Land Use and Environmental Law A
As a scarce and necessary resource, land triggers competition and conflict over its possession and use. For privately owned land, the market manages much of the competition through its familiar allocative price-setting framework. However, because one person’s use of land affects individual and collective interests and market mechanisms alone do not always protect or promote such interests, laws enacted by legislative bodies, administered by government agencies, and reviewed by courts have arisen to fill the gap.
Encompassed in local ordinances, higher-level legislation, administrative rules, discretionary government decisions, constitutions, and judicial opinions, land use laws and environmental laws significantly shape the built and natural environment. For example, zoning’s use and density restrictions affect whether neighborhoods are demographically diverse or homogeneous, its height and setback restrictions sculpt the skyline. Environmental laws govern the extent to which land uses pollute air, water, and land, whether habitat is available for endangered species, and whether wetlands are preserved. Recent legal responses to climate change involve considerations of whether and how individuals may build or rebuild in areas vulnerable to floods, severe storms, heat waves, droughts, and forest fires.
Through lectures, discussions, readings, and a written exercise, this course provides students with a working knowledge of land use laws and environmental laws, the institutions that create, implement, and review them, and the issues that swirl around them. The course distinguishes law’s method from those employed by other disciplines and fields. The role of non-lawyers, including urban planners, designers, public policymakers, real estate professionals, and community activists in influencing, drafting, and implementing land use and environmental laws, is explored.
No prior legal background is assumed. Students with a legal background have found the course instructive. For pedagogical reasons, laws employed in the United States will be the main references, but comparisons with laws in other countries will be regularly made. Reading assignments are drawn from primary sources (legislation, constitutions, judicial opinions) and secondary sources (law review and journal articles, book excerpts, professional reports). The written exercise asks students to critically examine one provision of a zoning law and draft its replacement. An oral final exam will test overall fluency with course subject matter.
There are two offerings of Land Use and Environmental Law: 5206 taught by Jerold Kayden and 5207 taught by Nestor Davidson. Students cannot take both courses for credit.
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.
Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management
This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate for all major property types and land uses. The course begins with a focus on real estate finance tools. Methods of using discounted cash flow analysis for income property, for-sale property, construction and permanent mortgage loans are explored. Acquisition and management of existing real estate assets are similarly explored. The course culminates in a study of the various stages of the development process, including site selection, market analysis, financial feasibility, design considerations, legal requirements, construction oversight, leasing and lease-up, operations, and ultimate property disposition. Teaching cases and simulations are designed to place students in decision-making situations commonly faced by real estate professionals. Optional review sessions focusing on real estate financial analysis will support the course.
Although this is a limited enrollment course, MRE students should enroll directly during the open enrollment period and not enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery.
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.
Advanced Reverse Design and EMBODIED CARBON
At a time when urgent action is needed to avert the climate crisis, it is very difficult to take an idealistic approach when considering key materials in building construction. We now know that transformation of the built environment is inevitable. Designers can play an important role in the race to de-carbonize the built environment and this course is founded on real current examples. We will touch on how we got to where we are and how we can move forward in practice with the lessons we have learned by illustrating what transitions are already in play. Through a series of conversations and presentations, including from external experts, we will engage in inversing the design process by utilizing newly available tools. We will demystify regulations, terminology, and popular language, and examine how the predominant materials for construction, which are unlikely to go away soon, can be improved and implemented in design and construction to promote a low carbon economy.
Adaptive re-use, retrofit, recycle, regenerative design, conservation, resilient development: these are just some of the common and generic terms that need to be more closely understood in the context of other processes that are now emerging in practice. To do so, we need to trace previous understandings of methods and construction. The city as an object has a rich history of being constructed and reconstructed. We need to grasp the progress that has been made in construction throughout history and retreat from relying on theoretical works alone where formal concerns dominate.
The course will offer opportunities to discuss evolving technologies, periodic advances in codes of practice, shifts in material supplies, and “hacking” policies and regulations where possible. At the same time, we will consider an amalgam of building types in continuous transformation as the city builds upon itself, and new cities rapidly emerge in the Global South.
Many ancient methods are going through an accelerated revival where capacity, building codes, and technical specifications, such as fire and acoustics, empower architects to take back control as Design Team Leader. But we must also resist demonizing the more recent materials without looking at how to “clean” them. Consequences to embodied carbon, social interaction, maintenance, durability, textural qualities, tactility, heat absorption parameters, insulation, and indoor air quality come into play. The Architect is trained and skilled sufficiently to predict and control these variables. The course will cover supply chains, procurement, and crafts, and touch on specific cases that work towards “reversing” the steps taken over the last 100-1,000 years.
The seminar will be held both remotely and in person with some international experts joining in remote presentations. You are expected to attend all class meetings. See the course syllabus for details regarding the schedule.
Quantitative Aesthetics : Introduction to Machine Learning and Perceptual Machines for Design
This course aims to introduce students to concepts and techniques from Machine Learning and Computer Vision as a way to revisit questions of perception and aesthetics in the context of an AI mediated world and with its implications for creative work. Rather than focusing on large language based generative AI models we are going to explore the design potential and implications of some of their constituent components and the frameworks that enable them. Through a series of workshops and small projects student should develop an intuitive understanding of how model architecture, dataset curation, training and inference work and what are the opportunities for injecting creative intent beyond the use of language and prompt manipulation. The emphasis will be placed more on the perceptual capabilities and idiosyncrasies of ML models with some forays into proto-generative processes.
We will start with simple language embedding models to discuss the structure and operations on vector spaces that underly most ML applications. We will later introduce the classifier and autoencoder models as two archetypes of artificial percpetion and building blocks of other models. Through a series of targeted projects students will train and deploy these models to use them as surrogate perceptual systems that can curate, filter, organize and ultimately modify visual content.
The course will start with a brief introduction to Python and the relevant development environments and workflows. The ML library Pytorch and the Computer Vision Library OpenCV will form the basic technological stack.
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.
Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology
GSD 6333 covers water across the globe in relation to (1) land-water interactions, emphasizing hydrology and water quality, (2) aquatic ecology, and (3) human activities, including design questions and methodologies. While the course will focus on fresh waters, there will be limited coverage of near-shore coastal waters and coastal wetlands.
This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources. Emphasis will be placed on both the science and the application of this science in designs for projects involving a wide range of interactions with water including coastlines, inland rivers and lakes, and urban stormwater. With ongoing global changes in climate, urbanization, and the use of water for energy and food production, the relationship between humans and water will continue to grow and evolve. We will learn about environmental and land justice issues and think about their relationship to our design work. We will learn from members of the Indigenous communities about the importance of land, water, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Students will come away from this course with a better understanding of our evolving relationship with water and the environment and how designs can account for hydrologic change and adaptation while also considering the local communities in which we work. While many varied case studies from around the U.S. and internationally will be discussed throughout the semester, much of the course content and assignments will involve hydrology, stormwater, and sea level rise in the Charles River and Boston Harbor; river and wetland restoration in Plymouth, MA; and stormwater and low-impact design in Washington, D.C.
Discussion of these focus areas will include design challenges, social issues, permitting, and the implementation process. Students will come away with a better understanding of how projects go from conceptual design to a constructed site. Students will be encouraged to bring water and ecology-related projects/challenges from other courses, studios, or projects to the class for an open discussion. Hands-on exercises include watershed delineation, hydrologic calculations to estimate runoff and groundwater infiltration and flow, design exercises developing recommendations for stormwater best-management-practices/low-impact design (LID) for a neighborhood in Washington, DC, and research and design exercises for river restoration projects. Multiple classes will have outside activities or visits to nearby river, wetland, and water-related sites, including the Alewife stormwater facility, Alewife Brook, and the Charles River. Attendance at 2 all-day Saturday fieldtrips with hands-on field sampling will be mandatory: one will be focused locally on an aquatic system near Harvard; the other will be in Plymouth, MA. A semester long group project will focus on the sites visited during these fieldtrips and will culminate in a conceptual design of restoration and revitalization.
Evaluation: Based on class attendance and participation (including field trips), short written assignments, quizzes, focused design exercises, and a semester-long project.
Climate by Design
The climate crisis is here now and for the foreseeable future. For designers who shape the built environment, there is an urgent need to respond to the changing climate with greater understanding, sophistication, and imagination. To do so requires a community of learning committed to deeper analysis of the patterns of change and the potential roles designers may play in reducing carbon emissions and adapting to the many changes the future will bring. We must ask critical questions and interrogate existing systems of knowledge. What is climate change? How can designers approach it? What are the design strategies? How effective are they? Who do they serve? And on what terms?
The effects and burdens of climatic change are unequal, contributing to increased social and economic disparity and often exacerbating historic patterns of inequity. The impacts are multiple and diverse, as are the many cultures and communities that must respond and adapt. Therefore, a universal, one size fits all approach is not an adequate response. To develop design tools that respond to these conditions, we need to understand not only the science, but also the political, social, economic, and cultural contexts on the ground, where design projects and movements are rooted.
Through a series of lectures and case studies, this course will explore the range of paradigmatic design responses to the climate crisis. This foundation will be built through a series of lectures and panel discussions by GSD faculty and external experts across a variety of fields. We will engage in discussion together and with these invited experts to advance our knowledge and interrogate existing practices.
Over the the semester, students will engage in the analysis of a case study, advancing methodologies for critical assessment and visual representation. The studies will consider social, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions as well as environmental function, economic deployment, and political engagement. These exemplary cases will be a means to understand and articulate the evolving role of landscape architecture and related disciplines in designing for an increasingly vulnerable planet. As such, the course will explore not only how landscape architects respond to the climate crisis, but what these actions say about the nature of design itself. The cases will be situated in different geographical and climatic contexts, and the responses will be understood in relation to advances in science as well as variations in political, environmental, economic, social, and historical contexts.
Climate by Design is a required course for MLA degree candidates and open to other GSD and Harvard students with an interest in the climate crisis and design.
Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies III
Ecology and the Design World (Max Piana):
This course introduces Landscape Architecture students to the fundamentals of ecological science. We will use urban ecology and the social-ecological-systems framework as a lens through which to interpret human-influenced landscapes, assess ecological management and design decisions, and generate interventions. Through lectures, case studies, discussions, and field trips students will develop a working understanding, or ecological literacy, of ecological systems, function, and dynamics at multiple scales. Students will synthesize and apply these analytical skills in a series of assignments that integrate methods from field ecology, research, and design.
An Introduction to Woody Plants as a Design Medium (Christopher Matthews):
This portion of the course is for MLA AP students.
Recognizing that plants are one of the essential mediums of landscape architecture, this module seeks to introduce the student to the relationships between plants and people (horticulture) and the relationships between plants and the environment (ecology). The class focuses on the following topics and objectives:
– Concepts and practices necessary for using woody plants as a design medium.
– An introduction to the spatial, visual, functional, temporal, and sensorial qualities of woody plants in the landscape.
– An introduction to the horticultural requirements of woody plants particularly as it relates to the urban environment.
– Techniques and practices for using woody plants in the designed landscape.
Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies I
This course recognizes plants as one of the most expressive materials of the artform — a living medium that distinguishes the discipline from the other applied sciences and fine arts. The goal of the course is to introduce the global potential of plants as a means of design for shaping the character of a place for individual and collective human experience. Investigations that straddle hand-drawn, digital and analog mediums will explore the universally accessible and adaptive power of plants in making healthy, resilient ecologies and socially dynamic spaces.
The course emphasizes the use of empirical observations and investigations to explore multiple-scaled thinking about plants and their habitats, including cultural and vernacular attributes and larger ecological systems. It is not a comprehensive overview of the horticultural or botanical history of plants, however, students will employ an important methodology for how to learn plants that can be translated to any locale, including the rote memorization of botanical and common plant names combined with recognition of a plant’s visual features.
Through in-person lectures, field trips and readings students will learn to identify approximately 60 plants, define notational systems, and translate plant characteristics into design languages that they can apply in future design work. The course exposes students to the understanding of plants from non-managed plant communities to managed living systems, all within the ever-changing context of the ongoing climate crises.
Products of the course will include mixed media drawings that explore typologies of designed and non-designed plant communities. Videos, photographs, field notes, sketches, diagrams, and a series of curated drawings in axon, plan, and section will be the vocabulary of the course.
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.
Structural Design II
This course is a continuation of GSD 6227 and completes the introduction to the analysis and design of building structures. Both 6227 and 6229 are the required courses to satisfy (and exceed) accreditation requirements for structures in the MArch I program.
The course has three closely related pedagogical components. First, it introduces additional methods for structural analysis and design–numerical analysis techniques, physical model analysis, ultimate strength design of reinforced concrete elements, and structural design software.
Second, it completes the introduction to the elements of structures by introducing 3-D trusses, continuous beams, statically indeterminate frames, shells, and membranes. In addition to timber and steel, we introduce the design of reinforced concrete structures.
Finally, this course dedicates a significant amount of time to the design of structural systems, addressing both gravity as well as lateral loading scenarios. The design of structural systems is not treated as a purely quantitative exercise but as a design activity that synthesizes architectural design and structural principles. Design exercises and case study analysis serve to expose the relationship between structural systems and architectural form and space. Students will learn to identify typical design strategies for structural system strategies and understand their spatial and formal ramifications. They will learn to select and apply appropriate methods of analysis when conducting structural analysis studies in order to make informed decisions throughout the architectural design process.
A computer-based structural analysis program will be used during the course. Together with its first part, GSD 6227, this course:
— Provides an understanding of the behavior of structural systems.
— Gives students an exposure to basic and advanced structural concepts and teaches simple calculations and the use of computer tools applicable in the early stages of the design process in order to select and size the most appropriate structural systems.
— Teaches the engineering language in an effort to improve communication with the engineers in the design team.
The Monday class meeting is an optional review session.
Prerequisites: GSD 6227 or equivalent.
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.
Construction Systems
This course introduces students to methods of construction: conceptually, historically, and practically. We will consider how construction techniques emerge in relation to architectural desires and technical criteria in order to emphasize the architect’s agency in shaping construction systems within the collaborative environment of contemporary building design. Construction has material, structural, spatial, economic, environmental, and cultural consequences. As such, this foundational course will have the dual charge of understanding not just how, but also why we build in a particular manner.
An overview of construction systems will be provided including a review of wall, roof, envelope, and foundation systems. Students will learn about construction systems through lectures, readings, and a series of research assignments that ask students to apply methods of dissection (by drawing and modeling selected systems in detail) and to speculate on the larger societal and cultural relevance of architectural technologies. Students will be evaluated on the basis of their research assignments and participation in course discussions. Select course materials will be made available online for students to review outside of class hours for asynchronous engagement and discussion.
This course is part of the core curriculum in architecture for MArch I and MArch I AP students.
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 Thursday, September 4th.