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 are united in their attempt 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 networks of food, energy, resources, culture, transportation, and capital.
The M.S.AUD 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 studio sequence runs adjacent to a number of required and elective courses that develop skills in spatial analysis, critical thinking, research methods, and visualization techniques—and that enable students to rigorously propose urban change in any number of capacities. Elective courses, encouraged at GSAPP and other schools at the university, address the specific and varied problems, facets, and processes of urbanization—from human rights to agricultural policy to systems of finance. Throughout the interwoven studio-seminars sequence, projects emphasize a multi-scalar approach to site and program, embracing local, regional, and global scales and advancing the role of the urban designer as a thoughtful practitioner entangled with a diverse set of actors and existing conditions, and crucial to the implementation of imagined futures.
The Summer semester consists of four courses 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 precedents, research protocols, and representational strategies. Faculty and associates overlap, courses and subjects mix, and design agendas are tested in various settings. This teaching model demonstrates how Urban design can weave together varied tasks of storytelling, community engagement, site survey and interpretation, filmmaking, digital visualization, mapping, and 3D modeling, all of which enable students to create urban knowledge and to iterate, represent and communicate design ideas.
The Fall Studio II expands in scope to consider the city-region, examining large scale interdependencies and interactions. Studio research addresses the particular conditions of American city-regions (currently, the Hudson Valley) in which shifting ecological, topographical, infrastructural, demographic and social conditions call for new strategies for systemic action.
The final Spring Studio III takes on problems of global urbanization, extending previous work on variously-scaled physical and social infrastructures, programmatic interventions and community partnerships. The studio typically travels to two cities, working in close cooperation with local partners and organizations.
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.
In this eleventh episode of GSAPP Conversations, Professor and Urban Design Program Director Kate Orff joins Dean Amale Andraos to discuss what it means to think across scales and connect our human life with the geological time scale, how traveling international studios allow students to better address challenges shared by otherwise very different cities, and teaching the reciprocity of physical design and social context.
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.
Course | Semester | Title | Student Work | Instructor | Syllabus | Requirements & Sequence | Location & Time | Session & Points | Call No. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A6851‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Urban Design Studio III
|
Kate Orff, Thaddeus Pawlowski, Adriana Chavez, Dilip da Cunha, Geeta Mehta |
FAYERWEATHER 206
M + TH 1:30 PM- 6:30 PM F 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
9 Points
|
11376 | |||
A4385‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Arab Modernism(s): Experiments in Housing, 1945-present
|
Yasser Elsheshtawy |
200 BUELL
M 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11402 | |||
A4397‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Speculative City, Crisis, Uncertainty and Projections in Architecture
|
David Eugin Moon |
504 AVERY
F 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11356 | |||
A4050‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Arch Elective Internship
|
Karen Cover |
FULL SEMESTER
1.5 Points
|
11354 | ||||
A4507‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Unorthodox Arch Practices
|
Juan Herreros |
408 AVERY
TH 9 AM - 11 AM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
12005 | |||
A4688‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Recombinant Urbanism
|
David Grahame Shane |
504 AVERY
TH 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11366 | |||
A4995‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Power Tools
|
Jelisa Blumberg |
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
14178 | ||||
A6676‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Cartography + Property
|
Molly Burhans |
115 AVERY
F 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
14553 | |||
A6702 | Spring 2023 |
Investigative Techniques
|
Amanda Thomas Trienens |
CONSERVATION LAB - 655 SCHERMERHORN
W 1 PM - 3:30 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11510 | |||
A6815‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Public Space: Rhetorics + Practices
|
David Smiley | Syllabus |
408 AVERY
TU 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11368 | ||
A4427‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Architecture Apropos Art
|
Steven Holl, Dimitra Tsachrelia |
408 AVERY
TH 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11358 | |||
A4715‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Re-Thinking BIM
|
Joseph Brennan |
115 AVERY
TH 7 PM - 9 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11420 | |||
A4987‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Architectural Photography: From the Models to the Built World
|
Michael Vahrenwald |
115 AVERY
F 9 AM - 11 AM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11416 | |||
A4988‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Coding for Spatial Practices
|
Celeste Layne |
114 AVERY
TU 7 PM - 9 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11418 | |||
A6414‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Digital Heritage Documentation
|
Bilge Kose |
CONSERVATION LAB - 655 SCHERMERHORN
W 5 PM - 7 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11508 | |||
A6857‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Measuring the Great Indoors
|
Violet Whitney |
115 AVERY
TU 4 PM - 6 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11425 | |||
A6892‑1 | Spring 2023 |
1:1 Crafting and Fabrication of Details
|
Zachary Mulitauaopele |
200 BUELL
TU 7 PM - 9 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11502 | |||
A4047‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Immeasurable Sites
|
Emanuel Admassu |
114 AVERY
W 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11291 | |||
A4890‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Conflict Urbanism
|
Laura Kurgan |
300 BUELL SOUTH
M 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11405 | |||
A4407‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Methods in Spatial Research
|
Adam Vosburgh |
WARE LOUNGE
F 9 AM - 11 AM
|
SES A
1.5 Points
|
11410 | |||
A4861‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Footprint: Carbon and Design
|
David Benjamin |
409 AVERY
TH 11AM - 1PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11468 | |||
A6675‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Resilient Caribbean: Prototyping a Hub for the Dominican Republic
|
Nelson De Jesus Ubri, Vanessa Espaillat Lovett |
115 AVERY
W 7 PM - 9 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
18430 | |||
A6897‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Principles and Praxis of Spatial Justice
|
Ifeoma Ebo |
504 AVERY
M 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
11294 | |||
Pla6816‑1 | Spring 2023 |
JOINT MSRED/MSUP SEMINAR OPTION
|
Adam Lubinsky, Melissa Bindra |
M 1:30-3:30
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
18431 | |||
Pla6818‑1 | Spring 2023 |
ADV VI STUDIO / SEMINAR OPTION
|
David Gissen |
M 1:30-3:30
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
18432 | |||
PLA6870‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Sustainability and Energy Efficiency for CRE
|
Adrian Silver |
209 FAYERWEATHER
TU 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
|
SES B
1.5 Points
|
12012 | |||
A4063‑1 | Spring 2023 |
Points Unknown: Cartographic Narratives
|
Joshua Begley |
WARE LOUNGE
F 11 AM - 1 PM
|
FULL SEMESTER
3 Points
|
14552 |