Courses
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Second Semester Architecture Core: SITUATE
Michelle Chang, Adam Frampton, Elle Gerdeman, Angela Pang, Ritchie Yao, Alexander Porter, Nancy Nichols
The overarching pedagogical agenda for second semester is to expand upon the design methodologies developed in the first semester such that students acquire an understanding…
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Fourth Semester Architecture Core: RELATE
Jenny French, Nima Javidi, Andrew Holder, Cara Liberatore, Elizabeth Whittaker, Emmett Zeifman
The fourth and final semester of the core sequence, this architecture studio tackles the complexity of the urban condition through the design of housing.
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Collaborative Design Engineering Studio II
Kipp Bradford, Mark Coughlin, Jonathan Grinham, Karen Reuther
The second-semester studio builds upon theoretical and technical concepts already introduced in the MDE program, emphasizing problem assessment, creative and critical thinking, observational and experimentation-based…
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Percent for Art: A New Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
In the option studio, we design a new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by re-using the structure of a large-scale shopping…
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Architecture or the City
Today, it would be reasonable to argue that the architecture of urban morphology is more visibly autonomous than at any time since the advent of…
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Mingei and its Future: Hida Takayama, Japan
The studio looks at the legacy of Mingei, the “Craft of the People.” Mingei is a philosophy developed in the 1920s in Japan by Soetsu…
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Translogic Studio: A Proto-Urban Vertical Monastery
For this Studio we will focus on typological transformation and archetypal hybridization, integration of design and technology, and the relationship between precedent, speculation, and invention…
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Kit House II
This studio has two objectives. The first is to revisit an icon of American vernacular. The second, to reflect on the design process itself, on…
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The Temporary Contemporary: Assembling a Public in Downtown Los Angeles
The contemporary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a nonlinear space that gauges modernity…
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Urban Glitch
Urban Glitch is a studio designed to research the pressing issue of systems-linked architecture in relation to the complex and intertwined ecological and social imperatives…
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Long Living Spolia
Spolia, derived from the Latin word for "spoils" or "booty," involves repurposing art and architectural elements from previous constructions or demolished structures. The practice dates…
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Rethinking Metabolic Rift: Tokyo: Architecture Between Scales and Typologies
Can Tokyo be a cultural city, a city that is cognizant of the “metabolic rift”—the often-inevitable environmental degradation that accompanies urbanization—and yet committed to confronting…
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Nordic Urban Weave: On Domesticity and Civic Continuity
Set within Copenhagen’s post-industrial Nordhavn District, the studio investigates the global challenges of water resiliency and housing—a common yet complex condition in many harbor cities…
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The Coming Community
In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben recounts the following tale, as told by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch: "The Hassidim tell a story about the…
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Magna Parens Materia
In the last century, architects have been driven by market conditions to build with the highest possible combination of CO2-heavy materials, including steel and reinforced…
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Reconstructions | Abandoned Lands + Abolitionist Futures
Harvard University has recently confronted its history with the release of a report detailing the institution's complicity in enslavement, stretching back to its founding. This…
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Digital Media: Writing Form
This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the essential pursuit of writing form. Setting aside the better-known paradigms of…
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Digital Media: Models
This course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods related to digital media in architecture and design, with a focus on reciprocal processes…
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Digital Media: Not Magic
According to folklore, Michelangelo fell to his knees upon seeing the Florentine fresco Annunciation, went silent, and eventually concluded that the image of the Virgin…
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Responsive Environments
The course introduces students to the tools and design methods for creating responsive environments and technologically driven experiences in the built environment. By putting the…
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Images as Instruments
In the last three decades, architectural praxis has undergone a paradigmatic shift, precipitated by what Jonathan Crary delineates as a seismic transformation in visuality—a metamorphosis…
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Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment
The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers, an expressive and playful supplement to computer-based labor. The aim of the class is…
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Material Practice and its Agency
This seminar introduces an understanding of material discourse in design and architecture that affects cultural, social, economic, and political issues. In addition to their pragmatic…
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Towards a Newer Brutalism
In the early 1950s, British architects Alison and Peter Smithson announced their arrival with a call for a “new brutalism”—a polemic sketched out over several…
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Appearance
This seminar will focus on architecture’s appearance, how architecture is grasped by its public. We will explore the sources, significances, and receptions of our work’s…
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Design Teaching Lab (DTL)
This course teaches design teaching for those interested in pursuing parallel paths in design and education. Starting from an understanding of design as a culture…
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Rome: Art, Architecture and Urbanism from Antiquity to the Baroque
A seminar on the art, architecture, and urbanism of Rome where the layering of material artifacts from successive historical periods provides an uninterrupted record of…
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Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies
Infrastructure plays a decisive role in urban development and in the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical perspective. History…
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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 Tange Kenzō (1913–2005) on the…
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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 challenges facing designers, and…
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Architecture: Histories of the Present
“Poets and prophets, like magicians, learn their craft from predecessors. And just as magicians will invoke the real or supposed source of an illusion as…
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On Architecture and Property
Most generously, property can be understood as a relational term. A property defines that which is characteristic, or unique, to a given thing vis-à-vis another.
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Displaced Becomings –The Many Faces of Modern Architecture in Sinophone Asia
The idea was that in [a] society, one that's incompletely modernized… the temporal dynamics of that society, and of the modernism that it produces, will…
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Architecture and Poststructuralism
We set the stage by means of a persistent dilemma shaping aesthetic practices as it was inaugurated by concepts from Kant and Hegel: Is architecture…
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Critical Boston: Challenge and Opportunity in a City Undergoing Rapid Change
This course will examine the rapid changes to the urban fabric of Boston and Cambridge. How are communities addressing rapid growth and gentrification? How effective…
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The Picturesque: Nature // Artifice
This seminar explores the legacy of picturesque image-making from the eighteenth century to the present. From its roots in eighteenth-century debates on the English landscape,…
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Computing Fantasy: Imagination, Invention, Radical Pedagogy (Munari / Rodari / Calvino) (at FAS)
Built around three seminal 20th century figures–the artist-designer Bruno Munari, the writer-educator Gianni Rodari, the novelist Italo Calvino–the course aims to explore structural, combinatory, and generative thinking…
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Modern Housing and Urban Districts: Concepts, Cases, and Comparisons
This course deals with ‘modern housing’ covering a period primarily from the 1900s to the present. It engages with ‘urban districts’ in so far as…
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Building Simulation
Ali Malkawi, Carlos Cerezo Davila
This course is the third of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6126) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. Objective: The best…
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Materials
This course explores the science and design of materials. How do we classify materials? Why do we build with certain materials? What are the energy,…
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Structural Design 1
This course introduces students to the analysis and design of structural systems. The fundamental principles of statics, structural loads, and rigid body equilibrium are considered…
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Cases in Contemporary Construction
As the final component in the required sequence of technology courses, this professionally-oriented course develops an integral understanding of the design and construction of buildings…
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Digital Material Systems: Ceramics
Digital design and fabrication technologies have become integral to the discourse surrounding contemporary design and architectural practice. The translation from design to realization is mediated…
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Informal Robotics
This course teaches how to create original robotic devices made of light, compliant – informal – materials. New fabrication techniques are transforming the field of…
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Procedural Fields: Functional Design of Discrete Hyperdimensional Spaces
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
This course will introduce participants to computational methods for the generation of discrete multi-dimensional media, using functional definitions. Digital modeling techniques are at the core…
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Data Science for Environmentally Responsive Buildings
Objective: With extensive high-fidelity measured data collected from modern buildings, data science has become a promising tool for optimizing building performance and design, enhancing the…
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BioFabrication
Rapid global climate change has lent new urgency to our longstanding interest of growing materials to break the unstainable reality of material extraction, use and…
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Machine Aesthetics: The Surrogate of Taste
The use of generative AI models increasingly involves the reliance on a few black box pretrained and centralized models where design intent is conveyed through…
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EMBODIED CARBON- Material Cycles, Circularity, and Advances in Reverse Engineering
At a time when urgent action is needed to avert the climate crisis, it is very difficult to take an idealistic approach when considering key…
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Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II
This graduate-level seminar course is part of the MDE program's first-year core curriculum, comprising a two-course sequence spanning one year. The course focuses on building…
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Is the Grass Any Greener? Architectural Practice & Project Delivery Around the World
Conversations about how architectural practice is regulated, how architects do their work, and how construction projects are delivered are typically constrained by regional and national…
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History and Theory of Architectural Practice
Who is the architect? This course considers architectural practice from social and historical perspectives, and it charts changing definitions of the architect with respect to…
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From Inception to Realization: Three Museum Case Studies
The process of design is continuous. At the inception of a project, we sketch, analyze with scale overlays, and develop preliminary massing models. Months later,…
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Independent Study by Candidates for Master’s Degrees
Andrew Holder, Kathleen Brandenburg, Diane Davis, Rahul Mehrotra, Andrew Witt, Ann Forsyth, Lisa Haber-Thomson, Edward Eigen, Martin Bechthold, Anita Berrizbeitia, Mark Lamster, Ewa Harabasz, Rosalea Monacella, Holly Samuelson, Luis Callejas, Allen Sayegh, Elizabeth Christoforetti, Jock Herron, John May, Lorena Bello Gómez, Malkit Shoshan, Ali Malkawi, James Stockard
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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Thesis project / Project Thesis
As the culminating effort for the Master of Architecture degree, a “Thesis” entails multiple expectations. It is a demonstration not only of competency and expertise,…
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Independent Study on Multi-Cultural Design Environments
An examination and comparison of design practices in a professional setting. This course is open only to students who will be undertaking an internship or…
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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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Independent Thesis for the Degree Master in Design Studies
(Previously "Open Projects”) Prerequisites: Filing of signed "Declaration of Advisor" form with MDes office, and approval signature of the program director. A student who selects…
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Independent Design Engineering Project II
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
Holly Samuelson, Ali Malkawi, Antoine Picon, Peter Rowe, Richard Peiser
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 Extension in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Martin Bechthold, Anita Berrizbeitia, Diane Davis, Gareth Doherty, Ann Forsyth, Ali Malkawi, John May, Rahul Mehrotra, Mohsen Mostafavi, Erika Naginski, Richard Peiser, Antoine Picon, Peter Rowe, Carole Voulgaris, Charles Waldheim, Gary R. Hilderbrand
Thesis extension in satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design. DDES stduents should search the my.harvard course catalog for their advisor's name and enrol in…
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Discourse and Research Methods
This pro-seminar is a core requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic areas that range…
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Discourse and Methods II
Antoine Picon, Divya Subramanian
The objective of the seminar is to examine and discuss in depth some of the main methodological issues that students enrolled in the PhD program…
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MDes Open Project: Forms of Assembly. All Things Considered
“When bodies congregate, move, and speak together, they lay claim to a certain space as public space.” – Judith Butler. In the public space, we…
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MDes Open Project: O(perating)S(ystem)1.1
Illumination is hard wired. Lighting networks require electric grids, digital chips, insulated conduit. Material infrastructure allows for immaterial transmission. Illumination blurs a building’s boundaries, creating…
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MDes Open Project: Physical Realms Synthetic Realities
This OP explores the notion of reality and authenticity of experiences in the built environment through the lens of current emergent technologies. By harnessing emergent…
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MDes Open Project: Experimental Infrastructures
Infrastructure is an encompassing and promiscuous term that has been enjoying a renaissance in design, the social sciences, and public discourse. We are inundated by…
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MDes Open Project: Framing Regenerative Futures
Framing Regenerative Futures is a platform to critically examine contemporary challenges to settlement and society and then, in collective and individual work, to create imaginative…
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MDes Open Project: Revisiting the Space of Appearance, the Implication of the “Self”
In considering the social dimension of space, the designer, (architect, landscape architect, urban designer, artist) is called to engage reality in all its messiness, indeterminacy…
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MDes Open Project: Communicating Climate – Representing Risk
In contemporary practice, designers are often called upon to visualize the implications of and potential responses to climate adaptation on behalf of individuals and institutions,…