THE TERRITORIAL CITY: Edge of the Megalopolis
Every foreground has a background. In California, the background is the Central Valley–a flat landscape that is used to harvest and extract resources to support other regions. It is no surprise that within the State, the greatest political, economic, and cultural divide manifests itself between the coastal cities and inland valley’s hinterland regions. Coastal California adorns an image of scenic landscape, progressive environmental movements, liberal culture, and density, while inland California is characterized by resource harvesting and extraction, conservative values, and a depravity in social infrastructure. With distinctions in labor, wealth, race, climate, and education, these two regions are emblematic of the increasing divide between geographies of immaterial labor/ resource consumption and the exploitation of land and communities to extract/ harvest these resources. While these ‘two Californias’ have remained relatively distinct, the ongoing construction of the high-speed rail (HSR) infrastructure to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles will run through the Central Valley. Accordingly, this infrastructure will produce a spatial collapse between these two worlds and foster a new type of urbanism to the American context — the territorial city.
The territorial city is comprised of extreme density and diffusion; of only network and nodes; of both rural and urban. Most importantly, it is a city made up of networked building complexes that can leverage architecture’s capacity to impact territorial issues. This studio will focus on collective housing complexes in the Central Valley to address the growing needs of the state and ongoing struggles with housing affordability. Specifically, the studio will examine how to expand the domestic commons into a networked urban commons to produce decentralized models of care. Leveraging the network of the HSR, new forms of sharing physical and non-physical resources as well as engaging the benefits of scale can offer new forms of support that were not previously tenable in hinterland environments like the Central Valley. Students will identify precarious subjects in the Central Valley and consider how the high-speed rail can redistributed resources more equitably. Ultimately these complexes will ask how architecture can foster empathy between these two Californias.
POOL TIME: Collective Equipment for Living
On June 24, 1936, thousands of New Yorkers experienced a civic spectacle unlike any other. Mayor La Guardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses officially opened Hamilton Fish Pool in the Lower East Side with marching bands and fireworks, the first of eleven WPA-funded pools that would open that summer to provide monumental new recreation facilities for millions of over-heated and Depression-strapped New Yorkers. Over the next half-century, New York City, along with many cities across the US, built impressive networks of municipal pools as ways for people to cool down, exercise, and play, but also as new focal points for civic pride and community. Most pools were segregated until the 1964 Civil Rights Act expanded the notion of community, quickly revealing the widespread racism present in society. As large populations of predominantly middle-class white people flocked to newly created private suburban pools, municipalities stopped funding public pools. Since 1972, funding for maintaining existing public pools has plummeted and only five new public pools have been constructed in NYC.
On June 18, 2024, eighty-eight years after that first grand poolside extravaganza, NYC Mayor Eric Adams pledged more than $1 billion in investments to improve, build, and maintain New York City’s public pools over the next five years, representing the highest investment in swimming infrastructure since the 1970s. How should this money be spent? What are the untapped architectural possibilities of these existing pools as more than just summer recreation spots? Could they be reimagined as year-long community, health, cultural, or education spaces? How can their reach and impact be expanded?
Important municipal services — trash collection, public libraries, clean water, safe streets, power, wifi, education, shelter, medical services, transport, and yes, public pools — provide the collective equipment for living together. We believe that these seemingly banal forms of civic infrastructure deserve nurturing and renewal, upkeep and expansion, to not just sustain us individually, but empower us to collectively participate in the continual remaking of our community.
Specifically, the studio will look at the eleven original WPA funded public pools and ask how these facilities might be renovated or expanded to better serve their communities. We will closely observe, map, and analyze the existing, as a way to develop radically pragmatic spatial design proposals for each site — in the form of buildings, landscape, or new systems of infrastructure.
As we think projectively about the relationship between water, health, leisure, and politics in the unique case of NYC’s existing public pool network, we will also engage more broadly with issues of ecology, gentrification, public space, decarbonization, and inequality, asserting our own opinions and spatial provocations in this real-world, real-time design challenge.
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.
The GSD has an irregular start of term. The first meeting of 1231 will be on Wednesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. In planning the local area is of great importance and planners need to engage the particularities of districts, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions. Planners also understand and engage the wider context of places–in terms of physical scale, historical development, built character, social groupings, political structures, environmental attributes, economic activities, and future possibilities.
The course focuses on four key challenges of contemporary urban planning–equity, access, health, and climate.
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 and foundational concern in planning.
Towns and cities exist to help people gain access to nearby resources such as jobs, services, and cultural opportunities for all. Technological developments have been changing whether one needs to be mobile in order to have access to resources; access to affordable housing is also key.
The COVID pandemic has highlighted the continuing challenge of infectious diseases even as non-communicable diseases and injuries remain the major health problems amenable to prevention through changes to the built environment.
Anthropogenic climate change is challenging planners to mitigate its effects and adapt to changes already underway, while also addressing other environmental challenges from water pollution to habitat loss.
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 identify issues, gather and analyze information, listen to opinions, draw on precedents, raise ethical concerns, and consider the future. They figure out the important questions to answer, engage stakeholders, propose strategies, communicate ideas, and create 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. The process is collaborative and iterative. This can be a bit uncomfortable at first, but it is a low-risk environment. The assignments take you through a sequence of exercises that include reflection, analysis, proposal-making, and implementation while also addressing challenges (equity, access, health, and climate). These occur at different scales and require both individual and group work. Students also experiment with how to effectively communicate with others using different visual, oral, and written techniques and media in pinups, slides, posters, and online presentations in in-person and virtual settings.
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.
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.
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.
First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT
PROJECT is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, PROJECT may refer to fundamental modes of architectural representation, the mapping of the subject in the larger objective context, or a conceptual foray into territory unknown.
A series of focused and intense design exercises requires students to investigate fundamental disciplinary issues of architectural thought, practice, and representation. As the introductory studio in the first professional degree program, the curriculum addresses the varied educational backgrounds of incoming MArch I candidates. Specifically, students are encouraged to leverage their varied expertise in the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines to find provocative and perhaps unexpected motivations of architectural form. Techniques of representation and iterative development across various mediums will be required.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in MArch I 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.
Urban Economics and Market Analysis
This course introduces economic frameworks for understanding both the benefits and challenges of living in, working in, and managing cities and their built environments. Urban economics incorporates the concept of space into canonical economic models and provides a lens for analyzing and describing the nature and organization of economic activity in urban settings. We will explore questions around why cities exist in the first place, what determines their growth, and what features contribute to their economic advantages as well as their unique problems. Why do some cities grow faster than others? Can cities ever get too dense or large? We will draw from typical urban economic models and frameworks but will also discuss and test their limits when applying them to complex urban systems. For example, how well do these models address issues of segregation and informality in cities? The course will draw from research and scholarship in the field of urban economics, as well as actual cases, policy applications and guest lecturers employing these concepts in the field.
The course also explores urban economics and market analysis as they intersect with real estate practice. Students learn, in a hands-on way, how to employ urban economics concepts and frameworks, including location theory, the interaction between local and global spatial dynamics, demographic trends, and regional economic forecasting, for data-driven market analyses useful for real estate and urban development practice more broadly. Students who take this class will be able to use economic frameworks and methods to design, evaluate and implement planning and policy interventions as well as understand the role of real estate markets in a range of urban settings. This course assumes no previous coursework in economics and will require some, but not extensive, math and graphing. This course satisfies the Economic Methods requirement for urban planning students, is required for Master in Real Estate students, and is open to cross-registrant students from other schools (including MIT). MRE students may pursue a waiver of this requirement by successfully passing a waiver examination administered during orientation week.
Note: MRE students can place out of this course.
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.