The Department of Architecture
"A School of Agritecture” by Yijia Tracy Tang (MArch I '22)
The Department of Architecture is a unique community, rich in diversity, collaboration, and scholarship through design. Here, students explore today’s most creative design approaches, with an international faculty prominent across the field.
Degree Programs
March i master of architecture i.
The program leading to the Master of Architecture is an accredited professional degree intended for individuals who have completed the bachelor's degree with a major other than one of the design professions or with a pre-professional undergraduate major in one of the design professions.
MArch II Master of Architecture II
The program leading to the Master of Architecture II is a post-professional degree intended for individuals who have completed a five-year undergraduate professional program in architecture or its equivalent.
Inside Architecture
Together with visiting design critics and theorists from around the world, architecture faculty and students explore a range of design investigations, expand knowledge, and confront the challenges of the contemporary built environment. Collaboration thrives in Gund Hall’s distinctive trays, five continuous tiers of open studio space.
The Department’s philosophy of design excellence integrates the imaginative and skillful manipulation of form, as well as the ability to draw inspiration from a broad body of knowledge. The architecture curriculum includes design studio, theory, visual studies, history, technology, and professional practice, with design as the central focus of instruction.
Gund Hall’s studio trays form both the physical and pedagogical core of the GSD experience, drawing together students and faculty from across the departments of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design. The creative, collaborative atmosphere of the trays is supplemented by Gund Hall’s advanced information infrastructure, media-enriched presentation spaces, vast library resources, and open access to fabrication technologies, enabling architecture students to develop, discuss, exchange, and materialize ideas through a comprehensive range of platforms and media. The student experience is further enriched by the School’s renowned lecture and public program series, exhibitions, and publications, as well as the resources available across Harvard University and the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Students in the Department of Architecture are integrated into an active network of internationally recognized designers, dedicated to addressing the changing needs of the modern world.
As new ways of thinking emerge in the profession of architecture, the field grows increasingly complex and requires new techniques of inquiry and design. For generations, the GSD has educated committed individuals who have assumed leadership roles in shaping the built environment. Today’s graduates in architecture continue this tradition by pioneering new design approaches to the challenges posed by contemporary society.
Graduate studies have expanded my own conception of what architecture is, what architecture can be, and what architecture can do. And I think that that's pretty powerful.
Selwyn Bachus
Apr 19, 2021
Design collaborative colab-19 is changing how we think about post-pandemic architecture
Late last year, a scaffolding structure rose to abut the facade of the popular…
Apr 8, 2021
Announcements
LA DALLMAN Architects wins 2021 Progressive Architecture Award for transformation of 1901 Wisconsin grain elevator
The transformative new design for the Teweles and Brandeis Grain Elevator in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin…
Mar 25, 2021
The way it is presented in the park, nature is culture, so bringing more kinds of culture into the visitor center site gives people a chance to come in and participate in the storied healing experience of nature.
Jeanne Gang
Faculty Honored with 2021 ACSA Architectural Education Awards
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) recently announced the recipients of its…
Feb 26, 2021
Groundscrapers: Exploring the logic behind long, low buildings
A visionary architect of the modern metropolis surveyed the vast urban scene unfolding from his…
Feb 17, 2021
Who we center as our subject is a really important question when we talk about architecture. Who is it for? Who gets to make it? Whose world view does it help prop up?
Jennifer Newsom
Nov 30, 2020
Talking Practice: Practice in an Uncertain World
In this episode of Talking Practice, host Grace La moderates a special roundtable, Practice in…
Mar 6, 2021
GSD exhibitions turn “Inside Out”
This spring, Harvard Graduate School of Design has turned its Druker Design Gallery, Experiments Wall,…
Pier Paolo Tamburelli on the “hardscrabble, repressed, and perverted” American Gothic psyche
In Sherwood Anderson’s collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio, the author…
Nov 12, 2020
With Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect, Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara speculate how wood might recapture the American architectural imagination
Moments of intense constraint have driven architecture toward seismic ruptures, which go on to determine…
Nov 24, 2020
“We are asking the students to take a visionary position,” says Moussavi. “The pandemic has called into question the efficiency of all the old housing systems, and I think it’s up to us to produce the visions of tomorrow.”
Farshid Moussavi
Nov 20, 2020
Preston Scott Cohen’s Post-Shaker studio draws on the austere formal language of Shaker design in proposing a new art colony in Mount Lebanon, NY
Mount Lebanon, NY has faded. When its last seven inhabitants moved away in 1947 it…
Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning
Share this page.
Students in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning are enrolled in and receive their degree from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences even though they may work primarily with faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
This program is ideal for individuals wishing to enter teaching and advanced research careers in the history and theory of architecture, architectural technology, landscape architecture, and urban form from antiquity to the present or the analysis and development of the built environment from a social, economic, technological, and ecological standpoint.
Program cohorts are small, enabling close one-to-one contact with faculty. In this interdisciplinary program, you will interact with a wide range of Harvard departments including History of Art and Architecture, Art Film and Visual Studies, Anthropology, American Studies, and the History of Science as well as the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Projects former students have worked on include Constructing Classicism: Architectural Theory, Practice, and Expertise in Paris (1670-1720) ; Prehistory of the Digital: Architecture becomes Programming, 1935-1990 ; Private Projects, Public Ambitions: Large-Scale, Middle-Income Housing in New York City ; The Well-Fed Subject: Modern Architecture in the Quantitative State, India (1943-1984) ; Britain’s Imperial Prospects and the Aesthetic Origins of the Scenographia Americana .
Most graduates have gone on to secure faculty positions at schools such as Columbia, Bard, Yale, MIT, Northeastern, UC Berkeley, Emory, and University of North Carolina and abroad at the University of Toronto, McGill University, The Courtauld, University of Basel, and Sweden Royal Institute of Technology.
Additional information on the graduate program is available from the PhD Program in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning , and requirements for the degree are detailed in Policies .
Admissions Requirements
Please review admissions requirements and other information before applying. You can find degree program-specific admissions requirements below and access additional guidance on applying from the PhD Program in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning .
Academic Background
A professional degree in architecture, landscape architecture, or urban planning is recommended but not required. Applicants are required to indicate a proposed major subject of study that is congruent with the interests and expertise of at least one member of the PhD standing committee.
Writing Sample
A writing sample is required as part of the application and can be a paper written for a course, journal article, and/or thesis excerpt and no longer than 20 pages. The writing sample should focus on a subject related to architecture, landscape architecture, or urban planning.
Please note: Unless a specific justification is provided by the applicant, design portfolios are not typically considered as part of the application.
Personal Statement
Standardized tests.
GRE General: Required
Theses & Dissertations
Theses & Dissertations for Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning
See list of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning faculty
APPLICATION DEADLINE
Questions about the program.
IMAGES