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.

Structural Design I

This course introduces students to the analysis and design of structural systems. The fundamental principles of statics, structural loads, and rigid body equilibrium are considered first. The course continues with the analysis and design of cables, columns, beams, and trusses. The structural design of steel follows, culminating in the consideration of building systems design. The quantitative understanding of interior forces, bending moments, stresses, and deformations are an integral part of the learning process throughout the course. Students are expected to have completed all prerequisites in math and physics.

Objectives:

Topics:

We will be placing a copy of “Structures” (7th Edition): Daniel Schodek, Martin Bechthold on reserve in the Loeb Library. This text is NOT a course requirement but will be on reserve as a reference for those seeking additional background information on course topics.

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.  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. Architecture students are welcome.

 

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.
 

Comparative Planning Regulation

This course provides an overview of the institutional and legal framework for planning through comparative lenses. It will examine how institutional structures and legal rules provide the sources and limits to planning authorities in different societies, and how planning systems regulate urban and regional issues through different approaches. Four national planning prototypes will be specifically addressed in the course: American, British, German, and Chinese, but comparisons from other countries will be drawn on certain topics. Students will be encouraged to explore such comparisons in their targeted countries or city regions.

The main objective of the course is to enhance students’ understanding of the ways that planning functions in different regimes and the tensions being resolved between the requirements of public welfare provision, private property rights, sustainable growth, justice, and urban planning. At the heart of the discussion lies an acknowledgment that planning is not a single process with a universally accepted outcome, but divergence and convergence happen across different systems, and comparison is instrumental to understanding their development.

The course will begin with three fundamental factors that shape the structure of planning regulation:  a society’s attitude toward property rights, the role of national and local governments and their relationship to each other, and the different nature of legal frameworks. 

Then the course discussion will cover a series of topics with a comparison of different approaches by different countries traditionally and how they evolved:

Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning in the Global South

This course starts from the premise that urban politics and governance arrangements shape the character, form, and function of cities as well as the planning strategies used to make them more just, equitable, and sustainable.  Using a focus on cities in the developing world, the course examines an array of governance structures (centralized versus decentralized institutions; local versus national states; participatory budgeting, etc.) and political conditions (democracy versus authoritarianism; neoliberal versus populist versus leftist party politics; social movements) that are relatively common to cities of the global south.

The course is structured around a comparative analysis of theories and cases that give us the basis for documenting the ways that politics affect urban policy and the built environment of the city more generally. The course’s critical approach to case studies and policy prescriptions will also prepare students to formulate relevant planning strategies in the future. Among a range of policy domains, special attention is paid to transportation, housing, mega-project development, land policy, and environmental sutainability, with most examples drawn from Latin America, South and East Asia, and Africa.

Do No Harm: Dilemmas in Planning for Health

Planners have long imagined themselves as physicians attending to the good health of cities and the communities living in them. Do No Harm unpacks the complex connections between environmental health, public health, and city planning. The course title, a nod to both the Hippocratic Oath and the creed of social reformer Florence Nightingale, represents a challenge to students preparing to manage the discrete, conflicting interests of that most complex of organisms–the metropolis. 

This class uses housing as a starting point for a sectional slice of inquiry that spans from the underground to the air that surrounds us. We will discuss how the design, policy, geography, ownership model, and maintenance of housing influence various public and environmental health metrics, and what levers are available to planners to influence those outcomes. We will explore and evaluate tools of assessment and intervention and identify points of leverage. Within this framework, students are expected to bring their own interests, disciplines, and experience to bear on a semester where our focus will range from affordable and simple tools at the housing-health nexus (smoke detectors, mosquito nets) to more complicated questions of ethics, objectives, and priorities. 

Together we’ll consider the nexus between health and planning as an ongoing process of experimentation, monitoring, learning, and adaptation, with the aim of constantly improving the conditions that promote health for all populations, but with a particular focus on improvements that alleviate the inequities currently experienced by segregated and disinvested communities around the world.

The class will be divided into two streams–input and action. In the input part of the class students will study famous and infamous stories about how our decisions can harm or heal communities, such as Haussmannian hygienist efforts in France, the rise of air-conditioning in Global South cities, or slum clearance in the United States. In the action component groups of students will develop an approach to addressing a real problem in a real place, using housing as a lever for better health. These may be speculative or tailored for a client who works at this nexus between planning and health (the Parisian Roofscapes). These may be speculative or tailored for a client who works at this nexus between planning and health. These outputs may take the form of written reports, graphic visualizations, or creative endeavors which students will refine and pitch at midterm and final presentations.  

We’ll ask: What are the key health issues that should concern those in planning and related fields? Can physical design and planning alone improve health? In a world of finite resources, how do we weigh competing priorities and evaluate the costs and benefits of our interventions? Do we need values systems to guide or restrain technocratic evidence-based approaches? Where are the limits of our responsibility for health outcomes in our jurisdictions? 

This course will equip you with the understanding, vocabulary, and tools you need to make health a part of your future practice, whether you become a housing advocate, a land use planner, a developer, an urban designer, a transportation planner, or some other role entirely. For those who come from the world of public health and environmental policy, you will gain new insight into the powers and politics that enable and constrain planners, architects, and other practitioners in the city.

Real Estate Private Equity and Capital Markets [Module 2]

Through lectures, case studies, site visits and expert panel discussions, this course explores the evolution of institutional real estate capital markets with a particular focus on market activity over the past decade. Capital markets embody a complex ecosystem of public and private equity and debt that finances real estate activities across the spectrum.  

The business model and investment objectives of capital purveyors depend on a variety of factors. Our classes will highlight key real estate investment concepts such as identifying risks and opportunities, real estate valuations, procuring investment capital, risk management and alignment of interests.  Industry experts also will discuss the current macro environment, key market concerns, capital availability, cost of capital and opportunistic and thematic investment strategies. By the end of the course, students will have gained a functional framework and understanding of how real estate private equity and capital markets function, the state of the industry and markets going forward.

Consistent, active engagement and speaking extemporaneously are important components of success in this class and the real estate industry. We expect that students will be prepared for class by having read speaker bios, reading materials, and completing assigned study questions in advance of class.  All classes will have a least one industry leader present and available to engage in open discussion with the class.  One of our class sessions will include visiting an actual project and understanding the investment thesis, execution and current status of this investment.  

There are four individual graded homework assignments required to be completed in advance of each of classes 2, 3, 4, and 6.  The course will not have a final exam. 
 

MRE students who enter this course in Limited Enrollment Course Lottery will be automatically enrolled.