Examines themes in the history of design, with emphasis on Euro-American theory and practice in their global contexts. Addresses the historical design of communications, objects, and environments as meaningful processes of decision-making, adaptation, and innovation. Critically assesses the dynamic interaction of design with politics, economics, technology, and culture in the past and at present. 

Seminar on how culture interacts with architecture. Analyzes architecture as a conveyor of messages that transcend stylistic, formal, and iconographic concerns to include an assessment of disciplinary, political, ideological, social, and cultural factors. Critically reviews methodologies and theoretical premises of studies on culture and meaning. Focuses on examples from Islamic history and establishes historical and theoretical frameworks for investigation.

‘Islam resembles what was later to be called “the Western tradition” in so many ways—the intellectual efforts to fuse Judeo-Christian scripture with the categories of Greek philosophy, the literary emphasis on courtly love, the scientific rationalism, the legalism, puritanical monotheism, missionary impulse, the expansionist mercantile capitalism—even the periodic waves of fascination with “Eastern mysticism”—that only the deepest historical prejudice could have blinded European historians to the conclusion that, in fact, this is the Western tradition.’

David Graeber, “There Never Was a West. Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between,” 2007

شمس العداوة حتى يستقاد لهم ... وأعظم الناس أحلاماً إذا قدروا

الأخطل في قصيدة يمدح بها عبد الملك بن مروان من كتاب الأغاني                               

In Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Garth Fowden says, “There are roads out of Antiquity that do not lead to the Renaissance.”  This statement challenges the dominant historical narrative, which posits the West as the only heir to the classical tradition, and opens the door for the Islamic culture to reclaim it. 

Following Fowden, this seminar offers a revision of the concept of Late-Antiquity through an in-depth study of the early Islamic artistic and architectural culture.  It examines the sequence of well-known Umayyad and early Abbasid monuments and artifacts (7th-8th c), which engaged in a vibrant and dynamic cross-cultural creative process. They treated Late Antiquity as a heritage to synthesize and build upon, or, sometimes, modify, deconstruct, or combine with other cultures with which the Islamic world came into contact.  The patterns of appropriation, modification, and transposition are interpreted as a conscious attempt to chart a new, or, perhaps more accurately, a Post-Post-Classical art and architecture, which ultimately bypassed all ethnic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries within the Islamic world despite its political fragmentation and crossed over to inform and invigorate the emergent European awakening in the late Middle Ages.  In other words, the seminar challenges the exclusive historiography of art history that posits the Western Renaissance as the sole heir of Antiquity and proposes another scenario with a more hybrid genealogy that invites us to rethink the impact of periodization on our conception of art history itself.

General study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. Focus 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. Explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as simple chronological succession of ideas.

GEO—DESIGN brings the agency of the “geo—” to bear on design at a moment when the planet—Earth, Gaîa—is a matter for thought and action.

In landscape architecture, regional land use and planning, and other environmental design fields, the term geodesign, as framed by Jack Dangermond and Carl Steinitz, has come to describe the application of computational tools, and in particular geographic information sciences, to model, visualize, and analyze ecological systems within design workflows. This course is a quest for a more material and situated context for geo—design, one that requires a more expansive and differentiated toolbox. The seminar distinguishes between the “globe” (the abstract, computational, anthropocentric view of the Earth) and the “planet” (complex Earth systems, and even cosmic forces, shared with other living beings and shaped by historical processes—geologic, ecological and political). A global perspective, also known as a God’s eye view, has often privileged a response from outside, maybe akin to geoengineering, in the form of promissory technologies and design solutioneering, at the risk of perpetuating the depleting forces and extractivist values that underpin the present climate crisis.

Where might and design touch down to counter such spatial abstraction? From a “planet-centered” perspective, geo-design focuses both on planetary-scale relations as well as on grounded places and situated practices. Such ability to respond (or response-ability) proposes a diffraction of the “global” viewpoint into a series of planetary portals or core samples, that look into a section of the Earth—its stories, matters, practices. The portal in speculative writing and science-fiction represents is an opening into time and space that connects seemingly unconnected geographies, and in this seminar, offers a theoretical framework for unearthing the systemic and situated logics of the climate crisis. The spatial framing of the Earth into such planetary portals is a lens to unearth the entanglements of climate, design, and politics and to speculate with different media on how to compose “Earths” that are worth living.

The course introduces theories and practices that seek to make (common) sense of the planet. The introduces voices from the humanities on the topic of Earth, planet, planetarity and planetarium (Spivak, Chakrabarty, Latour, Mbembe), along with allied practices of geohumanities, geo–philosophy, geopower, gerontology, geoaesthetics and geotrauma (Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz, Povinelli, Gabrys, Haraway, Tsing). The course then examines a series of planetary portals, many of which are iconic to the imagination of global commons, through practices that have addressed related climate controversies through design and architecture. Some such sites and practices include the Arctic and Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt (Susan Schuppli, Kathryn Yusoff, Olafur Eliasson, Design Earth), Amazonia deforestation (Ursula Biemann, Paolo Tavares), Oceans and Tidal Zones (Cooking Sections, TAB21, Ant Farm), the Great Coral Reef bleach (Karrabing Film Collective, Institute for Figuring), the atmosphere (Nerea Calvillo, Liam Young, Office for Political Innovation), the Caribbean (WAI Think Thank), as well as in planetary ruptures and geo-traumas in the form of disasters like plantations, landslides, heatwaves, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.

Throughout, the course explores the range of representational and discursive practices— emphasizes the roots of geo-graphy as “earth writing” or “earth drawing”—be it visual description, material sensors, computational processes, forensic reports, community activism, speculative narratives, institution building or unbuilding, and various combinations thereof. Collectively, we inquire into geo—design as a practice of life-support, and how it may be embodied, enacted, and imagined.
 

Beginning in the 1980s, the critique of Eurocentrism opened up an increasingly large domain for historical analysis and reassessment in both architectural and art history. . We will try to make sense of this shift and its embodied critiques as well as their on-going transformations, potentials, and problematics. Since secondary literature and analysis of this phenomenon is practically non-existent, we will study the phenomenon by trying to assemble different takes and perspectives.

The Temporal Commons is a multi-year research project that aims to bridge two millennia—one behind us & one to come—by integrating speculative futures with historical foundations. It will challenge the immediacy that dominates architectural discourse and the instinctive temporal narrowing of modernism’s legacy of presentism, proposing instead an approach grounded the expanded historical perspective of the longue dureé. The Temporal Commons workshops are offered in parallel to a sequence of research studios on topics in architecture and climate crisis. Each workshop adopts a historical perspective to pursue research in building materials, legal and regulatory frameworks, and environment.
The Spring 2026 version of the workshop will explore these areas in the context of mountain regions vulnerable to flash flooding and will focus on a range of topics including historical ecologies, timber extraction and use, riparian laws, cultural practices of riverine settlements, hydraulic science, property ownership, and other issues that will open new perspectives on the potentials for transformative architectural approaches.
Students may contribute to the workshop from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including building technology, design, history, material science, environmental science, computation, etc.

If the architectural drawing moves something unknown to something known (from vision to building), the reverse could be said of the architectural survey. The potential of the architectural survey lies in its mobilizing of something known into unforeseeable future uses (from building to visions). This course centers on recasting the architectural survey from conveyor of building facts to instrument for building stories. Operating somewhere between the limits of absolute truth and virtual truth, our research will aim to uncover new ways of engaging architecture’s relationship to vision, documentation, and the art of renewal (or preservation) against the backdrop of racial, economic, and material conditions in the turn-of-the century South. More specifically, the site of the course will be Tuskegee University and the legacy of Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Black architect, MIT graduate, and designer and builder of a significant portion of the campus’s brick buildings. Students will consider Taylor’s work both in the present context and its inception under Booker T. Washington’s leadership.

In addition to rigorously surveying a building through traditional and non-traditional survey methods and media, students will engage Taylor’s legacy through on-site field work paired with archival research. Observations will be filtered through distinct ways of looking to describe an existing building not as it is but as it is seen by the student. The results, a set of unconventional as-built drawings, will question and advance visuality as architecture’s essential resource.

This seminar invites architects to step away from the design of buildings and toward the choreography of behaviors. Instead of treating game engines as tools to simulate physical architecture, we will explore them as spaces of agency, interaction, and emergent systems - approached through the lens of the Non-Playable Character (NPC).

Non-Player-Characters can be understood as supporting characters without agency in the design process - figures who move through, occupy, and animate spaces but do not participate in shaping them. In games like The Sims or Animal Crossing, their behaviors are bounded by pre-set logics: they water flowers where flowers exist, gather where furniture is placed, or follow circulation paths laid out by the player. This dynamic mirrors how some architectural users are often positioned: not as co-designers but as bodies that test, confirm, or reveal the affordances of constructed environments. Thinking of NPCs this way allows us to frame game engines and digital twins as laboratories where human and more-than-human presence is simulated, not negotiated, offering architects a way to study occupation and spatial legibility while questioning the confines of agency within design practice.

In the world of simulated environments, particularly in computer games, NPCs are not players that the world is actively designed around; they are zero-sum rules, behaviors, consequences. They react, they loop, and perhaps most importantly, they adapt. What happens when we begin to think of design not in terms of form, but in terms of relationships, reactions, and responses? This course frames the NPC as a design actor; a system-aware inhabitant of simulated space. Through the logic of NPCs, we’ll explore how spatial environments are less about static structures and more about the relationships, scripts, and feedback loops they host. We’ll treat NPCs as both products and producers of space, understanding them as narrative tools, systems-thinking proxies, and spatial collaborators.

Throughout the semester, we will be joined by guest speakers working in level design, game development, and interactive storytelling, who will share insights into the production of behavior-driven environments and the role of NPCs in shaping user experience. These conversations will give students a lens into game-design practices and help situate architectural thinking within broader world-building and digital design ecosystems.

Participants in the seminar will learn to prototype not walls, but worlds - not elevations, but behaviors - using the affordances of game engines to build interactive ecologies rather than inert environments. If architecture traditionally answers what stands still, dynamic environmental design methods ask: what moves, what interacts and why? The seminar introduces game engines, and their respective asset development pipelines, as design laboratories where spatial form, character logic, and environmental systems converge, enabling new ways to imagine architecture as dynamic, lived experience. We will investigate the different opportunities to explore complex relationships within constructed environments through the lens of changing and adaptive game environments, illustrate interactions, responses, and challenges within architectural space, and investigate the limits and possibilities within simulated space. Creating processes and pipelines that weave architectural observations and design strategies into the logics of game development, we explore the opportunities and limitations that derive from the conversion of 3D assets, material mapping, and digital environments into interactive and adaptive worlds.

Introduction to theories of modernism and postmodernism and their related forms (roughly 18th century to present) in art and design. Focuses on how artists use the tension between fine art and mass culture to critique both. Examines visual art in a range of genres, from painting to design objects and "relational aesthetics." Works of art are viewed in their interaction with advertising, caricature, comics, graffiti, television, fashion, "primitive" art, propaganda, and networks on the internet.

Additional work required of students taking graduate version.