CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY

COURSES

Climate change is an urgent and multifaceted challenge facing all of society.

Harvard faculty teach an expanding array of courses examining the many dimensions of this shared challenge. Explore courses in climate and sustainability ranging from economics and English to public health and climate science. 

 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
THE SALATA INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY
Filter
Search
Semesters
Course Levels
Cross Registrations
Interest Areas

Keep me posted about Salata

ARE WE MISSING A COURSE?
Let Us Know
85 Results
Filters applied
Design & Architecture
Clear All
SES 5464

Do No Harm: Dilemmas in Planning for Health

Planners have long imagined themselves as physicians attending to the good health of cities and the communities living in them. Do No Harm unpacks the complex connections between environmental health, public health, and city planning. The course title, a nod to both the Hippocratic Oath and the creed of social reformer Florence Nightingale, represents a challenge to students preparing to manage the discrete, conflicting interests of that most complex of organisms—the metropolis.
Spring 2026 Graduate Available Design & Architecture Law & Policy Courses
Mon, Jan 26, 2026
SCI 6244

Climate by Design

Through a series of lectures and case studies, this course will explore the range of paradigmatic design responses to the climate crisis.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
STU 1306

Outfitting Architecture: Expanded Comfort in Athens

Outfitting Architecture imagines building assemblies like clothing—something you can layer, unzip, or throw on depending on the weather, your mood, or how many people are coming for dinner.This option studio challenges dominant understandings of comfort in architecture, proposing a layered, climate-responsive design methodology that bridges social, thermal, and material entanglements within the apartment buildings and arcades of Athens. The studio investigates how architecture—like clothing—can be rethought as an adaptable, soft system able to evolve for shifting climates and forms of inhabitation.
Fall 2025 Graduate Not Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
ADV 9674

Proseminar in ECOLOGIES: Regenerative, Interrelated, Evolving

The role of the proseminar is to introduce students to the range of individual and group research presently being pursued by GSD faculty, across Harvard schools, the Loeb Fellows, and researchers and practitioners from many disciplines. Concurrent with the research presentations will be readings, workshops, and presentations in four domain focus areas that will build capacity for individual students to create an abstract for their own design-research topic. 
Fall 2025 Graduate Not Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
DES 3348

The Idea of Environment

The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
DES 3241

History, Theory, Culture III: Theories of Landscape as Urbanism

This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
STU 1307

Anchoring Acts

This studio explores how ancestral and spiritual practices might inform new architectural imaginaries. In an age of ecological collapse and cultural erasure, how might we reclaim rituals of rooting, re-anchoring, and sanctuarization as meaningful design tools? What can we learn from practices that imbue ordinary materials with emotional and cosmological value—practices that sustain relationships between the living and the dead, the domestic and the divine, the ground and what lies beneath?
Fall 2025 Graduate Not Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
VIS 2484

Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices

Amid the climate emergency, escalating militarized conflicts, peak armament, and rapid technological advancements, we must reimagine visions, strategies, and pragmatic processes to foster new forms of collaboration that prioritize care for both others and the planet.This semester, in dialogue with the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) and the Vienna Art Academy PhD group led by Prof. Elke Krasny, the seminar will explore the themes of “Dark Matter” and “Design with Care”—both in theory and practice—by examining the diverse impacts and residues of atomic, nuclear, and quantum physics, ranging from bombs to AI, and considering their related material infrastructures, including mines, power plants, and waste facilities.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
SCI 6380

Working Landscapes: Natural Resiliency And Redesign

Topics will include understanding human impacts on natural systems through engineering and design, their consequences, and the use of ecological principles and methods of landscape design and planning to achieve natural restoration, resilience, balance, and sustainability.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
ADV 9641

Proseminar in Landscape Architecture

How do we understand a landscape? This proseminar explores epistemologies that constitute the field of landscape architecture.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
STU 1309

Housing as an Ecology of Care

The studio will explore housing as an ecology of care, a framework that understands architecture not as an isolated product but as a relational practice embedded in networks of interdependence among people, species, systems, and time. In this view, a multi-story residential building is not only a place to live, but a place to heal, connect, and coexist for both human and nonhuman life.
Fall 2025 Graduate Not Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
STU 1121

First Semester Core Urban Planning Studio

The course focuses on four key challenges of contemporary urban planning: equity, climate, health, and accessibility.
Fall 2025 Graduate Not Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025