History remains one of my most cherished areas of education because it brings context and understanding to the designs of the times. This fall I enrolled in ARC 441 History of Contemporary Architecture taught by Burak Erdim, Ph.D, and embarked on a journey of understanding the social, political and cultural contexts of the architectural works we studied.

Critical reading and writing were major components of the course where several smaller writing assignments prepared us for a final research project on a topic of our choice. I’ve been interested in the design of workspaces for a while and took this project as a opportunity to look further into that area. I choose to compare Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s residential and corporate projects to see how he designed spaces for the individual in the urban context.

One of my favorite quotes on his philosophy of design is:

We have to become the master of the unbridled forces of our time and build them into a new order, an order that gives life free room to move for its unfolding.

If you’d like to read on, download the research project PDF.