Rome
A seminar on the art, architecture, and urbanism of Rome where the layering of material artifacts from successive historical periods provides an uninterrupted record of more than two thousand years. Development of the urban site establishes a continuous framework and contextualizes the cultural, artistic, and political aspirations and values of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque city.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
The Aperture Analyzed: The Form and Space of Openings
This seminar will focus on an essential component of architecture, the aperture, which has broad implications for our understanding of space. An aperture is commonly understood as a window or door, an element offering a controlled connection between interior and exterior in buildings. Simultaneously and more conceptually, an aperture is a frame, threshold, portal, passage, oculus, cleft, chasm, gap, valve or void. Louis Kahn placed the aperture at the very center of our conception of space saying that, “architecture itself had begun ‘when the walls parted and the columns became,’ admitting light and creating a system of support at the same time.” As a primary element of enclosure, the aperture frequently yields our most intimate contact with buildings, offering light, view and ventilation. As a mechanism for engagement, the aperture provides a connection with the outdoors, both literal and phenomenal, serving as a conduit for movement through and access to architecture. The term, aperture, therefore is profound and significant to our study, as the seminar seeks to explore the value of openings in three distinct, yet integrated ways: (1) its functional power of illumination, ventilation and view, (2) its derivation of form and its relationship to structure and skin, (3) its role in shaping public / private realms, defining spatial experience and the contours of our consciousness.
We will explore these issues through readings, analysis and design. Students will lead and participate in discussions of the readings each week and will engage in analytic exercises of specific works by such architects as Corb, Scarpa, Loos, Kahn, Chareau, Holl, Siza, Aalto, etc. Additionally, the seminar will examine notions of the aperture in the work of such artists as Hopper, Vermeer, Turrell, and Pichler. Students will then explore issues of the aperture through an aperture design project. The designs will explore the possibilities for the aperture to offer illumination and view, to develop tectonic and material conditions, and to imply territories of space and habitation. Please see the course isite for more detailed weekly topics and schedule.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Appearance
This seminar will focus on architecture’s appearance, on how architecture is rendered both legible and actionable to its audience.
The many labels applied to architecture’s visual bearing illustrate its capriciousness across schools of thought: ‘envelope,’ ‘enclosure,’ ‘façade,’ ‘elevation,’ ‘composition,’ ‘index,’ ‘form,’ ‘representation,’ ‘symbol,’ ‘skin’…the list is long and points in disparate directions.
Appearances proffer architecture’s entry point. What a building looks like operates at the extremes of a building’s physical and metaphysical demands. Regardless of what we may want to do with it, architecture gives us no choice: it will appear. We will see our architectures as objects and we will look beyond their literalities in search of what they might signal. We will see them as exteriors and interiors. We will view them individually and collectively. And we will react to them in ways that are remarkably visceral. Our buildings loom large.
Corrective Lenses
Two corrective lenses, related to each other, will be important to our semester.
Lens One – Appearance and Action:
We will spend the semester discussing architecture’s appearance. With no desire to temper or sidestep that conversation, we will also take up a re-aligned version of Hannah Arendt’s “space of appearance,” in which she poignantly lays out “the various forms in which the public realm can be organized.” This seminar can be thought of as centering on the ‘appearance of space,’ an easy rearrangement of Arendt’s phrase that stays close to her assertion that “the only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people.”
Because architecture’s appearance reaches into the very nature of public life, and because both architecture and public life thrive on possibilities more than certainties, we will begin with the view that public life ought to exist because of architecture’s appearance…and never in spite of it
Lens Two – Parallax:
The second corrective lens, just below, is extracted from a short letter that I recently wrote on beauty. I’m including it here to clarify our starting point and out of fairness to anyone considering taking this seminar (see my note right after this paragraph):
“How we wedge a gap, or lack thereof, between architecture’s superficial and profound natures lies literally/aesthetically/figuratively in the middle of how we constitute beauty. And that’s where so much contemporary flattening is so ungratifying…so less-than beautiful. Much of this recent flattening hovers around notions of ‘image’ and ‘representation,’ terms that have lately acquired a spurious status akin to ‘idea.’ Beauty thrives in the shufflings that come with parallax, wherein the interactions of ‘skin’ and ‘deep’ sweet-talk our reception. And parallax requires depth. Depth of form, program, movement, matter, publicness…depth assembled from architecture’s constituent parts and held together with the glue that oozes from anyone’s engagement with space.”
Behind this excerpt: On some days, not more than occasionally, I am skeptical of architectural postmodernism’s appearance/re-appearance in our discipline. On all other days, I am hostile to it. Anyone interested in this seminar should be aware that we will not take up postmodernism other than establishing a parallel conversation.
‘Appearance’ is intended to advance not only your personal agility in carrying out architecture but also the strength of your actions as they affect public life.
Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Experiments in Public Freedom
Cities are spatial accumulations of capital and culture that can host and must cater to a vast array of different and often contradictory publics. While public space can be easily conceptualized and designed in response to congruent publics, the incongruency found in cities presents a different challenge: cities require public spaces capable of enabling non-hegemonic identities and events. Due to their role and meaning in constructing and defining cities’ public realm, public spaces are expected to embody a well-defined character and gravitas. However, due to the diversity of publics, these spaces must engage with temporary, overlapping, and often-contradictory sensibilities and occupations. The design question that emerges is how to conceptualize and design public space that embodies a non-hegemonic character and gravitas?
This design theory seminar presents an amalgamation of views from different perspectives (architecture, art, landscape architecture, urban design) that coalesce around six spatial conditions helpful in conceptualizing and designing spaces that promote cultural diversity, social acceptance, and individual spontaneity. Through this amalgamation, this course explores containment, neutrality, blankness, normalcy, anarchy, and amnesia as conditions that can open up public space.
Despite their potential, these spatial properties are usually underestimated because they seem to lack what is generally considered essential for designing successful public spaces: site-specificity, sensibility to local aesthetics, socio-cultural appropriateness, permanent and fixed identity, etc. It is precisely due to these so-called deficiencies that these spatial properties can be instrumental in imagining spaces that enable constant recirculation of multiple temporary publics rather than permanent forms of regulation, identity, or appropriateness.
The course is composed of six sections, one per spatial condition. Each section comprises a lecture by the instructor around a constellation of references (projects and texts) to be discussed in class. For each section, students are asked to analyze an environment of their choice (building, landscape, open space, etc.) that demonstrates the spatial condition being discussed. At the end of the semester, students assemble these six analyses into a design primer to enable public freedoms.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Type and the Idea of the City: Architecture’s Search for what is Common
Open to all students, the seminars will equip students with the theoretical and historical understanding of type as a heuristic device in the discourse of the city as a project. Taking Anthony Vidler’s Third Typology as a starting point, the seminar proposes the fourth typology as a common framework for the production of an architecture of the city in today’s globalized context. Unlike the first three typologies that found their justification for sociality from nature, the machine and the historical city respectively; the fourth typology is rooted in the developmental city. The first half of the seminar will begin with the understanding of type from Quatremère de Quincy and J.N.L Durand through the dialectics of idea and model. This renewed understanding of type and typology will offer an alternative reading of the writings and projects of Aldo Rossi and Rem Koolhaas as attempts to revalidate architecture’s societal and political role through the redefinition of the idea of the city. This idea of the city will be discussed through Aristotle’s polis, Schmitt’s ‘homogenous demos’, Mouffe’s ‘agonistic pluralism’, Rossi’s ‘collective memory’, Agamben’s ‘dispositif’ and Koolhaas’ ‘heterogeneous containments’.
The second half of the seminar will be focused on the history and theory behind the emergence of the developmental city and its corresponding dominant types. This discussion will cover the various urban and typological outcomes instigated by the rapid transformation of cities, its peripheries and countryside, following this developmental model – examples will be drawn from China, London, and Singapore. The reading and understanding of these emerging conceptions of the city will be guided by the concepts and theories offered in the first half of the course. Finally, the seminar will speculate on the possibility of conceiving alternative ideas of the city through its dominant type in these newfound conditions.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Discourse and Methods II
The objective of the seminar is to examine and discuss in depth some of the main methodological issues that students enrolled in the PhD program in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning may encounter in their studies and research. The seminar will be based on extensive reading as well as presentations by the instructor and other faculty members involved in the PhD program.
This course will be taught in person beginning the week of January 24th.
Discourse and Research Methods
This course is mandatory for first year doctoral students and its aim is to expose them to faculty and various modes of thought and application relevant to the DDes program and around broad areas of actionable knowledge pertinent to history, theory, technology, computation and so on. Each student is expected to provide a one-page reflection regarding the prescribed readings for each class session. All will also give presentations about their thesis topics.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
THICKER
For the last half century, the image of an office building has been synonymous with the curtain wall. Pioneered as early as Mies’ proposal for Friedrichstrasse, the soaring, diaphanous planes of glass stood for technological modernization and global capital unlike any other architectural element. The curtain wall defined not only the image of an architectural typology, it defined twentieth century urbanization in ways that we are only beginning to fully understand. Beyond the sociological or typological, its farthest-reaching consequences are without a doubt ecological. In the few inches of those thin panes, the curtain wall embodied the quixotic twentieth century attitude of building against nature – of building to control nature.
Today, we understand more clearly the impacts of that arrogance. In New York, the single greatest challenge to architects over the next decades will be the retrofitting of the glazed energivores. The city’s Green New Deal announced in 2019 includes the ban of all-glass structures. While this ban surprised many, it presents a wake-up call and an opportunity to question what has been a lazy default of office design both on a typological but also on a representational standpoint.
This research seminar will look at the alternative history of the envelope before and in parallel to the curtain wall. We will unpack the sociological, symbolic, performative and of course aesthetic demands placed on these outermost inches of a building. The seminar will be design-oriented and constructively based but will involve collective readings and discussions, as well as independent research, drawings, and short presentations. Please be aware that this course will be conducted in hybrid mode with online as well as in-class meetings.
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 that, the class will continue to meet on Zoom with the exception of four in-person sessions: 09/22, 10/27, 11/17, and 12/15. The course will be a combination of lectures, research presentations, and discussions. Please review the syllabus for more details. Please note that this is subject to change.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 8th. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.
Urban Form: Transition as Condition
The fixed categories by which we have traditionally understood the urban no longer hold. They have been undermined by the multiplicity of disparate urban formations that are transforming landscapes across the globe. These transformations radically challenge not only normative planning methods, but also traditional concepts of the urban, and even our ability to understand the dynamics of change. How can we understand the conditions of change, extreme differentiation, and hybridity that challenge current conceptual models and practices? How might the insights of history and theory inform one another as well as design practices more effectively?
The purpose of the seminar is to engage these questions and to explore a range of critical frameworks and research methodologies for understanding emerging conditions of the contemporary urban – historically, theoretically, and spatially across scales.
Urban Form: Transition as Condition takes as its starting point two working propositions that are implicit in the course title. The first puts forward a conception of urban form as dynamic and active – that is, as a process of urban formation in which transition is a continuous condition. The second working proposition is that in order to understand the generative dynamics of transitional urban conditions we need to develop new methodologies for understanding change and difference, methodologies that make it possible to chart continuities and discontinuities, to map relationships between the local and the translocal, and to examine complex and unstable phenomena over time and through multiple critical lenses. In short, our research needs to be both site-specific and comparative across cultures and geographies.
These propositions will be engaged in the seminar through readings and class discussions, and individual research projects. In the first half of the semester readings and discussions will focus on a series of theoretical frameworks that conceptualize emerging urban formations in categorically transitional terms – that is, in terms of post-industrial, post-fordist, post-socialist, post-communist, and post-modern formations. These transitional categories are framed in relation to historically-based urban paradigms that posit a relationship between social, political, and economic processes and systems (industrial, Fordist, socialist, communist, modern) and urban spatial forms. We will interrogate these concepts as epistemological categories, examine the paradigms on which they are based, and work to develop critical methods and visual techniques for site-based research of contemporary conditions.
In the second half of the semester students will apply these methodologies to the analysis of a particular urban site or intervention in a city or other urban environment and geography of their choice. The topics for these individual research projects will be determined in consultation with the instructor within the first 6 weeks of the semester. The final project will have a written and visual/graphic component (due in early May) and will be presented in class towards the end of the semester.
Requirements/Assignments: Aside from completing the assigned reading and active participation in class discussions, students will be required to submit reading responses [posted to the course canvas site] in preparation for class discussions of assigned texts and the issues they raise. In addition, a final research project with a written and visual component is required of each student.
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.
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Landscape, Energy, Matter
The structures and forms we perceive on the surface of the land are produced by forces that make order and those that upset it. Landscape architecture is one of these forces.
Borrowing the title from Stephen Jay Gould's book on the history of geology, this course will deal with the temporal dimension of landscape. As Henri Bergson said, time is invention, creation of forms. As a result of the interaction of different forces, the environment is in a continuous state of transformation, a state of becoming, of which we are not always aware. In landscape architecture today, ideas about time, process, and change are addressed through discourses often borrowed from the field of ecology. In this course, we will investigate these notions through lectures, readings, and discussions on the history of ecology and other concurrent theories—such as evolutionary theory and thermodynamics—which ultimately deal with the different kinds of order that emerge over time as different forms of energy—radiant, potential, kinetic, chemical and so on—inject life and transformation on matter, and thus in the landscape.
Students in the course will also have to choose and investigate a vernacular agricultural landscape, that is, a landscape that has slowly evolved through the agricultural practices of those who inhabit it. By selecting these case studies, the course as a whole will try to cover the broadest possible range of environmental conditions around the world: from the very hot to the very cold, the very dry to the very wet, the very high to the very deep. With the impacts of climate change in mind, we will focus on anthropogenic landscapes that arise from extreme conditions, such as deserts, rainforests, tundras, and great mountain ranges. We will draw these agricultural landscapes, trying to reveal their climatic and geomorphological processes and constraints, as well as the specific technologies that intervene on them and from which they receive their forms. This constructive and representative inquiry into the vernacular will support the theoretical component of the seminar, allowing the class to engage in a more productive conversation about the metaphysics of energy and matter, time and life, as well as to discuss the different propensities that exist on earth prior to human intervention, and to question how design and technology interfere with, accelerate, slow down or even eliminate them.
Students will be assessed on their contribution to the overall class discussion and their specific vernacular landscape research. The course is open to all GSD students, but solid graphic and representational skills are recommended.
Note: the instructor will offer 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.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 1st. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.