Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology

This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources. Emphasis will be placed on both the science and the application of this science in designs for projects involving a wide range of interactions with water including coastlines, inland rivers and lakes, and urban stormwater. With ongoing global changes in climate, urbanization, and the use of water for energy and food production, the relationship between humans and water will continue to grow and evolve. Students will come away from this course with a better understanding of this evolution and how designs can account for hydrologic change and adaptation. While many varied case studies will be discussed throughout the semester, the course content will be discussed in the context of four primary project and research areas:

Discussion of these focus areas will include design challenges, social issues, permitting, and the implementation process. Students will come away with a better understanding of how projects go from conceptual design to a constructed site. Students will be encouraged to bring water and ecology-related projects/challenges from other courses, studios, or projects to the class for an open discussion. This ‘Ecological Seminar’ will be an opportunity for students to cross-pollinate with other studios and departments and receive critical and helpful feedback for their projects.  Hands-on exercises include watershed delineation, hydrologic calculations to estimate runoff and groundwater infiltration and flow, design exercises developing recommendations for stormwater best-management-practices/low-impact design (LID) for neighborhood in Washington, DC, and research and design exercises for river restoration projects. Attendance at two fieldtrips with hands-on field sampling will be mandatory: a 2-day weekend field trip to Plymouth and an in-class fieldtrip to the Alewife stormwater facility.

Evaluation: Based on class attendance and participation (including field trips), short written assignments, quizzes, focused design exercises, and a semester-long project.

BROWNFIELDS: Remediation and Regeneration Practices

‘A Brownfields Site is real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence, or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant”
-From the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act known as the ‘Brownfield Act’ January 2002

This course concerns the reclamation of land altered by prior industrial, manufacturing, commercial and other active uses and in particular those that are derelict, environmentally hazardous and located within neighborhoods and/or close to residential communities. The subject matter addresses recent advances in the legal, regulatory, environmental, and economic and community landscape as well as the remediation of despoiled land in a manner that reclaims and redevelops these sites for future uses. Of interest to the instructor is how these advances can inform more progressive and creative planning research and design work, and conversely, to what extent planning and design work can direct the regeneration and reuse of these urban environments. Under consideration this semester is the class of sites commonly known as ‘brownfields' or ‘brownfield lands'. The class will visit local sites in Somerville and Lowell, MA as well as consider the subject globally. A class assignment will research the subject though international case studies.

Immersive Landscape: Representation through Gaming Technology

Soon will come plausible alternatives to our world.
You may have failed in this one but what if you had a million new chances in a million different new worlds?

The course is aimed at investigating new ways to interpret, conceive and describe landscape and architecture. While traditional methods of representation will prevail for some time, they make the cognitive process a one-way circumstance with an “emitter” and a “listener” that barely interact. Game technologies permit the creation of realistic, oniric, utopian as well as dystopian universes. It is possible to use, disregard, twist, bend or re-invent the laws of physics, the flow of time, the hazards of weather, the perception of depth, but most importantly, it permits absolute freedom.Just as Rome wasn't built in a day, connections will need to be made through studies of landscape representation in the arts, movies and, not surprisingly, video games.

Through the investigation, conception and construction of virtual “altered states” you will acquire the techniques required to develop your ideas from the early stages of preparatory work to the deployment phase, bearing in mind that technical skills matter less than the search for smart and imaginative solutions. Game fabrication should be envisaged as a mental layout where elements have to be structured and organized in a way that they are not perceived as being intrusive, unless, of course, you want them to be.

Some of the topics that will be covered include: “mastering planning and research”, “Strategies of representations”, “the finding of a graphic style”, “creating meshes and textures for game engines”, “building nature in Unity”, “realistic vs. non realistic approaches”, “sound design”, “navigation and interaction”, “document.write(“Hello World!”)”, “targeting different platforms”, “having fun” – while it's not exactly technical, it's a fundamental notion that should not be lost, especially when speaking of games.The classes will be divided in two parts, alternating weekly, where one class will be focused on theory, methods, and criticism, and the other will focus more on the technical, where will be put into practice what has been investigated. Both sessions will include lecturers and other guests.

Our software of choice will be “Unity3D” (https://unity3d.com), a real time 3D engine, which is an industry standard in game creation and simulation (most of the processes can actually be easily transferred to other engines). “Cinema 4D” (https://www.maxon.net/en/products/cinema-4d/overview/) , because of its very stable and simple workflow, will be used for most of the 3D operations. Students familiar with other 3D packages are free to use them as a possible replacement. Still, the most important tools will be a pencil, a piece of paper and your brain.

Landscape Representation III: Landform and Ecological Process

Landscape Representation III examines the relationship between terrain and the landscape it supports and engenders. It aspires to explore and challenge the representational conventions of land-forming, and support a Landscape Architecture design process that posits the landscape as a relational assemblage. It explores a description of the making of land-form through its inherent material performance in relationship to ecological processes that describe its connectability to the ordering and making of the landscape that is a reciprocation of forces between itself and its context at specific scales.

Measures of time will be utilised to describe and design the landscape through a comparison of sequence and event, and their intervals, rates and duration in relationship to spatial forces and flows. Time infuses the material reality of the landscape through states of formation, from those that signify stability, through to sequences that are predictable and observable processes of change, and 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 visualised through multiple forms of media. These are decision making models conceived to imbue interaction between evidence-based variables and design input.

Precedent studies will accompany an engagement in digital media, with fluid transitions between documentation and speculation, 2D and 3D, static and dynamic, illustrating time-based processes.

Lectures and lab exercises will provide the foundation for exploration and discussion and an 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.

Digital Media: Image

Over the past three decades the architectural process has been drastically reorganized by what historian Jonathan Crary calls “a transformation in the nature of visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective.” Architecture’s previously stable graphical conventions have dissolved and been replaced with an ever expanding repertoire of computational mediums, originally not designed for the architectural imagination.

If we acknowledge that architecture has for centuries produced new ideas and forms by treating representational media as spaces of visual exploration, how might techniques that belong to computational media—which often, however unintentionally, seem to prioritize “workflow optimization” at the expense of experimentation—be made to serve this same experimental function? Any such inquiry entails imagining and testing methods by which computational image making (or what Friedrich A. Kittler calls computer graphics) might be at times used to disrupt the smooth workflows which presently define digital fabrication culture. It also involves thinking carefully about how the history of form and tectonics—which architectural drawing managed so well for centuries—might be preserved and extended within the paradigm of these new digital media.

Students will be exposed to a diverse set of precedents in computer graphics, ranging from early video art practices to more recent experiments in compression aesthetics. Case studies will be paired with exercises involving technical processes that have generally been regarded as lying outside the domain of architectural practice, but which might now be used profitably as a way of opening up and expanding architecture’s own digital culture. In this sense, the course is interested in an expansion and revision of the notion of “digital representation” in architecture.

There are no prerequisites for this class, and no special software skills are required, only a willingness to explore various media in unconventional ways. Students will be encouraged to hybridize existing graphic and fabrication platforms.

Digital Media: Design Systems

The course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, methods and practical techniques in design computation with emphasis on a systems perspective. We take a view that computational design requires designing of systems instead of forms/geometries directly and that the quality of such systems reflect the success of the design outcome.

A system can be understood as a set of detailed procedures to achieve a specific objective, which takes input data/signal and transforms it into output/feedback. To design a computational system, it is necessary to adopt a particular way of thinking: identifying, abstracting, and decomposing a design goal. In addition, the data and procedures to achieve the goal requires the use of logical and numerical constructs. On the contrary to such a reductionist approach, it is important to note the output of a design system needs to be accessible to human thoughts for holistic and intuitive evaluation. In other words, the perspective of system helps elucidate the different modes of thinking embedded within the use of the digital medium for design.

The course will be comprised of three learning segments: (a) computational and geometric notations, (b) data organization and algorithms, (c) data flow and design control; introduced through a series of lectures and hands-on workshops. Students will create, analyze, and evaluate computational and geometric constructs within design-as-a-system thought-paradigm. Simultaneously, the course provides students with the basis for developing critical thinking towards computational tools through working on a series of design exercise and a final project. We will use Rhino, Grasshopper environment and C# where we expect the students to be familiar with 3D modelling and basic digital fabrication such as laser cutting and 3D printing. It is designed for architecture students with little programming experience who are interested in understanding the underlying principles of computational tools and customization of design processes using the tools. The success of students is evaluated not solely on technical accomplishments but according to the integrity of the produced design processes and products in engaging the given theoretical concepts.

 

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 towards 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.

Prerequisites:
Enrollment in the Urban Planning program

Architectural Representation II

This course examines the history, theory and practice of parallel (orthographic) and central (perspective) projection. The objective is to provide the tools to imagine and represent with precision, dexterity, and virtuosity a continually expanding repertoire of three-dimensional architectural form. The focus of the lectures will be twofold: first, to trace key historical developments of projection in architecture from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment into the 20th century, and second, to explain the comprehensive codification of descriptive geometry and the means by which it is practiced.

We will see that projective systems have affected relationships between masons, carpenters, engineers, mathematicians, cartographers, painters, and architects. The impact of the computer on architecture’s perennial oscillation between the three and two dimensions of projection will come into focus. The representation of objects as we see them and their measured description, two tasks that are conventionally distinguished in architectural drawing, will be shown to have been unwittingly, in many respects, mutually determined and transformed.
 

 

 

 

 

 

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.   

 
 
 
 

 

Form+Finance: the Design of Real Estate

This course exposes students to tools, instruments and strategies for design thinking and the mechanisms of finance and market forces that shape and impact built form.  The class bridges the disciplines of real estate finance, development and design by highlighting the ways in which the perspectives intersect, inform and negotiate with one another.  For students with a design background, the imbedded logics of real estate finance and market dynamics will impact their understanding and constructs of physical form.  For students with a background in finance and economics, exposure to the processes by which designers conceptualize design proposals and how to visualize space and understand building typologies at a variety of scales will be reinforced.  An underlying objective of the course is to amplify the synergies between how one spatializes development and how real estate dynamics shape and influence buildings and spaces.

Through in-class lectures, case studies, course readings, group exercises and assignments, participants will learn fundamental principles of real estate dynamics as they relate to various building typologies.  Students will also learn the processes by which developers, investors, architects and urban designers and planners conceptualize various frameworks for real estate development.  The class provides the skills to visualize and communicate concepts about a site and enable the assessment of a project for its development potential and value proposition, understanding the myriad of factors that influence a project’s form and character.  This course operates between design aesthetics and economic viability, demonstrating how design creates value for investors, owners and tenants of real estate and how finance influences the shape of our physical environment.

Various computer programs will be introduced in the course through periodic evening tutorials.  Each program presents a technique to visualize the development and design characteristics of a project and communicate that information in a variety of modes of representation.  While some students will be familiar with design and financial workflows, this class does not presume that they are familiar with them.  More complex considerations in combining financial analysis and form-making will emerge towards the end of the term.

This course in 2016 is for students enrolled in the MDes Real Estate and the Built Environment (REBE) graduate study. A small number of other students may be allowed to enroll by permission of the instructor.