Courses
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First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT
Mark Lee, Sean Canty, Jenny French, Elle Gerdeman, Lisa Haber-Thomson, Zeina Koreitem
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
Anita Berrizbeitia, Danielle Choi, Francesca Benedetto, Jungyoon Kim, Pablo Pérez-Ramos, 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
Toni L. Griffin, Sai Balakrishnan, Kathryn Firth, Lily Song, David Gamble
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
Jon Lott, Grace La, John May, Jay Siebenmorgen, 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
Rosetta S. Elkin, Robert Pietrusko, Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Rosalea Monacella, Paola Sturla
From Episode to Adaptation: Design for a Littoral Landscape This studio explores climate change, adaptation, and risk as fundamental to the design of the built…
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Elements of Urban Design
Rahul Mehrotra, Stephen Gray, Dennis Pieprz, Linda Pollak, Yun Fu, Michael Manfredi
Elements of Urban Design is an advanced core studio for the post-professional Urban Design program. The studio introduces critical concepts, strategies, and technical skills associated…
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Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)
Andrew Witt, Jock Herron, Peter Stark
The first year Collaborative Design Engineering Studio runs for two semesters, and this year will address the theme of “mobility”. The first semester focuses on…
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UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA: Living Post-Work
Today, at an unprecedented rate, new technologies and global networks (underground, in space, in the cloud) are transforming the ways in which we understand and…
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Dwelling / Garden / Being, Suzhou
“Poetically man dwells on this earth”, the phrase by Hölderlin inspired Heidegger to write an essay entitled “Building Dwelling Thinking”, in which he reveals how…
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The House: The Waken Desire
“An old house, a shadowy porch, tiles, a crumbling Arab decoration, a man sitting against the Wall, a deserted Street, a Mediterranean tree: this…
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On Health II: Amsterdam Health Kitchen
Ben van Berkel, Christian Veddeler
The widespread emphasis on healthy living and the demand for creating environments, cities and buildings accordingly has aligned with the ongoing integration of technology into…
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Natural Monument
Mauricio Pezo, Sofia von Ellrichshausen
It would be deceiving to claim a return to nature since there has never been a real departure from it. Buildings complete nature as…
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An American Plan
Kersten Geers, David Van Severen
This is the first of a series of studios focusing on American Architecture. The research will happen sideways. Not through analysis of local phenomena,…
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reCYCLO: Architectures of Waste
Human beings have traditionally built enclosures from close-to-hand materials: tents from animal hides in the desert, log cabins in forests, stone huts in rocky areas,…
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Architecture as a Tool to Improve Lives: Development of a Day Care Centre for Rohingya Children
For decades, construction in the context of international aid has predominantly followed a specific pattern: foreign organizations erect their structures, made of industrialized and…
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Soft Spaces
Simon Frommenwiler, Simon Hartmann, Tilo Herlach
Architectural design has to deal increasingly with given and inflexible concepts describing separation of functions, perimeters and areas of control. The three-year HHF Option Studio…
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New Formations for the Social Metropolis
This studio will explore housing architecture’s latent potential to transform the global project of urbanisation to one of productivity, inclusivity, hybridity and resilience. We…
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The Future Provincetown 1
Historical accretion vs total design and artisanal production vs technological innovation are two of the most productive dialectics to have accompanied modern architecture since…
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North Adams Central Park: MASS ART for MASS MoCA
North Adams is a city in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, USA. Historically, North Adams was a mill town located in a stunning valley, surrounded by…
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Now Arriving: A Manhattan Transit Landscape
This studio, third in a series in New York City, contemplates the insertion of a landscape where none exists today, where more than 650,000…
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Alternative Futures for Al-`Ula, Saudi Arabia
The region of Al-`Ula, Saudi Arabia — northwest of Medina, inland from the Red Sea, and along the ancient Mediterranean ‘incense route’ — has been…
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RHIZOSPHERE
A new understanding of the relationship between agriculture and ecology will give the students new clues to design in the vernacular landscape of La Camargue…
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Arlington National Cemetery: Engaging Hallowed Ground
Opened in 1864 to accommodate the massive casualties from America’s Civil War, Arlington National Cemetery is revered as the most hallowed shrine to the…
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The New Selma
More than three years have passed since a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson shot and killed an unarmed black…
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A Campus in a City – A City in A Campus: Harvard and Allston
While Harvard University’s roots are firmly planted in the City of Cambridge, the university now owns more land in the City of Boston. The slow…
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Gendering Urban Development: Making room for women in urban planning and design in Argentina
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” – Jane Jacobs Having adopted the…
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Multiple Miamis
This interdisciplinary studio will take on questions of how design can address issues of inequity, race, affordability, and resilience in the context of the contemporary…
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The Agency of Mezcal in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico
The Oaxaca Valley in Southern Mexico is known for its cultural heritage but also for its high levels of poverty and unemployment. Limited access to…
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Architectural Representation I
Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality Architectural representation is an ideology – a source of ideas and visionary theorizing that has a set…
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Architectural Representation II
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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Digital Media: Design Systems
The course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, methods and practical techniques in design computation with emphasis on a systems perspective.
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Digital Media: Image
Over the past three decades the architectural process has been drastically reorganized by what historian Jonathan Crary calls “a transformation in the nature of visuality…
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Landscape Representation III: Landform and Ecological Process
Craig Douglas, Rosalea Monacella
Landscape Representation III examines the relationship between terrain and the landscape it supports and engenders. It aspires to explore and challenge the representational conventions of…
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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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Constructing Visual Narratives of Place
The seminar explores the representation of identity and memory in the city and its territory. The case study is Boston, in…
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Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture
Current tendencies in the discipline suggest a split between two opposing architectural projects: the easy project versus the difficult project. Primarily…
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MAKE/BELIEVE
How does the action of making reflect, produce, enhance, aggregate, and/or suspend the beliefs of authors and audiences? This hybrid production-theory course…
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Graphic / Volume Conflations
“The myth of the Neutral Tool under complete human control and the myth of the Autonomous Destiny that no human can…
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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
Soon will come plausible alternatives to our world.You may have failed in this one but what if you had a million…
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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
This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics…
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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…
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Spaces of Solidarity
‘Spaces of Solidarity’ aims at examining community-driven spaces and spatial processes that pool and share resources to build social cohesion in times…
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Cyclical City: Landscape and the Longview
Cyclical City is a seminar about the evolution of cities. Cities are enticingly rich and complex. They are entropic and unpredictable places…
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Werewolf: Architectures of Change
While the figure of Vitruvian man has long served as a metaphorical reference for an architecture evolved through design, but fixed in…
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Selected Current (and Recurrent) Topics in Architecture Theory and Design Practice
A research seminar consisting on assigned readings, presentations, discussions, and design experiments on current (and some ever re-current) topics in architectural theory and design practice.
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Style Worry or #FOMO
Reyner Banham once described the proliferation of styles after a waning epoch as “style worry,” an anxiety where the architect must decide how to…
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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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Michelangelo Architect: Precedents, Innovation, Influence
An exploration of Italian Renaissance architecture and urbanism through the persona of Michelangelo as witness, agent, and inspiration. We look at architecture…
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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…
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Signal, Image, Architecture III: The Automatic Present
“I know well enough what time is, provided that nobody asks me; but if am asked what it is, and try to explain, I am…
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Building Conservation and Renewal: Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the spatial, material, and broad cultural values inherent in a building or site that must be understood to craft interventions…
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Mountains and the Rise of Landscape
Though mountains are generally understood to be “natural” and “grand,” the way we consider, experience, describe (and design) them has radically…
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Domesticity, Privacy, Transparency, Performance
This seminar explores 20th and 21st-century notions of domesticity in the U.S, and Europe through the lens of cultural politics, gender…
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Topology and Imagination: Between Chinese Landscapes and Architecture
This course deals with landscape architecture and architecture in contemporary China. Its purpose is twofold: to articulate new perspectives on the…
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Architecture in Early Modern England: Themes and Methods
This seminar takes a selective approach to architectural culture in 16th– and 17th-century England (that is, roughly speaking, from the Tudor period…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: Exhibiting Architecture – The Agency of Display
“What does it mean to exhibit architecture?” Exhibitions are an integral part of the history of architecture. While architecture entered the gallery during the…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: Architecture, Urbanism, and Agriculture
This course is for students in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. In order to stimulate the research on the Countryside, the course will investigate…
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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, Jerold S. Kayden, Alex Krieger, Eve Blau, Joan Busquets, Peter Rowe, Antoine Picon
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: Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, and Andover, MA
The Field Study course is designed to provide students an understanding of the dynamics and complexities of real world development challenges that…
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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 decades: a place,…
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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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Critical Perspectives in Environmental Planning
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 FAS)
This course will provide a framework (and multiple lenses) through which to think about the salient economic and social problems of the five billion…
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Metropolitics: Comparative Metropolitan Governance
More than 50% of the world population lives in cities, and will reach two thirds by 2060. Almost half of the urban…
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Economic Development Planning
This course will look at the theory and practice of economic development at the local and regional level, mostly in the context…
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Experimental Infrastructures
Infrastructure is an encompassing term that can refer to anything from railroad ties to social media to ecosystems, and one which has…
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Form+Finance: the Design of Real Estate
This course exposes students to tools, instruments and strategies for design thinking and the mechanisms of finance and market forces that shape and impact built…
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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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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 as well…
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Construction Systems
In this course we examine architecture as the manifestation of logics of systems, assemblies, and materials. We seek to understand how component assemblies have evolved…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies I
This course is an introduction to the understanding of plants from non-managed plant communities to managed living structures. Through field visits, observation,…
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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
Steven Handel, Christopher Matthews
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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The Innovator’s Practice: Finding, Building and Leading Good Ideas with Others (at SEAS)
Students gain experience overcoming many under-represented challenges of becoming an innovator, including: identifying your intrinsic motivations, finding related good ideas, working effectively with others to…
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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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Material Systems: Digital Design and Fabrication
Digital design and fabrication technologies have become integral to the discourse surrounding contemporary design and architectural practice. The translation from design…
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Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation
Maps do not represent reality, they create it. As a fundamental part of the design process, the act of mapping results in highly authored views…
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BROWNFIELDS: Remediation and Regeneration Practices
‘A Brownfields Site is real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence, or potential presence…
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Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology
Timothy Dekker, Nicholas Nelson
This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and…
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Introduction to Computational Design
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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Applied Urban Analytics
The course will investigate a number of qualitative and quantitative methods to measure and analyze urban spatial problems relevant to contemporary urban…
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Digital Fabrication and Robotics
The materials and procedures of constructing architecture have changed surprisingly little since the late 1800’s / early 1900’s when the introduction…
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Deployable Surfaces: Dynamic Performance Through Multi-Material Architectures
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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Architectural Acoustics (Module F2)
What does jazz sound like when it is played in a cathedral? How would Gregorian chant sound in a jazz club? And…
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Nano Micro Macro: Adaptive Material Laboratory (with SEAS)
Jonathan Grinham, Joanna Aizenberg
In recent years, a wealth of cross-disciplinary research has produced unprecedented growth in the study of “architectured-materials." At the heart of this…
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LIT: A Survey and Design Research Seminar of Architectural Lighting (Module F1)
Light defines what and how we see; our bodies are intimately tied to cycles of light and dark. Light is also a…
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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
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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Practices of Landscape Architecture
Karen Janosky, Paola Sturla, Thomas Ryan
This course examines landscape architecture practice through the consideration of contemporary frameworks for professional services, the legal and financial contexts in which they operate, and…
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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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Elements of the Urban Stack
As our physical and virtual worlds become more and more intertwined, the “Urban Stack” presents itself as an organizational system for…
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Thing Power in the Arles Region: Assemblages, Depositions and Displacements
Anita Berrizbeitia, Katarzyna Balug
Jane Bennett borrows Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of assemblages to argue that humans are not the sole actors in and on the world.
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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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Multiple Miamis Project-based Course: Infrastructure, Affordability, Identity + the Public
The Miami project-based course will explore how urban planning and design can promote affordable housing, retail, and services, public mobility and access,…
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Independent Study by Candidates for Master’s Degrees
Karen Janosky, Joan Busquets, Diane Davis, Sai Balakrishnan, Martin Bechthold, Neil Brenner, Danielle Choi, Daniel D’Oca, Sonja Dümpelmann, Edward Eigen, Ann Forsyth, Jenny French, Ewa Harabasz, Sawako Kaijima, Allen Sayegh, Andres Sevtsuk, Jorge Silvetti, Andrew Witt, Preston Scott Cohen, Steven Handel, Oana Stanescu, Mack Scogin, Christopher Herbert, Lily Song, Gareth Doherty, Panagiotis Michalatos, Holly Samuelson
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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Preparation of MLA Design Thesis
A thesis is a thematic proposition offered for discussion and debate. A thesis is typically developed through a piece of original research specific to an…
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Independent Design Engineering Project I
Martin Bechthold, Mary Tolikas
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
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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Preparation of Doctoral Thesis Proposal
Martin Bechthold, Ann Forsyth, Niall Kirkwood, Ali Malkawi, Erika Naginski, Antoine Picon, Peter Rowe
Independent Study with Doctoral Advisor to produce a preliminary literature review. Prerequisite: Enrollment in GSD DDes program. Prep of Thesis …
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Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Thesis in Satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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Thesis Extension in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Thesis extension in satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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MArch II Proseminar
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 proseminar is intended for Master in Design Studies (MDES) candidates entering the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology (ULE) stream as well as Master in Landscape Architecture…