Courses
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Computing Fantasy: Imagination, Invention, Radical Pedagogy (Munari / Rodari / Calvino) (at FAS)
Built around three seminal 20th century figures–the artist-designer Bruno Munari, the writer-educator Gianni Rodari, the novelist Italo Calvino–the course aims to explore structural, combinatory, and generative thinking…
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Atmospheric Projections: Media as Environments (at AFVS)
What is the ecology of the arts in our visual age of changing media? Can media be understood as environments? This seminar investigates a “material…
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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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Knowledge Design: What should or could knowledge look like in the 21st century?
This seminar/studio hybrid explores the shapes and forms that knowledge production is assuming in an array of disciplines, from media studies to digital humanities to…
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Survey of Energy Technology (at SEAS)
Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, 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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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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Acoustic Space: A Media Archaeology of Building Types
This is a seminar on the past and present relationship between architecture, information technologies, and mass media. More than ever before, we live in acoustic…
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Survey of Energy Technology (at SEAS)
Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, and…
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Materiality and Atmosphere: Media and Environments (at AFVS)
What is the place of materiality in our visual age of changing materials and media? How do media mediate material relations? Can media be understood…
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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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Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture
Current tendencies in the discipline suggest a split between two opposing architectural projects: the easy project versus the difficult project[1]. Primarily related…
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Off: On a Tangent
“An art professor once told me that in composition, elements should either overlap or there should be some space between them; that…
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Views, With Rooms
Evolving theories on optics, over time and place, have created a set of objects that physically model vision. Each renders vision visible…
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Talking Architecture
What is the use of architects interviewing other architects? Of course, it is about camaraderie, sharing experiences, and providing support. But, if…
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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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Type and the Idea of the City: Architecture’s Search for what is Common
Open to all students, the seminars in this course will complement Option Studio 1318: Midtown, Midrise, Mid-door. It will equip students with…
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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 Practice and its Agency
This seminar introduces an understanding of material discourse in design and architecture that affects cultural, social ,economic and political issues. In addition…
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Acoustic Space: A Media Archaeology of Building Types
This is a seminar on the past and present relationship between architecture, information technologies, and mass media. More than ever before, 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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Regarding an Archive
This will be the last course I will teach before retirement at the end of this academic year. Personally, it is an…
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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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Case Studies in Conservation and Adaptive Reuse
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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The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of an Architectural Idea
One of the arresting images in Michel Serres's Rome: The Book of Foundations is the idea that history is "a knot of different times" —…
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Architecture: Histories of the Present
“Poets and prophets, like magicians, learn their craft from predecessors. And just as magicians will invoke the real or supposed source of…
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History of the Art Museum
This seminar explores the development of the modern art museum as an architectural type, measured against the evolving nature of display objects, audience, urbanity, technology,…
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How Houses Build People (at FAS)
People build houses, but how do houses build people? This course will explore the house in both form and concept throughout pre-industrial Western history, with…
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Other(ed) Architecture: Coloniality, Subject, and Space
The aim of this seminar is to think critically about the authors and agents of architecture and the built environment. In examining relationships between ideological…
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Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
Holly Samuelson, Frank Apeseche
This course blends two shades of green: sustainability and money. It focuses on the intersection between environmental and social opportunities in the…
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Developing for Social Impact
How can real estate development advance social purpose while accounting for development feasibility? With increasing purposefulness, those involved in shaping the…
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Hidden Figures: The City, Architecture and the Construction of Race and Gender
What hidden figures do our buildings and urban environment conceal? There exists systematic erasure of the contributions of Women of Color…
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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’…
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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…
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Constructing Heterogeneity
Contemporary buildings are inherently heterogeneous; more often than not they are assemblages of different materials, programs, and subjects. Although homogenous finish layers…
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Data Analysis and Data Physicalization through ‘Wagashi’ Expressions
Data Analysis and Data Physicalization is a research seminar that explores the analysis and communication of data. We use python as a…
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Informal Robotics / New Paradigms for Design & Construction
This course teaches how to create original robotic devices made of light, compliant – informal – materials. New fabrication techniques are transforming…
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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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Products of Practice: From code to plan to code
A research seminar that critically mines historic systems of representation, instrumentation, and the product (or media) of the architect in relationship to…
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Methods of Research in Art and Design: A Workshop-tutorial
Methods of Research is a workshop for the development of individual projects in art and design. There is no preset syllabus. Our…
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Discourse and Methods I
This course is open only to Ph.D. students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design (Ph.D. students from other departments may participate with…
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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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Responsive Environments
The course introduces students to the tools and design methods for creating responsive environments and technologically driven experiences in the built environment. By putting the…
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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…
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Culture, Conservation and Design
This proseminar addresses issues of critical conservation, an evolving discipline that illuminates the bridge between cultural meaning, identity, and context as part…
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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…
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Marvelous Architecture – The Hallucination Of Reason
The seminar "Marvelous Architecture – The Hallucination Of Reason" is about architecture theory crossbred with representation. It will explore the specificity of architectural…
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Screens – Projecting Media and The Visual Arts
Giuliana Bruno, Emilio Vavarella
How do screens function as interface between us and the world? What is the role of the screen in contemporary visual arts and media culture?…
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Building Conservation and Renewal: Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the spatial, material, and cultural values inherent in a property that must be understood to craft interventions and additions that…
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Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Architecture 1960 to the Present
The concept of postmodernism finds its definitive articulation in architecture, even though postmodern thought far exceeds the use of the term postmodern…