Hyderabad, India. 
Image source: Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects (MoMA, 1964) 
 

ARC3018HF (LEC0103)
Instructor: Vivian Lee

The global rise of the International Style in the mid-twentieth century did more than homogenize architectural aesthetics. It severed the reciprocal relationship between climate, materials, culture, space, and form, interrupting a process of architectural adaptation and knowledge production that had evolved over thousands of years.

Every regional building tradition is the product of continuous experimentation—a form of iterative design research conducted at full scale, over generations, in real environments. These traditions encoded sophisticated intelligence about how to build in a particular climate, with available materials, for specific social and cultural ways of life. 

Vernacular Futures begins with a simple question: what would these architectures look like today if that continuity had never been broken?  

You will excavate the logic of a chosen tradition, understand it on its own terms, and project it forward into the present. This is not an exercise in heritage or replication, but in transformation. Every project must respond to a clearly defined contemporary condition: climate emergency, rapid urbanization, emerging construction technologies, changing social structures, new materials, or other forces shaping the built environment today. The challenge is not to reconstruct a lost past, but to design a future that might have been—and may still be possible.