• Knowledge and understanding:
By the end of the first part of the class the students will possess a critical capacity to compare architecture to cooking, to see architectural plans as the counterparts of recipes. This will let them to better explore the relation between architectural plans and buildings, and to address the question whether the architectural work is an abstract entity or not.
By the end of the second part of the class the students will possess a basic knowledge of the main approaches currently available in semiotics of architecture, their principles, and styles, as well as their strong and weak spots. The hypothesis that architecture is not a language will be considered, and the students will be challenged to argue in which sense one can hold that there are such things as architectural meanings. The notion of ‘affordance’ will be introduced to provide support to the idea that buildings and their parts can mean.
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• Applying knowledge and understanding:
The main goal of the first part of the class is to make the students able to apply in a critical way their understanding of the analogy between architecture and cooking for determining what the architectural work precisely consists in on a case by case basis.
A basic knowledge of the main approaches currently available in semiotics of architecture will be offered to the students in the second part of the class to make them develop argumentative skills and the capacity to apply them to the largest possible number of issues and situations where the problem of architectural communication rise in the domain of architectural and urban studies. This will also serve as a starting point to reflect about the moral responsibility of architects when their work invites people to act in certain ways, or, on the other hand, when it preempts some actions.

• Making judgements:
By the end of the class the students will be able to develop new arguments within specific debates about the meanings conveyed by an architectural work or its capacity to favour or preempt particular actions, and to estimate the strength of a specific argument when it is compared to a rival one. The very same ability will be cultivated relatively to the arguments supporting or rejecting the ontological statements about the nature of a specific architectural work, considering the analogy between architecture and cooking.

• Communication skills:
The students will be able to express their own intuitions about what an architectural work can be by using the language of analytical philosophy of art; to build up arguments in favour and against their position; to engage into an argumentative challenge with one or more than one interlocutors; to correctly evaluate their own argumentative performances.
Furthermore, the students will be able to make use of an essential set of concepts of semiotics to argue in support of their own position concerning what architecture can “say”, as well as about their own communicative and people-affecting choices in the practice of designing and planning.

• Learning skills:
The class is aimed at letting the students to have the sufficient skills in order to develop higher-level knowledge about how architecture can communicate, nudge to act in certain ways, and nudge not to act in other ways, as well as about the real nature of an architectural work (material or immaterial? a type or a token? etc.).
The class is aimed at letting the students have a more critical stance to designing and planning, which should bring to a more intimate and profound comprehension of the methods, techniques, history, authors and approaches in architecture and urban studies.