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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Talking Architecture
This seminar is intended to contribute to the Public Events Program at Harvard GSD. During this third version of the course, students…
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Bookmaking
Remment Koolhaas, Irma Boom, Phillip Denny
What was the book? What will it become? This team-taught, project-based seminar charts new trajectories for the future of the book. In tandem with exercises…
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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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The History of Heritage and the Heritage of History
This is a seminar course designed for design students who are interested in understanding the cultural background behind heritage theories, conservation practices, and related socio-cultural…
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OPEN WORK [Module 1]
Half a century ago, architecture became open-ended. Buildings would change and grow, architects argued, not unlike cities. Architects embraced impermanence, promoted flexibility, timed obsolescence, and…
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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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Chinese Modern Architecture and Urbanism
Modernity as a topic is generally both a historical period and an ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose…
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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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Resilience Under New Water Regimes: The Case of Monterrey, [MX] Day-Zero
Globally, the world is experiencing a period of unprecedented drought, the worst in 1200 years according to NASA. With rising global average temperatures, water is…
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How To Be a Critic
This workshop seminar will focus the student’s ability to think and write critically about buildings, the city, and the urban landscape, and in the process…
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“Speaking of Architecture…” (Authorship/Objecthood/Criticism)
This seminar is motivated by the premise that all architecture is “architecture,” and is offered as a polemical dispute with the myriad attempts to remove…
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Yeah, they were all Yellow: Asian Feminist Architectural Possibilities
Intervention and reflection have been made in the primarily male-dominated architectural field with its phallogocentric Western metaphysics foundation, particularly since the 1980s. Yet much effort…
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Authenticity and Historical Dimension – Conditions for Landscape Projects
The reference to existing or lost traces of a site in general or to specific elements and artefacts in particular have been of eminent importance…
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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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Creating Environmental Markets
There is a way out of the climate box we have created, though resistance to the necessary ecological transformation remains intense. Sunk investments in existing…
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Public Space
In a digital age, does physical public space matter? Tahrir Square, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Gezi Park, the streets of Hong Kong, Zuccotti Park, Madrid Rio,…
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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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Non-Professional Practice
“The particular threat to the intellectual today, whether in the West or the non-Western world, is not the academy, nor the suburbs, nor the appalling…
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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 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
This pro-seminar is a core requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic areas that range…