After having an amazing experience with Will Davis in Arch&UD 10B during Spring quarter in 2019, this class was a huge disappointment. Maura is clearly intelligent lecturer, but she occasionally comes off as condescending by ending almost every statement with “Yeah?” as if we had no clue what she was talking about. As her lectures are mostly slide-based, it was pretty hard to stay engaged, and the fact that we were not allowed to use laptops or other devices in lecture, not even for taking notes, only made things harder. The way she lectured also made it hard to keep up, since she doesn’t really post words/key facts on the slides, just pictures, so you’d better pay close attention to what she says, or else you might miss something crucial. What really upset me was that they changed the date of the final exam during Week 1, after class had already started.

The weekly assignments were fairly simple. You just had to read three (moderately lengthy) readings and write a two-page reading response, but in keeping with the no-technology theme, you had to bring your readings and response to discussion. My TA, Rebecca, was somewhat helpful as she helped us engage in useful discussions and was luckily an easy grader when it came to the reading responses and the exams, but based on the review sessions I went to I felt that Luke and Henry were probably the most helpful.

The exams were a pain. For the midterm and final (not cumulative, 25% and 30% each I think), you had to not only review key information from 70-80 images/architectural projects, but you also had to memorize the authors, titles, and key ideas of the readings for discussion, which was honestly pretty pointless and made my study time very unproductive. The prompts were somewhat vague but still allowed you to put in enough of your own creativity to write a decent essay. Fortunately, Maura did offer some extra credit. If you visited a major architectural site in Los Angeles and wrote a short paper on some of its key design features, you could get up to 5% bonus on your midterm or final grade, whichever was lower.

Overall, I would not take this class again. If you’re planning on taking this class as a visual/performing arts analysis GE, I would advise you to look elsewhere for a better experience. I got the A, but the amount of time I spent on this class was ridiculous.

I remember reading a bruinwalk review about this class before taking it. The person said they wanted to be an architect and after taking this class they no longer want to do it - that is exactly how I feel. This class is literally one of the worst classes I have taken. The material is not engaging whatsoever, the professor rambles on for about an hour and a half twice a week. The lectures are so difficult to get through (even on 2x speed!). The only benefit of this class was my TA (shoutout Dexter!) and the fact that there was no final or midterm. Instead, we had weekly worksheets based on lectures and 3 papers. The readings, though sometimes interesting, were often dense and also difficult to get through. For an intro class, this was a lot of bus work, and I 10/10 do not recommend it.

Maura is knowledgeable about the topics that are discussed throughout each lectures, however, she just reads from her printed out notes and some of the information is difficult to digest. We had to read roughly 60-80 pages of dense reads and write a short essay for each discussion. If we turned in all 7 of the short essays, 2 of them would be dropped at the end of the quarter. Participation during discussion is mandatory. The hardest part of the class was the midterm and final where we had to remember 60 slides of pictures that were presented during lectures and then only write about 4 -6 of said pictures in the actual exam.

Although I ended up doing well in this class, I can not recommend it or its professor. On a weekly basis, an unreasonable amount of reading was assigned. The tedious amount of reading was worsened by Maura’s lectures, which were dry and difficult to follow. This could have been an interesting class, but the ideas and concepts were introduced and explained to students about as poorly as they could have been. Since I think this was the professor’s first time teaching the class, maybe future iterations of this class will be better.