Cotton Kingdom, Now
In 1852, the New York Daily Times commissioned a 31-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to conduct an immersive research journey through the Southern slave states. The country was headed toward civil war, and the paper dispatched young Olmsted for his ability to reveal the cultural and environmental qualities of landscape in a narrative voice. Today, landscape architecture, urban design, and planning—disciplines Olmsted helped to shape—continue to grapple with the economic, political, and ecological conditions rooted in systems he documented so vividly 165 years ago. This seminar will investigate the relationship between a host of major contemporary issues with the documented conditions in Olmsted’s 1861 book, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom. The seminar positions Olmsted’s journey not only as source material but also as methodological proposition, in reflection on the significance and methods of research and representation in design practice.
Archived Landscapes
The course explores design methodologies for evaluating archives as evidence of material, spatial, and cultural change in constructed landscapes. Because archives seek comprehensiveness (distinct from the discretionary aims of a curated collection), they can contain undeclared evidence of the fleeting and sometimes unwelcome behaviors of living systems and human inhabitants in official accounts of the built environment. Using collections at Harvard and beyond, we will analyze scientific, technical, cultural, and commercial images for spatial configuration, composition, visual patterns, and references; evaluate the relationship of medium (film, specimens, flyers, digital media, etc.) to the subject matter; and critically assess these findings through writing as well as analytical and projective image-making.
In the seminar, we will mine archives of institutional records. Guest speakers and workshops will engage narratives that have been typically excluded from institutions: emerging archives (in retroactive formation) and those that are now accumulating (in real-time). Case studies presented will focus on infrastructure and designed landscapes in North America, but students will develop their own subjects for independent research on an environmental history—broadly defined as the mutual interactions of human society and the natural world—in relation to design history. This work will be guided through a series of prompts, culminating in a final proposal for the dissemination of archival research.
Course meetings will consist of: lectures by the instructor, guest speakers, interactive workshops, student research presentations, and visits to local archives. The seminar welcomes all disciplines.
Contextual Capacities
Urban analysis, understanding of ‘context,’ and specificity of a place, have long been intrinsic to architectural and urban discourse and practice. Today, this discussion is as relevant as ever, gaining renewed urgency in the face of numerous crises—be they environmental or related to equity and inclusion.
The course will explore the study and analysis of cities, context, and situations to formulate spatial interventions and urban transformations. It does so by examining existing theory and various architectural practices, highlighting the ‘context’ as an environmental, cultural, and social resource in the development and envisioning of spatial interventions.
Moreover, it provides tools for analyzing and understanding urban structures, fabrics, and situations, and for translating these into architectural potentials and spatial imaginaries. It further engages in critical discussions, on how to create meaningful spatial interventions and urban transitions, that can foster more sustainable, livable, and equitable cities.
This seminar’s aim is to establish a method to analyze and use existing urban situations and context as a driver in design development. Students will work in pairs for this assignment, which consists of two parts.
In Part One, they will analyze how the existing context and the analysis hereof can inform spatial interventions by reviewing literature and examining current and past architectural practices. All students will read and discuss the provided literature, with each group responsible for reviewing one text. Additionally, each student group will analyze a contemporary urban design project. The focus is on how existing urban situations influence spatial interventions and designs, exploring the relationship between urban situations and context, concept, and final design. The analysis also addresses the specific tools/methods used in the analysis of urban situations and contexts and in the translation into design concepts. Students also evaluate how the spatial intervention aims to improve the area and express their opinions on its success.
In Part Two, each student group individually analyzes a designated Boston site using tools from Part One. It is crucial to explore various analytical tools across scales and subjects, critically assessing analyses in relation to the case-study area and discussing them in terms of identified potentials for spatial interventions. Based on their analysis, each group will propose a spatial intervention that positively impacts the site and context, addressing aspects such as community building, resilience, connectivity, or housing. The concepts should be presented through diagrams or collages, serving as initial ideas pointing towards the development of design projects.
This course has an irregular schedule. Please see the course syllabus for details.
Thinking Landscape-Making Cities – Designing Regenerative Futures
This design seminar challenges you to assess existing and anticipated climate change threats for a city of your choice and create an image, plan, and narrative for mid-century and beyond. The city you choose may be your home city, a city facing multiple climate change challenges, or a city you are working with in another course.
In cities and metropolitan areas, temperatures are anticipated to become dangerously hot and coastlines and urban harbors will have to be restructured to cope with sea-level rise and more powerful storms. The spatial pattern of buildings and open spaces will be confronted with monsoon-type downpours perhaps alternating with months without rain. Thus, over the next 30 years, urban and regional spatial structure will change, sometimes dramatically. In this design seminar, you will project scenarios that imagine new spatial patterns and their corresponding social, political, and economic attributes. What are your ideas for a just, temperate, and regenerative future?
At the GSD, as designers and researchers, we are responsible for putting forward plans, policy concepts, and visual images that describe future alternatives and how design in the broadest sense can engage what seem to be insurmountable threats. The projects you develop will be not merely resilient but regenerative, they will support and build the capacity of all living and mineral systems.
Students working in both teams and as individuals, will develop materials to support an intention, concept, proposition, scenario, and images supported by diagrams, maps, plans, and precise texts. As a basis of our readings, discussion, and your project work, we will focus on four input areas: Water, Infrastructure, Pattern, and Narrative.
In Part 1, two Introduction meetings will establish the propositions of the course and the interests and questions of the students. In Part 2, 4 student teams will lead presentation and workshops on the foundational themes of Water, Infrastructure, Pattern, and Narrative. Water includes the blue-green structure of the city, especially the watershed and urban canopy. Infrastructure consists of energy and transportation as well as the metabolic flows of material and nutrients. Pattern will describe new spatial form and corresponding social and political structure. Finally, Narrative will describe the everyday life in terms of place and experience. During Part 2, supported by the discussions and materials of the Foundation workshops, students will develop an individual project. In Part 3, Focus and Scenario, you will consider your individual project in micro and macro scales to further develop your concepts and strategies for your chosen city, region, and community. In Part 4, Presentation and Communication, we will focus over three weeks on the art of effective communication and presentation.
The seminar is open to all students at the GSD. It offers urban design skills for landscape architects, and urban and landscape design thinking and skills for architects. For urban designers, it will offer landscape ecology strategies, and for city planners it will offer an opportunity to invent policy and future forms of representation. Prospective students without a design background may apply.
You will look beyond today’s adaptive solutions to imagine future scenarios. Working as individuals and teams, the collaborative and supportive experience of the class will nurture the confidence to experiment.
Time’s Arrow Time’s Cycle: Drawing Landscapes, Energy, and Matter
The structures and forms we perceive on the land are produced by forces that make order and those that upset it. Landscape architecture is one of these forces.
Borrowing the title from Stephen Jay Gould’s book on the history of geology, this course will deal with the temporal dimension of landscape. As Henri Bergson said, time is invention, creation of forms. As a result of the interaction of different forces, the environment is in a continuous state of transformation, a state of becoming of which we are not always aware. In this course, we will investigate these notions through lectures, discussion, and drawings on theories of ecology, geomorphology, evolution, and thermodynamics, all concerned with the kinds of order that emerge over time as different forms of energy–radiant, potential, kinetic, chemical, and so on–inject life and motion into matter and thus into landscape.
In addition to the collective discussion around these topics, each student in the course will choose and graphically investigate a vernacular landscape, i.e., a space on the face of the earth resulting from the intersection of human technology with a preexisting geomorphological configuration, which has evolved slowly through the cultural practices of those who inhabit it. In selecting these landscapes, we will work to collectively cover the broadest possible range of environmental conditions around the world: from the very hot to the very cold, the very dry to the very wet, the very high to the very low, the very steep to the very flat. With the impacts of climate change in mind, we will focus on landscapes that arise from extreme conditions, such as deserts, rainforests, tundras, deltas, and great mountain ranges. Through drawing, we will reveal their climatic and geomorphological processes, as well as the specific technologies that intervene in them and from which they receive their forms. This representational inquiry will help us visualize the theoretical component of the seminar, allowing the class to engage in a more productive conversation about the metaphysics of energy and matter, time and life, the different propensities that exist on earth prior to human intervention, and how design and technology interfere with, accelerate, slow down or even eliminate them.
Students will be assessed on their graphic investigation and contribution to the class discussion. Strong graphic and representational skills are recommended.
Curatorial Practices in the Public Realm: Working Outside the Box
The objective of this course is to teach students how to curate in public space. Students will learn the process of exploring pertinent issues, finding and responding to sites, selecting artists, strategies for engaging with local communities, as well as developing and presenting a curatorial proposal. We will discuss audiences, engagement, and working with communities around pertinent issues. The course will be taught as if the class is a curatorial team curating a biennale to take place in sites across the Americas. Prompts based on sites, artists, and issues will come together to develop individual large scale public art projects, that come together to form a decentralized biennial.
Each class is divided into various segments: lecture, group discussion, student presentations, guest speakers and an overview. The lectures approach the practice of working in public space by investigating existing public art projects. Student projects are developed through discussions where issues, sites, and artists are proposed and considered. Guest speakers, including artists, will join the class to speak about their work and outdoor processes. Readings, including catalog essays, artist interviews, reports and news coverage, will supplement the learning experience.
Throughout the semester we will explore potential topics, sites, and artists. During which students will begin to develop a curatorial proposal for the Biennale. As a final project, each student will submit a curatorial proposal and deliver a final presentation featuring an artist, issue, site, and related community.
Students may pursue issues such as migration, drug trafficking, indigenous rights and traditions, recycling, climate change, degrading biodiversity, public safety, and gang violence. Sites may include the US/Mexico Border (cities, desert, mountains, rivers), Darrien Gap, Orinoco River, Lake Ilopango, San Salvador, Guatemala City, Medellin, Colombian riverways, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Caracas, The Beast, The Wall, Mexico/Guatemala Border, Mayan Ruins, Aztec Ruins, Cabo San Lucas, Culiacan, Tulsa OK, autonomous towns such as those in Michoacan, Manaus, Belen, Iquitos, the Atacama Desert, Amazonia, and Patagonia, among others.
The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 10th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Architecture of Time
A film is an act of space making, which makes itself seen, an act of building shaped in time.
This class will examine what we can learn when we consider filmmaking as a critical spatial practice. Using a combination of film theory and practical workshops, students will learn to make films that interrogate our built environment and consider what film can teach us about how we understand, represent, and design space.
Architecture and film share an interdisciplinary correspondence, a desire to build worlds for spectators to inhabit. One may view film language as very different from that of space, but is it? If we accept that buildings and cities are instruments of time, and both are as much of the mind as they are physical, then it is easy to see how film and architecture share a visual and material world. The perception of a space is as much defined by its associations as by its physical qualities. When we watch a film, we register all the mental, sensual, and physical faculties that are engaged in a particular space at a precise time and yet such permanence does not have to be a building that is recognizable by its material appearance. Let us equate filmic experience to that of physical space and consider what film can teach us about how we interrogate and engage with architecture.
The accepted image of architecture on film has become acclimatized to conventional, static, ocular-centric, and binary representations of the so-called ‘man-made environment.’ In response to this position, the course will introduce the idea of the architectural essay film, as an alternative way to think of architecture, where openness, fluidity, and interdisciplinary create links between space making and film language. Drawing on the work of experimental filmmakers, such as Chantal Ackerman, Chris Marker, and Maya Deren, each session will interrogate how film, as a visual essay, can provide an infrastructure where tolerance and hope allow for a slow engagement with the complexities of architecture. Screenings will be accompanied with key texts by critical thinkers in the fields of film and architectural theory, such as Beatriz Colomina, Giuliana Bruno, and Vivian Sobchack, to build on a distinct analytical foundation, from where students will be invited to establish critical perspectives. Supporting ideas not merely advancing in a single direction, but which are interwoven and developed as a carpet, that delve between the gaps of each field of study, architecture and film. The intention is not to fulfill a preconceived goal, but to explore a space built on polysemy and multiplicity, which demonstrates the possibilities that arise from examining space-making from a cinematic dimension.
No filmmaking experience is required.
The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Native Nations and Contemporary Land Use
This community based project seminar focuses on some of the major issues Native Nations, American Indian tribes, and Indigenous communities face as they seek to assert rights of self-determination in the 21st Century. With a focus on land use, landback initiatives, and economic development opportunities, it provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to important issues faced by Native people today. Students will work in teams and will be immersed in questions relating to self-governance, Native sovereignty, economic development, leadership, health and social welfare, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, finance, budgeting, and education. In particular, the course emphasizes problem definition, collaborative/fieldwork relationships, and designing and completing a real-life project for a Tribal “client.” This course is devoted primarily to the preparation and presentation of a comprehensive research paper, memo, or report based on a semester-long investigation that will be undertaken in partnership with a Native community. Near the end of the semester, each team of students is required to make a video presentation of its near-final work, in addition to submitting a final written report, paper, or memo.
The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 10th. It will meet regularly thereafter.
Advanced Reverse Design and EMBODIED CARBON
At a time when urgent action is needed to avert the climate crisis, it is very difficult to take an idealistic approach when considering key materials in building construction. We now know that transformation of the built environment is inevitable. Designers can play an important role in the race to de-carbonize the built environment and this course is founded on real, current examples. It will touch on how we got to where we are and how we can move forward in practice with the lessons that we have learned, illustrating what transitions are already in play. Through a series of conversations and presentations, including from external experts, we will engage in inversing the design process by utilizing newly available tools. We will demystify regulations, terminology, and popular language, and examine how the predominant materials for construction, which are unlikely to go away soon, can be improved and implemented in design and construction to promote a low carbon economy.
Adaptive re-use, retrofit, recycle, regenerative design, conservation, resilient development: these are just some of the common and generic terms that need to be more closely understood in the context of other processes that are now emerging in practice. To do so, we need to trace previous understandings of methods and construction. The city as an object has a rich history of being constructed and reconstructed. We need to grasp the progress that has been made in construction throughout history and retreat from relying on theoretical works alone where formal concerns dominate.
The course will offer opportunities to discuss evolving technologies, periodic advances in codes of practice, shifts in material supplies, and “hacking” policies and regulations where possible. At the same time, we will consider an amalgam of building types in continuous transformation as the city builds upon itself and new cities rapidly emerge in the Global South.
Many ancient methods are going through an accelerated revival where capacity, building codes, and technical specifications, such as fire and acoustics, empower architects to take back control as Design Team Leader. But we must also resist demonizing the more recent materials without looking at how to “clean” them. Consequences with respect to embodied carbon, social interaction, maintenance, durability, textural qualities, tactility, heat absorption parameters, insulation, and indoor air quality come into play. The Architect is trained and skilled sufficiently to predict and control these variables. The course will cover supply chains, procurement, and crafts, and touch on specific cases that work towards “reversing” the steps taken over the last 100-1,000 years.
The seminar will be held both remotely and in person. You are expected to attend all class meetings. See the course syllabus for details regarding the schedule.
Note for students interested in SCI-6502: Advanced Reverse Design and Embodied Carbon with Prof. Kara and SCI-6372: Circuits, Circles, and Loops: Towards a Regenerative Architecture with Prof. Grinham. SCI-6502 focuses on contemporary practice topics with lectures, group projects, and discussions; the final deliverable is a written paper. SCI-6372 focuses on emerging research topics with lectures and workshops; the final deliverable is a built prototype.
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.
The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter.