Designing Critical Practices
Today, landscape architecture is a field in active transformation. At a broad scale, the climate crisis is transforming the built and natural environment surrounding us—putting frontline communities at risk of warming, expanding oceans, inland flooding, and pollution, scorching our cities and open spaces, destroying the foundation of global biodiversity, threatening agricultural production, and entirely reconstituting what it means to design for places in the midst of profound and uncertain change. At the same time, shifting market forces, supply chain crises, technological advancements, diversifying client pools, and evolving societal attitudes toward open space are reshaping practice as we know it, rapidly expanding the reach and scope of design services while grappling to value them appropriately.
The ground has shifted beneath us, and the way we have practiced landscape architecture for the last century is no longer applicable. Our context requires a new approach, affecting both the work of design and the structure of the business itself. For too long, self-regard and siloed competition across the design fields have prevented us from looking elsewhere for inspiration—but today, emerging professionals and leaders alike have much to learn from the business models, operational structures, and management structures of firms in creative industries, technology, manufacturing, and beyond.
The central premise of this course: to prepare students for a changing market, we will honestly examine the current state at play in the design industry, analyzing a wide cross-section of firm typologies and scales, while also looking beyond the field for inspiration. We will investigate these ideas through detailed case studies, guest lectures, workshops, discussions, assignments, and student-led research.
The course is divided into two sections (1) Contemporary Landscape Architecture Practice Today and (2) Looking Outside the Field. The first examines methods and structures for practicing landscape architecture today and the second looks outside the field. Students will use the ideas shared during the two modules to imagine alternative frameworks for practice. Throughout the semester, students will be asked to consider both the broader forces affecting design today and real, actionable ways to meet these challenges through practice, culminating in a final project that will be shared and presented to the class for discussion.
In-class participation is essential for this seminar. Each section will begin with an in-person workshop designed to orient students with strategies, terminologies, and goals for the content to follow.
This course assumes entry-level familiarity with the basics of professional practice in landscape architecture—including business types, design phases and processes, RFP/Q processes, and other essential elements of contemporary landscape architecture firms. At the beginning of the semester, we will briefly review these fundamentals of practice, including workplace culture, systems, norms, and team hierarchies, in order to set the stage for examining new modes of practice.
Urban Design Principles and Practices
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to urban design including its history, principles and processes, and impacts on people, places, and communities.
Over the course of the semester, students will gain a foundational understanding of the history and evolution of the field and the modes and methods of practice through readings and presentations, conversations with practitioners, interactive class discussions and workshops, and site visits. Students will acquire knowledge about the field, learn about professional resources and tools, and develop skills to navigate and participate in urban design processes and projects.
Throughout the course, we will explore the role of urban design in cities and society. We will consider the actors involved and intersections with architecture, landscape architecture, public policy, real estate development, urban planning, and other disciplines. We will examine the influence of culture and history, economics, and politics, and the benefits of advocacy and public engagement to advance ambitious civic visions and create beautiful, inclusive, and resilient places.
Each student will develop, practice, and refine skills of observation, inquiry, and critique via the semester-long research, evaluation, and documentation of a completed Boston development. Weekly prompts will help students integrate and apply ideas and lessons learned from readings and discussions and communicate them verbally, visually, and in writing. Students will share and discuss their progress with the class via informal presentations and pin-ups throughout the semester. Instructor and peer feedback on these and weekly assignments will contribute to and inform each student’s production of a detailed, illustrated case study about their project which is due at the conclusion of the semester.
This course is open to anyone interested in learning about design and the urban environment. Urban design is, by nature, experiential and visual. Prior experience with design, planning, and visual representation is not required, however a keen curiosity and desire to observe, explore, and learn is expected.
Introduction to Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management
Behind every building is a vision. Discover how to bring yours to life.
Real estate is an exciting and highly entrepreneurial field, where success hinges on the ability to manage projects with skill, diligence, and vision. This course offers a comprehensive journey through the world of real estate finance, development, and management, using case studies, hands-on financial modeling, and interactive exercises to prepare you to excel in this dynamic field.
You’ll explore the full lifecycle of real estate investments–acquisition, renovation, operation, and disposition–across key property types, including residential, retail, industrial, office, and mixed-use. You’ll learn how projects get built: from market analysis and site selection to project feasibility and construction. In addition, you’ll acquire tools of investment analysis and learn how to raise capital through debt and equity partnerships.
Taught by a practitioner in the field, this course equips you with the knowledge and skills to transform your vision into real estate developments and investments that shape communities and create lasting value.
This course welcomes cross-registered students. Interested students should e-mail the instructional staff at [email protected] and attend the first day of class. Detailed instructions for filing your petition will be provided during class. Petition approval depends on space availability and a review by the instructional staff.
Leadership, Entrepreneurship
This course explores how to conceive, build, and lead successful real estate organizations. Students learn how to create an initial strategy, craft and implement a business plan, manage an organizational culture, and compete in a world in which the only constant is change. The mediating role of ethical standards is emphasized throughout the course, helping students identify specific challenges in real estate settings and strategies to guard against ethical failures.
This module course takes place Tuesday, May 13th through Friday, May 23rd. Enrollment is limited to students in the GSD MRE program.
Negotiation
This course combines evolving academic theory with simulations to teach the concepts and practice of effective multi-party negotiation among developers, owners, governments, community groups, tenants, lenders, and investors.
This module course takes place Tuesday, May 13th through Friday, May 23rd. Enrollment is limited to students in the GSD MRE program.
Leadership, Entrepreneurship
This course explores how to conceive, build, and lead successful real estate organizations. Students learn how to create an initial strategy, craft and implement a business plan, manage an organizational culture, and compete in a world in which the only constant is change. The mediating role of ethical standards is emphasized throughout the course, helping students identify specific challenges in real estate settings and strategies to guard against ethical failures.
This module course takes place Monday, May 18th through Friday, May 29th, 2026. Class does not meet on Memorial Day, Monday, May 25th. Enrollment is limited to students in the GSD MRE program.
Negotiation
This course combines evolving academic theory with simulations to teach the concepts and practice of effective multi-party negotiation among developers, owners, governments, community groups, tenants, lenders, and investors.
This module course takes place Monday, May 18th through Friday, May 29th, 2026. Class does not meet on Memorial Day, Monday, May 25th. Enrollment is limited to students in the GSD MRE program.
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, practice, 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.
Thesis project / Project Thesis
As the culminating effort for the Master of Architecture degree, a “Thesis” entails multiple expectations. It is a demonstration not only of competency and expertise, but of originality and relevance. A thesis is an opportunity to conceive and execute work that is both a specific project (delimited in scope, with a specific set of appropriate deliverables) as well as a declaration of a wider “Project” (possessing disciplinary value, and contributing to a larger discourse). This class will address both valences of the architectural “project,” while providing space for students to develop methodological approaches for their own thesis. Over the course of a series of lectures and seminars, we will study the theory and practice of the architectural thesis by examining its institutional history and disciplinary development, in order to understand the conventions and possibilities of the format. In workshop sessions, as preparation for their own theses, students will work towards the articulation of their topics. This will include: identifying relevant precedents and existing literature; defining a site and program (however broad); and working through first iterations of working methods. With these efforts, the aim of the course is for students to be equipped to undertake a thesis project in every sense.
Integrative Frameworks: Innovation in Global Problem Solving (Module)
This course explores emergent approaches to addressing global challenges. Over six weeks, students explore frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals, wicked problems, decolonizing innovation, the intersection of artificial and collective intelligence and systems thinking applied to global problems. Taught by the founder of the United Nation’s largest innovation network and featuring practitioners from the global majority, the course will unpack creating social change related to problems in sustainable development. Students can expect to question how change and impact are made, who drives innovation and arrive at a basic understanding of the complexity in global problem solving. While the course may complicate how we understand making change, it is designed to unleash hope for how to make an impact on social and environmental problems. Learning objectives include designers’ roles in global change, designing interaction for collective intelligence, and understanding the dichotomy between scaling solutions versus working within complex adaptive systems. The curriculum challenges students to think critically about real use cases in social and environmental innovation and to design interventions to create common ground on wicked problems.