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.

Economic Development Planning

This course will look at the theory and practice of economic development at the local and regional level, mostly in the context of cities and regions in the United States. It will consider policies, strategies and programs for dealing with the decline and revitalization of neighborhoods, communities, cities, towns and regions.  The course will focus on forces that create change in communities and the tools and best practices that are available to address these forces.  The course will focus on both theory and case studies, and will explore strategies and solutions in an interdisciplinary fashion. 

Economic development typically involves the strategic use of pubic funds and programs to enable private investment to succeed.  At its best, economic development creates a triple bottom line solution, benefiting business, the community and the environment.

The course seeks to understand, through case studies, the economic and political challenges to developing an economic development strategy, and the application of technical skills and planning knowledge to ensure that economic development strategies are successful. 

 

The course is broken into three segments:

 

The course will include individual analytical work on the case studies as well as a team client project, where students will work to address a complex economic development challenge in a local community. 

Metropolitics: Comparative Metropolitan Governance

More than 50% of the world population lives in cities, and will reach two thirds by 2060. Almost half of the urban population lives in cities above 500,000 people, and 12% in Megacities beyond 10 million. These large cities extend from densely populated urban cores towards a wider number of jurisdictions and ecosystems, including suburbs, villages, towns and cities, on what is known as Metropolitan Areas. 

Rapid metropolization is adding pressure in local governments to cope with deteriorating infrastructure, air and water pollution, stressed ecological networks, transportation gridlock, rising poverty, immigration and social inequities while providing sound public services such as water, sewage, energy, transit, social services, education and health. 

Metropolitan Areas are also sources of opportunities and prosperity, providing the critical mass required to become engines of national economies and centers of global trade and investment; sometimes challenging traditional federal or unitarian government structures, hegemony and restrictions.

In a context of emerging national populism and protectionism, 21st century metropolises are no longer playing by conventional top-down rules of the 20th century. Political and economic power is shifting and devolving: downward from national governments to cities; horizontally on new platforms of public-private and civic collaboration; and globally along networks such as C40 or 100 Resilient Cities. A new metropolitan leadership is emerging by necessity to solve the grand challenges characteristic of modern cities.

This course will identify a range of current governance innovations and mechanisms to provide efficient and equitable urban services, develop sustainable megaprojects and improve policy coordination.

We will define metropolitan governance and its implications, describe its various models around the world and study emerging metro drivers such as: Innovation, Infrastructure, Inclusion, Urban Mobility, Security, Environment, Risk Management, Economic Development and Technological Change, exemplified by cases of cities that have moved from planning to implementation.

The course is in a lecture-seminar format, with evaluations based on a research-oriented paper and class participation. At the end of the semester we will present the findings as part of the Santiago de Chile Metropolitan Government devolving plan.

Critical Perspectives in Environmental Planning

What is the relationship between the natural environment and the design of successful places? How do we know? And how can we mobilize these ideas as planners and citizens? This class will explore environmental planning as an inescapably political and ideological practice and will give you tools to contextualize environmental planning methods in time and place. Starting with a brief survey of the history of environmental planning and its alternatives, we will explore recent planning perspectives that focus on empowering communities to shape their own environmental conditions, including Environmental Justice, Political Ecology, democratic resource management, and other methods of community governance and environmental activism. We will consider how environmental planning ideas spread, how they work in different contexts, and how they have been disruptive and disrupted. We will question the relationship between environmental protection and community empowerment. Finally, we will explore our own politics as planners and designers, in order to be more aware of the assumptions and values that drive the work we do, and to figure out how we can most fairly and equitably live in and with the natural world.

This class will be intellectually omnivorous, combining perspectives from planning, environmental history, anthropology, political science, and other fields. We will therefore occasionally interrogate how different fields produce knowledge and use these varied perspectives as data to explore how people experience nature and the built environment.

Sustainable Real Estate

This introductory course surveys the historical foundations, economic logics and underlying physics that underscore the design, development and operations of sustainable buildings. The recurring theme of people, place and profit is redefined within the context of user demand, asset management, site planning, building design and financial acumen. Students trace a narrative of process that begins with market analysis and conceptual design and ends with de-commissioning and recycling. Throughout the course, the central subjectivities and applications of sustainability will be challenged in order to critically evaluate aspects of social, financial, and environmental sustainability. In particular, the course seeks to understand the nature and extent to which empirical science can inform risk-adjusted business decisions. In practical terms, the course is built upon basic technical calculations ranging from material energy transfers to discount cash-flow analysis. These calculations are contextualized against building code benchmarks and exemplified through various technologies and building systems. The course includes a systematic review of various rating systems, building codes and delivery models, as well as the support systems necessary for informing investment and design decisions. At the conclusion of the course, students will have sufficient knowledge to pursue further competencies and accreditations leading to an entry-level practice in sustainable real estate management. For design students, the course defines a fundamental set of operational and economic parameters that shape design decisions and development trade-offs in commercial real estate. Students will be evaluated through the development of a business case based on programmatic requirements set forth in an RFP issued by the U.S General Services Administration (GSA). The business case will be based on an integrated design and financial strategy that includes a pre-tax investment analysis, physical plans and designs, and life-cycle projections. The course will conclude with a presentation of the business case in a format that is intended to simulate the process of making a successful bid to a GSA jury. Sustainable Real Estate is not exclusively about the efficiency of inputs and outputs of market production. It is about the design of material investments in the built environment that promote efficiency and reduce consumption in the advancement of the stability and durability of a broader range of urban ecologies.

There are no prerequisite courses required for this course.

Healthy Places

The connections between health, well-being, and place are a complex. This class focuses on four topics that will be important in coming decades: a place, suburbia; a population, older people; a method, neighborhood health assessment; and an implementation strategy, multi-sectoral collaboration.

• Place: Suburbia is a key site for urban growth in coming decades and has provoked polarized opinions about its healthiness. The class will look beyond the hype to understand the strengths and weaknesses of this very diverse part of the metropolitan landscape.

• Population: The aging of the world’s population is an enormous challenge that will fundamentally reshape households, cities, and regions. The class will engage the shifting physiological and psychological dimensions of aging. This is an area of some innovation in terms of technology, housing forms, transportation options, and lifestyle options.

• Method: Understanding the healthiness of existing and proposed neighborhoods is an issue that is more contentious than it would at first appear as various health assessments start from different premises. The class will examine existing tools including health impact assessment, healthy community assessment, community health needs assessment, as well as various livability and sustainability tools. The course will also engage with an emerging kind of tool the neighborhood health assessment or audit.

• Implementation strategy: Because health and well-being are so multifaceted many propose collaborative models of implementing healthy places strategies including well-known approaches like healthy cities, age-friendly communities, and child-friendly environments. The course will unpack these approaches, asking how effective they really are.

In examining these topics students will also reflect on some larger questions. Can the way places are planned and designed improve health? What are the key health issues that should concern those in planning and related fields? Does the work of incorporating health issues into planning and design processes always add value? Is evidence-based practice really an improvement over business-as-usual? What is the relationship between the different approaches to incorporating health into planning and design practice: health assessments, built projects, regulations and policies, interagency coordination, and programs to change how places are used?

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 twentieth 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

Transportation Policy and Planning (at HKS)

The course is intended to develop in students an understanding of the management, policy and planning problems that are peculiar to transportation and other types of infrastructure. The first half develops three basic analytic skills:
1. The ability to evaluate spatially and temporally detailed demand forecasts by systematically identifying and analyzing the relevant markets and by understanding the strengths and weakness of traditional mode split and four-step models.
2. The ability to estimate the costs of different services despite the presence of economies of scale and scope, peak, joint, fixed and sunk costs and other complications and an understanding of the different roles that cost and non-cost considerations play in the service and pricing decisions of for-profit firms and public enterprises.
3. A basic understanding of the importance of scheduling, network design and inventory policy in balancing customer convenience with carrier cost.

The second half builds the capability to identify and evaluate remedies for four policy and planning issues:
1. An understanding of the basic options for controlling congestion (such as building new capacity vs. managing existing capacity better) and air pollution (such as reducing vehicle miles traveled vs. reducing emissions per vehicle mile) and the ability to determine which option is most appropriate in a particular situation.
2. The ability to assess when a transportation policy or investment is likely to have a significant effect on urban land use and land values, including an understanding of the role the transportation has played in shaping metropolitan form in the past and the extent to which the parallels with the past can be misleading.
3. An understanding of when it is economically sensible and politically acceptable to have a private firm provide transportation services through public-private partnerships or other means and the ability to asses the need for government to regulate the prices or quality of service of private providers.
4. An understanding of the pros and cons of using transportation investments as a tool to stimulate the national economy or lagging regions including the different roles that benefit-cost, financial and regional income analyses play in the evaluation of those investments and how jobs created and the indirect or wider economic effects of investments should be reflected in the benefit-cost and financial analyses.

The course is taught primarily by the case method and the cases are drawn from a variety of urban and intercity modes—including mass transit, highways, railroads, airlines and ferries—and from both industrialized and developing countries.

This course has a discussion section on Fridays from 8:45-10 AM.

Jointly offered as HKS SUP 651

Those interested in GSD SES 5302/HKS SUP-651 are encouraged to attend a shopping session on Wednesday, September 5th from 8:45-10 AM at HKS in L230. The actual first class meetings will be on Friday, September 7th.  After that the course will meet regularly on Mondays and Wednesdays, 8:45-10 AM in L230, with reviews on Fridays 8:45-10 in R306.