Practices of Landscape Architecture

This course presents the application of landscape ideas as a process of engagement and building amidst financial, legal, cultural, political, and professional contexts. The course aims to introduce conventions and circumstances that may be encountered throughout one’s career while stimulating new and creative, alternative dimensions of practice in a global context of universal agency.

Course content includes lectures, workshops and discussions led by the instructors and guests from around the globe, and incorporates student research, readings and discussion.  Though concepts appear iteratively throughout the term, early topics focus on design leadership and community agency, professional identity, firm marketing and business development, with visitors describing their career trajectories, firm development and working contexts, as well as their current endeavors. Topics then move to conventions and circumstances influencing legal, ethical, financial and operational aspects of practice, particularly those that can contribute to and detract from the success of firms and their projects.    During the third part of the course, academic trajectory, future impacts on practice and historic documentation practices are featured, in addition to the sharing of ongoing research by students. During the course, lecturers and work by Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and LBGTQI people will be present. Issues of diversity and equity within the profession and in our work endeavors will be discussed throughout the course.

Recognizing that architecture, planning and landscape architecture share many aspects of practice, this course incorporates nuances and scope that are typically the focus of current landscape architectural practice itself, such as soils as a living medium; grading and planting; landscape architectural documentation and construction; landscape advocacy and stewardship; community contexts and agencies; and liabilities specifically associated with the practice of landscape architecture.

During this course students will develop the ability to:
1) Analyze and describe the various ways in which offices acquire work (particularly the Request For Qualifications and Proposal) and build their identity.
2) Demonstrate a familiarity with the vocabulary, concepts and processes associated with the financial management of a project and an office.
3) Describe the key elements contained in a contract for landscape architectural design services and typical points of negotiation, risk and opportunity.
4) Consider the role and requirements of professional licensure and professional associations, as well as ethics.
5) Describe the trade-offs involved with different types of practice and potential career trajectories, and begin to consciously build a professional network.

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.

Foundations of Practice

For students in the fifth semester of the MArch I degree program, this course examines models and issues that define contemporary professional practice. Requiring students to examine a broad range of legal, financial, organizational, and ethical topics, the course prepares students to engage and lead in the production of the built environment. The course takes advantage of the multidisciplinary programs of the GSD, bringing a wide breath of experienced professionals to share insights and develop the tools necessary for productive collaborations within the complex space of specific professional, practical, and disciplinary obligations. 

Each week the course explores professional practice through a critical reading of primary texts that frame key concepts and models, as well as relevant case studies and applications for stress testing the boundaries of these models. 

Course format: Combination of lectures, guest lectures, and workshops. Each subject area contains supplemental material that provides standard references and supplemental case studies that highlight the boundaries and thresholds of practice. This is intended to provide students with an exposure to critical aspects of practice—from accounting to contracting and from project delivery to professional ethics. In addition, students will explore the wide-ranging roles of respective professional associations in shaping contractual relationships, public policy, and the parameters of practice itself. In more immediate terms, students will explore: 

– Client communications and engagement; 

– The drafting and execution of standard AIA contract series; 

– The interpretation and due process considerations of local government regulations; 

– The strategic advancement of public design reviews or public procurement opportunities; and 

– The financial economics of operating a practice. 

Connecting each of these dimensions of practice are the codes of professional ethics and various elements of statutory and case law that collectively define the professional standard of care. The intent is for students to develop a reflexive understanding of their duty to clients, third-party consultants, and the general public consistent with their obligations as design professionals and community leaders. This course serves as a foundation from which students may develop further interests and skills in the GSD’s professional practice distributional elective course offerings. 

 

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.

Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society

Integrated Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society bridges diverse disciplines, perspectives, and techniques to address significant social challenges. This course explores a range of ‘frameworks’–including human-centered design, humanitarian design, communication design, industrial design, behavioral science, entrepreneurship, design thinking, ethnography, and organizational dynamics–offering students a comprehensive understanding of how these disciplines intersect to shape society and industry. The aim is to foster critical thinking and provide a holistic view of design’s impact on the world. Note: This syllabus is a living document and will be updated periodically.

This course supports students’ development as design engineers by building critical skills in framing complex problems, identifying leverage points, and connecting ideas to implementation. While distinct from the Collaborative Design Engineering Studio, it offers a conceptual foundation that students can draw on as they pursue applied projects, including their second-year Independent Design Engineering Projects. Throughout the semester, we will engage with external experts — especially practitioners — to explore specific situations and experiences in depth. The Fall semester will expose students to cutting-edge design practices, from commercial solutions to seemingly intractable problems that demand innovative responses. Students will be encouraged, with faculty support, to connect with experts.
 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: While the first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a Monday schedule at the GSD, PRO 7231 will maintain it’s regular schedule and meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 2nd. 

De-Centering the Canon: Architecture and Urbanism

This course is an enquiry into the boundaries of the Canons that dominate the discourse in Architecture and Urbanism globally. The seminar will interrogate the limits of the Canons propelled in the West — their histories and production cultures across material, political, economic and social spheres. Over the centuries, the legacy of colonization, the industrial revolution and globalization have insidiously proliferated monolithic, singular truths, which have dominated architectural and urban imaginaries in most geographies around the world. The philosophical underpinnings of modernity and the establishment of the global normative has conditioned the conversations of space and time largely to responding to and privileging the facilitation of universal tenets and notions of efficiency. This seminar intends to transcend these conservative, ideological imperatives that determine the contemporary understanding of cultural significance in the discourse of Architecture and Urbanism globally, and to draw theoretical frameworks from practices that often have been ‘othered’ by western dominance of the discourse in the academy as well as the professional media.  The intention of the seminar is to not locate the conversations in any one geography or in the various rubrics such as the global south etc., rather the intention is to develop theoretical frameworks around a shared or common set of issues and conditions that are shared by different geographies outside the west — (Europe and North America). Drawing from case studies largely from South Asia, but also Latin America, Africa, Southwest Asia etc., the seminar will illuminate philosophical orientations, traditions and knowledge systems which allegedly fall outside of the standards, values, and prescriptions of the west, but have existed over thousands of years and display relevance in the broader discourse on Architecture and Urbanism today. Through reviewing architectural, cultural, urban practices, students will delve into the complexities of societies globally, understanding geographies and landscapes as inherently dialogic, relational, and interdependent.

Some of the questions that will be central to the seminar include the following. What forms of practices do the contemporary political, social, and economic conditions suggest and inspire in geographies beyond Europe and North America more broadly? As practitioners and pedagogues, what constitutes our values, significance, and agency? The seminar aspires to interrogate the tenets of modern thought and expand the Canon to rethink contemporary culture, public life and a more situated agency of the architect. And lastly, the seminar will also facilitate the discerning of models of practices in other geographies that could propel the process of expanding the Canon.
 

Urban Design Contexts and Operations

The course focusses essentially on modern, including contemporary, contexts and operations that have emerged during the past 100 or so years. Here urban design is broadly regarded as a concern for the ‘thingness’ of constructed environments above the scale of singular buildings and in response to resolving competing claims brought to bear through design. Contexts refer to particular situations and orientations taken in urban design, whereas operations refer to actions involved in specific work and practical applications. It is a lecture-seminar class where participation is required of those in the first semester of Urban Design Program of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is intended to satisfy this program’s curriculum requirement in ‘History-Theory’. Students will be required to make one-page summaries of selected readings each alternative or second week of the semester and assigned in pairs or threesomes to make presentations of further materials and several urban design projects beginning in the second week of class. The aim is to introduce students to important developments and literacy in the field of urban design, along with matters of on-going and current speculation. What follows is an outline of weekly topics along with a short reading list for each that forms a background for the lectures and later discussion. Apart from making a one-page summary each second week of the assigned text and specific assigned presentations in a given week, all students are expected to prepare and participate in seminar discussions. All lecture components for each week’s theme will be available in asynchronous pre-recorded illustrated form.

Enrollment in this course is limited to incoming students in the GSD Master of Urban Design program.

The Project and the Territory: Japan Story

What is the future of urbanization?
What role can design play in shaping that future?
What will happen to the conflicting tensions between urban and rural?
How might technology transform our experience of the physical and social worlds?

This course will use the concept of the project, as both idea and implementation, to examine contemporary architecture and urbanization both reflectively and prospectively. Through a critical analysis of the historical evolution and contemporary conditions of Japanese cities and regions, and their encounters with disruption and continuity — such as World War II, the 1964 and 2020 Olympics, the bubble economy, and the 1995 Kobe earthquake — we aim to question and reimagine the future relationships between the physical and social worlds.

Drawing from architecture, urban design, technology, theory and practice, infrastructure and nature, institutions and memory, as well as literary and visual culture, the presentations consider how the physical and social worlds interact. We will examine speculative and built work from both the metropolitan centers and the regional cities, focusing on alternative models of practice, especially those emerging from younger generations responding to a post-growth condition.

The course integrates representations of Japanese life through literature, film, photography, and theory to explore the evolving tensions between center and periphery, tradition and modernity, spectacle and the everyday. While the focus will be on Japan, we will consider these ideas in light of parallel developments elsewhere in the world facing similar demographic and economic shifts.

The course will feature lectures, guest speakers from near and far, and class discussions based on a wide array of visual and textual materials provided for asynchronous review. Over the course of the semester, students undertake independent investigations into an issue of their choice, culminating in a speculative project.
 

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.

Architecture and Construction: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital

The course aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between architecture and construction through the study of key historical episodes such as the rise of modern tectonic ideals in the 18th century, the development of iron and concrete buildings, the 20th-century quest for light structures, or more recent developments in materials, structure and building technologies.

The course will also raise theoretical questions such as what the terms material and structure truly mean, or how does architecture differ from mere construction. The historical significance of ornament in relation to structure and its contemporary return will also be discussed. Beyond its historical and theoretical scope, the ambition of the course is also to foster students’ reflection on the recent evolution of the relationship between architecture and construction. Indeed, the rise of digital technologies applied to architecture and construction, from digital fabrication to AI, as well as the development of pressing environmental concerns challenge our received understanding of tectonics, materials, and ultimately design.

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 9th.

The Shapes of Utopia

“… you speak of that city of which we are the founders, and which exists in idea only, for I do not think there is such a one anywhere on earth…”
     –John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera (1874)

Utopia’s fall from grace in the modern period is crucially tied to architecture’s failure in giving shape to dreams of a new society wrought from social and political transformation. Its memorable articulations appear in a venerable philosophical and literary tradition, which includes Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s City of God, and Sir Thomas More’s utopian city of Amaurote. Its significant disarticulations materialize in the writings of Michel Foucault and Manfredo Tafuri as well as the dismal outcome of modernist projects like Pruitt-Igoe. Utopia divulges the oscillation of a concept associated alternately with Arcadian pasts or ordered futures, naive idealism or repressive totalitarianism, phalansteries or simple living, mental escapism or technological promise. Its etymological variants–Eutopia, Outopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia, Extropia, Ecotopia, and so on–reveal an interdisciplinary complexity, which forces upon buildings, landscapes, and cities the intractable fabric of social realities, possibilities, and disappointments.

This project-based lecture course takes a synoptic approach by considering both key writings and design experiments. We begin by deciphering a selection of foundational texts, which posit an architectural matrix for the construction of a more perfect world. We then turn to those architectural and urban proposals, Filarete to Frank Lloyd Wright and beyond, which attempted to reify the guiding principles of a transformed social order. Interwoven with our case studies are the theoretical critiques that emerged in modernism’s wake. Coursework includes weekly readings, participation, and the group-based “Utopics Project.”

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.

Building and Urban Conservation and Renewal: Assessment, Analysis, Design

What are the values inherent in a property, site, or district that must be understood to craft conservation policy and interventions that will reveal, complement, sustain, and enhance the original work while appropriately addressing socio-cultural, aesthetic, and technical integrity? This course will introduce students to the functional, technical, regulatory, and environmental principles of working with existing buildings and districts to ensure their continued viability.

Globally, over 40% of construction activity is devoted to work on existing structures — making the sustainability mantra “the greenest building is the one already built” increasingly relevant as we seek to minimize the impact of construction on the environment. Repair and renewal are therefore fundamental components of contemporary practice increasingly requiring facility in techniques of conservation planning and execution, rehabilitation and adaptive reuse. Increasingly new frontiers in rehabilitation and adaptation — such as the conversion of mid-century office towers to housing in major cities are expanding and enriching the opportunities to minimize demolition and “work with what we have.”

Designed to ground the participant in the methodologies of conservation and renewal and to introduce the tools necessary to successfully approach working with existing buildings in established precincts, the course will include lectures by the instructor and guest experts, and in-class discussions from readings. While interventions must include sound technical solutions, any modification from conservation to renovation and additions must address the full complement of values necessary to enable an economically viable, socio-culturally relevant rehabilitation.

We will examine a range of conservation and intervention case studies at the building and urban scale for both traditional and modern structures and sites — including the recent renovations to Gund Hall. There will be two local field trips as presently planned. We will look critically at how the international Charters and Standards employed in working with historic fabric impact our approach to modifications to any existing building or site from a technical, design, and regulatory standpoint, and will particularly address the question as to how the apparatus of conservation is changing to best serve both underrepresented constituencies and the legacy of modernism and the recent past.

This is a lecture course with a class discussion component. Appropriate provision will be made to accommodate hybrid learning through synchronous and asynchronous content as required should students have to participate remotely. Specific strategies will be outlined in the Syllabus. Evaluation will be based upon participation in readings and themed discussion, submission of a short analytical mid-term paper, and a choice of final project of the student’s choosing: either 1., an assessment and intervention design exercise on an undeveloped modest property, or 2., an analytical case study of the rehabilitation and transformation of a significant property.

The course is open to all interested GSD students.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Modernism, Its Practices, and Its Theories

Modernism has fundamentally to do with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events and, at the same time, new conceptualizations of their appearance, of changing event structures and temporalities, and of the relationships between objects, their producers and maintainers, and their audiences and consumers. A history and theory of modernism, then, must involve the category of the producing, using, viewing subject as well as the object, which itself includes buildings and projects, texts and discourses, and the contexts of their production and reception.

One of the most significant, sustained attempts to thematize the changed conceptualization of subjects and objects in modernity in a systematic aesthetic and critical theory is found in the body of work generated by Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, which is also related to the earlier writings of Georg Simmel and the later work of Manfredo Tafuri and Fredric Jameson. Theirs is a vivid diagnosis of the everyday life of the subject and object under industrial capitalism, as well as the specialized work of art and its necessary contradictions. At the same time, Martin Heidegger’s understanding of technology and his concern with the nature of working and production provided the basis for further work by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and a later generation of theorists of the modern and the postmodern. This course will use these texts to generate theories of modern architecture. Our question is not “How does modern architecture reflect the conditions of modernity,” but rather, positioned in modernity, “What can architecture (as subject, as object, as technique) do?’

We will propose a persistent dialectic for the study of the activity of modern architecture as a response to the contexts of modernity–the Tower and the Sphere–which can incorporate the conceits and paradoxes of the needle and the globe from Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, the pyramid and the labyrinth from Tschumi’s “The Architectural Paradox,” and the sphere and the labyrinth from Tafuri. Roughly, we will propose that the one domain, the Tower, tends toward connectivity and overdetermination by external forces, mainly technology and reification (the threat of the Thing), represented, for example, by the architecturally inert grid-elevation machine of the American skyscraper. The other domain, the Sphere, tends to be internalized and substantive, heterotopic, focusing on the relative autonomy of the discipline and the discourse, and producing self-reflexive thought. These persistent terms are, however, themselves dialectical–the tower internalizing the repetition of the typical plan as an architectural device, the spherical volume viewed from the exterior becoming a solid, geometric form. These negations and affirmation are refracted and reflected, fragmented and remontaged, in modernity through an increasingly thin but all the more present architectural surface–an intensifying facade assembly, the tenuous membrane between the architectural object and the metropolis, and a fading critical disciplinary boundary. It is at this sheer surface–at the junction of the interior and the exterior, subject and object, the Tower and Sphere–that we will inquire into the spacing work of architecture.

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.