Spring 2022 Elective Descriptions

Spring 2022 Elective Course Descriptions as of 11/8/2021

Please contact respective departments for more information. 

Electives

This page includes a partial list of electives offered at the Weitzman School for the Spring 2022 term. These electives may appeal to a cross-disciplinary audiences, beyond only students in the courses' home departments.

For a full list of Weitzman Spring courses, check out the ARCH, CPLN, FNAR, HSPV, and LARP subject rosters on the Registrar's page. Many of these courses may be open to students outside the department.

Architecture

*Subject to change* - Please check course search for up-to-date information on ARCH electives
If a course is CLOSED, contact instructor for waitlist.
If a course requires a permit, contact Sarah Lam sarahlam@design.upenn.edu 
 
ARCH 685-401: Environmental Readings
Frederick Steiner
Wednesday and Friday, 10:15AM-11:45AM
A long, deep green thread exists in American literature from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman through Herman Melville and William Carlos Williams on to Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry. This literature has influenced how we perceive our environments and, in the process, many planners, designers, and conservationists such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Addams, Aldo Leopold, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg, and Anne Whiston Spirn. In this seminar, we will explore this green thread and analyze its influence on how we shape our environments through design and planning. The course has three parts. Throughout, the influence of literature on design and planning theory will be explored. The first part will focus on the three most important theorists in environmental planning and landscape architecture: Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., Charles Eliot, and Ian McHarg. The senior Olmsted pretty much created the field of landscape architecture, adapting the English landscape aesthetic for the rapidly urbanizing North American continent to address pressing urban issues. Arguably, the planning profession in the United States also began with the senior Olmsted. Charles Eliot was a protégé of Olmsted’s. Eliot pioneered the use of comprehensive, scientific landscape inventories; originated the concept of land trusts; and designed the first metropolitan regional open-space plan. Educated in landscape architecture and city planning, Ian McHarg influenced both fields in the late twentieth century. He urged us to better understand natural processes and how people use space. The second part of the course will critically explore current theories in environmental planning and landscape architecture. The topics will include: frameworks for cultural landscape studies, the future of the vernacular, ecological design and planning, sustainable and regenerative design, the languages of landscapes, and evolving views of landscape aesthetics and ethics. In the third part of the course, students will build on the readings to develop their own theory for ecological planning or, alternatively, landscape architecture. While literacy and critical inquiry are addressed throughout the course, critical thinking is especially important for this final section.
 
ARCH 712-001: Topics in Arch Theory II: Visual Research: Architecture and Media after WWII
Taryn Mudge
Tuesday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
This course will question how architects have engaged in visual research of the built environment within the process of architectural design. In particular, we will consider the media and methods architects have used to observe and to record building sites and how visual information has influenced design thinking and informed architectural proposals in the postwar period. The visual material under investigation in this course will include, but is not limited to, photography (aerial, documentary, street, etc.), film, sketches, painting, collage, mapping as well as magazines and advertisements. Additionally, we will consider the physical distance and relationship between the observer and the observed. For example, does the architect observe the site from the air, as a pedestrian, or through a windshield? Do they borrow images or make their own? Are they in search of precise information or are they hoping to uncover the mood or local character? Are they preparing for a commissioned project or are they dreaming of a utopian future? The course is organized into three parts: Part I will concentrate on approaches to visual research and observation in Europe immediately following the Second World War, Part II will focus on the American context and images of postwar consumer culture, and Part III will discuss the rapid evolution of media and architecture in the late 20th century and question the trajectory of the “post” periods – post-modern, post-post-modern, post-documentary, post-digital and beyond.
 
ARCH 712-003: Topics in Arch Theory II: Architectural Envelopes: Technology and Expression
Ariel Genadt
Thursday, 5:15PM-08:30PM
Since the mid 19th century, architectural envelopes have become the prime subject of experimentations and investments, as well as theoretical conflicts. This seminar takes the revolution of steel and glass technology in the 19th century as a starting point to examine the relationship between construction technologies and architectural expression in the 20th and 21st centuries. It explores the interdependence of theory and practice in case studies located in various cultures and climates around the world, and built in a range of techniques and materials. The lectures are organized thematically, looking at the different ways by which technology can be instrumental in selectively revealing and concealing structural logic, material properties, fabrication, digital tools, climate control, sensorial perception, image-making, symbolism and atmosphere. The seminar develops students’ critical thinking towards contemporary practice, where globalized technology and large capital often hinder the creation of architecture with local cultural pertinence. Understanding the reciprocities between building, technology and expression is essential for creatively tackling architecture’s impact on the environment and sustaining its civic agency.
 
ARCH 712-004: Topics in Arch Theory II: Baroque Parameters
Andrew Saunders
Tuesday, 1:45-4:45
This course will provide an overview of the debate surrounding the term Baroque and its contemporary implications. The term Baroque is the subject of many debates ranging from its etymological origin, to disputes on the emergence of an aesthetic “style” post Council of Trent in the seventeenth century by historians such as Heinrich Wölfflin, and the more current and most broad application of the term as a recursive philosophical concept suggested by Gilles Deleuze to “Fold” through time. Although illusive and as dynamic as the work itself, students will become familiar with how the term Baroque has been associated with specific characteristics, attitudes and effects or more specifically the architectural consequences it has produced.
 
ARCH 718-001: History and Theory of Architecture and Climate
Kiel Moe
Wednesday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
Climate change is upon us. This course discusses the history of thinking about climate in architecture. We confront the geographic and epistemic challenges of climate change and other environmental threats, and reconsider the forces seen to condition the development of modern architecture. The course will explore the history of buildings as mechanisms of climate management, and the theoretical and conceptual frameworks that pertain.
As many of the arguments and innovations in the climate discourse were made through visual means, the images produced by architects and others interested in understanding the relationship between “man” and “climate” will be a central arena of exploration. We will treat these images as evidence of material innovations in energy efficient architectural design technologies and also as evidence of new ways of thinking about ecological, political, cultural, and economic relationships.
These narratives, images, and methods – and the broader understanding of environmental systems that emerged since the immediate post-war period – also suggest a complex relationship to the present. Rather than examine instrumental aspects of these methods and their histories, we will explore different historiographic and conceptual means for the archival analysis of climate, technology, and architecture. Recent texts concerned with theories of historical change, of new ideas about the human, and with the cultural anxieties associated with the Anthropocene will be read to this end.
 
ARCH 726-001: Furniture Design as Strategic Process
Mikael Avery
Thursday, 12:00PM-3:00PM
Like architecture, furniture exists at the intersection of idea and physical form. Due to the specific scale that furniture occupies, however, this physical form relates not only to the environment in which the furniture is set, but also intimately to the physical bodies that interact with and around it. Additionally, as a manufactured product, often specified in large quantities, furniture must also address not only poetic considerations, but practical and economic ones as well. Instead of being seen as one-off objects, the furniture created in this seminar focuses on furniture development as a strategic design process where the designer’s role is to understand the various responsibilities to each stakeholder (client/manufacturer, market/customer, environment) and the additional considerations (materials, processes, manufacturability, etc.), and ultimately translate these points into a potentially successful product.
In order to approach furniture in this manner, the course will be structured around specific design briefs and clustered into three distinct but continuous stages. First, through focused research into stakeholder needs and potential market opportunities, students will craft tailored design proposals and development concepts accordingly. Next, students will work toward visualizing a concept, complete with sketches, small mock-ups, scale-model prototypes, technical drawings, connections and other pertinent details in order to refine their proposals and secure a real world understanding of the manufacturing processes and the potential obstacles created by their decisions. From insights gained and feedback from these steps, students will ultimately develop a final design proposal for a piece, collection, or system of furniture that successfully leverages their understanding of a thoughtful and deliberate design strategy.
 
ARCH 732-001: Tech Designated Elective: Enclosures: Selection, Affinities & Integration
Charles Berman
Wednesday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
Details should be considered in the traditional sense, as assemblages of constituent elements. Not as a mere collection of parts, rather as an “assemblage”, the act of assembling under a guiding principle; the relationship to a whole. Frascari defines the detail as the union of construction – having the dual role of ruling both the construction and construing of architecture. This obligation of the relationship of the parts to the whole and the whole to the parts is the essence of the revelatory detail in service of architecture.
This seminar seeks to establish a framework of understanding enclosures in this sense of the revelatory detail. We will seek to counterpoint the numerical (external) facts of what is accepted as facade design (criteria, codes, loads, forces and consumptions) with an understanding of the generative processes underlying these physical criteria. The aim of this seminar is to arm the student with a guided understanding of the materials and assemblies available to them to form enclosures. The underlying intent is twofold.
In a generative role as architects, the course intends not for an encyclopedic overview of the elements and calculative methodologies of envelope design. Rather we will endeavor to investigate concepts of enclosure through assemblage of elements, mediated by details, in the service of the architectural intentions of the student. In a execution role as architects in practice, the investigation into methodologies of deployment and execution of enclosure, materials and assemblies is intended to arm the students to engage proactively in their future practices with the succession of consulting engineers, specialty facade consultants, manufacturers and facade contractors that they will encounter during the execution of their work.
 
ARCH 732-002: Beyond the Binary
Simon Kim & Mark Yim
Wednesday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
This seminar will examine the design methods of dynamic relationships in design and performance for stage and audience.  The class will be one part research and one part development of prototype for performance with the Mendelssohn Choir. As such, a heavy emphasis will be placed in producing a working prototype for the final performance. This means that the design and engineering needs to be ‘stage-proofed’ so that it is robust in its parts and performance
 
ARCH 732-003: Tech Designated Elective: Deployable Structures
Mohamad Al Khayer
Thursday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
The objective of this course is to introduce the rapidly growing field of deployable structures through hands on experiments conducted in workshop environments. Students develop skills in making deployable structures.
 
ARCH 732-004: Tech Designated Elective: Daylighting
Janki Vyas
Tuesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
This course aims to introduce fundamental daylighting concepts and tools to analyze daylighting design. The wide range of topics to be studied includes site planning, building envelope and shading optimization, passive solar design, daylight delivery methods, daylight analysis structure and results interpretation, and a brief daylighting and lighting design integration.
 
ARCH 732-005: Tech Designated Elective: Principles of Digital Fabrication
Mikael Avery
Thursday, 3:30PM-6:30PM
Through the almost seamless ability to output digital designs to physical objects, digital fabrication has transformed the way designers work. At this point, many of the tools and techniques of digital fabrication are well established and almost taken for granted within the design professions. To begin this course we will review these ‘traditional’ digital fabrication techniques in order to establish a baseline skill set to work from. We will then utilize a series of exercises in order to explore a hybrid approaches to digital fabrication in which multiple techniques are utilized within the same work. With the advent of 3D printing technology in the late 1980s and the current wave of widespread adoption as a design tool—found in design schools and offices across the world—the immediate testing of complex digital models has never been quicker, clearer, or more immediate. Despite this formal freedom to test and print, the installations and buildings generated from these complex digital models rely on much more traditional building techniques for their construction. By combining various digital fabrication approaches, we seek to challenge and reframe the often reductive geometries that currently supports much of this work and bring with it a new way of approaching aesthetics, structure, and construction based on the possibilities inherent in these digital tools and techniques.
 
ARCH 732-006: Tech Designated Elective: Heavy Architecture
Philip Ryan
Thursday, 3:30PM-6:30PM
Heavy Architecture is a seminar that will examine buildings that, through their tectonics or formal expression, connote a feeling of weight, permanence, or “heaviness.” Analysis of these buildings and methods of construction stand in relation to the proliferation of thin, formally exuberant, and, by virtue of their use or commodified nature, transient buildings. The course is not a rejection or formal critique of “thin” architecture, but instead an analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of the “heavy” building type in terms of a building’s financial, environmental, symbolic or conceptual, and functional goals. The course will parse the alleged nostalgic or habitual reputation of “heavy” architecture within the context of architecture’s ongoing struggle to be the vanguard of the built environment even while its relevancy and voice is challenged by economic, stylistic, and social forces.
 
ARCH 732-007: Envisioning Climate: A Virtual Reality Seminar
Vanessa Keith & Andrew Homick
Monday, 7:00PM-10:00PM
How can we mobilize to change the future for the better? Climate change unquestionably represents the biggest challenge to the continued presence of humankind—or any other species—on this planet. Managing and attempting to limit the effects of global warming should be our biggest project, prompting us to marshal our collective will, energy, and creativity to design a livable solution to the inevitable shifts in weather and habitat.
Urgent timelines alone, however, are not enough to prompt action. This seminar aims to make the invisible visible and tangible by harnessing virtual reality as an empathy machine. Taking inspiration from VR artists and creatives like Participant Media and Condition One (This Is Climate Change), Marshmallow Laser Feast (In the Eyes of the Animal, Ocean of Air), Winslow Porter and Milica Zec (Tree), Tamiko Thiel (Evolution of Fish, Unexpected Growth), the Yale University Hackathon (The Reality of Global Climate Change), among others, we will bring to life the latest climate data on the city’s potential future(s) in VR with the aim of creating immersive experiences that can spur us to positive change in the here and now.
 
ARCH 732-008: Tech Designated Elective: Inquiry into Biomaterial Architectures
Laia Mogas Soldevila
Monday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
Traditional building materials are environmentally- and economically-expensive to extract, process, transport or recycle, their damage is non-trivial to repair, and have limited ability to respond to changes in their immediate surroundings. Biological materials like wood, coral, silk, skin or bone outperform man-made materials in that they can be grown where needed, self-repair when damaged, and respond to changes in their surroundings. Their inclusion in architectural practice could have great benefits in wellbeing and the environment defining new tools and strategies towards the future of sustainable construction. Crucial projects describing future biomaterial architectures are emerging in the field. In this seminar, students will review their potential through lectures followed by case studies and propose future developments through a guided research project with special attention to functional, industrial, environmental and aesthetic dimensions. The course is structured to foster fundamental scientific literacy, cross-disciplinary thinking, creativity, and innovation in biomaterials in design.
 
ARCH 734-001: Ecological Architecture- Contemporary Practices
Todd Woodward
Tuesday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
Architecture is an inherently exploitive act – we utilize resources from the earth and produce waste and pollution to create and occupy buildings. We have learned that buildings are responsible for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions, 15% of water use and 30% of landfill debris. This growing realization has led building designers to look for ways to minimize negative environmental impacts. Green building design practices are seemingly becoming mainstream. Green building certification programs and building performance metrics are no longer considered fringe ideas. This course will investigate these trends and the underlying theory with a critical eye. Is "mainstream green" really delivering the earth-saving architecture it claims? As green building practices become more widespread, there remains something unsatisfying about a design approach that focuses on limits, checklists, negative impacts and being “less bad.” Can we aspire to something more? If so, what would that be? How can or should the act of design change to accommodate an ecological approach?
 
ARCH 736-001: Tech Designated Elective: Building Acoustics
Joe Solway
Tuesday, 3:30PM-6:30PM
0.5 CU – 01/12/22 – 03/02/22
This course covers the fundamentals of architectural acoustics and the interdependence between acoustics and architectural design. The course explores the effects of building massing, room shape and form, and architectural finishes on a project site’s soundscape and the user’s acoustic experience. It will include fundamentals on sound, sound isolation, room acoustics and building systems noise control, a lecture on the history and future of performance space design, a virtual visit to the Arup SoundLab, and two assignments.
 
ARCH 736-002: Tech Designated Elective: Virtual Construction & Detailing with BIM
Patrick Morgan
Thursday, 5:15-8:15
0.5 CU – 01/12/22 – 03/02/22
Building Information Modeling (BIM) has become the standard of building construction, design, and operation. During the past decade significant changes have taken place in the nature of design and construction practices which has transformed the very nature of architectural representation. Architects no longer draw 2D deceptions of what they intend others to build, but they instead model, code, simulate and integrate the final built product virtually, alongside their colleagues and collaborators, architects, engineers and builders. The production of an information rich BIM is the ground upon which all construction activities for advanced and complex buildings take place. BIM is also the origins of contemporary innovations in Integrated Design, the creation of collaborative platforms which aim to maximize the sustainable outcomes in the project delivery of buildings. Moreover, being able to collaboratively produce, share and query a BIM makes possible the global practice of design and construction. The course will familiarize students to this important field of architectural practice.
 
ARCH 736-006: Tech Designated Elective: Seeing Architecture: Technology, Ecology, Practice
Richard Garber
Monday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
0.5 CU – 03/03/22 – 04/27/22
The course will ask students to consider how we see architecture from both a technological and ecological basis – that is how we understand buildings within the larger global environment we co-habit; as well as how we can learn from booth our past as well as the earth itself – from “the ever nonobjective to which we are subject” to “an object that stands before us and can be seen” (Heidegger, The
Origin of the Work of Art, 1950). The implications of design, and more specifically the future work
of architects. Through a series of lectures and readings, students will have the opportunity to consider
building, both as a subjective act and an objective consequence of architectural workflows within the
larger framework of built ecologies and ecologies of thought.
 
 
ARCH 742-001: The Function of Fashion in Architecture
Danielle Willems
Monday, 7:00PM-10:00PM
The Function of Fashion in Architecture will survey the history of fashion and the architectural parallels starting from Ancient Civilization to Present. The focus will be on the relevance of garment design, methods and techniques and their potential to redefine current architecture elements such as envelope, structure, seams, tectonics and details. The functional, tectonic and structural properties of garment design will be explored as generative platforms to conceptualize very specific architectural elements. One of the challenges in the course is the re-invention of a means of assessment, the development of notations and techniques that will document the forces and the production of difference in the spatial manifestations of the generative systems.
 
ARCH 744-001: Image, Object, Architecture
Ferda Kolatan
Monday, 7:00PM-10:00PM
Architecture is intrinsically linked to objects and images. Since the earliest days of prehistoric monuments and painted caves, architecture has developed an inherently iconographic function. This function can be described as follows: Immaterial ideas about the world are physically embodied through material practices such as drawing, painting, and form-making. Or in other words,
architecture is a means of expressing cultural predilections, interests, and desires. This representational quality was traditionally aided by integrating painting and sculpting directly
into architecture. The confluence of these different mediums and their specific techniques and technologies was viewed as a critical component of manifesting ideas in matter. In modern times
however the iconographic function of architecture shifted toward abstraction and an emphasis was placed on separating mediums dealing with image, object, and architecture rather than further
integrating them. The seminar will re-examine the combinatorial alliance of image, object, and architecture in the context of contemporary cultural ideas and technologies by designing artifacts
that produce novel architectural effects and iconographies.
 
 
ARCH 748-001 Architecture and the New Elegance
Hina Jamelle
Wednesday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
The seminar will define and elaborate on the following topics for the digital discourse- diagrammatic relations, technique and aesthetic principles. Technological innovations establish new status quos and updated platforms from which to operate and launch further innovations. Design research practices continually reinvent themselves and the techniques they use to stay ahead of such developments. Mastery of techniques remains important and underpins the use of digital technologies in the design and manufacturing of elegant buildings. But, ultimately, a highly sophisticated formal language propels aesthetics. The seminar seeks to reframe the questions facing architectural design, setting the intellectual framework for an increasingly expansive set of design solutions. The goal is to narrow the gap between aesthetics, design research and practice.
 
ARCH 754-001: Performance Design Workshop
Jihun Kim
Wednesday, 8:30-11:30
The workshop applies simulation and diagramming techniques to a series of discrete design projects at different scales. The emphasis is on refinement and optimization of performance based building design. Performance analysis techniques can provide enormous amounts of information to support the design process, acting as feedback mechanisms for improved performance, but careful interpretation and implementation are required to achieve better buildings. Energy, lighting, and air flow are the three main domains convered in the workshop. Students will learn how to utilize domain tools at an advanced level, and utilize them as applications to examine the environmental performance of existing buildings. Using the results of analytical techniques, the students will develop high-performance design strategies in all three domains. Lectures will be given on specific topics each week. A series of analytical class exercises will be assigned to provide students with hands-on experience in using the computer models. A case-study building will be provided at the beginning of the course and students will model different components each week throughout the semester. Every week students present the progress of their work, which will be used to correct methodological and technical issues. Energy, lighting, and air flow are the three main domains covered in the workshop. Students will learn how to utilize domain tools at an advanced level, and utilize them as applications to examine the environmental performance of existing buildings. Using the results of analytical techniques, the students will develop high-performance design strategies in all three domains. Prerequisite: ARCH 753 Lectures will be given on specific topics each week. A series of analytical class exercises will be assigned to provide students with hands-on experience in using the computer models. A case-study building will be provided at the beginning of the course and students will model different components each week throughout the semester. Every week students present the progress of their work, which will be used to correct methodological and technical issues.
 
ARCH 762-401: Design and Development
Alan Razak
Friday, 8:30-11:30
This newly reconstituted course will introduce designers and planners to practical methods of design and development for major real estate product types. Topics will include product archetypes, site selection and obtaining entitlements, basic site planning, programming, and conceptual and basic design principles. Project types will include, among others; infill and suburban office parks, all retail forms, campus and institutional projects. Two-person teams of developers and architects will present and discuss actual development projects.
 
ARCH 765-001: Project Management
Charles Capaldi
Friday, 8:30-11:30
This course is an introduction to techniques and tools of managing the design and construction of large, and small, construction projects. Topics include project delivery systems, management tools, cost-control and budgeting systems, professional roles. Case studies serve to illustrate applications. Cost and schedule control systems are described. Case studies illustrate the application of techniques in the field.
 
ARCH 768-401: Real Estate Development
Asuka Nakahara
Wednesday, 3:30-6:30
This course focuses on “ground-up” development as well as re- development, and acquisition investments. We will examine traditional real estate product types including office, R&D, retail, warehouses, lodging, single-family and multi-family residential, mixed use, and land. “Specialty” uses like golf courses, resorts, timeshares, and senior assisted living will be analyzed. You will learn the development process from market analysis, site acquisition, zoning, entitlements, approvals, site planning, building design, construction, financing, and leasing to ongoing management and disposition. Additional topics - workouts, leadership, and running an entrepreneurial company - will be discussed.  Throughout, we will focus on risk management, as minimizing risk first results in maximizing long run profits and net worth accumulation.
 
ARCH 814-001: The Idea of the Avant-Garde in Architecture
Joan Ockman
Wednesday, 8:30-11:30
No historian of architecture has written as intensely about the contradictions of architecture in late-modern society or reflected as deeply on the resulting problems and tasks of architectural historiography as Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994). For many, the Italian historian's dismissal of "hopes in design" under conditions of advanced capitalism produced a disciplinary impasse. This in turn led to call to oublier Tafuri - to move beyong his pessimistic and lacerating stance. The seminar will undertake a close reading of one of Tafuri's most complexly conceived and richly elaborated books, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture form Piranesi to the 1970s. Initially published in Italian in 1980 and translated into English in 1987, the book represents the first effort to define and historicize the concept of an avant-garde specifically in architecture. Its content centers on the radical formal and urban experiments of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet Tafuri surprisingly begins his account with the eighteenth-century inventions of Piranesi, and he concludes with an examination of the "neo-avant-garde" of his own day. In addition to traversing The Sphere and the Labyrinth chapter by chapter - starting with the extraordinary methodological introduction, "The Historical 'Project'"-we shall also read a number of primary and secondary sources on the historical contexts under discussion and consider a number of important intertexts that shed light on Tafuri's position. The objectives of the course are at once historical and historiographic: we shall be concerned both with actual events and with how they have been written into history. Finally, we shall reassess the role of an avant-garde in architecture and compare Tafuri's conception to that advanced in other disciplines. Is the concept of an avant-garde still viable today? Or should it be consigned to the dustbin of twentieth-century ideas? Assignment for first class: read the introduction to The Sphere and the Labyrinth, pp. 1-21, "The Historical 'Project.'" A copy of the book is on reserve at the library. Note: the book is out of print. For future classes please make every effort to purchase a used copy or obtain one via interlibrary loan. Copies of individual chapters will also be made available on our class website.

City Planning

CPLN 623-001: Policing, Prison, Community and Economy (The Carceral State)
Lisa Servon
Tuesdays, 1:45PM-4:45PM
This course examines the period of mass incarceration that began in the US in the 1970s, its impact on communities and its connection to economic development. We'll look specifically at policies that fostered mass incarceration, the financialization of the criminal justice system, the militarization of policing, and grassroots organizing movements that challenge the carceral state. We will examine the ways in which policies and practices have had disparate impacts on people of color and women, and we will also pay attention to space and place, endeavoring to understand differences at the local, county and state levels. Students will read books and articles from a range of disciplines including sociology, law, political science, and planning. We will also read poetry and memoir, and study places that have instituted policies and practices that go against the grain. This is a heavy reading course that relies on student engagement and discussion. We will also take a couple of field trips to local reentry organizations, and students will be required to do courtroom observations.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
CPLN 730-001: Sustainable Cities
Allison Lassiter
Wednesdays, 1:45PM-4:45P
This reading and writing-intensive discussion seminar reviews and debates the history and future of sustainable urban development, primarily focusing on cities in the United States. We examine the theory behind the sustainable cities movement, charting the evolution from green cities to smart growth and landscape urbanism, to low-carbon cities, to resilient cities and just cities. We critically evaluate contemporary examples of sustainability planning by focusing on major environmental resources and movements within sustainability discourse. We discuss regulation, incentives, technological advances, and social norms. Finally, we evaluate contemporary urban sustainability plans. The class meetings leave room for students to raise and debate their own ideas of sustainability—in past semesters, students have driven conversation everywhere from cricket-based foods, to battery technology, to building community trust. By the end of the course, students will have a much more nuanced and comprehensive idea of what a sustainable city is and is not.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
CPLN 654-001: The Practice of Transportation Planning:  Crafting Policies & Bldg. Infrastructure
PERMIT NEEDED*
Leslie Richards
Fridays, 8:30AM-11:30AM
As the first woman and planner to serve as Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), and now as General Manager and CEO of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), Leslie Richards has over 20 years of leadership experience working on the planning and delivery of transportation projects, including overseeing two of the largest and most innovative transportation agencies in the U.S. She is recognized for her ability to find common ground among bi-partisan boards, as well as her commitment to engage local communities before the implementation of transportation projects to incorporate quality of life issues in all decisions. Her experience gives her a unique perspective on understanding operational, financial and stakeholder issues of transportation planning. 
In this seminar-style course, we will explore the planning, development and delivery of multimodal projects and policies at the state and regional level, including national influences and an awareness of the many actors and processes involved. Topics to be discussed include: funding and implementation processes through the levels of government; challenges and opportunities working with different sectors, politics, and contexts; current issues and emerging technologies; and best practices for individuals pursuing careers in planning or public administration. Presentations and lectures will be supplemented by guest presentations from transportation leaders, policymakers, and planning consultants offering local, regional, and state perspectives. Students will have the opportunity to learn directly from leaders in the field and develop the skills and knowledge to work effectively with federal, state, and local entities.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments.
 
CPLN 577-001: Asian New Towns (Topics in International Development)
Zhongjie Lin
Monday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
The concept of new town has transformed during the decades following the post-World War II reconstructions and continued to adapt to the globalized economy and neoliberal politics. It still effectively characterizes the wholesale master-planning approach of creating massive urban spaces as idealized environments on large sites treated as blank canvases, informed by ambitious political agendas and fixed principles, and built as antithesis to the (supposedly) declining old towns, a notion inherited from Howard’s model and the Modernist ideologies. Following a necessary historical recap of the evolution of new towns in the West and analysis of some of the landmark examples, this seminar focuses on the “new towns in the neoliberal era,” particularly those emerging in China and other regions in Asia in the last few decades. They represent a particular phase and typology of the new town that is transforming space production process, intensifying social inequality, and materializing political ambition.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments.
 
CPLN 665-001: Case Studies & Urban Design Exploration,
David Gouveneur 
Tuesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Contemporary Urbanism is a dynamic class in which each session is centered on a particular topic (see list below), combining class discussions and also the presentation of short planning/design exercises produced by small groups without the pressure of the studios, allowing to rapidly identify design opportunities, delivering the proposals with compelling narratives, strategic moves, graphics, models and verbal communication. Participants in this course are expected to become familiarized with a diversity of urban references, while acquiring skills that will facilitate planning and design processes, appreciating the value of interdisciplinary and multi-scaler initiatives, and the transformative contributions of city design/placemaking. Course topics include: good cities offer...; from territory to site-specific; on the public realm; on the urban infill; delving on history; mobility/infrastructure and urban form; community and urban design; Landscape/Ecological/Transformative Urbanism.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students in all departments, and HSPV students in particular.
 
CPLN 685-401: Environmental Readings
Frederick Steiner
Wednesday and Friday, 10:15AM-11:45AM
In this seminar, we will explore this green thread and analyze its influence on how we shape our environments through design and planning. The course has three parts. Throughout, the influence of literature on design and planning theory will be explored. The first part will focus on two of the most important theorists in environmental planning and landscape architecture: Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. and Ian L. McHarg. The second part of the course will critically explore current theories in environmental planning and landscape architecture. The topics include: frameworks for cultural landscape studies, the future of the vernacular, ecological design and planning, sustainable and regenerative design, the languages of landscapes, and evolving views of landscape aesthetics and ethics. In the third part of the course, students will build on the readings to develop their own theory for ecological planning or, alternatively, landscape architecture. While literacy and critical inquiry are addressed throughout the course, critical thinking is especially important for this final section.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments

Fine Arts

DSGN 506: DESIGN 21: Design After the Digital
Mina Zarfsaz
Tuesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
Last century, the digital revolution transformed every aspect of our lives. It shaped every design discipline and defined the ways we imagine and fabricate anything from images to everyday products to clothing, cars, buildings and megacities. Today, design is going through other technical and conceptual revolutions. We design with biotechnologies, fall in love in Virtual Reality with AI bots, rent our cognitive labor through cryptocurriencies. Our creative capabilities, on the other hand, are bounded by a polluted, over-crowded, and resource-constrained planet that is suffering major income and educational inequality. Design After the Digital interrogates the role of design for this century. The seminar surveys the conceptual and technical develoPMents in the past decade to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of design, science and technology. We will study how new design and fabrication methods shape what we eat, what we wear, how we form opinions and express ourselves. The goal will be to develop new literacies of design that will help us acclimate better to the realities of the century as creative and critical citizens who can shape its products and values.
 
FNAR 508: CLAY PRACTICES
Kirk McCarthy
Tuesday and Thursday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
This course introduces clay as a sculptural medium through fundamental clay-building techniques, mold making, model making, and casting. Through experimentation with these methods, this course promotes an understanding of materials, processes, visual concepts and techniques for creating three-dimensional forms in space. In addition to using different water-based clays and plaster, other materials such as wax, plastiline, paper pulp, and cardboard will be explored. Students will explore the full range of clay s capabilities and its role in contemporary art through lectures, readings, demonstrations, and assignments that incorporate conceptual and technical issues. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
DSGN 519: FEMINIST TECHNOSCIENCE
Ani Liu
Wednesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
How does scientific research produce and reinforce concepts of gender? How is sexism propagated through technological media? This course investigates how scientific and technological media shape culture and society, particularly through the lens of gender and sexuality. Engaging in interdisciplinary art making, students will use various technological media to reflect on the social, political, and ethical domains of technoscientific feminism. Exploring the relationship between digital and physical realities, students will engage art and design with critical social discourse and gender theory. Students will also develop skills in active reading, critical analysis, and scholarly writing. By the end of the course, students will have created a unique work of art that imagines more empowered, equitable futures. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
DSGN 520: PIXEL TO PRINT
Kayla Romberger
Monday, Wednesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
This studio course introduces students to the world of print media and circulation through techniques in Risograph (a high-speed digital printing system developed in Japan in the 1980s), xerography, and letterpress, focusing particularly on the format of posters and artists' ephemera. Beginning with the Adobe Creative Suite, students will create their own broadsides, flyers, announcement cards, and print-based installations throughout the course, exploring ways in which artists and designers make use of the printed form to disseminate information; initiate happenings; advertise events; or foment change. Students will learn about some of the most significant producers working within this realm--from Dada to punk bands in the '70s to contemporary hybrid publishing collectives--and develop skills in page layout, typography, and design; digital to analog pre-press and post-print production methods; and mechanized and hand-pulled press operations. The course includes a field trip to NYC.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all department
 
FNAR 523: DRAWING I
Section 401 – Alexis Granwell – Tuesday and Thursday: 5:15PM-8:15PM
Section 404 – Alexis Granwell – Monday and Wednesday: 5:15PM-8:15PM
Section 405 – Roderick Jones – Tuesday and Thursday: 1:45PM-4:45PM
This course is designed to develop visual awareness and perceptual acuity through the process of drawing. Students learn to sharpen perceptual skills through observational drawing, and to explore the expressive potential of drawing. A variety of problems and media will be presented in order to familiarize students with various methods of working and ways of communicating ideas visually. Subject matter will include object study, still life, interior and exterior space, self-portrait and the figure. Different techniques and materials (charcoal, graphite, ink, collage) are explored in order to understand the relationship between means, material and concept. Critical thinking skills are developed through frequent class critiques and through the presentation of and research into historical and contemporary precedent in drawing. If you need assistance registering for a closed section, please email the department at fnarug@design.upenn.edu.
 
FNAR 524: DRAWING INVESTIGATIONS
Ivanco Talevski
Monday and Wednesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Drawing is a fundamental means of visualization and a hub for thinking, constructing, and engaging in a wide variety of creative activities and problem-solving. This studio class explores drawing in both its traditional and contemporary forms. The projects are designed to help students in all disciplines find ways express and clarify their ideas through the process of drawing. The semester begins with the refinement of perceptual skills acquired in Drawing I, while encouraging experimentation through the introduction of color, abstract agendas, conceptual problem solving, and collaborative exercises, as well as new materials, techniques and large format drawings. Particular attention is given to ways to conduct visual research in the develoPMent of personal imagery. Assignments are thematic or conceptually based with ample opportunity for individual approaches to media, subject, scale and process. The goal is to strengthen facility, develop clarity in intent and expand expression. Attention is paid to the develoPMent of perceptual sensitivity, methods of image construction, and the processes of synthesis and transformation in order to communicate ideas through visual means. Recommended for students in all areas.
 
FNAR 525: FIGURE PAINTING
Jotham Malave-Maldonado
Tuesday and Thursday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Beyond the introduction to technique and materials this course will emphasis the figure in historical & contemporary painting. This course will be based in perception, working from the model and move through modernism and toward varying approaches to the figure. Further investigation about the language of color through color theory will be covered. Drawing 1 pre-requisite, Painting 1 pre-requisite recommended but not mandatory.
 
DSGN 528: FUNCTIONS AND MATERIAL
Joshua Mosley
Tuesday and Thursday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
This studio course will introduce methods of material selection and fabrication with the goal of developing evocative and effective designs. We will learn parametric modeling techniques that allow visulization to begin before all the requirements of a design are known. We will implement techniques that allow us to structurally test and optimize forms to be stronger, lighter, to fail more predictably, or to function efficiently. The class will work to identify materials with properties that introduce new structural or conceptual possibilities for our designs. For each project, we will use a broad range of fabrication techniques for metals, natural and synthetic materials. The goal of the course is to develop a creative approach towards learning to work with unfamiliar tools and materials.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
FNAR 531:  PAINTING PRACTICES
Section 401 — Seohyung Lee — Monday and Wednesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Section 402— Patricia Thomas —Tuesday and Thursday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
Painting practices is an introduction to the methods and materials of oil painting. This course begins with an investigation of color and color relationships. The beginning of the semester will cover technical issues and develop the student's ability to create a convincing sense of form in space using mass, color, light and composition. The majority of work is from direct observation including object study, still life, landscape, interior and exterior space and the self-portrait. Class problems advance sequentially with attention paid to perceptual clarity, the selection and develoPMent of imagery, the process of synthesis and translation, color, structure and composition, content and personal expression. Students will become familiar with contemporary and art historical precedent in order to familiarize them with the history of visual ideas and find appropriate solutions to their painting problems.
 
DSGN 540: UX AND UI DESIGN
Staff
Thursday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
Great user experience and user interface design are essential for creating digital products that people love. In this course, we'll cover a range of topics from user research through designing visual interfaces, as well as principles of human-centered design and the design process. We'll study existing products to understand the problems they solve and the elements that make them succeed. Lectures and coursework will include practical exercises with user journeys, flowcharts, style sheets, and prototyping tools. No design experience necessary.
 
FNAR 549: EXPERIMENTAL CLAY
Paul Swenbeck
Monday and Wednesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
In this course students will examine and explore the sculptural foundations of clay in the world of contemporary art and design, by experimenting with its sculptural materiality, as a means to develop ideas in large-scale and unconventional ways. Through investigative and conceptually driven projects, students will use clay and other non-traditional materials to make modular structures that incorporate advanced mold-making, casting, and advanced building techniques to develop their own artistic voice through the expansive medium of clay.
 
FNAR 550:  INTRO TO PRINTMAKING
Joshua Zerangue
Monday and Wednesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
The course offers an introduction to several forms of printmaking including: intaglio, screen printing, relief, and monoprinting. Through in-class demonstrations students are introduced to various approaches to making and printing in each medium. The course enhances a student's capacity for developing images through two-dimensional design and conceptual processes. Technical and conceptual skills are developed through discussions and critiques.
 
FNAR 552:  SCREENPRINTING
Roderick Jones
Tuesday and Thursday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
This course is an introduction to technical skills and investigative processes in screen printing and relief and examines methods for combining digital technology with traditional print media. The course introduces students to several contemporary applications of silkscreen and relief printmaking including techniques in multi-color printing, photo-based silkscreening, digital printing, woodcut, linocut, and letterpress. Demonstrations include photo and image manipulation, color separating and output techniques, hand carving and printing, as well as drawing and collage. Both traditional and experimental approaches are explored and encouraged and technical and conceptual skills are developed through discussions and critiques.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
DSGN 566:  GRAPHIC DESIGN
Section 401 – Staff – Thursday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
Section 402 – Mina Zarfsaz – Tuesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
The aim of this course is to introduce students creative ways to use color, typography, and layout across materials and media, ranging from print to physical objects. Students will explore visual design through a set of assignments and projects that are geared towards exploring the role of design in visual arts, interaction design, media design and architecture. The course introduces a number of design concepts such as content organization, navigation, interaction and data-driven design and show ways to develop new design metaphors, presentation techniques, and imagery using old and new technologies. Course is structured as a combination of lectures and hands on workshops where students will have the chance to work both individually and collaboratively to realize their projects.
 
FNAR 567: COMPUTER ANIMATION
Joshua Mosley
Tuesday and Thursday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Through a series of studio projects this course introduces techniques of 2D and 3D computer animation. Emphasis is placed on time-based design and storytelling through animation performance and montage. Students will develop new sensitivities to movement, composition, cinematography, editing, sound, color and lighting.
 
FNAR 571: INTRO TO PHOTOGRAPHY
Karen Rodewald
Monday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
This course is an introduction to the basic processes and techniques of black & white photography. Students will learn how to expose and process 35mm film, SLR camera operation, darkroom procedures & printing, basic lighting and controlled applications. It begins with an emphasis on understanding and mastering technical procedures and evolves into an investigation of the creative and expressive possibilities of making images. This is a project-based course, where students will begin to develop their personal vision, their understanding of aesthetic issues and photographic history. Assignments, ideas and important examples of contemporary art will be presented via a series of slide lectures, critiques and discussion. No previous experience necessary. 35mm SLR cameras will be available throughout the semester for reservation and checkout from the photography equiPMent room. If you need assistance registering for a closed section, please email the department at fnarug@design.upenn.edu.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
FNAR 574: RECONFIGURING PORTRAITURE
Frederick Wahl
Tuesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
As methods of representation are constantly shifting, one thing is clear - the photographic portrait is not what is used to be. Exploring both traditional and contemporary methods of portraiture, this class will uncover and discuss the ways in which we perceive each other in imagery, both as individuals and as groups. Throughout the semester, we will consider how portraits deal with truth, physical absence, the gaze, cultural embodiment, voyeurism and the digital persona. This course will build on the combination of perception, technology, and practice. Throughout the semester, students will advance by learning lighting techniques and strategies of presentation - as these core skills will become tools in the execution of project concepts. In tandem with each project, students will encounter and discuss a wide array of photography and writings from the past to the present, in an effort to understand the meanings and psychological effects of freezing the human image in time.
 
FNAR 580: FIGURE DRAWING I
Jotham Malave-Maldonado
Tuesday and Thursday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Students work directly from the nude model and focus on its articulation through an understanding of anatomical structure and function. Students will investigate a broad variety of drawing techniques and materials. The model will be used as the sole element in a composition and as a contextualized element.
 
FNAR 585: PERFORMANCE STUDIO
Sharon Hayes
Friday, 10:15AM-4:15PM
This course supports the individual and collaborative production of performance works. As the medium of performance consists of diverse forms, actions, activities, practices and methodologies, the course allows for an open exploration in terms of material and form. Students are invited to utilize technologies, materials and methodologies from other mediums and/or disciplines such as video, photography, writing and sound. In addition to the production component, the course will examine multiple histories of performance through readings, screenings and directed research.
 
FNAR 611: MEMORY IN THE CITY
Ewa Matyczyk
Tuesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
What role do history and memory play in processes of community building? Do they promote solidarity, inflame division, or both? What are the relationships between a city's built environment, commemorative landscape, and the circumstances that stimulate, or hinder, the growth of community? In this seminar students will tackle these questions in an effort to uncover some of the ways in which public space, memory, and community intersect. Through a series of case studies and texts we will examine the controversies, challenges, and community impact of commemorative projects in cities both in the U.S. and abroad. Each week we will focus on one city/region, theme, or commemorative project, and students will study design strategies, processes of develoPMent and construction, and theoretical concerns surrounding the role of memory and history in the public space. Drawing on discourse from art, architecture, urbanism, history, and preservation studies, this course brings these fields together in an effort to understand how communities can be strengthened through an engagement with, and examination of the past. For the final project, students will research a commemorative dilemma in a city of their choice, engaging with real-life debates and procedural processes to develop a more inclusive alternative to the status quo.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments.
 
FNAR 613: THE CHINESE BODY
Ken Lum
Tuesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
This course looks at representations of the Chinese (and Asian body) since the Limehouse district in East London and the advent of Chinese contract laborers to the Americas in the 19th century. The localization of the Chinese throughout the Americas within Chinatown precincts were also subject to representational imaginings that were negotiated through the lens of civic planning, literature and later in cinema. Chinatowns are ultimately a product of racism. They were created as a political and social support system for newly arrived Chinese immigrants. While Chinese laborers arrived into the United States in 1840 and in significant numbers into Canada about 1860, Chinese contract workers were encouraged to immigrate to the Americas as an inexpensive source of labor, especially after the end of the American Civil War. Industrial leaders in America, Canada and elsewhere in the Americas (Mexico, Cuba, Peru, etc) saw the arrival of Chinese workers as a victory for commercial interests. However, the celebration was short-lived, as anti-Chinese sentiment quickly transformed into anti-Chinese hysteria. Rather than attacking the vested interests that exploit foreign labor as embodied by the Chinese worker, racist unions with the cooperation of civic leaders and the police deemed it safer to burn Chinatowns than capitalist property. Deeply under-studied to this day is the number of mass murders of Chinese workers in the 19th century by anti-Chinese thugs. This seminar will focus in on how the body of the Chinese (and Asian) was imagined and reimagined multiple times from the middle of the 19th century to today. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
FNAR 622: BIG PICTURES: MURAL ARTS
Shira Walinsky, Jane Golden
Monday and Wednesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
The history and practice of the contemporary mural movement couples step by step analysis of the process of designing with painting a mural. In addition students will learn to see mural art as a tool for social change. This course combines theory with practice. Students will design and paint a large outdoor mural in West Philadelphia in collaboration with Philadelphia high school students and community groups. The class is co-taught by Jane Golden, director of the Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia, and Shira Walinsky, a mural arts painter and founder of Southeast by Southeast project, a community center for Burmese refugees in South Philadelphia.
 
FNAR 625: CONTEMPORARY ART STUDIO
Matthew J. Neff
Tuesday and Thursday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
This course offers an introduction to studio-based practices aimed at synthesizing the expansive potentialities of art through exposure to a diverse set of approaches, their histories, and contemporary applications. A wide range of multi-disciplinary projects will provide students with skills to conceptualize and visualize material investigations. Lectures, readings, films, visiting lectures, field trips, and critiques, will provide a historic and theoretical foundation for critical inquiry.
 
DSGN 634: ART OF THE WEB
Nika Simovich Fisher
Monday and Wednesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Art of the Web: Interactive concepts for art and design is a first step in learning how to create, analyze and discuss interactive content, as a visual creator. It is an exploration of the culture of the internet, the ideas behind its quirks, the dreams and freedoms it encapsulates, and the creative power it gives us. Students will be assigned projects that will challenge their current understanding of the web, and the ways it shapes human connectivity and ihnteraction. Upon completion of this course, students will possess a working knowledge how to organize and design websites and learn to critique web-content including navigation, UX design and information architecture. The course will require analytical conceptual skills and foster creative thinking.
 
DSGN 635: 3-D COMPUTER MODELING
Scott White
Monday and Wednesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Students will develop a comprehensive knowledge of how virtual worlds are constructed using contemporary computer graphics technique with a fine arts perspective. The course will offer the opportunity to explore the construction, texturing, and rendering of forms, environments, and mechanisms while conforming to modeling specifications required for animation, real-time simulations or gaming environments, and rapid prototyping.
 
DSGN 636: ART, DESIGN & DIGITAL CULTURE
Section 401 – Jacob Rivkin – Monday and Wednesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Section 402 – Staff – Monday and Wednesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Section 403 – Christopher Lawrence – Monday and Wednesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
Section 404 – Rami George – Tuesday and Thursday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Section 405 – Avery Lawrence – Tuesday and Thursday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Section 406 – Christopher Lawrence – Tuesday and Thursday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
This course is an introduction to the fundamental perception, representation, aesthetics, and design that shape today's visual culture. It addresses the way artists and designers create images; design with analog and digital tools; communicate, exchange, and express meaning over a broad range of media; and find their voices within the fabric of contemporary art, design, and visual culture. Emphasis is placed on building an extended form of visual literacy by studying and making images using a variety of representation techniques; learning to organize and structure two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, and designing with time-based and procedural media. Students learn to develop an individual style of idea-generation, experimentation, iteration, and critique as part of their creative and critical responses to visual culture. If you need registering for a closed section, please email the department at fnarug@design.upenn.edu
 
DSGN 637: INFORMATION DESIGN & VISUALIZATION
Mahir Yavuz
Tuesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
Information design and visualization is an introductory course that explores the structure of information (text, numbers, images, sounds, video, etc.) and presents strategies for designing effective visual communication appropriate for various users and audiences. The course seeks to articulate a vocabulary of information visualization and find new design forms for an increasingly complex culture.
 
FNAR 640: DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Section 401 – Rami George – Monday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Section 402 – Demetrius Oliver – Monday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Section 403 – Demetrius Oliver – Monday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
Section 404 – Heather Phillips – Tuesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Section 405 – Artie Vierkant – Tuesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Section 406 – Karen Rodewald – Thursday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Section 407 – Gabriel Martinez – Thursday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Section 408 – Jamie Diamond – Wednesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Section 409 – Jamie Diamond – Wednesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
This class offers an in-depth technical and conceptual foundation in digital imagery and the opportunity to explore the creative, expressive possibilities of photography. Students will become proficient with the basic use of the camera, techniques of digital capture, color management and color correction. They will also develop competency in scanning, retouching, printing and a variety of manipulation techniques in Photoshop. Through weekly lectures and critiques, students will become familiar with some of the most critical issues of representation, consider examples from photo history, and analyze the impact of new technologies and social media. With an emphasis on structured shooting assignments, students are encouraged to experiment, expand their visual vocabulary while refining their technical skills. No previous experience is necessary. Although it is beneficial for students to have their own Digital SLR camera, registered students may reserve and checkout Digital SLR cameras and other high-end equiPMent from the department. If you need assistance registering for a closed section, please email the department at fnarug@design.upenn.edu.
 
FNAR 642: DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY II
Frederick Brent Wahl
Wednesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
In this course students will continue to develop conceptual, technical, aesthetic and formal strategies in digital photography, expanding their artistic process while refining their critical approach to researched subject matter. The class will be driven initially by a series of assignments formulated to further expose students to broad possibilities related to the medium and then they will be guided towards the evolution of a personalized body of work that is culturally, theoretically and historically informed. We will be examining key issues surrounding the digital image in contemporary society, led through a combination of class lectures, readings, group discussions, film screenings, gallery visits and class critiques. Students will further their knowledge of image control and manipulation, retouching and collage, advanced color management; become familiar with high-end camera and lighting equiPMent and develop professional printing skills. In addition to learning these advanced imaging practices, this course will also emphasize an investigation of critical thought surrounding contemporary visual culture and the role of digital media in the creation of art.
 
DSGN 643: LANGUAGE OF DESIGN
Sharka Hyland
Wednesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
The course will explore the changing relationship during the modern era between design (structure, model, plan of a work of art) and language (metaphor for a system of communication; speech, writing, literature). Our readings and visual presentations will focus on topics in the decorative arts, painting, architecture, typography and visual communication. We will focus on primary sources in order to situate our inquiry in a larger historical context. The discussion will center on claims about the inherent meaning of forms, discuss different roles for design as an ideological statement, as an agent of societal change, and as an idiosyncratic expression. Topics will also include the search for a universal visual language, attempts at bridging the perceived gap between spoken and written language, and the impact of visual form on the meaning of literary texts (particularly when the author has been involved). Students can suggest additional topics related to their field of study. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments

DSGN 646: ADVANCED 3D MODELING
Scott White
Friday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Advanced 3-D Modeling will give students the opportunity to refine skills in modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering with an emphasis on the evolution of ideas through constant revision based on class critique. Students will use a variety of industry standard software packages, including, but not limited to Maya and Mudbox to compose complex environments. Projects are designed to give students the opportunity to work with original content within a simulated production environment.
 
FNAR 661:  VIDEO I
Section 402 – Emory Van Cleve – Tuesday and Thursday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Section 403 – James Maurelle – Tuesday and Thursday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
Section 404 – Menkkat Dukan – Tuesday and Thursday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Section 405 – Sosena Solomon – Monday and Wednesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
In this studio based course, students are introduced to video production and postproduction as well as to selected historical and theoretical texts addressing the medium of video. Students will be taught basic camera operation, sound recording and lighting, as well as basic video and sound editing and exporting using various screening and installation formats. In addition to a range of short assignment based exercises, students will be expected to complete three short projects over the course of the semester. Critiques of these projects are crucial to the course as students are expected to speak at length about the formal, technical, critical and historical dimensions of their works. Weekly readings in philosophy, critical theory, artist statements and literature are assigned. The course will also include weekly screenings of films and videos, introducing students to the history of video art as well as to other contemporary practices. If you need assistance registering for a closed section, please email the department at fnarug@design.upenn.edu.
 
FNAR 665: CINEMA PRODUCTION
Emory Van Cleve
Wednesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
This course focuses on the practices and theory of producing narrative based cinema. Members of the course will become the film crew and produce a short digital film. Workshops on producing, directing, lighting, camera, sound and editing will build skills necessary for the hands-on production shoots. Visiting lecturers will critically discuss the individual roles of production in the context of the history of film.    
 
DSGN 670: ADVANCED GRAPHIC DESIGN & TYPOGRAPHY
Mark Owens
Thursday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
This course will explore advanced commercial, public and personal forms of visual communication. Emphasis will be placed on creative problem solving with consideration for audience. Discussion of design history, current ideology and future design applications will inform individual student projects. Work generated in this studio can be used build a portfolio. Prerequisite: Permission from instructor if prerequites are not met. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
FNAR 676: ADVANCED LENS BASED PROJECTS
David Hartt
Monday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
Advanced Lens Based Projects (ALBP) is structured to create an open environment for students to develop a series of self-determined projects using any variety of image capture technologies. Mobile devices and DSLRs have blended the function of moving and still image capture while computers have become ubiquitous as instruments of display and dissemination. This has consequently led to the increasingly collapsed boundaries of artistic mediums. ALBP is a studio class where students will explore different modes of production and address the expanding field of exhibition strategies. Additionally, the class will foster a transdisciplinary approach to critiquing work and emphasize the shared context of the works reception. Readings, screenings, discussions, and critiques make up the curriculum along with dedicated studio time. Each student is required to complete three self- determined projects using still or moving image capture technologies. Grades will be determined through participation, completion of assignments, and the students' formal and critical engagement with the technology. While the focus of this course is not technical, prior knowledge of camera functions and post- production techniques is expected.
 
FNAR 685: PHOTOGRAPHY AND FICTION
Jamie Diamond
Thursday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
In spite of photography's traditional relationship with fact, the medium has been a vehicle for fiction since the very beginning. Fiction and photography encompass a broad range of meanings, from elaborately staging and performing for the camera, to manipulations using digital technology such as Photoshop to construct the work. This class will examine and trace the history of manipulated photography while paying special attention to the complex negotiations between the decisive moment, the constructed tableau, and the digitally manipulated image. There will be a combination of class lectures, studio projects, assigned readings, visiting artists, film screenings, field trips, and class critiques.
 
FNAR 687: Queer Imaginings
Heather Phillips, Gabriel Martinez
Wednesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
Queer is a fluid, unfixed and undefinable space offering endless utopian possibilities & potentials concerning gender, sexuality, personal autonomy and agency. Queer Imaginings is a forum for the reimagining of Queer representation/s. This course provides a safe space to mine, critique and analyze Queer imagery, both historical & contemporary. We will explore the ways in which Queerness is approached, represented & manipulated in pop culture, politics, society and the media. Students enrolled in this studio/seminar course will partake in discussions and research pertaining to Queer images and their intersections with race, trans/non-binary-equity, feminism, disability & class structure. These complex subjects will inspire respectful debate throughout the course, and most importantly, generate robust discussion about the work students create. Prompted through select readings and visual presentations, students will be guided to research, analyze and create artworks, which are inspired by various topics related to Queerness. A special emphasis will be placed upon issues arising around visibility, erasure & inclusivity. This forum offers a space to reexamine, research and propose new representations of Queerness. This is primarily a lens-based course with expansive possibilities (interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary).
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all department

Historic Preservation

HSPV 534-001: Public History of the Built Environment
Elizabeth Milroy
Thursday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
This graduate seminar explores ways of bringing histories of place before the public. It is required for Preservation students wishing to concentrate in this area (for whom HSPV 600 is a prerequisite) but is relevant to historians, designers, curators, and critical observers of all stripes. More than conventional public history courses, this one focuses on the built environment. It grapples with the tangible ways individuals, communities, and nations remember and forget. It acknowledges that while buildings and landscapes are in one sense simply larger forms of material culture than furniture or other objects, they also “work” differently by dint of being inhabited and publicly encountered, forming de facto frameworks for private and public life. Our coursework foregrounds interpretation and dissemination through multiple media – everything from signage and monuments to websites and exhibits. It is not, however, an introduction to the technical deployment of those media but a chance to reflect critically on their respective strengths and weaknesses in different contexts. In addition to discussing readings in history, historic preservation, sociology, anthropology, geography, and public art, students will design and conduct original research projects involving:
  • interviews with Philadelphians from diverse backgrounds about their experiences of various urban landscapes;
  • archival research involving architecture, city and regional planning, urban infrastructure, civic culture, and historical commemoration; and
  • conceptual design of monuments, installations, public events, and other forms of commemoration. Field trips will ground class discussions in the present-day fabric of Philadelphia while guest speakers will acquaint us with a variety of institutional and disciplinary perspectives. HSPV 534-001 Syllabus for Spring 2021. Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
HSPV 538/LARP 738: Cultural Landscapes
Randall Mason
Friday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
The course surveys and critically engages the field of cultural landscape studies. Over the semester, we will explore cultural landscape as a concept, theory and model of preservation and design practice; we will read cultural landscape historiography and creative non-fiction; we will examine a range of types (national parks, community gardens, designed landscapes, informal public spaces), and we will map the alternative preservation, planning and design methods that ground cultural landscape studies practically. Readings, class discussions, and projects will draw on cultural geography, environmental history, vernacular architecture, ecology, art, and writing. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
HSPV 551: Building Pathology
Michael Henry 
Friday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
This course addresses the subject of deterioration of buildings, their materials, assemblies and systems, with the emphasis on the technical aspects of the mechanisms of deterioration and their enabling factors, material durability and longevity of assemblies. Details of construction and assemblies are analyzed relative to functional and performance characteristics. Lectures cover: concepts in durability; climate; psychrometric, soils & hydrologic; conditions; physics of moisture in buildings; enclosure, wall and roof systems; structural systems; and building services systems with attention to performance, deterioration, and approaches to evaluation of remedial interventions.
 
HSPV 585/ANTH585:  Ruins & Reconstruction
Lynn Meskell
Wednesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
This class examines our enduring fascination with ruins coupled with our commitments to reconstruction from theoretical, ethical, socio-political and practical perspectives. This includes analyzing international conventions and principles, to the work of heritage agencies and NGOs, to the implications for specific local communities and development trajectories. We will explore global case studies featuring archaeological and monumental sites with an attention to context and communities, as well as the construction of expertise and implications of international intervention. Issues of conservation from the material to the digital will also be examined. Throughout the course we will be asking what a future in ruins holds for a variety of fields and disciplines, as well as those who have most to win or lose in the preservation of the past.  
 
HSPV 625: Preservation Economics
Donovan Rypkema
Tuesday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
The primary objective is to prepare the student, as a practicing preservationist, to understand the language of the development community, to make the case through feasibility analysis why a preservation project should be undertaken, and to be able to quantify the need for public/non-profit intervention in the development process. A second objective is to acquaint the student with measurements of the economic impact of historic preservation and to critically evaluate "economic hardship" claims made to regulatory bodies by private owners. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 
HSPV 671: Historic Preservation Law
Anne Nelson
Friday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
Introduction to the legal mechanisms used to protect historic resources in the built environment, focusing on the legal principles underlying preservation laws, including constitutional issues relating to governmental regulation of real property, as well as federal, state and local historic preservation laws. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments, and CPLN students in particular.
 
HSPV 703/CPLN773: Topical Seminar, Urban Regeneration In The Americas: The Conservation And Development Of Urban Heritage Areas
Eduardo Rojas
Tuesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
This advanced topic seminar will focus on the challenges confronted by the conservation and urban planning professions in turning the urban heritage into a social and economic development resource for cities in developing countries. The preservation of the urban heritage is moving to a new paradigm of intervention responding to: a growing interest in communities for preserving their intangible and tangible urban heritage; rising development pressures on historic neighborhoods; the generalization of adaptive rehabilitation as a conservation strategy; and recent international agreements calling for expanding the role of the urban heritage in the social and economic development of the communities. This is a problem that is in the cutting edge of the research and practice of heritage conservation and urban planning and has conservation, planning and design implications making it ideally suited to a multi-discipline seminar approach. The course is modeled on successful 1-CU spring seminars conducted in recent years—the Gordion Site Planning Studio (2011), Parks for the People (2012), and the Regeneration of Historic Areas in the Americas (2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020)—that attracted students from across the School and fit easily with core studios and thesis projects. Students from multiple departments are encouraged to participate in the course; enrollment will be kept to about 12. The course will combine seminar and field study methodologies in ways that they support each other. The knowledge acquired through the seminar work will be put to use in a field study exercise whose objective is to allow the students to work on topics of their interest and pursue research or urban development and heritage conservation interventions for expanding the contribution of the historic center of San Juan in Puerto Rico to the social and economic development of the city. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments

HSPV 740:  Conservation Seminar: Finishes
Catherine Myers 
Monday, 8:30AM-11:30M
The seminar will advance students’ knowledge of and skills at researching, analyzing and interpreting historic architectural finishes. Lectures, demonstrations, hands-on exercises, case studies, and site visits will consider the history, technology, analysis, deterioration, and treatment of historic finishes. Guest lecturers will enlarge the subject with discussion and demonstrations of archival research of finishes, advanced methods of scientific analysis and presentation of a long-term project to analyze and conserve historic finishes at the US Treasury Building (Robert Mills). The course will also address historic plaster with a guest lecture and demonstration of plaster materials, application, and casting for ornamental plaster. We will make and apply paints and other finishes in class. A visit to the decorative arts studio and Philadelphia sites displaying decorative painting will complement lectures and assignments. Bartram's Garden, the eighteenth-century home of botanist John Bartram in West Philadelphia, will serve as a case study and subject for the final assignment.
 
HSPV 741: Topics in Historic Preservation: Modern Matters
Matero/Matteini
Tuesday, 10:15AM-1:15PM
This seminar will address the thorny issues surrounding the conservation of modern built heritage.  The course will begin with a discussion about the challenges of conserving modern heritage within the framework of historic conservation practice and philosophy. Lectures will focus on a select number of common materials and systems that defined the latter 20th century such as reinforced concrete, curtain walls, and pre-fabrication. Case studies will illustrate the discussed concepts and demonstrate practical conservation solutions including Unity Temple, the Guggenheim Museum (NYC), Fallingwater, Lever House, Taliesin West, Nakashima House and Studios, and Richards Laboratories among others. 
Interdisciplinary Connections: Suited for students from all departments
 

Landscape Architecture

LARP 685-40: Environmental Readings
Fritz Steiner
Wednesday & Friday, 10:30AM-12PM
In this seminar, we will explore this green thread and analyze its influence on how we shape our environments through design and planning. The course has three parts. Throughout, the influence of literature on design and planning theory will be explored. The first part will focus on two of the most important theorists in environmental planning and landscape architecture: Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. and Ian L. McHarg. The second part of the course will critically explore current theories in environmental planning and landscape architecture. The topics include: frameworks for cultural landscape studies, the future of the vernacular, ecological design and planning, sustainable and regenerative design, the languages of landscapes, and evolving views of landscape aesthetics and ethics. In the third part of the course, students will build on the readings to develop their own theory for ecological planning or, alternatively, landscape architecture. While literacy and critical inquiry are addressed throughout the course, critical thinking is especially important for this final section.
Interdisciplinary connections: Open to all Weitzman School of Design graduate students.
 
LARP 710-001 Implementation of Urban Design
Candace Damon, Alex Stokes
Tuesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
This course is a requirement for students enrolled in the Certificate of Urban Design program.
This class focuses on the various ways in which urban design is affected by the opportunities and constraints associated with market conditions, development feasibility, political and community dynamics and the incentives and restrictions applied by the public sector to influence development. The premise of the class – and its organizing structure – is that urban development of lasting value requires all of visionary leadership, great design, a demonstration of financial feasibility, and a narrative that establishes value for diverse stakeholders. The class will walk students through the process of proposing and refining a redevelopment plan for a parking lot located in the vicinity of the University of Pennsylvania. Students will be tasked with demonstrating the feasibility of their redevelopment plan from a market, financial, community and public policy perspective. Students will further their understanding of key concepts that drive urban transformation through case studies, presentations, class debates and conversations with leading design, real estate and public sector professionals from the Philadelphia region and beyond. This course may open to other interested Weitzman School students if there is space and with the permission of the instructor.
Interdisciplinary connections: MCP, MArch, MUSA, Wharton students encouraged.
 
 
LARP 730-002: Topics in Professional Practice: Unruly Practices
Rebecca Popowsky, Sarai Williams
Wednesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
The widening gap between the work that urgently needs to get done and the work that can be done in current professional practice is driving a generation of landscape architects, architects and planners to search out and create new mechanisms for purpose-driven design action. This course will follow two parallel tracks - one focused on skill-building and one focused on studying practices and practitioners who are redefining what it means to provide design services. The class is intended to set students up to carry research and/or activist agendas into professional practice. Skills introduced will include research methods, grant writing, business and career planning. Weekly conversations with change-making practitioners will be scheduled and coordinated by instructors but led by students.
Students who have already developed their own lines of inquiry through the course Transformational Leadership or through independent studies/thesis are particularly encouraged to sign up as this course will allow you to build upon this work. The course is housed in the Landscape Architecture Department and will have a landscape focus, but will bridge into adjacent fields, including architecture, planning, fine arts and product design. 
Interdisciplinary connections: Open to all Weitzman graduate students - particularly students in MCP, MArch, MUSA, IPD and the Kleinman Center.
 
LARP 738-401/HSPV 538: Cultural Landscapes & Landscape Preservation
Randall Mason
Friday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
The course surveys and critically engages the field of cultural landscape studies. Over the semester, we will explore cultural landscape as a concept, theory and model of preservation and design practice; we will read cultural landscape historiography and creative non-fiction; we will examine a range of types (national parks, community gardens, designed landscapes, informal public spaces), and we will map the alternative preservation, planning and design methods that ground cultural landscape studies practically. Readings, class discussions, and projects will draw on cultural geography, environmental history, vernacular architecture, ecology, art, and writing.
 
LARP 750-001: Topics in Construction, Horticulture and Planting Design: Build it! / Detailing in Landscape Design
Abdallah Tabet
Thursday, 8:30AM-11:30AM
What is the role of the detail in landscape architecture? What makes a good detail, technically and conceptually? How do we understand "detailing" as a process? The detail is the moment of intersection between the conceptual and the practical, born out of the designer's effort to merge an idealized vision with a set of imposed – and often conflicting – parameters and constraints. For some, the detail may contain the essence of a project, a representation of the idea made manifest. Yet it may also be the reason the whole thing falls apart.
Through case studies of exemplary projects, lectures, discussions, and design exercises involving drawing, modeling, and fabrication at a range of scales, this seminar course will explore detailing as an idea, as a process, and as a vital component of design practice and construction methodology. This course offers students the opportunity to develop a strong grounding in the logic and language of details, supporting continued inquiry and critical engagement with design over the course of a career. This course is open to students in other departments if there is space.
 
 
LARP 760-001: Topics in Ecological Design: Large-Scale Landscape Reclamation Projects
William Young
Friday 8:30AM-11:30AM
This course will present practical techniques for the restoration of large tracts of disturbed lands. The course will emphasize techniques used to evaluate sites before a landscape design or restoration plan is prepared. Case studies will be employed to illustrate real world, practical application of course principles. Topics will include examples of how to evaluate and assess health and ecological (toxicity) condition of sites, remediation using sustainable practices, and how to add real economic value to clients’ projects and portfolios of properties through ecological restoration. The class promotes sustainable design through the application of “the triple bottom line”: Ecology-Economy-Culture, and a template approach on how to achieve that on every project.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Open to all Weitzman School of Design graduate students
 
LARP 780-001 Topics in Design & Theory: Yonder Lands: Political Economies of the Military, Fossil Fuel, Agriculture, and Prison Industrial Complexes in Rural Communities
William J. Fleming
Wednesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM  
For nearly 30 years, landscape architecture and the broader built environment professions have become hyper-focused on urbanism and rapid urbanization. Whether through the rise of post-critical theorists in architecture or their allies in landscape urbanism who, as Douglas Spencer argues, “have tended, since the mid-1990s in particular, to push those same truths of ‘the way of the world’ as have served the logic of neoliberalism”, one can clearly trace this emphasis on the urban and suburban to the increasingly vocational nature of design education—now focused primarily, if not singularly, on funneling alumni into the consulting firm pipeline. This urban turn has privileged global cities over rural communities; markets and private capital over the state and public investment; and top-down, technocratic measures like cost-benefit analysis and ecosystem services over redistributive programs demanded by movements, from the bottom, over this period. The erstwhile regional ambitions of the professions were also sublimated, set aside in the service of specious myths that the planet is or will become primarily urban by the end of the century (spoiler: this is not true and relies on questionable measures of urbanity to even approach such a figure).
Yet, the structural forces of global and racial capitalism, the causal agents of planetary climate change, are not purely—and perhaps not even primarily—urban questions. Rural communities and landscapes, or “Yonder Lands”, are critical sites of contestation and transformation within these systems. These Yonder Lands are important as sites themselves—where they are perpetually remade around logistics networks and industrial complexes linked to the military, fossil fuels, incarceration, and agriculture—and as sites where the kinds of urban redevelopment at the core of contemporary design practice are made possible—the territories where resources are minded and processed, where labor and other critical inputs are obscured and exploited, and where the production of the built environment is made possible. 
Yonder Lands will focus on the histories, presents, and futures of rural communities bound up in and otherwise shaped primarily by the military, fossil fuel, agriculture, and prison industrial complexes. The reasons for this rural turn are many: it can help us better understand the industries and structural forces reshaping the Earth’s terrestrial surface (far more in most cases than any measure of urbanism or urbanization); to merge the disparate threads of political economic analysis, political ecological analysis, and political theory with design in rural contexts; and, in doing so, to focus on the roots of our urban, ecological, and political crises through the totalizing, immiserating forces of the military, fossil fuel, agriculture, and prison industrial complexes.
Interdisciplinary connections: Well-suited for HSPV, ARCH, CPLN, FNAR, LARP students, and graduate students in Sociology, Anthropology and Environmental Humanities.
 
LARP 780-002: Topics in Theory & Design: Design with Risk
Matthijs Bouw
Tuesday, 1:45PM-4:45PM
This research seminar investigates designing with risk, particularly as it relates to the problem of climate adaptation and resilience. The role design can have in managing risk is to a large extent uncharted territory. Our aim is to explore the potential roles and tools of design as a means of responding to risk in spatial, infrastructural and policy projects for resilience at a variety of scales.
In collaboration with faculty, students and thinkers in other disciplines, we will develop a body of knowledge about risk and how it relates to streams of intellectual energy around resilience, and we will identify design tools and strategies to manage both climate risks and project risks. We will use the research seminar to collectively scope the openings where design can have the greatest agency (in either reducing risk or leveraging the potential for change that risk and instability create). These will be opportunities for further research, design projects, studios, investment or other intervention.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Open to all Weitzman School of Design graduate students.
 
LARP 780-004: Topics in Design & Theory: Public Health, Cities and the Climate Crisis
Join with the Master of Public Health Program
Janice Barnes, Matthijs Bouw, Hillary Nelson
Tuesday, 5:15PM-8:15PM
This course tackles the intersectional issues that climate change requires us to consider for public health and the design of cities. Jointly offered between the MPH program and School of Design, the course explores the relationship between health and design as related to climate change. Community-based interdisciplinary design projects will look to raise climate change risk awareness across disciplines and to identify strategies (policies, programs, projects) to ameliorate or adapt to those risks with health outcomes used as the benchmark for success and design thinking as a framework. These projects will be identified with our collaborators across UPENN and in collaboration with local communities, ultimately enabling students to co-create design strategies with these communities.
Interdisciplinary connections: All Weitzman School of Design graduate students are encouraged to join this interdisciplinary course with students from the MPH program.
 
LARP 780-005: Topics in Design & Theory: Takes on Lakes: Speculative Histories and Fresh Water Futures
Sean Burkholder
Wednesday, 5:15-8:15pm
Bodies have histories and histories have bodies. This seminar will begin with a critical interrogation of the contextual climates (cultural, political, economic, and/or ecological) that have participated in the creation or management of freshwater bodies (lakes) across the world. In many cases, this creation and management manifests itself in various forms of landscape infrastructure, a resultant that is planned, designed, and engineered for particular ends. Students will use these infrastructure-contingent histories as a method of contextual intervention and world-building that will allow for the speculation of new presents and possible lake-centric futures. Instead of projecting different futures from our current present - as is often done in design - we will explore how different pasts could encourage the consideration of alternative presents, allowing us to imagine different and imminent “now(s)” as opposed to possible and escapist “then(s)”. 
This course will require the production of promotional material and fictional first-person accounts that will explore the entangled relationships between past actions and the multiple present realities of lake landscapes. The work produced will serve as an example of the rhetorical role of speculation in design research and practice while fostering a larger understanding of the agency and value of freshwater bodies in our conceptualization of the world around us. Students will be encouraged to explore creative research practices and a wide range of production methods including but not limited to writing, video, and illustration. 
Interdisciplilnary Connections: Open to all Weitzman School graduate students.