RENAISSANCE ENGINEERS
 | Day/Time/Room: |
| Units : 3 |
| Instructors : Roger Hahn (History), James Casey (Mechanical Engineering), Filip C. Filippou (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Stephen Tobriner (Architecture) |
| Course Control No: |
Office Hours:
Description
This interdisciplinary course is designed to appeal primarily to students from Letters and Science, Environmental Design and Engineering.
Lectures will center on the mechanical inventions of Northern Italian artist-engineers, chief among them that genius, Leonardo da Vinci. A new interactive CD-ROM, which details these inventions will be the main "text" for the course.
Situated in the new urban environment of the Renaissance, the artisans and humanists of the time imagined and constructed beautiful structures and ingenious devices based on the newly-formulated principles of mechanics, many of which sill constitute the foundations of modern civil and mechanical engineering. The course will examine the sources of inspiration for Sienese and Florentine visionary engineers and architects, and consider their consequences for the modern scientific disciplines of structural and mechanical engineering.
Each student will be encouraged to devise a project based on the machines or structures of the period, or to write a research paper on a topic broached in the class. Limited enrollment.
