Practices of Landscape Architecture

This course examines landscape architecture practice through the consideration of contemporary frameworks for professional services, the legal and financial contexts in which they operate, and the documentation and delivery of landscape design projects and products.

Contemporary landscape architects practice operates in shifting environmental, economic and social climates, working in increasingly complex collaborations, with evolving legislative parameters, and using both traditional as well as emerging mechanisms for project delivery. The specific disciplinary concerns of landscape architecture – including the integration of biophysical, political, and cultural systems over time requires a full understanding of professional services and methods to engage these challenges. The course in three parts will explore the relationship between the discipline of landscape architecture and its professional practice.

The first of three parts looks at the emergence of the profession and its core elements to situate the structure and framework of contemporary landscape architectural practice. Guest landscape architects will present a range of design practices in terms of content, scale, types, programs and forms of collaboration. Of particular interest will be the nature of landscape practice internationally.

The second part introduces students to the legal, financial, and institutional frameworks of the landscape architectural profession. This involves the study of legal aspects such as contracts and legislation, financial management, and finally strategies for communication and marketing of landscape design and planning services.

The third part focuses on project delivery and construction documentation using case studies of built landscape projects. Through an evaluation and re-working of construction drawings and written specifications, students examine the relationship between design intent, documentation, and implementation.

GSD Professional Practice faculty lead each of the three parts through lectures, readings, and discussion. Group research projects will investigate and engage subjects covered in class meetings. Evaluation will be based on classroom participation and the completion and submission of a group research project during exam week.

Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society I

Developing and implementing good solutions to real problems facing human society requires a broad understanding of the relationships between technology innovation, science, manufacturing, design thinking, environment, sustainability, culture, aesthetics, business, public policy, and government. Various frameworks for understanding these complex relationships within the context of real-world problems will be explored and discussed.  Coursework will be based on assigned readings, case studies, research assignments, exercises, and class discussions.

GSD PRO 7231 and 7232 are the same as FAS SEAS ES 236a and ES 236b. These courses are a two-course sequence.

This course is for students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering (MDE) graduate program. MDE students should enroll in GSD PRO 7213. A small number of other students may be allowed to enroll by permission of instructor.

This course is held at SEAS. This course meetings 4pm-6pm Tuesdays in Pierce Hall 100F and 4pm-6pm Thursdays in MD 119.

Foundations of Practice

For students in the fifth semester of the M.Arch I degree program, this four (4) credit hour course examines models and issues that define contemporary professional practice. Requiring students to examine a broad range of legal, financial, organizational and ethical topics, the course prepares students to engage and lead in the production of the built environment. The course takes advantage of the multi-disciplinary programs of the GSD, bringing a wide breath of experienced professional to share insights and develop the tools necessary for productive collaborations within the complex space of specific professional, practical and disciplinary obligations. Each week the course explores professional practice through a critical reading of primary texts that frame key concepts and models, as well as relevant case studies and applications for stress testing the boundaries of these models. The format of the course will be a combination of lectures, guest lectures, and workshops. Each subject area contains supplemental material that provides standard references and supplement case studies which highlight the boundaries and thresholds of practice.  This is intended to provide students with an exposure to critical aspects of practice – from accounting to contracting and from project delivery to professional ethics. In addition, students will explore the wide ranging roles of respective professional associations in shaping contractual relationships, public policy and the parameters of practice itself.  In more immediate terms, students will explore: (i) client communications and engagement; (ii) the drafting and execution of standard AIA contract series; (iii) the interpretation and due process considerations of local government regulations; (iv) the strategic advancement of public design reviews or public procurement opportunities; and, (v) the financial economics of operating a practice. Connecting each of these dimensions of practice are the codes of professional ethics and various elements of statutory and case law that collectively define the professional standard of care. The intent is for students to develop a reflexive understanding of their duty to clients, third-party consultants and the general public consistent with their obligations as design professionals and community leaders. This course serves as a foundation from which students may develop further interests and skills in the GSD’s professional practice distributional elective course offerings.

 

  

Domesticity, Privacy, Transparency, Performance

This seminar explores 20^th and 21^st-century notions of domesticity in the U.S, and Europe through the lens of cultural politics, gender and sexuality. Through a close analysis of key modern and vernacular houses designed for women heads of households and “queer” clients, we will consider the significance of typology and convention, as well as issues of transparency, opacity, privacy, surveillance and performance. Architects include Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Le Corbusier, Luis Barragan, Eleanor Raymond, Michael Maltzan, and David Adjaye.

Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common

This lecture course examines selected cities between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., beginning with ancient Athens and ending with the rebuilding of London after the great fire in 1666 and the founding of Boston. It is not, however, a survey. Rather, the lectures take up one city at one “golden moment” of its development and propose a theme or themes for discussion. The course, therefore, is both chronologically and thematically structured.

The first half of the semester treats the ancient and late antique city, beginning with Athens and continuing with Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople and Antioch. This section concludes with a consideration of the effects of Christianization on urban form, the widespread decline of urban habitation in the early Middle Ages, and the rising importance of ideal or symbolic “cities of the mind.” The second half of the semester looks at selected instances of Renaissance and Baroque urban interventions, beginning with Florence, returning again to Rome, and then moving to Venice, Madrid, Paris, London and Boston.

The course format includes lectures, lecture/discussions, and discussions. Each lecture is normally devoted to one city. It covers urban layout and topography, infrastructure, patterns and types of housing, and typologies of the major monuments and treats in more depth those features relating to the themes for the week – the relation of the city to countryside, for instance, or the city as center of cultural activity, the city and ideas about space, and so on. The lecture/discussion sessions introduce additional material (sometimes a new city, sometimes a more in-depth treatment of one of the assigned readings) and then move to discussion of the lecture and readings. The discussion sessions sometimes compare two cities and sometimes deepen or amplify the themes and ideas covered in the lecture(s) and readings. Students are required to prepare for the discussions by reviewing the relevant lecture(s) (powerpoints are on the course site), doing the readings, and thinking about how the readings relate to the weekly topic.

Throughout the semester you will be working on what will become a final research paper of twelve pages text plus endnotes, illustrations and a bibliography on a city of your choice during its “golden age.”

Michelangelo Architect: Precedents, Innovation, Influence

An exploration of Italian Renaissance architecture and urbanism through the persona of Michelangelo as witness, agent, and inspiration. We look at architecture and urbanism in Florence, Rome, and Venice from about 1400 to 1600 as it formed, articulated, and reflected the creative achievements of this Renaissance genius. The course engages building typologies such as the villa, the palace, and the church, explores the theory and practice of urban space-making, and evaluates the authority of the Classical past in the creation of new work. Particular emphasis on Michelangelo’s creative process and on his drawings.

We begin with Medicean Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent and with the Early Renaissance legacy of Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, and Giuliano da Sangallo. Following Michelangelo’s footsteps, we move to High Renaissance Rome, with the achievements of Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo himself. Returning to Florence, we investigate the Mannerist experimentation of Michelangelo and others in the 1520s and consider the acceptance and rejection of this idiom by Giulio Romano in Mantua and Jacopo Sansovino in Venice. Michelangelo’s mature and late styles in Counter- Reformation Rome and the principles of Renaissance space-making at the urban scale conclude the course.

Four class meetings will be discussions of the material presented in lectures. Students should prepare for these by reviewing the lectures and images and reading the relevant sections in Ackerman (see below). Additional readings for each discussion will be presented (no more than ten minutes each) by participants on a rotating basis, and students will also facilitate the discussion by proposing topics within the given theme. For some discussions, a reading will be assigned to the whole class: these appear in bold on the syllabus.

In addition, a final paper or project is required. If a paper, it should have a text of 12 pages plus images, notes and bibliography, on any topic relevant to the course. A project could take any form desired with the consent of the instructor, but would most probably be a digital reconstruction of an unfinished or altered project by Michelangelo or another Renaissance architect.

Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture

Note, the first meeting on Wednesday, August 31, will take place in Stubbins, room 112, rather than Piper Auditorium.

This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci (see week one) in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a conspectus, a survey of the field, but one in which the underlying nature (made and found), boundaries, contours, and texture of this field—in fact several disparate fields—is made the object of close scrutiny. We will define landscape architecture as we survey it. In pursuing an intermittent chronological narrative, the lectures will place site-specific emphasis on a number of cognate disciplines (hydrology, forestry, geology, agronomy, geography, hunting, inter alia), in the context of endemic and transplanted (see week seven) visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, cities we will be attentive to surrounding formations of discourse (the pastoral, the picturesque, the emblematic, the Adamic and Edenic) that have and continue to imbue them with meaning.

The first meeting of this course, on Wednesday, September 5th, will take place in room 112 (Stubbins) in Gund Hall. The course will meet thereafter in Piper Auditorium.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts I

This course is structured as a dialogue between the historical and theoretical frameworks that have shaped the formulation of architectural principles – what the architectural historian Rudolf Wittkower called the “apparatus of forms” – by means of selected case studies. The organizing principle here is thematic as opposed to chronological, and synoptic rather than merely factual. We treat a selected range of concepts developed by philosophers and historians to explain the Classical and the Baroque as dialectical systems of thought that arise in history but transcend this history to mark modern and postmodern practices.

History and Theory of Urban Interventions

This class provides a high-intensity introduction the history and theory of urban planning practice under modern capitalism.  Building upon an interdisciplinary literature drawn from planning theory and history as well as urban social science (geography, sociology, political science, history), we explore the emergence, development and continual transformation of urban planning in relation to changing configurations of capitalist urbanization, modern state power and sociopolitical struggle.  We also explore (a) the changing sites and targets of planning intervention, from the neighborhood, city and regional scales to those of the metropolis, national economy and beyond, and (b) the evolution of political and institutional struggles regarding its instruments, goals and constituencies.  The course is organized in three main parts.

 

• Part One surveys several key intellectual perspectives on the nature of planning in modern capitalist social formations.  Key questions include:  What is planning, and how and why does it emerge?  How are planning practices and visions linked to broader structures of economic and political life, including formations of social power?  How are the sites and targets of planning constructed, and how do they change across time and space?  Do planners serve private interests or the public good?

 

• Part Two explores some of the key episodes, movements and pioneering figures in the history of modern urban planning since the first industrial revolution of the 19^th century.  Although we focus in some detail on the ideas, visions and practices of well-known urban, regional and territorial planners, we embed their activities within the historically and geographically specific constraints, opportunities and struggles associated with each of the major phases of modern capitalist urbanization and associated formations of national state power.  In thus proceeding, we explore the conflictual interaction of capitalist firms, property developers (rentiers), political institutions and social movements at various spatial scales, and the consequences of that interaction for the institutional, legal, spatial and ideological terrains of "planning" and for the broader geographies of urban development.

 

• Part Three offers a broad overview of some key lines of debate in contemporary planning theory.  What is the appropriate role of planning in a period of heightened fiscal austerity and global financial crisis, in which dominant ideologies promote a reduced role of state institutions in reorganizing the social fabric and the built environment?  We consider several approaches that attempt to illuminate the changing nature of contemporary urbanism and the possible role of planning in reshaping cities, regions, territories and the planet as a whole.

 

Previously offered as 5101.

This course will meet in Piper Auditorium for its first class meeting on 9/4.

Studies of the Built North American Environment: 1580 to the Present

North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs, and as depicted in fiction, poetry, cartography, television, cinema, and advertising and cybernetic simulation.

Jointly Offered Course: FAS VES 107