Description

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Program

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Architectural Engineering And Environmental Design

Objectives

• The approach of the course will be to address current day problems, projecting back into the past in order to offer something of a historical "frame" to understand the present. The course begins by looking at four or five issues in architecture understood to be critical for present times: globalization, technology, cognitive sciences, the environment, and cultural politics. The course then reaches back over the last fifty years to establish precedents for these current-day preoccupations in architectural and critical terms. The above topics will be seen to have formal or theoretical resonances in a host of architectural movements: the technofantasist movements of the 1960s, "post-modern" semiosis, phenomenology, Third World "social modernism", vernacularism, post- modernism, cybernetics, and so on. Students will look at buildings, writing and movements as part of the evolving critiques of modernism from the 1950s onwards; in doing so, the students will come to examine the manner in which modernism was both critically unraveled and reinvented at different moments of its aftermath.