Drawing Space / Marking Sensation

Designers often draw space digitally, and virtual reality creates vivid illusions of spatial experience. In an age of AI, how can we reconnect with the direct, here-and-now, bodily sensations that structure and inform these digital “spaces”? This course aims to do so through freehand charcoal drawing. We’ll strive for wordless experiences of space — architectural historian and theorist Zeynep Çelik Alexander calls this “kinaesthetic knowing” and notes that it has long been an undercurrent in design education and practice. Visually articulating such spatial sensations can enrich any mode of creativity.

Various drawing experiments — no experience required! — cultivate different ways to see, feel, and represent spatial dynamics. Subjects include interior spaces, intervals between objects, air itself, the volumes in bodies and atoms; techniques such as blind contour, line-free tonal studies, and “sculpting with shadows” expand our habits of looking. Arrive willing to play messy, which means both getting your hands dirty with charcoal, and prioritizing process over product. Visits to specific sites and to study selected works at the Harvard University Art Museum enrich our visual vocabulary. Optional readings in fiction and philosophy contextualize the dimensions of visual perception. At midterm, students will begin developing a final drawing portfolio to investigate some aspect of spatial dynamics; this can build on a project from another course or relate to a personal curiosity. 
 

Place-Based Scenario Planning for the Climate Emergency

The climate crisis is, in part, a communication crisis. How can we communicate the choices that communities will need to make to adapt to climate change with limited resources? How can we build awareness of how the climate is already changing while designing just adaptation strategies for the near future? How can we visualize climate impacts at a scale and resolution that is accessible to designers, policy makers, and the general public? This design research seminar will explore these questions through the methodology of place-based scenario planning.

Place-based scenario planning is a form of long-term strategic planning specific to the design disciplines. This method is used to create representations of plausible climate impacts to inform decision-makers in the present. Place-based scenario planning uses local communities as a starting point to understand climate adaptation through infrastructures, buildings, landscapes, and cultural institutions that are easily identified and familiar to people living in a place. Scenario planning is especially useful in regards to climate change, which has many different stakeholders and a high degree of uncertainty.

The course is divided into three phases: climate visualization, scenario development, and adaptation planning. The seminar will invite students to explore the methodology in a place of their choosing. Workshops from scenario planning practitioners and a series of guest lectures will supplement weekly readings and three assignments throughout the semester.

This seminar is open to students from all disciplines with proficiency in ArcGIS, Rhino, and Adobe Suite.
 

Faux: Design, Performance, and Perception of Material Imitations

Materials are everywhere. They remain central to our lives and to contemporary design, despite the omnipresence of digital information. Yet, the fact that many materials that we encounter on a daily basis are mere representations of other materials has largely escaped research and contemporary discourse. We simply do not think much about asphalt roofs made to look like slate or cedar, vinyl siding or ceramic floor tiles imitating wood. Did we not enjoy the suggestion of luxury that comes along with the faux wood grain on the dashboard of the budget car? How about astroturf on the urban scale? Looking beyond products and the built environment, faux materials have been instrumental for centuries on theater stages across the world. The performing arts have long deployed material illusions in the scenic space, often painstakingly painted and designed to be seen from specific angles and distances, under the controlled lighting conditions of the stage. These material illusions are broadly accepted and are an expected part of the performing arts, they are linked to the visions that the artistic team develops for the production itself. What lessons can be learned from scenic material illusions? Have faux materials paved the way for the current blurring of the real and the fake, triggered by the rise of social media and more recently, popular AI tools?

Materials are designed involving conscious choices, such as colors, textures, finishes, and formats. Biomaterials that are grown in labs or are produced from agricultural waste products and binders now expand on the traditional material palette. They substitute conventional materials such as leather or petroleum-based plastics and thereby lower the emission of harmful greenhouse gases. Yet biomaterials have no inherent aesthetics, no cultural or technical precedent, no history. How will they be designed?

The contemporary culture of faux materials is highly sophisticated. The theatrical world remains committed to a craft-based model, but the built environment embraces the vast scale of industrial production. Practical, economical, ecological, and cultural concerns are but some of the factors that play into today’s growing culture of faux materials.

The seminar sets out to explore and understand the past, present and future of design, making, performance, and perception of faux materials at the urban, the building, and the product scale. Throughout the course we will seek to learn lessons from the legacy of material illusions in the scenic environment. Students will engage in material ethnography and experience hands-on workshops that involve designing and manually crafting materials. We will debate theoretical positions, consider material stories, learn about craft and production, and quantitatively assess material perceptions. We encourage students from all programs to apply and join us on a journey at the edge of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘faux’.

Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment

The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers, an expressive and playful supplement to computer-based labor.

The aim of the class is to learn how to depict and express the presence and appearance of people in natural and built environments.

This class objective will be achieved through three projects:
First: focusing on people’s active presence in the landscape.  
Second: on people in a populated urban environment.
Third: on a person or two people acting or interacting in a specific spatial and social situation.

Each of the assigned projects will be realized in a different, specifically selected technique:
     – The first project will use a technique called a subtractive tone.
     – The second one will use a technique of a multiple lines/marks.
     – The last one will use an images projection.
 
The course will help to master techniques in hand drawing, refine sensitivity to all details of what one sees, and develop capacity to articulate them in a visually convincing and evocative form.

The class projects will include work in outdoor and indoor situations and places, as well as drawings of life models. In the process of drawing, students will focus on the world of lines, textures, shapes, light, shade, and values. We will use various tools, materials and artistic techniques including pencils, vine charcoal, graphite, etc.

In addition to the completion of three large drawing projects a special short assignment will be given at the beginning of each class session.

Working on projects will be supplemented by the field trips, presentations, and discussions of relevant examples from art history and contemporary art. Guest artists will be invited as reviewers for the presentations and exhibition of the final project.

No prerequisites are required.

Off: On a Tangent

The tangential inherently implicates the expression of how two things touch. In a moment where touching has become complicated, a formal exploration of this expression is similarly charged.

Mathematically, a tangent is expressed as a straight line that touches a curve at a point. In some of the earliest writing about infinitesimal calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz defined a tangent as “the line through a pair of infinitely close points on the curve”. This course uses the tangential as a formal, rhetorical, and mathematical framework to interrogate the relationship between the part and the whole, between the thick and thin, the complex and contradictory. Working with forms like cones and cylinders (amongst others), we will investigate formal tangential relationships and their implications on bringing programmatic spaces closer together or farther apart.

Conceptually, a tangent implies the permutation of an existing idea into a completely different line of thinking. A tangent articulates a moment where one thing diverges into two or, inversely, where two things merge into one: the moment they kiss. In Kissing Architecture, Sylvia Lavin teases out this tension between the discipline of architecture and new types of art practices. We will focus our exploration within the discipline at a more intimate scale: two mediums, two masses, two surfaces, or two curves. This tension — a version of are ‘they’ or aren’t ‘they’—is further activated by moving between the precise and the imperfect. This seminar will explore the role that image creation plays in articulating these tensions. We will engage in a rigorous investigation of rendering and drawing techniques to study the material, tectonic and spatial implications of tangential forms. At what scale does the tangential relationship build excitement?

Coursework will include weekly readings, digressions on technique and form, presentation asides, rendering, and precedent

Prerequisites: Working knowledge of Rhino/some knowledge of Vray.

Evaluation will be based on class engagement, design exercises, and the final.

Responsive Environments

The course introduces students to the tools and design methods for creating responsive environments and technologically driven experiences in the built environment. By putting the human experience at the center and forefront, from the immediate body scale to the larger environment, encompassing buildings and the urban spaces, the course examines new and emerging models and technologies for the design of innovative architectural human interfaces and technologically augmented physical environments.     

The class addresses fundamental questions including: What are new and emergent ways of understanding the digital and physical environments? How can we create responsive and interactive experiences that augment the person’s experience of the physical space? What are the consequences of creating technologically augmented environments? What are the psychological, social, and environmental implications of creating such hybrids? And what are the criteria to measure successful responsive environments?  

These questions of analyzing, understanding and designing responsive environments will be tackled through both class discussions and also hands-on designing and prototyping of interactive, responsive installations. Readings and discussions will explore current and historical examples, theories of phenomenology, psychogeography, multisensory experience of architecture, body-centricity, proxemics, interaction design, installation design, and human-machine interface. Informed by this discourse, the first part of the course will engage students in measuring and quantifying the ephemeral and invisible qualities of space and human experience of space. This will form the foundation for students to design spatial and interactive interventions at various scales, ranging from wearables, interactive objects, to large-scale architectural installations. In the process, students will become familiarized with technologies that can change and augment our physical environment such as biometric sensors, electronics, processing, projections, and others.

The course will culminate with an exhibition of the students’ responsive and interactive installations of varied scales using the tools and methods discussed in class. The course will take advantage of the resources and the ongoing research at the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab.

No specific prerequisites are needed. Students from any background and concentration are encouraged to apply to the lottery.

 

Mediums Domain students will be priotiized in the MDes Advanced Course Selection.

Digital Media: Environmental Geometries

Environmental Geometries investigates techniques for visualizing and designing interactively with hard-to-see environmental forces. This iteration of the class focuses on the geometry of air movement.

Air moves like an invisible ocean around and within buildings in response to differences in pressure. This motion can be described mathematically, but solving these equations in each situation remains a challenging and evolving problem. Ultimately, depicting and understanding a complex phenomenon requires more than one model and more than one mode of inquiry, as well as awareness of each specific model’s limitations.

There must be a space of interactive architectural experimentation with environmental forces, between general principles, like hot air rises, on the one hand, and computational fluid dynamics on the other, accurate enough to allow realistic feedback, but fast and loose enough for iterative conceptual study. This course tries to create such a space between design-play and engineering through empirical study.

This class proposes a back-and-forth process between physical and digital simulations. We will build two physical simulators: a wind tunnel for the simulation of wind-driven ventilation and a salt-water tank for the simulation of buoyancy driven ventilation. We will pair these with two digital simulations: a smoke simulation in Houdini and a fluid simulation developed within the course in C# in Rhino’s grasshopper environment. 
Students will experience the friction between the digital and the physical modes and engage with both as flexible approximations of reality. This exploration will be expanded with three additional topics: discussion of the heuristic principles of air movement, the mathematics of air models, and historical examples of design before air conditioning.

Architects are familiar with material experimentation with visible materials. Students don’t need to become carpenters or masons, but they do need methods to explore, experiment, test and fail, with wood or stone, in order to use them creatively in their designs. By analogy, students need methods of experimenting with the invisible material of air, if they are to gain familiarity with its behavior and consider it in their future work.

Alongside the construction of the simulators, students will design a series of models for each simulation and run parallel tests in the computational and physical simulators. Through comparisons, they will develop a formal lexicon for producing specific conditions in the air. In the interaction between two distinct ways of looking at the world, students can discover discrepancies, gain control over tools, and learn when and where to apply different types of analysis.

Digital Media: Experiments in Formwork

Whether precast or poured-in-place, nearly every concrete structure takes shape with the help of a sacrificial structure: its mold or formwork. Techniques for constructing molds and formworks have evolved countless times over centuries yet remain a ripe territory for reinvention. Waste-reduction, ease-of-use, and reusability affect both construction costs and sustainability. Our ability to distribute material where it needs to be – and to limit waste where it doesn’t – has the potential for even larger impact. 

As sustainability concerns and new material technologies drive concrete into ever-more-nimble, ever-more-slender forms, an opposing desire haunts our discipline: a nostalgic yearning for stereotomic thickness. Poché, divorced from its pure structural necessity to historic masonry structures, persists under new alibis in contemporary design. Similarly, the graphic techniques of stereotomy–that is, traditionally, of describing cut stone–find application across a range of computational and geometric applications.

In this course, we will attempt to reclaim a stereotomic understanding of surface development towards the production of low-waste, inexpensive and reusable, sheet-derived mold forms. In contrast to many digitally enabled mold-making processes, we will not work subtractively (i.e. we will not use CNC or other routing techniques to carve a negative from a preexisting volume). Instead, we will apply sheet bending and joining techniques to construct a new kind of mold. Casting into these sheet-derived molds, students will test tectonic, structural, and material variables affecting the form and performance of cast architectural elements.

Students can expect to spend the first half of the course constructing tabletop-scale molds and testing the pouring process through a sequence of tutorial-guided weekly assignments. Leveraging lessons learned from the collective body of research developed in the first half, students will move on to independent or small-group development of a tectonic concept using assembled cast parts.

Spatial Design Strategies for Climate- and Conflict-Induced Migration

Climate change presents an urgent global challenge with far-reaching implications for human societies and all other species inhabiting the planet. Over the next few decades, extreme climate zones and uninhabitable areas are projected to expand, driven by factors such as water stress, food insecurity, extreme heat, sea level rise, and weather-related disasters such as storms and wildfires. These challenges are already driving instability and increasing displacement, forcing individuals and communities to leave behind the spaces and cultures they have inhabited for generations.

As of 2024, an estimated 120 million people are displaced (UNHCR), with projections suggesting this number may rise significantly, disproportionally impacting individuals and communities historically the least responsible for the climate crisis.

This project-based seminar will examine migration induced by climate and conflict, which often intersect, in one of the most volatile hotspots in the world, the Sahel. The Sahel region has been grappling with the root causes and the multidimensional consequences of climate change for a long time; colonization, extensive resource extraction, conflict, and militarization. In the region, new trends in migration are observed, and local, national, and international policies and protocols for humanitarian contingency planning are currently being developed in response.

In the Sahel, traditional lifestyles such as nomadic pastoralism and transhumance have thrived for millennia in extreme weather conditions, offering valuable lessons in adaptability and perseverance in times of crisis and resource scarcity. 

In the seminar, the class will engage with diverse stakeholders and viewpoints from theory and practice. We will have conversations with representatives of United Nations agencies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which possess real-time data and field experience. Drawing on their data sets and engaging in dialogue with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community representatives, we will develop a case study focused on climate migration in the Sahel, with particular attention to the situation in Mauritania, where local and international organizations are working together to support the country’s open-door policy and its efforts to host refugees from the region (and keep them from reaching Europe).

Sessions will include meetings with diverse stakeholders, interaction with UN agencies, non-governmental organizations and representative of local communities, and in-class workshops for project development that include spatial analyses of migration trends and scenario exercises. To attend the class, students are required to have knowledge of spatial design (architecture, urban and landscape architecture) along with basic mapping skills.

Community-Informed Urban Design

In Community-Informed Urban Design, we will explore the role of urban design, architecture, and placemaking in shaping social conditions within the built environment. We will critically examine how design decisions have disproportionately impacted those most vulnerable, exacerbating existing disparities based on race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and age. Students must define their social responsibility and will directly confront social frameworks to explore avenues for reparative urban design.

Throughout the course, we will review historical design injustices and unveil the benefit of healing, trauma-informed, and community-driven alternatives. Our focus will center on two primary vulnerable populations: system-impacted communities and the unhoused. Marginalized and criminalized by society, these communities have been further failed by designers who concretize these value judgements spatially. To challenge implicit bias that compounds across the built environment, students will utilize numerous qualitative and quantitative research methods, alongside design-thinking to produce empathetic, data-driven solutions.
 
We will learn and deploy various community engagement practices, such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, intercepts, and online engagement tools. In light of the course’s sensitive topics, there will be special attention to cultural competency and best practices specific to vulnerable populations. Students will be evaluated on projects that incorporate design, policy, and financing that advocate for these communities, for justice, and that aim to repair past harms and improve outcomes well into the future.
 
Interdisciplinarity is strongly encouraged. Students across the GSD and from other areas of interest are welcome to enroll.