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.

 

 

Pre- and Post-

Pre- and Post- is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods in digital design, with a focus on processes of translation between digital media and material 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 these new tools within architectural history at large.

The course is organized into two sequential areas of inquiry. In the first phase, each student will research a different architectural precedent, considering how new digital tools could allow us to reconsider the project’s design and representation. Students will fabricate each precedent’s primary volume/massing with an articulation of the underlying geometry and tectonic logic. Students will also reconstruct analyzed information in the form of digital data which will then be represented through a series of animated projection mappings. This process will speculate new possibilities for perceiving and conceiving architecture, challenging established conventions of representation. 

During the second half of the semester, each student will develop a critical stance towards the precedent’s forms and will suggest a radical modification/manipulation of it. In this phase, students will also speculate on the capacity of digital technologies to assign new or alternative readings to physical form. Through a series of animated projections used against physical models, we will explore how time-based modes of two-dimensional representation can activate three-dimensional form. In this process, animation will transcend its role as a method of visualization, subverting the conventions of metrical geometry and becoming a design tool itself. Here, design will manifest a dynamic environment of forces in which form and matter can be manipulated by ever-moving, ever-changing sets of data and digital information. 

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. The line between physical objects and digital creations blurs as projections alter architecture in real-time. These projection mapping projects create a liminal zone between real and virtual space and question the relationship between perception and representation. In this series of design exercises, the course explores how new processes of manipulation—namely, techniques in digital fabrication 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 workshops, the course will address the content described above. Instructor-led workshops will include a rigorous introduction to scripting (a pre-modeling tool) and a set of post-modeling tools for the advanced representation of projects. Lectures and readings will situate these digital tools into the contemporary discourse on the status of representation and abstraction in architecture. There are no prerequisites for this course.

Urban and Town Ecology

Wildlife, vegetation, soil, air, water, and aquatic ecosystems, together with their human uses, are related to the distinctive, especially spatial, attributes of suburban and urban landscapes. Topics addressed with ecological emphasis include: urban region; suburbanization, growth and sprawl; planned community and city; suburban town; greenway and greenbelt; large and small open-space types; rail line and trail; road and vehicle; fire and flood; groundwater, wetland, stream, river, and shoreline; commercial and industrial areas; development and neighborhood; house lot; building; and tiny green spaces.

Design from Within: How New Immersive Technologies Create Value

For centuries, designers have hovered over physical models, paper blueprints, and digital screens, looking at the design challenges from “the outside.” New immersive technologies have the potential to fundamentally change how we perceive projects by landing us in the center of the design. Traditionally, it takes years for designers to walk into their own creations. However, virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR, AR, and MR), together with 3-D printing, are changing how we design, build, and navigate landscapes, buildings, and urban environments. We can experience the environments as they are being conceived. Immersive technologies combined with data analysis allow us to make better informed design decisions and create compelling experiences. 

The course will examine not only how we think about design projects with existing advanced technologies but also challenge students to imagine future workflows. The goal is to go beyond technology applications and focus on designing for business impact. We will explore the notion of entrepreneurship in design—how to identify, develop, and market innovative platforms in order to establish new design practices or technology startups. 

A combination of case studies, workshops, and simulations will be used to generate design ideas and market them to prospective customers. The course will allow students to generate a portfolio of ideas and projects that will boost their professional or academic careers. 

Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization

“Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization” is an advanced research- and project-based course initiated by the Art, Design, and the Public Domain (ADPD) MDes concentration in collaboration with IdeasCity, the New Museum’s platform to explore art and culture beyond the walls of the museum. 

In this seminar, “exhibit” is defined as the act of presenting an object, performance, or intervention in the public domain to trigger imagination and enact a response.

Situated at the intersection of (critical) theory and (visual) practice, and art, activism, and design, “Exhibit” explores how artistic practice can be critically engaged with its surroundings—built, social, and natural environments—by addressing local, global, and planetary concerns.

Models of cultural representation developed and deployed by institutions, like museums, foundations, or galleries, provide a unique opportunity to accumulate, generate, exchange, and disseminate knowledge over a short period of time. These institutions and their various models of representation, however, are centralized and co-opted by cultural and market forces that limit radical experimentation, inclusion, dialogue, collaboration, exchange, or long-term engagement. 

How can artistic practices, activism, and design go beyond the framework of centralized institutions, challenge power, and offer agency to a broader set of actors such as local communities, political movements, and people from other disciplines?

“Exhibit” will examine the relationship between cultural production and resistance through various precedents, referring to movements and projects from the Battle of Seattle, Black Audio Film Collective, Decolonize This Place, Immigrant Movement International, and Occupy, to projects by groups such as Superflex, Critical Art Ensemble, Pink Bloque, Yes Men, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Wavelength Foundation, or the Arctic Cycle. 

Through this advanced research seminar, which includes guest lecturers, workshops, and assignments, “Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization” will examine cases of art and design activism, diverse tactics of culture jamming, decentralization, and aesthetic interventions. The course will engage with artists, activists, curators, designers, and representatives of cultural and grassroots organizations to explore diverse modalities and designs of exhibits as catalysts for research and experimentation with public engagement. 

Throughout the semester, students will produce curatorial research and design concepts, develop public engagement strategies, and install site-specific projects. Concluding the course, students’ work will be featured at the upcoming IdeasCity program in Singapore in February 2020.

Vere van Gool, Associate Director of IdeasCity at the New Museum and the curator of the upcoming IdeasCity programs in Singapore, will contribute to the course.

Goals of the course:

– Explore the agency of art and design to enact public engagement.

– Expose students to methods, techniques, and positions of representation, intervention, and culture jamming.

– Engage with cultural institutions, museums, foundations, and galleries.

– Gain experience in curatorial practice through collaboration with IdeasCity in Singapore.

Student evaluation is based on the participation in class and the final project.

Note regarding prioritized enrollment: 50% of enrollment is prioritized for second year MDes students who select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery.

Environmentalisms

Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: at the very moment that the idea of “environment” has been 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 to its very opposite? Or to the “factual” (scientific, technical, bureaucratic) division between nature and some imagined “other?” 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 and urbanism, which despite being increasingly saddled with the complex task of imagining more “environmentally sensitive” responses to our intensifying “environmental problems,” are nonetheless often unable to formulate any clear or coherent answers to the simple question that ought to precede any such strategies: What is an environment? . . . and so the term becomes a kind of chimera within the design disciplines, haunting our thought with the specter of emptiness.

This course situates the concept of environment at the historical-philosophical intersection of architecture, technology, and a field of intelligibility comprised of specific kinds of environmental reasoning; ways of thinking that presume or posit a comprehension of the term, but which in fact only comprehend its technical formation and deployment. We will examine a series of themes—milieu, life, totality, regulation, interactivity, immersion, visibility, and management, among others—that will provide a structure for the course. We will move in a loosely chronological manner, at times reaching back to the late 19th century, but generally focusing on the 20th century, during which certain forms of environ-mentalism were—in some cases by necessity, at other times opportunistically—pressed to the forefront of architectural reasoning.

Note:

This course is taught in parallel with Bruno Latour’s upcoming Critical Zones exhibition at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in May 2020, and Latour will join the seminar for a series of workshops in October.

Note regarding prioritized enrollment: 50% of enrollment is prioritized for second year MDes students who select the course first in the limited enrollment course lottery.

The Landscape We Eat

“A recipe is more than the food it is made of: the geography of our dinner spills off of the plate.”

“The Landscape We Eat” seeks to explore the relationship between food systems and their geomorphology, climate, infrastructure, time, and culture.

During the 20th century, the transformation of global food production and its processes have homogenized most of the earth’s productive landscapes, diminishing their complexity and impoverishing their ecosystems. This transformation has been so thorough and pervasive that it is increasingly difficult to imagine how things could be any other way.

In order to think more creatively about this problem, we will focus our attention on La Camargue, an agricultural region of Southern France. In La Camargue, a complex system of canals moves fresh water from the delta to the Mediterranean Sea, which mediates between the conflicting requirements of the region’s primary products, such as poultry, asparagus, rice, and salt. By “thinking through drawing,” this seminar will explore the metabolic relations that construct both landscapes of production and landscapes of consumption in order to better understand the parameters of the problem that global food production confronts us with.

The course will be structured in five parts. In the first exploration, landscapes of production for selected ingredients will be drawn through geomorphology, climate, and soil in order to situate ingredients in their nonhuman milieu. In the second part, we will expand this lens to include the technical milieu of tools and infrastructure that constructs specific landscape relations in La Comargue. In the third “zoom,” we will test our insights in relation to time, thinking historically about the economic and cultural forces that have shaped the territory, and that connect it to the globe. If in the third zoom we have moved outward, the fourth zoom will move radically inward, considering the genetics, chemistry, and microscopic configurations of specific ingredients in order to, again, rethink the time and space of food production. Finally, each student will choose a recipe that distills and reveals their research over the course of the semester. Each recipe will be a heuristic device we will use to teach each other what we have learned, to see what is on the plate in a new way, and to better understand the geographies that overflow.

Transformable Design Methods

Architects have long imagined a built environment that is fundamentally dynamic. Portable buildings, retractable coverings, kinetic facades, and spaces that morph: these transformable structures are part of the lexicon of architectural possibilities. Yet despite this persistent interest, examples of dynamic buildings are few, and architectural design remains focused on static objects. 

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. We will learn how these projects were developed and also look at case studies of historic and contemporary practitioners in this field. 

It is an exciting time to practice this new discipline. New technologies are enabling us to implement transformable strategies in unprecedented ways. We will learn about parametric algorithms to simulate physical movement, digital fabrication techniques for mechanisms, use of inexpensive actuators and control systems, and building mechanical function through multimaterial hybrids. 

Course format: Our emphasis goes beyond technology, and we will apply these practical methods to your creative designs. As a seminar/workshop, course assignments will be staged in two parts. For the first part, students will create a series of mechanism studies to reinforce understanding of lecture topics and provide a hands-on familiarity with mechanical interaction. During the 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. These projects are exciting opportunities not only to think about but actually demonstrate new possibilities for transformable architecture. 

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. 

Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation

The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers and an expressive, playful supplement to computer-based labor.

This course will master techniques in hand drawing, refining sensitivity to all details of what one sees and developing capacity to articulate it in a visually convincing and evocative form. The class projects will include work in outdoor and indoor situations and places as well as drawings of live models. In the process of drawing, students will focus on the world of lines, textures, shapes, light, shade, and values. We will use various tools, materials, and artistic techniques including pencils, vine charcoal, markers, ink, and other wet and dry media, later combined with the use of camera, computer renderings, etc.

Throughout the duration of the course, students will complete several larger drawing projects. In addition, a special short assignment will be given at the beginning of each class session. There will be field trips to draw in city interior and exterior places and public settings.

In one nonrepresentational drawing project, students will focus on the formal articulation of emotional life experience. In another project, we will explore the performance of the human body in interaction with elements of the architectural environment. In a final project, students will experiment with the use of wall drawing to visually transform the perception and meaning of specific architectural space.

Work on studio projects will be supplemented by museum visits, presentations, and discussions of relevant examples from art history and contemporary art. Guest artists will be invited as reviewers for the presentation and exhibition of final projects.

For the first class session, please bring soft vine charcoal and a large kneaded eraser.