ARCT2010 Modern Architecture, Univeristy of Western Australia, 2019-2022
Unit Coordinator : Dr.Nigel Westbrook, Studio Coordinator: Dr. Ali Javid
This unit provides a basis to understand the relationship between contemporary architecture and its historical background. Building on the Level 1 survey units, it examines key periods and works in late nineteenth and twentieth-century global architecture, landscape architecture and urban design from the reformist movements of the late nineteenth century to the contemporary period. The theories and work of designers are discussed in relation to the major themes of modernism—industrial revolution, abstract formalism, expressionism, utopianism, the relation of architecture and ideology, functionalism, regionalism, environmental science and regional landscape planning, and recent reactions to modernist orthodoxy. The unit is intended to provide a useful introduction to important design philosophies of relevance to the contemporary culture of architecture.
Pedagogical Process:
The pedagogical process was divided into three interconnected projects:
(1) REFLECTIVE NOTEBOOKS
(2) PRESENTATION
(3) ESSAY
In Reflective Notebooks, students were invited to bridge the gap between textual analysis and architectural imagination. Through a series of weekly readings—from Art Nouveau to Modernism—they responded not with essays, but with visual notebooks. These sketchbooks became active thinking tools, where annotation, drawing, and diagramming were used to digest, challenge, and reinterpret key moments in architectural history.
The results are deeply personal and intellectually rich: fragments of buildings interweave with historical references, quotations transform into form, and spatial ideas emerge through image and text. This process not only sharpened their historical understanding but encouraged a visual literacy essential to architectural practice.
These pages are more than notes—they are design exercises in themselves
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