Courses
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Landscape Architecture II
Craig Douglas, Gary R. Hilderbrand, Amy Whitesides, Elaine Stokes
The studio will explore how we might reimagine cemetery landscapes of the future in response to the challenges of the climate crisis, and the clear…
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Landscape Architecture IV
Lorena Bello Gómez, Francesca Benedetto, Claire Fellman, Tomas Folch, Matthew Girard, Belinda Tato, Pamela Conrad, Min Yeo
The Near Future City The fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence responds to our most pressing urban agenda in the years…
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The Landscapes of the Norwegian Scenic Routes
Over the past thirty years, the "Norwegian Scenic Routes" project has produced imaginative buildings and landscapes in poetic dialogue with Norway's unique scenery and road…
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Bangkok Porous City: New Landscapes of Equity and Prosperity 2.0
Anita Berrizbeitia, Kotchakorn Voraakhom, Ignacio Bunster-Ossa
This studio will bring together faculty and students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to imagine how the last development parcel where river and city meet in…
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Wild Ways 3.0: California Connectivity
Site: Territorial California, from Death Valley to the Central Valley and the Sierra Madre Mountains This studio will explore themes of peri-urban, rural, regional, and…
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Under the Palm Trees
Sultan Youssef ben Tachfine founded in the 11th century Marrakech as the new capital of the Maroc empire in the middle of a desert plateau…
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Landscape Representation II
The Landscape Representation II course will examine the relationship between terrain and the dynamic landscape it supports and engenders. The course explores and challenges the…
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Public Space in the Informal City
This course seeks to open a discussion around the design and representation of public space in informal settlements, aiming to provide students with tools for…
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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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Place-Based Scenario Planning
The climate crisis is, in part, a communication crisis. How can we communicate the choices that communities will need to make to adapt to climate…
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Images of the Environment: Terror and Beauty
This project-based seminar will focus on producing “thick” descriptions of photographs of environmental crises in the recent decades. Those of interest include Edward Burtynsky’s series…
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Territorial Commons: Mapping Narratives in the Shifting Extractive Landscapes of the Antipodes
The relentless pursuit of economic growth has historically propelled an ever-expanding reliance on natural resources, shaping and altering cultures while transforming landscapes. This pursuit of…
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Theories and Practices of Landscape Architecture
Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Anita Berrizbeitia
What do you need to know in order to understand this landscape? How do design culture and design thinking transform over time? How are cultural…
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Wild Ways: The Nature of Wilderness, Wild-ness and Wild Being(s) in the Anthropocene
This seminar interrogates changing ideas of nature on an urbanizing planet under the intertwined crises of climate change (global heating) and biodiversity loss (extinction) –…
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Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Drawing Landscapes, Energy, and Matter
The structures and forms we perceive on the land are produced by forces that make order and those that upset it. Landscape architecture is one…
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Thinking Landscape-Making Cities – Designing Regenerative Futures
This design seminar challenges you to create regenerative concepts and strategies for a just, temperate, and regenerative urban future. You will design a new settlement…
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African Landscape Architecture: Alternative Futures for the Field
A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate…
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Histories of Landscape Architecture II
Designed gardens and landscapes are cultural artifacts that encompass three main expectations: pragmatic needs, cultural significance, and aesthetic order. Although some landscape narratives often ignore…
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Modernization in the Visual United States Environment, 1890-2035
Here find an ecology of changes, a course on the ecosystem of change so rapid most thoughtful Americans know it as modernization. Design remembered and…
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Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871-2036: Seminar
Fantasy opens portals to new life forms. It prepares us for supranatural humans, genetic adjustment, non-electronic novelty. It forms the core of natural-world reverence, maybe…
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Natural Histories for Troubled Times, or, Revisiting the ‘Entangled Bank’
This seminar looks at our (troubled) times, its toxic landscapes and eco-unfriendly townscapes, through the lens of natural history. By “lens” we can think immediately…
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Fight or Flight: Space Colonization and the Future of Landscape Architecture
This seminar aims to examine the future of the profession of landscape architecture in relation to the two forces that are likely to shape it…
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Making Participation Relevant to Design
By trying to understand how participation can make design more relevant to society, we can create more socially just cities. This course starts from the…
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Climate Justice
Recent discourse around climate change—including debates about the Anthropocene, Green New Deal legislation, the dire warnings of the IPCC, to name a few—increasingly make evident…
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Creating Environmental Markets
Robert Zimmerman, Lorena Bello Gómez
The Laredo Resilience Project There is a way out of the climate box we have created, though resistance to the necessary ecological transformation remains intense. …
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Untangling Climax Change
Departing from the book Climax Change! How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency, this seminar proposes to untie and explore the many…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II
Karen Janosky, Catherine Miller, Kirt Rieder
This course is required for all first-year MLA I and MLA I AP students. Topography is one of the primary and most powerful elements of…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV
GSD 6242 is the final course in the Ecologies, Techniques and Technologies landscape core sequence. It is a required course for all MLA I, and…
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Plants and Placemaking – New Ecologies for a Rapidly Changing World
In the face of crises spanning pandemics, political turmoil, and the rapid degradation of the planet’s natural systems—all within a backdrop of myriad inequalities—the power…
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Structures in Landscape Architecture, Joint & Detail
This class will study the design from and constructional detail of the landscape pavilion and the pedestrian bridge. This work will be focused through the…
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Climate Positive Design Lab
As the climate and biodiversity crises escalate, our world faces unprecedented times. With the 1.5oC threshold quickly approaching and 75% of emissions coming from the…
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Designing Critical Practices
Today, landscape architecture is a field in active transformation. At a broad scale, the climate crisis is transforming the built and natural environment surrounding us—putting…
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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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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 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 Thesis in Satisfaction of the Degree Master in Landscape Architecture
Following preparation in GSD 9341, each student pursues a topic of relevance to landscape architecture, which must include academic inquiry and design exploration.
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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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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,…