ARCH 200B
FUNDAMENTALS OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
ANDERSON/CHOKSOMBATCHAI/FERNAU
(8) 200B must be taken for a letter grade. Four hours of lecture/seminar, eight hours of studio, and four hours of laboratory per week. 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 201
CASE STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
(5) Course may be repeated for credit. Two hours of lecture and six hours of studio per week. Prerequisites: 100A-100B or 200A-200B. 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 201 SEC 1
CASE STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN STAFF
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 201 SEC 2
CASE STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN STAFF
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 201 SEC 3
CASE STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN STAFF
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 204
FINAL PROJECT STUDIO: STUDIO THESIS OPTION
STAFF
(5) Eight hours of studio per week. Formerly 202A. Focused design research as the capstone project for graduate students.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 208
INTRODUCTION TO CONSTRUCTION LAW
SHARAFIAN
(3) Two hours of seminar/discussion per week. The course introduces graduate students to legal and related professional practice issues that often arise during a design professional's career. Careful practitioners can avoid or mitigate many legal problems through vigilance and loss prevention techniques. Course topics include standard of care, business formation, contract analysis and negotiation, intellectual property rights, projects delivery models, insurance, and dispute resolution.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 218
HOUSING, URBANIZATION, AND URBANISM: DESIGN, PLANNING, AND POLICY ISSUES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
ALSAYYAD
(4) One and one-half hours of lecture and one and one-half hours of seminar per week. This seminar is concerned with the study of housing, urbanization, and urbanism in developing countries, studying not only the physical landscapes of settlements, but also the social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions. This course's focus will be on housing, its lens will be their processes of urbanization, and its intent will be to investigate the space for action by the professionals of the "urban" in the arena of housing. While the emphasis of the course will be on the diverse trajectories of developing countries, "First World" experiences will also be used to illuminate the specific transnational connections and their use in the making of housing theory and policy. The seminar complements the series of lectures offered in 111 and City Planning 111.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 219
SPECIAL TOPICS IN THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BASIS OF DESIGN
CRAWFORD
(1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Topics include the sociology of taste, personal and societal values in design, participatory design, semantic ethnography, environments for special populations such as the elderly, and building types such as housing, hospitals, schools, offices, and urban parks. For current offerings, see departmental website.
Extended Course Description
Listening to the City (3 units)
Instead of telling the city what to do, the approach design professionals usually take, this course will devote itself to trying to understand a particular place, in this case the town of Emeryville. Without preconceptions, we will listen to what Emeryville has to tell us about itself. In order to do this, we will visit it repeatedly, each time adopting a different interpretive persona. Assigned roles will include the tourist, the flaneur, the detective, the somnambulist, and the bricoleur. Students may select additional roles (the anthropologist, the psychiatrist, etc.). After each visit, students will produce appropriate representations (postcards, snapshots for the tourist, etc.). As our individual and collective interpretations of emeryville accumulate, they will constitute a “treasury” of meanings. We will use this as raw material to bring Emeryville’s various identities and issues to the surface. We will also meet with planners, officials, residents and others active in Emeryville. During the semester, a project will emerge. We will use our findings to respond and engage with this project.
Undergraduate students are welcome to enroll in this class with approval of Professor Crawford and an understanding that graduate level work will be required of them.
ARCH 227
WORKSHOP IN DESIGNING VIRTUAL PLACES
KALAY
(4) Three hours of seminar and one and one half hours of supervised laboratory sessions per week. This course introduces students to designing web-accessible, Multi User, Virtual Environments (MUVEs), inhabited through avatars. Such worlds are used in video games and web-based applications, and are assuming their role as alternative 'places' to physical spaces, where people shop, learn, are entertained, and socialize. Virtual worlds are designed according to the same principles that guide the design of physical spaces, with allowances made for the absence of gravity and other laws of nature. The course combines concepts from architecture, film studies, and video game design. It uses a game engine software and a modeling software to build, test, and deploy virtual worlds.
Extended Course Description
Rationale
Internet-accessible Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are a new type of ‘place,’ made possible through Web 2.0 technologies: an alternative to physical places, where people shop, learn, are entertained, and socialize. They provides unprecedented opportunities to architects, social scientists, archeologists, historians, journalists, computer scientists, game designers, film-makers, and other professionals, to create and inhabit web-accessible virtual worlds. Such worlds can be re-creations of physical places and culturally-significant human experiences that have existed in the past (like 1950s West Oakland or Medieval Cairo); or future places, yet to be built (as architectural CAD does); or they can be imaginary places, in the form of games like World of Warcraft and Lineage, or alternative realities like Second Life.
Such virtual places have once been the province of science fiction writers (like Neil Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash and William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer). But advances in computing, telecommunication, and our experience with the Web have made them possible and increasingly relevant, real, and economically viable. Video games are a multibillion dollar industry, which encompasses dozens of disciplines and employs thousands of people worldwide. On-line shopping, education, entertainment, and other human activities that have traditionally taken place in physical venues are migrating to cyberspace.
Virtual places are used for similar types of activities that ‘take place’ in physical places, performed by human beings (or their proxies). Therefore, they must be designed according to the same principles that guide the design of physical places, including form-related aspects (what do they look like?), social aspects (what kinds of social and cultural interactions do they support?), and phenomenological aspects (what does it feel like to ‘be’ there?). At the same time, natural and man-made laws that govern physical space do not always apply in cyberspace: gravity can be suspended, there is no climate to control, solid objects can be penetrated at will, and great distances can be traversed instantly. The design of virtual places, therefore, needs to reconcile the familiar with the possible, and result in places that are appropriate for their own intended functions and inhabitants.
Methodology
This course examines both the theoretical and technical aspects of creating virtual places, and allows students to design and experience virtual places. The course combines architectural place-making theory, on-line games technology, and cultural/social issues into a comprehensive and innovative whole. It provides students with the opportunity to learn how to create web-accessible, immersive, interactive, inhabitable places that can accommodate many visitors, and respond to some aspects of their lives, such cultural heritage, education, commerce, or entertainment.
The course uses the metaphor of stage-play to guide the development of virtual places: it comprises a stage (a context), a narrative (the play), and actors (the players):
The stage is the context of the place. It comprises both space and time, forming the spatial and temporal environment for the actors and their activities. It includes spatial components like buildings, trees, topography, sky, and ‘props’—objects that can be manipulated by the actors or can act on their own (trains, cars, etc.).
The narrative is the content of the place. It includes all aspects of the activities that take place in the environment (known together as simulation/action). They tell a story (or stories), and afford the freedom to participate in the story.
The ‘actors’ are the inhabitants of the place, and include visitors (or PCs—player characters), which are controlled by the people who are logged into the system; agents (or NPCs—non-player characters), which are pre-animated, semi-autonomous entities that perform pre-scripted roles, and have action modification capabilities based on some sensory input (e.g., they can start some action sequence when a visitor approaches within some pre-defined range); and animations, which are pre-scripted action sequences that are not responsive to the presence of visitors or agents.
Course project
The course uses principles and practices of Web-accessible Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) to develop virtual worlds. Specifically, students will use Second Life (a commercial virtual world platform) to design, implement, and explore a world of their own. Students will have the opportunity to design, implement and test their ideas, and invite fellow students to ‘visit’ their worlds.
The course uses the format of a design studio, or workshop, which affords the introduction of theoretical aspects together with the opportunity to test them through a project. Students, in groups of 3-4, will design and build a virtual place. Their designs will be guided by critiques of the instructors and guest critics. They will explore the nature of designing virtual places, implement them through the use of a game engine, and inhabit them.
To help the students develop their projects, they will be guided by a series of exercises that include concept design, project proposal, design development, implementation, and evaluation.
Note
The focus of this course is on hands-on design experience. Another course, which taught in parallel, explores the theoretical aspects of place-making. That 3-unit seminar course is:
ARCH 129/229: The Nature of Place: from cultural heritage to New Media (and back)
Interested students are invited to sign up for both courses.
ARCH 229
SPECIAL TOPICS IN DIGITAL DESIGN THEORIES AND METHODS
KALAY
(1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: 210 or consent of instructor. Selected topics in digital design theories and methods.
Extended Course Description
The Nature of Place: from cultural heritage to New Media (and back)
ARCH 236/136
THE LITERATURE OF SPACE
STONER
(3) Three hours of seminar per week. The concept of space as it is applied to the fields of architecture, geography, and urbanism can be understood as a barometer of the condition that we call "modernity." This course explores connections between the larger cultural frameworks of the past century, and the idea of space as it has been perceived, conceived, and lived during this period. Readings include key essays from the disciplines of philosophy, geography, architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and short works of fiction that illustrate and elucidate the spatial concepts. The readings are grouped according to themes that form the foundation for weekly seminar discussions. Chronological and thematic readings reveal the force of history upon the conceptualization of space, and its contradictions.
Extended Course Description
The concept of space as it is applied to the fields of architecture, urbanism and geography can be understood as a barometer of the condition that we call “modernity.” Many spatial themes unique to modernity emerge in short fiction and novels; these themes overlap with developments in critical theory. This course will explore connections between the larger literary and cultural frameworks of the past century and the idea of space as it has been perceived, conceived and lived during this period.
Adrian Forty’s essay on “Space” (Forty, 2000) provides an entry into the literature of the course. The course reader opens with this text, and includes some of Forty’s references, to which are added other key works from the disciplines of philosophy, geography, architecture, landscape, and urbanism. The readings are grouped according to themes that are in turn tied to the idea of space as a modern phenomenon. The themes will form the foundation for weekly seminar discussions.
One reading from each group belongs to the consecutive decades of the 20th century. This structure is balance by thematic readings that are not chronological—thus revealing both the force of history upon the conceptualization of space, and its contradictions. This duality further clarifies a key theme within much of the literature—the displacement of history by geography as the essential quality of the modern condition. The weekly classes will begin with a very short introduction to key events and intellectual developments of the relevant decade.
In addition to the theoretical readings, each week’s selection includes one or two works of twentieth-century short fiction, thus complementing the intellectual content with texts that reveal the geography of the imagination. Students will also read one novel from the period, which will serve as the foundation for the final paper.
ARCH 240
ADVANCED STUDY OF ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT
HUIZENGA
(3) Three hours of lecture/seminar per week. Prerequisites: 140 or consent of instructor. Minimizing energy use is a cornerstone of designing and operating sustainable buildings, and attention to energy issues can often lead to greatly improved indoor environmental quality. For designers, using computer-based energy analysis tools are important not only to qualify for sustainability ratings and meet energy codes, but also to develop intuition about what makes buildings perform well. This course will present quantitative and qualitative methods for assessing energy performance during design of both residential and commercial buildings. Students will get hands-on experience with state-of-the-art software -- ranging from simple to complex -- to assess the performance of building components and whole-building designs.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 241
RESEARCH METHODS IN BUILDING SCIENCES
BRAGER
(3) Course may be repeated for credit. Three hours of seminar per week. Required for doctoral students in the area of environmental physics.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 249
SPECIAL TOPICS IN THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT OF BUILDINGS
UBBELOHDE
(1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: 140.
Extended Course Description
This seminar will examine the topic urban waterfronts and the sustainability issues raised in their transformation from industrial sites to urban amenities. Internationally, urban waterfronts are undergoing a regeneration and re-occupation after port facilities are moved or upgraded. Sustainable design directions are demanded by both the toxic conditions of the industrial land-water interface and the need for environmentally regenerative design strategies as part of urban growth and development. After a survey of potential sites in the San Francisco Bay area and applicable sustainable issues, seminar will focus on one or two waterfront conditions and develop a case study of the waterfront history and potential future.
The seminar will participate as one of eight partner institutions addressing this issue as part of the
Erasmus IP project EWWUD 2010 (European Workshops on Waterfront and Urban Design) organized by Lusófona University in Lisbon, Portugal. Along with faculty and graduate students from seven European institutions, we will participate in a two week workshop in Lisbon from March 14-28, 2009 that will include:
• Port cities sharing projects of architecture and urban design at former port areas
• Discussion of the influence generated by geographic and historical factors,
• The cartographic culture of the urban fabric's transformation at the water edge
• Comparison of cultural, environmental and historical heritage solutions
• Production of architecture and urban design sketches for publication.
Our unique role will be to bring the only non-European case study as well the focus of sustainable issues and knowledge to the workshop.
Funding is being sought as part of the Workshop and from sources on the Berkeley campus. Students should expect partial but not full funding for the workshop in Lisbon. The workshop is an opportunity but not required for participation in the seminar.
ARCH 256
STRUCTURAL DESIGN IN THE STUDIO
BLACK
(1-3) Three hours of seminar per week. Prerequisites: 150 or equivalent. Teaching structures to architecture students on their own turf: in a design studio. The course is organized around weekly desk reviews and assignments for students enrolled in a 201 design studio or thesis. The reviews and assignments focus on the structural issues of the students' projects. A central goal of the course is to help students understand structural issues as they relate to design and to help them become comfortable with structural concepts so that they can begin to integrate the structure and architecture. The course can be taken for 1 unit, 2 units, or 3 units depending on the amount of time a student wishes to commit to it. A final report showing the evolution of each student's project with clear reference to how structural understanding influenced design decisions is required of all students regardless of units taken. Enrollment strictly limited to 10 students.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 269
SPECIAL TOPICS IN CONSTRUCTION AND MATERIALS
IWAMOTO
(1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Selected topics in construction and materials.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 276
SPACES OF RECREATION AND LEISURE, 1850-2000
GROTH
(3) Three hours of seminar per week. A reading and research seminar surveying the building types, social relations, and cultural ideas of recreation in the American city, including the tensions between home, public, and commerical leisure settings.
Extended Course Description
SOCIAL SPACES FOR RECREATION AND LEISURE, 1850-2000
Waverly Lowell and Paul Groth, Co-Instructors
3 units (reading only) or 4 units (for students writing research papers)
Participants in this seminar will examine the building types, social histories, and cultural geographies of recreation in the American city since 1850. The primary focus will be on settings for commercial leisure, including the activities, social relations, and ideas behind fairly well-known environments such as theaters, bars and saloons, expositions, amusement parks, cinemas, gambling, and vice districts to less-well-researched settings such as public halls and lodges, dancehalls, bowling alleys, dime theaters, shooting galleries, public swimming pools, drive-ins, local and national parks, and weekend resorts. Related and overlapping issues will include the tensions between home leisure with familial supervision versus commercial leisure in public social settings; recreation roles in the crossing of or reinforcement of lines between racial and ethnic groups, age cohorts, genders, and social classes; shifts from walking and streetcar access to automobile access; links between growing individual and personal freedom and cultures of leisure consumption.
Readings will include classic studies as well as recent work. Students taking the course for three units will do the readings, discussions, and short assignments but no research paper. Four-credit students will be expected to complete a 20- to 30-page research paper, or a section of an on-going thesis or dissertation on a related topic. Upper-division undergraduates will be admitted as space permits, by permission of the instructors.
Waverly Lowell is the founding Curator of the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley. She has worked as an archivist in a number of Bay Area research collections as well as published research and presented numerous exhibits and courses on research methods and Bay Area history.
Paul Groth is Professor of U.S. built environment history in the Department of Architecture and the Department of Geography. He is the co-editor of Everyday America, and is currently at work on a study of work, home, and leisure in West Oakland, California.
ARCH 279
SPECIAL TOPICS IN THE HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE
(1-4) Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Fifteen hours of lecture/seminar per unit per semester. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Selected topics in the history of architecture.
ARCH 279 SEC 1
SPECIAL TOPICS IN THE HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE CRAWFORD
Histories and Theories of Urban Interventions (3 units)
Organized around a series of historical episodes, this lecture/discussion course depicts the urban environment as an arena where differing concepts of representation, agency, order, and control compete for public attention. Lectures and readings will problematize the professional discourses of urbanism by juxtaposing them with topics, interpretations and practices drawn from a broad range of scholarly and popular sources. The course is intended to provoke students into reexamining conventional narratives of architecture, urban design and planning. To do this, we will critically analyze well-known and obscure examples of urban intervention selected from the history of 19th and 20th century European and American cities and suburbs in order to question both their assumptions and their efficacy. Topics will include amusement parks, decentralization, housing design, immigration, slums and poverty, professionalism, real estate development, urban sociology, settlement houses, tract houses, metropolitanism, nightlife, shopping malls, skyscrapers, segregation, urban parks, urban renewal and zoning.
This course is recommended for advanced M. Arch and MCP students, M.S. students in Architecture, and PhD students in all three CED departments with an interest in American urban topics. Particular attention will be given to historiography.
ARCH 279 SEC 2
SPECIAL TOPICS IN THE HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE ALSAYYAD
Traditions: The “Real”; the Hyper; and the Virtual in the Built Environment (3 units)
DESCRIPTION
This is a special closed seminar open to M.S, PhD, M.Arch and MCP students in Architecture and Planning. It aims to bring together students who have an interest in the concept of “tradition” and is designed to give participants a detailed overview regarding the discussion of tradition and its particular relation and intersection with the built environment. More specifically, the seminar uses the discourses generated over the past twenty years in the various forums of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) as a platform to further the theoretical debates surrounding the concept of tradition in the built environment. Starting with more conservative approaches regarding the concept of traditional environments, variously framed as vernacular, indigenous or organic, this course will move into more critical investigations of the use of tradition in architecture and urbanism. The built environment will be the primary lens through which we will explore traditions and its manifestations in space.
FORMAT
The course will meet for 14 weeks and classes are divided into four modules: definitions; “real” traditions; hyper-traditions; and virtual traditions, with 2-3 class sessions within each module.
GRADING
Attendance at all class sessions is required. A one-page summary of readings along with discussion questions should be circulated (on b Space) to the other students and professor by 9:00 a.m. Tuesday morning—i.e. one day before class. One student may also act as discussion leader each week. Final assignments include a review and an original research paper (15 pages in length).
ARCH 279 SEC 3
SPECIAL TOPICS IN THE HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE CENZATTI
Spaces of Local Development (3 units)
This course focuses on the workshops, firms, activities and labor skills that are present – even if in an embryonic form – in a given area and can be starting points for local (re)development. Drawing from industrial district studies (which deal with the success of geographical clusters of small firms in related activities), in this course we will pay particular attention, to the close-nit social and economic relationships that characterize these complexes of small firms. Students will be asked (1) to research specific case studies either of an already existing industrial district (e.g., the garment district in NY, urban agriculture in Berkeley), or of an underdeveloped area, and (2) to propose interventions on spaces that can facilitate the interactions necessary for the successful growth of the selected cases.
ARCH 296
DIRECTED DISSERTATION RESEARCH
STAFF
(1-12) Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prerequisites: Advancement to candidacy for the Ph.D. Open to qualified students who are directly engaged in the doctoral dissertation.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 298
SPECIAL GROUP STUDY
STAFF
(1-4) May be repeated for credit up to unit limitation. Sections 1-3 to be graded on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Sections 4-10 to be graded on a letter grade basis. Special group studies on topics to be introduced by instructor or students.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 299
INDIVIDUAL STUDY AND RESEARCH FOR MASTER'S AND DOCTORAL STUDENTS
STAFF
(1-12) Course may be repeated for credit. Individual studies including reading and individual research under the supervision of a faculty adviser and designed to reinforce the student's background in areas related to the proposed degree.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 300
SEMINAR IN THE TEACHING OF ARCHITECTURE
STAFF
(2) Two hours of seminar per week. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. This class is intended for first-time graduate student instructors, especially those working in studio and lab settings. The class covers a range of issues that normally come up when teaching, offers suggestions regarding how to work well with other graduate student instructors and faculty, and how to manage a graduate student instructor's role as both student and teacher. The greatest benefit of this class comes from the opportunity to explore important topics together. Using a relatively light, but provocative set of readings, the seminar will explore the issues raised each week. There will be one assignment intended to help students explore their own expectations as educators.
Extended Course Description
To come.
ARCH 602
INDIVIDUAL STUDY FOR DOCTORAL STUDENTS
STAFF
(1-8) Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare themselves for the various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D. This course may not be used for units or residence requirements for the doctoral degree.
