ARCH 565 Contemporary Architectural Discourse: Reading as Experimental Fieldwork

A graduate seminar that treats reading itself as the primary research method: instead of surveying twentieth-century architecture as a sequence of styles, you work through canonical theory texts (Ockman, Venturi, Hays, Jenks/Kropf) to see how architects argue, where their concepts come from, and how those debates still shape practice. Most weeks alternate between individual close readings and group seminar discussion, with two presentations along the way and a single research essay carrying the bulk of your grade. It builds the critical-writing muscle that downstream design-research and thesis work assume you already have, which is why it sits late in the curriculum rather than alongside the early history surveys.