Studio Laos
Strategic Landscape Planning for the Greater Mekong
(2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22)
Course abstract: "Strategic Landscape Planning for the Greater Mekong" builds on seven years of design-based experiential learning across mainland Southeast Asia by the Division of Landscape Architecture. This year, focusing on the regional impacts of China's Belt and Road Initiative in northern Laos, students spend one term engaging issues of development vis-à-vis landscape architecture to define problems and produce innovative planning proposals. During th...
Engaging development through critical landscape planning
(2013-14, 2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22)
Masters thesis section abstract: This section welcomes landscape-driven theses covering the cultural-technical practices of environmental planning, management, assessment, activism, and governance in Greater China and Southeast Asia. With the emergence of new technologies for assessing, predicting, and monitoring landscape and ecological change, some anticipate a governance transition from the “environmental state” (生态立州) to the “predictive stat...
Environmental Futures Studio: Hong Kong
Design, nature and the erosion of conservation in Hong Kong
(2018-19)
Course abstract: Given Hong Kong's unremitting development pressures, both pro-development and pro-conservation groups are now calling for ways to evaluate sites for development based on environmental metrics and new conservation agreements. However, for the built-environment disciplines in Hong Kong, sustainability discourse is predominantly aligned with economic and urban sustainability, rather than the new forms of conservation that contend to use environm...
Studio Nepal
Designing nature, standards, and discontinuities in the Himalayas
(2016-17)
Course abstract: Regional corridors tied to China's 2013 One Belt One Road strategy are set to connect Eurasian economic centers through some of the last frontiers of Central and South Asia. In efforts to expand China's overproduction into India's markets, land routes such as the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) economic corridor and rail via Tibet and Nepal are in various stages of planning and construction. At their seam along the foothills of the Hima...
Landscape as Development
Landscape architecture's missed connections with sustainability
(2020-21, 2021-22)
Course abstract: "Landscape as Development" is a technology-theory seminar that surveys the epistemological and practical gap between ecological planning (as construed by landscape architecture) and biological conservation. This course is designed to facilitate critical reflection on the selection and appropriation of secondary scientific research for environmental planning practice and policy. The course's reading list is a mix of: a) foundational texts in l...
Design on the Road to Burma
Landscape Planning Studio
(2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17)
Course abstract: Large-scale regional planning and infrastructure development is often implemented with a virtual absence of people on the ground, creating conflicts in land tenure, economic livelihood, and environmental resource use and conservation. "Design on the Road to Burma" takes students' learning to the frontier landscapes of transnational development along the Thai-Myanmar border, reinforcing the importance of fieldwork in reconciling abstract geogr...
Landscape Representation
Undergraduate core visual methods
(2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22)
Course abstract: Landscape Representation offers a landscape-centric approach to digital analysis and representation. While sharing histories and methods with architecture and planning, landscape representation, given its engagement with natural processes and ecologies, requires greater control over complex forms and materials. This course established students' foundational knowledge in computer science and geographic information systems (GIS) through reviewi...
Design Analytics Hong Kong
Nature, regions, and the erosion of conservation in Hong Kong
(2017-18)
Course abstract: More than 40% of Hong Kong's 1,080 km2 land area is conserved. At the end of 2016, Hong Kong detailed its commitments to the Convention on Biological Diversity through its Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan. Given Hong Kong's unremitting development pressures, both pro-development and pro-conservation groups are now calling for ways to evaluate sites for development based on environmental metrics and new conservation agreements. However, f...
Design Analytics
Visualizing Nature, Regions, and Discontinuities
(2013-14, 2014-15)
Course abstract: Design, as do many disciplines, has a difficult relationship with nature. It's also difficult to commit the act of "design" in places detached from the urban, such as national parks. This advanced computation-theory seminar follows Chinese infrastructure investment into the world's most biodiverse regions to explore the potential of computational design for supporting environmental conservation. Laura Kurgan noted in her 2004 exhibit "Monochr...
SAP: Protected areas in the Peruvian Amazon
Postgraduate research seminar
(2012-13)
Course abstract: In collaboration with The South America Project, a research effort spearheaded by Harvard GSD and with a network of institutions in the Americas, this course interrogates environmental conservation and development practices in two developing contexts: Western China and the Andean Amazon. Within the last year, China has become Peru's largest trading partner. Economic growth in Peru, one of the strongest in the world, is primarily supported by...
Scales of Environmentalism
Waterworks and Environmental Conservation in China
(2011-12, 2013-14)
Course abstract: 2013 marks the 30-year anniversary of the first established nature reserve in China's Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Area (TPR). This UNESCO site is constituted of 15 core areas that, when connected by buffer zones, amount to eight contiguous units spread over 50,000 square kilometers. This fragmentation and gradation is not isolated to the TPR area but characteristic of rural China, illustrating conservation and the creation of wi...
Landscape Media
Postgraduate core visual methods
(2012-13, 2013-14, 2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22)
Course abstract: Visual communications for landscape architects, as it's taught and practiced, is often appropriated and derivative from technologies and pedagogies of architecture and planning. However, landscape confronts forms, material conditions, and ecological processes more complex than the other design disciplines. Landscape Media is a shift in approach to medium and digital environments. Quickly moving beyond the acquisition of data and the digital a...
