14 Things (A Secret History of Italian Design) (offered with FAS)

Fourteen Things explores intertwinings between design, science, technology, society, art, and culture by means of the “excavation” of fourteen objects from different periods in the history of modern Italian design, from the turn of the 20th century to the present. Combining micro- and macro-perspectives, it approaches design history from a broad aesthetic, historical, and socio-anthropological standpoint. The seminar combines readings from contemporary Thing Theory, material culture studies, and design history, with materials from literature, popular culture, and media. It is built around a chronologically ordered sequence of case studies of exemplary things: artifacts designed for purposes of sitting, drinking, lighting, walking, moving about, cooling down, cooking and cleaning, writing and calculating, or media viewing.

Jointly offered with FAS as ROM STD 217

Competing Visions of Modernity in Japan

The course will trace the parallel trajectories of two of modern Japan’s most influential schools of architectural thought, represented by Kenzo Tange (1913–2005) on the one hand and Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006) on the other, and situate their contributions in the broader development of international modernism in the postwar period. Tange and his protégés in the Metabolist group dazzled the world with radical proposals for urban communities built either on the sea or elevated in the sky. Shinohara rejected this techno-rationalist stance through the slogan “A house is a work of art” and turned to the single-family house shunned by the Metabolists.  The House of White by Shinohara achieves an almost oceanic spaciousness through abstraction and precision. 

The course will be structured as a series of discursive narratives and debates, such as tradition, transparency, lightness, and technology, which defined architectural practice and criticism in Japan after 1945. Major figures, notably Toyo Ito, successfully overcame these differences and established new paradigms. We will also position young Japanese architects today, Ishigami, Fujimoto, and Hasegawa, in terms of these historical genealogies and the evolution of a critical discourse.  

The course will make extensive use of the Kenzo Tange Collection housed at the Loeb Library.  We will also engage recent exhibitions on modern Japanese architecture, including Constellations exhibition at MoMA, the Japanese House at the MAXXI and Barbican Center, and #SOSBrutalism at German Architecture Museum, and examine the framing of modern and contemporary architecture in Japan to public and professional audiences.

Modern Architecture and Urbanism in China

Modernizing influences, largely from the hands of foreign powers, first forcefully entered China in the aftermath of the Opium War and signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. Since then, China endured a stormy if not tumultuous course of events before finding itself with burgeoning modern industrialization and urbanization during the contemporary era, as well as a certain ambivalence about the shape of its future identity. Against this historical backdrop, modern architecture and urbanism developed spasmodically, before emerging strongly during the past decade or so. Rather than attempting to provide a continuous and cohesive narrative of these developments, this seminar will concentrate on significant episodes during the last 150 or so years. Of particular interest will be the work of several generations of Chinese architects, planners, and public officials, as well as that of foreign architects and planners, working in China during various periods. The aim of the course will be to introduce students to this modern work and underlying attitudes, together with cultural influences, which lay behind them. Students will be expected to be prepared for seminar discussion, by undertaking prescribed readings, and to produce an article-length research paper on a pertinent topic. There are no prerequisites for this course.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts III

This semester, Buildings, Texts, and Contexts III is structured as a special two-part course, taught by two different instructors.

Section I: Modernism. The Canon and Its Other
Amanda Reeser Lawerence
As a counter proposal to the narratives of genius and originality that predominate within the history of twentieth-century architecture, this course instead explores the unoriginal. Each week begins with a canonical work—Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, Wright’s Guggenheim, Venturi’s Mother’s House, Kahn’s Trenton Bath House, Johnson’s Glass House, Eisenman’s House VI – which is subsequently unraveled and repositioned through its connection to earlier and other works, as well as through its confrontation with various texts. The aim is to challenge the specificity of their historical position while simultaneously reaffirming their significance as but one possible instance of a more general condition of appropriation, reference, and reproduction.

SECTION II: The City as Architectural Project
Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani
This section of the course analyses the history of urban architecture in its three-dimensional form and as a complex human artefact, using the lens of specific episodes of the history of the European city between the Baroque and Modern periods. It explores the influences that prompted the construction of this artefact and determined its shape: topography, climate and demographics, but also and especially philosophical and religious concepts, social ideas and ideologies, property conditions and the mechanisms of economic exploitation, and building technology. Intellectual, literary and artistic currents will also come into play with regard to their impact on urban development. The close reading of key examples from the history of architecture and the city will allow students to extrapolate their strategies to other historical cases as well as to contemporary urban projects: not as models, but as types.

Emergent Urbanizations: Challenges for Theory, Method, and Research

This course proceeds from a simple premise:  new patterns and pathways of urbanization are emerging around the world, and these transformations require a radical rethinking of inherited approaches to urban theory and research.  A major site of investigation for the course is the urbanization of the hinterland / countryside, and the concomitant remaking of inherited agrarian environments across much of the global South, during the last three decades.  In these zones, as elsewhere, post-1980s processes of sociospatial restructuring have involved the transformation of agrarian sociospatial relations, land use systems and political ecologies through new forms of enclosure/land-grabbing, infrastructure investment, industrial development and financial speculation, often in close proximity to or in direct relation to processes of city building.  Their investigation thus requires scholars to rethink inherited disciplinary divisions of labor (e.g. urban studies vs. agrarian studies) and sociospatial binarisms (e.g. urban/rural; city/countryside; industrial/agrarian; society/nature).   

The course is structured as a research studio in which we will (a) explore the limits of inherited theoretical frameworks for the study of urbanization processes and their putative “outsides”; and (b) attempt to develop and apply alternative conceptualizations to decipher emergent conditions and transformations.  Our work is, in this sense, oriented simultaneously towards the analysis of emergent patterns and pathways of urban restructuring and the elaboration of appropriate theories, concepts and cartographies through which to decipher the latter.  Following a high-intensity overview of inherited 20th-century approaches to the urban and agrarian questions, and major axes of debate within early 21st-century urban, agrarian and development studies, we explore emergent urban-agrarian transformations across diverse sites and regions, and the state spatial strategies and forms of spatial politics through which the latter have been animated, mediated and contested.  Our major research foci will be strategic zones of the global south—especially in the so-called “BRICS (the rapidly industrializing territories of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa)—and a range of emergent agrarian-urban transformations that have crystallized within and across the transnational production networks associated with those zones.

In thus proceeding, we consider the question of “emergence” at once as a problem of conceptualization, as a methodological dilemma and as a challenge for contextually embedded research and visualization.  We will also explore the question of what contextual “specificity” might mean in the investigation of emergent urban/agrarian sociospatial transformations today.  In addition to several writing assignments, students will work in pairs to develop original research projects on the zones and issues explored in the class.  Although it is offered as a 4-credit course that meets 3 hours per week, the workload will more closely approximate that of a studio.  Prospective students—especially those enrolled in a required studio class for a professional design degree—should consider carefully whether they will be able to keep up with the intense volume and pace of work in this class.  Because the course is designed as a collaborative research project, we are not able to permit auditors to attend.  
 

Place-Based Design Inquiry

This workshop will critically and imaginatively engage design that is already embedded in the language of place—in maps, ecologies, histories, films, policies, plans, and everyday conversation.

We will focus on elements bound in their constitution to a dominant identity: the informal tied to formal, the invasive opposed to the indigenous, water contained by land, and waste that is not a resource. These ‘nonplace’ elements have come to disrupt and undermine habitation today in what are generally seen as problems that design is tasked to solve. However, before they become problems to solve, these nonplace elements must be seen for what they really are, namely, products of design, a design that tends to pass unquestioned in the ordinary and every day. This workshop will investigate this tacit design. What is its language and how does it operate to create the informal along with the formal, the invasive along with the indigenous, water with land, and waste with resource?

Each student will take a ‘lateral look’ at an informal, invasive, water and waste of their choice in a place of their choice, a place they are vested in exploring. They will enhance this looking through the pursuit of four simple ideas/crafts: splicing, layering, weaving, and folding. Inspired by incongruities and dissonances in the operation of nonplace elements and working with texts, images and materials like paper, wood, metal, and fabric, students will make analogous instruments that promise readings and sightings of new relations, identities, and languages of place.

The workshop will operate through discussions and making. Students will produce work that responds to ideas and prompts discussed in class in relation to their place of choice. The work itself will generate further conversations and trajectories of inquiry. These trajectories will take students to the archives, field, and back to their ‘work station’.

Designing the American City: Civic Aspirations and Urban Form

The course is an interpretative look at the characteristic patterns of settlement and attitudes towards cities and urban life that are identified with American urbanization. It introduces the American city as a culturally meaningful form and presents a body of historical and social material relevant to its study. The course seeks to foster an understanding of the cultural processes, policies, planning and design actions, which have influenced American urbanization.

The course chronicles the “love-hate” attitude that Americans have shown toward their cities across history, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts to reconceive how and in what shape cities and urban regions should grow. While not abandoning long-standing precedents of urban organization, Americans have consistently sought alternative ways to form communities. This search for alternatives generally proceeded in concert with a body of ideals that became fundamental to the European Enlightenment, and soon after to the explosion of urban growth brought about by the Industrial Revolution.  Just being conceived, rather than as European cities needing to adapt (with considerable difficulty) to the cultural, political and technological transformations of the 17th through the 20th centuries, American cities heralded the arrival of the modern world. This is key to their appreciation.

The course also seeks comparisons and contrasts between periods of rapid American urbanization, and the even more rapid urban growth currently taking place in regions around the world.  As American cities grew in emulation off and in contrast to older European counterparts, so today many cities, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions, seek inspiration from and attempt to improve upon the American urban experience.

This course is a lecture in the College’s Program in General Education, with a weekly graduate section for GSD. Enrollment is limited to 20 GSD students.

Offered as United States in the World 29 in FAS. Jointly Offered Course: FAS US-WORLD 29

Jointly Offered Course: FAS US-WORLD 29

Discourse and Research Methods

Research conducted in the Doctor of Design Program (DDes) at the GSD spans a broad range of topics and areas of investigation that not only represent the disciplines of the three departments at the GSD, but expand into domains such as art, culture, science, engineering or sociology, to just name a few.

GSD 9691 ‘Discourses and Methods’ is a required course for first year DDes students. It involves a close collaboration with the primary advisors, and for that reason the course is only open to DDes students. There are two primary learning goals:

All students will work on their own research design and, as the outcome of the course, produce a draft prospectus in written and in presentation format by the end of the semester. The overall goal is to provide all students a broad foundation in terms of discourses and methods, and contribute to preparing them for leadership roles in the academy or in other areas of society.

Discourse and Methods I

This course is open only to Ph.D. students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design (Ph.D. students from other departments may participate with instructor’s permission). This year’s course focuses on major theoretical and historiographical issues and themes that still structure scholarly discourse today. Students will confront these issues and themes by relating them to key methodological concerns and horizons in their own emerging research agendas.
 

Independent Thesis for the Degree Master in Design Studies

(Previously "Open Projects”) Prerequisites: Filing of signed "Declaration of Advisor" form with MDes office, and approval signature of the program director. A student who selects this independent thesis for the degree MDes pursues independent research of relevance to the selected course of study within the MDes program, under the direction of a Design School faculty member.