Architecture LEAP

Architecture LEAP 1610 and 1611 are sequence classes introducing students to the built environment. Fall semester (1610) gives students the critical and analytical tools necessary to better understand, appreciate and respond to the architectural world they encounter every day. With these tools, students will be encouraged to react critically to the basic architectural elements of space, material, mass, color, texture, line, form and content, and to appreciate a building’s context within the larger fabric of physical site, social life and the existing culture within which it was created.

Beyond this new critical ability to respond to the built environment, the class will teach not just what a building is when perception is limited to basic architectural elements, but what and how it means when the connections between culture and social life and technology are understood. The class will help students open their eyes to the rich and varied architectural world around them and give them tools necessary to understand and write about that world through creative, critical interpretation. The class will view movies, examine graphic novels, discuss TV shows and even venture into the world of college and professional sports to understand the important role architecture plays in our everyday lives.

The class will address the important issue of architects themselves; that is to say, who they were, how they were, and how they were educated or apprenticed to design and construct buildings. But history, as manifested by style and context, is not the only critical tool available toward understanding the lives of architects. Students will be introduced to writings by and about architects, from the very beginning of western culture to what is being discussed by architects and architectural critics in architectural and literary circles right now.

Even though the class is designed to encourage the dreams and aspirations of pre-architecture students, it is also designed to enrich the lives of any student, regardless of the career path she or he might select during the university experience. Because at some point in every person’s life, whether as a professional or simply as a member of society, a close encounter with architecture and with architects is inevitable.

Finally, the class will examine important and expansive implications of what the famous architect Louis Kahn meant when he said, “Architecture is the thoughtful making of spaces.” A much larger enterprise than perhaps words are able to convey in his simple but elegant statement. Because in the end, all natural and man-made phenomena are, in significant and complicated ways, connected and interrelated with the human condition. As we better understand architecture, we understand more of what it means to be a human being.

In the past, human beings have tried to discover the secrets underlying the natural world, the substance and material of the universe. Today, however, during the first decade of the twenty first century, scientists and philosophers are increasingly concerned with the total picture of life on this planet — detecting the underlying relationships between phenomena, and patterns of connections. In the same way, this class uses the lens of cultural studies to examine forces and ideas which shape buildings and environments we construct.

Building on material taught in Arch LEAP 1610, Arch LEAP 1611 introduces students to a range of perspectives on the built environment itself. The course introduces critical and historical texts to examine the important concepts of community and utopia, and how human beings have gathered themselves and their buildings together into villages, towns and cities thus creating what Christian Norberg-Schultz has referred to as “genius loci,” or spirit of place.

The class considers architecture in the context of community as an inextricable part of a pattern of interactions that play out on the land, and teaches critical understanding of the relationship between space and community, land and ideas, environment and culture. Moreover, students will begin to understand that spiritual connection between human beings within a nurturing and safe urban landscape is central to realizing what it means to be a human being.

Spring semester also brings together the collective understanding of architecture, city planning, environmental studies, ecology, sustainability, conservation, and new urbanism, so that students may begin to understand how it is possible to recover our broken and blighted cities and find ways to live sustainable urban lives.

The built environment constructs a three dimensional image of concepts about space, a protective shell for human activities, and reveals culturally symbolic meaning. In the same way, groups of structures create a physical embodiment of community ideas, values and beliefs. When cities are built, architecture and structure reveal the development of technology, the changing landscape of society – its needs, values and aspirations, and the relationship between human beings and the institutions of society that play out in community settings.