Courses
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First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT
Cameron Wu, Sean Canty, Jenny French, Zeina Koreitem, Andrew Plumb
Project is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, Project may refer to fundamental…
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Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio
Silvia Benedito, Danielle Choi, Francesca Benedetto, Gareth Doherty, Emily Wettstein, Alistair McIntosh
This studio course problematizes issues of orientation and experience, scale and pattern, topographic form, climatic and vegetative influences, and varied ecological processes that help define…
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First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio
Sai Balakrishnan, David Gamble, Ana Gelabert-Sanchez, Lily Song
The first semester core studio of the Master in Urban Planning program introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners…
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Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE
Eric Howeler, Jon Lott, John May, Kiel Moe, Oana Stanescu, Belinda Tato
Integration is the agenda for the third semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems…
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Landscape Architecture III: Third Semester Core Studio
Jill Desimini, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Craig Douglas, Rosalea Monacella, Pablo Perez-Ramos
This studio aims to conceptualize and articulate the adaptive city, the city in a state of flux as it responds to changing environmental, programmatic, market,…
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Elements of Urban Design
Felipe Correa, Anita Berrizbeitia, Stephen Gray, Clayton Strange, Robert Pietrusko, Michael Manfredi, Richard Sennett
Elements of Urban Design is an advanced core studio for the post professional programs in urban design. This studio introduces critical concepts, strategies and technical…
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Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)
Fawwaz Habbal, Andrew Witt, Jock Herron, Peter Stark
The first year MDE studio provides the students the opportunity to bridge the gaps between academic fields and practical, real-world stakeholders, and fosters a design…
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Entropy, History, Time. Architectural Infrastructure for a Gravel Pit in Spain
The Entropy, History, Time Studio will investigate three concurrent processes of time in a unique setting where these contexts converge. The site, a gravel pit…
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Tibet Contemporary: Building in the Himalayas
It is in Tibet that we can rediscover the inextricable relationship between architecture and landscape, the coherence between human settlement and nature, the simultaneous existence…
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A Bank for Burbank and Other L.A. Stories
Something funny is happening in L.A. Everywhere, resolution is lowered not heightened. Joints are butted, not mitered. Gaps are shimmed, not sculpted. Finish is dulled,…
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People in Motion
For ages, people have been in motion: Survival. Economical transactions. Religious expansions. Wars. Colorizations. Rural exodus. Slavery. Gold Rush. Great explorations. Grand tour. Tourism. Circulation…
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Northern Light
There is an endemic problem surrounding the fate of 20th century iconic buildings. They were once masterpieces with progressive vision, but over the past five…
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Idiom, Identity, Id
Arguably, the best architecture today originates intuitively, from deeply felt impulses rather than from the preconceptions, habits and the rules that are always and necessarily…
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Rethinking Haussmann: The Function of a 21st Century Multi-Story Residential Building
Farshid Moussavi, Ricardo Solar
As citizens, we can blame developers of building housing for maximum profit and our governments for investing too little on building affordable housing. But is…
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The Monument
Emanuel Christ, Christoph Gantenbein
"Monuments are human landmarks which men have created as symbols for their ideals, for their aims, and for their actions. They are intended to outlive…
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$2,000 Home
What can $2,000 buy in today’s world?a gucci hand baga yohji yamamoto fall winter coata boston-dhaka-boston flighta college coursea used…
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The Frugal Palazzo
Kersten Geers, David Van Severen
The 26th incarnation of Architecture Without Content brings us to Seattle via Florence and New York. Arguably the second most important housing typology innovation on…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Studio Option: Countryside
The Fall 2017 Rotterdam Studio is part of a long-term effort to document and speculate on radical changes shaping the countryside, which will culminate in…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Option Studio: Transforming Omishima into a Beautiful Japanese Garden
Omishima is an island in Seto Inland Sea with the population of 6,000 people. Thirteen hamlets are scattered along the coast and the island is…
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Re-Tooling Metropolis II: LA!
Los Angeles has long captured the imaginations of designers and urbanists and theorists for its embodiment of everything characteristic of the twentieth-century metropolis, and for…
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The Anatomy of an Island
Eelco Hooftman, Bridget Baines
‘In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1850 The Anatomy of an…
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Excavating Space and Nature in Tokyo
This studio encourages students to reflect on the qualities of hidden nature and culture underlying the metropolis program, and how these factors influence physical space.
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Civic Spaces in an Age of Hyper-Complexity: From Protest to Reverie
As civic spaces must now address manifold demands, more innovative and potent tools are necessary for their design. This elective studio will explore a range…
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The Unfinished City. Envisioning 21st Urban Ideals in Tallinn’s Largest Soviet-era Housing District
Eliel Saarinen’s 1913 Masterplan for Grand Tallinn proposed a bold expansion of the city to the east, occupying an underdeveloped area that has become known…
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Refugees in the Rust Belt
Today, there are over 65 million refugees worldwide—the highest number of displaced persons ever recorded. In the design community, most of the efforts to help…
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Robots In & Out of Buildings
New forms of mobility are currently being developed for the transport of people and goods. From autonomous container ships and trucks, to autonomous buses and…
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Phantom Coast: Transforming San Francisco’s Eastern Waterfront
"Every city is full of ghosts, and learning to see some of them is one of the arts of becoming a true local."– Rebecca…
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Visual Studies: Architectural Representation: Origins + Originality
Architectural representation is an ideology – a source of ideas and visionary theorizing that has an accompanying set of origins and natures. As such, it’s…
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Projective Representation in Architecture
This course examines the history, theory and practice of parallel (orthographic) and central (perspective) projection. The objective is to provide the tools to imagine and…
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Spatial Analysis and the Built Environment
Urban planners engage in many complex processes that defy easy representation. This course provides first-semester urban planning students with the graphic and technical skills needed…
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Landscape Representation I
The rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture is inextricably intertwined with the concept of representation. The first in a three-semester sequence, this course introduces…
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Landscape Representation III: Landform and Ecological Process
Craig Douglas, Rosalea Monacella
Landscape Representation III examines the fundamental relationship between terrain and the landscapes it supports and engenders. This examination will be developed through methods of associative…
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Communication for Designers
“The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings. In the end the communicator…
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Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf-life in the Supermarket Landscape
The supermarket shelf is a highly volatile, hyper-competitive space. On this shelf products struggle to maximize every possible advantage, all in a…
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Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation
The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers and an expressive and a playful supplement to computer based labor.
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Immersive Landscape: Representation through Gaming Technology
The course is aimed at investigating new ways to interpret, conceive and describe landscape. While traditional methods of representation will prevail for…
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Scalar Practices in Landscape Architecture
The practice of landscape architecture creates dwelling – situating inhabitants in an ordered and comprehensible spatial, social and environmental continuum. Scalar practices…
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Experiments in Computer Graphics
Over the past three decades the architectural process has been drastically reorganized by what historian Jonathan Crary calls “a transformation in the…
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Public Projection: Projection as a Tool for Expression and Communication in Public Space
The class will focus on development of original projection projects that can inspire and facilitate artistic expression and cultural communication in the…
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Art, Design and the Public Domain Proseminar
This seminar is intended to serve as a theoretical and practical laboratory for the development of student ideas and concepts toward their artistic, design and…
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Theories of Landscape as Urbanism, Landscape as Infrastructure: Paradigms, Practices, Prospects
Responding to contemporary urban patterns, ecological pressures and decaying infrastructures, this course brings together a series of influential thinkers and researchers from the design commons…
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Teaching Techniques
The course examines foundations for contemporary architectural design pedagogy according to several broad themes — spatial, programmatic, material, structural, technological – defined in dialectical terms…
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Conservation of Older Buildings: Techniques and Technics
This course will teach how to understand existing building form and fabric and how to conserve these. Where does one even start…
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Culture, Conservation and Design
This proseminar addresses issues of Critical Conservation, an evolving discipline that illuminates the bridge between Cultural Meaning, Identity and Context as part…
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The Idea of Environment
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations and actions that calls them…
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Field Methods and Living Collections
Confronting the reality of environmental degradation requires more than remote sensing, statistical analysis or institutional restructuring. As images of the changing planet…
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An Unsentimental Look at Architecture and Social Craft
Designers of the built environment have had an on-again/off-again relationship with social agency. Progressive design and social outcomes were closely linked in early modernism. However,…
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Material, Atmosphere and Ambience
The seminar introduces understanding of atmosphere and ambience in the discourse of material practice in architecture. The materials are contextual and cultural manifestation tool of…
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It’s a Wild World: Future Scenarios for Feral Landscapes
The urban wild, as a classification of open space, typifies the polyvalent factors at play in city transformation. As both a misunderstood…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: The Invention of the Countryside – A Critical Iconography
This Course is for students in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. This seminar invites students to analyze the political iconography of the countryside. Whereas in…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar: Tokyo – Catalysts for Change
This Course is for students in the Toyko Study Abroad Program. "Tokyo – Catalysts for change" is an invitation to having an insight into the…
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Studies of the Built North American Environment: 1580 to the Present
North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping…
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History and Theory of Urban Interventions
This class provides a high-intensity introduction the history and theory of urban planning practice under modern capitalism. Building upon an interdisciplinary literature drawn from planning…
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Buildings, Texts, and Contexts I
This course is structured as a dialogue between the historical and theoretical frameworks that have shaped the formulation of architectural principles – what the architectural…
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Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture
Note, the first meeting on Wednesday, August 31, will take place in Stubbins, room 112, rather than Piper Auditorium. This course introduces students to a…
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North American Seacoasts and Landscapes: Discovery Period to the Present
Selected topics in the history of the North American coastal zone, including the seashore as wilderness, as industrial site, as area of…
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Urbanization in the East Asian Region
The purpose of this lecture course is to provide an overall account of the urbanization in selected cities within the rapidly developing…
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Authority and Invention: Medieval Art and Architecture
Masterworks of art and architecture in Western Europe from the decline of Rome to the dawn of the Italian Renaissance. Explores the…
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Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common
This lecture course examines selected cities between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., beginning with ancient Athens and ending…
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Signal, Image, Architecture II: Automation, or the Politics of Very Large Numbers
If the first version of this seminar sought to understand computational images through an anthropology of the disappearance of “orthographic life”—and, in…
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Competing Visions of Modernity in Japan
The course will trace the parallel trajectories of two of modern Japan’s most influential schools of architectural thought, represented by Kenzo Tange…
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Practical Wisdom 2
“…the Moderns find themselves face to face with raw materiality, or they have to turn towards representations that reside only in their…
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Forest, Grove, Tree: Planting Urban Landscapes
Discussions about the urban forest and tree canopy, carbon sequestration, sustainability, and tree adoption programs are becoming more prevalent by the day.
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Architecture and its Texts (1650-1800)
This seminar focuses on a selection of important architectural writings from the late 17th and 18th centuries, with the aim of exploring…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: Designing and Managing Worlds in the Countryside
This Course is for students in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. One of the best medieval copies of Vitruvius’s De Architectura is in the codex…
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Real Estate Finance and Development
Richard Peiser, David Hamilton
This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate finance and development. Lectures and case studies introduce students to the full range of…
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Land Use and Environmental Law
As a scarce and necessary resource, land triggers competition and conflict over its possession and use. For privately owned land, the market manages much of…
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Cities by Design I
Rahul Mehrotra, Peter Rowe, Jerold S. Kayden, Alex Krieger, Eve Blau, Joan Busquets, Felipe Correa
Cities by Design I is concerned with in-depth longitudinal examination of urban conditions in and among selected cities in the world. The…
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Field Studies in Real Estate, Planning, and Urban Design: Seattle, WA and Boston
The Field Study course is designed to provide students an understanding of the dynamics and complexities of reality that create contemporary urban…
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Policy Making in Urban Settings (at HKS)
An introduction to policymaking in American cities, focusing on economic, demographic, institutional, and political settings. It examines economic development and job growth in the context…
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Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Quantitative
This course introduces students to quantitative analysis and research methods for urban planning. The course begins with an examination of how quantitative methods fit within…
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Analytic Methods: Qualitative
How can planners understand places in a rich, meaningful, and yet systematic way? This module examines how qualitative approaches can be used…
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Transportation Policy and Planning (at HKS)
The course is intended to develop in students an understanding of the management, policy and planning problems that are peculiar to transportation and other types…
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Housing and Urbanization in the United States
James Stockard, Jennifer Molinsky
This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those…
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Healthy Places
The connections between health, well-being, and place are a complex. This class focuses on four topics that will be important in coming…
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Urban Economic Concepts for Real Economic Development
The course begins with a thorough review of the principles of urban economics and the economic issues effecting cities and their regions. …
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Sustainable Real Estate
This introductory course surveys the historical foundations, economic logics and underlying physics that underscore the design, development and operations of sustainable buildings.
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Environment, Politics, and Action
What is the relationship between the natural environment and the design of successful places? How do we know? And how can we…
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Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems (at HBS)
Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Social and Economic Problems COURSE OBJECTIVES• To provide a framework through which to think about the salient…
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Global Leadership in Real Estate and Design: Barcelona, Spain and Seaport District, Boston, MA
In today’s increasingly connected urban centers, shifts in cultural preferences, design thinking, and spatial significations often reflect and parallel transitions in capital forces and economic…
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The Spatial Politics of Land: A Comparative Perspective
This course focuses on the deeply contested and political processes of land-use planning, i.e. of allocating land amongst different, often competing uses,…
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The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change
Gentrification and the real and perceived impacts that neighborhood change has on longtime local residents as well as new dwellers, is complicated…
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Real Estate Finance and Development Fundamentals for Public and Private Participants (at HKS)
Provides an analytical framework for understanding real estate finance and development fundamentals from both public and private perspectives. Topics addressed include: establishing investment/development objectives; structuring…
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Public Space
In a digital age, does physical public space matter? Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Madrid Rio, and the High Line argue yes, with ambitions ranging from…
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Environmental Systems 1
This course is the first of a two-module sequence in Building Technology (6121, 6122) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. Objectives:To…
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Environmental Systems 2
This course is the second of a two-module sequence in Building Technology (6121, 6122) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. The objective…
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Construction Systems
This course introduces a framework to know the instantiation of architecture through construction systems. Construction systems will be discovered through the methods of dissection, drawing,…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies I
Matthew Urbanski, Rosetta S. Elkin
Recognizing that plants are one of the essential mediums of landscape architecture, this class seeks to introduce the student to two basic relationships; the relationship…
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Structural Design II
This course is a continuation of GSD 6227 and, after an overview/reminder introduction, furthers understanding of more developed structural systems and materials in architectural design.
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies III: Ecology and the Design World
Required for both MLA 1 and MLA AP students taking the third LA core-studio. Ecological Principles for Design (Steven Handel). The fundamentals of ecological science…
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Innovation in Science and Engineering: Conference Course (at SEAS)
Explores factors and conditions contributing to innovation in science and engineering; how important problems are found, defined, and solved; roles of teamwork and creativity; and…
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Water Engineering (at SEAS)
Introduces the fundamentals of water biology, chemistry, physics and transport processes needed to understand water quality and water purification technologies. Practical instruction in basic water…
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Computer Vision (at SEAS)
Vision as an ill-posed inverse problem: image formation, two-dimensional signal processing; feature analysis; image segmentation; color, texture, and shading; multiple-view geometry; object and scene recognition;…
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Material Systems: Digital Design and Fabrication
Martin Bechthold, Jose Garcia del Castillo Lopez
The translation between architectural design and the subsequent actualization process is mediated by various tools and techniques that allow design teams, fabricators…
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Changing Natural and Built Coastal Environments
Steven Apfelbaum, Katharine Parsons
This course will examine natural and anthropogenic processes affecting the coastal zone and nearshore environment. Ecological principles and their application to design…
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Introduction to Computational Design
Panagiotis Michalatos, Sawako Kaijima
This is an introductory course to computational design and the prerequisite for a spring course that deals with more advanced topics in…
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Mapping II: Geosimulation
This advanced lecture course is a continuation of GSD6322 Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation. In Mapping II, students will learn the theories…
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Forms of Energy: Nonmodern
Offered for the final time at the GSD, the fall 2017 Forms of Energy course focuses on Nonmodern Forms of Energy and…
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Hybrid Formations: In Pursuit of Novel Form
“I do not oppose form, but only form as a goal.”– Ludwig Mies van der Rohe “Before computers, you'd start designing…
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Deployable Surfaces: Dynamic Performance Through Multi-Material Architectures
Chuck Hoberman, Jonathan Grinham
Rapidly deployable structures have been with us since nomadic people used sticks and fabric to create the first tents. Out of these…
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Visualization (at SEAS)
An introduction to key design principles and techniques for visualizing data. Covers design practices, data and image models, visual perception, interaction principles, visualization tools, and…
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Nano Micro Macro: Adaptive Material Laboratory (with SEAS)
Salmaan Craig, Joanna Aizenberg
In recent years, materials scientists have radically extended the arena for inventing new technology, by discovering how to manipulate matter starting from…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar: Tectonic Tradition: Structure and Material in Japan
In Japan, design, both traditional and contemporary, is inseparable from materials and how they are constructed together. In this seminar, guest speakers are invited to…
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Foundations of Practice
Jeffry Burchard, Jesse M. Keenan
For students in the fifth semester of the M.Arch I degree program, this four (4) credit hour course examines models and…
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Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society I
Woodward Yang, Diane Davis, Martin Bechthold, Chuck Hoberman, Robert Silman
Developing and implementing good solutions to real problems facing human society requires a broad understanding of the relationships between technology innovation, science, manufacturing, design thinking,…
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Frameworks of Practice
Since the dawn of the technological society that emerged after World War II, the normative practice of architecture, particularly in the United…
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Innovation in Project Delivery
Project delivery – the organizational, legal and economic arrangements by which society produces its built environment – has undergone a radical transformation…
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Aggregate Effects: Re-Tooling the Small City for Environmental and Social Impact at Multiple Scales
Discussions on the contemporary city often focus on the challenges of large metropolitan areas. The convergence of competing economic, geographic, and environmental…
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Real Estate and City Making in China
Real estate has increasingly become a compelling force in the process of city making, one uniquely capable of leading and guiding multiple steps in the…
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Ecology, Infrastructure, Power
Extraction redefines our understanding of urbanism in the 21st century. If everything we build comes from the ground, then extraction is the process and practice…
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Ecological Urbanism Field Research Seminar in China (summer course)
This summer field research seminar will offer an overview of ecological urbanism within a Chinese context. Integrating theory with practice and speculation, students will build…
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Emergent Urbanism: Planning and Design Visions for the city of Hermosillo, Mexico
This project-based class focuses on the planning and design of sustainable strategies for cities in the developing world, using the city of…
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Independent Study by Candidates for Master’s Degrees
Jennifer Bonner, Diane Davis, Jill Desimini, Edward Eigen, Ewa Harabasz, Peter Rowe, Bing Wang, Joan Busquets, Yusuke Obuchi, Hanif Kara, Remment Koolhaas, Jock Herron, Ray Torto, Martin Bechthold, Anita Berrizbeitia, Sonja Dümpelmann, Ann Forsyth, Andrew Holder, Jerold S. Kayden, Grace La, Ali Malkawi, Jorge Silvetti, Andrew Witt, Jon Lott, Mark Mulligan, Felipe Correa, Robert Pietrusko, Alistair McIntosh, Jesse M. Keenan, Chuck Hoberman, Richard Peiser, John May, Sai Balakrishnan, Niklas Maak, Francesca Benedetto, Holly Samuelson, Preston Scott Cohen
Students may take a maximum of 8 units with different GSD instructors in this course series. 9201 must be taken for either 2, or 4…
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Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD
This seminar is intended to provide the theoretical and methodological foundation for completing a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. By…
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Independent Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree MArch
The Thesis Program encourages students to take advantage of the wide range of resources and research initiatives of the Graduate School of Design and its…
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MDes Open Projects 1
“Open Projects” is a two-semester course sequence for second year MDes students. As the graduating requirement for students enrolled in the 4-Semester Track of the…
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Preparation of MLA Design Thesis
This research seminar is intended for Master in Landscape Architecture candidates electing to pursue a design thesis in their final year of study. The course…
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Independent Design Engineering Project I
Martin Bechthold, Woodward Yang, Peter Stark
The Independent Design Engineering Project (IDEP) is a two-semester project during which students in the Master in Design Engineering (MDE) program work on understanding a…
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Independent Study by Candidates for Doctoral Degrees
Edward Eigen, Diane Davis, K. Michael Hays
9502 must be taken for either 2, or 4 units. Under faculty guidance, the student conducts an independent reading program and formulates a thesis proposal.
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Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Martin Bechthold, Mohsen Mostafavi, Neil Brenner, Richard Peiser, Antoine Picon, Peter Rowe
Thesis in Satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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Thesis Extension in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Martin Bechthold, Anita Berrizbeitia, Neil Brenner, Joan Busquets, Ali Malkawi, Richard Peiser, Peter Rowe, Charles Waldheim
Thesis extension in satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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MArch II Proseminar
Jorge Silvetti, Jennifer Bonner
This course provides a forum for critical discussion of contemporary design practices that is exploratory and speculative in nature. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and…
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Urban Design Proseminar
The proseminar is a forum for conversation on contemporary urban design. It is structured around three overlapping discussions: the formation of the discipline,…
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Proseminar in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology
This research seminar is intended for Master in Design Studies (MDES) candidates entering the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology (ULE) stream as well as Master in Landscape…
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Doctoral Program Proseminar
This pro-seminar is one way of fulfilling a requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic…