Intro to Architecture

This course is a wide-ranging survey that will introduce students to the history of humankind's built environment within the Western tradition, with excursions to the Middle East. The course is organized around a series of key monuments that will help organize our approach to each period, and we will proceed chronologically. We will consider design, materials and techniques, patronage, function, and the evolution of the professions of builder and architect. We will also ask what buildings meant to the societies that built them, and how those meanings might have changed, and been manipulated, over time.