Architecture

This course explores the understanding of landscape and site analysis/development. Focus is on the testing and development of ideas involving experimentation with various iterative design strategies for testing designs, and informing the creation of critically aware design solutions. Students work on creative processes that involve physical model making, line drawing, and montage. Through these processes students explore the relationship between form and environment. The three projects in this studio course explore site, light, thermal, and acoustic environments.

This course offers a study of graphics software. Students use computer technologies for the creation, evaluation, understanding, communication, and presentation of architecture and urbanism projects by using three-dimensional modeling programs, editing and image processing, and digital presentation.

This course offers a study of contemporary architecture in Spain including primary movements or eras and their representative architects. Topics include: modernism; historicism; eclecticism; regionalism; rationalism and functionalism; postwar architecture; organicism; high-tech architecture; postmodernity and deconstruction.

This course focuses on developing prototypes for assigned industrial design projects. Themes include form, functionality, methods of development, collaboration, group critique, and sustainability.

This course discusses the basic concepts of architecture and urbanism, as well as elemental skills in modeling and drafting necessary to architecture design. It covers the principles of scale, dimension, proportion, and the recognition of spatiality and flows of architecture design. In the second half of the course, students prepare an architectural design for a single-family house. The final presentation includes a three-dimensional scale model, along with orthogonal and analytical drawings for the design.

The course begins with an examination of Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture, the architecture of the Middle Ages, Islam, Pre-Columbian America, and the first great re-evaluation of Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance. It goes on to survey the Renaissance in Britain and Northern Europe and the subsequent influence of the Italian Baroque in these areas. Later, other significant cultural traditions in the history of architecture are introduced, such as those of India, China, and Japan. Semester 1 concludes with an examination of the theoretical, cultural, and stylistic aspects of the architecture of the European Enlightenment.Throughout the course the development of building technology and the social, religious, and political understanding of buildings are recurring themes. Excursions into the related fields of landscape architecture and urban design necessarily appear from time to time.

This course introduces the rationale for, and process of, the emergence and growth of Singapore's built environment from a third world country to a world class city. It enables students to have an understanding and appreciation of the economic and social aspects and implications of how properties and infrastructure are developed and managed, given the constraints that Singapore faces. It also encourages them to develop alternative views on how the built environment can help Singapore continue to prosper and remain relevant in the region. 

Architectural Design 3 is the second in a two-course sequence forming a comprehensive introduction to the foundation studies of architecture, addressing the core and related issues essential to the training of an architect. The course aims to teach architectural literacy, to develop critical and analytical skills, to enhance visual, spatial and ideological sensibilities with a certain emphasis on the presentation of ideas, concepts, and design both in the visual and verbal format. Field trips form an integral part of the course. Assessment: 100% continuous coursework assessment

This course presents historical and aesthetic concepts related to the development of artistic styles that found an expression in architecture and visual arts. In addition to examining global artistic styles, their roots, and local developments, the course also explores various local, ethnic, religious, and societal facets, including Jewish art and architecture, different artistic representations that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the effects of the totalitarian system on the city through extensive construction of housing estates. Students discuss the development of Prague as a city, including the effects of technical advancements, philosophical and social concepts on city planning, housing, and daily life in different time periods. The course consists of lectures, discussions, group work, student presentations, and weekly field trips to various areas of Prague.

This course provides a study on urban risks. With a focus on resiliency planning, the course emphasizes analytical practices to evaluate risks related to natural phenomena (inclusive of earthquakes, storms, volcano eruptions, and other various phenomena) and human activities that create risks (for example, construction in vulnerable zones and threats due to climate change). It also analyzes risk reduction and management solutions that planners can utilize to mitigate against natural disasters and changing climates and conditions. Course materials and resources include case studies as well as professional guest speakers working in both public and private planning agencies in Mexico.