Mini MOOCs
INTRO. Distance learning tools are here to stay. The course will introduce students to make their own mini MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), considering many of them will be involved in academia after finishing their studies.
TEAM-WORK. Throughout the semester, students will group in three small production teams. Roles within these teams may include research, creative direction, script-writing, modeling, animation, programming, voice acting, sound engineering, and/or musicalization.
MODULE. Instead of a full MOOC with many parts, each group will develop only one module. The subject of each module will be a particular building during the entire academic term, with the main objective of making this project interesting for both us architects and to a broader public outside of our field.
CASE STUDY. This semester, we will focus on the single-family houses built during the 1970s by Japanese architect Kazunari Sakamoto (1943—). Apparently banal yet full of references and contradictions, these hermetic structures in opposition to the city may teach us how to live and design for today’s confinement.
EXPERIMENTS. An important thesis of the course in making MOOCs more accessible is to test new ways to display content and evaluations, beyond the video+quiz format which is standard in platforms such as edX or Coursera. We will look outside our field for examples in animation (in both Asia and the West), videogame design and music which could be appropriated and tested in architecture MOOCs.
COURSE FORMAT. Each week, sessions will be divided into two parts. The first part will be a live interview with protagonists in the field of MOOC production, animation, videogames, film, and music, with a new guest every time. After a 20-minute break, we will review the weekly development of each Mini-MOOC. Two midterm sessions are also considered.
EVALUATION. Mini-MOOC development will be graded every week, starting in the first session. Each weekly evaluation has the same percent value, including two midterms and final review, and will be accumulated in a final grade. Attendance to live-interviews or weekly reviews is not compulsory nor evaluated.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Due to no classes being offered on Labor Day and course selections being due on Wednesday, September 9, this class has scheduled a first irregular meeting on Monday, August 31, 4.35-7.30 pm EDT. Please make sure to check the Canvas site of the course for the meeting Zoom links.
Advanced Applications in Sustainable Architecture
This new elective seminar will provide a deeper dive into issues of evidence-based, high-performance, sustainable building design. The course is intended for first and second year Energy and Environment students, MArch students, and anyone with an interest in the environmental performance of buildings. Because we hope to create a diverse team of problem-solvers, students with any one of a variety of backgrounds, such as design, engineering, and financial analysis are encouraged to enroll.
Students will increase their understanding of high-performance environmental design strategies in architecture. They will also have the opportunity to learn the following skills, but they may choose the area(s) in which to focus their attention:
– whole-building energy simulation*
– daylight design and analysis methods, including daylight simulation*
– hygrothermal (thermal and moisture) simulations, as well as mold-growth simulation
– life-cycle analysis of materials and construction methods
– life-cycle cost analysis (construction costs and utility savings)
– assessing societal cost of carbon emissions and related health savings
*in greater depth than taught in 6122 Environmental Systems II or 6125 Building Simulation. Students will have the choice to explore either the same or different software tools.
Final Project
Students may choose one of the following options.
1. Students may join a team to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon design competition. (Since the competition offers multiple divisions, the class may form more than one team.)
2. Students may develop and detail a strategy within the built environment to help Harvard University meet its Climate Action Plan (Fossil Fuel Free by 2050).
3. Students may propose an alternate research or design project.
Class Format
The class format consists of lectures, in-class exercises, group discussions, student presentations, and project-based strategy sessions (or desk crits). Students learn skills/tools through a series of short tutorials and assignments. Then they narrow their focus and apply these skills to the final project.
Prerequisite
It is recommended that students have had (or are concurrently enrolled in) some introduction to sustainable design/building science, such as 6121/6122 Environmental Systems; 5370 Environment, Economics, and Enterprise; or a similar course at another institution.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Domestic Logistics
Modern domestic spaces are embedded in networks of goods, labor, media, and technology that shape their functions, capacities, and cultural role. They sit in federated supply chains, crisscrossed by networks of dependency and autonomy that extend to the city, countryside, and globe. The flows of materials and consumables, as well as data and labor, situate the home in a larger technosocial complex. Technology thus acts as an indispensable and mutating interface between domestic spaces and the territories around them.
The class will consider the bright and dark alternate futures of domestic space through the lens of its cultural representations and technological augmentations. Framed through the last 100 years as well as the next 100 years of domestic architecture, it will plumb the actual and fictional ways in which the space of the home has registered anxieties and optimisms around the social, ecological, and economic implications of technological futures. Specific technologies – spatial augmentation, telepresence, sensory expansion and deprivation, robotic farming, home droids, AI, drone tourism, and more, will be catalysts for critical discussions about what the home was, is, and could be.
While we unpack these dynamics we will also consider how the future of domestic space has been represented with respect to technology, and how we might inflect those representations and networks for the better. The historical and future representation of the interior will be a key lens through which we will examine domestic logics, from lavishly rendered Beaux Arts interior elevations to developed surface drawings, from meticulously arranged interiors of the Dutch golden age to the dioramas typical of theatre productions. More recent attempts to quantize and optimize interiors through motion studies and comprehensive sensing will comprise an analytic counterpoint to narrative modes of understanding domestic space. Particularly critical will be the relationship between animation, domestic robotics, and the diurnal rhythms of inhabitation.
The house as capsule will be a recurring theme, encompassing critical concerns related to safety and isolation, but also mobility, freedom, and the fraught line between autonomy and collectivism. Threads of the 1970s autonomous house movement will be interwoven with histories of nuclear shelters, continuity of government facilities, and the notion of the home as a cultural and technological bulwark against catastrophe and a last redoubt of civilization in ruins.
The class will also examine a number of themes the organically emerge from domestic logistics, including: the farm at the scale of the living unit, houses as micronations, how the domestic ritual of the dinner party may be transformed and reformatted through new food and media practices, recombinant and robotic furniture and the new political, social, and implications of houses that think.
Throughout these themes, there will be a cross-cutting interest in the notion of counterfactual history, particularly as it applies to domestic architecture. Actual and fictional precedents will be equally relevant, as the class embraces the full range of paths toward speculative domestic futures.
The content of the class will be primarily cultural, historical, and speculative, with some discussions of technical systems underpinning current innovations in the domestic sphere.
Students will develop a research topic affiliated with the themes of the class, articulate a speculative future that interrogates the topic through a paper and presentation, and venture a unique new video representation for that future.
The format of the class will be an asynchronous lecture, with a weekly synchronous session for discussions and pinups.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Climate by Design
Through a series of case studies, this course will explore paradigmatic design responses to the climate crisis including adaptation (both for communities to remain and retreat) and mitigation (through increased carbon draw-down and reduced emissions). These exemplary cases will be a means to understand and articulate the evolving role of landscape architecture and related disciplines in designing for an increasingly vulnerable planet. As such, the course will explore not only how landscape architecture responds to the climate crisis, but what these actions say about the nature of design itself. The cases will be situated in different geographical contexts and the responses will be understood relative to advances in climate science as well as the variations in social, environmental, economic and political context.
There will be a series of lectures by GSD faculty and external experts across fields (science, policy, economics, humanities, design). Students will develop and analyze a case study, developing methodologies for critical assessment and visual representation. The studies will consider social, cultural and aesthetic dimensions as well as environmental function, economic deployment and political engagement.
Climate by design is a required course for the MLA degree candidates (class of 2022) and open to other GSD and Harvard students with an interest in the climate crisis and design.
In Fall 2020, the course will meet two times per week for synchronous workshops, presentations and conversations with the class cohort, teaching faculty and invited guests. These synchronous sessions will be supported by additional asynchronous lectures, interviews, readings, and dossiers on the key case study projects.
Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Architecture 1960 to the Present
The concept of postmodernism finds its definitive articulation in architecture, even though postmodern thought far exceeds the use of the term postmodern in architectural discourse. Modern architecture—with its utopian aspirations, functional rationality, technological determinism, and aesthetic purism—is understood by postmodern thought as a primary expression of the general search for a metaphysics of certainty and universality, which rejects traditional spatial hierarchies and seeks to establish a new homogeneous and continuous space. Robert Venturi was the first architect to establish his work as explicitly dissenting from the dogma of modern movement. He and Aldo Rossi published important books in 1966 in which they announced their dissatisfaction with the modernist status quo. This course will begin by expanding out from these two practices and their progeny into the context of structuralist and poststructuralist theory that so often intersected with architectural theory and practice. A renewed interest in architecture theory accompanied the new practices; indeed, postmodern architecture was born in the academy and was developed in journals. We will follow that development with architectural projects and theoretical texts. Meanwhile, the larger currents of postmodern thought flowed through poststructuralist theories of language and the subject. Inevitably postmodern architecture also developed a global poststructuralist dimension, which we will study in detail.
The embrace of poststructuralist theory eventually precipitated the end of historicist postmodernism, though it is arguable that postmodern thought continues to frame recent architectural production. In the second half of the seminar, we will investigate the lineage of postmodernism in architectural practice since 1990. This part of the course will be more speculative and will require intense involvement on the part of participants.
Prerequisites: BTC I and BTC III or equivalent study in architecture theory and history.
Structure: The class will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 to 11:30 am (EST). Tuesdays will be devoted to lectures, and these will be recorded and available to students immediately after. Thursday will be discussion sessions, which will be arranged at the start of the semester, taking into account different time zones, if necessary
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Environmentalisms II: How to Have a Politics?
Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: at the very moment that the idea of “environment” is being placed at the center of our political and cultural debates, the content of the concept is becoming less and less clear. Does it refer to nature? Or its very opposite (the “built”)? Or to the factual (scientific, technical, bureaucratic) division between nature and something else? Is environment merely the residual notion of a so-called “natural world” that has now been tamed or constructed by technological systems?
This paradox is particularly evident within the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism, which despite being increasingly saddled with the complex task of imagining more "environmentally-sensitive" responses to our intensifying "environmental problems," are nonetheless unable to formulate any clear or coherent answers to the simple question that ought to precede any such strategies: what exactly is an environment? …and so the term becomes a kind of chimera within the design fields, haunting any emerging consensus with the specter of emptiness—an emptiness that presents a subtle but tectonic problem for the formation of any contemporary environmental politics.
The course aims to situate the idea of environment within a field of intelligibility comprised of specific kinds of environmental reasoning; ways of thinking that presume or posit a comprehension of the term, and that analyze or intervene in the world on that presumption. We will examine a series of themes—milieu, ecology, life, totality, control, regulation, interactivity, management, among others—that will provide a structure for the course.
In each case, our focus will be on certain methods of representational discontinuation; that is, on the way in which particular instances of environmental reasoning utilize techniques of representation as a means of dividing up, and ultimately intervening in, the world of lived experience. In doing so, the course recasts the concept of environment as a difficult amalgam of under-theorized managerial strategies, technical-instrumental processes, and reflexive scientific and political practices.
Each subsection of the course will move in a loosely-chronological manner, at times reaching back to the late nineteenth century, but generally focusing on Inter- and Postwar developments in environmental-representational techniques, including sensing, imaging, simulating and scanning.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
From Fallow: Equitable Futures for Landscapes of Injustice
Property abandonment is prevalent in places of disinvestment, where vulnerable communities bear the burden of untended land alongside structural racism, unjust policies, uneven capital distribution, and an inability to access education, healthcare and municipal services.
There is a relationship between the socio-economic and political well-being and the physical attributes of the land, the practices of its care, and its ownership status. The United States often privileges models of individual property ownership, where there are systems in place for acquisition and economic growth but not disposition, collectivity, ecological work and potential.
It is no secret that vacant lots have long vexed cities—especially the architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners and citizens living and working in them. In the past few decades hundreds of design ideas for abandoned property have emerged. Some remain purely speculative, while others have been tested and implemented. Meanwhile, neither the preoccupation with nor the accruement of abandoned property has abated.
Now, there is an urgency for propositions for how we can address the inequities of our urban environment, for visions for the city moving forward. Amidst so much negative attention, designers play a fundamental role in developing ideas that bring hope as well as other means of property distribution and care.
In this course, we will construct the American landscape of property investment and abandonment—and engage this landscape to form alternative models for the care of these complex spaces.
We will look intently at the present lived condition, as a reflection of a complex past, in order to imagine equally rich and varied futures. In many of these examples, it is a matter not so much of making drastic change to the sites themselves, as drastically reimagining how we approach them.
Students will tackle particular contexts and themes towards a collective body of work.
This course is open to all students but requires a basic understanding of urban development history and strong graphic skills.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Why Not Cultural Systems? Expanding Our Value System Beyond Nature and Ecology
This seminar will examine the planning, design and stewardship opportunities and constraints frequently encountered when dealing with cultural landscapes. In addition to addressing foundational principles, this seminar will demonstrate how bridging the artificial, often segmented divides between both design and historic preservation and nature and culture results in an expanded, holistic and more thoughtful design interventions.
Specifically, the seminar will address the issues, and identify the tools and strategies surrounding the planning, treatment and management of cultural landscapes (from surgical design interventions at an iconic landscape designed by Dan Kiley, for example, to a landscape that was associated with important people or past events that is also rich in narrative). Methodologies for historic research, tools for documenting existing conditions, and strategies for evaluating and analyzing cultural landscapes will be reviewed and tested. In addition, considerations and tools for assigning value, and the myriad and interrelated issues surrounding the level of design intervention, carrying capacity for change, and prescriptions for management and interpretation will also be debated. This work will be buttressed with case studies and supplemented with a small number of local site visits, and required student presentations.
Finally, a diversity of planning, design and stewardship challenges will be addressed. This includes: physical and financial limitations for essential research; how we assess and assign significance; the value we place on context (both physical and historical); the quest for authenticity and why this is an underutilized tool in our design kits; antiquity as an asset (also known as weathering); the need to determine a landscape’s carrying capacity for change; and, the recognition of a cultural landscape's palimpsest (historic layers). Integral to this work, the necessity for communications strategies for messaging and public engagement will be a key consideration.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle
The structures and forms we perceive on the face of the land are produced by forces that make order, and those that upset it. Landscape architecture is one of these forces.
Borrowing the title from Stephen Jay Gould’s book on the history of geology, this course will focus on the temporal dimension of landscape. As Henri Bergson put it, time is invention, the creation of forms. As a result of the interaction of forces exerted by different entities, the environment is in a continuous state of transformation, a state of becoming, of which we are not always aware. In today’s landscape architecture, ideas of time, process, change, and transformation are often approached through vague ecological discourse. In this course, we will investigate these notions through lectures, readings, and discussion on the history of ecological ideas and concurrent theories of evolution and thermodynamics, all of which ultimately deal with different kinds of order we see in the world as time flows through energy and matter.
Students in the course will also be asked to choose and investigate a vernacular agricultural landscape, that is, a landscape that has slowly evolved through the agricultural practices of those who live in it. With the selection of these different case studies, the course as a whole will aim at covering the widest possible range of environmental conditions across the globe. With climate change at the core of the agenda, we will focus on vernacular landscapes emerging from extreme conditions, such as deserts, tropical rainforests, and tundras. By drawing and modeling these agricultural landscapes, we will unveil the specific climatic, geomorphological, and technical processes and constraints through which they receive their forms. This constructive and representational inquiry into the vernacular will allow the seminar to engage in conversation about the metaphysics of time and life, energy and matter, discuss the different tendencies that exist on the land prior to human intervention, and question how design and technology interfere with, speed up, slow down, or even wipe out such tendencies.
Students will be evaluated by their contribution to the general class discussion and their specific investigation. The course is open to all GSD students, but strong graphic and representational skills are recommended.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
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 three larger drawing projects and special short assignments.
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, the drawing exploration of the bodily interaction with the architectural environment as well as the site-specific wall drawing exercise will be conducted in the interior places inspired by and creatively responding to the existential and spatial conditions imposed by the quarantine and the epidemics.
In addition, students will make individual self-guided field trips to sketch and draw in the outdoor environment and then complete their work in the places they live.
Work on projects will be supplemented by 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.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.