American Architecture: Domestic Forms - Syllabus

Using a case-study approach this course takes as a point of departure specific exemplary houses, both vernacular and high-style, studied from the perspectives of the history of style, of technology, of energy use, and of social use. We look at space (interior space, the relationship of structure to site, the relationship of site to environment, and to economic context), and we look at interior design and materials as well as at plan and expressive form. Considering examples ordered chronologically from the seventeenth century to the present the class provides students with a broad background in habitation in what is now the United States, the tools to ‘read’ most houses and neighborhoods, and experience in hands-on original research concerning the built environment today.