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 205/URB 205/LAS 225/ENV 205: Interdisciplinary Design StudioThe 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: Geometry and Architectural RepresentationThis introductory course sets out two goals: the first is to examine and understand the status of architecture's relationship to geometry; the second is to develop representational techniques through four thematic drawing exercises engaging manual and computational processes. Each exercise is structured around an introductory lecture, a tutorial, and a group discussion focusing on specific readings related to the topic at hand. Work in progress will be discussed at individual desk crits and in small groups. Each exercise will culminate in a course-wide review.
- ARC 303/URB 303/EGR 303: Wall Street and Silicon Valley: Place in the American EconomyThis course examines two places that play an outsized role in the American economy: Wall Street and Silicon Valley. They are distinct and similarly enduring locations. They embody a divide between urban and suburban, East Coast and West Coast, skyscrapers and office parks, tradition and innovation, conservative and liberal. What makes these places endure? How do their histories, architecture, economic dynamics, and distinct cultures shape them as places? Particular attention will be paid to the changes to white collar work and the challenges to the importance of place caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- 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 422: The Expanded Field: Tensions, Analogies, and ExchangesThis seminar, which evokes Rosalind Krauss' pathbreaking essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (which first appeared in October in 1979), explores tensions, analogies and exchanges that characterize the complex relationship between modern architecture and contemporary art. Its aim is to show not only that these two areas of aesthetic production and critical inquiry are joined in a single field, as Krauss argues, but also that the unity of this field did not emerge until fairly recently in the history of modernism.
- ARC 423: Ecologies of the EnvelopeThis seminar is aimed to develop knowledge about the principles of building envelope design, situated in a history of the envelope technologies. The course is aimed to research and discuss a new theory of the building envelope, able to replace the historical disciplines of the facade. We will teach the principles of insulation, waterproofing, air leakage, vapor barriers, ventilation, de-bridging, embedded energy etc,, trying to bring together technical and theoretical knowledge, into an ecological, evolutionary reading of building technologies.
- ARC 492/URB 492/ENV 492: Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure: Environmental Challenges of Urban SprawlAs part of the search for solutions to climate, water and energy challenges in a rapidly urbanizing world, it is crucial to understand and reassess the environmental challenges and potential of the exurban wasteland. This interdisciplinary course aims to add theoretical, pragmatic and cultural dimensions to scientific, technological, and policy aspects of current environmental challenges, in an effort to bridge the environmental sciences, urbanism and the humanities focusing on the transformation of the Meadowlands, the large ecosystem of wetlands, into a State Park.
- 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 518: Construction and InterpretationThis 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.
- ARC 525/ART 524: Mapping the City: Cities and CinemaThis course on cartographic cinema explores the digital film archive as a trove of images that can be re-appropriated, re-mixed, re-assembled into new ways of thinking about and imagining cities. Cutting a horizontal trajectory across cities --- New York, Tokyo, Vienna, Paris, Hong Kong, Lagos, Calcutta --- the cinema has captured the dynamic force of urban mutations and disruptions. It has also imposed a vertical axis of memories, allowing time to pile up and overlap, confounding meaning and points of view, especially in cities of trauma.
- ARC 528: New Forms of Knowledge in the Digital AgeAmong the most pressing questions facing contemporary architectural practice concerns the perceived value of expertise and the status of forms of knowledge that have traditionally been deprivileged. Who has currency, representation, authority, and legitimacy to exert power, impart knowledge, and design buildings? This course examines the role of amateur creators in the digital age in order to broaden our understanding of how knowledge circulates through underrecognized forms of architectural design and building practices today. Students work individually and collaboratively to produce a design project informed by their research.
- 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 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 sentient and smart cities, big data, hybrid places.
- ARC 548/ART 585: Histories and Theories of 19th-Century Architecture: Architecture and the History of the EarthThe seminar studies selected architectural projects, buildings, and writings from the nineteenth and late-eighteenth centuries in the context of their critical and historical reception, and their active influence on the theory of modern and contemporary design. Each year the seminar focuses on a specific topic, such as the relation between architecture and geology, ecology and material science, or the building projects and theoretical writings of an individual nineteenth-century architect examined in conjunction with the histories of art, culture, and science of the same period.
- ARC 549/ART 586: History and Theories of Architecture: 20th CenturyAn overview of the major themes running through the various strands of modern architecture in the twentieth century. While overarching in scope, the seminar is based on a close reading of selected buildings and texts by prominent figures of the modern movement and its aftermath. Special emphasis is given to the historiography and history of reception of modern architecture, as well as the cultural, aesthetic and scientific theories that have informed contemporary architectural debates, including organicism, vitalism, functionalism, historicism and their opposites.
- ARC 560: Topics in Contemporary Architecture & Urbanism: URGENT FUTURES / Potential PedagogiesThis design seminar invites participants to reflect on the fundamental aspects of architectural education, critically dismantle prevalent pedagogical models, and propose new referents for the social, political, technological and material agency that architects have in affecting the designed environment. From the History and Theory curriculum to the Design Studio passing by Professional Practice - this course invites us to reflect and produce potential pedagogies that embody new design methods and forms of speculation about the near and urgent future.
- ARC 560A: Topics in Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism: The Bed ProjectThis design seminar involves the design and fabrication of inflatable audience furniture, with Professor Beatriz Colomina as client and interlocutor. Inspired by Plato's Symposium, the figurality of the individual attendees and overall audience through furniture is emphasized, as well as audience raking, the politics of seating, and potential connectibility of individual furniture pieces. Students accompany their work to an inaugural event in Tokyo, currently planned for autumn 2021.
- 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/ART 582: 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 574: Computational Fabrication in ArchitectureThis course explores digital fabrication techniques and their relationship to architectural design, introducing core concepts of digital fabrication, programming and robotics. Students learn basic programming techniques, robotic simulation and control methods and how to set up a digital fabrication process. Tutorials in python/grasshopper for rhino introduce programming concepts and custom robotic control pipelines. A strong focus is on prototyping, tool development, robotic setup development, other digital fabrication methods (such as CMC milling, 3d printing, etc.) and their integration into a computational design workflow.
- ARC 576/MOD 502/ART 598: Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture: Reconstructing the Settler Colonial History of American ArchitectureThis course develops a settler colonial history of "American Architecture." Key texts from Settler Colonial Theory, American Studies, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness Studies provide the intellectual basis for reinterpreting architectural case studies and texts across time, from the late 19th to the early 21st century. Students must develop a principled critique of the whiteness of canonical historiographies of American architecture and mine local and digital archives to recover the lost contributions of people of color.
- ARC 578: Utopics: Utopias, Dystopias, Technotopias, and Heterotopias in Architecture and UrbanismThis seminar investigates the consistent presence of utopian thought in architecture. The seminar provides an introduction to the traditional narratives of utopia in Plato, More, Bacon, Ledoux, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and the emergence of utopianism as a critical practice in the 1950s and 1960s including Lettrism, Situationism, Archizoom, Superstudio, Archigram, Utopie, and Metabolism. Readings include historical and contemporary theories of utopia, and complementary texts in political, psychoanalytical, social and cybernetic theory. Participants select one example for research and documentation.
- ARC 580/HUM 580: Living Room: Gender, Cities, and DissentThis course asks how intersectional feminism, queer, and trans theory can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, cities, and human alliances within them. Overall, the seminar focuses on practices and forms of organizing around LGBTQ+ rights and how historical actors have formed networks and associations to resist dominant spatial and political regimes.
- ARC 586: Stranded Assets: Architecture and Energy TransitionsArchitecture is essential to the coming energy transition: design plays a role in the technological intensification of energy efficiency, and is also crucial to fostering a culture of low-carbon living. This course examines iconic buildings - Neutra's Lovell House, the Bauhaus Dessau, Mies' Seagram tower, among others - in their energy context in order to understand how architecture has both produced and responded to changing energy regimes. Students combine archival/textual research with visual and performance analysis to produce knowledge about the past that can also inform practice in the climate-changed present.
- ART 102/ARC 102: An Introduction to the History of ArchitectureA survey of architectural history in the west, from ancient Egypt to 20th-century 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 233/ARC 233: Renaissance Art and ArchitectureWhat was the Renaissance? This class explores the major artistic currents that swept northern and southern Europe from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries in an attempt to answer that question. In addition to considering key themes such as the revival of antiquity, imitation and license, religious devotion, artistic style, the art market, and the encounter with foreign cultures, peoples and goods, we will survey significant works by artists and architects including Donatello, Jan van Eyck, Alberti, Raphael, Leonardo, Sofonisba Anguissola and Michelangelo.
- ART 324/ARC 324: The Birth of a Profession: Architects, Architecture and Engineers in 18th-Century EuropeThe 18th century saw the emergence of the first architectural and engineering schools. Architects and engineers started to compete all over Europe in a time when technical knowledge and efficiency were becoming as important as experience and learnedness. This course provides students with a survey of 18th-century European architecture in the light of the rivalry between two trades on the verge of professionalization. The first weeks will be devoted to the actors of the building world before focusing on the fields of contest between architects and engineers and how this battle defined the nature of each profession, between art and science.
- CEE 262A/ARC 262A/EGR 262A/URB 262A: 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 critical analysis of major works, students are introduced to the methods of evaluating engineered structures as an art form. Students study the works and ideas of individual engineers through their basic calculations, their builder's mentality and their aesthetic imagination. Illustrations are taken from various cities and countries thus demonstrating the influence of culture on our built environment.
- CEE 364/ARC 364: 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.
- ECS 376/ARC 376/ART 386: The Body in Space: Art, Architecture, and PerformanceAn interdisciplinary investigation of the status of the human body in the modern reinvention of space within the overlapping frames of art, architecture, and the performing arts from the 1890s to the present. Works by artists, architects, theater designers, and filmmakers will be supplemented by readings on architectural theory, intellectual and cultural history, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and aesthetics. This semester, the class will analyze discourses of empathy and animation through practices of distancing and the use of masking in art, architecture, as well as social and theatrical performance.
- ENE 202/ARC 208/EGR 208/ENV 206: Designing Sustainable Systems: Understanding our Environment with the Internet of ThingsThe 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: synthesizing the environmental science with new IoT in an applied design project.
- HUM 597/ARC 597/LAS 597/SPA 557/MOD 597: Humanistic Perspectives on History and Society: Tropical Modern: Cuba, Architecture, RevolutionIn the years immediately before and after the 1959 Revolution, Havana was one of the great laboratories for experiments with modern architecture in a tropical and political climate. This seminar expands the understanding of modern architecture and urbanism in Cuba to include the full kaleidoscope of historical, political and cultural effects of the revolution. Through a series of case studies, we explore the spatial dimensions of a wide range of issues: climate, utopia, cold war, prefabrication, tropical modernism, ruins, preservation, disease, sexuality, violence and resistance-using multiple theoretical frames.
- MSE 201/ARC 212: Materiality of DesignAn introduction to the influence of materials in artistic, architectural, and product design. Primarily focused on the artist, architect, and designer who want to know more about materials and the principles of materials science and characterization. This class is also for the engineer who wants to study more about design. Focus will be on how technical properties, aesthetics, sustainability, manufacturability, and ergonomics relate to material properties and selection.
- 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 378/ARC 344/SAS 378/HUM 378: South Asian MigrationsThis interdisciplinary course will explore the history, politics, and social dynamics of urban migration on the Indian Subcontinent, home to and source of some of the largest migrations in human history. Through writing, discussion, and mapping, the class will also encounter broader concepts in the study of migration; its diversity, causes, challenges, as well as implications for social organization and city planning. Subtopics will include the history of Asia's great migrations, partition and refugee resettlement, internal migration, indentured and imported labor, gender politics, and the rural urban divide in the global South.
- 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.