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GSD Platform 4
Beyond a design school, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is an immersive environment--a dense atmosphere saturated with creative and intellectual activity. Platform 4 represents a selective sampling of agendas cultivated at the GSD during the last academic year, revealing a diverse mixture of projects, research, and events. Organized as a searchable database, this publication documents both site and situation at the GSD--it is an institutional index. While Platform 4 records research trajectories from the past year, it also has the capacity to set agendas for future work. By framing a set of issues and topics, Platform 4 focuses attention towards particular areas of interest, allowing individual work to build on and contribute to a larger body of disciplinary knowledge. In that sense, the themes within this book become projective, they provide frameworks for future inquiry.
Homing the Machine in Architecture
Homing the Machine in Architecture is a series of conversations on the ways designers, practitioners, historians, and theorists orient themselves within the world of architectural digital fabrication. To “home” a digital fabrication machine is to send it back to its origin point—a point that can be specified by the fabricator in advance of the fabrication process or by the defaults that are pre-programmed into the machine. The homing process is necessary and productive since it determines the physical point at which the machine (and the maker) begin making—every time that architectural designers begin to digitally fabricate something new, they first need to home the machine. This boo...
Responsive Environments
The entanglement of physical contexts with digital environments is constantly changing our relationship with the surrounding space and creating new hybrid experiences. These transformations pose complex design challenges and yet offer novel opportunities for the understanding and development of human-centered built environments. Drawing from a 5-year design research collaboration between the REAL Lab at Harvard GSD and the University of Bergamo, this book unfolds the experiential facets of our technologically-mediated relationship with space in the fields of architecture, urbanism and art. The book attempts to describe what makes an environment “responsive” in the form of a design manifesto, introducing ten attributes or principles at both methodological and experiential levels. Critically articulated from the perspective of leading experts, scholars and professionals, the ideas explored are unpacked through speculative urban visions and design concepts at different timeframes, contexts and scales ranging from smart artifacts to smart cities.
Imminent Commons: The Expanded City
In light of the increasing disengagement between urban and rural areas, this book address the interdependency of cities with ecological and technological processes outside the purview of traditional urban planning. It compiles a huge amount of essays in regards to the most important topics that cities must address today, such as their connection with global data networks, ecological cycles of resources which supersede the traditional boundaries of urbanism. For this reason, it frames investigation of contemporary urbanism on nine imminent commons grouping the urban commons into resources and technologies lead us to the arcane classification of natural resources: air, water, fire, and earth, the four elements of ancient cosmologies; and five basic technological commons based on expanded human capacities: sensing, communicating, moving, making, and recycling.
Diplomatic: Letter from the Architectural Enclave
Seeing Architecture as a political art, this book concerns itself with boundaries: those of regimes, of culture, of law, and of social strata. In a silent crisis where sustained inscription of physical and social boundaries evacuates urban space into archipelagos of enclaves, Architecture with only ambiguous claims of public space is rendered both an accomplice and a victim, impotent against forces of capital and concerns of security. Exposing the absurdities in urban geopolitics and persistent spatial logics of exclusivity is as important as proposing to hack into them. Critical of the innocence of so-called public space and the underlying architectural impasse, the book offers an investiga...
Mass-Customised Cities
What happens when computational design and fabrication technologies ramp up to the urban scale? Though these innovative production processes are currently now largely limited to small-scale design projects, what will happen when they are applied to the vast scale of the 21st-century world city? Could new technologies enable an important shift away from mass production to increasingly bespoke and custom-designed systems? The introduction of standardisation and mass production processes in the 20th century saw the industrial city take on a repetitious and homogeneous quality through the duplication of component parts. Today non-standard, bespoke systems hold out the promise of realising a distinctive urbanism; characterized by the differentiation of serial production and the variation of simple parts that should lead to a more complex and compelling whole. Given the current pace and rate of urbanisation in Asia, the mass customization of the city is set to have imminent and far-reaching practical consequences for the rest of the developing and developed world.
The Evolution of Computation in Architecture
This book is the first comprehensive overview of the pioneering works, events, and people that contributed to the paradigm shift defined by computation in architecture. Only recently has computation fostered profound new ways of designing, fabricating, constructing, and thinking about architecture. While the profession sits at the end of the beginning of this historically transformative shift, it is now possible to look back upon the rapidly maturing landscape of projects, influencers, and tools that have finally begun to catch up with the visionary thinking of the past. Readers are guided through the fascinating and fast-paced historical timeline of the development of computation in archite...
The Generic Sublime
The Generic Sublime is the outcome of an investigation on extra-extra-large developmental typologies carried out at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Departments of Architecture, Urban Design and Planning, and Landscape Architecture, between the years 2010 and 2013. The book assembles this investigation and structures its materials, methods and outcomes along three parts. The first part includes a series of writings by the author and invited theoreticians and practitioners toward debating, substantiating or challenging the theory of the Generic Sublime, as presented by the book. The second part proposes three operative taxonomies, understood as the consecutive steps in a proc...
Bizarre World
Atlas Obscura meets 1001 Facts to Scare the Sh*t Out of You in this serious survey of the most bizarre, creepy, and sometimes hilarious customs from cultures around the world. Every culture handles life differently. From the “blackening of the bride” in Scotland and the custom of not looking babies in the eyes in Kenya, to enlisting geese as part of the police squad in China and the tradition of children eating bread with chocolate sprinkles for breakfast in Amsterdam, there are so many unique behaviors all across the world. In Bizarre World, journey across the globe to understand how various cultures approach everything from grief, beauty standards, food, parenting, death, stress management, happiness, and more. Many customs may seem perfectly sane, while others, not so much. Some are just downright strange, funny, or weird. There’s so much to discover about the people around us and the beliefs they hold. Let Bizarre World be your armchair guide to a different way of life with quick facts and “did you knows?” that will leave you saying, “huh, that’s strange.”
