Architecture

This course examines the ways in which light interacts with surfaces, objects, and the human visual system. It covers some of the fundamental properties of light, mechanisms of human perception, and the ways that light interacts with surfaces. 

This course provides a theoretical overview of the key historical developments and on-going contemporary debates in Norwegian architecture and design. The interplay between architecture, city planning and design, and the specific Norwegian cultural, economic, and political environment in which they are practiced as applied design disciplines, is a central focus for exploration and discussion in the course. Norway’s role within overlapping Scandinavian, European, and increasingly global, contexts is also explored through the study of key international developments and the impact of these upon Norwegian architectural, city planning, and design discourse. The City of Oslo especially (considered in terms of its key historic and contemporary buildings, cultural institutions, public space and contrasting urban environments) is actively used as a "living classroom" for exploration of these issues and the wider questions that the issues subsequently raise. 

The course examines topics in the field of architecture and their connection to Brazil. Topics vary each term.

This course explores the challenges we face and identifies collaborative processes for nature-based solutions in urban planning, design, implementation, adaptation, and care. Through a range of creative processes, with reference to exemplar projects and contributions from industry experts and academics, students learn the principles and application of an urban green infrastructure approach for resilience, health and wellbeing, and social and environmental justice.

This course introduces students to key ideas and practices in architectural heritage and conservation, and to a range of practical and digital skills. The course is structured as a mixture of lectures, interactive/practical sessions, and tutorials. The lectures introduce the history, key ideas and philosophies which shape current heritage practice. In parallel, tutorials introduce some of the key policies, processes and practical skills used by architectural historians and heritage professionals.


 

This course provides a broad foundation in architectural acoustics and the human perception of sound ("psychological acoustics", or "psychoacoustics"), that may be grasped by students from a range of backgrounds. The course brings these subjects together through both theoretical study and a range of practical applications. For example, students explore how the principles of architectural and psychological acoustics have recently come together to drive a revolution in the world of augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) systems. This course provides a broad foundation in both architectural and psychological acoustics that combines aspects of acoustics, architecture, engineering, informatics, and music. Whether you are a student of one of these subjects or not, the only formal requirement is that you should have achieved a good pass in mathematics at Higher/A-Level.

Rome has played a pivotal role in the construction of a global scale culture. It first contributed to unifying the ancient world system as the capital of an empire. Then, in the early modern period (parallel to the age of explorations and colonialism), it became a laboratory for interactions between the local and the global. This course focuses on these interactions roughly between 1550 and 1750, the so-called Counter Reformation and Baroque Age.  Although this is mainly an on-site art history course, each art work, building, or urban plan is studied as a document to understand broader concepts related to geography, politics, religion, science, and philosophy. To assess the value of early modern art and architecture students develop multidisciplinary skills to investigate the multilayered meanings of objects, buildings, and urbanism. Focusing first on Caravaggio, then on the rivalry between Bernini and Borromini, and finally on the Renovatio Urbis (the new avenues connecting the main churches of the city), this course simultaneously explores the micro and the macro context of every commission. From the private fashioning of papal families (Borghese, Barberini, Pamphili, and Chigi) to the impression of orbialization (the concept that pervades the papal blessing addressed to the city and to the world), the city promised to be a topographical space of universal salvation. From the different approaches to art and architecture by Bernini and Borromini (theatrical and philosophical respectively) to the impact of the interreligious encounters of the new religious orders, Rome appeared as the laboratory of a globalization actualized in tandem with the colonial powers of Portugal, France, and Spain. The Spanish Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus in 1540 in Rome, shifted the religious discourse toward the universal good setting the program for a possible global society. The Jesuit system with their missionary and educational activities throughout the world was the most important institution for “interactions”. No wonder that in the 17th century, the Roman main educational institutions (Studium Urbis, Collegio Romano, Propaganda Fide) focused on the study of languages and the publication of dictionaries and grammar books. The impact of the Jesuit father Athanasius Kircher over 17th century Rome is as polyhedric as his writings. Kircher created one of the biggest cabinets of curiosities (wunderkammer) of Europe. His collection of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiques, embalmed animals, botanical rarities, scientific instruments, and a myriad of objects coming from China, India, Mexico, etc. was referred to as theatrum mundi (the theatre of the world), a metaphoric representation of the culture of the early modern city. By the end of the 17th century, Rome simultaneously assumed the connotations of new Jerusalem, Athens, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Babel mirroring the world as if in a theatre of memory and geography while other cities in different continents took the name of Rome of the East or Rome of the West through a religious and architectural response. The visual arts reveal the global resonance of Rome but also the presence of different ethnic groups in the city. The Eternal City was, undoubtedly, one of the loci where the subjective dimension of globalization originated.  

This course provides an understanding of what the space is. We experience spaces either created or developed by various relationships between people and their surroundings. This course covers the various relationships formed by environmental elements, such as building structure formed space as well as human beings. Beside this main concept, students have to find the method to express its inter-relationships for using graphic and rendering techniques clearly. This course focuses on practical sketch, drawing and color rendering techniques to express ideas.

Faraway and everyday landscape typologies shape human inhabitations, as well as cosmogonies, cosmologies, myths, and folklore of different cultures. These spaces are sometimes the place of conquests, other times the place of retreat; sometimes regarded with fear, other times with fascination. The same landscape typologies can be the archetypical images of inhabitation, and the archetypical images of abandonment. This course unfolds some of the meanings of landscape through the lenses of abandonment and inhabitation, shedding light over the pertinence of some concepts in particular historical periods and the cause of their oblivion in others, for example, concepts of nature and environment; wilderness and sublime; or landscape urbanism, social urbanism, or informal urbanism.