Courses
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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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Images as Instruments
In the last three decades, architectural praxis has undergone a paradigmatic shift, precipitated by what Jonathan Crary delineates as a seismic transformation in visuality—a metamorphosis…
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Public Space in the Informal City
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…
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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 the class is…
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Place-Based Scenario Planning
The climate crisis is, in part, a communication crisis. How can we communicate the choices that communities will need to make to adapt to climate…
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Images of the Environment: Terror and Beauty
This project-based seminar will focus on producing “thick” descriptions of photographs of environmental crises in the recent decades. Those of interest include Edward Burtynsky’s series…
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Territorial Commons: Mapping Narratives in the Shifting Extractive Landscapes of the Antipodes
The relentless pursuit of economic growth has historically propelled an ever-expanding reliance on natural resources, shaping and altering cultures while transforming landscapes. This pursuit of…
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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 to their pragmatic…
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Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Drawing Landscapes, Energy, and Matter
The structures and forms we perceive on the land are produced by forces that make order and those that upset it. Landscape architecture is one…
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Thinking Landscape-Making Cities – Designing Regenerative Futures
This design seminar challenges you to create regenerative concepts and strategies for a just, temperate, and regenerative urban future. You will design a new settlement…
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Towards a Newer Brutalism
In the early 1950s, British architects Alison and Peter Smithson announced their arrival with a call for a “new brutalism”—a polemic sketched out over several…
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URBAN GRIDS-3: GRID PLANS versus BIG PROJECTS
The historic evolution of the city can be tied to “regular systems” that have allowed for rational forms of development, which can be understand as…
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Contextual Capacities
Urban analysis, understanding of ‘context,’ and specificity of a place, have long been intrinsic to architectural and urban discourse and practice. Today, this discussion is…
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Transition as Condition: Ukraine Research- Urbanism, Environment, Infrastructure
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the displacement of millions of Ukrainians and the destruction of housing, neighborhoods, urban spaces, rural landscapes, physical…
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Case Studies in Urban Conservation: Principles & Narratives of an Emerging Discipline
Traditional conservation practice is increasingly proving inadequate to address the socio-cultural, economic, and environmental challenges facing the diverse array of sites and districts currently in…
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The Development Project
Justin Chapman, Matthew Kiefer, Richard Peiser, Bing Wang
The course places students in the role of developer of an international or domestic site for which they will produce project proposals that meet financial,…
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Urban Design and the Color-Line
We cannot talk about physical infrastructures in the United States without also talking about race. In this seminar/workshop, students will examine the role that race…
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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…
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Learning From Failure 1 [Module I]
It’s all too easy to learn from success. This course explores how real estate stakeholders can learn from concepts and examples of failure. The course…
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Learning From Failure 2 [Module 2]
It’s all too easy to learn from success. This course explores how real estate stakeholders can learn from concepts and examples of failure. The course…
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Community-Informed Urban Design
In Community-Informed Urban Design, we will explore the role of urban design, architecture, and placemaking in shaping social conditions within the built environment. We will…
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Urban Adaptation
In an era of accelerating climate disruption, the ways that people live in cities are changing in real time and urban planning must grapple with…
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Planning for Pedestrians and Cyclists
Meeting the ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets that will be required to reduce, prevent, or delay catastrophic changes to the global climate will require…
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Spatial Design Strategies for Climate Migration
Climate change has emerged as one of the most pressing global challenges of our time, with far-reaching implications for human societies and the environment. A…
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Digital Material Systems: Ceramics
Digital design and fabrication technologies have become integral to the discourse surrounding contemporary design and architectural practice. The translation from design to realization is mediated…
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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 the field of…
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Data Science for Environmentally Responsive Buildings
Objective: With extensive high-fidelity measured data collected from modern buildings, data science has become a promising tool for optimizing building performance and design, enhancing the…
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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 Surrogate of Taste
The use of generative AI models increasingly involves the reliance on a few black box pretrained and centralized models where design intent is conveyed through…
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Climate Positive Design Lab
As the climate and biodiversity crises escalate, our world faces unprecedented times. With the 1.5oC threshold quickly approaching and 75% of emissions coming from the…
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EMBODIED CARBON- Material Cycles, Circularity, and Advances in Reverse Engineering
At a time when urgent action is needed to avert the climate crisis, it is very difficult to take an idealistic approach when considering key…
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Is the Grass Any Greener? Architectural Practice & Project Delivery Around the World
Conversations about how architectural practice is regulated, how architects do their work, and how construction projects are delivered are typically constrained by regional and national…