Urban Studies courses

ASTP 2300 Architecture and Mysticism
Architecture and Mysticism
This is a survey and research course designed to investigate mystical qualities of both real and unreal architecture and of the architecture of magical and mystical places from antiquity to the present and beyond. Students will be required to present a major research project based on the element of mysticism as a design tool.
credit hours: 3
Architecture and Mysticism

ASTP 2310 Architecture and Music
Architecture and Music
A survey and research course dealing with the relationship through the ages of architecture and music and how each one complements the other. Some special topics that will be investigated include proportion, acoustics, notation versus drawings, aural versus visual, structure, composition, harmony, musical buildings, architectural music, decoration and ornamentation. No musical training is required.
credit hours: 3
Architecture and Music

ASTP 3300 Architecture and Human Health
Architecture and Human Health
An interdisciplinary course exploring the complex relationships among architectural design, human well-being, and health. Emphasis is placed on the planning and maintenance of health care facilities. The course focuses on user-based planning and design methods.
credit hours: 3
Architecture and Human Health

RBST 3400 Design Urbanism
Design Urbanism
Though the use of seminal writings on urban design ideology presented by architects and historians in the 20th century such as Bacon, Lynch, Koolhaas and Gandelsonas, students will be challenged to consider these significant foundations in order to apply a broader awareness of urbanism to their own architectural design process. Concurrently, methodologies of research and analysis that employ both conceptual and intuitive systems of investigation will be exercised as a critical means of observing, documenting and communicating about the city and the architecture that contributes to its form.
credit hours: 3
Design Urbanism

RBST 3410 Interpretive Urban Design
Interpretive Urban Design
This course will examine the concept of interpretive issues within the traditional downtown urban design framework today. Interpretive issues within traditional city cores have become a major part of cultural, economic development in city design. Within the retrenchment of traditional downtown retail to suburban malls, cultural development has become a principle economic tool in re-establishing critical mass in the downtown.
credit hours: 3
Interpretive Urban Design

RBST 3700 Neighborhood Development
Neighborhood Development
This course addresses the stalemate between preservationists and developers by inviting new players to a dialogue about how neighborhoods can grow and change. The course will explore ways to increase neighborhood participation in urban planning to build on creative resources and opportunities. The course will also expose students to the public, civic, business and neighborhood leaders involved in planning the city's environment and economy in order to learn the ways in which they function.
credit hours: 3
Neighborhood Development

RBST 4300 Designs on Los Angeles: 20th-century Architecture, Urban Planning, and Metropolitan Imagery in the Making of America's Second Ci
Designs on Los Angeles: 20th-century Architecture, Urban Planning, and Metropolitan Imagery in the Making of America's Second Ci
Investigates the particular role that twentieth-century architecture and urban planning played in creating Los Angeles's current image as a pre-eminent metropolitan node of design arts. This course will establish political, economic, geographic, and ecological contexts for twentieth-century architecture and urban design in L. A. through the study of not only built works and executed plans, but also visionary, unrealized projects. These works of architecture and urbanism will be studied against the background of other contemporaneous modes of Los Angeles artistic endeavor in fiction, music, dance, graphic arts, photography, and film, as well as in landscape and garden design.
credit hours: 3
Designs on Los Angeles: 20th-century Architecture, Urban Planning, and Metropolitan Imagery in the Making of America's Second Ci

RBST 4400 Tribal New Orleans
Tribal New Orleans
This seminar course will introduce students not only to the urban history of New Orleans, but also to current theoretical perspectives on the writing (construction) of the histories of cities. New Orleans will be studied from the earliest European settlements in the metropolitan area (Bayou St. John and Bayou Gentilly), to the challenges of the present, highlighting topographical, economic, and social factors in the city's growth. Our broad interest will be the city's evolving urban form and its architectural dimensions, focusing on the distinct ways in which the city has provided an arena for constructing what some urban theorists have described as tribal identities through the shaping of the urban fabric. We will examine, therefore, the settlement patterns and built environments of French, Spanish, American, African American, Irish, German, Guatemalan, Vietnamese, and other residents in order to reflect upon social spatialization in the city and upon the city as a representation of the ever-changing society that constructs it.
credit hours: 3
Tribal New Orleans

RBST 6400 Architecture and the Contemporary City
Architecture and the Contemporary City
This seminar will examine the relationship between contemporary culture, urbanism, and the practice of architecture, and how the changing conditions of the contemporary city provoke responses in avant-garde practices. Various topics (Freedom and Control, Place and Placelessness, Superficiality, Synthetic Landscapes, Formlessness, Voids, Automatic Urbanism, Dematerialized Urbanism, etc.) will be studied as a way of exploring the changing nature of the contemporary city and how political and social transformations generate theoretical discourses on architecture and the city. Referencing art, film, and cultural criticism, we will investigate a series of hypotheses concerning the current and future context of architecture.
credit hours: 3
Architecture and the Contemporary City

RBST 6410 Urban Analysis + Design
Urban Analysis + Design
The urban fabric, as a historical, collective form of architectural expression, is an integration of cultural artifacts and infrastructure: aesthetic, technological, environmental, social and political forms and systems that when overlaid, become a representation of the ideological structures of the societies that build and reside in them. This course will initially trace the history of the modern city as a backdrop to the investigation of contemporary urban positions that have emerged in the latter half of the 20th century including Archigram's nomadic cities, Venturi and Scott Brown's Las Vegas, Koolhaas's Delirious New York, Tschumi's Manhattan Transcripts, Eisenman's Cities of Artificial Excavation, and more contemporary examples such as the artificial landscapes of the Netherlands by West 8 and the IFCCA proposals for Manhattan's west side.
credit hours: 3
Urban Analysis + Design

RBST 6420 US Architecture and Urbanism
US Architecture and Urbanism
Undertakes focused historical studies of selected urban environments to emphasize the contributions that architecture and urban design make to conceptions of place. We will ask how buildings and their urban contexts function in the formation of communal identities and in the expression of cultural values. We will interpret the concept urban' broadly to include settlement, village, town, city, suburb, megalopolis, and utopia. Students will not only examine the role of the prominent designers in shaping urban identities, but they will also analyze the significance of the vernacular built environment in creating images of place. Additional assigned readings of key critiques will provoke group discussion of vital contemporary issues, from the ideology of preservation, to the concept of regionalism, and to the philosophy of socially engaged design practice.This is a Service Learning course with approximately 30 hours of guided community service through a placement with the Preservation Resource Center.
credit hours: 3
US Architecture and Urbanism

RBST 6910 Latin American Cities
Latin American Cities
A study of the development of the major cities of Latin America and particularly on the role that architecture and urbanism played in creating images of colonial power and, later, urban modernity. Emphasizes selected Latin American cities that have experienced significant immigration after 1880 and in which questions of cultural identity have loomed large: Havana, Mexico City, Montevideo, Santiago de Chile, Lima, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires.
credit hours: 3
Latin American Cities