Spatial Infrastructures
This semester we will be addressing the idea of the productive city through the design of a single building: an urban machine.
Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a continuous evacuation of industry from the city, slowly bleaching our cities into monocultural playgrounds without the economic engines on which they depend. While this may in part be attributed to economic factors, its root lies largely in misplaced planning decisions. Today, we realize more and more that the vibrancy, resiliency, and sustainable development of a city depends on its mix of functions, not only in creating jobs and diversity but in placing the sources of production close to where we live, work, and play.
In the last decade, Zurich has been at the forefront of redesigning its future with the aim of retaining and increasing light industries in the heart of the city, incentivizing the development of a new typology: that of vertical industry. These are not spaces of an industrial past but that of an ongoing present. The greatest distinction in this new typology is the speculative nature of it. Industrial buildings were and still are often built for specific companies. In Zurich, these are now being built with no particular tenant in mind but with the ambition for a mix of tenants who can also change over time. Most importantly, these are centrally located structures, integrated into neighborhoods and with a public presence, contributing to the life of the city.
Through the design of a production building we will imagine an infrastructural architecture that addresses use, comfort, flexibility, and collectivity. We will also look more specifically at sustainability through the lens of durability, resilience, and performance in the search for a new architectural language. The semester-long studio will be organized in two parts, beginning with a research and testing phase during which we will investigate precedents and visual references which may inform the conception of this new building type. We will also explore spatial thinking, from physical to digital models, collage, and photography to understand relationships between structure, image, and space. In particular, we will engage tools and techniques relative to a virtual semester. The second part of the semester will be the development of a vertical factory in Zurich-West, a rapidly developing post-industrial neighborhood.
Students will be evaluated on their participation in studio as well as the quality of their research, project development and final presentations.
GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions
ONIONS
Can there be an architecture that provokes the innate generosity of the human spirit? We think the answer is yes, but only if it’s creator has the personal will, talent, desire, knowledge and curiosity to search for an empowering design born of distinctive origins.
The aspiration of this studio is to create an environment that sponsors the discovery of self-liberating authorship. To do so, the student must be prepared to, at first, enjoy the freedom of getting lost in a rigorous process that is, by its very nature, seriously fun.
After an initial series of “shared experiences,” each student will designate their own site, then each student will be assigned their own program.
The studio will meet each week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is very important that each student “attend” the entirety of these sessions.
As a group we will be looking for creative ways to interact via ZOOM.
GSD students may view additional information on option studios:
Schedule for Zoom Q&A sessions
Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)
The first semester studio is a project-based introduction to a range of ideas, methods, and techniques essential for the design engineer. In the studio, students learn through making. This year, students will develop two independent half-semester projects around the topics of telepresence and telehealth:
1) Data and Design Research. Students will develop, in groups of two, an interactive digital tool for strategic analysis and decision support. Students will also define their own methodologies for design research and iterative design production.
(2) Product Design. Students will develop, in groups of three, a telemedicine product including physical, digital, and augmented reality prototyping.
Every three weeks, as part of studio time, all first-year MDE students will convene for "Debating Design," a series of roundtables when two outside speakers present short vignettes addressing topics in design engineering, followed by an open discussion with faculty and students.
This studio is limited to first-year students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering program, a collaborative degree associated with the Harvard GSD and SEAS.
This course is scheduled on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at Maxwell Dworkin G123 and G135
Elements of Urban Design
Elements of Urban Design is the mandatory advanced core studio for the post-professional Urban Design program. The studio introduces critical concepts, strategies, and technical skills associated with current thinking about Urban Design, and speculates on the designer’s spectrum of roles in analyzing and shaping urban environments. More generally, the studio aims to develop the necessary literacies for architects and landscape architects to critically engage in the bridging practice of Urban Design – to understand and interrogate questions related to urban environments, and to produce compelling formal responses.
A fundamental difference between Urban Design and Architecture and Planning is its concern for the ‘thingness,’ in the Heideggerian definition, of urban settlement, which transcends the single building or complex and involves competing claims and other unreconciled constraints needing to be resolved through design. Today, cities are often parts of larger networks of communities and ecologies within regions, with both overlapping and complementary roles. Urban growth and change now range over a wider landscape, offering both opportunities and constraints, and often with faster-growing areas located in peri-urban and peripheral locations. This is certainly the case in several North American cities like Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles; European cities like Rome and Paris; and a host of settlement across the globe.
Even within the thrall of global pressures, local characteristics and identities require both attention and resolution. Globally, the expansion and transformation of metropolitan regions have introduced different scales and types of urban form. Increased economic, social, and environmental complexities further complicate Urban Design circumstances, making them more challenging. The studio will expose students to this range of conditions and propel them to think systemically about how to intervene in these varied emergent urban formations.
In the Fall Semester of 2020, the Elements of Urban Design studio is organized around two 7-week design exercises, located at the core and periphery of the Greater Boston Region, which together cover a range of pertinent issues in Urban Design today, particularly, although not solely, in the North American context. These are preceded by pre-semester workshops to establishing familiarity with workflows and background knowledge.
Landscape Architecture III: Third Semester Core Studio
From Off-Shoring to Near Shore: Littoral Landscapes at Work
This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people at work in working landscapes—through the design of regional frameworks and localized sites in coastal Massachusetts.
Since the 18th century, cheap fuel, cheap labor, and cheap nature lay the foundation for settler wealth in North America. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the economic logic of “fossil capital,” as argued by Andreas Malm, coupled industrial power generated from fossil fuels with wage labor. The primary orientation of this coupling was economic growth. Fossil capital has led to rising temperatures, melting ice, and decreased biodiversity—and the uneven distribution of effects on human populations. In New England, the techno-ecological landscapes that once supported everyday life—e.g. productive fisheries, forests, and fields— have been transformed by the market orientation of fossil capital. Relocated overseas, fragmented by urbanization, or restructured by changing economies, the physical remnants of socially productive landscapes have been romanticized, miniaturized, and historicized.
During the early 20th century, through the New Deal, the profession of landscape architecture undertook a broad range of public projects. During the 1930s, landscape architects planned, designed, and executed work across federal agencies as diverse as the War Department, Tennessee Valley Authority, Federal Housing Administration, and the Department of the Interior, creating thousands of jobs for out-of-work Americans. A broader examination of the history of landscape and the New Deal reveals that among the celebrated public initiatives were also many projects of environmental absurdity, constructed through grueling manual labor, often by racially segregated work crews.
Amidst the 2020 economic crisis and calls for a Green New Deal, the discipline of landscape architecture has the potential to again create jobs—“green jobs”—in service of a decarbonized economy. But without compelling visions for the future, the discipline will be limited to projects of climate change resilience that stabilize contemporary ways of life. This is an understandable sentiment in turbulent times, but it also represents the most pernicious form of “sustainability.” A new paradigm for working landscapes requires new associations beyond recreation and ecological restoration. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed outdoors many activities that were previously limited to interior spaces. However, due to the urgency of this health crisis, most of these facilities are purely functionalist and designed for short- to medium- term deployment. This studio will explore the design of landscapes that can be new environments for health care, education, housing, and research that are disentangled from singular market orientation and hybridized with regional needs for food, fibers, clean water, and waste management.
Design approaches will be grounded in the material media of the discipline—soils, vegetation, water dynamics—and their controlling infrastructures, physical and policy-based. The studio will explore: how productive sectors will migrate due to climate risk; what happens to the land left behind; and how these landscapes can support dignified spaces for work and self-determination. These design propositions may lead to new forms, scales, and cadences for work and habitation that may seem improbable under current systems of funding, fuels, and power. In the 21st century, the socially productive landscape reconsidered does not merely provide the stuff of everyday life closer to home. It demands a paradigm shift from landscapes that are discrete and transactional to those that foster a commonwealth of human and natural labor.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in MLA Program.
Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE
Integration is the agenda for the third-semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems, and processes into a synthetic whole. Structural systems, envelope design, and environmental and thermodynamic processes will be systematically addressed in the development of a single project during the course of the whole semester.
The building type consists of a multiprogram urban building, requiring careful consideration of access and exchanges (circulatory, visual, and energy), between programs. During that time students will work in consultation with engineers and scientists. Design exercises will be addressed through team and individual study.
Prerequisites: GSD 1101 and GSD 1102, or advanced standing in the MArch I program.
First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio
First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to research, analyze, create and implement plans and projects for the built environment. The studio operates in conjunction with VIS-2129: Spatial Analysis and the Built Environment, which introduces students to the theoretical underpinnings and spatial analysis of representational techniques to design and communicate urban planning concepts.
The studio will use the Boston region and its neighborhoods as a planning laboratory and students will be expected to understand the city through the lens of planning elements such as demographics; economic, market, social, cultural, environmental attributes; urban character and built form; and public and private stakeholder interests, all of which shape the city and inform decisions about land use, development, and infrastructure.
We will consider urgent planning issues and dilemmas emanating from the US legacy of white supremacy, which operates through the built environment, political system, economic sectors and labor markets, and cultural institutions. These include disproportionate effects of the pandemic on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, mass protests against police killings of Black Americans, and the national movement for police divestment and reinvestment in public infrastructures and amenities, including parks and recreation, community development, and social services.
We also will examine how anthropogenic climate change is challenging the design disciplines, asking what are the responsibilities of today’s planners in mitigating its effects and promoting justice as it impacts the built environment. This is particularly true in the context of the Greater Boston region, where many communities are expected to experience some degree of sea-level rise by the year 2050.
Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio
GSD 1111 is the first in a sequence of four core studios that, together, constitute the foundation of your time at the GSD. The school’s curriculum asserts that design is at the center of a landscape architecture education. In the studios, the hands-on experience of design is a synthetic act, bringing together theory, technique, and aesthetic sensibility in the making of a landscape. In this studio, you will apply the skills and knowledge acquired through other first year courses—Histories of Landscape Architecture; Landscape Representation; and Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies.
The central topic of this semester’s studio is the PUBLIC. It will be explored through two themes— SPACE FOR PROTESTS: landscape as a venue that accommodate the right to congregate to discuss matters of public interest; and SPACE FOR HEALING: landscape as an agent of reconciliation. As a discipline that deals with the transformation and the production of space, landscape architecture is in essence as a materialist practice, whose outcome is made out of real, physical things. In this course we will put the accent on how the physical configurations produced by landscape architecture can also have significant consequences that transcend the physical. The landscapes we design enable and inhibit different forms of relationship between different entities. In urban contexts, such as the ones we will be working with during this semester, PEOPLE constitute the central subject and object of those interactions. Within urban landscapes, it is the public space, more specifically, what constitutes the fundamental domain in the provision and protection of democracy, for it is in the public space where the most profound manifestations of social conflict, individual self-expression, and cultural exchange take place.
In the design of the public, it is therefore impossible to extricate the political dimension. In this studio we will investigate both the physical and the political implications in the transformation of the City Hall Plaza in Boston, and the Charles River right bank in Allston. We will think of design as the initiation of processes, as the introduction of specific physical transformations for later and not fully predictable social processes to develop. Through these two different sites, we will look into public space as representation of our shared conditions of existence, as expression of difference, values, individuality, universality, knowledge, and power, and we will study how the changes we introduce in the received configuration of the public imply, inevitably, the affirmation, the manipulation, and the suppression of some of those conditions. While the landscapes we design are nested and largely determined by broad and intricate networks of social and economic processes, in this studio we will focus on how the specific forms we provide our landscapes with might constitute in themselves powerful tools in the transformation of those processes.
Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning in the Developing World
This course starts from the premise that politics and governance arrangements can both enable and constrain effective urban planning action. Using a focus on cities in the developing world, the course examines an array of governance structures (centralized versus decentralized institutions; local versus national states; participatory budgeting, etc.) and political conditions (democracy versus authoritarianism; neoliberal versus populist versus leftist party politics; social movements) that are relatively common to cities of the global south. In addition to assessing the impacts of these structures and conditions on urban policy formation and implementation, the course asks which governance arrangements and/or political contexts are more or less likely to produce equitable, inclusive, and sustainable urban environments. To address these questions, the course is structured around discussion of cases and theories that give us the basis for documenting the ways that politics affect urban policy and the built environment of the city more generally. Among a range of policy domains, special attention is paid to transportation, housing, informal vending, and mega-project development, with most examples drawn from Latin America, South Asia, and East Asia.
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.
First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT
PROJECT is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, PROJECT may refer to fundamental modes of architectural representation, the mapping of the subject in the larger objective context, or a conceptual foray into territory unknown.
A series of focused and intense design exercises requires students to investigate fundamental disciplinary issues of architectural thought, practice, and representation. As the introductory studio in the first professional degree program, the curriculum addresses the varied educational backgrounds of incoming MArch I candidates. Specifically, students are encouraged to leverage their varied expertise in the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines to find provocative and perhaps unexpected motivations of architectural form. Techniques of representation and iterative development across various mediums will be required.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in MArch I program.