Environmental Histories, Archived Landscapes

The course explores design methodologies for evaluating archives as evidence of material, spatial, and cultural change in constructed landscapes. Because archives seek comprehensiveness (distinct from the discretionary aims of a curated collection), they can contain undeclared evidence of the fleeting and sometimes unwelcome behaviors of living systems and human inhabitants in official accounts of the built environment. Using collections at Harvard and beyond, we will analyze scientific, technical, cultural, and commercial images for spatial configuration, composition, visual patterns, and references; evaluate the relationship of medium (film, specimens, flyers, digital media, etc.) to the subject matter; and critically assess these findings through writing as well as analytical and projective image-making.

In the seminar, we will mine archives of institutional records. Guest speakers and workshops will engage narratives that have been typically excluded from institutions: emerging archives (in retroactive formation) and those that are now accumulating (in real-time). Case studies presented will focus on infrastructure and designed landscapes in North America, but students will develop their own subjects for independent research on an environmental history—broadly defined as the mutual interactions of human society and the natural world—in relation to design history. This work will be guided through a series of prompts, culminating in a final proposal for the dissemination of archival research.

Course meetings will consist of: lectures by the instructor, guest speakers, interactive workshops, student research presentations, and visits to local archives. The seminar welcomes all disciplines.

Environmentalisms: How to Have a Politics?

Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: as the words “neoliberalism” and “environment” have come to occupy the center of our political and cultural debates, the actual content of those concepts has become less and less clear.

Neoliberalism, it seems, is now a ubiquitous category for describing contemporary life; a kind of vague, gaseous element that permeates everything from macroeconomic discourse to domestic spending habits and lifestyle choices. Spanning across otherwise divergent political ideologies and geopolitical rivalries, everyone and everything is now apparently “neoliberal”—even if it's unclear exactly what that means. And what of the concept of environment? Does it refer to nature? Or to its opposite (the “built,” the “artificial,” the “interactive,” etc.)? Is the environment merely a residual afterimage of the formerly “natural” world, which has now been tamed or constructed by humans and their technological systems? Or has the environment always been, in some way, “anthropogenic?"

Against this background, the course will proceed along two paths (somewhat) simultaneously. On the one hand, we will build up a “minor” history of neoliberalism’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, technical genealogy that (without discounting political economy) concentrates instead on a series of equally relevant histories—in order to trace, alongside and within our economic conditions, a series of technical and psychosocial transformations whose contours and consequences have only recently become apparent.

At the same time, the course will situate the idea of environment within a field of intelligibility comprised of specific kinds of environmental reasoning; ways of thinking that presume or posit a comprehension of the term, and which analyze or intervene in the world on that presumption. We will examine a series of themes—milieu, ecology, life, totality, control, regulation, interactivity, management, among others—that will provide a structure for analysis and reflection.
 
Topics covered include: orthodox accounts of neoliberalism; technics and technology; histories of environmental reasoning; the biopolitical foundations of metropolitan life; theories of industrial firm structure and location; Fordism, Taylorism and mechanization; Post-Fordism and the logic of flexible accumulation; individuation and the spatial atomization of neoliberalism; infrastructure, externalization and the technopolitics of environmental management; among others.

The course readings—drawn from media theory, economic geography, science and technology studies, political theory, anthropology, and the history and philosophy of technology—cover a period ranging from 1870 to the present. The course has no prerequisites, but some previous engagement with continental philosophy and critical theory is recommended.

Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies

Infrastructure plays a decisive role in urban development and in the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical perspective. History proves especially useful when dealing with the political dimension of urban infrastructure. From fortifications to smart technologies, infrastructure is inseparable from political intentions and consequences. This political dimension will constitute one of the threads of this lecture course. Other themes of the course will include the relation between cities and their hinterland, the progressive dematerialization of infrastructure, from walls or bridges to the invisible electronic networks that organize contemporary urban life, the rise of environmental concerns and their impact on infrastructural thoughts and practices, the key part played by infrastructure in social and racial inequality, the need to envisage infrastructure differently when dealing with informal settlements. Also of interest will be the changing relationships between cities, nature and infrastructure. More than ever, urban nature appears today as inseparable from infrastructure.

'Cities, Infrastructure, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies' suggests an alternative way to read cities and their evolution. Historical analysis will systematically serve as a basis to envisage contemporary issues such as the challenges of rising inequality and climate change. Since it aims to chart new territory, class discussions will be regularly organized after the presentations.

Readings related to the course content or expanding its perspectives are provided for each week lectures and will be available on Canvas in pdf format. In addition to required readings, suggested readings are also provided for some of the weeks. Course evaluation will be based on class attendance, a couple of questions related to the course to be posted online prior to two of the class meetings, as well as a final paper.

Please see Canvas for details on alternative locations for four class meetings.

Making Sacred Space

This course addresses the current crisis in church design by an in depth consideration of the ideas, images, concepts, and legislation that inform the creation of sacred space. The aim of the course is to enable designers to become leaders in the controversy, to propose new solutions, and build better religious buildings.

For almost 2,000 years church commissions have been the largest, most prominent, and most artistically and intellectual challenging that engage architects. No other commission poses equal demands for the realization of ideas in built form, and none draws on so rich a heritage of images and metaphors requiring visible shape. Recent projects by Rafael Moneo, Renzo Piano, SOM, and Richard Meier, among others, show this is still true today. Yet many recently-built churches are banal, generic or, in searching for novelty, ugly or weird. Others, while aesthetically or technologically admirable, function poorly and fail to meet the needs of the users.

Christian belief isn’t necessary in order to design a church, but knowledge of Christian culture and tradition, of the liturgy, and of what sacred space is and is not, is essential. In this course we approach Christianity as culture, not creed. Since in designing a church the expectations and needs of the client (both clerical and congregational users) are paramount, these will be explored in depth. Two of the programmatic requirements – that the church be beautiful and that it inspire wonder – will receive particular attention as aspects for which the designer is especially, perhaps solely, responsible. This course considers the conceptual, theoretical, and aesthetic foundations of contemporary church design and reviews specific examples of how those ideas can be and have been implemented through lectures, readings, discussions and an individual design project.

Chinese Modern Architecture and Urbanism

Modernity as a topic is generally both a historical period and an ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance in the Age of Reason of 17th Century thought and the 18th Century Enlightenment, predominantly in the West. It is typically associated with individual subjectivity, scientific explanation and rationalization, the emergence of bureaucracy and industrialization along with urbanization. By the early Qing Dynasty some such modern traits had entered China, as well as developing indigenously. Certainly, during the eras of Emperors Kangxi and Qianlong both the organizational manner and administration of urbanization began to take on a modern form. Further modernizing influences, largely from the hands of foreign powers, then more forcefully entered into China and began to take root in the aftermath of the Opium War and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842.  At first, these influences were primarily confined to Treaty Ports – concessions from the spoils of the Opium Wars – and some other foreign endeavors.  Not long after, Qing Dynasty China’s stand-offish attitude towards these incursions became replaced by concern with the foreign threat and increasingly serious questioning of their own institutional structures and place in the world.  By 1911, the Xinhai Revolution was well underway, resulting in the toppling of the Qing and the unsteady formation of a modern republic.  Years past, under deteriorated conditions of factionalism and with Japan, by then a power in East Asia, making territorial demands.  Two opposing ideological camps – the Communists and the Nationalists – also began to emerge, although with the Nationalists in the ascendancy throughout large parts of China.  With the full-scale outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan in 1937, a United Front was joined, only to be irreversibly broken at the end of World War II with the advent of civil war.  The victorious Communists came to power in 1949 and immediately began to re-fashion China as a modern Marxist-socialist state.  After a short though propitious start, the country was then plunged into the tragic follies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, also becoming isolated once again.  Then in 1978, with the historic opening up to the outside world, economic if not social circumstances began to change drastically, as China shifted from being a welfare state into a socialist market economy.  The contemporary period now finds the nation with burgeoning modern industrialization and urbanization, as well as striving to shape its future identity.

Against this backdrop, modern architecture and urbanism has developed in fits and starts, before coming on strongly during the past decades in most regions of China.  Therefore, rather than attempting to provide a continuous cohesive narrative, this course will concentrate on specific episodes of modern architecture and urban development.

 

Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871-2036: Seminar

Fantasy opens portals to new life forms. It prepares us for supranatural humans, genetic adjustment, non-electronic novelty. It forms the core of natural-world reverence, maybe worship, the religion of the green future. It cherishes solitary, low-tech adventure in natural and neo-natural environments, typically northern forests and fashion-magazine imagery. It is a genre, a haphazard collection, a force as amorphous as blowing leaves, a western-European device born about 1900 and now global, but always quasi-imperialist, always of the north. It scares public-school teachers who loathe Hogwarts, the Old Religion, the never-ending ancient tradition so deeply rooted in the European cultural past that it shapes contemporary propriety. Holly and other evergreens bedeck churches at Christmas, but not mistletoe, the evergreen that killed the Norse sun god, Balder, the sky-tree Druids brought west from the Danube and grafted onto oaks, the Yule sovereign that permits kisses forbidden at all other seasons, part of the merry (not happy) in Christmas. Quality fantasy teaches that every tree species once had individual character (willows walk, sometimes assault: the Whomping Willow behaves naturally) and that the most powerful (mistletoe included) once named the letters of the alphabet, that the year had thirteen lunar months marking the earth-mother menstrual cycle, that the seasons proved weird to those in the know, witches especially. Out of the great northern arc from Finland to Ireland (stabbed by the westward-moving Celts and the Albion wraiths) originates quality contemporary fantasy, much of it written by British writers schooled in Latin from childhood.  It comprises a grimoire of irresistible power. As climate change melts Arctic ice and opens new sea lanes, as Canada hurriedly builds a large navy, the north becomes more important politically, economically, and militarily – but its emerging conceptual importance orders this course this term. Cold, discomfort, swimming in the winter ocean, trusting to quality attire, knives, and open boats, seeing sideways in the winter dark, finding what one must find in the arboreal forests, all fuses into the meaning of north. Already fantasy slides past materialist and leftist ideology.  It prepares children for authentic change.

Note: This course is offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as AFVS 167.

 

Modernization in the Visual United States Environment, 1890-2035

Here find an ecology of changes, a course on the ecosystem of change so rapid most thoughtful Americans know it as modernization.  Design remembered and forgotten shapes its core, but always a caveat rules:  modernization and progress prove different in the long run.  Modernization shatters peace, quiet, certainty, value, even joy, and it impacts Americans differently.  Modernization happens to most, hits hard and fast, corrodes slowly and wretchedly.  But the few shape it, anticipating and skewing trends, inventing new processes, products, and attitudes: marketing research, hunch, luck, and advertising—always advertising—advance an agenda open to disruption and mishap alike.  Advertising now flourishes as the third political party and the fourth branch of government, determines what inventions and design triumph or fail, and occludes the deeper forces which reward risk and punish ideology.  The type-writing machine changed desks and offices, sparked the crossword puzzle, shamed poor spellers, and renamed young women clerks typewriters: a generation later, calculating machines transformed office work and renamed secretaries computers.  Advertising made cigarette smoking synonymous with feminism, cereal and fruit breakfasts equivalent to one-child families, and horseless carriages indicators of status.  But as automobiles made children and dogs the organized prisoners of highway mechanization, the aristocracy which governs modernization taught children to ride horseback, kept its sailboats, cherished its never-changing summer-vacation cottages, wilderness camps, and other hideaways.  Aristocrats dance in ballrooms where men always lead.  Wealthy women account for about 90% of the highest-level luxury market.  Aristocrats always flee cities when plague hits: their refuges blend in, look traditional, pass unnoticed.  An American middle-class peasantry ogles the British royal family as closely as the Depression unemployed watched Hollywood films about millionaires. Graduate students dump solid tenth-hand furniture (brown goods to antique dealers) for assemble-it-yourself coated particle board junk movers shrink wrap.  Contemporary university students no more think about invention, marking, and advertising of the first cell phones than they do about the great corporations deciding in the summer of 1970 that women’s lib was good.  Here find a course which focuses on those who make, anticipate, accelerate, and evade modernization.

Note: This course is offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as AFVS 160.

Urban Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative-Historical Origins and Applications

This course takes as its point of departure the historical and national origins of planning as a discipline, assesses its evolution over time and across developmental contexts, and situates our understanding of what has come to constitute “planning theory” in a deeper understanding of the political, economic, and social specificities and constraints on planning action. In understanding what might be referred to as planning praxis, we not only examine those social structures and economic as well as political power relations that enable or constrain preference for certain policies and processes of decision-making. We also examine the history of ideas about cities, debates over how the built environment should be designed and/or governed, and address longstanding conflicts over who should have the legitimacy or authority to undertake such decisions. The time span that we examine during this course begins in the late-19th and early 20th century and ends in the contemporary era.  

Upon completion of this course, students will understand the main theoretical and praxis traditions that underpin contemporary approaches to urban planning, especially in the US and Europe, but also in global-comparative perspective. They will be able to relate contemporary theoretical and praxis traditions to earlier rounds of debate and political struggle regarding urbanization as well as the attempt to plan, manage and modify its socio-spatial expressions and ecological consequences. In the process, they will understand the historical connections between the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and urban planning.

Additionally, students will be well equipped to assess the underlying normative, conceptual and political assumptions that mediate major contemporary approaches to urban planning and policy, globally and locally. This will entail becoming acquainted with social science approaches to the study of cities and urbanization and relating those approaches to the study of planning and design strategies across contexts and scales. Finally, students will be in a position to assess planning discourses—for instance, regarding social and spatial justice, equity, diversity, and sustainability—and will be able to relate them to ongoing social struggles to imagine and create alternative urban worlds. In the most general sense, this course will help students build critical capacities for understanding and contributing to efforts to shape and reshape urban life through the planning, design, and policy disciplines.

Histories and Theories of Urban Form and Design

This course provides an introduction to the critical histories and theories of urban intervention and formation, and to the disciplinary practices of urban design in relation to planning and the broader technological, institutional, economic, social and political contexts in which they operate over time and across cultures and geographies. Beginning in the mid 19th century, the course uses historical and theoretical readings and case studies of specific projects (built and unbuilt) to ground theoretical ideas, modes and models of practice in the material and discursive contexts in which those ideas and practices have emerged and operated since the beginning of captialist urbanization to the present day. The emphasis is on plural histories and plural readings of the processes of urban formation through multiple theoretical and critical lenses. We will focus on key episodes of transformation and paradigm-shift that allow us to explore a range of critical frameworks and methodologies for understanding emerging conditions of the contemporary urban historically, theoretically, and spatially across scales, and to situate the processes, debates, and projects that have shaped urban environments in larger discourses that foreground issues of social equity and identity, power, privilege, race, and gender. It connects the historical narrative to contemporary transformations and to the challenges presented by emergent urban problems, crises, and struggles across places, territories and scales.

Topics include: industrialization and capitalist urbanization: regulating the capitalist city; Garden City; Planned Metropolis; Parks Movement and City Beautiful; the Modernist City; Chicago School; the racialization of space, exclusionary zoning, redlining + suburbanization; regionalism; the Socialist City; CIAM in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Latin America; urban renewal, Civil Rights and the struggle for the city; advocacy planning + design in the US; the emergence of urban design as bridge-practice; postindustrial city; privatization, market rationalism + the withdrawal of the state; critiques of modernist urbanism; the semantic dimension of urban form + space; typomorphology + collage; landscape + ecological methodologies; preservation + alteration; New Urbanism; justice planning; the contradictions of informality; seeing from the South; design and planning for climate change; reparative planning and design.

First year Urban Design students have prioritized early enrollment in 4151 and 4496. The Histories and Theories of Urban Design lottery (HTUD lottery) will open on Tuesday, January 10 at 9 AM and close on Friday, January 13, at 9 AM. First Year UD students must submit selections by the deadline to ensure enrollment via this lottery.

Histories of Landscape Architecture II

Designed gardens and landscapes are cultural artifacts that encompass three main expectations: pragmatic needs, cultural significance, and aesthetic order. Although some landscape narratives often ignore needs (those of the users or the environment’s), reduce cultural meanings to a discourse on style, and focus on order as a problem in aesthetic theory, the fact remains that, almost without exception, one or more of these three criteria—needs, meanings, order—dominates the designed gardens and landscapes of every time and place. However, because gardens and landscapes are ephemeral and subject to many transformations, this course will consider their practical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects as embedded in a palimpsest of changing values. In order to do this, the course will not be structured around landscape architectural styles. Rather, it will examine a selection of topics that bring together thinkers and designers who live/have lived centuries apart. This will allow the class to unfold several issues that have shaped the profession through built work and intellectual inquiry, such as the recent reckoning about the discipline’s role and agenda, questions of race and the implicit violence of white archives and memorials, and the limits of the commonly accepted, tripartite taxonomy of nature—pristine, productive and genteel, with its implicit prioritization of the latter category at the expense of the first two or of anything in between.

Instructor’s talks will address contemporary designs alongside those conceived and implemented by our predecessors. Within this structure, instead of construing history as “the past,” we will consider, with Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, that every history is “contemporary history”: no matter how chronologically remote the facts under consideration may seem to be, in reality the writing of history always reflects, and is shaped by, present circumstances.