Cities and Creativity: Cultural and Architectural Interpretations of Madrid

This class is being offered in collaboration with Stanford in Madrid, Bing Overseas Studies Program. Focused on the artistic and architectural aspects of cities, this course fosters students' creative sensibilities through six basic approaches: experiment, research, analyze, interpret, think and do. These approaches will help students understand the sociocultural dimension of the human being within the urban context, where the inherent vitality of creativity lies. The case of Madrid is used as a framework for analysis and interpretation, since it provides the extraordinary opportunity to carry out activities and online experiences charged with significance in the setting of the city. Understanding the architecture of cities as an artistic result of society in each historic period helps to assess their formative capacity and their sociocultural impact. The aim is to analyze and interpret the cultural and educational mission of the city, using theoretical supports and researching relevant urban and architectural places of Madrid, seeing the city as a whole organism that for centuries has gone through an uninterrupted modernization process, as an outcome of society´s creativity.