| Spring 2012 Architecture Graduate Courses |
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ARCH 200B (5) 200B must be taken for a letter grade. Four hours of lecture/seminar, eight hours of studio, and four hours of laboratory per week. Introductory course in architectural design and theories for graduate students. Problems emphasize the major format, spatial, material, tectonic, social, technological, and environmental determinants of building form. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips. Students must take Arch 200D in conjunction with 200B. ARCH 202 (5) Eight hours of studio per week. Focused design and research as the capstone project for graduate students. ARCH 202 SEC 1 Description to come. ARCH 202 SEC 2 Description to Come. ARCH 202 SEC 3 The Mezcal Route Information session to be held November 16, 2011, 12 p.m., 104 Wurster. Prof. Margaret Crawford (Architecture) will be teaching a studio in the Talcolula Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico. Collaborating with professors and students from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, and other local partners in Oaxaca, we will produce a plan to shape low-impact, sustainable, and equitable tourism in the valley. As Oaxaca’s tourist industry continues to expand, change in the Tlacolula Valley is inevitable. The key questions now are the specifics of these changes, who will benefit from them, and how can they be managed. The plan will build on the existing natural environment, culture, and activities of the local area, such as sustainable agriculture, craft traditions, gastronomy, and artisanal mezcal production. The plan will be organized around one or more proposed tourist itineraries, called "The Mezcal Route," incorporating existing facilities where mezcal is produced and consumed. The studio is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture of the State of Oaxaca who will pay all student travel expenses, except food. Participation in the Studio. The studio is open to students from all three programs. In mid-November, Prof. Crawford will organize an information session about the studio. Students will need to apply to the studio. Selected students will be announced by the end of November. Students will travel to Oaxaca twice, once in January before school starts and then during Spring Break. ARCH 204B (5) Eight hours studio per week. Focused design research as the capstone project for graduate students. ARCH 205B (5) Eight hours studio per week. This course is the second semester of a one-year, post-professional design studio intended for those students who have a professional architecture degree and wish to explore current design issues in a stimulating, rigorous, and highly experimental studio setting. Students must also enroll in ARCH 249 Sec 002 (SCHIAVON) concurrently. ARCH 207B (1) One hour of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Co-requisite with Architecture 200B. Grading option: Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. This course accompanies the second semester of the required introductory design studio in the three-year option of the Master of Architecture program. It is the second in a series of three one-unit colloquia, scheduled consecutively for the first three semesters of the program. For a one-hour session each week, faculty in the department of architecture and other departments of the College of Environmental Design will present lectures on their research and design practice. ARCH 207D (3) Three hours of seminar per week. Prerequisites: 201. The nature of architectural practice, how it has evolved and how it is changing in today's world is the theme of the class. The course considers how diverse cultures--both anthropological and professional--contribute to practice, and how the culture of practice evolves. The class has three five-week modules, devoted to the following themes: traditions of practice, research in the culture of the profession, and innovations in practice. ARCH 208 (3) Two hours of seminar/discussion per week. The course introduces graduate students to legal and related professional practice issues that often arise during a design professional's career. Careful practitioners can avoid or mitigate many legal problems through vigilance and loss prevention techniques. Course topics include standard of care, business formation, contract analysis and negotiation, intellectual property rights, projects delivery models, insurance, and dispute resolution. Extended Course Description To come. ARCH 209 (1-4) One to four hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Second- or third-year graduate standing. Formerly 209X. Credit option: Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Topics deal with major problems and current issues in architectural design. ARCH 209 SEC 1
This seminar focuses on video media and filmic mode of representation, Emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century as an unprecedented means of capturing time, cinema, at its best, makes visible and comprehensible “temporal dimension.” According to Bergson, time, identified as duration in the impetus given to consciousness by sensation, links the past, present, and future in a seamless continuum. This duration is manifested within “filmic space,” where its structure, light, and material form the “architecture (as re-presentation and manifestation) of time.” As both comparative and directed study, this seminar will explore film and video media as modes of re-examinations and fabrication of temporal scale in architecture. We will attempt to utilize film and video media together with architectural conventions; i.e., diagrams and orthographic projections, as measuring/computation devises to calibrate form and space in building design. Within the context of this study, we will acknowledge the critical differences in the tectonic nature of architecture and film media. Through a series of film as case studies each week, we will critically investigate specific theoretical, structural, and technological constraints inherent to each medium. Another underlying objective of the seminar is to investigate the relationship of space and time as both cultural and phenomenological construct. Particularly, the proliferation and advancement of information technology, the effects of globalization and cross-breeding of ideas, as they rapidly and perpetually re-defined our shifting perception of space and time. Image: Cildo Meireles, Fontes (Detail), 1992/2008. ARCH 209 SEC 2 The Life of Form ARCH 209A (1-4) Extended Course Description An important part of our Berkeley design tradition is to overcome the remoteness between the designer in the studio and the reality of a site, city or region. We will walk through parts of San Francisco and observe the physical patterns of the City, its architecture, settlement and landform. We will ask, how urban patterns have developed over time and how individual architects, or builders have responded to topography, light and views; how individual buildings are part of an urban morphology and building typology. We will study neighborhood character and socio-economic conditions. On our walks we will observe and discuss the various clues that can be taken from the physical world and how such clues give us information about people’s need for privacy, sense of community, sense of place and orientation. We will study building materials, form and color, and how architectural elements behave under different light conditions. We will observe information that allows us to deduct how buildings, streets and neighborhoods have changed over time, the population group they were once intended for, and the potential for re-use or change. To answer these questions we will measure and observe matters of scale, density, fit, contrast and texture. We look at utility and function. We concentrate on dimensions and scale. We study the urban landscape, its vegetation and topography. We try to figure out how water drains and where it collects below the surface. We train ourselves to observe systematically and diagnose what is good in the urban fabric and why; what is vulnerable and what is weak. We use observation as a design tool, a preparatory task, generally done prior to working on a specific design in a specific setting. The course is open to all graduate students in CED. First meeting Friday, Jan. 20, 2012, 2 PM, Wurster 270. We will jointly conduct 10 walks; you will conduct two walk on your own, and meet on the remaining days in class to discuss your findings. You are required to keep a sketchbook to note down details and to draw spatial configuration that strike you as important. Also, you will write two papers, the first on observation as a method of inquiry, a second paper on building typology, urban morphology, or issues related to matters that can be observed first hand in a place of your choice. ARCH 215 (3) Three hours of seminar per week. This seminar aims to explore how the physical and conceptual understanding of landscape can enrich current forms of architectural and urban design practice. At the junction of landform, infrastructure, urban design, and architecture lies a rich field of possibilities that is increasingly superseding the narrower field of each of the disciplines by themselves. In the past century, contemporary culture and technology-automobiles, televisions, cell phones, and the internet have socially, culturally, environmentally, and physically reshaped the urban fabric, calling into question the very definition of urbanity. The course will explore the implications for public space in an era of increased security and risk mitigation and how designers may direct the various invisible forces which give form to the world around us. Extended Course Description Download the ARCH 215 Spring 2012 Course Syllabus [PDF] This seminar aims to explore how the physical and conceptual understanding of landscape can enrich current forms of architectural and urban design practice. We will introduce landscape and infrastructure discourses that increasingly impinge on the fields of architecture and urban design today. At the junction of landform, infrastructure, urban design and architecture lies a rich field of possibilities that is increasingly superseding the narrower field of each of the disciplines by themselves. Increasingly, landscape is emerging as a model for urbanism. While much of the urban design discourse is stuck in a quest for recapturing village life, the critique of current landscape and architecture is that by themselves they do not have the tools to reform the U.S. city that includes very large areas of horizontal non-dense development. Landscape urbanism has however been unable to produce any projects that are anything other than landscape parks. The movement is imprecise and abstracted from residential fabric and the rhythms of everyday life, but it has had an impact in shifting the conversation or at least counterbalancing neo-traditionalism, in heightening the relationship between architecture urban design infrastructure and landscape, in re-enforcing ideas of process over final product and in suggesting an architectural vocabulary that recalls natural forms. But while form and process are only one of a number of relevant aspects of the environmental design discourse today and not the most urgent, urbanity remains a key issue to provide a new perspective and allow for judgments far more germane to the problems of architecture and city-building. ARCH 219 (1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Topics include the sociology of taste, personal and societal values in design, participatory design, semantic ethnography, environments for special popultions such as the elderly, and building types such as housing, hospitals, schools, offices, and urban parks. Architecture and the Unconscious This is an invitation to experience how our unconscious mind shapes what we design. Explore different ideas about the unconscious from psychoanalysis, neuroscience, somatics, and architectural theory. We start from objective understanding of human anatomy and move to increasingly subjective experience of those structures, to what has been termed “experiential anatomy.” We gain access to the pre-verbal parts of the brain using techniques from meditation and interviewing. Once we have built acquaintance with sub-cortical knowing, primarily through imagery, we will document a new way of seeing human settlement as a subliminal projection of human form. We will share these perceptions with others via drawings and photographs (sometimes captured in field trips to local places). We will create a book of drawings and photographs to show how our world can be seen as the transformation of bodily states of awareness into built form. For me this is a new adventure in teaching, so you can expect to be a pioneer and co-investigator with me in looking a built form in this way. Learning objectives of exploring architecture as the unconscious expression of human anatomy: 1. Explore a new theory of architectural production as a subliminal projection of human form Course Outline Part I. Definitions of the unconscious (and consciousness): Readings in Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Somatics, Neuroscience, and Architectural Theory; Techniques for communicating with the unconscious: Freudian, Gestalt, dreams, alpha brain wave, giving voice to body structures; Learning anatomy, especially brain and embryology, through texts, models, Internet and lecture-demos. Part II. Interviewing the unconscious through anatomical imagery: Learning to interview the visual pathway; Learning to interview other anatomical structures; Learning to interview embryological structures. Part III. Documenting the Built Environment as a Projection of Human Anatomy: Drawing and photographing anatomical structures in the build environment, e.g., Berkeley Hills staircase and platform as optic nerves and chiasm; Calvin Lab as iris, picket fence as ora serrata, etc. Product: class book of drawings and photos of the environment as a subliminal expression of human forms. Alternatively, some might be interested in finding music to accompany a slide show of these images. ARCH 229/129 (1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: 210 or consent of instructor. Selected topics in digital design theories and methods. ARCH 229/129 SEC 1 All Tomorrow's Parties With today’s advances in the abilities of modeling tools, architectural representation and design have radically shifted in both their conception and execution. For architecture is both informed by and through these specific tools. This advanced course is organized as an amalgamation of architectural objectives and representational techniques that weave together the 2D, 3D, and 4D universes that we inhabit today. Students will be amplifying and developing their skill sets through the use of Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, and Photoshop, as well as Rhinoceros. ARCH 229/129 SEC 2 Future Cities: Urban Data Streams Over half the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and 75% will call a city home by 2050. In a city driven by real-time digital data, systems and networks; connectivity and the location of its users; transportation networks mobility of people and vehicles in the city is becoming ever more interconnected. This course will explore how such urban data streams can be visualized and become tools for planners, architects, designers, city officials, city inhabitants and other decision makers in creating new strategies for urban design through parametric modeling tools. Students will learn to use Elk, Firefly and Grasshopper to help generate maps using open source data. Additionally, students will learn how the Internet of Things may be used to inform intelligent digital city models to help designers make better more informed decisions. ARCH 236/136 (3) Three hours of seminar per week. The concept of space as it is applied to the fields of architecture, geography, and urbanism can be understood as a barometer of the condition that we call "modernity." This course explores connections between the larger cultural frameworks of the past century, and the idea of space as it has been perceived, conceived, and lived during this period. Readings include key essays from the disciplines of philosophy, geography, architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and short works of fiction that illustrate and elucidate the spatial concepts. The readings are grouped according to themes that form the foundation for weekly seminar discussions. Chronological and thematic readings reveal the force of history upon the conceptualization of space, and its contradictions. Extended Course Description INTRODUCTION The concept of space as it is applied to the fields of architecture, urbanism and geography can be understood as a barometer of the condition that we call “modernity.” Many spatial themes unique to modernity emerge in short fiction and novels; these themes overlap with developments in critical theory. This course will explore connections between the larger literary and cultural frameworks of the past century and the idea of space as it has been perceived, conceived and lived during this period. Adrian Forty’s essay on “Space” (Forty, 2000) provides an entry into the literature of the course, and the course reader opens with this text. The weekly readings are grouped according to themes that are in turn tied to the idea of space as a modern phenomenon. These themes are tied to the consecutive decades of the twentieth century, and the weekly classes will include a short introduction to key events and intellectual developments of the relevant period. The readings themselves, however, are not chronological—thus revealing not only the force of history upon the conceptualization of space, but also the sense of prophecy that comes with hindsight. The contradictions between sequential and rhizomatic orders of time further clarify a key theme within much of the literature—the displacement of history by geography (of time by space) as an essential quality of the modern condition. In addition to the theoretical readings, each week’s selection includes one or two works of twentieth-century short fiction, thus complementing the intellectual content with texts that reveal the geography of the imagination. Students will also read one novel from the period, which will serve as the foundation for the final paper or presentation. GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE COURSE 1. To understand the relationship between the concept of “space” and the condition of modernity. A selection of readings linked by a common theme is assigned each week, and forms the foundation of the seminar discussions and workshops. WEEKLY RESPONSES Each week, students will write a two-paragraph (300 – 400 words) response to the assigned readings, focusing on two of the selections. We will use a method of “peer review”, as well as instructor response, to comment upon and clarify the spatial themes revealed through these exercises. Reading responses will be posted on the course B-space site. SHORT LECTURES, DISCUSSIONS & WORKSHOPS We will use part of each class time for a short lecture, and the remainder for informal group workshops and discussion of the readings. Students will take turns leading these discussions. Workshops may involve conducting an informal debate, or diagramming the spaces within a work of fiction. As we approach the end of the semester, one of these workshops will be directly related to the content of the final project. FINAL PROJECT: ORAL PRESENTATION Students will prepare an oral presentation of approximately 10 minutes, including graphic material and text. Presentations should be structured to stimulate questions and discussion. The exact method of scheduling these presentations will depend upon the size of the class. These presentations may be done in partnership. NOVELS Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes Note: Undergraduates are admitted only by permission of instructor, and must have upper-division status. ARCH 237 (FORMERLY ARCH 229X) (3) Three hours of seminar per week. An examination and analysis of architectural manifestos and monographs from the first half of the 20th century to today. The class analyzes the possibilities and limits of grounding a discourse in practice as well as theory. The seminar complements thesis preparation or can serve as an introduction to critical thinking in architecture.
If architectural publishing in the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by the manifesto, the second half was characterized by the monograph and the current moment by a hybrid of the two. (The turning point in the first instance it might be argued was Venturi's, "Complexity and Contradiction," and in the second Koolhaas’ “S,M,L,XL.”) What makes the monograph distinct from the manifesto is that although it can take many forms and express a wide range of intentions (from intellectual discourse to self-promotion) it is always grounded in practice. Recently, however, the monograph has begun to be transformed into a vehicle for design exploration if not an ideological design statement in itself. Starting with a brief examination of the roots of the contemporary monograph in the manifestoes of early modernism and post-modernism, the course will turn its focus to recent developments in the monograph form, from Koolhaas to the present. The class will analyze the possibilities and limits of grounding a discourse in practice as well as in theory. In particular, the seminar will examine the relationship between publishing and practice in establishing the contemporary “Dutch School.” With the exception of a few canonical texts the course content changes from semester to semester. The course is not a survey but rather cuts a path through architectural theory that allows individual choice and demands a close study of ideas. Consequently, the seminar complements thesis preparation and, or, can serve as an introduction to critical thinking in architecture. Professional practice credit is given. The seminar is rigorous; each student will be expected to co-lead at least one seminar on the work and ideas of an architect as framed by their monograph. In addition there will be a number of one- to two-page written assignments. Enrollment is limited to 8-12 students. Interested students are advised to contact the professor: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it The course is open to all graduate students including recent and beginning ARCH 200 students. Undergraduates accepted with the consent of the instructor. Thesis prep students can tailor their assignments to develop their thesis topic. ARCH 238 (3) Three hours of seminar per week. Formerly 209A. This seminar examines the relationship between technology and design philosophy in the work of architects through analysis of individual buildings within the context of the complete oeuvre and an examination of the architect's writings and lectures. The seminar poses the following questions: What is the role of technology in the design philosophy of the architect and how is this theoretical position established in the architect's writings, lectures, interviews? How is this position revealed through the work moves to the developing world? How is this position negotiated in the design and construction of an individual building? Is this a successful strategy for achieving technical performance? Is this a successful strategy for achieving a coherent theoretical statement? A series of lectures explores these questions in relation to the architect and a set of required readings introduces the work of the architect and explores the relationship between technology and design philosophy. Students choose one building to investigate in parallel with the methods and issues discussed in class. These studies are presented in class as completed and assembled for submission as a final project. Louis Kahn This seminar examines the relationship between technology, design philosophy and the realities of practice in the work of architects through analysis of individual buildings within the context of the complete oeuvre and an examination of writings and lectures by the architect Louis I Kahn. The relationship between the polemic and performance in regard to climate, daylight, materials and structure are of particular interest. The seminar poses the following questions:
There will be a series of lectures exploring these questions in relation to the architect and a set of required readings that introduce the work of the architect and explore the relationship between technology and design philosophy. Students will choose one building to investigate in parallel with the methods and issues discussed in class. These studies will be presented in class as completed and assembled for submission as a final project. Attendance, readings and participation are required each week. ARCH 239 (1-4) Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Selected topics in contemporary and historical architectural design theory and criticism. ARCH 249 (1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: 140. ARCH 249 SEC 1 Green Studio Companion: Generative Tools for Bioclimatic Design Prequisite: ARCH 140 or equivalent (see instructor). This seminar explores the potential of both analytical and phenomenological notions of building performance to shape architectural design. Significant contemporary buildings will serve as case studies for a phased analysis and re-design of their relationships to climate, heat, air, and light. The class will focus on deriving sustainable building approaches from an understanding of human perception and response in a quick and generative fashion. Quantitative analysis using calculations and simulations will alternate with speculative explorations based on responses to theoretical texts, art films, and environmental artists’ work. Both of these “right-brain” and “left-brain” modes of analysis will inform short design interventions. Students at all levels are welcome who have met the pre-requisite, or equivalent. ARCH 249 SEC 2 Climate and Energy Analysis for Bay Area Buildings Three hours of lecture/seminar per week. Prerequisites: Building Science fundamentals (e.g. ARCH 140 or equivalent) or consent of instructor. This interactive class provides training in climate and energy analysis for buildings located in the Bay Area. It will be structured to support the work of students in ARCH 205b: Studio One. The Bay Area is characterized by highly variable climate within its different regions and throughout the day, but relatively stable and moderate climate throughout the year. In this class we will investigate how the Bay Area climate may be used as a freely available source of heating, cooling, lighting and ventilation of buildings. We will also analyze the presence of water in streams and in the bay as a possible energy source or sink, and will discuss the applicability of solar or ground-based renewable energy. Topics may include solar analysis, urban climate, comfort, energy use in building, building envelope, passive heating and cooling strategies, and renewable energy applications. Student will learn to use climate analysis and building performance software. In the last part of the course we will use the information obtained by the climate and building performance analyses to develop control strategies of dynamically response building elements. ARCH 269 (1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Selected topics in construction and materials. ARCH 269 SEC 1 Rebuilding Japan On March 11, this year, three large earthquakes struck almost simultaneously off the coast of northern Japan. The three together—within a mere six minutes—resulted in a force measured at Magnitude 9. The USGS lists significant earthquakes dating back over a millennium; this is the 4th strongest seismic event on its list. That earthquake shifted our globe, shortening the day by 1.8 microseconds. Earthquakes are not isolated events: they unleash fires, tsunami and other catastrophes. All these happened. So much occurred at once, in fact, that even today Japan’s political and professional community struggles to understand the work that lies ahead. It is clear that there are important lessons to be learned about town sites, about energy, and about the increased dangers from natural phenomena that exist as populations age. It is not clear how to address these challenges and changes in a short time, in an age of economic austerity. This class is not about answers, it is about probing those questions. We will start with historical studies and invite experts with specialist knowledge to the classroom. Students will be expected to do extensive reading, develop a set of short position papers, and end the class with a rigorous written argument that proposes a course for the future. Required texts will include Clancy, Gregory. EARTHQUAKE NATION (available to UCB students through the UC Press ebary) and Comerio, Mary. DISASTER HITS HOME. More recent material will be made available digitally through bSpace. ARCH 269 SEC 2 Nothing.Much.Happening Isn’t it too bad that nothing is happening? Some people are getting mad, and that’s a start, getting some vague itch about maybe doing something. Architects believe that the world can be built. The world can be occupied. We have big ideas, we make big things, we live large. Except that then there are the rules, Oh Yes!, and the naysayers, Oh No!. And then there is the money. Where is the money? So we wait. Or make a study of it. Or not. The problem with times like these is that when the money runs out we think we are tired and out of energy and out of hope. Do we run on money? No, we are makers; we make the money (this line of thinking is no longer popular in polite society, but the world for some time revolved excitingly and dangerously around these questions: who makes the money? who gets the money?). But that is only context for our project. If we are going to be in the world, we might as well occupy it. In fact, if we are architects, how we occupy the world is the very essence of our life’s investigation. Just now, occupation is again a popular question. What can we make of it? It is certainly very practical to make a small occupation. Smallness is less disturbing, and far less occupying for everybody. I suppose that will be OK, if that is what we decide to do. Smallness will certainly be appreciated when we are only building for ourselves and our friends and neighbors, rather than building for money. I myself have had some interesting experiences with ambitious construction projects, money and no money. Sometimes these projects fly, and sometimes they fizzle. Right now I am tired and beaten down too, and wary of a flop. Maybe we should only draw something, or just write it down? Interestingly enough, I believe there are mechanisms by which building projects might be made always to fly, in some concocted, predictable form. Or there are other ways to try setting things in motion, seeing how they take off, seeing where they land. This other way is risky hard work, and probably the only likely path toward architecture. But again, the risk of making nothing is only context for our project, not our stifling fear. Three words to occupy our minds: Nothing. Much. Happening. What can we make of it? ARCH 269 SEC 3
The purpose of the course will be to examine the potential of minimal surface for maximum effect. The class will investigate minimal surface, or a derivation thereof, as criteria for the development of a material system. The underlying imperative with be to develop a synthetic project based on a hanging surface structure. It is important to note that this does not mean structural optimization, but negotiating material, computational processes, fabrication, site constraints, programmatic performance, and visual and aesthetic, etc. conditions with each other and with structural performance to arrive at the most synthetic outcome. How can this projects be made to perform with specificity and structural and material integrity with an aim towards experiential and perceptual criteria rather than resorting to idealized "optimized" or pure engineering models? In this case, there are real-life performance criteria that must be met — the semester long project is to design and construct the Wurster Graduation Canopy in the Wurster Hall Courtyard. It will need to be mountable and demountable each spring as the celebratory visual end-note for this important event. This project provides a valuable opportunity to make a lasting and impactful design for the college. The temporary, but repeatable installation will require thinking and designing down to the last detail. It must resist uplift, provide shade, ideally repel water, be beautiful, connect to the building in elegant and efficient ways, compress for storage, and be simple to mount year after year. Like all good architecture, its conceptual drivers should be evident in the final form, tectonic and material realization and execution. All students in this semester’s seminar will be working on this one project. However the project has many parts including management, material re-sourcing, full scale prototyping, overall design, form finding, detail development, assembly streamlining and fabrication, and presentation. We will form small, overlapping groups around these specific research and design issues. All students will come together for the final assembly which will take place before graduation. ARCH 276 (3) Three hours of seminar per week. A reading and research seminar surveying the building types, social relations, and cultural ideas of recreation in the American city, including the tensions between home, public, and commercial leisure settings. Offered alternate years. ARCH 279 (1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Selected topics in the history of architecture. ARCH 279 SEC 1 Historiography of Modern Architecture This course explores the overlapping strands of writing on modern architecture from the 1930’s through the present, with particular emphasis on the ways in which architectural historians have grappled with constructing grand narratives for the Modern Movement. On the one hand, the course is a partial history of architectural history, using close readings of major texts by Hitchcock, Pevsner, Giedion, Banham, Collins, Tafuri, and others, to see how the field has taken shape and reveal the laminations and contestations of historical writing. It will lay out some of the intellectual debts and genealogies in the field. On the other hand, since many of the texts are surveys, the course will provide a foundation in the history of modern architecture, taking multiple passes over its major figures, buildings, theories, and texts. In this way, it will engage with the idea of the canon and flirt with a canon of architectural writing. Meta-historical analysis of key texts will be interleafed with historiographical readings about the origins and development of the field. Students will have ample flexibility to write about any aspect of architectural historiography, including papers on seminal figures, buildings, movements, theories, or methods, as well as on gaps or deficiencies in the field. (1-4) May be repeated for credit up to unit limitation. Sections 1-3 to be graded on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Sections 4-10 to be graded on a letter grade basis. Special group studies on topics to be introduced by instructor or students. ARCH 298 SEC 1 Description to come. ARCH 298 SEC 2 Creative Activism and Architecture Over the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in what has been variously described as “alternative,” “community-based,” “participatory,” “public interest” or “socially responsive” design. Last year’s “Small Scale/Big Change” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and the recent “Design with the other 90%” at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New Yorkare only a part of the much larger international constellation of debates, publications, collaborations, experimental practices and education initiatives that seek to question and redefine the social dimensions of architectural practice. The creative activity in this area is global in scale, and ranges from design/build programs and temporary urban installations to educational programs that link architectural schools to grassroots organizations. Some of the most provocative initiatives are based in California. In spring 2012, we are offering a weekly colloquium entitled “Creative Activism” as a means to examine these efforts in the context of wider international debates, and to discuss the theoretical and methodological insights they yield for design education and practice. The colloquium will operate as a forum for faculty and students to reassess and renew our department’s connection to these issues. The goals are threefold: first, to map the diverse initiatives in socially engaged education and practice in California and the US; second, to use the potential of the colloquium format to instigate a critical assessment of the range of current practices; and third, based on the debates and ideas generated, to encourage further regional collaborations, networks, and alternative strategies, some of which might become part of our department’s curriculum. Requirements: The requirements for this one-unit 11-week (January 17 to April 6) class include mandatory weekly attendance and participation in class discussions. We will also ask students to complete short background readings and to develop questions prior to weekly presentations by invited speakers. The course is open to all undergraduate and graduate students. Speakers: The following are among this year’s speakers: Sanjit Sethi, Chair of the Community Arts Program at CCA; Emily Pilloton, a founding member of Project H Design (originally based in San Francisco); Valery Casey, Founder and Executive Director of the Designer’s Accord; Raphael Sperry, current Board Member and past President of Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility; Liz Ogbu, Design Fellow at IDEO; Jeremy Till, Dean of the School of the Built Environment at the University of Westminster; and Dan Pitera, Director of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center. ARCH 298 SEC 3 Constructing_Detail ARCH 299 (1-12) Course may be repeated for credit. Individual studies including reading and individual research under the supervision of a faculty adviser and designed to reinforce the student's background in areas related to the proposed degree. ARCH 300 (2) Two hours of seminar per week. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. This class is intended for first-time graduate student instructors, especially those working in studio and lab settings. The class covers a range of issues that normally come up when teaching, offers suggestions regarding how to work well with other graduate student instructors and faculty, and how to manage a graduate student instructor's role as both student and teacher. The greatest benefit of this class comes from the opportunity to explore important topics together. Using a relatively light, but provocative set of readings, the seminar will explore the issues raised each week. There will be one assignment intended to help students explore their own expectations as educators. ARCH 602 (1-8) Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare themselves for the various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D. This course may not be used for units or residence requirements for the doctoral degree. |
Architecture of Time in Cinematic Space
Extended Course Description
MIN MAX <> Wurster Graduation Canopy