Topology and Imagination: Between Chinese Landscapes and Architecture
This course deals with landscape architecture and architecture in contemporary China. Its purpose is twofold: to articulate new perspectives on the challenges facing designers, and to demonstrate the pertinence of issues to a broader range of international discussions.
There are three major aspects involved:
– An expanded vocabulary for understanding design challenges in both urban and rural settings. We shall discuss a range of terms, taken from local Chinese discussions and from Western contexts, that can enable a more precise grasp of issues. In particular, the understanding of Chinese gardens in terms of topology (from the work of Zhu Guangya) shows a way for going beyond the idea of static “composition.”
– Detailed case studies that draw on a broad range of images documenting both design process and construction process. Our goal is to go beyond the usual presentation of design projects in six- or eight-page magazine articles and to attend to process and contingency. The main topics will include: redundant precision versus apparent precision in construction (from the work of Francesca Hughes), hi-fi versus lo-fi architecture (from the work of Jeremy Till), perspectival and aperspectival effects, and proactive intervention in the chain of supply of building materials.
– Cultural dimensions relevant for the understanding of architectural and landscape experience. This part of our study will involve both reading texts (in English translation) and analyzing extant gardens. The main topics will include: long-term and short-term memory, the pitfalls of thinking in dualistic dichotomies, the opportunities presented by different kinds of clientele, and the limitations of various kinds of regionalism.
Course format:
Includes attendance at lectures, seminar presentations, responses to readings, and a final research paper.
Prerequisites: None. Course materials and discussions do not presume previous knowledge of Chinese topics.
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.
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 individual 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. The seminar will include broader panel discussions on women in practice and on race and practice, and we will together identify—throughout the semester—barriers to entry and advancement for women and for people of color.
Interim assignments will ask students to reflect on issues of race, identity, and sex as they impact practice. 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.
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.
Planning for Climate Change
This seminar explores how public and private institutions and individuals, under labels of “adaptation” or “resilience,” are positioning built and natural environments to respond to threats posed by climate change. The threats include flooding caused by sea level rise and storm surges as well as changing weather conditions. Specific responses include construction and reconstruction of physical infrastructure, deployment of new building designs, and population retreat, together described by the phrase “armor, elevate, retreat.” Embedded in each of these actions are diverse questions about equity, winners and losers, vulnerability, probability and risk assessments, scales of interventions, institutional competencies, mandates versus incentives, property rights and regulation, participation processes, political will and public opinion, and public and private financial and insurance mechanisms.
Classes will consist of presentations and discussions about selected case studies, research projects, and readings. Guests will bring real-life cases and projects to the class. Students are expected to attend class, participate in discussions, complete assigned readings, and prepare a 5,000-word paper on a topic chosen by the student.
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.
Cotton Kingdom, Now
In 1852, the New York Daily Times commissioned a 31-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to conduct an immersive research journey through the Southern slave states. The country was headed toward civil war, and the paper dispatched young Olmsted for his ability to reveal the cultural and environmental qualities of landscape in a narrative voice. Today, landscape architecture, urban design, and planning—disciplines Olmsted helped to shape—continue to grapple with the economic, political, and ecological conditions rooted in systems he documented so vividly 165 years ago. This seminar will investigate the relationship between a host of major contemporary issues with the documented conditions in Olmsted’s 1861 book, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom. The seminar positions Olmsted’s journey not only as source material but also as methodological proposition, in reflection on the significance and methods of research and representation in design practice.
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.
Forms of Assembly
This course is an advanced two semester research and project-based seminar initiated by Art, Design, and the Public Domain MDes, in collaboration with GSD Exhibitions, that will focus on the Harvard Campus as a site of inquiry, design propositions, and, ultimately, built projects for its common spaces. Practice-oriented, this advanced project-based seminar includes lectures, workshops, assignments and the production of onsite, or online, interventions.
The city is a place of complex socioeconomic, cultural, and political entanglements. In its public spaces, we come together, inform and form one another. These spaces of physical, social, and cultural encounters are critical for democracy, freedom, and a just society. The university campus, situated within the city, expresses these tensions along its edges in how it negotiates the city.
Confronted by a global pandemic, we become confined within a minimal space. Physically, our bodies are locked inside the domestic environment, and when outside, they are masked and at six feet apart from one another. Intellectually, our virtual and online exchanges, which are seemingly open, remain highly edited and surveilled. We communicate with a world of similarity, gated in social and professional networks.
Not only the pandemic imperils our public spaces, and, by extension, our freedom, and rights. We are living in times of changing climate and environmental destruction that have immense consequences on human and other species’ lives and habitat. These growing stresses threaten to solidify policies, culture, and spaces of isolation, exclusions, and violence. Walls and detainment camps are forming vast landscapes along national political borders. At this time of public health crisis, precarious public life, and environmental catastrophe, we need to come together in solidarity more than ever before.
How can we imagine today, from the quarantine, our way out of isolationism? Can art and design practices become agents and agencies to conceive, enact, and mobilize agonistic and less striated environments – spaces of unedited, uncontrolled, open exchange, and places of care?
This seminar, at the intersection of art, design, and activism – theory and practice. It includes guest lectures, research, and design assignments. Students will be required to investigate and reimagine the potentiality of public spaces between the campus and the city and use the format of ephemeral interventions, performances, exhibitions, and installations to enact encounters and Forms of Assembly that are critical for democracy, freedom, and a just society.
The first semester will focus on Forms of Assembly theory and praxis, the development of a project and its conceptual design. The second semester is dedicated to advancing concepts into in-depth detailed designs, including, when possible, fabrication and implementation of onsite physical interventions, or the creation of digital platforms, visualization, video works, and projections.
Prerequisites: Participation in the second semester is contingent on first-semester enrollment. Thesis track students, who participated in the first semester, can continue developing their thesis in the second term under auspices of the seminar and its instructors' guidance.
A percentage of enrollment in this course is held for MDes students who select this course first in the limited enrollment course 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.
Advanced Applications in Sustainable Architecture
This new elective seminar will provide a deeper dive into issues of evidence-based, high-performance, sustainable building design. The course is intended for first and second year Energy and Environment students, MArch students, and anyone with an interest in the environmental performance of buildings. Because we hope to create a diverse team of problem-solvers, students with any one of a variety of backgrounds, such as design, engineering, and financial analysis are encouraged to enroll.
Students will increase their understanding of high-performance environmental design strategies in architecture. They will also have the opportunity to learn the following skills, but they may choose the area(s) in which to focus their attention:
– whole-building energy simulation*
– daylight design and analysis methods, including daylight simulation*
– hygrothermal (thermal and moisture) simulations, as well as mold-growth simulation
– life-cycle analysis of materials and construction methods
– life-cycle cost analysis (construction costs and utility savings)
– assessing societal cost of carbon emissions and related health savings
*in greater depth than taught in 6122 Environmental Systems II or 6125 Building Simulation. Students will have the choice to explore either the same or different software tools.
Final Project
Students may choose one of the following options.
1. Students may join a team to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon design competition. (Since the competition offers multiple divisions, the class may form more than one team.)
2. Students may develop and detail a strategy within the built environment to help Harvard University meet its Climate Action Plan (Fossil Fuel Free by 2050).
3. Students may propose an alternate research or design project.
Class Format
The class format consists of lectures, in-class exercises, group discussions, student presentations, and project-based strategy sessions (or desk crits). Students learn skills/tools through a series of short tutorials and assignments. Then they narrow their focus and apply these skills to the final project.
Prerequisite
It is recommended that students have had (or are concurrently enrolled in) some introduction to sustainable design/building science, such as 6121/6122 Environmental Systems; 5370 Environment, Economics, and Enterprise; or a similar course at another institution.
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.
Domestic Logistics
Modern domestic spaces are embedded in networks of goods, labor, media, and technology that shape their functions, capacities, and cultural role. They sit in federated supply chains, crisscrossed by networks of dependency and autonomy that extend to the city, countryside, and globe. The flows of materials and consumables, as well as data and labor, situate the home in a larger technosocial complex. Technology thus acts as an indispensable and mutating interface between domestic spaces and the territories around them.
The class will consider the bright and dark alternate futures of domestic space through the lens of its cultural representations and technological augmentations. Framed through the last 100 years as well as the next 100 years of domestic architecture, it will plumb the actual and fictional ways in which the space of the home has registered anxieties and optimisms around the social, ecological, and economic implications of technological futures. Specific technologies – spatial augmentation, telepresence, sensory expansion and deprivation, robotic farming, home droids, AI, drone tourism, and more, will be catalysts for critical discussions about what the home was, is, and could be.
While we unpack these dynamics we will also consider how the future of domestic space has been represented with respect to technology, and how we might inflect those representations and networks for the better. The historical and future representation of the interior will be a key lens through which we will examine domestic logics, from lavishly rendered Beaux Arts interior elevations to developed surface drawings, from meticulously arranged interiors of the Dutch golden age to the dioramas typical of theatre productions. More recent attempts to quantize and optimize interiors through motion studies and comprehensive sensing will comprise an analytic counterpoint to narrative modes of understanding domestic space. Particularly critical will be the relationship between animation, domestic robotics, and the diurnal rhythms of inhabitation.
The house as capsule will be a recurring theme, encompassing critical concerns related to safety and isolation, but also mobility, freedom, and the fraught line between autonomy and collectivism. Threads of the 1970s autonomous house movement will be interwoven with histories of nuclear shelters, continuity of government facilities, and the notion of the home as a cultural and technological bulwark against catastrophe and a last redoubt of civilization in ruins.
The class will also examine a number of themes the organically emerge from domestic logistics, including: the farm at the scale of the living unit, houses as micronations, how the domestic ritual of the dinner party may be transformed and reformatted through new food and media practices, recombinant and robotic furniture and the new political, social, and implications of houses that think.
Throughout these themes, there will be a cross-cutting interest in the notion of counterfactual history, particularly as it applies to domestic architecture. Actual and fictional precedents will be equally relevant, as the class embraces the full range of paths toward speculative domestic futures.
The content of the class will be primarily cultural, historical, and speculative, with some discussions of technical systems underpinning current innovations in the domestic sphere.
Students will develop a research topic affiliated with the themes of the class, articulate a speculative future that interrogates the topic through a paper and presentation, and venture a unique new video representation for that future.
The format of the class will be an asynchronous lecture, with a weekly synchronous session for discussions and pinups.
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.
Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Architecture 1960 to the Present
The concept of postmodernism finds its definitive articulation in architecture, even though postmodern thought far exceeds the use of the term postmodern in architectural discourse. Modern architecture—with its utopian aspirations, functional rationality, technological determinism, and aesthetic purism—is understood by postmodern thought as a primary expression of the general search for a metaphysics of certainty and universality, which rejects traditional spatial hierarchies and seeks to establish a new homogeneous and continuous space. Robert Venturi was the first architect to establish his work as explicitly dissenting from the dogma of modern movement. He and Aldo Rossi published important books in 1966 in which they announced their dissatisfaction with the modernist status quo. This course will begin by expanding out from these two practices and their progeny into the context of structuralist and poststructuralist theory that so often intersected with architectural theory and practice. A renewed interest in architecture theory accompanied the new practices; indeed, postmodern architecture was born in the academy and was developed in journals. We will follow that development with architectural projects and theoretical texts. Meanwhile, the larger currents of postmodern thought flowed through poststructuralist theories of language and the subject. Inevitably postmodern architecture also developed a global poststructuralist dimension, which we will study in detail.
The embrace of poststructuralist theory eventually precipitated the end of historicist postmodernism, though it is arguable that postmodern thought continues to frame recent architectural production. In the second half of the seminar, we will investigate the lineage of postmodernism in architectural practice since 1990. This part of the course will be more speculative and will require intense involvement on the part of participants.
Prerequisites: BTC I and BTC III or equivalent study in architecture theory and history.
Structure: The class will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 to 11:30 am (EST). Tuesdays will be devoted to lectures, and these will be recorded and available to students immediately after. Thursday will be discussion sessions, which will be arranged at the start of the semester, taking into account different time zones, if necessary
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.
From Fallow: Equitable Futures for Landscapes of Injustice
Property abandonment is prevalent in places of disinvestment, where vulnerable communities bear the burden of untended land alongside structural racism, unjust policies, uneven capital distribution, and an inability to access education, healthcare and municipal services.
There is a relationship between the socio-economic and political well-being and the physical attributes of the land, the practices of its care, and its ownership status. The United States often privileges models of individual property ownership, where there are systems in place for acquisition and economic growth but not disposition, collectivity, ecological work and potential.
It is no secret that vacant lots have long vexed cities—especially the architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners and citizens living and working in them. In the past few decades hundreds of design ideas for abandoned property have emerged. Some remain purely speculative, while others have been tested and implemented. Meanwhile, neither the preoccupation with nor the accruement of abandoned property has abated.
Now, there is an urgency for propositions for how we can address the inequities of our urban environment, for visions for the city moving forward. Amidst so much negative attention, designers play a fundamental role in developing ideas that bring hope as well as other means of property distribution and care.
In this course, we will construct the American landscape of property investment and abandonment—and engage this landscape to form alternative models for the care of these complex spaces.
We will look intently at the present lived condition, as a reflection of a complex past, in order to imagine equally rich and varied futures. In many of these examples, it is a matter not so much of making drastic change to the sites themselves, as drastically reimagining how we approach them.
Students will tackle particular contexts and themes towards a collective body of work.
This course is open to all students but requires a basic understanding of urban development history and strong graphic skills.
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.
Why Not Cultural Systems? Expanding Our Value System Beyond Nature and Ecology
This seminar will examine the planning, design and stewardship opportunities and constraints frequently encountered when dealing with cultural landscapes. In addition to addressing foundational principles, this seminar will demonstrate how bridging the artificial, often segmented divides between both design and historic preservation and nature and culture results in an expanded, holistic and more thoughtful design interventions.
Specifically, the seminar will address the issues, and identify the tools and strategies surrounding the planning, treatment and management of cultural landscapes (from surgical design interventions at an iconic landscape designed by Dan Kiley, for example, to a landscape that was associated with important people or past events that is also rich in narrative). Methodologies for historic research, tools for documenting existing conditions, and strategies for evaluating and analyzing cultural landscapes will be reviewed and tested. In addition, considerations and tools for assigning value, and the myriad and interrelated issues surrounding the level of design intervention, carrying capacity for change, and prescriptions for management and interpretation will also be debated. This work will be buttressed with case studies and supplemented with a small number of local site visits, and required student presentations.
Finally, a diversity of planning, design and stewardship challenges will be addressed. This includes: physical and financial limitations for essential research; how we assess and assign significance; the value we place on context (both physical and historical); the quest for authenticity and why this is an underutilized tool in our design kits; antiquity as an asset (also known as weathering); the need to determine a landscape’s carrying capacity for change; and, the recognition of a cultural landscape's palimpsest (historic layers). Integral to this work, the necessity for communications strategies for messaging and public engagement will be a key consideration.
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.