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.

The course focuses on the social forces that shape design thinking. Its objective is to introduce architectural and urban design issues to build design and critical thinking skills from a multidisciplinary perspective. The studio is team-taught from faculty across disciplines to expose students to the multiple forces within which design operates.

This course introduces a history of architectural theory by way of architectural production in the "western" world from antiquity through 20th century modernism. While we will examine an evolution of architectural thought through architectural developments that occurred primarily in Europe and the Americas, those architectures will be contextualized within a broader global history of built environment traditions and practices, and framed around recurring themes in the history of architectural production.

In preparation for a fluid and evolving contemporary design practice, this course introduces physical prototyping and computational design strategies for an era of environmental transformation and climate crisis. Across platforms and instruments, exercises and readings emphasize process development as a core competency in architecture. A lecture component provides a technological overview, situated in a long-term cultural perspective and a theoretical framework. Focused lab modules provides exposure to a range of prototyping and fabrication resources at SOA, where students gain hands on experience.

The semester will focus on the design of an addition (a graft) to an existing unused masonry structure along the Delaware Raritan canal, approximately 3 miles from Princeton University's campus. Students will consider how people use and perceive this piece of infrastructure, how it defines the landscape and identify opportunities for its transformation through operations. Specific assignments will include sketching, hand and digital drawings, a site model and 3d representations. Projects should reflect knowledge of the existing site and project spatial conditions that encourage human interaction, contemplation, exercise or other activities.

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 interdisciplinary. One or two major works will be discussed each week. We will critically evaluate their relevance and significance for architecture now. Topics include: modernism, technological futurism, density, the new urbanism, the networked city, landscape urbanism, and sustainable urbanism.

This course prepares seniors to write a thesis by conducting novel research on a topic in the history and theory of architecture. The principal aim is to engage in a sustained dialogue about the nature of architectural discourse and its modes of inquiry as a means of analyzing architectural research methods, sources, and genres of writing. You will engage methods of research and modes of analysis related to the discipline of architecture first by critically engaging historiographic and methodological texts on architectural research, then by setting out your own research agenda and crafting your thesis project.

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 each 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.

Design Studio

Explores architecture as a social art and the spatial organization of the human environment. Projects include a broad range of problem types, including individual buildings, groups of buildings, urban districts, and landscapes.

Integrated design studios approach architecture from a synthetic perspective. Considerations of structure, environmental technology, building materials and systems, exterior envelope, and site design are integrated directly into the design process through the participation of technical faculty and outside advisors in critiques and reviews. Projects are developed to a high level of detail. At least one course is required for professional M.Arch. students.

The Vertical Design Studio emphasizes site organization, the development of building plans, and the accompanying expression of architectural character in three dimensions.

The Vertical Design Studio emphasizes site organization, the development of building plans, and the accompanying expression of architectural character in three dimensions.

The Vertical Design Studio emphasizes site organization, the development of building plans, and the accompanying expression of architectural character in three dimensions. It explores architecture as a social art and the spatial organization of the human environment. Projects include a broad range of problem types, including individual buildings, groups of buildings, urban districts, and landscapes.

The Master of Architecture Thesis is an independent design project on a theme selected by the student, incorporating research, programming, and site definition.The Fall semester begins with written thesis proposals and culminates in thesis declaration and an open review. Students complete the work toward thesis declaration primarily with their individual thesis advisors.

After having taken this class, students are able to: 1) Recognize and explain how external forces (due to people, wind, heat, etc) act upon rigid bodies (eg.a skateboard, bridge, cable and arches, frames, grids and plates, shells and membranes) in the real world, 2) Identify and apply the appropriate analytical approach to quantify how strong such a rigid body is under the applied loading, 3) Write an informed critique about prominent structural designs.

The first part of a sequence taught over two terms that provides a broad introduction to Building Systems, Environmental Control and Energy Conservation. Sustainable design themes and environmentally responsible practices are stressed throughout and form a backdrop to all the instructional material provided. The fall course focuses on fundamental concepts and provides an introduction to Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, Lighting, Acoustical and Life Safety systems. ARC 515, taught in the spring, considers the design process and the integration of these systems into buildings.

This seminar will examine the relation of construction, structure and building services to the production of meaning through a series of case studies of buildings and bridges and as well as general surveys of the work of specific engineers and architects.

This course builds a discourse encompassing the many aspects of building function to try to rediscover the best role of the architect. We attempt to discover what level of functional system knowledge is appropriate for the architect today. A palette of potentially complex topics are provided to explore building function, but to avoid the seminar becoming overly technical, it is grounded in the basic elements of function that one might imagine: Aristotle's Air, Fire, Earth, and Water. Air: space and comfort; Fire: energy and operation; Earth: materials and construction; Water: flow and systems

The course focuses on the intersection of architecture and film, and its crucial role in establishing the formal, hermeneutic, and semiotic parameters of both arts. We examine the visual implications and signifying functions of the evolving intermedium condition that joins them.This condition and the artistic practices it generates presuppose a set of spatial and temporal intuitions that extend from architectural form to codes, both narrative and spatial, for reading the city as a real, an ideal, and anti-ideal space (that is, as a potentially utopian and dystopian space).

This course studies uneven geographies of environmental justice across scales: outer space, the earth, nation, city and neighborhood. It examines the production of sacrifice zones of geo-engineering projects, petrochemical landscapes, material resource extraction, toxic waste disposal, containment of ungovernable bodies, and unjust real estate practices. How can architects and landscape architects address the territorializing zones of entangled matter and bodies? How can they move beyond exposing injustices and oppressive structures to a new level of creative ecologies of justice and equity?

Course prepares students to formulate a rigorous design hypothesis based on a critical position and rooted in original research that outlines a path toward a compelling architectural project. Largely focused on broad questions of method, each year the course also addresses a different theme of general concern to the practice and discipline of architecture. It establishes a collective discourse and body of knowledge related to the topic to serve as launchpad for independent student work. Classes are devoted to discussions of readings, workshops and student presentations, dialog with invited speakers and preliminary design development.

A series of exercises guide students to identify the primary questions that currently structure the discipline and extra-disciplinary concerns which architecture must engaged today. Analyses of these issues are linked to contemporary architectural production. Each week students present from the format list. The focus in the formats and their connections substitute buildings analysis or close readings of texts as isolated arguments, and should help discern the diversity of threads they open. Our goal is to describe value systems and discursive paths used not only to evaluate but also reconstitute architectural practice.

Introduction to the primary projective systems that form the foundations of architectural representation and serve as essential tools of formal analysis and design. Coursework is derived from a structured examination of key primary sources by Gaspard Monge, Brook Taylor and Girard Desargues.

The carrying out of architectural services goes beyond design and involves obligations to the public, to clients, to peers and employees. This course deals with the contracts, specifications, technical documentation, project management, and the construction administration phases of architectural services in designing and constructing buildings. The course is required for the Master of Architecture degree unless you have taken Professional Practice in a 5-year program.

Bachelorhood is at the center of diverse forms of architectural programs, assuming massive connotations and demographic significance. It has shaped much of what we know about dormitories, boardinghouses, hostels, studios, garçonnières, penthouse apartments and minimum housing experiments. Despite its pivotal role in the history of domestic architecture, it has been neglected as an exceptional or temporary status. The seminar explores multiple meanings of singleness and its typological responses as a key for understanding and rethinking modern household paradigms, housing policies and residential design in Latin America and elsewhere.

This seminar examines the varied calls after World War II for a new language of architecture. Drawing on the work of philosophers, psychoanalysts and social scientists, theorists from Banham to Portoghesi sought to replace the shattered unities proposed by the Modern Movement by exploring new "isms," new concepts of "meaning," "emery," "symbolism" and above all, "history." Whether re-reading Freud, re-writing phenomenology, or construing anthropology on the basis of structural linguistics, these theorists paved the way for a second generation of philosophers to create the ground for an architecture of poetics and power.

This seminar is a topic-based investigation of contemporary concerns situated at the intersection of architectural history, theory and design. Exploring how architectural technics have been brought to bear on matters of broad socio-cultural salience, particular emphasis is given to establishing relations between architecture and other knowledge domains, close readings of architectural structures, settings and media but also to identifying ways of engaging with the endless work of expanding the field. Final projects range from research papers to collaboratively produced exhibitions to experimental and project-based formats.

This seminar investigates how feminism and gender theory (from eco-feminism and intersectional feminism to queer and trans theory) can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, and cities, as well as the human alliances within them. We study forms of organizing around women's and LGBTQ+ rights in cities, from the efforts of informal activist groups to those of institution building, and highlight these efforts as main sites for creative, architectural, and urban intervention in challenging heteronormative forms of living and instead providing spaces of care and kinship making.

Part of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological theories and architectural practices in the 19th and 20th c., this course focuses on the entanglement of architectural historiography with the historicization of design technology. It examines the historical treatment of buildings as prosthetic or organic tools and the reinvention of building practices as biological processes and anthropological techniques. Seminars probe the periodization of historical time in terms of progress and obsolescence informing early histories of modern architecture and design.

An introduction to the architecture of the Romans from the 8th century BCE through the 4th century CE. This course will provide an historical overview of the subject, analyzing how new building designs and technologies became, over time, standard Roman practice, alongside close studies of exceptional monuments in the city of Rome. Topics will include: city planning; engineering technique; acquisition of building materials; the transformation of the building trades; and the full breadth of Roman structures from houses to temples.

What was the Renaissance, and why has it occupied a central place in art history? Major artistic currents swept Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, an age that saw the rise of global trade, the development of the nation state, and the onset of mass armed conflict. To explore the art of this period, we consider themes including religious devotion, encounters with foreign peoples and goods, the status of women, and the revival of antiquity. We study artists including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as well as some who may be less familiar. Precepts visit campus collections of paintings, prints, drawings, and maps.

This seminar searches for a pivotal figure in the history of Greek architecture, Pytheos, designer of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the temple of Athena at Priene. This sculptor turned architect, theorist and critic offers a foothold for exploring trends of the late classical and early hellenistic world, including revivals and canons, grid-designed Rasterarchitektur, and colossal sepulchers in an age of emergent kingship. This course also reflects on the afterlife of Pytheos' theories on architectural education and the reception of the Mausoleum from early modern Europe to post-Civil War America.

Entwined with power and capital, architecture is inseparable from coloniality. In colonized lands, architecture concretized the European claim and facilitated systems of domination. But coloniality also influenced architecture of the metropole and catalyzed the international expansion of modernization. Tracing various phases of coloniality--from bureaucratic colonialism to postcolonial recovery--and scales of architectural design--climate, city, monument, and ornament--the course interrogates sites where European architecture colluded with colonial power, and reflects on the resistances that condition its legacy in colonialist expansion.

The course presents anthropogenic global changes and their impact on sustainable design. The course focuses on understanding the underlying principles from natural and applied sciences, and how new basic Internet of Things digital technology enables alternative system analysis and design. Material is presented in 2 parts: 1) Global Change and Environmental Impacts: studying our influences on basic natural systems and cycles and how we can evaluate them, and 2) Designing Sustainable Systems: addressing challenges of disease transmission in our built environment using sensors and data to rethink how we design and use space.

VR/AR can enable engineers, scientists, and architects to plan and conduct their work in fundamentally new ways, visualize and communicate their findings more effectively, and work in environments that are otherwise difficult, impossible, or too costly to experience in person. This course explores the basic concepts of effective VR/AR experiences, builds skills needed to develop and support innovative science, engineering, or architecture projects. In the second half of the semester, working in small teams, students develop, implement VR/AR projects of their choice.

VR/AR can enable engineers, scientists, and architects to plan and conduct their work in fundamentally new ways, visualize and communicate their findings more effectively, and work in environments that are otherwise difficult, impossible, or too costly to experience in person. This course explores the basic concepts of effective VR/AR experiences and builds the skills needed to develop and support innovative science, engineering, or architecture projects. In the second half of the semester, working in small teams, students develop and implement VR/AR projects of their choice.

This seminar introduces urban studies research methods through a study of New York in conversation with other cities. Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art and film, we will travel through cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day. We will examine how standards of evidence shape what is knowable about cities and urban life, what "counts" as knowledge in urban studies, and how these different disciplinary perspectives construct and limit knowledge about cities as a result.

This seminar introduces the study of gentrification, with a focus on mapping projects using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Readings, films, and site visits will situate the topic, as the course examines how racial landscapes of gentrification, culture and politics have been influenced by and helped drive urban change. Tutorials in ArcGIS will allow students to convert observations of urban life into fresh data and work with existing datasets. Learn to read maps critically, undertake multifaceted spatial analysis, and master new cartographic practices associated with emerging scholarship in the Digital and Urban Humanities.

The great thing about drawing is you can do it anywhere! This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing. We'll introduce basic techniques while also encouraging experimentation, with a focus on both drawing from life and drawing as an expressive act. Students will be introduced to the basics of line, shading, proportion, composition, texture and gesture. You'll also maintain a drawing journal, and use it as a regular space for observation and personal expression. Through exposure to a variety of mediums and techniques, you'll gain the skills and confidence necessary to develop an individual final project of your choosing.

An introduction to the materials and methods of painting, addressing form and light, color and its interaction, composition, scale, texture and gesture. Students will experiment with subject matter including still life, landscape, architecture, self-portraiture and abstraction, while painting from a variety of sources: life, sketches, maquettes, collages, photographs and imagination. Students will progressively develop personal imagery that will inform an individual final project. Princeton will provide all materials for the painting class.