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 instructors 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, with visitors describing 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 and equity within the profession and in our work endeavors will be discussed throughout the course.

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.

During this course students will develop the ability to:
1) Analyze and describe the various ways in which offices acquire work (particularly the Request For Qualifications and Proposal) and build their identity.
2) Demonstrate a familiarity with the vocabulary, concepts and processes associated with the financial management of a project and an office.
3) Describe the key elements contained in a contract for landscape architectural design services and typical points of negotiation, risk and opportunity.
4) Consider the role and requirements of professional licensure and professional associations, as well as ethics.
5) Describe the trade-offs involved with different types of practice and potential career trajectories, and begin to consciously build a professional network.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, 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 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society I

Integrated Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II engages diverse yet complementary disciplines, perspectives and techniques to help identify, diagnose and constructively address consequential social challenges. The disciplines — or ‘frameworks’ — explored include (in no order and to varying degrees) human-centered design research and methods, humanitarian design, communication design and storytelling, industrial design, public policy, behavioral science, entrepreneurship, design thinking, ethnography, organizational dynamics, and culture. The course aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of these relationships, fostering critical thinking and a holistic view of design’s impact and influence on society and industry.

Learning Objectives:

7231 will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 3rd.

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 classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, 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 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Translations and Negotiations: The Roman Landscape in the Modern World

This course investigates the myriad ways ancient Roman place-making, visual culture, and thought have been evoked, utilized, weaponized, and translated in North American thought, design, and visual history. Our investigation juxtaposes well-established connections between White Supremacy and the Classical Past with often overlooked Indigenous and Black engagement with classical forms. At the heart of our investigation are concepts of agency, ownership, and power, i.e. who shapes the land and who owns the classical forms?

Topics explored include:
The way Indigenous and Black artists, thinkers, and designers have engaged with and translated classical visual practices and concepts (such as Edmonia Lewis and Kent Monkman); Neoclassicism and White Supremacy (i.e. who owns the classical past in public parks?, and the question of Robert E. Lee/Marcus Aurelius); the entanglement between working the land and enslavement and the parallels and divergences between Roman and New World enslavement; the influence of Roman landscape design and horticulture on later American landscapes and gardens; the legacy of Roman surveying methods and centuriation in the mapping of the US; imperialism and the construction of the “other” (e.g. Neoclassical portrayals of Indigenous figures in civic spaces in the guise of ancient Mediterranean barbarians); and the translation and adoption of ancient Mediterranean and Roman visual culture in American cemeteries (including a class visit to Mount Auburn Cemetery).

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 10th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Tactile Architectures

Architecture has often constituted itself as hard and durable, from the Vitruvian principle of firmness to the raw concrete of brutalism. This seminar draws attention to the tactile and textural possibilities of architecture by looking at the mobilization of soft forms and materials as an alternate way of approaching buildings and cities. We will draw on a wide range of historical and theoretical readings to examine this topic in relation to three themes: material (the role of textile elements such as tents and hangings in tropical architectural traditions; soft furnishings and the emergence of domestic space), polemics (“hard” brutalism versus “soft” picturesque; the rhetoric of place and placemaking), and infrastructure (greening the city through parks and plantings, permeable/impermeable surfaces). We will extend our inquiry to the scale of the urban and the planetary by attending to the production of the “formal” city of permanent construction and the “informal” city of temporary structures and found materials. What can softness, as a series of interventions around temporality, comfort/caregiving, and spatial adaptability, offer designers working at a range of scales?

Students will focus their work over the course of the semester on identifying and exploring an example of a tactile architecture—broadly defined as a design strategy, an architectural tradition, an urban intervention, or a lived practice—and compiling and sharing this research in a pamphlet or other short-form project. This project will emerge from a series of assignments including presentations of material selected by students as well as written responses to texts. Working collaboratively, we will define and interrogate tactile architecture as political critique, contemporary condition, and response to crisis.

This seminar is open to students from all backgrounds and degree programs.

Contested Spaces: Architecture and Power

In this course we discuss space as the site in which power is mobilized, negotiated, and contested. We examine how buildings, landscapes, and their representation through multiple media inform uneven power relationships and participate in the construction of class, race, gender, body ability, and other markers of identity. Building on the histories of art and architecture, the course proposes the category of “space” as an alternative to the geographic, aesthetic, and analytic categories that have shaped the canons of these disciplines. Readings address the art and architecture production of those excluded from these canons. We will also problematize notions of agency and authorship in cultural production.

Each week we will focus on a type of space central to the formation of modernity, which we discuss through close attention to objects and sites from different historical times and geographical locations. The first half of the semester focuses on notions of otherness from broad transnational processes to the space of the body. We discuss the colonization of the Americas as a process of violence, resource extraction and exchanges that led to the construction of multiple modernities. We trace networks of colonial trade and the spaces they engendered, including the plantation, the quilombo, and the underground railroad. We explore the kitchen as a site of both community and labor, and the closet as a metaphorical space for the construction of gender identity. On the second half of the semester, we turn to institutional spaces such as schools, prisons, and museums. We supplement canonical analysis of these spaces with discussions on the prison industrial complex, the university as a settler colonial institution, and architecture’s own exhibitionary complex.

The use of a core spatial construct as the base of each weekly theme enables the course to range broadly across time and space while also offering students concrete, in-depth knowledge of specific objects and sites. By examining these contested spaces, we challenge canonical narratives and reveal the fundamental role of class, race, gender, body ability, and other struggles in the construction of modernity.

This course is taught with a politics of co-learning: we will assemble as a community of active participants. Our weekly sessions will include short lectures or presentations complemented with group activities such as collective diagram drawing, group reading, and small group conversations. Students are evaluated on class participation, discussion facilitation of one assigned session, three writing assignments, and a final project in the format of their choice, decided in conversation with the instructor.

* This course was designed by FAAC (Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative: Olga Touloumi, Tessa Paneth-Pollak, Martina Tanga, Ana María León); it has been modified for the GSD by Ana María León.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, 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 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Expanding the Canon: Architecture and Urbanism

This seminar is an enquiry into the boundaries of the Canons that dominate the discourse in Architecture and Urbanism globally. The seminar will interrogate the limits of the Canons propelled in the West — their histories and production cultures across material, political, economic and social spheres. Over the centuries, the legacy of colonization, the industrial revolution and globalization have insidiously proliferated monolithic, singular truths, which have dominated architectural and urban imaginaries in most geographies around the world. The philosophical underpinnings of modernity and the establishment of the global normative has conditioned the conversations of space and time largely to responding to and privileging the facilitation of universal tenets and notions of efficiency. This seminar intends to transcend these conservative, ideological imperatives that determine the contemporary understanding of cultural significance in the discourse of Architecture and Urbanism globally, and to draw theoretical frameworks from practices that often have been ‘othered’ by western dominance of the discourse in the academy as well as the professional media.  The intention of the seminar is to not locate the conversations in any one geography or in the various rubrics such as the global south etc., rather the intention is to develop theoretical frameworks around a shared or common set of issues and conditions that are shared by different geographies outside the west — (Europe and North America). Drawing from case studies largely from South Asia, but also Latin America, Africa, Southwest Asia etc., the seminar will illuminate philosophical orientations, traditions and knowledge systems which allegedly fall outside of the standards, values, and prescriptions of the west, but have existed over thousands of years and display relevance in the broader discourse on Architecture and Urbanism today. Through reviewing architectural, cultural, urban practices, students will delve into the complexities of societies globally, understanding geographies and landscapes as inherently dialogic, relational, and interdependent.

Some of the questions that will be central to the seminar include the following. What forms of practices do the contemporary political, social, and economic conditions suggest and inspire in geographies beyond Europe and North America more broadly? As practitioners and pedagogues, what constitutes our values, significance, and agency? The seminar aspires to interrogate the tenets of modern thought and expand the Canon to rethink contemporary culture, public life and a more situated agency of the architect. And lastly, the seminar will also facilitate the discerning of models of practices in other geographies that could propel the process of expanding the Canon.
 

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 classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, 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 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Making the American City: Form and Society

To understand today’s urgent social, environmental, and development issues, Making the American City: Form and Society explores the history of American urban growth, planning, and design. By examining specific plans and places, it traces the growth and elaboration of major North American cities from the early European settlement to the present, with an emphasis on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Through the study of plans, physical projects, and material conditions, the course investigates specific topics, such as the downtown; homes and housing; public parks and landscapes; planned communities and civic spaces; transportation systems; environmental threats and disasters; the provision of infrastructure; racial and ethnic settlement patterns; slums and ghettos; bohemias and art districts; urban renewal and revitalization; gentrification; and suburbia in all its diversity.

The objective of the course is to use history to inform the thinking and practice of contemporary designers, planners, and policy makers. Through lectures, discussions, texts, and films, this course aims to impart a fundamental knowledge of the major events that have contributed to the form and character of modern American cities.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, 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 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Plants of Ritual: Creating a Spiritual Connection to the Designed Landscape

The seminar aims to investigate and catalog plants that have a spiritual/emotional value to the public and individuals in the designed landscape. The seminar’s goal is to structure a collection and an archive of plants used during rituals and ceremonies in different cultures and beliefs. Moving from the four sacred medicines for the Native American people (tobacco, sweetgrass, sage, and cedar) to boneset for African-American People or pomegranates and citrons in Jewish traditions to plants that typify the Christian tradition (lilies for the Virgin Mary and thorny vines as an icon of the crucifixion, for example), we’ll unveil a more intimate and ritualistic relationship between human beings and nature in everyday life. This can inform and expand emotional connections between culture and landscape architecture. The seminar is divided into sections; each focused on the role of these plants during life cycle ceremonies such as birth, marriage, and death and the religious and pagan cycle of festivals.

The narrative about each plant will be combined with an illustrated herbarium and focused interviews with representatives of each spiritual community. In this plant exploration, a crucial role is also given to the common name of a plant that often assumes a cultural and ritual meaning instead of a purely botanical one. This type of nomenclature also builds connections between spiritual value and the designed landscape. This collection aims to have an impact in the design fields: in the past, plant palettes were chosen for visual beauty or screening, then more recently, plants also started to be selected for their ecological value. Through this atlas, we extend the criteria for how plants are chosen by introducing a spiritual connection to designed landscapes.

The goal is to have a more cultural reading of the landscape and to offer opportunities to the different communities to live in an environment that represents the spiritual values of the settled communities, their collective memory and identity, their aspiration, and their needs for the designed landscape to contain more of their emotional approach to plants and the intimate living environment.