University of Liechtenstein > Graduate School > Masterstudiengänge > Architektur > Curriculum > Architectural Design Theory

History of Architecture

Write! - This course focuses on the written word in architecture. It examines the way architecture and cities are treated and presented in texts, ranging from fictional literature to manifestos and essays on architecture. Texts, specifically chosen for the studio project are read, understood and discussed, resulting in a series of individual essays by students, adding to the complexity of and supporting the design project.

The lecture course will investigate the complex relations and influences between words, meanings and architecture. The aim of the course is to foster the students' understanding that architecture results always from a complex exchange between thoughts, possibilities, personal positions and collective meanings. The course will encourage students to actively investigate the specificities of reading and writing on architectural ideas, as a necessary moment for a conscious design practice.

Indicative Content
This Fall Semester is dedicated to the analysis of analogies and specificities between architecture and text. The course will inquire the way architecture and places are treated and presented in texts belonging to different cultural fields (literature, essays, architecture).

>	What does it mean to write or to read about architecture and places in a novel, in a cultural research, in a competition’s text?
>	What is specific and what generic in the way a writer, an essayist or an architect writes on buildings, cities, or contexts? Is it a question of personal preferences, of style, of time, of conventions, of audience?
>	Treatises, Essays, Manifests, Statements: architecture is a translation of ideas and theories into a touchable practice. The con-text of architecture is not only a phisical situation, but also and intellectual reality. As texts and words do, architecture deals always with meanings.

Learning Outcomes
At the end of the course each student should improve his personal ability to:

>	read, understand texts from different cultural field
>	analyse, compare and relate them to the field of architecture, infering analogies and specificities of different media
>	communicate and express complex ideas and intentions comprehensibly in written forms.
>	Demonstrate the ability to work with other students for assignments, readings and protocols.

All information is subject to change.