Collaborative Design Engineering Studio II
The second-semester studio builds upon theoretical and technical concepts already introduced in the MDE program, emphasizing problem assessment, creative and critical thinking, observational and experimentation-based evaluation, and context-aware communication strategies essential for complex problem-solving activities. Within the scope of the 2D, 3D, and 4D MDE studio pedagogy, the fourth dimension, time, will feature strongly in project considerations. Students will be challenged to prioritize deeper reflection and holistic connections across the entire ecology of their design-engineering project (i.e. systems design, experiential design, futuring, and large-scale thermodynamics).
This year, student teams will develop a semester-long project on “Water as a System of Care” through one of three human-centric-scales: IN the body (i.e., medicine, nutrition, drinking, TOUCHING the body (i.e. fashion, beauty, recreation, thermal health), or AROUND the body ( i.e., infrastructure, transportation, construction). Student teams will develop product-based solutions leveraging an interdisciplinary approach that blends design thinking with insights from economics, sociology, technology, and public policy. Collaboration with experts across these fields, as well as with the communities that will be affected by these changes, will be vital in developing human-centric solutions that are truly desirable, feasible, and tangible.
This Studio is limited to first-year students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering Program, a collaborative degree program associated with Harvard GSD and SEAS.
Landscape Architecture IV
The Near Future City
The fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence responds to our most pressing urban agenda in the years to come to transition into climatically just and resilient cities where no-one is left behind. As a Landscape Architect your role in this urban climatic transition is fundamental. Core IV provides you with the tools and skills to translate the important values and actions embedded in this process, into individual design proposals that are specific and concrete for the City of Boston.
In the Spring of 2024 Core IV joins current efforts from the federal, municipal, and civil society to accomplish this needed task. Among others: President Biden´s administration realignment with the Paris Agreement followed by his American Jobs Plan[1] and the Roadmap for Nature-Based Solutions[2] at the COP 27; the commitment to swift from fossil fuels at COP 28; Mayor Michelle Wu’s Boston Green New Deal & Just Recovery [3] synthesizing many of the Boston Climate Action [4] initiatives toward climate resilience and decarbonization; or EPA5 and the Mystic River Watershed Association to reduce pollution. The semester opens with an immersive pre-term symposium to learn first-hand from state, city officials, and NGOs on their multiple Boston plans, initiatives, and policies while experts share important precedents and critically assess the encounters. As an academic exercise, we will have the freedom to move beyond the “status quo” of present possibilities, to more desirable outcomes toward climatic resilience in the Near Future. While enhancing your imagination in the creative process of design, this might be precisely where our collaboration becomes more nurturing and catalyzing.
After the opening, the semester is structured around three ACTIONS: 01. analyzing; 02. spatializing; 03. projecting. Each ACTION combines expert lectures, readings, skill building workshops, and exercises that built sequentially and iteratively upon each other during the semester. In closing, students assembled their work for a Near Future Charlestown Presentation to continue the engaging conversation that was started at the opening symposium.
Fourth Semester Architecture Core: RELATE
The fourth and final semester of the core sequence, this architecture studio tackles the complexity of the urban condition through the design of housing. From individual to collective, from spatial to infrastructural, from units to systems, housing not only confronts the multiple scales of design but also exposes the values and ideals of its society. The semester will be an opportunity to imagine the possible futures of the city, recognizing the role of architecture at the intersection of the many interdependent as well as contradictory forces at play, and the negotiations that must necessarily take place.
The semester will be organized in two overlapping phases. The first weeks will be an intense research and analysis phase through which the students will develop not only an understanding of historical precedents but also begin to formulate their narrative on urban living – a hypothesis that they will use to launch their design for the rest of the semester. While this hypothesis will be constantly revisited and revised, it will serve as a first speculative act.
The second phase of the semester will be devoted to the elaboration of an urban project with a focus on housing and will have as its objective the understanding of design as a series of relativities: between building and the city, between collective and individual, between civic and domestic. The architectural project is fundamentally optimistic. It goes beyond problem solving to imagining a better future. In no other typology is this more true than with collective housing which defines the core of how we live and function together as a society.
Pedagogically, working in groups and pairs will be a component of the semester, demanding dialogue, understanding, and negotiation of different points of view.
The Architecture Core Studio Colloquium on Wednesdays from 1:30-3 PM takes place in Piper Auditorium.
Second Semester Core Urban Planning Studio
The second semester core planning studio expands the topics and methodologies studied in the first semester core studio, GSD 1121, aiming to prepare students for the mix of analytical and creative problem-solving needed to be an effective planner. In this studio, students work on a real project in a real place (with a real client) that allows them to interact with the public; define a vision; collect, analyze, and represent data that supports that vision; develop a proposal that reflects public input; and present work in a sophisticated way that is relevant, legible, and useful to those who are not planners. By the end of the studio students will be familiar with a number of dimensions of community engagement, data analysis, plan making, and implementation.
Landscape Architecture II
The studio will explore how we might reimagine cemetery landscapes of the future in response to the challenges of the climate crisis, and the clear and present issues of social inequality. These issues are extensively shifting the ways we live, and, at the very least, are the uninvited corollary through which we might imagine new expressions of the cemetery.
As sites of remembrance, cemeteries may be considered as ‘places where memory crystalises and secretes itself as part of an ongoing construction of history’ (Pierre Nora 1989), whilst simultaneously acting as ‘settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience’ (Michael Rothberg 2010). They are spaces that are socially produced and made productive in social practice (Lefebvre 1974), whilst also being highly logistical practical settings created in the absent presence of the body (Ken Warpole).
Just as death is a necessary part of life, cemeteries are sites of contrast, yet it is perhaps through the very preservation of this tension of contradiction that they exist as some of the most enduring landscapes across cultures around the world.
Often perceived as a space ‘apart’ from the city as a consequence of their physical traits and phenomenal characteristics, cemeteries none the less play significant roles within the life of the metropolis as biodiversity hotspots offering ecosystem services in the form of thermal regulation, stormwater management, and carbon absorption. They provide significant social functions such as spaces for people to seek sanctuary, reflection and play, and healthy spaces for individuals to contemplate in the context of a natural landscape.
Cemeteries, capable and perhaps charged to carry multiple meanings, are paradoxical spaces described by Foucault (1967) as ‘heterotopias’, a no place that, nonetheless, is. The studio will be exploring what the urban and social significance of the cemetery of the future could be, and ask what are the forms and cultural expressions the urban cemetery might project? How might the articulation of the material and physical space reinterpret the temporal experience of the cemetery, and how might the increasingly rich cultural diversity of a progressive society be celebrated through ritual and mediated through disparate processes of burial and internment? How might the cemetery critique and address the extensive environmental and social issues that are before us by proposing alternative organisational patterns and expression, a place that celebrates diverse beliefs and rituals, and a space as an important contribution to the city’s natural systems?
Second Semester Architecture Core: SITUATE
The overarching pedagogical agenda for second semester is to expand upon the design methodologies developed in the first semester such that students acquire an understanding of the interwoven relationship between form, space, structure, and materiality. This semester extends the subject matter to include the fundamental parameters of site and program, considered foundational to the discipline of architecture. Through the design problems, students will also engage in multiple modes of analytical processes that inform and inspire the study of mass, proportion, and tactility.
Prerequisites: GSD 1101
The Architecture Core Studio Colloquium on Wednesdays from 1:30-3 PM takes place in Piper Auditorium.
Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)
The first semester studio is a project-based introduction to a range of ideas, methods, and techniques essential for the design engineer. In the studio, students learn through making.
Every three weeks, as part of studio time, all first-year MDE students will convene for "Debating Design," a series of roundtables when two outside speakers present short vignettes addressing topics in design engineering, followed by an open discussion with faculty and students.
This studio is limited to first-year students enrolled in the Master in Design Engineering program, a collaborative degree associated with the Harvard GSD and SEAS.
Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: While the first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a Monday schedule at the GSD, STU 1231 will maintain it’s regular schedule and meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 3rd.
Landscape Architecture III: Third Semester Core Studio
From Off-Shoring to Near Shore: Littoral Landscapes at Work
This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people at work in working landscapes—through the design of regional frameworks and localized sites in coastal Massachusetts.
Since the 18th century, cheap fuel, cheap labor, and cheap nature lay the foundation for settler wealth in North America. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the economic logic of “fossil capital,” as argued by Andreas Malm, coupled industrial power generated from fossil fuels with wage labor. The primary orientation of this coupling was economic growth. Fossil capital has led to rising temperatures, melting ice, and decreased biodiversity—and the uneven distribution of effects on human populations. In New England, the techno-ecological landscapes that once supported everyday life—e.g. productive fisheries, forests, and fields— have been transformed by the market orientation of fossil capital. Relocated overseas, fragmented by urbanization, or restructured by changing economies, the physical remnants of socially productive landscapes have been romanticized, miniaturized, and historicized.
During the early 20th century, through the New Deal, the profession of landscape architecture undertook a broad range of public projects. During the 1930s, landscape architects planned, designed, and executed work across federal agencies as diverse as the War Department, Tennessee Valley Authority, Federal Housing Administration, and the Department of the Interior, creating thousands of jobs for out-of-work Americans. A broader examination of the history of landscape and the New Deal reveals that among the celebrated public initiatives were also many projects of environmental absurdity, constructed through grueling manual labor, often by racially segregated work crews.
Amidst the 2020 economic crisis and calls for a Green New Deal, the discipline of landscape architecture has the potential to again create jobs—“green jobs”—in service of a decarbonized economy. But without compelling visions for the future, the discipline will be limited to projects of climate change resilience that stabilize contemporary ways of life. This is an understandable sentiment in turbulent times, but it also represents the most pernicious form of “sustainability.” A new paradigm for working landscapes requires new associations beyond recreation and ecological restoration. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed outdoors many activities that were previously limited to interior spaces. However, due to the urgency of this health crisis, most of these facilities are purely functionalist and designed for short- to medium- term deployment. This studio will explore the design of landscapes that can be new environments for health care, education, housing, and research that are disentangled from singular market orientation and hybridized with regional needs for food, fibers, clean water, and waste management.
Design approaches will be grounded in the material media of the discipline—soils, vegetation, water dynamics—and their controlling infrastructures, physical and policy-based. The studio will explore: how productive sectors will migrate due to climate risk; what happens to the land left behind; and how these landscapes can support dignified spaces for work and self-determination. These design propositions may lead to new forms, scales, and cadences for work and habitation that may seem improbable under current systems of funding, fuels, and power. In the 21st century, the socially productive landscape reconsidered does not merely provide the stuff of everyday life closer to home. It demands a paradigm shift from landscapes that are discrete and transactional to those that foster a commonwealth of human and natural labor.
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.
Elements of Urban Design
Elements of Urban Design is the required first semester advanced core studio for the post-professional Urban Design Program. Regarding learning objectives, the studio introduces critical concepts, strategies and technical skills associated with thinking about Urban Design and allows speculation on a designer’s spectrum of roles in shaping urban environments. More generally the studio aims to develop necessary literacies for architects and landscape architects to engage in the bridging practice of Urban Design and to understand questions related to urban environments and to produce compelling formal responses. Here a fundamental difference between Urban Design and Architecture and Planning is its concern for the ‘thingness’ in a Heideggerian sense, of urban settlement, which transcends the single building complex and involves competing claims and other unreconciled constraints needing to be resolved through design. Typically, cities are often parts of larger networks of communities and ecologies with both overlapping and complementary roles. Urban growth and change now range over a wider landscape, offering both opportunities, constraints and outcomes located in peri-urban, peripheral, and central locations. Within the scope and content of the studio, consisting of two Urban Design problems, each subdivided into exercises, evaluative reviews and crits will be accomplished by a series of fourteen presentations across topics within the two problems. Structural racism and effects of the Anthropocene Era, along with concomitant institutional issues and biases will be engaged with each specific exercise but also more generally through adherence to social actions, environmental awareness, and a cosmopolitan outlook. More specifically, in the first problem and exercises dealing with South Boston, housing affordability and other forms of discrimination will be challenged and discussed, along with the matter of Climate Change and sea-level rise. Similarly, in peripheral developments like Westwood in the second problem, the matter of access as well as environmental suitability will be topics of consideration. Throughout a sequence of topical presentations will be provided in an asynchronous format on these and related topics, including brownfield site amelioration, sea-level rise, landscape ecology, storm-water management, urban justice, and various forms of spatial development. The other first-term required course for incoming Urban Designers, titled GSD 4496 Urban Desing Contexts and Operations, will also bear on many of these and related topics.
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.
Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE
Integration is the agenda for the third-semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems, and processes into a synthetic whole. Structural systems, envelope design, and environmental and thermodynamic processes will be systematically addressed in the development of a single project during the course of the whole semester.
The building type consists of a multiprogram urban building, requiring careful consideration of access and exchanges (circulatory, visual, and energy), between programs. During that time students will work in consultation with engineers and scientists. Design exercises will be addressed through team and individual study.
Prerequisites: GSD 1101 and GSD 1102, or advanced standing in the MArch I program.
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.