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Harvard Offers Free Online Architecture Course

The course offers grounding in the fundamental principles of architecture.

Updated on

January 21, 2018

The Harvard Graduate School of Design. PHOTO | COURTESY

Harvard University is offering a free 10-week online architecture course that will enable students from around the world to study at the institution without paying a dime.

The online course christened “The Architectural Imagination,” is being presented by the Massachusetts-based private Ivy League research university’s Graduate School of Design and will end on February 28.

The course offers grounding in the fundamental principles of architecture through a study of antiquity’s most important buildings.

It exposes students to “vivid analyses of exemplary buildings from a wide range of historical contexts, coupled with hands-on exercises in drawing and modelling.”

The 10-module course has been divided into three distinct parts – the first of which includes video presentations and hands-on training that present architectural imagination as “a faculty that mediates sensuous experience and conceptual understanding.”

The second part of the course introduces technology “as a component of architecture’s realization and understanding,” while the final segment addresses “architecture’s complex relationship to its social and historical contexts and its audiences, achievements, and aspirations.”

“In this course, you will learn how to ‘read’ architecture as a cultural expression as well as a technical achievement,” the university says in the course introduction.

Faculty members

Professors K. Michael Hays (architectural theory); Erika Naginski, (architectural history); and Antoine Picon, (history of architecture and technology) are some of the key faculty members behind the task.

Harvard University is the seventh-best architecture school according to the 2017 list of the QS World University Rankings by Subject.

The university has produced some of the world’s most famous architects including Harry Seidler and Frank Gehry – who has designed some of the world’s most iconic buildings of the past two decades including Guggenheim Bilbao.

According to the university, students will not be given any credentials for completing the online course. A certificate can, however, be purchased for $124.

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this story stated that the course begins on February 28. Harvard University has however clarified to CK that the course ends on the said date. The course is still available for those who want to check it out.