Architecture and Construction: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital
The course aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between architecture and construction through the study of key historical episodes such as the rise of modern tectonic ideals in the 18th century, the development of iron and concrete buildings, the 20th-century quest for light structures, or more recent developments in materials, structure and building technologies. The course will also raise theoretical questions such as what the terms material and structure truly mean, or how does architecture differ from mere construction. Beyond its historical and theoretical scope, the ambition of the course is also to foster students' reflection on the contemporary evolution of the relationship between architecture and construction. Indeed, the rise of digital technologies and more recently the development of strong environmental concerns challenge our received understanding of tectonics, materials, and ultimately design.
The course will consist of live lectures given online followed discussions. Lectures will be recorded and made accessible to the students of the course. Apart from regular attendance, the students will be asked to produce a short end-of-the-semester paper on a topic related to the course.
Plan of the course:
– Towards an Architectural History of Construction, Introduction
– Construction and Solidity in the Vitruvian Tradition
– The 18th-Century Crisis of Solidity and the Rise of the Structural Approach
– Early Iron Construction Development
– From Iron to Steel
– The Origin of Modern Concrete
– The Industrial Challenge from Ruskin to the Arts and Crafts
– Building Technologies in the 19th Century
– Structure and Ornament in the Industrial Age
– Modernist Architecture and Technology
– Concrete Engineering
– Concrete Architecture
– Early Space, Inflatable and Tensile Structures
– Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouvé and the Search for a Revolution in Design
– Postwar Technological Utopias and Dystopias from Archigram to Radical Architecture
– The High-Tech Temptation
– Contemporary Advances in Materials and Structures
– Digital Architecture and the Rise of a New Materiality
– Digital Fabrication, Between Futurism and Nostalgia
– The Environmental Challenge: From Mechanics to Thermodynamics?
– Architecture, AI: What is Next? Conclusion
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
The Idea of Environment
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations, and actions that calls them to intervene—that is, to make a plan, solve a problem, create a product, or strategize a process. They use various measures to assess and project their interventions from beauty and efficiency to systems and sustainability. Today, increasing volatility and uncertainty of the environment, however, alongside a growing sense and presence of crises and disasters, compels us to reconsider how we have imaged and imagined, defended and critiqued, planned and designed the environment. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.
This class is a seminar focused on reading and discussion. Course participants will be required to submit weekly reading responses, to contribute to discussions online and in class, and to develop an original research and/or design project over the course of the semester.
Climate by Design
Through a series of case studies, this course will explore paradigmatic design responses to the climate crisis including adaptation (both for communities to remain and retreat) and mitigation (through increased carbon draw-down and reduced emissions). These exemplary cases will be a means to understand and articulate the evolving role of landscape architecture and related disciplines in designing for an increasingly vulnerable planet. As such, the course will explore not only how landscape architecture responds to the climate crisis, but what these actions say about the nature of design itself. The cases will be situated in different geographical contexts and the responses will be understood relative to advances in climate science as well as the variations in social, environmental, economic and political context.
There will be a series of lectures by GSD faculty and external experts across fields (science, policy, economics, humanities, design). Students will develop and analyze a case study, developing methodologies for critical assessment and visual representation. The studies will consider social, cultural and aesthetic dimensions as well as environmental function, economic deployment and political engagement.
Climate by design is a required course for the MLA degree candidates (class of 2022) and open to other GSD and Harvard students with an interest in the climate crisis and design.
In Fall 2020, the course will meet two times per week for synchronous workshops, presentations and conversations with the class cohort, teaching faculty and invited guests. These synchronous sessions will be supported by additional asynchronous lectures, interviews, readings, and dossiers on the key case study projects.
Market Analysis and Urban Economics
This is a master’s level course intended to introduce students to urban economics and real estate market analysis. It covers urban market fundamentals and how they shape cities and neighborhoods. Key themes include: the economic role of cities, typologies of urban growth and form, bid-rent curves, household and firm location choices, the role of local government, housing, and the dynamics of local property markets. This course introduces students to the concepts, models, and methods used to analyze how economic forces impact (re)development processes, values, and locational patterns in real estate markets.
The course is structured as lectures and workshops, with synchronous and asynchronous components each week. Most weeks the structure will be one day of synchronous lecture and discussion, with a second day of modules (lectures, practice problems, reading responses, and engagement) that may be completed asynchronously.
Readings draw from classic, recent, and current works in urban economics, planning, and academic real estate literatures. Assignments reinforce urban economics concepts and the ability to analyze local property market fundamentals, identify new markets, and measure investment opportunities. Guest lectures by active real estate professionals will offer students the opportunity to learn from practitioners currently operating in the marketplace. Evaluation is based on weekly assignments, a midterm, and a final project/paper.
The course assumes no previous economic knowledge or training.
Spatial Analysis and the Built Environment
Urban planners engage in many complex processes that defy easy representation. This course provides first-semester urban planning students with the graphic and technical skills needed to reason, design, and communicate these processes with geospatial data. This knowledge will be embedded within a larger critical framework that addresses the cultural history of categorization, data collection, and cartography as tools of persuasion for organizing space.
Visual expression is one of the most compelling methods to describe the physical environment, and students will learn techniques specifically geared toward clarifying social, political, and economic dynamics and how they relate the structuring of spaces. The class will introduce fundamentals of data collecting, data formatting, and data importing into a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment.
Students will gain familiarity with the technical tools essential to GIS for making maps and exploring relationships in the physical, regulatory, and demographic dimensions of the landscape. Within GIS, students will learn the basics of geospatial processing to produce new forms of knowledge in support of ideas about urban planning and design. Desktop publishing tools, including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will be used to distil ideas into effective graphic presentations. The class will also advance techniques for representing form and space through diagramming and three-dimensional modeling programs.
Students will be introduced to workflows that demonstrate how to move effectively between data from these platforms and modes of representation. Class lectures will be complemented with technical workshops.
Objectives:
1. Establish a conceptual framework for critically engaging the practices of mapping and data visualization.
2. Provide a basic understanding of tools and techniques needed to reason, design, and communicate with geospatial data.
3. Develop students’ skill and confidence for visualizing the complex processes, flows, and dependencies unique to the planning discipline.
Course format: This course will meet via Zoom on Monday and Wednesday mornings. Wednesday meetings will typically begin with a 30-minute discussion of the day's reading assignment, followed by a 30-minute in-class exercise, which will often be a drawing exercise that can be done away from a computer. Wednesday sessions will conclude with a 30-minute discussion of key lessons and take-aways from that in-class exercise. An independent assignment will be assigned each Wednesday and due the following Monday. In Monday class sessions, students will present their work and receive feedback from their classmates and the instructor. Friday software tutorials will be also be offered on Friday mornings from 9am to noon. Attendance at these sessions is optional, and they will be recorded for students to view on-demand if they are unable to attend synchronously.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in the Urban Planning program.
Architectural Representation II
Architectural Representation II: Projective Disciplines
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 as technique (not merely style), 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.
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 modeling, and basic Grasshopper. Both Tuesday sessions (lectures and discussions) and Thursday sessions (technical workshops) will meet synchronously. Workshops will be recorded live for asynchronous viewing as well, though synchronous attendance is strongly encouraged. 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.
Housing and Urbanization in the United States
This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those with an interest in urban policy and planning with a broad background on why housing matters and how its unique attributes give rise to certain challenges and shape how practitioners respond to them.
The course first lays out a framework for understanding the roles housing plays in individuals’ lives, neighborhoods, and the metropolis. Early sessions examine the unique attributes and roles of housing, including the role of homes as constitutive of the private and domestic realms, housing as an icon and encoder of social status, housing as a commodity, and housing as a driver of urbanization and shaper of neighborhoods.
The next sessions focus on housing as an object of policy, examining the early rise of public intervention into housing as a result of concerns over slums and the expansion in the 20th century of programs and policies that shaped housing markets, homeownership, and metropolitan form. We also explore problems flowing directly out of these interventions, including sprawl, concentrated poverty, housing unaffordability, and racial segregation.
Finally, the course focuses on planning and policy responses to these challenges, including responses to poverty and segregation through urban renewal, public housing, fair housing laws, and participatory planning; cost-income mismatches and attempts to supply affordable housing; and land use regulation as a potential solution to the social and environmental problems of low-density, exclusionary development. The final session will touch on some of the most recent solutions to housing challenges including micro units, form-based zoning, age-friendly design, and others.
Upon completion, students will have a firm grasp of housing and urban issues, a theoretical frame for understanding them, and a working knowledge of the planning and policy tools used to address these issues.
Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-661
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Quantitative
This course introduces students to quantitative analysis and research methods for urban planning. The course begins with an examination of how quantitative methods fit within the broader analytic landscape. It then exposes students to basic descriptive statistics (including measures of central tendency and dispersion), principles of statistical inference, and a wide variety of analytic methods and their practical application. By the end of the course, students will be comfortable with many analytic techniques relevant to urban planning and policy, including: z-tests, t-tests, ANOVA, chi square tests, correlation, and multivariate regression. On a broader level, students will gain the ability to understand and critically question the kinds of analyses and representations of quantitative data encountered in urban planning and allied disciplines.
The aim of the course is to introduce students to key concepts and tools in quantitative analysis and research. Most importantly, however, the goal is to develop students’ intuition regarding data analysis and the application of statistical techniques. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with how common techniques of quantitative analysis can be applied to a wide variety of data. Students will also gain a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative data analysis and under what circumstances the tools learned in the class are best applied in practice. The course seeks to train technically competent, intellectually critical practitioners and scholars who are able to apply quantitative methods in a wide range of settings, and who are also aware of the wider analytic context into which these approaches fit. There is a focus throughout the course on epistemology and the ethics of claim-making. Over the course, students will deepen their understanding of how claims are made, how claims are connected to different forms of evidence, and what makes different kinds of claims credible.
Course format: This course will meet via Zoom on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Thursday meetings will typically begin with a 30-minute presentation of the material students will need to understand in order to complete their assignment for that week, followed by a 30-minute individual, in-class exercise. Thursday sessions will conclude with a 30-minute discussion of key lessons and take-aways from that in-class exercise. An independent assignment will be assigned each Thursday and due the following Tuesday. In Tuesday class sessions, students will present their work and receive feedback from their classmates and the instructor.
Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Qualitative
How can planners understand places in a rich, meaningful, and yet systematic way? This module examines how qualitative approaches can be used in planning practice and research. Qualitative methods are particularly useful in answering why and how questions; investigating differing perceptions and values; understanding unique situations; and helping describe complex situations.
Focused on learning-by-doing, the class examines how to design a qualitative research project and reviews a range of data collection and analysis methods useful in community and organizational environments. With the aid of well-thought-out conceptual frameworks, qualitative research can be designed to make a coherent and meaningful argument. Students learn about collecting and reviewing artifacts, observing places, asking questions, engaging with diverse groups, and using visual techniques. Such data are frequently organized into specific kinds of outputs including case studies, scenarios, and evaluations. Students will try out these approaches in weekly exercises.
By the end of the class, students will be able to:
1. Identify the range of qualitative methods commonly used in planning practice globally, including methods planners use themselves and those used in research planners commission and/or read.
2. Use different qualitative data collection and analytical approaches.
3. Comprehend the strengths and limitations of qualitative approaches and how they can be combined with other methods (mixed-method approaches).
4. Understand how qualitative methods can aid more complex and systematic understanding of urban places.
5. Critically assess qualitative research designs and outputs.
6. Design common forms of qualitative studies (e.g., assessing existing conditions, evaluating an intervention, preparing a case study, and developing future scenarios).
7. Appreciate ethical issues in qualitative research and their relationship to planning ethics more generally.