Master's Self-Study

Modern Architecture and Architectural Design

From the Enlightenment and the iron age of building to critical regionalism and climate: history, theory, and a design studio track.

Orientation

This course follows the shape shared by the first-year history and theory sequences at the Ivy League professional M.Arch programs: Harvard GSD's Buildings, Texts, and Contexts (HIS 4100 and HIS 4223, Modernism, its Practices, and its Theories), Yale's Architecture and Modernity pair (ARCH 7001 and 7002, the latter covering Western architectural theory from 1750 to the present), Columbia GSAPP's Questions in Architectural History I and II (which begin with the late eighteenth century Enlightenment and industrialization), Penn's ARCH 5110 History and Theory I (mid nineteenth century through World War II), and Princeton's requirement of courses in 18th and 19th century and 20th century architecture.

Every one of those programs pairs history and theory with a design studio. You will do the same: each week has a reading and viewing track and a small drawing, modeling, or writing exercise, and the last two weeks are a capstone design project with a written statement.

Columbia's distribution rule is worth adopting as a habit: look at work outside the North Atlantic (its post-1800 South/East category). Modules 10 and 12 do this on purpose.

Prerequisites

  • Two semesters of architectural history (Renaissance to Modern) are a stated prerequisite at Harvard GSD; if you lack them, spend the week before Module 1 with the Harvard Online Architectural Imagination course and Ching, Jarzombek, and Prakash.
  • One semester of calculus and one of physics (mechanics) are prerequisites at GSD and Columbia; you need them only for Module 13 (structures and environment).
  • Drawing: a sketchbook, pencils, a scale ruler. Software: any free 3D tool (Blender) is enough; Rhino is the studio standard but costs money, so it is optional.

Pace: 14 weeks at about 10 to 12 hours a week. Studio exercises take most of the time.

What the schools teach

Harvard (GSD)MArch I: HIS 4100 Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Origins and Ends; HIS 4223 Modernism, its Practices, and its Theories; structures, environmental systems, construction; core studios then option studios and thesis.
Yale (School of Architecture)ARCH 7001 Architecture and Modernity: Theories and Projects; ARCH 7002 Architecture and Modernity: Sites and Spaces (theory from 1750 through close reading); one history and theory elective with a 5,000 word paper.
Columbia (GSAPP)Questions in Architectural History I and II on architecture and modernity across two centuries; four distribution courses across pre/post 1800 and North/West versus South/East.
Princeton (SoA)ARC 501/502 studios; six History and Theory courses including 18th and 19th century, 20th century, and urbanism or landscape.
Penn (Weitzman)ARCH 5110 History and Theory I, mid nineteenth century through World War II.
Cornell (AAP)Seven semester professional M.Arch; history sequence ARCH 5801 and 5802 (per equivalency page).

No matching course found

  • Brown: no graduate architecture school (Brown undergraduates often cross-register at RISD). No M.Arch.
  • Dartmouth: no architecture school or M.Arch.
  • Stanford: no M.Arch program; architecture design appears inside Civil and Environmental Engineering and Art History, not a professional degree.
  • Oxford: no school of architecture or architecture degree (architectural history appears in History of Art).

The program, step by step

Module 1

Orientation: what architects do, and how to read drawings

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Name the three Vitruvian criteria and test them on one building you know
  • Read plan, section, and elevation conventions
  • Start a precedent notebook

Exercise or deliverable

Measure one room you live in. Draw a plan at 1:50 (or 1/4 inch = 1 foot), one section, and one elevation by hand.

Assessment

Self-check: could a stranger build the room from your three drawings? Note every missing dimension.

Module 2

Enlightenment, industry, and the question of truth (1750 to 1860)

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Explain the primitive hut argument and why it mattered
  • Contrast Ruskin's moral reading of material with Viollet-le-Duc's rationalism
  • Describe what iron and glass changed

Exercise or deliverable

Write 1,200 words: is the Crystal Palace architecture by Ruskin's standard? By Viollet-le-Duc's? Use two quotations from each.

Assessment

Rubric: clear thesis, accurate quotation, one counter-argument answered.

Module 3

Steel frame and skyscraper: Chicago and the tall building

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Explain base, shaft, and capital in Sullivan's essay
  • Relate structure to facade on a real tall building

Exercise or deliverable

Pick one tall building near you (or the Wainwright Building from photos). Draw its facade bay and annotate structure versus skin.

Assessment

Peer or self review: does the drawing show where the load actually goes?

Module 4

Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Frank Lloyd Wright

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Trace the Arts and Crafts critique of industry
  • Read the Prairie House plan as a spatial idea

Exercise or deliverable

Trace the Robie House ground floor plan (from the Wasmuth plates or a published plan) and diagram circulation, hearth, and view lines.

Assessment

Write five sentences: what does the plan do that a Victorian house plan does not?

Module 5

Industry and the avant garde: Behrens, Gropius, Loos, Mendelsohn

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Explain the AEG turbine factory as a corporate and architectural program
  • State Loos's argument against ornament and its limits

Exercise or deliverable

Make a two-column chart of five buildings from 1905 to 1922: what each claims to be modern about, and the material evidence.

Assessment

Seminar question to answer in writing: is Loos's essay about architecture or about class?

Module 6

The Bauhaus and the new housing

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Describe the Bauhaus program and its shift from craft to industry
  • Analyze Siedlung housing as social policy and form

Exercise or deliverable

Draw a typical Weissenhof or Berlin Siedlung dwelling unit at 1:100 and calculate floor area per person.

Assessment

Short answer: what did the minimum dwelling gain and lose?

Module 7

Le Corbusier: machine, villa, and the five points

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • State the five points and find each one in the Villa Savoye
  • Read Vers une architecture as polemic

Exercise or deliverable

Build a quick study model (card or Blender) of the Villa Savoye and photograph the promenade in six frames.

Assessment

Write 600 words: which of the five points is structural, and which is rhetorical?

Module 8

Mies, the International Style, and the 1925 to 1932 debates

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Explain the International Style as an exhibition and a label
  • Read a Mies corner detail as an argument

Exercise or deliverable

Draw the Seagram Building corner (or a Barcelona Pavilion column) at a large scale and label each material.

Assessment

Compare with Scharoun (the Other Tradition): 500 words on organic versus universal space.

Module 9

Housing, the city, and the welfare state

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Connect the garden city to later planning
  • Assess public housing successes and failures without myth

Exercise or deliverable

Design one urban block (about 100 by 100 m) of mid-rise housing with a courtyard. Plan at 1:500, one section.

Assessment

Self-review against Jacobs: list eyes on the street, mixed use, and short blocks in your scheme.

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Module 10

Monumentality and global modernisms

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Explain Kahn's served and servant spaces
  • Study modernism outside Europe and North America as its own history

Exercise or deliverable

Write a 1,500 word case study on one modern building outside the North Atlantic (for example Dhaka, Chandigarh, Brasilia, Sao Paulo, Tokyo). Include two drawings.

Assessment

Rubric: sources cited, building described from drawings not just photos, a claim about local adaptation.

Module 11

Critiques of modernism: complexity, the city, and pop

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • State Venturi's argument for complexity and contradiction
  • Explain what Learning from Las Vegas asked architects to look at

Exercise or deliverable

Photograph and diagram one ordinary commercial strip or Main Street near you, in the manner of Learning from Las Vegas (sign, shed, parking).

Assessment

Short essay: what did postmodernism get right, and what did it sell?

Module 12

Critical regionalism, globalization, and contemporary practice

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Explain Frampton's critical regionalism and its critics
  • Place current practice (Koolhaas, Grafton, Mehrotra) in that argument

Exercise or deliverable

Site study: pick a real site you can visit. Record climate, light, topography, materials, and building traditions in 4 diagrams.

Assessment

This site study becomes the site for your capstone.

Module 13

Building technology, structure, and climate

about 10 to 12 hours

Goals

  • Size a simple beam and understand load paths
  • Run or reason through a daylight and energy check
  • Explain embodied versus operational carbon

Exercise or deliverable

For your capstone site, design a roof and wall assembly, size one beam by hand, and estimate window to wall ratio for daylight. Optional: Ladybug Tools sun study.

Assessment

Check your beam with a second method or an online calculator; explain any difference.

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Module 14

Capstone studio: a small public building

about 20 or more hours

Goals

  • Integrate site, program, structure, and theory in one project
  • Present like a final review

Exercise or deliverable

Design a small public building (a reading room, about 300 square meters) on your Module 12 site. Deliver: site plan, plans, two sections, one elevation, a model or 3D view, a structural diagram, and a 1,000 word statement placing the design in the history you studied.

Assessment

Hold a mock review: record a 10 minute presentation and answer three hard questions in writing. Grade against: clarity, site response, structural logic, argument.

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