Please note this is a tentative list of courses offered during the 2015-2016 school year. Course offerings change each year. Additional courses taught in other departments may be used to satisfy Architecture requirements, and are not listed here. For the most up to date list of courses, visit the Registrar's Course Offerings page.
ARC 203 Introduction to Architectural Thinking
Julian Rose (Fall 2015)
The objective of this course is to provide a broad overview of the discipline of architecture: its history, theories, methodologies; its manners of thinking and working. Rather than a chronological survey, the course will be organized thematically, with examples drawn from a range of historical periods as well as contemporary practice. Through lectures, readings, and discussions every student will acquire a working knowledge of key texts, buildings and architectural concepts.
ARC 204 Introduction to Architectural Design (Spring 2016)
Paul Lewis
ARC 204 is the first in a series of design studios offered to students interested in majoring in architecture. The course will introduce architecture as an 'impure' plastic art, inseparable from a network of forces acting upon it. The student will be confronted with progressively complex exercises involving spatial relations in two dimensions, three dimensions and time. The course will stress experimentation while providing an analytical and creative framework to develop an understanding of structure and materials as well as necessary skills in drawing and model-making. Two three-hour studios with lectures included.
ARC 206 Geometry and Architectural Representation (Spring 2016)
Michael B. Young
This course sets out two goals: the first is to understand the theories and techniques of geometry in architectural representation; the second is to develop the student's drawing sensibilities through 5 thematic drawing projects engaging both digital and manual techniques. Each new theme will be introduced through a lecture, tutorial, and discussion including a number of specific readings related to the topic at hand. The second class will be an individual desk crit to discuss the development of each drawing project. The third class will consist of a group pin-up review of each drawing experiment.
ARC 308 History of Architectural Theory (Fall 2015)
Tamar Zinguer
This course offers a history of architectural theory, criticism, and historiography from the Renaissance to the present, emphasizing the texts, media and institutions that have supported architecture's claim to modernity since the late 17th Century. Architectural thought is examined in its social and cultural context as it relates both to the Western philosophical tradition and to design method and practice.
ARC 311 Building Science and Technology: Building Systems (Fall 2015)
Nat Oppenheimer
This course introduces students to the art and science of building. Emphasis will be placed on gaining an understanding of construction materials, methods and the process of translating design ideas into built form. Specific topics are introduced each week during the two one-hour lectures. These topics are then further explored, and students gain hands-on experience, each week during the two-hour laboratory component of the course.
ARC 374 Computational Design (Fall 2015)
Axel Kilian
This course is an introduction to computational design using a range of techniques from NURBS modeling, simple programming and parametric modeling to basic digital fabrication. Through a series of computational exercises, presentations, and in-class discussions, we will investigate the evolving relationship between models of design and generative design issues of technology and culture in architecture.
ARC 401 Theories of Housing and Urbanism (Fall 2015)
Andrew Laing
The seminar will explore theories of urbanism and housing by reading canonical writers who have created distinctive and influential ideas about urbanism and housing from the nineteenth century to the present. The writers are architects, planners, and social scientists. The theories are inter-disciplinary. One major work will be discussed each week. We will critically evaluate their relevance and significance for architecture now. Topics will include: modernism, functionalism and social change; technological futurism; social critiques of urban design, the New Urbanism; the networked city; and sustainable urbanism.
ARC 403 Topics in the History and Theory of Architecture (Fall 2015)
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
This course covers research methods and other subjects that students employ in the development of their individual undergraduate thesis topics and research. The course will consider that a successful thesis entails the meeting of a socio-cultural problematic with a specific disciplinary issue, that the confluence and exchange between these external and internal situations can instigate an original contribution to architectural knowledge and technique. The "newness" of this contribution comes through a particular kind of repetition, a wily swerve within the established canon. The seminar will introduce disciplinary methods and themes through close readings of architectural texts and objects and will provide a workshop for the testing and elaboration of architectural polemics through directed research.
ARC 404 Advanced Design Studio (Fall 2015)
Mario Gandelsonas
The Advanced Design Studio examines architecture as cultural production, taking into account its capacity to structure both physical environments and social organizations. A specific problem or topic area will be set by the studio critic, and may include a broad range of building types, urban districts or regional landscapes, questions of sustainability, building materials or building performance. Studio work will include research and data gathering, analysis and program definition. Students are expected to master a full range of design media, including drawing, model-making and computer-aided design.
ARC 489 Selected Works of Twentieth-Century Architects (Spring 2015)
Staff
This course is intended to expose the students to a range of major works, built and unbuilt, of architecture from 1950 to the present. This course will focus on these particular buildings as they open themselves to a textual analysis. These analyses are intended to open up issues such as criticality, autonomy and singularity as they begin to evolve in architectural building (as opposed to texts) in the last half of the 20th century. This course will concentrate on individual buildings not architects. Each analysis will be accompanied by an illustrated presentation and selected readings.
ARC 492 Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure – American Urbanism (Spring 2015)
Mario Gandelsonas
The American city has undergone a number of restructurings since colonial times. However, the mutations that occurred at the beginning and in the middle of the twentieth century not only restructured the city but also dramatically changed its configuration in a radical way. We might be living a similar situation today at the beginning of a new century, when changes as powerful as the sub-urbanization of the 1950's are generating new configurations of urban space and form that are expanding once more the definition of the city and urban culture.
URB 300 Urban Studies Research Seminar (Fall 2015)
Aaron Shkuda & Bruno Carvalho
(Crosslisted with HUM 300, ARC 300 & WWS 392)
This interdisciplinary seminar introduces research methods in urban studies. We will focus on some of the ways in which researchers make sense of cities, including various aspects of urban experience, culture, history, theory, form, and policy. Students will use the analytical frameworks covered in the course to develop their own research projects with the goal of developing more dynamic junior papers and senior theses.
*This course is supported by the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities.
DAN 310 The Arts of Urban Transition (Fall 2015)
Judith Hamera, Aaron Landsman & Aaron Shkuda
(Crosslisted with ARC 380, THR 323, URB 310)
This interdisciplinary course uses texts and methods from history, theatre, and dance to examine artists and works of art as agents of change in New York (1960-present) and contemporary Detroit. Issues include relationships between artists, changing urban economies, and the built environment; gentrification and creative placemaking; local history in art interventions; and impacts of urban arts initiatives. A fall break studio trip to Detroit, and visits to archives and sites in New York, are included. Students will use data and methods from the course to produce final creative projects.
*This course is supported by the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities.
