Required Courses

For students entering Fall 2020

First Year

32 units        Electives or Distributional Requirements*

Second Year

Coursework Track:
16 units        Electives or Distributional Requirements*

Or

Thesis Track:
16 units        Electives or Distributional Requirements*
8 units          GSD 9304        Independent Thesis for the Degree Master in Design Studies

*Students must take 12 units of the following Distributional Requirements:

4 units          GSD 4100       Building, Texts, and Contexts: Origins and Ends
4 units          GSD 4121        Building, Texts, and Contexts: Modernity’s Antecedents and Alternatives (not offered 2021/22)
4 units          GSD 4141        Histories of Landscape Architecture I
4 units          GSD 4122        Building, Texts, and Contexts: Between Origins and Modernity: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Architecture (not offered 2021/22)
4 units          GSD 4142        Histories of Landscape Architecture II
4 units          GSD 4223       Building, Texts, and Contexts: Modernism and its Counter-Narratives
2 units          GSD 4398       Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Architecture 1960 to the Present
4 units          GSD 4399       Architecture and Construction: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital
4 units          GSD 4451       Materiality and Atmosphere: Media and Environments (FAS)
4 units          GSD 4465       The Sociological Imagination: Conceptual Foundations for the Urban Planning and Design Professions
2 units          GSD 4482       Modernism

Recommended Research Methodology Course(s)
Courses that teach skills of potential relevance to thesis projects

HIS-4395 Environmentalisms
HIS-4476 Architecture’s Bodies: Agency and Biopolitics

Other Recommended Courses

HIS-4115  History and Theory of Urban Interventions
HIS-4362  Structuring Urban Experience: From the Athenian Acropolis to the Boston Common
HIS-4385  Mountains and the Rise of Landscape
HIS-4387  Topology and Imagination: Between Chinese Landscapes and Architecture
HIS-4395 Environmentalisms

(Required courses for students who entered in Fall 2017.)

(Required courses for students who entered in Fall 2018.)

(Required courses for students who entered in Fall 2019.)

Students contemplating cross-registering for courses at another Harvard school must abide by the dates and policies of the school in which the course is offered. Priority for enrollment may be given to the other school’s students first before cross-registrations are accepted — enrollment is not guaranteed. See https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/resources/cross-registration-policies-procedures/