[Nia Gipson]

Taylor, I love this idea! One of the things that I tell my students when thinking about architecture is that it is a cultural artifact and a projection of a society on the ground. I think having your students analyze architectural spaces like this will really get that point across! I will have to incorporate that idea into my lecture as well!
 

[Nia Gipson]

Amy, you might find the concept of vertical farming interesting. It isn't the same thing as the vertical parks that you were talking about or like the rooftop park in Osaka that Professor Bharne mentioned. Instead, they are hydroponic/aquaponic indoor farms in urban settings that are supposed to reduce the distance from farm to table in urban environments using less water and resources than traditional farming methods. Also look at vertical greening in Singapore as well, like the Parkroyal Hotel.

[Nia Gipson]

Taylor, I feel you on your comment about finding authentic city life when traveling! I would much rather purchase items from local craftsmen when I travel than generic tourist items. But economics dictates that vendors will supply whatever people are willing to buy, and that has just been historically true. I just went to the Peabody Essex Museum to see their exhibit on Asian Export Art from the 1400s to the 1800s and every one of the items in the exhibit is a blend of local artisanship and western consumer desires, that I wonder what is the authentic tourist experience anyways.

[Nia Gipson]

I really appreciated Dr. Bharne talking about how just having hi-rises doesn't necessarily mean that the city is becoming more densely populated and more efficiently planned. I think that we all know about the urban city centers and financial districts that were all but abandoned during the pandemic because people from the suburbs just used them as office spaces and not as living spaces. I think that the distance between the lived and work environments is something that needs to be more readily discussed when considering sustainable living.

[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. 

[Nia Gipson]

I watch one of the Five Colleges’ Center for East Asian Studies Archived Webinars: Ties that Bind: Peabody Essex Museum Asian Export Gallery. The webinar was originally given on July 24, 2020 by Karina H. Corrigan, the Curator of Asian Export Art at the museum. I plan on visiting the museum sometime this summer so I wanted a primer on what I would see. The museum developed out of a maritime club of sailors in Salem, MA that traveled around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn and the primary pieces were artifacts they brought back from their travels, including many pieces from China. One of the things Karina spoke about was that the gallery was designed to disrupt the idea that ours is the first global era, and to show how interconnected the United States was with China even at the inception of the nation. She showed some really great examples of some of the luxury commodities that Americans got from China including tea, furniture, textiles, and china (porcelain), really reframing the whole idea of what the term “Made in China” has meant historically. 

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/recording/1328370983527228172 

 

[Nia Gipson]

I really love this idea, asking kids to think about repurposing abandoned or underused spaces in their community and having them think about how they can actively rehabilitate it. It could be a nice project to have the students actually pick a location, design what a park could look, do a cost/benefit analysis and propose it to the local community/legislator. 

[Nia Gipson]

I think that you bring in a good point about how in urban environments you need to bring nature into the space. My classroom is in the basement so I need more outdoors indoors for sure. But I try to do as much outside as possible because the school has a great back lawn with lots of trees. I wonder when urbanites stopped valuing the natural world? Now in an urban city some of the best views are high rise apartments that overlook the city and not nature.

[Nia Gipson]

I really enjoyed the discussion on urban informality in the first part of this week's assignment. I think about how vibrant my area becomes in the summer with farmer's markets, festivals, and open markets and how they completely transform the public square or an empty parking lot. Though I have never been to Asia, I can imagine how that adds new dynamism to the city as a whole if that is the daily culture in the city, and not just a once a week/once a summer event. As a person who teaches environmental science, I have never thought about how these ephemeral enterprises and multi-use spaces are actually a form of sustainable urban planning. The idea of vertical urbanism/ horizontal urbanity will certainly make it into my next lecture on environmentalism in urban environments. I plan on showing my students pictures of different rural environments, suburban environments, and urban environments and have them talk about how sustainable each development is and why they think that. The challenge with some of these densely populated urban areas is that they are incredible heat sinks, with the lack of green space, they pose a huge challenge to migratory birds, there are environmental justice issues, the challenge of dealing with MSW, urban runoff, etc that are not solved by building higher. I also plan on teaching about Seoul's Cheonggyecheon river as an example of restorative ecology as well.

[Nia Gipson]

A lot of really interesting ideas are being shared this week, and I am looking forward to the discussion next week. 

Colonialism and its Legacies - Follow-up questions: 

In the lecture, Professor Bharne talks about reframing colonialism as a two-sided process, where both the colonial power and the colonized nation benefit, and together they fuse and develop a culture all their own that is distinct from each of the original society. Through the lecture, we get many examples of how the current architectural landscape still bares that visible remnant of colonial rule. Despite the plethora of examples, I find myself unconvinced. Instead, a quote from Wallach's European Architecture in Asia resonated with me more, "For most readers, this story is an obvious sliver of the much grander narrative of globalization. What else, one might ask, should one expect from a colonial age and its aftermath? Architectural styles would inevitably be introduced, along with languages, administrative systems, infrastructure, and commercial enterprises. I would only add that this reading has unwelcome implications for anyone who wants to understand globalization as hybridization or cross-fertilization. The diffusion of European architectural styles doesn't offer much support for that benign reading (17). We don't see much cross-cultural exchange when it comes to European cities adopting Asian architecture verbatim, just using European materials. While I see the value in being able to read a city's history through its architecture, I wonder if there is a danger of sanitizing history when we talk about the legacy of colonial rule on the current urban landscape without delving into the systemic challenges of colonial rule that still persist today?

[Nia Gipson]

Madelyn, I commend the fact that you are going to bring your students outside more. I also try to do that as much as possible (weather permitting....sometimes in New England, the weather just doesn't permit...). Sometimes, I do struggles with retaining their attention when all I want them to do is experience the outdoors and exist in nature, but I get better every year!

 

[Nia Gipson]

Amy, what a GREAT comment! I know that technology has greatly changed the way that teaching and learning are happening in the classroom (even more so because of COVID) but I have never thought about how that impacts our perception of space. I wonder if the fact that so much of a people's lives are now reduced to a small social media screen, how that impacts their perception of space in the wider world. I wonder if this will shifts people's desires for their own living and working spaces in the future and how architects and urban planners will respond to that.

[Nia Gipson]

Madelyn, I love your idea of using Japanese architecture to showcase how there are cultural patters that you can see through architecture! Such a great way to make a math concept visiable to students! I wounder if you could extend this idea to other countries in East Asia as well and compare the architecture to western designs too. 

[Nia Gipson]

I am thinking about how I can incorporate these different perspectives into my teaching for next year. One of the things that we talk about in environmental science is different worldviews: 1) ecocentric 2) biocentric and 3) anthropocentric. From our discussion, it really seems like the western perspective is focused on what resources we can get from the environment and how it can serve us (an anthropocentric worldview) while the Japanese perspective is more of an eco/biocentric world view, and it would be nice to include images of Japanese and American artwork to reinforce that message.

[Nia Gipson]

Hello, all I need is a certificate of completion. Thank you! 

 

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