Courses
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First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT
Sean Canty, Carl D’Apolito-Dworkin, Andrew Holder, Hyojin Kwon, Ian Miley, Emmett Zeifman
PROJECT is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, PROJECT may refer to fundamental…
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Landscape Architecture I: First Semester Core Studio
Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Gary R. Hilderbrand, Kira Clingen, Tomas Folch, Alistair McIntosh
WHAT IS PUBLIC ABOUT A PUBLIC SPACE? STU-1111 is the first in a sequence of four core studios that, together, constitute the foundation of your…
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First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio
Hannah Teicher, Daniel Hernandez, Anne-Marie Lubenau, Jeana Dunlap, Lourdes Germán, Lindsay Woodson, Dana McKinney, Carole Voulgaris
First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio introduces students to the fundamental knowledge and technical skills used by urban planners to investigate, analyze, create, and implement…
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Third Semester Architecture Core: INTEGRATE
Eric Howeler, Jennifer Bonner, Michelle Chang, Elle Gerdeman, Jon Lott, Angela Pang
Integration is the agenda for the third-semester architecture design studio. Architecture is fundamentally a part-to-whole problem, involving the complex integration of building components, systems, and…
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Landscape Architecture III: Third Semester Core Studio
Danielle Choi, Francesca Benedetto, Mark Heller, Rosalea Monacella, Alex Wall, Amy Whitesides
From Off-Shoring to Near Shore: Littoral Landscapes at Work This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people…
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Elements of Urban Design
Peter Rowe, Stephen Gray, Yun Fu, Dana McKinney, Alex Yuen, Michael Manfredi
Elements of Urban Design is the advanced core studio for the post-professional Urban Design program. The studio introduces critical concepts, strategies, and technical skills associated…
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Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)
Elizabeth Christoforetti, Andrew Witt
The first semester studio is a project-based introduction to a range of ideas, methods, and techniques essential for the design engineer. In the studio, students…
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Architectural Representation I
Architectural Representation I: Origins + Originality Architectural representation as a medium blends theorizing, historization, and a unique capacity to induce a physical entity, either fictional…
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Architectural Representation II
Architectural Representation II: Projective Realities Along with the first architectural drawing came the problem of the relationship between the worlds of two-dimensions (drawing) and three-dimensions…
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Representation for Planners
One task of an urban planner is to grapple with and understand a series of complicated processes that directly affect the organization and experience of…
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Spatial Analysis
Planning decisions are often idealized as being "evidence-based" or "data-driven." Spatial data often comprise the data and evidence that support such these decisions. In this…
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Landscape Representation I
Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Kira Clingen
The first in a two-semester sequence, Landscape Representation I introduces students to the rich and varied discipline of landscape architecture as inextricably intertwined with the…
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Digital Media: Not Magic
According to folklore, Michelangelo fell to his knees upon seeing the Florentine fresco Annunciation, went silent, and eventually concluded that the image of the Virgin…
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Digital Media: Errors and Omissions
errare — to move without clear direction, departing from truth, norm, or some other analog of unity omittere — fail to use or do, neglect…
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Lost and Alternative Nature: Vertical Mapping of Urban Subterrains for Climate Change Mitigation
This seminar aims to come up with mitigation strategies informed by planar and vertical mapping of lost geomorphologies (topography, waterbody, subsoil, groundwater, carbon cycle, etc.)…
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Interior Residential Planning, Furnishings, and Materials
Buildings are inseparable from Interior Planning. The objective of this course is to design interior spaces in an urban high-rise or low-rise building located in…
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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 highly volatile, hyper-competitive…
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Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation
The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers, an expressive, playful supplement to computer-based labor. This course will master techniques in hand…
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Ecological Do-Nothing Landforms
This design seminar will explore the reciprocal relationship between techniques of landforming and ecological analysis through precedent studies, relational digital modeling, computational analysis, and image-making.
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Faux: Design, Performance, and Perception of Fake Materials
Materials are everywhere. They remain central to our lives and to contemporary design, despite the omnipresence of digital information. Yet, the fact that many materials…
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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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Theories of Landscape as Urbanism
Charles Waldheim, Gareth Doherty
This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics…
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The Idea of Environment
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations, and actions that calls them…
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Type and the Idea of the City: Architecture’s Search for what is Common
Open to all students, the seminars will equip students with the theoretical and historical understanding of type as a heuristic device in the discourse of…
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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, plan-non-chalant, and, most importantly, the present. We…
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Why Not Cultural Systems? Expanding Our Value System Beyond Nature and Ecology
This seminar will examine the planning, design and stewardship opportunities and constraints frequently encountered when dealing with cultural landscapes. In addition to addressing foundational principles,…
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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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Philosophy of Technology: From Marx and Heidegger to AI, Genome Editing, and Geoengineering (HKS)
Technology shapes how power is exercised in society, and thereby also shapes how the present changes into the future. Technological innovation is all around us,…
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Housing Matters
This seminar investigates the politics of housing by focusing on the relationships between spatial, material, and typological decisions architects make when designing housing and the…
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FORESTS: Histories and Future Narratives
“Forests: Histories and Future Narratives.” From a distance, all forests appear to be remarkably similar: they are ecosystems characterized by the dominance of trees, they…
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Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture
This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a…
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Building, Texts, and Contexts: Architecture’s Multiple Modernisms
K. Michael Hays, Ana Maria Leon Crespo
Modernism is aligned with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events, new conceptualizations of their appearance, and changing event structures and temporalities. At…
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Michelangelo Architect: Precedents, Innovation, Influence
An exploration of Italian Renaissance architecture and urbanism through the persona of Michelangelo as witness, agent, and inspiration. We look at architecture and urbanism in…
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Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common
This lecture course examines selected cities between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., beginning with ancient Athens and ending with the rebuilding…
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Building and Urban Conservation and Renewal – Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the values inherent in a property, site or district that must be understood to craft conservation policy and interventions that will reveal, complement,…
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Architecture and Construction: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital
The course aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between architecture and construction through the study of key historical episodes such as…
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The Project and the Territory: Japan Story
What is the future of urbanization?What role can design play in shaping that future? What will happen to the conflicting tensions between urban and…
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Displaced Becomings –The Many Faces of Modern Architecture in Sinophone Asia
The idea was that in [a] society, one that's incompletely modernized… the temporal dynamics of that society, and of the modernism that it produces, will…
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Plants of Ritual: Creating a Spiritual Connection to the Designed Landscape
The seminar aims to investigate and catalog plants that have a spiritual/emotional value to the public and to individuals in the designed landscape. The seminar…
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Urban Design Contexts and Operations
The course focusses essentially on modern, including contemporary, contexts and operations that have emerged during the past 100 or so years. Here urban design is…
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Exhibiting Architecture: Percent for Art
Departing from Beverly Buchanan’s environmental sculptures – arrangements of monolithic mounds of concrete and cement that the artist placed throughout Georgia, USA, in the late…
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Histories of Architecture Against
This course focuses on the challenges of writing histories of architecture against—against capital, against the state, or other types of power. In the first half…
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Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management
Richard Peiser, David Hamilton, Charles Wu
This course teaches the fundamentals of real estate for all major property types and land uses. The various stages of the development process, including site…
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Land Use and Environmental Law
As a scarce and necessary resource, land triggers competition and conflict over its possession and use. For privately owned land, the market manages much of…
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Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design
Field Studies in Real Estate, Urban Planning and Design: Redeveloping the town center of a historic New England Town and New Visions for redeveloping one…
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Equitable Development and Housing Policy in Urban Settings (at HKS)
An introduction to policymaking in American cities, focusing on economic, demographic, institutional, and political settings. It examines inclusive and equitable economic development and job growth…
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Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Quantitative
This course introduces students to quantitative analysis and research methods for urban planning. The course begins with an examination of how quantitative methods fit within…
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Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Qualitative
How can planners understand places in a rich, meaningful, and yet systematic way? This module examines how qualitative approaches can be used in planning practice…
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Design for Real Estate
This course provides a comprehensive understanding of the role of design and design professionals in real estate, from project conception to project delivery to post-occupancy…
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Real Estate, Society, Environment
Lourdes Germán, Daniel Hernandez, Carlos Martín
This course examines the emerging context for real estate practice worldwide that measures success not solely by the financial bottom line but also by achievement…
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Housing and Urbanization in the United States
Jennifer Molinsky, James Stockard
This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those with an interest…
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Urban Ethnographies
Planners’ understanding of social process and cultural values is often woefully inadequate, and their thinking is dominated by a “one-size-fits-all” approach and by excessive attention…
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Land Policy and Planning for Equitable and Fiscally Healthy Communities
The course highlights the role land policy and land-based financing play in the development of equitable and fiscally healthy communities in developed and developing countries.
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Transportation Economics and Finance
We can define transportation infrastructure to comprise all the physical objects that provide mobility: including everything from trains, highways, and ports to sneakers, trails, and…
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Policy Analysis: A Tool for Evidence-Based Decision Making
Policy analysis is problem solving. It involves making systematic comparisons across a set of alternatives to address a particular policy or planning problem, usually in…
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Inclusive Cities in the Global South: From Development Narratives to Urban Forms
This seminar examines the notions of social inclusion and exclusion in cities according to different categories, including households’ income (wealthy and poor), identity (gender, race,…
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Race and Real Estate [Module]
The course is dedicated to an examination of race and real estate, in which we will explore their historical and contemporary intersectionality throughout the United…
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It Takes A Village [Module]
“It takes a village” to develop a real estate project is more than just a clever catch-phrase. In any city around the world, assembling and…
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Affordable Housing and Community Development
Explores issues relating to the development, financing, and management of housing affordable to very low, low, and moderate income households. Examines community-based development corporations, public…
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Urban Economics and Market Analysis
Rachel Meltzer, Richard Barkham
This course introduces economic frameworks for understanding the benefits and challenges of living in, working in, and managing cities and their built environments. Urban economics…
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Environmental Systems 1
This course is the first of a two-module sequence in building technology (6121, 6122) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. Objectives:–…
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Environmental Systems 2
Purpose: This course is the second of a two-module sequence in building technology (6121, 6122) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. Objective:…
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Construction Systems
This course introduces students to methods of construction: conceptually, historically, and practically. We will consider how construction techniques emerge in relation to architectural desires and…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies I
This course recognizes plants as one of the most expressive materials of the artform — a living medium that distinguishes the discipline from the other…
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Structural Design II
This course is a continuation of GSD 6227 and completes the introduction to the analysis and design of building structures. Both 6227 and 6229 are…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies III: Ecology and the Design World
Ecology and the Design World (David Moreno-Mateos): Landscape architecture incorporates an additional layer of complexity to design that is less present in other design disciplines:…
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Climate by Design
Amy Whitesides, Kira Clingen, David Moreno Mateos, Pamela Conrad
Through a series of case studies, this course will explore paradigmatic design responses to the climate crisis including adaptation (both for communities to remain and…
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Material Systems: Digital Design and Fabrication
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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Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology
Timothy Dekker, Nicholas Nelson
This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to…
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Introduction to Computational Design
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
#GSD6338 is an introductory course on Computational Design, with a particular focus on architecture, landscape and urbanism. In this course, we will understand "Computational Design"…
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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 digital agents in…
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Advanced Topics on Embodied Carbon in Buildings
Present assumptions indicate that the management of our material world accounts for more than half of all global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Around forty percent…
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Working Landscapes: Natural Resiliency And Redesign
Ecological principles and their application to design and planning will be emphasized. Topics will include understanding human impacts on natural systems through engineering and design,…
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Power||Energy: Mapping the Thickened Ground of Labor
The definition of energy is dominated by a western logic of energy as a resource. This understanding was focused on the primary objective of putting…
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Transformable Design Methods
The aim of Transformable Design is to is to introduce new ways of thinking about design through real-time morphological changes. The course provides a theoretical…
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Foundations of Practice
Jeffry Burchard, Gregg Garmisa, Timothy R. Twomey
For students in the fifth semester of the MArch I degree program, this course examines models and issues that define contemporary professional practice. Requiring students…
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Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society I
In the spirit of Herbert Simon, Frameworks engages diverse but complementary perspectives and techniques to identify, diagnose and constructively address consequential social challenges, sometimes referred…
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Practices of Landscape Architecture
This course presents the application of landscape ideas as a process of engagement and building amidst financial, legal, cultural, political, and professional contexts. The course…
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Frameworks of Practice
How should we practice today? The discipline, the profession, and the practice of architecture are invented and designed things. And the roles, relationships, protocols, and…
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Elements of the Urban Stack
The Urban Stack is a pedagogical framework for understanding the infrastructures of power that operate in relationship to practice. These constructs shape the design and…
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Contemporary Landscape Architecture of Korea and Politics
This will be the first one in a series on Korean landscape architecture, focusing on practice and through the lens of politics: the birth of…
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Independent Study by Candidates for Master’s Degrees
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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Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD
What does it take to complete a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design? The seminar introduces different types of theses that…
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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
(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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Preparation of MLA Design Thesis
“The natural sciences are concerned with how things are . . . Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be.”…
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Independent Design Engineering Project I
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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Preparation of Doctoral Thesis Proposal
Independent study with doctoral advisor to produce a preliminary literature review. Prerequisite: Enrollment in GSD DDes program. …
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Thesis in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Thesis in Satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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Thesis Extension in Satisfaction of Degree Doctor of Design
Thesis extension in satisfaction of the degree Doctor of Design.
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MArch II Proseminar
This course provides a forum for critical discussion of contemporary design practices that is exploratory and speculative in nature. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and…
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Proseminar in Landscape Architecture
“Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their…
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Proseminar in PUBLICS: Of the Public. In the Public. By the Public
Public, as a noun or adjective, is not confined to a single discipline, practice, narrative or theory. It is instead, a complicated construct that can…
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Proseminar in MEDIUMS: On Making Culture, Technology, and Art
In this proseminar, we will take a critical look at the current and emerging landscape of design technologies and technologically driven design. We will examine…
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Proseminar in NARRATIVES: Word and Image as Narrative Structure
In our Proseminar, we will grapple with a selection of critical discussions on word and image as these have been formulated in aesthetic philosophy, literary…
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Proseminar in ECOLOGIES: Interrelated, In-between, Dynamic
Our aim in the proseminar is to explore the inherent inventedness of ecology as a field of inquiry, its distinctly relational nature, and the potential…