The arts reflect the society that creates them. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of the ancient Greeks. Through their temples, sculpture, and pottery, the Greeks incorporated a fundamental principle of their culture: arete. To the Greeks, arete meant excellence and reaching one's full potential.

Investigates conceptual and formal issues in different media or between media such as sculpture, photography, and video. Explores issues of representation, interpretation, and meaning, and how they relate to historical, social and cultural context.

The goal of this course is to investigate with students backgrounds on some of the pivotal events that have shaped our understanding and approach to architecture. Emphasis of discussion will be primarily on buildings and works of individual architects. Canonical architects, buildings and movements that have exerted significant influences on the development of architecture will be studied in detail. We will visit some of these buildings for a first-hand look and to evaluate for ourselves their significance or lack thereof. As a final project, each student will analyze a building through drawings, text, bibliography and a physical model in a format ready for documentation and exhibition.

An analysis of historical structures is presented in this class, presented in themed sections based around construction materials. Structures from all periods of history are analyzed. The goal of the class is to provide an understanding of the preservation of historic structures for all students.

This course focuses on the archaeology of the Greek and Roman city. It investigates the relationship between urban architecture and the political, social, and economic role of cities in the Greek and Roman world. Analyzes a range of archaeological and literary evidence relevant to the use of space in Greek and Roman cities (e.g. Athens, Paestum, Rome, Pompeii) and a range of theoretical frameworks for the study of ancient urbanism.

This class investigates the use of computers in architectural design and construction. It begins with a pre-prepared design computer model, which is used for testing and process investigation in construction. It then explores the process of construction from all sides of the practice: detail design, structural design, and both legal and computational issues.

This semester students are asked to transform the Hereshoff Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island, through processes of erasure and addition. Hereshoff Manufacturing was recognized as one of the premier builders of America's Cup racing boats between 1890's and 1930's. The studio however, is about more then the program. It is about land, water, and wind and the search for expressing materially and tectonically the relationships between these principle conditions. That is, where the land is primarily about stasis (docking, anchoring and referencing our locus), water's fluidity holds the latent promise of movement and freedom. Movement is activated by wind, allowing for negotiating the relationship between water and land.

The project for this studio is to design a demonstration project for a site near the French Quarter in New Orleans. The objectives of the project are the following: To design more intense housing, community, educational and commercial facilities in 4 to 6 story buildings. To explore the "space between" buildings as a way of designing and shaping objects. To design at three scales - dwelling, cluster and overall. To design dwellings where the owners may be able to help build and gain a skill for employment. To provide/design facilities that can help the residents to gain education and skills.

Establishes basic attitudes toward architectural organization and its reflection in form. Includes projects where imposed conditions of site, program, and building system emphasize the interrelationship of fundamental elements in the pattern of decision-making that constitutes architectural design. Develops presentations through drawings and models. Intended for entering M.Arch. students. Course Description This studio explores the notion of in-between by engaging several relationships; the relationship between intervention and perception, between representation and notation and between the fixed and the temporal. In the Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges tells the perverse tale of the one to one scale map, where the desire for precision and power leads to the escalating production of larger and more accurate maps of the territory. For Jean Baudrillard, "The territory no longer precedes the map nor survives it. ĺÉit is the map that precedes the territory... and thus, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map." The map or the territory, left to ruin-shredding across the 'other', beautifully captures the tension between reality and representation. Mediating between collective desire and territorial surface, maps filter, create, frame, scale, orient, and project. A map has agency. It is not merely representational but operational, the experience and discursive potential of this process lies in the reciprocity between the representation and the real. It is in-between these specific sets of relationships that this studio positions itself.

This class investigates the theory, method, and form of collage. It studies not only the historical precedents for collage and their physical attributes, but the psychology and process that plays a part in the making of them. The class was broken into three parts, changing scales and methods each time, to introduce and study the rigor by which decisions were made in relation to the collage. The class was less about the making of art than the study of the processes by which art is made.

An intensive 9 DAY remote collaborative workshop involving MIT and Miyagi University in Japan. The objective is to develop a small housing project using shape computation as a design methodology. Students will use and test new interactive software for designing, sharing applications with overseas partners, presenting projects on an Internet workspace, and critiquing design proposals through the web and other advanced digital technologies. Students will be expected to do most of their work in class.

This is the second undergraduate architecture design studio, which introduces design logic and skills that enable design thinking, representation, and development. Through the lens of nano-scale machines, technologies, and phenomena, students are asked to explore techniques for describing form, space, and architecture. Exercises encourage various connotations of the "machine" and challenge students to translate conceptual strategies into more integrated design propositions through both digital and analog means.

This architectural studio will have one main project for the semester: to explore the issues surrounding the redesign of an area in Havana Cuba. It is a typical area about the size of a Law of Indies block that presently has a mix of housing, work, and shopping in buildings that need to be replaced and others that need to be rehabilitated. There is also vacant land, and buildings that are unused. Part of the blocks front on the Malecon, the street next to the water. The other edge fronts onto a typical neighborhood. The intention is to study the culture through an understanding of one area of Havana and then design an "echo" in architectural form. The design will include public space as well as a mix of buildings: some new, some rehabilitated.

This subject introduces skills needed to build within a landscape establishing continuities between the built and natural world. Students learn to build appropriately through analysis of landscape and climate for a chosen site, and to conceptualize design decisions through drawings and models.

Cairo still shines as a major cultural, political, and economic center in its three spheres of influence: the Arab world, Africa, and the Islamic world. This course narrates the history of the city from the initial settlement on the site (640s) to the present, reviews its urban and architectural developments, and connects them to their Islamic and Mediterranean architectural and cultural contexts.

This subject focuses on the objects, history, context, and critical discussion surrounding art since World War II. Because of the burgeoning increase in art production, the course is necessarily selective. We will trace major developments and movements in art up to the present, primarily from the US; but we will also be looking at art from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as art "on the margins" -- art that has been overlooked by the mainstream critical press, but may have a broad cultural base in its own community. We will ask what function art serves in its various cultures of origin, and why art has been such a lightning rod for political issues around the world.

Offers a foundation in the visual art practice and its critical analysis for beginning architecture students. Emphasis on long-range artistic development and its analogies to architectural thinking and practice. Learn to communicate ideas and experiences through various two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and time-based media, including sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Lectures, visiting artist presentations, field trips, and readings supplement studio practice. Required of and restricted to Course 4 majors. Lab fee.

This course addresses advanced topics in structures, exterior envelopes and contemporary production technologies. It continues the exploration of structural elements and systems; expanding to include more complex determinant, indeterminate, long-span and high-rise systems. Some of the topics covered include reinforced concrete, steel and engineered wood design, and an introduction to tensile systems. The contemporary exterior envelope is discussed with an emphasis on the classification of systems, their performance attributes and advanced manufacturing technologies.

This course addresses advanced structures, exterior envelopes and contemporary production technologies. It continues the exploration of structural elements and systems, and expands to include more complex determinante, indeterminate, long-span and high-rise systems. It covers topics such as reinforced concrete, steel and engineered wood design, and provides an introduction to tensile systems. Lectures also address the contemporary exterior envelope with an emphasis on their performance attributes and advanced manufacturing technologies.

This course offers an introduction to the history, theory, and construction of basic structural systems as well as an introduction to energy issues in buildings. It emphasizes basic systematic and elemental behavior, principles of structural behavior, and analysis of individual structural elements and strategies for load carrying. The course also introduces fundamental energy topics including thermodynamics, psychrometrics, and comfort. It is a required class for M. Arch. students.