Disciplinary Elasticity and Alternative Practice

This class aims to expose students to many ways of approaching, starting, developing, and leading a practice. This course hypothesizes that only by being exposed to dozens of different ways to grapple with creating or transitioning a practice can someone begin to chart their own path. Apart from charting a path, practice is equally, if not more, about how one negotiates and reacts to unforeseeable opportunities and obstacles. Reaction is as important as action, and they are intimately intertwined. As the word denotes, practice is a form of constant learning and learning from real-time conditions, which the practitioner often cannot imagine beforehand. Only by addressing ‘real world’ market conditions does one learn the skills required to develop a robust practice and start to recognize the emergent market patterns that often define practice. The ‘theory of practice,’ especially concerning domains compelled to engage and create in the physical world, is a quizzical field of study. Attempting to ‘teach’ practice, a process that embodies learning through action, is to make academic something intended to be explored outside the hallowed walls of academia. The theory of how to swim is not the same as practicing swimming. An overly theorized approach to practice removes the student from the actual source of learning while indoctrinating an ideology often supporting the professionalization of practice over the exploration of emergent characteristics of practicing. This course is not about ‘teaching’ practice but instead learning from the experiences of a wide variety of guest practitioners to develop a broader definition of practice and a greater understanding of the types of contextual and self-imposed obstacles that exist, some of which are manageable while others prove insurmountable.

Landscape, Architecture, and/on the Printed Page

This course goes down the proverbial rabbit hole in considering the fundamental, incidental, anecdotal, but above all the meaningful formal and structural analogies between books and other print media, and the spaces imagined and realized in and by architecture, landscape, and urban design and experience. The rabbit hole, it will be recalled, appears in the opening chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and was itself a passage furnished with bookshelves. There are texts within texts, and worlds within those texts, each and all producing planned and chance encounters between signifiers and signifieds, readers and writers. Questions of page layout, punctuation!, paratexts, narrative structure, paper-making, book-binding and ecocodicology, publishing houses and reading rooms, marginalia and marbled paper, the threaded histories of reading, writing, (though not so much ‘rithmetic), illustration, illumination, and blank spaces, the vineyard of text, the mirror in parchment, a scribal world set into print–these and other topics will be addressed with regard to masterworks (major and minor) of literature (Perec, Mallarmé, Sterne, Douglass, Piranesi, Stein, et. al.) and an array of familiar and fantastical books ranging from the sexagesimo-quarto to the Audubonian double elephantine folio. We will always have in view, specifically in relation to architectural, landscape and urban culture, what Roger Chartier describes as the “space between text and object, which is precisely the space in which meaning is constructed.”

Design Fundamentals, The Postdigital, and the Anthropocene

In the past several decades, design has been impacted by the digital revolution as well as by a series of challenges linked to the advent of a new era in the relationship between humans and planet earth, an era often characterized as the Anthropocene. This situation necessitates the need to rethink some of the fundamentals of the design disciplines, including: their relationship to nature as well as to space and time, questions of scale, tectonics and ornament, what is implied by the notion of inhabiting and its link to issues of subjectivity. Finally, the political relevance of design is more than ever at stake.

This research seminar will envisage these issues at the intersection of theory and history, history being mobilized to understand better some of the changes that are currently unfolding. For this is not the first time that the design disciplines, beginning with architecture, have had to change their frame of reference. The Renaissance, the late 18th century, and the dawn of modernism witnessed profound changes in architectural and urban design. We may be at the brink of a new series of transformations, as profound if not even more so than those which marked these previous episodes.

 

Ordinary to Icon: Case Studies in the Rehabilitation of Modern Buildings and Sites

The sustainable renewal of the legacy of 20th century Modernism and its contemporary progeny presents many challenges to conservation and adaptive reuse that continue to be debated across our industry. The concept of renewal through “modernization” is increasingly employed by commercial, institutional and government building owners fueling an exponential increase in the volume of rehabilitation activity. Organizations such as the Getty Conservation Institute, ICOMOS, Docomomo and APT have undertaken broader inquiries into addressing the questions that impact the fundamental philosophy of how to work with this large and diverse legacy. This in turn has produced new guidelines such as the ICOMOS Madrid Document on Approaches for the Conservation of 20th Century Architectural Heritagevthat are meant to update and complement the existing established international charters to guide appropriate treatment for modern properties.

This seminar proposes to identify and evaluate some of the key challenges facing the preservation of modern buildings and sites through a critical analysis of selected case studies exhibiting possible means of addressing these issues while seeking to minimize other perceived programmatic or technical failings. It is hoped that the seminar will foster more detailed investigation of some of the more persistent and complex challenges and how they interface with a general drive to create sensitive design interventions that conserve carbon and increase the sustainability quota of many of these resources. Among numerous topics we will address will be the following:

1. Should the evaluative criteria that we develop for modern properties differ from those applied to earlier and/or more traditional forms of construction. Should there be different criteria applied to landmark quality structures versus the Ordinary Everyday Modern (OEM) vernacular?

2. Modern structures in many cases use a lot of operational carbon because of thin construction and lack of insulation. How do we devise and vet strategies to enhance energy performance that are appropriately balanced with maintenance of historic character?  

3. Design of Interventions: Conservation is increasingly being acknowledged as being an integral, creative part of any renovation and adaptive re-use project, particularly with modern structures, many of which are unloved, leading property owners to increasingly embrace modernization as a strategy to enhance what may be perceived as tired or outdated structures. What is the right balance of new design and conservation, and what is the role of the preservation professional in developing criteria and making judgments as to what constitutes appropriate alteration?

The course is open to all GSD students, though knowledge of and interest in the history of 20th century modernism is encouraged. The seminar structure will consist of lectures by the instructor and distinguished guests, student-led discussion of themed readings, and local case study site visits. The final deliverable will be student chosen case studies of an existing building or site that raise critical questions about conservation, interpretation, and the design of interventions. The goal will be to understand how the interventions have used or rejected attributes of the host structure, and the degree to which the result still embodies the design intent and quality of each building campaign.

On Space and Time in Urban Formation and Design

As a project or workshop seminar, this course focusses on space and time and its interplay in urban formation and design. In so doing it is subdivided into five themes, preceded by a general introduction and proceeded by a summary and conclusion. The five themes begin with a fundamental treatment of both space and time as entities favoring classical definitions as distinct from those associated with spacetime and relativity. This is followed by particular emphases on both space and time and problematics introduced by concepts such as temporality, periodization and both spatial and temporal turns. A third theme deals with event time as distinct from clock time, including seasonal and religious events as well as so-called pseudo-events and the spatial and temporal aspects of use such as obsolescence and recycling. The fourth theme deals explicitly with the definition of hegemonic periods in historical time, how they might be measured, emerge and how they influence the sensing of space and time particularly in terms of cultural norms and different modes of spatiotemporal appreciation. Finally, the fifth theme is rather more conclusionary through the cataloguing, classifying of spatial and temporal influences in urban formation and design. Each theme will occupy about a two-week period in the academic calendar or four class periods.

The class is primarily oriented to students in the MAUD/MLAUD, DDes, and MLA programs at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Other students will require permission from the instructor and be able to show how the interplay of space and time is germane to their interests. All students must have prior experience with GIS. Participation of students will be mainly in the form of small group exercises dealing with a New England regionally based case study area and the presentation of a final paper drawn from that experience. The New England Region was selected in order to internalize other spatial dimensions like city, county, metropolitan area and conurbation. The initial class period of each theme will be a lecture on its subject and with the second session devoted to methodological issues and the underlying New England case study area that will perpetuate throughout the class. Then the final two class periods will be workshop sessions largely in the form of studio-style desk crits. Students will work in small groups and produce a final product in the form of a New England based set of case studies applicable to the themes. Secondarily, students will be required to participate in all classroom discussions and be adequately prepared to do so.

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.

Creating Environmental Markets

There is a way out of the climate box we have created, though resistance to the necessary ecological transformation remains intense. Sunk investments in existing infrastructure, broadly accepted design and economic theory, and the lifelong operations employment it has provided make the foundation of such resistance. Creating Environmental Markets will examine alternative capital markets based in regulatory requirements but offering opportunities to use credit trades and new approaches to old systems to restore ecology while providing economic incentives and jobs.

The climate problems we once anticipated have become a connected series of current crises: intense heat, extended drought, potable water shortages, almost spontaneous fires, floods, food shortages, enormous tornadoes and hurricanes, acute cold…. The prognosis for the coming decades is that these phenomena will get worse, yet our responses remain mostly mundane. We repair, rebuild, extend, and expand essentially the same 19th Century energy and water infrastructure that put us in this climate box, evidently expecting a different outcome.

If we are to meet and overcome the climate challenges we have created, incentivizing environmental restoration over broad landscapes, from individual site designs to entire cityscapes, is essential. The law as currently interpreted will not save us, but some combination of law and regulation together with markets creating economic incentives favoring ecological restoration of natural systems could. In addition to recognizing the damage we have done we need a clear conception of required ecological repair. Students will be introduced to that clear conception while examining a regulation-based market to incentivize ecological repair at scale, fostering the necessary energy and water infrastructure change.  

This class is intended for MLA, Planning, and Design students. Their skills provide them the insights necessary to make such markets work. Students will investigate, in small teams, whether a developing credit market based on phosphorus trading would also help up to four cities in Massachusetts meet their regulatory obligations to control Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) and Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems (MS4s). Intended to incentivize the restoration of natural systems, the market would also lead to enhanced flood control, resilience to drought, and restored habitat. Students will also work with city officials, producing a report on their findings and recommendations. Using Blue Cities/Stratifyx, a developing market platform, they will assess the damage existing infrastructure has caused while examining the benefits and potential for restorative change.

Climate Justice

Recent discourse around climate change—including debates about the Anthropocene, Green New Deal legislation, the dire warnings of the IPCC, to name a few—increasingly make evident that climate change is much more than a technological problem of carbon mitigation. Taking recent geological and climatic changes as symptoms of deeper structural challenges, this class will address climate change as fundamentally a problem of social and environmental injustice. The class will argue for the necessity of studying theories of justice, inequality, and structural violence along with climate science, policy, and international diplomacy. In our search for climate justice, the class will trace various forms of climate activism within the history of environmental movements, explore non-Western forms of knowledge as key critiques and logics of action, and evaluate concrete suggestions for radical reform. We will discuss how climate justice as a framework of concern is both universal and specific, and we will critically engage ideas of justice at different scales, from the local to the global, with careful attention to context. We will ultimately ask what new kinds of practices, knowledges, and collaborations are necessary to build more just and responsible relationships between people and the nonhuman world, and with each other.

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.

Fight or Flight: Space Colonization and the Future of Landscape Architecture

This seminar will examine the future of landscape architecture concerning the two forces that are likely to shape it well into the future: an increasingly uninhabitable Earth, and the evolution of humanity as a space-faring species.

The parallel tracks of space flight, colonization, and environmental protection and conservation will be analyzed and discussed. The former is about FLIGHT: the search for territory and resources beyond the confines of home, region, nation, and planet; the latter is about FIGHT: the counterforce to stay in place and “tough it out” in the face of peril, namely climate change, loss of biodiversity, zoonotic pandemics, and the disruptive advent of artificial intelligence.

Spacefaring will be addressed first: how it has existed in our imagination and how it has been translated into programs and associated technologies. The concern and care for the natural environment under anthropocentric and biocentric impulses will follow. Lastly, the seminar will examine how the flight-fight dichotomy informs the practice of landscape architecture, i.e.: how it should be aligned with a survival ethic and methods.