Seminar Archives

Architecture: Histories of the Present

“Poets and prophets, like magicians, learn their craft from predecessors. And just as magicians will invoke the real or supposed source of an illusion as part of their patter, or distractions from what his hands are doing, the most ambitious poets also take some stance about sources in the past, perhaps for an analogous purpose.” John Hollander 1973

This seminar investigates the role of architectural practice and thinking both geographically and thematically since WWII. The focus of the seminar will be on the work of architects as well as the ideas/writings that have helped shape contemporary practice. Why do you practice the way you do? What are the forces (architecture, concepts, texts) that have inspired and influenced the direction of your work? These are among the questions that we will be asking of ourselves as well as a diverse group of contemporary architects from divergent geographies. The seminar will discuss significant projects/buildings and ideas/ theories from the 1950’s to the present. In the process, seeking to make discoveries about the work of figures both remembered and seemingly forgotten. The tension and the relations between the present and the past will be discussed through specific architectural projects. How did an earlier generation of architects imagine the future of the discipline and the promise of its outcomes? How have the conceptual and practical operations of terms such as history or culture influenced contemporary architecture and the way it is practiced? What role does precedent play in the work of an architect?

The structure of the seminar is organized according to a series of case studies that compare and contrast the work of different figures and their ideas-from Africa to Asia, from Latin America to Europe and beyond. In addition to weekly lectures and presentations, the seminar will include class discussions with a diverse range of contemporary architects. The aim will be to study the role and value of site-specific contributions and yet to unravel the nature–even the burden- of influence and its porosity beyond geographical boundaries. How and what should the future of practice learn from its past?

Course structure: the course will meet online on Tuesdays from 10 am to 12 pm EST to discuss visual and reading material presented by Mohsen Mostafavi and guests (practitioners or scholars). Pre-recorded interviews with design practitioners/scholars or films (60 min on average) will be included as required materials for some weekly sessions. Students can watch these recordings in their own time prior to the class meetings.

Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.

Regarding an Archive

This will be the last course I will teach before retirement at the end of this academic year. Personally, it is an important occasion for me, and it coincides with the donation that Professor Emeritus Rodolfo Machado and I have made to the GSD of our entire academic and professional archives that register more than five decades of uninterrupted work in architecture. It is an occasion for an inevitable and welcome reflection on the whole arc of our work, which started in the late 60s, a moment that critics and historians concur marks a point in time when architectural discourse emerged as one of the most important events in the history of the discipline. Such discourse, characterized by a vigorous tone of self-reflection, forged an awareness of architecture’s position as a mode of knowledge whose constructions were open to a scrutiny as intense as any philosophical inquiry. My work both spans and is an inseparable part of this discourse, which is still unfolding. Thus, the coincidence of an author/protagonist’s self-examination and the relevance of the period it covers to our contemporary moment offers a rare pedagogical opportunity to share my regard on my oeuvre—my drawings, projects, buildings, writings, and pedagogy—both with architecture graduate students and also with one continuous interlocutor, Mark Lee, our chair, one of the most versed individuals on the period that defines the context of my work. This collective regard of an archive will take the form of a seminar that will include the participation of selected guests, contemporaries from this special period of architecture.

The seminar will take place over two meetings each week. The first will be a two-hour presentation by me, the instructor, and commentary, critique, and questioning by my interlocutor, Mark Lee. These lectures will focus on specific projects and preoccupations from the archive and their disciplinary and extra-disciplinary context. The second will be a one-hour session dedicated to general discussion and student presentations. Both sessions will be synchronous as the seminar nature of the course requires the active participation of all present. Students will be responsible for two additional assignments: a short midterm essay and a final design exercise, both critically engaging with materials from the archive. Students enrolled in this seminar will be expected to have previously acquired a broad and solid knowledge of the overall arc of western architecture history, from classical antiquity to the present.

Note: 6 spaces are reserved for MArch II students who select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery (the course fulfills Discourse and Techniques requirement). This course is restricted to architecture students.

Type and the Idea of the City: Architecture’s Search for what is Common

Open to all students, the seminars in this course will complement Option Studio 1318: Midtown, Midrise, Mid-door. It will equip students with the theoretical and historical understanding of type as a heuristic device in the discourse of the city as a project. Taking Anthony Vidler’s Third Typology as a starting point, the seminar proposes the fourth typology as a common framework for the production of an architecture of the city in today’s globalized context. Unlike the first three typologies that found their justification for sociality from nature, the machine and the historical city respectively; the fourth typology is rooted in the developmental city. The first half of the seminar will begin with the understanding of type from Quatremère de Quincy and J.N.L Durand through the dialectics of idea and model. This renewed understanding of type and typology will offer an alternative reading of the writings and projects of Aldo Rossi and Rem Koolhaas as attempts to revalidate architecture’s societal and political role through the redefinition of the idea of the city. This idea of the city will be discussed through Aristotle’s polis, Schmitt’s ‘homogenous demos’, Mouffe’s ‘agonistic pluralism’, Rossi’s ‘collective memory’, Agamben’s ‘dispositif’ and Koolhaas’ ‘heterogeneous containments’.

The second half of the seminar will be focused on the history and theory behind the emergence of the developmental city and its corresponding dominant types. This discussion will cover the various urban and typological outcomes instigated by the rapid transformation of cities, its peripheries and countryside, following this developmental model – examples will be drawn from China, London, and Singapore. The reading and understanding of these emerging conceptions of the city will be guided by the concepts and theories offered in the first half of the course. Finally, the seminar will speculate on the possibility of conceiving alternative ideas of the city through its dominant type in these newfound conditions.

Course Structure: Classes will consist of a one-hour asynchronous lecture by the instructor. Students are expected to read the main readings for each seminar and prepare several questions for discussion. A two-hour synchronous session will include students' presentation of assigned secondary readings followed by a class discussion on the topics raised in the lecture and assigned readings. Students are required to submit a 3,000 words paper at the end of the semester that discusses the overarching theme of the course, with particular focus on the idea of the city as an architectural project.

The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of an Architectural Idea

One of the arresting images in Michel Serres's Rome: The Book of Foundations is the idea that history is "a knot of different times" — a knot rendered visible by the tangible traces of past civilizations. The knot of which Serres speaks applies as readily to the stratigraphic realities of Roman urban space as to the composite aesthetics of 18th-century ruin pictures or Symbolist recasting of Medieval church portals. Artifacts, fragments, vestiges, rubble, debris, detritus, wreckage: all this has prompted a venerable body of writings and objects that work the metaphor of ruin into anything from a template for the Sublime to a mechanism for iconoclastic violence. We will begin by thinking about architecture and the vision of the past in the early modern period, considering a range of examples from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to antiquarian treatises. We will then consider how the cult of the ruin has shaped nostalgia and dystopia in modern contexts. Examples might include the Surrealist discovery of the Broken Column House at the Desert de Retz, Le Corbusier's apprehension of columns segments from the north facade of the Parthenon, the Heideggerian concept of Ruinanz and the reflection of absence in the National September 11 Memorial.

Prerequisites
This advanced history elective is designed for students in the postprofessional (MDES) and doctoral programs (PHD/DDES) as well as students in the professional programs who have completed core and, preferably, are embarking on thesis. Some knowledge of the history and theory of architecture is highly recommended but not required.

A limited number of seats are held for PhD students. Interested PhD students should contact the instructor as well as petition to cross-register.

Developing for Social Impact

How can real estate development advance social purpose while accounting for development feasibility?

With increasing purposefulness, those involved in shaping the built world are converging in their desire to harness real estate development for positive social impact. Community development corporations and other mission-focused non-profits have become entrepreneurial, tapping market forces to advance their social goals, as their funders expect them to do. Governments pursue ways to leverage surplus land and deploy development exactions and incentives to shape private investment to serve social policy goals. At the same time, to fulfill rising expectations to be responsible civic actors, real estate developers have become de facto city-builders, seeking to achieve social impact, from housing access, climate resilience and food security to improved health outcomes and job preparedness, that ripple beyond their project boundaries. Yet there is no established method to harmonize social impact with financial feasibility.

To address this troublesome gap, the course will serve as a social impact development workshop, with two interwoven strands. First, through readings, assignments, class discussions and class visits by outside speakers on corporate social responsibility, social impact investing, enterprise philanthropy, development incentives and equitable planning, students will devise a model for incorporating social impact goals into market-oriented real estate development. For the mid-term review, students will present their model to a panel of social impact investors.

For their term project, student teams will apply their model for aligning financial and social returns to an active development site in Boston. With its strong development climate, sophisticated development community and high public aspirations for development, Boston is an excellent social impact development laboratory. Developer sponsors will visit the class and will be available outside of class to assist student explorations.

Workshops on basic real estate financial modeling will be conducted outside of class for those without a finance background. Lectures and some class speakers will be recorded for asynchronous viewing. Workshops and discussion sessions, which will predominate, will be synchronous. In addition, the instructor will meet weekly with student teams during the second half of the term.

Architectures of the New Silk Road

Sino-African Infrastructure-led Urbanization – Deficits and Potentials

China’s Belt and Road Initiative can be considered one of the largest and possibly most consequential territorial ventures currently underway on the planet.

Taking this thesis as the point of entry and going beyond pro-or-contra narratives associated with the initiative, the seminar will focus on its direct and indirect effects on socio-spatial constellations on the ground – namely, on the realities of lived space in specific locations affected by transnational cooperation.

In order to limit the investigation, projects along development corridors in Africa will serve as case studies to unravel the mechanisms at work in infrastructure-led urbanization. This world region is of particular interest because China has been active there long before the Belt and Road Initiative was officially announced in 2013 and remains intent on expanding its operations through more public- and private-sector contracts in the future. Though the pacts among Chinese and African actors have put a premium on building highways, bridges, ports, dams, railways, industrial zones as well as energy networks at breakneck speed, their significant influence on settlements has been too often overlooked in on-going debates regarding the initiative’s geo-political and geo-economic ramifications. It is in this respect that the research in this seminar intends to examine the physical and social impact of transnational undertakings as they are being implemented in situ, official rhetoric notwithstanding.

Three research questions will orient the work:
(a) What are the operative practices at work in Sino-African development projects?
(b) What are the short- and long-term effects of the development projects on settlement systems?
(c) How can development protocols be reworked in order to attain more sustainable and equitable habitats?

The objective is to investigate not only the dynamics of Sino-African alliances in terms of what is really at stake and for whom in specific locations, but just as important, to explore feasible ways to make infrastructure-led development – usually perceived as a financial and technical issue alone – a true driver of beneficial economic, social and environmental change for all affected stakeholders.

Course structure: Fridays (lectures with the entire class / synchronous) and Tuesdays (asynchronous and flexible with small groups of students working on particular case studies, papers, and presentation). More will be explained in the syllabus.

Hidden Figures: The City, Architecture and the Construction of Race and Gender

What hidden figures do our buildings and urban environment conceal?

There exists systematic erasure of the contributions of Women of Color – Queer, Black and Indigenous -in the design field. This course is experimental by nature; it attempts to dismantle White-Supremacy ideology and the Western canon by not focusing on European, White and European American figures. The seminar explores critical race and gender theory to provide a framework for understanding society's role and cultural influences to the commissioning of buildings and the planning of cities. It will engage questions of authorship and production as it relates to the construction of our built environment. It will examine the hidden figures, often excluded from the canon of knowledge. These significant figures have made meaningful contributions to the built environment in colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Through weekly readings and case studies of queer and mostly non-white architects and planners, the seminar will consider how non-white identities are often erased or excluded, and how those actions have become a contributing factors to the development of urban form. The seminar will provide a knowledge base for students to become more familiar with past and contemporary contributions from Queer, Black, Indigenous and Women of Color. The seminar is structured around two scale- that of the building and the city. To explore the intersection of design as it relates to the adverse effects of sexism, racism, colonization, and globalization, the seminar will cover four themes:

– The City, Architecture and the Construction of Race and Gender
– Race and Gender in the Colonial Context
– Race and Gender in the Postcolonial Context
– Sexuality and Queering of Spaces and Neighborhoods

By exploring these four themes throughout the semester, we will examine how culture, cities and history can shape a person's right to progress.

Course structure:

Fixed synchronous – 1 hour: Lecture (30 minutes), 5 minutes break, Student presentation (25 minutes)
Flexible synchronous – 1 hour: Group discussion on assigned readings (55 minutes, 5 minutes break)
Flexible synchronous/Asynchronous – 1 hour: Attendance will not be required. We will use this hour to archive group work through online discussion on Canvas (15 minutes) and break out group work online (40 minutes, 5 minutes break)

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.

Course structure:

The seminar has two parallel tracks: one conversational and one based on group work. The conversational part will take place every Wednesday between 12-2pm EST and will require your attendance. Weekly guests from various professional fields will share with us the stories of their own practices, from failures to highs, from philosophical to practical. Students will have to introduce the guest as well as create a poster at the end of the semester that encapsulates the lessons from class.
The parallel track is based on group work and is to be scheduled in coordination with each group. We will collectively identify issues and interests with regards to practice, articulate them into assignments and investigate them, with the end goal to debunked them and develop a set of tools or language to address them. The workload and ability to reasonable address it will be an integral part of the way we define the assignment.

The main requirement for the class is desire to be there. The seminar is relying on each individual in creating a collective, and assume responsibility in shaping the seminar through participating – by being there and by using your voice. It’s it mandatory to attend the first two seminars in order to stay enrolled.

For further information, please refer to: nonprofessional.org

?Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.

Acoustic Space: A Media Archaeology of Building Types

This is a seminar on the past and present relationship between architecture, information technologies, and mass media. More than ever before, we live in acoustic space. We live constantly plugged-in, travelling in our personal sonic bubbles bounded by headphones and other devices. We listen because we like it, but also to disconnect and avoid other noises. Our times are defined by an unprecedented and simultaneous coexistence of sounds and images disseminated at the speed of light, and yet there is little understanding of the architectural implications of this phenomenon. However, the construction of the media-saturated environments we inhabit began more than 100 years ago, when radio started to populate the ether, when television entered the domestic space, until the present day, when the internet seems to cover every single aspect of our daily lives. This seemingly invisible and immaterial phenomenon has been producing—and has been produced by—new building types throughout the past century, which have been widely overlooked by our discipline.

If media technologies such as radio, telephony, television, and the internet presume the construction of “space” without any material implications, this seminar proposes to look closely at select case studies that evidence the consequences of media in built space. We will focus on the intersection of buildings and electronic media technologies, with specific interest in sonicity, aiming to understand the material questions these media-populated spaces raise for the architect. In this context, the seminar will trace the genealogy of Broadcasting Houses, Television Studios, Cinemas, Acoustic Laboratories, Telephone Exchange Buildings, Educational Spaces, and Data Centers, among others.

The seminar is a multidisciplinary course, situated at the intersection of the history and theory of architecture, and the history and theory of media. It is open to architecture students, as well as to students enrolled in other programs and intellectual disciplines with interests in media and/or sound studies. Given the virtual learning environment, each session will be structured by both synchronous and a synchronous content. Beyond weekly assigned readings, and pre-recorded lectures by the instructor, each student will prerecord one 20-minute-long presentation on a case study of their choice. We will meet weekly to discuss the presentations and the readings in 90-minute synchronous sessions. In addition, we will be joined by guests in some of the sessions, introducing different perspectives from artists and intellectuals outside of the discipline.

Assignments
Participants in the seminar are expected to work throughout the semester on one case study of their choice selected in conversation with the instructor. Students will work on an illustrated paper in which drawings and writing will have equal relevance. In addition, participants in the seminar will submit a 1-minute-long sound or video composition made of found footage or sounds related to their case study.

Grading Rubric
20% Class Presentation / 40% In-class Participation / 40% Final Presentation

Course structure
– 45-minute introduction to the topic of the session by the instructor (asynchronous and pre-recorded by instructor).
– 2 or 3 20-minute-long presentations by students on their case studies (asynchronous and pre-recorded).
– 90-minute reading discussion and debate about student presentations (synchronous).

??Note: the instructor will offer live course presentations on 01/19-01/21. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website. If you need assistance, please contact Estefanía Ibáñez.

Views, With Rooms

Evolving theories on optics, over time and place, have created a set of objects that physically model vision. Each renders vision visible and suspends diverse subjectivity in the act of seeing. These objects offer new ways of both conceiving and constructing architecture through their imaged views, which operate outside of the conventional limits of linear perspective. This course will examine these optical objects in order to reveal how traits of each were taken up by an architectural work that built from their views at the scale of inhabitable form and space, not only mining materiality and depth from images but also making vision an immersive bodily experience open to an expanded field of subjects.

The pre-digital works under focus are presented as visual-spatial stories – pairs of optical objects and architectures with specific significance for vision and associated production of form and space within contemporary postdigital image culture. Each will be considered in relation to screen-modes of seeing, today, as prompts for designing new architectures ‘of-the-image.’ We will do contemporary readings, watch films, and produce original analytical representations of the spatial conditions within a set of optical objects. These views will be used to generate the design of a new architectural room. These rooms will be used as a space of exhibition and display of the original drawings produced. A room-and-view tour will serve as the virtual space for the final review for the course.

Through visual representation and digital presentation, the work in this course will explore the possibilities of images given unusual agency in the generation of the architecture that surrounds them – inverting the trope ‘room with a view,’ through a close look at views, with rooms. The work produced in this course will be collectively considered for inclusion, with author attributions, in a forthcoming publication and exhibition on the topic.

Course Structure: This course will meet synchronously once per week for a two-hour block, with breaks. There will be an additional asynchronous hour or two of reading, watching, and consideration of course content each week as well.

Application Deadlines

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Public Programs

GSD Alumni Council 2025 Newsletter

Financial Aid Deadlines

Application Deadlines