Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
This course will teach anyone how to start to be a designer, not just of drawings and objects, but also buildings, landscapes, and urban spaces. And not just in isolation, but in the complex web of ecological and man-made systems which makes up our shifting environment. You will take from the course first-hand experience of drawing, measuring, and design — which form the basis of the professions of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning— and which culminate in a final design project in the course. The course is open to all undergraduate students.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session
This course accompanies the summer studio and media classes in the architecture and landscape architecture post-baccalaureate programs, (IN)Arch and (IN)Land, of the College of Environmental Design. This series of eight lectures by faculty in the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley presents a range of approaches, theories, and practices in the design fields. Lectures will include topics in landscape architecture, architectural practice, building construction and systems, global cities, urban ecology, building sustainability, social and political aspects of architecture, and a panel discussion by professionals who are previous students of the College.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course will expose students to key literature that examines, primarily, the relationship between sustainability and environmental design disciplines. Our goal will be not only to investigate the central ideas that inform the design of sustainable landscapes, cities, and buildings, but also to understand how competing arguments are presented in writing. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition Requirement.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course explores the relationships between design and activism, raising critical questions about what design is, and how designers serve as guardians of culture and as agents of change. Students will participate in "spontaneous acts of design activism" that address contemporary issues through the making of forms and space to reinvent relationships between people and their environments.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
This study of cities is more important than ever; for the first time in history more people live in urban than rural areas, and cities will account for all of the world's population growth for at least the next half-century. We will explore the challenges facing global cities in the 21st Century and expose students to some of the key texts, theories, and methods of inquiry that shape the built environment, from the human scale of home and community to the regional scale of the megacity.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course is intended to provide students with an overview of current thinking about cities and their components (buildings, parks, streets) as ecological and cultural systems. It will provide an introduction to methods for investigating the dynamics of flows and relationships in the built environment and students will gain experience constructing their own narratives as ways of asking and answering questions about human habitat that could shape the future.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session
This course is about cities, their environmental challenges, and the potentials of design innovation as a catalyst for change. The course is organized in four components: global cities and global challenges, design innovators, technology and media workshop on environmental visualization, and product design and fabrication studio.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2015 Second 6 Week Session
The embARC program allows high school students to explore the fields of sustainable environmental design and experience the culture of the design studio. Students study architecture, urban design, and city planning through a series of lectures, field trips, and studios. Introductory instruction in freehand sketching, drafting, model building and digital representation teaches students how to think with and communicate two- and three-dimensional design ideas.

Terms offered: Spring 2012, Spring 2011, Fall 2009
With emphasis on key events of the 20th and now 21st century, this course introduces the big ideas and individuals that have shaped architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2017
This is a special topics course intended to fulfill the individual interests of students, and provide a vehicle for professors to instruct students based on new and innovative developments in the field of environmental design.

Terms offered: Fall 2014
Berkeley Connect is a mentoring program, offered through various academic departments, that helps students build intellectual community. Over the course of a semester, enrolled students participate in regular small-group discussions facilitated by a graduate student mentor (following a faculty-directed curriculum), meet with their graduate student mentor for one-on-one academic advising, attend lectures and panel discussions featuring department faculty and alumni, and go on field trips to campus resources. Students are not required to be declared majors in order to participate.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017, Summer 2016 8 Week Session
This course is concerned with the study of cities. Focusing on great cities around the world - from Chicago to Los Angeles, from Rio to Shanghai, from Vienna to Cairo it covers of historical and contemporary patterns of urbanization and urbanism. Through these case studies, it introduces the key ideas, debates, and research genres of the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. In other words, this is simultaneously a "great cities" and "great theories" course. Its purpose is to train students in critical analysis of the socio-spatial formations of their lived world.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
An intensive workshop for students interested in writing about architecture, landscape, and the built environment. Recognizing that undergraduate students who take this course represent departments outside as well as within the College of Environmental Design, assignments are touchstones for students of different disciplines to bring their current academic interests into play when writing about environmental design. Weekly assignments include prose readings, generally essays related to life experience. Brief readings and discussions during each class, along with weekly writing assignments of 3-5 pages of prose will illustrate the skills involved in the craft of writing.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
In 101B: The Notebook (one long composition in 14 weekly assignments) assigned readings (principally short stories) offer examples of writing which parallel the focus of the week's writing assignment. Prompts and assigned readings encourage the individual development of a "story" or "theme" that each student at the outset or in the process of writing, arrives at a personal narrative. Course approved for English department credit and UC Undergraduate Minor in Creative Writing.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
The aim of the course is to provide students with knowledge and insight into the major issues and debates relating to sustainabiltiy. By the end of the course, students should have a critical understanding of the complexity and scale of the sustainability challenge, how different actors characterize and understand sustainability, the approaches that have been developed to implement these varyig vissions, and the institutional, political, and individual barriers to these visions

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 1997
This course begins with an open-ended question (“What is design?”) and asks students to think critically about the central tenets, commonalities, and limits of design in an ever-changing complex world. A historical and theoretical overview of predominant schools of thought across all scales of design (i.e. industrialization, modernism, post-modernism, and beyond) will ground the discussions to follow. Topics related to environmental sustainability including industrial ecologies, ecological design principles, lifecycle, biomimicry, LEED and accreditation systems, and closed-loop cycles will be presented.

Terms offered: Fall 2013, Fall 2012, Fall 2011
Design problems from an ecological perspective. Design studies of relationships among ecosystem, energy, and resource flows, human social and cultural values, and technological variables as they interact to produce the built environment.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
This course asks students to reflect back, reviewing the various disciplinary approaches introduced toward sustainability and to look forward by proposing interdisciplinary ways to affect the environment. Each year will be organized around a theme and project advanced by the faculty of the College. The workshop will require independent as well as collaborative research often in partnership with an external 'client' organization.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016
This course explores contemporary debates around race, gender, sexuality, disability rights and other forms of embodied politics and considers their potential to transform the normative assumptions and practices of the built environment disciplines. Concepts such as self-abstraction, assimilation, and discourses of the “universal” or neutral body will be examined critically in relation to socially situated theories of power, identity, and activism. The course will investigate case studies of everyday objects, buildings and urban space that exemplify the creative limits and possibilities of embodied difference in the design process. Weekly reading responses, class discussions, presentations, and a final project are required.

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Fall 2013, Fall 2012
Introduces ways of seeing and interpreting American histories and cultures, as revealed in everyday built surroundings-- houses, highways, farms, factories, stores, recreation areas, small towns, city districts, and regions. Encourages students to read landscapes as records of past and present social relations and to speculate for themselves about cultural meaning.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
Introduces ways of seeing and interpreting American histories and cultures, as revealed in everyday built surroundings--homes, highways, farms, factories, stores, recreation areas, small towns, city districts, and regions. Encourages students to read landscapes as records of past and present social relations, and to speculate for themselves about cultural meaning.

Terms offered: Spring 2013, Spring 2012, Spring 2011
What is the social art of architecture in America? What was it historically, where is it now, where is it going--and why should you care? In this course, we will explore contemporary and historic attempts to confront social needs through themes: Design by Professionals (Architects, City Planners, Urban Designers, Sociologists, Philosophers, Philanthropists), and Design by Laypeople (Squatters, Intentional Communities, Do It Yourself). The objective is to discharge the false dualism that has emerged in architecture between social concerns and creative design.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
This is a zero-unit internship course for F-1, non-immigrant, international students participating in internships under the Curricular Practical Training program. Requires a paper exploring how the theoretical contructs learned in Environmental Design courses were applied during the internship.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Directed study leading to preparation of a senior thesis.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Fall 2016
The Senior Thesis in Environmental Design is an advanced research and writing project that presents an original and thorough analysis of a topic of individual interest in architecture, landscape architecture, or urban studies. This class provides an introducion to various methodologies relevant for a senior thesis including qualitative, quantitative, and descriptive research approaches.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
Students taking this class will use it to complete the writing of their thesis under the supervision of a Senior Thesis Advisor. This class will operate as an independent study; faculty with more than one Senior Thesis student may choose to meet them in group sessions.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Summer 2017 8 Week Session, Spring 2017
This is a special topics course intended to fulfill the individual interests of students, and provide a vehicle for professors to instruct students based on new and innovative developments in the field of environmental design.

Terms offered: Fall 2014
Berkeley Connect is a mentoring program, offered through various academic departments, that helps students build intellectual community. Over the course of a semester, enrolled students participate in regular small-group discussions facilitated by a graduate student mentor (following a faculty-directed curriculum), meet with their graduate student mentor for one-on-one academic advising, attend lectures and panel discussions featuring department faculty and alumni, and go on field trips to campus resources. Students are not required to be declared majors in order to participate.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Enrollment is restricted by regulations in the General Catalog. Studies developed to meet individual needs.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
An intensive studio involving collaborative work on problems that are large in scope, yet require attention to spatial organization and design details.
The studio course is offered each fall semester and required for incoming graduate students in the Master of Urban Design Program (MUD). The course is also open to College of Environmental Design graduate students of advanced standing in the Master of City Planning Program/ Urban Design Concentration, the Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture Programs.

Terms offered: Not yet offered
This course explores contemporary debates around race, gender, sexuality, disability rights and other forms of embodied politics and considers their potential to transform the normative assumptions and practices of the built environment disciplines. Concepts such as self-abstraction, assimilation, and discourses of the “universal” or neutral body will be examined critically in relation to socially situated theories of power, identity, and activism. The course will investigate case studies of everyday objects, buildings and urban space that exemplify the creative limits and possibilities of embodied difference in the design process. Weekly reading responses, class discussions, presentations, and a final project are required.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015
The course is the first of three courses (ED251, ED252, ED253) directed toward the development of research and design proposals that advance the field of urban design. As the first course in the sequence, ED251 introduces topics and research methods in contemporary urban design. There is a lecture component (Section 1) that is open to the College and campus. Graduate students preparing for theses and professional reports in urban design will enroll in Section 2, which includes attending the lectures as well as a seminar that expands on the lecture topics by exploring various research and design methodologies.

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Seminar focuses on individual urban design interests, the design and research work that students are pursuing in other courses, and development of thesis or final design projects.

Terms offered: Summer 2017 10 Week Session, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Summer 2015 10 Week Session
A studio for Masters of Urban Design students aimed to support students during the final months of their thesis work. Faculty will hold bi-weekly individual desk critiques of student work and organize preliminary reviews to outside reviewers in preparation of the final review scheduled during the late August orientation week.

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Fall 2016
Topics to be announced at the beginning of each semester.