Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Origins and Ends

Our aim is to address the general rupture caused by the rise of modernity—that is, by the social, economic, technological, and ideological transformations accompanying the political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was an age of internationalization in design practices and issues, a process that was accompanied by technological transformation and utopian thinking as well as by rising tensions linked to social inequality, colonial expansionism, and political upheaval. Our work in this course will look at the three pillars of buildings, texts, and contexts in order to find the equilibrium between, on the one hand, localized historical narratives and, on the other, the sampling to which a global purview necessarily gives rise.

The transition of architecture to the modern world prompts a series of fundamental questions: How did historical conditions place pressure on the tradition-bound parameters of architecture, on its origins, theories, and pedagogies? How did new conditions of scientific possibility actively reconfigure architecture’s relation to engineering and ideologies of progress? And how, finally, did aesthetic conceptions and approaches, which trace an arc from the demise of the Vitruvian tradition to eclecticism, historicism, and rationalist avant-gardes, intersect with gender, race, society, and politics?

This course weaves these questions through topics and themes ranging from technology and utopia to ornament and imperialism. We begin with late Baroque polemics and the disintegration of the Classical system. We consider the multifaceted nature of eighteenth- century architectural expressions in such examples as: the ideal city from royal Jaipur to revolutionary Paris, the split between architects and engineers; origin myths and the status of history; and the formulation of building typologies from churches and factories to slave plantations in colonial contexts. The nineteenth century, which for us is inaugurated by a utopian imaginary, covers key episodes such as utopian socialism in the context of the Industrial Revolution, town planning and racial politics after the Civil War, the Beaux-Arts system in Europe, China, and the Americas, the intertwining of ornament and British imperialism in India, the collision of vernacular traditions and colonial modernity in Africa, and, finally, the global dream of colossal structures and the infrastructural programs of the modern metropolis.

Wild Ways 2.0: A Fifth Ecology for Metropolitan Los Angeles

Playing off Reyner Banham’s classic Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, the studio will explore themes of connectivity, resilience and landscape infrastructure under the twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene. The work will interrogate and explore what a system of landscape infrastructure for connectivity and habitat across Southern California’s biodiversity hotspots might look like—in the face of growing urbanization and climate change. Proposals will embrace regional networks of wildlife movement and potential re-imaginings of infrastructural spaces for habitat and public use, layering in humans as both users and kin; and that account for intensifying threats of wildfire.  The goal is to invent the basis for a new metropolitan ecology—a mix of culture, geography, environment, and lifestyle (in Banham’s terms)—adapted to a rapidly evolving and warming climate. We will draw on work by Donna Haraway, Jennifer Wolch, Mimi Zeiger, Julian Aguon, Winona LaDuke, Richard Weller, Reyner Banham, and more, and we will have the opportunity to learn from ecologists, urbanists, and designers on the ground in Los Angeles during our studio trip. In Jennifer Wolch’s words: “To allow for the emergence of an ethic, practice, and politics of caring for animals and nature, we need to renaturalize cities and invite the animals back in, and in the process re-enchant the city.” 

The Aperture Analyzed: The Form and Space of Openings

This seminar will focus on an essential component of architecture, the aperture, which has broad implications for our understanding of space. An aperture is commonly understood as a window or door, an element offering a controlled connection between interior and exterior in buildings. Simultaneously and more conceptually, an aperture is a frame, threshold, portal, passage, oculus, cleft, chasm, gap, valve or void. Louis Kahn placed the aperture at the very center of our conception of space saying that, “architecture itself had begun ‘when the walls parted and the columns became,’ admitting light and creating a system of support at the same time.” As a primary element of enclosure, the aperture frequently yields our most intimate contact with buildings, offering light, view and ventilation. As a mechanism for engagement, the aperture provides a connection with the outdoors, both literal and phenomenal, serving as a conduit for movement through and access to architecture. The term, aperture, therefore is profound and significant to our study, as the seminar seeks to explore the value of openings in three distinct, yet integrated ways: (1) its functional power of illumination, ventilation and view, (2) its derivation of form and its relationship to structure and skin, (3) its role in shaping public / private realms, defining spatial experience and the contours of our consciousness.

We will explore these issues through readings, analysis and design. Students will lead and participate in discussions of the readings each week and will engage in analytic exercises of specific works by such architects as Corb, Scarpa, Loos, Kahn, Chareau, Holl, Siza, Aalto, etc. Additionally, the seminar will examine notions of the aperture in the work of such artists as Hopper, Vermeer, Turrell, and Pichler. Please see the course Canvas site for more detailed weekly topics, schedule, and student roles.

 

Appearance

This seminar will focus on architecture’s appearance, on how architecture is rendered both legible and actionable to its audience.

The many labels applied to architecture’s visual bearing illustrate its capriciousness across schools of thought: ‘envelope,’ ‘enclosure,’ ‘façade,’ ‘elevation,’ ‘composition,’ ‘index,’ ‘form,’ ‘representation,’ ‘symbol,’ ‘skin’…the list is long and points in disparate directions.

Appearances proffer architecture’s entry point. What a building looks like operates at the extremes of a building’s physical and metaphysical demands. Regardless of what we may want to do with it, architecture gives us no choice: it will appear. We will see our architectures as objects and we will look beyond their literalities in search of what they might signal. We will see them as exteriors and interiors. We will view them individually and collectively. And we will react to them in ways that are remarkably visceral. Our buildings loom large.

Corrective Lenses
Two corrective lenses, related to each other, will be important to our semester.

Lens One – Appearance and Action:
We will spend the semester discussing architecture’s appearance. With no desire to temper or sidestep that conversation, we will also take up a re-aligned version of Hannah Arendt’s “space of appearance,” in which she poignantly lays out “the various forms in which the public realm can be organized.” This seminar can be thought of as centering on the ‘appearance of space,’ an easy rearrangement of Arendt’s phrase that stays close to her assertion that “the only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people.”
 
Because architecture’s appearance reaches into the very nature of public life, and because both architecture and public life thrive on possibilities more than certainties, we will begin with the view that public life ought to exist because of architecture’s appearance…and never in spite of it

Lens Two – Parallax:

The second corrective lens, just below, is extracted from a short letter that I recently wrote on beauty. I’m including it here to clarify our starting point and out of fairness to anyone considering taking this seminar (see my note right after this paragraph):
“How we wedge a gap, or lack thereof, between architecture’s superficial and profound natures lies literally/aesthetically/figuratively in the middle of how we constitute beauty. And that’s where so much contemporary flattening is so ungratifying…so less-than beautiful. Much of this recent flattening hovers around notions of ‘image’ and ‘representation,’ terms that have lately acquired a spurious status akin to ‘idea.’ Beauty thrives in the shufflings that come with parallax, wherein the interactions of ‘skin’ and ‘deep’ sweet-talk our reception. And parallax requires depth. Depth of form, program, movement, matter, publicness…depth assembled from architecture’s constituent parts and held together with the glue that oozes from anyone’s engagement with space.”

Behind this excerpt: On some days, not more than occasionally, I am skeptical of architectural postmodernism’s appearance/re-appearance in our discipline. On all other days, I am hostile to it. Anyone interested in this seminar should be aware that we will not take up postmodernism other than establishing a parallel conversation.

‘Appearance’ is intended to advance not only your personal agility in carrying out architecture but also the strength of your actions as they affect public life.

Urban Grids-3:Grid Plan versus Big Project

Within a larger research scope of exploring open forms for city design, this seminar will focus on a clear discussion of two paradigms:
1) Large scale plans that take the urban grid as the main layout, allowing many forms of development. We know that Manhattan is the result of a decision to establish a well-tempered urban grid over the whole island in 1811, framing all the different subsequent morphologies and transformations.
2) The big projects behind the initiatives of major events like World Expos that have to meet a precise program for a short period of time. Paris held seven different Expos along the Seine and created a cultural downtown district for the metropolis with parks, museums and mixed uses.

The two design strategies respond to the different logics, time constraints and social ambitions of the urban projects. This seminar is a distillation of a twofold research process at the GSD. The first is the Urban Grids: Handbook for Regular City Design presented at previous editions. The second is ongoing research on the “Urbanistic impact of World Expositions in cities” that summarizes some lessons to be learned from the experience of the more than 100 expos held since 1851 in London, covering cities in different continents and the most varied of cultures. Both paradigms are good examples of open forms for designing the city. Each responds to different urbanistic aims. The first is responsible for many expansions with the different characters we’ll discover as we study them, but they are, in general, lasting urban sectors. The second initially has something of the ephemeral about it as in many cases the programs are limited to a few months, but the transformation nevertheless produces special districts in most of the Expo cities that go on to induce other types of developments. The ultimate aim of the course is to create a new understanding of the way we approach city design by means of powerful models and innovative experiences that can rigorously inform our design decisions. Revisiting these two paradigms—that have channeled so many different objectives—with a critical viewpoint may help us to address new issues when approaching the urban future with its new social challenges and sustainable requirements.

The research seminar will specifically focus on the following steps:
A) Reviewing the conceptual framework of plans and projects. Understanding certain categories such as known vs unknown, systematic vs specific, and generic vs ad hoc. We will identify the nature of each paradigm.
B) Researching seminal projects (city fragments) that suggest new design patterns in both paradigms. Study of quantitative features in order to understand qualitative values in the design and its development.
C) Comparative studies of the various aspects of investigation to establish both individual research areas and a collective agenda for the group.
D) The final outcome will present the students’ individual critical views in relation to the values of each of the paradigms for future application, within the new environmental challenges we are facing today.

Course Format and Method:
Some introductory reading will be provided at the beginning of the course. After the initial steps, the seminar will go on to explore the topics, primarily by means of analytical and operative drawings that allow students to produce critical arguments about values and priorities using some relevant cases for both urban design paradigms.

***Please note that the material circulated during the seminar is for use in the seminar only.

The History of Heritage and the Heritage of History

This is a seminar course designed for design students who are interested in understanding the cultural background behind heritage theories, conservation practices, and related socio-cultural issues in a variety of geographical contexts. The course will be divided into three parts: the history of heritage conservation, the politics of heritage conservation, and how and for whom heritage conservation practices shape our world spatially and socially. It encourages students to question the essentialist understandings of our inherited space and to read the characters of space from a dynamic perspective. Students will learn to critically analyze the cultural meaning and identity of a place by identifying cultural groups and their social/cultural frames and to understand how ideas about the past are used and misused to create the present.   
 
Heritage has many identities. It began as a testament to authoritative history buttressing the legitimacy of the nation-state from the 19th century. But more recently it has become as aspect of popular culture promoting a neo-liberal commodity society. Heritage occupies a contested position in the built environment both spatially and socially because of its capriciousness in constructing historical and cultural meanings and social identities. “The past is everywhere,” says David Lowenthal, and as a consequence, everything humans inhabit is potentially susceptible to becoming heritage. Against this backdrop, heritage conservation starts to break away from its original meaning of inherited familial property to a much broader definition of sustaining national historical and cultural tradition, in the name of solidarity or national revival or simply community control of its “turf” against outsiders or change. However, “heritage” is a construct, often widely divergent from actual history, thus is never inherently beneficial or neutral. It carries different and sometimes incompatible meanings embedded in historical interpretations, identity politics, and social conflicts among various interest groups. These meanings are selectively constructed by dominant groups and reinforced by power.  
 
In this class, student participation will include a weekly one-page synthesis on required readings, presentations on case studies, and a final project. The class will meet weekly for the instructor’s lecture and discussions on readings and case studies for up to 3 hours. This seminar is open to all GSD students, and there is no prerequisite for this seminar.

Urban Design & Planning for Climate Transformation, Intense Migration, & Rapid Urban Growth

We face a vulnerable future due to the accelerated intensity of natural and humanitarian disasters. The resultant scale of unprecedented migration has been coupled with a lack of infrastructures to accommodate the climatic displacement giving rise to new and more complex forms of vulnerability. While current estimates account for 250 million international migrants, predictions indicate that by 2050 this number will increase to 350 million of which 60% will have been displaced due to environmental factors. These climate crises accentuate inequalities as the most vulnerable groups resort to informal settlements in areas with the greatest exposure to effects of environmental hazards. In short, the landscape of informality will soon be a direct reflection of the effects of climate change and its intensified migration.

Latin America exemplifies this twofold transition as approximately one third of its urban dwellers live in informal settlements. The global scenario finds Latin-America and the Caribbean at a moment of extreme transitions. 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.

Even though the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development were agreed upon between countries, to ensure effectiveness of its ambitious climate targets, there is a need to accelerate the implementation of these global agenda at the scale of a city and include the climate adaptation of precarious settlements at its center. Realizing the agency of local governments over about one-third of the potential for urban climate change mitigation in the region, the class will develop recommendations to move towards the localization of NDCs in cities and improve capacities for multi-level climate governance at a local context. We will focus on the capacity of designers in dialogue with subnational governments and mayors to be agents of change and demonstrate that deeper greenhouse gas emission cuts and equitable resilience building are not only possible but achievable, by unfolding the full potential of design imagination and thereby inspiring the intergovernmental relations to improve in the governance and coordination and vertical integration of their ambitious goals.

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 suffer deeply the effects of climate change and absorb a major part of the migrant influx. 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 seminar we will research about flexible solutions to temporary problems, imagining the physical form of cities in a more elastic condition, and discussing about reversible configurations that are able to articulate more sustainable forms of urban development. Indeed, when in the future, other deep transitions will also become prominent, a softer, weaker, and adjustable urban form will be the only fertile ground for conflict resolution. As part of the class, we will host prominent practitioners, regional policy leaders and influential intellectuals as guests 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.

Thinking Landscape – Making Cities: Designing Regenerative Futures

This design seminar challenges the notion of a gradual adaptation to the climate crisis with proactive regenerative design. Students will create a new settlement pattern for a city of your choice, based on three propositions that will be part of research, class discussion, and presentations.

First, regenerative design and development builds resource capacities, adds social coherence to human communities, and enriches the soils and waters that support the living world. Why regenerative design and development? Given the degenerating conditions of the biosphere, both sustainable development, which seeks merely to maintain resources for future generations, and resilience, which promises to adapt from extreme events, are inadequate.

The second proposition is that urban development and local and regional ecosystems will co-evolve as a single complex system reflecting the equal value given to the needs both realms. The third proposition is a commitment to justice for both human and non-human communities. New community-led commons resource institutions will ensure space for all living things to flourish, reproduce, and migrate.

The class will be a forum for both challenging these propositions and developing regenerative concepts and strategies for your chosen city. This can be your home city, a city which you are curious about, or a city you are working on in another context.

This is not a design studio. The goal is to support your thesis for your city with selected visual material. Students will produce an abstract, conceptual diagrams, and the comparative maps and plans to advance their concept including new models of urban and rural life and an aspect of daily life. Who are we designing for, and who has agency to realize your goals.

The seminar is open to all students at the GSD. It offers urban design skills for landscape architects, and urban and landscape design thinking and skills for architects. For urban designers, it will offer landscape ecology strategies, and for city planners it will offer an opportunity to invent policy and future forms of representation.

Besides instructor inputs, readings, and internal student presentations, we will have invited guests from GSD faculty, Loeb Fellows, and abroad. They will give presentations of their work relative to the aims of the course, lead discussions that engage your questions, or join us at our mid-term and final presentations. Bruce Boucek, Pamela Conrad, Rebecca McMackin, Claudia Dobles, Alberto Kritzler, and Derwent Sisnett provide inputs on data research, landscape concepts at regional to local scales, inclusive governance concepts, and real estate development strategies.

Grades are based on attendance and engagement in class discussion, and the concepts and questions put forward the abstract, diagrams, and drawings that support your presentation.

 

 

Experiments in Public Freedom

Cities are spatial accumulations of capital and culture that can host and must cater to a vast array of different and often contradictory publics. While public space can be easily conceptualized and designed in response to congruent publics, the incongruency found in cities presents a different challenge: cities require public spaces capable of enabling non-hegemonic identities and events. Due to their role and meaning in constructing and defining cities’ public realm, public spaces are expected to embody a well-defined character and gravitas. However, due to the diversity of publics, these spaces must engage with temporary, overlapping, and often-contradictory sensibilities and occupations. The design question that emerges is how to conceptualize and design public space that embodies a non-hegemonic character and gravitas?

This design theory seminar presents an amalgamation of views from different perspectives (architecture, art, landscape architecture, urban design) that coalesce around six spatial conditions helpful in conceptualizing and designing spaces that promote cultural diversity, social acceptance, and individual spontaneity. Through this amalgamation, this course explores containment, neutrality, blankness, normalcy, anarchy, and amnesia as conditions that can open up public space.

Despite their potential, these spatial properties are usually underestimated because they seem to lack what is generally considered essential for designing successful public spaces: site-specificity, sensibility to local aesthetics, socio-cultural appropriateness, permanent and fixed identity, etc. It is precisely due to these so-called deficiencies that these spatial properties can be instrumental in imagining spaces that enable constant recirculation of multiple temporary publics rather than permanent forms of regulation, identity, or appropriateness.

The course is composed of six sections, one per spatial condition. Each section comprises a lecture by the instructor around a constellation of references (projects and texts) to be discussed in class. For each section, students are asked to analyze an environment of their choice (building, landscape, open space, etc.) that demonstrates the spatial condition being discussed. At the end of the semester, students assemble these six analyses into a design primer to enable public freedoms.

 

 

Theories and Practices of Landscape Architecture

What do you need to know in order to understand this landscape? How do design culture and design thinking transform over time? How are cultural values embedded in the design of landscapes? This course is framed in terms of the relationship of landscape architecture to the evolving theorizations of nature and culture. In each class, we will map various critical assumptions, ideologies, and aspirations that inform how landscape is designed and interpreted. By learning to read landscapes and related projects of landscape architecture, we will study the constructedness of landscape. Conversely, we will also examine the capacities of landscape architecture to shape identity and ecology, reproduce or contest power relations and inequality, and commemorate diverse cultural meaning.

The course elaborates a working definition of theory as it relates to landscape practice. It contextualizes the discipline’s transition from a modernist paradigm in the West, to the gradual eradication of conceptual binaries and the pluralization of narratives in the late twentieth century. It considers landscape’s ‘social’ engagements to include non-human actors, and concludes with recent materialist approaches to landscape that emphasize its performance and flows in the era of global warming.

The course weaves together three kinds of investigations: one that focuses on built forms, another on the ideas and conceptual frameworks that guide the production of those forms, and a third that examines the retrospective interpretation of those forms. We will attend to diverse projects and topics, that may include border regions, urban landscapes, agricultural landscapes, colonial plantations, scientific gardens, territories of extraction, zones of environmental risk, successional forests, migrating ecosystems, national parks, native lands, domestic spheres, and postcolonial gardens. Through these sites, we will critically explore the spatial forms of exclusion, inclusion, conflict, and cooperation between and among people and their surroundings.

At the end of this class, students will understand the value and make use of theory in design, will be able to articulate the diverse intellectual, social, and political dimensions of landscapes, and to refer to a history of landscape architecture projects oriented to related issues. Students will also be able to articulate their priorities within the discipline. Assignments will include a combination of case study presentations, written responses to assigned readings and hands-on exercises designed to train students in the analysis of landscapes.

This course is open to all Harvard GSD students and also accepts cross-registered students.