MArch II Proseminar

This course provides a forum for critical discussion of contemporary design practices that is exploratory and speculative in nature. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and debate and prepares students to develop research interests and to formulate positions in architecture. 

Through inquiries based upon readings, analysis of architectural projects, and presentations given by the instructor, faculty of the Department of Architecture, and visitors, the course seeks to expand the student’s understanding of the cultural context that informs the production of architecture and the development of critical interpretations of site, program, service, and research. 

Prerequisites: Enrollment in the MArch II program. 

International Humanitarian Response (at HSPH)

This course offers practical training in the complex issues and field skills needed to engage in humanitarian work. Students will gain familiarity with the concepts and international standards for humanitarian response. While providing a solid theoretical foundation, the course will focus on practical skills such as conducting rapid assessments, ensuring field security, and interacting with aid agencies, the military, and the media during humanitarian crises. The course culminates in a required three-day intensive humanitarian crisis field simulation at Harold Parker State Forest in North Andover, MA, during May 1-3. 2020. Students will camp for two nights in the forest as part of an aid agency team responding to a simulated international disaster and conflict. Student teams will carry out rapid assessments, create a comprehensive humanitarian aid plan, and manage interactions with refugees, officials, and other humanitarian actors. Students will face challenges that test their subject knowledge, team skills, creativity, and grit.

Topics covered:         
– Humanitarian response community and history
– International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Law
– Sphere standards (shelter, water and sanitation, food security, health)
– Civil-military relations, media skills, logistics, and budgeting
– Monitoring and evaluation, accountability
– Personal security, metal health, stress, and teamwork
– Humanitarian technology, and crowdsourcing, and GPS skills

Course Fee: TBD (In previous years, $300 to cover camping gear hire, food, and other equipment costs).

This course is cross-listed with the Harvard Chang School (HSPH) as GHP 515 and GHP 518, and with Tufts University as NUTR324 and DHP213.  All cross-registrants and Harvard Chan students must apply for instructor permission here.

Please note that this course is the equivalent of 3 GSD units, not 4.

This course will take place in Fong Auditorium in Boylston Hall, Harvard Yard, not at HSPH.

Urban Politics, Planning, and Development (at HKS)

In the face of failures and dysfunction at the national level, there is growing excitement about the welfare- and democracy-enhancing potential of cities. Yet, not all cities are able to realize their promise as engines of economic growth and human development. Why some fail, while others succeed depends crucially on the politics and governance practices that shape cities and metropolitan regions. Understanding the politics of urban planning and development is therefore fundamental to unlocking the potential of our cities to boost the wealth, health, and well-being of citizens and communities. This course focuses on urban politics in the United States and Europe. Key topics include U.S. and European urban politics viewed in the large, and more specifically the politics of land-use, economic development, housing, water, policing, and transit. Cross-cutting themes include: the role of business and non-profits in local governance; citizen participation and urban social movements; the importance of race, ethnicity, and class in shaping group conflict and co-operation at the local level; as well as the costs and benefits of local government fragmentation. The course involves in-class exercises, group work, and simulations, as well as guest lectures. Most class sessions build off single-city case studies, including written and multi-media cases on Stuttgart, New Orleans, Atlanta, Naples, Seattle, New York, Portland, Chicago, Detroit, London, Boston, and Copenhagen.

The course purposes are twofold: (1) to enhance your sophistication in thinking about and analyzing the factors and conditions that shape political and planning processes at the urban level and what their consequences are; and (2) to hone your skills in thinking strategically about how to exercise influence in and on these decision processes.

Note: Shopping Day Schedule for SES-5201/SUP-601 at HKS: Friday, January 24th from 11:45-1:00 pm in Wex332.

Affordable and Mixed-Income Housing Development, Finance, and Management

Explores issues relating to the development, financing, and management of housing affordable to 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 development cost, financing, operating, rental assistance, tax credit, entitlement, and project-generated cross income subsidy vehicles. Assesses alternative debt and equity funding sources for both rental and for-sale mixed-income housing and addresses the now common practice of aggregating multiple subsidies into a single financial package. Reviews other aspects of the affordable housing development process, including assembling and managing the development team, preparing feasibility studies, controlling sites, 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. Historically, almost 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 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 expected or required.

Also offered by Harvard Kennedy School as SUP-666

 

Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-666

Note: Shopping Day Schedule for SES-5490/SUP-666 at HKS: Thursday, January 23rd from 1:15-2:30 pm in Littauer 230. There will be 2 sessions: 1:15 -1:45 pm and 2:00-2:30 pm.

Factory of the Sensible and the Political* (Equipping Experience)

Architects have long experimented with altering perceptions of space and structures in order to reconfigure experience. 

At stake in this course are pivotal historical and theoretical transformations in our understanding of perception and experience that are relevant to our contemporary architectural interest in these concepts. 

Behind these transformations lie different instantiations of humanism, proximate or remote technologies (equipment), explosive or suppressed uses of ornamentation, lineages of the sublime, conceptions of the visual, reformations of nature and body, object ontologies, the invention of the life sciences (sensory systems), cybernetics and non-linear dynamical systems theory.  Socio-political agency, in these contexts, are often new tables of operation embedded in aesthetic provocations. 

Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935 that modes of perception change when upheavals happen in the history of human life.  Fredric Jameson, on the other hand, argued in 1991 that the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, designed and built by John Portman, was a “mutation in built space” that is “unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject.”

Students will read seminal texts and we will collectively discuss evocative architectural projects.  A presentation and two short papers will be required. No prerequisites.

Theories for Practice in Conflict, Crisis, and Recovery

Course topics and objectives:

How do we understand the relationship between crisis, recovery and the built environment at the beginning of the 21st century? Conflicts and disasters are both symptoms and evidence of asymmetrical urban, territorial, and social development. For this reason, any ethically defensible response to a catastrophic event should go beyond “mere” reconstruction and imagine new, more resilient, and more equitable forms of urbanization. This research seminar will therefore examine situations of ‘post-disaster recovery’, as an opportunity to rethink, conceptually redefine, and proactively reconstruct or reconfigure new forms of urbanization.

To begin, we explore the social construction of crisis, disasters and emergencies through a critical interpretive lens, as well as situate contemporary discourses on disaster response within theories of modernization, crisis, and the ‘natural’. We identify the conditions under which certain crises or related challenges are considered normal or routine, as opposed to exceptional. We move beyond the abstract to ground our inquiry in the physical world. We examine the variety of actors involved in recovery interventions – including international institutions, NGOs, citizens, professional planners, political parties – and critically reflect on the role of technology and infrastructure, and various other methodologies deployed to achieve post-disaster aims.

Course format and methods of evaluation:

This course is a reading, writing, and research seminar. It requires sustained participation throughout the semester. Readings span multiple disciplines in the social sciences: urban studies, geography, sociology, political philosophy, and science and technology studies (STS). Some assignments are collective, others individual. Several guests will present themes ranging from the history of disaster, to post-conflict reconciliation, and new technologies of crisis response. Students will use a variety of methodologies such as analytical mapping and design techniques as well as archival, survey, planning, ecological, engineering, and critical conservation practices to offer projective ideas and grounded proposals for novel reconstruction practices that aim for a more vibrant, sustainable, and equitable urbanism.

Built Environment, Human Energy Expenditure and Public Health (at HSPH)

At the completion of this course, students will have an understanding of different built environments and human energy expenditure in those environments. As two examples, parks provide mental and social benefits but many park users have low human energy expenditure (sports spectators, slow walkers, park bench sitters, etc.). In contrast to parks, bicyclists in bicycle environments have higher energy expenditure. During this course, measures such as Health Impact Assessments (HIA) and policies such as Complete Streets will be studied to assess whether high human energy expenditure was considered. Through the students' understanding of the built environment and human energy expenditure measures such as METs, students will understand the ways of translating information on obesity, physical activity, and health into practice effectively. The course is intended for undergraduate students, graduate students, and individuals interested in the design of the built environment. Those enrolled may be interested in environmental health, landscape architecture, park design, exercise physiology, public health, urban planning, government, engineering, METs, human energy expenditure measures, HIA, and walking and bicycling in all populations. The focus will be on creating urban forms with high human energy expenditure to lessen obesity, diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer. This course is intended to fully address health and obesity reduction through the built environment in more ways than only recommending that individuals engage in physical activity.

Course Activities: Discussion, lectures, guest lectures, writing 3 three page double-spaced papers that culminate in one final paper that is a collection of the 3 papers, a design charrette, and delivering short presentations. Materials include readings, websites, webcams, and video clips.

Principles of Collective Learning (at SEAS)

How do teams, cities, and nation learn? How do they acquire the knowledge they need to improve their capacities, or enter new activities? This course will equip students with a basic understanding of both, the mechanisms that govern the creation, diffusion, and valuation of knowledge, and the tools needed to study these mechanisms. The course will be divided into three parts. The first part describes the mechanisms that contribute to the collective accumulation of knowledge (e.g. learning curves). The second part will focus on knowledge diffusion, and on the mechanisms governing it across geographies, social networks, and productive activities. The third part will focus on the consequences of knowledge accumulation, for the distribution of wealth and economic activity.  These three big lessons will be complemented with lectures and discussions on the policy implications of this knowledge-based view of economies and with mathematical models describing the accumulation and recombination of knowledge. The course’s learning goals will be supported with hands on data exercises in which students will use data on international trade, employment, and patents, to reproduce classical studies.

 

Evaluation: 

Students will be evaluated based on three problem sets and on class participation (class participation is mandatory).

Problem Set 1: 30%

Problem Set 2: 30%

Problem Set 4: 30%

Class Participation 10%

 

Learning outcomes: 

At the end of the course students will be able to conduct data driven analyses of the capabilities and diversification opportunities of regional and national economies. The students will also obtain a working understanding of modern theories in economic geography, innovation studies, and economic complexity, which will serve as a segue to academic work or consulting work on these topics.

Also offered as SEAS ENG-SCI 298BR

Open to Master of Design Engineering, Graduate School of Design, and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

See my.harvard, SEAS ENG-SCI 298BR, for location.

Digital Media: Writing Form

This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the primal pursuit of writing form.

Setting aside the better-known paradigms of sketching, 3D modeling, scripting or coding, writing –in this context– refers to the design potential of applied parametric formulations. Our appeal to form in this context is neither aesthetic nor ideological. Unlike shape (with which it is often confused), we understand form as a syntactic, procedural, and –increasingly– technical problem, with its fair share of architectural disciplinary autonomy. This is not just a technology offering, but an opportunity for architectural designers to expand their understanding of the canon of architectural typology, by taking on new, sneaky, ‘invisible’ types.

This crash course in indexical modelling (the deployment of variable analytic surfaces to parametrically define the space, boundaries, structure, and tectonic texture of a given three-dimensional construct) will be organised around semi-monthly lectures and applied workshops in parametric design, leading to the development of a number of intermediate design sketches, and a final design proposal. The outcome in all cases will be numerically fabricated physical models –laser-cut or 3D printed—with supporting diagrams.

On the theoretical side, the course will clarify the tenets of parametricism both practically (mathematically), formally, and theoretically with an assigned reading list stretching from Rosalind Krauss to George L. Legendre, and Greg Lynn.

On the practical side, generative design tools will include PTC MathCAD 15, Rhino 6 /Grasshopper, and the proprietary, third-party Grasshopper plugins Surf_TM, Millipede, and Weaverbird. No experience is necessary, as participants will be issued powerful software templates to work from every week.

 

Hours: Mondays, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM, and and Wednesdays, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM, every other week. An optional support class will be held on Mondays from 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM. The instructor will provide written progress feedback on a weekly basis.

Digital Media: Ambiance in Non-places

How do we define the “ambiance” of a place? What causes specific environments to evoke different feelings? Are there consistent elements that define these ambiances, and is it possible to measure their qualities and characteristics?

This class will explore these questions by observing, quantifying, and measuring different aspects of site-specific environments. It will attempt to create new ways of describing psychological attributes of places that go beyond what was traditionally measurable. Students will define different quantifiable strategies of capturing the unseen elements that define the feel of these different spaces.

This year, the class discussions will particularly focus around understanding qualities of “non-places”. In social sciences, “non-places” are a type of generic public spaces or institutions that do not confer a feeling of place. Many of these are transitory places, where humans pass through anonymously and do not identify with in any intimate sense, such as airports, train stations, and malls. Non-places offer a unique opportunity for interventions, as they are often seen as dehumanizing places. Students will create interactive tools, wearables, and site-specific installations that respond and intervene at these non-places. 

The course will expose students to digital and physical fabrication methods, and new technologies such as software, electronics, smart materials, and programming. An equally important part of the course is questioning how and why certain spaces make us feel a certain way, what role our senses play in perceiving physical environments, and how we can use technology through installations to interpret these questions in a poetic way. Class discussions will look at current and historical examples and theories of psycho-geographical effects that can be tested, revealed, or measured with new technologies. The class will learn the various ways of measuring and understanding these qualities through spatial sensing, mapping, creating, and prototyping.

Class workshops will cover the following digital and physical fabrication tools and skills based on project needs: Arduino (including input, output, making motions, and using devices to connect to the web), basic electronics, Ohm’s Law, potentiometers, capacitor charging, using a multimeter, Shopbot, scanning, 3D printing, 3D toolpaths, using an oscilloscope, solder, making simple boards, sending data to a computer for processing and display, and wireless devices.