Rome

A seminar on the art, architecture, and urbanism of Rome where the layering of material artifacts from successive historical periods provides an uninterrupted record of more than two thousand years. Development of the urban site establishes a continuous framework and contextualizes the cultural, artistic, and political aspirations and values of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque city. 

The course includes lectures and discussions on selected topics and student reports on their research. Some lectures are organized around historic spectacles – the Emperor Augustus’ funeral (14 A.D.), Constantine the Great’s triumphal procession (312), and the consecration of New St. Peter’s (1626) – imagined as walks through Rome highlighting the city’s evolving cultural and urban character. Other topics may consider a single building architect or idea in depth. The first half of the course covers Antiquity to the Renaissance while the second looks in greater detail at specific Renaissance and Baroque projects. Topics in the first part include the growth and decline of the ancient Roman city, the creation of new architectural forms and urban meanings in response to the Christianization of Empire, and the practice of pilgrimage as urban experience. The second part focuses on the style and meaning of those works of art, architecture, and urbanism which distinguish Rome today such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, Bramante’s design for New St. Peter’s, and Bernini’s sculpture for the rebuilt basilica.  In general, the approach of the first half emphasizes the historical and cultural foundations which constitute the idea of Rome while the second takes up more theoretical issues of representation and reception.

Miami Resilience: Housing & Infrastructure

This advanced research seminar in Miami, Florida (USA) is thematically focused at the intersection of community resilience, infrastructure design, housing studies, building science and zoning. With a particular geographic focus on the western portions of Miami-Dade County bordering the Everglades, the seminar will seek to understand the various forces shaping the adaptive capacity, livability and affordability of adjacent municipalities and communities. Within the context of rapid climatic, environmental and social change, students are tasked with developing a specialized research agenda that builds upon the various programs, methodologies and practices within the GSD. Each student will be required to independently select and develop a research agenda that demonstrates a command of the associated disciplinary literature framing the inquiry. In addition, each student will be required to develop analytical framework(s) that demonstrate the student’s competence for not only understanding the problem(s) but also utilizing such frameworks for practically engaging local stakeholders. In partnership with the Knight Foundation and the Chief Resilience Officers (CROs) of Miami and Miami-Dade County, students will travel to Miami to conduct field work to support their research. 
 
The seminar will culminate in the production of a project (e.g., memorandum, multi-media, etc..) that memorializes the analytical outcomes, as well as a normative position for advancing future policy, planning and design decisions. Students are evaluated on: (i) monthly presentations, and, (ii) the final research memorandum/media. Each student is required to lead discussions on relevant literature/data shaping their research, as well as periodic up-dates concerning their research progress. Students are encouraged to utilize the seminar to ground complementary existing research for ongoing theses and dissertations. Specialized research inquires may include engineering and architectural resilience design, hazard mitigation planning, landscapes of water and risk, and the architecture and urban design of TOD. 
 
Travel to Miami is anticipated to take place from February 27th to February 30th. The students selected to take part in the trip will be term-billed $100. Students may travel in only one course or studio in a given term and should refer to traveling seminar policies.

Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices

The Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar investigates art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of contemporary culture and the city. As artists and designers respond to challenges of global magnitude and local impact, engage with cross-cultural and often conflicting conditions, and operate in disparate economic and societal realms, the need for increased engagement and collaboration is paramount. The complexity present in the context of action—economic, social, political, cultural, and ecological— frequently requires interdisciplinary approaches accompanied by cross-pollinating knowledge and skillsets.

Socially engaged art, relational aesthetics, and activist and emancipatory design practices challenge disciplinary boundaries not only in the art and the design worlds but as they crossover and interact with communities, policymakers, and various experts. They lead to the expansion of professional vocabularies, tools, and imaginaries, and cultivates new forms of interdisciplinary knowledge. 

As art and design practices move from art in public space to art in public interest (Miwon Kwon), their participatory and relational makeup can generate platforms and agencies that question dominant culture, construct new practices, establish new subjectivities, and subvert existing configurations of power (Chantal Mouffe). Historical examples of such approaches include Dada, the Situationists, and other avant-garde movements, as well as contemporary art and design practices such as the Silent University, Philadelphia Assembled, Superflex, Critical Art Ensemble, Pink Bloque, Yes Men, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, or the Arctic Cycle. Such disseminated practices challenge the boundaries of art and design and their environments.

The seminar will navigate the evolving interdisciplinarity of art and design practices by engaging with the city, its communities, and the art world and by addressing contemporary urgencies and societal concerns. Practice-oriented, the seminar includes lectures, workshops, and assignments dedicated to exploring artistic tools and methods as well as the context in which they perform.

Fundamental goals of the seminar are:
– to expose students to methods, techniques, and positions of interdisciplinary art and design practices;
– to explore how art and design practices can engage with the public domain;
– to creatively explore the potential of mediums in the realization of ideas; and
– to raise relevant questions and to test them through the development of projects;
– Student evaluation is based on assignments, participation in class, and the final presentation.

This semester the seminar will explore the agency of art and design in interrogating and responding to issues related to border conditions and migration of human and non-human entities with curators, artists, activists, and policymakers. At the end of the semester, a selection of students' research and projects will be presented at A/D/O in the context of this year's program "At the Border." Priority enrollment to ADPD MDes students.

MAKE/BELIEVE

How does the action of making reflect, produce, enhance, aggregate, and/or suspend the beliefs of authors and audiences? This hybrid production-theory course merges training in artistic production strategies and methods with grounding in contemporary art practices, ideas, and histories. A seminar course intended for MDes students in the Art, Design, and the Public Domain concentration, but open to all students, MAKE/BELIEVE emphasizes project-based inquiries focused on the intersections of materiality, expression, and public engagement. From modernist debates over politics and aesthetics to post-truth parafictions of The Yes Men and “Arte Util” counterpoints of Tania Bruguera, to the wending “post-medium” tensions of Object Oriented Ontologies (and feminist and interspecies critiques thereof and therein), MAKE BELIEVE will move beyond the proposal to foreground actual material fabrication with a historically- and theoretically- substantive evaluative framework.  In particular, we will place a great emphasis on the ethics of engagement: how does one work with public constituencies, when should one be formal vs. informal, who is benefitting from your project, how does what we make express what we believe?

We aim to undo, or further complicate, an endless set of triangulations: Subject-Audience-Publics, Affect-Aura-System, Space-Object-Idea, Science-Fiction-Abstraction, Studio-Site-Territory, Land-Parcel-Terrain, and Being-Making-Doing. We will meet weekly in a format that will include outside reading and production endeavors, field work and site visits, group crits, individually-focused project work, occasional guest visitors, and general exploration of various cultural positionalities: curator, producer, activist, scholar, organizer, entrepreneur.

Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture

Current tendencies in the discipline suggest a split between two opposing architectural projects: the easy project versus the difficult project[1].  Primarily related to architecture’s form, this positioning of the divide might also be used to identify recent developments in representation: Cheap and fast one-point perspectives with minimal material changes as opposed to laborious photo-realistic renderings oozing tactile interiors. Compounded by the hourly “swipe,” up/down and left/right, or how the architectural image is posted, pinned, shared, and liked moments after it is created, places a further immediacy on the making of representation and naming an agenda. Rather than question the easy over the difficult, might we readjust our focus towards the conceptualization of representation first, as a way of conceiving of architecture? This seminar engages the following thought-polemic: “Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture.” 

The aim of this course is to develop techniques and methodologies around a series of representational experiments. All content will be framed by contemporary issues in representation, not a historical overview, and will include directed studies on materiality, color, digital tooling, animations, scale figures, and media. Formatted into a list of six curated references, with the majority of sources located in art practice and popular culture, each weekly lecture will attempt to construct a theory on representation.  

Over the course of the semester, participants will conduct biweekly exercises, culminating in the delivery of a twenty minute lecture to the class around your own theory on representation, potentially setting up a future architectural project for oneself.  Part lecture, part performance, and part production, “Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture” is a search for original representational agendas. 

[1] Somol, R.E. "Green Dots 101." Hunch 11 (2007): 28-37 

Responsive Environments: Episodes in Experiential Futures

This course introduces to the students the tools and necessary thinking framework to create technologically driven speculative environments in the near future of the built environment. The course takes a critical approach on technological augmentation that is valid spatially, socially and psychologically. 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, technologies, and techniques for the design of innovative architectural human interfaces and responsive environments.
Taking a holistic view, the class will address multifaceted aspects of our experience of the built environment and how the rapid pace of technological innovation affects our relationship to our daily lives and spaces around us. The course takes advantage of the resources offered by the ongoing research project at the REAL lab with the Italian City of Bergamo, the course aims to build on that research and open up new research and speculative design opportunities. Bergamo – a typical mid-size European city – offers an ideal case study for prototypical interventions that can be possibly replicated in other contexts.
The first part of the course leading to the final project will consist of readings and discussions, background research, site analysis, and emerging technology investigation. Hands-on prototyping will be part of the course requirement and will feed into the larger speculative concepts. The course places an important emphasis on what makes the design of these responsive environments perceptually valid and technically feasible. Topics of in-class discussions include: techniques of digital/physical perceptual correlations, body-centric interaction, user experience design, and technological viability and perceptual longevity. The final group project will be a speculative design intervention, supported by a research paper and prototypes, envisaging potential scenarios ? or episodes of experiential futures.
The course outcomes will be a contribution to a publication. Students from any background and concentration are encouraged to apply to the lottery. No specific prerequisites are needed.
 

Public Space as a Catalyst for Change in Informal Settlements: The Case of Argentina

How may we design transformative systems, tools, and frameworks to breach the gap between the formal and informal city through public space?

Shockingly, nearly 1 billion people (a quarter of those currently living in urban areas) reside in informal settlements that fail to meet their fundamental needs. In this context, it is urgent for designers and planners to explore understudied topics beyond dwelling and infrastructure, such as public space, which may challenge the existing notions of informality. Interventions in communal areas are often downplayed, but they may be
central in striving for equity and urban integration.

As a multidimensional aspect, public space is highly relevant when meeting the population’s needs, creating an equitable built environment, assessing decision-making processes, and enhancing community networks. Nonetheless, its significance and relevance in informal settlements is yet to be fully explored. For this course,public space interventions in the latter context are open-ended opportunities to compensate for individual shortages in the built environment by exploring frameworks for cross-scalar action, collective agency, emotional and cognitive development, environmental awareness, and other topics related both to individual and community welfare. It is a tangible realm to strive for equity and inclusion, one that is loosely defined nowadays when referring to informal settlements and that could be an entrypoint for planners and designers to imagine new systems of integration in the short, medium, and long-term. Therefore, the final outcome of the course will be for students to produce a methodological, policy, or design proposal, creating distinct toolsets to address the prior challenge.

The course will study Argentinian informal settlements, as it is part of a broader research effort led by the Inter-American Development Bank and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Through readings, case studies, guest lectures, class presentations, and intervention proposals, students will be urged to engage with topics that are crucial for Argentina’s public spaces in informal settlements, such as the understanding of urban design patterns and the study of landscape, environmental, and social infrastructure. Results will be part of a publication planned for 2020, intended as a tool to complement local actions in the near future.

CoDesign Field Lab: Program Evaluation for Change Leadership

CoDesign Field Lab is a project-based research seminar (4 units) in which GSD students will work directly with Boston-based community, civic, and philanthropic organizations; planners; and designers affiliated with the Place Leadership Network (PLN) to support public realm strategies. A joint initiative of The Boston Foundation (TBF) and GSD’s CoDesign, the PLN comprises 8 teams including main streets, parks conservancies, business improvement districts, and CDCs. While these place leaders operate at varying scales, are located in different geographies, and serve diverse constituents, they share commitments to managing and stewarding public spaces in Greater Boston.

The research seminar will undertake a semester-long project of program evaluation as a means for compelling change at field and organizational levels. This will require critical reading and adaptations of relevant literature; collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data; strategic planning and implementation of program evaluation with partner organizations and consultants; and distilling lessons for others using arts and cultural programming to improve the public realm. The class will additionally discuss and reflect on challenges and strategies to promote inclusive, democratic, and vibrant public spaces within an urban and regional context of racialized, classed, and gendered im/mobility and access—as they concern the Place Leadership Network and The Boston Foundation and more generally speaking.

Learning outcomes include: (1) Critically analyzing and informing Boston-area public realm interventions by place-based partners; (2) Conducting national field scan of place-based funding programs;  (3) Co-creating program evaluation with partner organizations; and (4) Understanding possibilities and limits of program evaluations to compel change. Course enrollment will be limited to 12 students. Course qualifications are as follows (students must meet at least two): experience with qualitative and/or quantitative research, ability to work effectively as part of a collaborative team, strong technical writing and verbal skills, ability to prepare maps/graphics, and/or experience with program evaluation.

Note: Course enrollment is limited to twelve students, all of whom must meet at least two of the following qualifications: experience with qualitative and/or quantitative research, ability to work effectively as part of a collaborative team, strong technical writing and verbal skills, ability to prepare maps/graphics, and/or experience with program evaluation. 

Up to four students are eligible for priority enrollment. Those who are interested in this option should email the instructor, Lily Song ([email protected]), a CV and brief statement of interest (highlighting relevant experience, skills, goals) by Wednesday, January 15, 2020. Priority enrollment students will be notified of selection on Friday, January 17th, and will need to select the course first in the limited enrollment lottery in order for their enrollment to be prioritized. 

Community Development: History, Theory, and Imaginative Practice

Community development is a heterogeneous and contested field of planning thought and practice. The profession has generally prioritized people and places that are disproportionately burdened by capitalist urbanization and development. In the US, the dominant focus has been on personal or group development and widening access to opportunities, with a growing reliance on market incentives to deliver housing options and spur economic development. Yet for many communities at the margins, development has rather connoted practices of freedom— freedom from oppression and deprivation; freedom to enjoy one’s time, make choices, and experience life as abundance and possibility. Thus conceived, community development is less a question of remedial policy than acts of resistance, claiming rights and power, and strengthening collective ownership and governance capacity over productive infrastructures and resources.

The course begins with an examination of evolving patterns, drivers, and explanations of urban inequality and poverty and corresponding urban policy and planning responses— with a primary focus on the US but in comparative world-historical perspective. We trace the evolution of community development from the Progressive Era to the contemporary period, where global trends such as urban-based economic growth and the new urban agenda are pushing community development practice beyond the neighborhood scale to local, metropolitan, and even supranational scales. In critically analyzing community development concepts and strategies, the course pays close attention to the dilemma of race that has continued to define capitalism, politics, and spatial production in America as well as divided working class and progressive movements, including those defining the field of community development. We also draw insights from historic movements that have sought to change race relations in America in connection with global assaults on capitalism, empire, and patriarchy.

For students to further develop their own community development agendas and skills, the course is built around a speaker series and discussion sessions focused on applied practices and cases. Notwithstanding significant advancements in affordable housing development, social service delivery, and placemaking— the traditional mainstay of community development— the course focuses on emerging community development approaches such as transformative economic projects built on community-labor partnerships, anchor-based strategies, and cooperative ownership and wealth creation. It also surveys innovative sectoral practices focused on renewable energy, mobility and access, food justice and sovereignty, and art, culture, and fashion. Guest speakers will moreover include political organizers and leaders working to build intersectional movements that inform progressive urban policy and planning agendas and community development goals.

Course evaluations will be based on three assignments (blog entry or comic strip, semi-structured interview, and applied research project) and class participation. It has no prerequisites and is open to graduate students across different disciplines.

Environment, Economics, and Enterprise

How can one optimize the benefits of environmental or social sustainability while generating a higher return on investment in buildings? Where are the opportunities for real estate initiatives that are highly functional, healthy, aesthetically pleasing and financially rewarding? The challenge to designers, developers, environmental consultants, policy-makers and other professionals lies in finding and communicating these synergies. This cross-disciplinary course will give students an approach to problem solving to help them contribute to thoughtful, high-impact decisions about design and construction that are both environmentally/socially impactful and economically effective.

At the end of the course students will be able to…
– identify sustainability opportunities for their projects. Identify sustainable/economic win-win solutions
– translate enhanced design into a project 's financial pro forma, and communicate the financial impact clearly to market makers
– complete accurate cost benefit economic analysis, with realistic assumptions on ability to finance and ability (if any) to obtain premium value on exit
– analyze market demand for projects with and without enhanced sustainability design
– think about how to finance their projects and where to go for capital
– explain their ideas in the language of decision-makers, from community groups to financial investors

Students from all GSD disciplines are encouraged to participate.
No prerequisites.