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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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
Armed with Bible and primer, missionaries and teachers in colonial America sought, in their words, “to Christianize and civilize the native heathen.” Both the attempts to transform Indians via schooling and the Indians' reaction to such efforts are closely studied for the first time in Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783. Margaret Connell Szasz’s remarkable synthesis of archival and published materials is a detailed and engaging story told from both Indian and European perspectives. Szasz argues that the most intriguing dimension of colonial Indian education came with the individuals who tried to work across cultures. We learn of the remarkable accomplishments of two Algonquian students at Harvard, of the Creek woman Mary Musgrove who enabled James Oglethorpe and the Georgians to establish peaceful relations with the Creek Nation, and of Algonquian minister Samson Occom, whose intermediary skills led to the founding of Dartmouth College. The story of these individuals and their compatriots plus the numerous experiments in Indian schooling provide a new way of looking at Indian-white relations and colonial Indian education.
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...