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
How can we address the issue of climate change, reducing the damages by preparing for impacts already underway and fixing the problem by transforming our energy system? This course will consider the challenge of climate change and what to do about it.
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.
The Domain of ECOLOGIES engages the relationships between the living and mineral world, between science and technology, between infrastructural and ecological networks, and between human society and the non-human world that sustains us.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.
The course will explore diverse atmospheric conditions with tools, techniques, and design methods for making the invisible visible. The measuring and mapping of atmospheric conditions seeks to redefine the notion of ‘site’ as a lived space of atmospheric encounters through analytical and conceptual approaches integrating drawing, modelling, simulation, and sensing to make visible the invisible thereby reconstituting it as a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space.
This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources.
