Fall 2025

This intensive course is designed to help students refine their research plan and prepare for their synthesis project.

This is the culminating thesis course of the Master of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) program. This course focuses on delivering a design-research project that integrates ecological principles into the design and analysis of the built environment across multiple scales.

This course challenges students to rethink how buildings perform — not just consume energy, but harness it. Students explore the physics behind daylight, thermal behavior, ventilation, and energy use, using advanced simulation tools like Rhino, Grasshopper, and Climate Studio. Through data-driven design, they learn to create environments that respond to climate, enhance human comfort, and minimize reliance on mechanical systems.Combining building science with computational design, the course equips students with workflows that inform better architecture — resilient, sustainable, and beautifully integrated with the forces of nature.

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.

This course explores various types and scales of change, compares the ways that architects deal with change, and analyzes the effectiveness of various precedents.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) centralizes essential project data, allowing architects to visualize, analyze and optimize designs. This course offers hands-on experience with one of the leading tools in BIM: Autodesk Revit. Students will gain the ability to leverage Revit’s parametric features alongside AI-driven analytics specific to the BIM environment, such as Autodesk Forma and Veras, for a more efficient and innovative design process and visualization.

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.