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 faculty to make a thoughtful contribution to the discipline. Thesis is a required component of the March I program, and an optional track for the March II program.

Each student works on a final thesis project based upon the interests and research done in the semesters leading up to the final term and under the guidance of a designated faculty advisor, with whom s/he will meet regularly throughout the course of the term.

The final thesis project, having attained a sufficient standard of completion, will be presented and defended at a final, open review consisting of a panel chaired by the thesis advisor and composed of members of the faculty and invited critics.

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 the end of the semester, students will have produced a solid thesis proposal and have the necessary intellectual foundation to complete their thesis by the end of the academic year. Over the semester, students will identify and refine their thesis topic, solidify their relationship with a thesis advisor, and produce a thesis proposal. Weekly sessions will involve discussions of relevant readings and exploration of emergent student work. As a forum for the exchange of work in progress, the seminar will allow students to share their ideas and get feedback on the development of their thesis from their peers, visiting critics and reviewers, and faculty. 

The seminar will begin by introducing the thesis as a conceptual frame and by identifying the key elements that cut across the different types of theses that might be produced by students, whether textual, design-focused, or based in some other medium, such as film. It will then address the following issues, among others: topic and question identification, research methods, case selection, the craft of thesis production, managing the student-advisor relationship, and techniques for verbally defending a thesis. 

Students will complete weekly assignments relevant to their thesis and present in class on most weeks. Since the seminar will be run as a graduate seminar, students will be expected to provide critical and thoughtful responses to their peers’ work and engage in informed and mature discussion of the issues found in the readings. The course will include a midterm and final review of students’ proposals, to be attended by faculty and critics. 

Course format: This course will meet weekly on Monday afternoons from 3pm to 6pm. This time will be subdivided into three 45-minute sessions (with breaks in between sessions). The first session will comprise of lectures and/or time to discuss the week's assigned reading. The second session will be a time for student's to present their progress on their thesis proposal to a group of two or three classmates. The third session will be a time for students to discuss challenges, lessons, and advice for completing a thesis proposal in groups of four or five students.

Independent Study by Candidates for Master’s Degrees

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 units.

Prerequisites: GSD student, seeking a Master's degree

Candidates may arrange individual work focusing on subjects or issues that are of interest to them but are not available through regularly offered coursework. Students must submit an independent study petition and secure approval of their advisor and of the faculty member sponsoring the study.

The independent study petition can be found on my.Harvard. Enrollment will not be final until the petition is submitted.

International Humanitarian Response (at HSPH)

This course offers practical training in the complex issues and field skills needed to engage in humanitarian work. Students will gain familiarity with the concepts and international standards for humanitarian response. While providing a solid theoretical foundation, the course will focus on practical skills such as conducting rapid assessments, ensuring field security, and interacting with aid agencies, the military, and the media during humanitarian crises. The course culminates in a required three-day intensive humanitarian crisis field simulation at Harold Parker State Forest in North Andover, MA, during May 1-3. 2020. Students will camp for two nights in the forest as part of an aid agency team responding to a simulated international disaster and conflict. Student teams will carry out rapid assessments, create a comprehensive humanitarian aid plan, and manage interactions with refugees, officials, and other humanitarian actors. Students will face challenges that test their subject knowledge, team skills, creativity, and grit.

Topics covered:         
– Humanitarian response community and history
– International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Law
– Sphere standards (shelter, water and sanitation, food security, health)
– Civil-military relations, media skills, logistics, and budgeting
– Monitoring and evaluation, accountability
– Personal security, metal health, stress, and teamwork
– Humanitarian technology, and crowdsourcing, and GPS skills

Course Fee: TBD (In previous years, $300 to cover camping gear hire, food, and other equipment costs).

This course is cross-listed with the Harvard Chang School (HSPH) as GHP 515 and GHP 518, and with Tufts University as NUTR324 and DHP213.  All cross-registrants and Harvard Chan students must apply for instructor permission here.

Please note that this course is the equivalent of 3 GSD units, not 4.

This course will take place in Fong Auditorium in Boylston Hall, Harvard Yard, not at HSPH.

Public Space

In a digital age, does physical public space matter? Tahrir Square, the streets of Hong Kong, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Zuccotti Park, Madrid Rio, and other physical public spaces argue the affirmative, with ambitions ranging from accommodation of everyday leisure activities to political protests. Physical public space, although adapting to current demands and contexts, would appear anchored in transcendent human needs and desires.

This course examines the case and place for physical public space. Physical public space takes on a variety of physical forms, including sidewalks, streets, squares, parks, plazas, arcades, atria, and other outdoor and indoor spaces, but morphology alone is not destiny. Public space raises fascinating substantive and procedural questions. What are the purposes of public space? What makes good public space? Who decides what is good? Should public spaces serve all publics and allow all uses at once? Who should decide what is allowed? What role should design play? Who should design public space? Are there universal design principles? Who should own and manage public space? Can private parties participate in public space provision without loss of publicness? Is government provision always better that private provision? Does theory usefully inform practice? How much do democracy and equality depend on ample availability of public space? How much public space is enough? Is physical public space threatened or enhanced by the digital? Is a shopping mall a public space? And the list goes on.

This course introduces foundations for thinking about and making public space and offers students an opportunity to contribute research and new ideas to the field. Classes include lectures, discussions, and two small exercises (drafting rules of public space user conduct and creating a public space logo) that replace readings for that class. Students are expected to complete assigned readings for each class before class so that they may actively participate in discussions. A 5,000-word term paper or other instructor-approved final project of equivalent effort is required. The final project will count for 75% of the course grade, while class participation will count for 25%.

Local Government Solutions to America’s Affordable Rental Housing Challenge

There are 10.9 million renters who are severely housing cost burdened – spending more than 50% of their income on shelter. The solutions to this national crisis are varied and involve all levels of government, but local governments are closest to the particular housing challenges in their communities and arguably have the widest range of levers to apply to the problem. This course will challenge students to create new and innovative approaches to the affordable housing problem that can be implemented at the local level.  These approaches will include a mix of strategies to raise additional funds for subsidies, reduce regulatory constraints, and encourage new forms of housing and new methods of housing construction. Students will be offering advice and solutions directly to mayors and housing professionals of four cities from different regions of the nation that have volunteered to serve as laboratories for the course: Austin, TX, Louisville, KY, Rochester, NY, and Stockton, CA. 

Students will receive a package of information about their cities in the first session of the class and will hear from representatives of each of the cities early in the semester. Students will also have access to important local actors as the class proceeds.  All four cities will return for presentations of the students final reports providing a comprehensive strategy for the cities to adopt that will substantially resolve the cities’ current need for housing affordable to severely cost-burdened residents.

The course will be limited to 20 students who will be divided into teams that will serve as “consultants” to the mayors and housing professionals of the participating cities. While there are not explicit prerequisites, this course will work best for students with some experience, either academic or professional in the housing sector. 

The class will meet in a seminar format for three hours each week.  Classes will include a mix of lectures, presentations and discussions with invited guest experts, and will often include presentations by student groups. Grading will include class participation, periodic presentations, and the final comprehensive strategy. 

Circular Eco-nomics: Mapping Architectural & Urban Ecosystems

This course introduces students to the idea of circular sustainable economies, hereby described as “eco-nomics,” looking simultaneously into the economics of sustainable lifestyles and work styles, sustainable product lifecycle, and sustainable environmental development. Eco-nomics is based on the value assessment that economy and environment are and should be interconnected.

How can we rethink architecture and urban conditions as a “system of systems,” that instead of promoting linear entropy, decay, and the accumulation of waste, can be designed with circular and recursive material and energetic metabolisms? We will examine new and emerging models, technologies, and techniques for the design of innovative architectural and urban “metabolizing” environments. “Metabolizing” is hereby understood as the constant circular exchange of matter and energy in the creation and operation of living and nonliving systems. 

To do this, we will constructively critique contemporary methods of design and collaboration, industrial and professional value creation and assessment, and persistent and evolving conventions of material fabrication, construction processes, and building operations within architecture and infrastructure. Materiality in these contexts must be studied holistically: Where do materials come from? How do materials transform and become what they are through human and nonhuman forms of labor? How does materiality and energy power systems represent systems of power? And how is materiality affected by global and international networks and trade practices?

By shifting toward a cyclical view of the lives of materiality and building products, their explicit and implicit web of connections, the seminar will focus on using architectural and urban proposals to provoke eco-nomics to modify the narratives of materiality, production, and their “commodity chains” of environmental resources, labor, and industry. 

The seminar will cover framework of thought and the digital tools of technical craft to create speculative, cross-scale design interventions taking into account new emerging eco-nomics within circular sustainable economies. Student production will depart from a linear model of architectural and urban design thinking, and arrive at a circular model with the goal of resulting in significant changes to how we think, design, construct, operate, and deconstruct future products, architectures, and environments.

The course is a seminar-workshop. The first part of the course consists of readings and discussions, background research, site analysis, and direct use of provided emerging collaboration platform technology. Students will document their work in groups. The second part of the course will be the making of V&R prototypes that serve as proof of concept. 

Students from any background and concentration are encouraged to apply. No specific prerequisites are needed (3-D modeling capabilities, coding, and a hands-on mentality are a plus).

Studio Abroad. Small is Big; Newborn Typologies from the City without a Manifesto

“For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.”
– Christopher Alexander

Tokyo is a city in a constant state of becoming; metabolism reigns mighty as history and sentimentality are casted easily aside to make way for “newness” that comes already with an expiration date. Tokyoism[1] is an irresistibly veiled assemblage of the futuristic, the traditional, the ineffable, the finite, all bundled in a poignant narrative of the relational field of networked “super legal”[2] objects. Antithetical to an archipelago of skyscraper blocks and architectural debris floating, self-absorbed, in its own gleeful solitude, Tokyo is an ever-fluctuating, undulating network; thoroughly connected with embedded redundancies, resilient to hollowing, and simultaneously a stubborn collective of medieval structures, both physical and ephemeral. This city is a great laboratory and it is up to us to tease out an unintended, but nonetheless projective theory of Tokyo that may be more about the future of global cities. 

Tokyo is a polycentric city, conceived from its inception and subsequent historical processes to develop in multiple nodes. It serves as a petri dish for a decentralized, highly distributed, and differentiated form of interventions in all scales. With this in mind, this studio will take a critical stance against the prevalent organizational model of consolidation and centralization insofar as urban developments have been concerned. We will begin by analyzing traditionally mega or XL-sized building typologies that occupy vast territories in other parts of the world, thrive in them, and perhaps some that can also be found in Japan. To name a few: shopping malls, hotels, office towers, high-rise condominiums, libraries, museums, theaters, concert halls, universities, convention centers, city halls, gymnasiums, stadia, aquariums, regional transportation hubs, airports, parks, parking garages, seawalls, power plants, water treatment facilities, dams, solar parks, and so on.

After a thorough analyses of those large to extra-large scale typologies, we will rigorously search for ways in which to dissect, fragment, atomize, combine efficiently, perhaps even absolve some redundancies in those bespoke contemporary megaliths into a distributed system instantiated into Tokyo. Thus, the whole city can potentially become a platform that thrives on diversity—in many senses conjured by that word—for complex coexistences of differences rather than demarcated into zoning segments for an efficiency of control, both politically and environmentally. Only then can Tokyo become a truly cosmopolitan global megapolis after the 2020 Olympics, and by chain reaction, can Japan become an open, unisolated archipelago in a sea of capitalism or whatever social order that may rise. Conversely, by releasing the programs from the sophisticatedly controlled interiority of a megastructure, a new kind of metabolism can emerge. This studio seeks to invent new typologies of architectural and urban space of diverse differences, rather than similarities; heterogeneity over homogeneity; heterotopic over utopic; exceptional over banal; small over large gestures.

Small is a new big, as it shall consume the city as a whole.

[1] Kaz Yoneda, 2014
[2] Yasutaka Yoshimura, Super Legal Buildings (Tokyo: Shokokusha, 2006).

Book Project Number Zero

1. Architecture is inseparable from bookmaking. Ever since Sebastiano Serlio discovered the potentials of the printing press, no cultural project in the field of architecture has escaped publishing and so thematising a possible reading of buildings—regardless of present or past, big or small, real or invented.

2. Even in the context of the extreme wealth of media available today, books are still the main instrument of architectural propaganda. The internet did not kill the architecture book. More likely, the internet increased the book’s value for an architect’s career.

3. Books are projects, as well as buildings. Books are imagined, sketched, designed and executed.  

4. Students will develop a project for a book on architecture. The choice of topic is open, as well as the format.

5. The final output of the seminar is a “book” that will include a written introduction, an index, an atlas of images, and a graphic design scheme. 

6. The imaginary book may be projected and assembled as long-form or short-form, text-based, image-based or composite. Students may realize their book using different media, but the final deliverable should be “book-alike” and printed.

7. Usually, when authors write a book, they A) first write the index and introduction, B) then write the actual book, C) then re-write the introduction. The seminar will stop at point A.

8. Instructors will present two case studies on bookmaking in fine detail. Pier Paolo Tamburelli will discuss his ongoing project of a (long-form) book on Bramante; Thomas Kelley will present his recent (short-form) treatise on vision. The seminar will consist of lectures, discussions with external guests, and a final review of the individual book projects.

9. And while the seminar will afford multiple strategies for ideating architecture through the medium of a book, each project will question how the essence of communication in architecture is informed, for better and for worse, by how a book (or any publication) relates to building.

This course has and irregular schedule:

Thomas Kelley will be in residence on January 30-31, February 6-7, 20-21, March 26-27, April 23-24, and for the Final Exam in May.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli will be in residence on January 30-31, February 27-28, April 9-10, and for the Final Exam in May.

Product and Experience Design for Desirability

Multi-disciplinary course for students interested in designing products and services that are simple, irresistible, delightful, cool, covetable, viral, and, increasingly these days, much more likely to be successful. Students study real world cases of how organizations (e.g., Apple, Gucci, Swarovski) strategically design for desirability. In weekly design challenges, students use analogical transfer to apply these insights to diverse industries and target markets (e.g., health literacy campaigns, declining technologies, the future of luxury). Weekly critique panels with experts enable students to develop their own design point of view and to finish with a diverse design portfolio.

Permission required for all students.

Jointly Offered Course: SEAS EngSci22.

This class meets in Maxwell Dworkin 119 (SEAS) on Mondays and WEdnesdays from 9:00 to 11:00 am.