The House in the City

The single-family house has long been a laboratory for design experiment. To design a house is to touch on fundamental issues of public and private space, as well as key architectural questions of structure, circulation, envelope, and site. The designer must address questions of construction, detail, and materiality, as well as contemporary concerns such as media, communication, changing lifestyles, and alternative work patterns. For many architects, a house is one of the first projects they will build. The history of architecture is, in many ways, written through canonical houses.

But the single-family house is, more often than not, located on a rural or suburban lot. The anachronistic model of the villa in a pastoral landscape has had surprising longevity in the discipline. At a time when architects have an imperative to address the changing character of city and new concepts of family and social roles, the single-family house is often deemed irrelevant. But this is to ignore the facts on the ground, particularly in the context of the North American city.

While it is true that single-family homes make up a relatively small percentage of the housing stock in New York City (around 15%), in cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Toronto (not to mention Los Angeles), the majority of the housing stock consists of single-family houses. In Detroit, 70% of the population lives in single-family units, the majority of which are detached houses. Despite this, with a few notable exceptions, significant house designs, recent and historical, are almost all located outside of the city.

The house in the city, by contrast, has a strong contextual imperative, and the premise of this studio is that the program of the single-family house can be a powerful tool to work simultaneously at the architectural scale and at an urban scale.

The site for the studio is the borough of Queens, New York. Under-studied and often ignored, Queens is the most diverse borough of the city: 26% Asian, 28% Hispanic, 24% White, and 16% Black. The borough is experiencing rapid growth and new development and offers an extraordinarily wide range of urban and building types for individual exploration. An overnight site visit is planned.

The studio will result in realistic and fully developed proposals. The scale of the single-family house as a program allows (requires) highly resolved design development, and it is expected that the projects will be presented in detailed large-scale models and drawings. At the same time, our synthetic approach and the inherently typological character of the house means that drawings and diagrams of the urban implications are also a key requirement. The potential of the program is to leverage the architectural potential of the house as an urban instrument, and to encourage students to think architecturally at the scale of the city.

The instructor will be on campus for in-person teaching every other week at a minimum, and available for online critiques each week.
 

Transformations. 6 Schools in Detroit

Buildings survive us. Hospitals become universities, churches turn into libraries and dance halls, warehouses re-emerge as art spaces. While their original functions may fade, their typological essence often endures. In this way, architecture resists shifting patterns of use and inhabitation through adaptation and reinvention.
Schools embody this resilience. As precise typologies–composed of classrooms, corridors, gymnasiums, cafeterias, and kindergartens–they are pragmatic and compartmentalized. Often arranged as pavilions, set back from the street and enclosed by fencing, they function intensely–but only for limited hours each day. When abandoned, they are often left to linger silently as civic ruins. Yet, in their genericity lies a powerful potential for transformation.

Detroit stands as a potent context for this investigation. A city rich in symbolic weight, Detroit epitomizes both the zenith of American industrial modernity and the stark consequences of its collapse. As population and services diminished, entire neighborhoods became sparsely inhabited. Amid this urban retreat, the abandoned school emerged as a recurring and visible marker.

This studio begins with a critical analysis of six vacant school buildings in Detroit, considering each as both subject and site. We will explore how embedded architectural typologies can be reinforced to support contemporary civic life, attuned to the specific character of their surrounding neighborhoods.

A series of typological precedents will guide our thinking–from Michelangelo’s adaptation of Santa Maria degli Angeli to Adolf Loos’ Villa Karma or Lina Bo Bardi’s revolutionary SESC Pompéia in São Paulo. These references will offer both strategic insights and polemical ground for students’ own proposals.

Each project will take one of two transformational approaches: expansion–extending the existing built volume to accommodate new programmatic needs, or reduction–selectively removing building fabric to recalibrate space for a new use. In either case, transformations will seek to reinforce the building’s urban presence while reactivating its social role. The goal is to produce architectures that serve as new civic landmarks, anchor points within Detroit’s evolving suburban grid. Through the production of drawings and models at different scales, students will explore architecture’s capacity to carry meaning forward through transformation.

The studio will work closely with community stakeholders, who will serve as project clients. Each student will develop a proposal around one of six hybrid programs that merge housing combined with urban agriculture, a new research and development center for Pewabic Ceramics, a music center and club, a special collections archive for the Detroit Public Library, a light industrial facility for timber structure fabrication, an artist residency and exhibition space.
 

Advancing the “Strategos-structure”

Architectural developments are increasingly massive, involving complex program mixes and/or public-private ventures where design by a single architect is arguably not advantageous, if even possible. Furthermore, the political processes surrounding these mammoth, single-building developments often dictate architectural solutions and imagery before their use combinations and ratios are finalized, or design on any individual program has commenced.

To navigate this increasingly prevalent scale–and the multiple authorship and programmatic indeterminacy it begs–architecture must explore strategic loss of control. So far, such forays have largely been limited to visions and critiques that do not take implementation seriously (e.g., Yona Friedman’s megastructures) or to the promiscuous layering of programs in single-authored ‘Big Buildings’ (e.g., OMA’s CCTV or REX’s Museum Plaza). Urban design has traversed the territory beyond solo-authored Big Buildings with multi-authored, seemingly heterogeneous ‘Mini-Cities.’ However, the Mini-City is usually little more than an architectural zoo: an accretion of individual signature works, each desperately trying to be unique but ultimately just different in the same way (e.g., Hudson Yards).

If architects can overcome their desire to control all aspects of a design, they can engage the potent ground beyond Big Buildings without surrendering large-scale development to urban design’s Mini-Cities of non-identical sameness. They can advance a new building typology–the “strategos-structure”–that effectively balances strategy and ego, retaining conceptual coherence and credibility even if its parts change and/or its size demands multiple authors.

In this studio, students will collaborate to create a cultural strategos-structure on the picturesque 150-acre site of the Santa Fe Opera, situated on a mesa seven miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It will consist of four closely related typologies: an opera hall, a concert hall, an operetta hall, and a multifunctional theater–the components that have defined contemporary opera house complexes since New York City’s Lincoln Center and the Sydney Opera House both broke ground in 1959.

For the first three weeks of the semester, the studio will work as a team to generate a conceptual framework–a strategy that hovers somewhere between a Big Building and a master plan–that allows each subsequent, independently authored venue to be a healthy component of the cultural strategos-structure. As planners of the strategos-structure, the team must determine the siting, zoning envelope, programmatic relationships and/or hierarchy, structural concepts, and circulation/service strategies, as well as whether to address issues such as formal harmony or façade expression through legislation.

Following this effort, for the remainder of the semester, students will work individually to design one of the four venues within the strategos-structure, resulting in three interchangeable options for each venue that can be used to test the success of the whole. Each student will have to navigate the rules decreed by the team during the planning phase, as well as address programmatic, organizational, experiential, acoustical, and aesthetic issues raised by their component. A large model–into which each student will place their portion of the strategos-structure–will be the primary vehicle for presenting and evaluating work.
 

Housing as an Ecology of Care

The studio will explore housing as an ecology of care, a framework that understands architecture not as an isolated product but as a relational practice embedded in networks of interdependence among people, species, systems, and time. In this view, a multi-story residential building is not only a place to live, but a place to heal, connect, and coexist for both human and nonhuman life.

To engage housing through this lens, we will begin by transforming an existing Parisian office building characterized by a concrete frame, central core, deep floor plates, limited daylight, and sealed facades. Working within these constraints, the studio will develop housing for 150 people, living individually or together, that responds creatively to the building’s conditions while caring for each other, the city, and the planet. Your design work will range from building-scale interventions to the spatial and material details that support collective life. We will approach this work through four overlapping and interdependent domains of care:
– Historical care centers on preserving and reinterpreting the history embedded in the existing building, including its structure, materials, and spatial patterns, so that past labor and use inform and enrich future dwellings. We will explore how these architectural traces can reduce the environmental cost of construction while giving the project a distinct character and connection to its history.
– Planetary care positions housing within broader systems of climate, ecology, and interspecies interdependence. We will explore how a residential building can contribute to the health of the planet while supporting biodiversity and nonhuman life at the scale of the city. This might include, for example, strategies such as green roofs, vertical gardens, or microhabitats that connect architecture to planetary cycles and promote coexistence across species.
– Social care positions housing as a space for inclusion, mutual support, and interdependence. You will consider how a residential building can accommodate a wide range of household structures, including single individuals, multigenerational families, co-living arrangements, and live-work collectives. This might include shared infrastructure such as communal kitchens, childcare spaces, or rooftop gardens.
– Temporal care views housing as adaptable and built to last. We will explore how a residential building can change over time to meet residents’ needs, using flexible layouts and durable materials that are easy to maintain. We will also consider how residents can work together to care for their home and community over the long term.

Together, these approaches will guide your proposals for a new kind of housing that is rooted in care, shaped by context, and designed to meet the environmental and social challenges of urban life today and in the future.

Professor Hanif Kara will collaborate with the studio during weeks 1 and 2, when the studio will be addressing Adaptive Reuse.

In October, we will take a two day studio trip to Manitoga and Dia Beacon in the Hudson Valley. These sites will offer two perspectives on transformation and care: one grounded in ecological restoration, the other in adaptive reuse. Together, they will support the studio’s broader inquiry into how architecture can respond to change and sustain life over time.

Offered in parallel with the seminar Housing Matters, students are encouraged to enroll in both, as the seminar provides research for the design work. Phillip Denny, Teaching Associate, will be present on alternate weeks when Professor Moussavi teaches remotely. See the course syllabus for details.

Anchoring Acts

This studio explores how ancestral and spiritual practices might inform new architectural imaginaries. In an age of ecological collapse and cultural erasure, how might we reclaim rituals of rooting, re-anchoring, and sanctuarization as meaningful design tools? What can we learn from practices that imbue ordinary materials with emotional and cosmological value–practices that sustain relationships between the living and the dead, the domestic and the divine, the ground and what lies beneath?

We propose that while metrics like carbon footprint and material performance remain essential, architecture must also confront the affective and sacred dimensions of care. In a time of profound climate crisis, we need not only greener technologies but a reimagining of modernity itself–one that broadens what truly sustains us. This is an invitation to think beyond sustainability as optimization and toward a “Sacred Green New Deal.”

Students will reimagine six programmatic archetypes–living, learning, playing, working, producing, and contemplating–through the lens of re-grounding, re-anchoring, and sanctuarization.

Projects will be grounded in the richly layered context of New Orleans–a city shaped by African, Caribbean, Indigenous, Arab, Spanish, French, Creole, Cajun, Pacific, and Vietnamese diasporas. These communities have created a complex spiritual landscape where Voudou, Catholicism, Islam, ancestor veneration, Buddhist, and folk practices coexist. The studio will explore how architecture can engage these entangled cosmologies to understand how place, memory, and belief shape the built environment.

The studio includes a research trip to New Orleans, where students will collaborate with local architects, communities, and cultural practitioners to explore material, spiritual, and spatial continuities across time.

This studio is developed in partnership with the RAK Art Foundation in Bahrain, whose collection–rooted in spiritual inquiry, material experimentation, and regional histories–will inform our explorations. While the project site is New Orleans, this collaboration will culminate in an exhibition of student work at the Foundation’s museum next year, fostering a transregional dialogue between geographies shaped by spiritual multiplicity, colonial entanglements, and evolving architectural languages.

This studio is for those ready to speculate across scales–between the intimate and the planetary, the buried and the visible, the remembered and the yet-to-be imagined.

Inhabiting Qualities. Climatic Types, Material Ecology, Tectonics, and Pleasure

During the last decade, in the light of climate change, architecture has oscillated between a universal approach which relies on technology and thermodynamics, and a regional perspective based on vernacular culture. The universal approach responds through abstract systemization, off-the-shelf industrial components, and a physiological understanding of human comfort, while the regional perspective relies on historical architectural types, artisanal technologies, and an experiential outlook which remits to the sensorial. Even though these two modes of thinking are opposite, it is necessary to integrate them. This opposition offers a fertile middle-ground that allows us to consider local particularities without overlooking global discussions. It is possible to embrace local idiosyncrasies, vernacular knowledge, and the pleasure of inhabitation without renouncing industrial systematization.

In response to this dichotomy, the studio will design a productive commune for one hundred inhabitants in Madrid, a fast-growing European city with a mild Mediterranean climate. The objective is to design a passive low-energy building (50.000 sq ft) with an approach that acknowledges that architecture is both a technical and cultural endeavor. Students will work on the connections that exist between climate, architecture, and the inhabitation patterns unfolded by its dwellers. The studio explores not only healthy and comfortable places, but also the pleasure of inhabiting them. Faced with a predominantly quantitative approach where the amount of space is what takes precedence over its quality, the studio will search for those attributes that improve living conditions. In this context, local climatic types provide a robust toolbox that offer spatial and material strategies that successfully integrate architecture, climate, and inhabitation patterns. Students will also consider architecture’s material ecology–material sourcing, processing, and the logistics connected to the geology and industry of the region.

The studio will learn from the rich Mediterranean cultural and architectural heritage that offers not only notable buildings such as the Alhambra, but remarkable buildings that interweave climate, space, and material to offer delightful living environments.

First Houses: Design & Retrofit

The convergence of the housing and environmental crises offers a unique opportunity to re-evaluate the performance of existing structures and pioneer new housing solutions for current socio-economic and climate-adaptive needs.

New York City’s housing stock has undergone two significant transformations over the past century. In the 1930’s, New Deal era policies helped fund and construct numerous housing projects that incorporated community spaces and parks. Through the Public Works Administration, architects William Lescaze, John Louis Wilson Jr., and others designed projects that incorporated large and small courtyards and playgrounds for family living. In the 1970’s, New York State formed the Urban Development Corporation, inviting architects and policymakers to collaborate on addressing the housing crisis. Architects, including Kenneth Frampton and Werner Seligmann, utilized the low-rise high-density housing typology to create a variety of units with private entrances, backyards, and terraces.

Today, the City is embarking on an ambitious policy titled City of Yes: Zoning for Housing Opportunity. The proposal’s goal is to create 82,000 new homes by 2040 by encouraging shared housing, building on parking lots, and modernizing existing housing stock. The objective of this studio will be to capitalize on this opportunity to design collective housing on an existing parking lot and retrofit an adjacent historic landmarked housing project.

The design studio will focus on a city block located on the Lower East Side drawing inspiration from the innovative modernist solutions of the 1930s and 1970s. The north side of the block features a project called First Houses, built in 1935 as the city’s first publicly funded housing development. The project has never been modernized and presents a critical window to implement the city’s new policies for housing and climate adaptation. The south side of the block is a parking lot where students will design new low rise high density collective housing. Final projects will go beyond responding to crises by injecting creative solutions and talent for greater problem-solving that can reshape the standards of living and how they are constructed.

The work will be broken into two parts. It begins with an analysis of a historical housing typology and domestic spaces. Students will develop methodologies for drawing and modeling structural components, material ecologies, as well as formal and spatial strategies. Readings and discussions will delve into complexities of housing, policy, and socio-economic divisions that have long affected the city. The second part is the design project focuses on incorporating climate-adaptive solutions across three scales: urban (public/private space, pathways, green space), building (climatic comfort, solar orientation), and unit (new domestic ideas, diverse layouts for families, individual living). Students will collaborate with dedicated structural and climate engineers who will guide project development throughout the semester.

Students will travel to New York City to visit various housing projects and meet with offices involved in housing design, research, and education. Students will work in self-selected pairs. The instructor will be in-person every other week, with alternating weeks held on Zoom during studio time.
 

Outfitting Architecture: Expanded Comfort in Athens

Outfitting Architecture imagines building assemblies like clothing–something you can layer, unzip, or throw on depending on the weather, your mood, or how many people are coming for dinner.

This option studio challenges dominant understandings of comfort in architecture, proposing a layered, climate-responsive design methodology that bridges social, thermal, and material entanglements within the apartment buildings and arcades of Athens. The studio investigates how architecture–like clothing–can be rethought as an adaptable, soft system able to evolve for shifting climates and forms of inhabitation.

Comfort has long been tied to interior predictability, air-conditioning, and sealed envelopes. Yet climate volatility, resource scarcity, and shifting social expectations call for a new spatial language. The studio explores how architectural envelopes can be outfitted–rather than sealed–to create responsive environments.

The studio will focus on the design of rooms without and rooms within–occupiable exterior wall sections and nested conditioned spaces–to challenge the binary between interior and exterior environments. Drawing inspiration from high-performance clothing and outerwear, the studio incorporates architectural textiles, insulation systems, barriers, and reflective surfaces to rethink architectural envelopes as dynamic systems. Students will study semi-permanent structures–awnings, canopies, umbrellas–as formal prompts. The work will value tactile variation, collective intimacy, and flexible thermal boundaries as students test how modularity and permeability might replace the sealed 70-degree interior, tuning instead to seasons, material culture, and history.

A key component is the studio’s site visit to Athens, often called Europe’s hottest capital, which will expose students to the climate realities of warming temperate zones. Traveling from the cold climate of Cambridge (Köppen climate classification: Dfb) to the temperate climate of Athens (Köppen climate classification: Csa), will allow students to study architecture’s response to shifting environmental conditions, projected to shape much of the developed world’s future climate.

Study sites in Athens include ancient and contemporary buildings that employ a range of climatic strategies and expose students to precedents that blur indoor/outdoor binaries. This research will be applied toward speculative proposals for retrofitting existing structures in Athens. Students will design adaptive thermal envelopes (semi-permanent architectural coverings) to both shield the thermal mass and create new social boundaries for existing buildings. The studio will work on two ubiquitous Athenian building types — the polykatoikia (apartment building) and the urban stoa (arcade). Along with these exterior interventions (rooms without), students will design small scale adaptive environments (rooms within), to host the intimate scale necessary for climatic and social retreat.

Research will span scales and disciplines: from historical analysis of clothing and furniture, to passive systems and textile prototyping. The studio introduces students to an alternative to the overreliance on mechanical conditioning while recognizing that thermal comfort is never purely technical–it’s also psychological, cultural, and formal.

The studio is generously supported by Harvard’s Center for Green Buildings and Cities and Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

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 studio will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.

Perugia in Cross Roads

Perugia exists between Florence and Rome in the north and south axis, and it also exists in the east west axis between Siena and Assisi. As one of the only landlocked municipalities in Italy it occupies an important and central location historically, culturally, and politically. It consists of 60 plus micro cities which existed before Italy became a unified nation in 1861. These micro cities are traditional centers of some of the most iconic products and crafts such as olive oil, ceramics, wine making, and textiles. The municipality tries to keep distinctive characteristics of each micro city by proposing facilities that can be used to give a strong identity to each community to be shared by different sectors and connects to the entire Perugia municipality. Their effort is to retain unique urbanity of each microcity without transformation of these places into generic suburban entities. The topography of its historical center which is up on a hill and the microcities at the base are surrounded by rural productive landscape which makes for a dramatic scenery between urban space and natural landscapes.

The studio will analyze the culture and history of Perugia to come up with programs for one of the micro cities to propose systematic and prototypical intervention into the existing context. This intervention can be a prototype for other microcities so that the analysis and the process is also a significant factor as well as the final design.

The studio is an architecture studio with some urban design and landscape design components. The studio encourages students to produce work individually with different modes of production.

The studio will travel to the site in October. 
 

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 studio will meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 3rd.

Post-Rural Futures: Designing What Comes After the Village

The studio’s focus, Ervy-le-Châtel, is a small medieval town in France. Compact and historically layered, the town appears nearly ideal, yet many of its young people have left in search of work and urban life. In an age of digital mobility and remote work, this studio asks how design might support new ways of living that enable the next generation to imagine their future in small, rural towns. This studio speculates on the spatial conditions in which post-rural futures might emerge.

Ervy seeks to activate vacant sites at its center while establishing a new incubator at the periphery–linking old voids and new programs into a distributed network of reinhabitation. Hosting artists, writers, and craftspeople–including workshops in the town’s stained-glass tradition–the incubator would bring seasonal residents whose presence could help repopulate sixteen vacant houses in the historic core. Questions remain about whether seasonal programs and hybrid forms of residence can sustain public life, and if design can anticipate both opportunity and resistance.  Students will explore such questions through spatial research and direct dialogue with residents and officials during a one-week field visit.

The studio emphasizes both responding to real conditions and translating perception into architectural language. Students are encouraged to develop proposals not only grounded in programmatic need, but also shaped by atmosphere, material presence, memory, and structural clarity. Architecture becomes both spatial act and inquiry–a tool for cultural and spatial regeneration.

Students will research Ervy’s constructional logic and design a small open-ended intervention on a vacant corner, using a clear structural language. Through on-site engagement with residents, spatial observation, drawing, and testing of ideas, each student will refine their understanding of the site’s role in town life and evaluate potential locations for the crafts incubator in relation to the town’s morphology and topography. Based on site experience, each student will adjust their structure and program and finalize their corner design before working in groups to select a site for a 1,500–2,000 m² crafts incubator at the town’s edge. Site selection is a key design act, and proposals must show how the chosen site engages with the spatial logic of the historic core. Proposals must also include a concept for adapting vacant houses into housing for instructors or visitors. Projects must integrate spatial experiences–framed views, sequences, tectonic cues–so the new architecture emerges from Ervy’s lived fabric, not apart from it.
 

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 studio will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.