Topics in Architecture History/Theory

Catalog description

This is one of four required half-semester courses introducing students to architectural history and theory by exposing them to a broad range of architectural origins, buildings examples and influences. The goal of the architecture history and theory course sequence is to prepare students to become accomplished researchers—well able to connect a useful taxonomy of architectural examples to contemporary issues and ambitions. Each of the courses begins with a contemporary figure in architectural practice and proceeds in a reverse chronology to explore the precedents and linages of thought that have been synthesized in the work of that contemporary practice. Teaching by example, these courses will offer a lesson in how distant antecedents support and continue to inform the discipline today. By exploring both a western and a non-western canon from a broader range of voices and vantage points, students will learn to further contextualize the basic architectural vocabulary acquired in their introductory courses.