Selection of Distributional Electives
In the first year, students are required to take a minimum of 12 units of distributional electives from an approved list of courses.
Distributional electives may be completed in the second year with approval from the Domain Head.

Note that courses may not be offered every academic year.

Architecture
VIS 2415 Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf Life in the Supermarket Landscape
VIS 2471 Architecture of Time
VIS 2484 Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices
VIS 2488 Building a Vision: Leadership, Curatorial and Design Practices for Public Spaces
VIS 2489 Parts of Speech: Reimagining Computing Through Verbs
DES 3389 The Fifth Plan
DES-3479 Philosophy of Technology: From Marx and Heidegger to AI, Genome Editing, and Geoengineering (HKS)
DES 3532 The Art Museum: Typological Trajectories
DES 3535 Essaying Architecture
HIS 4100 Buildings Texts, and Contexts: Origins and Ends
HIS 4223 Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Modernism, Its Practices, and Its Theories
HIS 4358 Authority and Invention: Medieval Art and Architecture
HIS 4374 Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies
HIS 4399 Architecture and Construction: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital
HIS 4423 The Shapes of Utopia
HIS 4454 The Project and the Territory: Japan Story
HIS 4509 History of Architecture Against
HIS 4525 Design Fundamentals, the Postdigital, and the Anthropocene
HIS 4531 Monuments, Monumentality, and Meaning

Landscape
DES 3241 Theories of Landscape as Urbanism
HIS 4141 Histories of Landscape I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture
HIS 4142 Histories of Landscape Architecture II: Design, Representation and Use
HIS 4461 Natural Histories for Troubled Times, or, Revisiting the ‘Entangled Bank’
HIS 4487 Plants of Ritual: Creating a Spiritual Connection to the Designed Landscape

Urban Planning & Design
DES 3348 The Idea of Environment
HIS 4152 Urban Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative Historical Origins and Applications
HIS 4518 De-Centering the Canon: Architecture and Urbanism
SES 5386 Urban Ethnographies
SES 5486 The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change
SES 5502 Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning in the Global South

Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS)
AFRAMER 112X Transition(s)
AFVS 239 Disfiguration: Art After Humanism
ANTHRO 2036 Lithic Technology
COMPLIT 299AR Comparative Literature in Theory and Practice
ENGLISH 189VG Video Game Storytelling
ENGLISH 294Z On Beauty: Graduate Seminar
HAA 171M Architecture | Utopia | Authoritarianism
HAA 174K Architecture in the Archive
HAA 179K Ten Trails: Drawing Outdoors
HISTSCI 2911 The Past and Futures of the University
TDM 167SC Dramatic Writing for Social Change

MIT
MIT 4.333 Introduction to Interactive, Participatory, and Generative Art Making
MIT CMS.855 Extending the Museum

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 our Cross Registration Policies and Procedures.