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.

Urban Transportation Planning and Implementation

This course examines the policy, politics, planning, and implementation of transportation systems in urban areas. We will explore a broad range of topics that touch on the urban planning framework (geography, demand, and supply); transportation/land use connections; tools and standards (basic traffic engineering and demand modeling concepts); policies (congestion pricing, sustainability, transportation finance, parking); process (project implementation and evaluation), including the evolving landscape of shared mobility, connected vehicles, and new transportation technologies.

Special focus will be given to the Boston context and “culture” of primary agencies and constituencies, examining land use and density, housing affordability, economic growth and connectivity, equity and environmental sustainability.  The course content will focus on detecting, analyzing and considering both persistence and change in primary factors over time and pattern breaks.  Our goal is to elicit class discussion, to spark your own thinking, and have you challenge the assumptions behind “conventional wisdom” in transportation planning.

The format of the course will include weekly readings, lectures, and two-three-hour walking tours (scheduled outside of the weekly meeting) — one featuring highlights of Boston’s transportation history and the other focused on the transportation issues that will be pertinent to assignments. Students are expected to come to class having read the required readings, submit to the class website a one-paragraph (no more than 150 word) response to the readings each week, and to participate actively in class discussions. Students will complete five assignments during the course, two of which will be assigned to groups of three or more.  A detailed assignment sheet will be posted for each assignment along with recommended resources.  Student evaluations will be based on participation (reading responses, discussions, and presentations) and written assignments.

Planning for Climate Change: Scarcity, Abundance, and the Idea of the Future

Climate change presents a range of complex challenges for urban planning and design. This class will explore the conditions planners face in response to the material and social impacts of climate-impacted places – sea level rise, extreme weather events, intensified conflicts over water rights, climate refugees, loss of livelihoods and other economic stressors, to name a few – as well as ask what responsibility rests on our shoulders to use the tools of planning and design to mitigate climate change?

We will approach anthropogenic climate change as a specific case of an older and broader challenge: How should planners design settlements to be flexible and responsive to changing environments? How can planning foster healthier relationships between people and non-human nature? To this end, we will examine moments of existential environmental crises in the past (e.g. the American Dust Bowl), explore the role that planners played in addressing these crises, and consider how global climate change poses fundamentally new problems. We will also explore the long history of climate predictions and their changing relevance over time. What should we make, for example, of calls to switch to new energy regimes in the 1920s, or of solar building designs in the 1950s?

Thinking about the ways in which scientifically-based warnings of scarcity have been ignored and/or mobilized over time, we will explore the politics of climate change, including the evolution of climate change discourse and the implications of current politics for planners. We will consider how the vocabulary of climate planning (sustainability, adaptation and mitigation, resilience, the Anthropocene) has been used and contested, and how different climate futures have been envisioned and evoked in different contexts relevant to planning and design.

This critical perspective on climate change planning as a necessary but politically fraught endeavor will bring us to the question of how planners should approach climate change data. How should we interpret models and predictions as the basis for action? How should we interpret and represent scientific uncertainty in practice? How can we determine which precautionary measures are most urgent?

Climate Change Resilience and Adaptation

Through the lens of climate change, this foundation course surveys the intellectual development of resilience and adaptation in the social, natural and applied sciences. Through a critical reading and analysis of central bodies of literature, students are provided a conceptual and empirical basis for exploring applied practices and policies advanced in the name of climate change adaptation. The practice component of the course focuses on community resilience in urban planning and policy, technical resilience in civil and systems engineering, multi-hazard risk assessment in disaster risk management, and adaptation mainstreaming in the public and private sectors. This range of applications reflects the opportunities for a diversity of actors to engage in new forms of practice that synthetically negotiate and mediate various socioeconomic and biophysical forces. Positioned within an emerging field of study, this course identifies many of the key unanswered questions that are critical for future conceptual and empirical development. With a focus on environmental change and the built environment, students will develop a critical understanding of relevant public policies and institutions, design and engineering techniques, economic strategies and planning models. The course pedagogy balances lectures, seminar readings and case study reviews to link theory with practice. Students may select their final course evaluation to be based on either be a final exam or a paper. The intent is to utilize the course as a means of research support for students across the university who may be incorporating aspects of resilience and adaptation scholarship into their existing theses, dissertations and peer-review manuscripts. This course is open to masters and doctoral students at the KSG, HSPH, FAS, MIT and Tufts.

U. S. Housing Markets, Problems, and Policies

This course will examine the operation of U.S. housing markets, the principal housing problems facing the nation, and the policy approaches available to address these problems within the existing political, regulatory and market context.  The course is structured around four central housing problems that are the focus of US housing policy:  the inability of a large share of renters to obtain housing that meets generally accepted affordability standards; the challenges facing low-income and minority households in attaining homeownership; the high degree of residential segregation by race/ethnicity and income and associated differential access to public and private resources that results; and how housing policy can support broader efforts at community development.  Each section of the course will develop a detailed understanding of the nature of the problem, how the operation of housing markets either produce or fail to address the problem, introduce the principal federal, state and local policy approaches available to address the problem, and wrestle with critical policy questions that arise in choosing how best to address the problem.

The goal of the course is to build both a foundation of knowledge and a critical perspective needed to diagnose the genesis of the nation’s housing problems, to identify the potential policy levers for addressing these failures, and assess the relative merits of alternative approaches.  Class sessions will be a mixture of lecture and class discussions focusing on the assigned readings.  Students will be expected to come to class prepared to be fully engaged participants in these discussions. Over the course of the semester, students will be required to prepare periodic reviews of assigned readings shared on Canvas, submit a 5-page paper making the case for a specific policy proposal, and complete a take home final exam.  The course is intended for graduate students with an interest in US housing policy, although no previous background in housing policy or disciplinary training is required.