Courses
-
Digital Media: Neural Bodies
This course considers the building as body from a computational and critical perspective. The friction between the building as a quasi-biological organism…
-
Digital Media: Design Systems
The course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, methods, and practical techniques in design computation with emphasis on a systems perspective. We take a view…
-
Digital Media: Writing Form
This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the essential pursuit of writing form. Setting aside the better-known paradigms of…
-
Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Origins and Ends
In the first semester of the Buildings, Texts, and Contexts sequence, our goal is to address architecture in the context of the general rupture caused…
-
Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies
Infrastructures play a decisive role in urban development and in the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical perspective. History…
-
Environmentalisms II: How to Have a Politics?
Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: at the very moment that the idea of “environment” is being placed at the center of our…
-
The Architect as Producer
In 2020, the interconnected crisis of racist violence, environmental collapse, and the global pandemic prompted profound changes in how we understand what architecture is and…
-
Modern Housing and Urban Districts: Concepts, Cases and Comparisons
This seminar course deals with 'modern housing' covering a period primarily from the 1900s to the present. It engages with 'urban districts'…
-
Building Simulation
This course is the third of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6126) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. Objective: The best…
-
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…
-
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 buildings…
-
Artifacts as Media: Signals, Data, Information and Technology
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
Media is the way we understand the world. Our consciousness is technologically extended, connecting us to the entirety of humankind through media interfaces. Content, information…
-
Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II
In the spirit of Herbert Simon, Frameworks engages diverse but complementary disciplines, perspectives and techniques to help identify, diagnose and constructively address consequential social challenges,…
-
Design Teaching Lab (DTL)
This course teaches design teaching for those interested in pursuing parallel paths in design and education. Starting from an understanding of design as a culture…
-
Thesis project / Project Thesis
Andrew Holder, Lisa Haber-Thomson, Eric Howeler
As the culminating effort for the Master of Architecture degree, a “Thesis” entails multiple expectations. It is a demonstration, not only of competency and expertise…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Digital Media: Models
This course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods related to digital media in architecture and design, with a focus…
-
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…
-
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 shapes how the present changes into the future. Technological innovation is all around us,…
-
Building, 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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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:–…
-
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:…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Introduction to Computational Design
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
#GSD6338 is an introductory course on Computational Design, with a particular focus on architecture, landscape and urbanism. In this course, we will understand "Computational…
-
Confronting Climate Change: A Foundation in Science, Technology and Policy (FAS)
How can we address the issue of climate change, reducing the damages by preparing for impacts already underway and fixing the problem by transforming our…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Digital Media: Neural Bodies
This course considers the building as body from a computational and critical perspective. The friction between the building as a quasi-biological organism…
-
Digital Media: Design Systems
The course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, methods, and practical techniques in design computation with emphasis on a systems perspective. We take a view…
-
Digital Media: Writing Form
This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the essential pursuit of writing form. Setting aside the…
-
Modernism and Its Counter-Narratives
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,…
-
Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies
Infrastructures play a decisive role in urban development and in the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a…
-
Environmentalisms II: How to Have a Politics?
Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: at the very moment that the idea of “environment” is being placed at the center of our…
-
Late-modern Japan and the Wild Samurai Generation
This course examines the development of architectural discourse and production in Japan from the 1970s to the very recent past, focusing on the radical polemics…
-
Otherness and Canon: Episodes of a Dialogic Reading of the History of Architecture.
In contrast to the debate in other areas such as art or literature – for the explanation of which capitalist expansion is a crucial factor…
-
Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
Holly Samuelson, Frank Apeseche
This course focuses on the intersection between environmental and social opportunities in the built environment and the economic impact they have on…
-
Modern Housing and Urban Districts: Concepts, Cases and Comparisons
This seminar course deals with 'modern housing' covering a period primarily from the 1900s to the present. It engages with 'urban districts'…
-
Building Simulation
This course is the third of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6126) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. Objective: The best…