Global Perspectives on Shelter Insecurity and Displacement

This course examines the drivers of, and responses to, global shelter insecurity and displacement. It addresses these issues in both the Global South and North and examines similarities and differences in the way displacement occurs and is addressed across these contexts. The course takes the form of a graduate seminar, in which students will co-create knowledge and engage in informed discussion and debate. The seminar will begin with an overview of the scale of global displacement and the history of this increasingly pervasive phenomenon. UNHCR reported in 2015 that displacement had reached the highest levels ever recorded with almost 1% of the planet’s population either a refugee, internally displaced person or asylum seeker. In 2014 alone the UN conservatively estimated that 59.5 million people had been displaced by war and persecution alone. To address this crisis in greater detail, the remaining seminar sessions will be divided into two sections. The first will cover the primary drivers of global displacement, including: gentrification, criminalization of housing marginality and the displaced, large development projects, conflict and natural disasters. The second section will address responses to displacement, including market and human rights approaches and resettlement in camps, transitional shelters and permanent housing. The seminar sessions will involve students reading weekly assigned papers and discussing these in detail. In most weeks, specific cases from a variety of geographic, social and political contexts will be presented and discussed. Participation in class discussions and reading of assigned papers are a course requirement. Additional course activities will include in-class debates on critical themes, practice-relevant simulations and visits by guest speakers. The seminar will also involve several local field trips to examine issues of shelter insecurity and displacement in more detail. These will include visits to a local homeless shelter and to the museum of Boston’s former West End neighborhood. Assignments will include weekly memos on the readings and a final analytic project.

Informal Robotics / New Paradigms for Design & Construction

Today new materials and fabrication techniques are transforming the field of robotics. Rather than rigid metal parts connected by mechanical components, robots may now be made of folded paper, carbon laminates or soft gels. They may be formed fully integrated from a 2D or 3D printer rather than assembled from individual components. Light, compliant, highly customized – we are seeing the emergence of a new design paradigm.

Informal Robotics is a direct collaboration between the Wyss Institute’s Bioinspired Robotics platform (http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpage/204/bioinspired-robotics) and the GSD.  Within the class, you will interact with Wyss researchers who will share their unique designs for ambulatory and flying robots, end-effectors, medical instruments and other applications.

The class will explore informal robotics from multiple perspectives, culminating with the design and fabrication 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.

The class will be organized along four primary topics:
– Kinematics includes an overview of mechanism principles, design techniques for pop-ups, flat-folding origami structures, and soft mechanisms.

– Fabrication methods will be explored through workshops on use of composite materials, laminated assembly techniques, self-folding, and integrated flexures.

– Controls considers how to actuate movement and program desired behavior. Topics include servos, linear actuators, shape memory alloys (SMAs) and use of Arduino for sensing and 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:
This course includes weekly lectures, workshops, and guest lectures. 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. Although, there are no firm prerequisites, some knowledge of scripting and/or fabrication using CNC machines is helpful. Evaluation will be based on completion of assignments and the final project.

Seminar/ Workshop in collaboration with the Wyss Institute’s Bioinspired Robotics Platform

Jointly Offered Course: SEAS ES256

 

Structures in Landscape Architecture, Joint & Detail

Summary

This class explores how to design and make physical landscapes that are both rationally constructed and expressively convincing. This search is focused through the lens of structural understanding. This lens clarifies how a working knowledge of structural principles guides the tectonic development of made landscapes from the overall material configuration of, for example, footbridges, pavilions or walled enclosures, to the evolution of specific detail and jointing vocabularies for these and other site elements.
 

Topics

– Understanding structural principles using a visual, non-mathematical format.
– Designing and applying structural principles to physical making using the categories of: to span, to frame and to enclose.
– Exploring the rhetoric of detail and material making. 
– Exploring the role of techniques that cause specified changes in the characteristics and shape of materials.
– Exploring the future of the craft of joining in a digital design, fabrication, and construction/assembly future.

Course Objectives & Outcomes

– Understand how to structurally shape and detail material landscape forms.
– Be able to explore the structural, material, and constructional aspects of landscape expression. 
– Be able to engage in a productive dialogue about landscape making with other design professionals.

Course Format

– Lecture/Workshop.
– Lectures explaining structural/detail principles accompanied by in class workshops applying these principles. 
– Case studies of landscape structures presented and critically discussed in class.

Method of Evaluation

– In-class participation in discussions
– A graphic case study of an existing landscape structure
– The design of a landscape element – a part of a current or previous studio or professional project

 

There are no prerequisites for this class. Students of all GSD disciplines who are interested in the physical design of landscapes are welcome.

MLA 1 and MLA 1AP students can take this class concurrently with GSD 6242.

Enactive Design: Creative Applications through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction

Enactive Design is an advanced research seminar on human-machine interaction. We will explore the role of real-time, bidirectional communication between human and digital agents in a design context, and leverage the potentials of this interactive relationship to establish new creative domains. 

Digital interfaces provide computational frameworks for creative exploration in disciplines such as architecture, design and art. However, in many instances, such as traditional 3D modelling environments or numerically-controlled machines, the machine is subservient to the orders of its human counterpart. While this model might be a convenient human-machine relationship for production-oriented scenarios, in the case of design environments, a higher degree of machine agency could generate new models of creative exploration and design through human-machine collaboration. Our investigation is structured around the concept of enactivism, a philosophy which argues that cognition arises from the interactions of an agent and its environment. Rather than an abstract intangible, knowledge and learning are derived from situated, embodied interaction. 

To fully harness the potential of computational design and robotic fabrication, we must fundamentally rethink how we design – and how our designs are realized – with the help of these technologies. Collapsing the distinction between the typically disparate, unidirectional processes of designing, creating and executing a program can create new design opportunities, and generate questions about the nature of the design and fabrication process. What kind of outcomes would an interactive 3D printer yield, one that allows modification of its toolpaths in real time? How can the power and precision of industrial robots be amplified by the decision-making capacity of humans-on-the-loop? How might technologies such as augmented reality supplement human capacity for creative making and fabrication? What are the potentials of mixed and virtual reality environments as mediators between humans and machines? Can design be conceived as the human curation of the suggestions of an artificial intelligence? Is this a new form of collaborative art?

We will address these questions, and many others, through the design of concurrent human-machine interactive platforms, with a particular focus on the computational aspects of the system. Exercises will experiment with real-time robotically-controlled fabrication techniques, interactive installations and/or artistic interventions, and the course will integrate empirical studies with digital modeling and simulation techniques. The creative outcomes of these new platforms for collaboration may reach much farther than the combination of its separate participants.

Offered as a single weekly 3-hour session of literature review, lectures, discussions and hands-on workshops, the course will address the content described above through a combination of hands-on assignments and a semester-long final project. This advanced research seminar will support a high degree of student independence and autonomy. Students are encouraged and expected to pursue their independent interests within the pedagogical framework established in the class, with close guidance from the instructors.  

For the final project, participants will leverage the workflows presented in class to develop a complete design project which addresses the topics described above, as well as the particular interests of the project team.  The results of each project will be documented in the form of an academic research paper.

Prerequisites: 
Demonstrated experience in computer programming via GSD6338, CS50 or similar. Students should have reasonable proficiency with Rhinoceros/Grasshopper. Experience in numerically-controlled fabrication, microelectronics, and robotics is encouraged though not required. 
 

Thermal Monocoques: An Energy Systems Laboratory

In this seminar, students learn to design energy systems that can orchestrate the flow of energy through buildings in novel ways. For these systems, the key to reducing carbon intensity lies in the design of heat-exchanging components in close thermal contact with freely available energy, found in the environment. What's an energy system in architecture? Broadly, it's an element that contributes to the transfer or conversion of energy from one state to another. In this course, examples of new energy systems may include a personal comfort system, facade element, or the design of a building section. 
 
The seminar is centered on design-led learning with lectures and hands-on workshops. Through semester-long projects, focused on practical building applications and proof-of-concept experimentation, teams will explore topics related to building performance, material extraction, embodied carbon, and experimental methods. Each team will couple their designs with whole-building energy flows, to understand the atmospheric, social, and life-cycle potential of their chosen energy systems. 

Overall, students will gain an advanced understanding of heat transfer in buildings, experimental methods, prototyping, as wells as analytical and computational modeling techniques for early design decisions. Likewise, teams will learn how the thermal performance of energy systems can be a catalyst for design in the built environment.  

** Note, this year's seminar will team up with Mass Design Group to develop solutions for real-world problem spaces.

CLIMATE CRISIS – BEYOND ADAPTATION & RESILIENCY: A Designer’s Geoengineering Toolkit for Mitigation

Currently, education of how landscape architects, architects and planners can address climate crisis (CC) impacts are focused on resilience (the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties) and adaptation (addresses impacts of CC). This seminar will explore mitigation, which goes to the root cause of CC, and what our role as professionals, in mitigating climate change can be. 

Many people are aware of CC but have neither deep knowledge of how it is caused nor what they can do about it. This seminar will introduce students to the basics of CC, its complexities and effects. The seminar will then explore solutions which go to the source of the problem: anthropogenically induced greenhouse gas which has been put up into the atmosphere, thereby inducing global warming, the cause of most of the effects we will face in the near future. We address the immense issue of global equity and the "Global South", which is now experiencing the worst effects of CC, many countries that have less economic resource and were not causal to climate change. These are ethical issues that we, from the "Global North", must address. 

In order to fully understand mitigation and its scope in climate change solutions, our seminar delves into the topic of geoengineering (GE), defined as "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth's climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming." The portfolio of GE tools ranges from biological solutions to physical and chemical solutions.  Furthermore, there is a high probability that, as a global community, we will not make necessary changes or meet deadlines in time to avert the worse-case scenarios of climate impacts. Thus, we will also study Solar Radiation Management, which increases the Earth's albedo by reducing its temperature to create "breathing space", or time, while we transition to renewables, new practices and technologies that can stabilize the earthsystem and avoid climate catastrophe. 

This is a weekly seminar focused upon required readings, instructor presentations and lectures from leading scientists in the climate community. Students will participate in lively and provocative conversations and debates, synthesize information, critique and evaluate arguments from texts by experts to create so to construct and formulate a personal position about CC and geoengineering solutions. Ultimately, students will shape their own "project" that will address the climate crisis.

By the end of the seminar, students will be able to engage the climate crisis discourse and, with a fuller understanding of solutions, can actively contribute to the challenges ahead.

Student Evaluation
50% Class attendance
30% Class participation
20% Complete Assignments

Cartographic Audition

Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest for sound within numerous sites academic and cultural production. With new environmental imperatives, researchers and practitioners have used sound to challenge conventions of spatial representation—both visual and conceptual—and provide evidence of spatial processes that otherwise escape easy documentation.  This ‘sonic turn’ has been expressed most clearly through numerous exhibitions of sound-based art practices; writings on the sonic aspects of cities and landscapes; and site-driven research projects that hope to communicate the dynamics of a changing biosphere through its changing soundscape.

With few exceptions, designers have engaged listening sporadically and superficially, and yet, would strongly benefit from a critical engagement with spatial listening, and reciprocally, contribute to the general understanding of the relationship between sound and space. In this regard, Landscape Architecture’s engagement with cartographic techniques and theories is instructive. By informing cartography with a design mentality, we have seen how spatial categories shape our expectations of what things populate a city or a landscape. This seminar will explore how a similar approach might inform our understanding of listening.

A number of questions are implied by the synthesis of sound-based practices with design-inflected cartographic theories. For instance, how might designers use listening as a rigorous method of urban and ecological research that is distinct from other modes of spatial inquiry? Or, how might we highlight nuanced questions about representation and forms of a priori spatial knowledge, through listening? 

In response to the above questions, this seminar will build a theory of Cartographic Audition with readings, class discussion, listening examples, and sound-based research exercises. Specifically, we will explore two parallel lines of thought within the environmental sound studies literature: On the one hand, that listening is an unmediated and non-representational practice that operates independent of spatial categories; and, on the other, that sound is evidential of urban and ecological through which a listener may detect important changes.  In the first half of the semester, we will focus on foundational sound studies texts that address these dual understandings of environmental sound. Alongside these texts, students will also read contemporary cartographic theory. During the second half of the semester, the topic of Cartographic Audition will be explored through student-derived research projects where practices of environmental sound recording will be informed by techniques of data-driven spatial analysis. 

Pre-requisite: SCI-6322 Mapping: Geographic Representation + Speculation, or permission of the instructor.

Landscape Practices

This seminar examines the nature of contemporary landscape architecture and public realm practices.  In this context, practice is considered broadly in terms of the various ways designers have applied their ideas about landscape and the public realm into professional settings that allow them to develop work.  The term is pluralized in the seminar title to acknowledge the increasingly diverse contexts in which we practice (and issues we could and should be addressing) and the multiplicity of practice types, approaches, and leaders that have emerged over the past few decades.

The seminar will shed light upon the ways in which a diverse array of practitioners and designers have both conceptualized what they do—the nature of and ideas behind their work—and operationalized it in terms of how they do it—the mechanisms, structures, and strategies that put their ideas into play.  The focus will be landscape practices, as well as practices that work generally within the public realm, at the various edges of landscape architecture and beyond.  For-profit, non-profit, and academic/research practices will all be featured.  The course will benefit from in-person presentations and case studies by over a dozen prominent designers working today.  The firms featured are from across the country and around the world, of different races and socio-economic backgrounds, led by both women and men, from established and newly emerging practices, and are both at the center and at the various edges of landscape architecture.

Final projects will ask students to imagine their own forms of practice and to create an operational strategy for realizing them.

The seminar is intended especially for advanced Landscape Architecture, MLAUD, and MDes ULE students, but is open to all.  Candidates should have already taken a basic/required course in Professional Practice, whether at the GSD or elsewhere.  

Non-Professional Practice

"I've never worked for a living. I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. I hope some day we'll be able to live without being obliged to work." Marcel Duchamp 

The course aims to study unconventional modes of creative practices and their underlying implications.  In a rapidly changing world that is facing unprecedented challenges, the hyperspecialization of the professional can backfire in its rigidity and the implied limitation, while also becoming a powerful tool of discrimination.  We will investigate collectively why it is important to look outside of the current framework of architectural practice, identify new possibilities and establish the role of design itself in this conversation. 

Topics that are brought up to debate with guest lecturers from various fields include the chance of changing times, the importance of production of culture, the permeability of disciplinary boundaries, the role of language and communication, the banality of kickstarting something, the urgency of (mis)use and interpretation, the Hacker and the Expert, the undercommons, the irrelevance of authorship, the beauty of failure and the social being as a practice.  

The class is based on a workshop format, centered on research, analysis and guest lecturers and requires above all your presence and participation in the dialogue.  

Cultural Fever: Postmodern Effects in Sino-American Architecture

It is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s-80s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture’s history. This seminar will begin with an in-depth exploration of selected practices and projects of the period. Using the tools of poststructuralism together with Lacan's RSI, we will construct an interpretation of this work that is historically specific and yet sets the terms and the challenges of all subsequent architectural practice, including today's.

The seminar will expand the account of the architectural effects of poststructuralist theory from the standard Euro-American context to the special context of China’s so-called “cultural fever.” French intellectuals of the late 1960s and early 1970s viewed “China” as a prime rubric under which a new post-structuralist episteme could be developed, thanks to their sympathy for Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The half-actual, half-fictionalized “China” of the French intellectuals was accepted, adopted, and further complicated by some Chinese readers since the 1980s, including artists and architects, who added yet other layers of meaning to the concept. The result has been a multi-layered, cross-cultural misreading and misuse of poststructuralist thought and China’s historical reality, one that has nonetheless profoundly shaped the contemporary state of Chinese architecture.