Syllabus

Course Description

Enrollment

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.  It is taught in the School of Architecture and students in professional degree programs in architecture will comprise most of the enrollment.  Total enrollment is limited to 15.

Focus

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 effect actions and decisions by individuals and societies and thereby effect the form of the things they make.

Subject of Readings

The assigned readings begin with a focus on the idea of nature and how it is manifest in ancient cities, architecture, and other artifacts that have comprised the human-made environment within which our cultures have evolved.  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 resources.

Weekly Format

The course meets twice a week for one and a half hours each session.  The first session each week is a lecture by the instructor on subjects related to the weekly reading assignment.  A one-page written assignment for the week, based on the reading and the lecture, is due at the beginning of the second meeting of the week and serves as the focus of that week's seminar discussion.

Readings Assignments and Assigned Paper

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.

Texts for the Course

• Norman Crowe, Nature and the Idea of a Man-made World, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994).
• Kwak, Alison, and Walter Grondzik. The Green Studio Handbook (Oxford: The Architectural Press, 2007).  -or-  Principles and Practices of Sustainable Architectural Design from The European Commission, Directorate General XVII for Energy . . . (London: James & James, 1999).

While these are the principle texts, readings excerpted from other sources are assigned during the semester as well.  See items denoted by an asterisk in "Readings" for references to documents listed as reading assignments in the calendar.

Grading

INTRODUCTION

Green Design

"Green Building Design," "Sustainable Design," "Environmentally Conscious Design" and "Ecological Design" are various shades of the same thing.  They reflect a growing awareness that the nonrenewable resources of energy that fuel the construction process and heat, cool, and provide light and ventilation throughout the life of a building, are finite.  In addition, the availability of raw materials that provide the basic stuff of building materials and manufactured building components are finite as well, while their procurement, shipping, and fabrication into building components consumes energy and produces pollution long before they take their place as integral parts of a building. Sustainable building practices begin with site selection, climatic conditions, and the urban or rural setting of a design; then proceed to the selection of building materials and components; and are finally reflected in the refinement of the completed design in the form of passive energy considerations.  The environmentalist's adage, "think globally, act locally," rings true among the critical ethical responsibilities of an architect or anyone else who is responsible, no matter how small the part, for the form and content of our built environment.  So-called Green Building design is a humanist enterprise as well.  This is to say that it includes how a building influences our awareness of the world in all its dimensions--how it insures our comfort and our sense of well-being and how it performs its role among many buildings that make up an urban setting that in turn nurtures the life of a community--all are part of the broader realm of "sustainable design."

A Dual Focus on Humanism and Science

A holistic view of the world was accomplished by ancient societies through a unity of their culture--religion, ethics, techniques of agriculture and craft, and how they built their houses and their towns--all drawn from a common cosmic vision or framework.  Thales of Miletus, an Ionian philosopher of the sixth century B.C., by means of intellect and logic, placed such a notion of unity into a consciously theoretical framework.  For having done so, he was regarded by Aristotle, two centuries later, as the founder of the physical sciences.  In our time, Thales' revelation has come to be known as "The Ionian Enchantment" and it has permeated scientific thought ever since.  This search for objective reality in science "is another way of satisfying religious hunger" according to the biologist E. O. Wilson.  Wilson goes on to say that the premise behind the Enchantment is that "when we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here.... The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities.  The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship."  Wilson offers, instead, a world view that extends beyond science and across the great branches of learning, a view that pre-supposes the possibility of a unity of knowledge and understanding.  He suggests a metaphysics that encompasses both science and religion, and in doing so, most fully addresses the human condition.  He calls it "Consilience."¹ His motivation arose from the environmental crisis, especially the failure of science to communicate the depth of environmental problems, and the failure of the humanities to adequately provide a world view that recognizes the consequent need to understand ourselves and our built world as reciprocal with nature.

A reverence for both nature and the man-made as part of the same thing sees "the environment" as something totally inclusive:

"Perhaps it is enough to argue that the preservation of the living world is necessary to our long-term material prosperity and health.  But there is another, and in some ways deeper, reason not to let the natural world slip away.  It has to do with the defining qualities and self-image of the human species.  Suppose, for the sake of argument, that new species can one day be engineered and stable ecosystems built from them.  With that distant prospect in mind, should we go ahead and, for the short-term gain, allow the original species and ecosystems to be lost?  Yes? Erase Earth's living history?  Then also burn the art galleries, make cordwood of the musical instruments, pulp the musical scores, erase Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Goethe, and the Beatles too, because all these--or at least fairly good substitutes--can be re-created."¹

"The issue, like all great decisions, is moral.  Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.  The ethic from which moral decisions spring is a norm or standard of behavior in support of a value, and value in turn depends on purpose.  Purpose, whether personal or global, whether urged by conscience or graven in sacred script, expresses the image we hold of ourselves and our society.  A conservation ethic is that which aims to pass on to future generations the best part of the nonhuman world.  To know this world is to gain a proprietary attachment to it.  To know it well is to love and take responsibility for it."