In this course, each student is asked to consider the evolution and existence of both 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' worldviews/value systems/reality systems/systems of evaluation and how each create situations where forms of individual and collective valution/evaluation are established consequently. (All while testing/evolving/discovering their own 'value hierarchy' in the process/in relation.)

From this, students are then encouraged to consider critically and analytically how this effects the intersection of architecture with economics, real estate, justice, society, culture, environment, ethics, and so on.

In the process, all students are exposed to not only the academic philosophical aspects of the above but also must embrace vernacular theory, and as well, the 'status quo' in terms of real estate, business, and neoclassical economic principles and motives.

This is a broad, wide-ranging, class which moves from theory to practice/general to specific by ending with each student creating a design and market/financial feasibility proposal and cost estimate for a small apartment complex; in which they are asked to produce alternatives that the so-called status quo would accept all while being consistent with their own evolving value hierarchy AND addressing criteria of all constituencies involved: community, user, client, local governing body, lender, investors, and so on.

In short, by requiring students to deal with the intersections as described above, each student is asked to see theory and practice not as separate and distinct, but instead as non-identical yet intersecting sets.

This course aims to create a constant feedback loop between, on the one hand, the material taught about macro and micro-economics, building economics and real estate investment and development and, on the other hand, the students' own evolving awareness of their personal value systems and epistemologies. Much time is spent asking questions, testing assumptions and preconceptions. Students will learn to respond critically to the issues through readings and discussions that are both highly critical of and wholly accepting of the status quo.

In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students and adults become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching. --Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

Meaning, not raw facts, is what humanity seeks, and society is a collection of kits or codes for processing raw facts into meaning. --Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature, 1991

Information is not knowledge. You can mass-produce raw data and incredible facts and figures. You cannot mass-produce knowledge, which is created by individual minds, drawing on individual experience, separating the significant from the irrelevant, making value judgments. --Theodore Roszak, 1987

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions, themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers. --Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet