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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Constructing Visual Narratives of Place
The seminar explores the representation of identity and memory in the city and its territory. The case study is Boston in its…
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Curatorial Practice: 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…
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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…
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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 to…
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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…
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Erasing the Line While Drawing
. . . la «chora» platonicienne est à la fois matrice et empreinte, notre milieu est à notre égard dans un état de mouvance passive et active: il est le domaine dans lequel nous agissons, et qui porte les marques de cette action, mais il est aussi le domaine qui nous affecte, et auquel nous appartenons de quelque manière . . . —Augustin Berque Ecoumene This seminar will explore the…
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Building Conservation and Renewal: Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the spatial, material, and broad cultural values inherent in a building or site that must be understood to craft interventions…
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Topology and Imagination: Between Chinese Landscapes and Architecture
This course deals with landscape architecture and architecture in contemporary China. Its purpose is twofold: to articulate new perspectives on the challenges…
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Visionary Architecture
This seminar will take a selective approach to French Visionary Architecture in the late 18th century. We will focus on some of…
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Materiality, Visual Culture, and Media (at AFVS)
What is the place of materiality in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts, architecture, and…
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Manfredo Tafuri and The Historiography And Criticism of Architecture 1960-1990
The seminar focuses on the markedly complex intellectual biography of Manfredo Tafuri, whose work touched upon many fields of knowledge including theories…
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Experimental Infrastructures
Infrastructure is an encompassing term that can refer to anything from railroad ties to social media to ecosystems, and one which has…
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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…
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Action Research for Open Public Realms
"The best way to understand something is to try and change it."—Kurt Lewin Action researchers work with partner communities to define…
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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…
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Integrated Design & Planning for Climate Change
This advanced research seminar in Miami-Dade County, Florida, is thematically focused within the integrated practices associated with designing and planning for climate change at an…
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Modern Housing and Urban Districts: Concepts, Cases and Comparisons
This seminar course will deal with “modern housing” covering a period primarily from 1990 to the present. It will engage with “urban…
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The Spatial Politics of Land: A Comparative Perspective
This course focuses on the deeply contested and political nature of land-use planning. Some would argue that land-use planning is the bread…
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Optimizing Facade Performance: A Deep Dive on Design Decisions
Building envelopes are at the intersection of design, performance, and occupant experience in architectural design. Facades influence many aspects of building performance,…
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Visualization (at SEAS)
This course is an introduction to key design principles and techniques for visualizing data. It covers design practices, data and image models, visual perception, interaction…
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Thing Power in the Arles Region: from Assemblages to Alchemy in the Camargue
Jane Bennett borrows Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of assemblages to argue that humans are not the sole actors in shaping…
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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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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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Preparation of MLA Design Thesis
A thesis is a thematic proposition offered for discussion and debate. A thesis is typically developed through a piece of original research specific to an…
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Proseminar in Landscape Architecture
The proseminar introduces MLA II students to a range of theories and methods in landscape architecture and their implications for practice and research. The focus…
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Proseminar in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology
This required seminar introduces candidates in the MDes Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology (ULE) concentration to the range of individual and group research on urbanism, landscape, and…