Courses
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Bramante is better than Alberti . . .
A seminar, in the manner of a forum, devoted to the practice of architectural critique and evaluation. Ten significant and comparable pairs…
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Andrea Palladio: Innovative Learning Experience
Howard Burns, Guido Beltramini
The two most eminent scholars of the architecture of Andrea Palladio, Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea…
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Materiality, Visual Culture, and Media (at VES)
What is the place of materiality in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts, architecture and…
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Architecture and Landscape before and after Watergate
In one of the defining moments of the Senate Watergate Hearings, June 28, 1973, Senator Howard H. Baker, Jr., put the “central…
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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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Energetics of Urbanization
Two significant discourses on energy and urbanization are converging, with increasingly parallel questions and concerns. First, a discourse on extended urbanization…
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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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Scenes of Design, Development, and Disaster
The architect’s arrival on the scene – like that of the hero, the movie star, and the forensic technician – is an…
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Miami Resilience: Affordability and Health
This advanced research seminar in Miami, Florida (USA) is thematically focused at the intersection of community resilience, public health and housing studies. With a particular…
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What is a Thesis? Conversations on Means and Methods of the Thesis Project
How does one frame the architectural problem? How does one begin the thesis project? This proseminar provides a platform for students to workshop and develop…
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Discourse and Methods II
K. Michael Hays, Catherine Ingraham
This seminar is designed as an introduction to some of the major critical approaches and methodologies that have shaped the history and theory of the…
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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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Conservation of Older Buildings: Techniques and Technics
This course will teach how to understand existing building form and fabric and how to conserve these. Where does one even start…
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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 early modernism. However,…
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Material, Atmosphere and Ambience
The seminar introduces understanding of atmosphere and ambience in the discourse of material practice in architecture. The materials are contextual and cultural manifestation tool of…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: The Invention of the Countryside – A Critical Iconography
This Course is for students in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. This seminar invites students to analyze the political iconography of the countryside. Whereas in…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar: Tokyo – Catalysts for Change
This Course is for students in the Toyko Study Abroad Program. "Tokyo – Catalysts for change" is an invitation to having an insight into the…
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Signal, Image, Architecture II: Automation, or the Politics of Very Large Numbers
If the first version of this seminar sought to understand computational images through an anthropology of the disappearance of “orthographic life”—and, in doing so,…
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Practical Wisdom 2
“…the Moderns find themselves face to face with raw materiality, or they have to turn towards representations that reside only in their…
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Architecture and its Texts (1650-1800)
This seminar focuses on a selection of important architectural writings from the late 17th and 18th centuries, with the aim of exploring…
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Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar: Designing and Managing Worlds in the Countryside
This Course is for students in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. One of the best medieval copies of Vitruvius’s De Architectura is in the codex…
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Hybrid Formations: In Pursuit of Novel Form
“I do not oppose form, but only form as a goal.”– Ludwig Mies van der Rohe “Before computers, you'd start designing…
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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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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar: Tectonic Tradition: Structure and Material in Japan
In Japan, design, both traditional and contemporary, is inseparable from materials and how they are constructed together. In this seminar, guest speakers are invited to…
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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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MDes Open Projects 1
“Open Projects” is a two-semester course sequence for second year MDes students. As the graduating requirement for students enrolled in the 4-Semester Track of the…
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Doctoral Program Proseminar
This pro-seminar is one way of fulfilling a requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic…
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Responsive Environments: CITY eMOTION
This 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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Narratives of Design Science
From Aldo Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography to Buckminster Fuller’s “Design Science”, the intellectual framework and heuristic tools of the exact sciences such as…
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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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What should or could (scholarly) knowledge look like in the 21st century? A Knowledge Design Seminar
This Humanities Studio course will be run by the metaLAB (at) Harvard team. It will explore the shapes and forms that experimental…
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Material, Atmosphere and Ambience
The seminar introduces understanding of atmosphere and ambience in the discourse of material practice in architecture. The materials are contextual and cultural…
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Philosophy of Technology
One hundred story buildings. Parametric design. Zero net energy. 3-D printing of exotic structures. What marvels technology brings us! We acknowledge that…
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Potential Architecture
The work of the architect, the urban designer and designers at large is conditioned by a number of factors that delimit and…
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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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Countryside Futurism: Rotterdam Study Abroad Seminar
The crisis of the city and the return of rural Utopias: Metropolitan centers have become ruralized. It is the militant spirit of the inner city…
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Architecture after neo-liberalism: Rotterdam Study Abroad
Rem Koolhaas’s text, Junkspace, describes architecture as a by-product of modernity, as its waste. Junkspace demontrates that the core value upon which architecture had been…
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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…
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Bavarian Rococo: A Retroactive Manifesto
In the early- and mid-18th century, architects, decorators, and artists in southern Germany produced a huge number of rococo church interiors. The…
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Signal, Image, Architecture. Design After Orthography
We labor over surfaces. We expend our energy pushing things across surfaces, and those surfaces constitute for us a kind of substrate…
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Materiality, Visual Culture, and Media (at VES)
What is the place of materiality in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts, architecture and…
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Architecture and Landscape before and after Watergate
In one of the defining moments of the Senate Watergate Hearings, June 28, 1973, Senator Howard H. Baker, Jr., put the “central…
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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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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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HYBRID FORMATIONS: Luftschloss
‘Luftschloss’ – (English translation: a castle in the sky) is a German term commonly used since the 16th century describing the creation…
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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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Thermal Tectonics for the Next Billion People
In the maelstrom of geopolitical and geophysical pressures, can you see opportunities to imagine, project and create new patterns of living? A…
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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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What is a Thesis? Conversations on Means and Methods of the Thesis Project
How does one frame the architectural problem? How does one begin the thesis project? This proseminar provides a platform for students to workshop and develop…