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.

ARC 206 introduces the role of geometry in architectural design and construction, as well as the origins, methods, and contemporary implications of projective geometry in visual culture and our physical environment. Students in this course will learn by doing. Through a sequence of eight drawing and modeling exercises, students will construct, interrogate, and transform volumes and spatial interiors. Within this sequence, geometric precision will be exploited not only as a means of communicating accurate and replicable information, but also as a means of persuasion, manipulation, or even deception.

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.

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).

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.

An overview of the major themes running through the various strands of architecture and environmental politics in the twentieth century. While overarching in scope, the seminar is based on a close reading of selected texts, drawings and research projects by prominent environmental engineers, designers and anthropologists. Special emphasis is given to the history of climate control, ventilation and theories of contamination as they manifest in built environments. During the course, we reflect on how these theories are rendered in the idealization of comfort and universal notions of well-being in modern architecture.

The 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 -- its images. 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.

Few architectural structures have been labored over as much as the barn. From community raising weekends and feminist pedagogical projects, to back-to-the land conversions and acts of preservation, throughout the rural United States these are sites where commonly held distinctions break down: between amateur participants and expert practitioners, between material culture and computational methods, between individuals and collectives, between manual trades and intellectual pursuits, between architectural discipline and building practice. This seminar begins by breaking down the barn, then designing and choreographing the raising of a new one.

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.

The 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.

This course investigates a conceptual framework for architecture, which positions digital manufacturing as an integral part of the computational design process. This framework places assembly¿the act of putting together discrete elements¿as the main generative driver for computation to bridge the gap between design and making. It requires breaking a building down into sub-assemblies and developing custom tools and assembly procedures to manufacture them. Moreover, it necessitates the implementation of custom algorithms, data structures, and digital workflows to generate, store, and seamlessly transfer design data to robotic assembly routines.

In Positions, we critically examine the characters, language, and concerns that greet us upon entering the field in the year 2023 and try to recreate and understand their recent trajectories and histories, traversing multiple times the period between 1970s and today. Our objective is to collectively develop tools and forms of critical thinking that help us navigate the map of contemporary architectural practices. Along the way, the historical events that unfold around us and our personal life experiences are important and welcome participants in our conversations.

This 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.

Histories of architecture often interpret Alberti's "window onto nature" as the medial interface between the denaturalizing abstraction of linear perspective and another more elemental nature exterior to architecture itself. This plane, however, is often marked by a range of material disturbances, from momentary obfuscations of passing clouds, to irregularities in glass to the invisible risks of fire and finance. By reconceptualizing immaterial representations as actions made through elemental media, students address the long chains of material and technical transfers that architectural techniques assemble into "windows onto nature."

Part of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological and architectural practices from the 18th c. to the present, this course focuses on recent ecological and environmental discourses through the writings of anthropologists, sociologists, material and environmental scientists, as well as architectural and literary critics. The seminar focuses on the effects of the diminishing distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic as well as the human and the non-human in the creation of living habitats and recreation of inequities within an environmentally challenged planet.

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.

Was Clio Hall built by the Ancient Greeks? Princeton Chapel by English masons of the Middle Ages? Some of the most recognizable architectural landmarks of Princeton's campus were built in reference to past architectural styles. This class will focus on the concept of "neo-styles" in the history of Western architecture, decoration and furniture, from the Renaissance to Postmodernism, interrogating the complex relationships between present needs and past dreams. Each week, students will confront the theoretical context of neo-styles with a series of American architectural case studies, mostly located on campus and in New Jersey.

This course examines the role of the senses in art and architecture to move beyond conceptions of art history that prioritize vision. While the experience of art is often framed in terms of seeing, the other senses were crucially involved in the creation of buildings and objects. Textiles and ceramic vessels invite touch, gardens involve the smell of flowers, sacred spaces were built to amplify the sound of prayers and chants. The focus will be on the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. Readings will range from medieval poetry and multisensory art histories to contemporary discussions of the senses in design and anthropology.

This course focuses on European maps, globes, and architectural drawings and prints produced in the period before aerial cartography and puts into dialogue cartography and architecture by interrogating their respective solutions to figuring space. Students interrogate the ways these graphic objects render complex and invisible realities through a mix of natural and conventional signs. Most of the sessions take place in the Special Collections classroom in Firestone Library in front of historical maps, atlases, globes, books, and architectural drawings and prints.

The course presents global anthropogenic impacts on the environment and their relationship to sustainable design. It focuses on understanding principles of applied sciences, and how IoT and Digital Fabrication facilitates rapid and deployable sensors and systems to make and analyze designs. Part 1) Global Change and Environmental Impacts: studying influences on basic natural systems and cycles and how we can evaluate them to rethink building design. Part 2) Designing Sustainable Systems: address learned synergies between making buildings more efficient and less prone to disease transmission through alternative heating cooling and ventilation.

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.