Courses
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Second Semester Architecture Core: SITUATE
Jeffry Burchard, Tomás dePaor, Sean Canty, Michelle Chang, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Alfredo Thiermann, Patrick McCafferty
The overarching pedagogical agenda for second semester is to expand upon the design methodologies developed in the first semester such that students acquire an understanding…
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Landscape Architecture II
Anita Berrizbeitia, Seth Denizen, Craig Douglas, Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Nadir Abdessemed, Silvia Benedito
Second semester core studio explores research and methods in the design of complex urban conditions: sites layered with multiple and uncoordinated interventions that present issues…
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Second Semester Core Urban Planning Studio
Daniel D’Oca, Brie Hensold, Kathy Spiegelman, Carole Voulgaris, Richard Peiser
The second semester core planning studio expands the topics and methodologies studied in the first semester core studio, GSD 1121, aiming to prepare students for…
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Fourth Semester Architecture Core: RELATE
Jenny French, Grace La, Oana Stanescu, Megan Panzano, Elizabeth Whittaker, Ron Witte
The fourth and final semester of the core sequence, this architecture studio tackles the complexity of the urban condition through the design of housing.
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Landscape Architecture IV
Jill Desimini, Rosalea Monacella, Danielle Choi, Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Belinda Tato, Alex Wall
Near-Future City Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change This is the fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence. It questions ways in which…
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Collaborative Design Engineering Studio II
Jock Herron, Stephen Burks, Luba Greenwood, Julia Lee
The spring studio builds upon theoretical and technical concepts already introduced in the MDE program with the emphasis on creative and critical thinking, observational and…
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KING TUT’S SKULL
Mack Scogin, Merrill Elam, Helen Han
This dusty skull was Ol’King Tut’s.I found it in this pyramid.This tiny skull was King Tut’s too(From when he was…
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Block Blob Mat Slab Slat: Art Spaces
“For this requirement there are no typologies”—Rem Koolhaas (teased over the apparent lack of historical perspective in OMA’s proposal for the addition of a…
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Béton Brut and Beyond
Jeanne Gang, Anika Schwarzwald
At a time when it is more essential than ever to conserve resources and prevent carbon pollution—which critically includes limiting the demolition of existing buildings…
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Making Next to Forest
Seventy-one percent of Japan’s northern-most island, Hokkaido, is covered in forest, comprising almost one-quarter of the entire nation’s forested landmass. It is also the center…
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Generic Specificity
Architecture’s most dramatic evolution in the last century has been the increasing fissure between the generic and the specific. As Internationalism at the beginning of…
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Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect
1. On Effect: When the Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain in 1997 it produced an instantaneous reaction from around the globe. New pacts were formed between…
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Geometry, Order, and Mannerism
Oliver Lütjens, Thomas Padmanabhan
The architecture of the Italian Renaissance is an architecture consisting of incomplete individual buildings and magnificent urban fragments. The artistic return to antiquity was above…
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Sic. Building Syndrome
“If we are to discuss the faults of building and their correction, we ought first to consider the nature and type of the faults that…
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Studio Abroad. Small is Big; Newborn Typologies from the City without a Manifesto
“For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree.
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Rewilding Seoul
This studio aims to elaborate a series of rewilding strategies for multiple sites in Seoul to reveal their immanent nature and mitigate the impact of…
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THAILAND REMADE: Lower Chao Phraya Flood Plain, Pathum Thani, and the Technological Imagination
Niall Kirkwood, Kotchakorn Vora-akhom
THAILAND REMADE explores technology and its relationship to design in landscape architecture. The studio will develop alternative futures for Thailand’s Lower Chao Phraya floodplain using…
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SMO PARK +/Climate Infrastructure, Arid Landscape
Santa Monica Municipal Airport (FAA code SMO) is a 227-acre general aviation airport about six miles from the Pacific Ocean that largely handles private and…
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GET READY HOLYOKE! Climate Preparedness 2050
This design studio focuses on Holyoke, the second-poorest city in Massachusetts and one of the 25 designated Gateway Cities. Sitting along the Connecticut River, Holyoke…
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Osaka – World Expos as Transformative Engine: Potentials for the Regular City
This studio focuses on the capacity of big urbanistic projects to direct the growth and transformation of large metropolises. It takes the example of Osaka…
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The Dam Studio: Climate Change Along the Mystic
Climate change presents one of the greatest challenges for cities. Extreme weather stresses infrastructures, nature, and the built environment. It impacts people, their health, safety,…
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ROCKET CITY: Envisioning a Future for the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL
The US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is NASA’s official Visitor Information Center for the Marshall Space Flight Center and receives over 1…
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After Amazon – What’s Next for LIC?
On February 14, 2019, New York City received an unexpected valentine from Amazon, announcing their withdrawal from a major new campus expansion project dubbed “HQ2.”…
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PUBLIC FIGURE/PRIVATE GROUND: Redevelopment of the FBI Site in Washington, DC
In 1790, Washington, DC, was established as the seat of political power in the newly formed United States. The plan and building form within the…
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TAISHAN: Designing the Rural Cosmopolis in China
Elaine Kwong, David Rubin, Kathryn Firth
Cosmopolitanism and its vibrancy are commonly associated with urban life; rural life by contrast is often seen as static, disconnected and monocultural. China’s rapid urbanization…
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Neuralisms Shenzhen: Fictions of Type and Territory
Shenzhen is China’s city of the future, a manufacturing and product development hub unlike any in the world. It is a place where innovation in…
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Landscape Representation II
Building on the foundations of Landscape Representation I, this course investigates further the generative potential of representation as part of a productive feedback loop in…
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Digital Media: Ambiance in Non-places
How do we define the “ambiance” of a place? What causes specific environments to evoke different feelings? Are there consistent elements that define these ambiances,…
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Digital Media: Writing Form
This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the primal pursuit of writing form. Setting aside the…
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Responsive Environments: Episodes in Experiential Futures
This course introduces to the students the tools and necessary thinking framework to create technologically driven speculative environments in the near future…
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MAKE/BELIEVE
How does the action of making reflect, produce, enhance, aggregate, and/or suspend the beliefs of authors and audiences? This hybrid production-theory course…
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Book Project Number Zero
Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Thomas Kelley
1. Architecture is inseparable from bookmaking. Ever since Sebastiano Serlio discovered the potentials of the printing press, no cultural project in the…
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Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment
The aim of the class is to learn how to depict and express the presence and appearance of people in natural and…
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Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices
The Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar investigates art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of contemporary culture and the city. As artists and…
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Theories and Practices of Landscape Architecture
Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Katarzyna Balug
What do you need to know in order to understand this landscape? This course explores how cultural values are embedded in the design of landscapes.
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Designing the American City: Civic Aspirations and Urban Form
The course is an interpretative look at the characteristic patterns of settlement and attitudes towards cities and urban life that are identified…
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Design Anthropology: Objects, Landscapes, Cities (with FAS)
In recent years, there has been a movement in anthropology toward a focus on objects, while design and planning have been moving…
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Urban Form: Transition as Condition
The fixed categories by which we have traditionally understood the urban no longer hold. They have been undermined by the multiplicity of…
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Experiments in Public Freedom
As places that accept and encourage multiple representations, cities need spaces to enable unregulated, temporary, and spontaneous events. Due to their role…
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Material, Atmosphere and Ambience
This seminar introduces an understanding of atmosphere and ambience within the discourse of material practice in architecture. The materials are a contextual…
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Style Worry or #FOMO
Reyner Banham once described the proliferation of styles after a waning epoch as “style worry,” an anxiety where the architect must decide…
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Factory of the Sensible and the Political* (Equipping Experience)
Architects have long experimented with altering perceptions of space and structures in order to reconfigure experience. At stake in this course are…
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Artificial Intelligence in Contemporary Design Practice
Unprecedented issues, such as climate change, challenge the standard hyper-specialized approach to problem-solving. Within this context, there is a need for professions…
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Thinking Through Soil
Urbanization is always a process of soil formation. Every material process that shapes the construction of the urban environment passes through the…
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Acoustic Space: A media archaeology of building types
We live in acoustic space. We live constantly plugged-in, travelling in our personal sonic bubbles defined by headphones and other devices. We…
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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, sequel-modern, and, most importantly,…
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Urban Grids: Open form for City Design-2
Framework: Within a larger research scope on “Revisiting the urban grids in the XXI century”, this seminar will focus on the investigation…
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Architecture as an Urban Issue: Challenges & Inventions in the Practice in Tokyo
Tokyo today is in a dilemma of urbanism. As a post-growth phenomenon, abandoned houses are increasing in number, especially in the old residential-commercial mix belt…
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Buildings, Texts, and Contexts II
Any account of architecture’s history over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries is faced with the…
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Film Theory, Visual Thinking (at AFVS)
How do moving images transform the way we think? Introduction to film theory aimed at interpreting the visual world, and developing skills to analyze films…
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Histories of Landscape Architecture II: Design, Representation, and Use
Designed gardens and landscapes are cultural artifacts that encompass three main expectations: pragmatic needs, cultural significance, and aesthetic order. Although some landscape narratives often ignore…
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Buildings, Texts, and Contexts III: MODERNISM AND ITS COUNTER-NARRATIVES
Lisa Haber-Thomson, K. Michael Hays
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,…
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Rome
A seminar on the art, architecture, and urbanism of Rome where the layering of material artifacts from successive historical periods provides an…
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Modern Architecture and Urbanism in China
Modernizing influences, largely from the hands of foreign powers, first forcefully entered China in the aftermath of the Opium War and signing…
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Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies
Infrastructures play a decisive role in urban development and the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical…
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Competing Visions of Modernity in Japan
The course will trace the parallel trajectories of two of modern Japan’s most influential schools of architectural thought, represented by Kenzo Tange…
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Bramante is better than Alberti
A seminar, in the manner of a forum, devoted to the practice of architectural critique and evaluation. Twelve significant and comparable pairs…
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Mountains and the Rise of Landscape
To ask when we started looking at mountains is by no means the same as asking when we started to see them.
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Palladio and Raphael: An Innovative Learning Experience
Guido Beltramini, Howard Burns
Two leading scholars of the architecture of Andrea Palladio, Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza,…
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Case Studies in Conservation and Adaptive Re-use
Traditional conservation practice is increasingly proving inadequate to address the cultural, economic, social and environmental challenges facing the diverse array of buildings…
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Cultural Fever: Postmodern Effects in Sino-American Architecture
It is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s-80s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture’s…
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Environmental Histories, Archived Landscapes
This course examines environmental histories of the 20th century—the alignments and contradictions of environmentalism and new technical environments—through the engineered landscapes of…
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Conservation, Destruction, and Curating Impermanence
“History is what hurts.” -Fredric Jameson. This course deals with the political dimension of architectural, urban, and landscape conservation and aims to…
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Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment
This lecture/workshop course studies and analyzes processes and expressions of power in urban form and design in the North American built environment.
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Public and Private Development
This course provides a high-intensity introduction to the theory and practice of urban development in the contemporary United States. Through lectures, technical…
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Urban Politics, Planning, and Development (at HKS)
In the face of failures and dysfunction at the national level, there is growing excitement about the welfare- and democracy-enhancing potential of…
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Markets and Market Failures
This course provides a critical introduction to the creation and operation of markets, and assesses the criteria and circumstances under which they…
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Cities by Design II: Projects, Processes, and Outcomes
Cities are palimpsests. They are the spatial manifestations of a layering and re-layering of social and environmental systems over time. Cities by Design II is…
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Advanced Real Estate Finance
This course builds on GSD 5204 and comparable introductory real estate courses offered by other schools at Harvard. This year’s course covers…
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Building and Leading Real Estate Enterprises and Entrepreneurship
This course focuses on how you conceive, build and lead successful real estate companies. By virtue of the industry in which they…
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Theories for Practice in Conflict, Crisis, and Recovery
Course topics and objectives: How do we understand the relationship between crisis, recovery and the built environment at the beginning of the…
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Housing and Urbanization in Global Cities
Housing and Urbanization in Global Cities examines housing policy and planning in urban societies around the world and especially in the Global…
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Global Perspectives on Shelter Insecurity and Displacement
This course examines the drivers of, and responses to, global shelter insecurity and displacement. It addresses these issues in both the Global…
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Climate Change Resilience and Adaptation
Through the lens of climate change, this foundation course surveys the intellectual development of resilience and adaptation in the social, natural, and applied sciences. Through…
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Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
Holly Samuelson, Frank Apeseche
How can one optimize the benefits of environmental or social sustainability while generating a higher return on investment in buildings? Where are…
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Community Development: History, Theory, and Imaginative Practice
Community development is a heterogeneous and contested field of planning thought and practice. The profession has generally prioritized people and places that…
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Urban Design and the Color-Line
“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend…
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Developing for Social Impact
How can real estate development advance social purpose while accounting for development feasibility? With increasing urgency, those involved in shaping the…
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CoDesign Field Lab: Program Evaluation for Change Leadership
CoDesign Field Lab is a project-based research seminar (4 units) in which GSD students will work directly with Boston-based community, civic, and philanthropic organizations; planners;…
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Public Space as a Catalyst for Change in Informal Settlements: The Case of Argentina
How may we design transformative systems, tools, and frameworks to breach the gap between the formal and informal city through public space?…
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Public health in an era of epidemics: from the camp to the building
We shouldn’t conceive anymore architecture projects and urban planning interventions that disregard their impact on public health. The way we design buildings,…
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Queer Spaces
How do queer populations form communities and locate those communities in urban space? How do urban governance structures support and/or regulate these…
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Local Government Solutions to America’s Affordable Rental Housing Challenge
Christopher Herbert, James Stockard, Bennett Hecht
There are 10.9 million renters who are severely housing cost burdened – spending more than 50% of their income on shelter. The…
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Urban Mixed-Use Development in Paris, FRANCE & Regeneration Project in Boston, MA
In today’s increasingly connected urban centers, shifts in cultural preferences, design thinking, and spatial significations often reflect and parallel transitions in capital forces and economic…
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Implementation: Strategy, Management and Leadership: Lessons from the Field (at HKS)
This course will include both cases and readings that address the analytical challenges and the tools that are necessary to produce…
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Urban Design for Planners
Course ObjectivesThis seminar course introduces physical planners to the approaches, techniques and tools of urban design necessary to structure the spatial…
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Creating Real Estate Ventures: a Legal Perspective
The course will examine how a commercial real estate deal is put together to move a project from conception to completion. The…
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The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change
Gentrification and the real and perceived impacts that neighborhood change has on longtime local residents as well as new dwellers, is complicated…
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Affordable and Mixed-Income Housing Development, Finance, and Management
Explores issues relating to the development, financing, and management of housing affordable to low and moderate income households. Examines community-based development corporations, public housing authorities,…
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Public Space
In a digital age, does physical public space matter? Tahrir Square, the streets of Hong Kong, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Zuccotti Park, Madrid Rio, and other…
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Building Simulation
This course is the third of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6125) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture…
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Materials
This course explores the science of stuff. How do we classify stuff? How do we build with stuff? What are the energy, health, and societal…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II
Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Karen Janosky, Kirt Rieder
Topography is one of the primary and most powerful elements of landscape architecture, forming a foundation for plant growth, habitat, the flow of water and…
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Structural Design 1
This course introduces students to the analysis and design of structural systems. The fundamental principles of statics, structural loads, and rigid body equilibrium are considered…
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Cases in Contemporary Construction
As the final component in the required sequence of technology courses, this professionally-oriented course develops an integral understanding of the design and construction of…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV
The fourth and final course in the Ecologies, Techniques and Technologies core sequence, GSD 6242 continues to develop an understanding of, and promote…
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Advanced Introduction to Robotics (at SEAS)
Also offered as Engineering Sciences 259: Advanced Introduction to Robotics Introduction to computer-controlled robotic manipulators. Topics include coordinate frames and transformations, kinematic structure and solutions,…
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Product and Experience Design for Desirability
Multi-disciplinary course for students interested in designing products and services that are simple, irresistible, delightful, cool, covetable, viral, and, increasingly these days, much more likely…
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Urban and Town Ecology
Wildlife, vegetation, soil, air, water, and aquatic ecosystems, together with their human uses, are related to the distinctive, especially spatial, attributes…
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Cartographic Audition
Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest for sound within numerous sites academic and cultural production. With new environmental…
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Building Human Interaction
This course investigates the interactions between humans and buildings with a focus on environmental sustainability and health. The exploration will fall into…
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CLIMATE CRISIS – BEYOND ADAPTATION & RESILIENCY: A Designer’s Geoengineering Toolkit for Mitigation
Currently, education of how landscape architects, architects and planners can address climate crisis (CC) impacts are focused on resilience (the capacity to…
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Thermal Monocoques: An Energy Systems Laboratory
In this seminar, students learn to design energy systems that can orchestrate the flow of energy through buildings in novel ways. For…
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Enactive Design: Creative Applications through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez, Zach Seibold
Enactive Design is an advanced research seminar on human-machine interaction. We will explore the role of real-time, bidirectional communication between human and…
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Pre- and Post-
Pre- and Post- is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods in digital design, with a focus on processes of translation…
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Circular Eco-nomics: Mapping Architectural & Urban Ecosystems
This course introduces students to the idea of circular sustainable economies, hereby described as “eco-nomics,” looking simultaneously into the economics of sustainable lifestyles and work…
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Structures in Landscape Architecture, Joint & Detail
Summary This class explores how to design and make physical landscapes that are both rationally constructed and expressively convincing. This…
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Informal Robotics / New Paradigms for Design & Construction
Today new materials and fabrication techniques are transforming the field of robotics. Rather than rigid metal parts connected by mechanical components, robots…
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Ecosystem restoration
Given the current speed of habitat and species loss caused by human development, the restoration of degraded ecosystem is one of the…
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Tectonic Tradition in Japan
In Japan, design, both traditional and contemporary, is inseparable from materials and how they are constructed together. There is a long history of fruitful collaboration…
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Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II
Developing and implementing good solutions to real problems facing human society requires a broad understanding of the relationships between technology innovation, science, manufacturing, design thinking,…
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Non-Professional Practice
"I've never worked for a living. I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. I hope…
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Landscape Practices
This seminar examines the nature of contemporary landscape architecture and public realm practices. In this context, practice is considered broadly in terms…
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Products of Practice: From code to plan to code
A seminar that critically mines historic systems of representation and the product (or media) of the architect in relationship to the evolving…
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Miami Resilience: Housing & Infrastructure
This advanced research seminar in Miami, Florida (USA) is thematically focused at the intersection of community resilience, infrastructure design, housing studies, building science and zoning.
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Independent Study by Candidates for Master’s Degrees
Stephen Ervin, Dingliang Yang, Ann Forsyth, Lisa Haber-Thomson, Emily Wettstein, Elizabeth Whittaker, Rahul Mehrotra, Mark Lee, Charles Waldheim, Jennifer Molinsky, Oana Stanescu, Carole Voulgaris, Sai Balakrishnan, K. Michael Hays, Andrew Holder, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Ivan Panushev, Joan Busquets, Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez, Ewa Harabasz, Sean Canty, Lily Song, Daniel D’Oca, Jock Herron, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Yusuke Obuchi, Alex Wall, Richard Peiser, Danielle Choi, Iman Fayyad, Jesse M. Keenan, Max Kuo
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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Thesis project / Project Thesis
Andrew Holder, Jon Lott, John McMorrough
As the culminating effort for the Master of Architecture degree, a “Thesis” entails multiple expectations. It is a demonstration, not only of…
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Independent Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree MArch
The Thesis Program encourages students to take advantage of the wide range of resources and research initiatives of the Graduate School of Design and its…
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Independent Thesis in Satisfaction of the Degree MAUD, MLAUD, or MUP
Following participation in the department’s fall thesis preparation seminar (GSD 9204), the spring term of the second year sees students complete, defend, and submit…
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Independent Thesis for the Degree Master in Design Studies
Sai Balakrishnan, Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Allen Sayegh, George Thomas, Alex Wall, Dilip da Cunha, Edward Eigen, Ann Forsyth, Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez, Lisa Haber-Thomson, K. Michael Hays, Gary R. Hilderbrand, Michael Hooper, Alex Krieger, Ali Malkawi, John May, Rahul Mehrotra, Toshiko Mori, Erika Naginski, John Peterson, Robert Pietrusko, Peter Rowe, Holly Samuelson, Malkit Shoshan, Susan Snyder, Abby Spinak, Krzysztof Wodiczko
(Previously "Open Projects”) Prerequisites: Filing of signed "Declaration of Advisor" form with MDes office, and approval signature of the program director. A student who selects…
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Independent Thesis in Satisfaction of the Degree Master in Landscape Architecture
Following preparation in GSD 9341, each student pursues a topic of relevance to landscape architecture, which must include academic inquiry and design exploration.
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Independent Design Engineering Project II
Martin Bechthold, Woodward Yang
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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Independent Study by Candidates for Doctoral Degrees
9502 must be taken for either 2 or 4 units. Under faculty guidance, the student conducts an independent reading program and formulates a thesis proposal.
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Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Martin Bechthold, Ann Forsyth, Niall Kirkwood, Ali Malkawi, Erika Naginski, Antoine Picon, Peter Rowe
Thesis in Satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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Thesis Extension in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Martin Bechthold, Anita Berrizbeitia, Neil Brenner, Joan Busquets, Diane Davis, K. Michael Hays, Alex Krieger, Ali Malkawi, Antoine Picon, Peter Rowe, Charles Waldheim
Thesis extension in satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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Methods of Research in Art and Design: A Workshop-tutorial
This workshop focuses on the exploration, elaboration, and development of students’ research and experimentation in projects that intersect the fields of art…
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Discourse and Research Methods
Research conducted in the Doctor of Design Program (DDes) at the GSD spans a broad range of topics and areas of investigation that not only…
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Discourse and Methods II
This seminar serves as an introduction to prevalent critical approaches and methodologies in the history and theory of the design disciplines. The focus will be…