This seminar engages in the notion of space from various points of departure. The goal is first of all to engage in the term and secondly to examine possibilities of art, architecture within urban settings in order to produce what is your interpretation of space.

This course introduces the history of Islamic cultures through their most vibrant material signs: the religious architecture that spans fourteen centuries and three continents — Asia, Africa, and Europe. The course presents Islamic architecture both as a historical tradition and as a cultural catalyst that influenced and was influenced by the civilizations with which it came in contact.

Looking for a fun and engaging way for your students to work on collaboration and using the engineering design process? STEM Challenge: Marshmallow Tower is for you! Simple and cheap materials and little prep required.

Looking for a fun and engaging way for your students to work on collaboration and using the engineering design process? STEM Challenge: Marshmallow Tower is for you! Simple and cheap materials and little prep required.

This art history video discussion looks at Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, 5th century A.D.

This class is a general study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. It focuses on the theoretical, historiographic, and design approaches to architectural problems encountered in the age of industrial and post-industrial expansion across the globe, with specific attention to the dominance of European modernism in setting the agenda for the discourse of a global modernity at large. It explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as a simple chronological succession of ideas.

This course explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing, as a research method, and as a medium of inquiry and of expressing ideas. Readings, observations, and photographs form the basis of discussions on landscape, light, significant detail, place, narrative, and how photography can inform research, design, and planning, among other issues. The class is highly recommended for students who want to employ visual methods in their thesis or dissertation.

Students are introduced to brainstorming and the design process in problem solving as it relates to engineering. They perform an activity to develop and understand problem solving with an emphasis on learning from history. Using only paper, straws, tape and paper clips, they create structures that can support the weight of at least one textbook. In their first attempts to build the structures, they build whatever comes to mind. For the second trial, they examine examples of successful buildings from history and try again.

The Smith College campus may seem to be an unlikely destination for a geological field trip. Buildings, pavement, grassy lawns, and garden plantings cover the sediment, glacial till, and sandstone bedrock that are evidence of the local geologic history. Nevertheless, there are many interesting rocks easily visible on the campus, most of them as construction materials for buildings. Sliced, sculpted, and in some cases polished, the rocks found as building stones are easy to see and provide interesting examples of a variety of rock types worthy of our attention. This guide provides information about many of the building stones on the Smith College campus.

This course explores how social theories of urban life can be related to the city’s architecture and spaces. It is grounded in classic or foundational writings about the city addressing such topics as the public realm and public space, impersonality, crowds and density, surveillance and civility, imprinting time on space, spatial justice, and the segregation of difference. The aim of the course is to generate new ideas about the city by connecting the social and the physical, using Boston as a visual laboratory. Students are required to present a term paper mediating what is read with what has been observed.

This workshop explores how designers might become as sensitive to space as they are to objects. Through a number of projects and precedent studies, architectural design is studied in relation to the Space Between. The design process is studied in reverse, considering space first and objects second. This is not to imply that objects are not important, but rather that space is equally important.

This class focuses on representation tools used by architects during the design process and attempts to discuss the relationship they develop with the object of design. Representation plays a key role in architectural design, not only as a medium of conveying and narrating a determined meaning or a preconceived idea, but also as a code of creating new meaning, while the medium seeks to establish a relationship with itself. In this sense, mediums of representation, as external parameters to the design process, are not neutral tools of translating an idea into its concrete form. They are neither authentic means of creativity, nor vapid carriers of an idea. Therefore, an important aspect in issues of meaning is how the architect manipulates the play of translating a concept to its concrete version, through the use of a medium of representation. The course is a continuation of the equivalent course taught in the fall semester and specifically focuses on digital media. The course is intended to establish a reciprocal relationship with the design studio, feeding from and contributing to its content.

The transition from high school and home to college and a new living environment can be a fascinating and interesting time, made all the more challenging and interesting by being at MIT. More than recording the first semester through a series of snapshots, this freshman seminar will attempt to teach photography as a method of seeing and a tool for better understanding new surroundings. Over the course of the semester, students will develop a body of work through a series of assignments, and then attempt to describe the conditions and emotions of their new environment in a cohesive final presentation.

This unit consists of five lessons covering architecture and structural engineering. Each lesson includes goals, anticipatory set, learner objectives, guided practice, procedure instructions, closing activities, and extensions. Student handouts and worksheets are also included.

Lesson 1: Animal Structures
Lesson 2: Homes
Lesson 3: Stability
Lesson 4: Local Towers & Bridges
Lesson 5: Schools

NGSS: K-2-ETS1-1, K-2-ETS1-2, K-2-ETS1-3, 3-5-ETS1-1, 3-5-ETS1-2, 3-5-ETS1-3

Materials: blocks or other building toys, ruler, book or ball (for weight), graph paper, pencils, and floor plan of school or hand-drawn approximation featuring highlights.

Course syllabus that outlines the first course in a survey of Western Art. Includes an outline of a 10-week course with readings, videos, and other resources.

Twentieth and twenty-first century architecture is defined by its rhetorical subservience to something called “technology.” Architecture relates to technology in multiple forms, as the organizational basis of society, as production system, as formal inspiration, as mode of temporization, as communicational vehicle, and so on. Managerial or “systems-based” paradigms for societal, industrial and governmental organization have routinely percolated into architecture’s considerations, at its various scales from the urban to the domestic, of the relationships of parts to wholes.

This course proposes that investigating the ways in which territory is produced, maintained and strategized, generates conflicts, establishes divisions, and builds identities can lead to a more critical understanding of architecture’s role in society. This course is designed to expand the student’s literacy in the concept of territory and its relation to the realm of architecture.

In diesem Kurs erhalten Sie einen Überblick über einige wichtige literarische Texte, Tendenzen und Themen aus der deutschsprachigen Literatur- und Kulturszene. Wir werden literarische Texte, Gedichte, Theaterstücke und Essays untersuchen, sowie andere ästhetische Formen besprechen, wie Film und Architektur. Da alle Texte gleichzeitig in ihrem spezifischen kulturellen Kontext gelesen werden, tragen sie zu einem Verständnis von verschiedenen historischen Aspekten bei. Unter anderen werden folgende Themen und Fragestellungen besprochen: Technologie und deren Einfluss auf die Gesellschaft, Fragen der Ethik bei wissenschaftlicher Arbeit, Konstruktion von nationaler Geschichte und kollektivem Gedächtnis.

This seminar is open to graduate students, and is intended to offer a synoptic view of selected methodologies and thinkers in art and architectural history (with many theorists from other fields). The syllabus outlines the structure of the course and the readings and assignments for each week; the goal is to become aware of the apparatuses of discourse, and find your own voice within them.

This course covers theories about the form that settlements should take and attempts a distinction between descriptive and normative theory by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. Case studies will highlight the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. Through examples and historical context, current issues of city form in relation to city-making, social structure, and physical design will also be discussed and analyzed.