Free Architecture Classes

Online Architecture Courses

Architecture classes involve a blend of mathematical, artistic, engineering, and design studies to prepare a young architect for a career in building. The skilled architect is both an artist and a scientist, so their educational background and skill set is often unique among the students at a college. To learn about the coursework you'll need to master to become an architectural engineer, you can use the distance learning programs at a number of prominent universities to see whether you stack up.

Below are some examples of architecture courses you might sign up for when you study architecture. These not only help you learn how to design building, but also to build structures in the midst of already-developed land and city areas. Some architects go on to become city planners and all architecture students study how to design and redesign their structures for the urban sprawl.

Urban Design asks students to consider to the west end of the MIT campus and adjacent to Cambridgeport for the development of urban design. By studying a real cityscape, you'll be able to discover how conflicting goals and expectations can be reconciled with a positive mix of activities and shared community to achieve good urban form.

Architectural Design I: Perceptions and Processes explores the relationship between the temporal and the fixed, between perception and "intervention", and between notation and representation. This might be a wild class to take for an architecture student, because the class description on its official web page quotes a long passage from Jorge Luis Borges's "Exactitude in Science", where a life-size map on a scale of 1-to-1 is theorized. In fact, that's all you get in the way of a description, so this professor (Meejin Yoon) could have some rather wild lectures, if the introduction is any indication.

Architectural Design II: Material and Tectonic Transformations is a study in architectural design through the redesign of a real-life structure: the Herreshoff Museum in Bristol, Connecticut. This challenge is said to be about wind, water, and land, and expressing the relationship between each. This is a graduate level course.

Architectural Design II: MIT Student Center challenges the students to consider a student center on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The professor wants the students to create a sense of place, foster a discovery of being, and to reflect the student's existence defined by participation in group events. That's heady stuff for a free online college architecture course, but it should be a challenge worthy of graduate students.

Engineering Statics is a study of civil and mechanical engineering which some college architecture students could find useful. You'll look at structural, biological, and mechanical systems and study methods of quantifying each. This is a free college course from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Case Studies in City Form takes a look at a selection of real life cities and asks the students to analyze, discuss, and compare these urban landscapes. You'll focus on the historical development of these cities and see how they grew over the decades and generations.

The Once and Future City takes a close look at a number of American cities and asks what a city is and what shapes a city. How does the physical form of a municipality and its institutional needs create these differences? You'll look at inner cities, suburban areas, and edge cities.