Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV

This lecture/workshop class addresses the relationships between landscape design conceptualization, material properties and technologies of making. The class introduces the practices of design development and construction documentation. These practices enable students to “work out” the materiality and making of their conceptual landscape speculations and document them for construction.

Weekly Course Format:

  1. Class lecture addressing a syllabus topic.
  2. Detail design workshop practice based on class topic.
  3. Case study analysis and discussion

Topics:

  1. Using the diagnostic section and isometric as instruments of analysis, and design development.
  2. Learning from examples of the existing made landscape using reverse engineering.
  3. The nature of materials and means of construction.
  4. Weathering and durability and the meaning of landscapes.
  5. Construction documentation and specification.

Course Objectives and Outcomes
Each student will:

  1. Understand practices of design development and detail design and how these practices shape the meaning of a landscape.
  2. Be able to develop a schematic concept into a constructed material proposal in their studio work and later in professional practice.
  3. Understand and practice how a developed design proposal is documented for construction.

Method of Evaluation

  1. Weekly class participation in discussion groups.
  2. Successful completion of workshop assignments.
  3. Successful completion of the final project assignment.

Required course for MLA 1 – 4 & MLA 1 – AP

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

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.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Structural Design 1

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.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II

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, geomorphology, and the act of grading and contour manipulation, and then introduces the conventions of grading representation, terminology and communication in the construction industry, as well as accessibility codes.  The flow of water is inherent in all grading activity, thus we will include techniques used to calculate the amount of water flowing over a site and the various ways that the topography can be manipulated in order to convey, filter, collect or disperse water in order 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.

Learning Objectives
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.  

Pedagogical Structure
Asynchronous, flipped, with in-class workshops:  The course is taught as a series of lectures and individual, in-class short-term exercises that focus on core competencies.   Most lectures will be recorded in advance and available for asynchronous learning.  The course will use a “flipped” classroom approach in which stu-dents will review lectures independently in many cases, and use class time for questions and assistance on the assigned exercises.  Select lectures will be live and recorded, or played live, with instructors available to answer questions during the lecture.

2 class sessions per week: Each week will include two class sessions:  one dual session attended by both MLA I and MLA I AP students, and one session dedicated to a smaller group of students, per the schedule de-scribed at the beginning of this syllabus.  The smaller group sessions will be primarily work sessions on the short-term “techniques” exercises, during which students can request assistance from the instructors.  The exercises will require additional out-of-class time in order to complete them.  

Digital and hand work:  Early core competency exercises are completed by hand, and grading in AutoCAD is introduced during the second week, in order to help provide students with few shifts in media types during the pandemic.

Tools
The following tools should be brought to each class:  engineering scale, architect’s scale, calculator, trace, drawing implements, computer.  Computer programs incorporated into this course will include:  AutoCAD, Excel, Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, InDesign and other graphic programs.  

Grade Evaluations
Grades will be based on submitted exercises and participation in class as follows:

In-Class Exercises: 85%
Participation: 15%

Work submitted late will be marked down accordingly.  Attendance will be taken in class and absences will be noted.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Materials

This course explores the science of materials. How do we classify materials? How do we build with 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 near- and long-term environmental impact 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 and the Master of Design in Energy and Environments.

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.
 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II

In the spirit of Herbert Simon, Frameworks engages diverse but complementary disciplines, perspectives and techniques to help identify, diagnose and constructively address consequential social challenges, sometimes referred to as "wicked problems". The disciplines – or 'frameworks' – explored include (in no order and to varying degrees) systems analysis, industrial design, scientific methods, behavioral and organizational dynamics, law, economics, risk management, manufacturing, culture, aesthetics, health sciences, history, branding, anthropology, statistics, public policy, ecology and the like. While individual frameworks are presented, the teaching goal over the two semesters is to help students: a) identify problems that are both consequential and tractable; b) select and apply the suite of frameworks best suited to addressing the problem at hand.

Frameworks I & II are designed both to complement the Collaborative Design Engineering Studio by offering conceptual support for applied solutions and to prepare students for the second year Independent Design Engineering Projects by focusing on problem definition, diagnostic techniques and the challenges of translating ideas into action.

 

This course will be held in person from the start of the term. This course will be held in room LL2.224 at the Science and Engineering Complex in Allston.

 

Environmentalisms II: How to Have a Politics?

Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: at the very moment that the idea of “environment” is being placed at the center of our political and cultural debates, the content of the concept is becoming less and less clear. Does it refer to nature? Or its very opposite (the “built”)? Or to the factual (scientific, technical, bureaucratic) division between nature and something else? Is environment merely the residual notion of a so-called “natural world” that has now been tamed or constructed by technological systems?

This paradox is particularly evident within the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism, which despite being increasingly saddled with the complex task of imagining more "environmentally-sensitive" responses to our intensifying "environmental problems," are nonetheless unable to formulate any clear or coherent answers to the simple question that ought to precede any such strategies: what exactly is an environment? …and so the term becomes a kind of chimera within the design fields, haunting any emerging consensus with the specter of emptiness—an emptiness that presents a subtle but tectonic problem for the formation of any contemporary environmental politics.

The course aims to situate the idea of environment within a field of intelligibility comprised of specific kinds of environmental reasoning; ways of thinking that presume or posit a comprehension of the term, and that analyze or intervene in the world on that presumption. We will examine a series of themes—milieu, ecology, life, totality, control, regulation, interactivity, management, among others—that will provide a structure for the course.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

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

Infrastructures play 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 infrastructures. From fortifications to smart technologies, infrastructures are 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 infrastructures, 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 need to conceive differently infrastructures when dealing with informal settlements.

'Cities, Infrastructures and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies' would like to suggest 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.

In the context created by the sanitary crisis, some flexibility will be offered to students in terms of attendance. While real-time attendance will be strongly encouraged for Thursday presentations that will take place from 8:20 to 10:00AM EST, it will be optional for Tuesday presentations scheduled from 1:00 to 2:30PM EST. After each meeting, lecture recordings will be made systematically available to enable a complete engagement with the material provided by the instructor.

To validate the course, students will be asked to produce a short end-of-the-semester paper on a topic related to the course.

Among the topics covered:
– Urban Infrastructure and Politics. A Theoretical and Empirical Challenge
– Cartography as Infrastructure
– Infrastructures for Conflicts: From Urban Fortification to electronic surveillance
– Territories, Cities and the Transportation Revolution
– The Rise of the 19th-Century Networked City
– From Nineteenth-Century Urban Parks to the High Line in New York: An Infrastructural Nature
– Technology, Infrastructure and the Urban Experience: From Electricity to the Digital
– Rationalization Doctrines, Architecture and Urban Planning from Scientific Management to System Theory
– Infrastructure and Urban Modernization in the 20th Century
– Infrastructures for Leisure and Tourism
– Smart Cities: A Self-Fulfilling Ideal
– Urban Metabolism and Infrastructure: Towards the Sustainable and Resilient City

A limited number of seats are held for PhD students. Interested PhD students should contact the instructor as well as submit a petition to cross-register.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Modernization in the Visual United States Environment, 1890-2035

Here find an ecology of changes, a course on the ecosystem of change so rapid most thoughtful Americans know it as modernization.   Design remembered and forgotten shapes its core, but always a caveat rules:  modernization and progress prove different in the long run.   Modernization shatters peace, quiet, certainty, value, even joy, and it impacts Americans differently.   Modernization happens to most, hits hard and fast, corrodes slowly and wretchedly.  But the few shape it, anticipating and skewing trends, inventing new processes, products, and attitudes:  marketing research, hunch, luck, and advertising—always advertising—advance an agenda open to disruption and mishap alike.   Advertising now flourishes as the third political party and the fourth branch of government, determines what inventions and design triumph or fail, and occludes the deeper forces which reward risk and punish ideology.   The type-writing machine changed desks and offices, sparked the crossword puzzle, shamed poor spellers, and renamed young women clerks typewriters:  a generation later, calculating machines transformed office work and renamed secretaries computers.   Advertising made cigarette smoking synonymous with feminism, cereal and fruit breakfasts equivalent to one-child families, and horseless carriages indicators of status.   But as automobiles made children and dogs the organized prisoners of highway mechanization, the aristocracy which governs modernization taught children to ride horseback, kept its sailboats, cherished its never-changing summer-vacation cottages, wilderness camps, and other hideaways.   Aristocrats dance in ballrooms where men always lead.  Wealthy women account for about 90% of the highest-level luxury market.  Aristocrats always flee cities when plague hits:  their refuges blend in, look traditional, pass unnoticed.  An American middle-class peasantry ogles the British royal family as closely as  the Depression unemployed watched Hollywood films about millionaires.  Graduate students dump solid tenth-hand furniture (brown goods to antique dealers) for assemble-it-yourself coated particle board junk movers shrink wrap.   Contemporary university students no more think about invention, marking, and advertising of the first cell phones than they do about the great corporations deciding in the summer of 1970 that women’s lib was good.   Here find a course which focuses on those who make, anticipate, accelerate, and evade modernization.

Note: This course is offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as AFVS 160.

 

Jointly Offered Course: FAS VES 160. This course will be held in person from the start of term.

 

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