Courses
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Detroit Re-Connected: Reparative Mobilities in the Motor City
Ten years ago, Detroit Future City, a citywide strategic framework plan was released, addressing six urban elements including economic prosperity, neighborhoods, land use, city systems,…
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The Rohingya Camps; Permanence in Transition
The Rohingya refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh host the largest refugee population in the world. The Rohingyas are a Muslim, ethnic-minority people who live in…
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Sao Paulo Reaction: Vacant Infralandscape
Fernando Viegas, Cristiane Muniz
This Option Studio is about dissolving the rigid limits between architecture, landscape and urbanism and it’s about Sao Paulo and its vacant infrastructures. We propose…
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Airports and HST Stations as Nodes of Centrality for a New Age
Changes in territorial and urban mobilities play a vital role in addressing the challenges of environmental crisis. The studio will explore long-distance transportation modes as…
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Agropolitan Mats, Rugs and Quilts
This studio will focus designing a suite of buildings, connective armatures and productive landscapes that can catalyse sustainable food regions in the fringes of one…
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Future Proof Neighborhoods: Old and New Housing Ideals
The search for new models for affordable housing in the world’s growing cities has never been more urgent. Good and affordable housing is needed to…
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Designing the Conditions: Cooperative Housing in America
At the heart of how we conceive of housing in the United States lies a paradox: the goals of a house appreciating as an asset…
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The Future of Oil Boom Towns in Ecuadorian Amazonia
Geographers estimate that circa 80% of urbanization in Amazonia is peri-urban in nature. Since the urban frontier in the region is one of the fastest…
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Modulating Change
Mumbai’s urban identity has been in flux since its founding as a colonial port city. Its economy in the post-colonial phase of its history has…
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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 and lived responses
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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Leveraging Boston’s Building Boom to Advance Equity
A transit-oriented development on Dorchester Bay is a case study in creating ties to institutions and diverse neighborhoods on the south side of the city. …
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Airport Urban Districts for a New Age
Rethinking airports in the context of environmental crisis challenges for exploring efficient intermodal transportation nodes as new frontier for developing the future. The right combination…
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A Moratorium on New Construction
“We need to stop constructing in order to start building.”— Menna Agha Back in March 2020, everything stopped. Or so it seemed. Worldwide, construction…
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Transversal Grounds: Engaging Infrastructure, Landscape and Heritage for Lima’s New Urban Commons
Sandra Barclay, Jean-Pierre Crousse
In developing countries, heritage sites in urban settings often collide with urban growth and economic expansion. Lima has more than 385 archeological sites within its…
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LATIN AMERICA IN TRANSITION: Imagining Infrastructures for Climatic Migration
The world is facing a moment of growing climate and migratory uncertainty. The accelerated intensity of natural and humanitarian disasters is giving rise to new…
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Quo Vadis, Addis?
The design studio Quo Vadis, Addis? addresses the question of how to integrate manufacturing in the textile and garment sector within the socio-spatial fabric of…
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Houston: Extreme Weather, Environmental Justice and the Energy Transition
This multidisciplinary studio will use the lenses of climate adaptation, climate mitigation and climate justice to explore the design opportunities that could come with a…
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Bangkok: New Landscapes of Equity and Prosperity
Anita Berrizbeitia, Alejandro Echeverri, Tomas Folch
This studio will bring together faculty and graduate students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to imagine how Bangkok can be designed for the future as a…
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Extending and mending Thamesmead: re-envisioning the town of tomorrow, today
It was a good place to be as a kid. There was so much nature and wide open space. In the spring there would be…
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Highways Revisited
The U.S. Interstate Highway System has been lauded as one of the greatest public works projects in human history. Encompassing nearly fifty thousand miles of…
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History, Boundaries and the Future – Conservation and Infill in Boston’s Chinatown
Boston is fortunate to have large, intact, precincts of fine scaled historic fabric whose character and conservation is carefully monitored through established regulatory processes. However,…
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Great Migration and Memorial Highway: Culture Heritage as Inspiration in New Rochelle
Long perceived as a bedroom community of New York City, New Rochelle is a place unique in colonial New York as being settled by a…
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Planning a Piece of a City, The Architectural Form of the Neighborhood
Contemporary cities generally grow in an amorphous and often mono functional way, generating peripheries that do not contribute to social life and identity. The latter…
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SAO PAULO REACTION: TAMANDUATEÍ RIVER MOUTH
Cristiane Muniz, Fernando Viegas
The city of São Paulo grew dramatically during the 20th century. However, the transformation of the small village into the largest South American metropolis in…
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Xiamen Studio. Merging urban development and natural landscape.
Merging urban development and natural landscape: Searching for “spectacular or regular” projects? The Studio Option focuses on the capacity of large-scale projects to direct the…
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Building Respect on San Francisco’s Third Street
In the past decade (prior to the presence of the Coronavirus), San Francisco’s economy experienced its most substantial growth in nearly a century. Two factors…
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DIVIDING BRIDGES & BRIDGING DIVIDES. A studio on infrastructures and their consequences
Cities fail their citizens if they adapt too slowly. The pace of adaptation is, in part, dependent on the capacity of spatial practitioners to reimagine…
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FRINGE CITIES: The legacies and future of renewal in the small American city
Across the nation, small, post-industrial cities today occupy a critical boundary between our polarized metropolitan hubs and vast rural landscapes. These are the Fringe Cities.
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Quo Vadis, Addis? Manufacturing-led Urbanization in Ethiopia – Empower Design!
The studio ‘Quo Vadis, Addis?’ addresses the question of how to integrate existing manufacturing zones in the textile and garment sector within the socio-spatial fabric…
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Below and Beyond: Imagining the future of underground infrastructure at Harvard Square
This studio aims to propose a near-future scenario for the Brattle Tunnel, a piece of decommissioned train infrastructure located under Harvard Square. As the oldest…
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This Land Is Your Land [M1]
In the US, there are over 300 federal Indian reservations, covering over 50 million acres of land in 36 states. However, a majority of Native…
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As of Right: First Nations Reclaim the City [M2]
Ninety-five percent of British Columbia is “unceded,” meaning it was never given up by indigenous communities in treaties. As a result, today, many First Nations…
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Extreme Urbanism (7), Imagining an Urban Future for Ishkashim, Afghanistan
Rahul Mehrotra, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Bordering Tajikistan and within the province of Badakhshan, one of the most natural disasterprone area in Afghanistan, lies Ishkashem. The name, Ishkashim stands both for…
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The CANARY IN THE MINE, Wildfires and rural communities in the Mediterranean Hinterland
“Fire is a phenomenon that derives from its circumstances… It synthesizes its surroundings.”¹Stephen J. Pyne 1. WhyWildfires rage throughout the rural and peri-urban…
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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…