Preparation of MLA Design Thesis
A thesis is a thematic proposition offered for discussion and debate. A thesis is typically developed through a piece of original research specific to an academic discipline, often at the culmination of a program of study. Design theses are pursued through the methods and media specific to the design disciplines, through design research. Candidates in the Master in Landscape Architecture Program elect to pursue independent design theses at the culmination of their graduate work.
This research seminar is intended for Master in Landscape Architecture candidates electing to pursue a design thesis in their final year of study. The course defines the parameters of a design thesis and assists candidates in the development of their own individual design thesis proposals. The course addresses a series of broad themes essential to developing a cogent thesis proposal including design research, projective practices, discursive agendas, site contexts, programmatic drivers, and representational strategies. The seminar examines the role of precedent projects and design methods in thesis, as well as the status of design and design research as forms of knowledge production in the research university.
The seminar meets weekly for three hours, beginning with a presentation and seminar discussion, followed by tutorial workshops with smaller groups. In addition to the regularly scheduled class sessions, tutorial workshops, and formal reviews, individual meetings with faculty advisors are an important aspect of the course. Students will be invited to identify and secure a GSD faculty thesis advisor during the first half of the term. By the end of the term candidates will have prepared a proposal for their individual design thesis through word and image.
Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD
This seminar is intended to provide the theoretical and methodological foundation for completing a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. By the end of the semester students will have produced a solid thesis proposal and have the necessary intellectual foundation to complete their thesis by the end of the academic year. Over the semester, students will identify and refine their thesis topic, solidify their relationship with a thesis advisor and produce a thesis proposal. Weekly sessions will involve discussions of relevant readings and exploration of emergent student work. As a forum for the exchange of work in progress, the seminar will allow students to share their ideas and get feedback on the development of their thesis from their peers, visiting critics and reviewers, and faculty. The seminar will begin by introducing the thesis as a conceptual frame and by identifying the key elements that cut across the different types of theses that might be produced by students, whether textual, design-focused or based in some other medium, such as film. It will then address the following issues, among others: topic and question identification, research methods, case selection, the craft of thesis production, managing the student-advisor relationship and techniques for verbally defending a thesis. Students will complete weekly assignments relevant to their thesis and present in class on most weeks. Since the seminar will be run as a graduate seminar, students will be expected to provide critical and thoughtful responses to their peers’ work and engage in informed and mature discussion of the issues found in the readings. The course will include a mid-term and final review of students’ proposals, to be attended by faculty and critics.
Multiple Miamis Project-based Course: Infrastructure, Affordability, Identity + the Public
The Miami project-based course will explore how urban planning and design can promote affordable housing, retail, and services, public mobility and access, and sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems in more inclusive and equitable terms within the context of the contemporary American city. Funded through the Knight Foundation, and using Miami as an urban laboratory, it is part of a series of courses that seeks to address contemporary urban dilemmas facing many American cities and explore opportunities for transformative urban design and planning interventions.
The project-based seminar course (which will run alongside and be integrated with the “sister” Miami option studio taught by Chris Reed and Sean Canty) will focus on the Overtown neighborhood near downtown, home to a predominantly African-American population partly rooted in historic waves of migration. The source of skilled labor and cultural vitality through Miami’s rapid growth, Overtown has also been a target of racial discrimination, violence, and dispossession. Following decades of redlining and segregation, its vibrant commercial and entertainment district and residential neighborhoods were decimated by two interstate highway projects in the 1960s. As Miami transitioned into a major global hub for capital, innovation, and tourism in subsequent decades, Overtown experienced overwhelming public and private disinvestment, police surveillance, and mass incarceration of its populace. Today, the effects of real estate speculation and boom, together with climate change and sea level rise, compound pressures on the neighborhood. That parts of Overtown are served by the Miami MetroRail, spatially proximate to the city’s premier cultural and medical institutions, and sit on high/dry ground poses both acute tensions and transformative opportunities.
Centering the neighborhood of Overtown in exploring questions about Miami’s future as an American city with an emphasis on power and empowerment, the hybrid project-based course + studio will grapple with and challenge its hitherto fragmented development pathways and sociospatial realities. Students will develop multi-disciplinary spatial strategies and design and planning proposals for re-imagining a Miami that reckon with its multiple, conflicted pasts; recognize its full and diverse citizenry; and suggest new possibilities for living in the contemporary American city. Work from the studio and project-based seminar course will be published in a GSD-produced Studio Report and will be presented in Miami. We will organize topical seminars on key issues with special guests from across the design disciplines, both at GSD and in Miami.
Twelve students will be selected to participate in the Miami, FL trip via the limited enrollment course lottery. Students traveling to Miami will be term billed $200, and are responsible for the cost of all meals and incidentals related to the trip, including any change fees related to modifications to set flight itinerary. Those selected in the limited enrollment course lottery will lose their places in the Miami trip if they fail to show up at the first class. Students with close waitlist numbers should also attend. The site visit will take place September 23- 27. The project-based course primarily caters to planning and MDes students, and preference will be given in the running of the limited enrollment lottery. Students participating in a traveling option studio or course are not eligible for enrollment.
Real Estate and City Making in China
Real estate has increasingly become a compelling force in the process of city making, one uniquely capable of leading and guiding multiple steps in the construct of vital urbanism: from conceiving an idea to constructing complex structures; from sourcing funding to creating master-planned communities; and from negotiating design forms to implementing urban public realms. A country like China is at once experiencing rapid urbanization while undergoing unprecedented transformation in the mechanism of city making: the forces of real estate and the shifting roles played by public and private sectors are constantly challenging conventional city building models, while defining and redefining their positions in the production of the built environment.
This course, conducted as a research seminar, focuses on the interdependence between real estate and city making. It addresses both theoretical and empirical investigations on the concepts and paradigms that have shaped and are still shaping real estate practices and their impact on contemporary Chinese cities. It analyzes emergent real estate and urban development strategies, their respective financing structures, underlying domain expertise and organizational hierarchy. Students will work independently and in teams on selected themes to identify critical forces in real estate development and investment: how key real estate players, domestic or international, have formed their central business strategies, interacted with capital markets and participated in the city form process to facilitate or drive the formation of the built environment; and how emergent private sector leaders are integrating human capital, financial capital, and design capital, to reshape the design, form and composition of China’s urban centers. With the investigative research framework set at the beginning of the semester, students will proceed to examine the city making process through the lens of real estate, in parallel with readings and class discussions, to anticipate the trajectory for contemporary real estate development, investment, and city making in China. The class meets once a week and is open to students of all programs at the GSD.
Thing Power in the Arles Region: Assemblages, Depositions and Displacements
Jane Bennett borrows Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of assemblages to argue that humans are not the sole actors in and on the world. Instead, always-becoming assemblages that include human and non-human beings, materials, and forces produce events that shape our experience and, she argues, ought to shape our politics. How can these ideas help re-imagine a region under continuous transformation for several millennia, and now under social and environmental stress?
The seminar will start with Bennett’s and others’ concepts of “thing power,” or the idea that inanimate matter has capacity to act upon the world. Then, we will examine the assemblages acting upon the Arles region of southern France. Three landscapes converge around Arles: the Bauxite, or aluminum ore in the Alpilles, the flat lands of the Crau, and the marshes of the Camargue. The received image of this Mediterranean eden – lavender fields, markets overflowing with herbs, vibrating colors of Van Gogh’s landscapes – belies centuries of ecologically insensitive treatments that are coming to the fore in the present era of global disruption.
The ‘displacements and depositions’ that characterize the movements of human and non-human assemblages in Arles have significantly, but politically invisibly, shaped current regional conditions. Studied movements may include the entwined stories of rock from the Alpilles mountain range and now-underground Roman ruins; vegetal movements such as that of the Morus alba from the East via the Middle East and north Africa, through Spain to France; and the potentials of plants like algae to transform into new species of technonatures. We will examine time scales, from deep geological time to the seasonal movements of tourists, migrating people and animals, as well as perceptual features such as shade and illumination.
By understanding the vibrations of the region’s living and non-living matter, we will reimagine its ecological and socio-political futures. Our aim will be to understand how individual parts assemble into larger forces that affect the region. The outcome of the seminar will be an atlas of movements through and around Arles, which will suggest an expanded political agenda for the region.
Note: Students enrolled in the option studio RIZHOSPHERE, led by Teresa Gali Izard, are encouraged to take this seminar in conjunction with the studio. Individuals enrolled in the seminar but not enrolled in the studio will have an opportunity to enter a lottery allowing them to participate in a site visit to Arles, Frances, in conjunction with the studio. Students enrolled in the seminar but who are traveling in conjunction with another studio or course are not eligible to travel with this course. The six students selected to take part in the trip to Arles, France will be term-billed $300 and will be expected to cover meals and incidentals, including visa costs and any changes to the set itinerary for the trip. The enrollment for the seminar is limited to 20, and 6 of those students will travel to Argelaguer, Spain and Arles, France September 24- October 1st.
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Imagine Michelangelo
The use of digital models as instruments of historical research. Almost all of Michelangelo’s architectural projects are unbuilt, unfinished, or have been significantly altered by later additions and changes which obscure the architect’s original vision for them. In this seminar, students create digital “site” models of these projects, or parts of them, as they exist or are known to have been planned. They then develop the models using historical sources such as drawings and texts to explore how the existing work differs from Michelangelo’s intentions. Renderings are made that recreate the original form, color, texture and light intended by the architect. This imaginative recreation makes possible a deeper and more accurate assessment of Michelangelo’s own ideas for the work. On the basis of that knowledge, students then contextualize the project within Michelangelo’s design philosophy and its architectural context.
The first six weeks of the seminar are taken up by lectures on Michelangelo’s architecture. During this time students choose a problem, research it, and prepare the “site” model. The second half of the semester is given to presentation and discussion of the individual projects. The final product, submitted at the end of the course, will be a series of renderings of the chosen “site” together with a written narrative of the research findings.
The course is primarily intended for students who have the skills to make complex models and finished renderings. No instruction on digital representation will be provided. However, students who wish to take the course and who do not have these skills may choose, instead, to explore a problem through traditional means and submit a written term paper on their topic.