Students and architecture enthusiasts from New Zealand and around the world are being offered the chance to study architecture at Harvard University for free.

The prestigious Ivy League university is running an online course titled “The Architectural Imagination”, which will aim to teach the fundamental principles of architecture through a study of history’s most important buildings.

Students will be exposed to “Vivid analyses of exemplary buildings from a wide range of historical contexts, coupled with hands-on exercises in drawing and modelling.”

Presented by the university’s Graduate School of Design, the 10-week course was first held last year and enrolment is open now.

The course is taught by professors and instructors from the architecture faculty, including K. Michael Hays, a professor of architectural theory; Erika Naginski, professor of architectural history; and Antoine Picon, professor of the history of architecture and technology.

It features ten modules, divided into three distinct topics.

The first part of the course, which includes video presentations and hands-on exercises, introduces the idea of the architectural imagination as “a faculty that mediates sensuous experience and conceptual understanding.”

In the second set of modules, the course addresses technology “as a component of architecture’s realisation and understanding.”

The final section of the course confronts “architecture’s complex relationship to its social and historical contexts and its audiences, achievements, and aspirations.”

A course introduction states, “Architecture engages a culture’s deepest social values and expresses them in material, aesthetic form. In this course, you will learn how to ‘read’ architecture as a cultural expression as well as a technical achievement.”

Harvard University was ranked the seventh best architecture school in 2017, based on the QS World University Rankings by Subject. The Graduate School of Design’s alumni and current and former faculty include many influential names, including an abundance of Pritzker Prize Laureates.

The current faculty includes Pritzker Prize laureates Rem Koolhaas of OMA and Toyo Ito of Toyo Ito and Associates, while former faculty members include Walter Gropius and Zaha Hadid.

The school’s distinguished alumni include architects Harry Seidler, I. M. Pei and Frank Gehry.

While students will not receive any credentials for completing the course, a certificate can be purchased for US$99.

For more information, or to enrol, head here.