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
Through lectures, discussions, readings, and a written exercise, this course provides students with a working knowledge of land use laws and environmental laws, the institutions that create, implement, and review them, and the issues that swirl around them.
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.
This proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, both spatially and socially – how it becomes legible and desirable, who gets the right to create it and for whom.
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.
The seminar will provide the foundation for a Department of Landscape Architecture exhibition, “Forest Futures,” scheduled for the spring of 2024, which will explore the topic of shade and environmental justice.
At a time when urgent action is needed to avert the climate crisis, it is very difficult to take an idealistic approach when considering key materials in building construction. Designers can play an important role in the race to de-carbonize the built environment and this course will touch on how we got to where we are and how we can move forward in practice with the lessons that we have learned. Through a series of conversations and presentations, including from external experts, we will engage in inversing the design process by utilizing newly available tools. We will demystify regulations, terminology, and popular language, and examine how the predominant materials for construction, which are unlikely to go away soon, can be improved and implemented in design and construction to promote a low carbon economy.
We are racing towards multiple global tipping points, one being temperature rising far beyond expected due to carbon emissions. Forty percent of global carbon emissions derive from the construction industry and, as architects, we have the opportunity to make a difference. We must radically reassess how to build with the goal of proactively minimizing carbon emissions. To do so, we are forced to develop new tools, a new library of references, without losing our aesthetic ambition.
This seminar course will examine resilience of communities to natural and man-made disasters, climate change and other vulnerabilities. It will do so with an objective of finding ways to create resilience in communities that are apparently ‘weak’.
