Digital Media: Models
This course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods related to digital media in architecture and design, with a focus on reciprocal processes of translation between digital media and material artifacts. It examines how digital technologies mediate our interaction with the physical environment, critically engages the capacities and limitations of select computational processes and investigates the latent design opportunities embedded in each one.
This semester we will structure our investigation around the notion of the model as a means of addressing broader questions related to the role of digital media in architecture and design. Whether a digital entity, physical artifact or something in-between, the model can be considered as an instrument for the development, prototyping and representation of architecture, as well as a discrete design artifact to be evaluated on its own terms. The plurality of design approaches and working methods afforded by the postdigital has blurred the role of models within experimental architectural practice. Accordingly, we position the contemporary model not as a singular entity but as an amalgamation of multiple models, each tailored to inform the design process, instrumentalized to act on the world, and evaluable via its own unique criteria.
Our exploration will be categorized into four sequential thematic areas – digitization, simulation, materialization, and visualization. Each thematic area will act as a lens through which to reconsider the role and agency of the model. Lectures, readings, and in-class discussions will situate the model within a theoretical and historical context. Digital processes including photogrammetric 3D scanning, animation, physics-based simulation, texture mapping, interactive visualization, along with select digital and analog fabrication processes, will be introduced via a series of workshops.
The course will address the content described above through a combination of lectures, discussions, technical workshops, and design exercises. Typically, each session will be divided into a lecture half and a workshop half. Technical workshops will introduce software including Rhino/Grasshopper (along with its associated plugins for analysis, simulation, and animation), Autodesk Recap (photogrammetry), Cinema 4D (rendering, simulation, animation) and Unity (interactive visualization, first-person navigation) All software utilized in the class is either available for educational use via the GSD or open source.
The presented concepts and techniques will be explored through a semester-long project organized into a sequential set of assignments. Beginning with the process of photogrammetric 3D scanning, students will explore a variety of modeling and form-making strategies using a collection of digital and fabrication tools. Subsequent assignments will explore the affordances of specific modeling techniques and examine the relationship of the presented technique to architectural concerns including scale, materiality, originality, and authorship. Each assignment will invite opportunities for scalar translation, ranging from 1:1 to scaleless to various scales over physical and digital models with focus on reciprocal materiality, structure, and organization changes. For the final project, participants will work in small groups to utilize the workflows presented in class in a collaborative design exercise. Anticipated costs include materials for two physical modeling exercises, executed in groups, at the midterm and final reviews.
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.
Landscape Representation I
The first in a two-semester sequence, Landscape Representation I introduces students to the rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture as inextricably intertwined with the concept of representation. This relationship is grounded in landscape’s history and conventions, and expanded through a wide range of techniques that embrace the highly generative agency of representation in the design process.
Throughout the semester, a series of lectures on a range of theoretical perspectives in design and adjacent fields will ask students to engage critically with diverging concepts of representation. These approaches will intersect with a sequence of exercises focussed on diverse conceptions of site as a critical construct, and the multiplicity of lenses through which to understand agents in the landscape.
These explorations will be supported by tutorials introducing techniques, skills, and workflows that engage both analog and digital methodologies, from physical modeling and hand drawing to software such as Rhino and the Adobe Creative Suite. Students will iterate between different modes of abstraction and translation to understand both site and agent as imagined, created, and ultimately designed through their various representations.
Finally, weekly discussions will provide an open collaborative space to think critically about representation’s agency in design, as we work together to articulate the reflexive relationship between visualization and conceptualization. Employing these various modes of learning in conjunction, students will develop their own iterative approaches to representation as a process of thinking, making, and designing, as they articulate and advance their own representational voice and position.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. This hybrid course will meet both virtually (50%) and in person (50%), as appropriate to course content. Please review the syllabus for details, and note that this is subject to change.
Architectural Representation II
Architectural Representation II: Projective Disciplines
Course Summary
This course examines systems of projection as constructs that mediate between our spatial imagination and built form. Projective systems have defined relationships between masons, engineers, industrial designers, mathematicians, cartographers, painters, and architects. Their historical origins and evolution into digital culture will be studied through the theory and practice of projective and descriptive geometry. Invented as techniques to draw form, these discourses are the bases of the intractable reciprocity between representation and three-dimensional space. The objective of this course is to uncover the centuries-old and still ongoing relationship between representation, form, and construction—more generally, the reciprocity between three-dimensional form and flatness.
Principles of parallel (orthographic), central (perspectival), and other less common forms of projective transformation explain many processes of formal production—vision, subjective experience, drawing, modeling, and building. Beginning with 2D drawing exercises and transitioning to 3D modeling, we will interrogate the effects of the digital interface and mechanics of modeling software on contemporary discourse. As students explore the power and limitations of the flat drawing plane, they will also develop literacy in primitive and complex surface geometries—their combinatory aggregation, subdivision, and discretization—as they relate back to the most reductive of architectural forms—the planar surface. Ultimately, these techniques will be placed into a productive dialogue with architectural and programmatic imperatives. The design tools of the digital and post-digital age have allowed designers to invent and produce form with increasing facility, eliminating the need to understand the consequential and demanding relationships between geometry and architecture. The course will involve close formal reading of buildings as a way to introduce students to the practice of reading, drawing, and writing architecture.
Course Structure
Composed of both lectures and workshops, the course is participatory and is equal parts theoretical and technical. Exercises will involve two-dimensional digital drawing, digital and physical modeling, and basic Grasshopper. Both Tuesday sessions (lectures and discussions) and Thursday sessions (technical workshops) will meet synchronously. The physical modeling component will require use of the fabrication facilities and the appropriate in-person tutorials in Gund Hall, and will conclude with an in-person final review which all students must attend. This course is required for all first-year MArch I students.
Architectural Representation I
Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality
Architectural representation is an ideology—a source of ideas and visionary theorizing that has a set of origins and qualities. As such, it’s prudent to study the origins of conventional techniques of architectural representation to be informed about their intentions and the specific contexts that conditioned their development.
Representation is not a conclusive index of an architecture already designed and completed, in the past tense. Rather, representation is integral to the design process and the production of architecture—it is present and future tense: an active participant in exploring and making. It occurs in multiple instances and forms along a project’s evolutionary path. Though not deterministic of the architecture, representation techniques selected to visualize ideas influence the evolution and outcome of the work.
The course initiates with an analysis of conventional representation techniques and their intentions. Using this knowledge as a platform, the class pivots to consider representational riffs emerging in response to the contemporary context—those that explore the limits of our “origin arsenal” and question what each offers for the present. Possible paradigms of architectural spaces generated from representation (rather than the other way around) will be presented and discussed.
“Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality” will involve readings, lectures, and discussions framing the backstory on conventional techniques as well as contemporary critical stances in relation to these techniques. Students will be required to complete weekly representation exercises in relation to each course topic by experimenting with new representations of their design work being produced in parallel courses. These design exercises will be presented to and discussed by the class.
The final project will involve isolating a representation from concurrent studio work and critically evaluating the architectural possibilities that extend from its close reading and revision. The final project will require articulation of the goals of the original representation technique and the specific aims toward originality in the tweaking of this technique, as suited to the design project.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Planning a Piece of a City, The Architectural Form of the Neighborhood
Contemporary cities generally grow in an amorphous and often mono functional way, generating peripheries that do not contribute to social life and identity. The latter is entrusted to individual buildings instated as urban acupuncture. The studio will work on a different strategy and endeavor to produce a model for an eminently urban city expansion.
Subject of the studio is the urban quarter or neighborhood. This is defined as a complex which belongs to the city as a whole, but which has a partial social and functional autonomy and its own character. It is a fragment of the city with the city’s complexity, and designing it means to design a city en miniature, dealing with all its determinants: social, ideological, political, technical, economical, and cultural. Clearly, not all these determinants will be addressed in depth in the studio work, but the students will have to be aware of this intricacy.
After a theoretical and historical introduction where possible definitions and significant examples of architectural neighborhoods will be discussed, the students will produce a short programmatic paper with their own definition of an urban quarter, contrasting the random city development and specifying the determinants they intend to privilege. Subsequently, they will produce an exemplary design of a new urban quarter on a lot of a little more of 12 Acres situated in a developing area near Bern, Switzerland. The design can be schematic, but exemplary parts of it, ideally a square or a street and two model residential building units, will be detailed. Particular attention shall be devoted to the connection of the urban spaces to the buildings and types and vice versa.
The design process will be underpinned with historical references: Rome, with its deliberately created 20. century Quartieri from Garbatella to Tiburtino, Berlin, and others, European and non-European. The students themselves will choose them, analyze them and share them with the group. The design process will also be accompanied by theoretical discussions. If the results are worth it, a small publication is planned.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Thursdays and Fridays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Vittorio will be in residence (Cambridge) during the first half of the semester (until 10/14) and will teach remotely for the second half.
Great Migration and Memorial Highway: Culture Heritage as Inspiration in New Rochelle
Long perceived as a bedroom community of New York City, New Rochelle is a place unique in colonial New York as being settled by a relatively large community of enslaved Africans, pre-dating the Revolutionary War by nearly 100 years. This legacy has left a lasting imprint on the city in numerous ways despite being largely hidden from the dominant urban narrative – one defined by leadership, projects, and policies that directly undercut the social and historic fabric of Black history.
At the same time, New Rochelle is growing and changing in significant ways as manifest in over thirty downtown development projects and a large transportation improvement planning initiative. The speed of this change and its significant imprint on the city fabric has had and continues to have the potential to overlook long-latent needs and histories. Change could also bring with it unintended consequences to long-term and historically disadvantaged populations that have experienced the negative and traumatic effects of urban change disproportionately already.
This studio will focus on cultural storytelling, systems-thinking, and investment in public infrastructure as means of surfacing new stories, addressing equitably issues of connectivity and change, and building more awareness of rich buried layers of the city's past. We will work directly with identified civic advocates and community members to better comprehend the lived experiences of the place – looking to learn from the past to envision an equitable future.
Engaged as a multi-disciplinary team of students and in collaboration with the community, we will (1) assemble a coherent compilation of the city's history and current physical attributes, (2) dig deeply into cultural archaeology and narrative via a series of project “muses”, (3) move from an assessment of city-wide systems thinking to the identification and design pilot exploration of key sites, and (4) share the studio findings in an outward public forum, micro-site online, and/or a physical and moving exhibition. Student work will be evaluated on its rigor and authenticity in story-telling, its technical and design excellence and its ability to align community need with grounded and aspirational strategies.
This funded studio will tentatively include multiple studio site visits and frequent community engagement. Travel expenses will be covered for day trips to New Rochelle.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Gena and Rhiannon will be in residence (Cambridge) on 9/2, 9/14, 9/16, 9/28, 9/30, 10/12, 10/14, 10/26, 10/28, 11/9, 11/11, 11/30, 12/2 and Final Reviews.
History, Boundaries and the Future – Conservation and Infill in Boston’s Chinatown
Boston is fortunate to have large, intact, precincts of fine scaled historic fabric whose character and conservation is carefully monitored through established regulatory processes. However, many historic neighborhoods in thriving cities have been significantly altered by modern, haphazard development. The resulting fragmentation makes the crafting of conservation guidelines a nuanced and daunting exercise, especially as these are often contested spaces in which community aspirations compete with development forces to preserve the integrity and affordability of their district. Nowhere is this more evident than in Chinatown, cleaved by two interstate highways and bounded by Boston’s high-rise downtown core, an intermodal transportation center and the continuously expanding Tufts New England Medical Center (TNEMC). For decades, with strong community support, Chinatown has struggled to simultaneously sustain its identity and cohesion as a neighborhood, while improving the quality of life for its inhabitants.
The South Cove neighborhood that became Chinatown was built on fill, a process that began in the 1830s. The Chinese began to settle this area before 1880, following waves of Irish, Jewish and Syrian immigrants, and had established a coherent, identifiable community in roughly the area occupied today by the 1940s. The buildings of this precinct are highly varied from mid-19th century brick rowhouses through turn of the 20th century manufacturing lofts and a plethora of modern era and recent development.
The purpose of this studio is to aid the community in the development of plans and guidelines to protect the integrity of those areas of Chinatown currently lacking historic designation; it will have two foci: The first will be to map and evaluate the physical and cultural history and general urban morphology of Chinatown with an eye to what has value and why. Students will identify ways in which resources may be protected, and where appropriate enhanced through sustainable development. Deliverables for this portion of the studio will be illustrated analytical maps identifying the type and location of historic fabric, with preliminary asset classification utilizing values-based conservation criteria and including a listing of general exterior character defining features.
The second half of the studio will be a design/planning implementation exercise incorporating knowledge gained in the first half, using one of three types of options. The first is to propose a program and concept level design for a vacant site, suggested at this time to be Parcel R-1, a cleared site bounded by Tyler, Harvard and Hudson Streets. An alternative infill site may be proposed with the instructor’s concurrence. The second option is to renovate an existing building within the district such as the 125 Lincoln St. Parking garage – which would be adapted for non-automobile mixed use. The third choice, geared particularly to Planning students, is to develop and present a more in-depth conservation planning study.
The studio will be informed by visits to the site, guest lectures, and meetings and a possible workshop with both community representatives and officials from the City of Boston.
Highways Revisited
The U.S. Interstate Highway System has been lauded as one of the greatest public works projects in human history. Encompassing nearly fifty thousand miles of standardized, limited-access highways, the system radically remade the built environment in the U.S. by connecting cities and making possible the massive suburbanization of the metropolitan landscape. But Interstate Highways also served to disconnect and disempower. Planners hoping to reinforce racial segregation routinely sited higways either through the heart of black and Latino neighborhoods or along boundaries between those communities and white ones. As a result, hundreds of thousands were evicted, thriving black and Latino neighborhoods were destroyed, and damaging color lines were reinforced. Those who remained were left to contend with increased physical, economic, and psychological barriers, not to mention noxious fumes from vehicle emissions, the constant whirr of vehicle engines, and other negative externalities that come with living next to a limited access highway.
Recognizing these historic injustices, the Biden administration, as part of its ambitious, two trillion dollar American Jobs Plan, committed $20 billion for reconnecting neighborhoods that were cut off, bulldozed, and blighted by urban renewal-era highways. Communities will compete for funds to remove, cap, or otherwise undermine these highways and replace them with parks and mixed-use development. For many communities, the newly developable sites created by highway removal offer a unique opportunity to address affordable housing shortages, especially considering the American Jobs Plan’s provisions for affordable and public housing.
This interdisciplinary studio invites students from all departments to work alongside community leaders in a number of cities across the U.S. to reimagine Interstate rights- of-way. Students will be required to 1) select an Interstate in the U.S. that is ripe for reimagining from a list provided by the instructor; 2) meet with community leaders to better understand local priorities; 3) present a clear, compelling case about the damage the highway did (and continues to do); 4) develop a compelling vision for what should be built; and 5) compile your work into a persuasive pitch. As the American Jobs Plan also includes provisions for affordable housing, public housing, clean energy, resiliency, and environmental justice, students will be strongly encouraged to incorporate these elements into their schemes.
Day trips to New York, the Hudson Valley, Portland, Lowell, and/or other local cities are tentatively planned.
Extending and mending Thamesmead: re-envisioning the town of tomorrow, today
It was a good place to be as a kid. There was so much nature and wide open space. In the spring there would be grass fights, in the summer there’d be water fights, in the autumn would be mud bombs and winter would be snow balls. Philip Samuel, Resident from 1975
In the mid-1960s, a vast concrete housing estate began to rise out of neglected marshland on the south bank of the River Thames. Headed by the Greater London Council (GLC), the scheme intended to solve the post-war housing crisis, and was heralded as visionary. Its design was both architectural and urban experimental: concrete townhouses, blocks of apartments and elevated walkways were all built around a system of lakes, canals and parkland. Architects, sociologists and politicians all turned their attention to the transformation of a marshland into the ‘town of tomorrow’.
In the beginning, the estate was so exclusive that families had to be vetted to get a home there. However, there were real hardships and difficulties for these early pioneers. The slow development of local infrastructure, leaking concrete buildings and, most importantly the failure to provide the new township with the quick and efficient transport links its population required started to erode Thamesmead’s shiny new image. In 1971 Thamesmead provided a backdrop to Stanley Kubrick’s seminal film, A Clockwork Orange. The abolishment of the GLC 1986 and ongoing lack of investment meant a continual slide into disrepair, crime and marginalization over the subsequent three decades.
In 2016 it was announced that the estate would undergo a £200million redevelopment. A joint venture partnership between a developer and a public housing association – Lendlease and Peabody – will steward the future of Thamesmead.
Thamesmead Waterfront comprises 100ha of the 647ha of the overall area. It is one of the few remaining undeveloped sites in London and the Southeast UK that offers the scale and capacity to accommodate significant, sustainable, long-term economic growth and housing. Thamesmead’s community is strong, but it is predominantly inward facing and physically isolated; weak transport connectivity reduces resident mobility, and the area is classified as amongst the most deprived 40% of neighbourhoods in England.
This studio will investigate what it means to extend and mend a ‘new town’. We will explore the many physical and social edge conditions and tensions that arise when the new meets existing populations and places.
Students will be asked to consider what qualities distinguish a place as urban or suburban. As the boundaries between work, learning and living have blurred geographically over the past 18 months do characterizations of urban and suburban still make sense?
We will study what holistic resiliency means in the context of an isolated district that will soon have better transport links to the metropolis of London.
The scale of Thamesmead Waterfront means that it has the potential to tackle all-encompassing challenges post COVID-19: climate change, social inclusion, diversity, diverse models of living and working, changing commuter patterns, infrastructure in a currently sub-urban context.
Students will have the opportunity to meet, work with and hear from local school students, the professionals that represent the diverse disciplines on the development and consultant teams and local government planners.
This course has an irregular meeting schedule. Studio sessions will take place on Wednesdays and Fridays, with a few exceptions, but will not meet every week. Kathryn Firth will be in residence (Cambridge) during the weeks of 8/30, 9/6, 10/18, 10/25, 11/1, 11/29, 12/7
Seeking Abundance: Designing Engagement and Experience for All
The landscape, the land itself, is where inequity has always, and continues to express itself. Access to health, wealth, safety and education are embedded in the timeless wheeling and dealing of space, place, property. Marginalized communities, subaltern communities, oppressed communities are all terms that emanate from the non-reflexive view, a view that inherently prioritizes its own experiences and world views, primarily those of the mainstream, the colonizer, the oppressor. These embedded predilections have created spaces that, at best, are not designed to welcome or make comfortable a diversity of users and communities, and at worst, have systematically destroyed the structures and networks that had historically catered to the needs of the non-majority. There is a wealth of knowledge and a richness of the deaf experience, the indigenous experience, the immigrant experience, the blind experience, the black experience that must inform our design decision making. How do we, as designers, design a process that leverages culturally specific experiences to create spaces of cross-cultural resonance?
In this studio, we will explore how various communities experience, navigate, or claim space, whether architecture, landscape, or metaphysical, in order to create a culturally responsive environment that amplifies community, connection, and care. The structure of this studio is one that is informed by both the freedoms and challenges of the past year and a half of remote learning and working. We have all been embedded in our home communities or adopted communities, which gives us access to a network we’ve been a part of for at least some part of our lives. Perhaps more importantly for the work of this studio, we are in a time where, at least for a moment, some voices of some underprivileged are being heard. Our work this semester will be guided by these unique opportunities.
1. Research – Initially, we will work through a few lines of questioning. First, who can designers serve? Why have we become designers, what affinities do we share with mission driven organizations or communities, and how can we bring our unique skillsets to support community efforts and partners through the spatial disciplines? Second, how do we engage with this topic or partner to understand how design can serve their needs? We will welcome lecturers, “desk mentors” and other experts as needs arise within projects to help approach topics such as Deaf Space Design, design in Black Space, or Indigenous Planning.
2. Design the Process – We invite students who have a clear idea of a partner and project they are interested in, but we also have a few sites and projects for students who are interested in the studio but may not have a particular project in mind. Having chosen a partner/project, we will design and implement an engagement to reveal the correct design drivers, understand the mission and build support and interest in the project.
3. Design the Place – Having determined the project site, chosen and engaged a partner, built a robust sensory design palette, we will design a new kind of place that is driven by a rich and diverse set of inputs, or design drivers built up over the semester. This place can be a small front yard for a special person, a park for a particular community, a memorial for a previously erased history, a large, newly preserved landscape, or a new kind of lifeways center.