural spaces generated from representation (rather than the other way around) will be presented and discussed.

“Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality” will involve readings, lectures, and discussions framing the backstory on conventional techniques as well as contemporary critical stances in relation to these techniques. Students will be required to complete weekly representation exercises in relation to each course topic by experimenting with new representations of their design work being produced in parallel courses. These design exercises will be presented to and discussed by the class.

The final project will involve isolating a representation from concurrent studio work and critically evaluating the architectural possibilities that extend from its close reading and revision. The final project will require articulation of the goals of the original representation technique and the specific aims toward originality in the tweaking of this technique, as suited to the design project.

 

Feeding Boston

The development of postindustrial food supply systems parallels the explosion of the modern city. This studio will deal with an ordinary matter whose future impacts every one of the world’s citizens. On the one hand, how we eat is related to global challenges as inequalities of distribution, climate crisis, or cultural sovereignty. On the other, attempts of healthiness in the production, sustainability, on chain distribution, or responsible comestibles consumption, often become individual and solitary actions against a system that responds to structural rules of economy.

Focusing on Greater Boston, the studio will analyze temporal, spatial, and relational patterns of food production, transportation, storage, and sale. The first part of the studio will consist of a thorough analysis in order to set Boston’s foodprint, understood as the complex web of both static and dynamic infrastructures between buildings, urban space, policies, and personal attitudes toward food. We will investigate the capacity of food supply systems to trigger social cohesion, to create local centralities, and to foster urban transformation processes.

At the start of the studio, students will select one of the following topics to develop: 

– Food in central places/food as a commodity; 

– Food in the suburbs/food deserts in Boston; 

– Ethnic food versus luxury imported edibles; 

– Farmers markets, local producers, and locavorist consumers; 

– Food justice, gleaners, ugly food, and freeganism; 

– Mobile food, takeaway, kitchen incubators, and dark kitchens; 

– Food supply infrastructures, warehouses, and coldscapes; 

– Food processing or the loss of freshness in raw foods; and

– Organic and inorganic food waste processing.

This research work will overlap with a continued design process to identify programs and research sites. Three sites with their respective programs will be proposed at the beginning of the course, but alternatives emerging from the analysis developed and equivalent in the ambition of the objectives they raise, will also be encouraged. Representations, both at urban and at detail scales, are posed as the main research and design tools.

Facing a reality in postindustrial metropolises in which food has become a commodity, and in which most people have settled into a passive relationship with edibles as consumers, designers are called on to be actors and to change the rules of future urban food systems.