Courses
-
Landscape Architecture II
Craig Douglas, Gary R. Hilderbrand, Amy Whitesides, Sara Zewde, Min Yeo
The studio will explore how we might reimagine cemetery landscapes of the future in response to the challenges of the climate crisis, and the clear…
-
Landscape Architecture IV
Lorena Bello Gómez, Tomas Folch, Danielle Choi, Mark Heller, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Rosalea Monacella, Belinda Tato, Alex Wall, Min Yeo
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…
-
TUNISIAN NIGHTSCAPES: Nocturnal Landscapes in the Medina of Tunis
The studio will reimagine six public spaces in the Medina of Tunis, Tunisia. Taking a long-term view over a 5 to 50–year timespan, the studio…
-
Biospheric Urbanism – Changing Climates
Critical MomentThe climate crisis poses the urgent question of how to make our built environment more resilient to the challenging atmospheric changes such as…
-
CANARY IN THE MINE: De-carbonize, De-climatize, De-colonize rural communities
Canary in the mine is a sequence of Option Studios at the Harvard GSD focused on rural territories addressing communities and landscapes subject to ever-growing…
-
Below, Above, and Beyond: Future of Antwerp’s Mobility and Public Space
This studio aims to project the near-future scenario of Antwerp 's mobility and public space. We will challenge the conventional monofunctionality of urban infrastructure by…
-
BANGKOK REMADE
Niall Kirkwood, Kotchakorn Voraakhom
BANGKOK REMADE will advance alternative futures for the capital city of Thailand. The studio subtitled ‘Design to Enhance Social Dignity, Climate Resilience and Inspire the…
-
Landscape Synergies of the new Energies
Faster than we would have ever thought we will and do already experience sustainable forms of energy production, storage, distribution and transport dominating and profoundly…
-
Wild Ways 2.0: A Fifth Ecology for Metropolitan Los Angeles
Playing off Reyner Banham’s classic Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, the studio will explore themes of connectivity, resilience and landscape infrastructure under the…
-
Landscape Representation II
The Landscape Representation II course will examine the relationship between terrain and the dynamic landscape it supports and engenders. The course explores and challenges the…
-
Public Drawing
This course seeks to open a discussion around the design and representation of public space in informal settlements, aiming to provide students with tools for…
-
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…
-
Expository Cartography
Today’s cartographic convention, software, and methods of data harvesting all homogenize how designers approach and communicate through maps. Across practice and academia these forces produce…
-
Theories and Practices of Landscape Architecture
What do you need to know in order to understand this landscape? How do design culture and design thinking transform over time? How are cultural…
-
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…
-
Thinking Landscape – Making Cities: Designing Regenerative Futures
This design seminar challenges the notion of a gradual adaptation to the climate crisis with proactive regenerative design. Students will create a…
-
Histories of Landscape Architecture II
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…
-
Modernization in the Visual United States Environment, 1890-2035
Here find an ecology of changes, a course on the ecosystem of change so rapid most thoughtful Americans know it as modernization. Design remembered and…
-
Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871-2036: Seminar
Fantasy opens portals to new life forms. It prepares us for supranatural humans, genetic adjustment, non-electronic novelty. It forms the core of natural-world reverence, maybe…
-
Environmental Histories, Archived Landscapes
The course explores design methodologies for evaluating archives as evidence of material, spatial, and cultural change in constructed landscapes. Because archives seek comprehensiveness (distinct from…
-
Natural Histories for Troubled Times, or, Revisiting the ‘Entangled Bank’
This seminar looks at our (troubled) times, its toxic landscapes and eco-unfriendly townscapes, through the lens of natural history. By “lens” we can think immediately…
-
Resilience Under New Water Regimes: The Case of Monterrey, [MX] Day-Zero
Globally, the world is experiencing a period of unprecedented drought, the worst in 1200 years according to NASA. With rising global average temperatures, water is…
-
Authenticity and Historical Dimension – Conditions for Landscape Projects
The reference to existing or lost traces of a site in general or to specific elements and artefacts in particular have been of eminent importance…
-
Making Participation Relevant to Design
By trying to understand how participation can make design more relevant to society, we can create more socially just cities. This course starts from the…
-
Creating Environmental Markets
There is a way out of the climate box we have created, though resistance to the necessary ecological transformation remains intense. Sunk investments in existing…
-
Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II
Karen Janosky, Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, 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…
-
Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV
GSD 6242 is the fourth and final course in the Ecologies, Techniques and Technologies landscape core sequence. It is a required course for all MLA…
-
Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation
Maps both represent reality and create it. It is in the context of this contention that this course presents the fundamentals of mapping, spatial analysis,…
-
Plants and Placemaking – New Ecologies for a Rapidly Changing World
In the face of crises spanning pandemics, political turmoil, and the rapid degradation of the planet’s natural systems—all within a backdrop of myriad inequalities—the power…
-
Structures in Landscape Architecture, Joint & Detail
This seminar/workshop explores how to design and make landscapes that are rationally constructed and expressively convincing. This search is focused through the lens of structural…
-
Ecosystem Restoration
Given the current speed of habitat and species loss caused by human development, the restoration of degraded ecosystems is one of the greatest challenges humankind…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.
-
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.
-
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…
-
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…