Final Essay

[stubing]

Please post your reflective essay here.

[Nia Gipson]

I really enjoyed this class on how to approach and read an East Asian city and what their design aesthetics can teach us about effectively designing urban spaces. In particular, I thought that the conversations around looking at indigenous structures like the Yurts of Mongolia, the Minkas of Japan, and the Fujian Tulous in China as examples of how to have a more harmonious life with nature. One thing that was particularly interesting to me was talking about traditional Japanese building and conservation techniques, and how, because of repeated natural disasters, their traditional wood building style is not about building permanent structures out of stone. They expect to rebuild their structures, like their temples every generation or so, and thus parts of Japan had experienced wood shortages in the past, and their traditional building method were not very sustainable but were still responsive to their environment in terms of materials.

Next time that I am going to teach about the built environment in class, I am going to make sure to mention the megacities in East Asia and talk about the history, sustainability, and functionality of the cityscape. The concept of urban informality was new to me and I would like to include the case study of the Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul, South Korea, and Namba Park in Osaka, Japan as examples of restorative ecology as well.

There was a lot of great content for me to pull into the STEAM/Engineering classroom, just from this five-week course, and I am really grateful to learn from Professor Bharne. This was a wonderful experience. 

[Taylor Bub]

I found this seminar to be particularly enlightening.  This fall I want to incorporate teaching different cultures into my homeroom.  The curriculum project I designed is something that I want to implement and improve and I am excited to bring this to life in my classroom.  I want to have students complete this research on different architecture styles as an introduction to a bigger project that would involve how they might change their community for the better.  I found the discussions about architecture and how we might repurpose the many buildings we have that are no longer in use to be so fascinating and want to incorporate them into my teaching.  The different ideas that are incorporated into cities found in Southeastern Asia, especially the Zakkyo buildings, are such a great inspiration and I am looking forward to introducing them to my students, to potentially give them ideas for how they might change their community.  I intend to teach my students about these buildings and about the reclaiming of buildings and other structures into things like the High Line Park, and how we can pull from the influences of Asian architecture to bring nature into our buildings.  Then I want to challenge my students to come up with even more ideas as to how they might repurpose the many buildings that are now not being used by businesses that have moved their employees to work from home.  I think our students are going to be emerging from school into an entirely different world then pre-COVID, and I think that having them explore the brilliant ideas found in other cultures around the world, and showing them that they can fight for these changes to happen in their cities will be particularly empowering for them.  I am excited to share these ideas with my students, and I am excited to see how they might go out and change their communities for the better.

 

[Madelyn Masterson]

The content from this five-week course has been very eye-opening. There is plenty of material I can use in my biology classes during the fall semester. We spend the majority of our time in our Ecology units during the fall semester. The topics I will be sure to apply in my classroom include our discussions regarding sustainability, land scarcity, adapting to overpopulation, and the social dynamics represented within the architecture. One concept that I found particularly fascinating was the immense symbolism of culture and social hierarchies that inspire many architectural designs. For one, the Yoyogi stadium was a design rooted in Japanese culture as it mirrors the shape of a samurai hat. Additionally, the layout of a traditional Beijing courtyard represents social dynamics with those of higher social status further in the courtyard. I can use the approaches behind these designs to support our lessons regarding the social dynamics and interactions between organisms. 

 

The different attitudes of Japanese architecture can help my students practice identifying patterns and, ideally, they will be able to point out the common themes such as wood building material, columns, and beams. I found it fascinating that many Asian architectural designs, just like the Isle Shrine,  involved the natural world around it which highlighted the respect and honor of nature. During our upcoming lessons on population density and human impact on climate change, I will mention how much land pressure there is on Tokyo regarding their adaptation to potential natural disasters. This can often limit the involvement and consideration of the surrounding nature and I can push students to think of sustainable approaches to urbanism. Overall, this course has provided many opportunities for me to involve east Asian culture and history in my biology class. I look forward to seeing how my students apply these topics to their learning.

 

[Amy Stamm]

This course has helped me to understand some of the unique characteristics of Asian urban design and urban spaces that have grown from long traditions of artistic practice, as well as Buddhist and Shinto traditions, ecological conditions that have shaped indigenous vernaculars, and bureaucratic and political institutions. The course started out with a discussion about the distinction between the conceptual underpinnings of Michelangelo’s Pieta vs. the Ryoanji Temple. Whereas Michelangelo used the medium of stone to create a work that centralized the human form and people as a subject, the Japanese artists who created the Ryoanji Temple made central the form of the natural world. This reverence for the natural world and natural forms continued into East Asian design of spaces with Paul Wheatley’s (1975) explanation of how the design of certain Asian cities was thought to create a portal from the heavens down to the earth and in some cases then to the underworld.

The course helped me to think about the liminal spaces of East Asian cities, from the travel and communication between sacred and secular, or between the living and the dead, to the ever shifting boundaries between public and private life, as in Japanese cities where the membrane or wall that separated the house from the street in Japan was permeable. From shifting uses of the same spaces to layered and multiple forms of interaction made possible in Hong Kong’s vertical stacking, edges, interfaces, and shifting and/or layered uses of the same spaces at different times of the day (Cookson Smith 2012), these contingent and multivalent relationships are made possible through specific forms of spatial design.

I particularly appreciated our study of indigenous vernaculars in response to specific ecological conditions, such as the underground houses in China, the yurts in Mongolia, and the pagoda-inspired residential designs in Japan. Jeffrey Hou lays out in “Everyday Urban Flux” (2020) the Japanese appreciation of impermanence that is founded, in part, on the city’s repeated redesign and rebuilding process in response to tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters that periodically wipe out the urban landscape. In addition to this natural sense of flux, the “temporary urbanism” of marginalized populations to circumvent exclusionary formal regulations forms “ritualized spatial tactics” (2020: 197) that reorganize the opportunities that urban spaces make possible. Temporary adaptations of public spaces like parking lots, traffic islands, the undersides of bridges, abandoned buildings, etc. thrive on the creativity and possibility of marginalized groups trying to survive, making possible new types of relationships and interactions between people.

I hope to use some of these ideas and case studies with my students to help them to see multiple ways to address and adjust to climate change and to think of design as a fundamentally important shaper of how we move, interact, feel, pass time, and form relationships.

[Miguel Diaz]

I really enjoyed Professor Bharne’s seminar titled East Asian Design: Architecture & Urbanism. The online synchronous sessions, assigned readings, and videos were both highly informative and fascinating.

I teach elementary school (5^th grade). However, I believe that many of the topics and concepts that were discussed during the seminar can be taught to 5th graders, especially gifted students. Due to advances in technology and the continued growth in global trade, the world is increasingly interconnected. Therefore, today’s K-12 students need to be taught more about the world beyond their borders and shores in a more comprehensive and systematic manner. Additionally, students need to learn to embrace a comparative West-East approach that is based on a deeper level of understanding, and more importantly, one that is based on mutual respect.

I believe that my students will be able to make a nice comparison between their city in the San Fernando Valley, and a great East Asian city such as Tokyo or Shanghai. As Professor Bharne pointed out, Western cities can learn from East Asia. From the perspective of city planning, students will benefit from learning about the aesthetic principles that have driven (and currently drive) design at various East Asian cities. Students, for example, can conduct a comparative study of transportation systems and infrastructure in a place like Hong Kong and their home city in the Los Angeles area.

I’d like to end on this note. The seminars that are made possible by the USC US-China Institute are of great value to teachers (and our students) because the institute brings together world-class scholars who are willing to share their insightful work with us.

A big thanks to Professor Bharne and Professor Dube!

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