Otherness and Canon: Episodes of a Dialogic Reading of the History of Architecture.
In contrast to the debate in other areas such as art or literature – for the explanation of which capitalist expansion is a crucial factor – the canonical narratives of modern architecture ignore the existence of colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism. In recent decades, voices have been raised against these Occidentalist narratives that either oppose the very existence of the canon, or have successfully raised the need for its expansion from regional, ethnic or gender perspectives. However, the history of architecture has continued to have a monological character, that is: the gestation of the canon continues to be attributed to factors of exclusively Western origin.
Through the use of alternative theoretical notions and the study of a set of episodes, in this course we will try to verify the possibilities of a dialogic reading of that history as a constant dispute between identity and otherness.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
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.
See my.harvard, SEAS COMPSCI 283, for location
Global Leadership in Real Estate and Design
In today’s increasingly connected urban centers, shifts in cultural preferences, design thinking, and spatial significations often reflect and parallel transitions in capital forces and economic realities, locally and across the globe. This course begins with the premise that globalization imposes forces and tensions that directly impact the formation and production of the urban built environment, and that future real estate and design professionals will have a competitive advantage if they are well-prepared to understand, navigate, and lead amidst cultural and economic disequilibrium and disruptions of the global realm.
This project-based course encourages a forward-looking examination of and exposure to complexity in today’s real estate design, development and investment process. The course integrates domestic and international field studies, lectures, and class discussion, and encourages students to rethink, anticipate, and reinvent practice paradigms in both the real estate and design fields that respond to exigent and projected transformative environmental, market, economic and cultural changes, while fully leveraging highly-interactive, semester-long engagement with accomplished real estate and/or design leaders.
The pedagogical focuses of this course are two-fold: to provide practice opportunities in an academic setting for students to sharpen their professional skills required to traverse global contexts as culturally sensitive and professionally savvy practitioners, and, to establish an intellectual framework for students to understand and embrace the interrelationship between real estate and design so that creativity and design thinking become a value-adding and differentiating component in real estate thought leadership and development.
The interrelationship between real estate, design, and their underlying conceptual and production process are explored thus through thematic analysis of cultural underpinnings, artistic formal deliberations, economic activities, real estate market performance, ownership structures, private and public joint venture, as well as the efficacy of public financing.
Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to REBE Area students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Creating Real Estate Ventures: a Legal Perspective
This course examines, through the lens of the legal documents involved, how a complex commercial real estate deal moves from conception to completion. We will review the major stages of commercial real estate development including securing control of land, sourcing and raising equity, completing predevelopment steps such as agreements for design and construction and obtaining governmental permits, securing construction financing, leasing and other aspects of operating the project, and realizing capital returns from refinance and/or sale. We also will consider steps which may be taken in the legal arena when the unexpected happens and a deal goes sideways, such as lease or loan modifications, bankruptcy and litigation.
For each stage, we will analyze core concepts in actual negotiated agreements, including purchase and sale contracts, joint venture agreements, construction and design contracts, construction loan agreements, tenant leases, and permanent loan documentation. The course will include a mix of lectures, discussion of transaction documents and other course readings, individual exercises, guest appearances by experienced attorneys, panel discussions with real estate professionals involved in major projects in the greater Boston area, and a site visit (in-person or virtual) to a project recently completed or under construction. A highlight of the course will be team mock negotiations and role-playing exercises relating to securing control of the land, formation of a joint venture, construction loans, and leasing.
The course goal is to enable students to get deep inside the series of transactions–and their legal documentation– that produce development projects, to understand key business and legal issues embedded in the legal documents, to gain familiarity with how these issues are commonly resolved, and to recognize how to manage legal risk and the risk/reward calculation. There is no prerequisite for taking the course or any need for prior legal experience.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Digital Media: Writing Form
This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the essential pursuit of writing form.
Setting aside the better-known paradigms of sketching, 3D modelling, scripting or coding, writing –in this context– refers to the application of parametric formulations to visual design. This is not only a technology offering, but a place for designers to expand their understanding of architectural typology, and form in general, by taking on the new, sneaky types which emerged during the past 20 years.
The course fulfils a distributional requirement of Core in the area of Digital Media.
This course will be taught online through Friday,This course will meet in person on February 9, 11; March 2, 4, 23, 25; April 13, 15 and for the final exam. The course will be held via Zoom on all other Wednesdays and Fridays.
Digital Media: Neural Bodies
This course considers the building as body from a computational and critical perspective. The friction between the building as a quasi-biological organism on the one hand and a precise geometric construct on the other has long been conceptually and formally productive. We will interrogate the reciprocity between architectural, biological, and mathematical form through the contemporary lens of datasets, AI, and geometry. In particular, we will develop techniques that draw on hybrid architectural-biological datasets to generate ambitious multi-material prints of speculative proto-architectures.
The course will look at both large architectural datasets—for example, beaux-arts plans—as well as large biological datasets—such as skeletal scans of comparative anatomy—and ask how the biological data might be understood architecturally and vice versa. Beyond available image and 3d-scan datasets certain representation and imaging techniques, such as tomographic scanning, will be critical. Through AI techniques such as volumetric neural networks and fabrication processes like multi-material printing, students will explore bio-architectural generative spaces in a spatially sophisticated way.
Students will develop three sequential exercises related to (1) planmaking, (2) intricate double, triple, and quadruple staircases, and (3) a quasi-architectural proposal that negotiates the first two assignments. A key aspect of the class will be the development of productive workflows that leverage disparate tools for novel effect. Students will use AI tools like Google Colab, Stylegan, and Shapenet as well as a range of surface modfication, analysis, and discretization tools in Houdini, Meshmixer, and Grasshopper. Students will also be introduced to a range of more procedural processes to discretize and resolve their proposals into constructible forms.
The ambitions of the course extend beyond techniques of form making to critical perspectives on architecture as body and broader ideas of morphological analysis and classification. The course thus engages ways of thinking about and measuring bodies generally, and considers these practices as constitutive of a rich mode of architectural production.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students, with priority given to Mediums Domain and Technology Area students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Landscape Representation II
Landscape Representation II examines the relationship between terrain and the dynamic landscape it supports and engenders. The course explores and challenges the representational conventions of land-forming and supports a landscape architecture design process that posits the landscape as a relational assemblage of dynamic physical and temporal forces. It investigates the making of landforms through its inherent material performance in relationship to ecological processes that describe its connectability to the ordering and making of the landscape that is a reciprocation of forces between itself and its context at specific scales.
Measures of time will be utilized to describe and design the landscape through a comparison of sequence and event, and their intervals, rates, and duration in relationship to spatial forces and flows. Time infuses the material reality of the landscape through states of formation: from those that signify stability, through sequences that are predictable and observable processes of change, to those that are uncertain and instantaneous.
Representation is approached as an activity of thinking and making in which knowledge is generated through the work. This facilitates an iterative process of reflection in action, enabling testing in which new knowledge informs subsequent design decisions. The course will introduce methods of associative and generative modelling, and quantitative and qualitative analysis visualized through multiple forms of media. These are decision-making models conceived to imbue interaction between evidence-based variables and design input.
Precedent studies will accompany an engagement in digital media with fluid transitions between documentation and speculation, 2-D and 3-D, static and dynamic, illustrating time-based processes.
This course will be taught in person beginning the week of January 24th.
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.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Affordable and Mixed-Income Housing Development, Finance, and Management
Explores issues relating to the development, financing, and management of housing affordable to very low, low, and moderate income households. Examines community-based development corporations, public housing authorities, housing finance agencies, private developers, and financial intermediaries. Identifies, defines, and analyzes seven general public and private subsidy categories: development cost, financing, operating, rental assistance, tax credit, entitlement, and project-generated cross income subsidies. Assesses alternative debt and equity funding sources for both rental and for-sale mixed-income housing and addresses how multiple subsidies are aggregated to create an economically feasible development. Reviews other aspects of the affordable housing development process, including assembling and managing the development team, preparing feasibility studies, negotiating site control, gaining community support, securing subsidies, establishing design objectives, coordinating the design and construction process, selecting residents or homeowners, providing supportive services, and managing the completed asset. All students in this course have participated in the Affordable Housing Development Competition (AHDC) sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston and others. As part of this competition, teams of multidisciplinary graduate students primarily from Harvard and MIT prepare detailed affordable housing development proposals working with real sponsors on real sites in the Greater Boston area. These AHDC proposals serve as the final project for this course. The course includes lectures, cases, exercises, site visits, guest lectures, and student presentations. No prior real estate development or finance experience is anticipated or required.
Also offered by Harvard Kennedy School as SUP-666
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Land Loss, Reclamation, and Stewardship in Contemporary Native America
This course will explore three critical dimensions in American Indian land issues: historical land loss, contemporary tribal governmental efforts at land reclamation, stewardship, and co-management. We will begin by tracking the history of land dispossession from colonial settlement to the present day. We will then move on to explore the reality of contemporary tribal governance and how that critical function turns on jurisdiction over traditional lands. Are these lands owned outright? Are they held in trust by the US government for the benefit of the tribal nations? Are they traditional territories technically outside the control of the tribes, but with day-to-day stewardship and oversight provided by tribes? Finally, we will conclude the course with a speculative exercise that invites students to imagine future scenarios for land reclamation.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.