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
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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
STU 1406

Canary in the Mine

Focused on wildfire-prone Mediterranean climates, the Canary in the Mine initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Design prepares students to design in—and for—extreme conditions. It positions design as a critical force in advancing Restorative Adaptation: an approach that integrates ecological recovery with cultural restitution, community stewardship, and multi-species well-being. The studio explores, therefore emerging frameworks that align: (1) Ecological symbiosis with cultural practices; (2) Community stewardship with metabolic flows and nutrient cycles; (3) Productive disturbance engaging with “wild diplomacies,” traditional knowledge, and bioengineering.Students will develop design scenarios in which the Dangermond Preserve becomes an Analog Landscape—a living model for fire-adapted design strategies that can be applied across similarly flammable regions in California and the broader Mediterranean type of landscapes.
Fall 2025 Graduate Not Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
SCI 6381

Power||Energy: Mapping the Thickened Ground of Labor

The seminar reckons with the immediate need to upgrade and expand the US electrical power grid system to meet the demands of growing urban communities and recognizes the obligation to engage with the climate crisis.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Design & Architecture Physical Sciences Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
PRO 7453

Designers of Mountain and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate

This seminar explores contemporary landscape architecture in Northeast and Southeast Asia to envision the future of sustainable design in the face of climate change. Students will meet world-leading practitioners and scholars, learn about their practices and research, and participate in a workshop and symposium, “Designers of Mountain and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate,” on February 5-6, 2026. At this event, students will share their coursework with the designers they have studied, and selected class work will be exhibited at Druker Gallery.
Fall 2025 Graduate Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
SCI 6141

Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies I

The goal of the course is to introduce the global potential of plants as a means of design for shaping the character of a place for individual and collective human experience.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Design & Architecture Physical Sciences Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
STU 1402

Presence of Water: Garden Inherency and New Hydraulic Culture of Kyoto

This studio aims to reexamine and reevaluate the value of Kyoto’s environmental culture as shaped by its long history, seeking to update the city’s landscape culture for a sustainable and resilient future that moves beyond its tradition and style. Kyoto, renowned for the Kyoto Protocol and its legacy of environmental stewardship, serves as an ideal site for this inquiry. Its natural wealth derives from distinctive topography and abundant water resources, nurtured by a culture that has managed these resources responsibly and in such elaborate forms for centuries.
Fall 2025 Graduate Not Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025