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 significance of geometry in architectural design and construction, along with the origins, methods, and contemporary implications of representation in visual culture. Through a series of drawing and model-making exercises, students will propose novel understandings and interpretations of architectonics by frustrating and reordering architectural elements. Students learn by doing, actively participating in drawing and modeling exercises to construct and analyze forms, to progress beyond the objectification of form toward understanding and evaluating digital representation's capacity to engage with material composition.

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.

Architectural theory tends to move from the how to the why of the built environment -- the underlying reasons why individuals and societies design and build. To assess this shift, this course will explore a set of foundational theoretical concepts: nature/organicism, form, function, program, signification, materiality, space, site, structure, tectonics, construction, typology, ornament, style, representation, monumentality, ideology, operativity and technology (up to and including the digital.) Close readings of exemplary architectural projects will enable us to chart the interplay of theory and practice.

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.

One of architecture's oddities is that its bibliography features very little biography, since most architects of the last 2,000 years have been telling us about everything except themselves. It is this omission that this course seeks to address, and is inspired by the only sustained investigation into architectural biography, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). Prompted by Vasari, the lectures will present a history of architecture through a series of characters, as well as images, quotations, and sound recordings, not so much as a history of their projects, but as a history of their lives.

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.

ntegrated 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.

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.

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.

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 seminar addresses the relationship between settler colonialism and the built environment, approaching the city as a site of dispossession, contestation, and resistance, shaped by both colonial histories and anticolonial movements. Settler colonialism refers to historic and ongoing strategies of land dispossession through processes of permanent settlement. This plays out in urban space where public land and private property confront practices of self-determination, and institutions like schools and housing exercise the hegemony of the state on the one hand, or agendas activist and community movements on the other.

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?

This seminar explores the connections between the built environment, society, and human behavior by introducing novel visual and writing experiments that question implicit social interactions in cities. Clustered around the topics of "Everyday Life", "Street Life" and "Urban Life", the experiments will explore hidden patterns of social life in cities and commonplace considerations that unconsciously shape our design and urban choices. While varied in scope, duration and scale, the experiments will each share one key characteristic: they will get students out of the rut of conventional thinking and will stimulate design creativity.

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.

The seminar supports two parallel modes of thinking. The first mode investigates sets of case studies focusing on broad themes (such as tectonics, landscapes, urbanisms, etc.). These themes are examined as critical debates, whereby sets of theories, projects, and practices reflect historical positions. The second mode of thinking offers each student an opportunity to engage specific features of the case studies by conceptualizing and curating a final project. Our goal is to better understand how ongoing historical arguments become catalysts for redefining contemporary architectural projects and practices.

This seminar will introduce the students to research techniques from Science and Technology Studies (STS) that will equip them with analytical and narrative tools to make sense of technological developments in cities, innovation, design success and failure, and object-oriented politics. Through a series of "ateliers d'écriture", the students will engage in exercises in different styles of academic writing, experiment with various research techniques and hone their critical thinking skills based on introspection, tracing and observation of design experiences and urban processes.

The 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.

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.

Stairs are a necessary mode of vertical movement through a building, and are legally regulated by a range of specific dimensions and safety parameters. Foot traffic is concentrated and repeated at the stair, and the material finish can be subject to rapid deterioration by dirt and wear. The position and social program of the stair has also evolved over time. In this design seminar, each student will develop a stair through precedent research, narrative writing, construction detailing, and the full-scale construction of a run of two steps using actual building materials.

Architecture's relationship with Nature or Life is obvious and complex- associated with notions of site, climate, etc. Historically we have built in an almost reactionary way to these givens yet the human relationship with nature is increasingly complex. Notions of health and wellness have recently re-manifested in Architecture notably in Biophilia. Biophilic design principals theoretically stimulates a spectrum of physical, mental benefits which we shall interrogate this semester. We will look backwards and forward to discuss how the contemporary iterations of these concerns have always been central to Architectural discourse/ design.

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.

Full-time research internship at a host institution, to perform scholarly research relevant to student's dissertation or thesis work. Research objectives are determined by advisor in conjunction with outside host. A mid-summer progress review and a final report are required. Special rules apply to international students regarding CPT/OPT use.

From secret laboratories to monumental infrastructures and the many landscapes of war, energy, and waste in between, nuclear power is at the core of a vast and radically understudied array of 20th c. architectures. Central to the most iconic architectural images of the post-war era while also rendered invisible in apparently unseen wastelands, atomic weapons, nuclear reactors, and atmospheric fallout eventually attracted intense architectural attention. Drawing on multiple literatures, the seminar explores how the nuclear penetrated beyond warscapes to enter even the private spaces of the domestic realm and the human body.

This proseminar is a required two-part course for students in the PhD track in Computation, Energy, and 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 (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.

This seminar explores the parallelism of two things that were arguably at their peak in the US between 1950-75, namely architecture (with architecture understood as a discipline that is in the business of producing buildings) and criticism, with so many writers all straddling the popular world of newspapers, magazines, and radio, and the more rarefied world of scholarly discourse. Students engage with both of these things, not (or at least not wholly) through the nostalgia of enjoying a particular moment and milieu, but as a spur to generating their own written content, which will be contained in a specially conceived one-off magazine.

Buildings routinely simulate stability and immobility yet operate as porous membranes suspended within vast pulsating material, economic, social, energetic, bacteriological, and informational circuits. Architecture is an effect that is inseparable from what it represses, the vast networks trafficking between ever-increasing holes and mounds across the planet devoted to extraction and waste. This seminar pays attention to the strange entangled complexities of both architecture and extraction, and rethinks the ethics, psychopathologies, and beauties of architecture embedded in its relationships to extraction.

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.

Vitruvius, the author of the only surviving architectural treatise from Antiquity has been called alternatively an architect or an engineer. Architects and engineers started to organize themselves as professions in the early modern period and to compete to secure commissions. This course addresses the story of how two professions came to define themselves against each other. Students will first review the different actors of the European early modern building world, before focusing on the fields of contest between architects and engineers and how this battle ultimately defined the nature of each profession, between art and science.

This seminar explores various connections between modernist art and socialist politics from the 1848 revolutions to the present. How were these links forged, and why were they broken? What (if anything) can we deduce about the relationship between vanguard aesthetics and politics then and now?

The 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.

This course unfolds from a variant on the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich's question "what was life?" to trace vitalism across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while interrogating its contemporary theoretical implications in relationship to biopolitical theory and the ontological plasticity of life at the horizon of technological expansion. We consider scalar complexity, from the cell to the cosmos and the new planetary connectedness. We also consider differently scaled histories of life through receptions of classicized Greek texts in modern vitalisms and the unstable temporality between the modern and the contemporary.

Modern architects flocked to Cuba during the 1950s: Mies, Sert, Neutra, Becket, Harrison & Abramovitz worked in Havana and built a gleaming city of modern towers, which appear as the setting of fictional works by Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Alejo Carpentier, and films by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Mikhail Kalatozov and others. After the 1959 Revolution, these modern spaces are re-purposed, re-fashioned and re-worked for use by a socialist government, recalling the Situationist strategy of detournement. How are these spaces read by writers and filmmakers? And how did the Revolution alter their function?

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.