May Term Travel Opportunities

Critical Works for Modern and Emergent European Architecture, led by Distinguished Senior Lecturer John Blood and Professor Elizabeth Danze

Locations: Copenhagen, Zurich, Basel

This course directly exposes students to critical works of contemporary and emergent architecture from the twentieth and early twenty-first century. By visiting these significant buildings, students will engage in an immersive experience that provides direct insight into the design principles, contextual influences, and innovative techniques that define truly great architecture. This hands-on experience will foster a deeper appreciation of how these buildings interact with their environments and how they have come to exist within their cultural contexts.

By using the three cities of Copenhagen, Zurich, and Basel as our home base, we will visit a significant number of important and consequential buildings created in the last 100 years. Through exposure to extraordinary architecture, this course will help develop an insatiable interest in, and an expanded ability to see and appreciate the richness of architecture and its impact on the built world. 

Mayterm Asia, led by Associate Professor Danelle Briscoe

Locations: Japan and South Korea

Mayterm ASIA is a proposed four-week experience in Asian countries, involving intensive study in Japan with a side trip to South Korea. These two countries are highly vulnerable to climate change impacts like rising sea levels, extreme weather, and heat waves. Their resiliency is evident in the innovative architectural and urban design strategies that they have adopted to mitigate and adapt to these challenges. 

Through site visits to built works, talks with local practitioners, and focused study of both traditional and contemporary passive strategies of resilience, the program will expose students to new approaches for using advanced technology to better our buildings, interiors, and urban conditions. Ultimately, design students participating in this program will experience the innovative ways these communities integrate design thinking into their daily life and culture to create a sustainable future. 

Experiments in Visualization: Expanding Architectural Photography in London, led by Professor David Heymann and Dean Heather Woofter

Location: London

Students in “Experiments in Visualization” will use London and its surroundings, with its rich and superbly available architecture, as a daily laboratory to explore how architectural meaning and experience can be conveyed through photography and related media. 

These days, architecture—of a room, building, square, urban sequence, or landscape—is almost exclusively communicated through photographs or architectural photograph-like images. But conventional architectural photography is notoriously limited in what it can convey: it favors form over other factors that give the built environment value, like experience, social and historical context, environmental conditions and performance, etc. The rise of after-Modern art, digital technologies, and social media have changed our understanding of how a photograph can be made, what its interactions are with other media, and what we consider a photograph to be. This program will ask students to experiment with how they represent this extraordinary place.