These courses serve to create a background of knowledge within which the act of design takes place. They expose the students to new concepts, ways of thinking, specialised skills that can contribute to the overall development of the student. They need not dovetail smoothly with the studio space at all times. They can be spaces that support or challenge some of the presumptions of the studio. They largely follow three intersecting trajectories across five years:

Humanities Courses 

The humanities aims to establish the criteria to evaluate architecture for what it does, and to test the profession’s claim to validity in public culture. Architecture is understood broadly, as the built landscape – not simply as significant works by significant architects,  These courses will encourage students to investigate the built landscape through the social relations of spatial production. 

Architectural Theory

The course intends to inculcate a habit of reflexivity, to open out the critical/dialectical relationship between knowing and doing.The theory of design course will frame architecture as an expanded cultural practice, that engages and borrows from ideas across disciplines. It will frame the act of architecture as a reflexive critical practice and theory as critical and propositional endeavour. It is the place for meditation, discussion and debate about language concerning architecture- visual, spatial, verbal as well as written. The attempt is to create a space for conversation about the dialectical relationships between the idea of ‘architecture’- a disciplinary question concerned with what the domain of architecture is, what it’s identity is, and what its responsibilities and ethical role is; and that of the ‘self’ of the ‘architect’ – a philosophical / psychological question that is concerned with what the particular skills of this profession are, what it’s role is and how does this person place herself in the world. 

It aims to  engender in students a capacity to think conceptually to enable new ideas and approaches to emerge. The course will expose students to works of art, literature, architecture and ideas through history, to engender an agility of thinking conceptually across and through traditional disciplinary boundaries. Within the course there is an attempt to challenge the idea that practice and thought are separable – that there can be theory that has no concrete relevance; or that there can be practice that exists outside of thought. The attempt is to allow students to explore the relationship between thought and practice in cultural works, but through the particularity of the here and now. Unlike the history course- it will use a comparative and conceptual  framework rather than a strictly historical one.