Global Arc

This seminar/laboratory examines the history of glass architecture and its future. Glass will be explored through the framework of cultural, technological, and perceptual filters. Students will analyze a selection of twentieth century and contemporary glass buildings and their details, as well as films and artwork related to the subject. The class will be divided into collaborative groups to design and build full-scale architectural interventions on campus that rethink glass today. Students are encouraged to work in a range of media from conventional architectural materials to new media to performance.

The seminar intends to use the research, briefing, programming, and design of the workplace as a means to examine the role of the architect and designer as a professional contributor in the knowledge economy. We will use the workplace as a site of practice in which the architect is engaged with the driving forces of the economy: advanced information technology, new ways of working that are distributed across space and time, the global business imperatives that segment work across continents. We will examine the issues of workplace design at every scale from the desk to the city to the region.

This course is intended to expose the students to a range of major works, built and unbuilt, of architecture from 1950 to the present. This course will focus on these particular buildings as they open themselves to a textual analysis. These analyses are intended to open up issues such as criticality, autonomy and singularity as they begin to evolve in architectural building (as opposed to texts) in the last half of the 20th century. This course will concentrate on individual buildings not architects. Each analysis will be accompanied by an illustrated presentation and selected readings.

This course is organized in two interrelated parts covering urban design strategies for the contemporary city. The first part examines case studies in the design of cities in the modern era; particularly design proposals and built examples of large-scale additions to cities. Several recent projects will be examined in detail by guest lecturers. We will also analyze exemplary urban design texts from the same period and their relationship with completed projects. The second part of the course will require students to make urban design proposals for contemporary projects utilizing drawings, computer modeling and other media.

The Western city, American and European, has undergone a number of mutations since the Renaissance. This course will explore the complex relationships between different cities and architecture, between "real" cities and "fictional" architectural cities. Possible topics might include: urbanization as it affects contemporary life; the American vs. European city; the state of New Jersey, the exurban state "par excellence." One three-hour seminar.