Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management

This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate for all major property types and land uses. The various stages of the development process, including site selection, market analysis, financial feasibility, design considerations, legal requirements, construction oversight, lease-up, operations, and ultimate property disposition, are examined. Acquisition, management, and disposition of existing real estate assets are similarly explored. Teaching cases are designed to place students in decision-making situations commonly faced by real estate professionals. Methods of using discounted cash flow analysis for income property, for-sale property, construction and permanent mortgage loans, joint venture structures, real estate investment trusts, and secondary markets are explored. Optional review sessions focusing on real estate financial analysis will support the course. MRE students are required to take this course but may pursue a waiver of this requirement by successfully passing a waiver examination administered during orientation week. Other students will need to demonstrate a basic literacy in real estate through prior coursework or experience in order to take the class.

Although this is a limited enrollment course, MRE students should enroll directly during the open enrollment period and not enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Quantitative Aesthetics : Introduction to Machine Learning for Design

This course aims to introduce students in art and design related fields to concepts and techniques from Machine Learning. Rather than focusing on large “black box” generative AI models we are going to explore the design potential and implications of some of their constituent components and the frameworks that enable them. Through a series of workshops and small projects student should develop an intuitive understanding of how model architecture, training and inference work, how to explore and visualize embeddings and latent spaces and how text and images can occupy the same semantic space. The emphasis will be placed more on the perceptual capabilities and idiosyncrasies of ML models with some forays into generative processes.

The course will start with a practical introduction to two- and three-dimensional vector math as this will be the basis for extending our intuition to the multidimensional vector spaces at the heart of ML models. In parallel we will be learning the fundamentals of python programming.

Our main tool chain will consist of Python with the ML library Pytorch and the Computer Vision Library OpenCV along with Rhino’s grasshopper visual programming environment that will help us visualize vector spaces and handle parameterized geometric inputs.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Transformable Design Methods

The aim of Transformable Design is to is to introduce new ways of thinking about design through real-time morphological changes. The course provides a theoretical overview and practical methods for designing objects that can change their size, shape and surface.

Class sessions will generally consist of a lecture followed by discussion and review of project assignments. Several workshops will also be offered on software and hardware techniques. All classes are in-person.

Lecture topics include introduction to mechanisms theory, classification of transformable behaviors (e.g. expansion, morphing, retraction, folding, etc.), design methods to produce behavior types, as well as practical techniques, for construction and automated control. The concepts presented will be reinforced though physical experimentation and software simulations.

This course involves use of CAD software to produce simulations and animations of mechanisms, however, no prerequisite software skills are required and workshops will be offered on Grasshopper/Rhino on these topics:

Course assignments will be staged in two parts. For the first part, students will create a series of mechanism studies — both in physical and virtual form. These assignments will reinforce understanding of lecture topics as well as provide a hands-on familiarity with mechanical interaction. For the second part, students will form groups (2-4 students) to produce a functional project demonstrating physical transformation. Groups may choose the project emphasis according to their particular interests. Projects may range from full-scale operable architectural sections to scale-models that focus on broader architectural context. This project offers the opportunity for creative engagement and original thinking about new possibilities for transformable architecture.

Grades are based on the quality of the research, submitted assignments (inclusive of the final group project), and class participation. There is a final review and participation is required for this session.

Students from all GSD departments and from across the University, as well as MIT students, are encouraged to enroll.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 10th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Power||Energy: Mapping the Thickened Ground of Labor

The definition of energy is dominated by a western logic of energy as a resource. This understanding was focused on the primary objective of putting energy to effective use that was then translated into power objectives and governance schemes for putting the planet to work in service of fossil-fuel empires. Subsequently this defined concepts of labour, society, and the environment through power struggles for vast territories of natural resources, land claims, the growth of economies, and development of urbanised areas.

The now outmoded and failing US electrical network of energy production, distribution, and consumption have shaped the patterns and territorial infrastructure of our urbanized landscapes. This vast infrastructure network describes a complex, dynamic exchange between human beings and the landscape over an extensive period of time. Emerging from these tensions is a thickened ground of multiple heterogeneous parts and networks intertwined with less tangible metabolic and material processes that describe the ‘natures’ of the urbanised landscape through its indeterminable characteristics.

The ubiquitous and relentless exploitation of the earth as a resource for energy production to be plundered and commodified continues to disrupt the deep complex processes of nature leading to major environmental and health ramifications. Consequently racial, social, and economic disparities that are imminently present and inherently linked to the environment are further exacerbated. The climate crisis is symptomatic of this prejudice where the power of a select few humans rises above others and their non-human counterparts, corralled into disciplinary regimes of work valued through distinct economic imperatives.

The seminar reckons with the immediate need to upgrade and expand the US electrical power grid system to meet the demands of growing urban communities and recognizes the obligation to engage with the climate crisis. In it, we envision energy systems that inherently hold a capacity for adaptation and simultaneously serve as the formative catalyst of the urban landscape.

The seminar introduces and explores new value systems for the environment and alternative definitions of power, work, and energy to tackle this complex systemic suite of crises. This project-based seminar is structured around two phases; Phase One: Energy and Power and Phase Two: Energy and Ecology, . The teaching and learning schedule includes a series of guest lectures focused on articulating the relationship between the different positions and definitions of energy and the implications of their territorial and spatial formations.  A range of critical mapping and representation techniques will be explored in order to generate an understanding and future speculations of a thickened ground of energy. The aim is to question who are the actors and agencies involved, what are the forms of governance, their territorial demarcations and land use,  ecosystems, historical events and material flows and processes that determine the shape of the ever evolving form of ground and its planetary effects.

Working Landscapes: Natural Resiliency And Redesign

Ecological principles and their application to design and planning will be emphasized. Topics will include understanding human impacts on natural systems through engineering and design, their consequences, and the use of ecological principles and methods of landscape design and planning to achieve natural restoration, resilience, balance, and sustainability. Exploration of new approaches to design and infrastructure at local and regional scales will include water management, hardened coastlines, sediment and toxics management, marsh and wetland restoration, alternative renewable energy development, reclaimed water and restored natural hydrology, and leveraging the efficiencies and effectiveness of restored natural systems to aid in the control of flooding, remediating drought, and reducing heat island effect. Additionally, using restoration as the basis for design, students will be introduced to the potential of leveraging capitalism to incentivize environmental restoration. A science field trip into wetlands acquired and protected by the US Army Corps of Engineers on the Charles River will be used to highlight the principle of protecting and restoring nature as a climate resilience strategy.

The course is designed around providing the opportunity to apply these approaches, principles, and methods to student-selected landscapes, exploring options and opportunities. By identifying and then using heavily altered historic natural systems as their guide for landscape design, students will develop a restoration aesthetic that builds resilience to climate and generates income to pay for change.  Students will also learn to develop strategies for using legal and regulatory frameworks, agency initiatives, and advocates to get projects built.

Though not a prerequisite, Working Landscapes will prove quite useful to students interested in taking Creating Environmental Markets during the Spring semester. Markets examines existing environmental markets like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and stormwater trading, as well as a new market, Blue Cities Exchange, where the use of Working Landscapes restoration approaches and methods are the basis for water and pollution trading and preparing for the vagaries of climate. We will not resolve the climate issues we’ve created with taxes and fees. To take restoration to scale we will need to leverage capitalism and generate income in the transformational process.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 10th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Advanced Applications in Sustainable Architecture

This elective seminar will provide a deeper dive into issues of evidence-based, high-performance, ecological building design.

The course is intended for MArch students, MDes students, and anyone with an interest in the environmental performance of buildings.  Diverse problem-solvers, with any one of a variety of backgrounds, such as design, engineering, materials, landscape architecture, and financial analysis are encouraged to enroll.

This is a project-based course in which students will work alone or in groups on a semester-long project.  The topic is flexible, so students may choose one of the following options for their project.

  1. Students may join a team to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon design competition. (Since the competition offers multiple divisions, the class may form more than one team.)  
  2. Students may develop a strategy within the built environment to help Harvard University meet its Climate Action Plan (Fossil Fuel Free by 2050).
  3. Students may propose an alternate research or design project (perhaps in preparation for a thesis or dissertation).  

The class format consists of lectures, in-class exercises, group discussions, student presentations, and project-based strategy sessions (i.e. desk crits). The course will include multiple guest lectures from practitioners working on high-performance sustainable buildings.

The course will delve into topics of energy, including the importance of the timing of energy use and building design’s role in this increasingly important consideration.  It will also explore ecological issues beyond energy, such as durability/resilience, health, and water management.

Students will have the opportunity to learn hands-on skills through tutorials but may choose the area(s) in which to focus their attention.  Examples include learning or honing skills in whole-building energy simulation and/or daylight simulation.  (Students may either learn these skills for the first time, or dive deeper than in past courses, using the same or different software tools.)  Other skills could include hygrothermal (thermal and moisture) simulations, as well as mold-growth simulation, storm-water analysis, Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of materials and construction methods, life-cycle cost analysis (construction costs and utility savings), or assessing societal cost of carbon emissions and related health savings.

It is recommended that students have had (or are concurrently enrolled in) some introduction to sustainable design/building science, such as 6121/6122 Environmental Systems; 5370 Environment, Economics, and Enterprise; or a similar course at another institution.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 10th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Circuits, Circles, and Loops: Towards a Regenerative Architecture

Present assumptions indicate that the management of our material world accounts for more than half of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly fifty percent of these emissions are attributed directly to building construction. And these numbers are predicted to grow, more than doubling the gross amount of material extraction and flow around the planet by 2060. This course asks how we design new architectures that fit within the circuits, circles, and loops of a healthy, regenerative material ecology.

Through in-class lectures, case studies, and hands-on workshops, students will develop a comprehensive understanding of both contemporary theory and practical applications surrounding lifecycle material design. They will actively research topics such as systems ecology, extractive geographies, life cycle material modeling, circular design, pervasive connectivity, biomaterials, adaptive reuse, indigenous and traditional craftsmanship, healthy materials, social equity, and other pertinent subjects. Additionally, students will acquire advanced proficiency in utilizing software tools and innovate new fabrication processes to address material flows around and through buildings effectively.

Beyond theoretical knowledge, this course offers a unique opportunity for students to actively confront the environmental and human impacts associated with material management in the built environment. Through hands-on, design-led learning experiences, students will be encouraged to tackle these challenges by designing and building real-world prototypes through semester-long team projects that utilize industry and Harvard University material resources. Ultimately, students will develop a robust research framework to investigate, deconstruct, and invent new material life cycle design strategies that critically engage pluralistic design solutions toward a new regenerative architecture.

Note for students interested in SCI-6502: Advanced Reverse Design and Embodied Carbon with Prof. Kara and SCI-6372: Circuits, Circles, and Loops: Towards a Regenerative Architecture with Prof. Grinham. SCI-6502 focuses on contemporary practice topics with lectures, group projects, and discussions; the final deliverable is a written paper. SCI-6372 focuses on emerging research topics with lectures and workshops; the final deliverable is a built prototype.

Enactive Design: Creative Applications through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction

Enactive Design is an advanced research seminar on human-computer interaction. We will explore the role of real-time, bidirectional communication between human and digital agents in a design context, and leverage the potentials of this interactive relationship to establish new creative domains.

Digital interfaces provide computational frameworks for creative exploration in disciplines such as architecture, design and art. However, in many instances such as traditional computer-aided design software, integrated development environments, numerically-controlled fabrication machines, or certain kinds of robots and artificial intelligence systems, the machine is subservient to the orders of its human counterpart. While this model might be a convenient human-machine relationship for production-oriented scenarios, in the case of design environments, a higher degree of machine agency could be desired, as it may generate new models of ideation, creative exploration and design through human-computer collaboration.

Our investigation is inspired by the concept of Enactivism, a philosophy which argues that cognition arises from the interactions of an agent with its context. Rather than in an abstract or intangible way, knowledge and learning in agents arise from purposeful, situated and embodied interaction with their context. Translated to design environments, what would it mean to create with tools that have a certain degree of agency of their own? How would that inform and expand our creativity? What kind of opportunities may arise from designing as a conversation rather than an imposition? Can design be conceived as the human curation of the suggestions of an artificial intelligence? How can the power and precision of computation be amplified by the decision-making capacity of humans-on-the-loop? Are these new forms of collaborative art?

We will address these questions, and many others, through the design of concurrent human-machine interactive platforms, with a particular focus on the computational aspects of the system. Participants will learn techniques such as applied artificial intelligence, network communication, asynchronous programming and RESTful APIs, and additional topics such as physical sensing, interactive fabrication and robot control will be discussed. The course will rely heavily on the use of state of the art, off-the-shelf generative AI models, including large language models, diffusion models, etc. (i.e. no foundational machine learning topics will be covered). Students are expected to use these tools to build prototype applications as demonstrators of their design questions.

The course will be conducted through a series of lectures, readings, discussions and hands-on workshops. Exercises will experiment with real-time communication between human and digital agents, leading to a semester-long personal/group final project and a conference-grade research paper. This is an advanced research seminar: a high degree of maturity, independence and initiative are expected.

This course is the last installment of a three-part course series on Computational Design preceded by SCI- 6338: Introduction to Computational Design (Fall), and SCI-6483: Procedural Fields, Functional Design of Discrete Hyperdimensional Spaces (Spring), taught by the same instructor.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Introduction to Computational Design

#GSD6338 is an introductory course on Computational Design, with particular focus on architecture, landscape, and urbanism.

In this course, we will understand “Computational Design” as the set of methods borrowed from fields such as computer science, mathematics and geometry, applied to solving design problems. Chances are that a significant portion of your typical design workflow is mediated by digital tools and, in particular, computer software that has been designed and created by a third party, and therefore, your creativity is partially biased by someone else’s opinions. However, the real craftsman is the one who understand their tools so well that they can change, improve and adapt them to their own desires. In this course, you will learn how to think algorithmically, and how to understand and create computer software, so that you will be able to explore new creative opportunities and relate them to your personal interests.

The course will offer student the possibility of becoming familiar with the process of programming in a creative context, as the power of computational media will be revealed through examination of code and data as a medium for creative expression.
 

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology

GSD 6333 covers water across the globe in relation to (1) land-water interactions, emphasizing hydrology and water quality, (2) aquatic ecology, and (3) human activities, including design questions and methodologies. While the course will focus on fresh waters, there will be limited coverage of near-shore coastal waters and coastal wetlands.

This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources. Emphasis will be placed on both the science and the application of this science in designs for projects involving a wide range of interactions with water including coastlines, inland rivers and lakes, and urban stormwater. With ongoing global changes in climate, urbanization, and the use of water for energy and food production, the relationship between humans and water will continue to grow and evolve. We will learn about environmental and land justice issues and think about their relationship to our design work. We will learn from members of the Indigenous communities about the importance of land, water, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Students will come away from this course with a better understanding of our evolving relationship with water and the environment and how designs can account for hydrologic change and adaptation while also considering the local communities in which we work. While many varied case studies from around the U.S. and internationally will be discussed throughout the semester, much of the course content and assignments will involve hydrology, stormwater, and sea level rise in the Charles River and Boston Harbor; river and wetland restoration in Plymouth, MA; and stormwater and low-impact design in Washington, D.C.

Discussion of these focus areas will include design challenges, social issues, permitting, and the implementation process. Students will come away with a better understanding of how projects go from conceptual design to a constructed site. Students will be encouraged to bring water and ecology-related projects/challenges from other courses, studios, or projects to the class for an open discussion. Hands-on exercises include watershed delineation, hydrologic calculations to estimate runoff and groundwater infiltration and flow, design exercises developing recommendations for stormwater best-management-practices/low-impact design (LID) for a neighborhood in Washington, DC, and research and design exercises for river restoration projects. Multiple classes will have outside activities or visits to nearby river, wetland, and water-related sites, including the Alewife stormwater facility, Alewife Brook, and the Charles River. Attendance at a 2-day weekend fieldtrip with hands-on field sampling will be mandatory. A semester long group project will focus on the sites visited during this weekend fieldtrip and will culminate in a conceptual design of restoration and revitalization.

Evaluation: Based on class attendance and participation (including field trips), short written assignments, quizzes, focused design exercises, and a semester-long project.