Courses
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Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture
Current tendencies in the discipline suggest a split between two opposing architectural projects: the easy project versus the difficult project[1]. Primarily related…
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Off: On a Tangent
“An art professor once told me that in composition, elements should either overlap or there should be some space between them; that…
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Views, With Rooms
Evolving theories on optics, over time and place, have created a set of objects that physically model vision. Each renders vision visible…
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Talking Architecture
What is the use of architects interviewing other architects? Of course, it is about camaraderie, sharing experiences, and providing support. But, if…
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Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices
The Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar investigates art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of contemporary culture and the city. As artists and…
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Type and the Idea of the City: Architecture’s Search for what is Common
Open to all students, the seminars in this course will complement Option Studio 1318: Midtown, Midrise, Mid-door. 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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Material Practice and its Agency
This seminar introduces an understanding of material discourse in design and architecture that affects cultural, social ,economic and political issues. In addition…
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Artificial Intelligence in Contemporary Design Practice
Unprecedented issues, such as climate change, challenge the standard hyper-specialized approach to problem-solving. Within this context, there is a need for professions…
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Thinking Through Soil: the earth in the herbarium
Every material process that shapes the construction of the urban environment passes through the soil at some point. In Thinking Through Soil, we will use…
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Acoustic Space: A Media Archaeology of Building Types
This is a seminar on the past and present relationship between architecture, information technologies, and mass media. More than ever before, we…
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The Fifth Plan
In this seminar we will consider the evolution of the floor plan across five iterations: proto-modern, modern, post-modern, sequel-modern, and, most importantly,…
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The anatomy of (wild)fire, a design quest?
The research seminar examines the anatomy of (wild)fires in the context of climatic disintegration and the dismantling of agro-cultural practices of collectively…
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Regarding an Archive
This will be the last course I will teach before retirement at the end of this academic year. Personally, it is an…
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Urban Grids: Open form for City Design-2
The historic evolution of the city can be tied to “regular systems” that have allowed for rational forms of development, which can…
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Adventure and Fantasy Simulation
Fantasy opens portals to new life forms. It prepares us for supranatural humans, genetic adjustment, non-electronic novelty. It forms the core of…
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Rome
A seminar on the art, architecture, and urbanism of Rome where the layering of material artifacts from successive historical periods provides an…
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Modern Architecture and Urbanism in China
Contrary to many interpretations, by the early Qing Dynasty some modern traits, in the accepted Western sense of modernity, had entered China…
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Case Studies in Conservation and Adaptive Reuse
Traditional conservation practice is increasingly proving inadequate to address the cultural, economic, social and environmental challenges facing the diverse array of buildings…
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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" —…
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Architecture: Histories of the Present
“Poets and prophets, like magicians, learn their craft from predecessors. And just as magicians will invoke the real or supposed source of…
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Natural Histories for Troubled Times, or, Revisiting the ‘Entangled Bank’
This seminar looks at our (troubled) times, its toxic landscapes and eco-unfriendly townscapes, through the lens of natural history. By “lens” we can think immediately…
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History of the Art Museum
This seminar explores the development of the modern art museum as an architectural type, measured against the evolving nature of display objects, audience, urbanity, technology,…
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How Houses Build People (at FAS)
People build houses, but how do houses build people? This course will explore the house in both form and concept throughout pre-industrial Western history, with…
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Other(ed) Architecture: Coloniality, Subject, and Space
The aim of this seminar is to think critically about the authors and agents of architecture and the built environment. In examining relationships between ideological…
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Urbanization and Development
This course examines the relationship between urbanization and development, paying close attention to the ways that public and private sector priorities, legal frameworks, land use…
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Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
Holly Samuelson, Frank Apeseche
This course blends two shades of green: sustainability and money. It focuses on the intersection between environmental and social opportunities in the…
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Community Development: History, Theory, and Imaginative Practice
Community development is a heterogeneous and contested field of planning thought and practice. The profession has generally prioritized people and places that…
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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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Developing for Social Impact
How can real estate development advance social purpose while accounting for development feasibility? With increasing purposefulness, those involved in shaping the…
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CoDesign Field Lab Black Belt Study for the Green New Deal
Biden’s historic win in Georgia, along with the disproportionate impacts of COVID and heightening vulnerability to climate change, bring into clear relief…
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Local Government Solutions to America’s Affordable Rental Housing Challenge
Christopher Herbert, James Stockard, Bennett Hecht
There are more than 10 million renters who are severely housing cost burdened – spending more than 50% of their income on…
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Hidden Figures: The City, Architecture and the Construction of Race and Gender
What hidden figures do our buildings and urban environment conceal? There exists systematic erasure of the contributions of Women of Color…
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Architectures of the New Silk Road
Sino-African Infrastructure-led Urbanization – Deficits and Potentials China’s Belt and Road Initiative can be considered one of the largest and possibly most…
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Modern Housing and Urban Districts: Concepts, Cases and Comparisons
This seminar course deals with ‘modern housing’ covering a period primarily from the 1900s to the present. It engages with ‘urban districts’…
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Enactive Design: Creative Applications through Concurrent Human-Machine Interaction
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
Enactive Design is an advanced research seminar on human-computer interaction. We will explore the role of real-time, bidirectional communication between human and…
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Re-Wilding Harvard
David Moreno Mateos, Joyce Chaplin
This is a year-long class on rewilding, returning a habitat to an earlier form. Students in this course will research historical and cultural definitions of…
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Constructing Heterogeneity
Contemporary buildings are inherently heterogeneous; more often than not they are assemblages of different materials, programs, and subjects. Although homogenous finish layers…
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Data Analysis and Data Physicalization through ‘Wagashi’ Expressions
Data Analysis and Data Physicalization is a research seminar that explores the analysis and communication of data. We use python as a…
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Altered Rural and Urban Landscape Restoration
Steven Apfelbaum, Katharine Parsons, Robert Zimmerman
Highly altered and often engineered rural, coastal, and urban landscapes are difficult and expensive to adapt to the realities of climate change. Food…
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Structures in Landscape Architecture, Joint & Detail
This seminar/workshop explores how to design and make landscapes that are rationally constructed and expressively convincing. This search is focused through the…
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Informal Robotics / New Paradigms for Design & Construction
This course teaches how to create original robotic devices made of light, compliant – informal – materials. New fabrication techniques are transforming…
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Ecosystem restoration
Given the current speed of habitat and species loss caused by human development, the restoration of degraded ecosystem is one of the…
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Non-Professional Practice
"I've never worked for a living. I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. I hope…
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Products of Practice: From code to plan to code
A research seminar that critically mines historic systems of representation, instrumentation, and the product (or media) of the architect in relationship to…
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Methods of Research in Art and Design: A Workshop-tutorial
Methods of Research is a workshop for the development of individual projects in art and design. There is no preset syllabus. Our…
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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…
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Discourse and Research Methods
Research conducted in the Doctor of Design Program (DDes) at the GSD spans a broad range of topics and areas of investigation that not only…