Making Sacred Space

This course addresses the current crisis in church design by an in depth consideration of the ideas, images, concepts, and legislation that inform the creation of sacred space. We consider the conceptual, theoretical, and aesthetic foundations of contemporary church design and review specific examples of how those ideas can be and have been implemented through lectures, readings, discussions and an individual design project. The course aims to enable designers to build better religious buildings by proposing new solutions and becoming leaders in the controversies.

For almost 2,000 years church commissions have been the largest, most prominent, and most artistically and intellectual challenging that engage architects. No other commission poses equal demands for the realization of ideas in built form, and none draws on so rich a heritage of images and metaphors requiring visible shape. Recent projects by Rafael Moneo, Renzo Piano, SOM, and Richard Meier, among others, show this is still true today. Yet many recently-built churches are banal, generic or, in searching for novelty, ugly or weird. Others, while aesthetically or technologically admirable, function poorly and fail to meet the needs of the users.

Christian belief isn’t necessary in order to design a church, but knowledge of Christian culture and tradition, of the liturgy, and of what sacred space is and is not, is essential. In this course we approach Christianity as culture, not creed. Since in designing a church the expectations and needs of the client (both clerical and congregational users) are paramount, these will be explored in depth. Two of the programmatic requirements – that the church be beautiful and that it inspire wonder – will receive particular attention as aspects for which the designer is especially, perhaps solely, responsible.

Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871-2036

Visual constituents of high adventure since the late Victorian era, emphasizing wandering woods, rogues, tomboys, women adventurers, faerie antecedents, halflings, crypto-cartography, Third-Path turning, martial arts, and post-1937 fantasy writing as integrated into contemporary advertising, video, computer-generated simulation, and private and public policy.

Note: This course is offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as VES 167.

Prerequisites: GSD 4105, GSD 4303, and GSD 4304, or permission of the instructor.

Jointly Offered Course: FAS VES 167

Modernization in the Visual United States Environment, 1890-2035

Modernization of the United States visual environment as directed by a nobility creating new images and perceptions of such themes as wilderness, flight, privacy, clothing, photography, feminism, status symbolism, and futurist manipulation as illustrated in print-media and other advertising enterprise.

Note: This course is offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as VES 160.

Prerequisite: GSD 4105 or permission of the instructor.

Jointly Offered Course: FAS VES 160

Histories of Landscape Architecture II: Design, Representation, and Use

This course introduces students to relevant topics, themes, and sites that help us understand the conception, production, evolution, and reception of designed and found landscapes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It aims at building an understanding of landscapes as both physical spaces and as cultural media that sit at the nexus between art and science and that contribute knowledge about humankind’s relationship with non-human nature. Landscapes are the result of social, political, artistic and intellectual endeavors. The topography, soil and climate of a site also condition their designs, use and habitation. As much as designed and found landscapes are a product of their time, they have also contributed to shaping history, both through their physical materiality and through the mental worlds they enable. Embedding found and designed landscapes into their social, political and cultural contexts, the course also pays close attention to the role of expert knowledge and the professions that have contributed to creating them. Using a variety of sources including texts, illustrations, and film the course offers insights into the development and transfer of ideas between different cultures, countries and geographical regions, and time periods. Course readings that will accompany every lecture will be made available on Canvas. Student assignments for this class will include reading response papers and one final paper.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts II

 Any account of architecture’s history over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries is faced with the challenge of addressing the general rupture caused by the rise of modernity—that is, by the social, economic, technological and ideological transformations accompanying the political and industrial revolutions marking the end of the European Enlightenment. The transition of architecture to the modern world gave rise to a series of fundamental questions, which might be framed as follows: How did historical conditions place pressure on the time-honored foundations of architecture, on its origins, theories, and pedagogies? How did new conditions of scientific possibility actively reconfigure architecture’s relation to engineering? And finally, how did aesthetic conceptions and approaches, which followed an arc from Beaux-Arts eclecticism and historicism to Modernist avant-gardes, intersect with society and politics?

This course weaves these questions through topics and themes ranging from technology and utopia to ornament and nationalism. We begin with late Baroque polemics and the academic foundations of architecture as discipline. We then consider the multifaceted nature of 18th-century architectural expressions insuch examples as Rococo space, origin theories from Laugier to Piranesi, and the formulation of building typologies. The 19th century, which for us is inaugurated by a utopian imaginary (in Ledoux and Fourier), covers key episodes such as the Beaux-Arts system in Europe and America, architecture and national identity (in Schinkel and Wagner), and, finally, the dream of colossal structures and the infrastructural programs of the modern metropolis. Course requirements include attendance at lectures and sections, responses to readings, and several written assignments.

One hour sections will take place on Thursday afternoon.

 

 

 

Urban Grids: Open form for City Design-2

Framework:

Within a larger research scope on “Revisiting the urban grids in the XXI century”, this seminar will focus on the investigation of recent urbanistic projects which use the grid and its multiple variations as their main structural device for the construction of the city. The ultimate objective of the course is to develop new understanding of the way we are approaching the design of the city by means of “grids and networks”

This semester the seminar will focus on the forms of blocks with exploring the diversity of urban block types and  researching the important aspects of block-design, which include: 1) dimensions and scales; 2) parcellation and its relationship to the regularity of land division and the subsequent subdivision or aggregation; 3) the evolution of compositional strategies and formation logics, and the relation between the compositions and the densities the block system is able to accommodate; grid composition is a useful metric as it indicates the relative efficiency of different grid systems, considering the space required to render services and provide mobility across a set extent of private land subdivision; 4) the continuity or fragmentation of the facades of the urban blocks, as well as the sectional design of blocks with multilayered considerations; 5) patterns of built form vs open space or communal space; and 6) how the forms of buildings response to the general form of the block.

Research Topics:

The research seminar will specifically focus on the following topics:

Course Format and Method:

Even though a few introductory readings will be handed out at the beginning of the course, the seminar will explore the topics primarily through the construction of analytical and operative drawings.

The seminar is open to all students in GSD. Note that a high level of graphic skills is required.  Students will work individually and in groups of two.

Limited Enrollment: Number of students is limited to 24.

Notice: ***Please note that the material circulated during the seminar is for use within the seminar only.

Experiments in Public Freedom

As places that accept and encourage multiple representations, cities need spaces to enable unregulated, temporary, and spontaneous events. Due to their role and meaning in the construction and definition of the public realm, public spaces are expected to embody a well-defined character and gravitas. Due to the multiplicity of publics, however, these spaces must engage with temporary, overlapping, and often-contradictory sensibilities and occupations. The design question that emerges is, what type of character and gravitas can be achieved with temporality and spontaneity?

This design theory seminar presents an amalgamation of views from different perspectives (architecture, art, landscape architecture, urban design) that coalesce around six spatial conditions that are useful for conceptualizing and designing spaces capable of promoting cultural diversity, social acceptance, and individual spontaneity. Through this amalgamation, this course explores containment, neutrality, blankness, normalcy, anarchy, and amnesia as conditions that can open up public space.

Despite their potential, these spatial properties are usually underestimated as they seem to lack aspects of what is generally considered essential for designing successful public spaces: site specificity, sensibility to local aesthetics, sociocultural appropriateness, permanent and fixed identity, etc. It is precisely due to these so-called deficiencies, however, that these spatial properties can be instrumental to imagine spaces that enable constant recirculation of multiple publics rather than permanent forms of regulation, identity, or appropriateness.

The course is composed of six sections, one per spatial condition. Each section comprises a lecture by the instructor around a constellation of references (projects and texts) to be discussed in class. For each section, students are asked to analyze an environment of their choice (building, landscape, open space, etc.) that demonstrates the spatial condition being discussed. At the end of the semester, students are asked to assemble these six analyses into a design primer for the enabling of public freedoms.

Urban Form: Transition as Condition

The fixed categories by which we have traditionally understood the urban no longer hold. They have been undermined by the multiplicity of disparate urban formations that are transforming landscapes across the globe. These transformations radically challenge not only normative planning methods, but also traditional concepts of the urban, and even our ability to understand the dynamics of change. How can we understand the conditions of change, extreme differentiation, and hybridity that challenge current conceptual models and practices? How might the insights of history and theory inform one another as well as design practices more effectively?

The purpose of the seminar is to engage these questions and to explore a range of critical frameworks and research methodologies for understanding emerging conditions of the contemporary urban – historically, theoretically, and spatially across scales.

Urban Form: Transition as Condition takes as its starting point two working propositions that are implicit in the course title. The first puts forward a conception of urban form as dynamic and active – that is, as a process of urban formation in which transition is a continuous condition. The second working proposition is that in order to understand the generative dynamics of transitional urban conditions we need to develop new methodologies for understanding change and difference, methodologies that make it possible to chart continuities and discontinuities, to map relationships between the local and the translocal, and to examine complex and unstable phenomena over time and through multiple critical lenses. In short, our research needs to be both site-specific and comparative across cultures and geographies.

These propositions will be engaged in the seminar through readings and class discussions, and individual research projects. In the first half of the semester readings and discussions will focus on a series of theoretical frameworks that conceptualize emerging urban formations in categorically transitional terms – that is, in terms of post-industrial, post-fordist, post-socialist, post-communist, and post-modern formations. These transitional categories are framed in relation to historically-based urban paradigms that posit a relationship between social, political, and economic processes and systems (industrial, fordist, socialist, communist, modern) and urban spatial forms. We will interrogate these concepts as epistemological categories, examine the paradigms on which they are based, and work to develop critical methods and visual techniques for site-based research of contemporary conditions.

In the second half of the semester students will apply these methodologies to the analysis of a particular urban site or intervention, in a city or other urban environment and geography of their choice. The topics for these individual research projects will be determined in consultation with the instructor within the first 6 weeks of the semester. The final project will have both a written component (8-10 pp) and a visual/graphic component (Due May 7). The project will also be presented in class at the end of the semester.

Requirements/assignments: Aside from completing the assigned reading and active participation in class discussions, students will be required to submit weekly 500-750 word reading responses to the canvas site on the Tuesday before class. A final research project with written (8-10 pp.) and visual components is required of each student.

The Nature of Difference: Theories and Practices of Landscape Architecture

This course explores how notions of cultural difference are embedded in the design of landscape. Social landscapes—as understood through race, class, nationality, indigeneity, disability, gender, and sexuality—will be the focus of each class. By learning to “read” these landscapes and related projects of landscape architecture, we will study the ways in which landscapes shape identity, produce power and inequality, and commemorate diverse cultural meaning.

The course is organized by two kinds of investigations: one that focuses on built forms and another on the ideas and conceptual frameworks that guide the production of those forms. We will attend to diverse projects and topics, including border regions, urban landscapes, colonial plantations, territories of extraction, zones of environmental risk, national parks, native lands, domestic spheres, and postcolonial gardens. Through these sites, we will critically explore the nature of difference in spatial forms of exclusion, inclusion, conflict, and cooperation.

At the end of this class, students will be able to articulate the diverse social and political dimensions of landscapes and refer to a history of landscape architecture projects oriented to related issues. Assignments will include a combination of written responses to assigned readings and hands-on exercises designed to train students in the social analysis of landscapes in and around the university.

Independent Design Engineering Project II

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, multi-disciplinary aspects. Work on a solution involves a combination of analytical and visualization skills, technical skills, and design methods, culminating in the development and prototyping 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 proposals for the IDEP are due at the end of the second semester, with final versions being submitted at the beginning of the third semester. Course group meetings serve as platforms for 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.