The Harvard Graduate School of Design has relaunched its free online course entitled “The Architectural Imagination.” Directed by the school’s Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, K. Michael Hays, the course seeks to teach students “how to understand architecture as both cultural expression and technical achievement.”

The free 10-week program runs until July 2019 and is carried out through the online edX platform, a Harvard/MIT system that specializes in high-quality massive open online courses. During the course, students will engage with the social and historical contexts behind major works of architecture, basic principles to produce drawings and models, and the pertinent content for academic study or a professional career as an architect.

The course will be introduced by the idea of architectural imagination, exploring perspective drawing, and the challenges in writing architectural history. Students will then address technology as a component of architecture, discovering how innovative technology can enable and promote new aesthetic experiences. Finally, the course will confront architecture’s complex relationship to its social and historical contexts and its audiences, achievements, and aspirations.

Architecture is one of the most complexly negotiated and globally recognized cultural practices, both as an academic subject and a professional career. Its production involves all of the technical, aesthetic, political, and economic issues at play within a given society. Join us as we examine how architecture engages, mediates, and expresses a culture’s complex aspirations.

-Harvard Graduate School of Design

The course from Harvard GSD joins other architectural courses hosted on edX from institutions including MIT, ETH Zurich, and TU Delft. Now open, the course is free, but students can receive a verified certificate of completion of the course for an additional $99. Members of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) who earn a verified certificate may be eligible to receive AIA Learning Units (LUs).

The course will be delivered by K. Michael Hays, alongside Harvard colleagues Erika Naginski (Professor of Architectural History), Antoine Picon (G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology), and Lisa Haber-Thomson (Instructor in Architecture).

Last year, the Masters of Architecture degree at the Harvard GSD was ranked the best postgraduate architecture program in the world by Spain-based Best Architecture Masters (BAM).

Those interested in the course can enroll here, and see other courses offered through edX here.

News via: Harvard Graduate School of Design