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

 

Spaces of Solidarity

‘Spaces of Solidarity’ aims at examining community-driven spaces and spatial processes that pool and share resources to build social cohesion in times of crisis or absence of government, at a variety of scales, places, and contexts. ‘Spaces of Solidarity’ attempts to explore environments of community formation and open up a dialogue on the agency of design in enacting and facilitating actions of solidarity.

Solidarity is equally a product of imagination and pragmatism. One must be able to imagine forms of human coexistence but must also be able to produce spaces and to coordinate actual processes for distributing resources and creating access to services. Production of solidarity involves all spatial scales of human communities: one can have solidarity with his or her peers, a society can demonstrate collective solidarity towards those in need and states can show solidarity towards each other or the natural world.

Values of solidarity extend beyond survival; they enable us to build relations with multiple communities and with strangers, develop cultures, a commons, economic or ecological systems, and designs.

‘Spaces of Solidarity’ will look at individuals and communities coming together and generating new forms of mutual support. Examples include the Women’s March, Sanctuary Cities, support for refugees along the shores of Greece, Tent Cities, Hotel Walmart, Boston's Methadone Mile, and more.

The primary goal of this course is to explore the built environment from the perspective of solidarity: accumulating showcases, sharing methods and forming design tools to make visible and enact spaces and imaginaries of solidarity. We will examine and propose Spaces of Solidarity from multiple perspectives and disciplines, and in a variety of scales and territories. At the end of the semester we will produce an online publication at: www.spacesofsolidarity.org.

Theories of Landscape as Urbanism

This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics describing landscape’s embeddedness in processes of urbanization as well as economic transformations informing the shape of the city. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and case study projects, students will be introduced to a reading of landscape through the lenses of capital, labor, material, subject, and environment. The first half of the course revisits the origins of landscape in response to the societal and environmental challenges of industrialization and the attendant transformations in industrial economy shaping the modern metropolis. The second half of the course repositions recent discourse on landscape as urbanism in relation to the economic and territorial transformations associated with ongoing urbanization at the planetary scale.

The first quarter of the course introduces the origins of landscape as a genre of painting and the invention of the ‘new art’ of landscape architecture as responses to urbanization and their attendant social, economic, and cultural transformations. This portion of the course describes the material and cultural contexts in which landscape was conceived as well as the sites and subjects it invoked. The second quarter of the course describes the emergence of city planning from within landscape architecture and the subsequent impoverishment of the field in the absence of its urban contents. This portion of the course introduces the aspirations and implications of ecologically informed regional planning in the 20^th century, as well as the ongoing ideological effects of that agenda in the context of neoliberalism.

The third quarter of the course introduces the discourse and practices of landscape urbanism over the past two decades. This portion of the course surveys the discursive and projective potentials of an ecological urbanism, as distinct from those of ecological planning, and speculates on the recent formulation of projective ecologies, among other discursive formations shaping the field. The final quarter of the course follows the transition from region to territory, and from regional urbanization to planetary urbanization. This portion of the course describes landscape’s role as a medium of cultural production and critical revelation in relation to the increased scale and scope of anthropogenic impacts across the planet.

The course meets weekly on Friday afternoons in small groups for discussion sections (12:00-1:00 or 1:00-2:00) and as a group for class lectures (2:00-5:00). Members of the course will be invited to contribute to discussions, prepare brief response papers, and complete an extended essay on a topic attendant to the course content at the end of the term. The course invites candidates from the Master in Landscape Architecture Program as well as candidates in the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology stream of the Master in Design Studies Program.

Urban Design Proseminar

 

The proseminar is a forum for conversation on contemporary urban design. It is structured around three overlapping discussions: the formation of the discipline, critiques of urban design, and projections and speculations on the future of the discipline. Theory and practice are contextualized in a way that is not limited to the study of the physical city but includes operations made on the city as well as topics in related fields. The course examines the contested terrain of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, with engineering, geography, sociology, and scientific, cultural, and historical disciplines. Although all the mechanisms for considering the city cannot be covered within the constraints of the proseminar, the focus will be on developing a critical perspective that comes from a deeper understanding of theory, practice, and speculation. Presentations by guest GSD and Harvard faculty, together with site visits, will contextualize urban design today and its range of opportunities and potential. The proseminar requires active engagement with discussions and assignments, and provides a foundation for further course and studio work at the GSD.

Expectations: The emphasis of the course is on engagement: with the readings, the guests, and with the discussions.

Grading: Class participation (30%), Response Papers (40%), Assignment 1 (10%), Assignment 2 (20%). Late assignments will not be accepted unless agreed in advance with the instructor or, in the case of illness, accompanied with a medical certificate.

 

 

 

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.