WRLD 125:
THE CREATIVE DRIVE:
CREATIVITY IN ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC AND SCIENCE

• What makes monumental creative works great?
• Do great creators share particular personality traits?
• How do their lives affect their ingenious and prodigious work?

In "The Creative Drive," faculty members of Music, Architecture, and Mathematics address these fundamental questions as they focus on several great creators and their works.

This course is designed to help students obtain a basic understanding of creative thinking. In this vein, each student is asked to prepare three essays:

• Addressing the feelings evoked by a visit to The U.S. Holocaust Museum
• Concerning the certain aspects of movies such as Amadeus and Immortal Beloved
• Creating a new "dream," after reading Alan Lightman's best-selling novel Einstein's Dreams

Topics include the following:

MUSIC:

• Periods of music history
• Famous medieval composer: Hidegard von Bingen
• Baroque and Classical giants: Bach, Mozart and Beethoven
• Silence and structure: Schoenberg and Cage
• Great women of jazz: Smith, Fitzgerald, Holiday
• Creative current rock artist: Madonna

ARCHITECTURE:

• Palladio and Renaissance architecture
• Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses and "Fallingwater"
• Le Corbusier's "five points"
• Mies van der Rohe's "minimalistic" architecture
• Contemporary architecture

SCIENCE:

• Fundamental scientific discoveries leading to Isaac Newton's great work
• Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity
• Basic notions of chaos, and applications to weather prediction ahead?

F.L. Wright's Fallingwater

A fractal from the Mandelbrot Set

Student Comments:

"What I liked best was the three subjects surrounding the one topic of creativity."
"It sparked all sorts of interests in me that I never had before."