Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle
The structures and forms we perceive on the face of 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 focus on the temporal dimension of landscape. As Henri Bergson put it, time is invention, the creation of forms. As a result of the interaction of forces exerted by different entities, the environment is in a continuous state of transformation, a state of becoming, of which we are not always aware. In today’s landscape architecture, ideas of time, process, change, and transformation are often approached through vague ecological discourse. In this course, we will investigate these notions through lectures, readings, and discussion on the history of ecological ideas and concurrent theories of evolution and thermodynamics, all of which ultimately deal with different kinds of order we see in the world as time flows through energy and matter.
Students in the course will also be asked to choose and investigate a vernacular agricultural landscape, that is, a landscape that has slowly evolved through the agricultural practices of those who live in it. With the selection of these different case studies, the course as a whole will aim at covering the widest possible range of environmental conditions across the globe. With climate change at the core of the agenda, we will focus on vernacular landscapes emerging from extreme conditions, such as deserts, tropical rainforests, and tundras. By drawing and modeling these agricultural landscapes, we will unveil the specific climatic, geomorphological, and technical processes and constraints through which they receive their forms. This constructive and representational inquiry into the vernacular will allow the seminar to engage in conversation about the metaphysics of time and life, energy and matter, discuss the different tendencies that exist on the land prior to human intervention, and question how design and technology interfere with, speed up, slow down, or even wipe out such tendencies.
Students will be evaluated by their contribution to the general class discussion and their specific investigation. The course is open to all GSD students, but strong graphic and representational skills are recommended.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning in the Developing World
This course starts from the premise that politics and governance arrangements can both enable and constrain effective urban planning action. Using a focus on cities in the developing world, the course examines an array of governance structures (centralized versus decentralized institutions; local versus national states; participatory budgeting, etc.) and political conditions (democracy versus authoritarianism; neoliberal versus populist versus leftist party politics; social movements) that are relatively common to cities of the global south. In addition to assessing the impacts of these structures and conditions on urban policy formation and implementation, the course asks which governance arrangements and/or political contexts are more or less likely to produce equitable, inclusive, and sustainable urban environments. To address these questions, the course is structured around discussion of cases and theories that give us the basis for documenting the ways that politics affect urban policy and the built environment of the city more generally. Among a range of policy domains, special attention is paid to transportation, housing, informal vending, and mega-project development, with most examples drawn from Latin America, South Asia, and East Asia.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Urban Ethnographies
Planners’ understanding of social process and cultural values is often woefully inadequate, and their thinking is dominated by a “one-size-fits-all” approach and by excessive attention to the values of an international middle class rather than to local experience. In this course, we will read some urban ethnography inspecting the interactions among local people, planners, anthropologists, architects, and builders in order to think against the grain, especially in cases where disputes over whose heritage is at stake dominate the discourse. We will also examine the role of conflict in shaping urban space and ask whether attempts to smooth it over are necessarily to the benefit of local populations, especially where internal factionalism and political dissent are at stake. Finally, we will also examine the role of urban space in shaping people’s subjectivities and ask what that role tells us about governmental structures and the way they affect ordinary people’s lives.
.A percentage of enrollment in this course is held for MDes CC students who select this course first in the lottery.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Screens – Projecting Media and The Visual Arts
How do screens function as interface between us and the world? What is the role of the screen in contemporary visual arts and media culture? The art of projection has traveled from film theatre to art gallery, from pre-cinematic exhibition to post-medium conditions. We examine this history and archaeology of screen media, and their current cultural and aesthetic dimensions. We explore the architecture of the screen, transforming into environments of screen surfaces and interconnected sites of projection.
Note: Offered jointly with the FAS, Visual and Environmental Studies as AFVS283.
Limited enrollment to 12. Instructor approval required.
Visit canvas class site during shopping week for application and registration procedure.
Building Conservation and Renewal: Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the spatial, material, and cultural values inherent in a property that must be understood to craft interventions and additions that will reveal, complement, sustain and enhance the original work while appropriately addressing social, architectural and technical integrity? This course will introduce architecture students to the functional, technical, regulatory and environmental principles of working with existing buildings to ensure their continued cultural, technical and programmatic viability. Designed specifically to ground the participant in the methodologies of building conservation and renewal and to introduce the tools necessary to successfully approach working with existing buildings, the course will include lectures by the Instructor and guest experts, and in-class discussions from readings. Students will prepare a short analytical paper and will develop and present an assessment and intervention design exercise on a property of the student’s choosing.
Globally, roughly 35% of construction activity is devoted to work on existing structures – making the sustainability mantra “the greenest building is the one already built” increasingly relevant as we seek strategies to minimize the impact of construction on the environment. Repair and renewal are therefore fundamental components of contemporary architectural practice increasingly requiring facility in techniques of rehabilitation, adaptive reuse and conservation.
We will look critically at how the international Charters and Standards employed in working with historic structures impact our approach to modifications to any existing building from a technical, design and regulatory standpoint, and will particularly address the question as to how the apparatus of conservation is changing to best serve both underrepresented constituencies and the legacy of modernism and the recent past.
While interventions must include sound technical solutions, any modification from conservation to renovation and addition designs must address the full complement of values necessary to enable an economically viable, socio-culturally relevant rehabilitation. We will examine a range of intervention design case studies on both traditional structures and modern buildings including works by architects such as Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn. Though geared to students in the M.Arch curriculum, the course is open to all interested students.
Classes will typically include roughly 90 minutes of lecture time with the balance for discussion. Lectures will be given in real time but will be available for asynchronous viewing. Students are encouraged to attend the full class, but allowances can be made for time zone differences. All are required to participate in the discussion and student presentation sessions.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
North American Seacoasts and Landscapes: Discovery Period to the Present
Selected topics in the history of the North American coastal zone, including the seashore as wilderness, as industrial site, as area of recreation, and as artistic subject; the shape of coastal landscape for conflicting uses over time; and the perception of the seashore as marginal zone in literature, photography, painting, film, television, and advertising.
Note: Offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as VES 166.
Prerequisites: GSD 4105 and GSD 4303, or permission of the instructor
Jointly Offered Course: AFVS 166
Students interested in taking this course are invited to a Zoom shopping session at 12:00PM EST on Tuesday, August 18. The Zoom link will appear on the Canvas course site.
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
An Unsentimental Look at Architecture and Social Craft
Designers of the built environment have had an on-again, off-again relationship with social agency. Progressive design and social outcomes were closely linked in early modernism. These interests realigned again under much different circumstances in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, we are again witnessing an elevated interest in their linkage. To date, however, we lack the ability to articulate what forms of social impact are actually within the architect’s scope. The majority of the praise given to projects of perceived societal value is limited to the project’s social benefit program or its underserved community context. The problem with these critiques is that they reveal little about how the architect’s design decisions have created any greater or lesser social value. This course will have you move beyond program and context to speculate how you can address social impact opportunities within mainstream practice.
Because this area of knowledge is so nascent, we will use dialogue as the exploratory tool and final products of the course. The challenge of this course is to develop your own inquiries into social agency and learn to leverage your agency as a student to influence the discourse within the school. Working in small teams, your final deliverable is to curate an action that influences the conversation concerning the social agenda within the Harvard GSD and beyond. You will choose the focus of the discourse and you will have room to pursue both conventional and unconventional methods of engagement. Projects could include, film, open letters, installations, online campaigns, or dinner parties.
Throughout the semester, you will meet with me or the TAs to discuss the development of your project. Success will be determined by the quality of debate you are able to generate around the issue you are raising. Classes will explore different approaches and tools for negotiating our agency through case studies and guest speakers. You will be required to read short case studies and brief weekly readings. Once over the semester, you will each be asked to analyze a particular project and present it to the class. The task is to evaluate the options available to the designers as well as the choices they made. While this course is within the architecture program, we will consider design interventions at many scales and I welcome students from all disciplines to join the course.
Due to no classes being offered on Labor Day and course selections being due on Wednesday, September 9, this class has scheduled a first irregular meeting on Thursday, September 3, 6:00-7.30 pm EDT. Please make sure to check the Canvas site of the course for the meeting Zoom links.
Culture, Conservation and Design
This proseminar addresses issues of critical conservation, an evolving discipline that illuminates the bridge between cultural meaning, identity, and context as part of the design process. Critical conservation explores the multiple forces that underlie contemporary life and the creation of places. The field addresses issues of social justice as applied to the design of places: whose history is being told; whose future is being created; who benefits; who is included and excluded by the process of creating new designs in an existing context? The goal of the course is to broaden the student’s understanding of the cultural dimensions of a place and to understand how we use/misuse the past and how we value the present.
The course is organized around three topics:
1. The Dynamic Present addresses the inherent dynamism of modernity and tradition in creating personal and group identities. It investigates questions about the past, history, permanence, temporality, obsolescence, and authenticity and applies them to understanding the identity of places.
2. Place & Cultural Identity addresses the social construction of meaning associated with group identities, places, artifacts, and history. Issues include history, heritage, nostalgia, authenticity, and their intersection with regulatory agencies and preservation standards that are used to attempt to control context by design and identity narratives.
3. Conservation Uses & Abuses addresses how conservation is used to create, control, and transform places. The roles of ancestor worship, government use of racial zoning, urban renewal, creation of tourist destinations, the stigmatization of the other, and private use of exclusionary amenities will be examined to understand how groups use underlying agendas to manifest power, shape and enforce group identity, and exclude the other.
The seminar is open to all GSD students and required for MDes Critical Conservation students. There are no prerequisites. Course work includes a one-page synthesis of weekly reading assignments, three case study presentations with short papers, and a paper/presentation of a final research project framed in the topics explored in the seminar.
Open to all: 16 student lottery; preference for DES3333 /Critical Conservation
Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 08/31, and/or 09/01. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Proseminar in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology
The Master of Design Studies Urbanism-Landscape-Ecology [U-L-E] proseminar introduces students to the range of individual and group research presently pursued by GSD faculty across the pedagogic and disciplinary agendas of the school. Each week, there is a discussion of readings about the challenges facing city making and finally, students will make three presentations: an abstract, a mid-term and then a final.
The proseminar relies on student engagement, class discussion and presentations. The essence of the seminar is the creation of critical research questions that will drive your future work. These will emerge from literature, precedent, the rich context of the GSD, and a penetrating sense of current and future challenges to human settlement.
The U-L-E area is a synthesis of three fields, which in their own right are complex and engage uncertainty. Part of this complexity is based on current and historical practices that have engendered social, cultural and economic inequality. Understanding this context can drive research questions that can lead to a more just and resilient 21st century city. Thus our work will cut across the specificity and synthesis of the three disciplines to engage social equity + values, technology + traditional knowledge, governance + ecologies of commerce, and radical imagination + pragmatic visioning.
The seminar advances design research as an emerging and innovative form of knowledge production to inspire new practices of making cities and to initiate diverse forms of theoretical and empirical scholarship. After defining design and design research as contrasting and complimentary ways of thinking, course discussion will investigate various modes of research on urbanism and urbanization, the expanding field of landscape architecture, and ecology as a science but also as a metaphor. The thesis abstracts will measure a range of discursive and disciplinary models for the production of knowledge on cities.
Seminar participants will gain insight into the discourse surrounding a diverse array of disciplinary questions, and insight into their methodological implications. Upon completion of the seminar, U-L-E students will have articulated a specific research question to pursue in the coming semesters with a faculty advisor.
Proseminar in Landscape Architecture
The proseminar introduces MLA II students to a range of theories and methods in landscape architecture and their implications for practice and research. The focus is on developing a critical perspective that comes from a deeper understanding of landscape architecture theory, methods, and speculation. The proseminar provides a foundation for further course and studio work at the GSD and upon completion of the seminar participants will have articulated a specific research question to pursue in the coming semesters.
Classes will typically consist of a presentation by landscape architecture faculty followed by a discussion of assigned readings and a tutorial on a specific skill, resource, or research question. Each student will develop and present their own research interests within the context of the topics discussed in the seminar. Evaluation will be based on weekly response papers, participation in class sessions, a seminar presentation, and final research paper.
Participation in the seminar is limited to MLA II students.