Sustainable Performance in Heritage Architecture

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is about learning from buildings and cities past and the present to design for the future. The course will establish a synergy between students from Architecture, Engineering and Real Estate, who will learn to collaborate in ways that their professional practice will demand post-graduation. Students will combine efforts using their unique and complementary skill sets to tackle issues of the 21st century - such as energy, sustainability, resilience, traffic and transportation, natural hazards, social factors, building techniques, as well as urban morphology and typology-- and derive conclusions in terms of costs within the complex dynamics of our modern society. The course will broaden students' perspectives by exposing them to cultural differences and local responses to cities and buildings; challenging them with critical geographic thinking, location-based data collection, analysis and management, and visualization; and inviting them to chart the outcome of their own experiences. This will allow students to come up with a theoretical framework for tackling problems that are -by their very nature- universal in nature but always contingent in application and to create new and more resilient and sustainable systems. The students will work within a holistic method of analysis and synthesis by exploring both the urban scale and the building scale. The ultimate goal of this course is to inspire students to develop theories for sustainable design (calculate, conserve, compensate, reduce, reuse, recycle, environment, economy) in the light of contemporary environmental concerns.