Columbia University in the City of New York · Courses
ARCH UN
14 courses with the subject ARCH UN, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
ARCH UN1010DESIGN FUTURES: NEW YORK CITY3.00
How does design operate in our lives? What is our design culture? In this course, we explore 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, collaborative design work and field trips in order to engage in the topic through texts and experiences
ARCH UN1030THE CITY: THINKING WITH THE URBAN BUILT ENVIRONMENT4.00
This experiential learning course provides an introduction to the organization and design of the urban built environment. What kinds of spaces make up the city, how are they formed, and what impact do they have on people’s lives? We will consider these key questions of urban design and the distinct answers that have arisen in different historical and geographical contexts, with reference to a global array of case studies. And we will use the built environment of New York City as our classroom, with weekly field trips to iconic (and iconoclastic) examples of urban form, including sites from all five boroughs that reflect a diversity of cultural milieux. Through this comparative approach, the class will challenge the naïve view that the built environment is neutral or inert, emphasizing instead the inherent politics of urban design and the ongoing transformation and contestation of urban space. To arrive at this understanding, students will learn to think with the city, acquiring tools for understanding, representing, and analyzing the urban built environment. The class is organized morphologically into six modules: image, park, plaza, street, block, and arcade. During each unit, students will also be introduced to a specific technique for analyzing urban form: figure-ground, collage, plan, diagram, map, projection, and section. The main assignments ask students to deploy these techniques to compare the urban spaces we encounter in the city
ARCH UN2101ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN: SYSTEMS AND MATERIALS4.50
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
ARCH UN2103ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN: ENVIRONMENTS AND MEDIATIONS4.50
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
Prerequisites: Designed for but not limited to sophomores; enrollment beyond 60 at the discretion of the instructor. Note: Designed for but not limited to sophomores; enrollment beyond 60 is at the discretion of the instructor. Co-requisite: ARCH UN3118. How has architecture been “modern”? This course will introduce students to this contentious and contradictory concept emerging across the world during a time in which ideas and tools similar to ours were used for seeing and ordering constructed environments and architectural thinking. It introduces students to the history of modern architecture as an art of building as well as a discursive field, whose historical consciousness played a part in its historical development. The course is structured chronologically and encourages experiential learning around episodes that informed the development of the built environment and the architecturally “modern.” Students will gain hands-on practice in researching and writing architectural history, theory, and criticism: skills that lie at the basis of conceptual architectural practices. While a one-semester course will not provide a full survey of buildings, events, and people associated with modern architecture, students will develop the critical tools to identify, approach, and comprehend such histories. The following areas of focus anchor the course, and students learn about each by understanding the establishment and institution of structures nourishing and supporting them, which have persisted into the present: Architecture as made, thought, and taught—enmeshed with power and ideas, social concerns, intellectual and public debates, and diverse forms of cultural production Makers, thinkers, and organizers of the designed or built environment Designed constructions as the material ends and means of extraction, refinement, trade, and the labor associated with each Sites, institutions, media, events, and practices that have come to hold meaning in architectural discourse Concerns with both the past and the future as a basis for architectural theory Modernization, modernism, and modernity as drivers for events, their historical narration, and the dissemination of these architectural narratives The conceptual writing practices of history, theory, and criticism The course is designed to accommodate multiple styles of learning. Course components include weekly lectures and discussions of assigned readings; research and writing assignments designed so that students may pursue individual interests and develop a variety of skills; shared visits to archives; and individual and small group visits to museums. This course has no prerequisites, but demands critical thinking and reading skills
City, Landscape, Ecology is a thematically driven course that centers on issues and polemics related to landscape, land settlement and ecology over the past two centuries. The course interrogates our changing attitudes to nature from the 18th century to the present, focusing on the artistic and architectural responses to these perceptions. It aims to demonstrate the important role that artists and architects have played, and are to play, in making visible the sources of environmental degradation and in the development of new means of mitigating anthropogenic ecological change. City, Landscape, Ecology is divided into three parts. Part I explores important episodes in the history of landscape: picturesque garden theory, notions of “wilderness” as epitomized in national and state parks in the United States, Modern and Postmodern garden practices, and the prevalence of landscape in the work of artists from the 1960s to the present. The purpose here is to better understand the role that territorial organization plays in the construction of social practices, human subjectivities, and technologies of power. We then turn to ecology and related issues of climate, urbanization and sustainability in Part II. Here we will look at the rise of ecological thinking in the 1960s; approaches to the environment that were based on the systems-thinking approach of the era. In the session “Capitalism, Race and Population Growth” we examine the history of the “crisis” of scarcity from Thomas Robert Malthus, to Paul R. Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, 1968) to today and look at questions of environmental racism, violence and equity. The course concludes with Part III (Hybrid Natures). At this important juncture in the course, we will ask what is to be done today. We’ll examine the work of contemporary theorists, architects, landscape architects, policy makers and environmentalists who have channeled some of the lessons of the past in proposing lasting solutions to our land management and ecological crises of the present and future
Prerequisites: ARCH V3101 and ARCH V3103. Open to architecture majors or with permission of instructor. Prerequisites: ARCH UN2101 and ARCH UN2103. Advanced Architectural Design I explores the role of architecture and design in relationship to climate, community, and the environment through a series of design projects requiring drawings and models. Field trips, lectures, and discussions are organized in relation to studio exercises. A portfolio of design work from the prerequisite courses ARCH UN2101 and ARCH UN2103 will be reviewed the first week of classes
Prerequisites: ARCH V3201. Open to architecture majors or with permission of instructor. Prerequisite: ARCH UN3201. Advanced Architectural Design II culminates the required studio sequence in the major. Students are encouraged to consider it as a synthetic studio where they advance concepts, research methodologies and representational skills learned in all previous studios towards a semester-long design project. Field trips, lectures, and discussions are organized in relation to studio exercises
ARCH UN3211ADVANCED ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH AND DESIGN4.50
Prerequisites: ARCH V3202 and permission of the department chair. Enrollment limited as space permits. Application required: A design portfolio and application is required for this course. The class list will be announced before classes start. Advanced Architectural Research and Design is an opportunity for students to consider international locations and address contemporary global concerns, incorporating critical questions, research methods, and design strategies that are characteristic of an architect’s operations at this scale
See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department website for the course description: https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions
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. The course is divided into two parts: Over the first five weeks, we will consider the historical context of China’s urbanization and its urban-rural relations, including the imperial, colonial, and socialist periods, as well as the current period of reform. In the remainder of the semester, we will turn our focus to contemporary processes of urbanization, with a particular emphasis on the complex interrelationship between urban and rural China. This portion of the semester is organized into three two-week units on land and planning, housing and demolition, and citizenship and personhood.
