Architecture 50611: Nature and the Built Environment

Course Description

This is a seminar that is open to graduate students and upper division undergraduates. It has no stipulated pre-requisites and is open to all majors.

This course explores the evolutionary roots of form and order in the built environment. While grounded in scientific evidence, a broad perspective of humanism is emphasized throughout, with discussions of how ideas, beliefs, experience, ideals, and human nature animate individuals and societies and thereby give form to the things they make.

Readings begin with the idea of nature and how it is manifest in ancient cities, architecture, and other artifacts. This is then contrasted with today’s built environment and our world of increasing economic and cultural globalization, the advent of mega-cities, and an impending worldwide scarcity of critical natural resources.

Weekly Format:

The course meets twice a week. The first session is a lecture by the instructor on subjects related to the weekly reading assignment. A one-page writing assignment for the week, based on the reading and the lecture, is due on the second meeting of the same week as the focus of that week’s seminar discussion.

Readings and Assignments

Most weekly reading assignments, as indicated in the calendar, are from the text for the course, while a few are from other sources.

In addition to the weekly one page papers, an extended paper (of 9 to 12 pages) is due the next-to-the-last week of the course. Its subject may be selected from a range of subjects suggested by the instructor or it may reflect a particular personal interest of the student’s, with the instructor’s permission.

Text for the Course

Norman Crowe, Nature and the Idea of a Man-made World, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994).

While this is the principle text, readings excerpted from other sources are assigned during the semester as well. See items denoted by an asterisk in “Extended Bibliography” for titles of works from which reading assignments listed in the calendar are made.