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M.S. Architecture and Urban Design
Gloria Hiuyan Mah, Galina Novikova, Govardan Rajasekaran Umashankar, Rotina Yuxin Tian
Kate Orff
,Thaddeus Pawlowski
,Adriana Chavez
,Geeta Mehta
,Lorena Bello Gomez
Giulia Chagas, Lucas Coelho Netto, Samuel Dye, Yasmine Katkhuda
Kate Orff
,Thaddeus Pawlowski
,Adriana Chavez
,Geeta Mehta
,Lorena Bello Gomez
Jiamin Huang, Shinan Liu, Hao Ma, Curran Zhang
Kate Orff
,Thaddeus Pawlowski
,Adriana Chavez
,Geeta Mehta
,Lorena Bello Gomez
Daniela Deu, Tanuja Dhanasekaran, Kimberly Marie Ramirez, Carmen Yu
Kate Orff
,Thaddeus Pawlowski
,Adriana Chavez
,Geeta Mehta
,Lorena Bello Gomez
Ahmed Al Yaseen, Mariana Majima, Thanawat Phituksithkasem, Jil Shah
Kaja Kühl
,Lee Altman
,Anna Dietzsch
,Shachi Pandey
,Thaddeus Pawlowski
Aruna Das, Yuehui Du, Cheng Ju Lee, Lijing Yu
Nans Voron
,Tami Banh
,Ifeoma Ebo
,Sagi Golan
,Austin Sakong
,Noah Chasin
Chao Li, Yifei Luo, Nupur Roy Chaudhury, Yong Zhuang
Nans Voron
,Tami Banh
,Ifeoma Ebo
,Sagi Golan
,Austin Sakong
,Noah Chasin
Corina Fuenmayor , Chrysothemi Kouloumentas, Yoo Jin Lee, Nupur Roy Chaudhury
Kaja Kühl
,Lee Altman
,Anna Dietzsch
,Shachi Pandey
,Thaddeus Pawlowski
Alexandra Burkhardt, Lorena Galvão, Maria Palomares
Kate Orff
,Dilip da Cunha
,Geeta Mehta
,Thaddeus Pawlowski
,Linh Pham
,Julia Watson
Mansoo Han
Carmelo Ignaccolo
,Jesse Hirakawa
,Kyle Hovenkotter
,Shuman Wu
Yile Xu
Tricia Martin
,Nans Voron
,Hayley Eber
,Sagi Golan
,Quilian Riano
,Austin Sakong
,Shin-pei Tsay
Samuel Dye, Minsung Kim, Javier Ortiz, Carmen Yu
Richard Chou
,Paul Kamuf
,Eric Huntley
Shirley Chen, Jie Kong, Sydnee Sampson, Jake Tiernan
Emanuel Admassu
,Lexi Tsien
,Nina Cooke John
,Chat Travieso
Bianca Bryant, Surabhi Dahivalkar, Cesar Delgado, Jake Tiernan
Kate Orff
,Thaddeus Pawlowski
,Adriana Chavez
,Geeta Mehta
,Lorena Bello Gomez
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.
Urban Design Publications
Urban Design Semester in Review
Summer 2023 Urban Design Newsletter
Summer/Fall 2022
Urban Design Newsletter
Fall 2021
Urban Design Semester Update
Spring 2019 Urban Design Semester in Review
Fall 2018 Urban Design Semester in Review
Summer 2018 Urban Design Semester in Review
Spring 2018 Urban Design Semester Update
Fall 2017 Urban Design Semester in Review
Summer 2017 Urban Design Semester in Review
Spring 2017 Urban Design Semester in Review
Fall 2016 Urban Design Semester in Review
Spring 2025 Courses
| Course | Semester | Title | Student Work | Instructor | Syllabus | Requirements & Sequence | Location & Time | Session & Points | Call No. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A6851‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Urban Design Studio III
|
|
Kate Orff, Geeta Mehta, Emanuel Admassu, Gabriel Vergara, Lucas Coelho Netto, Sebastian Delpino |
206 FAY / 114 AVAERY
M + TH (1:30 PM- 6:30 PM), F (3:30 PM - 5:30 PM)
|
FULL SEMESTER
9 Points
|
11294 | ||
| A6952‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Guidelines for Future Cities
|
Ivan Shumkov |
UD Seminar |
Ware Lounge
M 11AM - 1PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11296 | ||
| A4385‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Arab Modernism(s): Experiments in Housing, 1945-present
|
Yasser Elsheshtawy |
200 BUELL
M 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11313 | |||
| A4321‑1 | Spring 2025 |
University and City: The Columbia Campus after 1945
|
Reinhold Martin |
300 BUELL SOUTH
TU 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11406 | |||
| A4389‑1 | Spring 2025 |
(Un) Modern: Ex-Centric Latin@/X Spatial Practices
|
Luis E. Carranza |
408 AVERY
M 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
16520 | |||
| A4507‑1 | Spring 2025 |
UNORTHODOX PRACTICES 3: PRACTICE AS A PROJECT
|
Juan Herreros |
408 AVERY
TH 9 AM - 11 AM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11288 | |||
| A4688‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Recombinant Urbanism
|
David Grahame Shane |
504 AVERY
TH 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11290 | |||
| A4880‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Making Senses
|
James Nanasca |
115 AVERY
W 9-11AM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11310 | |||
| A4882‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Some Structures (ADV Structural Design)
|
Hermona Tamrat | Syllabus |
203 FAYERWEATHER
TU 10AM-12PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11311 | ||
| A4995‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Power Tools
|
|
Jelisa Blumberg |
115 AVERY
M 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11377 | ||
| A6702‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Investigative Techniques
|
Amanda Thomas Trienens | Syllabus |
Preservation Technology LAB - 655 SCHERMERHORN
W 1-3:30PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
10935 | ||
| A6815‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Public Space: Rhetorics + Practices
|
David Smiley |
115 AVERY
TU 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11292 | |||
| A6900‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Research I
|
Danielle Smoller |
FULL SEMESTER
2-3 PTS Points
|
11289 | ||||
| A6911‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Metabolic Materialities: Between the Animate and the Inanimate
|
Michael Wang |
408 AVERY
W 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11304 | |||
| A6947‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Designing Spaces for Children
|
300 BUELL SOUTH
TU 9 AM - 11 AM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11306 | ||||
| A4427 | Spring 2025 |
Architecture Apropos Art
|
Steven Holl, Dimitra Tsachrelia |
WARE LOUNGE - 600 AVERY
TH 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
17779 | |||
| A4715‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Re-Thinking BIM
|
Joseph Brennan |
600 AVERY
TU 7-9PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11385 | |||
| A4987‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Architectural Photography: From the Models to the Built World
|
|
Michael Vahrenwald |
115 AVERY
F 9 AM - 11 AM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11376 | ||
| A6414‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Digital Heritage Documentation
|
|
Bilge Kose | Syllabus |
Preservation Technology LAB - 655 SCHERMERHORN
W 5-7PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
10932 | |
| A6892‑1 | Spring 2025 |
1:1 Crafting and Fabrication of Details
|
Zachary Mulitauaopele |
200 BUELL
TU 7-9PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11303 | |||
| A4890‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Conflict Urbanism
|
Laura Kurgan |
300 BUELL SOUTH
W 9 AM - 11 AM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11365 | |||
| 4323‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Topographic Modernism
|
Lucia Allais |
300 BUELL NORTH
TU 11AM-1PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11407 | |||
| A4861‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Footprint: Carbon and Design
|
David Benjamin |
TECH ELECTIVE |
409 AVERY
TH 11AM-1PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
13288 | ||
| A4063‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Spatial Data Narratives
|
|
Josh Begley |
300 BUELL SOUTH
W 7-9PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11381 | ||
| A4312 | Spring 2025 |
Storytelling through Design
|
Hilary Sample |
ALL GSAPP + SCHOOL ARTS |
300 BUELL SOUTH
TH 9 AM - 11 AM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 PTS Points
|
11412 | ||
| A4407‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Methods in Spatial Research
|
|
Adam Vosburgh | Syllabus |
300 BUELL SOUTH
F 9 AM - 11 AM
|
SES A
1.5 PTS Points
|
11383 | |
| PLA6036‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Urban Political Ecology and the Climate Crisis
|
Hugo Sarmiento |
204 FAYERWEATHER
M 3PM-5PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
13331 | |||
| Pla6831 | Spring 2025 |
Performance Zoning
|
Adam Lubinsky | Syllabus |
ALL GSAPP |
412 AVERY
W 3:30-5:30 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
10974 | |
| 6423‑1 | Spring 2025 |
ENERGY, FEMINISM AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
|
Alexandra Quantrill |
409 AVERY
TU 9-11 AM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
16523 | |||
| A4325‑1 | Spring 2025 |
Multi Graphics & Representation
|
|
Wael Morcos |
505 Avery
F 10AM -12PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11409 |
News
