Courses
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Manfredo Tafuri and The Historiography And Criticism of Architecture 1960-1990
The seminar focuses on the markedly complex intellectual biography of Manfredo Tafuri, whose work touched upon many fields of knowledge including theories…
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Urban Ethnographies
Planners’ understanding of social process and cultural values is often woefully inadequate, and their thinking is dominated by a “one-size-fits-all” approach and…
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Integrated Design & Planning for Climate Change
This advanced research seminar in Miami-Dade County, Florida, is thematically focused within the integrated practices associated with designing and planning for climate change at an…
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Optimizing Facade Performance: A Deep Dive on Design Decisions
Building envelopes are at the intersection of design, performance, and occupant experience in architectural design. Facades influence many aspects of building performance,…
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Visualization (at SEAS)
This course is an introduction to key design principles and techniques for visualizing data. It covers design practices, data and image models, visual perception, interaction…
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Responsive Environments: Episodes in Experiential Futures
Allen Sayegh, Stefano Andreani
This course introduces to the students the tools and necessary thinking framework to create technologically driven speculative environments in the near future…
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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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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, Atmosphere and Ambience
This seminar introduces an understanding of atmosphere and ambience within the discourse of material practice in architecture. The materials are a contextual and cultural manifestation…
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Architecture as an Urban Issue: Challenges & Inventions in the Practice in Tokyo
This Course is for students in the Toyko Study Abroad Program. Tokyo today is in a dilemma of urbanism. As a post-growth phenomenon, abandoned houses…
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Making Sacred Space
This course addresses the current crisis in church design by an in depth consideration of the ideas, images, concepts, and legislation that inform the creation…
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14 Things (A Secret History of Italian Design) (offered with FAS)
Fourteen Things explores intertwinings between design, science, technology, society, art, and culture by means of the “excavation” of fourteen objects from different…
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Palladio and Raphael: An Innovative Learning Experience
Guido Beltramini, Howard Burns
Two leading scholars of the architecture of Andrea Palladio, Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza,…
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Architecture’s Bodies: Agency and Biopolitics
The aim of this seminar is to think carefully about how bodies engage with architecture and the built environment. In examining relationships…
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Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
Holly Samuelson, Frank Apeseche
How can one optimize the benefits of environmental or social sustainability while generating a higher return on investment in buildings? Where are…
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Developing for Social Impact
This field studies course will use a combination of readings, lectures, class discussion and a focused development exercise for a Boston site to explore…
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Survey of Energy Technology (at SEAS)
Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, and…
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Mechatronic Optics
The drawing as a certain transcription of vision into operational, communicative, and instructional notation is at the very core of design. Deeply…
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Informal Robotics / New Paradigms for Design & Construction
Today new materials and fabrication techniques are transforming the field of robotics. Rather than rigid metal parts connected by mechanical components, robots…
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Non-Professional Practice
The course aims to study unconventional modes of architectural practice and their underlying implications. It is based on a workshop format,…
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Designing with the Urban Stack: A Practice Course for Designers of the Built Environment
The seminar will investigate critical issues of the Urban Stack for the Kendall Square District, Cambridge, MA. The first half of…
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Miami Resilience: Housing & Infrastructure
This advanced research seminar in Miami, Florida (USA) is thematically focused at the intersection of community resilience, infrastructure design, housing studies, building science and zoning.
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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…
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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. Primarily…
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MAKE/BELIEVE
How does the action of making reflect, produce, enhance, aggregate, and/or suspend the beliefs of authors and audiences? This hybrid production-theory course…
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Graphic / Volume Conflations
“The myth of the Neutral Tool under complete human control and the myth of the Autonomous Destiny that no human can…
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Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf-life in the Supermarket Landscape
The supermarket shelf is a highly volatile, hyper-competitive space. On this shelf products struggle to maximize every possible advantage, all in a…
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Culture, Conservation and Design
This proseminar addresses issues of Critical Conservation, an evolving discipline that illuminates the bridge between Cultural Meaning, Identity and Context as part…
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An Unsentimental Look at Architecture and Social Craft
Designers of the built environment have had an on-again/off-again relationship with social agency. Progressive design and social outcomes were closely linked in…
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Werewolf: Architectures of Change
While the figure of Vitruvian man has long served as a metaphorical reference for an architecture evolved through design, but fixed in…
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Selected Current (and Recurrent) Topics in Architecture Theory and Design Practice
A research seminar consisting on assigned readings, presentations, discussions, and design experiments on current (and some ever re-current) topics in architectural theory and design practice.
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Style Worry or #FOMO
Reyner Banham once described the proliferation of styles after a waning epoch as “style worry,” an anxiety where the architect must decide how to…
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Signal, Image, Architecture III: The Automatic Present
“I know well enough what time is, provided that nobody asks me; but if am asked what it is, and try to explain, I am…
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Building Conservation and Renewal: Assessment, Analysis, Design
What are the spatial, material, and broad cultural values inherent in a building or site that must be understood to craft interventions…
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Architecture in Early Modern England: Themes and Methods
This seminar takes a selective approach to architectural culture in 16th– and 17th-century England (that is, roughly speaking, from the Tudor period…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: Exhibiting Architecture – The Agency of Display
“What does it mean to exhibit architecture?” Exhibitions are an integral part of the history of architecture. While architecture entered the gallery during the…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: Architecture, Urbanism, and Agriculture
This course is for students in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. In order to stimulate the research on the Countryside, the course will investigate…
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Digital Fabrication and Robotics
The materials and procedures of constructing architecture have changed surprisingly little since the late 1800’s / early 1900’s when the introduction…
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Visualization (at SEAS)
An introduction to key design principles and techniques for visualizing data. Covers design practices, data and image models, visual perception, interaction principles, visualization tools, and…
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Frameworks of Practice
Since the dawn of the technological society that emerged after World War II, the normative practice of architecture, particularly in the United…
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Elements of the Urban Stack
As our physical and virtual worlds become more and more intertwined, the “Urban Stack” presents itself as an organizational system for…
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Responsive Environments: The Future of Shopping
Allen Sayegh, Stefano Andreani
The course looks into the future of the built environment from a technologically augmented point of view, with a strong focus on…
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Curatorial Practice
Today everybody is a curator – we curate our meals, our social media feeds, and our outfits. What does it mean to…
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Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices
The Interdisciplinary Art Practices seminar investigates the exploratory character of art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of the contemporary culture. In the present…
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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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Philosophy of Technology
Zero net energy. Parametric design. Wood skyscrapers. 3-D printing of exotic structures. What marvels technology brings us! We acknowledge that we live…
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London Study Abroad Seminar – London: Past, Present, and Emerging
London is a city with many people from different places defined by its openness (like no other Global city). Its people are united by mutual…
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Making Sacred Space
This course addresses the current crisis in church design by an in depth consideration of the ideas, images, concepts, and legislation that inform the creation…