Proseminar in MEDIUMS: On Making Culture, Technology, and Art
In this proseminar, we will take a critical look at the current and emerging landscape of design technologies and technologically driven design. We will examine new and emerging tools, technologies, and methods that help us augment ourselves and our environments, and learn to think critically about their significance in current cultural contexts. Situated in contemporary spatial, environmental, and social problems – students will have opportunities to explore and debate and take a position on the spectrum of technology as a tool and a mediator and technology as an intimate human and social interlocutor.
The readings and topics of discussion will cover topics in Simulation and Representation, Interaction and Cognition, Digital Craft and Creativity, Intelligence and Biases. In addition to the readings and the theoretical framework of the class, the students will have opportunities to create and experiment with new technologies and situate them in the topics of the class discussions. As such, the proseminar will introduce students to a solid theoretical framework and the necessary approaches to frame and create projects, and serve as a foundation for the different trajectories within the Domain of Mediums.
Proseminar in PUBLICS: Of the Public. In the Public. By the Public
Public, as a noun or adjective, is not confined to a single discipline, practice, narrative or theory. It is instead, a complicated construct that can either dictate the rules and regulations that order our cities, reveal and disclose “fake news” or knowledge about the city , or include or exclude the right to occupy the city. With this in mind, this proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, both spatially and socially – how it becomes legible and desirable, who gets the right to create it and for whom. Lectures, discussions and debates will interrogate what it means to be public; of the public; in the public; for the public, with the public, or by the public. Each proposition holds a different implication for design, democracy, processes and populations when overlaid with the compounding issues of our time – economic and social inequality, climate change, population growth and decline, territorial conflicts, health and violence epidemics, aging infrastructures, and eroding trust in democratic governance. The course will draw from scholars, practitioners and everyday folk to build foundational intelligence and provocative interpretations of social and spatial publics, and their potential to advance the Just City.
The course is a discussion-based seminar where weekly engagement by enrolled students with the instructor and invited guest experts is a requirement. Each course session will be designed with a combination of synchronous or asynchronous lectures provided by the instructor or topic experts, accompanied by complementary readings or other media content. The objectives for the proseminar course will expose students to the following:
1. General concepts of governance and participation
2. General concepts of societal and political conflicts, crisis, contestations that effect the built and natural environment
3. Forms of practice that engage the multiple and varied forms of publics across GSD disciplines
4. Representational applications
5. Research methodologies
Students will develop position papers, including core values, manifesto and case studies that help define various notions of Public and advance the development of their individual research topics.
This course will meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 7th.
Proseminar in Landscape Architecture
“Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place."
-‘A Fortunate Man’ by John Berger, (1969)
This course provides a weekly joint forum for post-professional landscape architecture students (MLA II) in their first semester at the GSD to introduce the mastery of landscape architecture and to discuss and explore contemporary themes, questions and issues surrounding the landscape field. It will introduce current teaching and research carried out by GSD faculty and other researchers and prepare class members to explore and develop their own intellectual projects and research interests while at the GSD and to articulate positions from the field of landscape architecture in their design studios and other course work.
Individual and collective inquiries into the discipline of landscape architecture are based upon readings in the English language by a range of authors, critical analysis of current landscape architectural ideas and projects, and talks and discussion given by the faculty of the Department of Landscape Architecture and GSD guests in class. Presentations will be given addressing matters in design education, criticism, design practices and interdisciplinarity in the contemporary landscape field. Through assigned weekly short readings, written responses and a final in-class research presentation the course seeks to deepen the student's understanding of the aesthetic, ecological, social, environmental, multi-disciplinary, cultural, ethical and political context(s) of landscape architecture.
This course will meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 7th.
Talking Architecture
This seminar is intended to contribute to the Public Events Program at Harvard GSD.
Students will team up to produce questions for two live-video interviews with visible and emerging figures in the field during this interactive course. These interviews will be spin-offs of two Architecture Department-sponsored public lectures held during the semester. They intend to extend the conversations between these guests and the GSD community.
Students will work in groups to craft questions for each of the two live conversations. A third private interview will be developed at the beginning of the term to practice before going live, with roughly one interview at the middle of every month after that. Students will publicly ask questions at each event, with the opening and closing remarks conducted by the instructor.
Teams of students will also be in charge of setting the stage for video recording the in-person events, testing new ways to represent these conversations. Students will also experiment with editing the interviews before they are published on the GSD YouTube channel.
Asynchronous time will focus on question formulation and interviewee background research, done through formal (Frances Loeb Library) and informal sources (the Internet). Students in charge of stage production or edition will also prepare their proposals during asynchronous time. This hybrid course will have consecutive modules of two online sessions followed by two in-person sessions until the end of the term.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Building and Urban Conservation – 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 technical and programmatic viability.
Globally, roughly 35% 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 strategies 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 specifically 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 addition designs 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 structures and modern buildings.
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.
Evaluation will be based upon regular participation in discussion of readings, submission of a short analytical paper and a final project that will develop and present an assessment and intervention design exercise on a property of the student’s choosing.
The course is open to all interested GSD students.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
On Architecture and Property
Most generously, property can be understood as a relational term. A property defines that which is characteristic, or unique, to a given thing vis-à-vis another. Etymologically at its core, it is also a spatial term (pro, prae) – ‘in front of’, ‘what stands before’; or, more divisive, perhaps, ‘that which separates me from you.’ And of course, modern capitalist property regimes rest on the often-violent separation between those that wield power, and those that are subject to it. This seminar course will explore the intersections of architecture and property, with a particular attention to how they come together in law. Not only will we ask who wields properties’ power, and to what end? But also how is that power put into play, what tools (however banal) are necessary to enact it, and how can it be resisted or practiced differently?
The semester is structured in two parts. In the first four sessions, we will explore major themes in contemporary property theory, with special attention to how these themes relate (however loosely) to architectural form. In the second half of the semester, these themes will be expanded through specific topics that allow a deep dive into the relationship between law and architecture. Each week a legal case is paired with secondary texts that help contextualize that week’s topic. We will spend class time unpacking the legal case together, with the aim of understanding how architectural knowledge, either implicitly or explicitly, is at play in the construction of its arguments. The legal cases here are chosen with specific attention to the ways in which they conjure up questions about the relationship between architectural form and social form. Some are landmark decisions (Lawrence v. Texas), some are very much not (Stambovsky v. Ackley). All speak to how architecture and law, together, have historically structured concepts of property and ownership that underlie the modern political world.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Wild Ways: Thinking, Relating and Being with/in Wilderness, Wild-ness and Nature in the Anthropocene
This seminar interrogates changing ideas of nature on an urbanizing planet under the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Grounded in transdisciplinary research across the humanities, ecology and design, the course will use visual-spatial analyses, critical reflection and artistic media to engage diverse ways of thinking and knowing about, relating to and being in wilderness and wild-ness. Seminar contributions will facilitate and encourage un-learning colonial myths of wilderness through exploring intersectional and intercultural epistemologies of nature, and the primordial human connection to the wild through interrogating ideas of wilderness, and wild-ness on an urbanizing planet.
Up to six seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Ecologies Domain and ULE Area students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Architecture: Histories of the Present
“Poets and prophets, like magicians, learn their craft from predecessors. And just as magicians will invoke the real or supposed source of an illusion as part of their patter, or distractions from what his hands are doing, the most ambitious poets also take some stance about sources in the past, perhaps for an analogous purpose.” John Hollander 1973
This seminar investigates the role of architectural practice and thinking both geographically and thematically since WWII. The focus of the seminar will be on the work of architects as well as the ideas/writings that have helped shape contemporary practice. Why do you practice the way you do? What are the forces (architecture, concepts, texts) that have inspired and influenced the direction of your work? These are among the questions that we will be asking of ourselves as well as a diverse group of contemporary architects from divergent geographies. The seminar will discuss significant projects/buildings and ideas/ theories from the 1950’s to the present. In the process, seeking to make discoveries about the work of figures both remembered and seemingly forgotten. The tension and the relations between the present and the past will be discussed through specific architectural projects. How did an earlier generation of architects imagine the future of the discipline and the promise of its outcomes? How have the conceptual and practical operations of terms such as history or culture influenced contemporary architecture and the way it is practiced? What role does precedent play in the work of an architect?
The structure of the seminar is organized according to a series of case studies that compare and contrast the work of different figures and their ideas-from Africa to Asia, from Latin America to Europe and beyond. In addition to weekly lectures and presentations, the seminar will include class discussions with a diverse range of contemporary architects. The aim will be to study the role and value of site-specific contributions and yet to unravel the nature–even the burden- of influence and its porosity beyond geographical boundaries. How and what should the future of practice learn from its past?
Course structure: the course will meet online on Tuesdays from 10 am to 12 pm EST to discuss visual and reading material presented by Mohsen Mostafavi and guests (practitioners or scholars). Pre-recorded interviews with design practitioners/scholars or films (60 min on average) will be included as required materials for some weekly sessions. Students can watch these recordings in their own time prior to the class meetings.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Architectures of the New Silk Road – Spaces of Transnational Infrastructure-led Urbanization
The aim of the seminar entitled “Architectures of the New Silk Road” is to devise pathways for making emerging spaces of urbanization along New Silk Road corridors sustainable for all attendant stakeholders. In view of the rapid pace and unwieldy processes of urbanization catalyzed by large-scale infrastructure works, the question is whether such projects will improve the quality of life for local populations or, on the contrary, will only exacerbate poverty, poor governance, and environmental degradation already afflicting regions affected by transnational development.
Whereas all eyes are on China’s Belt and Road advances in Africa, Eurasia, and Southeast Asia, many other players are just as eager to strengthen their presence on these regions via multilaterally orchestrated development projects. But the projects themselves, regardless of who initiates them and where they are implemented, seem to follow a generic formula by now familiar worldwide. Even more, for all the planning know-how invested in a new port, data center, special economic zone, health facility, or smart city, what remains neglected are the collateral spaces of urbanization generated by selective economic growth agendas.
Drawing on expertise from a broad range of disciplines, we will examine infrastructural projects underway in specific corridors along the so-called New Silk Road. These corridors are undergoing the kind of rapid urbanization that accompanies transnational development, thus making them exemplary sites of settlement constellations still in the making. The significance of the research lies in its multi-local approach to studying proto-urbanization processes in progress. Examining individual projects as well as clusters of infrastructural interventions, we will not only determine urbanization processes and patterns throughout the regions of study but will also projectively ask how to make infrastructure-led development – usually treated as a financial and technical issue alone – a contextually responsive driver of sustainable urbanization.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Homes on Fields
"How can one understand the towns without understanding the countryside, money without barter, the varieties of poverty without the varieties of luxury, the white bread of the rich without the black bread of the poor?" Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism- 15th-18th Century, vol. III: The Limits of the Possible (London: Book Club Associates, 1981), 29.
"How might we privilege the social uses of property and resist the real estate developers and mortgage lenders that prey on vulnerable communities in their drive to accumulate as much capital as the law encourages and permits them to do?" Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 183.
A paradoxical question is raised by affordable forms of residential urbanization:
On the one hand, cheap housing settlements across the world devours thousands of hectares of arable fields at the periphery of growing cities. On the other hand, housing is a human need (and right). This research seminar investigates the spatial characteristics of housing development on agrarian land, and the mode of production at work in the transformation of fertile, cultivated plots into urbanized settlements. As we face the climate emergency, is it sustainable to keep on chipping at our food sheds, and what are the alternatives? How dramatic is this phenomena in reality and what are the political economies behind such modes of development? From tenure laws and land reforms to agriculture policies and development strategies, from so-called informal areas to massive real-estate developments, “Homes on Fields” is a research seminar investigating the urbanization of agrarian land globally.
Set on researching:
1) contemporary residential forms of the built environment constructed over agrarian land anywhere (i.e. self-initiated and affordable housing, speculative schemes),
2) the social, economic, or political forces that have facilitated, allowed or affected these modes of development—at times historically grounded, and
3) what are their impacts on selected topics (food systems, real estate, infrastructures, construction materials markets, communities, electoral results, etc.), the aim is to uncover, understand and communicate this urban growth phenomena.
Drawing the architecture and urban form of these urbanizations shall be deployed as a tool to understand the re-organization of territory and complex issues of regimes of land ownership, land use policies, and property laws, to in turn inform how the accumulation and transfer of land as capital is materialized in the competition for land between housing and cultivation.1 Via readings and guest lectures, we shall dwell into these perspectives and adopt them as ‘useful knowledge’ for our own investigation (Confirmed speakers: Ana María León& Andrew Herscher, Swarnabh Ghosh, Paulo Tavares, Sai Balakrishnan).
In this seminar, we shall seek to articulate a mixed methodology of research in which drawing emerges as a valid research method, in parallel to classical forms of investigation (primary and secondary literature, media, archive, field-work, etc.) to enhance our capacity to critically reflect on spatial conditions while using representation tools available to designers and planners to do so.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
William Cronon, "A World of Fields and Fences," in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003).
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.