Real Estate Law

This course examines real estate law through transactions and the legal documents involved in the development, financing, operation, and disposition of real estate. The course reviews the major stages of commercial real estate projects including obtaining control of land, completing predevelopment, securing debt, raising equity, leasing, and realizing returns, as well as the broader interplay between real estate and capital markets. Through this transactional lens, the course will consider regulatory frameworks shaping real estate markets as well as processes the legal system offers when real estate ventures face challenges such as bankruptcy or litigation.

Advanced Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management

5205 COURSE DESCRIPTION:

5205, Advanced Real Estate Finance Development and Management is an important course for students going into real estate acquisitions, development, asset management, investments, or private equity. This year’s course is divided into two major sections.

Section 1 focuses on individual properties or projects and covers five major topics: (1) advanced analysis and management of development projects, (2) advanced analysis and management of acquisitions (including complex waterfalls and investor after-tax capital accounts), (3) the asset’s capital stack, distress, and “special situations”, (4) management and recovery of an asset in a distressed environment, (5) the real estate underwriting process, investment committee package and stochastic return analyses.

Section 2 focuses on critical concepts and skills required to build performing real estate portfolios and successful real estate companies. Section 2 covers up to seven additional topics: (6) real estate market cycles and investment/management considerations, (7) portfolio construction and techniques for optimizing long-term risk adjusted rates of return, (8) REITs and the IPO process,  (9) raising private equity capital for real estate projects, portfolios, and companies, (10) developing a financial business plan for a startup, (11) PropTech, CleanTech, and FinTech in real estate, and (12) leadership of real estate companies.

The course is fast paced, rigorous and quantitative. We will be using a combination of  case studies, lectures and problem sets to examine a multitude of important advanced real estate topics. Many of the cases require students to apply a full range of real estate skills and learnings to evaluate the appropriate strategic opportunities. They also require one to work outside of their comfort zone in tackling complex problems. We may occasionally host guest lecturers who are experts in their respective fields.

This course is required and intended for GSD MRE students. Non-MRE students who successfully complete GSD 5204 with high grades, may apply to take 5205 with the instructor’s pre-approval in my.harvard. This course builds on 5204 and assumes students can adeptly analyze and model real estate financial pro formas, including levered investor returns, project waterfalls, and investor taxes for all major real estate asset categories.

Public and Private Development

Cities are developed by a complex blend of public and private actors and actions. Using lectures, discussions, guest case studies, individual and team exercises, and readings, this course introduces students to the analytic methods, contextual frameworks, and implementation techniques needed by private for-profit, private not-for-profit, and public actors to understand, evaluate, and carry out development in cities. The course commences with instruction about core analytic methods, stressing real estate financial analysis while also addressing modified cost-benefit, economic impact, and fiscal impact analyses. Early classes additionally examine legal, institutional, political, and ethical frameworks equally essential to navigating public and private development. Together, the analytic methods and contextual frameworks form the basis for decision rules about appropriate tradeoffs and deployments of public and private resources as well as the choice of implementation techniques for pursuing urban development. Implementation techniques covered in the course include public subsidies, public land disposition through sale or lease. public land acquisition through eminent domain, public and private provision of physical infrastructure, inclusionary zoning, linkage, exactions, incentive zoning, community benefits agreements, business improvement districts, and “friends” groups. Although most of the implementation tools and examples explored in the course are drawn from United States practice, international tools and examples are introduced from time to time to demonstrate the range of variation. Critical viewpoints about the very model of public and private development will be regularly discussed.

Environmental Histories: Ancient Practices and Modern Problems

This course investigates the environmental histories of the ancient Mediterranean world through a diverse array of archives–including cultural materials such as paintings, mosaics, excavated landscapes, and textual records; natural proxies like ice cores, ocean sediments, and dendrochronological data; and archaeobotanical and faunal evidence, such as ancient fish populations that inform us about past marine ecologies. By juxtaposing human and environmental archives, students will critically analyze how ancient societies perceived, interacted with, and were shaped by their environments. The course engages with ongoing scholarly debates about the potential for ancient modes of resource management, agricultural practice, and ecological adaptation to inform resilient solutions to today’s environmental crises. It further interrogates the methodological and interpretive challenges of translating ancient practice into modern application, asking what is at stake in forging environmental bridges between past and present. Through case studies, interdisciplinary readings, and hands-on analysis of select archives, students will develop skills to assess both the promise and the limits of learning from the environmental past.

Inscriptions: Experimental Architecture in Contemporary China

“Let us consider architectural thinking. By that I don’t mean to conceive architecture as a technique separate from thought and therefore possibly suitable to represent it in space, to constitute almost an embodiment of thinking, but rather to raise the question of architecture as a possibility of thought, which cannot be reduced to the status of a representation of thought.”
       -Jacque Derrida, “Architecture Where the Desire May Live”

A longstanding tradition in Chinese art emphasizes the interconnectedness of calligraphy and painting, which share a common techne for presentation in their use of ink, brush, and paper, and an association with the gongshi or scholar’s rock, which often served the literati as the focus of meditation and a source of inspiration. This advanced history and theory seminar will explore several openings for what might be called a contemporary synthetic poetics, which not only organizes and propels the imbricated machinery of these different arts of inscription, but also enables it to set into its structured field the system of architecture; or to be more precise, an architecture of inscription.

The hypothesis of this course is that certain contemporary architectural and art practices in China– many in the Jiangnan region, the original site of literati practices , with its focus on perceptions of nature and materiality — reinscribe and map this tradition of inscription in contemporary work. What is more, we will show that it is poststructuralist thought (begun but never developed in architecture theory), that provides the most articulated access to the machinery of architecture’s inscription.

Example: In his theoretical writings, the Ming painter-philosopher Shitao articulated the use of the “single stroke” of the brush (yi hua) as the generative “primordial line” –the conceptual and material support and expressive pulse of all his painting. Three hundred years later, the French psychoanalytic theorist Jacque Lacan returned to Shitao’s mark which he translated to French as the trait unaire, his reinscription of yi hua. For Lacan, the unpartitioned oneness of the originary stroke was the “primordial symbolic term,” the formalized trace-trait of which is the first step for entry into identification and language. Contemporary architects and artists are engaging the minimal formal structure of generative material marks to explore the related issues of site, place, and memory.

This course will expand out from close symptomatic readings of these practices into the context of the poststructuralist theory that intersected with architectural practice in Europe, the Americas, and China. A renewed interest in architecture theory accompanied the new practices and was developed in architecture journals. We will follow that development with close examinations of architectural projects and theoretical texts.

Intense reading, lectures, discussions; reading responses, and several short projects are required.

Monuments, Monumentality, and Meaning

This lecture course explores monumentality through a close historical and theoretical examination of what a monument has been thought to be, what monumentality has meant, and how monuments have succeeded or failed to embody their intended meanings. The course material extends chronologically from pre-history to the present but remains within the cultural heritage of the Western tradition and is, in fact, a course about that intellectual and artistic tradition with examples ranging from Stonehenge and Archaic Greek Kouroi to Breuer’s proposed service to war memorial on Cambridge Common (1945). In-depth case studies will display the variety of monuments and monumentality exemplifying the hermeneutic breadth of these concepts in the Western tradition of art, architecture, and urbanism. The course proposes a fresh look at projects which have been marginalized in academic scholarship and offers viewpoint diversity to other architectural history courses at the GSD.

All monuments are about memory but the significance of many, perhaps all, is not stable or fixed but evolves over time. Case studies will highlight how monuments are used in the creation of political and cultural identities. Always awe-inspiring and therefore close to wonder, monuments serve as a powerful idiom which, as historical examples such as Milan’s Castello Sforzesco to Hitler’s Germania show, can be abused. Urban projects will be considered through the lenses of monumentality and memory. Particular attention is given to American architecture and urbanism from the design of Washington D.C. to Rockefeller Center in New York. Some, such as the Seven Wonders of the World, fall into a separate class of monuments, lauded especially for their engineering and technology, while others, such as many UNESCO heritage sites, represent the culture that produced them. We will look to religious buildings and martyria (buildings or shrines over the tombs of martyrs), such as St. Peter’s in Rome, Richardson’s Trinity Church, Boston, and Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, places of worship, which could be considered an explicit act of memory in a public place. The time seems right for a re-evaluation of the many nineteenth and twentieth-century monuments, monumental buildings, and urban communities done in historicizing styles, which are considered by Modernists as either inauthentic, authoritarian, or both. Throughout the course we will remain mindful of the Modernist rejection of the American examples, asking whether it is true.
 

The Architect as Producer: Theory as Liberatory Practice

The past few years have brought the necessity of theory as liberatory practice to the foreground of discussions on architecture. The interconnected crisis of violent war, mass enforced migrations, global warming, precarity, and structural inequality have changed how we understand what architecture is and does. These and other events have highlighted the role of architecture in the rise of wealth accumulation, racism, patriarchy, land dispossession, labor struggle, and environmental disaster. In this course we examine how architects further these processes and how they might contribute to counter them by turning to the role of architecture within the relations of production.

The course responds to these challenges–as outlined by bell hooks and Manfredo Tafuri–by thinking about architecture’s position within the relations of production through four interrelated topics: lands, materials, labors, and knowledges. We start by questioning where architecture happens, the land we stand on, the ways in which lands are transformed into real estate, and the role architects play in this process. We then move on to the materials, resources, and objects that architecture is made of, as well as the processes of extraction they are imbricated in. We address the bodies that participate in the making and maintenance of architecture, from building labor to the role of the architect as worker. We conclude by reflecting on the motivations that animate the discipline and its teaching, and the ways in which it is being unlearned and reimagined.

Students will be evaluated on class participation, discussion facilitation, short writing assignments, and a research project. This course is planned as a “lecture” with many small group activities and other alternative pedagogies. It qualifies as a BTC Distributional Elective.

Competing Visions of Modernity in Japan

The course will trace the parallel trajectories of two of modern Japan’s most influential schools of architectural thought, represented by Tange Kenzō (1913–2005) on the one hand and Shinohara Kazuo (1925–2006) on the other, and situate their contributions in the broader development of international modernism in the postwar period. Tange and his protégés in the Metabolist group dazzled the world with radical proposals for urban communities built either on the sea or elevated in the sky. Shinohara rejected this techno-rationalist stance through the slogan “A house is a work of art” and turned to the single-family house shunned by the Metabolists. The House of White by Shinohara achieves an almost oceanic spaciousness through abstraction and precision. The course will be structured as a series of discursive narratives and debates, such as tradition, transparency, lightness, and technology, which defined architectural practice and criticism in Japan after 1945. Major figures, notably Itō Toyoo, successfully overcame these differences and established new paradigms. We will also position young Japanese architects today, Ishigami, Fujimoto, and Hasegawa, in terms of these historical genealogies and the evolution of a critical discourse.

Cities, Infrastructure, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart and Sustainable Technologies

Infrastructure plays a decisive role in urban development and in the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical perspective. History proves especially useful when dealing with the political dimension of urban infrastructure. From fortifications to smart technologies, infrastructure is inseparable from political intentions and consequences. This political dimension will constitute one of the threads of this lecture course. Other themes of the course will include the relation between cities and their hinterland, the progressive dematerialization of infrastructure, from walls or bridges to the invisible electronic networks that organize contemporary urban life, the rise of environmental concerns and their impact on infrastructural thoughts and practices, the key part played by infrastructure in social and racial inequality, the need to envisage infrastructure differently when dealing with informal settlements. Also of interest will be the changing relationships between cities, nature and infrastructure. More than ever, urban nature appears today as inseparable from infrastructure.

'Cities, Infrastructure, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies' suggests an alternative way to read cities and their evolution. Historical analysis will systematically serve as a basis to envisage contemporary issues such as the challenges of rising inequality and climate change. Since it aims to chart new territory, class discussions will be regularly organized after the presentations.

Readings related to the course content or expanding its perspectives are provided for each of the lectures and will be available on Canvas in pdf format. In addition to required readings, suggested readings are also provided for some of the weeks. Course evaluation will be based on class attendance, the conception of a couple of prompts related to topics of interest to students to be run on a generative AI program such as ChatGPT (more detailed explanation will be given at the beginning of the semester), as well as a final paper.

Urban Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative-Historical Origins and Applications

This course takes as its point of departure the historical and national origins of planning as a discipline, assesses its evolution over time and across developmental contexts, and situates our understanding of what has come to constitute “planning theory” in a deeper understanding of the political, economic, and social specificities and constraints on planning action. In understanding what might be referred to as planning praxis, we not only examine those social structures and economic as well as political power relations that enable or constrain preference for certain policies and processes of decision-making. We also examine the history of ideas about cities, debates over how the built environment should be designed and/or governed, and address longstanding conflicts over who should have the legitimacy or authority to undertake such decisions. The time span that we examine during this course begins in the late-19th and early 20th century and ends in the contemporary era.