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. 

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

Architects have long experimented with altering perceptions of space 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 interest in these ideas.  

Behind these transformations lie different instantiations of humanism, proximate or remote operations of technology (equipment), explosive or suppressed uses of ornamentation, lineages of the sublime, conceptions of the visual, reformations of nature and body, and the invention of the sciences of the senses: biology, psychology, cybernetics, cognitive science, neuro-science, and non-linear dynamical systems theory.

Students will read seminal texts and critique evocative architectural projects.  A presentation and two short papers will be required.

*This title is a slight riff on Jacques Rancière’s examination of aesthetics as the “distribution of the senses,” which will be part of our inquiry.

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 during 26-28 April 2019. 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, mental health, stress, and teamwork.

Lecture location: Harvard Yard, Cambridge. Course Fee: $300 to cover camping gear hire, food, and other equipment costs. Field Simulation: 8am, Friday, April 26 through 3pm, Sunday, April 28, 2019.

Course Note: This course is based at the Harvard Chan School as GHP 515 and GHP 518. This course is the equivalent of 3 GSD units, not 4

This course will be held in Fong Auditorium in Boylston Hall (Boylston Hall 110) on Harvard’s Cambridge Campus.

Urban Design for Planners

Course Objectives
This seminar course introduces physical planners to the approaches, techniques and tools of urban design necessary to structure the spatial and dimensional relationships of the built environment. Through an individual, Boston-based project, students will be required to give spatial definition and form to an urban district through the elaboration of streets, block and building morphologies, open space networks and typologies, and urban design guidelines. This course complements the first year Core Urban Planning Studios by concentrating on the design of urban spaces – informed by but independent of – the demands of quantitative analysis, decision-making frameworks, economic forecasting or the specifics of plan implementation.

Students in this class will learn urban design strategies for integrating form and program into a framework for research, collaboration, and communication. Students will gain familiarity with the technical tools and representational techniques essential for planners to portray development scenarios.

Methodology
The parameters for the site and program will be investigated at the outset of the course in order to begin with the investigation of urban form directly. The class will develop a spatial analysis of specific sites including but not limited to block patterns and parcelization, circulatory systems, open space characteristics, and relevant regulatory restrictions – easements, waterway setbacks, etc. Working individually, students will then create concept plans for specific interventions that will be elaborated throughout the remainder of the semester. The class will review urban design approaches for similarly scaled redevelopment projects, identifying relevant case studies from a range of urban design and planning practices. Students will develop their plans through the production of an urban design presentation board or boards that will include a street network plan, a public realm plan, a taxonomy of building types, three dimensional modeling of height and setback requirements and perspectival views conveying character. Techniques of representation will be customized by each student to align with their specific project approach in an acknowledgement of the relationship between representation and spatial or programmatic ideas.

Structure
The class will meet once per week, combining lectures, discussions and design reviews of individual students’ work. Grading will be based on successful completion of the urban design document described above. This course is primarily intended for first and second year planning students enrolled in the MUP program. Students outside this program may gain access to the class with permission from the instructor.

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, drafting, 3D modelling, scripting or even coding, writing (in this context) refers to the level of design agency afforded by the essential application of parametric formulations to design thinking. By the same token, our titular appeal to the notion of form is neither aesthetic nor ideological. Unlike shape (with which it is often confused), we understand form as a syntactic, procedural, and – increasingly– technical proposition, with its fair share of architectural disciplinary autonomy.

Hence this is not a technology offering. Rather, it is a course for architectural designers wishing to work out of –and then expand– the canon of architectural typology, by taking on the 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 and Wednesdays, 11:30 AM – 1 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

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 capture the qualities and characteristics?

This class will explore these questions by observing, quantifying, and attempting to measure different aspects of site-specific environments at Harvard. Students will explore and define different measurable and quantifiable strategies of capturing the unseen elements that define the feel of these different spaces.

Class discussions and projects will utilize the tension created by our natural inclination to detect and react to different ambiances, even though the environment’s characteristics may be difficult to deconstruct, analyze, and pinpoint. The class will look at current and historical examples and theories of psycho-geographical effects that can be tested, revealed, or measured with new technologies, and will work to quantify the different elements that contribute to the ambiance of these spaces. The class will learn the various ways of measuring and understanding these qualities through spatial sensing, mapping, creating and prototyping.

The final project will involve the creation of site-specific installations, either individually or in groups that reveal, augment, or represent the specific elements.

Class workshops will cover the following tools and skills based on project and individual group 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, printing, 3D toolpaths, using an oscilloscope, solder, making simple boards, sending data to a computer for processing and display, wireless devices, Rx/Tx chip, Bluetooth.

 

Landscape Representation II

Building on the foundations of Landscape Representation I, this course investigates further the generative potential of representation as part of a productive feedback loop in the design process.

The course will provide a space to think critically about the representation of design, the role that representation plays in the process of designing, and the skills needed to create those representations. Experimenting with new modes of documentation and framing, we will work collaboratively to explore the reflexive relationship between conceptualization and visualization.

Providing a platform to engage studio work in new ways, students will translate and reinterpret drawings and models through a variety of conventional and unconventional media. The course will cover a range of techniques, skills, and workflows that embrace both analog and digital methodologies, exploring representation as a process of thinking, making and designing.

Market Analysis and Urban Economics

This course focuses on the built environment and land-use policy.  The course combines readings from the real estate economics academic literature with conversations with active commercial real estate professionals to offer GSD students an opportunity to learn how to measure, evaluate and understand real estate market forces—trends and cycles.   These factors shape and determine urban planning and urban form, and determine the success or failure of an architect’s, or designer’s, or urban planner’s vision or project.  Both the space and capital markets for real estate are studied.

The course addresses two questions: 

  1. How do urban land and real estate markets function in the global macro-economy? and,
  2. How should a designer/developer/planner/investor evaluate these markets both with regard to the macro and the micro aspects of a specific project?

The course assumes no economic course prerequisite knowledge and is presented in a lecture format.  Evaluation is based on an in-class mid-term, a take home final exam, and a course project/paper.

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:

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

Creating Real Estate Ventures: a Legal Perspective

The course will examine how a commercial real estate deal is put together to move a project from conception to completion. The course will utilize research resources and actual transactional documentation related to the major stages of commercial real estate development such as (a) securing control of land, (b) sourcing and raising equity, (c) completing predevelopment steps including permits and construction and design agreements, (d) obtaining construction financing and building the project and (e) operating the project and realizing capital returns from refinance and/or sell.

Actual negotiated agreements used in each stage are planned to be analyzed, including project specific joint venture agreements, purchase and sale contracts, development agreements, construction and design contracts, construction loan agreements, major tenant leases, asset management arrangements and permanent loan agreements.

The course will include lectures, student participation in negotiation scenarios, student prepared presentations and exercises, guest appearances by experienced real estate professionals, and site visits to completed or under construction projects and the offices of lawyers and developers. 

The goal of the course is to enable students to get “inside” the deals that produces development projects and to understand major business and related complexities embedded in the various stages of development deals and how these complexities are often addressed and resolved.

There is no prerequisite for taking the course or any need for prior legal experience.