Environmental Systems 2 [Module 2]
Purpose: This course is the second of a two-module sequence in building technology (6121, 6122) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture.
Objective: To continue the study of environmental considerations in architectural design.
Content: The course will cover building systems and their technologies including the conventional and emerging HVAC systems, renewable energy systems, and other active building systems. It will also introduce daylight and electric lighting in buildings along with manual and computer-based methods for analyzing daylight design. The course also covers fundamental concepts of acoustics and their application in architecture.
In this course, students will:
– Learn the fundamentals of HVAC systems in architecture and practice the schematic design of such systems;
– Learn the basic principles and applications of daylighting and acoustic considerations in architecture; and
– Continue to develop analytical and creative thinking regarding sustainability and energy issues in building design.
Class format: Includes lectures and workshops. Where noted, attendance at evening workshops may be mandatory. In all classes, the goal is an interactive format, so questions, comments, and other forms of active participation are encouraged.
Origins and Contemporary Practices of Asian Landscape Architecture: Korean Perspectives and More
The term “Asian” can be misleading; it conjures images of one identity that can be applied to all 51 countries in Asia. Scholars and practitioners, such as William Lim, Jillian Walliss, and Heike Rahmann, have elaborated on the inevitable complexities associated with identity in Asia’s landscapes, architecture, and urban practices. In his book Asian Alterity (Hackensack, N.J.: World Scientific, c2008), William Lim argues that most of the urban development processes in Asian countries can rarely be explained using Western theories. He also invited architects and landscape architects from nine Asian cities to write about their singularities. On the other hand, in The Big Asian Book of Landscape Architecture (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2020), Walliss and Rahmann claim that Asia is a method, not an identity, and write extensively about several practices and various aspects of “being in the landscape profession in Asia.” Taking all of this into consideration, what can students expect to discuss and learn in this class? Furthermore, why Korean perspectives?
In this seminar, we will deploy a particular lens to examine the onset of the contemporary landscape architecture profession in a few Asian countries and how their respective origins have shaped and are shaping each country’s landscape. Korea will be used as a case study through which the practices of other countries—China, Japan, Singapore, and Thailand—can be revealed since Korea’s landscape practices had an obvious initiator (i.e., former President Mr. Park) and a single strong motivation (i.e., post-war reforestation). Additionally, this course aims to promote further and in-depth discussions about other countries (beyond these five).
Please refer to the syllabus for the detailed schedule, contents, and course requirements.
It is open to all the degree programs of the GSD. This course is not exclusively for a group of students with a specific ethnic heritage, and it would be ideal if the class could consist of students with as diverse backgrounds as possible.
*The first class will be held on Tuesday 9/5. You must attend the first class to take the course.
TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Urban Stack: Practice Methods for a Complex World
The Urban Stack is a pedagogical framework for understanding the infrastructures of power that operate in relationship to practice. These constructs shape the design and production of the built environment in our time of increasing uncertainty, project complexity, and risk. The course is designed to explore, translate and generate alternative readings of our built context; to imagine how design and planning practice can shape the environmental, social, cultural, and experiential qualities of urban form within our emerging 21st century context. A primary objective of the course is to identify gaps and opportunities in the layered socio-technical systems that guide the production of the built environment; to enable culturally and socially transformative development with the goal of practical application in the real world.
This course addresses the practice of design as it inevitably confronts and interacts with infrastructures of policy, technology, and finance. Theoretical frameworks will help us seek space for design impact and agency through established and emerging modes of practice and projects that operate upon, within, or against these systemic constructs. Our task is to collectively answer the following questions: As urban projects grow in complexity, swelling and speeding up to attain maximum impact, is our work inevitably defined and shaped by the pressures of finance, automation, and regulation? Where does our agency as designers of the built environment lie in current practice?
The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Frameworks of Practice
How should we practice today?
The discipline, the profession, and the practice of architecture are invented and designed things. And the roles, relationships, protocols, and expertise that define architecture’s overarching frameworks are neither ancient nor fixed, even if buildings and the people who design them have existed for millennia. That said, for much of the twentieth century, the pace of change in the discipline, profession, and practice of architecture—and how one navigates these in the course of building a career—has been but gradual.
Crisis, however, is a powerful accelerant. Since the turn of the century, a series of interrelated economic, social, climate, and health crises have not just challenged architectural practices and practitioners, but are necessitating a wholesale reconsideration of the underlying frameworks of practice inherited from the twentieth century. While many architects will struggle to adapt, some are discovering and inventing new frameworks with which to confront not only specific crises, but to take a more proactive role in addressing the needs of society.
In Frameworks of Practice this fall, we will critically examine the challenges and opportunities created by crisis, and seek to understand how architects have designed new ways of practicing in direct response to crises ranging from economic collapse to structural racism to natural disaster to global pandemic. Acknowledging that the discipline, the profession, and the practice of architecture are invented, designed concepts, our ultimate aim is to uncover and imagine new ways of practicing in an increasingly upended world.
Course Format: Lectures by course instructor and guests; full-class and small group workshops and tutorials; discussions and team exercises; collaborative and individual projects.
Requirements: Consistent class attendance and engagement; satisfactory participation in and completion of collaborative and individual projects.
Prerequisites: The course is open to all degree programs at the GSD and certain cross-registration students from MIT. M.Arch I candidates must have completed the core professional practice course (PRO-07212) in order to enroll in PRO-07408. Prior work experience is beneficial but not required.
The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets only on Tuesdays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Practices of Landscape Architecture
This course presents the application of landscape ideas as a process of engagement and building amidst financial, legal, cultural, political, and professional contexts. The course aims to introduce conventions and circumstances that may be encountered throughout one’s career while stimulating new and creative, alternative dimensions of practice in a global context of universal agency.
Course content includes lectures, workshops and discussions led by the instructor and guests from around the globe, and incorporates student research, readings and discussion. Though concepts appear iteratively throughout the term, early topics focus on design leadership and community agency, professional identity, firm marketing and business development. Visiting lectures by established professionals from around the globe speak about their practices and a variety of topics including their career trajectories, firm development and working contexts, as well as their current endeavors. Topics then move to conventions and circumstances influencing legal, ethical, financial and operational aspects of practice, particularly those that can contribute to and detract from the success of firms and their projects. During the third part of the course, academic trajectory, future impacts on practice and historic documentation practices are featured, in addition to the sharing of ongoing research by students. During the course, lecturers and work by Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and LBGTQI people will be present. Issues of diversity within the profession and in our work endeavors will be considered in depth during an evening event featuring guest panelists from non-profit entities.
Recognizing that architecture, planning and landscape architecture share many aspects of practice, this course incorporates nuances and scope that are typically the focus of current landscape architectural practice itself, such as soils as a living medium; grading and planting; landscape architectural documentation and construction; landscape advocacy and stewardship; community contexts and agencies; and liabilities specifically associated with the practice of landscape architecture.
Class Sessions The course meets twice a week for 1.25 hours (2.5 hours total). Guest lecturers will participate in Gund and remotely (zoom). Two sessions will be held at alternate class times; excused absences or other arrangements can be arranged with the instructor in the event of a personal schedule conflict.
The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. The course will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 7th and will meet regularly thereafter.
Due to room capacity, enrollment is likely limited to Landscape Architecture students who are required to take the course. Please contact the instructor with questions.
Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society I
This graduate-level seminar course is part of the MDE program's first-year core curriculum, comprising a two-course sequence spanning one year. The course focuses on building an integrated intellectual framework to explore the complex relationships between science, engineering, manufacturing, design, innovation, environment, sustainability, culture, aesthetics, business, public policy, and government. Through the study of various frameworks and lenses, students will gain insights into real-world problem-solving. The course fosters critical thinking and intellectual literacy, providing a holistic perspective on the interplay between scientific progress, technological innovations, manufacturing systems, and their broader implications for industry and society. Through readings, discussions, and exercises, students will develop interdisciplinary knowledge and problem-solving skills, empowering them to address multifaceted challenges effectively in their professional endeavors.
Fall Semester Modules Topics:
– Knowing and Understanding
– Science, Engineering, and Design
– Intellectual Property and Industry Standards
– Basic Accounting and Finance
– Manufacturing Processes and Systems
– Business Strategy
– Industry Architecture and Technological Innovation
Course Learning Objectives: The main learning objectives of this course are:
Critical Thinking for Problem Solving
– Ability to differentiate between various types of information, such as observations, assumptions, facts, opinions (assertions), beliefs, and prejudices, to facilitate unbiased and evidence-based decision-making
– Ability to reason at the level of first principles, fostering deeper understanding and innovative problem solving
– Proficiency in identifying significant problems, delving into their root causes, and proposing insightful and well-founded solutions
Integrative Analysis – Consilience across Disciplines
– Ability to integrate knowledge from engineering, business, design, sociology, psychology, government, and philosophy to approach real-world problems with a comprehensive mindset
– Ability to propose realistic and practical solutions that address the needs and perspectives of multiple stakeholders, bridging various disciplines
Intellectual Literacy – Establishing a Broad Background
– Broad knowledge base that will serve as a foundation for effectively solving real-world problems with interdisciplinary insights
– Broad knowledge base that will facilitate continuous learning
Course Structure and Format: This course will involve a significant amount of assigned readings from primary reference materials in science, engineering, business, economics, and management as well as prepared course materials and case studies based on specific companies. In addition, attendance and active in-class participation in discussions of the readings, case studies and other group activities are expected and will be a significant factor in grading. For the Fall semester, there will be a group project to analyze an assigned industry.
Recommended Background and Prerequisites: undergraduate level background in Physics, Chemistry, and/or Engineering and in Economics (none for MDE students). This course is for students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering (MDE) graduate program. A small number of other students may be allowed to enroll by permission of instructor. After receiving approval, SEAS/FAS students should enroll in SEAS ES235A. MDE and all other students should enroll in GSD PRO 7231. This course does not count for concentration credit for SEAS undergraduate concentrators; this course does not count as a disciplinary course for SEAS Ph.D. students.
This course will meet for the first time as scheduled, on Tuesday, September 5th.
Histories of Architecture Against
This course focuses on the challenges of writing histories of architecture against—against capital, against the state, or other types of power. In the first half of the course, we will examine the links between the task of the historian and systems of domination such as colonialism and settler colonialism, and the technologies mobilized by these systems to exert power over territories and subjects. In the second half, we will discuss systems of control including citizenship, culture, and real estate, as well as the work of agents within, against, or outside these systems.
How do we historicize the production of spaces and works of defiance? How do we trace systems and networks designed to promote non-compliance? We will look at histories of subjects that managed to escape or elide the reach of empire, as well as case studies of architects operating against the state and actors shaping the built environment outside the traditional boundaries of the discipline. We will discuss historians’ challenges in navigating representation, partisanship, and operative criticism, and the methodological complications of writing histories of disenfranchised, marginalized, and dispossessed groups as they design, produce, and claim space.
Readings problematize and complicate the intellectual production of Western intellectuals with the work of Postcolonialism, the Black Radical Tradition, Latin American Marxism, Decolonization theory, intersectional feminism, and other groups, together with historical narratives of resistance, non-compliance, disobedience, and other alternatives in resistance to power. Evaluation will be based on class participation, leading one discussion during the semester, three short writing assignments, and a final paper.
Prerequisites:
This advanced history elective is designed for students in the postprofessional (MDES) and doctoral programs (PHD/DDES) as well as students in the professional programs who have completed core and, preferably, are embarking on thesis. Some knowledge of the history and theory of architecture is highly recommended but not required.
A limited number of seats are held for PhD students. Interested PhD students should contact the instructor as well as petition to cross-register.
Foundations of Practice
For students in the fifth semester of the MArch I degree program, this course examines models and issues that define contemporary professional practice. Requiring students to examine a broad range of legal, financial, organizational, and ethical topics, the course prepares students to engage and lead in the production of the built environment. The course takes advantage of the multidisciplinary programs of the GSD, bringing a wide breath of experienced professionals to share insights and develop the tools necessary for productive collaborations within the complex space of specific professional, practical, and disciplinary obligations.
Each week the course explores professional practice through a critical reading of primary texts that frame key concepts and models, as well as relevant case studies and applications for stress testing the boundaries of these models.
Course format: Combination of lectures, guest lectures, and workshops. Each subject area contains supplemental material that provides standard references and supplemental case studies that highlight the boundaries and thresholds of practice. This is intended to provide students with an exposure to critical aspects of practice—from accounting to contracting and from project delivery to professional ethics. In addition, students will explore the wide-ranging roles of respective professional associations in shaping contractual relationships, public policy, and the parameters of practice itself. In more immediate terms, students will explore:
– Client communications and engagement;
– The drafting and execution of standard AIA contract series;
– The interpretation and due process considerations of local government regulations;
– The strategic advancement of public design reviews or public procurement opportunities; and
– The financial economics of operating a practice.
Connecting each of these dimensions of practice are the codes of professional ethics and various elements of statutory and case law that collectively define the professional standard of care. The intent is for students to develop a reflexive understanding of their duty to clients, third-party consultants, and the general public consistent with their obligations as design professionals and community leaders. This course serves as a foundation from which students may develop further interests and skills in the GSD’s professional practice distributional elective course offerings.
The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
CONTESTED Landscapes + COUNTER Narratives
No place holds one, singular story. Every place, every site is complex, layered, and full of history. This seminar will explore how a critical place-based inquiry shapes readings of complex landscapes and their histories. Such lands hold contested narratives and histories, from places of deep meaning to that of quick extraction, from sites of enslaved labor to mining operations, from reservations to internment camps, from places of violence to those of resistance, among others. We will interrogate place theories in the context of land/place-based sources, methods, and tools (including archives, walking, drawing, thick sections, texts, maps, oral histories, poetry, song,…) for identifying, revealing, interpreting, and sharing narratives that may collide or upturn, and deny or erase one another. Drawing from a selection of places in the United States including the Harvard campus, the seminar will focus on how narratives of identity, race, gender, and indigenous sovereignty have shaped place; the approaches designers might employ when taking on the responsibility of design and making; and the approaches from which historians might draw in curating and curating histories of place.
We frame this seminar as a series of discussions, grounded in an inquiry into ways of knowing and critical place-based studies as a foundation for building alternative bodies of knowledge. Our readings will engage with studies of the social constructions of identity, race, and gender as embedded in and emanating from land and place, and in particular through the practice of designing landscape. We will build on the scholarship of Omi and Winant’s work on racial formation and theories of intersectionality for while race is a “master category” “it is not possible to understand the (il)logic of any form of social stratification, any practice of cultural marginalization, or any type of inequality or human variation, without appreciating the deep, complex, comingling, interpenetration of race, class, gender, and sexuality.” (Michael Omi, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. Routledge, 2015.: 106) Our work will also draw from George Lipsitz’s essay on the racialization of space and spatialization of race to consider how counter narratives might reveal alternative histories. As we extend our discussion, we will explore the theories of intersectionality with careful readings of selected writings of Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Tiffany Lethabo King, Andrea Roberts, Anna Tamura, and a richness of other authors, thinkers, and scholars of land, landscape, and place, each of who has shared approaches to re-reading and revealing counter narratives of people and place.
Our purpose will be to critically consider how we might engage with history to question how we have come to frame and define practices of place-making including landscape architecture, and in turn, how might re-imagine potential futures.
While there exists a deep body of knowledge and scholarship, there is much more to do; there remains critical narratives yet to be shared in our collective learning. To build alternative narratives, we will center how communities have made place in their own ways, rather than focusing on the oppression and the violence of neglect. We will focus on resistance as evident for example in the practice of landscape and garden design and land property rights and food sovereignty. As a means to move forward we will investigate practices of preservation, labor, and environmental justice to identify how this work might amplify counter narratives of potential futures in landscape studies.
By revising our understanding of history and historiographies of landscape architecture as a constellation of practices that describe a profession and a discipline, we open the door to a richer and more complex future for designers, and even more importantly, for our communities.
Urban Design Contexts and Operations
The course focusses essentially on modern, including contemporary, contexts and operations that have emerged during the past 100 or so years. Here urban design is broadly regarded as a concern for the ‘thingness’ of constructed environments above the scale of singular buildings and in response to resolving competing claims brought to bear through design. Contexts refer to particular situations and orientations taken in urban design, whereas operations refer to actions involved in specific work and practical applications. It is a lecture-seminar class where participation is required of those in the first semester of Urban Design Program of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is intended to satisfy this program’s curriculum requirement in ‘History-Theory’. Students will be required to make one-page summaries of selected readings each alternative or second week of the semester and assigned in pairs or threesomes to make presentations of further materials and several urban design projects beginning in the second week of class. The aim is to introduce students to important developments and literacy in the field of urban design, along with matters of on-going and current speculation. What follows is an outline of weekly topics along with a short reading list for each that forms a background for the lectures and later discussion. Apart from making a one-page summary each second week of the assigned text and specific assigned presentations in a given week, all students are expected to prepare and participate in seminar discussions. All lecture components for each week’s theme will be available in asynchronous pre-recorded illustrated form.
Enrollment in this course is limited to incoming students in the GSD Master of Urban Design program.
The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets on Mondays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.