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.
Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation Building II (at HKS)
This community based research course focuses on some of the major issues Native American Indian tribes and nations face in the 21st century. It provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to native development issues, including: sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, leadership, health and social welfare, tribal finances, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, and education. In particular, the course emphasizes problem definition, client relationships, and designing and completing a research project for a tribe, tribal department, or those active in Indian Country. The course is devoted primarily to preparation and presentation of a comprehensive research paper based on work with a tribal community. In addition to faculty presentations on topics such as field research methods and problem definition, students will make presentations on their work in progress and ultimate findings.
Please see schedule information for the HKS course shopping period, taking place Thursday, January 20th and Friday, January 21st.
Domestic Logistics
Modern domestic spaces are embedded in networks of goods, labor, media, and technology that shape their functions, capacities, and cultural role. They sit in federated supply chains, crisscrossed by networks of dependency and autonomy that extend to the city, countryside, and globe. The flows of materials and consumables, as well as data and labor, situate the home in a larger technosocial complex. Technology thus acts as an indispensable and mutating interface between domestic spaces and the territories around them.
The class will consider the bright and dark alternate futures of domestic space through the lens of its cultural representations and technological augmentations. Framed through the last 100 years as well as the next 100 years of domestic architecture, it will plumb the actual and fictional ways in which the space of the home has registered anxieties and optimisms around the social, ecological, and economic implications of technological futures. Specific technologies – spatial augmentation, telepresence, sensory expansion and deprivation, robotic farming, home droids, AI, drone tourism, and more, will be catalysts for critical discussions about what the home was, is, and could be.
While we unpack these dynamics we will also consider how the future of domestic space has been represented with respect to technology, and how we might inflect those representations and networks for the better. The historical and future representation of the interior will be a key lens through which we will examine domestic logics, from lavishly rendered Beaux Arts interior elevations to developed surface drawings, from meticulously arranged interiors of the Dutch golden age to the dioramas typical of theatre productions. More recent attempts to quantize and optimize interiors through motion studies and comprehensive sensing will comprise an analytic counterpoint to narrative modes of understanding domestic space. Particularly critical will be the relationship between animation, domestic robotics, and the diurnal rhythms of inhabitation.
The house as capsule will be a recurring theme, encompassing critical concerns related to safety and isolation, but also mobility, freedom, and the fraught line between autonomy and collectivism. Threads of the 1970s autonomous house movement will be interwoven with histories of nuclear shelters, continuity of government facilities, and the notion of the home as a cultural and technological bulwark against catastrophe and a last redoubt of civilization in ruins.
The class will also examine a number of themes the organically emerge from domestic logistics, including: the farm at the scale of the living unit, houses as micronations, how the domestic ritual of the dinner party may be transformed and reformatted through new food and media practices, recombinant and robotic furniture and the new political, social, and implications of houses that think.
Throughout these themes, there will be a cross-cutting interest in the notion of counterfactual history, particularly as it applies to domestic architecture. Actual and fictional precedents will be equally relevant, as the class embraces the full range of paths toward speculative domestic futures.
The content of the class will be primarily cultural, historical, and speculative, with some discussions of technical systems underpinning current innovations in the domestic sphere.
Students will develop a research topic affiliated with the themes of the class, articulate a speculative future that interrogates the topic through a paper and presentation, and venture a unique new video representation for that future.
Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Cities and the Urban Informal Economy: Rethinking Development, Urban Design and Planning
This interdisciplinary course, led by an urban designer, an urban planner, and a leading global advocate for the urban working poor, intends to scrutinize the different theories and their applications, since the early 1970s, to better understand and influence the informal economy. The objective is to transcend conventional disciplinary approaches with innovative, multidisciplinary thinking regarding how to valorize and enhance the contribution of the urban working poor to good city form, equitable city planning, and democratic urban governance.
This course will meet for the first time on Monday, January 31st and taught online through February 4th.
This course is jointly offered by the GSD, HKS, and MIT. Please see the course logistics website for more information.
Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation
Maps both represent reality and create it. It is in the context of this contention that this course presents the fundamentals of mapping, spatial analysis, and visualization. In a design process, the act of mapping selectively narrates site conditions. By choosing what features, forces, and flows to highlight—and which to exclude—the designer creates the reality in which their intervention will be situated. This is only becoming more true, as urban space and populations are ever-more pervasively measured, monitored, and categorized by innumerable institutions. Such representations are often a designer’s primary means of responding to a site. Designers are in the difficult position of approaching spatial datasets critically and as sites of contestation while also employing them in their work.
Over the course of a semester, students will work extensively with techniques of spatial analysis. Using desktop GIS software, we will explore data sources, data models, overlays, map algebra, spatial statistics, terrain analysis, and suitability modeling, among other techniques of spatial representation. Students will learn to embed these techniques, recursively, within larger design workflows. Lastly, a portion of the semester will be devoted to visualizing spatial data, programmatically, using the Processing language.
Course format: The course will combine workshops showcasing techniques, and lectures that place these in conversation with design and other forms of spatial inquiry. Students will complete short exercises and reading assignments, as well as two larger projects in which students will deploy mapping techniques to further their own research.
Each week, the two course sessions – in many weeks, a lab and a lecture – will be held synchronously, and students will be encouraged to attend when possible. However, recordings of all sessions will be made available for students who are unable to join synchronously. Furthermore, the instructor, the student TAs and the course TF will be scheduling office hours intentionally to ensure that even those who cannot join class sessions have ample opportunities for face-to-face virtual instruction
Prerequisites: None. No previous experience with GIS is assumed. Familiarity with standard modeling and visual design software is preferred.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Artifacts as Media: Signals, Data, Information and Technology
Media is the way we understand the world. Our consciousness is technologically extended, connecting us to the entirety of humankind through media interfaces. Content, information and message blend seamlessly into the nature of the medium, for the medium is the message, and the message in any medium is another medium by its very nature.
In this course, we will unfold the technological basis of media as an instrument of information transfer, and exploit its meta-nature as a medium of media in itself. Participants will gain an understanding of the computational representations of modern forms of digital media, such as meshes, images, shaders and video, as well as the technical tools for their creation, parsing, manipulation and analysis. Yet ultimately, the goal of this course is to challenge the assumptions of the nature of the "messages" these mediums can carry, explore them as vessels of other forms of information, and propose novel forms of trans-media artifacts of polymorphic meaning. Can meshes be used as graph representations? How can data be encoded in an image? Can voxel fields be decoded from video or shaders? What stories can be extracted from databases? In this course, we will explore creative mappings between and in between mediums to create new informational systems.
The content of the class will be predominantly technical, and taught through a combination of high-level lectures and hands-on technical workshops. Demonstrated experience in computer programming, such as SCI-6338, CS50 or similar, is a pre-requisite for this class. Additionally, a semester-long book reading will be assigned at the beginning of the course, and a discussion session around it will be held by the end of the semester. Student work will consist of three preparatory assignments, culminating with a personal final project of the student's choice.
This course is the second installment of a three-part course series on Computational Design preceded by SCI-6338: Introduction to Computational Design (Fall), and continued by SCI-6365: Enactive Design, Creative Applications Through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction (Fall), taught by the same instructor.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.