Digital Media: Not Magic
According to folklore, Michelangelo fell to his knees upon seeing the Florentine fresco Annunciation, went silent, and eventually concluded that the image of the Virgin must have been made through divine intervention since its brushwork surpassed human talents. When the computer graphics company Blue Sky released its commercial for Chock Full o’Nuts in 1994, The New York Times called the rendering of a walking and talking coffee bean “computer magic.” It was the best way to explain the video’s special effects. What else would one call using lines of code to give an inanimate object life? Or the transfiguration of mere paint into saintly likeness?
Esoteric processes have long imbued artforms with power, rendering audiences speechless, awestruck, and affected. In the nineties, anthropologist Alfred Gell proposed that mundane things can be construed as “enchanted forms” when differences exist between an audience’s technological expectations and an object’s facture. This contradiction gives rise to a belief that artifacts and artisans can possess otherworldly faculties. In reality, everyday forms become enchanted not through magic, but through precise construction methodologies.
This course seeks to articulate what aesthetic categories are at play when technology is perceived to be magical. A working theory for the class is that more nuanced descriptions for the transformations found in computational and craft traditions are good frameworks for understanding architectural effects. We will explore these ideas in synchronous lectures and case studies, and asynchronous workshops. Readings include texts by Alfred Gell, Walter Benjamin, Beatriz Colomina, and Felicity Scott. Case studies include projects by Anne Holtrop, Ensamble, Junya Ishigami, and examples from imperial architecture.
Note: Class discussion is held in a debate format.
Landscape Representation I
The first in a two-semester sequence, Landscape Representation I introduces students to the rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture as inextricably intertwined with the concept of representation. This relationship is grounded in landscape’s history and conventions, and expanded through a wide range of techniques that embrace the highly generative agency of representation in the design process.
These explorations will be supported by tutorials introducing techniques, skills, and workflows that engage both analog and digital methodologies, from physical modeling and hand drawing to software such as Rhino and the Adobe Creative Suite. Students will iterate between different modes of abstraction and translation to understand both site and agent as imagined, created, and ultimately designed through their various representations.
Spatial Analysis [Module 1]
Planning decisions are often idealized as being "evidence-based" or "data-driven." Spatial data often comprise the data and evidence that support such these decisions. In this course, you will learn how to create spatial datasets, both by assembling them from existing sources and by collecting data in the field. You will also learn data visualization techniques to identify spatial relationships within and between spatial datasets. You will learn to identify the arguments that mapmakers make through their maps and to use spatial data visualization to make your own arguments. Student in this course are expected to have completed the preterm workshop for MUP students and software tutorials on ArcGIS, R, and RStudio.
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 Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Representation for Planners [Module 1]
One task of an urban planner is to grapple with and understand a series of complicated processes that directly affect the organization and experience of place. Social, cultural, political, and economic forces all influence the complexity of a site. The planner must interpret these forces, arrive at a position in response to them, and make them legible to a wide array of stakeholders. Beyond the proposed plan and strategy, another critical contribution of the planner is to communicate, persuade, and be an agent for reaching consensus among competing agendas.
While urban planners need to communicate through a variety of means, visual representation of abstract concepts and processes is a skill needed to speculate and make intelligible ideas on the future of urbanism and the environment. Effective visualizations not only support verbal proposals but can stand alone as standalone artifacts that communicate new information to their audience.
In the service of these various roles, Representation for Planners provides first semester urban planning students with the graphic and technical skills needed to reason, design, and communicate. Students will learn the basics of visual representation and gain familiarity with the technical tools essential for making maps and exploring relationships in the physical, regulatory, and demographic dimensions of the built environment. Additionally, we will use computer software and modeling tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and SketchUp to distill ideas into effective graphic presentations. Each program presents opportunities to communicate visual information in different ways and, over the course of the class, workflows to operate between programs will be reinforced. Students will learn how these techniques can be used as part of the planning process itself and communicate with broader audiences.
The general structure for each week is as follows—on Tuesdays, a conceptual underpinning of representation will be presented with specific examples. Students will engage a specific exercise on Thursday classes synthesizing the representational techniques presented on Tuesday with the software skills introduced. Readings will also be discussed at the beginning of class.
This half-semester module works in tandem with Course 2128, Spatial Analysis.
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 Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Architectural Representation II [Module 2]
There has never been just one geometry. In mathematics, the Euclidean, projective, vector, and topological approaches each have different starting points, theorems and methods of study. In parallel, this course defines a geometry as a set of principals about relationships in space that can be built on as a foundation and extended by exploration. From this point of view, materials, construction systems, assembly processes, ergonomics, statics, vision and drawing are each geometries in their own right with different principles and metrics of evaluation that may be deeply pursued on their own terms. These geometries exist alongside the abstract geometry of surfaces; all are present in any work of architecture. This course is about resolving interactions between geometries and seeking discoveries in their convergence and divergence.
This course proceeds directly from the first module. The first module introduces abstract geometry and explores its interactions with vision, drawing and the flatness often demanded by architecture. The second module explores its interactions with thickness, materiality, and architectural function. Geometry is reframed as a site that forces a confrontation between form and architectural constraint, between design intention and assembly systems.
Module I and II are planned as a pair with significant overlap in instruction and assignment sequence. Some content that pertains to Module II will be delivered in guest lecture format during Module I and visa versa. Module II will conclude with a project that brings together themes from both halves.
Module II focuses on reflecting practice. In any real building project, the richness of the interplay between goals and constraints arising from the extraordinary specificity of site, client, material economy and interdisciplinary discussion makes the accurate resolution of intersections in space a practical necessity and brings geometry out of abstraction. Geometry provides a means of adjusting flexibly as design progresses towards construction and new requirements reveal themselves. The exercises in this class create a microcosm of these interactions with the goal of developing tools for precision, adaptability, permutation, resolution of tension and translation to physical reality.
The assignments and lectures in Module II take place in two modes: simulation and prototype, iterating and fabricating. These two fundamental and parallel approaches to the process of architectural discovery are taught through specific techniques of parametric modeling and physical model making. Parametric modeling is taught as a tool for the adaptation of a system to the constraints of fabrication and architecture, rather than as a generative tool for form. Model making is taught as an experimental discipline for testing materials and assembly rather than a representation tool.
Over the exercises, students study the geometry of surface paired with the geometry of interacting architectural forces (material thickness, layered construction, supporting frames, circulation, flat floors). These constraints in dialogue lead to architectural fragments that perform a balancing act. These requirements are those which abstract geometry, traditionally, has trouble accepting and are also lasting sources of invention in a discipline that must cross from imagination to reality.
Architectural Representation I [Module 1]
Architectural Representation I: Projective Disciplines
This course examines systems of projection as constructs that mediate between our spatial imagination and built form. Projective systems have defined relationships between masons, engineers, industrial designers, mathematicians, cartographers, painters, and architects. Their historical origins and evolution into digital culture will be studied through the theory and practice of projective and descriptive geometry. Invented as techniques to draw form, these discourses are the bases of the intractable reciprocity between representation and three-dimensional space. The objective of this course is to uncover the centuries-old and still ongoing relationship between representation, form, and construction-more generally, the reciprocity between three-dimensional form and flatness.
Principles of parallel (orthographic), central (perspectival), and other less common forms of projective transformation explain many processes of formal production–vision, subjective experience, drawing, modeling, and building. Beginning with 2D drawing exercises and transitioning to 3D modeling, we will interrogate the effects of the digital interface and mechanics of modeling software on contemporary discourse. As students explore the power and limitations of the flat drawing plane, they will also develop literacy in primitive and complex surface geometries-their combinatory aggregation, subdivision, and discretization–as they relate back to the most reductive of architectural forms-the planar surface. Ultimately, these techniques will be placed into a productive dialogue with architectural and programmatic imperatives. The design tools of the digital and post-digital age have allowed designers to invent and produce form with increasing facility, eliminating the need to understand the consequential and demanding relationships between geometry and architecture. The course will involve close formal reading of buildings as a way to introduce students to the practice of reading, drawing, and writing architecture.
Course Structure
Composed of both lectures and workshops, the course is participatory and is equal parts theoretical and technical. Exercises will involve two-dimensional digital drawing, digital and physical modeling, and basic Grasshopper. This course is required for all first-year MArch I students.
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 Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Urban Economics and Market Analysis
This course introduces economic frameworks for understanding both the benefits and challenges of living in, working in, and managing cities and their built environments. Urban economics incorporates the concept of space into canonical economic models and provides a lens for analyzing and describing the nature and organization of economic activity in urban settings. We will explore questions around why cities exist in the first place, what determines their growth, and what features contribute to their economic advantages as well as their unique problems. Why do some cities grow faster than others? Can cities ever get too dense or large? We will draw from typical urban economic models and frameworks but will also discuss and test their limits when applying them to complex urban systems. For example, how well do these models address issues of segregation and informality in cities? The course will draw from research and scholarship in the field of urban economics, as well as actual cases, policy applications and guest lecturers employing these concepts in the field.
The course also explores urban economics and market analysis as they intersect with real estate practice. Students learn, in a hands-on way, how to employ urban economics concepts and frameworks, including location theory, the interaction between local and global spatial dynamics, demographic trends, and regional economic forecasting, for data-driven market analyses useful for real estate and urban development practice more broadly. Students who take this class will be able to use economic frameworks and methods to design, evaluate and implement planning and policy interventions as well as understand the role of real estate markets in a range of urban settings. This course assumes no previous coursework in economics and will require some, but not extensive, math and graphing. This course satisfies the Economic Methods requirement for urban planning students, is required for Master in Real Estate students, and is open to cross-registrant students from other schools (including MIT). MRE students may pursue a waiver of this requirement by successfully passing a waiver examination administered during orientation week.
Note: MRE students can place out of this course.
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 Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Affordable Housing and Community Development
This course is intended for students interested in the affordable housing crisis. Can governments alone solve this problem or are public-private approaches an answer? The course explores how affordable housing is created, preserved, and managed, as well as how community development strategies incorporate and extend beyond the provision of affordable housing. Specific methods to sponsor, permit, finance, design, construct, manage, and preserve affordable housing are presented, including use of public subsidies and regulatory mandates.
MRE students have prioritized enrollment in the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery. All MRE students who select this special MRE elective in the Lottery will be enrolled, with additional seats potentially available to other students.
Urbanization and Development
This course examines the relationship between urbanization and development, paying close attention to the ways that the growth and structure of cities have and will influence the economic, social, and political prospects of their residents as well as the broader national contexts in which they are located, and vice-versa. With a focus on both theory and empirical evidence, the course’s main objective is to interrogate and deconstruct assumed ideas about relationships between urbanization and economic development, and to discuss the implications for equity, inclusion, ecological sustainability, and social as well as environmental justice. Although a majority of readings focus on Latin America, South Asia, East Asia, or other parts of the late industrializing world, where both positive and negative synergies between urban and national economic development have often set global South cities and nations on pathways different from advanced capitalist contexts, the course also uses several readings on the US and seeks to identify similarities and differences between various developmental contexts. It thus asks whether and how historical and/or contemporary patterns of urban growth are similar or different in global south and global north cities, and with what implications for urban futures? A second and related question that threads through this course is whether planners and designers in both the global North and the global South will need to operate differently if they are to secure a just and sustainable future for their residents? Given the fact that many of the current local-to-global threats of ecological destabilization resulting from anthropogenic climate change are themselves byproducts of prior patterns of national industrialization, resource extraction, and urban growth, will we need new territorialities of governance – including those that span or bypass the urban or even national scales and perhaps operate regionally – if planners and designers are to preserve and protect cities, nations, and citizens in both the immediate and long-term future?
The course is reading-intensive and geared towards graduate students from across the planning, design, and social science disciplines. It has no prerequisites.
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.
Housing and Urbanization in the United States
This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those with an interest in urban policy and planning with a broad background on why housing matters and how its unique attributes a) give rise to certain policy and planning challenges and b) should shape how practitioners respond to these challenges. A major theme of the course is that consequences of previous policy and planning interventions have had lasting effects. These are reflected today in continued residential segregation by race and income, the persistence of barriers to affordable and healthy housing, and gaps in homeownership rates and housing wealth by race and ethnicity. The theme of structural racism as shaping access to housing over US history will be examined at some length.
The course first lays out a framework for understanding the roles housing plays in individuals’ lives, neighborhoods, and the metropolis. Class sessions examine the unique attributes and roles of housing, including the role of homes as constitutive of the private and domestic realms, housing as an icon and encoder of social status, and housing as a commodity. This section of the course also explores housing as a driver of urbanization and shaper of neighborhoods, as well as theories of neighborhood change.
The next four sessions of the course focus on government interventions into housing in the United States from the beginning of urbanization up to the 1960s. Classes cover early efforts to eradicate slums and improve housing for the poor; systematic efforts to enforce segregation by race in the early 20th century including the practice of redlining; federal involvement in homeownership and suburbanization, ; the policy motivations and design of early public housing and urban renewal programs; and local interventions to regulate the development of housing and access to it, particularly in suburbs.
The third section of the course focuses on a second wave of interventions arising in the 1960s in response to unanticipated consequences of earlier interventions, including public housing and urban renewal, as well as responses to demographic and economic shifts and the Civil Rights and citizen participation movements. This section of the course examines policy interventions aimed at affordability, including rental subsidy programs, fair housing law, and community development programs, and reflects new ideas about who should be in charge of revitalization plans and where federal assistance should be targeted.
The final section of the class takes us to the present, examining more recent trends shaping housing and planning and policy interventions. Sessions will focus on the housing and foreclosure crisis and its aftermath; recent trends in and responses to concentrated poverty and segregation by race and income; and gentrification. We will also take an in-depth look at the current housing situations of low-income households and housing’s relationship to poverty and health. Final classes will look at the implications of the ongoing affordability crisis for future housing supply, as well as demographic shifts and climate change that are forcing planners and policymakers to reevaluate the design of our housing stock and its location. Given the slow departure from the housing sphere by the federal government, these sessions will necessarily focus more on local responses to housing issues.