Courses
-
Neuralisms Shenzhen: Fictions of Type and Territory
Shenzhen is China’s city of the future, a manufacturing and product development hub unlike any in the world. It is a place where innovation in…
-
Housing & Infrastructure in Yucatán: Beyond the Mayan Train
The Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico has been described as “one big flat slab of limestone gently slanting into the sea.” It is a place…
-
Affordability Now!
The United States is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. Over the last two decades, rents have risen far faster than renters’ incomes, resulting in…
-
Novi Sad ? The Agency of the Urban Ensemble: Community ? Action ? City
The main objective in this studio is to critically explore Novi Sad, Serbia, the European Capital of Culture 2021. In Novi Sad, we will research…
-
Feeding Boston
The development of postindustrial food supply systems parallels the explosion of the modern city. This studio will deal with an ordinary matter whose future impacts…
-
Extreme Urbanism 6: Designing Sanitation Infrastructure
This studio examines the issue of sanitation infrastructure in Mumbai, with a special focus on community toilets in the city’s informal settlements. The site…
-
Large Scale Projects to Create New Centralities in Shanghai. Potentials for the Regular City
The studio focuses on a study of capacity of big urbanistic projects to direct the growth and transformation of large metropolises. It takes the example…
-
Designing Atmospheres and Technologies for Social Interaction
The knowledge economy has become the main engine of economic prosperity in urban areas. High-tech talent and industry have moved back to many cities, raising…
-
Future of Streets in Los Angeles
The Future of Streets studio in Los Angeles will investigate the impact of new mobility technologies on the built environment of LA, seeking solutions that…
-
Patterned Justice: Design Languages for a Just Pittsburgh
Christopher Alexander’s seminal 1977 book “A Pattern Language” describes that people designing their environments rely on certain "languages” that allow them to articulate and communicate…
-
Re-thinking a Humanist Skyscraper City
As the birthplace of the modern Skyscraper, the city of Chicago holds a place in history as one of great architectural innovation. From the first…
-
The New Selma
More than three years have passed since a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson shot and killed an unarmed black…
-
A Campus in a City – A City in A Campus: Harvard and Allston
While Harvard University’s roots are firmly planted in the City of Cambridge, the university now owns more land in the City of Boston. The slow…
-
Gendering Urban Development: Making room for women in urban planning and design in Argentina
Chelina Odbert, Ignacio Cardona
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” – Jane Jacobs Having adopted the…
-
Multiple Miamis
This interdisciplinary studio will take on questions of how design can address issues of inequity, race, affordability, and resilience in the context of the contemporary…
-
The Agency of Mezcal in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico
The Oaxaca Valley in Southern Mexico is known for its cultural heritage but also for its high levels of poverty and unemployment. Limited access to…
-
Quito and the Elasticity of the Spanish American Block
Using the city of Quito as a laboratory, this studio examines the urban legacy, current decline, and future opportunities of the Spanish-American colonial grid. It…
-
Zhengzhou: Designing Critical Nodes for the “Urban Grids”
The fast-growing process in the Metropolis is associated with the large expansion of buildings and infrastructure, but also to the radical transformation of previous urban…
-
The Industrious City: Rethinking Urban Industry in the Digital Age
Markus Schaefer, Hiromi Hosoya
Cities have always been places where commerce and production, working and living, are physically and functionally integrated. Only with the rise of industry have zoning…
-
Extreme Urbanism V: Exploring Hybrid Housing Typologies, Elphinstone Estate, Mumbai
This studio will focus on questions of housing in the city of Mumbai. Exponential real estate values coupled with a burgeoning population and lack of…
-
Urban Disobedience: 99 Provocations to Disrupt Injustice in St. Louis
The legacy of discriminatory laws, urban disinvestment, the decline of the industrial economy, shifts to a knowledge-based economy, concentrated poverty, physical, social and political divides,…
-
Between Earth and Sky: A Building for the HafenCity, Hamburg
The setting for this studio is the HafenCity in Hamburg, which is currently one of Europe’s most ambitious urban transformations. Over twenty years to date,…
-
The Unfinished City. Envisioning 21st Urban Ideals in Tallinn’s Largest Soviet-era Housing District
Eliel Saarinen’s 1913 Masterplan for Grand Tallinn proposed a bold expansion of the city to the east, occupying an underdeveloped area that has become known…
-
Refugees in the Rust Belt
Today, there are over 65 million refugees worldwide—the highest number of displaced persons ever recorded. In the design community, most of the efforts to help…
-
Robots In & Out of Buildings
New forms of mobility are currently being developed for the transport of people and goods. From autonomous container ships and trucks, to autonomous buses and…
-
Phantom Coast: Transforming San Francisco’s Eastern Waterfront
"Every city is full of ghosts, and learning to see some of them is one of the arts of becoming a true local."– Rebecca…
-
The Park System as a Catalyst for Urban Regeneration
Two venerable American cities – Baltimore and Boston – are independently considering how their park systems, both products of the late 19th century urban park…
-
Type, City, Ecology: Hydro-types and Knowledge Environments for a New Township in India
The Harvard GSD project on Palava City is a two-year sponsored research and design project focused on the challenges posed by the construction of a…
-
Savannah: Rethinking the Multi-Scalar Capacity of the City Project
James Oglethorpe’s 1733 plan for the city of Savannah is well known for its strong capacity for creating a city in the countryside, but also…
-
Sao Paulo: the Rescaling of Rail Infrastructure and New Models of Domestic Life
This advanced option studio will examine how the rescaling and decking of inner city rail infrastructure can serve as a driver for new sites of…
-
The High Line as Urban Spine
The vast majority of urban development is created without an appropriate conceptual urban framework. In dense urban centers, we find an emerging mixed use typology…
-
Affirmatively Further: Fair Housing After Ferguson
When asked to name the most surprising finding of the Ferguson Commission, which was tasked with examining the underlying social and economic conditions of the…
-
Urban Strategies for the Retiro Area, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The studio will test the relevance of urbanism, landscape and urban design approaches to a particular area in Buenos Aires City. Specifically, the studio will…
-
INTERFACE: Constructing the Edge for Malaysia Vision Valley
Malaysia Vision Valley (MVV) is a new economic growth area announced by the Malaysian Government in 2015. Comprising of 108,000 hectares of land on the…
-
Housing in Merida Yucatan: the urban and the territorial
This is the 3rd studio sponsored by INFONAVIT, the National Workers Housing Institute of Mexico. As in previous years, this studio seeks to generate new…
-
“Regular City” in Chongqing: Searching for Domesticated Superstructures
The Studio sets out to interpret urban evolution in Chongqing in order to draw conclusions for the hypothesis of central city development at the heart…
-
Oh, Jerusalem: Eternal Center / Generic Periphery
“Jerusalem …. focus of the struggle between the Abrahamic religions, the shrine for increasingly popular Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, the strategic battlefield of clashing…
-
Extreme Urbanism IV: Looking at Hyper Density – Dongri, Mumbai
In recent years, housing has become an extremely scarce commodity in Mumbai. In 2007, Mumbai was the sixth most expensive city globally to rent an…
-
The Factory and the City: Rethinking the industrial spaces of the developmental city
The studio is premised upon two fundamental ambitions, the recuperation of an idea of the city as a project and the pursuit of alternative forms…
-
Jakarta: Models of Collective Space for the Extended Metropolis
This advanced option studio will examine the role of new mass transit infrastructure as a driver for new models of collective space, in a context…
-
Canceled: When the Future Looked Bright We Didn’t Wear Shades
In their golden years, the young Arab nations gave birth to aspiring modern urban projects. In a part of the world where the notion of…
-
The MLK Way: Building on Black America’s Main Street
The “MLK Atlas” maps all the streets named after Dr. King in the continental U.S. Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of America’s most revered…
-
Urban Blackholes: Development and Heritage in the Lima Metropolis
In cities with fast urban growth, heritage and development have often created friction zones where economic logics collide with preservation policies. This option studio will…
-
Craft, Politics, and the Production of Housing in Oaxaca, Mexico
Studio Overview: This is the 2nd studio sponsored by INFONAVIT, the federal agency responsible for the origination of home mortgages for workers across the…
-
Re-thinking “Urban Grids” in Hangzhou
The construction of modern Hangzhou can be seen as a laboratory of urban projects and planning strategies. Its recent development has occurred at unprecedented rates,…
-
A Campus for the 21st Century: The Purisima Alameda District of Monterrey
Felipe Correa, Carlos Garciavelez
This option studio will examine the role of the academic institution as a driver of an intermediate scale urban project. The studio will focus on…
-
Extreme Urbanism III
Jose Mayoral Mortilla will serve as Teaching Associate for this studio. The South Asian city exemplifies contemporary challenges in planning, designing, and constructing the built…
-
The Calumet Collaborations: Daniel Burnham Meets Andre Breton on the South Side of Chicago
Chicago, lake-sided and magnificently flat, gridded to the horizon, studied and troubled, is ever ready for reimagining. What better moment than the impending 119th anniversary…
-
Study Abroad Option Studio: “Poor but Sexy”: Berlin, The New Communal
Frank Barkow, Arno Brandlhuber
Former Berlin Mayor Klaus “Wowi” Wowereit’s claim in 2004 that Berlin is “Arm aber Sexy”, poor but sexy, set the tone for a post-reunification milieu…
-
RURBAN: Resilient Practices and Networks in the Contemporary City (Canceled)
Doina Petrescu, Constantin Petcu
The studio addresses the recent calls for collective urban action to confront challenges such as global warming, depletion of fossil fuels and natural resources, economic…