Courses
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Second Semester Architecture Core: SITUATE
Jeffry Burchard, Michelle Chang, Elle Gerdeman, Oana Stanescu, Liang Wang, Emmett Zeifman
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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Fourth Semester Architecture Core: RELATE
Jenny French, Jennifer Bonner, Sean Canty, Andrew Holder, Grace La, Jon Lott, Elizabeth Whittaker
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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Collaborative Design Engineering Studio II
Kipp Bradford, Jonathan Grinham, Karen Reuther, Amanda Parkes
The second-semester studio builds upon theoretical and technical concepts already introduced in the MDE program, emphasizing problem assessment, creative and critical thinking, observational and experimentation-based…
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Ruinophilia & Pentimenti – Chinatown Milan Case Study
Arguably, the conception of ruins has long shaped western architecture historians’ origins narrative dating back to antiquity. Largely shaped by a distinct visual culture and…
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Grafting Adaptations onto Existing Buildings and into the City
Today’s architects have an urgent responsibility to address the climate crisis by radically reducing the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from our work. Reusing and adapting…
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Identity and Difference: Annuated Civic Typologies
This term we will revisit a theme we first explored in the option studios Block Blob Mat Slab Slat (2015) and—to a lesser extent— Intuition…
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Revitalizing Onomichi: Architecture, Community, Territory
Onomichi is a port city in Hiroshima Prefecture in the western part of Japan with a history of ship building. It was one of the…
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Voices of Change
Oliver Lütjens, Thomas Padmanabhan
The tone of our voice is more important than the words that we use. When we speak, we use a common language that we share…
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Barnes’ Barns in the Grid of Des Moines
This studio will explore the typology of the industrial shed – a 60,000 square foot building – developed from a kit-of-parts assembly to accommodate adaptable…
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Reconstructions / Unearthing Traces (On History, Memory and Architecture for Life)
“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.” James A.
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The Last Free Space [M1]
What can public libraries do that other spaces – schools, community centers, museums – cannot do? This studio will study and speculate on how a…
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An Incomplete Performance [M1]
Our option studio will explore the double meaning of performance – working between the short-lived act of theatrical performance, and the environmental performance of long-lasting…
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Swerves [M1]
Half a century ago, architecture became open-ended. Buildings would change and grow, architects argued, not unlike cities. Architects embraced impermanence, promoted flexibility, timed obsolescence, and…
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Do-It-Anyway: Place, Tectonics, and Time [M1]
In this studio, students will design and fabricate a project at one-to-one scale in the space of seven weeks. Why? We are living in an…
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Designing the In-Between; Transecting the Heart of Chinatown on a Forgotten Site [M2]
A curious “missing tooth” in the chaotic and dense urban fabric of Boston’s Chinatown reveals a vivisection of the neighborhood and provides an opportunity for…
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Building on Buildings [M2]
In pre-Hispanic cultures, pyramids were often built on top of others. Layer by layer, the structures would grow, understanding that each finished building would at…
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Tower for a Collector [M2]
This studio follows on from a teaching program called “City & Utopia” established 10 years ago in Paris with the aim of exploring the world…
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Housing Future: Reclaiming the Chicago 6-Flat as a Site for Architecture [M2]
Lap Chi Kwong, Alison Von Glinow
The pairing of “Housing Future” and the “6-Flat” is somewhat contradictory. Housing Futures typically point towards advancements in new technologies or new configurations. On the…
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Digital Media: Neural Bodies
This course explores generative artificial intelligence for volumetric, and especially architectural, modeling by considering the building as body from a computational and…
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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…
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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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Offsite/Onsite: Curating Contemporary Art
Today, everybody is a curator—we supposedly curate our meals, our social media feeds, and our outfits. But what does it mean to curate exhibitions of…
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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
The tangential inherently implicates the expression of how two things touch. In a moment where touching has become complicated, a formal exploration…
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Talking Architecture
This seminar is intended to contribute to the Public Events Program at Harvard GSD. During this third version of the course, students…
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Word(s) Count : Writing, Publishing, Design
The dual purposes of this course are 1) to teach students how to write clearly, concisely, and critically and 2) to teach the fundamentals of…
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Image as Instruments
Image as Instruments is an introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques, and methods in digital design, with a focus on the processes of…
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Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment
The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers, an expressive and playful supplement to computer-based labor. The aim of…
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Bookmaking
Remment Koolhaas, Irma Boom, Phillip Denny
What was the book? What will it become? This team-taught, project-based seminar charts new trajectories for the future of the book. In tandem with exercises…
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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, the city, and the world. As…
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Experiments in Public Freedom
Cities are spatial accumulations of capital and culture that can host and must cater to a vast array of different and often…
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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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Proximities / or Readings and Methods within Reflexive Formalism
“Making comparisons is the only good method in a world in which things take on consistency in relation to others. A comparison may be implicit…
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OPEN WORK [Module 1]
Half a century ago, architecture became open-ended. Buildings would change and grow, architects argued, not unlike cities. Architects embraced impermanence, promoted flexibility, timed obsolescence, and…
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Towards a Newer Brutalism
In the early 1950s, Alison and Peter Smithson, along with their friend and colleague Reyner Banham, announced their arrival with a call for “a new…
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Appearance
This seminar will focus on architecture’s appearance, on how architecture is rendered both legible and actionable to its audience. The many labels applied to architecture’s…
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The Aperture Analyzed: The Form and Space of Openings
This seminar will focus on an essential component of architecture, the aperture, which has broad implications for our understanding of space. An…
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Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Origins and Ends
Our aim is to address the general rupture caused by the rise of modernity—that is, by the social, economic, technological, and ideological transformations accompanying the…
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Making Sacred Space
This course addresses the current crisis in church design by an in depth consideration of the ideas, images, concepts, and legislation that inform the creation…
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Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies
Infrastructure plays a decisive role in urban development and in the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical perspective. History…
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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 Tange Kenzō (1913–2005) on the…
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Environmentalisms: How to Have a Politics?
Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: as the words “neoliberalism” and “environment” have come to occupy the center of our political and cultural…
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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 an illusion as…
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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…
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How To Be a Critic
This workshop seminar will focus the student’s ability to think and write critically about buildings, the city, and the urban landscape, and in the process…
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“Speaking of Architecture…” (Authorship/Objecthood/Criticism)
This seminar is motivated by the premise that all architecture is “architecture,” and is offered as a polemical dispute with the myriad attempts to remove…
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Yeah, they were all Yellow: Asian Feminist Architectural Possibilities
Intervention and reflection have been made in the primarily male-dominated architectural field with its phallogocentric Western metaphysics foundation, particularly since the 1980s. Yet much effort…
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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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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…
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Materials
This course explores the science of materials. How do we classify materials? How do we build with materials? What are the energy, health, and societal…
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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 buildings…
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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 Applications in Sustainable Architecture
This elective seminar will provide a deeper dive into issues of evidence-based, high-performance, ecological building design. The course is intended for MArch students, MDes students,…
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Towards a new Science of Design?
This project- and discussion-based seminar offers a deep, critical inspection of contemporary design practices, research methods and discourses informed by Neuroscience, Behavioral Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction…
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Automation in Practice: Building the future of Architecture(s), Engineering, and Construction
Population is estimated to exceed 10 billion people by the year 2050 requiring an immediate doubling of productivity in the AEC industry which includes Architecture…
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Informal Robotics
This course teaches how to create original robotic devices made of light, compliant – informal – materials. New fabrication techniques are transforming…
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Procedural Fields: Functional Design of Discrete Hyperdimensional Spaces
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
This course will introduce participants to computational methods for the generation of discrete multi-dimensional media, using functional definitions. Digital modeling techniques are at the core…
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Data Science for Performance-Driven Design
The modeling of energy-efficient buildings and sustainable urban development is an increasing concern in both the building design and sustainability consulting industries. Early adoption of…
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Unsupervised Machine Learning for Designers
This course provides an introduction to the rapidly advancing area of research in unsupervised machine learning with a focus on generative models. Recent advances such…
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Nano, Micro, Macro: BioFabrication
Rapid global climate change has lent new urgency to our longstanding interest of growing materials to break the unstainable reality of material extraction, use and…
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Machine Aesthetics: The Binary and the Spectrum
The increasing encroaching of ML into the creative fields has been spearheaded by generative models that couple an artificial perceptual system to a generative parametric…
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Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones… it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from…
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Non-Professional Practice
“The particular threat to the intellectual today, whether in the West or the non-Western world, is not the academy, nor the suburbs, nor the appalling…
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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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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…
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For Everyone a Garden: The Evolution of High-Rise Modular Housing Systems [1-unit, Module 2 course]
High density urban housing remains one of the puzzling unresolved issues of our time. Many experiments confuse issues of typology with those of construction methodologies.
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Independent Study by Candidates for Master’s Degrees
Edward Eigen, Eve Blau, Rahul Mehrotra, Jacob Reidel, Thaïsa Way, Danielle Choi, Rosalea Monacella, Daniel D’Oca, Ewa Harabasz, John May, Enrique Silva, Erika Naginski, Peter Rowe, Ann Forsyth, Diane Davis, Yun Fu, Richard Peiser, Ian Miley, Andrew Witt, Ellie Jungmin Han, Joan Busquets, Allen Sayegh, Alex Yuen, Christopher Herbert, Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez, Nathan King, Rachel Meltzer, David Fixler
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
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,…
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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 for the Degree Master in Design Studies
Holly Samuelson, Malkit Shoshan, Rosalea Monacella
(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 Design Engineering Project II
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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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 Extension in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Martin Bechthold, Anita Berrizbeitia, Gareth Doherty, Ann Forsyth, Jerold S. Kayden, Niall Kirkwood, Ali Malkawi, John May, Rahul Mehrotra, Erika Naginski, Richard Peiser, Peter Rowe, Holly Samuelson, Carole Voulgaris, Charles Waldheim
Thesis extension in satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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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
This pro-seminar is a core requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic areas that range…
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MDes Open Project: Forms of Assembly: All Things Considered
"When bodies congregate, move, and speak together, they lay claim to a certain space as public space." Judith Butler. In the…
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MDes Open Project: New Figures of Exodus (Histories and Philosophies of the Designed Present)
As the politics of extraction, exploitation, circulation, and adaptation cast an increasingly large shadow across the design disciplines, this project centers on an historical-philosophical study…
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MDes Open Project: Apparatus for Hacking Perception
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing our world today with a lot of indisputable evidence about it. Yet,…
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MDes Open Project: Black Counter-Cartographies and The Futures of Time
Black temporalities within zones of extraction are marked by the imposition of delay, which pushes people and spaces outside the regulated, normative…
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MDes Open Project: Revisiting Field Conditions
In surveying landscapes, neighborhoods, and communities, design could greatly benefit from further consideration of how they are recorded. While categorization and reproduction…
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MDes Open Project: Technology, Trust, and Governance
This Open Project collaboration concentrates on the transformation of democratic institutions and the novel mechanisms of trust building that governments are exploring…