Architecture
- ARC 203: Introduction to Architectural ThinkingThe 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.
- 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 308/ART 328: History of Architectural TheoryThis course offers a history of architectural theory, criticism, and historiography from the Renaissance to the present, emphasizing the texts, media and institutions that have supported architecture's claim to modernity since the late 17th Century. Architectural thought is examined in its social and cultural context as it relates both to the Western philosophical tradition and to design method and practice.
- ARC 311: Building Science and Technology: Building SystemsIn preparation for a fluid and evolving contemporary design practice, this course introduces physical prototyping and strategies for fabrication in a computational era. 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.
- ARC 350: Junior StudioThe 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.
- ARC 401/URB 401: Theories of Housing and UrbanismThe seminar will explore theories of urbanism and housing by reading canonical writers who have created distinctive and influential ideas about urbanism and housing from the nineteenth century to the present. The writers are architects, planners, and social scientists. The theories are interdisciplinary. One or two major works will be discussed each week. We will critically evaluate their relevance and significance for architecture now. Topics include: modernism, technological futurism, density, the new urbanism, the networked city, landscape urbanism, and sustainable urbanism.
- ARC 403: Topics in the History and Theory of ArchitectureWe will consider that a successful thesis entails the meeting of a socio-cultural problematic with a specific disciplinary issue, that the confluence and exchange between these external and internal situations can instigate an original contribution to architectural knowledge and technique. The "newness" of this contribution comes through a particular kind of repetition, a wily swerve within the established canon. The seminar will introduce disciplinary methods and themes through close readings of architectural texts and objects and will provide a workshop for the testing and elaboration of architectural polemics through directed research.
- ARC 404: Advanced Design StudioThe 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.
- ARC 501: Architecture Design StudioDesign Studio
- ARC 503: Integrated Building StudiosExplores 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.
- ARC 504: Integrated Building StudiosIntegrated 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.
- ARC 505A: Architecture Design StudioThe Vertical Design Studio emphasizes site organization, the development of building plans, and the accompanying expression of architectural character in three dimensions.
- ARC 505B: Architecture Design StudioThe Vertical Design Studio emphasizes site organization, the development of building plans, and the accompanying expression of architectural character in three dimensions.
- ARC 505C: Architecture Design StudioThe 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.
- 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 507: Thesis StudioThe Master of Architecture Thesis is an independent design project on a theme selected by the student, incorporating research, programming, and site definition.
- 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 510: Structural Analysis for ArchitectureAfter 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.
- 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 514: The Environmental Engineering of Buildings, Part IThe 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.
- 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 519: Climate Change, Adaptation and Urban DesignClimate change adaptation is a pressing and difficult challenge to urban design, ecological and engineering planning theory and practice. It is clear that architects, planners, engineers and designers have an important role to help cities contend with climate adaptation. This seminar reviews the general state of science and practice of climate change and adaptation with a primary focus on the United States. It looks to the work of Frederick Law Olmsted for some of the theoretical basis of developing an approach to climate adaptation that is democratic and progressive and evaluate the impediments which restrict change.
- ARC 521: Elemental Building FunctionThis 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
- ARC 522: History of Comparative Architecture: What Color is the Modern?Color is the great repressed of modern architecture. We start with the contrast between Le Corbusier's color palette in his Purist villas and the Bauhaus split between white architecture and colorful design. This split was challenged by Ponti and by Lina Bo Bardi and Barragan, who proposed totalizing "Mediterranean" and "indigenous" color schemes. After analyzing the White/Grey debates of the 1970s, emphasizing the Pop color sensibility of Venturi/Denise Scott Brown and the analogical and poetic chromatics of Rossi and Hejduk, the course ends with the perceptual, semiotic, and gendered dimensions of color in contemporary practice.
- ARC 526: Research in Urbanism: The Geographies of Environmental JusticeThis 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?
- ARC 530: M.Arch. Thesis SeminarCourse 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.
- ARC 531: Proseminar for Post-Professional M.Arch.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.
- 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 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 548/ART 585: Histories and Theories of 19th-Century Architecture: Architecture and TravelThe 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, travel, 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 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 562: Introduction to the Architecture ProfessionThe 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.
- 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 571/ART 581/MOD 573: Research in Architecture: Architecture in the Age of PandemicsArchitecture and medicine have always been tightly interlinked. Every age has its signature afflictions and each affliction has its architecture. The age of bacterial diseases gave birth to modern architecture. The twenty-first century is the age of neurological disorders: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorders, burnout syndrome and allergies-the 'environmentally hypersensitive' unable to live in the modern world. With COVID-19, a virus is completely reshaping architecture and urbanism and once again disease exposes the structural inequities of race, class and gender. Will architectural discourse likewise reshape itself?
- 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 575: Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture: Inventing the "Isms": from "Modernism" to "Postmodernism," 1945-1980."Modernism" and "postmodernism" emerged as rival ideas in architecture and culture between 1945 and 1980. What Auden named "the age of anxiety" was obsessed with the felt loss of the avant-guard movements of the interwar period, and the need to develop - in Britain, Italy, France, Japan, Brazil and others - a postwar identity through naming, and branding, architectural approaches, forms, and political stances. Through case studies of architectural projects, theoretical texts and the cultural contexts of these movements, we discover the historical, geographical and critical complexity to the usual narratives of "Modernism to Postmodernism."
- ARC 577/MOD 577: Topics in Contemporary Architectural Theory: Atmospheric PerspectivesConventions of architectural representation typically rely on trees, mountains and clouds to countermand the denaturing effects of drawing in plan, section and elevation. This seminar argues instead that the landscape settings included in a wide range of representational genres are not only signs of nature or techniques for producing naturalistic space, but exactly what they appear to be; neglected components of as yet to be written environmental histories of architecture. With attention to historical events, we examine how trees, mountains and clouds were represented and redesigned as architects sought to cultivate the natural world.
- ARC 594/MOD 504/HUM 593/ART 584: Topics in Architecture: Building Life: Space, Field, TerritoryPart of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological theories and architectural practices in the 19th and 20th c., this course focuses on processes of spatialization, territorialization, and colonization of natural and metropolitan environments on a global scale. Topics include the techniques of fieldwork, mapping, measurement, and classification along the study of building typologies in institutions ranging from natural history and anthropology museums, biological stations, laboratories, zoos and aquariums, to libraries, universities, and prisons.
- ART 207/HLS 207/CLA 207/ARC 211: Greek ArchitectureWhat makes a Greek temple ringed with marble columns "classical"? This course offers a historical overview of Greek architecture, case studies of landmark structures, and thematic explorations of how ancient religion, politics, and society shaped the built environment of the Aegean and broader Mediterranean. It also delves into the oldest surviving work of architecture theory and looks critically at the legacies of antiquity, particularly in the making of American self-image(s). Precepts include exercises in observation and experiments with ancient building materials (e.g. carving marble) and technologies.
- 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 547/ARC 552: Early Modern ArchitectureNew technologies and ancient discoveries inspired a range of creative responses from early modern architects. This seminar explores the tools that architects used as a means to consider relationships between invention and tradition, craft and art, material and form, ancient and modern. We study works by Alberti, Serlio, Philibert de l'Orme, and Michelangelo, among others, and take a transnational and transmedial approach to the study of key developments in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architecture.
- ART 583/ARC 583: Textile ArchitectureThis seminar examines the theoretical and practical intersections between architecture and woven materials across time, focusing on three key moments: the imagined origins of architecture in a non-Western, a-historical past: textiles' place in transforming built architecture; and twentieth-century experiments in which the figure of cloth allowed for expressing ideas that often exceeded what standing material realities were then possible for architects.
- ENV 345/URB 345/ARC 345/LAS 395: Thinking Through SoilSoil is a critical resource for an increasingly urbanized planet. In this course our goal will be to familiarize ourselves with the fundamentals of soil science and soil theory in order to consider the relationship between soils and the urban environment. Through engagements with both humanistic and empirical scholarship we will develop a perspectival approach to tracing the diverse political and disciplinary contexts in which soil is made an object of knowledge. In particular, the course will feature an extended case study of Mexico City's wastewater agriculture system, and the colonial history of indigenous Latin American soil knowledge.
- HUM 450/ART 482/ARC 450/ECS 450: Empathy and Alienation: Aesthetics, Politics, CultureIn 19- and 20-c. debates that crossed borders among disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, art history, philosophy, and political theory, empathy and alienation emerged as key terms to describe relations among human beings, works of art, and commodities. This seminar addresses the dynamics of empathy and alienation across a range of discourses and artifacts in European culture. Our explorations of how relationships between empathy and alienation were variously conceptualized in psychological aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and critical theory will aim to open up new perspectives on recent debates about identity and affect.
- URB 300/ARC 300/HUM 300/AMS 300: Urban Studies Research SeminarThis 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.
- URB 378/ARC 344/SAS 378/HUM 378: South Asian MigrationsThis interdisciplinary course explores 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 other activities, 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 include the history of Asia's great migrations, partition and refugee resettlement, indentured and imported labor, gender politics, South Asian diasporas in the US, and the rural-urban divide in the global South.
- URB 385/SOC 385/HUM 385/ARC 385: Mapping GentrificationThis 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.
- VIS 201/ARC 201: 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 203/ARC 327: 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.