Understanding the built environment requires two elemental aspects building itself and its surroundings. To this end, this course will be organized thematically and will broadly follow a chronological order – beginning with the origins and evolution of the urban world and ending with modern and contemporary urban spaces. This course aims to look at basic building types throughout history according to their relevance with both the period and the urban context such period offers. To do so, each week a different building type will be examined corresponding to the most critical space production of the period. Starting with the early public and private spaces we will cover the spaces of performance, religion, mobility, exhibition, and education. Each week a selected building correlated with the themes of the week will be covered in a detailed manner and its contextual connections with the space surrounding them will be discussed. In each thematic week, the building, its urban context, and periodical specifiers producing such spaces will be studied to help make sense of key architectural typologies.