Urban Soil Studies: From Field to Lab to Design

Aimed primarily toward soils and plant growth, Landscape Architectural Design and the Curation of Urban Landscapes, and taught collaboratively by a landscape architect, multiple noted soil scientists, ecologists and other guests, this course will provide basic understandings of soil and other growing media in relation to plant growth, for the purpose of designing, constructing and maintaining or curating urban landscapes.  Inherent in the course content, students will examine and critique current practices within landscape industries, primarily within urban, post-industrial environments. Though global conditions will be touched upon and may be selected as student research topics, the course will focus on practices within the United States.

The course is broken into three parts: 1) Soil Fundamentals 2) Current Culture, Practice, Critiques, and 3) Future Potentials.  

SOIL FUNDAMENTALS will include lectures and readings on soil formation, characteristics, chemistry and biology, and plant-soil relation-ships, and the role of carbon and carbon sequestration. This introduction will include a field trip to observe a variety of soil types and conditions within a forest, and one to observe the relationship between tree roots and soils at the Arnold Arboretum. This will segue into human practices with a session on prehistoric and ancient Human-Soil relationships.

CURRENT CULTURE, PRACTICE, CRITIQUES will focus on the development of landscape architecture and soil science, as well as the collaborative planting-soil-related practices used in the design, gardening, landscape and construction industries today; this will include deep critiques and potentials for improvement or innovation.  Topics covered will include site evaluation and hidden implications that can be found within historic soils maps, soil testing processes, soil design typologies, soil blending processes on and off-site, compaction ranges, potable water chemistry, and circumstances involving chemical contamination, and the role of phytoremediation. We will also cover project documentation processes like procurement, soil plans and details, specifications and field quality control during construction.  

FUTURE POTENTIALS will include topics looking toward the future innovations and research, including practical recommendations for funding research including ongoing research within forms and basics associated with grant writing. This portion will conclude with presentations from students’ research throughout the course.
 

Refugees in the Rust Belt

More than 114 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced–the highest number ever recorded. Among them, millions of Muslim refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Myanmar have resettled in the United States, where cities–not camps–become their new homes. This project-based studio explores how design, planning, and policy can help Muslim refugee communities build thriving lives across Upstate New York’s Erie Canal corridor, linking Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.

Once the industrial heartland of the state, these cities now face population decline, aging infrastructure, and thousands of vacant lots. Yet they have also become some of the most welcoming places in the country. Refugee families are revitalizing neighborhoods, opening businesses, and establishing mosques, halal markets, and community spaces, while still confronting challenges of housing quality, mobility, employment, and access to culturally appropriate services.

The class unfolds in four phases:
Phase 1 (Introduction) introduces the refugee resettlement process in the U.S., exploring best practices for integration and principles for ethical engagement with Muslim communities.

Phase 2 (Cultural and Spatial Research) investigates cultural and spatial traditions from refugees’ countries of origin (including housing typologies, public gathering spaces, and faith-based institutions) to identify design principles that can inform resettlement strategies in host communities.

Phase 3 (Spatial Atlas) maps settlement patterns and everyday geographies (i.e. where Muslim refugees live, work, shop, and worship). Students will assess the supply and condition of affordable homes and explore design approaches that reflect multi-generational living, privacy needs, and family-centered space.

Phase 4 (Proposals) develops multi-scalar interventions that integrate cultural infrastructure and foster belonging, from housing prototypes and adaptive reuse strategies to corridor frameworks and policy recommendations. A special emphasis will be placed on housing as both a foundation for stability and a catalyst for community life.

A regional field trip through the corridor cities will connect students with resettlement agencies, Muslim community leaders, land banks, and municipal partners, revealing how design can advance inclusive, culturally grounded arrival cities that uphold the dignity and aspirations of Muslim refugees and the communities that welcome them.

Fortress of Solitude

“Soon, plausible alternatives to our world will emerge. You may have failed in this one, but what if you had a million new chances in a million different worlds?”

This course explores new approaches to interpreting, conceiving, and describing landscapes and architecture, along with the emotions they evoke. While traditional representation methods will remain dominant for some time, they often create a one-way cognitive experience with an “emitter” and a “listener” who barely interact. Game technologies allow for the creation of realistic, dreamlike, utopian, and dystopian universes. It is possible to use, disregard, twist, bend or re-invent the laws of physics, the flow of time, the hazards of weather, the perception of depth, but most importantly, it permits absolute freedom.

Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, meaningful connections will develop through studies in representation across art, film, and -not surprisingly- video games. Through exploring, designing, and constructing virtual “altered states,” you’ll acquire techniques to mature your ideas from early preparatory work through to deployment. This journey emphasizes imaginative solutions over technical prowess. Think of virtual fabrication as a mental blueprint, where elements must be arranged and framed thoughtfully–unless, of course, you want them to be jarringly noticeable.

Some topics we’ll cover include:

The project:
Build a “Fortress of Solitude” – a purely virtual, emotional space for self-reflection, detached from the real world. This space doesn’t have to be “pleasant”; while it could be peaceful and contemplative, it might also evoke discomfort, anger, or conflict.

The tools:
Our primary software tools will be Unreal Engine, an industry-standard real-time 3D engine for game world creation and simulation (easily transferable skills to other engines), and Cinema 4D, chosen for its stable and intuitive workflow. Students may use other 3D packages if preferred.

Nevertheless, the most vital tools will be a pencil, a sheet of paper, and your mind.

Class structure:
Each weekly class will have two parts: one focusing on theory, methods, and critique, and the other on technical skills, where you’ll apply what’s been studied so far. Occasionally, the structure will vary–routine is not the French way. There will be 3 assignments before the “Grand Finale”.

Class requirements:
Given the technical nature of this course, a relatively recent computer will be necessary. Review the minimum system requirements.
 

Transportation Justice and Equity

The AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct identifies five principles to which people who participate in the planning process should aspire, including that “People who participate in the planning process should work to achieve economic, social and racial equity” and should “[s]eek social justice by identifying and working to expand choice and opportunity for all persons.” How should transportation planners in particular implement this charge? In this project-based course, students will engage with the arguments of moral philosophers including John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Iris Marion Young to formulate their own definitions of equity and justice that are grounded in their understanding of that scholarship. They will apply those frameworks and definitions to propose plans and frameworks for public engagement and project evaluation for real clients working on current transportation projects in locations across the United States.

Mapping the Region: Cartographic Methods for Place-Based Spatial Theory

Rather than fixed geographies, Regions are spatial constructs shaped by dynamic relationships across multiple urban, rural, and ecological terrains. While planning and design disciplines have often centered urbanization as the dominant force of spatial transformation, this narrow lens obscures the broader systems of labor, land use, and ecosystem services that shape territories beyond the city. Regional theory offers a way to conceptualize these interdependencies, drawing attention to uneven development, extraction, and forms of governance that operate across multiple spatial typologies.

Mapping the Region approaches cartography as a representation method and mode of theoretical inquiry to reveal geographic relations and inform spatial practice. Drawing upon the entangled history of digital cartography and practice at the regional scale, this course offers both theoretical foundations and technical geospatial methods for regional definition and inquiry. Using Esri ArcGIS software, students will explore data models, methods of overlay, raster analysis, composite indices, network connectivity, remote sensing fundamentals, and spatial statistics in parallel with concepts of regionalism around infrastructures, climate, landscapes, and social formations. By the end of the course, students will be expected to posit their own regional definitions through layered cartographies and engagement with emerging topics in digital geospatial practice.
 

Patagonia Portscapes: Mapping Transitions, Designing Legacies

Set in Patagonia’s Bahía San Antonio–the coastal system of Las Grutas, San Antonio Oeste, and San Antonio Este in Rio Negro, Argentina–this project-based seminar investigates how an energy-and-logistics boom can be reimagined as a platform for long-term regional development. As the bay emerges as the Atlantic gateway for exports from Vaca Muerta, the world’s second-largest shale gas reserve, students will consider whether and how local capacities might endure beyond the boom. How can productive diversification strengthen long-term sustainability? Combining spatial analysis, policy design, and research-based writing, students will explore strategies that can improve quality of life and meet local expectations. In order to produce an integrated territorial diagnosis that weaves together social, economic, environmental, and institutional dimensions, students will build projects through critical readings, comparative case studies, and mapping exercises. The seminar approaches the bay both as a productive landscape and as a social system in transition, working with public officials, scholars, and local actors students to chart the institutional and spatial ecology of the region. Beyond identifying land-use and expansion scenarios, priority investments and infrastructure, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining benefits beyond the energy cycle, student projects will lay the groundwork for a digital publication synthesizing the seminar’s outcome by combining maps, visual narratives, and concise analytical essays into a coherent whole. The seminar aims to deliver both a diagnostic portrait of Patagonia’s Atlantic frontier and a design framework for its sustainable future.

Forms of Accessibility

This seminar approaches accessibility through a formal lens–examining architectural form as it operates on the threshold of human abilities. Moving beyond prescriptive standards and the notions of acceptable minimums or generous maximums, the seminar aims to expand the understanding of human abilities and their range, while critically investigating the origins and methods through which accessibility standards have been developed.

From these two analytical trajectories, the seminar seeks to map out latent formal projects–a series of case studies developed by students–that connect the disciplinary interests of architecture with the objectives of accessibility.

It explores the reciprocal relationship between form and its receiving senses, and how each threshold condition affects the legibility of the other. Ultimately, the seminar asks: How can we critically engage with and appreciate the unexplored formal projects that emerge and operate at the threshold–the moment when one of our senses reaches its limit?

Depths of the Cloud: Architecture and Data Ecologies in the AI Era

Today, much of architectural drawing is generated in digital environments. In zeros and ones, in what we call the cloud. A space that appears limitless, yet whose possibilities are predetermined long before we trace a line or move a cursor, by the tools that structure it and those who own them.

Like language, which defines the boundaries of what can be expressed, systems of architectural representation shape not only how we interact with the world but also the limits of our imagination. The way an image is constructed determines the world it brings forth. Over recent decades, programs such as CAD, SketchUp, BIM, and Rhino have automated processes of representation, establishing conventions that condition how we design, what we design, and how we build. These tools and their encoded logics have generated distinct aesthetics and architectures. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the increasing accessibility of computational power introduce new paradigms.

AI-assisted drawing is increasingly commonplace in classrooms and offices, opening new spatial conceptions. Yet as it reshapes architectural practice, it also exposes the material and political infrastructures that sustain it. Far from neutral, its outputs embed ideology while binding architecture to planetary processes of extraction that lie at the center of contemporary environmental disputes.

The repercussions of the digital on the analog are palpable in the heat of machines rendering images that dominate architectural production. Behind individual devices lie vast infrastructures of servers consuming electricity, cables spanning oceans, and mines cutting into mountains to extract the minerals essential for digital operations. Each prompt activates data centers that demand immense amounts of energy and, often, potable water for cooling. Maintaining these images (along with their duplicates and backups) keeps servers running and resources flowing.

This seminar combines architectural research with media studies, environmental humanities, and political ecology to examine the “depths” of the cloud: its material foundations and entangled geographies. We will study the architectures of digital infrastructures that underpin both everyday life and architectural practice. We will ask how architecture might engage in their redesign. Drawing on examples such as sovereign and Indigenous clouds, feminist servers, permacomputing imaginaries, and low-tech or feral computation, we will reconsider the relationship between architectural drawing and resolution. Together we will explore aesthetics of incompleteness, low-carbon computation, and community-driven data infrastructures. We will challenge the paradigm of speed and constant connectivity and imagine new rhythms for the digital world–ones that embrace pauses and attunement with the climate.

Through readings, discussions, and case studies (including the tools we use daily) the seminar seeks alternatives to dominant models of the digital space, proposing affirmative ways of inhabiting and operating in the world, digitally and otherwise.

Plant Remains: Representing Disturbance through Digital Media

Plants die. But how often do we see dead plants in digital landscape representation? In the corners of renders and animations, vegetation from digital asset libraries–collections built into tools like V-Ray, Enscape, or Lumion–is typically rendered in a lush climax state. These 3D models operate as an aesthetic shorthand for lush, green, and idealized nature, sanitizing digital landscapes that are modeling futures shaped by collapse and scarcity. What is often missing, however, is the visual language of disturbance that is made legible through the remains of plants and the plants that remain. These absences raise a critical question: what does it mean to design or depict a landscape without death, and what stories are lost when we do? Death in the landscape is not incidental; it is informational. Dead and dying plants index a wide range of causes for landscape change–drought, disease, pollution, invasive species, shifting climates, extraction, or neglect–each embedded in specific sociopolitical and ecological histories. Within scientific collections like herbaria and arboreta, plant remains are collected, catalogued, and preserved for their evidentiary value–though these material archives are also faced with their own forms of loss and disturbance. Botanical collections, living and dead, understand plant remains not as disappearance, but as data that traces of the past and indicates the future.

In this course, we will disturb the digital plant collection. By developing landscape assets that depict mortality and decomposition, we will respond to the technical and conceptual gaps in visualization software that flatten ecological relationships with time, history, and disturbance. By including the remains and plants that remain in our screens–the burnt tree, the felled forest, the withered crop–we will aim to demonstrate complexity, context, and consequence into plant representation by considering their physiological responses to stressors. Using open source 3D scanning and animation software, students will develop representations of plants based on herbarium reference material and live plant specimen to create drawings, 2D and 3D animations. Focusing on plants sited in the northeast, these representations will describe how plants change over the course of their lifecycles and how they respond physiologically to environmental change and stressors, culminating into a final project in a digital medium of the students’ choosing. Course material will be supported by reading on environmental history and theories, lectures, and field trips to local collections, living and dead.

Students are encouraged to experiment: no prior experience with digital animation software is required, just a curiosity and interest in learning more.

Intangible Design: Organizations

Organizations are everywhere, yet their underlying rules and cultures are largely invisible, often complex, and inherently difficult to understand let alone change. This new exploratory course teaches methods to analyze and characterize organizations in the context of specific challenges, with the goal of ultimately strategizing for change.

We are all exposed to multiple organizations, involuntarily or by choice, including but not limited to governmental, educational, religious or corporate organizations, as well as many others. Many organizations are nested within others, with lines blurred and bi-directional forces enacting impact. Burton and Obel defined an organization as “…a social unit of people with a relatively identifiable boundary that is structured and managed to meet a collective goal.” (Burton and Obel, 1984). Organizations are systems with cultures, and their governing forces are mostly intangible.

The core hypothesis of the course is that design as a discipline, with its unique methods, outcomes and cultures, can be leveraged to describe, visualize, understand and ultimately transform complex organizations. To understand this claim more in-depth we will venture on a journey that at times will resemble a studio (albeit without the space and with much lower intensity), at other times will feature workshops and discussions, lectures, or site visits. The course will be a real time experiment, because our ambition will be to leverage a set of methods borrowed from the design disciplines in a context that they were not conceived for. This ‘methodological hacking’ will touch upon a variety of tangentially important fields including systems theory, organizational theory, and psychology. These fields will be approached through readings, lectures and guest presentations, always through the lens of design. While theoretical foundations will be emphasized throughout the term this is ultimately a project-based class, which is how the various divergent strands weave together into strategic visualizations of the intangible.

There are numerous potential projects that would be suitable to build related analytical and visualization skills. Given this particular moment in time, our project this year will be Harvard University itself, a highly complex, decentralized organization with unique organizational characteristics at a scale that makes change particularly difficult. Harvard as a procedural and cultural system is being challenged through a range of societal developments, including the rapidly shifting disciplinary fields it seeks to contribute to. While Harvard is our ‘project site’ the learning outcomes are not dependent on it, as the ‘site’ is interchangeable. Students will learn generalizable approaches and methods suitable to analyzing and characterizing organizations through visual means, to model and visualize these systems, and for advancing theories of change.

There are no prerequisites for the class. The instructor hopes for a group of collaborative students from various disciplines and from inside and outside the GSD. As an experimental seminar students should expect the unexpected, be willing to adopt to change, and enjoy diving into cultures and value systems that are foreign to their own.