ARCH 7001a, Architecture and Modernity: Theories and Projects  Staff

Required of first-year M.Arch. I students and available as an elective for M.Arch. II and M.E.D. students. This survey lecture course considers how theory activates new ways of making and imagining the built environment. Each week highlights a topic of architectural theory (e.g., Form, Site) and maps its development across historical periods, geographies, and fields of knowledge. Complementing the main lectures are presentations of recent projects by design faculty from the Yale School of Architecture and beyond. By challenging the familiar binary of theory versus practice, the course explores the past, present, and future limits of architectural knowledge. Moreover, by emphasizing the activating properties of theory, we speculate on how the discipline’s tool kit of ideas and practices might engage the urgent crises of our contemporary world.  0 Course cr
HTBA

ARCH 7002b, Architecture and Modernity: Sites and Spaces  Staff

(Required of first-year M.Arch. and available as an elective for M.Arch. II and M.E.D. students.) This course explores the history of Western architectural theory, from 1750 to the present, through the close reading of primary texts. Lectures place the readings in the context of architectural history; the texts are discussed in required discussion sections. Topics include theories of origin, type and character, the picturesque, questions of style and ornament, standardization and functionalism, critiques of modernism, as well as more contemporary debates on historicism, technology, and environmentalism.  3 Course cr
HTBA

ARCH 7003a, Design Research I: Design as Research  Jordan Carver

(Required of and limited to first-year M.Arch. II students.) In this course, students  develop technical and conceptual skills for expanding architectural design, design discourse, and critical design thinking. Design research is understood as a relational process of transdisciplinary knowledge-making that advances existing and new forms of architectural representation to address myriad complex and important issues demanding our collective attention. The seminar is run as part seminar (close reading and writing) and part workshop (case studies, research exercises, group work) with the goal of building robust theoretical, contextual, and methodological foundations for each students’ individual thesis project.  3 Course cr
W 9am-10:50am, W 11am-12pm

ARCH 7004b, Design Research II: Cross-Disciplinary  Jordan Carver

(Required of and limited to first-year M.Arch. II students.) This seminar requires students to explore an assigned theme based on urgent contemporary issues in architecture and urbanism, both through individual projects and as a group. Students also select thesis projects adjacent to the course theme to take into the subsequent post-professional seminar and post-professional design studio.  3 Course cr
W 9am-12pm

[ ARCH 7005, Land Activism: Reparations and Planetary Solidarity ]

The seminar studies land activism and reparations in the US and the world. Much of the work builds from and references an episode in which the US South and the Global South were linked in solidarity—a moment of world-making activism from the 1960s–70s and a model for contemporary planetary thinking. Just as former colonies were gaining independence, the Civil Rights, Panafrican, Nonaligned, and Tricontinental movements inspired international organizations to challenge the Global North before a neoliberal turn broke South-South solidarities and further tilted the economic playing fields. The generative episode tracks activists who went to the South for the Civil Rights Movement but stayed to work on Black and Indigenous land theft. While there may be a very general knowledge about the theft of 1.5 billion acres from Indigenous people, less familiar is the magnitude of Black land loss and migration—a drop from sixteen million acres in 1910 to three million acres in 1970. White aggression, abetted by government agencies, caused the most precipitous decline as whites, no longer needing Black labor, were poaching Black-owned land for industrial agriculture. The activists who resisted often developed novel, cooperative land holding organizations. While US history often portrays cooperatives as anecdotal, misguided experiments that only deliver pinprick critiques of capital, the land activist/cooperative movement demonstrated that cooperatives were more like weeds in the capitalist lawn—hardy, naturally-occurring, and capable of displacing monocultures and plantation logics. The course goes on to survey a spectrum of similar land and community infrastructures from around the world that are available as immediate popular tools to address dispossession, gentrification, food justice, and the extremes of inequality and climate. These are the live, patchy, abundant networks of mutualism that abolitionist, Indigenous, Black feminist, anarchists, and environmentalists have long been calling for as alternatives to monocultures of all sorts. And in contrast to the globalizing infrastructure projects that have reinforced Western dominance and exacerbated inequality, these are the counter-infrastructures of community worthy of just as much public investment as those of concrete and conduit. Land activism offers special powers and capacities to activism in general. The multivalent approaches of land activism reflect the pervasive capacity of property to be a reservoir for the powers of capital and whiteness. Considering land not as a possession but a living resource, an ecology, or even a network of circulation, land activism’s many techniques also account for the interplay and exchange of multiple economies—the economies that the monocultures of capital cannot compute. The US South-Global South episode also returns to a moment when people of color asked whites to go beyond a patronizing allyship and work against racism in their own white communities—a challenge as yet unfulfilled. This course argues that it is not the job of Black and Indigenous institutions to wrest reparations resources from white institutions. It is the job of white institutions to release their hold on resources and deliver them to the kinds of counter-infrastructures we are studying. Of many possible approaches to reparations, land, and education—resources with incalculable value—might constitute the first installment on an incalculable debt. Also, following Olúfémi Táíwò, it is now nearly impossible to address inequality and climate without addressing reparations—without returning to repair root causes and patterns of harm that will otherwise only continue. And the special sovereignties modeled in this period from the 1960–70s are essential in building the necessary planetary solidarities. Readings include Brenna Bhandar, Thulani Davis, Robert S. Browne, Joe Brooks (Yusufu Sonebeyatta), Arturo Escobar, Silvia Federici, Adom Getachew, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Saidiya Hartman, Irvin J. Hunt, Miriame Kaba, Robin D.G. Kelley, Winona La Duke, Peter Linebaugh, Robyn Maynard, Priscilla McCutcheon, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Russell Rickford, Elizabeth Povinelli, AbdouMaliq Simone, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dean Spade, Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Anna Tsing, and others.  3 Course cr

ARCH 7007a or b, Independent M.E.D. Research  Keller Easterling

(Required of and limited to M.E.D. students in each term; credits vary per term, determined in consultation with the director of M.E.D. Studies.) The proposal submitted with the admissions application is the basis for each student’s study plan, which is developed in consultation with faculty advisers. Independent research is undertaken for credit each term, under the direction of a principal adviser, for preparation and completion of a written thesis. The thesis, which details and summarizes the independent research, is to be completed for approval by the M.E.D. committee by the end of the fourth term.  3 Course cr
HTBA

[ ARCH 7100, Adaptive Reuse in Karachi: History, Documentation, and Intervention ]

This seminar considers the challenges of adaptive reuse in a global mega-city and explores and enacts the potential of cultural preservation to resist mechanisms of erasure that stem from capital-driven development. Karachi is considered as an interdisciplinary case-study and working site, bringing together graduate students from History of Art, Architecture, and South Asian Studies. This multidisciplinary collective of students and faculty with diverse backgrounds and skills in research, documentation, analysis, and design works as a team to both learn from, and contribute to, ongoing work that is being led by the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan (HFP). The HFP, established by Sohail and Yasmeen Lari in 1980, has been documenting the British Colonial–era buildings of Karachi and Lahore for several years. At present, Yasmeen Lari has designed a pedestrian pathway through Kharadar, with the help of local shop-owners, on the principals of community engagement and participatory design. Countering urban decay and climate change, the aim of this seminar is to consider how future architects, urbanists, and historians may approach the issues facing the region. From this vantage point, we consider the manners in which urban space is instrumentalized towards narratives of imperial and national identity; how gentrification and ex-urbanization effects historical city-centers; how revitalization projects must be understood ad critiqued; and what role collaborative and interdisciplinary study may play as a conduit and conveyer of positive solutions. Starting with a comparativist approach, the seminar digs deep into the histories and cultures of Sindh, Pakistan, foregrounding how culture is made manifest through buildings and cities. We then move to contemporary Karachi and how these histories confront the dynamics of a city of over twenty million inhabitants per the 2023 census. Finally, the group will take an in-depth look at Kharadar, its urban form and the forces that are shaping the context that HFP is working with and responding to. These three inputs inform a midsemester report integrating text and drawings collectively compiled by the student group in preparation for on-site fieldwork in Karachi. In Karachi, we collaborate with the HFP, using the Kharadar pedestrian pathway project as both site and substrate to directly participate in an ongoing cultural preservation project. This fieldwork includes collection of contextual documentation (architectural, oral, and historical); engagement with community stakeholders, policymakers, and urban designers; and collaboration with the shop-owners, craftspeople, and designers creating the pathway. Finally, we work with HFP to outline envisioning a project that the students undertake over the second half of the semester that contributes to the Kharadar pedestrian pathway, while also identifying strategies for its expansion in the old city. On return to New Haven, the student group synthesizes material from the fieldwork, articulate the scope of the project, and again work collectively to craft a design proposal, in text, drawings, and models, that is theoretically and materially responsive to the context of the old city and the contemporary forces that it is negotiating. The results are presented to a group of academics, architects, preservationists, and Mrs. Lari herself, whose travel to Yale is supported by the School of Architecture as part of a presentation and celebration of her career and work.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7101, American Architecture and Urbanism ]

An introduction to the field of American architecture and urbanism: the study of buildings, architects, designs, styles, and urban landscapes, viewed in economic, political, social, and cultural contexts. Organized chronologically, from pre-Colonial times to the present, as well as thematically, the course studies the formation and meaning of the built environment in America. The many topics encountered along the way include the public and private investment in the built environment; history of housing in America; transportation and infrastructure; architectural practice; and the social and political nature of city building and urban change. Attention also paid to the transnational nature of American architecture—the role of colonialism, the global exchange of architectural ideas, and the international careers of some architects. We will take advantage of our local setting, New Haven, as a cross-section of American architectural and urban history and a storehouse of key examples of building types, urban landscapes, and architectural styles. Upon completion, students should be expected to grasp the basic periods, trends, and processes in American architectural history and their connection to urban patterns. This course aims to give students the tools to appreciate and interpret the built environments that surround them, from impressive monuments to ordinary structures. There are no prerequisites and the course is open to all Yale students and auditors who are interested in buildings and cities.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7102, Architecture and Industry ]

This course considers the role of industry in architecture’s history. The aim of the class is to consider the persistent gap between these two forms of knowledge—industrial and architectural—as itself having history. Therefore, the course assumes a skeptical attitude toward a synthesis of architecture and industry. Nevertheless, the more industrial culture establishes work as the ubiquitous experience of modern life, the more it becomes the core motivator for defining future forms of architecture.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7103, Architecture and Print: Techniques, Formats, Methods ]

Architectural culture is unthinkable without the medium of print. Indeed, today architecture is printed in more and different ways than ever before. At the same time, we live at a moment when the demise of print is routinely proclaimed. Against the grain of such claims, this seminar highlights the specificity of print within the broad and multimodal communication landscape in which architects have operated. This research seminar introduces students to some of the key formats and techniques operative across 250 years of architectural publishing, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing to the 1970s. The seminar investigates various approaches to the relationship between print history and architectural culture and asks students to develop their own approaches through the close examination of printed matter. The goal is to think critically about what role changing techniques and formats of printing played in the emergence of new concepts within architectural culture and new publics concerned with the built environment. The seminar also invites students to consider how the study of printed media might open new conceptual and material approaches to design culture today, together with new methodologies for engaging architectural history. The seminar is conducted as a semester-long course using special collections at the Beinecke Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Haas Library, among others. Due to collections usage, this class is capped at ten students. Priority is given to students in Ph.D. programs in the History of Art and the School of Architecture.  3 Course cr

ARCH 7104a, Capital Building: Histories of Design and Accumulation  David Sadighian

How has design shaped the rise of global capitalism, ca. 1700 to present? Surveying a wide range of buildings, objects, infrastructures, and landscapes across the Atlantic World, our aim is to understand how the built environment evolved to guide practices of capital accumulation—from the plantations of the early modern Caribbean to the “supertalls” of Billionaires’ Row. Readings draw from a growing body of scholarly literature that approaches design as an agent of political economy as opposed to a reflection of pre-existing ideas and economic structures. The seminar’s case studies therefore emphasize the reciprocity between themes of architectural and capitalist modernity (e.g., Circulation, Development) as well as the spatial forms and extractive processes that accompany them. Coursework results in new critical perspectives for the historical study of present-day spatial inequality. Moreover, moving beyond familiar narratives and geographies of modernity, we consider design’s relation to not only the production of wealth but also counter-models of local autonomy, mutual aid, and redistribution.  3 Course cr
Th 9:20am-11:15am

ARCH 7105a, The Automatic Promise: Architecture’s Computer Dismembered  Francesca Hughes

Indiscreet Histories of the Architect’s Universal Discrete Machine: As architecture slips (wittingly or unwittingly) into the embrace of AI, this seminar posits that well before the “arrival” of the modern computer, the ideations of architecture and computation were already long entangled, if not coconstitutive. By way of a set of recursive histoires longues durées, these sessions consider the constituent duties, devices and desires the project of computation has always shared with architecture: memory storage and retrieval architectures; the “taming” of chance by prediction and the algorithm; the gun, the pen and the window; code and compression in a reductive system that harbors synthetic ambitions and guarantees “true” products; the imprinting of (and by) the body in reproduction. All are inseparable, unthinkable even, without architectural imagination. If we are to rethink architecture now, as we must, we will need also to rethink its relations to computation. Reimagining the future of their mutuality requires reimagining their mutual pasts. In order to construct an alternative historiography of architecture’s relations to computation that is recursive, not unlike its subject, and always promiscuously indiscreet in its reconfiguring of the discrete, the presentations, readings and discussions compose a strategic dismembering of their entanglements. Once dismembered, like Humpty Dumpty, the parts will not go back together again and thus complicate beyond retrieval the already waning platitudes of optimisation and digital solutionism and the construed inevitability of our present digital “shortcuts.” Instead, they suggest potential new categories with which to mutually reconstitute architecture’s past and future relations to computation: the cutter, the alienated, the appetite, the mediocre, the sacrifice, the duped, and the promise of the automatic.  3 Course cr
F 9:20am-11:15am

[ ARCH 7106, Contemporary Archt'l Discourse ]

na  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7107, Architecture Reconstructed ]

This course examines histories, theories, and methods in the historic reconstruction of architecture – the drawn, modeled, and built representations that architects create to visualize the architectural past. We will explore this topic in three interconnected units: The first, “archaeologies,” examines episodes in the modern history of architectural reconstructions. We will focus on ways that architects created reconstructions out of the surviving fragments of the past – from reconstructions of ancient architecture to modernist monuments. The second unit, “rehabilitations” explores the aesthetics and methodologies of reconstruction techniques. We will examine a range of approaches – ones that emphasize physical and temporal stability and wholeness as well as ones that embrace fragmentation and the differing experiences of a beholder. The final unit, “restitutions” explores the shifting political meaning and role of reconstructions. Here, we will examine the way reconstructions are embraced as tools of cultural supremacy, historic reckoning, and human rights, among other concerns. The seminar is project-based, and students will undertake an architectural reconstruction project of their own – developed each week and engaged with themes from each unit.   3 Course cr

ARCH 7108a or b, Domo Ludens: Modern Art and Architecture at Play  Michael Schlabs

The notion of play occupies a special place in the history of modern art and architecture. Theorized in the 19th century by Friedrich Froebel as fundamental to the process by which children learn, play would form the basis of Froebel’s kindergarten, now a model for early childhood education worldwide. The aesthetic intensity of Froebel’s program would likewise contribute to a variety of radical educational projects in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the Bauhaus. Later, Johan Huizinga’s seminal meditation on the “play element in culture,” Homo Ludens, would provide an intellectual foundation for a number of 20th century aesthetic and political movements, among them the Situationist International. Finally, a generous focus on play has recently reemerged within the discourse on a range of 21st century art and design practices, characterized by a shared focus on participation and performativity, as in the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Lottie Child. This course, then, explores the place and problem of play in three ways: as a critical framework for understanding the aesthetic qualities of the human environment; as a mode of experience, giving meaning to that environment; and as a working method employed by artists and architects as a specific form of practice.  3 Course cr
HTBA

[ ARCH 7109, Field Methods in American Architectural and Urban History ]

The built environment both reflects and (re)produces social, economic, and political relationships and indicates cultural values from the smallest lawn ornament to the most ambitious urban plans. Even the most modest individual structures and vernacular building types represent evidence in larger narratives about power, equity, and urban change. We can learn to read common or typical urban landscapes (a streetcar-era residential sub-division; lowrise commercial buildings on Main Street; central city office towers; parks and public spaces, for example) as a palimpsest of agency over time: who has the power to author and to rewrite the built environment, at what scale, and for what purposes? This graduate methods class examines theories and practices of research in the built environment with a focus on interdisciplinary field work and archival documentation in which we interrogate what information can be observed in the field and what must be gleaned from the archives. Mixed methods introduced include walking, durational observation, mapping, drawing, photography, video, sound, oral history, and survey. We learn to interpret historical and contemporary maps, city directories, public records, physical artifacts, and personal and institutional archives. Course readings include guidance on methodology as well as models of contemporary scholarship. Over the course of the semester, students develop a piece of public scholarship or academic journal article that advances a narrative framework drawing on original research.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7110, Karkhana: Process and Collaboration in Design ]

n/a  3 Course cr

ARCH 7111a, Knowledge Sharing Spaces  Summer Sutton Adlparvar

This course explores the complexities of Indigenous architecture in the United States, not only as a study of historical and cultural influence on the built environment but also as a reflection of Indigenous sovereignty, articulated through spatial design. The seminar delves into the principles, philosophies and socio-political settings that shape a range of Indigenous architectural practices where themes of communication and “knowledge sharing” play a fundamental role in design. From the construction of schools and museums to cosmological structures and water management facilities, the architectural function of exchanging or sharing knowledge through the built environment weaves a common narrative in Indigenous architecture. The premise of “knowledge sharing spaces” informs the critical lens in which to evaluate past and present architecture designed by and/or for Indigenous communities. Throughout the semester, case studies that both contest and contend with broad issues of colonialism, Eurocentric narratives of indigeneity, cultural appropriation, environmental stewardship, community engagement, and Indigenous recognition, are examined within the context of communicative architecture. Amplifying Indigenous voices and viewpoints in the practice of “knowledge sharing spaces” reveals new depth and layers to architectural design that is primed for informed analysis and discussion.   3 Course cr
T 9:20am-11:15am

ARCH 7112b, Laboring for Architecture  Jordan Carver

Architecture—as a profession and pedagogy—has always had a complicated relationship to labor. As a practice, architecture requires inputs, time, and effort from many people with many different types of knowledge. From the design and development of architectural drawings in office settings, to the construction of buildings on site, to the production of architectural materials across the world, building projects are accumulations of different forms of labor, manufacturing capacities, and expertise. This seminar analyzes and investigates the labor(s) required to create architecture, from design through construction. We locate the laboring bodies that produce building projects and the knowledge that surrounds them. And we interrogate how the profession understands its past, present, and possible future relations to labor.  3 Course cr
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

ARCH 7113a, Landscape, Film, Architecture  Fatima Naqvi

Movement through post-1945 landscapes and cityscapes as a key to understanding them. The use of cameras and other visual-verbal means as a way to expand historical, aesthetic, and sociological inquiries into how these places are inhabited and experienced. Exploration of both real and imaginary spaces in works by filmmakers (Wenders, Herzog, Ottinger, Geyrhalter, Seidl, Ade, Grisebach), architects and sculptors (e.g. Rudofsky, Neutra, Abraham, Hollein, Pichler, Smithson, Wurm, Kienast), photographers (Sander, B. and H. Becher, Gursky, Höfer), and writers (Bachmann, Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek). Additional readings by Certeau, Freytag, J.B. Jackson, L. Burckhardt.  3 Course cr
F 9:25am-11:20am

[ ARCH 7114, Poetic Technologies: Luis Barragan's Modern Mexican Architecture ]

This course looks at the work of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán focusing, principally, on his early works in Guadalajara and Mexico City. It aims to contextualize it within the broader architectural explorations occurring in Mexico at the time and in reaction and relation to architectural developments in the US and Europe. The intention is to closely study the work's theoretical and historical underpinnings, their architectural character and formal innovations, and the context of their production. The investigations will result in written documents, models, drawings, etc. that will form part of an exhibition of this work at the Barragán Gallery at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. The class, as a result, will be in contact with the Barragán Foundation and archive and be partially responsible for helping organize the exhibition layout and curate the material to be presented.    3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7115, Race and the Built Environment ]

In their book Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant write in the introduction, “the racial present always needs to be studied and explained anew.” In this short quote they position race as unstable, constantly undergoing processes of formation. And they also lay out an empirical framework, placing our present understanding of race contingent on our present historical context. This course adds our present spatial context into that equation, understanding the construction of race as a spatial phenomenon deeply implicated by architectural practices. This seminar focuses on the relationships between space and racial formation, viewing the construction of race as a process linked to other social relations, influenced by contemporary politics, economics, and forms of resistance. Throughout the semester we investigate how architecture(s) fit(s) within theories of racialization. That is, how spatial constructions—including infrastructure, housing, mapping, borders, segregation, taxation, and policing—produce both normative inequality and forms of hierarchization. Our goal is to better understand how the nation’s multiple spatial entanglements structure life and social relations. If contemporary American racism is often thought of as “structural,” this course analyzes what that structure means as an architectural metaphor and empirical question. How does space and architectural form contribute to processes of racial formation? How is subjectivity formed in relation to aesthetics and architectural form? And how is architectural design and urban development linked to larger structures of uneven capitalist development and entrenched nationalist histories? Our discussions focus on important texts that are integral to scholars across many disciplines. We read these texts in two ways: close readings of the proposed ideas and content, and secondly, we read them spatially to see how spatial thinking remains an underrepresented presence in histories and theories of race and national development.  3 Course cr

ARCH 7116a, Semiotics  Francesco Casetti

The foundational goal of semiotics has been to reconstruct how meaning emerges in objects and situations, how it circulates within and across different cultural environments, and how it influences and is influenced by the cultural context. To renew semiotics’ main tasks, this reiteration of the seminar explores the process of “making meaning” of some of the current AI-powered apps and tools. Specifically, we analyze the ways these apps and tools engage users in a set of operations that determine their positions, freedom, and trust. These operations, which often look like “conversations,” function as discursive interface in human/machine interactions. Through this exploration, we outline the foundation of semiotics of AI in connection with general semiotics. The seminar engages participants in a weekly discussion about case studies, in which we seek to uncover how these apps and tools become “meaningful,” in the double sense of having meaning and giving meaning. Students from Film and Media Studies and the School of Architecture have priority: they are asked to express their choice by August 25. Students from other departments are asked to send the instructor up to ten lines with the reasons why they want to attend the seminar by August 26. The seminar is aimed at bolstering a dialogue that crosses cultures and disciplines.  3 Course cr
W 4pm-5:55pm

ARCH 7117a, Spatial Concepts of Japan: Their Origins and Development in Architecture and Urbanism  Yoko Kawai

The seminar explores the origins and developments of Japanese spatial concepts and surveys how they help form the contemporary architecture, ways of life, and cities of the country. Many Japanese spatial concepts, such as ma, are about creating time-space distances and relationship between objects, people, space, and experiences. These concepts go beyond the fabric of a built structure and encompass architecture, landscape, and city. Each class is designed around one or two Japanese words that signify particular design concepts. Each week, a lecture on the word(s) with its design features, backgrounds, historical examples, and contemporary application is followed by student discussion. Contemporary works studied include those by Maki, Isozaki, Ando, Ito, SANAA, and Fujimoto. The urbanism and landscape of Tokyo and Kyoto are discussed. Students are required to make in-class presentations and write a final paper. Limited enrollment.  3 Course cr
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

ARCH 7118b, Tall Tales  Ife Vanable

Architecture is a body of fantastic lies. Speculative and projective, architectural production corrals, traffics in, and concocts imaginaries; its histories and theories are steeped in myth and regimes of mythmaking. This course provides space to interrogate the particular, ongoing, and mutating narratives, fictions, and myths perpetuated around the design, development, and material realization/construction of high-rise residential towers from the turn of the century to the start of what has been referred to as the Reagan era, alongside the various political, financial, and social agendas that motivated their development. The course aims to nurture modes of recognition of “housing” as critical loci where architectural form, federal and state power, municipal interactions of zone (zoning envelope, building volume, and air rights), finance, body, law, rhetoric, aesthetics, real estate development, and conceptions of racial difference come into view. The course reckons with typology and the seeming difficulty with imagining subjects racialized as black holding a position up in the sky.  3 Course cr
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

ARCH 7119b, The Challenge of the Classical  Kyle Dugdale

After millennia of creative effort, has classical architecture run its course? This seminar asks whether it has anything left to offer to the contemporary designer. It starts from the premise that architecture’s recent trajectory, far from being a record of triumphal progress, has plunged toward tectonic, environmental, and ethical ruin. Reaching further back into history, the course takes a generous view of the classical, noting that it propagated offshoots extending far beyond the boundaries of the so-called Western canon, embracing changes in climate, geography, material, patronage, program, scale, sensibility, and technology, producing architectures both ephemeral and enduring, extravagant and austere. To establish the nature of its claim upon the present, and the viability of its promise for the future, the seminar works through a series of discreet architectural problems—the formation of a vocabulary, the construction of a door, the articulation of a wall, the organization of a façade, the development of a tectonic—to test the challenge of the classical.  3 Course cr
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

ARCH 7120b, The Physiologies of Modern Architecture  David Gissen

This seminar explores architectural histories and theories related to human physiology from the late nineteenth century to the present. Our explorations extend from nineteenth-century theories of architecture style and human physiognomy to recent discussions of immunology and architecture. Concepts of human physiology inform a broad spectrum of architectural discourses: the design and management of buildings and urban spaces; theories of architectural form and environment; and, most provocatively, the writing of architecture history itself. Physiological concepts in architecture are far from neutral: They intersect with pseudo-scientific racial and eugenic theories, debates on gender and sexuality, and evolving concepts of physical capacity, impairment, and disability. Our goal is to understand how architects, historians, and theorists have shaped and responded to conceptions of human-ness, environment, health, and physical capacity within their practices. Participants in this seminar are expected to complete weekly readings, complete a few weekly assignments, lead or co-lead one discussion, and complete a final research project.  3 Course cr
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

[ ARCH 7121, Urban Century: Theorizing Global Urbanism ]

Does the word “urban” describe a geographic location or a condition? Does urbanization describe a universal and ubiquitous process with uniform and inevitable outcomes? How does this process intersect with capitalism, colonization, decolonization and modernization? If indeed the process of urbanization is defined neither by uniform outcomes nor by an inevitable telos, what accounts for difference and divergence in the localities we recognize and describe as “urban”? By the late twentieth century, it became de rigeur to remark that more than half the world’s population now lived in cities, a dramatic turning point in human history. Since then, a wealth of scholarship and policy documents have explored the many implications of this shift. Amongst others, these include a global housing crisis, dramatic increases in poverty, disease and conflict in densely packed urban locations and the impending environmental catastrophe to which urban growth has contributed significantly. These conditions also produce new social and political forms and actions, accelerating change, highlighting turbulence, uncertainty and flux. This course has three goals: 1. To provide students with the theoretical tools necessary to frame, locate and understand these conditions in a world where social and cultural life is now inextricable from the environmental and infrastructural conditions associated with urbanization. 2. To explore, through analyzing concrete case studies and real-life situations how to make sense of the tremendous complexity knotted into contemporary social life in and through its presumed overlaps with capitalist urbanization. 3. To situate and assess the links between the urban condition and architecture or, in other words between the analysis of uncertainty, speculation and flux and the praxis of designing, imagining and reshaping social life through material and virtual interventions.    3 Course cr

ARCH 7122b, Writing and Criticism: Platforms and Practice  Christopher Hawthorne

The focus of this seminar is twofold: to examine the nature and state of architecture criticism and to explore the relationship between writing and practice in architecture. This year the seminar focuses on platforms for architecture criticism as an organizing rubric, with each student choosing to develop a work of criticism across the term in a singular format, whether print volume, newsletter, podcast, broadsheet, journal essay, or some other medium. The course begins with an efficient survey of modern and contemporary approaches to architecture criticism, for both public and disciplinary audiences, including the recent urbanist turn, emerging models of collective criticism, and the anxieties and possibilities unleashed by the decline of print and the rise of social media and the larger realm of digital culture. It explores the role, influence, and strategic approaches of architects who write, with an emphasis on how publication, across a range of genres, can inform and complement practice and give architects a particular kind of agency within the field. Critics, editors, and architects join the course across the semester to offer reflections on writing (their own and others’), criticism, and publication. Students finish the course with an informed sense of how criticism has operated and now operates in architecture culture—a sense that directly informs their own understanding of practice and the future trajectory of their own work.  3 Course cr
W 4pm-5:50pm

[ ARCH 7123, Sensing Space: Architecture, Technology and Human Embodiment ]

Although the built environment shapes multi-sensory experience, Western architects since antiquity have upheld the mind/body split, framing architecture as a medium primarily apprehended through vision and hearing—senses historically associated with male reason, abstract thinking, and the scientific method. Meanwhile, they have marginalized the so-called “lower” senses—touch, taste, and smell—linked to the abject physical body and the material world. And while buildings are constructed from solid materials extracted from the natural environment, architects have largely ignored the haptic sensations elicited when corporeal beings engage with the material world, considered a female principle, associated with Mother Earth. This course challenges these problematic assumptions by situating them in a techno-historical context. We will examine the intertwined histories of architecture and sensory-enhancing technologies that privilege seeing and hearing—from the Renaissance camera obscura to 20th-century glass curtain walls to 21st-century smartphones. These technologies have shaped both the design of built environments and our sensory experience of space in ways that reinforce the mind/body split and exclude those who do not conform to able-bodied norms. Critically examining these techno-sensory developments through the lens of gender and disability will allow us to propose alternative futures. How can we learn from the experiences of people with physical and sensory disabilities, as well as from ethnic and religious communities whose engagement with the built environment draws on different senses, faculties, and customs? How can we harness technological innovations that augment sensory perception to design immersive, inclusive environments—spaces that promote meaningful human interaction among people with diverse embodied identities as they navigate both virtual and physical realms?  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7124, Architecture and Disability ]

Architects have explored the topic of disability and human impairment well before and beyond contemporary practices of “accessible design.” This seminar examines histories of architecture, disability, and human impairment through a range of case-studies from 1900 to the present. We will understand how disability transformed (and was transformed by) the practices of modern and late-modern architects and designers – from early 20th century theories of design to recent debates on the aesthetic character of urban monuments. To explore these histories, we will draw on an interdisciplinary range of readings, documents, films, and physical artifacts. The course will include a mix of lectures and discussion, guest presentations, and the development of a final research project related to the course case-studies and readings.  3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7125, Environment Architecture ]

Environment, broadly defined, may be one of the most enduring subjects within modern architectural history and theory – from architectural historical writing on buildings and weather in the 19th century to contemporary architecture histories inspired by environmental humanities. This course examines many of the key themes and methods within architecture histories and theories of environment. These include histories and theories of climate, nature, ecology, regions, ecosystems, urban metabolisms, and material toxicities, among many other topics. We will focus on methods as much as the specific theoretical and practical applications of these ideas, with the goal of developing additional formulations out of them.    3 Course cr

[ ARCH 7126, Destruction, Continuation and Creation: Architecture and Urbanism of Modern Japan ]

This course examines how design philosophies and methodologies were developed in Japanese architecture during the 150 years from the Meiji Restoration until the post-modern era. Special attention is paid to how the country’s cultural identity has been continuously relevant to modern society by evolving itself through natural disasters such as earthquakes, and political destruction such as wars. The methodologies and technologies for architecture and cities supported and were influenced by this constantly transforming, yet unchanging, Japanese culture. The course also compares the architecture of two International Expos in Osaka, one in 1970, signifying the end of metabolism, and another in 2025. Highlighted architects include Chuta Ito, Goichi Takeda, Frank Lloyd Wright, Kameki Tsuchiura, Sutemi Horiuchi, Kunio Maekawa, Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kazuo Shinohara, Tadao Ando, and Sou Fujimoto. Students are required to make in-class presentations and write a final paper.    3 Course cr

ARCH 7127a, Body Politics  Joel Sanders

As architecture confronts growing demands for accessibility, public health, and equity of experience, inclusive design has emerged as a rapidly evolving and urgent frontier. This course positions students at the forefront of this shift by equipping them with three practical tools to critically analyze and reimagine the built environment for diverse users: cross-disciplinary research drawing from gender, race, and disability studies; body-based site analysis that maps the challenges and opportunities faced by differently embodied people as they encounter space; and participatory design practices that engage lived experience through interviews, surveys, and workshops. Students apply these tools through two complementary formats. A series of conversations and guest lectures, informed by the work of Sanders’ practice, JSA/MIXdesign, introduces real-world projects including restrooms, museums, campuses, and housing. In parallel, cohort-based critiques support students working individually or in teams in conducting an in-depth typological case study of an everyday building type—such as libraries, gyms, residential colleges, or hospitals—located on the Yale campus or in New Haven. Looking at architecture through the lens of differently embodied identities equips students with actionable methods for studio and professional practice, enabling them to critically reassess normative standards and design innovative, multisensory environments that enhance the experience of all users.  3 Course cr
W 4pm-5:55pm

ARCH 7129a, Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure to Planetary Solidarity  Keller Easterling

Recent surges in the last 500 years of colonizing, capitalizing, and globalizing may be more treacherous and untraceable than those of previous empires. This course exposes their infrastructures. While it begins with the global colonial extraction networks, most of the material circles around the spatial apparatus deployed toward the end of the twentieth century that accompanied what is often amnesically referred to as “globalization.” This infrastructure is not only the infrastructure of pipes and wires underground but also the ubiquitous enveloping urban medium of repeatable formulas for space—a human/nonhuman socio-technical space that is rapidly producing a new layer of the earth’s crust. Critiqued by both the left and the populist right this massive physical plant contains a spectrum of dangers: capitalism, fascism, racism, whiteness, settler colonialism, femicide, caste, xenophobia, psychotic leadership, and countless other ways of hoarding power, abusing people, and damaging the planet. The story resists and exceeds any easy ideological explanations or definitions of the neoliberalism with which this moment is associated—a moment when, not rational actors and nation states, but an often irrational extrastatecraft deploys stealthy, bullet-proof forms of power. Discussion is interspersed with heavily illustrated talks that encounter: instant free zone world cities, satellite urbanism and broadband from the perspective of Non-Aligned countries in South Asia and Africa, labor, conflict, and climate migration, an agripole in Southern Spain, automated ports, islands and offshore financial centers as the confetti of multiple empires, contagious spatial products of commerce and tourism, a cruise ship to the DPRK, the standards and management platforms of ISO, sweatshops, tax havens, and exploding urban peripheries among many other things. Going beyond the anointed legal, scientific, and econometric languages, the seminar also uncovers forms of spatially-embedded activism to meet this moment. The evidence returns to moments of worldmaking solidarity within newly independent colonies in the Global South—solidarities between the Pan-African, Non-Aligned, Tricontinental, and civil rights movements that the Global North broke by further tilting the playing fields in their own favor. And the seminar considers the infrastructures that dominant infrastructures eclipsed—live infrastructures of land, water, atmosphere, and community—to be as worthy of public support as infrastructures of concrete and conduit. As reparations for patterns of harm that will otherwise only continue, these alternative infrastructures are inextricably linked to climate change and planetary concerns. If the global conjures associations with White Enlightenment modern universals, singular evils and singular solutions, planetary conjures the patchy, partial, multiple approaches in the pluriverse. Treating everyone as a designer, the course is an adventure in thinking as well as a mixing chamber for disciplines across the university: social sciences, arts, economics, business history, science and technology studies, history of science, organization studies, informatics, media and communication studies, architecture and urbanism. Cultural ephemera is screened as a prelude to each lecture. Weekly readings offer evidence, discursive commentary, and critique. Tutorials help to shape group work.  3 Course cr
Th 9:20am-11:15am

[ ARCH 7130, The Essay in Architecture ]

This seminar examines the essay as form of writing, paying particular attention to its role in the field of architecture. It is also a writers’ workshop. Close reading will focus on the structure and language of several essays, both about architecture and not. Some of the essays’ authors will include Michel de Montaigne, Theodor Adorno, Aldo Rossi, Denise Scott Brown, Hannah Arendt, Jean Starobinski, Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Lavin, among others. Lessons from these readings will structure the terms for the workshop. Exercises will guide students as they produce and refine an essay on a topic of their choice over the course of the semester.  3 Course cr

ARCH 7999a, Independent Course Work  Staff

Program to be determined with a faculty adviser of the student’s choice and submitted, with the endorsement of the study area coordinator, to the Rules Committee for confirmation of the student’s eligibility under the rules. (See the School’s Academic Rules and Regulations.)  3 Course cr
HTBA