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 and urbanism in Florence, Rome, and Venice from about 1400 to 1600 as it formed, articulated, and reflected the creative achievements of this Renaissance genius. The course engages building typologies such as the villa, the palace, and the church, explores the theory and practice of urban space-making, and evaluates the re-interpretation of the Classical past in the creation of new work. Particular emphasis is given to Michelangelo’s creative process and his drawings.

We begin with Medicean Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent and with the Early Renaissance legacy of Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, and Giuliano da Sangallo. Following Michelangelo’s footsteps, we move to High Renaissance Rome, with the achievements of Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo himself. Returning to Florence, we investigate the Mannerist experimentation of Michelangelo and others in the 1520s and consider the acceptance and rejection of this idiom by Giulio Romano in Mantua and Jacopo Sansovino in Venice. Michelangelo’s mature and late styles in Counter-Reformation Rome and the principles of Renaissance space-making at the urban scale conclude the course. 
 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Architecture’s Multiple Modernities

This lecture course examines the intersection between the multiple experiences of modernity and architectural production, following two guiding premises. The first one is that modernity does not originate in one particular point or place, but rather is the result of complex entanglements that result in different experiences depending on location and context. The second one is that these experiences stem from a negotiation with power that is in direct conversation with the design of space. Thus, we use formal analysis–the spatial organization of buildings, site plans, and other spaces–as an active component to understand these multiple modernities.

Following these premises, each lecture takes on a specific theme that participates in the production of modernity–a technology, a building type, a construction material, or a cultural moment–and traces its consequences in the built environment in different sites around the world. At the same time, we balance this extended scope with close formal analysis of specific buildings and sites, to understand how architectural production contributes, redirects, or pushes back against these transformations. Furthermore, we examine the built environment at multiple scales and the possibility of its production by multiple authors. In doing so, we problematize notions of agency and authorship in cultural production, and learn from many forms of spatial agency.

The first half of the semester focuses on notions of otherness from broad transnational processes to the space of the body. We trace networks of colonial trade and the spaces they engendered, from the plantation to the quilombo. We examine the materials and programs prompted by the expansion of the railroad and modernism’s shifting relationship with ornament and surface. We explore the kitchen as a site of both community and labor, and the multiple repercussions of World War II in architectural discourse and production. We follow the effects of petro-urbanism from the highway to suburbia, as well as the landscapes of extraction this phenomenon prompts in oil producing countries. Architecture’s attention to the environment is manifested through different reactions, from discussions on the notion of the tropics to the propagation of the curtain wall. We trace the results of developmentalism and the global 1968 moment, as conclude by thinking about neoliberalism and reflecting about the presence of history in our contemporary moment.
The course is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather, we balance the extended scope of global networks with close examination of specific case studies, objects, and sites. Ultimately, the course expands the actors, sites, materials, and conversations that participate in the construction of architecture’s multiple modernities.

In addition to the lectures, all students are required to attend a weekly one-hour discussion section led by an assigned Teaching Fellow. Students are graded on attendance and participation, one section facilitation, and four exams or assignments.

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd.

History, Theory Culture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture

This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a conspectus, a survey of the field, but one in which the underlying nature (made and found), boundaries, contours, and texture of this field—in fact several disparate fields—is made the object of close scrutiny. We will define landscape architecture as we survey it. In pursuing an intermittent chronological narrative, the lectures will place site-specific emphasis on a number of cognate disciplines (hydrology, forestry, geology, agronomy, geography, hunting, inter alia), in the context of endemic and transplanted visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, and cities, we will be attentive to surrounding formations of discourse (the pastoral, the picturesque, the emblematic, the Adamic and Edenic) that have and continue to imbue them with meaning. 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd.

Housing Matters

In the twentieth century, modern architects approached housing as a project centered on affordability, standardization, and efficiency. In the postwar period, there was an urgent need to provide basic hygiene and shelter quickly, and industrialization offered the tools to build at scale. These priorities brought important gains but often came at the cost of social diversity, ecological awareness, and long-term adaptability. Standardization was closely tied to zoning, a mode of planning that separated living, working, and leisure into distinct areas, as if these aspects of life had no influence on one another. This way of thinking pushed industry to the margins and treated it as separate from domestic life, ignoring the social and environmental consequences of such separation. Given that housing occupies a large portion of our cities, it must be understood as more than a commodity. Today, we are living with the outcomes: industrial activity has contributed to ecological degradation, while social fragmentation continues to deepen.

In response to these challenges, the course is premised on the idea that many contemporary problems are fundamentally matters of care. Since housing forms such a significant part of urban life, it is central to addressing these issues. Architectural decisions at the scale of the unit, the building, and the city shape both social relations and environmental outcomes. Through lectures, case studies, and critical discussions, the course explores housing as a space of interdependence among people, systems, and the planet, asking: How can housing support diverse forms of life and foster long-term care for one another, our cities, and the planet? These questions will be examined through five matters of concern:

Community: Housing cooperatives, mutual aid, and shared infrastructure
Difference: Designing for plural identities, cultures, and bodies
Live and Work: Hybrid domestic models in the aftermath of the pandemic
Flexibility and Appropriation: Forms that adapt over time and support collective stewardship
Well-being: Material, emotional, and planetary health in relation to housing

Each of these concerns will begin with a lecture by Farshid Moussavi, followed by a guest speaker presentation, and expanded through student-led presentations and discussions. Guests include Cristina Gamboa (Lacol), Phillip Denny, and Jonathan Kischkel (Gesewo), with additional speakers to be confirmed before the start of classes.

This course is structured as a research seminar to provide students with historical, theoretical, and practical insight into the design of collective housing. Weekly sessions combine lectures, guest talks, and student-led presentations to explore how housing intersects with care, community, ecology, and spatial justice. Each class engages a specific housing concern through conceptual frameworks and case studies, supporting both studio work and independent research.

Offered in parallel with the design studio Housing as an Ecology of Care, students are encouraged to enroll in both courses. The seminar is intended to provide research and critical grounding for design exploration.

The class will meet every Friday. Farshid Moussavi meets weekly with students either in person or remotely. Phillip Denny will be present on the days that Farshid teaches remotely. See the course syllabus for details. 

Material Practice and its Agency

This seminar introduces an understanding of material discourse in design and architecture that affects cultural, social, economic issues. In addition to their pragmatic functions the basis for construction means and methods–materials also carry a long history of human civilization and tradition. This seminar aims to embed material practice into the history and culture of its origins, resource utilization, craftsmanship, fabrication and its role in performance within building assembly and beyond to its atmospheric effect both as perceptual experience and thermodynamic performances. We will look at the material use through the lens of various global and environmental topics. Material practice carries affects such as ambience and atmosphere. It impacts acoustics, lighting, tactility, aesthetics and environmental performance. This seminar aims to bring forth more comprehensive, complex and holistic understandings of material culture which varies in diverse scales–from personal to communal and local to global. Topics include specific focus on contemporary material practice which also includes traditional materials. The ethics and ecology of material culture and its life cycle will be addressed.

We will look at a range of fabrication methods–handmade, mechanical and digital–within different economies, from vernacular building materials and techniques to new and advanced material explorations.

Each student will be expected to choose one material practice as a focus for research, exploring its application and the possibilities for its role, meaning, effects and message in contemporary practice. The class is an interactive seminar format encouraging active participation in the class presentations and discussion. 

The Fifth Plan

In this seminar, we will consider the evolution of the floor plan across five iterations: proto-modern, modern, post-modern, plan-non-chalant, and, most importantly, the present. We will begin with a simple hypothesis about the present, namely that there is a new plan afoot. This plan has been making its way into architecture across a long gestation, declaring what it isn’t more often than what it is. Its terms are not those of the suck-the-air-out gangly hollowness of proto-modern experiments in iron and steel (as seen in train stations, department stores, and exhibition halls), nor the give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death plan of modernism (universal, free), nor the we-used-to-do-it-like-this-plus-je-ne-sais-quoi plan of post-modernism (neo-historical, juxtaposing, typological), nor the plan-non-chalant of recent reinvigorations of modernist architecture (data-driven, a-formal). Given it descends from these four earlier paradigms of plan thinking, I’ve provisionally labeled this new plan the ‘fifth plan.’

This seminar is not intended to provide a conclusive fifth plan definition. On the contrary, our aims will focus on the fifth plan’s continuing evolution and, most importantly, on the relevance of its various speculative threads for contemporary practice.

The course format – think ‘salon’ – will center on readings (of both the visual and textual sort) of a range of examples forming the last century of plan-thinking. We will evaluate case studies of historical and contemporary relevance. This is not a history course. Our aim will be instrumental: how might a conceptual re-positioning of the contemporary plan inform your work as a designer? The course threads will include seminar discussions, student presentations, visual/graphic analyses, and the development of hypotheses concerning the rule-sets defining the contemporary plan.

The weekly submittals are meant to make your weekly participation more fruitful, and to rebalance the seminar’s workload distribution in favor of a week-to-week effort rather than a single ‘big’ paper at the end of the semester. There will be a final paper/analysis requirement, but that paper will be limited to 5 pages, along with visual analyses.

Evaluation will be based 40% on class participation, 40% on weekly submittals, and 20% on your final paper.

 

The Idea of Environment

What is “the environment” and how do we mobilize it as a category of action in planning and design? How does “the environment” relate to nature? To place? When is the environment “built”? How do humans interact with environments and when is the human body itself an environment of concern? Whose environments count as “the” environment?

This class will explore the environment as a “promiscuous concept,” in order to grasp how it is historically contingent, culturally situated, politically mobilized, and in many cases contradictory. The class starts from the premise that environmental categories in planning and design are a constellation of knowledge largely dictated by Western epistemologies. We will therefore interrogate environmental practices as historical artifacts and explore how these entanglements limit the possibilities for more just, inclusive futures. To decenter these forms of knowledge, we will study their histories alongside radical critiques and non-Western conceptions of nature, place, and community. The goal of the class is to offer you an alternative canon for designing with the more-than-human that can begin to repair the violence that hegemonic conceptions of the environment have wreaked on landscapes, communities, and the planet.

This is a history and theory class, which prioritizes reading, writing, and discussion. Course participants will be required to submit weekly reading responses, to contribute to discussions online and in class, and to develop an original research and/or design project over the course of the semester.
 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 9th.

History, Theory, Culture III: 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 describing landscape’s embeddedness in processes of urbanization as well as economic transformations informing the shape of the city. The course introduces students to landscape as a form of cultural production, as a mode of human subjectivity, as a medium of design, as a profession, and as an academic discipline. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and case study projects, students will be introduced to landscape through the lenses of capital, labor, material, subject, and environment. The first half of the course revisits the origins of landscape in response to the societal and environmental challenges of industrialization and the attendant transformations in industrial economy shaping the modern metropolis. The second half of the course repositions recent discourse on landscape as urbanism in relation to the economic and territorial transformations associated with ongoing urbanization at the planetary scale.

The first quarter of the course introduces the origins of landscape as a genre of painting and the invention of the ‘new art’ of landscape architecture as responses to urbanization and their attendant social, economic, and cultural transformations. This portion of the course describes the material and cultural contexts in which landscape was conceived as well as the sites and subjects it invoked. The second quarter of the course describes the emergence of city planning from within landscape architecture and the subsequent impoverishment of the field in the absence of its urban contents. This portion of the course introduces the aspirations and implications of ecologically informed regional planning in the 20th century, as well as the ongoing ideological effects of that agenda in the context of neoliberalism.

The third quarter of the course introduces the discourse and practices of landscape urbanism over the past two decades. This portion of the course surveys the discursive and projective potentials of an ecological urbanism, as distinct from those of ecological planning, and speculates on the recent formulation of projective ecologies, among other discursive formations shaping the field. The final quarter of the course follows the transition from region to territory, and from regional urbanization to planetary urbanization. This portion of the course describes landscape’s role as a medium of cultural production and critical revelation in relation to the increased scale and scope of anthropogenic impacts across the planet.

Course readings and supplementary multimedia materials are made available for asynchronous review via Canvas. Course meetings are held in person twice a week (Lectures Tuesdays 9:00–10:15 and Thursdays 9:00–10:15). Weekly discussions sections are led in person by Teaching Fellows (Fridays 3:00–4:15 or 4:30-5:45). Students are invited to contribute to discussions, prepare brief response papers, and complete a design research dossier on a topic attendant to the course content at the end of the term. The course is required for candidates in the Master in Landscape Architecture Program, is recommended for candidates in the Ecologies Domain of the Master in Design Studies Program, and invites elective students from all programs and departments of the school.

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.

Master in Real Estate Practicum Prep

The Master in Real Estate Practicum is a three-part academic experience that enables students to apply the knowledge and skills acquired during their time in-residence at Harvard to a practice-based institutional environment that makes a meaningful contribution to their education as well as to the host organization.

The Practicum begins with the 0-unit Prep Seminar in the Fall and Spring terms, where students are introduced to participating organizations, explore emerging trends in professional practice, and prepare for a productive summer placement.

During the Summer term, students complete a two-month, full-time Practicum with a private, public, or non-profit real estate organization, participating in ongoing real estate projects or initiatives that advance cutting-edge practices, including those promoting social and environmental best practices. The experience concludes with a final paper and participation in two days of presentations and discussion at the GSD during Orientation Week.

Together, these components comprise 12 course units, equivalent to three term-long courses. Participation is limited to students in the Master in Real Estate program at the GSD.

In fall 2025, this course meets in room 225 in 485 Broadway.

 

Proseminar in NARRATIVES: Word and Image as Narrative Structure

In our Proseminar, we will grapple with a selection of critical discussions on word and image as these have been formulated in aesthetic philosophy, literary criticism, media studies, and art and architectural history. The encounter between graphic form and written discourse has been construed as a seamless exchange, a contentious rivalry, or an outright war between incommensurable modes of expression. By setting this encounter against design-related tropes and themes (these might include, but are not limited to, Sign, Figura, Shadow, Threshold, and City), we will assess a debate that ranges from the doctrine of ut pictura poesis to visuality and textuality, the rhetoric of the image, and the mediation of cultural techniques.  

Enrollment is limited to students in the GSD MDes Narratives Domain.

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd.