Fall 2024 Courses
For more information, view the UC Berkeley Online Schedule of Classes.
- REQUIRED UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
- REQUIRED GRADUATE COURSES
- ELECTIVES AND SEMINARS
Arch 11A – Introduction to Visual Representation and Drawing [David Orkand]
Introductory studio course: theories of representation and the use of several visual means, including freehand drawing and digital media, to analyze and convey ideas regarding the environment. Topics include contour, scale, perspective, color, tone, texture, and design.
Arch 100A – Fundamentals of Architectural Design [Various Instructors]
Introductory courses in the design of buildings. Problems emphasize conceptual strategies of form and space, site relationships and social, technological and environmental determinants. 100A focuses on the conceptual design process
Arch 100C – Architectural Design III [Various Instructors]
This is a studio course in architectural design. Students work on individual and group design projects that build on topics from Architecture 100B with additional integration of conditions pertinent to architectural production that may include architectural precedents, context, landscape and urban issues, envelope, performance, structure, and tectonics in the design of buildings.
Arch 112- The Social Life of Buildings [Alec Stewart]
How do buildings form and inform how we live — as individuals and as part of different communities? This course explores the multiple ways in which people and buildings interact. Our cultural and economic practices shape the form of our environment which in turn shapes social constructions of gender, race, and class. At the same time, as individuals, we are always making choices about how we use our spaces. Intended as a gateway to advanced architectural humanities classes, the course is organized around three themes that highlight ways of thinking about individual actions, social constructions of gender, race, and class, and cultural associations of the built environment.
Arch 130 – Introduction to Architectural Design Theory and Criticism [Sam Shpall]
This class introduces students to the history and practice of design theory from the late 19th century to the present, emphasizing developments of the last four decades. Readings and lectures explore specific constellations of theory and practice in relation to changing social and historical conditions. The course follows the rise of modernist design thinking, with particular emphasis on the growing influence of technical rationality across multiple fields in the post-World War II period. Systematic approaches based on cybernetics and operations research (among others) are examined in the context of wider attempts to develop a science of design. Challenges to modernist design thinking, through advocacy planning and community-based design, the influence of social movements and countercultures, and parallel developments in postmodernism within and beyond architecture, provide the critical background for consideration of recent approaches to design theory, including those informed by developments in digital media and technology, environmental and ecological concerns, questions surrounding the globalization of architectural production, and the development of new materials.
Arch 142 – Sustainability Colloquium [Gail Brager]
Presentations on a variety of topics related to sustainability, offering perspectives from leading practitioners: architectural designers, city planners, consultants, engineers, and researchers. Students can enroll for one unit (required attendance plus reading) or two units (with additional writing assignments.
Arch 150 – Introduction to Structures [Ramon Weber]
Study of forces, materials, and structural significance in the design of buildings. Emphasis on understanding the structural behavior of real building systems.
Arch 170A – An Historical Survey of Architecture and Urbanism [Andrew Shanken]
The first part of this sequence studies the ancient and medieval periods; the second part studies the period since 1400; the aim is to look at architecture and urbanism in their social and historical contexts.
*For MArch students only*
Arch 200A – Introduction to Architecture Studio I [Various Instructors]
Introductory course in architectural design and theories for graduate students. Problems emphasize the major format, spatial, material, tectonic, social, technological, and environmental determinants of building form. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips.
Arch 200C – Representational Practice in Architectural Design I [Matthew Kendall]
This course will address three distinct levels of representational practice in architectural design: 1) cultivate an understanding of the foundational discourse and diversity of approaches to architectural representation; 2) develop a fluency in the canonical methods found in architectural practice; 3) encourage the development of a personal relationship to forms of modeling and formats of drawing.
Arch 201 – Architecture & Urbanism Design Studio [Various Instructors]
The design of buildings or communities of advanced complexity. Each section deals with a specific topic such as housing, public and institutional buildings, and local or international community development. Studio work is supplemented by lectures, discussions, readings, and field trips.
Arch 203 – Integrated Design Studio [Various Instructors]
The Integrated Design Studio is the penultimate studio where students incorporate their accumulated knowledge into architectural solutions. The students demonstrate the integrative thinking that shapes complex architectural design and technical solutions. Students will possess an understanding to classify, compare, summarize, explain and/or interpret information. The students will also become proficient in using specific information to accomplish a task, correctly selecting the appropriate information and accurately applying it to the solution of a specific problem while also distinguishing the effects of its implementation.
Arch 204A – Thesis Seminar [Various Instructors]
Focused design research as the capstone project for graduate students.
Arch 205A – Studio One [Philip Tidwell]
The first semester of a one-year, post-professional design studio is intended for those students who have a professional architecture degree and wish to explore current design issues in a stimulating, rigorous, and highly experimental studio setting.
Arch 207A – Architecture Lectures Colloquium [Ajay Manthripragada]
TBA
Arch 207B – Architecture Research Colloquium [Maria Alvarez Garcia]
This course accompanies the second year of the required architecture and urbanism design studio in the three-year option of the Master of Architecture program. It is the second in a series of three one-unit colloquia, scheduled consecutively in the fall for the first three years of the program. For a one-hour session each week, faculty in the Department of Architecture, other departments of the College of Environmental Design, and global guest speakers will present lectures on their research and design practices in urbanism.
Arch 207C – Professional Practice Colloquium [Dan Speigel]
This course accompanies the required comprehensive design studio in the three-year option of the Master of Architecture program. It is the third in a series of three one-unit colloquia, scheduled consecutively for the first three semesters of the program.
Arch 207D – The Cultures of Practice [TBD]
The nature of architectural practice, how it has evolved, and how it is changing in today’s world is the theme of the class. The course considers how diverse cultures — both anthropological and professional — contribute to practice, and how the culture of practice evolves. The class has three five-week modules, devoted to the following themes: traditions of practice, research in the culture of the profession, and innovations in practice.
Arch 260 – Introduction to Construction, Graduate Level [Yasmin Vobis]
This course addresses the methods and materials of construction. While students will not be experts at the end of the semester, the course should give students the confidence to feel comfortable on a construction site or when designing a small building for a studio. The course will focus on four major territories: structural materials, building envelope, built elements such as stairs and cabinets, costs, labor conditions, conventional practices, and the regulatory environments that control design.
Arch 270 – History of Modern Architecture [Matt Lassner]
This course examines developments in design, theory, graphic representation, construction technology, and interior programming through case studies of individual buildings. Each lecture will delve deeply into one or sometimes two buildings to examine the program, spatial organization, critical building details, and the relationship of the case study building with regard to other parallel works and the architect’s overall body of work.
This list contains both graduate and undergraduate courses. Varying courses are cross-listed at the graduate level with a limited number of undergraduate seats available.
ARCH 98BC & 198BC – Berkeley Connect [Thomas Oommen and Tania Osorio]
Berkeley Connect is a mentoring program, offered through various academic departments, that helps students build intellectual community. Over the course of a semester, enrolled students participate in small group discussions facilitated by a graduate student mentor (following a faculty-directed curriculum), meet with their graduate student mentor for one-on-one academic advising, attend lectures and panel discussions featuring department faculty and alums, and go on field trips to campus resources. Students are not required to be declared majors in order to participate.
Arch 119/219 – Towards Community-Centric Futures [Sandhya Naidu Janardhan]
In an increasingly inequitable world, how do we design for communities at the margins by centering their lived experiences? In this course, students will research ways to apply participatory processes and investigate how social design practice can be used to address societal issues that lie at the intersections of the built environment and gender, social and health inequity, climate vulnerability and identity. Using applied principles of design thinking, research and a collaborative interdisciplinary approach, the seminar designed as a workshop series aims to equip students with tools and processes to facilitate their imagination of new inclusive futures through the urban built environment. Centering the voices and wisdom of marginalized communities, students will hear directly from community leaders. These workshops will serve as a lab for testing, iterating and improving processes for community engagement and design for spatial justice.
Arch 129/229 – Drawing Cities [Raveevarn Choksombatchai]
Designed and structured as an experimental drawing workshop, the course will explore techniques and methods of analyzing and investigating contemporary urban forms. Emphasizing close observations into particularities and latent potentials of specific urban issues or environments, these drawings strive to reveal not only the tangible but also shed light on the intangibles, rendering the invisible visible. These drawings augmented and altered realities; they straddle between real and fiction. They are allegorical and abstract on one hand, yet act as a practical re-investigation of the contemporary urban paradigm on the other. This course is open to undergraduate seniors and graduate students only.Arch
139/239 – Mexico City: Materiality, Performance, and Power [Greig Crysler]
This seminar will construct a cross-section through the complex history of Mexico City, beginning with the Aztec period in the 14th century, and culminating in the transnational present. The course is at once an attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of the rich layers of culture that interact to form Mexico City’s history and an inquiry into the potential of material conditions as a starting point for urban and architectural research, using one of the world’s largest and most dynamic cities as a site of investigation. The seminar’s chronological format will be anchored in several major historical texts that will give students a basic understanding of the city’s palimpsest history – one in which layers of the past shape the social and political spaces of urban life today. Course readings, discussions, and lectures will juxtapose more general historical accounts with detailed architectural and urban analyses, organized around urban case studies and their related material conditions (such as earth, water, concrete, blood, waste, and rubble). Students will gain an understanding of new epistemologies and methods of architectural and urban history through a rich combination of interdisciplinary texts. Course requirements include weekly reading responses, case study presentations, and a final paper. The course is open to upper-division undergraduates and graduate students from all disciplines.
Arch 139/239 – Another Architecture: Restaging Climate Futures [Neyran Turan]
How do we reimagine architecture on a burning planet marching toward climate catastrophe? Instead of greenwashing, how can we imagine, project, and practice architecture with a sense of sustained optimism? This course starts with the provocation that this possibility begins, first and foremost, with a radical reimagining of architecture itself as a field. Through the idea of restaging, the course positions architecture—both as a discipline and a practice—as a possible framework for imagining probable post-carbon climate futures. Organized around various themes and case studies, the seminar aims to identify new directions for critical thinking and speculative work in contemporary architecture, design, and scholarship.
Arch 139/239 – Modern Urbanism [Noah Rubin]
Learning from Jerusalem: Society and Space in a Shared City
This seminar will explore the urban design of Jerusalem as a shared space: a sacred site and a national emblem for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It will rely on the reciprocal relationship between society and space, i.e., how different cultures produce different urban settings to ask how a city reflects its living societies and examine the tools and tactics different societies employ to shape their living spaces through urban design, architecture, and urban planning. Furthermore, we will ask: What does the shape of a city reveal about space and urban community? How does the urban landscape transmit hidden meanings? Finally, we will ask what happens when society changes, bringing with it its goals and means of design, and explore changes to the urban landscape that occur when cultures change and, with them, values, notions of holiness, and spatial design. Shaped by different cultures over 3,000 years, Jerusalem will serve us as a unique laboratory through which we will trace the relationship between culture, architecture, and design as they are reflected on the ground and in various cultural media. A major source for the course will be a newly established database of Jerusalem Architectural Archives, which reveals new collections about the modern development of Jerusalem during the Ottoman, British Mandate, and Israeli periods.
Arch 169/269 – Imposters [Aaron Forrest]
Architecture relies on stability and authenticity to construct its cultural authority. The direct relationship between material and tectonic routinely goes unquestioned. But architecture has a long history of faking it: in reality, it is supremely invested in constructing the appearance of authenticity over its reality. In the context of contemporary digital media, the inherently scenographic nature of the discipline may now be opening up fertile new territory for design experimentation. This seminar will investigate a range of architectural impostors–-buildings that behave differently than they look—as generators for contemporary design thinking. Weekly discussions around copies, twins, reconstructions, fakes, mistranslations, and analogies will feed into student experiments that will mine the gap between construction and image for new design directions.
Arch 169/269 – Earthen Material Practices in Contemporary Art and Architecture [Ronald Rael]
This 3 credit course will be a survey of the use of raw earth, (e.g. adobe, rammed earth, cob, etc.) in contemporary Architectural and Artistic Practices. The seminar will be salon-style and consist of student presentations on various topics, projects, and themes. The course will contribute to and build upon an established database of contemporary earthen architecture, art, and culture, and knowledge of earth-based practices will include field studies and hands-on learning.
Arch 169/269 – Constructing Heterogeneity [Yasmin Vobis]
This seminar will look closely at theories and methods of heterogeneity to expose and expand upon their architectural potential in the context of the circular economy. How do we work with things at hand, the as-found, the imperfect, or broken, to reimagine these through a contemporary lens? Combining discussions on episodes of heterogeneity within architectural history with experimental design work, the aim of the seminar will be to develop new frameworks for constructing differences in a contemporary architectural context. Coursework includes weekly readings, participation in seminar discussions and presentations, and a creative project.
Arch 144/249 Introduction to Acoustics [Charles Salter]
This 1-unit course focuses on what architects need to know about acoustics. Initially, we address the fundamentals of acoustics, including how sound levels are described and human response to sound. Then the course covers building acoustics, mechanical equipment noise and vibration control, office acoustics, design of sound amplification systems, and environmental acoustics. This course is 5 weeks long and no enrollment will be accepted after August 21st, 2024.
Arch 129/229 – Across Sections [Maria Paz Gutierrez]
This seminar discusses milestones in the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the section and its potential fundamental transformations in the forthcoming decades. Students explore the theoretical implications of representational tools from the 15th century to the future micro and nanoscale and Artificial Intelligence interfaces, as well as imaging beyond the visible light spectrum to analyze, construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the section of a selected past or ongoing studio section. Through an analytic, critical, and constructive study of the history of the section, the seminar will conjecture on the future of The Section in architecture.
Arch 129/229 – Architectures of Accumulation [Georgios Eftaxiopoulos]
The seminar will scrutinize a series of architectures of accumulation that emerged during the past centuries and facilitated an extensive and violent process of extraction. It will critically discuss key buildings, policies, and institutions, and through talks, texts, and drawing assignments build a collection of such spaces that unveil their complexity and sophistication.
Arch 149/249 – Special Topics in Building Technology: Prepared Mass: Desert Architectures I [Liz Galvez]
Through the lens of thermal mass in desert environments, this seminar investigates how thermally massive buildings and their architects can “prepare mass” that enables (or enabled) human inhabitation in hot arid climates. This seminar will ask students to carefully study a series of “thermally massive” case studies in various desert climates through images, drawings, and model-making. Students will also engage in weekly readings, reading responses, and collective discussions.
Arch 179/279 – Constructing a Settler Colonial History of American Architecture [Charles L. Davis II]
This course challenges students to develop a settler colonial critique of “American Architecture” using rubrics from American Studies, Whiteness Studies, critical race theory, and architectural history. Students will develop a racial critique of canonical examples of American architecture using papers stored in the Environmental Design Archives, as well as mine local and digital archives to recover the contributions of women, sexual minorities, and people of color.
Arch 242 – Sustainability Colloquium [Gail Brager]
Presentations on a variety of topics related to sustainability, offering perspectives from leading practitioners: architectural designers, city planners, consultants, engineers, and researchers. Students can enroll for one unit (required attendance plus reading) or two units (with additional assignments).
Arch 252 – Form and Structure [Simon Schleicher]
The class investigates the interplay between geometry and structural behavior of different structural systems categorized with respect to their load-bearing mechanism. Special focus is placed on form-active and surface-active structures like cable nets, membranes, gridshells, and continuous shells. The class will begin by providing a holistic overview of ancient and cutting-edge form-finding approaches and analysis methods. Using playful physical experiments, students will gain a hands-on understanding of how different structural states can affect the shape of a structure and how this interrelation could be used creatively to drive the design process.
Arch 279 – Contemporary Urban Dynamics [Margaret Crawford]
This course is an introduction to the broad range of polemical positions that currently exist in the field of urbanism. It begins with a 3-week survey of traditional, modernist, and postmodern urban design models. The second section examines contemporary models for urban designers and urban design projects. The third section engages with the plethora of competing “urbanisms” that currently define urban design discourse. The articles in the reading list emphasize each of these positions as propositions to be analyzed and debated rather than as guides to be followed. For this final section, each student will present a summary of one of these approaches, describing their advantages and disadvantages. Their presentations (and accompanying readings), based on a common format, will allow students to compare, contrast, and critique these positions as a first step toward formulating their approach to urbanism.
Arch 298 – Rethinking Futures [Andrew Shanken & various professors]
Bringing together both senior and junior scholars involved in a variety of pursuits–literature, film, visual art and music, architectural history, landscape architecture and environmental planning, urban planning, geography, the history of science, technology, and philosophy –our group represents a wide range of disciplines as well as temporal and geographical coverage. Ranging across the United States, Europe, Japan, and Africa our group is global in reach. We will expand the reach of the project even further by including outside visitors working with materials beyond our reach.