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M.S. Architecture and Urban Design

Overview

The Urban Design Program is a three-semester degree in the multidisciplinary study of cities, regions, infrastructures, and ecosystems. The program focuses on the city as an agent of resilient change and on the role of design in redefining the twenty-first century urban landscape, advancing new paradigms of research, practice, and pedagogy to meet the challenges of climate change, rapid urbanization, and social inequality. Students and faculty in the MSAUD program work to integrate and underscore the essential links between public space, social justice, and ecological systems. The program asks the venerable and necessarily shifting question: what is “the good city?”— reframing the city not as a fixed, delimited territory but as a gradient of varied landscapes supported by uneven networks of food, energy, resources, culture, transportation, and capital.

The MSAUD program is open to both pre- and post-professional students, and encourages applicants from a range of backgrounds who are focused on the questions and possibilities of the changing field of urban design. All applicants must have an undergraduate degree from an accredited college or university by the time they start the MSAUD program. Please note that the MSAUD is not a professional architecture degree and does not in itself qualify for licensure.

The MSAUD program is a designated STEM program eligible under the CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) Code 04.0902: Architectural and Building Sciences/Technology. Learn more about STEM designation.

The MSAUD program encourages students to critically confront planetary urbanization via applied and on-site research that advances the idea of urban design as an inclusive, activist, tools-based project for specific sites and communities and as a critical project examining urban form, knowledge, and research processes. A sign of the program’s success is its strong, catalytic alumni working globally and across disciplines, institutions, and communities to help create robust and equitable places to live.
Curriculum

The Urban Design program’s curriculum balances the need for shared and specialized knowledge with individual student research interests. The core of the program is the three-semester sequence of studios.

Summer Studio I is foundational and addresses the experimental, representational, and constructive aspects of urban design as a process. The studio frames the Five Boroughs of New York City as a learning lab, an aggregate of socio-spatial tensions, an archive of biophysical infrastructures, and an evolving set of lived experiences.

Fall Studio II expands in scope to consider the city-region, examining large scale interdependencies, interactions, and conflicts. Studio research addresses the particular conditions of American city-regions (previously, the Hudson Valley, currently the Atlanta region) in which shifting ecological, infrastructural, financial, racial, and social conditions call for new strategies for action.

Spring Studio III takes on problems of global urbanization, extending previous studio work to include the challenges and scales of the climate emergency, examining physical and social infrastructures, new visions of programmatic intervention, and robust community, governmental and NGO partnerships. The studio typically travels to two cities, working in close cooperation with local partners and organizations.

Semesters
The Summer semester consists of four courses (including studio) that operate intellectually and methodologically as an integrated curriculum focusing on the New York metropolitan region. All work is based on the coordinated learning of concepts, working methods, historical and theoretical frameworks, research protocols, and representational strategies. Faculty roles overlap, courses and subjects mix, and design agendas are tested in various settings. This teaching model demonstrates how Urban Design weaves together varied tasks of storytelling, community engagement, site survey and mapping, film making and digital visualization, and 3D modeling, all of which enable students to create urban knowledge and to iterate, represent and communicate design strategies.

During the Fall and Spring Semesters students take (in addition to Studio II and Studio III), several required seminars in Urban Design as well as required electives at GSAPP or the University. (See degree requirements). The array of seminars and electives asks that students create their own focus in Urban Design, in other words, shaping an agenda, or set of concerns, or a subject area to create a unique experience in Urban Design pedagogy.
PODCAST CONVERSATIONS

Professor Kate Orff, Urban Design Program Director and principal of Scape, discusses rewilding on the At a Distance podcast as one tool among many for restoring ecological infrastructure, oysters as engineering assistants in preventing coastal flooding, and other out-of-the-box solutions local and federal authorities should be considering before the next hurricane hits.


Listen to more podcasts from the Urban Design program by following UD Sessions: The Expanded Field of Urban Design, a series of conversations with urban designers around the globe, who graduated from or taught at GSAPP’s Urban Design program. By discussing their current work and reflecting on how their experience at GSAPP shaped their thinking about design, cities, and politics, the series explores the ways in which the field of urban design expanded since its emergence. Hosted by Faculty Kaja Kühl and Grahame Shane.

Summer 2021 Urban Design Lecture Series
Javier Vergara Petrescu

Learn more about the event.

Current Faculty
Candelaria Mas Pohmajevic
Deborah Helaine Morris

Fall 2024 Courses

Course Semester Title Student Work Instructor Syllabus Requirements & Sequence Location & Time Session & Points Call No.
A6820‑1 Fall 2024
Urban Design Studio II
Thaddeus Pawlowski, Nadine Maleh, Miriam Harris, Christopher Kroner, Katie Swenson, Julia Murphy, Samuel Carter, Lee Altman
206 FAYERWEATHER
M + TH 1:30 - 6:30 , F 9AM -11AM
FULL SEMESTER
9 Points
10593
A6832‑1 Fall 2024
Toward Resilient Cities and Landscapes
Kate Orff
115 AVERY
TU 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10594
A6940‑1 Fall 2024
Designing Climate Corridors
Kaja Kühl
409 AVERY
W 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10595
A4625‑1 Fall 2024
Tensile/Compression Surfaces in Architecture: Tactile Methods for Architects
Robert Marino
409 AVERY
TU 2 PM - 4 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10587
A6678‑1 Fall 2024
The Long History of Arch Technology
Lucia Allais
300 BUELL SOUTH
TU 11 AM- 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10560
A6900‑1 Fall 2024
Research I
Danielle Smoller
FULL SEMESTER
2 or 3 Points
10568
A6941‑1 Fall 2024
Architectural Acoustical Ecology
Arch schaperkotter thomasgomezospina fa23 drawing copy
Ethan Bourdeau
203 FAYERWEATHER
TH 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10590
A6942‑1 Fall 2024
Daylight, Metabolism
Elliot Glassman
115 AVERY
TU 7 PM - 9 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10591
A4427‑1 Fall 2024
Architecture Apropos Art
Steven Holl, Dimitra Tsachrelia
412 AVERY
TH 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10566
A4441‑1 Fall 2024
Interlaced Existence: Death, Life, Liminality
Karla Rothstein
200 BUELL
TU 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10567
A4715‑1 Fall 2024
Re-Thinking BIM
Joseph Brennan
WARE LOUNGE (600 AVERY)
TH 7 PM - 9 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10574
A4987‑1 Fall 2024
Architectural Photography: From the Models to the Built World
Michael Vahrenwald
115 AVERY
F 9 AM - 11 AM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10571
A4988‑1 Fall 2024
Coding for Spatial Practices I
Celeste Layne
WARE LOUNGE (600 AVERY)
TU 7 PM - 9 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10578
A6756‑1 Fall 2024
Make
Ada Tolla, Giuseppe Lignano
WARE LOUNGE (600 AVERY)
F 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10572
A6917‑1 Fall 2024
Seed Bombs, Technologies in Ecological Design
Emily Bauer
504 Avery
TU & THU 11:00AM-1:00PM Sept 3 - Oct 15 : (exceptions THU 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Sept 5 + Sept 12)
SES A
3 Points
10589
A6886‑1 Fall 2024
Building the Engine: Industry + the African Urban Agenda
Fatou Dieye
505 Avery
TU 9 AM - 1 PM ( First class: F 1:30pm)
SES A
3 Points
14032
Pla4577‑1 Fall 2024
Geographic Information Systems
Jonathan Stiles
UP COMPUTER LAB + 204 FAYERWEATHER
TU 10 AM - 1 PM
3 Points
10873
Pla4577‑2 Fall 2024
Geographic Information Systems
Jonathan Stiles
UP COMPUTER LAB + 204 FAYERWEATHER
TH 5 PM - 8 PM
3 Points
10874
A4892‑1 Fall 2024
Data Visualization for Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities
Jia Zhang
409 AVERY
F 9 AM - 11 AM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10576
A4047‑1 Fall 2024
Immeasurable Sites
Emanuel Admassu
408 AVERY
W 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10596
A6830‑1 Fall 2024
Difference and Design
Justin Moore
412 AVERY / ONLINE
TU 3 PM - 5 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
14028
A6927‑1 Fall 2024
Science + Technology Studies
Albena Yaneva
412 AVERY
M 11 AM - 1PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10533
A6929‑1 Fall 2024
The Reimagining of Lower Manhattan Post-Sandy
Michael Kimmelman
408 AVERY
W 9 AM - 11 AM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10534
Pla4444‑1 Fall 2024
The Future City: Transforming Urban Infrastructure
Kate Ascher
209 FAYERWEATHER
TU 1 PM - 3 PM
3 Points
14136
A6814‑1 Fall 2024
New Towns After Smart Cities
David Smiley
412 AVERY
TU 1 PM - 3 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
14029
Pla6272‑1 Fall 2024
New York Rising: How Real Estate Shapes a City
Kate Ascher
114 AVERY
F 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
10530
ARCHA6966‑1 Fall 2024
Le Corbusier Beyond Europe
Mary McLeod
409 Avery
TU 11 AM - 1 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
18002
ARCHA6967‑1 Fall 2024
Cities of Knowledge: Orientalizing Manhattan
Ziad Jamaleddine
934 SCHERMERHORN
TU 2:10 PM - 4 PM
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
18102

News

Jun 24
Monday 24th l.e.ft poster 01 1
Faculty Ziad Jamaleddine delivers lecture, “Al-Mataf: The Formation of the Sacred Object” at at TOPOS–Landscape, Design and Planning at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Brasília, Brasilia, Brazil
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