Every society, wrote Bernard Tchumi, is expecting architecture to reflect its ideas and domesticates its deepest fears.

As Part of cultural practice, it is clear that the significance of making architecture cannot be reduced just to its physical and functional aspects taken in their narrow sense of the term. On the contrary, it is well recognized that the field of architecture demands a conceptual framework in order to assist reveling its meaning. Furthermore, architectural expressions should be interprets as a dictum with regard to human being and the world surrounded him. Making architecture is never an innocent practice, as the matter of fact; it is deeply involved with philosophy, as well as social and ideological arrangements.

Ever since, the discipline of architecture has been sensitive towards changes occurring in other fields of knowledge and activity, such as philosophy, science, art, sociology and linguistic. Thus, it has been endowed with a critical-reflective discourse. Moreover, it succeeded in creating and reflecting a variety of cultural trends and motivating change ideas.

The objective of this course is to establish the foundations for a critical reading of the architectural phenomenon, through three theoretical attitudes, three hermeneutic spaces: linguistic, phenomenological and social. The first interprets architecture as a communication system and discuss the intention of the architectural statement, as well as the disruption of the system of representation. The second, interprets architecture as part of the self-conception of the subject with respect to the universe, as an effort of uncovering an existential and poetic meanings. The third interprets architecture as a social practice, hence deriving its meaning and function.