Rome

A seminar on the art, architecture, and urbanism of Rome where the layering of material artifacts from successive historical periods provides an uninterrupted record of more than two thousand years. Development of the urban site establishes a continuous framework and contextualizes the cultural, artistic, and political aspirations and values of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque city. 

The course includes lectures and discussions on selected topics and student reports on their research. Some lectures are organized around historic spectacles – the Emperor Augustus’ funeral (14 A.D.), Constantine the Great’s triumphal procession (312), and the consecration of New St. Peter’s (1626) – imagined as walks through Rome highlighting the city’s evolving cultural and urban character. Other topics may consider a single building architect or idea in depth. The first half of the course covers Antiquity to the Renaissance while the second looks in greater detail at specific Renaissance and Baroque projects. Topics in the first part include the growth and decline of the ancient Roman city, the creation of new architectural forms and urban meanings in response to the Christianization of Empire, and the practice of pilgrimage as urban experience. The second part focuses on the style and meaning of those works of art, architecture, and urbanism which distinguish Rome today such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, Bramante’s design for New St. Peter’s, and Bernini’s sculpture for the rebuilt basilica.  In general, the approach of the first half emphasizes the historical and cultural foundations which constitute the idea of Rome while the second takes up more theoretical issues of representation and reception.

Miami Resilience: Housing & Infrastructure

This advanced research seminar in Miami, Florida (USA) is thematically focused at the intersection of community resilience, infrastructure design, housing studies, building science and zoning. With a particular geographic focus on the western portions of Miami-Dade County bordering the Everglades, the seminar will seek to understand the various forces shaping the adaptive capacity, livability and affordability of adjacent municipalities and communities. Within the context of rapid climatic, environmental and social change, students are tasked with developing a specialized research agenda that builds upon the various programs, methodologies and practices within the GSD. Each student will be required to independently select and develop a research agenda that demonstrates a command of the associated disciplinary literature framing the inquiry. In addition, each student will be required to develop analytical framework(s) that demonstrate the student’s competence for not only understanding the problem(s) but also utilizing such frameworks for practically engaging local stakeholders. In partnership with the Knight Foundation and the Chief Resilience Officers (CROs) of Miami and Miami-Dade County, students will travel to Miami to conduct field work to support their research. 
 
The seminar will culminate in the production of a project (e.g., memorandum, multi-media, etc..) that memorializes the analytical outcomes, as well as a normative position for advancing future policy, planning and design decisions. Students are evaluated on: (i) monthly presentations, and, (ii) the final research memorandum/media. Each student is required to lead discussions on relevant literature/data shaping their research, as well as periodic up-dates concerning their research progress. Students are encouraged to utilize the seminar to ground complementary existing research for ongoing theses and dissertations. Specialized research inquires may include engineering and architectural resilience design, hazard mitigation planning, landscapes of water and risk, and the architecture and urban design of TOD. 
 
Travel to Miami is anticipated to take place from February 27th to February 30th. The students selected to take part in the trip will be term-billed $100. Students may travel in only one course or studio in a given term and should refer to traveling seminar policies.

Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices

The Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar investigates art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of contemporary culture and the city. As artists and designers respond to challenges of global magnitude and local impact, engage with cross-cultural and often conflicting conditions, and operate in disparate economic and societal realms, the need for increased engagement and collaboration is paramount. The complexity present in the context of action—economic, social, political, cultural, and ecological— frequently requires interdisciplinary approaches accompanied by cross-pollinating knowledge and skillsets.

Socially engaged art, relational aesthetics, and activist and emancipatory design practices challenge disciplinary boundaries not only in the art and the design worlds but as they crossover and interact with communities, policymakers, and various experts. They lead to the expansion of professional vocabularies, tools, and imaginaries, and cultivates new forms of interdisciplinary knowledge. 

As art and design practices move from art in public space to art in public interest (Miwon Kwon), their participatory and relational makeup can generate platforms and agencies that question dominant culture, construct new practices, establish new subjectivities, and subvert existing configurations of power (Chantal Mouffe). Historical examples of such approaches include Dada, the Situationists, and other avant-garde movements, as well as contemporary art and design practices such as the Silent University, Philadelphia Assembled, Superflex, Critical Art Ensemble, Pink Bloque, Yes Men, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, or the Arctic Cycle. Such disseminated practices challenge the boundaries of art and design and their environments.

The seminar will navigate the evolving interdisciplinarity of art and design practices by engaging with the city, its communities, and the art world and by addressing contemporary urgencies and societal concerns. Practice-oriented, the seminar includes lectures, workshops, and assignments dedicated to exploring artistic tools and methods as well as the context in which they perform.

Fundamental goals of the seminar are:
– to expose students to methods, techniques, and positions of interdisciplinary art and design practices;
– to explore how art and design practices can engage with the public domain;
– to creatively explore the potential of mediums in the realization of ideas; and
– to raise relevant questions and to test them through the development of projects;
– Student evaluation is based on assignments, participation in class, and the final presentation.

This semester the seminar will explore the agency of art and design in interrogating and responding to issues related to border conditions and migration of human and non-human entities with curators, artists, activists, and policymakers. At the end of the semester, a selection of students' research and projects will be presented at A/D/O in the context of this year's program "At the Border." Priority enrollment to ADPD MDes students.

Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment

The aim of the class is to learn how to depict and express the presence and appearance of people in natural and built environments.

This class objective will be achieved through three projects:

Each of the assigned projects will be realized in a different, specifically selected technique:

MAKE/BELIEVE

How does the action of making reflect, produce, enhance, aggregate, and/or suspend the beliefs of authors and audiences? This hybrid production-theory course merges training in artistic production strategies and methods with grounding in contemporary art practices, ideas, and histories. A seminar course intended for MDes students in the Art, Design, and the Public Domain concentration, but open to all students, MAKE/BELIEVE emphasizes project-based inquiries focused on the intersections of materiality, expression, and public engagement. From modernist debates over politics and aesthetics to post-truth parafictions of The Yes Men and “Arte Util” counterpoints of Tania Bruguera, to the wending “post-medium” tensions of Object Oriented Ontologies (and feminist and interspecies critiques thereof and therein), MAKE BELIEVE will move beyond the proposal to foreground actual material fabrication with a historically- and theoretically- substantive evaluative framework.  In particular, we will place a great emphasis on the ethics of engagement: how does one work with public constituencies, when should one be formal vs. informal, who is benefitting from your project, how does what we make express what we believe?

We aim to undo, or further complicate, an endless set of triangulations: Subject-Audience-Publics, Affect-Aura-System, Space-Object-Idea, Science-Fiction-Abstraction, Studio-Site-Territory, Land-Parcel-Terrain, and Being-Making-Doing. We will meet weekly in a format that will include outside reading and production endeavors, field work and site visits, group crits, individually-focused project work, occasional guest visitors, and general exploration of various cultural positionalities: curator, producer, activist, scholar, organizer, entrepreneur.

Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture

Current tendencies in the discipline suggest a split between two opposing architectural projects: the easy project versus the difficult project[1].  Primarily related to architecture’s form, this positioning of the divide might also be used to identify recent developments in representation: Cheap and fast one-point perspectives with minimal material changes as opposed to laborious photo-realistic renderings oozing tactile interiors. Compounded by the hourly “swipe,” up/down and left/right, or how the architectural image is posted, pinned, shared, and liked moments after it is created, places a further immediacy on the making of representation and naming an agenda. Rather than question the easy over the difficult, might we readjust our focus towards the conceptualization of representation first, as a way of conceiving of architecture? This seminar engages the following thought-polemic: “Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture.” 

The aim of this course is to develop techniques and methodologies around a series of representational experiments. All content will be framed by contemporary issues in representation, not a historical overview, and will include directed studies on materiality, color, digital tooling, animations, scale figures, and media. Formatted into a list of six curated references, with the majority of sources located in art practice and popular culture, each weekly lecture will attempt to construct a theory on representation.  

Over the course of the semester, participants will conduct biweekly exercises, culminating in the delivery of a twenty minute lecture to the class around your own theory on representation, potentially setting up a future architectural project for oneself.  Part lecture, part performance, and part production, “Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture” is a search for original representational agendas. 

[1] Somol, R.E. "Green Dots 101." Hunch 11 (2007): 28-37 

Responsive Environments: Episodes in Experiential Futures

This course introduces to the students the tools and necessary thinking framework to create technologically driven speculative environments in the near future of the built environment. The course takes a critical approach on technological augmentation that is valid spatially, socially and psychologically. By putting the human experience at the center and forefront, from the immediate body scale to the larger environment encompassing buildings and the urban spaces, the course examines new and emerging models, technologies, and techniques for the design of innovative architectural human interfaces and responsive environments.
Taking a holistic view, the class will address multifaceted aspects of our experience of the built environment and how the rapid pace of technological innovation affects our relationship to our daily lives and spaces around us. The course takes advantage of the resources offered by the ongoing research project at the REAL lab with the Italian City of Bergamo, the course aims to build on that research and open up new research and speculative design opportunities. Bergamo – a typical mid-size European city – offers an ideal case study for prototypical interventions that can be possibly replicated in other contexts.
The first part of the course leading to the final project will consist of readings and discussions, background research, site analysis, and emerging technology investigation. Hands-on prototyping will be part of the course requirement and will feed into the larger speculative concepts. The course places an important emphasis on what makes the design of these responsive environments perceptually valid and technically feasible. Topics of in-class discussions include: techniques of digital/physical perceptual correlations, body-centric interaction, user experience design, and technological viability and perceptual longevity. The final group project will be a speculative design intervention, supported by a research paper and prototypes, envisaging potential scenarios ? or episodes of experiential futures.
The course outcomes will be a contribution to a publication. Students from any background and concentration are encouraged to apply to the lottery. No specific prerequisites are needed.
 

Digital Media: Writing Form

This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the primal pursuit of writing form.

Setting aside the better-known paradigms of sketching, 3D modeling, scripting or coding, writing –in this context– refers to the design potential of applied parametric formulations. Our appeal to form in this context is neither aesthetic nor ideological. Unlike shape (with which it is often confused), we understand form as a syntactic, procedural, and –increasingly– technical problem, with its fair share of architectural disciplinary autonomy. This is not just a technology offering, but an opportunity for architectural designers to expand their understanding of the canon of architectural typology, by taking on new, sneaky, ‘invisible’ types.

This crash course in indexical modelling (the deployment of variable analytic surfaces to parametrically define the space, boundaries, structure, and tectonic texture of a given three-dimensional construct) will be organised around semi-monthly lectures and applied workshops in parametric design, leading to the development of a number of intermediate design sketches, and a final design proposal. The outcome in all cases will be numerically fabricated physical models –laser-cut or 3D printed—with supporting diagrams.

On the theoretical side, the course will clarify the tenets of parametricism both practically (mathematically), formally, and theoretically with an assigned reading list stretching from Rosalind Krauss to George L. Legendre, and Greg Lynn.

On the practical side, generative design tools will include PTC MathCAD 15, Rhino 6 /Grasshopper, and the proprietary, third-party Grasshopper plugins Surf_TM, Millipede, and Weaverbird. No experience is necessary, as participants will be issued powerful software templates to work from every week.

 

Hours: Mondays, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM, and and Wednesdays, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM, every other week. An optional support class will be held on Mondays from 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM. The instructor will provide written progress feedback on a weekly basis.

Digital Media: Ambiance in Non-places

How do we define the “ambiance” of a place? What causes specific environments to evoke different feelings? Are there consistent elements that define these ambiances, and is it possible to measure their qualities and characteristics?

This class will explore these questions by observing, quantifying, and measuring different aspects of site-specific environments. It will attempt to create new ways of describing psychological attributes of places that go beyond what was traditionally measurable. Students will define different quantifiable strategies of capturing the unseen elements that define the feel of these different spaces.

This year, the class discussions will particularly focus around understanding qualities of “non-places”. In social sciences, “non-places” are a type of generic public spaces or institutions that do not confer a feeling of place. Many of these are transitory places, where humans pass through anonymously and do not identify with in any intimate sense, such as airports, train stations, and malls. Non-places offer a unique opportunity for interventions, as they are often seen as dehumanizing places. Students will create interactive tools, wearables, and site-specific installations that respond and intervene at these non-places. 

The course will expose students to digital and physical fabrication methods, and new technologies such as software, electronics, smart materials, and programming. An equally important part of the course is questioning how and why certain spaces make us feel a certain way, what role our senses play in perceiving physical environments, and how we can use technology through installations to interpret these questions in a poetic way. Class discussions will look at current and historical examples and theories of psycho-geographical effects that can be tested, revealed, or measured with new technologies. The class will learn the various ways of measuring and understanding these qualities through spatial sensing, mapping, creating, and prototyping.

Class workshops will cover the following digital and physical fabrication tools and skills based on project needs: Arduino (including input, output, making motions, and using devices to connect to the web), basic electronics, Ohm’s Law, potentiometers, capacitor charging, using a multimeter, Shopbot, scanning, 3D printing, 3D toolpaths, using an oscilloscope, solder, making simple boards, sending data to a computer for processing and display, and wireless devices.

Landscape Representation II

Building on the foundations of Landscape Representation I, this course investigates further the generative potential of representation as part of a productive feedback loop in the design process.

The course will provide a space to think critically about the representation of design, the role that representation plays in the process of designing, and the skills needed to create those representations. Experimenting with new modes of documentation and framing, we will work collaboratively to explore the reflexive relationship between conceptualization and visualization.

Providing a platform to engage studio work in new ways, students will translate and reinterpret drawings and models through a variety of conventional and unconventional media. The course will cover a range of techniques, skills, and workflows that embrace both analog and digital methodologies, exploring representation as a process of thinking, making and designing.