The Architect as Producer: Theory as Liberatory Practice

The past few years have brought the necessity of theory as liberatory practice to the foreground of discussions on architecture. The interconnected crises of war, enforced migrations, global warming, and structural inequality have put pressure on how we understand what architecture is and does. These events have highlighted the role of architecture in the rise of land dispossession, material extraction, labor struggle, and conflicting epistemologies. Thinking with bell hooks, the course reframes architectural theory a liberatory practice. Thinking with Manfredo Tafuri, with respond to these challenges by rethinking architecture’s position within the relations of production.

In this course we examine contemporary spatial thinking that responds to these challenges and seeks to address them through four interrelated topics: lands, materials, labors, and knowledges. We start by questioning where architecture happens, the land we stand on, the ways in which lands are transformed into real estate, and the role architects play in this process. We then move on to the materials, resources, and objects that architecture is made of, as well as the processes of extraction they are imbricated in. We address the bodies that participate in the making and maintenance of architecture, from building labor to the role of the architect as worker. We conclude by reflecting on the motivations that animate the discipline and its teaching, and the ways in which it is being unlearned and reimagined.

Students will be evaluated on class participation, discussion facilitation, short writing assignments, and a research project. This course is planned as a “lecture” with many small group activities and other alternative pedagogies. It qualifies as a BTC Distributional Elective.
 

Competing Visions of Modernity in Japan

The course will trace the parallel trajectories of two of modern Japan’s most influential schools of architectural thought, represented by Tange Kenzō (1913–2005) on the one hand and Shinohara Kazuo (1925–2006) on the other, and situate their contributions in the broader development of international modernism in the postwar period. Tange and his protégés in the Metabolist group dazzled the world with radical proposals for urban communities built either on the sea or elevated in the sky. Shinohara rejected this techno-rationalist stance through the slogan “A house is a work of art” and turned to the single-family house shunned by the Metabolists. The House of White by Shinohara achieves an almost oceanic spaciousness through abstraction and precision. The course will be structured as a series of discursive narratives and debates, such as tradition, transparency, lightness, and technology, which defined architectural practice and criticism in Japan after 1945. Major figures, notably Itō Toyoo, successfully overcame these differences and established new paradigms. We will also position young Japanese architects today, Ishigami, Fujimoto, and Hasegawa, in terms of these historical genealogies and the evolution of a critical discourse.

Cities, Infrastructure, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart and Sustainable Technologies

Infrastructure plays 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 infrastructure. From fortifications to smart technologies, infrastructure is 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 infrastructure, 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 key part played by infrastructure in social and racial inequality, the need to envisage infrastructure differently when dealing with informal settlements. Also of interest will be the changing relationships between cities, nature and infrastructure. More than ever, urban nature appears today as inseparable from infrastructure.

'Cities, Infrastructure, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies' suggests 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.

Readings related to the course content or expanding its perspectives are provided for each of the lectures and will be available on Canvas in pdf format. In addition to required readings, suggested readings are also provided for some of the weeks. Course evaluation will be based on class attendance, the conception of a couple of prompts related to topics of interest to students to be run on a generative AI program such as ChatGPT (more detailed explanation will be given at the beginning of the semester), as well as a final paper.

Urban Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative-Historical Origins and Applications

This course takes as its point of departure the historical and national origins of planning as a discipline, assesses its evolution over time and across developmental contexts, and situates our understanding of what has come to constitute “planning theory” in a deeper understanding of the political, economic, and social specificities and constraints on planning action. In understanding what might be referred to as planning praxis, we not only examine those social structures and economic as well as political power relations that enable or constrain preference for certain policies and processes of decision-making. We also examine the history of ideas about cities, debates over how the built environment should be designed and/or governed, and address longstanding conflicts over who should have the legitimacy or authority to undertake such decisions. The time span that we examine during this course begins in the late-19th and early 20th century and ends in the contemporary era. 

History, Theory, Culture II: Material Histories of Landscape Architecture

Histories II: Palimpsestic, Peripatetic, and Plotted Landscape Histories

Following in the footsteps of Aristotle’s Peripatetic School (from the ancient Greek, meaning to walk about) this course strolls conceptually and bodily through landscape history, tracing the deep roots of modern design history. Our investigation will begin with questioning the archive and the concept of who’s history. This meandering approach allows us to read land as palimpsestic text, and to thus juxtapose the traditional “canon” with historically excluded narratives, new research on environmental history, a fieldwork-based approach to design, and the underlying relevance of time to all of these concepts. The artifact, be it the site, the plan, or the text, is central throughout the semester. To be able to consider the artifact first and foremost, we will stroll and visit Harvard collections (the Peabody, Pusey, Harvard Archives, and Art Museum) and outdoor sites (rain or shine) across campus where we will learn about and experience spaces corporeally. In addition to on-campus site visits, class field trips also include Mount Auburn Cemetery. Assignments include active learning exercises during class time, a visual representation and textual description explaining how landscape/plant/environment/place knowledge has been passed down within your family or community of choice; a series of video recordings practicing public speaking skills; and for the final project a professional cover letter written in the guise of a historical figure of choice that will require historical research as well as study of contemporary professional documents.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Origins and Ends

Our aim is to address the general rupture caused by the rise of modernity—that is, by the social, economic, technological, and ideological transformations accompanying the political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was an age of internationalization in design practices and issues, a process that was accompanied by technological transformation and utopian thinking as well as by rising tensions linked to social inequality, colonial expansionism, and political upheaval. Our work in this course will look at the three pillars of buildings, texts, and contexts in order to find the equilibrium between, on the one hand, localized historical narratives and, on the other, the sampling to which a global purview necessarily gives rise.

The transition of architecture to the modern world prompts a series of fundamental questions: How did historical conditions place pressure on the tradition-bound parameters of architecture, on its origins, theories, and pedagogies? How did new conditions of scientific possibility actively reconfigure architecture’s relation to engineering and ideologies of progress? And how, finally, did aesthetic conceptions and approaches, which trace an arc from the demise of the Vitruvian tradition to eclecticism, historicism, and rationalist avant-gardes, intersect with gender, race, society, and politics?

This course weaves these questions through topics and themes ranging from technology and utopia to ornament and imperialism. We begin with late Baroque polemics and the disintegration of the Classical system. We consider the multifaceted nature of eighteenth- century architectural expressions in such examples as: the ideal city from royal Jaipur to revolutionary Paris, the split between architects and engineers; origin myths and the status of history; and the formulation of building typologies from churches and factories to slave plantations in colonial contexts. The nineteenth century, which for us is inaugurated by a utopian imaginary, covers key episodes such as utopian socialism in the context of the Industrial Revolution, town planning and racial politics after the Civil War, the Beaux-Arts system in Europe, China, and the Americas, the intertwining of ornament and British imperialism in India, the collision of vernacular traditions and colonial modernity in Africa, and, finally, the global dream of colossal structures and the infrastructural programs of the modern metropolis.

African Landscape Architecture: Alternative Futures for the Field

A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate the impacts of changing climates and social injustice now and in the future. Africa is a continent rich in landscape projects and practices but only nine out of fifty-four African nations have professional associations of landscape architects. The course is framed around three central questions: 1.) How is landscape architecture currently practiced in African countries? (2.) What lessons can we learn from landscape practices in various African societies that can help mitigate the impacts of climate change and social inequities? (3.) As landscape architecture unfolds across the continent in the next 50–200 years, how can it continue assert its agency in the fight against changing climates and social inequity and claim a central space in the shaping of African cities of the future? Each week we will focus on a different region or landscape types. In collaboration with several practitioners and academics from across the continent, this seminar will explore what it means to practice and teach landscape architecture in societies in which the profession is nascent or non-existent and speculate on the future of the shaping of landscapes in the Global South.

This GSD course is jointly listed with FAS as AFRAMER 143Y.

History, Theory, Culture IV: Theories and Practice of Landscape Architecture

What do you need to know in order to understand this landscape? How do design culture and design thinking transform over time? How are cultural values embedded in the design of landscapes? This course is framed in terms of the relationship of landscape architecture to the evolving theorizations of nature and culture. In each class, we will map various critical assumptions, ideologies, and aspirations that inform how landscape is designed and interpreted. By learning to read landscapes and related projects of landscape architecture, we will study the constructedness of landscape. Conversely, we will also examine the capacities of landscape architecture to shape identity and ecology, reproduce or contest power relations and inequality, and commemorate diverse cultural meaning.

The course elaborates a working definition of theory as it relates to landscape practice. It contextualizes the discipline’s transition from a modernist paradigm in the West, to the gradual eradication of conceptual binaries and the pluralization of narratives in the late twentieth century. It considers landscape’s ‘social’ engagements to include non-human actors, and concludes with recent materialist approaches to landscape that emphasize its performance and flows in the era of global warming.

The course weaves together three kinds of investigations: one that focuses on built forms, another on the ideas and conceptual frameworks that guide the production of those forms, and a third that examines the retrospective interpretation of those forms. We will attend to diverse projects and topics, that may include border regions, urban landscapes, agricultural landscapes, colonial plantations, scientific gardens, territories of extraction, zones of environmental risk, successional forests, migrating ecosystems, national parks, native lands, domestic spheres, and postcolonial gardens. Through these sites, we will critically explore the spatial forms of exclusion, inclusion, conflict, and cooperation between and among people and their surroundings.

At the end of this class, students will understand the value and make use of theory in design, will be able to articulate the diverse intellectual, social, and political dimensions of landscapes, and to refer to a history of landscape architecture projects oriented to related issues. Students will also be able to articulate their priorities within the discipline. Assignments will include a combination of case study presentations, written responses to assigned readings and hands-on exercises designed to train students in the analysis of landscapes.

This course is open to all Harvard GSD students and also accepts cross-registered students.

Digital Media: Algorithmic Problems: Grasshopper as Medium

Grasshopper has become the design tech world’s second favorite idiom — after Python anyway. Incidentally, it has also become the design tech world’s answer to ‘broken English’: a seemingly easy, go-to language spoken effectively by billions of people, albeit with scant regard for its intrinsic depth, rigor, or idiosyncrasies.

Its relative ease of use and commensurate popularity have only exacerbated this paradox. The more people adopt it, the less it is understood. The course will challenge this paradox and explore Grasshopper’s algorithmic complexity on its own merit.

Focusing on this most ubiquitous of media may seem like an odd choice at first. Since nearly everyone uses it in some form, Grasshopper is usually taken for granted. In practice, however, while the low bar of entry and ease with which it delivers basic results have led to its widespread adoption as the lingua franca of design and computation, Grasshopper has become the victim of its own success. As the scripting language of choice in fields as disparate as architecture, thermal analysis, robotics, fashion design, and machine learning, Grasshopper is inevitably framed as the lowly enabler of far loftier endeavors, the lowest common denominator of computational design thinking, the plumbing underneath –best dealt with in technical workshops and evening tutorials.

This perception is a misunderstanding as a matter of course. With its stark syntactic differences with most other computer languages (one of which is gradually subsuming) and intricate, multi-layered data structures, Grasshopper is nothing if not a complex environment that demands exclusive attention to deliver its full potential. That is the ambition of the course.

The syllabus is based on weekly lectures and applied workshops and is generally geared towards dispensing core technical knowledge suitable for use in core and option studios, as well as in advanced computational courses, such as are currently on offer across the GSD.

The schedule is divided into two main sections on either side of the midterm week (March 26, 2024).
The first section explores the syntax of geometry, with an emphasis on computational and mathematical instruments such as ranges, domains, parameters, and data structures. This part of the course combines (possibly) familiar Grasshopper strategies with decidedly unfamiliar morphogenetic models based on the instructor’s previous offering (VIS 2227 Writing Form, 2017-24). Topics include parametric 3D modelling, procedural tessellation, image processing, and more.

The second half of the course offers a critical introduction to Grasshopper’s essential role as a gateway to complex third-party applications for physical and environmental analysis. Topics will include mechanics/kinematics, environmental performance, and strategies of optimization. This part brings together well-known plugins with the elaborate data structures explored during the first half of the course.

Landscape Representation II

The Landscape Representation II course will examine 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 relation to ecological processes that describe its connectivity to the ordering and making of the landscape which 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 relation 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.

Lectures and lab exercises will provide the foundation for exploration and discussion and exposure to a set of digital techniques for analysing and generating landform processes to advance technical and conceptual ability, as well as to provide a point of departure for an in-depth awareness of landscape precedents and representational techniques.

It aims to provide students with an understanding of landscape as a set of complex systems in which duration and matter are encoded within, and driven by, a changing landscape. The course engages in the advanced exploration of digital media, with an emphasis on responsive and performative modelling as well as the fluid transition between documentation and speculation, 2d and 3d, static and dynamic, and digital and analogue media.