Establishes basic attitudes toward architectural organization and its reflection in form. Includes projects where imposed conditions of site, program, and building system emphasize the interrelationship of fundamental elements in the pattern of decision-making that constitutes architectural design. Develops presentations through drawings and models. Intended for entering M.Arch. students. Course Description This studio explores the notion of in-between by engaging several relationships; the relationship between intervention and perception, between representation and notation and between the fixed and the temporal. In the Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges tells the perverse tale of the one to one scale map, where the desire for precision and power leads to the escalating production of larger and more accurate maps of the territory. For Jean Baudrillard, "The territory no longer precedes the map nor survives it. …it is the map that precedes the territory... and thus, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map." The map or the territory, left to ruin-shredding across the 'other', beautifully captures the tension between reality and representation. Mediating between collective desire and territorial surface, maps filter, create, frame, scale, orient, and project. A map has agency. It is not merely representational but operational, the experience and discursive potential of this process lies in the reciprocity between the representation and the real. It is in-between these specific sets of relationships that this studio positions itself.

Subject engages a dialogue with architecture and urbanism from the perspective of the visual artist. Ideas investigated thematically from early modernist practices to the most recent examples of contemporary production. Art making as an adjunct to the design process is challenged by both synthetic and critical models of production. Visual art practice is examined as a conceptual prologue to architectural and urbanistic thinking, as an integrated part of the design process, and as a critical epilogue. Lectures and discussions lead to the development of realized projects to be coordinated with architectural studio. In this class we will examine how the idea of the city has been "translated" by artists, architects, and other diverse disciplines. We will consider how collaborations between artists and architects might provide opportunities for rethinking / redesigning urban spaces. The class will look specifically at planned cities like Brasilia, Las Vegas, Canberra, and Celebration and compare such tabula rasa designs with the redesign of recyclable urban spaces demonstrated in projects such as Ground Zero, Barcelona 2004, and Boston's Rose Kennedy Greenway. While the course will involve some reading and discussion, coursework will focus largely on the students' own projects / interventions that should evolve over the course of the semester. Of the two weekly class meetings, one will be a group discussion or lecture with the whole class and visiting guests, and the other will be an individual meeting between the student and the instructor to discuss his or her work for the class, including the final project.

Kevin Lynch's landmark volume, The Image of the City (1960), emphasized the perceptual characteristics of the urban environment, stressing the ways that individuals mentally organize their own sensory experience of cities. Increasingly, however, city imaging is supplemented and constructed by exposure to visual media, rather than by direct sense experience of urban realms. City images are not static, but subject to constant revision and manipulation by a variety of media-savvy individuals and institutions. In recent years, urban designers (and others) have used the idea of city image proactively-- seeking innovative ways to alter perceptions of urban, suburban, and regional areas. City imaging, in this sense, is the process of constructing visually-based narratives about the potential of places.

This studio proposes to engage tectonics as a material process. By exploring transformation, indeterminacy and mutability inherent in material and landscape processes, students will be challenged to engage notions of duration as a design strategy for architecture and urbanism. While the second law of thermodynamics states that the material universe tends toward a state of increasing disorder, architects build and construct in opposition to these forces. Attempting to delay the processes of disorder, decay and collapse, tectonics is often seen as the embodied expression of an arrested moment-the finite resolution of the building process. Yet the processes that enable and disable architecture extend beyond any arrested moment. While the design of materials is not new, the recent evolution of mutant materials and fabrication technologies has created a material culture pregnant with possibilities. Plastics can be endowed with the properties of glass, wood made to appear like fabric, and foams given the power of memory. Materials and their methods are multiplying while our inherited notions of material significance and signification are increasingly challenged. 'Truth' in materials or in their methods of construction is no longer (and arguably never was) an absolute concept. Highlighting the multiple states of materials (raw, finished, decomposed) and new methods for fabrication (CAD-CAM, CNC, rapid prototyping), this studio seeks to understand the processes that form, deform and ultimately dematerialize built matter. This studio will explore the limits of materiality and immateriality to engage a tectonics of temporal change, transformation, and succession. Materials will be treated, not merely as finishes, but as critical points of departure for investigating new spatial possibilities. Students will design and fabricate full scale material constructs in order to explore a material's inherent properties. Investigations of casting, stressing, weathering, eroding, corroding, etc. will be part of the design process. Students will translate these studies into critical architectural propositions for the Stearn's Quarry site in Chicago. Dating back 400 million years, the site was once a part of an ancient reef near the equator before the shift in the North American tectonic plate. Rich in calcium carbonate, the 23 acre Stearns quarry site was excavated from 1936 to 1970 to a depth of 350 feet. Located within Chicago's city grid, the quarry supplied the dolomite used to line the cities waterways and yielded an unprecedented amount of fossils from the Silurian Age. Since 1970 the quarry has been used as a dumping site for incinerator ash, and construction debris. Designated a 'Superfund Site' due to concerns over its toxicity, the city of Chicago is currently examining the reprogramming, reuse and reclamation of the site. Students will design a series of architectural interventions and public interfaces to enable, support and house the geological and ecological processes and artifacts of the site. The Stearns Quarry site presents a unique opportunity to engage temporal change, transformation, adaptation and succession at the scale of the building, the city and the landscape. By engaging the materials on the site in a process of excavation, recycling, and recovery, the studio addresses a prolonged understanding of architecture, one that acknowledges duration within the framework of architectural design. Engaged in the unpredictable interface of nature, history, construction and imagination, we will attempt to arrest, reverse, stretch, divert, adhere and accelerate the temporal qualities of architecture. The studio hopes to arrive at a strategy of reworking the landscape, rather than a finite architectural object- a shift from product to process. In doing so, it seeks to unleash urban scaled material effects within the deep surface of the landscape.

This course uses readings and discussions to focus on a series of short-term events that shed light on American politics, culture, and social organization. It emphasizes finding ways to make sense of these complicated, highly traumatic events, and on using them to understand larger processes of change in American history. The class also gives students experience with primary documentation research through a term paper assignment.

This course explores how social theories of urban life can be related to the city's architecture and spaces. It is grounded in classic or foundational writings about the city addressing such topics as the public realm and public space, impersonality, crowds and density, surveillance and civility, imprinting time on space, spatial justice, and the segregation of difference. The aim of the course is to generate new ideas about the city by connecting the social and the physical, using Boston as a visual laboratory. Students are required to present a term paper mediating what is read with what has been observed.

Focuses on the production of visual art for public places outside the gallery/museum context. Readings and discussions that engage aesthetic, social, political, and urban issues relevant to this expanded public context complement studio production. Traditional approaches of enhancement and commemoration are contrasted to more temporal and critical methodologies. Historical models are studied and discussed, including Russian Constructivist experiments, the Situationists, Conceptual Art, and more recent interventionist tactics.

This workshop investigates the current state of sustainability in regards to architecture, from the level of the tectonic detail to the urban environment. Current research and case studies will be investigated, and students will propose their own solutions as part of the final project.

Theories about cities and the form that settlements should take will be discussed. Attempts will be made at a distinction between descriptive and normative theory, by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. The class will concentrate on the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. It analyzes current issues of city form in relation to city making, social structure, and physical design. Case studies of several cities will be presented as examples of the theories discussed in the class.