Courses
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Landscape Representation II
The Landscape Representation II course will examine the relationship between terrain and the dynamic landscape it supports and engenders. The course explores and challenges the…
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Digital Media: Neural Bodies
This course explores generative artificial intelligence for volumetric, and especially architectural, modeling by considering the building as body from a computational and…
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Digital Media: Writing Form
This course offers an introduction to the field of design and computation through the essential pursuit of writing form. Setting aside the…
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Expository Cartography
Today’s cartographic convention, software, and methods of data harvesting all homogenize how designers approach and communicate through maps. Across practice and academia these forces produce…
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Theories and Practices of Landscape Architecture
What do you need to know in order to understand this landscape? How do design culture and design thinking transform over time? How are cultural…
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Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Origins and Ends
Our aim is to address the general rupture caused by the rise of modernity—that is, by the social, economic, technological, and ideological transformations accompanying the…
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Histories of Landscape Architecture II
Designed gardens and landscapes are cultural artifacts that encompass three main expectations: pragmatic needs, cultural significance, and aesthetic order. Although some landscape narratives often ignore…
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Histories and Theories of Urban Form and Design
This course provides an introduction to the critical histories and theories of urban intervention and formation, and to the disciplinary practices of urban design in…
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Urban Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative-Historical Origins and Applications
This course takes as its point of departure the historical and national origins of planning as a discipline, assesses its evolution over time and across…
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Modernization in the Visual United States Environment, 1890-2035
Here find an ecology of changes, a course on the ecosystem of change so rapid most thoughtful Americans know it as modernization. Design remembered and…
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Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies
Infrastructure plays a decisive role in urban development and in the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical perspective. History…
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Competing Visions of Modernity in Japan
The course will trace the parallel trajectories of two of modern Japan’s most influential schools of architectural thought, represented by Tange Kenzō (1913–2005) on the…
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Environmentalisms: How to Have a Politics?
Today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: as the words “neoliberalism” and “environment” have come to occupy the center of our political and cultural…
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Urban Design Contexts and Operations
The course focusses essentially on modern, including contemporary, contexts and operations that have emerged during the past 100 or so years. Here urban design is…
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The Architect as Producer
In 2020, the interconnected crisis of racist violence, environmental collapse, and the global pandemic prompted profound changes in how we understand what architecture is and…
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Public and Private Development
Cities are developed by a complex blend of public and private actors and actions. This course employs a combination of lectures, discussions, readings, case studies,…
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Equitable Development and Housing Policy in Urban Settings (at HKS)
An introduction to policymaking in American cities, focusing on economic, demographic, institutional, and political settings. It examines inclusive and equitable economic development and job growth…
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Advanced Real Estate Development and Finance
This course builds on GSD 5204 and comparable introductory real estate courses offered by other schools at Harvard. It is an essential course for anyone…
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U. S. Housing Markets, Problems, and Policies
This course examines the operation of U.S. housing markets, the principal housing problems facing the nation, and policy approaches to address them within the existing…
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Travel Behavior and Forecasting
All planning is based on planners’ beliefs about the future. In many cases, the most important (and most uncertain) aspects of the future relate to…
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Climate Justice
Recent discourse around climate change—including debates about the Anthropocene, Green New Deal legislation, the dire warnings of the IPCC, to name a few—increasingly make evident…
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Urban Design for Planners
Urban design is a complex and interdisciplinary process that indelibly shapes the economic, social, and physical character of places and communities, large and small. This…
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Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation Building II (at HKS)
This community based research course focuses on some of the major issues Native American Indian tribes and nations face in the 21st century. It provides…
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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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Designer Developer
Design and finance can both be understood as universal languages. Although architects, landscape architects, and planners are trained to produce and interpret design, it is…
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Land Loss, Reclamation, and Stewardship in Contemporary Native America
Daniel D’Oca, Eric Henson, Philip Deloria
This course will explore critical dimensions in American Indian land issues: historical land loss, contemporary tribal governmental efforts at land reclamation, stewardship, and co-management. We…
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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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Planning Sustainable Built Environments
Modern infrastructure that invisibly delivers clean water and reliable power is often held up as a norm. Yet, in reality, it often fails, or even…
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Affordable and Mixed-Income Housing Development, Finance, and Management
Explores issues relating to the development, financing, and management of housing affordable to very low, low, and moderate income households. Examines community-based development corporations, public…
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Building Simulation
This course is the third of four modules (6121, 6122, 6125, & 6126) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture. Objective: The best…
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Materials
This course explores the science of materials. How do we classify materials? How do we build with materials? What are the energy, health, and societal…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies II
Karen Janosky, Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Kirt Rieder
Topography is one of the primary and most powerful elements of landscape architecture, forming a foundation for plant growth, habitat, the flow of water and…
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Structural Design 1
This course introduces students to the analysis and design of structural systems. The fundamental principles of statics, structural loads, and rigid body equilibrium are considered…
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Cases in Contemporary Construction
As the final component in the required sequence of technology courses, this professionally-oriented course develops an integral understanding of the design and construction of buildings…
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Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV
GSD 6242 is the fourth and final course in the Ecologies, Techniques and Technologies landscape core sequence. It is a required course for all MLA…
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Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation
Maps both represent reality and create it. It is in the context of this contention that this course presents the fundamentals of mapping, spatial analysis,…
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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 lens of structural…
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Ecosystem Restoration
Given the current speed of habitat and species loss caused by human development, the restoration of degraded ecosystems is one of the greatest challenges humankind…
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Procedural Fields: Functional Design of Discrete Hyperdimensional Spaces
Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
This course will introduce participants to computational methods for the generation of discrete multi-dimensional media, using functional definitions. Digital modeling techniques are at the core…
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Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones… it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from…
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Design Teaching Lab (DTL)
This course teaches design teaching for those interested in pursuing parallel paths in design and education. Starting from an understanding of design as a culture…
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International Real Estate and Urban Developments
Real estate, in the international realm, is anchored at the intersection of economic activities, capital flows, and the spatial transformation of the environment. While different…
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For Everyone a Garden: The Evolution of High-Rise Modular Housing Systems [1-unit, Module 2 course]
High density urban housing remains one of the puzzling unresolved issues of our time. Many experiments confuse issues of typology with those of construction methodologies.
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Thesis project / Project Thesis
Lisa Haber-Thomson, Eric Howeler
As the culminating effort for the Master of Architecture degree, a “Thesis” entails multiple expectations. It is a demonstration not only of competency and expertise,…