This seminar aims to elicit students’ participation in a free-spirited conversation and regain a sense of wonder and intimacy with architecture.  The discussion topics will be based on five readings, which are accessible, practical, and poetic. They will offer a generous survey of philosophical and architectural thinking from classical to modern, examining the motives and reasons for the making of architecture and the concurrent material consciousness.

The five sessions address Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle for Everybody, which examines man the maker; Paul Valéry’s essay “Eupalinos, or The Architect”; Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, pointing toward material consciousness; Peter Zumthor’s Thinking Architecture; and Louis I. Kahn’s Light Is the Theme, which focuses on the design and building of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.