Real Estate Private Equity [M1]

Real Estate Private Equity explores, in depth, the analysis, decision-making and challenges private equity investors face when:

1. making and structuring highly leveraged investments, 
2. managing investments through turbulence if market difficulties emerge, 
3. developing superior, differentiated portfolio strategies and successfully aligning these with institutional capital, 
4. procuring and managing sources of equity and debt capital, 
5. negotiating institutional investor capital agreements, local partner operating agreements and transaction execution agreements,
6. managing all the stakeholders involved in complicated real estate transactions when circumstances require change, 
7. successfully building and managing their organizations for long-term sustainability in the midst of having to compete in an environment fraught with constant risk, uncertainty and geo-political and economic fluctuation.

The course will be structured in a format using actual business cases, where each case will tackle a situation and specific set of challenges faced by private equity investment groups. Cases will typically be 20 to 30 pages in length including a number of subsidiary agreements and schedules. Students will need to lay out the problems being addressed, probe the situation, develop the right questions to focus on, analyze the relevant data, and evaluate the best courses of action along with their anticipated outcomes. Case situations will be viewed from multiple perspectives: the private equity investor, their institutional capital sources, local operating partners, lending institutions, tenants, and many times public authorities and their representatives.

There are two modules that comprise the course. Each module will last ½ of the semester. Students have the option of taking just module 1 for two credits, or both modules 1 and 2 for 4 credits. 

In module 1 we will be covering 5 business cases. The subjects of investigation and discussion will include 

1. analyzing an international development/redevelopment joint venture opportunity, 
2. examining the process of investing in debt securities in a complex transaction, 
3. assessing a hostile tender offer of  a public company and examining the responsibilities to all of the stakeholders in making the right decisions, 
4. from an investment committee member’s perspective examining, evaluating and choosing between two disparate competing investment opportunities, a joint venture acquisition of a student housing project against a mezzanine debt investment in an international real estate operating service company, 
5. Deriving what the optimum path forward should be in the launch and capitalization a new startup real estate development company.

In module 2, students will be tackling an independent study research paper which delves deeper into a topic of choosing in real estate private equity. Some potential areas to pursue include:

1. Developing a business plan to start a new real estate PE firm,
2. Evaluating the strategy and long term competitive viability of an existing real estate PE firm,
3. Analyzing a live, complicated real estate PE transaction,
4. Investigating and conducting a comprehensive research report to evaluate a given market opportunity,

It is expected that papers delivered for module 2 will be approximately 20-25 pages in length, single spaced, plus exhibits, quantitative analyses, and appendices.

Course prerequisites: 5275 and 5276 or other course equivalents.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.

Michelangelo Architect: Precedents, Innovation, Influence

An exploration of Italian Renaissance architecture and urbanism through the persona of Michelangelo as witness, agent, and inspiration. We look at architecture and urbanism in Florence, Rome, and Venice from about 1400 to 1600 as it formed, articulated, and reflected the creative achievements of this Renaissance genius. The course engages building typologies such as the villa, the palace, and the church, explores the theory and practice of urban space-making, and evaluates the authority of the Classical past in the creation of new work. Particular emphasis on Michelangelo’s creative process and on his drawings. 

We begin with Medicean Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent and with the Early Renaissance legacy of Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, and Giuliano da Sangallo. Following Michelangelo’s footsteps, we move to High Renaissance Rome, with the achievements of Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo himself. Returning to Florence, we investigate the Mannerist experimentation of Michelangelo and others in the 1520s and consider the acceptance and rejection of this idiom by Giulio Romano in Mantua and Jacopo Sansovino in Venice. Michelangelo’s mature and late styles in Counter- Reformation Rome and the principles of Renaissance space-making at the urban scale conclude the course. 

Course Format:
    
The course will use “flipped class” pedagogy and have both asynchronous and synchronous elements each week. We will meet together once each week, usually on Monday, for discussion of the assigned lectures and readings. The lectures are on our course site in the Media gallery; a ppt version (without audio) for study purposes is on our site under Modules. The readings are on our site under Modules. Students will submit a question or a comment arising from the assigned readings and lectures by midnight of the Thursday preceding our discussion. This is not intended to be a response paper, but merely a sentence or two indicating something you found interesting or didn’t understand. The quality of your comments and of your participation in the discussions will determine 60% of your final grade.
    
A final paper or project is required. If a paper, it should have a text of 12 pages (12 pt double-spaced in Word, not Acrobat) and, in addition to the text, it should have images, notes and bibliography. The subject may be any topic relevant to the course and must be approved by me. A project could take any form desired and also requires my consent. It would most probably be a digital reconstruction of an unfinished or altered project by Michelangelo or another Renaissance architect. The paper or the project should apply knowledge from the course and will equal 40% of your final grade.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. The course will have all the weekly discussions in person beginning on 9/27. The class will meet in person (in Gropius) on the following dates: 9/27, 10/4, 10/13, 10/18, 10/25, 11/1, 11/8, 11/15, 11/22, and 12/1.

Digital Media: Not Magic

According to folklore, Michelangelo fell to his knees upon seeing the Florentine fresco Annunciation, went silent, and eventually concluded that the image of the Virgin must have been made through divine intervention since its brushwork surpassed human talents. When the computer graphics company Blue Sky released its commercial for Chock Full o’Nuts in 1994, The New York Times called the rendering of a walking and talking coffee bean “computer magic.” It was the best way to explain the video’s special effects. What else would one call using lines of code to give an inanimate object life? Or the transfiguration of mere paint into saintly likeness?

Esoteric processes have long imbued artforms with power, rendering audiences speechless, awestruck, and affected. In the nineties, anthropologist Alfred Gell proposed that mundane things can be construed as “enchanted forms” when differences exist between an audience’s technological expectations and an object’s facture. This contradiction gives rise to a belief that artifacts and artisans can possess otherworldly faculties. In reality, everyday forms become enchanted not through magic, but through precise construction methodologies.

This course seeks to articulate what aesthetic categories are at play when technology is perceived to be magical. A working theory for the class is that more nuanced descriptions for the transformations found in computational and craft traditions are good frameworks for understanding architectural effects. We will explore these ideas in synchronous lectures and case studies, and asynchronous workshops. Readings include texts by Alfred Gell, Walter Benjamin, Beatriz Colomina, and Felicity Scott. Case studies include projects by Anne Holtrop, Ensamble, Junya Ishigami, and examples from imperial architecture.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person for lectures and discussions every Wednesday from 1:30 to 3:45 pm (except the first two weeks of the semester). Additionally, there will be four asynchronous technical workshops. 

Digital Media: Models

This course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods related to digital media in architecture and design, with a focus on reciprocal processes of translation between digital media and material artifacts. It examines how digital technologies mediate our interaction with the physical environment, critically engages the capacities and limitations of select computational processes and investigates the latent design opportunities embedded in each one.

This semester we will structure our investigation around the notion of the model as a means of addressing broader questions related to the role of digital media in architecture and design. Whether a digital entity, physical artifact or something in-between, the model can be considered as an instrument for the development, prototyping and representation of architecture, as well as a discrete design artifact to be evaluated on its own terms. The plurality of design approaches and working methods afforded by the postdigital has blurred the role of models within experimental architectural practice. Accordingly, we position the contemporary model not as a singular entity but as an amalgamation of multiple models, each tailored to inform the design process, instrumentalized to act on the world, and evaluable via its own unique criteria.

Our exploration will be categorized into four sequential thematic areas – digitization, simulation, materialization, and visualization. Each thematic area will act as a lens through which to reconsider the role and agency of the model.  Lectures, readings, and in-class discussions will situate the model within a theoretical and historical context. Digital processes including photogrammetric 3D scanning, animation, physics-based simulation, texture mapping, interactive visualization, along with select digital and analog fabrication processes, will be introduced via a series of workshops. 

The course will address the content described above through a combination of lectures, discussions, technical workshops, and design exercises. Typically, each session will be divided into a lecture half and a workshop half. Technical workshops will introduce software including Rhino/Grasshopper (along with its associated plugins for analysis, simulation, and animation), Autodesk Recap (photogrammetry), Cinema 4D (rendering, simulation, animation) and Unity (interactive visualization, first-person navigation) All software utilized in the class is either available for educational use via the GSD or open source.

The presented concepts and techniques will be explored through a semester-long project organized into a sequential set of assignments. Beginning with the process of photogrammetric 3D scanning, students will explore a variety of modeling and form-making strategies using a collection of digital and fabrication tools. Subsequent assignments will explore the affordances of specific modeling techniques and examine the relationship of the presented technique to architectural concerns including scale, materiality, originality, and authorship. Each assignment will invite opportunities for scalar translation, ranging from 1:1 to scaleless to various scales over physical and digital models with focus on reciprocal materiality, structure, and organization changes. For the final project, participants will work in small groups to utilize the workflows presented in class in a collaborative design exercise.  Anticipated costs include materials for two physical modeling exercises, executed in groups, at the midterm and final reviews.

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.

Landscape Representation I

The first in a two-semester sequence, Landscape Representation I introduces students to the rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture as inextricably intertwined with the concept of representation. This relationship is grounded in landscape’s history and conventions, and expanded through a wide range of techniques that embrace the highly generative agency of representation in the design process.

Throughout the semester, a series of lectures on a range of theoretical perspectives in design and adjacent fields will ask students to engage critically with diverging concepts of representation. These approaches will intersect with a sequence of exercises focussed on diverse conceptions of site as a critical construct, and the multiplicity of lenses through which to understand agents in the landscape.

These explorations will be supported by tutorials introducing techniques, skills, and workflows that engage both analog and digital methodologies, from physical modeling and hand drawing to software such as Rhino and the Adobe Creative Suite. Students will iterate between different modes of abstraction and translation to understand both site and agent as imagined, created, and ultimately designed through their various representations.

Finally, weekly discussions will provide an open collaborative space to think critically about representation’s agency in design, as we work together to articulate the reflexive relationship between visualization and conceptualization. Employing these various modes of learning in conjunction, students will develop their own iterative approaches to representation as a process of thinking, making, and designing, as they articulate and advance their own representational voice and position.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. This hybrid course will meet both virtually (50%) and in person (50%), as appropriate to course content. Please review the syllabus for details, and note that this is subject to change.

Architectural Representation II

Architectural Representation II: Projective Disciplines

Course Summary

This course examines systems of projection as constructs that mediate between our spatial imagination and built form. Projective systems have defined relationships between masons, engineers, industrial designers, mathematicians, cartographers, painters, and architects. Their historical origins and evolution into digital culture will be studied through the theory and practice of projective and descriptive geometry. Invented as techniques to draw form, these discourses are the bases of the intractable reciprocity between representation and three-dimensional space. The objective of this course is to uncover the centuries-old and still ongoing relationship between representation, form, and construction—more generally, the reciprocity between three-dimensional form and flatness.

Principles of parallel (orthographic), central (perspectival), and other less common forms of projective transformation explain many processes of formal production—vision, subjective experience, drawing, modeling, and building. Beginning with 2D drawing exercises and transitioning to 3D modeling, we will interrogate the effects of the digital interface and mechanics of modeling software on contemporary discourse. As students explore the power and limitations of the flat drawing plane, they will also develop literacy in primitive and complex surface geometries—their combinatory aggregation, subdivision, and discretization—as they relate back to the most reductive of architectural forms—the planar surface. Ultimately, these techniques will be placed into a productive dialogue with architectural and programmatic imperatives. The design tools of the digital and post-digital age have allowed designers to invent and produce form with increasing facility, eliminating the need to understand the consequential and demanding relationships between geometry and architecture.  The course will involve close formal reading of buildings as a way to introduce students to the practice of reading, drawing, and writing architecture.

Course Structure
Composed of both lectures and workshops, the course is participatory and is equal parts theoretical and technical. Exercises will involve two-dimensional digital drawing, digital and physical modeling, and basic Grasshopper. Both Tuesday sessions (lectures and discussions) and Thursday sessions (technical workshops) will meet synchronously. The physical modeling component will require use of the fabrication facilities and the appropriate in-person tutorials in Gund Hall, and will conclude with an in-person final review which all students must attend. This course is required for all first-year MArch I students.

Architectural Representation I

Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality

Architectural representation is an ideology—a source of ideas and visionary theorizing that has a set of origins and qualities. As such, it’s prudent to study the origins of conventional techniques of architectural representation to be informed about their intentions and the specific contexts that conditioned their development.

Representation is not a conclusive index of an architecture already designed and completed, in the past tense. Rather, representation is integral to the design process and the production of architecture—it is present and future tense: an active participant in exploring and making. It occurs in multiple instances and forms along a project’s evolutionary path. Though not deterministic of the architecture, representation techniques selected to visualize ideas influence the evolution and outcome of the work.

The course initiates with an analysis of conventional representation techniques and their intentions. Using this knowledge as a platform, the class pivots to consider representational riffs emerging in response to the contemporary context—those that explore the limits of our “origin arsenal” and question what each offers for the present. Possible paradigms of architectural spaces generated from representation (rather than the other way around) will be presented and discussed.

“Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality” will involve readings, lectures, and discussions framing the backstory on conventional techniques as well as contemporary critical stances in relation to these techniques. Students will be required to complete weekly representation exercises in relation to each course topic by experimenting with new representations of their design work being produced in parallel courses. These design exercises will be presented to and discussed by the class.

The final project will involve isolating a representation from concurrent studio work and critically evaluating the architectural possibilities that extend from its close reading and revision. The final project will require articulation of the goals of the original representation technique and the specific aims toward originality in the tweaking of this technique, as suited to the design project.

 

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.

Urban Economics for Planners and Policymakers

This course introduces economic frameworks for understanding both the benefits and challenges of living in, working in and managing cities.  Urban economics incorporates the concept of space into canonical economic models and provides a lens for analyzing and describing the nature and organization of economic activity in urban settings.  We will explore questions around why cities exist at all, what determines their growth, and what features contribute to their advantages as well as their unique problems.  Why do some cities grow faster than others?  Can cities ever get too dense or large?  We will draw from typical urban economic models and frameworks, but will also discuss and test their limits when applying them to complex urban systems. For example, how well do these models address issues of segregation and informality in cities?  The course will draw from research and scholarship in the field of urban economics, as well as actual cases, policy applications and guest lecturers employing these concepts in the field.  Students who take this class will be able to use economic frameworks and methods to design, evaluate and implement planning and policy interventions in a range of urban settings.  

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person with the exception of a few sessions that will be held via Zoom to accommodate guest speakers and other content delivery. Please review the syllabus and course schedule for more details. Please note that this is subject to change.

Transportation Economics and Finance

We can define transportation infrastructure to comprise all the physical objects that provide mobility: including everything from trains, highways, and ports to sneakers, trails, and scooters. The amount and type of available infrastructure that is available to urban travelers depends very much on who is willing to pay for it and how.

Upon completion of this course, you will be prepared to evaluate alternative methods of funding the construction, purchase, and maintenance of transportation infrastructure in terms of feasibility and fairness. You will also be prepared to use financing and pricing as tools to shape the development of transportation networks and to facilitate sustainable travel.

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.

Land Policy and Planning for Equitable and Fiscally Healthy Communities

The course highlights the role land policy and land-based financing play in the development of equitable and fiscally healthy communities in developed and developing countries.  The presentation and analysis of global cases, particularly from the Global South, on land value capture, community land trusts, and land readjustment will demonstrate why and how land markets and creative land policy approaches are relevant to planners, urban designers, real estate professionals, and risk managers, especially as they pursue sustainable, equitable urban development goals.  The course identifies the relationship between planning regulations, infrastructure investments, and land value increments and the synergies that can be created at the local level to sustain municipal finances and the investments needed to battle climate change, housing crises, and informality, among other transcendental policy issues.

Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.

Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.