Research in Architecture and Urban Design

Catalog description

This course prepares M. Arch. students to conduct research leading to their design project by looking at foundational methods in the field. It also trains students to identify significant project topics and engage in individual critical research in order to build the intellectual and scholarly armature sustaining the future design that every student will undertake. The target is to raise critical awareness of the social, cultural, economic, and disciplinary complexities in the context of different spatial practices. The course will engage research in architecture in order to find opportunities to make significant claims contributing to the advancement of the field. The course will explore different methodologies, whether based in the humanities or the sciences, in order to inform research paradigms in the discipline of architecture in academic institutions. In addition, the course will explore the specifics of formal speculation as a form of knowledge, as well as the relationship between the discipline and its formal, cultural, and economic past, present, and future.