Introduces students pursuing a major in the School of Architecture to the intellectual and extracurricular opportunities within the school and within the College of Arts, Media and Design. Exposes students to the cultural vibrancy of Boston with the goal of building networks to facilitate the creation of a vibrant and supportive learning community.

ARCH

Architecture at Northeastern

Introduces students to architectural representation as a form of documentation, experimentation, and communication through a series of exercises in orthographic, axonometric, and perspectival projection as well as physical and digital modeling. Supports the development of an iterative design methodology by introducing students to the tools of representation. Includes theoretical lectures and workshops in analog and digital media.

Fundamental Architectural Representation

Introduces architectural design. Examines a number of approaches to spatial organization, massing, and envelope articulation through the analysis of pertinent case studies as well as through a series of fast-paced design exercises. Offers students an opportunity to develop a single design through a series of design studies that deal with issues of site planning, program, user input, and collective negotiation. Requires a portfolio demonstrating the student’s representational abilities and iterative design process.

Fundamental Architectural Design

Introduces students to architecture, as understood through buildings, cities, and landscapes from antiquity to the present. Studies important monuments in the global history of architecture, as well as tools for analyzing the built environment. Considers buildings in relation to their political, social, economic, and cultural context, and as expressions of diversity in human societies and cultural perspectives. Topics include the language of architecture, architectural drawings, the classical orders, the problem of ornament, construction techniques, materials, site,and the role of the patron. Develops students' eye for composition in two and three dimensions, aesthetic discrimination of detail, ability to see buildings as part of a larger social and cultural fabric, and critical judgment in speaking and writing.

Buildings and Cities, A Global History

Offers a small-group discussion format to cover material in ARCH 1310.

Recitation for ARCH 1310

Introduces undergraduates at all levels to the importance of design thinking as a method of critical inquiry and creative expression. Class meetings include lectures and discussions on the power of design thinking to shape diverse facets of the natural and built environment—from cities and landscapes, to buildings and interiors, to the scale of the human body. In addition to class presentations, hands-on workshops introduce students to a range of tools and tactics for working creatively and iteratively through design and prototyping.

Understanding Design

Studies how to analyze, draw, and model the built environment. Students engage in issues of program, composition, type, and material. Offers students the opportunity to think conceptually about architectural design.

Site, Space, and Program

Studies how to analyze, model, and intervene in the city. Offers students an opportunity to engage in urban analysis, urban massing strategies, and architectural design of urban institutions.

Urban Institutions

Introduces construction techniques and precise material realization of buildings as an integral part of architectural design thinking and processes. Uses historical and contemporary architectural precedents to explore the spatial and tectonic interrelationships of the primary constructional systems of wood, masonry, concrete, and steel. Uses a diverse mixture of student learning methods, including in-class lectures and student exercises; group discussions and guest lectures; textbook reading; and the production of construction models, drawings, and diagrams.

Architectonic Systems

Introduces fundamentals of building technology and explores technology as means and manifestation of architecture in the world. Using a systems approach, studies the interactions among natural forces, material properties, technological capabilities, and human cultural values and the ways these relationships give rise to architecture. Considers a series of physical principles—including gravity, moisture, heat, light, and air—to reveal specific architectural possibilities and material responses. Explores the ways design shapes the interaction of materials and forces to provide for human safety, shelter, comfort, and delight through a combination of hands-on workshops, seminal readings, and design exercises.

Introduction to Building Systems

Covers the development of the built environment in China from prehistory to the nineteenth century. Emphasizes technological transformation, structural and stylistic evolvement, cultural exchange, and ideological engagement.

HIST

ASNS

History of Chinese Architecture

Covers the development of the built environment in China from 1840 to the present. Emphasizes educational and professional shifts in architectural practice, political engagement in the design process, structural and technological transformation, conceptual background, and global impact.

Modern Chinese Architecture

Focuses on the history and theory of architecture and urban design in the nineteenth century. Emphasizes European architecture and urbanism and the ways in which European approaches to design shaped and were shaped by sustained cultural, political, and economic exchange with the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Major topics include the birth of the modern city and urban planning, capitalism and industrialization, new building typologies, infrastructure, urban parks and early suburbs, and new materials and technologies.

ENGL

ENGW

Architecture and the City in the Nineteenth Century

Offers a small-group discussion format to cover material in ARCH 2330.

Recitation for ARCH 2330 (HON)

Considers the forms and principles—as well as the sources for and development of—architecture and urbanism during the twentieth century. Explores the paradoxes within what has broadly been termed modernism, including the tension between historicism and innovation; between universal principles and regional expressions; between industry and craft; and between the utopian vision of planners and the role of individual will.

Modern Architecture (HON)

Offers a small-group discussion format to cover material in ARCH 2340.

Recitation for ARCH 2340

Exposes students to a range of critical architectural practices and key theoretical frameworks from roughly 1990 through the present. Situates architectural production and discourse within a broader context of technological, cultural, and social processes, emphasizing the reciprocal exchange between architecture and its larger cultural and social context. Investigates the idea of the “contemporary” as both a temporal and conceptual notion, as well as the idea of a “critical” architecture and its relationship to both a historical avant-garde and “mainstream” architectural culture.

Contemporary Architecture

Examines how architecture and urban design respond to the challenges of intervening in already built environments, whether in the form of adaptation, extension, conservation, radical transformation, or sustainable reuse. Discusses cultural, social, as well as energy-efficiency-related topics. Includes a critical introduction to the key concepts of architectural intervention, followed by some exemplary design cases, and a special focus on recent and contemporary practices. Architecture deals with time, duration, change, and resilience. Places, not unlike palimpsests, retain multiple traces of former uses. Architects work with locations that inevitably contain a diversity of references and preexisting conditions. Students work on a “curatorial project," that is, a conceptual proposal for an ephemeral intervention in an existing site.

Architecture Conservation: Intervention, Transformation, and Reuse

Covers a variety of topics in architectural history and theory. Taught by faculty according to their interests and expertise.

Deconstructing Whiteness

Offers a studio course addressing the architectural and urbanistic consequences at the intersection of large-scale infrastructure and the contemporary city. Focuses on how to integrate buildings and neighborhoods with highways, rail lines, storm water management, bus, bike, parking, rivers, watersheds, and industrial networks.

Architecture, Infrastructure, and the City

Explores the interaction of environmental, physical, and energy systems in architecture. Offers students an opportunity to learn the fundamentals of building science as design opportunities to create particular conditions of light and shadow; provide shelter from heat, cold, and rain; and incorporate systems that provide for water, electricity, and sanitation. Course revolves around a series of workshops, labs, and design exercises.

Environmental Systems

Offers a small-group discussion format to cover material in ARCH 3210 and provide opportunities for hands-on and creative work, both individually and in teams.

Recitation for ARCH 3210

Interactions Between Art, Design and Architecture: This course examines the evolution of mutual influences and collaborations between modern art, architecture, media and design in the 20th Century. The course starts by providing a conceptual framework on the meanings of modern art and design, to look at different cases of collaboration, interaction or transdisciplinary work among these fields. Subjects to be covered include, among others, the emergence of international avantgardes and cosmopolitan architecture, the Independent Group, Cobra and Team X, Art Brut and Brutalism, the Situationist city, Land Art, Contemporary Media Art, Art and Politics, Exhibitions and Curatorial Practices.

Advanced Topics in Architectural History

Builds on CAD (computer-aided design) skills to develop ability to model in three dimensions and develop surfaces and lighting. Also addresses strategies in design communication for effective presentation of digital material.

Advanced Architectural Communication

Offers students an opportunity to deeply explore topics related to architecture and the built environment. Students complete a semester-long intensive research and writing capstone project. Offered in the final year of the BS in Architectural Studies program.

Architectural Studies Capstone

Offers an upper-level design studio that covers new studio topics, content, and studio instructors each semester. The studio instructors offer topical content that best aligns with their research and practice expertise, which provides students with the latest concepts in architectural design, theory, and research on a consistently updated and rotating basis. Students select their top choices of studio topics and instructors, giving them more flexibility in the areas for which they would like to focus their education. May be repeated twice for credit.

Option Studio

Focuses on the materials and making of architecture. Considers architectural connections at all scales, from the nut and bolt to the scale of a door or window to the scale of the whole building and the city. Grounds design proposals upon a tectonic strategy, unlike traditional design studios that produce a schematic design before considering constructional ideas.

Comprehensive Design Studio

Explores the ways in which architectural form can create particular conditions of light and shadow; provide shelter from heat, cold, and rain; and incorporate systems that provide for water, electricity, and sanitation. Provides a series of simple and straightforward small-scale design projects.

Offers a small-group discussion format to cover material in ARCH 5210.

Recitation for ARCH 5210

Studies how to integrate into students' building designs all the environmental and tectonic systems that they have covered in previous architecture courses.

Integrated Building Systems

Introduces the fundamental concepts of structural analysis and design for architecture. Examines the nature of forces and their effects on different types of structural elements; the structural properties of shapes and materials; and the selection, analysis, and design of efficient structural systems that resist the loads acting upon them. Uses historical and contemporary examples to illustrate how the changing context of architectural ideas drives structural form and the selection of structural systems. Includes field trips and student presentations of structural models and diagrams. Restricted to students in the architecture BS program and to students in the three-year MArch program.

PHYS

MATH

Structural Systems

Provides a small-group discussion format to cover examples from the material in ARCH 5230.

Recitation for ARCH 5230

Encourages students to develop the connections between critical attitudes and techniques in design, through important historical texts. Offers a kind of “great books” approach to the integration of design and history, introducing the writings and seminal designs of Alberti, Palladio, Wright, Le Corbusier, Semper, Sitte, Rowe, Colquhoun, Moneo, Koolhaas, Rossi, Frampton, Venturi and Scott Brown, Scarpa, and Lynch.

Design Tactics and Operations

Addresses advanced topics in real estate development and finance and examines innovative models of practice in real estate development available to design professionals. Studies a set of advanced analytical tools and techniques for evaluating the cash flows and economic returns of real estate investment and development. Introduces advanced methods of financing real estate and the structure of capital markets involved in property assets. Uses the case instruction method and includes active, discussion-oriented learning.

Innovative Models in Real Estate Development and Design

Presents students new to architecture with the fundamentals of three-dimensional thinking and spatial representation with a series of increasingly complex assignments. Offers students an opportunity to learn a wide variety of graphical software tools and then use these tools to complete their assignments. Covers freehand sketching and physical model building skills. This intensive course is taught as a hands-on design studio (with ample studio access outside class meetings).

Graduate Skills Studio

Focuses on a series of increasingly complex assignments that emphasize the fundamentals of architectural design. Offers students an opportunity to propose and test proposals through an iterative process using a wide variety of tools and media, including design software, physical models, and freehand sketches. Explores spatial definition, the orchestration of a spatial sequence, modulation of natural light, and responsiveness to existing conditions (whether natural or man-made). Taught as a hands-on design studio (with ample studio access outside class meetings).

Graduate Studio 1: Architectural Design

Examines the state of architecture and urbanism in the two decades leading up to 2000. Explores contemporary issues in architectural theory and urban design. Examines a broad range of ideas affecting contemporary developments in architectural practice. Engages cultural and historical forces as well as contemporary criticism to define the nature of modernism, late modernism, postmodernism, and deconstruction. Case studies, analysis of theoretical models, and application of methods of history provide students with support for their own design work in studio and co-op experiences.

Seminar in Modern Architecture

This course will provide a framework for understanding construction ecology architecture: the energetics and material/carbon cycling of building as a terrestrial process. The course, though, will present this framework through a survey of buildings with premodern, modern, and nonmodern examples. The twenty-first century demands a far more architecturally and ecologically ambitious paradigm. Other forms and formations of architecture are possible—and often more evident—throughout the nonmodern world. This explication of construction ecology establishes the course’s key question: what should constitute an architectural agenda for energy, material, and form in this century?

Participatory Mapping

Focuses on how architectural practice occurs and must be understood within a larger social context. The cultures-interests and objectives-of the constellation of participants in the bringing of a building to completion are dynamic, diverse, and complex, especially in an urban environment. Seeks to make sense of this broader social contract from within the perspective of professional design practice. As one of many participants in the process of bringing a building to completion, students review the roles, responsibilities, and interests of each contributor. Our task is to understand the obligations and constraints that constitute these relationships. Examines the products of design as manifestations of these relationships and situates them within a discourse of value-determined actions. Investigates normative and critical professional practices through selected readings and individual field research. Develops project case studies that provide examples of excellent design results achieved through the application of expert professional practices.

Case Studies 1

Continues ARCH 6430. Builds on the understanding of professional practice developed in the previous course and investigates the array of &#8220;artful ways in which some practitioners deal competently with the indeterminacies and value conflicts of practice.&#8221; These indeterminacies, uncertainties, and value conflicts are part of a rapidly changing, dynamic world. There is an unprecedented need for flexible and responsive practices that can bridge the gap between traditional professional techniques and these situations. Requires core competencies that are not mismatched with the changing situations of practice. Requires new skills as well as traditional analytic techniques to respond adequately to these unique conditions of work. Through a closer examination and development of an in-depth project case study, students speculate on possible approaches to a revised and restructured model of professional knowledge and guidelines for reflective practice that can sustain a culture of design excellence.

Case Studies 2

Offers the research portion of a two-part graduate project focused on the complex issues facing the postindustrial landscape of the contemporary city. Examines in detail the design elements of everyday building types, such as office buildings, labs, parking garages, and retail spaces, with an eye toward creating new prototypes for urban architecture that are informed by the realities of contemporary market forces. Provides the foundation for the more speculative design proposals of ARCH 7140. May be repeated without limit.

Master's Research Studio

Offers the second of a two-part degree project focused on manipulating contemporary market-driven building types. Seeks to invent new variations and hybrids from the existing store of urban building types to address new challenges, such as irregular sites, new adjacencies, and other unmet demands in cities. Based on research, analysis, and modeling of different types done in the first semester, offers students an opportunity to propose synthetic solutions to the complex problems of postindustrial development, housing, and identity facing the contemporary city. May be repeated without limit.