ARCH 7001a, Architecture and Modernity: Theories & Projects  Staff

This survey lecture course considers how theory activates new ways of making and imagining the built environment. Each week highlights a topic of architectural theory (e.g., Form, Site) and maps its development across historical periods, geographies, and fields of knowledge. Complementing the main lectures are presentations of recent projects by design faculty from the Yale School of Architecture and beyond. By challenging the familiar binary of theory versus practice, the course explores the past, present, and future limits of architectural knowledge. Moreover, by emphasizing the activating properties of theory, we will speculate on how the discipline’s toolkit of ideas and practices might engage the urgent crises of our contemporary world.    0 Course cr
HTBA

ARCH 7002b, Architecture and Modernity: Sites & Spaces  Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

(Required of first-year M.Arch. and available as an elective for M.Arch. II and M.E.D. students.) This course explores the history of Western architectural theory, from 1750 to the present, through the close reading of primary texts. Lectures place the readings in the context of architectural history; the texts are discussed in required discussion sections. Topics include theories of origin, type and character, the picturesque, questions of style and ornament, standardization and functionalism, critiques of modernism, as well as more contemporary debates on historicism, technology, and environmentalism.  0 Course cr
T 11am-12:50pm

ARCH 7003a, Design Research I: Design as Research  Jordan Carver

(Required of and limited to first-year M.Arch. II students.)  In this course, students will develop technical and conceptual skills for expanding architectural design, design discourse, and critical design thinking. Design research is understood as a relational process of transdisciplinary knowledge-making that advances existing and new forms of architectural representation to address myriad complex and important issues demanding our collective attention. The seminar will be run as part seminar (close reading and writing) and part workshop (case studies, research exercises, group work) with the goal of building robust theoretical, contextual, and methodological foundations for each students' individual thesis project.     3 Course cr
W 9am-10:50am, W 11am-12pm

ARCH 7004b, Design Research II: Cross-Disciplinary  Jordan Carver

(Required of and limited to first-year M.Arch. II students.) This seminar requires students to explore an assigned theme based on urgent contemporary issues in architecture and urbanism, both through individual projects and as a group. Students also select thesis projects adjacent to the course theme to take into the subsequent post-professional seminar and post-professional design studio.  3 Course cr
W 10am-12:50pm

ARCH 7005b, A Land Reparations Network  Keller Easterling

With support from Yale’s ASCEND initiative, this seminar shares sessions with Morgan State and other HBCUs to explore precedents and potentials for land reparations in the U.S. The ownership of land as property has been a central mechanism for generating staggering wealth inequality. The seminar considers a broader history of mutualism, care, maintenance, and kinship that are at the heart of Indigenous, Black, abolitionist, feminist, and anarchist thinking. It pays particular attention to an underexplored, 150-year tradition of Black land cooperatives—from reconstruction to the civil rights era to today. Generating community economies that avoid the automatic harm of financial abstractions, cooperative land holding organs are treated as spatial infrastructures as worthy of public investment as those of concrete and conduit with compounding values that can begin to address the incalculable debt of reparations. Considering reparations and climate change as inseparable, the seminar also studies solidarities to deal with climate injustice at a planetary scale. Guest speakers, shared between MSU and YSOA, strengthen a consortium of HBCUs and prepare to pursue design studios at the northern and southern ends of a proposed spine of existing public land called the ATTTNT. The ATTTNT is created from the Appalachian Trail (AT), the water route of the Trail of Tears (TT) on TVA land, and the Natchez Trace Parkway (NT). Continuous from Maine to the Mississippi, this three-thousand-mile linear formation, often scripted by narratives of white supremacy, here receives another reckoning with the under-told histories of Black and Indigenous resistance and survival.  3 Course cr
Th 11am-12:50pm

ARCH 7007a or b, Independent M.E.D. Research  Keller Easterling

(Required of and limited to M.E.D. students in each term; credits vary per term, determined in consultation with the director of M.E.D. Studies.) The proposal submitted with the admissions application is the basis for each student’s study plan, which is developed in consultation with faculty advisers. Independent research is undertaken for credit each term, under the direction of a principal adviser, for preparation and completion of a written thesis. The thesis, which details and summarizes the independent research, is to be completed for approval by the M.E.D. committee by the end of the fourth term.  3 Course cr
HTBA

[ ARCH 7100, Adaptive Reuse in Karachi: History, Documentation, & Intervention ]

This seminar will consider the challenges of adaptive reuse in a global mega-city and will explore and enact the potential of cultural preservation to resist mechanisms of erasure that stem from capital-driven development. Karachi will be considered as an interdisciplinary case-study and working site, bringing together graduate students from History of Art, Architecture, and South Asian Studies. This multi-disciplinary collective of students and faculty with diverse backgrounds and skills in research, documentation, analysis, and design will work as a team to both learn from, and contribute to, ongoing work that is being led by The Heritage Foundation of Pakistan (HFP). The HFP, established by Sohail and Yasmeen Lari in 1980, has been documenting the British Colonial era buildings of Karachi and Lahore for several years. At present, Yasmeen Lari has designed a pedestrian pathway through Kharadar, with the help of local shop-owners, on the principals of community engagement and participatory design. Countering urban decay and climate change, the aim of this seminar is to consider how future architects, urbanists and historians may approach the issues facing the region. From this vantage point, we will consider the manners in which urban space is instrumentalized towards narratives of imperial and national identity; how gentrification and ex-urbanization effects historical city-centers; how revitalization projects must be understood ad critiqued; and what role collaborative and interdisciplinary study may play as a conduit and conveyer of positive solutions. Starting with a comparativist approach, the seminar will dig deep into the histories and cultures of Sindh, Pakistan, foregrounding how culture is made manifest through buildings and cities. We will then move to contemporary Karachi and how these histories confront the dynamics of a city of over 20 million inhabitants per the 2023 census. Finally, the group will take an in-depth look at Kharadar, its urban form and the forces that are shaping the context that HFP is working with and responding to. These three inputs will inform a mid-semester report integrating text and drawings collectively compiled by the student group in preparation for on-site fieldwork in Karachi. In Karachi, we will collaborate with the HFP, using the Kharadar pedestrian pathway project as both site and substrate to directly participate in an ongoing cultural preservation project. This fieldwork will include - collection of contextual documentation (architectural, oral, and historical); engagement with community stakeholders, policymakers, and urban designers; and collaboration with the shop-owners, craftspeople, and designers creating the pathway. Finally, we will work with HFP to outline envisioning a project that the students will undertake over the second half of the semester that contributes to the Kharadar pedestrian pathway, while also identifying strategies for its expansion in the old city. On return to New Haven, the student group will synthesize material from the fieldwork, articulate the scope of the project, and again work collectively to craft a design proposal, in text, drawings, and models, that is theoretically and materially responsive to the context of the old city and the contemporary forces that it is negotiating. The results will be presented to a group of academics, architect, preservationist, and Mrs. Lari herself, whose travel to Yale will be supported by the School of Architecture as part of a presentation and celebration of her career and work.    3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7101, American Architecture and Urbanism ]

An introduction to the field of American architecture and urbanism: the study of buildings, architects, designs, styles, and urban landscapes, viewed in economic, political, social, and cultural contexts. Organized chronologically, from pre-Colonial times to the present, as well as thematically, the course studies the formation and meaning of the built environment in America. The many topics encountered along the way include the public and private investment in the built environment; history of housing in America; transportation and infrastructure; architectural practice; and the social and political nature of city building and urban change. Attention also paid to the transnational nature of American architecture—the role of colonialism, the global exchange of architectural ideas, and the international careers of some architects. We will take advantage of our local setting, New Haven, as a cross-section of American architectural and urban history and a storehouse of key examples of building types, urban landscapes, and architectural styles. Upon completion, students should be expected to grasp the basic periods, trends, and processes in American architectural history and their connection to urban patterns. This course aims to give students the tools to appreciate and interpret the built environments that surround them, from impressive monuments to ordinary structures. There are no prerequisites and the course is open to all Yale students and auditors who are interested in buildings and cities.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7102, Architecture and Industry ]

This course considers the role of industry in architecture’s history. The aim of the class is to consider the persistent gap between these two forms of knowledge—industrial and architectural—as itself having history. Therefore, the course assumes a skeptical attitude toward a synthesis of architecture and industry. Nevertheless, the more industrial culture establishes work as the ubiquitous experience of modern life, the more it becomes the core motivator for defining future forms of architecture.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7103, Architecture and Print: Techniques, Formats, Methods ]

Architectural culture is unthinkable without the medium of print. Indeed, today architecture is printed in more and different ways than ever before. At the same time, we live at a moment when the demise of print is routinely proclaimed. Against the grain of such claims, this seminar highlights the specificity of print within the broad and multimodal communication landscape in which architects have operated. This research seminar introduces students to some of the key formats and techniques operative across 250 years of architectural publishing, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing to the 1970s. The seminar investigates various approaches to the relationship between print history and architectural culture and asks students to develop their own approaches through the close examination of printed matter. The goal is to think critically about what role changing techniques and formats of printing played in the emergence of new concepts within architectural culture and new publics concerned with the built environment. The seminar also invites students to consider how the study of printed media might open new conceptual and material approaches to design culture today, together with new methodologies for engaging architectural history. The seminar is conducted as a semester-long course using special collections at the Beinecke Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Haas Library, among others. Due to collections usage, this class is capped at ten students. Priority is given to students in Ph.D. programs in the History of Art and the School of Architecture.  3 Course cr

ARCH 7104a, Capital Building: Histories of Design and Accumulation  David Sadighian

How has design shaped the rise of global capitalism, ca. 1700 to present? Surveying a wide range of buildings, objects, infrastructures, and landscapes across the Atlantic World, our aim is to understand how the built environment evolved to guide practices of capital accumulation—from the plantations of the early modern Caribbean to the “supertalls” of Billionaires’ Row. Readings draw from a growing body of scholarly literature that approaches design as an agent of political economy as opposed to a reflection of pre-existing ideas and economic structures. The seminar’s case studies therefore emphasize the reciprocity between themes of architectural and capitalist modernity (e.g., Circulation, Development) as well as the spatial forms and extractive processes that accompany them. Coursework results in new critical perspectives for the historical study of present-day spatial inequality. Moreover, moving beyond familiar narratives and geographies of modernity, we consider design’s relation to not only the production of wealth but also counter-models of local autonomy, mutual aid, and redistribution.  3 Course cr
Th 11am-12:50pm

ARCH 7105a, The Automatic Promise: Architecture’s Computer Dismembered  Francesca Hughes

If we are to rethink architecture now, as we must, we need also to rethink its relations to computation. In homage to Tony Vidler’s “Architecture Dismembered”, this seminar examines the historic, and now uncanny, doubling of architecture with not the body but with the long and inevitable project of computation, itself ironically a project to de-corporealize thought and render it automatic. In the sessions we consider the ideations of architecture and computation as ever-entangled, if not co-constitutive, arguing, tout court, that without architectural imagination the computer would not be the same, and vice versa. A historiographic dismembering of the architect’s various discrete (and indiscreet) machines reveals shared: memory storage and retrieval systems; mechanisms for deletion and forgetting; windows, guns, pens, nozzles; universal languages, algorithms and other compressive strategies in the calculation of true products; taming of chance by prediction. Like Humpty Dumpty, once apart, they will not go back together again and thus complicate beyond retrieval the already waning platitudes of optimisation and digital solutionism. Instead they suggest potential new categories with which to mutually reconstitute architecture’s relations to computation: the appetite; the mediocre; the alienated; the duped and the promise of the automatic.  3 Course cr
F 9am-10:50am

[ ARCH 7106, Contemporary Archt'l Discourse ]

na  3 Course cr

ARCH 7107a, Architecture Reconstructed  David Gissen

This course examines histories, theories, and methods in the historic reconstruction of architecture – the drawn, modeled, and built representations that architects create to visualize the architectural past. We will explore this topic in three interconnected units: The first, “archaeologies,” examines episodes in the modern history of architectural reconstructions. We will focus on ways that architects created reconstructions out of the surviving fragments of the past – from reconstructions of ancient architecture to modernist monuments. The second unit, “rehabilitations” explores the aesthetics and methodologies of reconstruction techniques. We will examine a range of approaches – ones that emphasize physical and temporal stability and wholeness as well as ones that embrace fragmentation and the differing experiences of a beholder. The final unit, “restitutions” explores the shifting political meaning and role of reconstructions. Here, we will examine the way reconstructions are embraced as tools of cultural supremacy, historic reckoning, and human rights, among other concerns. The seminar is project-based, and students will undertake an architectural reconstruction project of their own – developed each week and engaged with themes from each unit.   3 Course cr
W 2pm-3:50pm

ARCH 7108a, Domo Ludens: Modern Art and Architecture at Play  Michael Schlabs

The notion of play occupies a special place in the history of modern art and architecture. Theorized in the 19th century by Friedrich Froebel as fundamental to the process by which children learn, play would form the basis of Froebel’s kindergarten, now a model for early childhood education worldwide. The aesthetic intensity of Froebel’s program would likewise contribute to a variety of radical educational projects in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the Bauhaus. Later, Johan Huizinga’s seminal meditation on the “play element in culture,” Homo Ludens, would provide an intellectual foundation for a number of 20th century aesthetic and political movements, among them the Situationist International. Finally, a generous focus on play has recently reemerged within the discourse on a range of 21st century art and design practices, characterized by a shared focus on participation and performativity, as in the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Lottie Child. This course, then, explores the place and problem of play in three ways: as a critical framework for understanding the aesthetic qualities of the human environment; as a mode of experience, giving meaning to that environment; and as a working method employed by artists and architects as a specific form of practice.  3 Course cr
M 11am-12:50pm

[ ARCH 7109, Field Methods in American Architectural and Urban History ]

The built environment both reflects and (re)produces social, economic, and political relationships and indicates cultural values from the smallest lawn ornament to the most ambitious urban plans. Even the most modest individual structures and vernacular building types represent evidence in larger narratives about power, equity, and urban change. We can learn to read common or typical urban landscapes (a streetcar-era residential sub-division; lowrise commercial buildings on Main Street; central city office towers; parks and public spaces, for example) as a palimpsest of agency over time: who has the power to author and to rewrite the built environment, at what scale, and for what purposes? This graduate methods class examines theories and practices of research in the built environment with a focus on interdisciplinary field work and archival documentation in which we interrogate what information can be observed in the field and what must be gleaned from the archives. Mixed methods introduced include walking, durational observation, mapping, drawing, photography, video, sound, oral history, and survey. We learn to interpret historical and contemporary maps, city directories, public records, physical artifacts, and personal and institutional archives. Course readings include guidance on methodology as well as models of contemporary scholarship. Over the course of the semester, students develop a piece of public scholarship or academic journal article that advances a narrative framework drawing on original research.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7110, Karkhana: Process and Collaboration in Design ]

n/a  3 Course cr

ARCH 7111a, Knowledge Sharing Spaces  Summer Sutton Adlparvar

This course explores the complexities of Indigenous architecture in the United States, not only as a study of historical and cultural influence on the built environment but also as a reflection of Indigenous sovereignty, articulated through spatial design. The seminar delves into the principles, philosophies and socio-political settings that shape a range of Indigenous architectural practices where themes of communication and “knowledge sharing” play a fundamental role in design. From the construction of schools and museums to cosmological structures and water management facilities, the architectural function of exchanging or sharing knowledge through the built environment weaves a common narrative in Indigenous architecture. The premise of “knowledge sharing spaces” informs the critical lens in which to evaluate past and present architecture designed by and/or for Indigenous communities. Throughout the semester, case studies that both contest and contend with broad issues of colonialism, Eurocentric narratives of indigeneity, cultural appropriation, environmental stewardship, community engagement, and Indigenous recognition, are examined within the context of communicative architecture. Amplifying Indigenous voices and viewpoints in the practice of “knowledge sharing spaces” reveals new depth and layers to architectural design that is primed for informed analysis and discussion.   3 Course cr
T 11am-12:50pm

ARCH 7112b, Laboring for Architecture  Jordan Carver

Architecture—as a profession and pedagogy—has always had a complicated relationship to labor. As a practice, architecture requires inputs, time, and effort from many people with many different types of knowledge. From the design and development of architectural drawings in office settings, to the construction of buildings on site, to the production of architectural materials across the world, building projects are accumulations of different forms of labor, manufacturing capacities, and expertise. This seminar analyzes and investigates the labor(s) required to create architecture, from design through construction. We locate the laboring bodies that produce building projects and the knowledge that surrounds them. And we interrogate how the profession understands its past, present, and possible future relations to labor.  3 Course cr
W 2pm-3:50pm

[ ARCH 7113, Landscape, Film, Architecture Landscape, Film, Architecture Landscape, Film, Architecture ]

Movement through post-1945 landscapes and cityscapes as a key to understanding them. The use of cameras and other visual-verbal means as a way to expand historical, aesthetic, and sociological inquiries into how these places are inhabited and experienced. Exploration of both real and imaginary spaces in works by filmmakers (Wenders, Herzog, Ottinger, Geyrhalter, Seidl, Ade, Grisebach), architects and sculptors (e.g. Rudofsky, Neutra, Abraham, Hollein, Pichler, Smithson, Wurm, Kienast), photographers (Sander, B. and H. Becher, Gursky, Höfer), and writers (Bachmann, Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek). Additional readings by Certeau, Freytag, J.B. Jackson, L. Burckhardt.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7114, Poetic Technologies: Luis Barragan's Modern Mexican Architecture ]

This course looks at the work of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán focusing, principally, on his early works in Guadalajara and Mexico City. It aims to contextualize it within the broader architectural explorations occurring in Mexico at the time and in reaction and relation to architectural developments in the US and Europe. The intention is to closely study the work's theoretical and historical underpinnings, their architectural character and formal innovations, and the context of their production. The investigations will result in written documents, models, drawings, etc. that will form part of an exhibition of this work at the Barragán Gallery at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. The class, as a result, will be in contact with the Barragán Foundation and archive and be partially responsible for helping organize the exhibition layout and curate the material to be presented.    3 Course cr

ARCH 7115a, Race and the Built Environment  Jordan Carver

This seminar investigates the many relationships between racial formation and the built environment. That is, how the built environment—including infrastructure, housing, borders, segregation, taxation, and policing—are integral to processes of racialization, hierarchization, and inequality. The seminar focuses on the American context, but the definition of American boundaries is open to interpretation and contestation. We look at American expansion and political history to see how inequalities have been historically constructed and how they continue to persist. We analyze American internal and external imperialism, militarism, and securitization to better understand how the nation’s myriad spatial entanglements structure life and social relations. The seminar reads a broad set of texts including Toni Morrison, John Locke, Cedric J. Robinson, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Cheryl I. Harris, Charles Davis III, Mabel O. Wilson, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and others. We engage with current discourses on race and architecture and link them to discussions on media, politics, and the contested project of the American nation. Students develop a semester-long research project locating a spatial strategy of their choosing and unpack the social, political, and racial histories and futures of their chosen subject.  3 Course cr
W 2pm-3:50pm

[ ARCH 7116, Semiotics ]

Digging into semiotics tradition, the seminar provides analytical tools for “close readings” of a vast array of objects and operations, from verbal texts to all sorts of images, from cultural practices to all sorts of manipulation. Semiotics’ foundational goal consisted in retracing how meaning emerges in these objects and operations, how it circulates within and between different cultural environments, and how it affects and is affected by the cultural contexts in which these objects and operations are embedded. To revamp semiotics’ main tasks, after an introduction about the idea of “making meaning,” the seminar engages students in a weekly discussion about situations, procedures, objects, and attributes that are “meaningful,” in the double sense that they have meaning and they arrange reality in a meaningful way. Objects of analysis are intentionally disparate; the constant application of a set of analytical tools provides the coherence of the seminar. Students are expected to regularly attend the seminar, actively participate in discussions, propose new objects of analysis, present a case study (fifteen–twenty minutes), and write a final paper (max. 5,000 words). Enrollment limited to fifteen. Also FILM 833. Students from Film and Media Studies and the School of Architecture have priority: they are asked to express their choice by August 25. Students from other departments are asked to send the instructor up to ten lines with the reasons why they want to attend the seminar by August 26. The seminar is aimed at bolstering a dialogue that crosses cultures and disciplines.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7117, Spatial Concepts of Japan: Their Origins and Development in Architecture and Urbanism ]

The seminar explores the origins and developments of Japanese spatial concepts and surveys how they help form the contemporary architecture, ways of life, and cities of the country. Many Japanese spatial concepts, such as ma, are about creating time-space distances and relationship between objects, people, space, and experiences. These concepts go beyond the fabric of a built structure and encompass architecture, landscape, and city. Each class is designed around one or two Japanese words that signify particular design concepts. Each week, a lecture on the word(s) with its design features, backgrounds, historical examples, and contemporary application is followed by student discussion. Contemporary works studied include those by Maki, Isozaki, Ando, Ito, SANAA, and Fujimoto. The urbanism and landscape of Tokyo and Kyoto are discussed. Students are required to make in-class presentations and write a final paper. Limited enrollment.  3 Course cr

ARCH 7118b, Tall Tales  Ife Vanable

Architecture is a body of fantastic lies. Speculative and projective, architectural production corrals, traffics in, and concocts imaginaries; its histories and theories are steeped in myth and regimes of mythmaking. This course provides space to interrogate the particular, ongoing, and mutating narratives, fictions, and myths perpetuated around the design, development, and material realization/construction of high-rise residential towers from the turn of the century to the start of what has been referred to as the Reagan era, alongside the various political, financial, and social agendas that motivated their development. The course aims to nurture modes of recognition of “housing” as critical loci where architectural form, federal and state power, municipal interactions of zone (zoning envelope, building volume, and air rights), finance, body, law, rhetoric, aesthetics, real estate development, and conceptions of racial difference come into view. The course reckons with typology and the seeming difficulty with imagining subjects racialized as black holding a position up in the sky.  3 Course cr
T 11am-12:50pm

ARCH 7119b, Challenging the Classical  Kyle Dugdale

This course examines the problem of “the classical” in its contemporary context—not only as an exercise in the study of architectural history, but also as an attempt to come to terms with the claims of history upon the present, and of the present upon history. Recognizing that the unusually vivid architectural images that have impressed themselves upon the public imagination of America over the past few months are only the most recent evidence in a longer list of charges, the course examines accusations of Eurocentrism and elitism, of obsolescence, irrelevance, and historical naivete, and associations with totalitarianism and whiteness, along with questions of language, tectonics, and sustainability—aiming to introduce a range of new voices into a conversation that is, today, more critical than ever.  3 Course cr
W 2pm-3:50pm

[ ARCH 7120, The Physiologies of Modern Architecture ]

This seminar explores architectural histories and theories related to human physiology from the late nineteenth century to the present. Our explorations extend from nineteenth-century theories of architecture style and human physiognomy to recent discussions of immunology and architecture. Concepts of human physiology inform a broad spectrum of architectural discourses: the design and management of buildings and urban spaces; theories of architectural form and environment; and, most provocatively, the writing of architecture history itself. Physiological concepts in architecture are far from neutral: They intersect with pseudo-scientific racial and eugenic theories, debates on gender and sexuality, and evolving concepts of physical capacity, impairment, and disability. Our goal is to understand how architects, historians, and theorists have shaped and responded to conceptions of human-ness, environment, health, and physical capacity within their practices. Participants in this seminar are expected to complete weekly readings, complete a few weekly assignments, lead or co-lead one discussion, and complete a final research project.  3 Course cr

ARCH 7121a, Urban Century: Theorizing Global Urbanism  Vyjayanthi Rao

Does the word “urban” describe a geographic location or a condition? Does urbanization describe a universal and ubiquitous process with uniform and inevitable outcomes? How does this process intersect with capitalism, colonization, decolonization and modernization? If indeed the process of urbanization is defined neither by uniform outcomes nor by an inevitable telos, what accounts for difference and divergence in the localities we recognize and describe as “urban”? By the late twentieth century, it became de rigeur to remark that more than half the world’s population now lived in cities, a dramatic turning point in human history. Since then, a wealth of scholarship and policy documents have explored the many implications of this shift. Amongst others, these include a global housing crisis, dramatic increases in poverty, disease and conflict in densely packed urban locations and the impending environmental catastrophe to which urban growth has contributed significantly. These conditions also produce new social and political forms and actions, accelerating change, highlighting turbulence, uncertainty and flux. This course has three goals: 1. To provide students with the theoretical tools necessary to frame, locate and understand these conditions in a world where social and cultural life is now inextricable from the environmental and infrastructural conditions associated with urbanization. 2. To explore, through analyzing concrete case studies and real-life situations how to make sense of the tremendous complexity knotted into contemporary social life in and through its presumed overlaps with capitalist urbanization. 3. To situate and assess the links between the urban condition and architecture or, in other words between the analysis of uncertainty, speculation and flux and the praxis of designing, imagining and reshaping social life through material and virtual interventions.    3 Course cr
W 2pm-3:50pm

ARCH 7122b, Writing and Criticism: Architect as Author, Architect as Subject  Christopher Hawthorne

This course examines the relationship between practice and publication in architecture. Its foundation is a survey of architecture criticism over the last century. It also considers how a select number of architects have written about their own work and that of other practitioners; the focus in this section is on those architects who use writing not for its descriptive or promotional value but as a critic or historian might, which is to say as a means of sharpening or expanding their own architecture or of reframing or even unsettling their place in the profession or larger culture. Class discussions focus to a large degree on the intersection of these two tracks: the process by which the architect moves from subject to author and back again, and what is gained (and perhaps sometimes lost) by that traffic.  3 Course cr
W 4pm-5:50pm

ARCH 7123a, Sensing Space: Architecture, Technology and Human Embodiment  Joel Sanders

Although the built environment shapes multi-sensory experience, Western architects since antiquity have upheld the mind/body split, framing architecture as a medium primarily apprehended through vision and hearing—senses historically associated with male reason, abstract thinking, and the scientific method. Meanwhile, they have marginalized the so-called “lower” senses—touch, taste, and smell—linked to the abject physical body and the material world. And while buildings are constructed from solid materials extracted from the natural environment, architects have largely ignored the haptic sensations elicited when corporeal beings engage with the material world, considered a female principle, associated with Mother Earth. This course challenges these problematic assumptions by situating them in a techno-historical context. We will examine the intertwined histories of architecture and sensory-enhancing technologies that privilege seeing and hearing—from the Renaissance camera obscura to 20th-century glass curtain walls to 21st-century smartphones. These technologies have shaped both the design of built environments and our sensory experience of space in ways that reinforce the mind/body split and exclude those who do not conform to able-bodied norms. Critically examining these techno-sensory developments through the lens of gender and disability will allow us to propose alternative futures. How can we learn from the experiences of people with physical and sensory disabilities, as well as from ethnic and religious communities whose engagement with the built environment draws on different senses, faculties, and customs? How can we harness technological innovations that augment sensory perception to design immersive, inclusive environments—spaces that promote meaningful human interaction among people with diverse embodied identities as they navigate both virtual and physical realms?  3 Course cr
Th 11am-12:50pm

ARCH 7124a, Architecture and Disability  David Gissen

Architects have explored the topic of disability and human impairment well before and beyond contemporary practices of “accessible design.” This seminar examines histories of architecture, disability, and human impairment through a range of case-studies from 1900 to the present. We will understand how disability transformed (and was transformed by) the practices of modern and late-modern architects and designers – from early 20th century theories of design to recent debates on the aesthetic character of urban monuments. To explore these histories, we will draw on an interdisciplinary range of readings, documents, films, and physical artifacts. The course will include a mix of lectures and discussion, guest presentations, and the development of a final research project related to the course case-studies and readings.  3 Course cr
Th 11am-12:50pm

ARCH 7125b, Environment Architecture  David Gissen

Environment, broadly defined, may be one of the most enduring subjects within modern architectural history and theory – from architectural historical writing on buildings and weather in the 19th century to contemporary architecture histories inspired by environmental humanities. This course examines many of the key themes and methods within architecture histories and theories of environment. These include histories and theories of climate, nature, ecology, regions, ecosystems, urban metabolisms, and material toxicities, among many other topics. We will focus on methods as much as the specific theoretical and practical applications of these ideas, with the goal of developing additional formulations out of them.    3 Course cr
W 2pm-3:50pm

ARCH 7126a, Destruction, Continuation and Creation: Architecture and Urbanism of Modern Japan  Yoko Kawai

This course examines how design philosophies and methodologies were developed in Japanese architecture during the 150 years from the Meiji Restoration until the post-modern era. Special attention is paid to how the country’s cultural identity has been continuously relevant to modern society by evolving itself through natural disasters such as earthquakes, and political destruction such as wars. The methodologies and technologies for architecture and cities supported and were influenced by this constantly transforming, yet unchanging, Japanese culture. The course also compares the architecture of two International Expos in Osaka, one in 1970, signifying the end of metabolism, and another in 2025. Highlighted architects include Chuta Ito, Goichi Takeda, Frank Lloyd Wright, Kameki Tsuchiura, Sutemi Horiuchi, Kunio Maekawa, Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kazuo Shinohara, Tadao Ando, and Sou Fujimoto. Students are required to make in-class presentations and write a final paper.    3 Course cr
W 2pm-3:50pm

[ ARCH 7127, Body Politics ]

COVID-19 underscores how public health and environmental justice are intimately related. This seminar explores the urgent need for transdisciplinary teams representing design, science, and the humanities to create safe, hygienic, accessible, and inclusive spaces that accommodate all bodies, including people of different races, genders, religions, and abilities that fall out of the cultural mainstream. Through in-depth analysis of everyday spaces—homes, workplaces, hospitals, museums—we look at how the conventions of architecture, transmitted through building typologies, standards, and codes, have marginalized or excluded persons who fall outside white, masculine, heterosexual, able-bodied norms. After analyzing each of these sites in their cultural and historical context, students generate innovative design proposals that allow a spectrum of differently embodied and culturally identified people to productively mix in a post-pandemic world. Limited enrollment.  3 Course cr

ARCH 7129a, Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure to Planetary Solidarity  Keller Easterling

Recent surges in the last 500 years of colonizing, capitalizing, and globalizing may be more treacherous and untraceable than those of previous empires. This course exposes their infrastructures. While it begins with the global colonial extraction networks, most of the material circles around the spatial apparatus deployed toward the end of the twentieth century that accompanied what is often amnesically referred to as “globalization.” This infrastructure is not only the infrastructure of pipes and wires underground but also the ubiquitous enveloping urban medium of repeatable formulas for space—a human/nonhuman socio-technical space that is rapidly producing a new layer of the earth’s crust. Critiqued by both the left and the populist right this massive physical plant contains a spectrum of dangers: capitalism, fascism, racism, whiteness, settler colonialism, femicide, caste, xenophobia, psychotic leadership, and countless other ways of hoarding power, abusing people, and damaging the planet. The story resists and exceeds any easy ideological explanations or definitions of the neoliberalism with which this moment is associated—a moment when, not rational actors and nation states, but an often irrational extrastatecraft deploys stealthy, bullet-proof forms of power. Discussion is interspersed with heavily illustrated talks that encounter: instant free zone world cities, satellite urbanism and broadband from the perspective of Non-Aligned countries in South Asia and Africa, labor, conflict, and climate migration, an agripole in Southern Spain, automated ports, islands and offshore financial centers as the confetti of multiple empires, contagious spatial products of commerce and tourism, a cruise ship to the DPRK, the standards and management platforms of ISO, sweatshops, tax havens, and exploding urban peripheries among many other things. Going beyond the anointed legal, scientific, and econometric languages, the seminar also uncovers forms of spatially-embedded activism to meet this moment. The evidence returns to moments of worldmaking solidarity within newly independent colonies in the Global South—solidarities between the Pan-African, Non-Aligned, Tricontinental, and civil rights movements that the Global North broke by further tilting the playing fields in their own favor. And the seminar considers the infrastructures that dominant infrastructures eclipsed—live infrastructures of land, water, atmosphere, and community—to be as worthy of public support as infrastructures of concrete and conduit. As reparations for patterns of harm that will otherwise only continue, these alternative infrastructures are inextricably linked to climate change and planetary concerns. If the global conjures associations with White Enlightenment modern universals, singular evils and singular solutions, planetary conjures the patchy, partial, multiple approaches in the pluriverse. Treating everyone as a designer, the course is an adventure in thinking as well as a mixing chamber for disciplines across the university: social sciences, arts, economics, business history, science and technology studies, history of science, organization studies, informatics, media and communication studies, architecture and urbanism. Cultural ephemera is screened as a prelude to each lecture. Weekly readings offer evidence, discursive commentary, and critique. Tutorials help to shape group work.  3 Course cr
Th 11am-12:50pm

[ ARCH 7130, The Essay in Architecture ]

This seminar examines the essay as form of writing, paying particular attention to its role in the field of architecture. It is also a writers’ workshop. Close reading will focus on the structure and language of several essays, both about architecture and not. Some of the essays’ authors will include Michel de Montaigne, Theodor Adorno, Aldo Rossi, Denise Scott Brown, Hannah Arendt, Jean Starobinski, Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Lavin, among others. Lessons from these readings will structure the terms for the workshop. Exercises will guide students as they produce and refine an essay on a topic of their choice over the course of the semester.  3 Course cr

ARCH 7999a, Independent Course Work  Matthew Rosen

Program to be determined with a faculty adviser of the student’s choice and submitted, with the endorsement of the study area coordinator, to the Rules Committee for confirmation of the student’s eligibility under the rules. (See the School’s Academic Rules and Regulations.)  3 Course cr
HTBA