Urban Design and the Color-Line

We cannot talk about physical infrastructure in the United States without also talking about race. This seminar/workshop introduces students to the role that race and class have played – and will continue to play – in the design and implementation of physical infrastructures. It provides tools for: (1) Interrogating design’s contributions to, and complicity with, structural and infrastructural racism; and, (2) Developing intentionally anti-racist, equity-focused research and design methodologies that produce more equitable public spaces.

Reflecting on the High Line’s social and economic challenges, in 2017 Friends of the High Line (FHL) established the High Line Network (HLN), a peer-to-peer community of infrastructure reuse projects that spans the United States. This “trans-local” advocacy network disseminates knowledge on avoiding failures and missed opportunities that plagued the High Line’s advocates from the beginning, ranging from ensuring social inclusion, managing gentrification to avoid displacement, institutionalizing public programming, and negotiating city revenues for project development. Throughout the semester, students will work in pairs and collaborate with one of six HLN organizations, helping them develop their own Equitable Impacts Framework (EIF).

This limited enrollment project-based seminar provides students with a framework for unpacking the making and remaking of physical infrastructures with a deeper understanding of the relationship between systemic racism and the production of space. This course requires weekly readings, writing, discussion, and engagement with a US based civil society organization, as well as the creation of graphic materials for a single infrastructure reuse project.

 

Up to three seats will be held for MDes students.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Informal Robotics / New Paradigms for Design & Construction

This course teaches how to create original robotic devices made of light, compliant – informal – materials.

New fabrication techniques are transforming the field of robotics. Rather than rigid parts connected by mechanical connectors, robots can now be made of folded paper, carbon laminates or soft gels. They can be formed fully integrated from a 3D printer rather than assembled from individual components. Informal Robotics draws on cutting-edge research from leading labs, in particular, Harvard’s Micro Robotics Laboratory which has created unique designs for ambulatory and flying robots, end-effectors, medical instruments and other applications.

We will explore informal robotics from multiple perspectives, culminating with the design of original devices displaying animated intelligence in real-time. Going beyond traditional engineering approaches, we will also explore new opportunities for design at the product, architectural, and urban scales.

Techniques:
Hands-on:  Working with the GSD’s Fab Lab we are creating a kit of parts that will be available to all enrolled students. With the kit, you can create a wide range of folding mechanisms controlled by on-board miniature electronics. 

Software / Simulation: Software workshops will be offered on Fusion 360 and Grasshopper to simulate robotic performance within a virtual environment. 

Topics:
– Kinematics: design techniques for pop-ups, origami, and soft mechanisms.
– Fabrication: methods: for composite materials, laminated assembly, self-folding, and integrated flexures – the kit of parts will allow for hands-on exploration.
– Controls: how to actuate movement and program desired behavior. Topics include servos, linear actuators, and use of Arduino actuator control.
– Applications: takes us beyond purely technological concerns, contextualizing Informal Robotics within larger trends where materials, manufacturing and computation are starting to merge.

Format, prerequisites, evaluation:

A portion of the lecture material will be pre-recorded, allowing students to view this on their own schedule. The class session will emphasize discussion and review of assignments & projects. 

There will be assignments to produce test mechanisms and CAD models, followed by final group projects. Presentations and discussions of ongoing student work are integral to the course. There are no prerequisites and evaluation will be based on completion of assignments and the final project.

Projects may be virtual, physical or both. Resources for fabricating customized final projects are not fully known at this point, but I am committed to supporting physical-making to the degree possible.

Jointly Offered Course: SEAS ES256

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Jointly Offered Course: SEAS ES256

 

 

Towards a new Science of Design?

This project- and discussion-based seminar offers a deep, critical inspection of contemporary design practices, research methods and discourses informed by Neuroscience, Behavioral Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction and Philosophy of the Mind. In recent years, theories about extended cognition, embodied interaction and material engagement, to name a few, combined with physiological data collection techniques such as eye-tracking, electroencephalogram and galvanic skin response, among many others, have given rise to new questions about the foundations of design. Crucially, these methods and frameworks have allowed design practitioners and scholars to ask disciplinary questions with a new  degree of rigor, and supported by empirical evidence. How are buildings perceived by their users? How do materials affect occupant behavior? How do designers think when they design? These and other puzzles have begun to be scrutinized under a new light.

While acknowledging the role that contributions from these fields play today in our understanding of architecture (as an experience) and design (as a practice), this course argues that a rigorous and systematic assessment of their applicability, value and potential in design research is needed. What aspects of the built environment can these fields’ methods and theories help us understand better? How relevant is their potential to change the ways we conceptualize and operationalize design practice? What methods are available to understand the degree to which there might be a scientific basis for design?

 

Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Data Analysis and Data Physicalization

Data Analysis and Data Physicalization is a research seminar that explores the analysis and communication of data through statistical analysis and physical artefacts.

Data can bring clarity and insights into otherwise chaotic problems and phenomena around us yet at the same time, can be deceiving or blinding without the knowledge to handle them skilfully. This skill is often referred to as data literacy that is the ability for one to carry out statistical analysis and to appreciate and critique information made available by others. Along with data literacy, the aptitude for communication with data is becoming ever more important. Data visualization is a discipline that aims to augment human understanding of data.  The primary challenge of visualization design is to develop techniques that transform abstract data into representations that are easy to perceive and interpret. Successful data visualization using graphs, charts, timelines, and diagrams are extremely helpful in prompting visceral comprehension of data, nevertheless, many of the two-dimensional representations of complex data are difficult to be felt and digested. Physicalization of data is one of the approaches to extend the cognition and communication of data.  

In this class, we use python, commonly used in the data science community to understand the fundamentals of data analysis. Though advanced data analysis methods are beyond the scope of the class, we will cover basic concepts and techniques through a series of exercises and assignments. Simultaneously, we will explore approaches to materialize the information obtained from data analysis. Students will work on a final design project combining data analysis and data physicalization approaches introduced in the class.

 

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students, with priortiy given to Mediums Domain and Technology Area students.

 

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Pre- and Post-

Pre- and Post- is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods in digital design, with a focus on the processes of translation between digital media and artifacts. Beyond an exploration of novel form and its reading, this course is a critical inquiry into how digital tools can extend beyond visualization and fabrication to change the way we view architectural projects from the past, present, and future.

Today, digital representation and fabrication methods are primarily used in the production of new projects, rarely finding application in the analysis of historical precedents. Restriction of contemporary tools almost exclusively to contemporary architecture limits the knowledge these methods can help us glean from projects built before the digital era. By analyzing pre-digital precedents through a post-digital lens, we can begin to reconceptualize these precedents and situate these new tools within architectural history at large.

Within this context, the course focuses on digital image as a speculative medium and its epistemic and communicational implications. Beyond typical end-process output used in everyday practice, the course conceives digital image as instruments for conceiving and perceiving architecture, which invites multiple interpretations and modes of engagement. The course is organized into three sequential areas of inquiry. As these different approaches play into different epistemic questions about architecture, it explores new possibilities of feedback between image and architecture, revolving around the processes of design and representation.

In the first phase, each student researches architectural precedents, considering how new digital tools could allow us to reconsider the project’s design and representation. We will reconstruct analyzed information in the form of digital data, drawing, and imagery.

During the second phase, each student develops a critical stance towards the precedent’s forms and suggests a radical modification/manipulation of it. The material from the first phase will be sourced and re-assembled into three-dimensional form-making through methodologies by deploying images as a generative instrument. In this process, inherent values of images stored in pixels are taken as variables for three-dimensional form defining processes. The reciprocal processes of manipulation between image and formal artifacts investigate the latent design opportunities embedded in each one with a focus on the capacities and limitations of select computational processes. This study will involve recursive developments of proto-architectural objects.

In the third phase, we speculate on the capacity of digital technologies to assign new or alternative readings to form. Through a series of imaging, processing, rendering techniques, and animated projections used against physical models, this phase explores how time-based modes of two-dimensional representation can activate and manipulate three-dimensional form. This framework allows the conception of a variable architecture and the line between physical objects and digital creations blurs as projection mapping alters architecture in real-time. In this series of design exercises, the course explores how new processes of manipulation—namely, techniques in digital design, fabrication, and representation—can facilitate new ways of thinking about architecture, both pre-digital and post-digital.

Course Format – offered as a single, weekly 3-hour session. Each session will be divided into a lecture half and a workshop half. Instructor-led workshops will include a rigorous introduction to Rhino/ Grasshopper scripting (pre-modeling tools) for analyzing and modeling, and Processing/Cinema4D/MadMapper (post-modeling tools) for the advanced representation of projects.

Prerequisites – None.

Up to eight seats will be held for MDes students.

 

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This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Environmental Histories, 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 (rather than the discretionary aims of a curated collection), they often contain undeclared evidence of the fleeting and sometimes unwelcome behaviors of living systems and human inhabitants in official accounts of technical lands. Through case studies, we will analyze scientific, technical, or commercial images for spatial configuration, compositional qualities, visual patterns, and cultural references; evaluate the relationship of media (film, glass plate photography, social media) to the subject matter; and document these findings through analytical and projective drawings. The case studies presented will focus on built infrastructure and design projects in North America, but students are to develop their own relevant subjects for independent research. This course is open to all disciplines.

 

Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Machine Learning and the Image of the City

This project-based seminar explores the potential for machine learning to enhance our creative process as we re-imagine the image of the contemporary city. This work is occasioned by the recent acquisition of Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive by the Getty Research Institute. In partnership with the Getty, the project-based seminar will utilize the vast digital record of tens of thousands of Ruscha’s photographs of Sunset Boulevard taken between the 1960s and 2010s. This vast digital image archive will inform the development of machine learning processes that will allow students to extrapolate potential alternative images for the contemporary city.

Ruscha’s deadpan photographs of Los Angeles’s iconic streetscapes and automobile-based architectural typologies were appropriated by Denise Scott Brown as a graphic language applicable to the analysis of the Las Vegas strip as published in Learning from Las Vegas. Ruscha’s photographs were equally influential to Reyner Banham’s conception of the city’s Four Ecologies. In both cases, the postwar American city was seen through the lenses of limitless solar plentitude, extreme illumination, and the legibility of information at speed.

The GSD Office for Urbanization has worked in collaboration with Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez and GSD Laboratory for Design Technologies to develop specific workflows based on the Ruscha archive. Spread across several decades, these images present endless opportunities for surveying change throughout the city. Students will be invited to track, monitor and project forward these changes by cross referencing each image’s geospatial data with object detection and depth map generation algorithms. The workflow will also deploy generative adversarial neural networks, such as StyleGAN, to project a limitless number of imaginary cities extrapolated from the Getty’s archival Ruscha images. These “machine hallucinations” will inform the curation of new time-based images of the contemporary city.

Each member of the seminar will be invited to develop facility with machine learning processes to curate new architectural imaginaries for the future of the city through animated images of the public realm. The seminar will also convene a series of conversations with leading voices across a range of topics including the role of Ruscha’s image of the postwar American city and the potential for machine learning as a generative process. The seminar welcomes candidates from all departments and programs across the GSD. It welcomes students with little or no experience with computation, as well as those with more experience. The seminar forms part of the GSD’s Future of the American City Initiative sponsored by the Knight Foundation and supported by the GSD Office for Urbanization.

 

Up to four seats will be held for MDes students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Institutions & Impact: Mental Health – Could Hybrid Institutions have more impact?

The world is rapidly changing around us, and to many, conventional institutions – from libraries to museums and from healthcare to schools – are failing. What are the impacts we want institutions to have moving forward?

Now is the time for institutions to look ahead long-term and rethink their roles in society, rather than simply being reactive to the current moment. How can they ensure stronger ties with communities and neighborhoods and a focus on people over collections? Can they become the service providers of the future and help us focus on topics that matter today and tomorrow?

This interdisciplinary course will examine what institutions for the 21st century become when we explore updated missions, visions, and programs. During the semester, we will explore the value of hybrid institutions and the change in institutional directions of the last 150 years through lectures and reading materials. Together we will analyze programs and space programs for existing institutions and develop concepts for new institutions.

This year, we will focus on the potential impact institutions could have on mental health. We investigate reasons that mental health is often underemphasized and suggest ideas for institutions to stimulate better mental health in various ways. For instance, institutions could provide platforms for communities to improve mental health and social bonds–a much-needed effort in today's complex psychological climate.

In groups of two to four students, you will be developing concepts (not designs!) for a new institution (including Vision & Program, Forecast & Analysis, and a Space Program) or find programmatic and spatial solutions for existing institutions to have a more positive impact on mental health.

 

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

Urban Grids-3:Grid Plan versus Big Project

Within a larger research scope of exploring open forms for city design, this seminar will focus on a clear discussion of two paradigms:
1) Large scale plans that take the urban grid as the main layout, allowing many forms of development. We know that Manhattan is the result of a decision to establish a well-tempered urban grid over the whole island in 1811, framing all the different subsequent morphologies and transformations.
2) The big projects behind the initiatives of major events like World Expos that have to meet a precise program for a short period of time. Paris held seven different Expos along the Seine and created a cultural downtown district for the metropolis with parks, museums and mixed uses.

The two design strategies respond to the different logics, time constraints and social ambitions of the urban projects. This seminar is a distillation of a twofold research process at the GSD. The first is the Urban Grids: Handbook for Regular City Design presented at previous editions. The second is ongoing research on the “Urbanistic impact of World Expositions in cities” that summarizes some lessons to be learned from the experience of the more than 100 expos held since 1851 in London, covering cities in different continents and the most varied of cultures. Both paradigms are good examples of open forms for designing the city. Each responds to different urbanistic aims. The first is responsible for many expansions with the different characters we’ll discover as we study them, but they are, in general, lasting urban sectors. The second initially has something of the ephemeral about it as in many cases the programs are limited to a few months, but the transformation nevertheless produces special districts in most of the Expo cities that go on to induce other types of developments. The ultimate aim of the course is to create a new understanding of the way we approach city design by means of powerful models and innovative experiences that can rigorously inform our design decisions. Revisiting these two paradigms—that have channeled so many different objectives—with a critical viewpoint may help us to address new issues when approaching the urban future with its new social challenges and sustainable requirements.

The research seminar will specifically focus on the following steps:
A) Reviewing the conceptual framework of plans and projects. Understanding certain categories such as known vs unknown, systematic vs specific, and generic vs ad hoc. We will identify the nature of each paradigm.
B) Researching seminal projects (city fragments) that suggest new design patterns in both paradigms. Study of quantitative features in order to understand qualitative values in the design and its development.
C) Comparative studies of the various aspects of investigation to establish both individual research areas and a collective agenda for the group.
D) The final outcome will present the students’ individual critical views in relation to the values of each of the paradigms for future application.

Course Format and Method:
Some introductory reading will be provided at the beginning of the course. After the initial steps, the seminar will go on to explore the topics, primarily by means of analytical and operative drawings that allow students to produce critical arguments about values and priorities using some relevant cases for both urban design paradigms.

The seminar is open to all students at the GSD. Up to five seats will be held for MDes students. Please note that a high level of graphic skills is required. Students will work both individually and in pairs to exchange ideas and contrast the two paradigms. Dingliang Yang will serve as Teaching Fellow.

***Please note that the material circulated during the seminar is for use in the seminar only.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.

 

Extracanonical Buildings

analysis, "a breaking-up" or "an untying;" from ana– "up, throughout" and lysis "a loosening" [1]

This project-based seminar is concerned with the formal analysis of buildings not included in officially sanctioned bodies of work. In "Radical Thought," Vittoria Di Palma argues for the value in studying the distant in time and place to challenge preconceptions of architectural precedent. Rather than seek historical corollaries in the recent past and in familiar contexts to validate work, this calls for a fundamentally destabilizing presence of history in design. Through initial reading discussions, the class will define the concept of the extracanonical, theorize its implications for the discipline, and think about its power to reorganize modes of instrumentalizing the past. Using these criteria, we will perform a double "untying"—of the canon, via each project. Students will describe and interpret a single building, looking critically at received methods of formal analysis and rethinking those methods with respect to the newly established extracanonical body.

The first part the seminar will entail weekly readings, a related student presentation and collective discussion. In the second part of the semester, students, working alone or in pairs, will design and produce an in-depth formal analysis, comprising drawings, animations, and/or models, of their chosen extracanonical example. After an initial project proposal, weekly progress will be expected for feedback from the instructor and collective engagement from the class. Final work will be aimed toward a review/display at the end of the term. The course is open to MArch and MDes students with demonstrable proficiency in visual techniques of architectural representation as listed above.

Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.

[1] Douglas Harper (2001—2012). “analysis (n.)”. ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY. Douglas Harper.

This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.