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 course uses historical and analytical readings and case studies to address several major theoretical questions concerning the aims and outcomes of urban interventions. The overall theme is the relationship at a given historical moment between conscious public policy and the spatial, economic, social, and political framework in which it operates and which it affects. To what extent are planning, design, and policy simply the resultant of social forces and to what degree do they shape those forces? Where do planners and policy makers derive their goals? What is the relationship between the goal-setting process, the quality of policy, and the character of cities and regions? What are the values that should govern practice? How can planners enhance their control over social outputs, and, in turn, by what mechanisms should the public control them? Who benefits from urban and regional planning? What is the relationship between race and gender and urban outcomes?
Topics include: the history of urban planning and its relationship with the history of urban development; a comparison of American, European, and Asian examples of urban interventions; development theory; social construction; neoliberalism; cities and social inequality; technological possibilities; and environmental quality.
The course is of general relevance to anyone entering the design and planning professions or interested in urban studies as well as to doctoral students in these fields. It connects theories, histories, and debates about planning to contemporary urban transformations and to the challenges presented by emergent urban problems, crises, and struggles.
The course aims at helping students build critical capacities for understanding and contributing to efforts to shape and reshape urban life through the professional methods and ethics of the planning, design, and policy disciplines through research, scholarship, and political participation.
Course format:
The course will be a mix of lecture and discussion. In addition to the lectures, there will be required section meetings every two weeks. Written work consists of two short and two longer papers.
Prerequisites: None.
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 1960s and 1970s. 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 dialogue 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 Harvard 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 around 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 analyze 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—that is, 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. Today, increasing volatility and uncertainty of the environment, however, alongside a growing sense and presence of crises and disasters, has seen the rise 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:
– Geographic Space: maps and plans, Apollo’s Eye, and the measure of space/time.
– Urban Infrastructure: cities and regions, Geddes’s “Valley Section,” and the measure of solution/failure.
– Cultural Context: histories and texts, “Reflective Gaze,” and the measure of meaning/difference.
– Development Trajectory: needs and economies, homo economicus, and the measure of growth/sustainability.
– Ecological Relations: natures and systems, Thoreau’s Walking, and the measure of dependency/autonomy.
– Temporal Dynamics: seas and rivers, aqua fluxus, and the measure of complexity/resilience.
The course is designed as a lecture, seminar, and 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 students’ 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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 MDes 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.
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 concentration of the Master in Design Studies program.
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, and 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.
Evaluation: Class participation (30 percent), response papers (40 percent), assignment 1 (10 percent), assignment 2 (20 percent). Late assignments will not be accepted unless agreed in advance with the instructor or, in the case of illness, accompanied with a medical certificate.
Independent Design Engineering Project I
The Independent Design Engineering Project (IDEP) is a two-semester project during which students in the Master in Design Engineering (MDE) program work on understanding a concise, real-world problem and develop a prototypical solution. Methodologically a continuation of the MDE first-year studio, each student frames a complex problem and engages with stakeholders in order to understand its multi-scalar, multidisciplinary aspects. Work on a solution involves a combination of analytical and visualization skills, technical skills, and design methods, culminating in the development, prototyping, and evaluation of a solution.
The two-semester long IDEP is the required second-year component of the MDE program. Each student receives guidance from an advisor from SEAS and an advisor from the GSD. Initial domain outlines for the IDEP are due at the end of the second semester. Course group meetings serve as platforms for workshops, updates, and the sharing of progress, and allow for feedback on methods from the project coaches. Presentations and reviews will be scheduled during the fall and the spring semester to facilitate feedback by advisors, stakeholders, Harvard faculty, and guests. The final presentation at the end of IDEP includes an oral presentation, visuals, and a demonstration of the solution.
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.
Preparation of MLA Design Thesis
A thesis is a thematic proposition offered for discussion and debate. A thesis is typically developed through a piece of original research specific to an academic discipline, often at the culmination of a program of study. Design theses are pursued through the methods and media specific to the design disciplines, through design research. Candidates in the Master in Landscape Architecture program elect to pursue independent design theses at the culmination of their graduate work.
This research seminar is intended for Master in Landscape Architecture candidates electing to pursue a design thesis in their final year of study. The course defines the parameters of a design thesis and assists candidates in the development of their own individual design thesis proposals. The course addresses a series of broad themes essential to developing a cogent thesis proposal including design research, projective practices, discursive agendas, site contexts, programmatic drivers, and representational strategies. The seminar examines the role of precedent projects and design methods in thesis, as well as the status of design and design research as forms of knowledge production in the research university.
The seminar meets weekly for three hours, beginning with a presentation and seminar discussion followed by tutorial workshops with smaller groups. In addition to the regularly scheduled class sessions, tutorial workshops, and formal reviews, individual meetings with faculty advisors are an important aspect of the course. Students will be invited to identify and secure a GSD faculty thesis advisor during the first half of the term. By the end of the term, candidates will have prepared a proposal for their individual design thesis through word and image.