Architecture and Urbanism (AURB)

The architectural discourse of the city is introduced through close examination of Chicago and other major urban centers present and past. Themes include the city as a political entity, relationships between urban and architectural form, and the technical infrastructure of the metropolis. A parallel film series explores the cultural construction of urban life.

This class explores urban form and metropolitan systems and introduces a synthetic overview of the interdependent factors that influence the design of 21st century metropolitan cities. The course covers several cities spanning the globe as case studies to expose students to a range of city-making protocols. Both the urban condition as a whole and less formal, incremental (sometimes spontaneous) urbanisms are presented in detail. The course addresses current day urban challenges, projecting back into the (modernist) past to frame our understanding of the present. Vital issues are spotlighted affecting contemporary architecture and urban design: globalization, technology, social engineering, the environment, and cultural politics. The course enables students to establish a broader definition of "urban" by investigating both common and distinct design strategies of divergent cities.