Building Disasters: When Things Go Wrong This seminar flips the traditional approach to architectural education by focusing not on celebrated successes, but on failures – spectacular, sobering, and instructive. Through detailed case studies of structural and architectural disasters, the course examines how miscalculations, human error, design flaws, mismanagement, and unforeseen conditions can lead to catastrophic outcomes. More than a technical postmortem, these failures are also considered within their broader political, cultural, environmental, and professional contexts. What went wrong? Why did it happen? What were the consequences—not just for the buildings themselves, but for the people who used, built, and designed them? The course also looks at how these failures have prompted changes in building codes, engineering standards, professional ethics, and architectural practice. By studying what did not work, students gain critical insight into what it means to build responsibly, learning to anticipate risk, question assumptions, and navigate the complex realities of the practice of architecture. Each student selects a building failure to research and presents their findings in class. Through this process, the course aims to develop more thoughtful, critical, and ethically grounded designers – aware not only of how things are built, but of how things can go wrong.