Representation for Planners
Representation for Planners helps those who are not trained to think and draw spatially how to do so. The half semester course runs in parallel to the first semester core urban planning studio and works together with 2128 Spatial Analysis. The class helps students develop the necessary technical tools, techniques and methodologies to analyze and represent planning ideas. Weekly exercises introduce students to the methodologies that enable them to communicate ideas in graphic written form.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person on Mondays from 9 to 10.15 am in 516, while the Wednesday class (9-10:15 am) will be taught remotely.
Migration in Latin-America: Imagining Flux, Rapid Response and Reversibility
Today’s fast-paced, global flow of people and goods is challenging the idea that the city should be an entity that aspires to stability and permanence. Before the pandemic projections indicated that the share of migrants relative to the total global population would increase from 2.8% in 2010 (190 million people) to 3.5% in 2050 (334 million people)—Today projections are higher.
Once the world reopens, international migration will intensify. Besides the acceleration of cross border migration due to post pandemic dynamics, predictions signal that in following decades there will be migratory displacements of up to 200 million additional people due to environmental factors. Rising sea levels, changes in rainfall distribution patterns and in ocean chemistry will strongly affect coastal cities where 77% of the at-risk global population resides. People displaced by the effects of climate change will join those displaced by more cyclical natural events, such as earthquakes and other natural phenomena. All these migrants will have to be taken in by destination cities.
This global scenario finds Latin-America and the Caribbean at a moment of extreme transitions. As an effect of border closures and constant curfews, precariousness in the city has acquired a new magnitude. We have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of rapid response settlements fueled by interrupted migration flows. It is expected that in incoming years uneven urban growth of the region, climatic fragility, political conflict, and other migratory drivers will set up the stage for massive human displacement, which will translate into aspirational and forced migration at an unprecedented scale. A more vulnerable migration landscape will increase the demands for rapid response settlements, bringing a new set of challenges to destination cities. If architecture, urban design, and planning do not come up with transitional strategies and find agile strategic responses, it is highly likely that precarious settlements will absorb a major part of this migrant influx. Such context of flux is forcing the region to reimagine its relation to temporality and inviting design imagination to create softer strategies, which are more elastic, reversible, and light enough to encompass a wide spectrum of unpredictable city pressures. In the near future urban robustness will be increasingly related to the ability of cities to structure their systems as open, recombinant, and capable of withstanding varying levels of requirements through constant reconfigurations.
In this course we will explore flexible solutions to temporary problems, reimagining the physical form of cities in a more elastic condition, and thinking about reversible configurations that are able to articulate more sustainable forms of urban development. Indeed, when in the future, besides migration, other deep transitions—such as climatic vulnerability—will also become prominent, a softer, weaker, and adjustable urban form will be the only fertile ground for conflict resolution. Through research and speculation will explore the potential of design for introducing a renovated narrative that incorporates human flux in the policies and politics of the city. We will critically interrogate displacement drivers, analyze migratory sub-systems and geographies, and discuss about how urban design and planning interventions can respond to migration. We will host prominent practitioners, regional policy leaders and influential intellectuals as guest to discuss strategies that governments, cities, and designers can apply in this imminent scenario. Assignments include leading and participating in discussion sessions and a final paper.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the course will meet mostly in person with the exception of 5 sessions that will happen online. Please review the syllabus for details, and note that this is subject to change.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 1st. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems (at FAS)
What problems do developing countries face, and how can individuals contribute to solutions rather than await the largesse of the state or other actors? Intractable problems – such as lack of access to education and healthcare, forced reliance on contaminated food, deep-seated corruption – are part of the quotidian existence of the vast majority of five of the world’s seven billion people. Developing societies suffer from what we refer to as ‘institutional voids’ that make organized activities of all sorts difficult; think of the mundane but important physical infrastructure that allows us to get to work or school in the developed world, as well as our access to higher-order institutions such as the availability of information at our fingertips or the security of the rule of law. The course demonstrates that reflecting upon the nature of the developing world’s intractable problems through different lenses helps characterize candidate interventions to address them. The scientist’s hypothesis-driven and iterative experimentation, the artist’s imagined counterfactuals through putting oneself in others’ shoes literally and theatrically, and the planner’s top-down articulation of boundary conditions, all tailor the ultimate solution.
Prerequisites: None.
Jointly offered courses: Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) as GENED 1011.
Open to cross-registration for students from other schools and universities. May accept a limited number of auditors, pending instructor approval.
Please note that the class will meet in Sever Hall 113.
Interface Design: Integrating Material Perceptions
The course explores the interface between architecture and engineering by examining our perceptions towards materials.
Interdisciplinary research has gained interest in recent years due to its creative potential to solve complex problems through the integration of diverse perspectives. Epistemological convergence across fields, though, is hindered due to different languages, value sets, and frames of reference used in individual domains. On the other hand, computation / computational thinking is becoming a common language across fields today that can facilitate new forms of communication and collaboration.
In this context, the class will focus on linking intrinsic material properties, often examined by engineering fields, to extrinsic material properties and geometry more central to the architectural domain. The course provides insight into the structural and mechanical engineering perspectives of material along with their quantitative analysis, optimization, and evaluation methods. In parallel, students will be exposed to computational workflows used to access and process material information. The discussions and design investigations will be organized as a dialog between numerical and visual, analytical and synthetical, as well as digital and physical with the goal of recognizing the differences and similarities between the fields.
Students will be asked to work in teams to (i) design and develop a simple software tool that assists in the understanding of engineering material knowledge in ways that are intuitive and relevant to architecture design processes, (ii) propose an integrative design application manifested in physical prototypes, and (iii) document the process in an academic paper format.
Minimal programming skills per team would be desirable but not required.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Real Estate Private Equity [M1]
Real Estate Private Equity explores, in depth, the analysis, decision-making and challenges private equity investors face when:
1. making and structuring highly leveraged investments,
2. managing investments through turbulence if market difficulties emerge,
3. developing superior, differentiated portfolio strategies and successfully aligning these with institutional capital,
4. procuring and managing sources of equity and debt capital,
5. negotiating institutional investor capital agreements, local partner operating agreements and transaction execution agreements,
6. managing all the stakeholders involved in complicated real estate transactions when circumstances require change,
7. successfully building and managing their organizations for long-term sustainability in the midst of having to compete in an environment fraught with constant risk, uncertainty and geo-political and economic fluctuation.
The course will be structured in a format using actual business cases, where each case will tackle a situation and specific set of challenges faced by private equity investment groups. Cases will typically be 20 to 30 pages in length including a number of subsidiary agreements and schedules. Students will need to lay out the problems being addressed, probe the situation, develop the right questions to focus on, analyze the relevant data, and evaluate the best courses of action along with their anticipated outcomes. Case situations will be viewed from multiple perspectives: the private equity investor, their institutional capital sources, local operating partners, lending institutions, tenants, and many times public authorities and their representatives.
There are two modules that comprise the course. Each module will last ½ of the semester. Students have the option of taking just module 1 for two credits, or both modules 1 and 2 for 4 credits.
In module 1 we will be covering 5 business cases. The subjects of investigation and discussion will include
1. analyzing an international development/redevelopment joint venture opportunity,
2. examining the process of investing in debt securities in a complex transaction,
3. assessing a hostile tender offer of a public company and examining the responsibilities to all of the stakeholders in making the right decisions,
4. from an investment committee member’s perspective examining, evaluating and choosing between two disparate competing investment opportunities, a joint venture acquisition of a student housing project against a mezzanine debt investment in an international real estate operating service company,
5. Deriving what the optimum path forward should be in the launch and capitalization a new startup real estate development company.
In module 2, students will be tackling an independent study research paper which delves deeper into a topic of choosing in real estate private equity. Some potential areas to pursue include:
1. Developing a business plan to start a new real estate PE firm,
2. Evaluating the strategy and long term competitive viability of an existing real estate PE firm,
3. Analyzing a live, complicated real estate PE transaction,
4. Investigating and conducting a comprehensive research report to evaluate a given market opportunity,
It is expected that papers delivered for module 2 will be approximately 20-25 pages in length, single spaced, plus exhibits, quantitative analyses, and appendices.
Course prerequisites: 5275 and 5276 or other course equivalents.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Michelangelo Architect: Precedents, Innovation, Influence
An exploration of Italian Renaissance architecture and urbanism through the persona of Michelangelo as witness, agent, and inspiration. We look at architecture and urbanism in Florence, Rome, and Venice from about 1400 to 1600 as it formed, articulated, and reflected the creative achievements of this Renaissance genius. The course engages building typologies such as the villa, the palace, and the church, explores the theory and practice of urban space-making, and evaluates the authority of the Classical past in the creation of new work. Particular emphasis on Michelangelo’s creative process and on his drawings.
We begin with Medicean Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent and with the Early Renaissance legacy of Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, and Giuliano da Sangallo. Following Michelangelo’s footsteps, we move to High Renaissance Rome, with the achievements of Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo himself. Returning to Florence, we investigate the Mannerist experimentation of Michelangelo and others in the 1520s and consider the acceptance and rejection of this idiom by Giulio Romano in Mantua and Jacopo Sansovino in Venice. Michelangelo’s mature and late styles in Counter- Reformation Rome and the principles of Renaissance space-making at the urban scale conclude the course.
Course Format:
The course will use “flipped class” pedagogy and have both asynchronous and synchronous elements each week. We will meet together once each week, usually on Monday, for discussion of the assigned lectures and readings. The lectures are on our course site in the Media gallery; a ppt version (without audio) for study purposes is on our site under Modules. The readings are on our site under Modules. Students will submit a question or a comment arising from the assigned readings and lectures by midnight of the Thursday preceding our discussion. This is not intended to be a response paper, but merely a sentence or two indicating something you found interesting or didn’t understand. The quality of your comments and of your participation in the discussions will determine 60% of your final grade.
A final paper or project is required. If a paper, it should have a text of 12 pages (12 pt double-spaced in Word, not Acrobat) and, in addition to the text, it should have images, notes and bibliography. The subject may be any topic relevant to the course and must be approved by me. A project could take any form desired and also requires my consent. It would most probably be a digital reconstruction of an unfinished or altered project by Michelangelo or another Renaissance architect. The paper or the project should apply knowledge from the course and will equal 40% of your final grade.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. The course will have all the weekly discussions in person beginning on 9/27. The class will meet in person (in Gropius) on the following dates: 9/27, 10/4, 10/13, 10/18, 10/25, 11/1, 11/8, 11/15, 11/22, and 12/1.
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.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
The Desert We Eat
Explorations on Otomi Diet at Valle del Mezquital
In the landscape imaginary of modern agriculture the farm is a water-intensive operation, which according to the United Nations, currently consumes 70% of the world's freshwater. Today, farmland could easily be considered the opposite or antithetical landscape to the world’s deserts and drylands. This opposition is false however, as deserts and drylands have supported food production for centuries in diverse cultures and geographies. Hidden underneath the statistics of modern agricultural water consumption are a set of assumptions about the necessity of growing water-intensive crops for export to global markets, and in this sense there is a hidden menu behind agricultural water requirements. What if we questioned this menu? What would a dryland diet look like? What kinds of ecologies, photosynthetic pathways, and cultural practices would support this diet? In this seminar we will explore the desert we eat.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the course will continue to meet online with the exception of 9/29, 10/13, 10/27, 11/3, 11/10, 11/17, in which classes will be in-person. For more details, please review the syllabus.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 8th. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.
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
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, this course will meet mostly in person with the exception of 3-4 sessions that will happen online. Please review the syllabus for details, and note that this is subject to change.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 8th. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.
Digital Media: Not Magic
According to folklore, Michelangelo fell to his knees upon seeing the Florentine fresco Annunciation, went silent, and eventually concluded that the image of the Virgin must have been made through divine intervention since its brushwork surpassed human talents. When the computer graphics company Blue Sky released its commercial for Chock Full o’Nuts in 1994, The New York Times called the rendering of a walking and talking coffee bean “computer magic.” It was the best way to explain the video’s special effects. What else would one call using lines of code to give an inanimate object life? Or the transfiguration of mere paint into saintly likeness?
Esoteric processes have long imbued artforms with power, rendering audiences speechless, awestruck, and affected. In the nineties, anthropologist Alfred Gell proposed that mundane things can be construed as “enchanted forms” when differences exist between an audience’s technological expectations and an object’s facture. This contradiction gives rise to a belief that artifacts and artisans can possess otherworldly faculties. In reality, everyday forms become enchanted not through magic, but through precise construction methodologies.
This course seeks to articulate what aesthetic categories are at play when technology is perceived to be magical. A working theory for the class is that more nuanced descriptions for the transformations found in computational and craft traditions are good frameworks for understanding architectural effects. We will explore these ideas in synchronous lectures and case studies, and asynchronous workshops. Readings include texts by Alfred Gell, Walter Benjamin, Beatriz Colomina, and Felicity Scott. Case studies include projects by Anne Holtrop, Ensamble, Junya Ishigami, and examples from imperial architecture.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person for lectures and discussions every Wednesday from 1:30 to 3:45 pm (except the first two weeks of the semester). Additionally, there will be four asynchronous technical workshops.