Lecture Class: Architectural History from the Ancient to the Baroque Era,
Fall 2023, 2022, 2020 (For 2020, Remote Delivery), 45-61 undergraduate students
McGill University, Montréal.
Professor: Ricardo L. Castro
Teaching Assistant: Ali Reza Shahbazin
This course comprised a series of lectures on the history of world architecture from the ancient to the baroque era. The objective was to give the student a basic comprehension of the architectural period’s history and theories and their relevance in the contemporary architectural fields of theory and practice.
As part of their midterm project, students curated poster papers in which they selected and analyzed architectural elements from the pre-baroque era, all within diverse cultural contexts.
The final assignment goal was to teach students how literary imagination can be a fertile depository for architectural knowledge. The subject of the drawing was one of the cities described in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972). The rendering was left to the student’s imagination, the only constraint being that it had to be contextualized in one of the periods that the course addresses, e.g. Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, Islam, etc.… The frames should also indicate movement through the city. Invisible Cities helps students to see architecture with a world-building capacity that includes shared stories, values, histories, and myths.
During the lecture class, students not only take notes but also express their historical understanding through drawings. Emphasizing the significance of drawing as a mode of knowledge.
This video features a Moleskine Sketchbook by Alixe Gauthier (2022).
This video features a Moleskine Sketchbook by Deborah Yang (2023).
