Courses
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Responsive Environments: CITY eMOTION
This course looks into the future of the built environment from a technologically augmented point of view, with a strong focus on…
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Constructing Visual Narratives of Place
This 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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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…
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Type and the Idea of the City
Open to all students, the seminars in this course will compliment Option Studio 1504: Type, City, Ecology. It will equip students with…
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Experiments in Public Freedom
As places that accept and encourage multiple representations, cities need spaces to enable unregulated, temporary, and spontaneous events. Due to their role…
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What should or could (scholarly) knowledge look like in the 21st century? A Knowledge Design Seminar
This Humanities Studio course will be run by the metaLAB (at) Harvard team. It will explore the shapes and forms that experimental…
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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…
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Philosophy of Technology
One hundred story buildings. Parametric design. Zero net energy. 3-D printing of exotic structures. What marvels technology brings us! We acknowledge that…
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Urban Grids: Open form for City Design-2
Framework:Within a larger research scope on “Revisiting the urban grids in the XXI century”, this seminar will focus on the investigation…
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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…
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The Aperture Analyzed: The Form and Space of Openings
This seminar will focus on an essential component of architecture, the aperture, which has broad implications for our understanding of space. An…
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Countryside Futurism: Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar
The crisis of the city and the return of rural Utopias: Metropolitan centers have become ruralized. It is the militant spirit of the inner city…
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Architecture after neo-liberalism: Rotterdam Study Abroad
Rem Koolhaas’s text, Junkspace, describes architecture as a by-product of modernity, as its waste. Junkspace demontrates that the core value upon which architecture had been…
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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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Super Landscapes, Super Sports
As a form of play, sports are deeply embedded in human nature and culture. Throughout history, sports have had considerable impact on…
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Making Sacred Space
This course addresses the current crisis in church design by an in depth consideration of the ideas, images, concepts, and legislation that…
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Bavarian Rococo: A Retroactive Manifesto
In the early- and mid-18th century, architects, decorators, and artists in southern Germany produced a huge number of rococo church interiors. The…
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Representing the collective: constructing meaning, legitimizing the discipline
How are the representations and discoures of collectivity organized? From the City Beautiful to Broadacre City, from Camillo Sitte to the Metabolists,…
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Signal, Image, Architecture. Design After Orthography
We labor over surfaces. We expend our energy pushing things across surfaces, and those surfaces constitute for us a kind of substrate…
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Materiality, Visual Culture, and Media (at VES)
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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Architecture and Landscape before and after Watergate
In one of the defining moments of the Senate Watergate Hearings, June 28, 1973, Senator Howard H. Baker, Jr., put the “central…
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Urbanization and International Development
This course interrogates the relationship between urbanization and development. One of the main objectives of the course is to move beyond seeing…
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Design for the Just City
To reside in an American city means to always be in pursuit of the values or inalienable rights that embody the Just…
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Towns and Settlements in Metropolitan Regions
As cities expand into metropolitan regions they inevitably push up against, produce, otherwise engage, and sometimes engulf already established settlements on their…
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Global Perspectives on Shelter Insecurity and Displacement
This course examines the drivers of, and responses to, global shelter insecurity and displacement. It addresses these issues in both the Global…
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Urban Infrastructure, Environment, and Sustainability
Urban infrastructures are socio-technical systems of facilities and services (i.e. energy, telecommunications, transportation, water, waste management, food distribution, housing) vital to the…
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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…
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Creating Real Estate Ventures: a Legal Perspective
The course will examine how a commercial real estate deal is put together to move a project from conception to completion. The…
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Survey of Energy Technology (at SEAS)
Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, and…
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Seminar in Urban Restoration Ecology
Landscape architecture projects, at all scales, can involve elements which add to our natural resources. These restored areas are increasingly shown to…
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Responsive Technologies in Landscape Architecture
The interface between the constructed environment and ecological systems is slowly blurring strategies in urbanism, biological engineering, and technological interface. These strategies…
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HYBRID FORMATIONS: Luftschloss
‘Luftschloss’ – (English translation: a castle in the sky) is a German term commonly used since the 16th century describing the creation…
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Structures in Landscape Architecture
Topics Covered· • How to think about structure visually and qualitatively as an aspect of landscape architectural design.• The structural…
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Mechatronic Optics
The drawing as a certain transcription of vision into operational, communicative, and instructional notation is at the very core of design. Deeply…
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Planted Form and Re-Formation: Horticultural Interpretation and Invention
Danielle Choi, Kimberly Mercurio
Planted Form and Re-Formation is a seminar that investigates how and why vegetation (as a living design medium) changes over time, and…
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Thermal Tectonics for the Next Billion People
In the maelstrom of geopolitical and geophysical pressures, can you see opportunities to imagine, project and create new patterns of living? A…
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Informal Robotics / New Paradigms for Design & Construction
Today new materials and fabrication techniques are transforming the field of robotics. Rather than rigid metal parts connected by mechanical components, robots…
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SURPLUS HOUSING: From Project to Model
Housing as typology is one of the richest representations of a city’s history and evolution of culture. The gradual collection of dwellings…
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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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What is a Thesis? Conversations on Means and Methods of the Thesis Project
How does one frame the architectural problem? How does one begin the thesis project? This proseminar provides a platform for students to workshop and develop…
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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…