Courses
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Culture, Conservation and Design
This proseminar addresses theoretical foundations of Critical Conservation as an evolving discipline that bridges between Cultural Meaning, Identity and Context. Its goal…
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An Unsentimental Look at Architecture and Social Craft
Designers of the built environment have had an on-again/off-again relationship with social agency. Progressive design and social outcomes were closely linked in early modernism. However,…
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Style and Time
Farshid Moussavi, Ricardo Solar
This course explores a non-representational approach to style, its consequence on the process of design, as well as on the built environment…
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Practical Wisdom, or the nature of architectural intelligence
Since the advent of architecture in universities, and particularly since World War II, architects have raided the other disciplines for insights and…
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“In the Manner of a Picture”: The Lure of the Picturesque
Instead of trying to wrest order from chaos, the picturesque now is wrested from the homogenized, the singular liberated from the standardized.”— Rem Koolhaas, JunkspaceWhen…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar: Tokyo on a Crossroads
Factors driving Tokyo’s urban mutation are beginning to change and becoming complex after the long period of economic growth. While it’s busy trying to fulfill…
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Hybrid Formations: Interdisciplinary Design
“How much does your building weigh?” This question was posed to Lord Norman Foster by Buckminster Fuller after he visited the Sainsbury…
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Visualization (at SEAS)
SEAS Computer Science 171 Catalog Number: 8877 Tu., Th., 2:30-4, and a weekly section to be arranged. Please check the…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar on Structure and Material in Japan
This seminar consists of lectures, site visits, and hands on experience on materials of traditional Japanese crafts in relation to architecture and built environment. Lectures…
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Frameworks of Contemporary Practice
Purpose of the course: 1. Examine architecture through the optics of the Discipline, Profession and Practice — the issues of knowledge domains,…
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Doctoral Program Proseminar
This pro-seminar is one way of fulfilling a requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic…
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Responsive Environments: Bergamo eMotion
This course looks into the future of the built environment from a technologically augmented point of view, with a strong focus on sustainability and…
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Fieldwork in Conservation Design
Architects practicing in the 21st century can no longer assume that most of their design projects will begin with an empty site. Several factors –…
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Socio-Environmental Responsive Design
Jose Luis Vallejo, Belinda Tato
This seminar considers the complexity of the human ecosystem and the interpenetration of natural and artificial elements that are embedded within it. People, nature,…
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The Architecture of Health: Power, Technology, and the Hospital
This seminar traces the form of the hospital from the beginning of modern medicine through to the present, across Europe, the United States, and…
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Philosophy of Technology
“In addition to man’s ageless obligation to meet the threat of things, he bears for the first time the responsibility of prime agent in…
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Potential Architecture
The work of the architect, the urban designer and designers at large is conditioned by a number of factors that delimit and demarcate the…
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Political Landscapes
This course is offered for students enrolled in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. This seminar invites students to analyze the political iconography of the countryside,…
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Screens: Media Archaeology and the Visual Arts Seminar
How do screens function as interface between us and the world? What is the role of the screen in contemporary visual arts and media culture?…
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The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of an Architectural Idea
One of the arresting images in Michel Serres’s Rome: The Book of Foundations is the idea that history is “a knot of different times”…
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Le Corbusier: Themes/Discourse/Figures
Antoine Picon, K. Michael Hays
Half a century after his death, Le Corbusier remains the most emblematic architect of the twentieth century and a major reference for the architectural discipline.
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Countryside versus Cityside: A Seminar in Environmental History
This Course is for students in the Rotterdam Study Abroad Program. Investigating the countryside, as architects, requires a zooming out of the city and the…
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Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
Holly Samuelson, Frank Apeseche
How can one optimize the benefits of environmental or social sustainability while generating a higher return on investment in buildings? Where are the opportunities…
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The Thermal Allometry of Massive, Breathing Buildings
By form and ‘massing’ alone, termite mounds balance the baritone beat of thermal mass with the soprano shrill of surface convection and the tenor pulse…
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Structural Surfaces
This course is about maximum effect with minimum means. Complex surfaces present a wide variety of construction and structural challenges, as well as a…
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Visualization (at SEAS)
SEAS Computer Science 171 Catalog Number: 8877 Tu., Th., 2:30-4, and a weekly section to be arranged. Please check the…
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Life-Cycle Design
The design of sustainable buildings has long focused on reducing energy needs during the operational phase, largely disregarding energy and material consumption as well…
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Genome of the Built Environment: Measuring the Unseen
The built environment is one of the most fascinating yet enigmatic artifact of the human being. We perceive it as a complex entity resulting…
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What is a Thesis? Conversations on Means and Methods of the Thesis Project
Mohsen Mostafavi, John May, Jon Lott
The course is organized around a series of in-depth discussions with leading figures in the design fields. Weekly meetings provide a forum for exploring…
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Art, Design and the Public Domain Pre-Final Project Workshop
Frida Escobedo, James Voorhies
The seminar will serve as a space for artistic and design experimentation, and discussion intended to foreground students’ emergent interests, concepts, and methodologies toward their…
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Discourse and Methods II
This is one of two seminars fulfilling a requirement for successful completion of the PHD curriculum. The seminar is designed as an introduction to canonical…
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Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf-life in the Supermarket Landscape
The supermarket shelf is a highly volatile, hyper-competitive space. On this shelf products struggle to maximize every possible advantage, all in a ruthless effort…
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Interdisciplinary Art Practices
The Interdisciplinary Art Practices seminar investigates the exploratory character of art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of the contemporary culture. In the present…
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Conservation of Older Buildings: Techniques and Technics
This course will teach the understanding of existing building form and fabric and how to conserve them. Where does one even start the evaluation…
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Culture, Conservation and Design
This proseminar addresses theoretical foundations of Critical Conservation as an evolving discipline that bridges between Cultural Meaning, Identity and Context. Its goal is to…
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Learning from The Function of Style
Farshid Moussavi, James Khamsi
This course will meet at 12 noon instead of 10 AM on Wednesday, September 2nd. The springboard for this course is The Function…
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States of Design: The Present and Future of the Field in Twelve Parts
In the past decades, design has branched out in many new directions that have galvanized emerging practitioners, sparked business models, and set the worldwide…
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The Aperture Analyzed: The Form and Space of Openings
This seminar will focus on an essential component of architecture, the aperture, which has broad implications for our understanding of space. An aperture is…
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Architecture and its Texts (1650-1800)
This seminar focuses on a selection of important architectural writings from the late 17th and 18th centuries, with the aim of exploring the connections…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar: The Japan Syndrome
The Japan syndrome – shrinking, aging, combined natural disasters – is forcing the whole population to think of how to survive post-modernization. Under Abe’s new…
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Mechatronic Optics
The drawing as a certain transcription of vision into operational, communicative, and instructional notation is at the very core of design. Deeply variegated and…
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Informal Robotics / New Paradigms for Design & Construction
This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 1st from 9 am – 12 pm in room 318. Today…
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Tokyo Study Abroad Seminar on Structure and Material in Japan
This seminar consists of lectures, site visits, and hands on experience on materials of traditional Japanese crafts in relation to architecture and built environment. Lectures…
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Frameworks of Contemporary Practice
Purpose of the course is to: 1. Examine architecture through the lenses of the Discipline, Profession and Practice — the issues of knowledge domains,…
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The Architecture of Waste
Andreas Georgoulias, Leire Asensio Villoria
This course will meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 2nd from 6 – 9 pm in room 510. See note…
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Doctoral Program Proseminar
This pro-seminar is one way of fulfilling a requirement for successful completion of the Doctor of Design program. Primarily, it will focus on various thematic…
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Responsive Environments: Glitchy Food
Today, more than ever before, we feel the technological presence as part of our everyday life. The all-pervasive nature of digital information and technological interaction…
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Critical Conservation: Urban Cultural Ecologies of Progressive Places
Critical Conservation seeks to disentangle the complex web of 19th c. elite values of historic preservation and 20th c. mass-culture strategies that together complicate 21st…
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The Mixed-Reality City: The urban fabric as landscape, network, and platform
The contemporary city is constituted by multiple overlapping, intermixing realities articulated across built form and imagined space, individual experience and collective memory, embodied sensation and…
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Philosophy of Technology
\”In addition to man’s ageless obligation to meet the threat of things, he bears for the first time the responsibility of prime agent in the…