Seminar Overview:

As the first in the sequence of seminars in the Master of Architecture I curriculum at ISU, this course introduces students to the history and traditions of architecture and urbanism. The cultivation of creative and productive collective discourse which critically engages the relationship between historical inquiry and contemporary practice is the primary goal of this course. Students learn skills in critical thinking, visual analysis, and research methods. Course sessions develop thematically with interdisciplinary readings, critical reflections, discussion, workshops, research methods, student presentations, and research projects.

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Methods and Format:

This seminar is integrated with Arch 505: Architectural Design and Media I. The two courses will unfold in tandem, content from each is designed to reinforce the other through a feedback loop of thinking and making. The seminar will progress through prehistorical, ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and Modern architectural histories, with an emphasis on understanding each through methods of visual representation, including but not limited to: drawing, painting, collage, mixed-media, sculpture, models, photography, and film. These various representational methods, and the architectural ideas that flow through them, are the hinge through which the history-based seminar and design-based studio interface with each other. While the line between the seminar and the studio is intentionally fuzzy, the seminar will function as a space for (re)constructing histories of architecture through investigation of existing material conditions. Meanwhile the studio will function as a space for developing new architectures through projecting speculative material conditions. The material conditions of labor, the functional dynamics of capital in its various forms, and socioeconomic stratifications through categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality will be explored through the design-thinking lens of historical architectural (re)constructions and speculative architectural projections.

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Class meeting formats will include reading discussions, student presentations, workshops, and instructor presentations. Students are expected to complete assigned readings before class and to arrive at sessions prepared with notes to support critical engagement through collective verbal discourse. Student and instructor presentations will be given primarily through slides shared via projector. Workshops will primarily unfold through the instructor demonstrating methods step-by-step with students aiming to reconstruct demonstrated methods in real time. It is expected that students will bring laptops to the digital workshops with the required software installed beforehand. The design software required for the semester is Rhino, InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator.  Laptops can be checked out from the Design Output Center in CoD Room 426 if students don’t have their own. It is expected that students will bring supplies and materials to the workshops which require them, the instructor will distribute a list of required and optional supplies and materials in advance of each workshop.

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Learning Objectives:

The primary learning objective of this seminar is a collective, emergent, and nuanced understanding of architectural histories (i.e. architectures of the past) as (re)constructions realized through contemporary ideologies and their perspectives on the future, while the architectural design (i.e. the prefiguration of future architectures) necessarily entails working through, with, or against contemporary ideologies consisting of historical cultural narratives.