Precedents in Critical Practice
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate architecture seminar built around six themes tracing recent architectural history and discourse: city and global economy, urban plan and map of operations, program and performance, drawing and scripting, image and surface, and utopia and projection. Students study specific buildings and read assigned texts to place contemporary architectural projects within their disciplinary and cultural context. The course functions as a guided map of current practice, asking how economic, technological, and representational shifts have reshaped what architects design and how they justify it. Materials include reading lists and course structure from MIT's architecture department, suited to students who already have some grounding in architectural history and want to connect recent buildings to the ideas driving them.