Architecture
- ARC 204: Introduction to Architectural DesignThe first in a series of design studios offered to students interested in majoring in architecture, this an introductory studio to architectural design. Issues and ideas about space and form will be explored through a sequence of projects based on specific architectural representational techniques. The students will be confronted with progressively complex exercises involving spatial relations. 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 RepresentationThis course sets out two goals: to examine and understand the status of architecture's relationship to geometry; and to develop techniques of architectural representation, documentation, and communication. The course is organized around three drawing exercises. Each provides an introductory lecture, tutorial, and group discussion related to the topic at hand. Students will present work in progress at individual desk crits and in small groups for discussion and feedback. Each exercise will culminate in a course-wide review.
- ARC 322: History of Comparative Architecture: What Color is the Modern?Color is the 'great repressed' of modern architecture. Rather than being concerned with how this chromophobia came about, this course explores the multiple ways it conditions our perception of works of architecture which exhibit a chromaticism, and even a chromophilia incompatible with the modernist ideology of whiteness. Starting from this premise we explore basic concerns of architectural modernism - the relation to nature and to materials, the affective impact of vision, the complex question of the relation of color and functionality, the mediation of color involving various forms of notation, coding and representation.
- ARC 351: Junior Studio IIThis junior studio will focus on a number of specific design techniques in a highly regimented manner. We will continue to sharpen our skills in model-building, with emphasis placed on the value of accurate representation both by fostering craft and by exploring novel techniques of drawing and modeling.
- ARC 378/VIS 378: Collage Making in ArchitectureA graphic skills course that focuses on the techniques, craft, and ideologies of collage as a form of architectural representation. There are in-class workshops and weekly projects involving (handmade) collages. There are also a limited number of supplementary readings to situate our work within the context of architectural history and theory.
- ARC 382/URB 382/HUM 366: Unlikely Architects in Plantation LandscapesThis seminar explores architecture in out-of-the-way places through the perspectives of an unlikely set of historical actors: counterinsurgency experts, guerrilla fighters, Indigenous resistance groups, government officials, religious activists. Thinking from the intellectual traditions of the global South, the course explores the ways in which architecture was employed as a narrative device in twentieth century environmentalist movements.
- ARC 412: Implications and Complications of Embodied Energy AnalysisReducing the Embodied Energy (EE) of new and retrofitted buildings is a crucial part of addressing the climate crisis. Early classes will be devoted to the pros and cons of various methods of measuring EE. Questions: Can we curb EE without being able to measure it accurately? What if the things we do to make buildings more operationally efficient -- including following Passive House guidelines -- vastly increase their EE?
- ARC 502: Architecture Design StudioPart two of a two semester sequence in which fundamental design skills are taught in the context of the architect's wider responsibilities to society, culture and the environment. Students acquire a command of the techniques of design and representation through a series of specific architectural problems of increasing complexity. Both semesters are required for three-year M.Arch. students.
- ARC 504: Integrated Building StudiosIn this studio, architecture is conceived primarily as a technical endeavor. We approach design in consideration of ecology, environmental technology, building materials and structure, but also in respect to the integration of communications, robotics, geolocation and sensing technologies in the built environment. The studio is supported by technical experts. Students are required to investigate in depth a relevant technology and construct their projects around it. Projects are developed to a level of detail sufficient to demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of the chosen technology.
- ARC 506A: Architecture Design StudioVertical Design Studios examine architecture as cultural production, taking into account its capacity to structure both physical environments and social organizations. Projects include a broad range of project types, including individual buildings, urban districts and landscapes.
- ARC 506B: Architecture Design StudioVertical Design Studios examine architectural design in the intersection of materiality, technology, sociality and politics; taking into account its capacity to rearticulate physical environments and social organizations. Projects are intended to explore the role of architectural apparatus to intervene daily urban enactments, by the development of a broad range of architectural devices: including buildings, urban districts, landscape and the interactions that bring them all into shared performances.
- ARC 508A: M. Arch Thesis StudioThe Master of Architecture Thesis is an independent design project on a theme selected by the student. The student begins with a thesis statement outlining an area of study or a problem that has consequences for contemporary architectural production. Marking the transition between the academic and professional worlds, the thesis project is an opportunity for each student to define an individual position with regard to a specific aspect of architectural practice. As an integral part of the design process, it is intended that the thesis project incorporate research, programming and site definition.
- ARC 508B: Post-Prof. Thesis StudioThe Master of Architecture Thesis is an independent design project on a theme selected by the student. The student begins with a thesis statement outlining an area of study or a problem that has consequences for contemporary architectural production. Marking the transition between the academic and professional worlds, the thesis project is an opportunity for each student to define an individual position with regard to a specific aspect of architectural practice. As an integral part of the design process, it is intended that the thesis project will incorporate research, programming and site definition.
- ARC 509: Integrated Building SystemsAn introduction to building systems and the methods of construction used to realize design in built form. First half of the course is an overview of the primary systems, materials and principles used in construction of buildings and the fabrication of elements, through lectures and accompanying lab sessions. The second half allows students to design, detail and fabricate a custom fabrication utilizing principals explored in the lectures.
- ARC 511: Structural DesignIntroduction to the design of building structures of steel, timber and reinforced concrete.
- ARC 513: Contemporary Facade DesignThe course introduces the students to the main themes of performance oriented technical design of the building enclosure while reinforcing the generally understood idea of the facade as the primary language for communication of the architectural idea, developed in harmony with material, its techniques and several other forces of the industry. The students develop a historical, theoretical and practical understanding of the contemporary building enclosure and the architect's role within the process of its design and execution.
- ARC 515: The Environmental Engineering of Buildings, Part IIDesign and analysis of a 100,000sf net-zero energy building (or equivalent) using techniques, tools and information from ARC 514 (a full set of course materials are provided to students not taking 514). Selection, design and evaluation of environmental systems including air-conditioning, ventilation, lighting, power and renewable energy systems with an emphasis on design integration with architecture and structure. Selection of building envelope components and materials for optimum thermal performance. Sustainable design concepts and energy conservation are stressed throughout.
- ARC 532: Post-Professional M.Arch. Thesis SeminarThis course supports students in the development of a broad range of thesis topics optimized to the faculty of the SoA. A series of exercises guide students to identify the primary questions that currently structure the discipline and those extra-disciplinary concerns which architecture must engage today. Throughout the work, analyses of these issues are linked to contemporary architectural production. All work is conducted by small teams and harnesses the dynamic feedback between specifically architectural problematics and the general logic of contemporary culture in preparation for future thesis work.
- ARC 533: Collage Making in ArchitectureA graphic skills course that focuses on the techniques, craft, and ideologies of collage as a form of architectural representation. There are in-class workshops and weekly projects involving (handmade) collages. There are also a limited number of supplementary readings to situate our work within the context of architectural history and theory.
- ARC 537: Architecture, Technology, and the Environment: Energy from Turtles to the GridAs climate change reshapes enviro-technical landscapes across the globe, this seminar examines discussions on the history of energy, nature, and built landscapes in terms of historiography and on location. Independent research thus considers the material and historical ramifications of the discussed concepts and probes them through case studies and locally. Students can choose to focus on historical or design inquiries for the final independent research projects which result in a journal-article style paper or exhibition that includes historical maps, drawings and installations.
- ARC 546/URB 546: Technology and the City: The Architectural Implications of Networked Urban LandscapeThe seminar explores the implications of technologically networked cities for architectural programming and the design of spaces and places. Key issues examined: information technology reshaping the nature of architectural programming and our ideas of spaces, places and communities; programs for spaces, buildings, and the city being transformed by increasing mobility, fluidity and `blurring' of activities in space; and, the history of ideas that shape how we understand technology and urbanism, programming and architecture, including cyborg cities, sentient and smart cities, big data, hybrid places, crypto cities, and metaverse urbanism.
- ARC 547: Introduction to Formal AnalysisIntroduction 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.
- ARC 550: Space and Subjectivity: Labor's HistoriesThis seminar explores concepts and themes concerning the interplay of labor, identity, and the built environment. We proceed from an intersectional analysis that roots questions of labor within physical bodies and from there aim to understand how these bodies labor to construct the built environment as well as how the built environment shapes laboring bodies, questions of identity, and our understandings of work and labor.
- ARC 553/AAS 553: Of Monkeys, Men and Great EdificesThe seminar explores philosophical intersections of race and architecture, revealing Blackness as a negative aesthetic formation in historical and theoretical discourses. The transfiguration of Blackness from "inferior" historical racial sign to compelling architectonic language parallels John Dewey's formulations on rhetoric and "becoming." The result is a new spatial rhetoric founded on Blackness. Blackness is discussed as an aesthetic principle rather than a strictly socio-political condition. The distinction allows us to understand how race and architecture coexist.
- ARC 560: Topics in Contemporary Architecture & Urbanism: Writing the CityThe cultural discourse of architecture and cities is created and sustained largely by the writing of architects, critics, and historians. As an intellectual discipline, architecture requires writing to support and communicate its ideas, requires texts to position and expand upon its visual representations. The course introduces students to different models of writing through reading architecture and theory texts and through learning to read the city at its many scales. The goal is to give students the conceptual tools to form and write their own ideas and the confidence to present their writing in a public forum.
- ARC 560A: Topics in Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism: Building and Embodied CarbonThe climate crisis requires a radical shift in how buildings are built to significantly decrease their embodied carbon. This design seminar explores the tectonics of plant-based building materials (wood, straw, hemp, cork, bamboo, etc.), invents new assemblies and tests how different material assemblies can be catalysts for new forms of buildings. As a design intensive course, the visible aesthetics of these materials are combined with the invisible attributes made legible through other means such as life cycle analysis, thermal imaging, and carbon calculations.
- ARC 560B: Topics in Contemporary Architecture & Urbanism: Bed Project II, Symposium BanquetThis design seminar involves conceiving, designing, and holding a Symposium/Banquet at Princeton, with Professors Beatriz Colomina and Sanford Kwinter as clients and interlocutors. Inspired by Plato's Symposium, the task of the seminar participants is to create a detailed minute by minute score for the event which integrates the design and creation of: food and drink, serving and tableware, music and movement as a ritual framework for the Symposium's free discourse. The Princeton event is a dress rehearsal for an inaugural event in Tokyo planned for 2024.
- ARC 563: Founding, Building, and Managing your own Architectural Practice: Managing your own Architectural PracticeReview and analysis of the dynamics and process inherent in starting, developing, managing and operating your own architectural practice, including marketing, finance, human resources, project process, liability, insurance, and general management. Areas of particular emphasis include project accounting, public presentations, and the development of a business plan.
- ARC 572: Research in Architecture (Proseminar)This advanced pro-seminar investigates research methodologies in architectural discourse and practice. Each year the pro-seminar focuses on a specific theme addressing the history of the discipline from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students engage as a group in an in-depth reading of theoretical and historiographic sources on architecture and related fields.
- ARC 573: Pro Seminar: Computation, Energy, Technology in ArchitectureThe pro seminar is offered to incoming PhD students in the PhD track in Computation, Energy, building Technology in the School of Architecture (open to other interested graduate students as well) and is organized as a research seminar to introduce the participants to scientific research methods in the context of design in Architecture and science in engineering. It is structured as a series of introductory presentations of exemplary methods based on case studies and a number of guest presentations from collaborating disciplines.
- ARC 575: Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture: Mies van der Rohe and the Architecture of CapitalismRecent monographs and thematic studies have shaped our understanding of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's life and work, yet the last archival discoveries and interpretations inspire a different view of the architect's trajectory. Often seen as a lonesome, misanthropic figure, Mies's worked as a professional architect with an extreme artistic and intellectual ambition, deeply engaged in the capitalist modernization of two metropolises: Berlin, where his provocative manifestos of the 1920s elucidate his built work, and Chicago, where his refinement of paradigmatic structure types characterized his second, American, career in the 1950s.
- ARC 576/MOD 502/ART 598: Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture: Environments of Governance: Architecture, Media, DevelopmentThis seminar investigates discourses and techniques of environmental governance addressed to the so-called "Third World," those seeking to regulate not only economic production but spatial arrangements, social reproduction, and forms of subjectivity in the decades after World War II. It does so by interrogating the intersection and co-constitutive realms of architecture, media, and development aid. To this end, an important task of the course is to ask how to identify, recognize, and attend to the many techno-social forms of designing and managing environments, with their distinctly northern epistemologies and imperial dispositions.
- ARC 578: Utopics: Private Fantasies, Public ProjectsThis seminar investigates the consistent tensions between interior fantasy and exterior publicity in the modern period. Case studies and readings include the private houses and public projects of Ledoux, Soane, Fourier, Loos, Le Corbusier, Kiesler, and others, in relation to the literary influences of Romanticism, Symbolism, Surrealism, and psychoanalysis. Participants will select an example of their choice for research and documentation.
- ARC 580/GSS 580/MOD 580: Gender, Cities, and Dissent: Living RoomThis 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.
- ARC 594/MOD 504/HUM 593/ART 584/SPA 559: Topics in Architecture: The Total Corporation: The Design of Everything In a Global ContextTo distance architecture from the "war machine," architects called for the reintegration of the arts after WW2. The resulting post-war Gesamtkunstwerk accompanied the development of ever larger corporations and corporate architectural practices integrating new kinds of agents into their increasingly complex wholes, from women designers and computing services to global environmental and economic models. By exploring how corporations--Olivetti in Ivrea, Hilton in Havana, JUMEX in Mexico City--operated architecture across all scales and mediums, students in this seminar will uncover the questions post-war integration was designed to answer.
- ART 102/ARC 102: An Introduction to the History of ArchitectureA survey of architectural history, from ancient Egypt to contemporary America, that includes comparative material from around the world. This course stresses a critical approach to architecture through the analysis of context, expressive content, function, structure, style, building technology, and theory. Discussion will focus on key monuments and readings that have shaped the history of architecture.
- ART 447/HLS 445/ARC 440: Siegecraft: Architecture, Warfare, and MediaSiegecraft was an art more complex than painting, more powerful than sculpture, and more monumental than any building in the early modern world. This seminar confronts the discomfiting reality that the period long known as the Renaissance was defined as much, if not more, by brutal and collective warfare than it was by the rise of the individual. The class has no prerequisites and is open to all, including students of architecture, engineering, art, history, media, and literature. Seminar sessions will include hands-on study of original artworks in campus collections.
- CEE 262B/ARC 262B/EGR 262B/URB 262B: Structures and the Urban EnvironmentKnown as "Bridges", this course focuses on structural engineering as a new art form begun during the Industrial Revolution and flourishing today in long-span bridges, thin shell concrete vaults, and tall buildings. Through laboratory experiments students study the scientific basis for structural performance and thereby connect external forms to the internal forces in the major works of structural engineers. Illustrations are taken from various cities and countries thus demonstrating the influence of culture on our built environment.
- CEE 364/ARC 364/MSE 365: Materials in Civil EngineeringAn introductory course on materials used civil and environmental engineering. Lectures on structure and properties of construction materials including concrete, steel, glass and timber; fracture mechanics; strength testing; mechanisms of deterioration; impact of material manufacturing on the environment. Labs on brittle fracture, heat treatment of steel, strength of concrete, mechanical properties of wood.
- CEE 546/ARC 566: Form Finding of Structural SurfacesThe course looks at the most inventive structures and technologies, demonstrating their use of form finding techniques in creating complex curved surfaces. The first part introduces the topic of structural surfaces, tracing the ancient relationship between innovative design and construction technology and the evolution of surface structures. The second part familiarizes the student with membranes(systems, form finding techniques,materials and construction techniques.) The third part focuses on rigid surfaces. The fourth part provides a deeper understanding of numerical form finding techniques.
- ENG 571/COM 592/ARC 589/MOD 570/HUM 570: Literary and Cultural Theory: Architectures of TheoryThis class engages with spatial analysis across a range of disciplines and approaches; from architecture, architectural theory and manifestos to continental philosophy, Marxism, Black studies, decolonial writings, and a sample of graphic- and novelistic depictions of built space. We ask whether thinking about built space as a "language" is fundamentally different from "picturing" space or inhabiting space with our bodies, and whether these approaches count as "cognitive mapping." We contemplate the dystopian actualities and utopian possibilities inherent in the built environment and the constructive projects of world building.
- SPI 485/ARC 485: Climate Change, Floodplains, and Adaptation DesignThis seminar is organized in three parts: an overview of the impacts of climate change and general approaches to adaptation and transformation in floodplains; a study of several regions that have had to adapt to increasing flooding; and a series of five specific local case studies, coastal and riverine. The topic of climate adaptation is of course vast and of necessity the scope of this seminar is limited to one already major impact of climate change.
- URB 201/SPI 201/SOC 203/ARC 207: Introduction to Urban StudiesThis course will examine different crises confronting cities in the 21st century. Topics will range from informal settlements, to immigration, terrorism, shrinking population, sprawl, rising seas, affordable housing, gentrification, smart cities. The range of cities will include Los Angles, New Orleans, Paris, Logos, Caracas, Havana, New York, Hong Kong, Dubai among others.
- URB 390/ARC 390/HUM 362/AFS 390: African Urban HistoryThis course examines how cities, and city-dwellers, across Africa have changed over the past 500 years. We consider how local, regional, and global forces have structured African cityscapes, jobs done by urban workers, and the relationship African urbanites had with changing environments. By doing so, students develop the tools to analyze urban spaces and explain the different ways cities have structured Africa's past, present and future. Students will examine how people experienced, built, and transformed urban landscapes across Africa and unpack the social, economic, political, and spatial structures that have structured African cities.
- VIS 202/ARC 202: Drawing IThe 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.
- VIS 204/ARC 328: Painting IAn 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.