Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture
This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a conspectus, a survey of the field, but one in which the underlying nature (made and found), boundaries, contours, and texture of this field—in fact several disparate fields—is made the object of close scrutiny. We will define landscape architecture as we survey it. In pursuing an intermittent chronological narrative, the lectures will place site-specific emphasis on a number of cognate disciplines (hydrology, forestry, geology, agronomy, geography, hunting, inter alia), in the context of endemic and transplanted visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, and cities, we will be attentive to surrounding formations of discourse (the pastoral, the picturesque, the emblematic, the Adamic and Edenic) that have and continue to imbue them with meaning.
Studies of the Built North American Environment: since 1580
North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs, and as depicted in fiction, poetry, cartography, television, cinema, and advertising and cybernetic simulation.
This course will meet in a temporary location for the first three weeks of the semester. The intial location is Boylston Hall, room 105.
Philosophy of Technology: From Marx and Heidegger to AI, Genome Editing, and Geoengineering (HKS)
Technology shapes how power is exercised in society, and thereby also shapes how the present changes into the future. Technological innovation is all around us, and new possibilities in fields like artificial intelligence, genome-editing and geoengineering not only reallocate power, but might transform human life itself considerably, to the point of modifying the essence of what it is to be human. While ethical considerations enter prominently, the philosophy of technology is broader than its ethics. It aims to interpret and critically assess the role of technology for human life and guide us to a more thoughtful integration of technology in our individual lives and in public decision making. This course aims to teach you to do just that, starting with basic stances and key figures in the field and then progressing towards a number of challenges around specific types of technology as they arise for the 21st century. At times it is tech optimism that dominates these debates (sometimes even techno-boosterism that sees technology as key to heaven on earth), at other times it is more low-spirited attitudes from romantic uneasiness to doom-and-gloom Luddism and technology-bashing. A closer look at these attitudes – alongside reflection on how technology and power are intertwined — will help generate a more skeptical attitude towards all of them and contribute to more level-headed debates, which is badly needed.
This course is jointly-listed with HKS as DPI-207.
It will take place at HKS in Wexner room 330. There is an additional course meeting on Fridays from 12-1:15 in Littauer Bldg L230 (HKS).
The Idea of Environment
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations, and actions that calls them to intervene—that is, to make a plan, solve a problem, create a product, or strategize a process. They use various measures to assess and project their interventions from beauty and efficiency to systems and sustainability. Today, increasing volatility and uncertainty of the environment, however, alongside a growing sense and presence of crises and disasters, compels us to reconsider how we have imaged and imagined, defended and critiqued, planned and designed the environment. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.
This class is a seminar focused on reading and discussion. Course participants will be required to submit weekly reading responses, to contribute to discussions online and in class, and to develop an original research and/or design project over the course of the semester.
This course will meet in Gund 109 on Friday, September 2nd.
Theories of Landscape as Urbanism
This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics describing landscape’s embeddedness in processes of urbanization as well as economic transformations informing the shape of the city. The course introduces students to landscape as a form of cultural production, as a mode of human subjectivity, as a medium of design, as a profession, and as an academic discipline. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and case study projects, students will be introduced to landscape through the lenses of capital, labor, material, subject, and environment. The first half of the course revisits the origins of landscape in response to the societal and environmental challenges of industrialization and the attendant transformations in industrial economy shaping the modern metropolis. The second half of the course repositions recent discourse on landscape as urbanism in relation to the economic and territorial transformations associated with ongoing urbanization at the planetary scale.
The first quarter of the course introduces the origins of landscape as a genre of painting and the invention of the ‘new art’ of landscape architecture as responses to urbanization and their attendant social, economic, and cultural transformations. This portion of the course describes the material and cultural contexts in which landscape was conceived as well as the sites and subjects it invoked. The second quarter of the course describes the emergence of city planning from within landscape architecture and the subsequent impoverishment of the field in the absence of its urban contents. This portion of the course introduces the aspirations and implications of ecologically informed regional planning in the 20thcentury, as well as the ongoing ideological effects of that agenda in the context of neoliberalism.
The third quarter of the course introduces the discourse and practices of landscape urbanism over the past two decades. This portion of the course surveys the discursive and projective potentials of an ecological urbanism, as distinct from those of ecological planning, and speculates on the recent formulation of projective ecologies, among other discursive formations shaping the field. The final quarter of the course follows the transition from region to territory, and from regional urbanization to planetary urbanization. This portion of the course describes landscape’s role as a medium of cultural production and critical revelation in relation to the increased scale and scope of anthropogenic impacts across the planet.
Course readings and supplementary multimedia materials are made available for asynchronous review via Canvas. Course meetings are held in person bi-weekly (Lectures Wednesdays 10:30-11:45 and Lectures+Discussions Fridays 16:30-17:45). Weekly discussions sections are led in person by Teaching Fellows (13:30-14:45 or 15:00-16:15). Students are invited to contribute to discussions, prepare brief response papers, and complete a design research dossier on a topic attendant to the course content at the end of the term. The course is required for candidates in the Master in Landscape Architecture Program, is recommended for candidates in the Ecologies domain of the Master in Design Studies Program, and invites elective students from all programs and departments of the School.
This course will not meet on Wednesday, August 31st. It will meet for the first time on Friday, September 2nd.
Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD
What does it take to complete a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design? The seminar introduces different types of theses that might be produced by students, whether textual, design-focused, or based in some other medium, such as film. It addresses topic and question identification, research methods, case selection, the craft of thesis production, managing the student-advisor relationship, and techniques for verbally defending a thesis.
Over the semester, students identify and refine their thesis topic, solidify their relationship with a thesis advisor, and produce a thesis proposal. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a solid thesis proposal and have the necessary intellectual foundation to complete their thesis by the end of the academic year.
Course meetings combine input from faculty, group discussions, progress reports by students, and reflections on next steps. The course will include a midterm and final review of students' proposals, to be attended by faculty and critics.
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 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 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 following:
1. to introduce students to frameworks in approaching an unfamiliar real estate market
2. to familiarize students with many aspects of real estate issues, especially those intersected with physical urban design and planning methods and perspectives
3. to expose students 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 and guided by the instructor's lectures each week, 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.
Due to the Labor Day holiday, this course will meet for the first time at its standard time on Wednesday, August 31st.
Giography
Neoliberalism has given globalization a bad name. But the age after World War II has also produced détente – ironic word – the disappearance of blocs, and triggered the elimination of many obstacles to exchange and the massive facilitation of all forms of global interaction. Individual lives do not take place in a single geographical location, their episodes are increasingly dispersed. It is only logical that this revolution also demands a new type of biography: not a linear narrative based on sequential chapters, but a layering of simultaneous lives that are now lived in a range of fundamentally different cultures and environments, each engagement profound enough to require its own examination.
In that case, the single memoir becomes an implausible model, it needs to be replaced by a cluster-memoir, a stacking of almost independent stories that reconstruct the internal coherence, causalities, influences, encounters of each separate life.
This is the initial hypothesis on which this course is based. Out of a potential maximum of 10, it will focus on three “lives” in three places, and will inventory and interpret the experiences, characters, precedents, traditions, practices, histories in each, as crucial components of a new kind of cumulative identity.
If you have questions about the course (e.g., schedule, readings, assignments) please contact Phillip Denny.
Course Requirements:
This 1-unit course will have a series of four sessions in March and April. To receive credit for the course, students must submit weekly assignments and are required to attend all three live, online lectures from 8-10 AM on Tuesdays March 8, March 22, and April 12. Professor Koolhaas will hold an additional session and live q&a on April 14th at 6:30 PM. This final session will be open to non-enrolled students as well. To ensure spots in the room, enrolled students should plan on attending this in-person session and must notify the TF in advance if unable.
Students who enrolled in Geaugraphy during the spring 2021 semester may enroll in the course for credit again this year; this semester's course includes lectures on a range of new topics.
This course is not open to auditors or cross-registration.
Read these important enrollment instructions: If you are interested in enrolling in this 1-unit course, you must add the course to your Crimson Cart after the add/drop period ends on Wednesday, Setpember 14, as this one unit will likely push you over your maximum unit limit and impact your ability to enroll in other courses. In early October, you will be officially enrolled in the course from your Crimson Cart, even if that means you will exceed your maximum units. You do not need to receive program director approval for exceeding your maximum units for this course. Students may still add the course to their Crimson Cart prior to the first class meeting.
Please note that if enrolling in this course would have you exceed the following units by degree program, you will be charged extra tuition in late November:
20 – MDES
22 – MDE
24 – all other GSD programs
If you are a concurrent student, you would be considered among those who would be charged extra tuition if this course would mean that you would exceed 24 units.
Late-modern Japan and the Wild Samurai Generation
This course examines the development of architectural discourse and production in Japan from the 1970s to the very recent past, focusing on the radical polemics of Isozaki Arata, Hara Hiroshi, and the so-called Wild Samurai generation that consists of Ando Tadao, Ito Toyo, Hasegawa Itsuko, and Ishii Kazuhiro. Standing outside or even opposite to the orthodoxies of Tange Kenzo and Shinohara Kazuo, these figures represent critical impulses that sustained new vitalities to Japanese architecture, liberating and ultimately helping to shape the contemporary scene.
Isozaki Arata is the mercurial and polarizing figure who has continued to create, provoke, and anoint since his association with the Metabolist Movement. We will also close attention to his non-architectural work, as a curator, critic, and impresario. Similar in age, Hara Hiroshi authored some of the most megalomanic creations of Japan at the height of its economic might, most famously Kyoto Station and the 500mx500mx500m Cube. Perhaps paradoxically, Hara’s architectural visions are intensely romantic and sensitive, informed by field studies of vernacular settlements and uninhibited by conventions of decorum.
The two main historiographical themes of late-modern Japan are the relevance of postmodernism and Japan’s evolving relationship to the international scene. To what extent was postmodernism embraced? And how did it precipitate the transformative trajectories of the subsequent generations? In a global context that has changed profoundly since the early days of Tange and Shinohara, the discourse of style, language, and tectonics also took on new significance.
We will work closely with efforts to digitalize the archives of Isozaki and Hara and forthcoming exhibition projects. While the course continues some of the threads of HIST-4377 (Competing Visions of Modernity in Japan), it is not a prerequisite. The course qualifies as an alternative to Buildings, Texts, and Contexts 3.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Digital Media: Design Systems
The course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, methods, and practical techniques in design computation with emphasis on a systems perspective. We take a view that computational design requires the designing of systems instead of forms/geometries directly and that the quality of such systems reflects the success of the design outcome.
A system can be understood as a set of detailed procedures to achieve a specific objective, which takes input data/signal and transforms it into output/feedback. To design a computational system, it is necessary to adopt a particular way of thinking: identifying, abstracting, and decomposing a design goal. In addition, the data and procedures to achieve the goal require the use of logical and numerical constructs. On the contrary to such a reductionist approach, it is important to note the output of a design system needs to be accessible to human thoughts for holistic and intuitive evaluation. In other words, the system perspective helps elucidate the different modes of thinking embedded within the use of the digital medium for design.
The course will be comprised of three learning segments: (a) computational and geometric notations, (b) data organization and algorithms, (c) data flow and design control; introduced through a series of asynchronous lectures and exercises as well as synchronous workshops. Students will create, analyze, and evaluate computational and geometric constructs within the design-as-a-system thoughtparadigm. Simultaneously, the course provides students with the basis for developing critical thinking towards computational tools through working on a series of design exercises and a final project. We will use Rhino, Grasshopper environment, and C# where we expect the students to be familiar with 3D modeling in Rhino. It is designed for architecture students with little programming experience who are interested in understanding the underlying principles of computational tools and customization of design processes using the tools.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.