Courses
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First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT
Sean Canty, Carl D’Apolito-Dworkin, Jenny French, Helen Han, Hyojin Kwon, Ritchie Yao, Paul Kassabian, Brett Schneider
PROJECT is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, PROJECT may refer to fundamental…
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Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio
Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Gary R. Hilderbrand, Tomas Folch, Matthew Girard, Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Kira Clingen, Alistair McIntosh
WHAT IS PUBLIC ABOUT A PUBLIC SPACE? STU-1111 is the first in a sequence of four core studios that, together, constitute the foundation of your…
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First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio
Ann Forsyth, Hannah Teicher, Anne-Marie Lubeneau, Jeana Dunlap, Lourdes Germán, Carole Voulgaris, Lindsay Woodson, Dana McKinney
First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to investigate, analyze, create, and implement…
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Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE
Michelle Chang, Aaron Forrest, Ellie Jungmin Han, Eric Howeler, Grace La, Ajay Manthripragada, Angela Pang, Emmett Zeifman, Paul Kassabian, Nat Oppenheimer
Integration is the agenda for the third-semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems, and…
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Landscape Architecture III: Third Semester Core Studio
Danielle Choi, Claire Fellman, Francesca Benedetto, Craig Douglas, Mark Heller, Rosalea Monacella, Alex Wall, Amy Whitesides, Min Yeo
From Off-Shoring to Near Shore: Littoral Landscapes at Work This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people…
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Elements of Urban Design
Peter Rowe, Yun Fu, Dana McKinney, Alex Yuen, Mark Heller, Michael Manfredi, Rahul Mehrotra
Elements of Urban Design is the advanced core studio for the post-professional Urban Design program. The studio introduces critical concepts, strategies, and technical skills associated…
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Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)
Elizabeth Christoforetti, James Weaver, Siqi Zhu, Andrew Witt
The first semester studio is a project-based introduction to a range of ideas, methods, and techniques essential for the design engineer. In the studio, students…
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An American Model
Kersten Geers, David Van Severen
In the three previous studios, our aim was to investigate simple (drawing) tools of architecture – plan, section and perspective – in order to obliquely…
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Complete Houses, Designing Non-Fragmented Landscapes of Beds
Taking further the concept of “Complete Streets” (safe, accessible to all, multi-program, sustainable, and context conscious), we will reimagine the relationships between streets, houses, activities…
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On Health III: Design for Longevity
This studio is the third in a series of On Health GSD design studios (On health I, 2016 and On Health II, 2018). The studio…
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REVISITING MIES: An extension to Haus Lemke in Berlin [M1]
Haus Lemke, built in 1932 by Mies van der Rohe, sits at the Obersee lake in the Northeast of Berlin. The house was completed before…
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After the Party 2.0 – The Vertical Fairground [M2]
Simon Hartmann, Tilo Herlach, Simon Frommenwiler
In HHF’s fall 2022 semester GSD Module Option Studio After the Party – The Vertical Fairground, students will reimagine the center of the fairground Messe…
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A Playground [M2]
We are going to design a playground in a small plot in Rionegro, Colombia, located 2.300 meters above sea level. The studio aims to locate…
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Home Makers [M2]
A home is both a physical and a spiritual construct. We all want a home that gives us shelter and supports our way of living,…
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Canary in the Mine: A question on the rural Habitat
Guinea-Bissau is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change in West Africa due to the low-lying/flat topographical conditions, low nutrient soils, and complete…
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Designing of/for Lake Texcoco: Post-industrial Landscapes in Free Fall
Just a few kilometers north from Mexico City’s historic colonial center lies the arid desiccated lakebed of former Lago Texcoco. Historically, Texcoco has acted as…
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Decarb Lux! Towards Territorial Transition – Transforming Luxemburg into a Zero-Carbon Nation
Why (relevance):Decarb Lux! explores spatial strategies, concepts, and approaches for shaping large-scale transnational developments in architecture and urban planning towards decarbonization and ecological transition.
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The Immeasurable Enclosure
This option studio offers immeasurability as the aesthetic and spatial expression of the public realm and asks students to imagine immeasurable single-space enclosures as forums…
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Trauma-Informed Design at Parrott Creek
Parrott Creek Child & Family Services – an 80-acre creekside facility in Portland, Oregon – support's some of Portland's most vulnerable community members: children and…
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Transient Ecologies: The Landscape of Massive Temporary Dwelling
It is commonplace to think of our time as one of constant mobility, a concept that has been attached to geopolitical, cultural, and social definitions,…
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Dreamscapes of Aurora: Geothermal Landscapes of Energy and Rejuvenation
“The people’s history of bathing is one of shared space. Histories and practices of the bath belong to histories and practices of the commons. Bathing…
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The Future of Housing in Los Angeles
Like most cities in the US today, Los Angeles doesn’t build enough housing to keep up with demand, a fact that has contributed to what…
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Desert Futures. Scenarios for a World of Extremes
Desert Futures is a multidisciplinary studio at the intersection of research, spatial design, and activism. It aims to spatialize and make visible the tensions between…
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Void infrastructures
The site for this studio is two breathtakingly beautiful golf courses in Cape Town. We will build a city over them. Why? Currently, social justice…
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Engaging Energy Productions and Tourism Landscapes Towards a Circular Ecosystem in Iceland
Tourism in Iceland has grown at an unprecedent rate in recent decades. With numbers of visitors rising from 500 thousand in 2008 to over 2-milions…
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LATIN AMERICA IN TRANSITION: Ecological Design for Settlements & Climate Migration in Argentina
We face a vulnerable future due to the accelerated intensity of natural and humanitarian disasters. The resultant scale of unprecedented migration has been coupled with…
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Legacy Lands | Protopian Futures Reconciliation, Reclamation, and Reconstruction in Indianapolis
Practices of extraction, exclusion, discrimination, and devaluation are common to most historically Black American neighborhoods in the United States. While all suffered from periods of…
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Architectural Representation I
Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality Architectural representation as a medium blends theorizing, historization, and a unique capacity to induce a physical entity, either fictional…
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Architectural Representation II
Architectural Representation II: Projective Realities Along with the first architectural drawing came the problem of the relationship between the worlds of two-dimensions (drawing) and three-dimensions…
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Representation for Planners
One task of an urban planner is to grapple with and understand a series of complicated processes that directly affect the organization and experience of…
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Spatial Analysis
Planning decisions are often idealized as being "evidence-based" or "data-driven." Spatial data often comprise the data and evidence that support such these decisions. In this…
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Landscape Representation I
Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Kira Clingen
The first in a two-semester sequence, Landscape Representation I introduces students to the rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture as inextricably intertwined with the…
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Digital Media: Models
Pre- and Post- is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods in digital design, with a focus on the processes of…
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Digital Media: Errors and Omissions
errare — to move without clear direction, departing from truth, norm, or some other analog of unity omittere — fail to use or do, neglect…
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Lost and Alternative Nature: Vertical Mapping of Urban Subterrains for Climate Change Mitigation
This seminar aims to come up with mitigation strategies informed by planar and vertical mapping of lost geomorphologies (topography, waterbody, subsoil, groundwater, carbon cycle, etc.)…
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Home-Active: Furniture Design Beyond Social Media Complacency
In today’s algorithmically determined digital environments, interiors have become pinterested images of themselves, standardized compositions in predictable declinations. Whether luxurious or affordable,…
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Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf Life in the Supermarket Landscape
We tend to assume that supermarkets are static, neutral spaces where little of significance ever happens. The supermarket shelf is actually a highly volatile, hyper-competitive…
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Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation
The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers and an expressive, playful supplement to computer-based labor. This course will master techniques in…
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Ecological Do-Nothing Landforms
This design seminar will explore the reciprocal relationship between techniques of landforming and ecological analysis through precedent studies, relational digital modeling, computational analysis, and image-making.
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Theories of Landscape as Urbanism
This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics…
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The Idea of Environment
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations, and actions that calls them…
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An Unsentimental Look at Architecture and Social Craft
Designers of the built environment have had an on-again, off-again relationship with social agency. Progressive design and social outcomes were closely linked in early modernism. These…
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The Fifth Plan
In this seminar, we will consider the evolution of the floor plan across five iterations: proto-modern, modern, post-modern, plan-non-chalant, and, most importantly, the present. We…
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Extracanonical Buildings
analysis, "a breaking-up" or "an untying;" from ana– "up, throughout" and lysis "a loosening" [1] This project-based seminar is concerned with the formal analysis of…
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Interior Space Thinking
A large part of the experience of Architecture is in the Interior. True in residential, public, hospitality, and workplace spaces, the functioning Interior can define…
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Cultivated Imaginaries: Superblock and the Idea of the City
SUPERBLOCK is a term with which almost all architects are familiar. Used to describe a typology found in large-scale urban developments from Raymond Unwin’s Town…
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Philosophy of Technology: From Marx and Heidegger to AI, Genome Editing, and Geoengineering (HKS)
Technology shapes how power is exercised in society, and thereby also changes how the present changes into the future. Technological innovation is all around us,…
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Housing Matters (Arles, France Seminar Abroad)
The housing crisis today is not just a question of a shortage of affordable homes but also about increasing people's quality of life. This seminar…
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How to Live Together. Fourier and the Future of Collective Housing (Arles Seminar Abroad)
This elective seminar will investigate the history and theory of collective housing in Europe. Seminal texts will enable students to theorize concepts of domesticity, private…
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Studies of the Built North American Environment: since 1580
North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs,…
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Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture
This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a…
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Buildings, Texts, And Contexts ARCHITECTURE’S MULTIPLE MODERNISMS
K. Michael Hays, Ana Maria Leon Crespo
Modernism is aligned with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events, new conceptualizations of their appearance, and changing event structures and temporalities. At…
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North American Seacoasts and Landscapes: Discovery Period to the Present
Selected topics in the history of the North American coastal zone, including the seashore as wilderness, as industrial site, as area of recreation, and as…
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Authority and Invention: Medieval Art and Architecture
Masterworks of art and architecture in Western Europe from the decline of Rome to the dawn of the Italian Renaissance. Explores the creative tension between…
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Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common
This lecture course examines selected cities between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., beginning with ancient Athens and ending with the rebuilding…
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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,…
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Topology and Imagination: Between Chinese Landscapes and Architecture
This course deals with landscape architecture and architecture in contemporary China. Its purpose is twofold: to articulate new perspectives on the challenges facing designers, and…
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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…
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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…
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Cotton Kingdom, Now
In 1852, the New York Daily Times commissioned a 31-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to conduct an immersive research journey through the Southern slave states. The…
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Inscriptions: Recent Experimental Architecture
One has heard the characterization of the work of the recent generation of architects as neo-postmodern. The assumption behind this label is twofold: first, that…
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On Architecture and Property
Most generously, property can be understood as a relational term. A property defines that which is characteristic, or unique, to a given thing vis-à-vis another.
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Race and Gender: Landscape Architecture as Practice, Profession, and Discipline
This seminar interrogates Landscape Architecture, both the production of a discipline and a profession, by exploring what it would mean to place women and people…
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Displaced Becomings –The Many Faces of Modern Architecture in Sinophone Asia
The idea was that in [a] society, one that's incompletely modernized… the temporal dynamics of that society, and of the modernism that it produces, will…
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Plants of Ritual: Creating a Spiritual Connection to the Designed Landscape
The seminar aims to investigate and catalog plants that have a spiritual/emotional value to the public and to individuals in the designed landscape. The seminar…
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Making the American City: Form and Society
This course examines major episodes in the history of American urban growth, design, and planning to understand the urgent social, environmental, and development issues of…
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Landscapes of Profit: Heresy, Sedition and Oppression from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic World
This advanced seminar begins with the assumption that the crucial experience of any garden or designed landscape is as a topos, where the physical object…
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Highways, Deforestation, and State-driven Colonization in Amazonia
Climate change has placed Amazonia at the center stage of global socio-environmental consciousness, particularly after the fires of 2019, which revealed the continental scale of…
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Real Estate Finance and Development
Richard Peiser, David Hamilton
This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate finance and development. Lectures and case studies introduce students to the full range of financial analysis skills…
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Land Use and Environmental Law
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…
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Cities by Design
Yun Fu, Eve Blau, Joan Busquets, Farès el-Dahdah, Alex Krieger, Rahul Mehrotra, Antoine Picon, Peter Rowe
Cities by Design is concerned with the in-depth longitudinal examination of urban conditions in and among selected cities in the world. The broad aims are:…
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Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design
Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design: Redeveloping the town center of a historic New England Town and New Visions for redeveloping one…
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Equitable Development and Housing Policy in Urban Settings (at HKS)
An introduction to policymaking in American cities, focusing on economic, demographic, institutional, and political settings. It examines inclusive and equitable economic development and job growth…
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Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Quantitative
This course introduces students to quantitative analysis and research methods for urban planning. The course begins with an examination of how quantitative methods fit within…
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Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Qualitative
How can planners understand places in a rich, meaningful, and yet systematic way? This module examines how qualitative approaches can be used in planning practice…
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Housing and Urbanization in the United States
Jennifer Molinsky, James Stockard
This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those with an interest…
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Urbanization and Development
This course examines the relationship between urbanization and development through an historical and contemporary lens, paying close attention to the ways that the growth and…
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Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems (at FAS)
What problems do developing countries face, and how can individuals contribute to solutions rather than await the largesse of the state or other actors? Intractable…
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Urban Ethnographies
Planners’ understanding of social process and cultural values is often woefully inadequate, and their thinking is dominated by a “one-size-fits-all” approach and by excessive attention…
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Land Policy and Planning for Equitable and Fiscally Healthy Communities
The course highlights the role land policy and land-based financing play in the development of equitable and fiscally healthy communities in developed and developing countries.
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Transportation Economics and Finance
We can define transportation infrastructure to comprise all the physical objects that provide mobility: including everything from trains, highways, and ports to sneakers, trails, and…
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Inclusive Cities in the Global South: From Development Narratives to Urban Forms
This seminar examines the notions of social inclusion and exclusion in cities according to different categories, including households’ income (wealthy and poor), identity (gender, race,…
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Urban Economics for Planners and Policymakers
This course introduces economic frameworks for understanding both the benefits and challenges of living in, working in and managing cities. Urban economics incorporates the concept…
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Environmental Systems 1
This course is the first of a two-module sequence in building technology (6121, 6122) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. Objectives:–…
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Environmental Systems 2
Purpose: This course is the second of a two-module sequence in building technology (6121, 6122) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. Objective:…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies III: Ecology and the Design World
David Moreno Mateos, Christopher Matthews
Ecology and the Design World (David Moreno-Mateos): Landscape architecture incorporates an additional layer of complexity to design that is less present in other design disciplines:…
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Climate by Design
David Moreno Mateos, Kira Clingen, Amy Whitesides
Through a series of case studies, this course will explore paradigmatic design responses to the climate crisis including adaptation (both for communities to remain and…
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Innovation in Science and Engineering: Conference Course (at SEAS)
The course explores factors and conditions contributing to innovation in science and engineering; how important problems are found, defined, and solved; roles of teamwork and…
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Advanced Introduction to Robotics (at SEAS)
Introduction to computer-controlled robotic manipulators. Topics include coordinate frames and transformations, forward and inverse kinematic solutions to open-chain manipulators, the Jacobian, dynamics and control, and…
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Material Systems: Digital Design and Fabrication
Digital design and fabrication technologies have become integral to the discourse surrounding contemporary design and architectural practice. The translation from design to realization is mediated…
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Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology
Timothy Dekker, Nicholas Nelson
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…
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Introduction to Computational Design
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
This is an introductory course on Computational Design, with a particular focus on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. In this course, we will understand "Computational…
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Enactive Design: Creative Applications through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
Enactive Design is an advanced research seminar on human-computer interaction. We will explore the role of real-time, bidirectional communication between human and digital agents in…
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Working Landscapes: Natural Resiliency And Redesign
Ecological principles and their application to design and planning will be emphasized. Topics will include understanding human impacts on natural systems through engineering and design,…
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Power||Energy: Mapping the Thickened Ground of Labor
The definition of energy is dominated by a western logic of energy as a resource. This understanding was focused on the primary objective of putting…
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Optimizing Facade Performance: A Deep Dive on Design Decisions
Building envelopes are at the intersection of design, performance, and occupant experience in architectural design. Facades influence many aspects of building performance, from energy usage…
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Visualization (at SEAS)
This course is an introduction to key design principles and techniques for visualizing data. It covers design practices, data and image models, visual perception, interaction…
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Transformable Design Methods
The aim of Transformable Design is to is to introduce new ways of thinking about design through real-time morphological changes. The course provides a theoretical…
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EMBODIED CARBON- Material Cycles and Circularity (Arles Seminar Abroad)
To grasp the role that designers play in the race to DE-carbonising the built environment, the course must touch on how we got here in…
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Foundations of Practice
Jeffry Burchard, Gregg Garmisa, Timothy R. Twomey
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…
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Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society I
In the spirit of Herbert Simon, Frameworks engages diverse but complementary perspectives and techniques to identify, diagnose and constructively address consequential social challenges, sometimes referred…
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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…
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Frameworks of Practice
How should we practice today? The discipline, the profession, and the practice of architecture are invented and designed things. And the roles, relationships, protocols, and…
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Elements of the Urban Stack
The Urban Stack is a pedagogical framework for understanding the infrastructures of power that operate in relationship to practice. These constructs shape the design and…
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Real Estate and City Making in China
Real estate has increasingly become a compelling force in the process of city making, one uniquely capable of leading and guiding multiple steps in the…
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Stage and Street
This module explores performing spaces and practices in the city. Through four lectures, it presents some key issues: theatre buildings in relation to public spaces;…
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Independent Study by Candidates for Master’s Degrees
Students may take a maximum of 8 units with different GSD instructors in this course series. 9201 must be taken for either 2, or 4…
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Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD
What does it take to complete a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design? The seminar introduces different types of theses that…
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Preparation of MLA Design Thesis
“The natural sciences are concerned with how things are . . . Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be.”…
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Independent Design Engineering Project I
Martin Bechthold, Mary Tolikas
The Independent Design Engineering Project (IDEP) is a two-semester project during which students in the Master in Design Engineering (MDE) program work on understanding a…
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Preparation of Doctoral Thesis Proposal
Independent study with doctoral advisor to produce a preliminary literature review. Prerequisite: Enrollment in GSD DDes program. …
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MArch II Proseminar
This course provides a forum for critical discussion of contemporary design practices that is exploratory and speculative in nature. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and…
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Proseminar in Landscape Architecture
“Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their…
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Proseminar in PUBLICS: Of the Public. In the Public. By the Public
Public, as a noun or adjective, is not confined to a single discipline, practice, narrative or theory. It is instead, a complicated construct that can…
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Proseminar in MEDIUMS: On Making Culture, Technology, and Art
In this proseminar, we will take a critical look at the current and emerging landscape of design technologies and technologically driven design. We will examine…
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Proseminar in NARRATIVES: Word and Image as Narrative Structure
In our Proseminar, we will grapple with a selection of critical discussions on word and image as these have been formulated in aesthetic philosophy, literary…
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Proseminar in ECOLOGIES: Interrelated, In-between, Dynamic
Our aim in the proseminar is to explore the inherent inventedness of ecology as a field of inquiry, its distinctly relational nature, and the potential…