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.

Designing Critical Practices

Today, landscape architecture is a field in active transformation. At a broad scale, the climate crisis is transforming the built and natural environment surrounding us—putting frontline communities at risk of warming, expanding oceans, inland flooding, and pollution, scorching our cities and open spaces, destroying the foundation of global biodiversity, threatening agricultural production, and entirely reconstituting what it means to design for places in the midst of profound and uncertain change. At the same time, shifting market forces, supply chain crises, technological advancements, diversifying client pools, and evolving societal attitudes toward open space are reshaping practice as we know it, rapidly expanding the reach and scope of design services while grappling to value them appropriately.
 
The ground has shifted beneath us, and the way we have practiced landscape architecture for the last century is no longer applicable. Our context requires a new approach, affecting both the work of design and the structure of the business itself. For too long, self-regard and siloed competition across the design fields have prevented us from looking elsewhere for inspiration—but today, emerging professionals and leaders alike have much to learn from the business models, operational structures, and management structures of firms in creative industries, technology, manufacturing, and beyond.
 
The central premise of this course: to prepare students for a changing market, we will honestly examine the current state at play in the design industry, analyzing a wide cross-section of firm typologies and scales, while also looking beyond the field for inspiration. We will investigate these ideas through detailed case studies, guest lectures, workshops, discussions, assignments, and student-led research.
 
The course is divided into two sections (1) Contemporary Landscape Architecture Practice Today and (2) Looking Outside the Field. The first examines methods and structures for practicing landscape architecture today and the second looks outside the field. Students will use the ideas shared during the two modules to imagine alternative frameworks for practice. Throughout the semester, students will be asked to consider both the broader forces affecting design today and real, actionable ways to meet these challenges through practice, culminating in a final project that will be shared and presented to the class for discussion.
 
In-class participation is essential for this seminar. Each section will begin with an in-person workshop designed to orient students with strategies, terminologies, and goals for the content to follow.

This course assumes entry-level familiarity with the basics of professional practice in landscape architecture—including business types, design phases and processes, RFP/Q processes, and other essential elements of contemporary landscape architecture firms. At the beginning of the semester, we will briefly review these fundamentals of practice, including workplace culture, systems, norms, and team hierarchies, in order to set the stage for examining new modes of practice.

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.
 

Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart 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.

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

Designed gardens and landscapes are cultural artifacts that encompass three main expectations: pragmatic needs, cultural significance, and aesthetic order. Although some landscape narratives often ignore needs (those of the users or the environment’s), reduce cultural meanings to a discourse on style, and focus on order as a problem in aesthetic theory, the fact remains that, almost without exception, one or more of these three criteria—needs, meanings, order—dominates the designed gardens and landscapes of every time and place. However, because gardens and landscapes are ephemeral and subject to many transformations, this course will consider their practical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects as embedded in a palimpsest of changing values. In order to do this, the course will not be structured around landscape architectural styles. Rather, it will examine a selection of topics that bring together thinkers and designers who live/have lived centuries apart. This will allow the class to unfold several issues that have shaped the profession through built work and intellectual inquiry, such as the recent reckoning about the discipline’s role and agenda, questions of race and the implicit violence of white archives and memorials, and the limits of the commonly accepted, tripartite taxonomy of nature—pristine, productive and genteel, with its implicit prioritization of the latter category at the expense of the first two or of anything in between.

Instructor’s talks will address contemporary designs alongside those conceived and implemented by our predecessors. Within this structure, instead of construing history as “the past,” we will consider, with Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, that every history is “contemporary history”: no matter how chronologically remote the facts under consideration may seem to be, in reality the writing of history always reflects, and is shaped by, present circumstances.

Urbanization and Development

This course examines the relationship between urbanization and development through an historical and contemporary lens, paying close attention to the ways that the growth and structure of cities in the late-industrializing world has influenced the economic, social, and political prospects of residents and their host nations, as well as vice-versa. Students will learn how to interrogate and deconstruct the assumed relationships between urbanization and economic development. Although the latter is frequently understood as employment and prosperity conditions driven by market and investment dynamics at territorial scales that both include and transcend the city, students will also be encouraged to think about "de-growth" strategies and the politics underlaying the emergence of this discourse. Students will become versed with the inter-relationships between urban growth and national or global economic priorities, on one hand, and the connections between cities and their surrounding regions on the other. They will then be asked to consider the implications of these relationships for equity, inclusion, ecological sustainability, and social as well as environmental justice, with the aim of identifying potential actions to advance these aims. In addition, we highlight the social and economic exigencies of citizens in the face of these relationships, examining their capacities to accommodate, modify, or reject the priorities, projects, and policies imposed by planners, designers, governing authorities, investors or other capitalists, and multilateral development agencies with specific urban development agendas. Readings draw primarily from Latin America, South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East, although on occasion evidence from Europe and the United States is used for contrast.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, 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 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

SPECIAL SCHEDULE NOTE: This course will meet ONLINE for the first course meeting, on Tuesday, September 5th. See Canvas site for more information.

Real Estate and City Making in China

Real estate has increasingly become a compelling force in the process of city making, one uniquely capable of leading and guiding multiple steps in the construct of vital urbanism: from conceiving an idea to constructing complex structures; from sourcing funding to creating master-planned communities; and from negotiating design forms to implementing urban public realms.   
 
A country like China is at once experiencing rapid urbanization while undergoing an unprecedented transformation in the mechanism of city making: the forces of real estate and the shifting roles played by public and private sectors are constantly challenging conventional city-building models, while defining and redefining their positions in the production of the built environment.  
 
This course, conducted as a research seminar, focuses on the interdependence between real estate and city making. It addresses both theoretical and empirical investigations on the concepts and paradigms that have shaped and are still shaping real estate practices and their impact on contemporary Chinese cities. It analyzes emergent real estate and urban development strategies, their respective financing structures, underlying domain expertise and urban organizational hierarchy.   

Thus, the pedagogical approaches of the course are as the following:  
    
1. to familiarize students with many aspects of real estate issues, especially those intersected with physical design and planning methods in the process of city making  
2. to introduce students to frameworks in approaching an unfamiliar real estate market  
3. to expose students to the linkage between real estate and city-making parameters, using China as a case study  
 
Students will work independently and in teams on selected themes to identify critical forces in real estate development and investment: how key real estate players, domestic or international, have formed their central business strategies, interacted with capital markets, and participated in the city-making process to facilitate and drive the formation of the built environment; and how emergent private sector leaders are integrating human capital, financial capital, and design intelligence, to reshape the form and composition of urban centers within China and beyond. With the investigative research framework set at the beginning of the semester, students will proceed to examine the city-making process through the lens of real estate, design, planning, finance, and land ownership structure, in parallel with readings and class discussions, to anticipate the trajectory of contemporary real estate development and city making. The class meets once a week and is open to students from all programs at the GSD as well as students from other departments within the university. 

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, 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 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Computer Vision (at SEAS)

Vision as an ill-posed inverse problem: image formation, two-dimensional signal processing; feature analysis; image segmentation; color, texture, and shading; multiple-view geometry; object and scene recognition; and applications.

This course follows the FAS academic schedule. Please reference FAS to see start of term information..