Architecture Department Course Descriptions

This design studio course for non-majors introduces design as an analytical, representational and productive act. Emphasis is placed on the development of a methodology for architectural design work and critique. Students explore various analytical, conceptual and design approaches and examine existing and potential spatial and programmatic conditions. Students use and experiment with various modes of representation (collage, sketching, orthographic drawing, physical models). Students are encouraged to address architecture through the expertise of their own disciplines. Studio work is integrated with field trips throughout the city.

Syllabus available upon request. 

This architectural design studio explores material assemblies, techniques of fabrication, and systems of organization. These explorations will be understood as catalysts for architectural
analysis and design experimentation.

Both designed objects and the very act of making are always embedded within a culture, as they reflect changing material preferences, diverse approaches to durability and obsolescence, varied understandings of comfort, different concerns with economy and ecology. They depend on multiple resources and mobilize varied technological innovations. Consequently, we will consider that making always involves making a society, for it constitutes a response to its values and a position regarding its technical and material resources. Within this understanding, this studio will consider different cultures of making through a number of exercises rehearse design operations at different scales—from objects to infrastructures.

Syllabus available upon request. 

This architectural design studio course explores modes of visualization, technologies of mediation and environmental transformations. These explorations will be used as catalysts for architectural analysis and design experimentation. Introducing design methodologies that allow us to see and to shape environmental interactions in new ways, the studio will focus on how architecture may operate as a mediator – an intermediary that negotiates, alters or redirects multiple forces in our world: physical, cultural, social, technological, political etc. The semester will progress through three projects that examine unique atmospheric, spatial and urban conditions with the aid of multimedia visual techniques; and that employ design to develop creative interventions at the scales of an interface, space and city.

Syllabus available upon request. 

This architectural design summer studio course explores modes of visualization, technologies of mediation, and spaces of environmental and material transformations. These explorations will be used as catalysts for architectural analysis and design experimentation. Introducing design methodologies that allow us to perceive and reshape spatial and material interactions in new ways, the studio will focus on how architecture negotiates, alters or redirects multiple forces in our world: physical, cultural, social, technological, political etc. The semester progresses through two projects that examine unique atmospheric, spatial and urban conditions with the aid of multimedia visual techniques; and that employ design to develop critical and creative interventions at different scales. Learning analog and digital drawing techniques, physical model-making, and multimedia image production, students will work in the studio and digital architecture lab. The course includes site visits and field trips in the city. 

Syllabus available upon request. 

In this two-semester sequence of studios students study architectural design as a mode of cultural communication and imaginative experimentation. As the studio sequence evolves, emphasis is increasingly placed on the relationship between material, tectonic, and programmatic organization and the social and cultural contexts of a site of investigation. Students work at a variety of scales, with a variety of techniques and in a variety of research situations and are asked to comprehensively address architectural problems. Emphasis is placed on architectural production as a process of analysis, critique and synthesis. The two studios broaden and deepen the students' awareness architecture as a discipline.

Note: Advanced Architectural Design I is taught only in the fall semester and Advanced Architectural Design II is taught only in the spring.

Syllabi available upon request. 

This is a vertical studio taught by our senior faculty. The studio focuses on intensive research based experimental work. 

Fall 2023 Course Description: 

Displaced by war. Migratory for work. Unhoused by earthquakes and climate crisis. Under-resourced through the uneven and inequitable distribution of social infrastructure. This studio will address the potential for architecture and the built environment to support and strengthen communities of unsettled populations, focusing on the unique conditions of a site in Nicosia, Cyprus.

Postwar, between 1976-1986, Cyprus developed a significant amount of experimental refugee housing to settle those displaced by the war that captured territory in Northern Cyprus in an attempt to form a Turkish state. These housing projects, currently undergoing social and physical changes, will be the site of our work in Cyprus where we will research and design projects to address the gaps in the social infrastructure and civic spaces that support resilient communities.

The original refugees that the housing was designed for are considered “internal refugees.” They were displaced from one part of Cyprus to another – northerners, many of them farmers from small towns, were displaced to the south – forced to move into refugee housing as new boundaries were delineated. Over time, the inhabitants of this housing have shifted, and now they are a mix of the original displaced Cypriots as well as new migrants who work in the area.

The boundary dividing the north and south is a demilitarized zone known as the Green Line, which crosses the center of the capital, Nicosia. And while border crossing was significantly opened in 2003, the boundaries are again being challenged by expanded requests for asylum. Cyprus currently has the largest numbers of asylum seekers per capita in the European Union including a high percentage of unaccompanied and separated migrant children.

Architecture studios at the University of Nicosia, led by Barnard alumna, Professor Alessandra Swiny, have been researching and mapping one of these original housing projects this spring semester. In the Fall of 2023, our studio will work in parallel with colleagues there, building on design research underway in the Architecture School at the University of Nicosia to help envision new futures for these communities. We will spend a week in Cyprus collaborating with students and faculty from the University of Nicosia, visiting the experimental housing projects of the 70’s, and traveling throughout Cyprus, north and south, to learn about its rich and complex history.

As an advanced research studio, students will develop independent research on the broader topics as well as work collaboratively on design projects for this community. Projects will address alternative visions for civic projects and shared spaces and landscapes to support a shift from unsettled and abandoned to, optimistically, resilient and recognized. Our work will contribute to the ongoing research being done at the University of Nicosia so that the transition of this housing project, a current project of the state, supports the needs of the local community.

Syllabus available upon request. 

Perceiving architecture involves the interpretation of optical imagery into a conception of space, which is subject to a perpetual reading of abstract meanings related to the city, nature, technology and culture. This is to say that the “perception of architecture” is more complex than simply seeing built form or the drawings used to represent building production; it involves a critical examination of human experience through prevailing modes of architectural convention. Together these conditions constitute a responsive body of knowledge that operates as the context for the perceiving subject, and as a constant basis for interpretive analysis and verbal discussion. By concentrating on modern buildings of high sensory and intellectual impact, studied along with a sequence of critical texts written by a range of architects, historians, philosophers and socio-cultural theorists, this class will explore the development of the discipline of architecture during the twentieth century and beyond.

Syllabus available upon request.

The survey course is composed of two weekly lectures that trace the idea of modernity from the Enlightenment to the present. It examines modernity as an aesthetic imperative in architecture, the visual arts and urban culture, and as a set of cultural transformations affecting society at every level: social mores and beliefs, philosophical inquiry, scientific impulse and technological innovation. The course is focused on the Modern Movement in the pre-war period (The Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, Le Corbusier, etc.) and post-war period (CIAM, Brutalism, Metabolism, International Style, etc. ), although we will also examine pivotal developments in the 19th century and postmodernism.

Syllabus available upon request.

City, Landscape, Ecology is a thematically driven course that examines issues and polemics related to urbanization, land settlement and ecology over the past two centuries. The course is made up of discussion sessions and lectures. The purpose is to better understand the role urban, territorial and ecological organization plays in the construction of social practices, human subjectivities, and technologies of power.

Syllabus available upon request.

This course examines colonialism and humanitarianism as objects of architectural history. We will use architecture and its histories as a set of tools with which to rethink colonialism and humanitarianism in relation to each other. We will also use the linked problems of humanitarianism and colonialism to rethink architectural history. In this course, we will study perspectives from Africa and Asia, refugee camps and detainment centers, colonial expositions and museums, and United Nations administrative headquarters and field sites.

Syllabus available upon request.

This class offers a critical platform for the discussion of housing in the modern and contemporary periods. It will explore the definition of housing at different scales, ranging from domestic objects and spatial arrangements to urban proposals and territorial organizations. Housing plays a central role in the formation of subjectivity, the definition of cultural norms, and the consolidation of social relations. This course will analyze the development of housing in relation to changing technologies, cultural shifts, and political transformations. It will focus on the relationship of diverse processes of modernization and traditions of housing around the world, ultimately reaching to housing paradigms in the contemporary world characterized by global processes and accelerating transformations. A series of workshops interspersed throughout the semester will introduce students to different modes of research, speculation, and argumentation coordinated with the development of a semester-long writing assignment.

Syllabus available upon request.

Through a history of institutional and informal practices in the 19th and 20th centuries, this course interrogates modern architecture of the South Asian subcontinent and its diasporas. The course considers building, landscape, material culture, territorial construction, design, art, photography, writing, pedagogy, and related cultural activity. We study celebrated as well as understudied figures and institutions: Begum Samrū, Sris Chandra Chatterjee, Otto Koenigsberger, Minnette de Silva, and Habib Rehman; the Archaeological Survey of India, the Dhaka Urban Study Group, the Asia Art Archive. We explore writings by James Fergusson, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Sir Banister Fletcher, which founded a discipline, and journals such as MARG, Mimar, and Design, which represented its discourse.

Syllabus available upon request.

This course investigates the dramatic urban transformation that has taken place in mainland China over the last four decades. The speed and scale of this transformation have produced emergent new lifeways, settlement patterns, and land uses that increasingly blur the distinction between urban and rural areas. At the same time, Chinese society is still characterized by rigid, administrative divisions between the nation's urban and rural sectors, with profound consequences for people's lives and livelihoods. The course therefore examines the intersection between the rapid transformation of China's built environment and the glacial transformation of its administrative categories. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to this investigation, using perspectives from architecture, history, geography, political science, anthropology, urban planning, and cultural studies, among other disciplines. This year, the course is being offered in an immersive, online format with an introduction and five thematic modules, each of which focuses on a particular dimension of urban-rural relations in contemporary China: land and planning, housing and demolition, citizenship and personhood, agriculture and food, and nationality and identity.

Syllabus available upon request.

Life Beyond Emergency examines constructed environments and spatial practices in contexts of displacement, within the connected histories of colonialism and humanitarianism. People migrating under duress, seeking refuge, practicing mutual aid, and sheltering in governmental or nongovernmental settings invest in the built environment as a holder of knowledge, critical heritage, and imaginaries of life beyond emergency. The course considers a politics and poetics of architectures and infrastructures of partitions, borders, and camps: territories and domesticities of concern to authorities and inhabited by ordinary people forging solidarities and futures. We will investigate the connected histories and theories of humanitarianism and colonialism, which have not only shaped lives as people inhabit spaces of emergency, but produced rationales for the construction of landscapes and domesticities of refuge, enacted spatial violence and territorial contestations, and structured architectural knowledge. The course examines iconic forms such as refugee camps in relation to colonial institutions such as archives. From Somalia to Palestine to Bangladesh and beyond, our inquiry into contested territories where people have been forced to migrate invites students to interrogate the normalized discourses and spaces, for example, of ‘borderlands,’ or ‘refugees,’ in order to imagine and analyze emergency environments as constructions that people have resisted, endured, transcended, theorized, and inhabited.

This seminar introduces students to intersectional feminist histories and practices of writing the constructed environment. It examines how architecture, art, urbanism, ecology, and material culture can be and have been used to shape practices, narrate histories, and purvey discourses. We examine the problems feminist theory and pedagogy raise in relation to the dominant practices that have driven the making and study of modern environments. Students in this course work in institutional archives and engage directly in the construction of collections, curating a selection of archival materials along the themes raised in the course. Shared readings and discussion in this course attend to intersectional feminist concerns around abolition and resistance in the built environment. Each student’s curated materials inform a final written project on historiographical methods, which contextualizes the institutional and ephemeral archives behind the histories we tell of the constructed environment, and the histories it reveals.

Syllabus available upon request.

This seminar investigates the criteria for judging architecture and urban design in the last 150 years in America. In doing so, the class will explore the values (such as functionalism, organicism), principles (compositional, contextual, etc.) and intellectual thought (such as idealism, positivism, phenomenology, structuralism, and post-structuralism) that shaped the criteria for evaluating the buildings. Seminar students will criticize the written results in order to arrive at an understanding about how architectural criticism could be improved. The focus is on “applied” criticism in magazines and newspapers, where the buildings are evaluated according to criteria derived from theoretical principles peculiar to a certain time. During the seminar students analyze the critical essays to isolate those principles and criticize their effectiveness, while placing them within historical and philosophical frameworks. At the end of the semester, students themselves will criticize a contemporary work of architecture in New York for a seminar presentation.

Syllabus available upon request.

The course examines the rich tradition of utopian thinking in architecture, urban planning and the visual arts. In this seminar, utopia is explored in its modern form: as a call to transform the world through human planning and ingenuity. The purpose of the course is to better understand the role that the utopian imagination has played in the construction of social practices, the development of urban and social planning models, and technologies of power. At the end of the course, students present slideshows of their vision of a utopia or dystopia for our time.

Syllabus available upon request.

This seminar considers architecture’s articulation with modern and contemporary geopolitical transformations; developing regimes of circulation of people, goods, and information; and changing realities broadly considered under the paradigm of globalization. Students in this course will seek to develop new understandings of architecture’s relationship with place and context adequate to this new paradigm—a relationship that has many times been simplified within disciplinary discourse and that lends itself as a fascinating area for expanded inquiry. The seminar will particularly consider the different orders organizing these territories within which architecture operates (from diplomacy to tourism, from preservation to humanitarianism and environmentalism), as well as the diverse figures consolidating the transactions that it mediates: networks, borders, and camps. Student’s research and writing will explore the expanded forms of practice developed to intervene in those territories and processes.

Syllabus available upon request.

“What-Ifs”: Histories of Environments in Architecture” explores the intersections between environmental imaginaries and architectural designs (built or not) throughout history to investigate how storytelling has informed architectural notions of the environment, climate, and nature. By way of addressing the writer Amitav Ghosh's generative provocation that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (2016), this seminar asks: What if we could read and write environmental histories based on buildings? How could we situate architectural histories within the contested grounds of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene/Plantionanocene?

The course encourages students to reckon with normative conceptions of the built environment -- such as continuations of empire and colonialism, fossil capital, geoengineering, and other mitigation strategies regarding climate change -- and read “climate” and environments through agencies of infrastructure, technology, and grassroots movements. Through methods of architectural history in research and visual analysis, along with writing genres and exercises, the class will weekly assess a combination of primary and secondary sources to contend with themes from political and architectural movements, postcolonial and decolonial critiques, and other theoretical frameworks from marginalized geographies and methods. Primary sources will include land treaties, architectural manifestoes, professional statements, speculative designs, scientific reports, artistic genres, and speculative fiction, among others.

Syllabus available upon request. 

The seminar is structured around six cities subjected to French rule during the second wave of European colonialism. While these urban enclaves were situated on the periphery of French state, they functioned as laboratories of urban techniques and experimentation and were as essential to the nation’s global ambitions as they were to its aims of reshaping social environments within the “hexagon.”

Each city will be explored through the perspective of distinct colonial policies and practices. Port-au-Prince, the first city studied, will be examined in relation to the ideals of the French Enlightenment and in relation to the terror of the Atlantic slave trade. Cairo, while colonized for only a very brief period, ignited new passions for the east, and will be viewed as a repository of exotic fantasies and as a site for infrastructural modernization. Algiers is to be studied through the policy of assimilation and the destruction of Algerian religious identity. Seen through the prism of France’s so-called civilizational mission, Dakar will be explored in relation to the application of the grid to its urban fabric. Hanoi   is to be viewed through colonial theories of acclimatization and architectural hybridity. Finally, Casablanca will be considered in relation to new planning practices and the application of colonial policies of association. 

Syllabus available upon request. 

This seminar examines architecture and urban planning in North Africa from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, through the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, the establishment of French protectorates in Tunisia (1881) and Morocco (1912), and the Italian colonization of Libya (1911), to the period of decolonization and post-independence, concluding with present-day struggles over national identity and governance.

A central concern will be the role of modernization in both colonial and postcolonial societies—a process, while integrally connected to European power, dominance, and violence, is often complex and ambiguous. In fact, modernization sometimes precedes European control as was the case in nineteenth-century Egypt, and, in other instance post-independence, it becomes a means to establish national identity and separation from European powers, as in the case of Egypt under Nasser or Algeria under Ben Bella or Boumediene (note, for example, the public commissions of the Brazilian modern architect Oskar Niemeyer in Algiers and Constantine, in which a modern architecture is seen as a distinct break with the Arabesque/ Neo-Mauresque forms of French colonialism). Nor should European influences in North Africa, however dominant and pervasive, be seen as only related to its political and economic control; multi-ethnic populations, trade and commerce, different places of architectural training, and cross-national infrastructures, such as railroad routes, all contributed and continue to contribute to making exchanges between European and Muslim culture diverse and multi-directional, if uneven in their power and influence.

Among the many issues the course plans to address, as it considers connections between architecture and its political and social context, are: modernization under the Ottoman empire, differences among English, French, and Italian colonization, the role of the Catholic church in the destruction of Muslim religious structures and urban transformation, stylistic hybridity, association versus assimilation, Lyautey’s vision of cultural difference and urban segregation, colonial cities as “laboratories” of modernization, Mediterraneanism and visions of integration, debates about historic and urban preservation, modernism as form of national identity, and contemporary efforts to reclaim vernacular traditions.

Syllabus available upon request.

This course explores the role that migrant communities have historically played in the construction of New York as well as the spatial negotiations, frictions, and conflicts derived from their settlement in the city. Architecture and urban strategies have historically participated in the definition of frameworks of belonging and have supported networks of kinship for migrant communities. However, they have also been used as tools for the exclusion of minoritized communities, as an alibi in xenophobic arguments, and as mediators of assimilationist policies.

We will discuss the manifold relations of architecture and migration. Migrant individuals and communities are responsible for the design, transformation, and resignification of different structures and enclaves. We will regard both the spatial, material, and aesthetic properties of these transformations as well as the social and cultural struggles, exchanges, and dislocations that they mediate.

We will also discuss the inextricable connection between New York City and migration. The city historically served as the major port of entry for migrants into the US and continues to be a major attractor for transient populations. We will regard New York simultaneously as a city characterized by its ethnic diversity, and one in which immigrants continue to struggle to secure housing, assert their presence in public space, guarantee their access to resources, and defend their rights.

Architecture and Migration in New York is organized around class discussions and a semester-long project involving historical research, mapping, and spatial observation.

Syllabus available upon request.

The seminar “Colonial Practices” considers colonial practices through architectures, institutions, and ecologies around the world. Each week, we study aesthetic and spatial practices alongside Black and Brown consciousness, Feminist, Indigenous, and anticolonial and decolonial theory. The places around which maps have been constructed, across which migrants have moved, and within which insurgents have configured form the intellectual problems of this course and strategic positions from which to sense, write, and think with the constructed environment.

Students lead discussions on shared readings, co-produce collaborative research with community partners for public dissemination, and write papers based on individual research. Our collective studies examine archives of colonial practices, museum-based institutional critique, insurgent art and design practices, and forms of geographical counter-cartography and architectural counter-occupation. Students are expected to conduct in-depth independent research, bringing their own interests and objects of historical inquiry into the course, and special sessions of the course will be targeted toward the development of students’ scholarly research and methods.

To study de/colonial practices using embodied methods across forms of difference, the course incorporates collaboration between students and faculty at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York, the Technical University of Kenya (TUK) in Nairobi, and the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) in Mumbai in a travel-based module titled “Architecture as a Form of Knowledge.” Participants engage in online discussion of shared readings in preparation for convening in Nairobi mid-semester for intensive study with artists, architects, urbanists, and scholars, using architecture (broadly defined) as a basis for research methods of historical sites and institutions around the city. During the “Architecture as a Form of Knowledge” module, students attend especially to African history, theory, and practice, building a body of research in partnership with the GoDown Arts Centre, a Nairobi urban arts institution directed by Barnard College 2020 Virginia C. Gildersleeve Visiting Professor Joy Mboya, which is engaged in situated critical aesthetic and heritage practices. Students will share and publish this collaborative research in conjunction with “Nai Ni Who?” [https://thegodown.org/nai-ni-who-2/], a community-based program of festivals and events facilitated by the GoDown Arts Centre.

Syllabus available upon request.

This advanced seminar explores key debates in contemporary urban planning and policy. Most fundamentally, these debates are about how we make collective decisions regarding shared problems, which arise from our co-inhabitation of urban space. Resolving these debates is not always an either-or proposition—there are multiple shades of gray and multiple potential resolutions. Nor are there necessarily right or wrong answers. The positions one takes in these debates are fundamentally normative—they are shaped by one’s place in the world and one’s view of it. Nevertheless, these debates require decisions. In urban planning and policy, we are called upon to act, not just debate. In this course, we will endeavor to develop informed positions that can help us engage with others to take action.

These debates are not new, nor are they unique to any one place. But their specific articulation varies as a function of historical and geographical context. In this course, we will explore both levels of these debates: we will first discuss them as they have been understood in history and theory, and we will then discuss them with reference to cases drawn from different parts of the world. Specific cases will be selected collectively by the class at the beginning of the semester, and students will develop and present the case study materials in consultation with the instructor. Students are therefore actively involved in the design of the course and are encouraged to bring 2 their own interests and agendas to the table. (Case studies might address, for instance, policing, school busing, mixed income housing, participatory budgeting, universal basic income, etc.)

This year, the course is being offered in an immersive, online format with an introduction and five one-week modules. Each module will address one debate: preservation versus progress, democracy versus authority, diversity versus identity, plan versus market, and reform versus revolution. In the first meeting of each week, we will explore the debate’s general contours; in the second meeting, we will investigate its articulation in a specific case study; and in the third meeting, we will hold an in-class debate.

Syllabus available upon request.

This seminar turns a lens on partitions, borders, and camps. Whereas these iconic forms have
been studied most often through legal, policy, or social science lenses, we will consider them conceptually,
aesthetically, and historically as complex practices of architectural form-making in the long twentieth
century. The partition, the border, and the camp can each be understood as a legal and territorial
concept, a symbolic and aesthetic marker of violent land demarcation, a material environment, and an
intersection of spatial practices. Through careful readings and discussion, we will look closely at each as an
illumination of irreducible entanglements between politics and aesthetics, and sensible expressions of
colonial practices that persist in the built environment.

In this course, students examine histories of partitions from Ireland to Somalia to Pakistan, and
their reification as borders. Understanding partition as a concept and a process rather than a determinate
end, the course examines histories of built environments that create the illusion of determinacy by
reinforcing territorial markers: whether through large intentional projects, for example, the construction
of a new state capital at Chandigarh in India, or unstated means, for example, the responsive
humanitarian or detention architectures of camps at borders in Palestine and East Africa. The course will
examine the robust discourse on the materialities of borders, thinking beyond the construction of walls to sometimes obscured forms of spatial anchoring across divides, for example, mediatic traversals, animal
crossings, or the work of crowds. The course examines histories of camps, from the concentration
technologies used during the Spanish American War in Cuba and the Boer War in South Africa in the
nineteenth century to twenty-first century ephemeral environments enabling people to crystallize forms of
dissidence, whether at Wall street in New York or Shaheen Bagh in Delhi. We analyze processes by which
the refugee camp enclosure racializes, genders, sexualizes, and controls bodies, precipitating a self-
partitioning by asylum seekers in the performance of vulnerability. Although the constructed
environments of camps serve as repositories of power, regardless of their purpose (and regardless of their
orientation toward control or care—for example, whether made to confine migrants or to shelter
refugees), they are iconic for their impermanence, and it is precisely their partial persistence that
establishes them as epistemic sources often needing to stand in for missing documentary archives.
To explore these and other problematics raised by partitions, borders, and camps, students in this
course lead discussions on shared readings (2-4 articles or book chapters per week). All course materials
will be provided, and discussions are used generatively to build a basis for understanding complex subjects
through interdisciplinary means. Students write papers based on in-depth independent research on a
subject selected in consultation with the professor. The research and writing of a final paper is scaffolded
across the semester, with special sessions of the course targeted toward the development of students’
scholarly research and methods.

Syllabus available upon request. 

This seminar introduces students to architectural and environmental histories of abolition through constructed environments, spatial practices, and texts from the eighteenth century to the present. The course locates abolition in social movements and historical discourses, examining the roles that reform and radical refusal have played in struggles for spatial justice, considering debates around enslavement, prisons, and borders. The course understands abolition as a significant intersectional feminist problem, and conceptually core to the consideration of race in global architectural history. We examine individual and collective works of architecture, art, landscape, and material culture, which highlight incarceration within the institutions that have shaped it in various parts of the world, understanding incarceration within the formation of space, power, and knowledge in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Each student leads seminars and produces a written research paper derived from the themes of the course.

Syllabus available upon request.

How does design operate in our lives? What is our design culture? In this course students will examine the many scales of design in contemporary culture - from graphic design to architecture to urban design to global, interactive, and digital design. The format of this course moves between lectures, discussions, and collaborative design work to field trips in order to engage in the topic through texts and experiences. The work of the course involves discussion, writing, visual commentary, and group design projects.

Syllabus available upon request.

The goal of this seminar + workshop course is to develop new visual representations of the impact of environmental issues on New York City. The course will focus on two catastrophic events and sites: Greenpoint Oil Spill (1978), Newtown Creek; and Hurricane Sandy (2012), Lower Manhattan; and examine related toxic histories, environmental damage, impacted communities, clean-up and protection efforts and planning and design possibilities. Resourcing historical maps, on-site documentation and future design proposals, the class will explore environmental crises and their impact on the built environment and on the social, cultural and political life of the city. Based on this research, students will use digital mapping techniques, 360 video, and AR (augmented reality) technologies to create compelling experiential, spatial, analytical, critical, and reflective reconstructions of catastrophic events and remediation.

Syllabus available upon request.

The interlinked crises of climate, justice, and health continue to disproportionately threaten vulnerable and marginalized communities. Yet to date, most policy and planning efforts continue to privilege those with power, privilege, and ability, and to reinforce multiple planes of oppression and exclusion. Can the magnitude of our current predicament serve as a call to action for radical change? As we weigh our next steps, can we reinvent the ways we construct space, place, and identity – so that we can design for the inclusion of the broadest number of people?

This course examines the relationship between design, space, and practices of inclusion. We will reframe sustainability as the intersection of technological performance, on the one hand, with user experience and agency, on the other. Historical and contemporary examples will provide the foundations for new ways of thinking about architecture in terms of sensory choice rather than simply function or efficiency. Through case studies and material experiments, we will define and design environments for inclusion as spaces where different identities, abilities and possibilities can thrive.

Syllabus available upon request.

This seminar will introduce and investigate historically marginalized modes of cultural production, including Black, Indigenous, and traditionally female-driven practices as a means of rethinking the epistemic values of architecture and related mediums of communication and language, and rhetoric. Students will engage these aesthetic modes and templates - “fugitive mediums” - such as textiles and weaving, regional forms of hip hop and social dance, storytelling, and archival practice through a series of protagonists both historical and present-day as a means of activating and incorporating them into their projective design toolset.

Employing a pedagogy of discursive seminar and making exercises, students will conduct their own critical exploration of these practices while developing their own method of generative commentary through the curation and design of an “unruly” zine or viral pamphlet. Using the vehicle of the zine as a “site” of exploration, students will re-center these fugitive mediums while combining scholarly reflection, rhetorical polemic, and experimental design strategies both physical and digital, verbal and non-verbal. This seminar is conceived in dialogue with the Spring 2020 Fugitive Practice course conducted between Howard University and Yale University. The class will draw upon resources at Barnard, including the Design Center and the Barnard Zine Library, as well as experts and guests within and beyond the school.

Syllabus available upon request.

Maps are abstractions. Through the process of mapmaking, an environment’s visible and invisible elements are translated into a coded two-dimensional representation. At each step of this transformation, the mapmaker decides which information is to be edited in or edited out. Maps are thus subjective representations that bolster or conceal certain narratives. Like any artistic, architectural, or urban representation, a map is influenced by its maker’s socio-political moment and, in turn, the map influences its viewer’s perception of a space’s future. Students in this studio will study maps of the past, specifically the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps, which were part of a federally-funded project to assess neighborhoods’ credit-worthiness, a program that effectively determined individuals’ access to housing along racial lines. In 1936, Morningside Heights and South Harlem, the neighborhoods in which Barnard and Columbia University are located, were mapped by the HOLC. Students will be asked to interrogate the subjectivity of these maps, and to compare the maps’ assumptions with contemporary metrics and local narratives. This hybrid theory and practice course will consist of one one-part lectures, reading discussions, and presentations, and one-part student-led research and map-making initiatives.

Syllabus available upon request.

This course seeks to explore architecture’s occupations as a critical component of disciplinary discourse and practice. While architectural projects have been many times understood as stable and autonomous objects when considering the way they advance authorial intentions and anticipate expected transformations, the course will focus on how architecture operates in relation to changing and heterogeneous actors and practices performed through their occupation. In fact, after their design, architectural structures are appropriated by diverse individuals and at times dissident collectives; they channel different institutional agendas; they are mobilized with different meanings for changing audiences; and they manage overlapping material processes. Different to other ways of regarding architecture’s use or inhabitation, occupation suggests an active appropriation of a space and its transformation. Students in this class will seek to demystify the relationship between architectural projects and the buildings’ occupations, exploring their performance and their significance expanding beyond architects’ intentions by critically revising the tradition of post-occupancy evaluations.

Syllabus available upon request.

This seminar will investigate new forms of drawing the city. It is a course for making, experimenting and collectively thinking about representational techniques that enable us to analyze the city in new ways. As a hybrid course examining both theory and practice, the course includes seminar-style discussions, field trips, and drawing workshops. In this course, students will discuss the work of other architects to learn from their drawing processes and discourse; sstudents will also explore and experience the city through readings, conversations and site visits; and, most importantly, students will draw and draw. This class will encourage fearlessness toward a blank sheet of paper, fostering an attitude that promotes research through the simultaneous actions of thinking and drawing. Together, students will draw some of the most iconic places in New York City and then incorporate individual drawings into the construction of collaborative drawings; experimenting with systems of representation that embrace shared research goals and participatory action as a new way to archive and draw our cities.

Syllabus available upon request.

This hybrid seminar & studio course will investigate the dynamic interactions between ourselves and the designed world. Through acts of design, we will explore different levels of engagement through the following perspectives: inside vs. out, public vs. private, and global vs. local.

This course is a platform for experimentation and innovation through both analog and digital fabrication methods, with an emphasis on thinking through making. Students are encouraged to help each other learn and have a fearless approach to making — failure and resilience are key ingredients for a successful design process. Projects will challenge students to explore how material choices and fabrication processes can inform their design decisions.

The course will survey a variety of design methods, forms, materials, tools, and techniques through a series of hands-on projects, technical workshops, presentations, discussions, and field trips. Projects will consider factors such as scale, the dialogue between space & the human body, sociocultural contexts, and more. Workshops will highlight fabrication resources available at the new Design Center at Barnard College. We will examine and discuss the work of other designers, artists, and architects, with material curated by both the instructor and students alike. Field trips will include visits to museums, design studios, and digital fabrication facilities in NYC.

Syllabus available upon request. 

Advancements in technology today is making real the possibility of occupying the digital space of computers. Speculations on this digital realm within popular culture imagined an alternate reality that existed in parallel with the real where one could enter and exit freely. However, we may not fully realize that we are already living alongside this virtual reality as it augments our everyday lives channeled through spatial technology like our smart devices. The rapid growth of spatial computing continues to push us towards new levels of immersion as advancements in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (collectively XR) takes us both into the space of the computer and layers data on the built environment further blurring the boundary between the virtual and the real.

The virtual, though, is not exclusive to the digital and exists within the narratives and symbols embedded in our built environment as expressions of desire, place, and culture. While we may take for granted that the virtual is always there, it behooves architects to explore the virtual critically to both gain an understanding of its role within the built (and unbuilt) environment and to directly engage with its inherent spatial, experiential and immersive qualities. If instead, architecture’s engagement with technology remains limited to the production of images we risk reducing architecture to affect. XR technology offers a critical tool with which to examine how the virtual in architecture can be expressed experientially as it also calls into question our very notion of the real.

This course will task students with critically exploring the boundary between the real and the virtual utilizing Unity 3D video game development software, or game engine, to apply layers of the virtual as augmented reality applications overlaid onto more traditional modes of architectural representations as part of a deeper analysis of historically significant architectural projects.

Syllabus available upon request.

Maps and data are shaping contemporary cities. Everything—from traffic, to consumer patterns, to social behaviors—is now subject to being recorded, analyzed, visualized, and even turned into algorithms that could calculate a future city. This information overload, coupled with our current obsession for data visualization and with quick advances in digital tools, has reconfigured the evidentiary regimes used by architects and urbanists. It is now routine in urban analyses to push the use of data under the guise of objectivity, efficiency, and universal applicability. But data mediated approaches that promise the betterment of urban spaces are far from neutral, and their ambivalent effects have also contributed to reinforce algorithmic discriminatory techniques—a widespread practice that has gained the tittles of “algorithms of oppression” (Safiya Umoja Noble), “weapons of math destruction” (Cathy O’Neil), or “automating inequality” (Virginia Eubanks). Learning how data and maps shape cities is a crucial task today. This hybrid course aims to address this question by analyzing visual techniques used to represent urban data, as well as the technologies that they rely upon. Students will explore such questions through the reading of historical and contemporary texts, and the making of composite digital models—that is, 4D urban models that embed maps, images, text, and videos—that reconstruct an urban research question.

Syllabus available upon request.

This design workshop explores the generative potentials of material logics and novel fabrication methods for architecture. Specifically, we will experiment with materials and work at full-scale toward the design of decorative vessels, engaging nonlinear material behavior, chance operations, digital and analog technologies, and mold-making to incorporate irrational geometries into replicable processes. Absent programmatic, mechanical, and other functional requirements, students are encouraged to take risks, develop their own lines of inquiry within the overall requirements of the seminar, and present their insights to others. Weekly design workshops and desk crits are supplemented by lectures, short readings, and guest speakers from the spheres of engineering, architecture, and art.

Principally, our design work will question the primacy of geometric rationalization during the course of design, concomitant with a reevaluation of drawing, modelling, rendering, animation, photography, and other representational techniques. As architectural design and construction are traditionally predicated on geometric rationalization and constraining matter to predetermined geometric bounds, they are latently predicated on linear-elastic material behavior. This regime of material behavior, where deformation is temporary and stress is proportional to strain, ensures that material organizations will not deviate from the geometries assigned to them. If architecture is popularly associated with strength, stasis, and control, it is surely due to the fact that it has existed comfortably within this elastic range. Thus, that a material or a structure can permanently maintain its shape has informed not only architecture’s symbolic functioning but also its formal generation during the process of design. Though geometric rationalization is obviously useful, this course posits that it, along with the elastic-linear range of material deformation, has limited architectural design in terms of its structural potential, environmental reciprocity, symbolic functioning, and formal possibilities.

Many of the most compelling architectural advances of the 20th century thereby bridged art and science, leveraged physical model making, engaged nonlinear behavior, and developed novel analytic methods to question the primacy of geometric rationalization. Experimenting with soap film, spider webs, clay, and stockings before the advent of digital computation, the engineer-architect Frei Otto found that physical models embodied structural behaviors and nonlinear geometries that drawings and calculations could not initially provide. In fact, measurements for his Munich Olympic Stadium were scaled directly from his models. Similarly, Frank Gehry’s appropriation of software from the aerospace industry finds origin in his beginnings as a ceramicist at USC. Through seminars and our own design work, we will likewise explore how technological advances might allow for greater architectural freedom (and vice versa), all while speculating on the potential scalability of our vessels and their consequences within and beyond architecture.

An architecture need not be entirely rational, but merely predictable in form and behavior to an acceptable degree. We should naturally not disregard geometric rationalization, yet question its primacy in the design process. Working iteratively and experimenting with materials at full-scale, our aim is to bring it in greater reciprocity with the singular material bodies and environmental conditions through which it manifests. 

Syllabus available upon request.

Architects are always telling stories. In fact, we do nothing but tell stories. In school, we stand by our projects and explain our process. In practice, we talk about design with our colleagues; we draw to communicate our intent to builders. But what is a building to do after its architect has walked away?

This course is about the stories objects tell. We will read stories by architects and artists as well as their critics. We will look at spaces, and at works of art and design, and talk about the thoughts and feelings they evoke. We will share objects that are meaningful to us, and talk about why we love them. We will craft our own story, told through a physical object we will make.

We will explore the elemental architectural palette - material, color, light and shadow, form and void - and how these can be composed to create function, support program,

establish ambiance, convey meaning. Our medium for this exploration will be a light fixture - a relatively small and simple object - yet one that demands a high level of creativity, craft, and knowledge of design history. In other words - a microcosm for design thinking at once as technical and complex as contemporary LED technology and at the same time as intuitive as gathering around a campfire.

We will be rigorous in our craft. Students will use both digital and analog techniques, honing their skills in Rhino, lasercutting, finishing, assembly, and documentation. We will explore workflows and best practices to enable students to extend these techniques to other classes and into their future professional work.

Syllabus available upon request.

By highlighting the relationship between hazardous environments and social vulnerability,
environmental justice (EJ) mapping tools, such as EPA’s EJScreen, have the potential to
powerfully advocate for repairing harm in historically under-resourced communities. At the same
time, these tools tend to represent material flows, value accumulation, and sites of injustice as
isolated points and polygons rather than as interconnected socio-environmental processes. In
this class, we will work extensively with GIS spatial analysis and After Effects animation to
critically explore New York City’s energy systems, with a focus on the relationship to burgeoning
decarbonization and climate justice movements. Hybrid representation techniques will help
illuminate how fossil fuel infrastructure permeates social life and culture in ways that go mostly
unnoticed, the under-recognized role of grassroots activism in energy transitions, the
elusiveness and often immeasurability of toxic exposures, among other topics difficult to
spatialize through static forms of mapping. Each week will consist of skill-building workshops
paired with lectures and discussions that situate projects in relation to larger theoretical
discourses, from geography and environmental history to ecocriticism and feminist decolonial
perspectives.

Syllabus available upon request.

We live in a world of concepts, ideas and sketches. Rarely do these ideas have the opportunity to leap off the page, canvas or screen and become a resolved physical object. This class is focused on the design and fabrication of a full-size object – an instrument that tracks time. These instruments are not meant to be traditional clocks, rather a way for time, rhythm, and sequence to be displayed. We will approach the concept of time as something subjective, or relative to an individual’s perception of time. The goal is not only to make an object, but also create a device which will help each student explain their interpretation of the concept of time.

Students will use parametric modelers to design and fabricate their time keeping device. You will develop mathematical algorithms using parametric modelers such as Grasshopper and Artificial Intelligence Systems, and, concurrently, you will test modeling techniques to prototype your timing system. Students will be able to pick the type of device, materials used and fabrication techniques. The class will circulate between digital and physical development, using that iterative process to inform the final design of the timing device.

Architects are always telling stories. In fact, we do nothing but tell stories. In school, we stand by our projects and explain our process. In practice, we talk about design with our colleagues; we draw to communicate our intent to builders. But what is a building to do after its architect has walked away?

This course is about the stories objects tell. We will read stories by architects and artists as well as their critics. We will look at spaces, and at works of art and design, and talk about the thoughts and feelings they evoke. We will share objects that are meaningful to us, and talk about why we love them. We will craft our own story, told through a physical object we will make.

We will explore the elemental architectural palette - material, color, light and shadow, form and void - and how these can be composed to create function, support program, establish ambiance, convey meaning. Our medium for this exploration will be a light fixture - a relatively small and simple object - yet one that demands a high level of creativity, craft, and knowledge of design history. In other words - a microcosm for design thinking at once as technical and complex as contemporary LED technology and at the same time as intuitive as gathering around a campfire.

Commercial light fixtures are often made with plastics, glass, and other carbon-intensive materials. An important goal of the course will be to explore biomaterials and low-embodied-carbon materials, such as wood, paper-based materials, hemp and other fibers, earth, clay, and recycled materials. Using this material constraint, students will be challenged to consider their work in the context of the built environment and global supply chains as the industry strives toward decarbonization. The objects we make will tell the story of their materials - past, present, and future.

Syllabus available upon request. 

If we accept that buildings and cities are instruments of time, and both are as much of the
mind as they are physical, then it is easy to see how film and architecture share a visual and
material world. The perception of a space is as much defined by its associations as by its
physical qualities. When we watch a film, we register all the mental, sensual and physical
faculties that are engaged in a particular space at a particular time and yet such
permanence does not have to be a building that is recognizable by its material appearance.
Let us equate filmic experience to that of physical space and consider how we can
intercross the making of films and buildings. This course will explore filmmaking as a form of
spatial practice.

A film is an act of space making, which makes itself seen, an act of building shaped in time.
Architecture and film share an interdisciplinary correspondence, a desire to ‘build worlds’
for spectators to inhabit. Furthermore, as both architects and users, our understanding of
space is conditioned by how it is represented. The accepted image of architecture on film
has become acclimatized to conventional, static, ocular-centric and binary representations
of the so-called ‘man-made environment.’ In response to this position, the course will
introduce the idea of the architectural film essay, as an alternative way to think of
architecture, where openness, fluidity and interdisciplinarity create links between space
making and film language. The film, as an essay, can provide an architectural infrastructure
where tolerance and hope allow for slow engagement with the complexity and ambiguity of
the world. A distinct analytical and spatial arrangement, that supports ideas not merely
advancing in a single direction, but which are interwoven and developed as a carpet, to
delve between the gaps of each field of study, architecture and film.

One may view film language as very different from that of space, but is it? By identifying
film practice as a form of space building, this course will interrogate how processes, such as
cinematography and editing, can be explored in connection to their spatial implications.
You will be encouraged to underpin your film-based research with hands-on, in-person, site
and material investigations, to develop and explore how film, as a creative medium, can
interrogate architectural questions independent of all terminology and established
methods. The intention of the work is not to fulfill a preconceived goal, but to propose a
space built on polysemy and multiplicity, which demonstrates the possibilities that arise
from examining space-making from a cinematic dimension. Exploring how one can build a
spatiality that has architectural qualities but is immaterial; a spatiality that can hold material
memories, built-in light and sound, with a constantly changing appearance to express a
space of poetic intelligence, a multidimensional energetic combination of contradictory
elements governed by a logical singularity.

Syllabus available upon request. 

In contemporary urban environmental discourse, trees are often primarily portrayed as providers of
"ecosystem services." This system of valuation is fueled by sophisticated tools for quantifying and
translating trees' climatological functions into tangible benefits for humans, such as kWh energy
conserved, gallons of stormwater intercepted, enhanced property values, etc. At the same time, these
top-down modes of analysis tend to overlook the broader context in which our arboreal landscapes
exist, including stewardship practices, histories of social activism, city policies, microbial interactions,
and tree intelligence, among other factors. Tracing and strengthening these relationships across space
and time is increasingly pertinent, especially given the rise of a grassroots urban forestry coalition
focused on tree equity and the recent passage of a bill aimed at expanding NYC’s canopy coverage from
the current 22% to 30%.
The second iteration of Cartographies of Environmental Justice will explore how mapping, sensing, data
processing, and visualization practices shape our understanding of the urban forest’s performance and
distribution across NYC’s neighborhoods. We will employ tools such as the Street Tree Census, LiDAR
and satellite imagery, and the NYC Tree Map, while also critically examining how these platforms often
treat trees as isolated data points divorced from their social, cultural, and political contexts. Working
extensively with GIS spatial analysis, we will investigate how techniques like visual storytelling, animating
time-based media, ground-based data collection, and the integration of analog methods can convey
richer and more nuanced narratives at the nexus of environmental performance, public health, urban
policy, social equity, and climate justice. Each week will feature skill-building workshops paired with
lectures and discussions that situate projects in relation to larger theoretical discourses, from queer
ecologies, care and maintenance studies, political ecology, and multi-species justice approaches.

Introduction
The purpose of the class is to design and fabricate a time capsule to contain physical memories. Over the course of the semester students will execute a series of projects based on different sensorial memories. The last project will be the container to keep all these memories along with a strategy to store the container until the students are ready to access those memories again.

Thesis
We live in a world of concepts, ideas and sketches. Rarely do these ideas have the opportunity to leap off the page, canvas or screen and become a resolved physical object. This class makes more than simple objects, we will make physical realizations of memories. These projects are not meant to be a collection of items but rather a way of using all our senses to help retain the truest essence of the memory. We will approach the concept of memory as something ephemeral, or relative to an individual’s perception and recollection. The goal is not only to create a catalog of memories, but also create an experience which will help each student explain their interpretation of the concept of memory.

Project
Students will use parametric modelers to design and fabricate a physical object that will be the physical realization of their memories. They will develop mathematical algorithms using parametric modelers such as Grasshopper and Artificial Intelligence Systems. Concurrently students will be testing modeling techniques to create a prototype for each memory and ultimately their time capsule. The class will circulate between conceptual, digital, and physical development with the goal that all these items inform the final design of the time capsule.