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.

Enrollment is limited to students in the GSD MDes Mediums Domain.

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 and exclude the right to occupy the city. With this in mind, this proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, historically, spatially and socially: how, when, and why it becomes legible and desirable, who gets the right to create it and for whom; and whether different historical moments or political and/or spatial contexts enable, constrain, or transform the “social production of the public.” Among other things, through lectures, discussions, and debates we 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 social justice.

Enrollment is limited to students in the GSD MDes Publics Domain.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 10th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Proseminar in Landscape Architecture

How do we understand a landscape? This proseminar explores epistemologies that constitute the field of landscape architecture. The proseminar will introduce MLA II students to a range of landscape knowledge and practice from around the world, and the implications for design and research. The focus is on developing a critical perspective from understanding landscape architecture theory, practice, and speculation from diverse, climatic, cultural, social, and racial backgrounds.

The proseminar takes a global perspective, addressing multiple definitions of the field of landscape architecture. We will ask what it means to practice professionally in various parts of the world, especially in those regions, such as most of Africa, that have no formal association of landscape architects. In a 1961 essay, “A Table for Eight,” Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, the founding president of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, proposed that “the landscape architect who was first called a landscape gardener is still surely wrongly named.” Jellicoe went on to call for a single word to describe the profession, a term that would exist between all countries. While we will speculate on what this word might be, the proseminar’s starting point is that the field should be open to a plurality of understandings of landscape architecture rather than a single, universal, term.

To help with our inquiry into diverse forms of landscape knowledge and practice, we will explore a range of recourses available at Harvard University including the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Map Collection. GSD faculty will also speak about their current interests within the historical context of the school. To this end, the proseminar serves as an introduction to the department, the school, and the university.

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. 

The Picturesque: Nature // Artifice

This seminar explores the legacy of picturesque image-making from the eighteenth century to the present. From its roots in eighteenth-century debates on the English landscape, the picturesque has never been far from broader political questions of localism, indigeneity, and the management of land and labor. The course situates the picturesque within the empiricist tradition of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith before tracing its expression in the built environment, with the goal of reading European encounters with colonial landscapes back into histories of modern architecture and urban planning. We will pair writings on the eighteenth-century landscape garden (William Gilpin, Uvedale Price), nineteenth century vernacular revivalism and medievalism (John Ruskin, Camillo Sitte), and twentieth century Townscape (Nikolaus Pevsner, Reyner Banham) with examinations of the circulation of ideas, forms, artifacts, and architects across colonial space. We will also pay close attention to the embodied nature of the picturesque and its gendered and raced dimensions, as well as the potential of digital tools to redefine traditional picturesque methodologies. The final third of the course will examine the possibilities the picturesque offers for contemporary practice, reflecting on design approaches to climate change, urban informality, and urban regeneration and place-making.

Students will be evaluated on class discussion and short writing assignments, and will submit a final paper alongside a design project.

This is an advanced history elective open to students across GSD degree programs. Some previous coursework in the history and theory of architecture is recommended, but not required.

Critical Boston: Challenge and Opportunity in a City Undergoing Rapid Change

This course will examine the rapid changes to the urban fabric of Boston and Cambridge. How are communities addressing rapid growth and gentrification? How effective are the steps being taken to adjust to changing climate? What does development pressure mean for the historic fabric of the city? The class will focus on communities where development is radically changing urban character, among them Alston, the Seaport, and Kendall Square. Students will study the history of these areas and evaluate how new building is reshaping them. Special emphasis will be placed on short and medium-form critical writing.

In-class field trips will take students to explore communities and projects in the area, and will be supplemented by discussions with architects, historians, planners, developers, city officials, and critics.

Each student will complete several short critical assignments and one final project, in a format (written, audio, video) of their choice. They will also lead a tour of the project of their choice.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.