Landscape Representation I

Landscape Representation I introduces students to the foundational and evolving role of design communication within the discipline of landscape architecture. This course positions representation not simply as a tool for documenting and communicating ideas, but as a creative, analytical, and interpretive process that shapes how landscapes are imagined, understood, and designed. Grounded in the discipline’s rich visual and conceptual traditions, students will explore how techniques of drawing, modeling, and fabrication contribute to the making of both site and design intervention.

Through a structured sequence of hands-on exercises, students will engage with a broad range of analog, digital, and hybrid representational methods. Technical tutorials will support the development of core skills in architectural drawing, digital workflows, and introductory digital fabrication. The course places emphasis on iteration, precision, and the use of abstraction as a design strategy.

Representation for Planners [Module 1]

One task of an urban planner is to grapple with and understand a series of complicated processes that directly affect the organization and experience of place. Social, cultural, political, and economic forces all influence the complexity of a site. The planner must interpret these forces, arrive at a position in response to them, and make them legible to a wide array of stakeholders. Beyond the proposed plan and strategy, another critical contribution of the planner is to communicate, persuade, and be an agent for reaching consensus among competing agendas.

While urban planners need to communicate through a variety of means, visual representation of abstract concepts and processes is a skill needed to speculate and make intelligible ideas on the future of urbanism and the environment. Effective visualizations not only support verbal proposals but can stand alone as standalone artifacts that communicate new information to their audience.

In the service of these various roles, Representation for Planners provides first semester urban planning students with the graphic and technical skills needed to reason, design, and communicate. Students will learn the basics of visual representation and gain familiarity with the technical tools essential for making maps and exploring relationships in the physical, regulatory, and demographic dimensions of the built environment. Additionally, we will use computer software and modeling tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and SketchUp to distill ideas into effective graphic presentations. Each program presents opportunities to communicate visual information in different ways and, over the course of the class, workflows to operate between programs will be reinforced. Students will learn how these techniques can be used as part of the planning process itself and communicate with broader audiences.

This half-semester module works in tandem with Course 2128, Spatial Analysis.

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.

Spatial Analysis [Module 1]

Planning decisions are often idealized as being "evidence-based" or "data-driven." Spatial data often comprise the data and evidence that support such these decisions. In this course, you will learn how to create spatial datasets, both by assembling them from existing sources and by collecting data in the field. You will also learn data visualization techniques to identify spatial relationships within and between spatial datasets. You will learn to identify the arguments that mapmakers make through their maps and to use spatial data visualization to make your own arguments. Student in this course are expected to have completed the preterm workshop for MUP students and software tutorials on ArcGIS, R, and RStudio.

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.

Architectural Representation II [Module 2]

There has never been just one geometry. In mathematics, the Euclidean, projective, vector, and topological approaches each have different starting points, theorems and methods of study. In parallel, this course defines a geometry as a set of principals about relationships in space that can be built on as a foundation and extended by exploration. From this point of view, materials, construction systems, assembly processes, ergonomics, statics, vision and drawing are each geometries in their own right with different principles and metrics of evaluation that may be deeply pursued on their own terms. These geometries exist alongside the abstract geometry of surfaces; all are present in any work of architecture. This course is about resolving interactions between geometries and seeking discoveries in their convergence and divergence.

This course proceeds directly from the first module. The first module introduces abstract geometry and explores its interactions with vision, drawing and the flatness often demanded by architecture. The second module explores its interactions with thickness, materiality, and architectural function. Geometry is reframed as a site that forces a confrontation between form and architectural constraint, between design intention and assembly systems.

Module I and II are planned as a pair with significant overlap in instruction and assignment sequence. Some content that pertains to Module II will be delivered in guest lecture format during Module I and visa versa. Module II will conclude with a project that brings together themes from both halves.

Module II focuses on reflecting practice. In any real building project, the richness of the interplay between goals and constraints arising from the extraordinary specificity of site, client, material economy and interdisciplinary discussion makes the accurate resolution of intersections in space a practical necessity and brings geometry out of abstraction. Geometry provides a means of adjusting flexibly as design progresses towards construction and new requirements reveal themselves. The exercises in this class create a microcosm of these interactions with the goal of developing tools for precision, adaptability, permutation, resolution of tension and translation to physical reality.

The assignments and lectures in Module II take place in two modes: simulation and prototype, iterating and fabricating. These two fundamental and parallel approaches to the process of architectural discovery are taught through specific techniques of parametric modeling and physical model making. Parametric modeling is taught as a tool for the adaptation of a system to the constraints of fabrication and architecture, rather than as a generative tool for form. Model making is taught as an experimental discipline for testing materials and assembly rather than a representation tool.

Over the exercises, students study the geometry of surface paired with the geometry of interacting architectural forces (material thickness, layered construction, supporting frames, circulation, flat floors). These constraints in dialogue lead to architectural fragments that perform a balancing act. These requirements are those which abstract geometry, traditionally, has trouble accepting and are also lasting sources of invention in a discipline that must cross from imagination to reality.

The Urban Rift: Seeking Abundance in Kigali’s Urban Wetlands

Rwanda is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies and a global leader in climate-forward development. But with this rapid growth comes a tension that is playing out across the African continent: Can human development and ecological restoration be advanced together, or are they fundamentally in conflict? Nowhere is this question more urgent than in Kigali’s wetlands. 

These once-overlooked ecological zones are now at the center of a major urban transformation – transitioned from informal settlements and industrial uses, to restored landscapes serving as vital infrastructure for biodiversity, flood control, climate resilience, and public life. Yet the restoration of these ecosystems has also come at a social cost, displacing thousands of vulnerable residents. In parallel, new eco-planned neighborhoods like Green City Kigali target upper-middle income and international residents, prompting questions of equity, access, and ecological gentrification. 

This studio begins with a provocation: What would it mean to pursue abundance, for both people and planet, through the design of urban housing and ecological infrastructure in one of the world’s most biodiverse regions? What if housing development could become a tool for regenerative urbanism, reconciliation, and coexistence? Students will explore these questions through ecologically significant landscapes in the Albertine Rift region: Kigali’s Urban Wetlands. 

Throughout the semester, students will examine the unique conditions that have shaped the ongoing tension between human development and ecological conservation in Rwanda. They will study the country’s approaches to economic growth, food security, conservation, craft, and tourism, and develop research-based proposals that integrate design, policy, and ecological frameworks. Early coursework will include inspiration gathering, literature review, precedent and data analysis, leading to the creation of a stakeholder engagement plan to inform the site visit. In October, students will travel to Rwanda for a week-long immersive experience to visit key ecological areas, precedent projects and meet with select organizations and stakeholders. From the trip, students will then work in groups to generate a “design playbook” and identify a project site. Final deliverables will include a development framework and speculative design proposal that centers the wetland ecosystem and housing typology as the intersecting forces that could drive a new model of regenerative urban development. 

The studio will be supported with opportunities for virtual and in person community and resident engagement in collaboration with Rwandan University architecture and planning students as well as designers at the MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) Kigali Office. The studio will engage directly with key partners such as the Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA), the Rwanda Development Board (RDB), City of Kigali officials, as well as local organizations and experts. Instructors will hold weekly in-person desk crits, seminars, and mid-reviews; visiting critics and guest speakers will be incorporated throughout the term.

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 studio will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.

Architectural Representation I [Module 1]

Architectural Representation I: Projective Disciplines

This course examines systems of projection as constructs that mediate between our spatial imagination and built form. Projective systems have defined relationships between masons, engineers, industrial designers, mathematicians, cartographers, painters, and architects. Their historical origins and evolution into digital culture will be studied through the theory and practice of projective and descriptive geometry. Invented as techniques to draw form, these discourses are the bases of the intractable reciprocity between representation and three-dimensional space. The objective of this course is to uncover the centuries-old and still ongoing relationship between representation, form, and construction-more generally, the reciprocity between three-dimensional form and flatness.

Principles of parallel (orthographic), central (perspectival), and other less common forms of projective transformation explain many processes of formal production–vision, subjective experience, drawing, modeling, and building. Beginning with 2D drawing exercises and transitioning to 3D modeling, we will interrogate the effects of the digital interface and mechanics of modeling software on contemporary discourse. As students explore the power and limitations of the flat drawing plane, they will also develop literacy in primitive and complex surface geometries-their combinatory aggregation, subdivision, and discretization–as they relate back to the most reductive of architectural forms-the planar surface. Ultimately, these techniques will be placed into a productive dialogue with architectural and programmatic imperatives. The design tools of the digital and post-digital age have allowed designers to invent and produce form with increasing facility, eliminating the need to understand the consequential and demanding relationships between geometry and architecture. The course will involve close formal reading of buildings as a way to introduce students to the practice of reading, drawing, and writing architecture.
Course Structure

Composed of both lectures and workshops, the course is participatory and is equal parts theoretical and technical. Exercises will involve two-dimensional digital drawing, digital and physical modeling, and basic Grasshopper. This course is required for all first-year MArch I students.

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.

Who Owns the Grid? Spatializing Our Collective Clean Energy Futures

In the face of the climate crisis, distributed clean energy technologies–such as solar, geothermal, waste-heat recovery, and battery storage–will play a critical role in powering our cities. Yet their integration raises urgent questions: Who will own them? Who will profit from them? Who will benefit?

Infrastructure is shaped by both its technical characteristics and the political economy that envelopes it. With that in mind, this studio invites students across planning, urban design, architecture, and landscape architecture to explore the physical, social, political, and institutional architectures of clean energy futures.

The future grid could be a public project, co-owned by the people it serves. But planning this distributed (and democratized) grid will require efforts from across the allied design disciplines. This is why we’ve opened the studio to a broad range of GSD programs. Together, we will ask questions like: Can a community land trust also be an energy supplier? What mix of uses support a circular energy economy in a new neighborhood? How should we design buildings and landscapes for co-use while managing safety?

This studio will focus on Newmarket Square–Boston’s industrial core–where freight meets food systems, high-tech manufacturing borders housing insecurity, and addiction intersects with homelessness. It’s a place where heat risk and flooding converge, and where an aging electric grid struggles to meet current and future demands–a challenge echoed citywide.

Boston’s grid is at a critical tipping point. The system, which currently peaks at 6.1 GW, is projected to reach 7.5 GW by the mid-2030s and double to 15 GW by 2050. Without urgent action, the already strained grid will soon exceed capacity in many neighborhoods, risking blackouts, rising costs, and stalling progress on decarbonization goals.

Structured in three phases, the course will equip you to engage with the technical, spatial, and political dimensions of energy infrastructure. In Phase 1, you will work in groups to explore clean energy technologies, the grid, and conduct site research in Newmarket. We will learn directly from technical experts, historians, and energy activists. In Phases 2 and 3, you will define your design scope, select a scale of intervention, and complete your final design project. For these final two stages, you may work individually or in groups. Every project must include systems for the production, storage, and distribution of energy, as well as a plan for co-use and co-ownership.

You will choose one of three scales of intervention. (1) Parcel Scale: this could be a building or landscape that integrates a utility-scale battery storage system, substation, or heat recovery center with community-serving uses. (2) Neighborhood Scale: here we ask you to imagine an urban neighborhood powered by a circular energy economy, strategically linking programs that produce and use energy. (3) System Scale: here you’ll work at the level of planning, regulation, and governance. Your product might look like a policy platform, an implementation toolkit, or a set of illustrated standards.

By the end of the course, you will be able to understand the foundations of clean energy planning and design; apply this knowledge within regulatory and economic systems; evaluate and interpret complex site conditions; and navigate the intersections of spatial, social, and policy-based decision-making to imagine a more just, resilient energy future.

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 studio will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.

Canary in the Mine

The Canary in the Mine Option Studio lands this semester in California, based at the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve–an ecologically critical site managed by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), one of the world’s leading organizations dedicated to environmental protection. The studio follows in the wake of catastrophic wildfires that tore through parts of California this past January. In Altadena, Malibu and Pacific Palisades, fast-moving flames engulfed hillsides, destroyed homes, and forced thousands to evacuate. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ash, air quality plummeted, and both human and non-human communities suffered profound losses. These fires were not isolated events, but part of a rapidly intensifying pattern–one that reflects the escalating impact of anthropogenic climates on flammable landscapes.

In response to this climate-driven volatility, the studio poses an urgent question: How can we design for resilience and adaptation in an era of human-induced extremes? From wildfires to floods, tornadoes to melting glaciers, these events call for a radical rethinking of how and where we build–and how we live with dynamic, at-risk ecologies.

Focused on wildfire-prone Mediterranean climates, the Canary in the Mine initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Design prepares students to design in–and for–extreme conditions. It positions design as a critical force in advancing Restorative Adaptation: an approach that integrates ecological recovery with cultural restitution, community stewardship, and multi-species well-being. The studio explores, therefore emerging frameworks that align: (1) Ecological symbiosis with cultural practices; (2) Community stewardship with metabolic flows and nutrient cycles; (3) Productive disturbance engaging with “wild diplomacies,” traditional knowledge, and bioengineering.

Students will develop design scenarios in which the Dangermond Preserve becomes an Analog Landscape–a living model for fire-adapted design strategies that can be applied across similarly flammable regions in California and the broader Mediterranean type of landscapes. This studio includes a six-day immersive experience in early October, featuring a site visit to the Preserve and a stay at the Field Stations, which host researchers from around the world. Students will also explore areas affected by the Palisades wildfires as well as those spared–examining how and why to design in contexts marked by pyric vulnerability. As part of this reconnaissance, students will engage in reflection and dialogue with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) team, helping to reframe the discourse of conservation as a project of restitution. The studio will be supported by advanced geospatial resources developed for the technology program of the Preserve, and students will engage with the digital simulation of wildfire behavior in development of design interventions. Upon culmination of the studio, students’ spatial propositions will be shared with partners in the form of Esri StoryMaps, a dynamic platform for spatial storytelling and analysis. The Canary in the Mine continues its mission to address rural lands and vulnerable communities across Mediterranean bio-regions impacted by climate degradation. Originally launched in Southern Europe and later expanded to Africa, the initiative is now focused on California.

Home. House. Housing.

Housing in the United States is becoming unattainable for a growing number of households including those of middle income, low income, and the very poor, affecting the housing choices families, young adults, creatives, entrepreneurs and aging populations.  Production has been unable to provide the scale of housing supply to adequately meet this demand, despite the large amounts of devalued urban land located in many urban communities where diverse housing options are desperately needed.

Additionally, how we regulate, design, finance, and build housing in our cities has been slow to adapt, innovate, and change at scale. This also affects the adaptive reuse potential of the massive supply of single-family housing in American cities, as well as the production of multi-family housing where nearly 70% of developments accommodate households of two people or less.  

Finally, for many of us, home is no longer a place solely dedicated to where we reside, but it also the place where we work, learn, create, produce (food, products, services) and find social community (virtually). A such, the design and regulation of existing residential land parcels and structures is perhaps outdated and inflexible.

Home. House. Housing. is multi-disciplinary housing studio based in two neighborhoods on the southside of Chicago that will advance radical solutions for housing regulatory, design, and production reform. These neighborhoods hold both a history of extraordinary wealth and achievements by Black Chicagoans; anchor institutions like the University of Chicago and the Obama Presidential Center; as well as a legacy of urban renewal, displacement and disinvestment.  But in recent years, the middle class, new local noprofits and creatives including Amanda Williams and Theaster Gates have invested and made these neighborhoods their place of home and production.  The core intention of the studio will be to re-examine contemporary needs and cultural-based practices of what makes a “home”, how the “house” accommodates these needs, and how the provision of “housing” should be transformed through the lens of 8-12 resident types, and explore the ways designers, creatives and residents can co-create a more diverse climate-adaptive, culturally adaptive and economically sustainable housing supply and neighborhood urban form.

Values-based learning objectives connect the pedagogy of the studio and its outputs.

Rooted in Place
• Develop land narratives, including known and lost histories and current cultural and development conditions of each neighborhood

Rooted in Personhood
• Understand of housing needs and desires through the development of household profiles

Rooted in Adaptation
• Explore reforms for economic, cultural and climate reparative and adaptive land use, zoning and building codes; neighborhood identity, density and urban form; site plan and plan development; materiality and sustainability; fabrication and construction technologies

The studio will be open to architecture, urban planning, and urban design students with the goal of producing a comprehensive neighborhood plan, land use, zoning and building codes, and model home and housing designs.

The studio outputs will include:
• Architectural designs for different housing typologies
• Urban design plans neighborhood 
• Urban planning land use, zoning and development regulatory reforms
• Studio publication/catalogue of proposed design and regulatory housing and people and place narratives
 

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 studio will meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 3^rd.

Fireworks

Fire is a powerful and transformative process, a metaphor for energy, hope, renewal, destruction, and creativity in the collective psyche. Throughout history, humans have been grappling with fire’s duality as a force that both creates and destroys. Today, fire poses a mounting existential threat that demands attention and action. As designers, we must confront how landscape interventions can both harness and evade the transformative power of fire. How can these interventions apply, contain, and control fire in the landscape?

Led by James A. Lord and Roderick Wyllie of San Francisco-based international landscape architecture firm Surfacedesign, this studio will examine the theme of fire through a multi-disciplinary lens encompassing the practical, environmental, aesthetic, and symbolic.

This studio will focus its inquiry of fire on the Napa Valley region in California. The studio will explore the interplay of art, agriculture, architecture, ecology, landscape, restoration, and rewilding, while reinterpreting the relationship to fire at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art is a cultural institution and arts incubator founded by Rene and Veronica di Rosa. A pioneering Figurative and Funk Art collector drawn to emerging artists whose work often had a humorous bent, Rene di Rosa was an early supporter of Northern California artists including Roy De Forest, William T. Wiley, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Nathan Oliveira, Viola Frey, and Ron Nagle.

Students will reimagine the future of this eccentric Northern California art and nature preserve through the lens of fire, examining the ecological, cultural, and aesthetic reflections thereof. Building off Rene di Rosa’s legacy as an outsider, students will look for alternatives through design. Using the site as a laboratory, students will seek different models for fire management and site design, deconstructing and challenging current thinking about how we incorporate art within the landscape. Can art and landscape provide an imaginative and speculative vision for the future hand in hand with design? This studio will ask students to suggest a speculative reworking of how fire, art, and landscape meet.

Students will examine the impact and potential of fire in Northern California through a series of four discrete and interconnected modules:

The first module is a personal design exercise: a shelter embracing fire.

The second module includes the studio trip to the Bay Area and the Napa Valley. The purpose of this trip is to gain full exposure to the character, climate, and culture of the Northern California landscape. Students will meet a diverse range of local experts on the topic of fire and how it has impacted their lives. Students will be expected to document their experiences.

The third module asks students to work in groups to create a stewardship plan of the site that considers fire as a point of inspiration for the design. Students are encouraged to find alternative methods to convey design ideas.

For the final project, students will work individually to create a site-specific intervention, inventing a new typology that combines fire research, contemporary art, and land.

This design-focused studio will be open to Landscape Architecture and Architecture students; however, there will be a strong emphasis on engagement with the landscape.