Courses
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Responsive Environments: Glitchy Food
Today, more than ever before, we feel the technological presence as part of our everyday life. The all-pervasive nature of digital information and technological interaction…
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Critical Conservation: Urban Cultural Ecologies of Progressive Places
Critical Conservation seeks to disentangle the complex web of 19th c. elite values of historic preservation and 20th c. mass-culture strategies that together complicate 21st…
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Design Anthropology: Objects, Landscapes, Cities
In recent years, there has been a movement in anthropology toward a focus on objects, while design and planning have been moving toward the understanding…
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Canceled: Urbanism, Quantified: Modalities of mapping and modeling in contemporary design practice
Contemporary design practice has a habit of qualifying the word “urbanism” with any number of modifiers: Ecological Urbanism. Landscape Urbanism. Relational Urbanism. Tactical Urbanism. These…
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The Subject and the City
This seminar takes as its premise that a history and theory of the city cannot be known without an accompanying history and theory of the…
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The Mixed-Reality City: The urban fabric as landscape, network, and platform
The contemporary city is constituted by multiple overlapping, intermixing realities articulated across built form and imagined space, individual experience and collective memory, embodied sensation and…
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Philosophy of Technology
\”In addition to man’s ageless obligation to meet the threat of things, he bears for the first time the responsibility of prime agent in the…
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Light Structures II
Light Structure The seminar is a one yearlong study of Light Structure spanning two semesters, fall 2014 and spring 2015. The students can…
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Urban Grids: Score for Designing the City: Seminal Projects
Framework: Within a larger research scope on “Revisiting the urban grids in the XXI century”, this seminar will focus on the investigation of…
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Potential Architecture
The work of the architect, the urban designer and designers at large is conditioned by a number of factors that delimit and demarcate the designer\’s…
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Berlin Study Abroad Seminar: Plattenbau vs. the New Communal. Mass Housing, Alternative Dwelling Models, and a theory of Shared Spaces in Germany
With equal emphasis on historical and theoretical analysis, this seminar investigates the potential offered by various forms of historic alternative dwelling, and new ways to…
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Adventure and Fantasy Simulation, 1871-2036
Visual constituents of high adventure since the late Victorian era, emphasizing wandering woods, rogues, tomboys, women adventurers, faerie antecedents, halflings, crypto-cartography, Third-Path turning, martial arts,…
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Translating Architecture: Walter Gropius and the Legacy of the Bauhaus
The inspiration behind this course is Walter Gropius (1883-1969), German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who subsequently moved to the United States, and…
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Modern Architecture and Urbanism in China
Modernizing influences, largely from the hands of foreign powers, first forcefully entered China in the aftermath of the Opium War and signing of the Treaty…
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The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of an Architectural Idea
One of the arresting images in Michel Serres\’s Rome: The Book of Foundations is the idea that history is \”a knot of different times\”—a knot…
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Structure, Infrastructure, and Ornament
With the rise of digital design and fabrication, ornament is back. Its return has been accompanied with recurring interrogations regarding the need to redefine tectonics,…
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Narratives of Design Science
From Aldo Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography to Buckminster Fuller’s “Design Science”, the intellectual framework and heuristic tools of the exact sciences such as physics and mathematics…
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Berlin Study Abroad Seminar: The Urban Architecture of Berlin: From Schinkel to the Present
After abstract modernist planning lost contact with the physical aspects of the built environment, we returned to looking at the city at the scale of…
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Territorial Intelligence in Landscapes of Production
In this millennium of intense urbanization, design and its value will strengthen around the assurance of data gathering and its argumentation as evidence of complex…
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Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
Holly Samuelson, Frank Apeseche
How can one optimize the benefits of environmental or social sustainability while generating a higher return on investment in buildings? Where are the opportunities for…
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Territorial Organization Beyond Agglomeration: Towards an Atlas of the Global Hinterland
This research seminar starts with an understanding of urbanization as a process of generalized territorial organization where cities, metropolises, megalopolises are the focal points in…
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20th Century African Cities
General Context Most capital cities in Africa were designed and built during European colonization. Although capital cities were originally modest in size, they were…
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Material Ecologies Workshop
Landscapes are shaped by continuous flows of materials and energy driven by anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic forces. Designers participate in this reorganization of materials around the…
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(Re)fabricating Tectonic Prototypes
Leire Asensio-Villoria, instructor, with Hanif Kara, structural consultant The course is framed by a general ambition to develop explorations in digital design, fabrication and parametric…
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Quantitative Aesthetics: Re-sensing / Augmenting reality
This course is looking at computational approaches to digital media that allow us to analyze and reinterpret our environment as a signal, creating interactive interventions…
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Designed Porous Media
How do trees get their shape, and why is this shape so similar to other natural forms, such as river deltas, lungs, and lighting strikes?…
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Structural Surfaces
This course is about maximum effect with minimum means. Complex surfaces present a wide variety of construction and structural challenges, as well as a rich…
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Poetics of Planting Design
Poetics of Planting Design is a workshop-based seminar built around a series of investigations into the spatial implications of plants in Landscape Architecture. The course…
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Visualization (at SEAS)
SEAS Computer Science 171 Catalog Number: 8877 Tu., Th., 2:30-4, and a weekly section to be arranged. Please check the…
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Contemporary Practices in Urbanism
Mark Johnson, Christopher Glaisek
This course will provide an in-depth study of the range of practice issues, methods and strategies for achieving built works in the urban context, including…
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Research Seminar on New Towns in China
This research seminar is the first phase of a 2 1/2 year research project on new towns sponsored by the China Vanke Co. Vanke is…
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Livelihoods and Urban Form: Mumbai in a Comparative Perspective
Small-scale manufacturing in workshops and homes, small-scale trading on street corners or makeshift markets, car guarding, waste collecting, among a myriad of informal activities, is…
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Vegetal City: Projecting Urban Canopy
Gary R. Hilderbrand, Sonja Dümpelmann
In this seminar/workshop we will explore an under-studied but crucially important urban realm—the designed, adapted vegetative canopy—through descriptive, analytical, and projective methods. We will build…
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SURPLUS HOUSING: Models of Collective Living in South America.
Housing as typology is one of the richest representations of a city’s history and evolution of culture. The gradual collection of dwellings in multiple forms…
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REAL: Genome of the Built Environment: Measuring the Unseen
The built environment is one of the most fascinating yet enigmatic artifact of the human being. We perceive it as a complex entity resulting from…
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Research Methods in Landscape Architecture
This seminar offers an overview of various types and practices of research methodology in contemporary landscape architecture. Central to the ambitions of the course is…
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Proseminar in Art, Design and the Public Domain
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Silvia Benedito
The proseminar will serve as a space for artistic and design experimentation, and discussion intended to foreground students\’ emergent interests, concepts, and methodologies toward their…
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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…