Graduate Courses Fall 2025

ARCH 5100 (15489)

Trattie Davies

M 11am-12:50pm

The course studies the nature of animal occupation on Earth, then focuses on a method or system of occupation by a single species. Species selection and methods of representation are governed by individual interests based on an introductory series of exercises focused on the primary categories of land, sea, and air. Work is realized in the form of visualizations that collect and re-present discoveries. Given the nature of the research, visualizations push the boundaries of traditional and contemporary architectural drawings and imagery by incorporating process, time, and material reconstitution into the presentation of spatial language. The seminar allows for in-depth individual research and practice in the transformation of information. Understanding the material nature of occupied space, the research further allows for an expanded understanding of alternate building practice and methodologies.

 

ARCH 5103 (15690)

Joyce Hsiang

W 4pm-5:50pm

Climate change disproportionately affects the people and places with the least power and resources. As our sea levels have risen, so too has the extreme socioeconomic disparity of specific communities and countries, creating a drowning class of climate refugees. Entire countries on the front lines of sea-level rise face the specter of nationhood without territory, despite the undeniable fact that their contribution to this global problem is negligible. And if climate change is in fact “the result of human activity since the mid-20th century,” it is in actuality a largely male-made phenomenon, if we unpack the gender dynamics and underlying power structures of the proto-G8 nations, the self-proclaimed leaders of industrialization. These power dynamics become even further exacerbated as we consider the implications of the particularly American interest in doubling down on investing in the heaviest piece of infrastructure ever—climate engineering. The architectural community appears to be in agreement. Climate change is a fundamental design problem. And yet calls to action have been ineffectual, responses underwhelming in the face of this overwhelming challenge. As the architectural community is eagerly poised to jump on the design bandwagon, this course seeks to reveal, foreground, empower, and give physical form to the spatial dimensions and power dynamics of the people and places most impacted by climate change. More broadly, the course aspires to help students develop their own critical stance on climate change and the role architects play.

 

ARCH 5116 (15516)

Mark Gage

Th 9am-10:50am

Architectural ruins index the total failure of individual buildings, technologies, economies, or, at times, entire civilizations. This course researches the topics of ruination and architectural ruins—what produces them, what defines them, and how they impact individuals, cities, and civilizations on levels from the visual and formal to the philosophical and psychological. The formal and visual materials of this course emerge from the study of ruins from not only the past and present, but also the future, through research into the speculative territories of online “ruin porn,” new genres of art practice, and in particular dystopian television and film projects that reveal an intense contemporary cultural interest in apocalyptic themes. While significant nineteenth-century theories of architectural ruination, including those of John Ruskin (anti-restoration) and Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (pro-restoration), are addressed, the primary intellectual position of the course emerges from readings and discussions of the philosophical methodology of “ruination.” Student projects involve the philosophical and aesthetic ruination of iconic architectural projects to determine not only their essential qualities, but hidden, latent ones as well. Subsequent group discussion of this work vacillates between philosophical and aesthetic poles in an attempt to tease out new observations on these projects as well as on the nature of ruins and ruination. The self-designed final project is determined pending consultation between the students and instructor, but involves photorealistic failure of past, present, or future architectural or urban projects; dystopic visual speculations; fabrication experiments that test actual material decay and failure; or attempts to reproduce the aesthetic ambitions of ruin porn through the manipulation of existing, or the design of new, projects. The goal of the course is not to convey an existing body of architectural knowledge, but to unearth a new architectural discourse that considers architecture in reverse—emphasizing its decay rather than its creation in an effort to reveal new territories of architectural agency. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 6113 (15496)

Dana Karwas

Th 11am-12:50pm

This course examines the human relationship to mechanized perception in art and architecture. Mechanical eyes, such as satellites, rovers, computer vision, and autonomous sensing devices, give us unprecedented access to nonhuman and superhuman views into known and unknown environments. But the technology of automatic observation alienates human observers and fools them into thinking that this is an unemotional, inhuman point of view due to its existence in a numeric or digital domain. The observer is looking at seemingly trustworthy data that has been “flattened” or distilled from the real world. But this face-value acceptance should be rejected; interpreters of this device data should interrogate the motives, biases, or perspectives informing the “artist” in this case (that is, the developer/programmer/engineer who created the devices). Despite the displacement of direct human observation, mechanical eyes present in remote sensing, LiDAR scanning, trail-cams, metagenomic sequencing, urban informatics, and hyperspectral imaging have become fundamental to spatial analysis. But as these become standard practice, observers should also be trained in cracking open the data to understand the human perspective that originally informed it. In this class, students investigate the impact of the mechanical eye on cultural and aesthetic inquiry into a specific site. They conceptually consider their role as interpreter for the machine and create a series of site analysis experiments across a range of mediums. The experiments are based on themes of inversion, mirroring, portraiture, memory, calibration, and foregrounding to “unflatten” data into structure and form. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 7104 (155101)

David Sadighian

Th 11am-12:50pm

How has design shaped the rise of global capitalism, c.1700 to present? Surveying a wide range of buildings, objects, infrastructures, and landscapes across the Atlantic World, our aim is to understand how the built environment evolved to guide practices of capital accumulation—from the plantations of the early modern Caribbean to the “supertalls” of Billionaires’ Row. Readings draw from a growing body of scholarly literature that approaches design as an agent of political economy as opposed to a reflection of pre-existing ideas and economic structures. The seminar’s case studies therefore emphasize the reciprocity between themes of architectural and capitalist modernity (e.g., Circulation, Development) as well as the spatial forms and extractive processes that accompany them. Course work results in new critical perspectives for the historical study of present-day spatial inequality. Moreover, moving beyond familiar narratives and geographies of modernity, we will consider design’s relation to not only the production of wealth, but also counter-models of local autonomy, mutual aid, and redistribution. 

 

ARCH 7105 (15500)

Francesca Hughes

F 11am-12:50pm

If we are to rethink architecture now, as we must, we need also to rethink its relations to computation. In homage to Tony Vidler’s “Architecture Dismembered”, this seminar examines the historic, and now uncanny, doubling of architecture with not the body but with the long and inevitable project of computation, itself ironically a project to de-corporealize thought and render it automatic. In the sessions we consider the ideations of architecture and computation as ever-entangled, if not co-constitutive, arguing, tout court, that without architectural imagination the computer would not be the same, and vice versa. A historiographic dismembering of the architect’s various discrete (and indiscreet) machines reveals shared: memory storage and retrieval systems; mechanisms for deletion and forgetting; windows, guns, pens, nozzles; universal languages, algorithms and other compressive strategies in the calculation of true products; taming of chance by prediction. Like Humpty Dumpty, once apart, they will not go back together again and thus complicate beyond retrieval the already waning platitudes of optimisation and digital solutionism. Instead they suggest potential new categories with which to mutually reconstitute architecture’s relations to computation: the appetite; the mediocre; the alienated; the duped and the promise of the automatic.

 

ARCH 7108 (15502)

Michael Schlabs

M 11am-12:50pm

The notion of play occupies a special place in the history of modern art and architecture. Theorized in the 19th century by Friedrich Froebel as fundamental to the process by which children learn, play would form the basis of Froebel’s kindergarten, now a model for early childhood education worldwide. The aesthetic intensity of Froebel’s program would likewise contribute to a variety of radical educational projects in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the Bauhaus. Later, Johan Huizinga’s seminal meditation on the “play element in culture,” Homo Ludens, would provide an intellectual foundation for a number of 20th century aesthetic and political movements, among them the Situationist International. Finally, a generous focus on play has recently reemerged within the discourse on a range of 21st century art and design practices, characterized by a shared focus on participation and performativity, as in the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Lottie Child. This course, then, explores the place and problem of play in three ways: as a critical framework for understanding the aesthetic qualities of the human environment; as a mode of experience, giving meaning to that environment; and as a working method employed by artists and architects as a specific form of practice.

 

ARCH 7115 (15507)

Jordan Carver

W 2pm-3:50pm

This seminar investigates the many architectures that participate in state and racial formation. That is, how spatial constructions—including infrastructure, housing, borders, segregation, taxation, and policing—supported by the state are integral to processes of racial hierarchization and how racialized subjects are managed and controlled. The seminar focuses on the American context, but the definition of American boundaries is open to interpretation and contestation. We look at American expansion and political history to see how inequalities have been historically constructed and how they continue to persist. We analyze American internal and external imperialism, militarism, and securitization to better understand how the nation’s myriad spatial entanglements structure life and social relations. The seminar reads a broad set of texts including Madison, Locke, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Cedric J. Robinson, Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Cheryl I. Harris, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and others. We engage with current discourses on race and architecture and link them to discussions on media, politics, and the contested project of the American nation. Students develop a semester-long research project locating a state-backed spatial strategy of their choosing and unpack the social, political, and racial histories and futures of their chosen subject

 

ARCH 7121 (15506)

Vyjayanthi Rao

W 2pm-3:50pm

From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, urbanization has gradually come to dominate political, economic, social, and cultural landscapes of the contemporary world. To be urban was to be modern, and the development of modern social theory relied on using the city as its research laboratory. Two decades into the twenty-first century, features of urbanization such as density, resource extraction, environmental degradation, and intense social inequalities appear to be ubiquitous across different geopolitical conditions. This course presents students with a range of theories that attempt to make sense of the variegated and intersecting conditions that define contemporary urban localities. Building on the understanding offered by these theories, we conclude with an exploration of emerging positions, concepts, and propositions that enable new ways of understanding the centrality of urbanism within a world dominated by uncertainty, speculation, and dystopia.

 

ARCH 7123 (15511)

Joel Sanders

Th 11am-12:50pm

Although the built environment shapes multi-sensory experience, Western architects since antiquity have upheld the mind/body split, framing architecture as a medium primarily apprehended through vision and hearing—senses historically associated with male reason, abstract thinking, and the scientific method. Meanwhile, they have marginalized the so-called “lower” senses—touch, taste, and smell—linked to the abject physical body and the material world. And while buildings are constructed from solid materials extracted from the natural environment, architects have largely ignored the haptic sensations elicited when corporeal beings engage with the material world, considered a female principle, associated with Mother Earth. This course challenges these problematic assumptions by situating them in a techno-historical context. We will examine the intertwined histories of architecture and sensory-enhancing technologies that privilege seeing and hearing—from the Renaissance camera obscura to 20th-century glass curtain walls to 21st-century smartphones. These technologies have shaped both the design of built environments and our sensory experience of space in ways that reinforce the mind/body split and exclude those who do not conform to able-bodied norms. Critically examining these techno-sensory developments through the lens of gender and disability will allow us to propose alternative futures. How can we learn from the experiences of people with physical and sensory disabilities, as well as from ethnic and religious communities whose engagement with the built environment draws on different senses, faculties, and customs? How can we harness technological innovations that augment sensory perception to design immersive, inclusive environments—spaces that promote meaningful human interaction among people with diverse embodied identities as they navigate both virtual and physical realms? *

 

ARCH 7124 (15512)

David Gissen

Th 11am-12:50pm

Architects have explored the topic of disability and human impairment well before and beyond contemporary practices of “accessible design.” This seminar examines histories of architecture, disability, and human impairment through a range of case-studies from 1900 to the present. We will understand how disability transformed (and was transformed by) the practices of modern and late-modern architects and designers – from early 20th century theories of design to recent debates on the aesthetic character of urban monuments. To explore these histories, we will draw on an interdisciplinary range of readings, documents, films, and physical artifacts. The course will include a mix of lectures and discussion, guest presentations, and the development of a final research project related to the course case-studies and readings.

 

ARCH 7126 (15504)

Yoko Kawai

W 2pm-3:50pm

This course examines how design philosophies and methodologies were developed in Japanese architecture during the 150 years from the Meiji Restoration until the post-modern era. Special attention is paid to how the country’s cultural identity has been continuously relevant to modern society by evolving itself through natural disasters such as earthquakes, and political destruction such as wars. The methodologies and technologies for architecture and cities supported and were influenced by this constantly transforming, yet unchanging, Japanese culture. The course also compares the architecture of two International Expos in Osaka, one in 1970, signifying the end of metabolism, and another in 2025. Highlighted architects include Chuta Ito, Goichi Takeda, Frank Lloyd Wright, Kameki Tsuchiura, Sutemi Horiuchi, Kunio Maekawa, Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kazuo Shinohara, Tadao Ando, and Sou Fujimoto. Students are required to make in-class presentations and write a final paper.  

 

ARCH 7128 (15551)

Mark Gage

Th 11am-12:50pm

This class will explore the architecture of Postmodernism as architecture’s allergic response to the ahistorical, acontextual, self-referential language that modernism had become by the mid-20th century. By pushing aside history, context, and social concerns, modernism of that period exhausted itself of its potential, and restless architects began to explore new forms of architectural creativity that incorporated figuration. precedent, color, and representation as they sought to make the discipline more responsive to the wider expanses of 20th century culture. Such exploration is particularly timely in the architectural climate of today, where a “default” of non-ideological modernism tends to operate unquestioned and history is suppressed as a tool to inform design. The fine print of this course is the belief that through relying on celebrating abstract narratives of virtue or sustainability over the aesthetics of built form the field has once-again lost its power in the cultural imagination of the public. By studying how the Postmodern movement reclaimed agency and the interest of the public, the course seeks to inform and empower students to do the same in their own creative ways in the future. Two aspects of Postmodernism were critical to its early and nearly viral success- its flirtations with historic classicism, and its emphasis on humor and wit through challenging, bending, and breaking the rules of that same classicism. Accordingly, students will be taught the language of classical architecture using an abbreviated version of the system taught at the Ecole Des Beaux Arts for centuries (a system through which the course professor was educated). With this newfound knowledge and skills, students will themselves design new versions of some of postmodernism’s most iconic projects that will exhibit fresh takes on architectural humor, irony, and wit. These will include several projects that numerous postmodernist architects designed simultaneously, allowing for “apples to apples” comparisons, including the iconic “tea piazza” sets for Alessi, miniature façades for the 1980 Venice Biennale’s famous “Strada Novissima,” and an “extremely late entry” for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition held in 1922 and again in 1986. These design projects will be seen as a re-imagining for today of what, often Yale-affiliated, architects such as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, James Sterling, Leon Krier, Robert A.M. Stern, Michael Graves, Terry Farrell, Kengo Kuma, Charles Moore and others attempted to do nearly fifty years ago. Students will research the work of these architects, and also discover a number of architects who have been overlooked and deserve new consideration. This course was originally taught at Yale by former Dean Robert A.M. Stern, who was a key player in architectural postmodernism, and as-such the course will rely not only on readings but also first-hand accounts of the architects and architecture that, as noted by theorist Sylvia Lavin, came to become the world’s first truly global architectural movement.

 

ARCH 7129 (15513)

Keller Easterling

Th 11am-12:50pm

Recent surges in the last 500 years of colonizing, capitalizing, and globalizing may be more treacherous and untraceable than those of previous empires. This course exposes their infrastructures. While it begins with the global colonial extraction networks, most of the material circles around the spatial apparatus deployed toward the end of the 20th century that accompanied what is often amnesically referred to as “globalization.” This infrastructure is not only the infrastructure of pipes and wires underground but also the ubiquitous enveloping urban medium of repeatable formulas for space—a human/nonhuman socio-technical space that is rapidly producing a new layer of the earth’s crust. Critiqued by both the left and the populist right this massive physical plant contains a spectrum of dangers: capitalism, fascism, racism, whiteness, settler colonialism, femicide, caste, xenophobia, psychotic leadership, and countless other ways of hoarding power, abusing people, and damaging the planet. The story resists and exceeds any easy ideological explanations or definitions of the neoliberalism with which this moment is associated–a moment when, not rational actors and nation states, but an often irrational extrastatecraft, deploys stealthy, bullet-proof forms of power. Discussion is interspersed with heavily illustrated talks that encounter: instant free zone world cities, satellite urbanism and broadband from the perspective of Non-Aligned countries in South Asia and Africa, labor, conflict, and climate migration, an agripole in Southern Spain, automated ports, islands and offshore financial centers as the confetti of multiple empires, contagious spatial products of commerce and tourism, a cruise ship to the DPRK, the standards and management platforms of ISO, sweatshops, tax havens, and exploding urban peripheries among many other things. Going beyond the anointed legal, scientific, and econometric languages, the seminar also uncovers forms of spatially-embedded activism to meet this moment. The evidence returns to moments of worldmaking solidarity within newly independent colonies in the Global South—solidarities between the Pan-African, Non-Aligned, Tricontinental, and civil rights movements that the Global North broke by further tilting the playing fields in their own favor. And the seminar considers the infrastructures that dominant infrastructures eclipsed—live infrastructures of land, water, atmosphere, and community—to be as worthy of public support as infrastructures of concrete and conduit. As reparations for patterns of harm that will otherwise only continue, these alternative infrastructures are inextricably linked to climate change and planetary concerns. If the global conjures associations with White Enlightenment modern universals, singular evils and singular solutions, planetary conjures the patchy, partial, multiple approaches in the pluriverse. Treating everyone as a designer, the course is an adventure in thinking as well as a mixing chamber for disciplines across the university: social sciences, arts, economics, business history, science and technology studies, history of science, organization studies, informatics, media and communication studies, architecture and urbanism. Cultural ephemera is screened as a prelude to each lecture. Weekly readings offer evidence, discursive commentary, and critique. Tutorials help to shape group work. 

 

ARCH 8107 (15508)

Warren Fuermann

F 11am-12:50pm

This course presents an introductory survey of the history of gardens and the interrelationship of architecture and landscape architecture in Western Europe from antiquity to 1700, focusing primarily on Italy. The course examines chronologically the evolution of several key elements in landscape design: architectural and garden typologies; the boundaries between inside and outside; issues of topography and geography; various uses of water; organization of plant materials; and matters of garden decoration, including sculptural tropes. Specific gardens or representations of landscape in each of the four periods under discussion—Ancient Roman, medieval, early and late Renaissance, and Baroque—are examined and situated within their own cultural context. Throughout the seminar, comparisons of historical material with contemporary landscape design are emphasized. Limited enrollment.

 

ARCH 8117 (15514)

Anthony Acciavatti

M 11am-12:50pm

What if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had developed “soft infrastructures” and “living systems” for dealing with the changing flows of the Mississippi in and around New Orleans? What if Henry Ford had used soy protein for automotive parts and synthetic meats in the 1940s? Or what if South Asian nation states had adopted the Ganges Water Machine model in the 1970s to address critical water shortages in urban areas? What do these three seemingly disparate examples all have in common? Each is based on a patent or series of patents that were never adopted for one reason or another. These are just a few of the questions that animate this course. Historians ask the why and the how, but they are rarely trained to visualize what a city, a meal, or a landscape might have looked like had a particular technology or living system been adopted. Rather than shy away from such counterfactuals, we explore and seek to visualize these historical what-ifs by taking a comparative, global perspective on the history of patents as visual and textual artifacts. No prior knowledge of the history of science and technology or architecture is required. Limited enrollment.

 

HIST 8916 (14269) / HSHM 7520

Deborah Coen

T 1:30pm-3:20pm

Recent scholarship brings the atmosphere from the background to the foreground of history. Inspired in part by present-day problems of climate change, air pollution, airborne viruses, and police brutality, humanities scholars are teasing out the historical specificity of experiences of the atmosphere. A focus on the atmosphere allows historians to make connections between local, embodied practices and planetary processes. We explore ways to periodize the atmosphere’s history, from its invention in the seventeenth century to its weaponization in the twentieth. While some scholars in the humanities are working in partnership with the natural sciences, others present their work as complements to or critiques of science. We consider how scientific and cultural analyses of the atmosphere can build on each other as well as the tensions between them. Authors include Leo Spitzer, Peter Sloterdijk, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Christina Sharpe, Timothy Choi, and Kimberly Bain. Students have the option of a creative final project or a historical research paper.