Courses
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Talking Architecture
This seminar is intended to contribute to the Public Events Program at Harvard GSD. Students will team up to produce questions for…
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Wild Ways: Thinking, Relating and Being with/in Wilderness, Wild-ness and Nature in the Anthropocene
This seminar interrogates changing ideas of nature on an urbanizing planet under the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Grounded in transdisciplinary research…
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Type and the Idea of the City: Architecture’s Search for what is Common
Open to all students, the seminars will equip students with the theoretical and historical understanding of type as a heuristic device in…
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Experiments in Public Freedom
Cities are spatial accumulations of capital and culture that can host and must cater to a vast array of different and often…
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Appearance
This seminar will focus on architecture’s appearance, on how architecture is rendered both legible and actionable to its audience. The many labels applied to architecture’s…
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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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Homes on Fields
"How can one understand the towns without understanding the countryside, money without barter, the varieties of poverty without the varieties of luxury,…
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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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Chinese Modern Architecture and Urbanism
This course concentrates on four periods of modern architecture and planning in China. The first spans from the 19th century 'treaty ports'…
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Building and Urban Conservation – Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the values inherent in a property, site or district that must be understood to craft conservation policy and interventions that will reveal, complement,…
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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 an illusion as…
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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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On Architecture and Property
Most generously, property can be understood as a relational term. A property defines that which is characteristic, or unique, to a given thing vis-à-vis another.
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Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment
This course addresses processes and expressions of power in the North American built environment. Focusing on topics of identity and differentiation that…
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Eco Folly- History and Technology
Whether at the scale of the structure, garden, or machine, the folly has emerged as an object of excess—a playful moniker in…
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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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Architectures of the New Silk Road – Spaces of Transnational Infrastructure-led Urbanization
The aim of the seminar entitled “Architectures of the New Silk Road” is to devise pathways for making emerging spaces of urbanization along New Silk…
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Public Finance for Planners: Creating Equitable & Sustainable Communities
Infrastructure challenges are significant and rising. To meet these challenges, urban planners will need to acquire foundational knowledge and skills in the public finance discipline…
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The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change
Gentrification and the real and perceived impacts that neighborhood change has on longtime local residents as well as new dwellers, is complicated…
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Plants and Placemaking – New Ecologies for a Rapidly Changing World
In the face of crises spanning pandemics, political turmoil, and the rapid degradation of the planet’s natural systems—all within a backdrop of myriad inequalities—the power…
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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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Discourse and Research Methods
This course is mandatory for first year doctoral students and its aim is to expose them to faculty and various modes of thought and application…
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Discourse and Methods II
The objective of the seminar is to examine and discuss in depth some of the main methodological issues that students enrolled in the PhD program…