Courses

This course explores core urban design methods and theories organized into three themes intended to give students a foundational understanding of urban design, examine key critiques of urbanization, and explore emerging modes of design agency.

The focus of this seminar is to understand how practices and policies from American plantation life to the modern U.S. city have created racial and economic inequality, human exposure to environmental hazards and climate risks, and how community organizing power has altered these conditions at all levels of government.

This graduate-level seminar provides an overview of scholarly, design, and research-based approaches addressing ecology, technology and climate change in architecture and urban design.

This course explores new forms of media and representation in urban design.

Throughout the semester we explore various types and scales of change. Each week we review various concepts, such as mass customization, computationally responsive environments and facades, open building, shearing layers of change, adaptive reuse, metabolism, persistence, preservation, circular economy, design for deconstruction and reuse (DfD+R), and repair/maintenance.

In this course, MSAECM students apply the diverse knowledge and skills they have acquired during the program to a critical public interest issue related to Pittsburgh’s built environment.

This course is a compendium of Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) practice, methods and management with an emphasis on how the AEC professions can more effectively work together by understanding each other’s roles, responsibilities and professional perspectives.

This course is an introduction to the importance of the indoor environment and human health and productivity. Throughout the semester, the course lectures challenge students’ intellectual curiosity as it relates to the built environment.

The culmination thesis project for the Master of Science in Building Performance & Diagnostics includes individual and collaborative dissertations on the integration of advanced building and urban technologies for environmental sustainability, human health and productivity, and organizational change.

This course explores several evolving topics of material and digital culture in contemporary architectural design, research and practice in order to provide foundational knowledge necessary for the establishment of the MAAD thesis proposal.