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 10:30–11:45 and Thursdays 10:30–11:45). 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.

Proseminar in ECOLOGIES: Regenerative, Interrelated, Evolving

The Domain of ECOLOGIES engages the relationships between the living and mineral world, between science and technology, between infrastructural and ecological networks, and between human society and the non-human world that sustains us.

The role of the proseminar is to introduce students to the range of individual and group research presently being pursued by GSD faculty, across Harvard schools, the Loeb Fellows, and researchers and practitioners from many disciplines. Concurrent with the research presentations will be readings, workshops, and presentations in four domain focus areas that will build capacity for individual students to create an abstract for their own design-research topic. This can be a topic which you have previously worked on, a project in progress, or a question you want to develop this semester.

In Part I, Introduction, Regenerative Development and Design proposes that increasing the capacity of all living and mineral systems is the most practicable way to engage the evolving threats of changing climate. This is followed by Research and Projections, which contrasts the skills and methods of research with the art and craft of communication and dissemination.  In Part II, the Domain Focus Areas: Communities, Biosphere, Resources and, and Settlement offer source material for the individual and collective research of the cohort. The domain focus area Communities, Society and Action engages the theory, practice and forms of collective society and seeks the corresponding regulatory and policy frameworks. The consequences of world-wide urbanization and land use change have altered land, water, and air. In Biosphere and Atmosphere, the planetary scale of the biosphere is the arena of transformation in which these changes can be studied and engaged. 
Resources and Metabolic flows is devoted to the transition from a linear to a circular metabolism and the cycling of the material and nutrients that support development. Geographies and Settlement Form studies evolving built and landscape structures, including population dynamics, as they are driven by climate change. Part III, Project Development, includes workshops and a mid-term review. Finally, Part IV, Presentation and Communication includes a pre-final presentation, individual appointments, and the final review.

Each student will develop their design-research topic through three Abstract stages, first, project definition, intention, and outcome; second, research strategy and process (mid-term review); and third, engaged fields, problems, and outlook (pre-final review). A project text will follow each oral presentation.

Readings will span from established texts, recent scientific research papers, and current critical journalism. As students build their research topic they will be expected to contribute bibliographic materials to the cohort’s specific interests.

The proseminar builds on the foundational work of the first iteration of ECOLOGIES. It is a venue for addressing questions of resource depletion, food and water insecurity, habitat and biodiversity loss, global policy and development disparities, regulatory misalignments, social and cultural upheaval, and inequities in wealth distribution and public health outcomes. The proseminar will focus attention on the interlocking challenges of climate change, and the potential to increase the capacities of living and mineral systems implied by regenerative design and development.

Each student’s work and contribution will include engaged participation in weekly class discussion, research and presentation in one of the Domain Focus Area team groups, and completion of an individual project. 

Proseminar in MEDIUMS: On Making Culture, Technology, and Art

The notion of “Mediums” lies at the heart of understanding and shaping our designed world. Mediums are not merely passive channels, but active agents that both constrain and expand the ways in which ideas, experiences, and environments are conceived, communicated, and transformed. In this proseminar, we will take a critical look at the current and emerging landscape of design technologies and technologically-driven design. We will examine new and evolving tools, technologies, and methods that help us augment ourselves and our environments, developing a critical perspective on their significance within today’s cultural contexts. 

 

Situating our inquiry within contemporary spatial, environmental, and social challenges, students will have opportunities to explore and debate, and to position themselves along the spectrum of technology, as both a tool for creation and an intimate human and social interlocutor. 

 

Readings and discussions will address topics including Simulation and Representation, Interaction and Cognition, Creativity and Digital Craft, and Intelligence and Bias. In addition to engaging with the theoretical frameworks presented, students will have opportunities to create projects and experiment with new technologies, contextualizing their work within the themes of class discussions. As such, this proseminar provides students with a robust theoretical foundation and essential methodological approaches to inform and inspire their work across the diverse interests and trajectories that define the Domain of Mediums.

 

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

Proseminar in Landscape Architecture

How do we understand a landscape? This proseminar explores epistemologies that constitute the field of landscape architecture. The proseminar will introduce MLA II students to a range of landscape knowledge and practice from around the world, and the implications for design and research. The focus is on developing a critical perspective from understanding landscape architecture theory, practice, and speculation from diverse, climatic, cultural, social, and racial backgrounds.

The proseminar takes a global perspective, addressing multiple definitions of the field of landscape architecture. We will ask what it means to practice professionally in various parts of the world, especially in those regions, such as most of Africa, that have no formal association of landscape architects. In a 1961 essay, “A Table for Eight,” Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, the founding president of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, proposed that “the landscape architect who was first called a landscape gardener is still surely wrongly named.” Jellicoe went on to call for a single word to describe the profession, a term that would exist between all countries. While we will speculate on what this word might be, the proseminar’s starting point is that the field should be open to a plurality of understandings of landscape architecture rather than a single, universal, term.

To help with our inquiry into diverse forms of landscape knowledge and practice, we will explore a range of recourses available at Harvard University including the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Map Collection. GSD faculty will also speak about their current interests within the historical context of the school. To this end, the proseminar serves as an introduction to the department, the school, the university as well as the field.

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.

Proseminar in PUBLICS: Of the Public. In the Public. By the Public

Public, as a noun or adjective, is not confined to a single discipline, practice, narrative or theory. It is instead a complex construct that a) impacts the rules and regulations that order our cities; b) reveals cultural, political, and ecoomic priorities of a society; and c) establishes the faultlines of both city form and urban action, either individiually or  collectively, including who has the right to the city and its spaces. With this in mind, this proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, historically, spatially and socially: how, when, and why it becomes legible and desirable; who gets the right to create it and for whom; and whether different historical moments or political and/or spatial contexts enable, constrain, or transform the “social production of the public.” Among other things, through lectures, discussions, and debates we will interrogate what it means to be public; of the public; in the public; for the public, with the public, or by the public. Each proposition holds a different implication for design, democracy, processes, and populations when overlaid with the compounding issues of our time — economic and social inequality, climate change, population growth and decline, territorial conflicts, health and violence epidemics, aging infrastructures, and eroding trust in democratic governance. The course will draw from scholars, practitioners, and everyday folk to build foundational intelligence and provocative interpretations of social and spatial publics — including how they are imagined, represented, and brought into view, whether through physical space, media, or collective imaginaries. Beyond its emphasis on reading classic texts, the seminar seeks participatory engagement in order to advance both theory and praxis.

Thesis Extension in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design

Thesis extension in satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.

MArch II Proseminar

This course provides a forum for critical discussion of contemporary design practices that is exploratory and speculative in nature. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and debate and prepares students to develop research interests and to formulate positions in architecture. 

Through inquiries based upon readings, analysis of architectural projects, and presentations given by the instructor, faculty of the Department of Architecture, and visitors, the course seeks to expand the student’s understanding of the cultural context that informs the production of architecture and the development of critical interpretations of site, program, service, and research. 

Prerequisites: Enrollment in the MArch II program. 

Preparation of Doctoral Thesis Proposal

Independent study with doctoral advisor to produce a preliminary literature review. 
Prerequisite: Enrollment in GSD DDes program.