Global Arc

Explores the relationships between architectural discourse and the visual arts from the historical avant-garde to the present. Architectural discourse will be considered here as the intersection of diverse systems of representation: buildings, projects, drawings, but also architectural theory and criticism, exhibitions, photographs, professional magazines, and the popular press. The course will treat as visual arts not only painting and sculpture, but also photography, cinema, fashion, advertisement, and television. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course examines two places that play an outsized role in the American economy: Wall Street and Silicon Valley. They are distinct and similarly enduring locations. They embody a divide between urban and suburban, East Coast and West Coast, skyscrapers and office parks, tradition and innovation, conservative and liberal. Despite the ubiquity of electronic trading, firms still congregate in Lower Manhattan. Tech workers fight traffic to maintain a presence in Mountain View. What makes these places endure? How do their histories, architecture, economic dynamics, and distinct cultures shape them as places?

Examination of a range of urban spatial types, city plans, maps, and communication networks. Focus on how inherited models have been used by modern architects/planners in the 20th century. One 90-minute lecture, one 90-minute preceptorial.

Studies of the contemporary problems and process of urban design and physical planning. Analysis of the design and organization of space, activities, movement, and interaction networks of the urban physical environment. One three-hour seminar.

This seminar will utilize and hone students¿ research, design, and graphic design skills in a study of the interrelationship between sustainability, urbanism, development, and design. We will produce an analysis and critique of current planning trends and create proposals for new methods of urban planning and design, working towards the development of new building typologies and planning standards that fuse the ecological and the architectural. We will focus on specific issues surrounding development in areas experiencing growth due to the phenomenon of eco-tourism.

Architectural theory, criticism, and historiography from the Renaissance to the present, emphasizing the transformations of the classical Vitruvian tradition and theories of modern architecture from the end of the 17th century to the 1930s. Architectural thought in its institutional and cultural context and as it relates to design method and practice. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

An introduction to the nature of building. Emphasis will be placed on understanding construction methods, materials, and evaluating the processes by which architects formulate strategies to execute their design ideas. A continuing theme will be to evaluate the relationship between architectural design and building systems and technology. Two lectures, one two-hour laboratory.

The seminar explores the implications of technologically networked cities for architectural programming and the design of spaces and places, including: 1) how information technology is reshaping the nature of architectural programming and our ideas of spaces, places and community; 2) how programs for spaces, buildings, places, and the city are being transformed by the increasing mobility, fluidity, and "blurring" of activities in space; and 3) the history of ideas that shape our understanding of technology and urbanism, programming and architecture: the networked global city; the sentient city; smart cities; big data; hybrid place.

This research seminar examines the relationship between architecture, resources, and territory in 20th century modernization projects in the USA, Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa. We will explore the conditions in which architecture has become a tool of development (a concept which we will address critically), and the functions it assumed in the ordering and managing of labor, natural resources and industry.

Focusing on the mutual reception of Italian and American architecture 1920-2018, we take into account divergences of urban form and architectural tradition that separate the two cultures alongside convergences of theory and practice. Starting with the impact of Wright on Mollino and Moretti, we move to the critical fortune of Organic Architecture in the postwar work of Scarpa and to the diverse roles of Ponti and BBPR in the USA, culminating with the dialogue between the New York Five and Italy in the 1970s. The course ends with an overview of contemporary dialogues between Italian and American architects, theoreticians and critics.