Courses
Listed below are a sampling of courses which have recently been taught by members of the PhD Committee. Course offerings vary every year depending on the current research interests of students and faculty.
For current course information, consult the appropriate area:
Additionally, students can freely take courses at any school at Harvard or MIT.
Courses Offered at the Graduate School of Design
GSD 4355: Architecture, Science and Technology, XVIIIth Century-Present
Antoine Picon
Department of Architecture
Since the first industrial revolution, science and technology have constantly challenged architecture. Technology in particular has represented a powerful source of change for architecture. New materials and structural types have emerged, inducing dramatic changes in the definition of the architectural discipline. From iron construction to digital architecture, from Viollet-le-Duc's structural rationalism to Archigram's technological eclecticism and beyond, the course will study important episodes in this two-century history.
GSD 4407: Transition/Zagreb: Urban Condition and Spatial Practice
Eve Blau
Department of Architecture
The seminar is concerned with conceptualizing and examining transition as both a condition and spatial practice of the European post-communist city. A sequel to last semester's seminar, Conflict + Modernity, this seminar also focuses on the Croatian capital of Zagreb – a city with a vital and highly sophisticated urban culture and modern architectural fabric, which is currently making the transition (economic and existential) from Eastern Europe and post-communist marginality to Central Europe and full EU membership. This semester builds on the research of the first semester, and expands the parameters – cultural and theoretical – of both the inquiry and critical discourse. The focus in the fall semester was on understanding the evolution and patterns of urban growth in relation to changing political, social, and technological conditions over the course of the 20th century. Starting with a "naive" confrontation with the fabric of the city itself, key sites were examined as a means of understanding the spatio-temporal layers of the city, their internal logic and relationships to each other.
GSD 5101: Histories and Theories of Urban Interventions
Margaret Crawford
Department of Urban Planning and Design
Beginning with the mid 19th century city, this course surveys a broad range of urban interventions. These include transportation and infrastructural engineering, settlement houses, landscape design, and real estate development, among others. Urban planning and urban design are situated with them as part of a larger discourse about the problems and possibilities of urban life. American and European examples are used as case studies demonstrating the complex mix of social, cultural, political and economic factors that shape urban processes and the built environment. Topics include the industrial city, utopian towns, the inner city, decentralization and suburbs, the metropolis, housing, urban renewal and edge cities.
GSD 3305: The Architectural Imaginary: Experimental Architecture of the 1970s
K. Michael Hays
Department of Architecture
This course examines selected architecture practices and projects in the expanded decade of the 1970s -- the period between 1966 and 1983. Lectures will focus on the work of Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Bernard Tschumi, but others will be discussed. The theoretical work of Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, and others will be invoked to help us interpret this material.
GSD 5103: Public and Private Development
Jerold Kayden
Department of Urban Planning and Design
This course explores the analytic frameworks, skills, and bodies of knowledge required to understand, evaluate, plan, and implement public and private development within cities and surrounding regions. Using lectures, discussions, case studies, and individual/team exercises, the course teaches students how to measure the complex blend of public and private actions promoting growth and change against financial, economic, legal, institutional, political, and other planning metrics. Planning techniques that are specifically explored include, among others, public subsidies (grants and loans), public land acquisition and disposition through RFPs, strategic provision of physical infrastructure, inclusionary zoning, linkage, and business improvement districts.
GSD 5471: Political Economy of Urbanization
Marco Cenzatti
Department of Urban Planning and Design
Over the last two decades or so, cities have been undergoing a drastic process of restructuring. An ever-growing number of terms-urban villages, edge cities, exopolises, exurbia, etc.-try to capture the new urban form. In other cases the new names attract attention to the changing urban role-post-industrial, post-modern, service, world cities, etc. To further complicate the picture, the analytic tools traditionally used to understand the city are equally being restructured, questioning both mainstream and radical urban explanations. The purpose of this course is to offer a terrain for discussion by tracing the restructuring of both the city and its interpretations. The first half of the course focuses on traditional and Marxist approaches to the city. Within both approaches a further distinction is made between views that privilege economic or social readings of the city. The second half of the course introduces the many changes that restructuring has brought to the city-new functions, spatial organizations and social compositions. It also wants to highlight newly emerging ways of interpreting the city. In parallel to traditional readings of the city ''from above'' (i.e., overarching and all inclusive views) several sessions will be devoted to urban readings derived from personal and empirical experience of the city.
GSD 4357: Alternative Constructions
Christine Smith
Department of Architecture
An in-depth consideration of selected topics of enduring relevance for the theory and practice of architecture. The course examines concepts such as wonder, knowledge, authority, progress, beauty, and meaning as these are framed in primary sources from Antiquity to the Renaissance, and explores the ways in which buildings and cities have been observed and described during the same period. The specific topics vary from year to year. Readings introduce foundational ideas in the Western European intellectual tradition from Plato to Ficino relevant to design practitioners. Student participation in discussion is an integral part of learning: implementation of the concepts in short exercises fosters original thought and critical judgment.
GSD 4343: Developing Worlds: Planning and Design in the Middle East and Latin America After WWII
A. Hashim Sarkis
Department of Architecture
The course examines the impact of different models of social and economic development on architectural and urban design. It focuses on Latin America and the Middle East after WWII. The models range from financial and technical assistance to sustainability and micro-credit. The case studies cover reconstruction and preservation, new towns, housing and institutions.
Courses Offered in FAS Departments
History of Art and Architecture 174m. Modern Architecture and its Histories
Neil Levine
When and how did modern architecture begin? Who were its leaders? What were its original goals and achievements and how did they change over time? These are some of the questions to be investigated through close readings of the most influential accounts of the movement’s history from the 1920s through the present. Texts studied will include ones by Hitchcock, Johnson, Giedion, Pevsner, Banham, Scully, Frampton, Tafuri, and Colquhoun.
History of Art and Architecture 271m. Architecture, Display, and Mass Culture in 19th/20th c.
Alina A. Payne
Examines the redefinition of architecture at the turn of the 19th/20th century in both practice and theory in the context of the museum/exhibition movement and the rise of historical (archaeology, art history) and man-based sciences (anthropology, ethnology, psychology).
Comparative Literature 273 . Approaches to Modernity: The Metropolis
Lizabeth Cohen
Examines the relationship between urban experience and debates on modernity/postmodernity in art, architecture and social theory. Topics: nostalgia and modernization, cultural archeology and architecture of transition, memorial, museum and public art, national identity and cosmopolitan imagination, metropolis and megapolis.
Visual and Environmental Studies 182. Film Architectures: Seminar
Giuliana Bruno
What is our experience of architecture in cinema? Considering the relation of these two arts of space, we look at how film and architecture are linked in history on the "screen" of the modern age. Highlighting the interaction of modernity, urban culture, and cinema, we explore the architecture of film in relation to the architectures of transit and the culture of travel. Emphasis on readings and case study analysis to pursue research projects and make presentations.