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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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…