Rules for the Electronic Zoo: A Mediatechnics of Architecture’s Present
“I know well enough what time is, provided that nobody asks me; but if am asked what it is, and try to explain, I am baffled.”
-St. Augustine, Confessions
The seminar explores the technical composition of the present. If traditional (orthographic) media established a delay between lived life and its many representations—producing both an historical record and an historical consciousness through and against which the present was understood and experienced—electronic media appear to have eliminated that temporal separation. This apparent elimination lies at the heart of the logic of “real time,” which by its very name suggests its equivalence with the time of lived life. In strictly technical terms, however, the opposite has occurred: what outwardly appears to be an elimination is in fact a displacement and intensification, wherein the delay between the present and its past is displaced beneath the threshold of unaided perception, and reestablished in an electronic elsewhere, so that the present may be composed anew. This technical displacement and recomposition has had dramatic implications, radically altering not only the internal working methods of the design fields (their ways of working and making), but also the larger cultural conditions in which those practices hope to meaningfully intervene.
The course readings—drawn from media theory, philosophy, engineering manuals, science and technology studies, anthropology, and the history and philosophy of science and technology—cover a period ranging from 1870 to the present. Taken together, they mean to show that what at first appear to be merely technical issues are in fact epistemic, evidentiary, political, and ultimately existential questions. The course will build up a philosophical framework for exploring—without rhetoric or nostalgia—the technical collapse of a certain form of historical reasoning in the design fields.
This seminar can serve as a theoretical and mediatechnical prelude to (though by no means a prerequisite for) a companion lecture course—titled Environmentalisms: How to Have a Politics?—to be offered in the spring term.
The course has no prerequisites, but a foundational knowledge in continental philosophy or critical theory is recommended.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After September 15th, the class will meet in person, with the exception of the following dates, when we will meet virtually: October 13th and November 17th. On these dates, the class will meet virtually in smaller groups and will focus on student’s individual research and final paper development.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 8th. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.
The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change
Gentrification and the real and perceived impacts that neighborhood change has on longtime local residents as well as new dwellers, is complicated to unpack and define. Many believe displacement is an inherent byproduct of gentrification, yet little research exists to quantify or even confirm if and how displacement occurs. We are left to speculate about whether residents are being priced out of their rents; do owners chose to “cash out” and sell their properties; and/or do people of color choose to leave the neighborhood because the longstanding cultural character and amenities are eroding. Is displacement inevitable, is it voluntary or involuntary; and if so, is it economic or cultural?
So, what definition of gentrification are we to rely on to improve our understanding of neighborhood change. The gentrification definition that relies on the statistics commonly measured by inflation in housing prices, increases in median household income, and changes in educational attainment, might confirm that neighborhood change through gentrification is real. Or what about the definition of neighborhood change as presented in the 2014 “Lost in Place” report highlighting that only 100 out of 1,100 urban areas saw reductions in poverty levels between 1970-2010, a change that may be a function of backfilling four decades of neighborhood population decline rather than the upward mobility of long time low-income households. This report is telling us we are obsessed with the wrong neighborhood change phenomenon– that instead of tracking the smaller percentage of urban areas that are truly “gentrifying”, we should instead be more focused on why the other 1,000 out of 1,100 urban areas and its residents are no better off than they were 40 years ago!
But what about the upside of new investment in historically disinvestment neighborhoods? The addition of new, and often better quality amenities should be a benefit to all residents, incoming and existing. Long-time homeowners who have not seen increases in the value of their homes should now see increases in their long-term household wealth. And areas of the city that have been steeped in income and racial divide can become places of mixed income and mixed-race, enabling a more productive social and economic ecosystem of community life. Does this type of investment always have to be seen as disruptive?
This course will explore the debate about the causes and effects of gentrification and attempt to document the real and perceived impacts of such change on the physical, economic, social and cultural dynamics of community. The course will use national and city-specific research on gentrification; neighborhood change measurement methodologies; examine the neighborhood change using data research, literature and media articles and guest lectures. Students will prepare 1) an opinion-editorial essay, offering a definition of gentrification; 2) participate in a team debate arguing either the positive or negative impacts of gentrification; 3) assign indicators and metrics for measuring the presence of gentrification and 4) prepare a case study presentation on effective strategies for addressing either the negative impacts or advancing positive impacts of gentrification.
Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Publics Domain students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Public Finance for Planners: Creating Equitable & Sustainable Communities
Infrastructure challenges are significant and rising. To meet these challenges, urban planners will need to acquire foundational knowledge and skills in the public finance discipline and gain a basic awareness of how such tools and levers are used by city leaders to raise money to fund infrastructure, neighborhood redevelopment plans, and other new capital projects. This course will introduce students to the spectrum of public finance strategies and approaches that are available to cities, states and localities and will elevate how each strategy can be considered in the development of urban planning strategies to enhance an urban planners work and position projects to achieve strong equity, sustainability, and other place-based outcomes. The goal of the course will be to educate students on tactical ways that public finance principles can be integrated into the urban planning process. To that end, students will learn how to make choices that position an urban planning project for stronger funding, for stronger economic development outcomes and to achieve growth that is inclusive. The course will combine various pedagogical methods that include lecture, discussion, and exercises that challenge students to consider their role as advisors to leaders in a city. Throughout the semester, students will learn how to evaluate the impact of alternative resource mobilization and public finance avenues that an urban planner may encounter by examining real projects. No prior course work or experience in public finance or economic development is necessary for students to succeed in the course, as the course will provide students with the necessary foundation to understand core concepts in the domains of public finance and economic development that will be covered.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Experimental Infrastructures
Infrastructure is an encompassing term that can refer to anything from railroad ties to social media to ecosystems, and one which has been enjoying a renaissance in planning and public discourse. We are inundated by rhetoric about green infrastructure, social infrastructure, global infrastructure, and so on. Yet, infrastructural work in practice often seems to be as much about reinforcing the status quo than about building new connections or enabling new ways of living.
This seminar will explore infrastructures as cultural objects and culminate in the design of “experimental infrastructures” that can interject new narratives into society through the built environment. The class will start with a survey of critical infrastructure studies, an interdisciplinary approach that questions how infrastructure has been designed, built, and maintained in ways that reinforce (often problematic) social structures. “Infrastructure” is a term with a specific history, though it has come to encompass a wide range of networks, systems, and tools, and we will use this critical infrastructure approach to map out the political life of the term and its subsequent expansion. After building a theoretical framework around the argument that “infrastructure is social structure” as our foundational premise, we will then attempt to reimagine infrastructure as a tool for radical social change. What, for example, might an explicitly feminist infrastructure look like? A queer infrastructure? A decolonizing infrastructure? An infrastructure of degrowth? To engage in this rethinking, it will be necessary to confront the complicity of infrastructure within historical projects of global economic growth, nationalism, urbanization, natural resource extraction, and other world-ordering projects positioned as necessary public goods, but which have in practice led to gross injustices and inequalities around the world. Class assignments will ask students to consider infrastructural work and infrastructural subjectivity at different scales, from the individual to the global, and will culminate in a final project focused on designing and/or researching a critical counterhegemonic infrastructure and imagining its implementation.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Ecologies Domain and RR Area students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Plants and Placemaking – New Ecologies for a Rapidly Changing World
In the face of crises spanning pandemics, political turmoil, and the rapid degradation of the planet’s natural systems—all within a backdrop of myriad inequalities—the power of plants in shaping human experience has been proven. Erosive pressures associated with changes to climate have placed global ecologies and plant communities under assault, yet abundant and resilient life still adapts and flourishes in most places. This course will encourage students to observe these patterns and to learn from context so that we can place the healing and restorative qualities of plants, essential to sustaining life on this planet, in the foreground of our work as landscape architects.
To reimagine the revegetation of a place after catastrophe or amidst the pressures of development and the complexities of human movement, we must first understand context by digging into the past to examine what ecologies were there before the present state occurred. With these informed perspectives, we can begin to repair fragmented natural systems, preserve (and create) habitat, sequester carbon, and buffer communities from destructive weather and climate—all while embracing the realities of how people gather, work, and live. Plants define the character of place; they shape who we are and who we become. We must get this right or the same patterns in more chaotic contexts will simply reemerge.
This course is open to those who crave a creative and interpretive, yet pragmatic, approach toward utilizing plants to create landscapes that actively rebuild systems stretching far beyond site boundaries. Expressive and iterative weekly exercises will encourage rapid design that inspires students to explore natural and designed plant communities. Conventional and non-conventional planting typologies will be examined.
Together we will seek new and innovative ideas for how to restore biological function to the land. This course will not be a comprehensive botanical overview of the history of plants; however, it will reinforce important methodologies for how to learn and research plants that can be translated to any locale, by studying individual vegetative features and characteristics. We will translate these investigations into design languages that can be applied in future design work.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Products of Practice: From code to plan to code
A research seminar that critically mines historic systems of representation, instrumentation, and the product (or media) of the architect in relationship to the evolving societal role of the discipline, practice, and profession. Our goal is to understand design practice as a dynamic and ever-changing pursuit in order to imagine practice futures; to use this research to create a bridge between discipline and practice.
Within the cacophony of contemporary media, under the pressures of financial instruments, and with an expectation of artificial intelligence, this practice seminar looks to the past to explore the product of the architect as an artifact of circumstance, framing and projecting practice potentials now and into the future. Critically tracking the development of our practice, we will research design context, instruments of service, and representational formats as cultural and temporal constructs that limit or expand the role of the architect in practice. Our collective goal is an exploration of the relationship between – and the limits of – discipline, practice, and profession to better understand their structural potentials.
Course content will be organized thematically, exploring the origins of contemporary practice and its products at any given moment – from built form to model to drawing to code – as the architect evolved from master builder to author to project manager. The work of Vitruvius, Baldassarre Peruzzi, Leon Battista Alberti, Peter Cook, Cedric Price, Christopher Alexander, Peter Eisenman, and New Urbanism, among others, will be assessed within their cultural context. Legal and technical issues, client types, and structures of fee and control, will be considered. Students will develop critical positions on the renewed debate between empirical vs. cultural practice, on mediatic production and instruments of service for single projects vs. systems of design deployment and process design.
Synchronous class time will be focused on discussion and debate. Guest panels from practice and related sectors will be assembled to add perspective to specific topics, particularly around the issue of emerging modes of production and instrumentation. Asynchronous formats will include pre-recorded lectures and one-on-one or small group research charrettes.
Working individually or in pairs, students will research a specific type of architectural production in relationship to its evolution within the discipline and practice. Students will synthesize their topical research within a shared research framework to yield a collective research publication. Final course output will aggregate and draw from this collective knowledge to speculate on the future product of the architect.
There are no prerequisites for this course, which is intended as an interdisciplinary discussion. While this course is focused on the evolution of the product of the architect, the emergence and co-evolution of the related disciplines of landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design are essential to the conversation.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Eco Folly- History and Technology
Whether at the scale of the structure, garden, or machine, the folly has emerged as an object of excess—a playful moniker in which the useless, the mad, the extreme, the theatrical, and the daring intervene in intimate as well as civic spaces. Such descriptors attest to how designers throughout history have been drawn to the folly’s programmatic theatricality and liberation—qualities with which we will grapple in order to focus on the exploration of net zero techniques and the potency of super raw materials (earth, wind, fire, light, stone, wood) to generate innovation in form.
This seminar, which runs in tandem with the design research studio STU-1318, takes the folly as a typological springboard for coalescing formal creativity and sustainable imperatives. Our seminar foregrounds the study of historical and technological examples, which are set against writings in aesthetic philosophy, the history of science, environmental history, and architectural technology: these might range from the Renaissance sun-machines of Salomon de Caus and the Ruined Column House at the Désert de Retz to the Folly/Function competition (co-sponsored by the Architectural League) or the Rock Garden at Chandigarh (constructed entirely out of industrial refuse). Our aim is to insist on the environmental implications grounding such works, which oscillate between art and techne and in which the concepts of pleasure and beauty can be daringly connected to concepts of green architecture. How can the folly act as a precursor to the act of building itself, nesting responsive design parameters into design thinking?
Invited expert consultants will play a role in the studio and seminar through presentations, workshops, and discussions. The studio and seminar are generously funded by the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities.
NB: Taught in conjunction with the studio STU-1318. While studio participants are strongly encouraged to enroll in the seminar, additional space is made for students from the professional and ASP programs who want to conduct historical/theoretical research on the topic. Students enrolled in the studio, 1318, who select 4480 first in the limited enrollment course lottery will be prioritized for enrollment.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment
This course addresses processes and expressions of power in the North American built environment. Focusing on topics of identity and differentiation that throughout history are expressed in spatial interventions and boundaries, this course uncovers historic and contemporary cultural conflicts that emerged from development and regulatory processes, many of which intentionally or unintentionally result in patterns of social exclusion.
The course develops ways of thinking, research methodologies (familiarity with original historical sources and databases) and analytical means enabling evaluation and understanding of places where power and politics have had a critical but often undisclosed influence in shaping the built environment. The goal is to foster an understanding of urban ethics and political awareness that can be applied to any place, leading to a broader understanding of the dimensions of a place over time. It is particularly valuable for researching how to understand a place for MDes research or thesis projects. Short videos are used to construct narratives about the meaning of the research. Videos go viral, papers rarely do.
2022’s site explores the communities surrounding the Rio Hondo Confluence Area project in Southeast LA identified in the Gehry Partners Masterplan for the Los Angeles River. The project addresses how the LA River channel, a 51-mile publicly owned right of way that has served as critical infrastructure for flood-risk-management, can be extended to benefit social, cultural, and ecological communities by creating resilient systems that address climate change, population growth, resource scarcity, and social inequity. The Rio Hondo/South Gate communities once provided jobs and housing for white working-class families. Today these communities struggle with de-industrialization, toxic environments, lack of recreational and cultural spaces, and a density of marginalized populations vulnerable to displacement. Can the new public infrastructure reverse this trajectory or will it accelerate displacement and gentrification? The seminar will research power forces embedded in the communities over time and new forces that the public infrastructure introduces to transform and revitalize.
This course includes a required site visit to Los Angeles, which is scheduled to take place during spring recess. The cost of the trip will be $250 (term-billed) plus meals and incidentals. All course travel is subject to change or cancellation. All travelers must follow University and local travel guidance pertaining to COVID-19, and should read through the GSD Travel and Safety Guidelines webpage prior to enrolling in a course with a travel component.
Format: 3 hours in-person
Evaluation: attendance, participation, assignments
Prerequisites: Adobe Creative Cloud
Open to all; Critical Conservation requirement; preference for MDes
Up to twelve seats will be held for CC Area students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Natural Histories for Troubled Times, or, Revisiting the ‘Entangled Bank’
This seminar looks at our (troubled) times, its toxic landscapes and eco-unfriendly townscapes, through the lens of natural history. By “lens” we can think immediately about optical instruments that bring the world into view, from the first microscopes that revealed legions of minute beasties and beauties, to scanning electron microscopes, which create their own phantasms of visual mastery. What makes this materiality of vision so inviting is that intrinsic to the craft, practice, and indeed the science of natural history are the techniques of observing, representing, writing, drawing, modeling, collecting, sorting, naming, and knowing that are consistent with our own work as architects and landscape architects. The natural history tradition—which at one point in its own history shifted from a descriptive to a historical art—long promoted the notion of the kingdoms of nature: mineral, vegetable, animal. Living amidst their ruins, we will attend to the ways in which the social, political, and especially economic (i.e. ecological) ideas and ideals that supported these kingdoms fell apart, producing far more curious and complicated affiliations and entanglements. For the sake of focus (see the discussion of lenses above), the narrators and objects of this seminar will be drawn mainly from two large phyla: Arthropoda (insects, arachnids, crustaceans) and Annelida (segmented worms). That said, some other sorts of creatures will inevitably crawl, wing, or wiggle their way into our discourse. These relatively small beings, all of them “spineless,” play a tremendous role in our lived and inhabited world, which we will examine through the art, language, craft, and literature of natural history. In these troubled times we need natural history more than ever to explain to ourselves, while looking out for, peering back from, or projecting onto our environment, what nature has become and/or where it has gone.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Chinese Modern Architecture and Urbanism
This course concentrates on four periods of modern architecture and planning in China. The first spans from the 19th century 'treaty ports' to the plans and architecture of the Nationalists. The second spans from the end of the civil war in the late 1940s to the end of the Cultural Revolution. The third is from the late 1970s reforms through to the period of the rise of the municipal state and Hypermodern architecture, with the fourth in the present era of 'new normals' and sustainability .The aim is to introduce students to this development. They are expected to attend to lectures, present a well-documented and illustrated presentation of an assigned project and assigned readings and participate in discussion. There are no prerequisites and the course is open to all GSD students.
Up to five seats course will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.