Design Fundamentals, The Postdigital, and the Anthropocene

In the past several decades, design has been impacted by the digital revolution as well as by a series of challenges linked to the advent of a new era in the relationship between humans and planet earth, an era often characterized as the Anthropocene. This situation necessitates the need to rethink some of the fundamentals of the design disciplines, including: their relationship to nature as well as to space and time, questions of scale, tectonics and ornament, what is implied by the notion of inhabiting and its link to issues of subjectivity. Finally, the political relevance of design is more than ever at stake.

This research seminar will envisage these issues at the intersection of theory and history, history being mobilized to understand better some of the changes that are currently unfolding. For this is not the first time that the design disciplines, beginning with architecture, have had to change their frame of reference. The Renaissance, the late 18th century, and the dawn of modernism witnessed profound changes in architectural and urban design. We may be at the brink of a new series of transformations, as profound if not even more so than those which marked these previous episodes.

 

Ordinary to Icon: Case Studies in the Rehabilitation of Modern Buildings and Sites

The sustainable renewal of the legacy of 20th century Modernism and its contemporary progeny presents many challenges to conservation and adaptive reuse that continue to be debated across our industry. The concept of renewal through “modernization” is increasingly employed by commercial, institutional and government building owners fueling an exponential increase in the volume of rehabilitation activity. Organizations such as the Getty Conservation Institute, ICOMOS, Docomomo and APT have undertaken broader inquiries into addressing the questions that impact the fundamental philosophy of how to work with this large and diverse legacy. This in turn has produced new guidelines such as the ICOMOS Madrid Document on Approaches for the Conservation of 20th Century Architectural Heritagevthat are meant to update and complement the existing established international charters to guide appropriate treatment for modern properties.

This seminar proposes to identify and evaluate some of the key challenges facing the preservation of modern buildings and sites through a critical analysis of selected case studies exhibiting possible means of addressing these issues while seeking to minimize other perceived programmatic or technical failings. It is hoped that the seminar will foster more detailed investigation of some of the more persistent and complex challenges and how they interface with a general drive to create sensitive design interventions that conserve carbon and increase the sustainability quota of many of these resources. Among numerous topics we will address will be the following:

1. Should the evaluative criteria that we develop for modern properties differ from those applied to earlier and/or more traditional forms of construction. Should there be different criteria applied to landmark quality structures versus the Ordinary Everyday Modern (OEM) vernacular?

2. Modern structures in many cases use a lot of operational carbon because of thin construction and lack of insulation. How do we devise and vet strategies to enhance energy performance that are appropriately balanced with maintenance of historic character?  

3. Design of Interventions: Conservation is increasingly being acknowledged as being an integral, creative part of any renovation and adaptive re-use project, particularly with modern structures, many of which are unloved, leading property owners to increasingly embrace modernization as a strategy to enhance what may be perceived as tired or outdated structures. What is the right balance of new design and conservation, and what is the role of the preservation professional in developing criteria and making judgments as to what constitutes appropriate alteration?

The course is open to all GSD students, though knowledge of and interest in the history of 20th century modernism is encouraged. The seminar structure will consist of lectures by the instructor and distinguished guests, student-led discussion of themed readings, and local case study site visits. The final deliverable will be student chosen case studies of an existing building or site that raise critical questions about conservation, interpretation, and the design of interventions. The goal will be to understand how the interventions have used or rejected attributes of the host structure, and the degree to which the result still embodies the design intent and quality of each building campaign.

Architecture & the Death of Carbon Modernity

This course studies how the adoption of fossil fuels has changed the spatial organization of human society, from new building typologies invented to manage an emerging working class to new urban archetypes designed to meet the demands of mechanized mobility and global consumption. From the steam engine onward, these architectural and urban configurations–what could be called carbon form–have enmeshed the cultural, economic, and political aspects of social life within an energy-intensive network of space and form. These are the spatial roots of the climate crisis and they remain largely understudied, unchallenged, and until recently, unnamed. And yet, carbon form not only holds the current energy paradigm in place but actively strengthens it. As such, studying its evolution and identifying its characteristics is essential work, as the crisis itself demands that architects look beyond the quantification of material and energy flows in order to address how the widespread adoption of fossil fuels has shaped architectural thought. Any proposal for the future must confront–and ultimately overcome–this cultural and architectural legacy.

To aid in this effort, this course offers a critical account of carbon form–both its physical manifestations in built form and its ideological contours within specific lineages of architectural thought. By drawing a deep connection between energy and form, the course offers new insight into the climate crisis and argues that decarbonization is much more than a technical problem, as it is also a theoretical problem for architectural and urban thought.

The course is organized in three parts.

Histories
To situate and contextualize carbon form as a legible spatial order, the semester begins by offering historical context, from deep histories of energy transition to the colonial roots of industrial society.

Projects
Once the conditions for the birth of carbon modernity are understood, lectures and readings focus on design proposals in the 19th and 20th century, progressing both by chronology and by scale in order to trace the emergent properties of carbon form under early industry, Modernism, post-industrial economies, and finally, financialization. Special attention is given to the role of designers within this evolution.

Counterprojects
Having identified examples of carbon form and analyzed its formal and spatial characteristics, the final weeks of the semester combine lectures, readings, and collaborative research to ask where the seeds of an alternative might be found.

Coursework includes readings, in-class discussions, collaborative research, and drawing assignments. Students will be asked to work in teams. Evaluation will be based on class engagement, drawing exercises, and the final assignment.
 

Curatorial Practices in the Museum: From Art to Audience

This course aims to familiarize students with varied aspects of exhibition-making, moving from concept to completion of an in-progress exhibition and publication. From a decidedly anti-racist perspective, it introduces to and engages students in a broad spectrum of approaches to exhibition presentations and acquisitions, interpretation, accessibility, and institutional contexts, with a focus on audience engagement, public and private programming, social responsibility, working with living artists, collectors, and artists. Of equal import will be asking questions of history and critiquing historiography to create a contemporary moment imbued with and rooted in authenticity, integrity, diversity, equity, and accuracy.

The objective is to learn how to explore timely issues, select artists, make acquisitions, find and secure traveling venues, as well as develop and implement the emails, proposals, documents, etc. to do so. In addition, guest lectures by esteemed curators, artists, scholars, and activists will share myriad curatorial methodologies and exhibition strategies, including monographic, thematic, collection presentation, biennial, performance, media-based and interactive projects, artist residencies and new commissions, performance, and nontraditional sites for exhibitions including the public realm and publications, alternative and artist-run spaces. Through museum visits, readings and discussions, viewing assignments and journals, we will critically analyze the role of curators, artists, and art institutions, examining the ways contemporary art and its reception in the public realm engages with broader social, cultural, and political issues.

The course will be taught as if the class is a curatorial team working through the processes of organizing an exhibition within the field of contemporary visual arts and in the context of public art institutions; it is focused on the practical – not the theoretical – parameters of curation. We will maintain a particular focus on the interdisciplinary nature of curatorial work and how curators must engage with each department of the museum, from facilities to development to volunteers.

Throughout the semester, students will perform research and development, critiquing and engaging with an exhibition and publication planned for 2026 that will travel to at least two venues. Additionally, some sessions will take place at Boston-area museums, cultural institutions, and arts organizations.

 

Drawing Space / Marking Sensation

Designers often draw space digitally, and virtual reality creates vivid illusions of spatial experience. In an age of AI, how can we reconnect with the direct, here-and-now, bodily sensations that structure and inform these digital “spaces”? This course aims to do so through freehand charcoal drawing. We’ll strive for wordless experiences of space — architectural historian and theorist Zeynep Çelik Alexander calls this “kinaesthetic knowing” and notes that it has long been an undercurrent in design education and practice. Visually articulating such spatial sensations can enrich any mode of creativity.

Various drawing experiments — no experience required! — cultivate different ways to see, feel, and represent spatial dynamics. Subjects include interior spaces, intervals between objects, air itself, the volumes in bodies and atoms; techniques such as blind contour, line-free tonal studies, and “sculpting with shadows” expand our habits of looking. Arrive willing to play messy, which means both getting your hands dirty with charcoal, and prioritizing process over product. Visits to specific sites and to study selected works at the Harvard University Art Museum enrich our visual vocabulary. Optional readings in fiction and philosophy contextualize the dimensions of visual perception. At midterm, students will begin developing a final drawing portfolio to investigate some aspect of spatial dynamics; this can build on a project from another course or relate to a personal curiosity. 
 

Faux: Design, Performance, and Perception of Material Imitations

Materials are everywhere. They remain central to our lives and to contemporary design, despite the omnipresence of digital information. Yet, the fact that many materials that we encounter on a daily basis are mere representations of other materials has largely escaped research and contemporary discourse. We simply do not think much about asphalt roofs made to look like slate or cedar, vinyl siding or ceramic floor tiles imitating wood. Did we not enjoy the suggestion of luxury that comes along with the faux wood grain on the dashboard of the budget car? How about astroturf on the urban scale? Looking beyond products and the built environment, faux materials have been instrumental for centuries on theater stages across the world. The performing arts have long deployed material illusions in the scenic space, often painstakingly painted and designed to be seen from specific angles and distances, under the controlled lighting conditions of the stage. These material illusions are broadly accepted and are an expected part of the performing arts, they are linked to the visions that the artistic team develops for the production itself. What lessons can be learned from scenic material illusions? Have faux materials paved the way for the current blurring of the real and the fake, triggered by the rise of social media and more recently, popular AI tools?

Materials are designed involving conscious choices, such as colors, textures, finishes, and formats. Biomaterials that are grown in labs or are produced from agricultural waste products and binders now expand on the traditional material palette. They substitute conventional materials such as leather or petroleum-based plastics and thereby lower the emission of harmful greenhouse gases. Yet biomaterials have no inherent aesthetics, no cultural or technical precedent, no history. How will they be designed?

The contemporary culture of faux materials is highly sophisticated. The theatrical world remains committed to a craft-based model, but the built environment embraces the vast scale of industrial production. Practical, economical, ecological, and cultural concerns are but some of the factors that play into today’s growing culture of faux materials.

The seminar sets out to explore and understand the past, present and future of design, making, performance, and perception of faux materials at the urban, the building, and the product scale. Throughout the course we will seek to learn lessons from the legacy of material illusions in the scenic environment. Students will engage in material ethnography and experience hands-on workshops that involve designing and manually crafting materials. We will debate theoretical positions, consider material stories, learn about craft and production, and quantitatively assess material perceptions. We encourage students from all programs to apply and join us on a journey at the edge of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘faux’.

Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment

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

The aim of the class is to learn how to depict and express the presence and appearance of people in natural and built environments.

This class objective will be achieved through three projects:
First: focusing on people’s active presence in the landscape.  
Second: on people in a populated urban environment.
Third: on a person or two people acting or interacting in a specific spatial and social situation.

Each of the assigned projects will be realized in a different, specifically selected technique:
     – The first project will use a technique called a subtractive tone.
     – The second one will use a technique of a multiple lines/marks.
     – The last one will use an images projection.
 
The course will help to master techniques in hand drawing, refine sensitivity to all details of what one sees, and develop capacity to articulate them 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 life 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, graphite, etc.

In addition to the completion of three large drawing projects a special short assignment will be given at the beginning of each class session.

Working on projects will be supplemented by the field trips, presentations, and discussions of relevant examples from art history and contemporary art. Guest artists will be invited as reviewers for the presentations and exhibition of the final project.

No prerequisites are required.

Off: On a Tangent

The tangential inherently implicates the expression of how two things touch. In a moment where touching has become complicated, a formal exploration of this expression is similarly charged.

Mathematically, a tangent is expressed as a straight line that touches a curve at a point. In some of the earliest writing about infinitesimal calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz defined a tangent as “the line through a pair of infinitely close points on the curve”. This course uses the tangential as a formal, rhetorical, and mathematical framework to interrogate the relationship between the part and the whole, between the thick and thin, the complex and contradictory. Working with forms like cones and cylinders (amongst others), we will investigate formal tangential relationships and their implications on bringing programmatic spaces closer together or farther apart.

Conceptually, a tangent implies the permutation of an existing idea into a completely different line of thinking. A tangent articulates a moment where one thing diverges into two or, inversely, where two things merge into one: the moment they kiss. In Kissing Architecture, Sylvia Lavin teases out this tension between the discipline of architecture and new types of art practices. We will focus our exploration within the discipline at a more intimate scale: two mediums, two masses, two surfaces, or two curves. This tension — a version of are ‘they’ or aren’t ‘they’—is further activated by moving between the precise and the imperfect. This seminar will explore the role that image creation plays in articulating these tensions. We will engage in a rigorous investigation of rendering and drawing techniques to study the material, tectonic and spatial implications of tangential forms. At what scale does the tangential relationship build excitement?

Coursework will include weekly readings, digressions on technique and form, presentation asides, rendering, and precedent

Prerequisites: Working knowledge of Rhino/some knowledge of Vray.

Evaluation will be based on class engagement, design exercises, and the final.

Responsive Environments

The course introduces students to the tools and design methods for creating responsive environments and technologically driven experiences in the built environment. By putting the human experience at the center and forefront, from the immediate body scale to the larger environment, encompassing buildings and the urban spaces, the course examines new and emerging models and technologies for the design of innovative architectural human interfaces and technologically augmented physical environments.     

The class addresses fundamental questions including: What are new and emergent ways of understanding the digital and physical environments? How can we create responsive and interactive experiences that augment the person’s experience of the physical space? What are the consequences of creating technologically augmented environments? What are the psychological, social, and environmental implications of creating such hybrids? And what are the criteria to measure successful responsive environments?  

These questions of analyzing, understanding and designing responsive environments will be tackled through both class discussions and also hands-on designing and prototyping of interactive, responsive installations. Readings and discussions will explore current and historical examples, theories of phenomenology, psychogeography, multisensory experience of architecture, body-centricity, proxemics, interaction design, installation design, and human-machine interface. Informed by this discourse, the first part of the course will engage students in measuring and quantifying the ephemeral and invisible qualities of space and human experience of space. This will form the foundation for students to design spatial and interactive interventions at various scales, ranging from wearables, interactive objects, to large-scale architectural installations. In the process, students will become familiarized with technologies that can change and augment our physical environment such as biometric sensors, electronics, processing, projections, and others.

The course will culminate with an exhibition of the students’ responsive and interactive installations of varied scales using the tools and methods discussed in class. The course will take advantage of the resources and the ongoing research at the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab.

No specific prerequisites are needed. Students from any background and concentration are encouraged to apply to the lottery.

 

Mediums Domain students will be priotiized in the MDes Advanced Course Selection.

Digital Media: Environmental Geometries

Environmental Geometries investigates techniques for visualizing and designing interactively with hard-to-see environmental forces. This iteration of the class focuses on the geometry of air movement.

Air moves like an invisible ocean around and within buildings in response to differences in pressure. This motion can be described mathematically, but solving these equations in each situation remains a challenging and evolving problem. Ultimately, depicting and understanding a complex phenomenon requires more than one model and more than one mode of inquiry, as well as awareness of each specific model’s limitations.

There must be a space of interactive architectural experimentation with environmental forces, between general principles, like hot air rises, on the one hand, and computational fluid dynamics on the other, accurate enough to allow realistic feedback, but fast and loose enough for iterative conceptual study. This course tries to create such a space between design-play and engineering through empirical study.

This class proposes a back-and-forth process between physical and digital simulations. We will build two physical simulators: a wind tunnel for the simulation of wind-driven ventilation and a salt-water tank for the simulation of buoyancy driven ventilation. We will pair these with two digital simulations: a smoke simulation in Houdini and a fluid simulation developed within the course in C# in Rhino’s grasshopper environment. 
Students will experience the friction between the digital and the physical modes and engage with both as flexible approximations of reality. This exploration will be expanded with three additional topics: discussion of the heuristic principles of air movement, the mathematics of air models, and historical examples of design before air conditioning.

Architects are familiar with material experimentation with visible materials. Students don’t need to become carpenters or masons, but they do need methods to explore, experiment, test and fail, with wood or stone, in order to use them creatively in their designs. By analogy, students need methods of experimenting with the invisible material of air, if they are to gain familiarity with its behavior and consider it in their future work.

Alongside the construction of the simulators, students will design a series of models for each simulation and run parallel tests in the computational and physical simulators. Through comparisons, they will develop a formal lexicon for producing specific conditions in the air. In the interaction between two distinct ways of looking at the world, students can discover discrepancies, gain control over tools, and learn when and where to apply different types of analysis.