This course offers an exciting investigation into failure in art during the uniqueness of life and culture in 2020. We will discover and debate the complexities, challenges, and benefits of failure and what it means for making art. Students will experiment with flaws, imperfections, rejects, and errors in their art projects. We will encourage you to think about failure in positive, unexpected, inspirational, and low-fi ways. You will learn about artists who are motivated by errors, uncommon methods, and breaking rules.

(Offered as ARCH 202 and ARHA 202) This seminar explores the emerging interdisciplinary field that combines the theory and practice of architecture and anthropology. We compare and contrast these two disciplines’ canonical methods, their ethical stances, and their primary subject matters (i.e., buildings and people). With that, we reflect upon the challenges of ethnoarchitecture as a new discipline, emphasizing the challenges of carrying out architectural research and/or construction work among people from cultural backgrounds different than the architect’s own.

This introductory course explores art produced between 1960 and the present. We will take a transnational approach, from the emergence of Pop art as an  international phenomenon in the 1960s to the mushrooming cloud of biennials in the twenty-first century. The course will sometimes look at art’s intersection with architecture, film, and visual culture more broadly. We will keep in mind the following questions: How have new technologies, civil rights movements, emergent subjectivities, new forms of theoretical inquiry, and processes of globalization shaped the work of art?

(Offered as ARHA 154, ARCH 154, and ASLC 154) This introductory course surveys the architecture, painting, sculpture, textiles, decorative arts, and photography of India as well as other parts of the Indian subcontinent—namely Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka—from 2300 B.C. to the present. It considers the role of tradition in the broader history of art in India, but does not see India as "traditional" or unchanging.

(Offered as BLST 313 [A] and ARHA 138) In the traditionally non-literate societies of Africa, verbal and visual arts constitute two systems of communication. The performance of verbal art and the display of visual art are governed by social and cultural rules. We will examine the epistemological process of understanding cultural symbols, of visualizing narratives, or proverbs, and of verbalizing sculptures or designs.

(Offered as ARHA 135, ARCH 135, and EUST 135) This course, a gateway class for the study of art history, introduces the ways that artists and architects imaginatively invented visual language to interpret the world for contemporary patrons, viewers, and citizens in early modern Europe. Painters, printmakers, sculptors and architects in Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands created new ways of seeing empirical phenomena and interpreting them, by means of both ancient and new principles of art, science and philosophy and through powerful engagement with the senses.

An introductory course in the fundamentals of drawing. This course will be based in experience and observation, exploring various techniques and media in order to understand the basic formal vocabularies and conceptual issues in drawing; subject matter will include still life, landscape, interior, and figure. Weekly assignments, weekly critiques, final portfolio. Two three-hour sessions per week.

Limited to 12 students. In the fall semester 4 seats are reserved for first-year students and the course will be offered fully online.

(Offered as ARCH 105 and ARHA 105)
This hands-on design studio will foster innovation as it guides students through the creation of conceptual architecture. Through a series of three-dimensional handbuilt projects, students will develop their own design language. The projects will build on each other, and culminate in the design of a building on a chosen site. We will work through sketches, hand-drafted and computer drawings, as well as physical and 3D model-making in order to understand buildings through plan, section, elevation, diagramming and concept model.