Thing Power in the Arles Region: from Assemblages to Alchemy in the Camargue

Jane Bennett borrows Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of assemblages to argue that humans are not the sole actors in shaping the world. Instead, always-becoming assemblages that include human and nonhuman beings, materials, and forces produce events that form our experience and, she argues, ought to shape our politics. How can these ideas help reimagine the Arles region of southern France, a region under continuous transformation for several millennia and now under social and environmental strain? 

In this seminar, we will examine the assemblages acting on the Camargue, the marshy delta of the Rhone river where Arles meets the sea. Here, humans have, for millennia, grappled with both river and sea to make them better suited for civilization. The received image of this Mediterranean Eden—lavender fields, bustling regional markets, Van Gogh’s vibrating landscapes—belies the centuries of tension between human intervention and the timeless forces and flows that first shaped the area. These interventions are emblematic of global human-caused disruption on the scale of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene makes urgent the need to reconceptualize human relations with nonhumans. With the Camargue as our research site, we will deploy Bennett’s and others’ “thing theories,” which emphasize the capacity of inanimate matter to act on the world. As the warming climate affects local seasonal patterns of, for example, rice growing, bird migration, or sea salt production, we will identify new hurdles and opportunities to combine human ingenuity with the predisposition of nonhuman forces. 

The course builds from a regional atlas of Arles produced in last year’s seminar, which traced the movements of assemblages from deep geological time to the present. We will study layered vibrations of the Camargue: its Alpine rivers and their channelization, animal habitats, and relationship to Arles, to envision ecological and sociopolitical possibilities. The outcome of the seminar will be an atlas of collisions between existing cross sections and potential futures of the Camargue that will suggest an expanded political agenda. By rearranging familiar human and nonhuman forces in transformative ways, we will aim for alchemical reactions for the region. 

Travel note:

The enrollment for the seminar is limited to 20, and 8 of those students will be selected to travel to Arles, France. The 20 students will be selected via the limited enrollment course lottery. 8 students will be selected for the traveling spots, with students waitlisted for travel spots thereafter. Students enrolled in the option studio 1406: FALLOWSCAPES, Territorial Reconfiguration Strategies for Arles, France are encouraged to take this seminar in conjunction with the studio, but must select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery in order to be considered for enrollment. The 8 students selected to take part in the trip will be term-billed $300 and travel September 20 – September 28. Students may travel in only one course or studio in a given term and should refer to traveling seminar policies distributed via email.

Policy Making in Urban Settings (at HKS)

This course is an introduction to policymaking in American cities, focusing on economic, demographic, institutional, and political settings. It examines economic development and job growth in the context of metropolitan regions and the emerging “new economy” and addresses federal, state, and local government strategies for expanding community economic development and affordable-housing opportunities. Of special concern is the continuing spatial and racial isolation of low-income populations, especially minority populations, in central-city neighborhoods and how suburbanization of employment, reduction in low-skilled jobs, and racial discrimination combine to limit housing and employment opportunities.

Course format:

During the semester, students will complete two brief policy memoranda and a take-home examination consisting of three short essays.

Jointly offered course: Also offered as KSG SUP-600.

This course is scheduled on Mondays and Wednesdays at HKS in Wexner 330 (Wex330 classroom is part of the recent HKS construction and can be accessed via the third-floor hallway).
Please see the draft shopping schedule.
 

Visualization (at SEAS)

This course is an introduction to key design principles and techniques for visualizing data. It covers design practices, data and image models, visual perception, interaction principles, visualization tools, and applications, and introduces programming of web-based interactive visualizations. 

Prerequisites: Students are expected to have basic programming experience (e.g., Computer Science 50). 

See my.harvard, SEAS COMPSCI 171, for location

Computer Vision (at SEAS)

This course explores vision as an ill-posed inverse problem: image formation, two-dimensional signal processing; feature analysis; image segmentation; color, texture, and shading; multiple-view geometry; object and scene recognition; and applications. 

See my.harvard, SEAS COMPSCI 283, for location

Innovation in Science and Engineering: Conference Course (at SEAS)

The course explores factors and conditions contributing to innovation in science and engineering; how important problems are found, defined, and solved; roles of teamwork and creativity; and applications of these methods to other endeavors. Students will receive practical and professional training in techniques to define and solve problems, and in brainstorming and other individual and team approaches. 

Course format: Taught through a combination of lectures, discussions, and exercises led by innovators in science, engineering, arts, and business. 

See my.harvard, SEAS ENG-SCI 139, for location

Materiality, Visual Culture, and Media (at AFVS)

What is the place of materiality in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts, architecture, and media? This seminar investigates a “material turn” in philosophy, art, media, visual, and spatial culture. Topics include: actor-network theory, thing theory, the life of objects, the archive, the haptic and the affect, vibrant materialism, elemental philosophy, light and projection, and the immateriality of atmosphere.

Note: Interested students must attend the first meeting of the class during shopping week.

Jointly offered course: This course is jointly offered as AFVS 279. GSD students should enroll in the course via the GSD.

 

This course meets on Wednesdays from 2pm to 4pm in Carpenter Center 402.   Interested students must attend the first meeting of the class during shopping week. This course is jointly offered at the Graduate School of Design as HIS 4451; GSD students should enroll in the course via the GSD.

Site and Shelter: Design for the ‘Whole Landscape’

Charlotte Leib (MDes ’19)

This thesis examines the ways that modernist architects, landscape architects, planners, and government agencies began to conceptualize the built environment through the terms ‘site’ and ‘shelter’ in the first decades of the twentieth century. It begins by tracing how the site and shelter discourse coalesced, looking in particular at the role that the American magazine Shelter played in bringing the ideas of European modernism to readers across the Atlantic. It then examines how the site and shelter discourse found its way into design pedagogy by introducing readers to the housing design, financing, and site planning ideas that former Chief City Planner of Berlin, Martin Wagner, imbued to his students in his course, Site and Shelter, which was a requirement for all first-year architecture, landscape architecture, and planning students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1939 to 1941. It goes on to examine how Wagner and his colleague at the GSD, Walter Gropius, furthered the site and shelter discourse through their teaching and practice in the US, first working together and then splitting ways as they developed their ‘total architecture’ and ‘whole landscape’ concepts. The thesis concludes by highlighting the efforts of several of Gropius and Wagner’s students who created a non-profit housing corporation, ‘Site and Shelter’, in 1948, to experiment with the communitarian and proto-ecological housing design ideals that they had learned in Wagner’s eponymous course and in Gropius’ design studios.

The Humid Threshold: Cooling hot, humid climates via membrane dehumidification

Pamela Lucia Cabrera Pardo (MDes ’19)

The thesis centers on the design of a membrane material for cooling hot, humid climates via dehumidification, by selecting water vapor out of humid air. While membrane selectivity is a well-known field of study, found throughout nature and applied across industries, architecture has only regarded membranes as barriers. However, membranes have the potential to separate substances through diffusion, a passive process that is isothermal, and therefore a membrane selectivity system for dehumidification can be less energy intensive than typical vapor compression systems (Yang, Yuan, Gao, & Guo, 2015) (Woods, 2014) (Mahmud, Mahmood, Simonson, & Besant, 2010). Membrane dehumidification research has been developed over two decades for the enhancement of air mechanical units, but it has not yet been proposed as a building material. This thesis investigates the possibility of using membranes as a building screen material to dehumidify incoming air as it is drawn into a building. This application could lower the latent heat that drives air conditioning demand in humid climates, and thus increase natural ventilation potential and other passive dry-bulb cooling strategies.

Cyberfeminism Catalog 1990–2020

Malinda Seu (MDes ’19)

This is not a book about women and technology. Nor was this book created for women. Throughout these pages, scholars, hackers, artists, and activists of all regions, races, sexual orientations, and genetic make-ups consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. What is a woman anyway?

The creation and use of this catalog is a social and political act. The texts, organizations, events, and other media aggregated herein push against the dominant understanding of internet history. We are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol. But the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants.

As a publication, this catalog is the site around which a public is formed. However, this public is broader than those of the individual entries or categories included in this index. Together, these works map the radical techno-critical activism that shapes a cyberfeminist counterpublic. The publication takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight for others to respond and build upon. To name something is to claim its existence.

Architecture for a New World: Louis Kahn and Philadelphia

Izzy Kornblatt (MDes ’19)

This project reinterprets the architecture of Louis Kahn as expressing a particular experience of modernity rather than returning to an archaic past. Based upon extensive archival research and interviews, I argue that Kahn and his engineers, working in collaboration, derived a distinctive architecture from the ways of thought embedded in Philadelphia. I show the origins of Kahn’s method to be in the work of Frank Furness, passed on to Kahn by his mentor George Howe. From them Kahn inherited a commitment to an architecture of material and programmatic honesty—an architecture that against the abstraction of high modernism and formalism of the Beaux-Arts sought to reflect the conditions of contemporary life. Relying on the knowledge of his engineers, Kahn made that commitment concrete by integrating structure, building systems, and program into an architecture of clear and legible meaning. 

In making this case, I question the major claims of present Kahn scholarship: that Kahn’s mature architecture derives from the study of ancient ruins, and that Kahn represents a turn toward French neoclassicism. I argue instead for a research-based view of Kahn that returns agency to his work while dismantling the cult of genius that too often surrounds him. Ultimately, I argue that the historical importance of his work lies in the new approach toward the architectural subject that it introduced in 20th-century architecture—thanks to its derivation of form from contemporary realities and insistent rejection of aestheticism.