Plants and Placemaking – New Ecologies for a Rapidly Changing World
In the face of crises spanning pandemics, political turmoil, and the rapid degradation of the planet’s natural systems—all with a backdrop of human inequality—the power and importance of our work as landscape architects is becoming clearer to those outside the profession. Erosive pressures associated with changes to climate have placed global plant communities under constant assault, yet abundant and resilient life still adapts and flourishes in most places. This course will encourage students to observe these patterns and to learn from context so that we can place the healing and restorative qualities of plants, essential to sustaining life on this planet, in the foreground of our work as leaders in this incredible and dynamic profession.
A frequent criticism of new landscape architects emerging from academia focuses on their limited practical knowledge related to plants and planting design. Let’s change this. We share a collective responsibility to lead and teach our peers, patrons, collaborators, and the public of the vital role that plants and well-considered planting design plays in shaping the human experience.
To reimagine the revegetation of a place after catastrophe or amidst the pressures of growth and large-scale human movements, we must first understand context by digging into the past to examine what ecologies were there before the present state occurred. With these informed perspectives, we can begin to repair fragmented natural systems, preserve (even create) habitat, sequester carbon, and buffer communities from destructive weather and climate—all while embracing the realities of how people gather, work, and live. Plants define the character of place; they shape who we are and who we become. We must get this right or the same patterns in more chaotic contexts will simply reemerge.
This course is open to those who crave a creative and interpretive, yet always pragmatic, approach toward utilizing plants to create landscapes that actively rebuild systems stretching far beyond site boundaries.
Expressive and iterative weekly exercises will encourage rapid design that inspires students to explore natural and designed plant communities. Conventional and non-conventional planting typologies will be examined. Together we will seek new and innovative ideas for how to restore biological function to the land. We will use empirical observations and investigations to explore multiple-scaled thinking about plants and their environments, including cultural and vernacular attributes. This course will not be a comprehensive overview of the horticultural or botanical history of plants; however, it will reinforce important methodologies for how to learn and research plants that can be translated to any locale, by studying individual vegetative features and characteristics. Together, we will translate these investigations into design languages that can be applied in future design work.
Products of the course will include mixed-media drawings that explore typologies of designed and non-designed plant communities. Videos, photographs, drawings, sketches, and diagrams, as well as conventional plans, sections, and elevations, will be the vocabulary of the course.
Material World
“Who is it that the Earth belongs to?” Bangstad, Sindre, and Nilsen Torbjørn Tumyr. "Thoughts on the Planetary: An Interview with Achille Mbembe." New Frame (2019).
Every decision planners take in the design process of a project has an impact when implemented, not only on the site of construction, but also on the site of extraction and of production. From the window frames of a house to the concrete pillars of a highway bridge, from the wood flooring of a living room to the asphalt of our streets, and from the steel bolts of a door to the tree species of a park, these choices deployed in the materiality of the built environment have a global knock-on effect.
At a staggering scale, capital accumulation and the corresponding brutal and exploitative processes at work in the transfer of raw materials to the built environment have long been perceived as detached from the practice of planning. While claiming an objective approach, design disciplines detach from political commitments and turns a blind eye to the very source of their materialization. Yet, the expansionist global enterprise of extraction spans across all scales. Seemingly isolated construction details are physical artifacts that impact entire regions tectonically: mountains, rivers, forests, populations. What Donna Haraway calls “the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture” is grounded in historical colonial projects, made visible in the architecture and infrastructure of our cities and settlements—at least, for those who care to look. The translation of the Earth’s resources into the built environment and its economic model of development historically is further mirrored in today’s global neocolonial modes of extraction capitalism. The ramifications of contemporary mining and exploitation are violent, immense, and disastrous, impacting humans and non-humans alike, with racialized populations most affected, through and alongside severely adverse effects on soil, topography, labor, transportation, water, and food systems—with deep territorial political entanglements.
This seminar seeks to establish a broad picture of the ways that design disciplines intersect with extractivism and resource exploitation, and of how seemingly irrelevant composition details fit in the global enterprise of “extractive neoliberalism.”
Starting by a detail of a project and tracing the material to its source, the work aims to make visible the global chains of exploitation that translate the Earth resources into our built environment by investigating most prevalent and banal construction materials (i.e. plaster, wood, concrete, brick, steel) and their political economy.
Format, Deliverables, and Grading
The seminar will alternate the following formats: the production of a research produced in a video format (work guided across the semester with help of our recurrent guest, film-maker Severin Bärenbold), and a series of 6 lectures on dedicated Mondays (including guests from ETH Zurich and the Architecture of Territory Chair, Prof. Milica Topalovic) which will be prepared with readings. The output of the class is a research on global construction chains of construction materials in a video format.
Grading will be based on: 30% participation, 30% reading/questions at guest lecture, and 40% research video
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.
Pre- and Post-
Pre- and Post– is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods in digital design, with a focus on the processes of translation between digital media and artifacts. Beyond an exploration of novel form and its reading, this course is a critical inquiry into how digital tools can extend beyond visualization and fabrication to change the way we view architectural projects from the past, present, and future.
Today, digital representation and fabrication methods are primarily used in the production of new projects, rarely finding application in the analysis of historical precedents. Restriction of contemporary tools almost exclusively to contemporary architecture limits the knowledge these methods can help us glean from projects built before the digital era. By analyzing pre-digital precedents through a post-digital lens, we can begin to reconceptualize these precedents and situate the new tools within architectural history at large.
Within this context, the course focuses on digital image as a speculative medium and its epistemic and communicational implications. Beyond typical end-process output used in everyday practice, this research conceives digital image as instruments for conceiving and perceiving architecture. The course is organized into three sequential areas of inquiry and each explores new possibilities of feedback between image and architecture, revolving around processes of design and representation.
In the first phase, each student researches architectural precedents, considering how new digital tools could allow us to reconsider the project’s design and representation. We will reconstruct analyzed information in the form of digital data, drawing, and imagery.
During the second phase, each student develops a critical stance towards the precedent’s forms and suggests a radical modification/manipulation of it. The information from the first phase will be sourced and re-assembled into three-dimensional architectural form-making through a series of methodologies introduced in the course. This inquiry speculates on new form-generating processes by deploying images as a generative instrument. The reciprocal processes of manipulation between image and formal artifacts investigate the latent design opportunities embedded in each one with a focus on the capacities and limitations of select computational processes.
In the third phase, we speculate on the capacity of digital technologies to assign new or alternative readings to form. Through a series of imaging, processing, and rendering techniques, this phase explores how time-based modes of two-dimensional representation can activate and manipulate three-dimensional form. This process will speculate new possibilities for perceiving and conceiving architecture, challenging established conventions of representation.
This framework allows the conception of a variable architecture, capable of representing not only static forms but the very conditions of formalization and the embodiment of dynamic variables. In this series of design exercises, the course explores how new processes of manipulation—namely, techniques in digital design and representation—can facilitate new ways of thinking about architecture, both pre-digital and post-digital.
Course Format – Offered as weekly three-hour sessions of lectures, discussions, and technical workshops, the course will be broken down into two classes. Typically, the course will meet synchronously on Friday, while content for the Wednesday session will be available for asynchronous viewing. Instructor-led workshops will include a rigorous introduction to Rhino/ Grasshopper (pre-modeling tools) for analyzing and form-finding and Processing (post-modeling tools) for the advanced representation of projects.
Prerequisites – None.
?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.
Mapping the Political Economy of Space
“The ability to think critically involves three things: (1) an attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one’s experiences, (2) knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning, and (3) some skill in applying those methods. Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience, and to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life.” Edward M. Glaser, An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking, Teacher’s College, Columbia University, 1941.
There is no such thing as neutral space. Topography and soil history, land use and tenure chronicle, housing demands and construction costs, public policies, plot subdivision and zoning, access to water and electricity networks and other public infrastructure, negotiations and financing schemes, urban codes and insurance policies, location and surrounding context, project design and materiality choices, excavation works, execution and construction settings, labor force and machinery, completion and real estate mechanisms, occupancy, use and expansion, decay and destruction: at every turn, several agents and forces act upon space. The production of architecture and urban form is grounded in power structures, and articulating a possible political economy of space uncovers how the house, the neighborhood, the city, and the territory partake in the violent and unjust spatiality of power.
This seminar is set on understanding what forces shape the built environment and in what ways by uncovering the social, economic, or political forces that impact and generate the physical and technological features of our world. The aim is to enhance our capacity to reflect on spatial conditions in a critical way, and use representation tools available to designers to do so.
First by discussing specific projects and theories, we shall get familiar with methods to organize, clarify, formulate, question, and discuss our process of thinking in relation to the built environment, and to reflect critically on the production of space, and the various concepts necessary to critical thinking (i.e. Henri Lefebvre, Keller Easterling, Neil Smith, Isabelle Stengers). Mappings and graphic representations shall be produced in order to untangle the actors and forces acting upon space, to investigate and uncover the relationship between social, economic, and political processes and spatial form. Ultimately, the aim is to articulate a definition of what a possible political economy of space could entail, and how to use it as a critical thinking tool within design and research practices.
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.
Due to no classes being offered on Labor Day and course selections being due on Wednesday, September 9, this course has scheduled a first irregular meeting on Monday, August 31, 4:35-6.00 pm EDT. Please make sure to check the Canvas site of the course for the meeting Zoom links.
Thinking Landscape – Making Cities
Deploying a landscape and ecology framework for resilient citymaking
This design seminar aims to build citymaking skills for landscape architects.
To imagine and strategize new urban patterns and forms, students will choose a city representing a particular climate zone. After framing the historical-spatial and biogeophysical attributes of their city, students will create concepts and strategies for guiding future development and deploy these through different geographical and temporal scales to imagine new kinds of living and built landscapes.
The concepts and strategies developed will be measured in site plans, heretofore an undervalued and under-conceptualized design tool. These will be developed at scales spanning from the region to the city and from the district to the neighborhood—each accompanied by critical sections and views. We will begin at the scale of the urban quarter, zoom out to the region and finally return to the neighborhood. The goal is to demonstrate that a landscape-ecology framed urban plan is able to engage uncertainty, adapt to climate change and support social justice.
Each week we will discuss a reading and a precedent project and consider these with respect to the selected cities. From the four site plans produced for the final review, students will select one to develop in detail. Besides our weekly meetings devoted to discussion and critical reviews, there will be regular individual meetings with the instructor offered at hours convenient for international students.
At the semester’s end, students will be able to identify the salient elements of landscape and urban design at regional, city, district and neighborhood scales. Students will track how a concept changes through scales and will be able to articulate the design potential at each stage. Priority will be given to MLA students. Evaluation will be based on weekly assignments and participation in class sessions (35%), and the three presentations (65%).
Course structure:
10.00-11:00 (60 min) – Weekly inclusive for all.
11.00-12:00 (60 min) – Weekly inclusive (international students in Asia optional)
Individual meetings for international students will be scheduled as necessary.
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.
Urban Design and the Color-Line
“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.” – James Baldwin
We cannot talk about physical infrastructures in the United States without also talking about race. Questions thus arise about the main beneficiaries of infrastructure reuse projects: How are contributions to (or detractions from) the public sphere measured? Under what conditions might well-designed public spaces, ecologically-informed or otherwise, produce or strengthen urban inhabitants’ “right to the city,” and at what scales will such outcomes materialize? What other conditions – social, spatial, political, or economic – must also exist to ensure socially just outcomes through infrastructural reuse? In this research and design seminar students examine the role that race and class have played (and will continue to play) in the design and production of physical infrastructures. They engage the problematic either-social-impact-or-design binary in two fundamental ways: (1) Interrogating design’s contributions to, and complicity with, structural and infrastructural racism; and, (2) Developing intentionally anti-racist, equity-focused research and design methodologies that produce more equitable public spaces.
The High Line is New York City’s much celebrated – and in some corners, much reviled – infrastructure reuse project. Although the citizens who led the struggle to repurpose an abandoned rail infrastructure into a public park may not have fully foreseen the project’s larger gentrification risks, they soon understood these and other undesirable impacts. Reflecting on the High Line’s social and economic challenges, in 2017 Friends of the High Line (FHL) established the High Line Network (HLN), a peer-to-peer community of infrastructure reuse projects that spans the United States. Network partners at various stages of development lend their technical assistance and advice to one another about how to advance equity in their respective communities. This “trans-local” advocacy network disseminates knowledge on avoiding failures and missed opportunities that plagued the High Line’s advocates from the beginning, ranging from ensuring social inclusion, managing gentrification to avoid displacement, institutionalizing public programming, and negotiating city revenues for project development.
In this project-based course, students will partner with HLN organizations and contribute to an Equitable Impacts Framework (EIF) pilot — a cooperative effort with the HLN, GSD CoDesign, and Urban Institute – conducting research, readings, writings, discussions, and producing graphic materials in collaboration with HLN partner organizations. It is organized into three parts with the expectation that students will work in pairs to sustain focus on two of 19 US-based infrastructure reuse projects:
– Part 1 – Cultures of Racism: Students will research histories of inequity in each city through the HLN’s six equity indicators, asking: Why are these six indicators important for assessing and addressing equity?
– Part 2 – Geographies of Racism: Students will map present-day manifestations of historically-based inequities in each city, with emphasis on dynamics of race, class, and power, asking: Which indicators are particularly relevant to each HLN city, neighborhood, and project?
– Part 3 – Infrastructures of Racism: Students will research examples of good practices in equity planning and development, incorporating goals that the HLN organizations have set for themselves and proposing equity agendas for, and across, HLN projects.
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.
Forms of Assembly (semester two)
"Forms of Assembly" 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.
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.
Prerequisite: students must have completed 9153: Forms of Assembly in the Fall semester
Environmentalisms II: How to Have a Politics?
Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: at the very moment that the idea of “environment” is being placed at the center of our political and cultural debates, the content of the concept is becoming less and less clear. Does it refer to nature? Or its very opposite (the “built”)? Or to the factual (scientific, technical, bureaucratic) division between nature and something else? Is environment merely the residual notion of a so-called “natural world” that has now been tamed or constructed by technological systems?
This paradox is particularly evident within the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism, which despite being increasingly saddled with the complex task of imagining more "environmentally-sensitive" responses to our intensifying "environmental problems," are nonetheless unable to formulate any clear or coherent answers to the simple question that ought to precede any such strategies: what exactly is an environment? …and so the term becomes a kind of chimera within the design fields, haunting any emerging consensus with the specter of emptiness—an emptiness that presents a subtle but tectonic problem for the formation of any contemporary environmental politics.
The course aims to situate the idea of environment within a field of intelligibility comprised of specific kinds of environmental reasoning; ways of thinking that presume or posit a comprehension of the term, and that analyze or intervene in the world on that presumption. We will examine a series of themes—milieu, ecology, life, totality, control, regulation, interactivity, management, among others—that will provide a structure for the course.
In each case, our focus will be on certain methods of representational discontinuation; that is, on the way in which particular instances of environmental reasoning utilize techniques of representation as a means of dividing up, and ultimately intervening in, the world of lived experience. In doing so, the course recasts the concept of environment as a difficult amalgam of under-theorized managerial strategies, technical-instrumental processes, and reflexive scientific and political practices.
Each subsection of the course will move in a loosely-chronological manner, at times reaching back to the late nineteenth century, but generally focusing on Inter- and Postwar developments in environmental-representational techniques, including sensing, imaging, simulating and scanning.
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.
Public Projection: Projection as a Tool for Expression and Communication in Public Space
The class will focus on the development of original projection projects that can inspire and facilitate artistic expression and cultural communication in public space.
In their projects students may consider (but not be limited to) experimenting with two kinds of projections:
1. Projections-installations that transform and assign new meaning to specific architectural and sculptural urban sites;
2. Wearable, portable, or mobile projections that engage bodily performance in public places.
Students will learn cultural, technical, and ergonomical aspects of such projects.
The projects may require relevant cultural research and invite a creative use of software, hardware, and physical modeling. Students will be encouraged to experiment with video projectors and micro-projectors in connection with media devices, such as smart phones, speakers, monitors, sensors, and other input and output components, as well as the use of unconventional materials and sites as projection “screens.”
The class meetings will include experimentations, development and realization of site-specific and performative projections in public space, presentations, and discussions on relevant artistic and media work, as well as visits to research groups and labs at Harvard, the MIT Media Lab, and in the Boston area.
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.
Transformable Design Methods
This course is intended for students interested in how to create products, buildings, and environments that utilize physical transformation to realize enhanced performance and engagement. We will cover the theory, methodology, and application of “transformable design.” In this course, you will learn how transformation itself is a design parameter that can be shaped, crafted, and optimized.
Creating a mechanism that converts a simple push or pull into an overall metamorphosis of its size and shape is based on kinematics—the foundation of mechanical design. Using these techniques, students will learn how to program an object’s behavior by designing its form.
Building on this design foundation, we will explore how to take this new discipline into the real world. From my own practice, we will draw on a series of pioneering projects for public art, stage sets, deployable shelters, adaptive facades, and retractable roofs, as well as case studies of historic and contemporary practitioners in this field.
Course format: a portion of the lecture material will be pre-recorded, allowing students to view this on their own schedule. The class session will emphasize discussion and review of assignments & projects.
Hands-on techniques: Working with the GSD’s Fab Lab, we are creating a kit of parts for transformable structures that will be available to all enrolled students. Parts can be assembled in many different ways, allowing students to develop and demonstrate their original designs.
Software and Simulation techniques: Methods to simulate transformable structures within a virtual environment will be taught, with workshops offered on Fusion 360 and Grasshopper.
– Modeling transformable mechanics within the software environment
– Applying parametric methods to different types of transformable structures
– Analyzing motion and dynamic performance
Final Projects: During the semester’s second half, students will form groups to organize final projects that demonstrate physical transformation. Past projects have included deployable pavilions, dynamic facades, and other interactive installations. Projects may be virtual, physical or both. Resources for fabricating final projects are not fully known at this point, but I am committed to supporting physical-making to the degree possible.
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.