Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio
STU-1111 is the first in a sequence of four core studios that, together, constitute the foundation of your education at the GSD. In the studios, the hands-on experience of design is a synthetic act, bringing together theory, technique, and aesthetic sensibility in the making of a landscape. In this studio, you will apply the skills and knowledge acquired through other first-year courses–Histories of Landscape Architecture, Landscape Representation, and Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies–to the conceptualization and design of landscapes. Upon successfully completing this studio, you will have laid the foundation on which the rest of your studies at the GSD will stand.
The central topic of this semester’s studio is landscapes in the public realm: how is the public defined? Who defines it? What is a public landscape? How do we recognize it? How is it different from private ones? What and who do they represent, and how are they funded?
These questions will be explored through three themes that build upon one another– material culture, spaces for free assembly, and spaces for equity and health. As a discipline that deals with the transformation and the production of space, landscape architecture is, in essence, a materialist practice, whose outcome is made out of real, physical things. More specifically to landscape architecture, design entails the transformation of living systems, and requires deep knowledge about materials, how they live, reproduce, die, their interactions with time and weather, and their origins and evolution.
While you learn to work with living materials, we will put emphasis on how the spatial configurations produced by landscape architecture can have significant consequences that transcend the purely physical: the landscapes we design enable and inhibit different forms of relationships between various entities. In urban contexts, people and their rights as citizens–and as human beings– constitute the central subject and object of those interactions. Within urban landscapes, it is the public space, more specifically, that constitutes the fundamental domain in the provision and protection of democracy, for it is in the public space where the most profound manifestations of social conflict, individual self-expression, and cultural exchange take place.
Thus, this studio explores two types of public space commonly found in the American city, the public square–City Hall Plaza in Boston–and the riverfront park–the right bank of the Charles River in Allston–and the physical and political implications in their transformation. Through these two different sites, we will investigate public space as representation of our shared conditions of existence, as expression of difference, values, individuality, universality, knowledge, and power, and we will study how the changes we introduce in the received configuration of the public imply, inevitably, the affirmation, the manipulation, and the suppression of some of those conditions.
While the landscapes we design are nested within larger landscapes and urban systems that are determined by broad and intricate networks of social and economic processes, in this studio, we will focus on how the specific forms of discrete sites might constitute in themselves powerful tools in the transformation of those larger processes. Thus, although this studio starts with a rather small site (a site-less enclosed space) and ends with a presumably large one (a portion of the Charles River in Allston), we will not be bound by the simplistic idea that a larger site is necessarily more “difficult” as a design process, or that each is typologically bound to a predetermined historical format. Instead, we will focus on all the scales embedded in any landscape, finding the minute in the large, and the expansive in the small.
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 Tuesday, September 2nd.
First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio
First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to investigate, analyze, create, and implement plans and projects.
In this studio Boston provides the location for developing skills and strategies to address and understand the local in its wider context. In planning the local area is of great importance and planners need to engage the particularities of districts, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions. Planners also understand and engage the wider context of places–in terms of physical scale, historical development, built character, social groupings, political structures, environmental attributes, economic activities, and future possibilities.
The course focuses on four key challenges of contemporary urban planning–equity, access, health, and climate.
While the US legacy of white supremacy raises questions of great urgency, the question of how planning can help make places more just and equitable is an enduring and foundational concern in planning.
Towns and cities exist to help people gain access to nearby resources such as jobs, services, and cultural opportunities for all. Technological developments have been changing whether one needs to be mobile in order to have access to resources; access to affordable housing is also key.
Healthy city planning is an ongoing process of intervention, monitoring, learning, and adaptation, with the aim of improving the conditions that promote health for all populations, with a particular focus on inequities experienced by segregated, poor, racial and ethnic minority populations.
Anthropogenic climate change is challenging planners to mitigate its effects and adapt to changes already underway, while also addressing other environmental challenges from water pollution to habitat loss.
There are no easy answers; the critical and creative skills of the urban planner are being called upon now more than ever to advance the notion of a just society.
Planners address messy situations where the problems are disputed and the solutions contested. They identify issues, gather and analyze information, listen to opinions, draw on precedents, raise ethical concerns, and consider the future. They figure out the important questions to answer, engage stakeholders, propose strategies, communicate ideas, and create and revise proposals. In this studio students gain experience engaging with complex and unclear situations in ways that can lead toward plausible and ethical approaches to addressing them.
The studio teaching approach is one of creating a setting for producing learning rather than delivering instruction about exactly what you should do. The process is collaborative and iterative. This can be a bit uncomfortable at first, but it is a low-risk environment. The assignments take you through a sequence of exercises that include reflection, analysis, proposal-making, and implementation while also addressing challenges (equity, access, health, and climate). These occur at different scales and require both individual and group work. Students also experiment with how to effectively communicate with others using different visual, oral, and written techniques and media in pinups, slides, posters, and online presentations in in-person and virtual settings.
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 Tuesday, September 2nd.
First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT
PROJECT is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, PROJECT may refer to fundamental modes of architectural representation, the mapping of the subject in the larger objective context, or a conceptual foray into territory unknown.
A series of focused and intense design exercises requires students to investigate fundamental disciplinary issues of architectural thought, practice, and representation. As the introductory studio in the first professional degree program, the curriculum addresses the varied educational backgrounds of incoming MArch I candidates. Specifically, students are encouraged to leverage their varied expertise in the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines to find provocative and perhaps unexpected motivations of architectural form. Techniques of representation and iterative development across various mediums will be required.
Prerequisites: Enrollment in 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 Tuesday, September 2nd.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Please refer to the course syllabus for classroom information for the Wednesday afternoon Core Studio Colloquium.
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.
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
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.
The GSD has an irregular start of term. The first meeting of 1231 will be on Wednesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.