Flow Space: Post-Fire Watersheds and the Design of Dynamic Computational Landscapes

This course examines post-fire watersheds as dynamic computational landscapes operating within flow space and phase space encompassing spatial, material, and systemic conditions in which flows of matter, energy, and information are structured, modulated, and made legible. Students will learn to work with dynamic landscapes as active computational systems using a stream table and AI methods to design interventions across dynamic post-fire watersheds.

Following fire, debris flows can mobilize within minutes as vegetation, soil structure, and hydrologic regimes are radically altered, while gravitational and climatic forces remain intact or intensified. In these conditions, risk does not arise from fixed form, but from continuous variation across gradients, thresholds, bottlenecks, and attractors.

The course employs a geomorphology simulation stream table as a physical computational laboratory where landscape processes unfold in accelerated time. This is paired with the development of AI-based methods that infer underlying system behavior from observation and measurement. Together, these tools support design interventions in evolving systems and cultivate fluency in working with landscape computation rather than imposing static form. Through close documentation of temporal changes in material states students examine how local interactions scale into watershed-level effects.

Framed through Computational Landscape Architecture, the course treats landscapes not as static compositions, but as active systems that continuously generate form through interaction. The core model describes two reciprocal fields: a Potential Field that carries energetic forces, and a Constraint Field that encodes structure, boundaries, and memory.

Experimental work focuses on altering material states to develop micro-infrastructures that operate intuitively at local scales while performing collectively across post-fire territories.

This course will be held in 7 Sumner Road, room B1.

Architecture’s Audience

What is the purpose of exhibiting architecture? One difficulty of curating architectural exhibitions is the impossibility of exhibiting buildings themselves. Instead, exhibits often focus on drawings, models, photographs, correspondence, and publications. However compelling, this material rarely holds the same interest for people outside our discipline as for those within it. Even a floor plan may be illegible to the uninitiated. Any exhibition must wrestle with the question of audience: of who we communicate with, and why. 

This course makes that question concrete. The setting is the Branch Museum of Design, a small institution housed in a Tudor Revival mansion in Richmond, Virginia. The subject to be exhibited is a trove of archival materials related to Best Products, a retail company that commissioned a series of experimental big-box showrooms in the 1970s. Our objective is to interrogate the contemporary significance of this material and to explore how, why, and to whom it should be shown. Students will investigate the history and current conditions of architectural exhibitions, and contribute to the curation of a show on Best Products to open at the Branch in May 2026. We will engage with this subject not only through archival materials, but by meeting directly with the designers behind the work, including James Wines, Malcolm Holzman, and Tom Geismar. We will also gain insights from prominent architectural curators.

Beyond buildings, how does the discipline of architecture communicate with the public? Beyond niche publications, how do we record and share our history? What is the role of a design museum in stimulating civic discourse in an American city today? Together, we will not only ask questions but posit answers and imagine strategies with the potential to impact a real-world institution. This course will include a sponsored overnight trip to the Branch Museum of Design.

AI and the Physical Imaginary

“We are interested in — if not fascinated by — the two-way relationship between humans and technology. Humans create inspiring and empowering technologies but also are influenced, augmented, manipulated, and even imprisoned by technology, depending on the situation and the interpreter.” 
   – Pertti Hurme, Jukka Jouhki, in “We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us” in Human Technology 13(2).

Generative AI is currently impacting architectural and design workflows, offering new possibilities for ideation, visualization, and formal exploration. Builders of these tools promise to accelerate creative processes, democratize design, and expand the space of formal possibilities, yet this promise obscures several major issues. For example, many current generative AI systems generate forms that often misunderstand gravity and physicality of materials. It lacks understanding of embodied, tacit knowledge through which designers actually work. And, AI systems, more than prior computational tools such as CAD or parametric modeling, act with a degree of independence that challenges designers’ agency, process, and the nature of design knowledge.

Architecture and design are embodied practices. Designers think through making, learn through material experimentation, and generate knowledge through haptic feedback and proprioceptive awareness. As Polanyi observed, “we know more than we can tell”: much of design expertise remains tacit knowledge, resistant to explicit formalization. How can we then design with AI in a way that preserves the material intelligence, tacit knowledge, and embodied awareness that are central to architectural and design practices?

This course interrogates two questions: (1) How do we move AI processes out of the 2D screen into the 3D physical world; the realm of bodies, materials, and fabrication? (2) How do we integrate information about physical reality and tacit/tactile knowledge into design workflows using AI? We will explore these questions through three modules:

Module 1: AI and Physical Making — Students fabricate architectural models and 3D artifacts that demonstrate meaningful integration of human creative process and AI capabilities, and move beyond prompt-based image generation.

Module 2: Interaction Paradigms — Exploration of human-AI interaction models (one-click, real-time, incremental, non-linear, and more) through experimentation. Students develop their own methods of interaction.

Module 3: Multimodal, Human and Tacit Intelligence — Investigation of how tacit knowledge and embodied intelligence can be integrated into AI workflows through methods such as material sensing, gesture, touch, spatial positioning, etc. Students use such methods to design.

We will discuss topics such as computational design thinking, embodied cognition, comparisons between human-AI interaction and human-robot interaction, participatory design, ethical and critical AI humanities approaches, and meta-design (designing the design process). Workshops introduce students to generative AI tools, creative coding with ml5.js/TouchDesigner, and LLM-assisted development of custom AI tools. Projects will engage in physical prototyping, digital fabrication, and model making through emerging AI technologies. We will ask: What roles should AI play in architecture and design? What types of interaction enable meaningful human control? How might we incorporate physicality, material feedback, and evolving intentions into human-AI interaction? 

Spatial Intelligence: Designing the Future of Work

The average adult spends one-third of their life working. Can workspaces be designed to reduce stress, strengthen social connection, or improve focus in real time? As organizations adopt sensors, digital platforms, and AI-driven analytics, workplaces are evolving into complex, data-rich environments that continuously capture patterns of behavior. Designers have new tools to understand spaces of work — and to leverage data to reimagine environments that better support human performance and well-being.

This course investigates how spatial conditions — light, sound, temperature, biophilia, and layout — shape cognitive functioning, creativity, comfort, and communication, across a range of work environments (including traditional and home offices, studios, classrooms, and service and healthcare spaces). Students will collect, analyze, and visualize data, using surveys, sensors, and computational tools, including machine learning, to quantify how spatial factors influence work outcomes. The course emphasizes “micro-interventions,” where students design and evaluate small-scale changes in real-world environments.

Hands-on work is central: students will complete exercises and mini-projects that progressively build towards a final project. By exploring emerging AI trends and hybrid work patterns, students will develop designs that re-envision the future of work. Throughout the course, students will also critically examine the ethical, social, and technical implications of intelligent environments. Using workplaces as a case study, this course aims to illustrate how design, technology, and human outcomes intersect in practice.

By the end of the semester, students will be equipped to collect and interpret multimodal data, design and evaluate evidence-based interventions, and articulate how AI, sensing, and data analytics can shape the future of work.

The course is intended for students from architecture, urban design, MDes, and MDE programs. Non-GSD students are welcome. Prior programming experience is recommended, but not required.

Embodied Architectures: Signals, Data, and Perception

Cross-disciplinary seminar at the intersection of design, physical computing, and psychophysiology.

This course examines how designers can create environments and objects that sense and respond to bodies, context, and ambient conditions. As ubiquitous sensing (biosignals, environmental data, spatial tracking) becomes embedded across scales, from wearables to materials to rooms, how can designers meaningfully integrate and interpret these signals, and how should they critique their use? In this course, students will learn the technical foundations of sensing, instrumentation, signal processing, and system integration, while pursuing design experiments that probe the limits, ambiguities, and ethical stakes of affective artifacts.

With guest lectures from faculty and researchers in psychology, neuroscience, and computational design, the course will introduce principles of physical computing from both technical and experimental design perspectives. Students will learn how to structure, conduct, and analyze small-scale studies that connect physiological and behavioral data to questions of perception, emotion, and experience, bridging hands-on prototyping with research methodology.

Over the semester, students will move through a scaffolded sequence of projects. Students will first engage data as input through sensing and representation [Project 1A: Latent Signals], then develop experimental framings that explore how these signals participate in broader human-spatial, human-environment, or human-machine relationships [Project 1B: Relational Fields]. This sequence will culminate in a final design intervention [Project 2: Affective Assemblies*] that synthesizes sensing, interpretation, and feedback into a responsive artifact, material system, or spatial condition. Projects may operate across multiple scales, from objects to spatial environments.

*Students may integrate the final project into their studio work, provided it is approved by their studio instructor and discussed with Prof. Richter-Lunn.

Students with experience and an invested interest in digital design, digital fabrication, electronics, or coding will find these skills particularly valuable in the course, though they are not required. Students from all backgrounds and disciplines are welcome.

Modeling Light

The invention of Skiagraphia by ancient Greek painter Apollodorus left an indelible mark on western civilization. Applying shade and shadow to drawn work, or ‘rendering,’ fundamentally transforms 2-dimensional drawings from abstractions to representations of phenomenal experience. It prefigured an explosion of exploration into the qualities of light and perspective during the Renaissance, inspiring the scientific revolution’s quest for a philosophical and physical understanding of light, and the engineering science of illumination.

Modeling Light investigates how light is designed, represented, and communicated in architectural spaces–tracing methods from analog and linguistic approaches to physically based, real-time digital simulation using ray-tracing and virtual reality to push beyond the limits of human sensation. Grounded in historical context and theoretical frameworks, the course examines how visualization tools simulate perception to illuminate design intent and further sustainability outcomes. Through lectures, discussions, and hands-on experimentation, students will work across multiple modes of modeling light –including drawing, physical prototyping, notational and mathematical systems, and a range of digital workflows for daylight and electric lighting analysis and design.

By engaging directly with luminous phenomena, students will cultivate an intuitive and critical understanding of the language of light. Assignments will cover fundamental methods and tools, while a comprehensive term project will integrate both physical and digital techniques to communicate luminous experiences in a fun and low-stakes learning environment. This will establish both a strong conceptual foundation and technical fluency in contemporary lighting practices, offering concrete opportunities to incorporate learned techniques into their studio and future professional work.

While there are no explicit prerequisites, a solid foundation in digital modeling tools is recommended. Specific digital tools will include Climate Studio in Rhino, and 3ds Max.

 

Origin Stories: The Migration of Material Practices

Landscape regions are conventionally defined through a set of interrelated logics: deterministic (geology, biogeography, climate), administrative (governance, policy), functional (markets, logistics), and projective (planning, development, colonization). Together, these logics stabilize landscapes into discipline specific, coherent, and generally contiguous–if contested–regions. This seminar examines a more elusive register: the ways modern landscape regions are defined through a constellation of distributed material practices–including the instruments of monitoring and forecasting, the technical operations of cultivation, building, and maintenance, and the labor that underwrites physical intervention–and, in turn, how these definitions circulate through the globalized industries of design, construction, and engineering.

From Jersey barriers to Cape Cod berms, Arizona crossings to the Rikers (Island) soil series, Chicago caissons to Portland cement, Stockholm tree pits to the Missouri gravel bed method–place names in material practices and techniques proliferate throughout the making of the built environment. However, how and why these techniques emerged from (or refer to) specific cultural and climatic conditions–and how they circulate to new geographies through social and professional networks, rather than through marketing–is relatively underexamined. Countless other techniques and materials–gootee propagation, barbed wire, tile drainage–arose from highly specific environmental contexts before they were disseminated or appropriated globally. In tracing these operative practices–and deliberately bracketing off narrow economic explanations of market segmentation–the seminar investigates alternative modes of landscape regionalism that have emerged between standardization and craft, between a globalized industry and the situated particularities of matter, ecology, and culture.

The course is organized into three units. The first unit will survey key scholarship from the design fields and labor geography that theorizes how place influences what people intentionally make (e.g., critical regionalism and its critiques). In parallel, we will draw on frameworks from science and technology studies and material culture studies to think about how to examine specific things in relation to the wider worlds they inhabit. Lectures and in-class discussions will be the primary activities.  

In the second unit, we will develop a collective index/atlas that documents the political ecology of place-based instruments, operations, and labor. In this unit, students will identify a preliminary research topic, starting with a geographic region or a specific practice/technology. A list of possible topics will be provided; however, students are also welcome to propose their own. In-class workshops and guest lectures will offer methods and resources for contemporary and historical research. A guided set of prompts for writing and diagramming will guide our work; we will focus on the work of the seminar as a collective, comparative effort, learning from differences and deviations in practices that originate from various places.  

In the third unit, we will assemble a new “chorography” of landscape practices–a systematic, qualitative description of a region–through a shared format for developing and disseminating research, culminating in a collective exhibition or publication. In-class peer-to-peer workshops and presentations will facilitate the development of the chorographic study.  

 

Urban Soil Studies: From Field to Lab to Design

Aimed primarily toward soils and plant growth, Landscape Architectural Design and the Curation of Urban Landscapes, and taught collaboratively by a landscape architect, multiple noted soil scientists, ecologists and other guests, this course will provide basic understandings of soil and other growing media in relation to plant growth, for the purpose of designing, constructing and maintaining or curating urban landscapes.  Inherent in the course content, students will examine and critique current practices within landscape industries, primarily within urban, post-industrial environments. Though global conditions will be touched upon and may be selected as student research topics, the course will focus on practices within the United States.

The course is broken into three parts: 1) Soil Fundamentals 2) Current Culture, Practice, Critiques, and 3) Future Potentials.  

SOIL FUNDAMENTALS will include lectures and readings on soil formation, characteristics, chemistry and biology, and plant-soil relation-ships, and the role of carbon and carbon sequestration. This introduction will include a field trip to observe a variety of soil types and conditions within a forest, and one to observe the relationship between tree roots and soils at the Arnold Arboretum. This will segue into human practices with a session on prehistoric and ancient Human-Soil relationships.

CURRENT CULTURE, PRACTICE, CRITIQUES will focus on the development of landscape architecture and soil science, as well as the collaborative planting-soil-related practices used in the design, gardening, landscape and construction industries today; this will include deep critiques and potentials for improvement or innovation.  Topics covered will include site evaluation and hidden implications that can be found within historic soils maps, soil testing processes, soil design typologies, soil blending processes on and off-site, compaction ranges, potable water chemistry, and circumstances involving chemical contamination, and the role of phytoremediation. We will also cover project documentation processes like procurement, soil plans and details, specifications and field quality control during construction.  

FUTURE POTENTIALS will include topics looking toward the future innovations and research, including practical recommendations for funding research including ongoing research within forms and basics associated with grant writing. This portion will conclude with presentations from students’ research throughout the course.
 

Refugees in the Rust Belt

Today, more than 114 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced–the highest number ever recorded. Over 43 million of them are refugees who have crossed international borders to escape war, persecution, or environmental disaster. Ongoing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, and Gaza make displacement not an episodic crisis but a defining condition of our time.

Within design and planning, professional attention to displacement has rightly focused on emergency responses such as refugee camps, temporary shelters, and humanitarian infrastructure. Far less attention has been given to the longer-term process of resettlement, particularly in the United States, where refugees build new lives not in camps but in cities and towns. Since 1975, more than 3.5 million refugees have been resettled across the U.S., forming vibrant and enduring communities. Despite a restrictive federal context–including the suspension of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program during the second Trump administration–the everyday work of helping refugees find housing and employment, navigate cities, and adapt to daily life continues at the local level.

This project-based class invites students to work with refugee resettlement organizations and community partners to explore how design, planning, and policy can support refugee communities in building thriving lives. The studio focuses on Upstate New York’s Erie Canal corridor, linking Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. Once the industrial heartland of the state, these cities now face population decline, aging infrastructure, and thousands of vacant or substandard housing units. At the same time, they have become some of the most welcoming places in the country, leveraging affordability, civic infrastructure, and strong community institutions to receive newcomers. Buffalo is home to more than 10,000 refugees from over twenty countries; Syracuse has sizable Bhutanese-Nepali, Congolese, and Somali communities; Utica–long known as “the city that loves refugees”–counts nearly one in four residents as foreign-born; and Albany has welcomed recent arrivals from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine.

The class unfolds in three phases. First, students will develop a foundational understanding of the U.S. refugee resettlement system, best practices for integration, and principles for ethical engagement with refugee communities. This phase situates Upstate New York within a broader geopolitical context and explores how cities along the Erie Canal function as a connected regional ecosystem of arrival. Second, students will conduct research and mapping to analyze refugee settlement patterns and everyday geographies, examining housing conditions, mobility, access to services, and environmental and social challenges. Finally, students will develop planning and design proposals at multiple scales, including housing prototypes, adaptive reuse strategies, neighborhood infill plans, corridor frameworks, public spaces, and policy interventions. The goal is to generate visionary yet implementable ideas that help Upstate New York’s arrival cities become more inclusive, resilient, and welcoming.

A regional field trip to Buffalo, Syracuse, Utica, and Albany will allow students to meet with resettlement agencies, community leaders, city officials, and municipal partners; tour neighborhoods where refugees live and work; and see firsthand how physical conditions and policy frameworks shape resettlement outcomes. 
 

This course includes a trip to New York’s Erie Canal corridor. Students enrolled in the course will be term billed $100 and will be responsible for meals and incidentals. 

Fortress of Solitude

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

This course explores new approaches to interpreting, conceiving, and describing landscapes and architecture, along with the emotions they evoke. While traditional representation methods will remain dominant for some time, they often create a one-way cognitive experience with an “emitter” and a “listener” who barely interact. Game technologies allow for the creation of realistic, dreamlike, utopian, and 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, meaningful connections will develop through studies in representation across art, film, and -not surprisingly- video games. Through exploring, designing, and constructing virtual “altered states,” you’ll acquire techniques to mature your ideas from early preparatory work through to deployment. This journey emphasizes imaginative solutions over technical prowess. Think of virtual fabrication as a mental blueprint, where elements must be arranged and framed thoughtfully–unless, of course, you want them to be jarringly noticeable.

Some topics we’ll cover include:

The project:
Build a “Fortress of Solitude” – a purely virtual, emotional space for self-reflection, detached from the real world. This space doesn’t have to be “pleasant”; while it could be peaceful and contemplative, it might also evoke discomfort, anger, or conflict.

The tools:
Our primary software tools will be Unreal Engine, an industry-standard real-time 3D engine for game world creation and simulation (easily transferable skills to other engines), and Cinema 4D, chosen for its stable and intuitive workflow. Students may use other 3D packages if preferred.

Nevertheless, the most vital tools will be a pencil, a sheet of paper, and your mind.

Class structure:
Each weekly class will have two parts: one focusing on theory, methods, and critique, and the other on technical skills, where you’ll apply what’s been studied so far. Occasionally, the structure will vary–routine is not the French way. There will be 3 assignments before the “Grand Finale”.

Class requirements:
Given the technical nature of this course, a relatively recent computer will be necessary. Review the minimum system requirements.