Library Stacks, originally uploaded by plemeljr

If I was attending Yale this fall, or could afford to take the MEDIUM FAST TRAIN to and from New Haven to sneak into campus like some 1980’s plot device, and had my choice of first semester classes, these would be my top three seminars I would fight to attend:

• The Construction of Exactitude: Classicism and Modernism
  

  This seminar critically considers modern classicism not only as a compositional design method and as an evocation of precedents, but also as a language of clarity, reduction, and economy resistant to an unquestioned avant-gardist predilection for the “new.”

• Modernism and Environmentalism in the Twentieth Century
  

  The seminar explores connections among the social, technological, and formal proposals of architectural modernism as well as the connections between the growing concern over the destructive nature of human interaction with the natural environment.

• Opulence and Excess: The Architecture of Techno- Romanticism
  

  This seminar posits that during the past decade digitally produced architecture based on geometric, mapping, and performance-based ambitions has failed to yield the intended results.

Go forth Yale students, and earn your degree.