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.
Regenerative Design in the Territory: Recalibrating Supply Chain Ecologies
This research seminar explores how design, ecology, and systems thinking can address critical challenges in sustainability at regional scales. Focusing on supply chains for essential resources like food, water, and energy, the course examines how these systems shape and transform the built and natural environments.
Students will investigate current systems’ environmental and social impacts on local ecologies and communities. We will ask: How can we reimagine the landscapes of supply systems, meaning the sourcing and movement of essential products and resources to restore balance and recalibrate human and environmental relationships for a better future?
We will use methodologies of design, with an emphasis on multi-disciplinary research, design-thinking frameworks for actionable proposals. The class will introduce regenerative design principles for resiliency, equity, and the healing of ecosystems. The class will include guest lectures and presentations of case studies of projects.
At the end of the semester, each student will present a proposal for the redesign of a supply chain system and its corresponding built and natural environment. Open to all disciplines; the course provides a platform for envisioning alternative futures where supply chains act not as extractive systems but as regenerative networks.
Disclaimer:
This is not a course about supply chain economic optimization; it focuses on raw materials, extraction and transformation (for example, coffee, cacao, paper, minerals…) and the impact that such processes have on the land, environment, and communities. The emphasis is on redesigning and reconfiguring the places and relationships of said supply chains.
Products of Practice: A Critical History and Uncertain Present
This research seminar traces the dynamic dance between the shape of design practice and the society it serves through the lens of the defining media and practical instruments of our time, the “products of practice.” Through an engagement with history, theory, and the mechanics of everyday practice, the course aims to frame structural change within practice and for the role of the architect in society in order to prepare students to innovate, define, and lead future design practice.
Within the cacophony of contemporary media, under the pressures of financial instruments, and with an expectation of artificial intelligence, this practice seminar looks to the past to explore the product of the architect as an artifact of circumstance, framing and projecting practice potentials now and into the future. Critically tracking the development of our practice, we will research design context, instruments of service, and the media of production as cultural and temporal constructs that limit or expand the role of the architect in practice. Our collective goal is an exploration of the relationship between — and the limits of — discipline, practice, and profession to better understand their structural potentials.
Course content will be organized thematically, exploring the origins of contemporary practice and its products at any given moment — from built form to model to drawing to code — as the architect evolved from master builder to author to project manager. Legal and technical issues, client types, and structures of fee and control will be considered alongside cultural impact. Students will develop critical positions on the renewed debate between empirical vs. cultural practice, on mediatic production and instruments of service for single projects vs. systems of design deployment, and rapid technological change as it intersects with changing structures of labor.
Class time will include framing lecture content as well as group discussion around evolving student research, media, and readings. Guests from practice and related sectors will be assembled to add perspective to specific topics, particularly around the issue of emerging modes of production and instrumentation. Guest speakers with perspectives on the history and theory of architectural practice will also join the class to assist in framing essential questions relevant to the topic at hand.
Building Resilient Communities
This seminar course will examine resilience of communities to natural and man-made disasters, climate change and other vulnerabilities. It will do so with an objective of finding ways to create resilience in communities that are apparently ‘weak’. Many communities in the world today are vulnerable to environmental and man-made threats. In many cases there is not sufficient help from governments and organizations to create resilience in such communities. In such instances the people have to rely on their own strengths and abilities. The course will emphasize the ability of the people to develop resilience with the skills and knowledge they possess with some support from technical inputs. The key being self-sufficiency.
There will be discussions and guest lectures on the topic from various parts of the world. Through these and suggested reading material, students are expected to identify a community of their choice, anywhere, and develop a resilience strategy for the same, preferably using community skills and strengths. This will be topic of the final paper. There will be interim presentations on this with comments and suggestions from the tutor. Students are also expected to submit summaries of the discussions and presentations every two weeks.
Students are expected to develop a better understanding of how to address vulnerabilities in communities that need it and develop strategies for the same. One important point is to be able to identify the strengths and skills of the people at risk and how they can be applied independently for their own resilience.
The Art Museum: Typological Trajectories
This seminar provides a critical analysis of the art museum. Rooted in the varied contexts and motives of its programmatic evolution, the course equips students with tools to anticipate the art museum’s typological trajectory amidst socio-economic, cultural, and environmental challenges. At stake is architecture’s prerogative to enable the institution’s relevance.
The art museum has emerged as one of the most significant and prolific typologies of the last century. Its edifice is at once a vessel for our cultural memories and a platform for espousing values, ideas, and knowledge essential to navigating our collective futures. The museum building tethers the objects it houses to the public it hosts. The three – building, object, and public – are constantly in dynamic alignments and tension with one another.
The course is divided into four sections.
- Origins of the Typology: Expands the discourse to include non-Mediterranean/Western antecedents, reflecting our shared urge to collect and display.
- The Gallery: Traces the evolution of the gallery – the primary space of display – and the corresponding evolution in art, educational frameworks, and sociocultural practices. The study of gallery types, from the palatial salon to the white box, to burgeoning contemporary strategies, lay bare the didactic relationship between architecture and objects.
- The Non-Gallery: Analyzes the roles of non-gallery programs – spaces of conservation and storage, circulation, infrastructure, retail, food, classrooms and auditoriums, among others – as mechanisms that expand the art museum’s relevance and economic viability, while providing alibis for architectural form.
- Future Trajectories: Anticipates new directions relative to contemporary issues such socio-economic inequity, cultural property, and the climate crisis.
The course straddles art and architectural history, design, exhibition, arts programming and operations, infrastructure, climate, economics, landscape, and curatorial practices. Guest speakers, including designers, curators, public officials and museum leaders, will provide diverse perspectives on these matters.