Nexus of Ecology, Education, and Design – A new School of Design on an Island at Yangtze Estuary
This studio project touches upon two important areas relevant to our collective future— ecology and education. This is a future in which we must change the way we live as the threshold for climate change is about to be crossed and this future lies in the hands of our young people. The task at hand is the design of an architectural design school within a new college at Yangtze Estuary on Chongming Island, China. The studio will explore new modes of operation needed to face the complex and difficult, yet still hopeful, realities. Each student will transform seminal ideas to spatial ideals as they imagine their own design school.
We will approach this project with three primary considerations in mind:
• Ecology as a Social Agenda
• Architecture as Means to Gather and Connect
• Education as Spatial and Cultural Interventions
Architects need to change our mode of operation and consider how design can encourage healthy lifestyles and form new communal relationships with nature. We will explore how we can ground ourselves, together with other species, on this carefully reserved small piece of land, which is surrounded by a beautiful yet danger-ridden ecological system.
As uncertainty is the only certain thing, in a complex system such as the education of multidisciplinary designers, physical and mental spaces that are flexible and adaptive to changes are needed. We must build resilience into the core of the future designers and discover new spatial relationships among different components of teaching, learning, and campus living.
The world is a complex system of elements, constantly interacting and in flux. Architecture is a vessel, a medium, through which we interpret increasingly complex issues at work. It is a means to gather and connect in tangible ways. The studio will search for architecture that connects us with people, to meet, exchange, and share; architecture that connects us with nature—trees and birds, sea and land, air, and light – and architecture that connects us with our inner selves.
Instead of didactic teacher-pupil relationships, we see a design studio as a constant dialogue, in which new knowledge and understanding form, new ideas and reflections emerge. We encourage our students to ask questions and seek solutions; heighten awareness and enact changes. We learn from each other; we learn from the world. We expect from each student, in way of a final product, to produce a piece of architecture that is genuine, in depth, grounded, with surprises, magical, touching—both radical and poetic—designs that are authentically born out of each student’s own interests.
Percent for Art: A New Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
In the option studio, we design a new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by re-using the structure of a large-scale shopping mall.
We will look at museums that transformed and expanded existing structures as a springboard to investigate the potential of architecture to occupy and repurpose existing space. However, instead of post-industrial structures that house many of today’s leading contemporary art institutions, we inhabit obsolete retail space.
As implied in the ambiguous title, our project asks: what percentage of society is represented and acknowledged by museums? Official museum architecture within the context of urban landscapes represents the ideology of a certain percentage, not only acknowledging but also dividing communities.
Our site is situated in a charged urban context: the shopping mall—a slab 350 meters in length—faces the existing Museum of Modern Art with its white, abstract concrete facade and behind it the towering structure of the Soviet Palace of Culture and Science. This specific place embodies Warsaw’s recent history with the shift from communism to neoliberalism. During our studio trip to Warsaw, we will meet with artists, curators, and activists and explore the site’s artistic, architectural, and political environment.
You will not only work on the building’s design, but as architects you are also responsible for developing its spatial and cultural program. Learning from different strategies that challenge official narratives of urban memory, we aim to shed light on issues and communities which are consistently ignored. What architectural features ensure accessibility to a wider audience and foster the inclusive memory of Warsaw’s urban landscape, its appearance threatened by the onslaught of ongoing real-estate development? What happens when the cultural realm of the museum is confronted with commerce? What kind of activities—exhibitions, events, and collections—should the new museum envision?
The studio begins with a research phase, where you work on an “artist’s book” of your own to define and specify your cultural mission for the “museum of the future” that you are about to design. After visiting the site in Warsaw and discussing your projects with our clients, the curators at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, you will work on your individual project brief and scheme for a future program. You will not only design and produce a complete architectural project, but also its display for the exhibition at the museum that will be dedicated to the studio’s investigation (planned for summer, 2024).
Throughout the term we will be joined by numerous guests, artists, curators and scholars, contributing input lectures.
New York New York
There is a famed anecdotal evidence that designing a tower is easier than designing a chair. The boastful comparison was rather meant to aggrandize architects’ furniture, but this improbable claim reveals a curious analogy: both are veritable object proper. An accidental type, stemming from sheer real-estate speculation, the tower is the ultimate architectural object, New York its indisputable place of origin. Akin to furniture, tall buildings of various kinds have been seemingly haphazardly placed in the city's urban landscape, as copiable items in a vast and sprawling family of things. The singular model proved to be easily malleable and able to adapt to any zoning codes and developers’ legerdemain, continuously breaking the records. Its indefinite condition makes the tower an expression of the latest fads, their agglomeration a testament to our collective unfolding. This studio somehow takes the tower at face value and sees its proliferation as the ultimate outcome of the building as a thing; an object with a DNA, a structure, a system, a figure, a type and a form—and all this always, at the same time. In an attempt to do justice to the radical idea of the tower, and its supreme indifference, we propose to embrace one of the many available towers in the New York skyline and make a duplicate of it: New York New York. What happens when we copy an object as a building; how does it transform; what and who is it for; what makes it relevant; what changes in hundred, or just twenty years; what are the potentials of a seemingly outdated figure… Many questions to answer in one semester, but we can only try.
Baizo House – Perception Description Representation
On October 8, 1980, New York band Talking Heads released Remain in Light, their fourth album. The album's final track, "The Overload", was written in the style of the Mancunian band Joy Division. But, at the time of recording, the members of Talking Heads knew Joy Division's music only from the record reviews they'd read about it; they'd never listened to it before. The result is a "copy" full of errors, in a way, and at the same time, one is also struck by the accuracy of certain parts or sounds. This copy is of the same order as those made by Renaissance architects seeking to build as accurately and well as the Ancients, i.e. the Romans. But archaeological knowledge in the 15th century was very incomplete and inaccurate, as we have since learned from the progress made in this field. Taking as true what was false, having to imagine what they didn't know, Renaissance architects invented a new architecture, which is an obvious echo of Roman architecture, but which is also totally singular.
For the autumn 2023 studio, we propose to make the imaginary project of the Baizo house from the real one of Le Corbusier’s Baizeau house. Students will conceive the Maison Baizo project from the description of the Maison Baizeau, built in Tunis by Le Corbusier in 1928, by the grandchildren of the house's owners as adults when they vacationed there as children. Naturally, the vision is fractional and fragmentary, as are memories, all the more so when they are distant. They will deal here more with mental images than visual ones. Our aim is to know nothing more about the Baizeau house than what the owners' grandchildren say about it. The aim is to design a house that can be described by the same fragments but which, apart from this aspect, will be far away from the original model. We'll have to learn to forget the original Baizeau house project and imagine the Baizo one. Armed with this almost total ignorance of the project, the students will design the Baizo house in the same way that the members of Talking Heads, in association with Brian Eno, wrote "The Overload", inspired by songs they had never heard.
In this way, we'll highlight the joys of induced ignorance as a means of guiding intuition from fragments of spatial devices – those described, explicitly or implicitly, in the text – which are to form part of the final project but whose status in this new ensemble will be quite different. A kind of imaginary ready-made.
Moreover, because the historical perspective is itself historicized, the project will not seek to mimic one from the 1920s and will take into account aspects of reality, such as climate change, use, or composition, in a contemporary way. The aim is, therefore, to create a totally new work based on a reasoned relationship with an existing architectural object, but one that can, in part, be described as the Baizeau house.
To underline the fact that architecture takes on multiple modes of existence and perception, the Baizo house is a copy of the Baizeau house, based on its description. Copying has long served as the cultural and pedagogical basis for architecture. This is undoubtedly still true but in a less structured and conscious way. We still need to agree on the definition of "copy"…
As part of the project's rendering, we'll be exploring a mode of representation we call "textures". At the crossroads of traditional perspective and geometrical representation, and concrete poetry, such drawings express the link between architecture and writing, or space and ideas, i.e. the way in which ideas serve to give rules to the shaping of space, but also give a singular meaning to the actual construction. And the more relevantly the ideas are able to combine distant planes of reality in this shaping process, the richer the work and the more complex its meaning.
Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)
The first semester studio is a project-based introduction to a range of ideas, methods, and techniques essential for the design engineer. In the studio, students learn through making.
Every three weeks, as part of studio time, all first-year MDE students will convene for "Debating Design," a series of roundtables when two outside speakers present short vignettes addressing topics in design engineering, followed by an open discussion with faculty and students.
This studio is limited to first-year students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering program, a collaborative degree associated with the Harvard GSD and SEAS.
Elements of Urban Design
Elements of Urban Design is the required first semester advanced core studio for the post-professional Urban Design Program. Regarding learning objectives, the studio introduces critical concepts, strategies and technical skills associated with thinking about Urban Design and allows speculation on a designer’s spectrum of roles in shaping urban environments. More generally the studio aims to develop necessary literacies for architects and landscape architects to engage in the bridging practice of Urban Design and to understand questions related to urban environments and to produce compelling formal responses. Here a fundamental difference between Urban Design and Architecture and Planning is its concern for the ‘thingness’ in a Heideggerian sense, of urban settlement, which transcends the single building complex and involves competing claims and other unreconciled constraints needing to be resolved through design. Typically, cities are often parts of larger networks of communities and ecologies with both overlapping and complementary roles. Urban growth and change now range over a wider landscape, offering both opportunities, constraints and outcomes located in peri-urban, peripheral, and central locations. Within the scope and content of the studio, consisting of two Urban Design problems, each subdivided into exercises, evaluative reviews and crits will be accomplished by a series of fourteen presentations across topics within the two problems. Structural racism and effects of the Anthropocene Era, along with concomitant institutional issues and biases will be engaged with each specific exercise but also more generally through adherence to social actions, environmental awareness, and a cosmopolitan outlook. More specifically, in the first problem and exercises dealing with South Boston, housing affordability and other forms of discrimination will be challenged and discussed, along with the matter of Climate Change and sea-level rise. Similarly, in peripheral developments like Westwood in the second problem, the matter of access as well as environmental suitability will be topics of consideration. Throughout a sequence of topical presentations will be provided in an asynchronous format on these and related topics, including brownfield site amelioration, sea-level rise, landscape ecology, storm-water management, urban justice, and various forms of spatial development. The other first-term required course for incoming Urban Designers, titled GSD 4496 Urban Desing Contexts and Operations, will also bear on many of these and related topics.
TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 7th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Landscape Architecture III: Third Semester Core Studio
From Off-Shoring to Near Shore: Littoral Landscapes at Work
This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people at work in working landscapes—through the design of regional frameworks and localized sites in coastal Massachusetts.
Since the 18th century, cheap fuel, cheap labor, and cheap nature lay the foundation for settler wealth in North America. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the economic logic of “fossil capital,” as argued by Andreas Malm, coupled industrial power generated from fossil fuels with wage labor. The primary orientation of this coupling was economic growth. Fossil capital has led to rising temperatures, melting ice, and decreased biodiversity—and the uneven distribution of effects on human populations. In New England, the techno-ecological landscapes that once supported everyday life—e.g. productive fisheries, forests, and fields— have been transformed by the market orientation of fossil capital. Relocated overseas, fragmented by urbanization, or restructured by changing economies, the physical remnants of socially productive landscapes have been romanticized, miniaturized, and historicized.
During the early 20th century, through the New Deal, the profession of landscape architecture undertook a broad range of public projects. During the 1930s, landscape architects planned, designed, and executed work across federal agencies as diverse as the War Department, Tennessee Valley Authority, Federal Housing Administration, and the Department of the Interior, creating thousands of jobs for out-of-work Americans. A broader examination of the history of landscape and the New Deal reveals that among the celebrated public initiatives were also many projects of environmental absurdity, constructed through grueling manual labor, often by racially segregated work crews.
Amidst the 2020 economic crisis and calls for a Green New Deal, the discipline of landscape architecture has the potential to again create jobs—“green jobs”—in service of a decarbonized economy. But without compelling visions for the future, the discipline will be limited to projects of climate change resilience that stabilize contemporary ways of life. This is an understandable sentiment in turbulent times, but it also represents the most pernicious form of “sustainability.” A new paradigm for working landscapes requires new associations beyond recreation and ecological restoration. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed outdoors many activities that were previously limited to interior spaces. However, due to the urgency of this health crisis, most of these facilities are purely functionalist and designed for short- to medium- term deployment. This studio will explore the design of landscapes that can be new environments for health care, education, housing, and research that are disentangled from singular market orientation and hybridized with regional needs for food, fibers, clean water, and waste management.
Design approaches will be grounded in the material media of the discipline—soils, vegetation, water dynamics—and their controlling infrastructures, physical and policy-based. The studio will explore: how productive sectors will migrate due to climate risk; what happens to the land left behind; and how these landscapes can support dignified spaces for work and self-determination. These design propositions may lead to new forms, scales, and cadences for work and habitation that may seem improbable under current systems of funding, fuels, and power. In the 21st century, the socially productive landscape reconsidered does not merely provide the stuff of everyday life closer to home. It demands a paradigm shift from landscapes that are discrete and transactional to those that foster a commonwealth of human and natural labor.
TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 7th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE
Integration is the agenda for the third-semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems, and processes into a synthetic whole. Structural systems, envelope design, and environmental and thermodynamic processes will be systematically addressed in the development of a single project during the course of the whole semester.
The building type consists of a multiprogram urban building, requiring careful consideration of access and exchanges (circulatory, visual, and energy), between programs. During that time students will work in consultation with engineers and scientists. Design exercises will be addressed through team and individual study.
Prerequisites: GSD 1101 and GSD 1102, or advanced standing in the MArch I program.
TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 7th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio
First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to investigate, analyze, create, and implement plans and projects.
In this studio Boston provides the location for developing skills and strategies to address and understand the local in its wider context. Planners need to engage the particularities of districts, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions as well as their wider contexts.
The course focuses on four key challenges of contemporary urban planning—equity, climate, health, and accessibility. While the US legacy of white supremacy raises questions of great urgency, the question of how planning can help make places more just and equitable is an enduring concern in planning. Anthropogenic climate change is challenging planners to mitigate its effects and adapt to changes already underway, while also addressing other environmental challenges. The COVID pandemic has highlighted the continuing challenge of infectious diseases even as non-communicable diseases and injuries remain major causes of death amenable to prevention through changes to the built environment. Finally, towns and cities exist to help people gain access to nearby resources such as jobs, services, and cultural opportunities. Changes in technologies have altered whether one needs to be mobile to have accessibility; whether these changes will further equity is an open question. There are no easy answers; the critical and creative skills of the urban planner are being called upon now more than ever to advance the notion of a just society.
Planners address messy situations where the problems are disputed, and the solutions contested. They figure out the important questions to answer, identify relevant information, listen to multiple voices, propose strategies, communicate ideas, and revise proposals. In this studio students gain experience engaging with complex and unclear situations in ways that can lead toward plausible and ethical approaches to addressing them. The studio teaching approach is one of creating a setting for producing learning rather than delivering instruction about exactly what you should do. Students also experiment with how to effectively communicate with others at different stages of a planning process.
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.
Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio
What is public about a public space?
STU-1111 is the first in a sequence of four core studios that, together, constitute the foundation of your education at the GSD. In the studios, the hands-on experience of design is a synthetic act, bringing together theory, technique, and aesthetic sensibility in the making of a landscape. In this studio, you will apply the skills and knowledge acquired through other first-year courses—Histories of Landscape Architecture, Landscape Representation, and Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies—to the conceptualization and design of landscapes. Upon successfully completing this studio you will have laid the foundation on which the rest of your study at the GSD will stand.
The central topic of this semester’s studio is landscapes in the public realm: how is the public defined? Who defines it? What is a public landscape? How do we recognize it? How is it different from private ones? What and who do they represent, and how are they funded?
These questions will be explored through three themes that build upon one another— material culture, spaces for free assembly, and spaces for equity and health. As a discipline that deals with the transformation and the production of space, landscape architecture is in essence a materialist practice, whose outcome is made out of real, physical things. More specifically to landscape architecture, design entails the transformation of living systems, and require deep knowledge about materials, how they live, reproduce, die, their interactions with time and weather, and their origins and evolution.
While you learn to work with living materials, we will put emphasis on how the spatial configurations produced by landscape architecture can have significant consequences that transcend the purely physical: the landscapes we design enable and inhibit different forms of relationships between different entities. In urban contexts, people and their rights as citizens—and as human beings– constitute the central subject and object of those interactions. Within urban landscapes, it is the public space, more specifically, what constitutes the fundamental domain in the provision and protection of democracy, for it is in the public space where the most profound manifestations of social conflict, individual self-expression, and cultural exchange take place.
Thus, this studio explores two types of public space commonly found in the American city, the public square—City Hall Plaza in Boston—and the riverfront park–the right bank of the Charles River in Allston—and the physical and political implications in their transformation. Through these two different sites, we will investigate public space as representation of our shared conditions of existence, as expression of difference, values, individuality, universality, knowledge, and power, and we will study how the changes we introduce in the received configuration of the public imply, inevitably, the affirmation, the manipulation, and the suppression of some of those conditions.
While the landscapes we design are nested within larger landscapes and urban systems that are determined by broad and intricate networks of social and economic processes, in this studio we will focus on how the specific forms of discreet sites might constitute in themselves powerful tools in the transformation of those larger processes. Thus, although this studio starts with a rather small site (a site-less enclosed space) and ends with a presumably large one (a portion of the Charles River in Allston), we will not be bound by the simplistic idea that a larger site is necessarily more “difficult” as a design process, or that each is typologically bound to a predetermined historical format. Rather, we will focus on all the scales embedded in any landscape, finding the minute in the large, and the expansive in the small.
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.