Building Simulation

This course is the third of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6126) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. 

Objective: The best intent does not always lead to the best performing design, as intuition and rules of thumb often fail to adequately inform decision making. Therefore, high-performance architecture increasingly utilizes simulation tools to eliminate some of the guesswork. Simulation is the process of making a simplified model of some complex system and using it to predict the behavior of the system. In this course, state-of-the-art computer simulation methods for ventilation (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and thermal/energy analysis will be introduced. 

Innovative techniques for using these models in the architectural design process will be explored.

The course will provide students with:
1. An understanding of building simulation methods and their underlying principles
2. Hands-on experience in using computer simulation models to support the design process
3. An increased understanding of high-performance environmental design strategies in architecture

Content: In this course, students will acquire skills in computerized building performance simulation for architecture while simultaneously using these skills to explore fundamental design issues such as building massing and envelope design. The course includes discussion of the benefits as well as the limitations of these methods. Topics include fundamentals such as modeling strategies, underlying physical principles, understanding simulation assumptions, and interpreting results with an emphasis on developing the ability to translate the analysis into design decisions. Through practice with the software tools, students develop a better understanding of physics in architecture and hone their own design intuition.
 

Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II

Integrated Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II engages diverse yet complementary disciplines, perspectives, and techniques to help identify, diagnose and constructively address consequential social challenges. The disciplines — or ‘frameworks’ — explored are sectioned into four modules.

The modules include:
– Business, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship
– Product Design
– Design of Social Innovation
– Product Management

The course aims to foster interdisciplinary learning and critical thinking, and provides student with a deeper examination of topics that build off Frameworks I.
 

Modules take place on Tuesday or Thursday, 2:30-5:30 PM. See the canvas page for details.

Note: A limited number of non-MDE students will be permitted to enroll in this module pairing: Design for Social Innovation (Spring 1) and Product Management (Spring 2). This two-module sequence must be taken together and occurs on Thursdays, 2:30-5:30 PM. The other listed modules (Business, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship; Product Design) are not open to enrollment.

The Architect as Producer: Theory as Liberatory Practice

In Teaching to Transgress, theorist, educator, and social critic bell hooks reclaims the word theory and challenges us to produce theory as a liberatory practice. hooks affirms that in the production of this theory “lies the hope of our liberation, in its production lies the possibility of naming all our pain–of making all our hurt go away.” Such a form of theory, hooks concludes, is necessary to build a mass-based resistance struggle: one in which there is no gap between theory and practice.

The past few years have brought the necessity of theory as liberatory practice to the foreground of discussions on architecture. The interconnected crisis of violent war, mass enforced migrations, global warming, precarity, and structural inequality have changed how we understand what architecture is and does. These and other events have highlighted the role of architecture in the rise of wealth accumulation, racism, patriarchy, land dispossession, labor struggle, and environmental disaster. In this course we examine how architects further these processes and how they might contribute to counter them by turning to the role of architecture within the relations of production.

In his essay “L’Architecture dans le boudoir,” architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri concludes by wondering what might happen were we to shift the focus from what architecture wishes to be or say, to the role the discipline plays within the capitalist system. Citing Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer,” Tafuri proposes that instead of asking about the attitude of a work to the relations of production, we should ask: what is its position within them? By keeping this central question in mind, he concludes, many of the so-called masterpieces of modern architecture come to take on a secondary or even marginal importance, and many debates are relegated to peripheral considerations.

The course responds to hooks and Tafuri’s challenges by thinking about architecture’s position within the relations of production through four interrelated topics: lands, materials, labors, and knowledges. We start by questioning where architecture happens, the land we stand on, the ways in which lands are transformed into real estate, and the role architects play in this process. We then move on to the materials, resources, and objects that architecture is made of, as well as the processes of extraction they are imbricated in. We address the bodies that participate in the making and maintenance of architecture, from building labor to the role of the architect as worker. We conclude by reflecting on the motivations that animate the discipline and its teaching, and the ways in which it is being unlearned and reimagined.

Students will be evaluated on class participation, discussion facilitation, short writing assignments, and a research project. This course is planned as a “lecture” with many small group activities and other alternative pedagogies. It qualifies as a BTC Distributional Elective.
 

Cities, Infrastructure, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart and Sustainable Technologies

Infrastructure plays a decisive role in urban development and in the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical perspective. History proves especially useful when dealing with the political dimension of urban infrastructure. From fortifications to smart technologies, infrastructure is inseparable from political intentions and consequences. This political dimension will constitute one of the threads of this lecture course. Other themes of the course will include the relation between cities and their hinterland, the progressive dematerialization of infrastructure, from walls or bridges to the invisible electronic networks that organize contemporary urban life, the rise of environmental concerns and their impact on infrastructural thoughts and practices, the key part played by infrastructure in social and racial inequality, the need to envisage infrastructure differently when dealing with informal settlements. Also of interest will be the changing relationships between cities, nature and infrastructure. More than ever, urban nature appears today as inseparable from infrastructure.

'Cities, Infrastructure, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies' suggests an alternative way to read cities and their evolution. Historical analysis will systematically serve as a basis to envisage contemporary issues such as the challenges of rising inequality and climate change. Since it aims to chart new territory, class discussions will be regularly organized after the presentations.

Readings related to the course content or expanding its perspectives are provided for each of the lectures and will be available on Canvas in pdf format. In addition to required readings, suggested readings are also provided for some of the weeks. Course evaluation will be based on class attendance, the conception of a couple of prompts related to topics of interest to students to be run on a generative AI program such as ChatGPT (more detailed explanation will be given at the beginning of the semester), as well as a final paper.

Modernization in the Visual United States Environment, 1890-2035

Here find an ecology of changes, a course on the ecosystem of change so rapid most thoughtful Americans know it as modernization.  Design remembered and forgotten shapes its core, but always a caveat rules:  modernization and progress prove different in the long run.  Modernization shatters peace, quiet, certainty, value, even joy, and it impacts Americans differently.  Modernization happens to most, hits hard and fast, corrodes slowly and wretchedly.  But the few shape it, anticipating and skewing trends, inventing new processes, products, and attitudes: marketing research, hunch, luck, and advertising—always advertising—advance an agenda open to disruption and mishap alike.  Advertising now flourishes as the third political party and the fourth branch of government, determines what inventions and design triumph or fail, and occludes the deeper forces which reward risk and punish ideology.  The type-writing machine changed desks and offices, sparked the crossword puzzle, shamed poor spellers, and renamed young women clerks typewriters: a generation later, calculating machines transformed office work and renamed secretaries computers.  Advertising made cigarette smoking synonymous with feminism, cereal and fruit breakfasts equivalent to one-child families, and horseless carriages indicators of status.  But as automobiles made children and dogs the organized prisoners of highway mechanization, the aristocracy which governs modernization taught children to ride horseback, kept its sailboats, cherished its never-changing summer-vacation cottages, wilderness camps, and other hideaways.  Aristocrats dance in ballrooms where men always lead.  Wealthy women account for about 90% of the highest-level luxury market.  Aristocrats always flee cities when plague hits: their refuges blend in, look traditional, pass unnoticed.  An American middle-class peasantry ogles the British royal family as closely as the Depression unemployed watched Hollywood films about millionaires. Graduate students dump solid tenth-hand furniture (brown goods to antique dealers) for assemble-it-yourself coated particle board junk movers shrink wrap.  Contemporary university students no more think about invention, marking, and advertising of the first cell phones than they do about the great corporations deciding in the summer of 1970 that women’s lib was good.  Here find a course which focuses on those who make, anticipate, accelerate, and evade modernization.

Note: This course is offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as AFVS 160.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Modernism, Its Practices, and Its Theories

Modernism has fundamentally to do with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events and, at the same time, new conceptualizations of their appearance, of changing event structures and temporalities, and of the relationships between objects, their producers and maintainers, and their audiences and consumers. A history and theory of modernism, then, must involve the category of the producing, using, viewing subject as well as the object, which itself includes buildings and projects, texts and discourses, and the contexts of their production and reception.

One of the most significant, sustained attempts to thematize the changed conceptualization of subjects and objects in modernity in a systematic aesthetic and critical theory is found in the body of work generated by Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, which is also related to the earlier writings of Georg Simmel and the later work of Manfredo Tafuri and Fredric Jameson. Theirs is a vivid diagnosis of the everyday life of the subject and object under industrial capitalism, as well as the specialized work of art and its necessary contradictions. At the same time, Martin Heidegger’s understanding of technology and his concern with the nature of working and production provided the basis for further work by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and a later generation of theorists of the modern and the postmodern. This course will use these texts to generate theories of modern architecture. Our question is not “How does modern architecture reflect the conditions of modernity,” but rather, positioned in modernity, “What can architecture (as subject, as object, as technique) do?’

We will propose a persistent dialectic for the study of the activity of modern architecture as a response to the contexts of modernity–the Tower and the Sphere–which can incorporate the conceits and paradoxes of the needle and the globe from Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, the pyramid and the labyrinth from Tschumi’s “The Architectural Paradox,” and the sphere and the labyrinth from Tafuri. Roughly, we will propose that the one domain, the Tower, tends toward connectivity and overdetermination by external forces, mainly technology and reification (the threat of the Thing), represented, for example, by the architecturally inert grid-elevation machine of the American skyscraper. The other domain, the Sphere, tends to be internalized and substantive, heterotopic, focusing on the relative autonomy of the discipline and the discourse, and producing self-reflexive thought. These persistent terms are, however, themselves dialectical–the tower internalizing the repetition of the typical plan as an architectural device, the spherical volume viewed from the exterior becoming a solid, geometric form. These negations and affirmation are refracted and reflected, fragmented and remontaged, in modernity through an increasingly thin but all the more present architectural surface–an intensifying facade assembly, the tenuous membrane between the architectural object and the metropolis, and a fading critical disciplinary boundary. It is at this sheer surface–at the junction of the interior and the exterior, subject and object, the Tower and Sphere–that we will inquire into the spacing work of architecture.

Urban Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative-Historical Origins and Applications

This course takes as its point of departure the historical and national origins of planning as a discipline, assesses its evolution over time and across developmental contexts, and situates our understanding of what has come to constitute “planning theory” in a deeper understanding of the political, economic, and social specificities and constraints on planning action. In understanding what might be referred to as planning praxis, we not only examine those social structures and economic as well as political power relations that enable or constrain preference for certain policies and processes of decision-making. We also examine the history of ideas about cities, debates over how the built environment should be designed and/or governed, and address longstanding conflicts over who should have the legitimacy or authority to undertake such decisions. The time span that we examine during this course begins in the late-19th and early 20th century and ends in the contemporary era. 

Histories of Landscape Architecture II

Histories II: Palimpsestic, Peripatetic, and Plotted Landscape Histories

Following in the footsteps of Aristotle’s Peripatetic School (from the ancient Greek, meaning to walk about) this course strolls conceptually and bodily through landscape history, tracing the deep roots of modern design history. Our investigation will begin with questioning the archive and the concept of who’s history. This meandering approach allows us to read land as palimpsestic text, and to thus juxtapose the traditional “canon” with historically excluded narratives, new research on environmental history, a fieldwork-based approach to design, and the underlying relevance of time to all of these concepts. The artifact, be it the site, the plan, or the text, is central throughout the semester. To be able to consider the artifact first and foremost, we will stroll and visit Harvard collections (the Peabody, Pusey, Harvard Archives, and Art Museum) and outdoor sites (rain or shine) across campus where we will learn about and experience spaces corporeally. In addition to on-campus site visits, class field trips also include Mount Auburn Cemetery. Assignments include active learning exercises during class time, a visual representation and textual description explaining how landscape/plant/environment/place knowledge has been passed down within your family or community of choice; a series of video recordings practicing public speaking skills; and for the final project a professional cover letter written in the guise of a historical figure of choice that will require historical research as well as study of contemporary professional documents.

Theories and Practices of Landscape Architecture

What do you need to know in order to understand this landscape? How do design culture and design thinking transform over time? How are cultural values embedded in the design of landscapes? This course is framed in terms of the relationship of landscape architecture to the evolving theorizations of nature and culture. In each class, we will map various critical assumptions, ideologies, and aspirations that inform how landscape is designed and interpreted. By learning to read landscapes and related projects of landscape architecture, we will study the constructedness of landscape. Conversely, we will also examine the capacities of landscape architecture to shape identity and ecology, reproduce or contest power relations and inequality, and commemorate diverse cultural meaning.

The course elaborates a working definition of theory as it relates to landscape practice. It contextualizes the discipline’s transition from a modernist paradigm in the West, to the gradual eradication of conceptual binaries and the pluralization of narratives in the late twentieth century. It considers landscape’s ‘social’ engagements to include non-human actors, and concludes with recent materialist approaches to landscape that emphasize its performance and flows in the era of global warming.

The course weaves together three kinds of investigations: one that focuses on built forms, another on the ideas and conceptual frameworks that guide the production of those forms, and a third that examines the retrospective interpretation of those forms. We will attend to diverse projects and topics, that may include border regions, urban landscapes, agricultural landscapes, colonial plantations, scientific gardens, territories of extraction, zones of environmental risk, successional forests, migrating ecosystems, national parks, native lands, domestic spheres, and postcolonial gardens. Through these sites, we will critically explore the spatial forms of exclusion, inclusion, conflict, and cooperation between and among people and their surroundings.

At the end of this class, students will understand the value and make use of theory in design, will be able to articulate the diverse intellectual, social, and political dimensions of landscapes, and to refer to a history of landscape architecture projects oriented to related issues. Students will also be able to articulate their priorities within the discipline. Assignments will include a combination of case study presentations, written responses to assigned readings and hands-on exercises designed to train students in the analysis of landscapes.

This course is open to all Harvard GSD students and also accepts cross-registered students.

Thesis project / Project Thesis

As the culminating effort for the Master of Architecture degree, a “Thesis” entails multiple expectations. It is a demonstration not only of competency and expertise, but of originality and relevance. A thesis is an opportunity to conceive and execute work that is both a specific project (delimited in scope, with a specific set of appropriate deliverables) as well as a declaration of a wider “Project” (possessing disciplinary value, and contributing to a larger discourse). This class will address both valences of the architectural  “project,” while providing space for students to develop methodological approaches for their own thesis.  Over the course of  a series of lectures and seminars, we will study the theory and practice of the architectural thesis by examining its institutional history and disciplinary development, in order to understand the conventions and possibilities of the format. In workshop sessions, as preparation for their own theses, students will work towards the articulation of their topics. This will include: identifying relevant precedents and existing literature; defining a site and program (however broad); and working through first iterations of working methods.  With these efforts, the aim of the course is for students to be equipped to undertake a thesis project in every sense.