Thinking Through Soil: the earth in the herbarium
Every material process that shapes the construction of the urban environment passes through the soil at some point. In Thinking Through Soil, we will use the process of soil formation as a critical lens to trace the politics and material contingency of the urban environment.
The goal of this course is to familiarize ourselves with the fundamentals of soil science and soil theory, in order to think in new ways about the geos of design. As a material that lies at the intersection of the biological and geological sciences, this kind of thinking requires us to engage with the categorical boundaries that have historically shaped soil knowledge. By learning where these boundaries are and how to navigate them, we will become better equipped to make design decisions, and think critically about larger environmental issues such as climate change, wastewater agriculture, and local biology.
The course will begin with seminar style discussions around key texts that frame an analytical approach to the science and politics of soil knowledge. Here we will encounter recent critiques of the politics of soil by queer and feminist materialist scholars such as Vanessa Agard-Jones, Mel Chen, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Kathryn Yusoff have identified the geos as a crucial source of power distinct from the bio-political, and yet animated by the same ontological cut that distinguishes between them.
Through guest lectures by soil scientists, historians, and botanists, we will also learn more about how soil works, how it is understood empirically, and how it has been delineated as a natural historical object since the 1880’s. Through these engagements with both humanities and science scholarship on soils, we will begin to try to imagine what a different conception of soil might mean for our design practice, and for a broader commitment to decolonial geo-environmental justice.
Final projects in this course will be done in partnership with the Harvard Herbarium. In approaching this herbarium’s vast and immaculate digital collection, we will ask a simple question: where is the Earth in the Herbarium? To put the question another way, in preparing the millions of catalogued plant specimens that fill national herbariums around the world, and our own herbarium here at Harvard, what happened to the dirt? Predating the university itself, the longevity of the herbarium as a form means that it has not only accumulated plants but has also accumulated our ideas about plants, and through a strange kind of absence, our ideas about earth as well. Through a series of presentations and workshop style feedback sessions with the seminar as a whole, students will build a final research project reconnecting a plant with its missing soil. In this phase of the course, we will engage directly in the representational questions our readings have lead us to, taking seriously the old architectural maxim that drawing is thinking. Final projects will consist of student-selected projects based in the digital collection of the Harvard Herbarium, and will require us to imagine more clearly the missing earth in the herbarium.
For a preview of last years final projects, see: https://thinkingthroughsoil.studio/
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Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
Altered Rural and Urban Landscape Restoration
Highly altered and often engineered rural, coastal, and urban landscapes are difficult and expensive to adapt to the realities of climate change. Food production systems in rural America characterized by drainage infrastructure (tiles, ditches, dams, pipelines, irrigation units) are old and/or inefficient. Urban centralized utility and transportation infrastructure is old and failing, vulnerable to climate change, and antithetical to restoring natural function. Coastal areas suffer from upstream pollutants from tributary rivers and as border lands are increasingly impacted by sea level rise and catastrophic storms. Repairing, rebuilding, and extending existing infrastructure in these landscapes is not an option if we are to sustain ourselves, anticipate and mitigate climate change, and support and restore nature. As a later-sequence ecology course on natural processes and built environment issues in the coastal zone/nearshore environment and rural landscapes, this course complements existing GSD emphasis on introductory ecology, terrestrial systems, and freshwater wetlands. The course focus on ecological design and management of rural and urban landscapes is highly relevant to current/future climate concerns with sea level rise, stormwater management and flooding, drought, energy infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, and food supply.
Apfelbaum brings expertise in ecological applications to achieve restoration objectives, stormwater management, and risk assessment. Zimmerman brings expertise in assessment of and solutions to the ecological impacts of urban development from CSOs and stormwater to energy demand, groundwater, and equity issues. Parsons brings expertise in estuarine ecosystems and biodiversity, toxics and sediment management in urban ports (including New York City, Boston, Philadelphia/Wilmington, Baltimore), ecologically-based engineered solutions to habitat loss including islands, coastal wetlands, barrier beaches, and peninsulas.
Learning Goals:
The course takes advantage of the instructors knowledge as practitioners. From people issues and conflict to dealing with conventional approaches to engineering and design, regulation, and anticipating the consequences of climate, the course will give students a real world look at how to assess existing rural and urban infrastructure and how it impacts natural systems. They will understand the principles and methods of evaluating altered systems practiced by the instructors, learn to apply them in their own work, develop natural restoration alternatives based on their evaluations, and become familiar with the issues, regulations, and obstacles to their implementation.
Course structure:
– Fixed Synchronous meeting: Thursdays 10:00am-12:00pm (120 minutes). Entire class meets online
– Flexible Synchronous meeting: Either Wednesday mornings 9:00am-10:00am or afternoons 3:00pm-4:00pm (60 minutes). Focus groups, case study work, Student presentations, additional lecture material
– Asynchronous Content (as necessary based on availability – 60 minutes). Team projects, lab sections, small groups
– Preparation Time: 6 hours. Reading, writing, case studies, research
?Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
Plants and Placemaking – New Ecologies for a Rapidly Changing World
In the face of crises spanning pandemics, political turmoil, and the rapid degradation of the planet’s natural systems—all with a backdrop of human inequality—the power and importance of our work as landscape architects is becoming clearer to those outside the profession. Erosive pressures associated with changes to climate have placed global plant communities under constant assault, yet abundant and resilient life still adapts and flourishes in most places. This course will encourage students to observe these patterns and to learn from context so that we can place the healing and restorative qualities of plants, essential to sustaining life on this planet, in the foreground of our work as leaders in this incredible and dynamic profession.
A frequent criticism of new landscape architects emerging from academia focuses on their limited practical knowledge related to plants and planting design. Let’s change this. We share a collective responsibility to lead and teach our peers, patrons, collaborators, and the public of the vital role that plants and well-considered planting design plays in shaping the human experience.
To reimagine the revegetation of a place after catastrophe or amidst the pressures of growth and large-scale human movements, we must first understand context by digging into the past to examine what ecologies were there before the present state occurred. With these informed perspectives, we can begin to repair fragmented natural systems, preserve (even create) habitat, sequester carbon, and buffer communities from destructive weather and climate—all while embracing the realities of how people gather, work, and live. Plants define the character of place; they shape who we are and who we become. We must get this right or the same patterns in more chaotic contexts will simply reemerge.
This course is open to those who crave a creative and interpretive, yet always pragmatic, approach toward utilizing plants to create landscapes that actively rebuild systems stretching far beyond site boundaries.
Expressive and iterative weekly exercises will encourage rapid design that inspires students to explore natural and designed plant communities. Conventional and non-conventional planting typologies will be examined. Together we will seek new and innovative ideas for how to restore biological function to the land. We will use empirical observations and investigations to explore multiple-scaled thinking about plants and their environments, including cultural and vernacular attributes. This course will not be a comprehensive overview of the horticultural or botanical history of plants; however, it will reinforce important methodologies for how to learn and research plants that can be translated to any locale, by studying individual vegetative features and characteristics. Together, we will translate these investigations into design languages that can be applied in future design work.
Products of the course will include mixed-media drawings that explore typologies of designed and non-designed plant communities. Videos, photographs, drawings, sketches, and diagrams, as well as conventional plans, sections, and elevations, will be the vocabulary of the course.
Rules for the Electronic Zoo: A Mediatechnics of the Neoliberal Present
Expanding outwards from a lecture bearing the same title, delivered in the spring of 2020, this course explores the technical and political composition of the present. As the term “neoliberalism” has, in recent years, become a ubiquitous category for describing various features of contemporary life, it has arguably also lost much of its conceptual content and specificity. Neoliberalism, it now seems, refers to a kind of vague, gaseous element, which permeates everything from economic discourse to domestic spending habits to construction labor policies.
Against this background, the course will build up a “minor” history of neliberalism’s emergence. If historical-theoretical accounts have thus far overwhelmingly sought to articulate neoliberalism’s political and economic origins, we will work in this course towards the explication of a lesser-known, mediatechnical genealogy, which, without discounting political economy, concentrates instead on spatial histories and theories of automation, information, and environmentalism.
Topics covered include, among others: technics and technology; media, formats and memory; the biopolitical foundations of contemporary urbanism; industrial location theory and the economic geography; individuation, and the spatial politics of neoliberalism; attention, distraction, and the psychopolitics of exhaustion; infrastructure and the managerial politics of environment.
Course structure: Lectures will run for approximately one hour, twice weekly (live), with additional asynchronous content and discussion sessions (time TBD).
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
Philosophy of Technology: From Marx and Heidegger to AI, Genome Editing, and Geoengineering (HKS)
Technology shapes how power is exercised in society, and thereby also changes how the present changes into the future. Technological innovation is all around us, and new possibilities in fields like artificial intelligence, genome-editing and geoengineering not only reallocate power, but might transform human life considerably, to the point of modifying the essence of what it is to be human. Basic attitudes towards technology vary considerably. At times it is tech optimism that dominates the debates (sometimes even a techno-boosterism that sees technology as key to heaven on earth), and at other times it is more low-spirited attitudes ranging from romantic uneasiness to doom-and-gloom Luddism and technology-bashing. A closer look at these various attitudes – and reflection on how technology and power are intertwined — will help generate a more skeptical attitude towards all of them and contribute to a more level-headed debate, which is so badly needed. While ethical considerations will enter prominently, the philosophy of technology is broader than its ethics. It aims to interpret and critically assess the role of technology for human life and guide us to a more thoughtful integration of technology in our individual lives and in public decision making. This course aims to teach you to do just that, starting with basic stances and key figures in the field and then progressing towards challenges around technology as they will arise for the 21st century.
This course is jointly-listed with HKS as DPI-207.
Immersive Landscape: Representation through Gaming Technology
"Soon will come plausible alternatives to our world. You may have failed in this one but what if you had a million new chances in a million different new worlds?”
The course is aimed at investigating new ways to interpret, conceive and describe landscape and architecture. While traditional methods of representation will prevail for some time, they make the cognitive process a one-way circumstance with an “emitter” and a “listener” that barely interact. Game technologies permit the creation of realistic, oneiric, utopian as well as dystopian universes. It is possible to use, disregard, twist, bend or re-invent the laws of physics, the flow of time, the hazards of weather, the perception of depth, but most importantly, it permits absolute freedom.
Just as Rome wasn't built in a day, connections will need to be made through studies of landscape representation in the arts, movies and, not surprisingly, video games. Through the investigation, conception and construction of virtual “altered states” you will amass the techniques required to maturate your ideas from the early stages of preparatory work to the deployment phase, bearing in mind that technical skills matter less than the search for astute and imaginative solutions. Game fabrication should be envisaged as a mental layout where elements have to be structured and formulated in a way that they are not perceived as being intrusive, unless, of course, you want them to be.
Some of the topics covered include: “mastering planning and research”, “Strategies of representations”, “realising a graphic style”, “creating meshes and textures for game engines”, “building nature”, “realistic vs. non realistic approaches”, “sound design”, “navigation and interaction”, “document.write(“Hello World!”)”, “targeting different platforms”, “having fun” –
while it's not exactly technical, it's a fundamental notion that should not be lost, especially when talking about games.
The theme of this year is "Gamma World", a journey into a troubled future built upon mutations and ruins. All we can hope is that the continuum of time can be reversed to avoid its final collapse. Exploring this cataclysmic future end-of-the-world scenario with it’s origins rooted in the context of an 80’s environment, old school with no trace of smart phones or google, instead we find DOS, big hair, breakdance, neon and shoulder pads. Of the most memorable from this period would surely be the sounds, the era of synthesisers and the advent of computer technology.
Our software of choice will be “Unreal", a real time 3D engine serving as industry standard in game world creation and simulation (most of the processes can actually be easily transferred to other engines). “Cinema 4D”, because of its very stable and simple workflow, will be used for most of the 3D operations. Students familiar with other 3D packages are free to use them as a possible replacement. However, the most important tools will be a pencil, a piece of paper and your brain.
You can check https://www.immersivelandscape.org to browse through some sample projects from the last two sessions.
Course structure:
The weekly class will be divided into three parts. The first one will focus on theory, methods, and criticism; the second on the technical, where we will be put into practice what has been already investigated. Finally, the third part will be interviews with selected, relevant guests.
On Tuesdays, attendance will be required from 10 to 12 pm EST. Additionally, 1 hour of asynchronous materials will be made available.
Three intermediate assignments will lead to the final.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the <a href="https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/live
History of the Art Museum
This seminar explores the development of the modern art museum as an architectural type, measured against the evolving nature of display objects, audience, urbanity, technology, and curatorial practices. We focus on the spatial relationship between the gallery space and the material on view and discover moments of co-amplification. This course occupies a space in between architectural history, art history, curatorial practice, and exhibition design.
From the consolidation of the type in early 19th-century Europe to more contemporary critiques of the White Cube, the art museum has been the primary site where symbiotic trajectories between artistic and architectural development have played out. Architecture often makes aggressive commentaries on objects it is designed to display, and works of art acquire new significance in the physical environments they occupy. The reverse is also true, especially as museums learn to be flexible and adapt over time.
The course will pay particular attention to how cultural artifacts from beyond the Western canon are dealt with and look at the importation of the art museum as a program into non-Western countries, which sometimes responded with their own canons and classifications of fine art. The evolving public is similarity a major concern, as we explore and update the concept of Museums without Walls and the ideas of participatory, non-hierarchical, and open-ended museum experiences.
Building on the course’s interdisciplinary premise, we will be involving curators and exhibition designers to discuss their disciplinary concerns and strategies.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
Local Government Solutions to America’s Affordable Rental Housing Challenge
There are more than 10 million renters who are severely housing cost burdened – spending more than 50% of their income on shelter. The solutions to this national crisis are varied and involve all levels of government, but local governments are closest to the particular housing challenges in their communities and arguably have the widest range of levers to apply to the problem. This course will challenge students to create new and innovative approaches to the affordable housing problem that can be implemented at the local level. These approaches will include a mix of strategies to raise additional funds for subsidies, reduce regulatory constraints, and encourage new forms of housing and new methods of housing construction. Students will be offering advice and solutions directly to mayors and housing professionals of four cities from different regions of the nation that have volunteered to serve as laboratories for the course: Pittsburgh, PA, Memphis, TN, Kansas City, MO, and West Jordan, UT.
Students will receive a package of information about their cities in the first session of the class and will meet virtually with representatives of each of the cities early in the semester. Students will also have access to important local actors as the class proceeds. Students will present final reports to the city representatives providing a comprehensive strategy for the cities to adopt that will substantially resolve the cities’ current need for housing affordable to severely cost-burdened residents.
The course will be limited to 20 students who will be divided into teams that will serve as “consultants” to the mayors and housing professionals of the participating cities. While there are not explicit prerequisites, this course will work best for students with some experience, either academic or professional in the housing sector.
The class will meet virtually each week. Each class session will include a mix of mini lectures, presentations and discussions with invited guest experts, breakout sessions with city teams, and will often include presentations and discussions led by students. Grading will include class participation, periodic presentations, and the final comprehensive strategy.
Course structure: The class will meet synchronously on Wednesdays from 2-4 ET. A total of one hour of asynchronous class time will be assigned each week generally consisting of meetings of each team separately. While it may be ideal for the teams to meet in the 4-5 hour on Wednesday, each team will be free to select their own time to meet during the week. Each faculty member will also schedule office hours at different times during the week and students may use that hour for team meetings with faculty.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.
Urban Politics, Planning, and Development (at HKS)
In the face of failures and dysfunction at the national level, the welfare- and democracy-enhancing potential of cities has come into focus in recent years. Yet, not all cities are able to realize their promise as democratic engines of economic growth and human development. Why some fail, while others succeed depends crucially on the politics and governance practices that shape cities and metropolitan regions. Understanding the politics of urban planning and development is therefore fundamental to unlocking the potential of our cities to boost the wealth, health, and well-being of citizens and communities in ways that are sustainable and equitable. This course focuses on urban politics in the United States and Europe. Key topics include U.S. and European urban politics viewed in the large, and more specifically the politics of land-use, economic development, housing, water, policing, and transit. Cross-cutting themes include: the role of business and non-profits in local governance; citizen participation and urban social movements; the importance of race, ethnicity, and class in shaping group conflict and co-operation at the local level; as well as the costs and benefits of local government fragmentation. The course involves in-class exercises, group work, and simulations, as well as guest lectures. Most class sessions build off single-city case studies, including written and multi-media cases on Atlanta, Copenhagen, Detroit, Madrid, Naples, New Orleans, New York, Pittsburgh, San Juan, Seattle, and Stuttgart.
The course purposes are twofold: (1) to enhance your sophistication in thinking about and analyzing the factors and conditions that shape political and planning processes at the urban level and what their consequences are; and (2) to hone your skills in thinking strategically about how to exercise influence in and on these decision processes.
Product and Experience Design for Desirability (at SEAS)
Multi-disciplinary, project-based course for students interested in designing products, services, or ambitious art or educational works that are meaningful, beautiful, useful, as simple as possible, and emotionally desirable (e.g., calming, inspiring, delightful, cool, covetable.). Students learn the fundamentals of design theory, emotional design, user-centered design, and design leadership. The class format consists of a series of project-based design challenges, and each challenge has three parts. The first part is a summary of the scientific literature on an important emotional concept that is relevant to design, such as trust, anxiety reduction, or belonging. The second part includes one or more case studies of past works that were exceptionally well designed for this emotional concept. The third part is a custom design challenge for students to practice applying what they are learning to their own creative ideas. Past project prompts include challenges like designing headphones for anxiety reduction, health literacy campaigns for rapid adoption, and sustainable materials like bamboo to represent the future of luxury. Along with this cycle of theory and application, the course teaches research-based design process and design leadership skills. Weekly critique panels enable students to develop and refine their own design point of view. The final project in the course is a professional design portfolio.
Limited enrollment. Instructor permission required for all students. Engineering Sciences 22 is jointly offered with the Graduate School of Design as SCI 6276.