Architecture and Construction: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital

The course aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between architecture and construction through the study of key historical episodes such as the rise of modern tectonic ideals in the 18th century, the development of iron and concrete buildings, the 20th-century quest for light structures, or more recent developments in materials, structure and building technologies.

The course will also raise theoretical questions such as what the terms material and structure truly mean, or how does architecture differ from mere construction. Beyond its historical and theoretical scope, the ambition of the course is also to foster students’ reflection on the contemporary evolution of the relationship between architecture and construction. Indeed, the rise of digital technologies applied to architecture and construction, from digital fabrication to AI, as well as the development of strong environmental concerns challenge our received understanding of tectonics, materials, and ultimately design.

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. 

Building and Urban Conservation and Renewal – Assessment, Analysis, Design

What are the values inherent in a property, site or district that must be understood to craft conservation policy and interventions that will reveal, complement, sustain and enhance the original work while appropriately addressing socio-cultural, aesthetic and technical integrity? This course will introduce students to the functional, technical, regulatory and environmental principles of working with existing buildings and districts to ensure their continued viability.  

Globally, 35% or more of construction activity is devoted to work on existing structures – making the sustainability mantra “the greenest building is the one already built” increasingly relevant as we seek to minimize the impact of construction on the environment. Repair and renewal are therefore fundamental components of contemporary practice increasingly requiring facility in techniques of conservation planning and execution, rehabilitation and adaptive reuse.

Designed to ground the participant in the methodologies of conservation and renewal and to introduce the tools necessary to successfully approach working with existing buildings in established precincts, the course will include lectures by the instructor and guest experts, and in-class discussions from readings. While interventions must include sound technical solutions, any modification from conservation to renovation and additions must address the full complement of values necessary to enable an economically viable, socio-culturally relevant rehabilitation. We will examine a range of conservation and intervention case studies at the building and urban scale for both traditional and modern structures and sites – including a mini-module on the impending renovations to Gund Hall.

We will look critically at how the international Charters and Standards employed in working with historic fabric impact our approach to modifications to any existing building or site from a technical, design and regulatory standpoint, and will particularly address the question as to how the apparatus of conservation is changing to best serve both underrepresented constituencies and the legacy of modernism and the recent past.

The course is a lecture course, with a class discussion component. Evaluation will be based upon participation in readings and themed discussion, submission of a short analytical mid-term paper, and a choice of final project: either 1., an assessment and intervention design exercise on an undeveloped modest property, or 2., an analytical case study of the rehabilitation and transformation of a significant property – either of the student’s choosing.

The course is open to all interested GSD students.

Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common

This lecture course examines selected cities between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., beginning with ancient Athens and ending with the rebuilding of London after the great fire in 1666 and the founding of Boston. It is not, however, a survey. Rather, the lectures take up one city at one “golden moment” of its development and propose a theme or themes for discussion. The course, therefore, is both chronologically and thematically structured.

The first half of the semester treats the ancient and late antique city, beginning with Athens and continuing with Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople and Antioch. This section concludes with a consideration of the effects of Christianization on urban form, the widespread decline of urban habitation in the early Middle Ages, and the rising importance of ideal or symbolic “cities of the mind.” The second half of the semester looks at selected instances of Renaissance and Baroque urban interventions, beginning with Florence, returning again to Rome, and then moving to Venice, Madrid, Paris, London and Boston.

Authority and Invention: Medieval Art and Architecture

Art and architecture in Western Europe from the decline of Rome to the dawn of the Italian Renaissance. Explores the creative tension between the impulse to originality and the constraint of authoritative models in the invention of new architectural forms. Emphasis on representative works considered in their totality (architecture, painting, sculpture, and minor arts) as experiential wholes; and on the plurality of geographical and cultural contexts (Italy, Germany, France, England, and Spain). Exploration of the forms, types, styles, intellectual, theoretical, and cultural contexts of paradigmatic monuments and places from Late Antiquity to the dawn of the Renaissance (approximately 300-1300 A.D.). A complete list of monuments seen in class is on the course site.
 
This course, intended for both graduate and undergraduate students, has no prerequisites. It is a lecture course but uses “flipped class” pedagogy. This means that the course format includes lectures, which are pre-recorded and which you will listen to on your own, and discussions, which will take place in the classroom. In many weeks we will meet in class only once, on Thursdays, using the Tuesday time slot for site visits, individual office hour meetings, optional review sessions, and so forth. Each pre-recorded lecture is normally devoted to one theme and focuses on one building or place. The lectures are available on Canvas as videos (images and narration in sync) and as PowerPoints without narration under Modules, for studying the images. Additional short lectures may take place at the beginning of the weekly discussion session. Students prepare for the weekly discussions by studying the assigned lectures and readings and thinking about how these relate to the week’s topic. Since the topics of discussion will address the students’ interests, each person submits a short question, comment, or topic prior to our meeting. The discussion sessions clarify, deepen, and/or extend themes and ideas introduced in the lecture(s) and readings.

 

The course is jointly offered with FAS as MEDVLSTD 107.

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. 

North American Seacoasts and Landscapes: Discovery Period to the Present

Selected topics in the history of the North American coastal zone, including the seashore as wilderness, as industrial site, as area of recreation, and as artistic subject; the shape of coastal landscape for conflicting uses over time; and the perception of the seashore as marginal zone in literature, photography, painting, film, television, and advertising.

Note: Offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as VES 166.
Prerequisites: GSD 4105 and GSD 4303, or permission of the instructor

Note that this course follows the FAS academic calendar. See the FAS calendar for information on the first day of classes. 

Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture

This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a conspectus, a survey of the field, but one in which the underlying nature (made and found), boundaries, contours, and texture of this field—in fact several disparate fields—is made the object of close scrutiny. We will define landscape architecture as we survey it. In pursuing an intermittent chronological narrative, the lectures will place site-specific emphasis on a number of cognate disciplines (hydrology, forestry, geology, agronomy, geography, hunting, inter alia), in the context of endemic and transplanted visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, and cities, we will be attentive to surrounding formations of discourse (the pastoral, the picturesque, the emblematic, the Adamic and Edenic) that have and continue to imbue them with meaning. 

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. 

Studies of the Built North American Environment: since 1580

North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs, and as depicted in fiction, poetry, cartography, television, cinema, and advertising and cybernetic simulation.

Note that this course follows the FAS academic calendar. See the FAS calendar for information on the first day of classes. 

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.

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. 

FORESTS: Histories and Future Narratives

From a distance, all forests appear to be remarkably similar: they are ecosystems characterized by the dominance of trees, they provide habitat for species of flora and fauna, they provide shelter and resources to humans, and they are key agents in climate mitigation and adaptation. Yet, at the same time, they are all unique, and their distinctiveness is what will draw our attention to them as the subject of study. More specifically, we will examine case examples of designed forests, those that were introduced into a site with intention. The seminar will be structured in three parts. The first one, “Understanding Forests” will explore basic concepts that explain how forests work, such as sprouting and evolutionary and ecological succession. The second one, “Forest Legacies,” will explore the evolving role of forests in the history of designed landscapes and the overlap between forestry and design. Finally, we will explore contemporary works of regeneration and conservation, from small urban forests to transcontinental mega forests. Students will examine case examples of their choice and explore through text and image the necessary multivalence and multi-scalarity of these landscapes in the future. A central theme of analysis will be how the encounter of new sciences and technology, when combined with market economies (or the resistance against them), drives shifts in forest ecology and design.

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. 

Why Not Cultural Systems? Expanding Our Value System Beyond Nature and Ecology

How do cultural landscapes shape our shared public memory? How do our collective planning, design and stewardship decisions affect how we assign value and manage change? Once a project is built, how do we measure success?

In an attempt to address these challenges, what role can – and should — Landscape Architecture play as collaborative participants in a national reckoning? How can the discipline prepare themselves to develop the necessary awareness and tools to address historical (and purposeful) erasure, memorials of the past, antiquated rigidity of historic government standards — and – in response, how can we commemorate the past in our shared public realm in our cities, parks, campuses (academic, cultural), and elsewhere – by amplifying community voices?  

This seminar will examine the planning, design and stewardship opportunities — and constraints — frequently encountered when dealing with cultural landscapes. In addition to addressing foundational principles, this seminar will demonstrate how bridging the artificial, often segmented divides between both design and historic preservation as well as nature (accelerated by climate change resiliency) and culture can result in an expanded, holistic, and more nuanced design interventions.

Specifically, this seminar will address the issues, and identify the tools and strategies surrounding the research, analysis. planning, treatment, and management of cultural landscapes from surgical design interventions to a landscape that was (and can still be) associated with important people, cultural lifeways, or past events. Cultural landscapes are a palimpsest to be read, that can be both messy and complicated, and rich in a narrative that is waiting to be revealed.

Methodologies for historic research, tools for documenting existing conditions, and strategies for evaluating and analyzing cultural landscapes will be reviewed and tested. In addition, considerations and tools for assigning value, and the myriad and interrelated issues surrounding the level of design intervention, carrying capacity for change, and prescriptions for management and interpretation will also be debated. This work will be buttressed with case studies, supplemented with a small number of local site visits, and two required student presentations.

Finally, a diversity of planning, design and stewardship challenges will be addressed. This includes: physical and financial limitations for essential research; how we assess and assign significance; the value we place on context (both physical and historical); the quest for authenticity and why this is an underutilized tool in our design kits; antiquity as an asset (also known as weathering); the need to determine a landscape’s carrying capacity for change; and, the recognition of a cultural landscape's palimpsest (historic layers).  Integral to this work, the necessity for communications strategies for messaging and meaningful public engagement will be a key consideration.