Courses
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Energy Simulation
The best intent does not always lead to the best performing design, as intuition and rules of thumb often fail to adequately…
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Natural Ventilation
Topics to be covered:1. Climate analysis, thermal comfort and natural ventilation potential.2. Basics of wind-driven and buoyancy-driven ventilation.3. Thermal…
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Daylighting
Picture a space, one that feels vibrant, comfortable, warm, and healthy. Now visualize someplace cheerless, depressing, and dull. What changed in your…
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Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society I
Developing and implementing good solutions to real problems facing human society requires a broad understanding of the relationships between technology innovation, science, manufacturing, design thinking,…
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Innovation in Project Delivery
Project delivery—the organizational, legal and economic arrangements by which society produces its built environment—has undergone a radical transformation over the past half…
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MArch II Proseminar
This course provides a forum for critical discussion of contemporary design practices that is exploratory and speculative in nature. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and…
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Today’s Architecture as Seen Through Enduring Concerns
This lecture course focuses on the critical reflection of long-standing issues in the architectural practice still providing a valuable frame for considering recent…
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Buildings, Texts, and Contexts II
Any account of architecture’s history over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries is faced with the challenge of addressing the general rupture caused…
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Film Theory, Visual Thinking
How do moving images transform the way we think? Introduction to film theory aimed at interpreting the visual world, and developing skills to analyze films…
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Property in Common: The Nexus Between Architecture and Real Estate
Property both in law and in logic means enforceable rights, not things. It is a political relation between persons that includes private (right to…
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Interiors, Environments, Atmosphere
Confronted with the new importance given to energy and sustainability requirements, the architectural discipline is not only in need of new technological knowledge and…
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Selected Topics on Contemporary Chinese Architecture and Urban Planning
For more than three decades and still today, China has embraced rapid social, economic, and cultural transformation. Discussion of contemporary Chinese…
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Making Sacred Space
Many recently-built churches are ugly as sin. Others are wonderful as form but don’t work well functionally or symbolically. Most are just boring. How…
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Discourses and Methods: Conservation, Destruction, and Curating Impermanence
Natalia Escobar Castrillon, K. Michael Hays
This seminar on critical conservation aims to develop concepts and strategies able to describe and curate the transitory and dynamic nature of architecture, landscapes…
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Construction Systems
This course introduces a framework to know the instantiation of architecture through construction systems. Construction systems will be discovered through the methods of dissection, drawing,…
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Environmental Systems in Architecture
The primary focus of GSD 6125 is the study of ecological considerations in architectural design. These considerations include the thermal, luminous, and acoustic behavior of…
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Structural Design 2
This course is a continuation of GSD 6227 and, after an overview/reminder introduction, furthers understanding of more developed structural systems and materials in architectural design.
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Survey of Energy Technology (at SEAS)
EAS Engineering Sciences 229. Survey of Energy Technology Catalog Number: 94822 EXAM GROUP: 7, 8 Please check the FAS schedule for…
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Innovative Construction in Japan
Modern Japanese architecture has been much admired in the West for its attention to materials, its refined construction details, and its ability to integrate…
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Interdisciplinary Design Practice
Hanif Kara, Andreas Georgoulias
This course aims to teach, stimulate and demonstrate “design led” opportunities that exist in the practice of Architecture. Positioned within the space of interdisciplinary…
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Digital Structures and Material Distribution
This course explores the role of computational structural analysis and form finding methods in design and fabrication problems. Such techniques can offer hints on…
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Issues in Architectural Practice and Ethics
This course, for students in the fourth semester of the MArch I program, examines basic issues arising in contemporary architectural practice. The course challenges the students to examine critically…
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The Practice as Project
The role of the architect adjusts as society changes. Inevitably, there will be a continual need for numbers of well rounded, licensed and affiliated architects…
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Visual Studies
Schedule: The course will meet once as a group on the first class, 11:30-12:30 on Wednesday, September 2nd, in room 112. The remaining course times…
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Projective Representation in Architecture
This course examines the history, theory and practice of parallel (orthographic) and central (perspective) projection. The objective is to provide the tools to imagine and…
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Digital Media II
This class explores the design and science of logical form making, examined through geometry, parametric control, algorithms, and digital tools. The point of departure is…
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Teaching Techniques
The course will examine the bases for contemporary architectural design pedagogy according to several broad themes — spatial, programmatic, material, structural, technological – defined in…
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Buildings, Texts, and Contexts I
Erika Naginski, K. Michael Hays
This course is structured as a dialogue between the historical and theoretical frameworks that have shaped the formulation of architectural principles – what the architectural…
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Buildings, Texts, and Contexts III: The Tower and the Sphere: Architecture and Modernity
K. Michael Hays, Bryan Norwood, Hilde Heynen
Modernism has fundamentally to do with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events and, at the same time, new conceptualizations of their appearance,…
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Authority and Invention: Medieval Art and Architecture
Masterworks of art and architecture in Western Europe from the decline of Rome to the dawn of the Italian Renaissance. Explores the creative tension…
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Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common
This lecture course examines selected cities between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., beginning with ancient Athens and ending with proposals…
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Construction Lab
The first meeting of 6121 on Wednesday, September 2nd will take place in room 112 instead of Piper. The covert title of this course is…
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Energy in Architecture
This lecture course introduces students to energy and environmental issues, particularly those that must be faced by the discipline of architecture. An overview of the…
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Structural Design 1
The course introduces the discipline of structural engineering as a means of unlocking hidden architectural design potential. Students develop the skills necessary to make informed…
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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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Water Engineering (at SEAS)
SEAS Engineering Sciences 165. Catalog Number: 4274 EXAM GROUP: 13, 14 Please check the FAS schedule for room information. Introduces the fundamentals…
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Computer Vision (at SEAS)
SEAS Computer Science 283. Catalog Number: 4475 Please check the FAS schedule for room information. Vision as an ill-posed inverse problem: image formation, two-dimensional…
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Introduction to Computational Design
This is an introductory course to computational design and the prerequisite for a spring course that deals with more advanced topics in the field.
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Architectural Acoustics (module)
What does jazz sound like when it is played in a cathedral? How would Gregorian chant sound in a jazz club? And why…
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Architecture in the Daylight (module)
At this point it is abundantly clear that worship of technologically-determined solutions that attempt to transcend local conditions has bit us in the ass.
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Innovation in Project Delivery
Project delivery – the organizational, legal and economic arrangements by which society produces its built environment – has undergone a radical transformation over the…
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MArch II Proseminar
This course provides a forum for critical discussion of contemporary design practices that is exploratory and speculative in nature. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and…
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Film, Media, Space (at VES)
The possibility to access the media everywhere and every time gives us the illusion to be emancipated from any temporal or spatial constraint and yet,…
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Soft Thought: Towards a Theory of Computational Design
Digital design remains one of the few areas within the discipline of architecture that remains relatively under theorized. This situation is in part the result…
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Digital Culture, Architecture and the City
Some twenty years ago, when Bernard Tschumi and young instructors like Greg Lynn or Ali Rahim launched the so-called \”Paperless Studio,\” based upon the intensive…
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Buildings, Texts, and Contexts II
Any account of architecture’s history over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries is faced with the challenge of addressing the general rupture caused…
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Michelangelo Architect: Precedents, Innovations, Influence
An exploration of Italian Renaissance architecture and urbanism through the persona of Michelangelo as witness, agent, and inspiration. We look at architecture and urbanism in…
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Case Studies in Critical Conservation: Strategies for Curating the Built Environment
This course analyzes case studies in conservation as a means for developing projective strategies for interpreting and curating buildings, landscapes, and cities. More specifically, the…
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Construction Systems
This course introduces a framework to know the instantiation of architecture through construction systems. Construction systems will be discovered through the methods of dissection, drawing,…
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Environmental Systems in Architecture
The primary focus of GSD 6125 is the study of ecological considerations in architectural design. These considerations include the thermal, luminous, and acoustic behavior of…