The 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.

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.

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.

How do sources determine the histories we can tell about architecture, urban space, and the agents that enliven it? How do we reconcile seeming absences and actual acts of erasure that stare back at us from the archive? How can feminist, gender, queer and trans* theory help us chart new avenues for writing critical architectural histories that are attentive to discourses of difference but also narratives of equity? Which methods, beyond conventional modes of architectural inquiry, can we employ to uncover histories of groups and institutions that have actively resisted dominant regimes of power and their corresponding systems of knowledge?

Color is the 'great repressed' of modern architecture. Rather than being concerned with how this chromophobia came about, this course explores the multiple ways it conditions our perception of works of architecture which exhibit a chromaticism, and even a chromophilia incompatible with the modernist ideology of whiteness. Starting from this premise we explore basic concerns of architectural modernism - the relation to nature and to materials, the affective impact of vision, the complex question of the relation of color and functionality, the mediation of color involving various forms of notation, coding and representation.

This course examines how politico-ideological and environmental discourses have shaped cities and their architectures in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Paying close attention to select cities including Almaty, Dhaka, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Islamabad, New Delhi, Pyongyang, Phnom Penh, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, Tashkent and Tokyo, it aims to provide a preliminary answer to the increasingly urgent questions: what are the specificities of `Asian' modernity, and how was this modernity embraced and contested in urban contexts throughout Asia? For each city under study, a notable work of architecture will be singled out and subjected to close reading.

This 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.

This elective studio will allow students to continue to develop and expand architectural design techniques. This course will foster a deeper understanding of how to effectively convey ideas and concepts through a series of exercises that will culminate with the design of a mid-size building on an urban site. Students will refine their craftsmanship while engaging with innovative drawing and modeling techniques.

A graphic skills course that focuses on the techniques, craft, and ideologies of collage as a form of architectural representation. There are in-class workshops and weekly projects involving (handmade) collages. There are also a limited number of supplementary readings to situate our work within the context of architectural history and theory.

This course addresses reparations as a matter of design. Aside from matters of economics, history, or policy, engaging with reparations requires multiple environmental epistemologies. This course pursues a transcalar and interlocking approach. While the topic of reparations has circulated broadly with the work of activists and scholars, such as Angela Y. Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates, architectural discourse has only recently begun to engage with reparations.  Literature, research, and policy related to reparations intersect the built environment, urbanism, planetary climate crisis, postcolonialism, art history, and aesthetics.

Part 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.

In 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.

Vertical 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.

Vertical 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.

The 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.

The 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.

An 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.

Introduction to the design of building structures of steel, timber and reinforced concrete.

The 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.

Design 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.

This 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.

This 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.

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, AI urbanism.

This seminar explores concepts, themes, and methods for framing histories and theories of the built environment from a labor perspective. We proceed from an intersectional analysis that roots questions of labor within physical bodies and from there aim to understand how, why, under what conditions, and to what ends these bodies labor to construct the built environment. We additionally seek to understand how the built environment in turn shapes laboring bodies, questions of identity, and our understandings of work.

The term "model behavior" is often used to describe good social skills. This seminar turns that concept on its head to investigate how models themselves behave. Conceptual models, study models, section models, and presentation models are givens in architecture, but their role in projecting or inducing social behavior is seldom considered. As models in other disciplines - such as climate change and economic models - clearly affect social behavior, how do architectural models change social behaviors? This course explores the symbolism and potential of the architectural model and its relationships to the myriad models that shape behaviors today.

The climate crisis requires a radical shift in how buildings are built to significantly decrease their embodied carbon. This design seminar explores the tectonics of plant-based building materials (wood, straw, hemp, cork, bamboo, etc.), invents new assemblies and tests how different material assemblies can be catalysts for new forms of buildings. As a design intensive course, the visible aesthetics of these materials are combined with the invisible attributes made legible through other means such as life cycle analysis, thermal imaging, and carbon calculations.

Among the many devices carried on Apollo 11 was the humble "N600-ES" slide rule. This analog calculator may seem out of place in an era of rockets and space exploration, but its significance points to a deeper history. Since the 1600s, handheld slide rules have been essential for engineers, scientists, and craftspeople in solving complex equations, charting stars, and recording the color of the sky, revealing the connection between human ingenuity and the tools we use. This design seminar mocks, mimics, and annotates the hidden regime of architecture through a series of objects, drawings, and videos, culminating in a 1:1 final project.

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.

Review 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.

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.

Recent monographs and thematic studies have shaped our understanding of Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's life and work, but some aspects that speak to larger formations in the history of modern architecture have been persistently ignored. Namely, this was her engagement in international resistance networks, her work in the peace and denuclearization movements, as well as the international women's movement. The course revisits these themes in the context of debates in modern architecture to excavate multiple figures from Austria, Turkey, Poland, Hungry, Germany, and France, but also Mexico, Chile, Cuba, and the Soviet Union.

"Socialist construction," in the early USSR, was an idea that brought architecture, infrastructure, and media to bear on cultivating belonging within an ethnically, ecologically, and historically complex territory ("one-sixth of the world"). This seminar takes the term as an opening onto the architecture of global socialism more broadly, with particular focus on the links between architecture, landscape, multinationalism, and internal colonization. We revisit familiar architectural movements like Constructivism, but we focus on gathering a broad geographic and temporal range of encounters between design and socialist politics.

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.

Computational design is often presented as a problem-solving tool for design implementation rather than as an integral part of design conceptualization and exploration. In this course we approach computational design from the conceptual design direction, extending existing design methods and defining novel visualization tools and stochastic sequences for interactive computational models and computationally generated physical prototypes as embodiments of the design process.

A survey of architectural history, from ancient Egypt to contemporary America, that includes comparative material from around the world. This course stresses a critical approach to architecture through the analysis of context, expressive content, function, structure, style, building technology, and theory. Discussion will focus on key monuments and readings that have shaped the history of architecture.

Before establishing the first formal architectural school of North America at the MIT in 1866, William Ware toured Europe. He came back with one conclusion: The French courses of study are mainly artistic and the German scientific, and the English practical. Opting for the artistic path of the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ware opened the door to the international propagation of a term that has become associated with a period - the turn of the 20th century - and a style. This seminar examines the origins, developments, and ramifications of the global Beaux-Arts through texts, drawings, prints, and buildings in the New York area.

Known as "Bridges", this course focuses on structural engineering as a new art form begun during the Industrial Revolution and flourishing today in long-span bridges, thin shell concrete vaults, and tall buildings. Through laboratory experiments students study the scientific basis for structural performance and thereby connect external forms to the internal forces in the major works of structural engineers. Illustrations are taken from various cities and countries thus demonstrating the influence of culture on our built environment.

In 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. Our explorations of how empathy and alienation were variously conceptualized in psychological aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and critical theory will aim to open new perspectives on recent debates about identity, affect, and human-animal and human-AI relations.

This 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.

This interdisciplinary course explores the dynamic relationship between urban development and the natural environment between 1450 and 1800. Contrary to the common perception of nature as existing solely beyond urban boundaries, this course reveals how cities have always intertwined with natural elements that required protection, restoration, and even creation. Through engaging discussions and written assignments, students will gain a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between urban growth and environmental stewardship, and how these historical insights can inform contemporary urban and environmental practices.

This course introduces students to the ways that policy, design, and citizen activism shaped affordable housing in the United States from the early 20th century to the present. We explore privately-developed tenements and row houses, government-built housing, publicly-subsidized suburban homes and cooperatives, as well as housing developed through incentives and subsidies. Students will analyze the balance between public and private, free market and subsidy, and preservation and renewal. Close attention will be paid to the role of race in structuring the relationship between policymakers, property owners, renters, and homeowners.

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.