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 4121 Building, Texts, and Contexts: Modernity’s Antecedents and Alternatives (not offered 2020/21)
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
4 units GSD 4142 Histories of Landscape Architecture II
4 units GSD 4223 Building, Texts, and Contexts: Modernism and its Counter-Narratives
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/