CONTESTED Landscapes + COUNTER Narratives

Land is not a stage on which history takes place, it is not a neutral site for becoming human or building community. Imperial histories are not intended to understand place but to legitimate the taking of place. No place holds one, singular story. Every place, every site is contested, complex, layered, and full of both histories and futures. Our purpose in this seminar will be to interrogate how we might frame and define practices of place-making including landscape architecture, and in turn, how might re-imagine potential futures of design as a practice and as a way of thinking.

We will explore how a critical place-based inquiry shapes readings of complex landscape histories. Places hold contested narratives and histories, from lands of deep meaning to that of quick extraction, from sites of enslaved labor to mining operations, from reservations to internment camps, from places of violence to those of resistance, among others. We will study critical place theories in the context of land/place-based sources, methods, and tools (including archives, walking, drawing, thick sections, texts, maps, oral histories, poetry…) for identifying, revealing, interpreting, and sharing narratives that may collide, upturn, deny or erase one another.

Drawing from a selection of places primarily in the United States including the Harvard campus, we will consider how narratives of identity, race, gender, and indigenous sovereignty have shaped place; the approaches designers might employ when taking on the responsibility of design and making; and the sources from which historians might draw in curating histories of place.

We frame this seminar as an inquiry, grounded in an interrogation of ways of knowing in order to build alternative bodies of knowledge. Our readings will engage with studies of the constructions of identity, race, and gender as embedded in and emanating from land and place, and in particular through the practice of designing landscapes. We will center on how communities have made place in order to survive and thrive. We will interrogate resistance in the landscape. Our work will draw from George Lipsitz’s essay on the racialization of space and spatialization of race to consider counter narratives of place and community. As we extend our discussion through the work of Tiffany Lethabo King, Lisa Prosper, Andrea Roberts, Anna Tamura, Ken Lustbader, and a richness of other scholars of land, landscape, and place. Our purpose will be to interrogate how we engage with history, to question how we have come to frame and define practices of place-making, including landscape architecture, and in turn, how might re-imagine potential futures of design and our community places.
 

The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of an Architectural Idea

One of the most arresting ideas in the philosopher Michel Serres’s Rome: The Book of Foundations (1983) is that history is “a knot of different times”–a knot most visibly reified by the tangible traces of past civilizations. Such a knot speaks as readily to stratigraphic accumulations in urban space as to the composite aesthetics of ruin pictures. Artifacts, fragments, vestiges, rubble, debris, detritus, wreckage: all this has prompted a venerable body of writings and objects that work the metaphor of ruin into everything from a philosophical template for the Sublime to a mechanism for iconoclastic violence.

The subject of the ruin stems from the interconnection of themes crucial to the history of architecture. These include the vexed legacy of the Classical tradition well into Modernism and Postmodernism, changing attitudes towards past and patrimony, the relationship of architecture and archaeology, the adaptability of architectural form through and despite time, and the politics of collective memory: what does it mean to be, as it were, forever “building on ruins?” The subject of the ruin also stems from a theoretical discourse on the function of decay in architecture, which was inaugurated by thinkers such as the German sociologist Georg Simmel. As he wrote in an essay published in 1911: “The ruin strikes us so often as tragic–but not as sad–because destruction here is … the realization of a tendency inherent in the deepest layer of the existence of the destroyed.”

The seminar will begin with architecture and the vision of the past in the early modern period. We will consider a range of examples such as the Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity, the plates of antiquarian treatises, and the polemical stance of architects such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi with regards to architecture’s origins. We will then consider how the cult of the ruin has come to shape notions of nostalgia and dystopia in modern and contemporary contexts. Examples might include the Heideggerian concept of Ruinanz, the adaptive reuse of industrial ruins, or the reflection of absence in such examples as the National September 11 Memorial. Our broader aim will be to gain an understanding of a multi-faceted discourse, which sets architecture into relation with time, memory, and forgetting.

The seminar is based on intensive reading, writing, and conversation, and participants should be ready to engage critically with the assigned readings on a weekly basis. Requirements include active participation, reading responses (1-2 pages), a paper proposal, a short presentation, and a final research paper (15-20 pages). Students should have background in the history and theory of architecture. Those in the doctoral and MDES programs as well as professional students exploring related thesis topics are especially welcome.

Rome: Art, Architecture and Urbanism from Antiquity to the Baroque

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.

The course has lectures on selected topics by the professor (both asynchronous and synchronous), prepared discussions, and student reports on their research. Some lectures are organized around historic spectacles – the Emperor Augustus’ funeral (14 A.D.), Constantine the Great’s triumphal procession (312 A.D.), and the consecration of New St. Peter’s (1626) – imagined as walks through Rome highlighting the city’s evolving cultural and urban character. Other lectures and lecture/discussions consider a single topic in depth, such as Vitruvius’ theory of design, or a single building, such as Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. The first half of the course covers Antiquity to the Renaissance while the second looks in greater detail at specific Renaissance and Baroque projects. Topics in the first part include the growth and decline of the ancient Roman city, the creation of new architectural forms and urban meanings in response to the Christianization of Empire, and competing theories of beauty. The second part focuses on the style and meaning of those works of art, architecture, and urbanism which distinguish Rome today such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, Bramante’s design for New St. Peter’s, and Bernini’s architecture and sculpture for the rebuilt basilica.  

Course Structure: The structure is that of a “flipped” course where students are responsible for learning the materials provided on Canvas and class meetings are devoted to their discussion. Two or three lectures of one hour each are posted on the course site for each week: students watch these at their convenience. There are also assigned readings. Each week you will submit a thought, observation, or question (just a few sentences, not a full response) based on the lectures and reading: these are the basis for class discussion. In weeks 1 through 9, class will meet in person for discussion and short lectures on special topics. In weeks 10, 11 and 12 students will present their research in reports of about ½ hour (depending on class enrollment).  

Redefining Urban Design

The field of urban design is undergoing a process of major transformation. Josep Lluís Sert’s initial definition as the space between planning and architecture, emphasizing the culture of cities as “civic culture” and proposing pedestrian interaction as the “underlying coherence” of the work developed at different scales, followed his reinterpretation of the CIAM. This began at the GSD in 1956 with the Urban Design Program and has evolved continuously for seven decades. This seminar sets out to contribute to redefining urban design by enhancing theoretical principles and exploring innovative practices in the field.

Industrialization and progress guided development throughout the 20th century, resulting in financial globalization, and the advancement of forms of communication and digital development. The emergence of new forms of economy that impact the conception and design of the city allows us to consider more creative alternatives to those of the prevailing globalization process. This is the framework in which we wish to situate discussion in the seminar.

Defining this new urban field calls for a more in-depth study of projects that represent the roles or issues that urban design can address. It also requires us to produce design actions and strategies within the urbanistic discipline through research and practice. The design of the present-day city must consider environmental and climate challenges, digital impact, a knowledge-based economy, multiple and changing modes of mobility, as well as the more demanding aspirations of an older and more educated population.

The seminar method is based on facing today’s challenges by considering ongoing projects or research that allow us to understand that development is not linear and univocal; rather there are open and varied solutions centering on housing, energy, transport, etc. The process is a plural one, and the solutions in each case depend largely on the context, including aspirations, limitations, and available technologies.

The Seminar is based on research into sixteen topics that define current thinking and practice of urban design and projecting them into the future. We are selecting certain topics and case studies to advance the discussion of theoretical background, design tools, development process, and the conditions of agency and governance. Topics are structured within a theoretical framework, using relevant case studies and key projects to show the scope and conditions for the development of each chapter. Research is organized in four blocks corresponding to different scales and approaches, and an introduction.

The four main blocks are:
– Long-term strategies operating at different scales.
– Systematic forms of transition from the present-day city.
– Infilling and upgrading.
– Experimenting with new design issues.

Above all, we will be interested in the way this discipline develops plans, projects, and strategies, within the extraordinary complexity of today’s urban design field. Because, to quote Lesley Lokko at the 2023 Venice Biennale, “it is impossible to build a better world if we cannot first imagine it”.
 

African Landscape Architecture: Alternative Futures for the Field

A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate the impacts of changing climates and social injustice now and in the future. Africa is a continent rich in landscape projects and practices but only eight out of fifty-four African nations have professional associations of landscape architects. The course is framed around three central questions: 1.) How is landscape architecture currently practiced in African countries? (2.) What lessons can we learn from landscape practices in various African societies that can help mitigate the impacts of climate change and social inequities? (3.) As landscape architecture unfolds across the continent in the next 50–200 years, how can it continue assert its agency in the fight against changing climates and social inequity and claim a central space in the shaping of African cities of the future? Each week we will focus on a different country including South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria. In collaboration with several landscape architecture university programs across Africa and including practitioners and academics from across the continent, this seminar will explore what it means to practice and teach landscape architecture in societies in which the profession is nascent or non-existent and speculate on the future of the shaping of landscapes in the Global South.

This GSD course is jointly listed with FAS as AFRAMER 143Y.

Appearance

This seminar will focus on architecture’s appearance, how architecture is grasped by its public. We will explore the sources, significances, and receptions of our work’s expression and posture. Our aim will be to develop better understandings and instruments through which to exploit how architecture is made both legible and actionable to its audience.

The labels attached to architecture’s visual bearing speak to its fickle nature across schools of thought: envelope, enclosure, façade, elevation, composition, index, form, representation, symbol, skin…the list is long and points in disparate directions. For an architect, pausing over questions of what architecture looks like can induce an unease about architecture’s perimeter that may nudge us toward the safe haven of impartial or veiled expression, specious as that may or may not be.

And yet, architecture’s appearance tantalizes. With reason.

In both literal and cultural senses, appearances tender architecture’s most immediate entry point. What a building looks like trades on the extremes of a building’s physical and metaphysical demands. Appearance is at times the result of something akin to pure science (as in building construction or optics) and at other times marinated in various combinations of significance, beauty, and appropriateness…the wooliest of architectural pursuits.

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 look into and past their literalities in search of what they might signal. We will take hold of them as exteriors and interiors. And we will react to them in ways that are visceral. Our buildings don’t just appear. They entice, loom, defend, and evaporate.

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.” With Arendt’s evocative thoughts as background, this seminar might be thought of as centering on the ‘appearance of space,’ an easy rearrangement of Arendt’s phrase meant to stay close to her assertion that “the only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people.” Architecture may well be our only hope vis-à-vis what she called “the potentiality of being together.”

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 hypothesis that architectural appearances are particularly well suited to cajoling public life. Another way to put this: Public life ought to exist because of architecture’s appearance…and never despite it.

Lens Two — Time to Move Along
Occasionally, I’m skeptical of architectural postmodernism’s appearance/re-appearance in our discipline. On all other days, I’m hostile to it. Anyone interested in this seminar should be aware that we will not take up postmodernism other than to establish a parallel conversation that might, on some days, dip into being complementary.
 

Master in Real Estate Practicum Prep

This 0-unit seminar is part of the 12-unit Master in Real Estate Practicum. Participation is limited to students in the Master in Real Estate program at the GSD.

Discourse and Research Methods

This pro-seminar is a core requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic areas that range across various topics and the methods and skills that might be involved in each area. Generally, these will include: historical thinking, critical thinking, thinking about technologies, analysis of social settings, theorizing landscapes, and theorizing aspects of urban form, as well as analyzing its environmental performance. Each seminar will be of two or more hours in duration and comprised of presentation by an invited faculty member on a theme of their research and scholarly interest, followed by discussion among the class. The seminar will meet on Thursdays between 3:00pm and 5:45pm at 20 Sumner Road, House Zero’s lower floor conference room.

Discourse and Methods I

This course is open only to Ph.D. students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design (Ph.D. students from other departments may participate with instructor’s permission). This year’s course focuses on major theoretical and historiographical issues and themes that still structure scholarly discourse today. Students will confront these issues and themes by relating them to key methodological concerns and horizons in their own emerging research agendas.
 

Symptomatic Reading of Architecture

Within the longstanding traditions of architectural interpretation, symptomatic reading is distinguished by its roots in Marxism and ideology critique, psychoanalytic models, and its emphasis on the productivity of reading form deeply, historicizing it, deconstructing it. While the general trajectory of this discourse stretches from Louis Althusser’s symptomatic reading of Marx in 1965, to Fredric Jameson’s crucial work on the political unconscious and theory as symptomatology, and Rosalind Krauss and T. J. Clark’s work on modern sculpture and painting, it is Manfredo Tafuri who is the most recognized symptomatic reader of architecture.

This seminar examines the foundational texts of symptomatic reading, beginning with readings of Louis Althusser, whose understanding itself requires a close reading of selected writings of Jacques Lacan. These readings will be joined with reminders about the importance of Walter Benjamin’s work to establish our core concepts. Selected theoretical writings of Tafuri will lead us to case studies of close readings of architecture. In more speculative parts of the course, we will extend our understanding of symptomatic reading with recent works in theory and architecture. The instructor will treat the history of this discourse and add to it a developing contemporary model of a theory of inscription.

This course is recommended for students enrolled in the Narratives Domain of the MDes program, doctoral studies focusing on architecture, and MArch and MLA students sufficiently prepared in theory.

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.