Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV

GSD 6242 is the final course in the Ecologies, Techniques and Technologies landscape core sequence. It is a required course for all MLA I, and MLA I AP students. The class introduces the concept of the poetics of a material landscape architecture. Each class participant will learn and develop skill in traditional, current and emerging practices of landscape making.

The learning objectives of this class are:
1. Develop skill in the use of the Diagnostic Section and Constructive Drawing as instruments of analytic observation of existing built landscapes and in the design conception, development, and documentation of material landscape propositions.

2. Develop skill in the application of the judgment of the senses to landscape making:
   2.1 The Differentiation of Size, Scale and Proportion
   2.2 The Application of Surface Refinements, Surface Diversity, and the Trace of the Hand

3. Understand that design proposes and workmanship disposes and that this dialectic is central to the making of a work of landscape architecture.

4. Know how and why to select a palette of landscape construction materials for a project. A material selection based on:
   4.1 Technical Performance
   4.2 Aesthetic/Symbolic/Emotional Response
   4.3 Environmental Performance
   4.4 Regulatory Mandate
   4.5 Economy – Measured as the Expenditure of Energy Over Time

5. Understanding the environmental and social implications of how “raw” materials are sourced and processed into “building” materials.

6. Develop skill in the design application of techniques of shaping materials for landscape construction:
   6.1 Wasting
   6.2 Forming
   6.3 Casting
   6.4 Depositing

7. Develop skill in the joining of materials as the source of detail design languages of landscape architecture.

8. Understand the logic of and develop skill in the design documentation of a work of landscape architecture.

Cases in Contemporary Construction

As the final component in the required sequence of technology courses, this professionally-oriented course develops an integral understanding of the design and construction of buildings and their related technologies: structural, constructional, and environmental. Building on fundamentals covered in GSD 6123: Construction Systems, the course looks in detail at examples of innovative construction techniques in wood, steel, and concrete structures. Building design and construction will be evaluated within the context in which technological innovation takes place by exploring the relationship of the principal project participants, such as designers, contractors, building product manufacturers, and the owner(s). On this, the course will introduce the fundamentals of managing design and construction projects as well as the principal project delivery methods and scheduling techniques. Aspects such as risk management and environmental and social impacts on projects will be introduced, as well as topics related to facilitating innovation and developing talent.

Class meetings concentrate on case studies of recent buildings, which students are expected to study prior to class meetings. Each main course theme will be introduced by a lecture, and certain cases may have participants from the project team as guest speakers. Detail drawings as well as issues of project and construction management are introduced for discussion. Computer applications on structures, construction, environmental control systems, and techniques and decision-making frameworks on managing projects and teams are an integral part of the course.

Prerequisites: GSD 6123, 6125, and 6229, or equivalent.

Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II

This course is required for all first-year MLA I and MLA I AP students.

Topography is one of the primary and most powerful elements of landscape architecture, forming a foundation for plant growth, habitat, the flow of water and energy, and human experience. This course is dedicated to developing students’ facility in reading the land and manipulating topography and water flow through a variety of representational tools with a focus on plan drawings of contours, slopes and spot elevations, models, and section drawings. Students will learn techniques that cumulatively build toward an ability to resolve difficult grading problems with many layers of complexity.

The course begins with reading the land and understanding the relationship between the ground surface and water flow. Topics move on to geomorphology; the process of grading and contour manipulation; the conventions of grading representation, terminology and communication in the construction industry; as well as accessibility codes. The second part of the course focuses on water quality and quantity, introducing techniques used to calculate the amount of water flowing over a site and the various ways that the topography can be manipulated to slow, convey, filter, collect or disperse water to help improve its quality and control water flow emanating from a range of storm events. The case studies and precedents presented throughout the course help to illustrate a broad range of approaches to problem solving and the act of sculpting the land.
 

This course focuses on the agency of landform and water flow in the creation and design of landscape. At the end of the course, students will be able to manipulate contours toward a given intention and will understand the factors that contribute to stormwater volumes and flows and ways to embrace and incorporate those factors toward a desired design intent. 
 
During this course, students will learn to:
– Read the land and water, manipulate contours and become familiar with conventions for drawing and communicating intents
– Design topography for human experience
– Collect and clean stormwater
– Support living systems.

The course is taught as a series of lectures and individual, short-term exercises that focus on core competencies, and one longer-term design exercise.  Live lectures will be supplemented with asynchronous resources such as pre-recorded lectures, recordings of select class lectures, and written primers. Instructors anticipate that some shifts may be required during the term to respond to yearly shifts in student needs.
 

Each week will typically include two class sessions of 1.25 hours each (2.5 hrs total), consisting of one lecture session attended by all students, and one ‘section’ session dedicated to a smaller group of students. Section sessions typically will be dedicated toward questions and deeper dives into the ongoing assignments, and some time to work on assignments. MLA I and AP students will be divided equally into each section. Assignments will require additional time outside of class. Assignment deadlines are focused on the first half of term, and sections toward the end of term are more focused on lectures and visiting lecturers.

Prerequisites: Experience drafting 2-dimensional plan and section drawings to scale in Autocad or Rhino.

Materials

This course explores the science and design of materials. How do we classify materials? Why do we build with certain materials? What are the energy, health, and societal implications of materials? And what does the future of materials look like? The goal of this course is to enable students to understand the full systems ecology of materials and how to leverage this knowledge in building design.

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

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.