After millennia of creative effort, has classical architecture run its course? This seminar asks whether it has anything left to offer to the contemporary designer. It starts from the premise that architecture’s recent trajectory, far from being a record of triumphal progress, has plunged toward tectonic, environmental, and ethical ruin. Reaching further back into history, the course takes a generous view of the classical, noting that it propagated offshoots extending far beyond the boundaries of the so-called Western canon, embracing changes in climate, geography, material, patronage, program, scale, sensibility, and technology, producing architectures both ephemeral and enduring, extravagant and austere. To establish the nature of its claim upon the present, and the viability of its promise for the future, the seminar works through a series of discreet architectural problems—the formation of a vocabulary, the construction of a door, the articulation of a wall, the organization of a façade, the development of a tectonic—to test the challenge of the classical.