Courses
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Communication for Designers
“The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings. In the end the communicator…
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Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf-life in the Supermarket Landscape
The supermarket shelf is a highly volatile, hyper-competitive space. On this shelf products struggle to maximize every possible advantage, all in a…
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Conservation of Older Buildings: Techniques and Technics
This course will teach how to understand existing building form and fabric and how to conserve these. Where does one even start…
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Culture, Conservation and Design
This proseminar addresses issues of Critical Conservation, an evolving discipline that illuminates the bridge between Cultural Meaning, Identity and Context as part…
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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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Field Methods and Living Collections
Confronting the reality of environmental degradation requires more than remote sensing, statistical analysis or institutional restructuring. As images of the changing planet…
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An Unsentimental Look at Architecture and Social Craft
Designers of the built environment have had an on-again/off-again relationship with social agency. Progressive design and social outcomes were closely linked in early modernism. However,…
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Material, Atmosphere and Ambience
The seminar introduces understanding of atmosphere and ambience in the discourse of material practice in architecture. The materials are contextual and cultural manifestation tool of…
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It’s a Wild World: Future Scenarios for Feral Landscapes
The urban wild, as a classification of open space, typifies the polyvalent factors at play in city transformation. As both a misunderstood…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: The Invention of the Countryside – A Critical Iconography
This Course is for students in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. This seminar invites students to analyze the political iconography of the countryside. Whereas in…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar: Tokyo – Catalysts for Change
This Course is for students in the Toyko Study Abroad Program. "Tokyo – Catalysts for change" is an invitation to having an insight into the…
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North American Seacoasts and Landscapes: Discovery Period to the Present
Selected topics in the history of the North American coastal zone, including the seashore as wilderness, as industrial site, as area of…
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Signal, Image, Architecture II: Automation, or the Politics of Very Large Numbers
If the first version of this seminar sought to understand computational images through an anthropology of the disappearance of “orthographic life”—and, in doing so,…
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Practical Wisdom 2
“…the Moderns find themselves face to face with raw materiality, or they have to turn towards representations that reside only in their…
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Architecture and its Texts (1650-1800)
This seminar focuses on a selection of important architectural writings from the late 17th and 18th centuries, with the aim of exploring…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: Designing and Managing Worlds in the Countryside
This Course is for students in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. One of the best medieval copies of Vitruvius’s De Architectura is in the codex…
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Healthy Places
The connections between health, well-being, and place are a complex. This class focuses on four topics that will be important in coming…
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The Spatial Politics of Land: A Comparative Perspective
This course focuses on the deeply contested and political processes of land-use planning, i.e. of allocating land amongst different, often competing uses,…
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The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change
Gentrification and the real and perceived impacts that neighborhood change has on longtime local residents as well as new dwellers, is complicated…
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Public Space
In a digital age, does physical public space matter? Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Madrid Rio, and the High Line argue yes, with ambitions ranging from…
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Changing Natural and Built Coastal Environments
Steven Apfelbaum, Katharine Parsons
This course will examine natural and anthropogenic processes affecting the coastal zone and nearshore environment. Ecological principles and their application to design…
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Mapping II: Geosimulation
This advanced lecture course is a continuation of GSD6322 Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation. In Mapping II, students will learn the theories…
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Hybrid Formations: In Pursuit of Novel Form
“I do not oppose form, but only form as a goal.”– Ludwig Mies van der Rohe “Before computers, you'd start designing…
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Visualization (at SEAS)
An introduction to key design principles and techniques for visualizing data. Covers design practices, data and image models, visual perception, interaction principles, visualization tools, and…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar: Tectonic Tradition: Structure and Material in Japan
In Japan, design, both traditional and contemporary, is inseparable from materials and how they are constructed together. In this seminar, guest speakers are invited to…
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Frameworks of Practice
Since the dawn of the technological society that emerged after World War II, the normative practice of architecture, particularly in the United…
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Aggregate Effects: Re-Tooling the Small City for Environmental and Social Impact at Multiple Scales
Discussions on the contemporary city often focus on the challenges of large metropolitan areas. The convergence of competing economic, geographic, and environmental systems…
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Real Estate and City Making in China
Real estate has increasingly become a compelling force in the process of city making, one uniquely capable of leading and guiding multiple steps in the…
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Ecology, Infrastructure, Power
Extraction redefines our understanding of urbanism in the 21st century. If everything we build comes from the ground, then extraction is the process and practice…
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Ecological Urbanism Field Research Seminar in China (summer course)
This summer field research seminar will offer an overview of ecological urbanism within a Chinese context. Integrating theory with practice and speculation, students will build…
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Emergent Urbanism: Planning and Design Visions for the city of Hermosillo, Mexico
This project-based class focuses on the planning and design of sustainable strategies for cities in the developing world, using the city of…
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Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD
This seminar is intended to provide the theoretical and methodological foundation for completing a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. By…
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MDes Open Projects 1
“Open Projects” is a two-semester course sequence for second year MDes students. As the graduating requirement for students enrolled in the 4-Semester Track of the…
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Preparation of MLA Design Thesis
This research seminar is intended for Master in Landscape Architecture candidates electing to pursue a design thesis in their final year of study. The course…
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Proseminar in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology
This research seminar is intended for Master in Design Studies (MDES) candidates entering the Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology (ULE) stream as well as Master in Landscape…
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Doctoral Program Proseminar
This pro-seminar is one way of fulfilling a requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic…