Fall 2007 Territories of Investigation: Architecture and Technology
Column, Wall, Elevation, Façade ARCH 334/634
Schedule: Thursdays. 2:30 pm - 4:25 pm
Location: 142 East Sibley Hall
Professor: Jerry Wells Prerequisites: ARCH 231/232 or ARCH 531/532 or permission of instructor. The course is lecture/seminar format, limited to 15 students - third year through graduate level.
Course Overview: Field and figure relationships (the interrelation of parts dominated by the general character of the whole) are the general themes used to study numerous issues relevant to the design of elevations and facades. Case studies from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on Renaissance and Modern periods, are used.
The first part of the seminar traces the evolution of the elements of architecture, with the column being the primary element. The column is dealt with as an iconographic and decorative element; as a primitive marker of domain; as a structural device in the composition of facades. The geometric and spatial properties of column bays and grids, and the relationship of the column matrix to walls and wall-like structures, are differentiated.
The second part of the seminar deals with the wall, in particular, architectural walls as the fields upon which the elements of architecture are composed as figures (field and figure strategies). The role of the wall in architecture is discussed at length: wall as fence, wall as divider, wall as frontal plane, wall as façade, wall as filter, wall as compositional theater, etc. Devices such as open versus closed composition; regulating lines; scale versus proportion; field versus figure; literal and phenomenal depth; transparency; architectural content; geometric properties of forms; and various systems of organization are discussed. A series of short exercises, mostly of a collage nature, are done demonstrating an understanding of the ideas presented. A series of readings, including, for example, "The Provocative Façade: Frontality and Contrapposto," by Colin Rowe, are discussed in class (readings vary).
The final series of lectures examine Venetian buildings as models, beginning with the "Ca de Oro," and concluding with a review of minor Venetian facades using Venezia Minore by Elge Renata Trincanato. These buildings are analyzed relative to the issues previously raised in the seminar. (I have found that by using the minor buildings of Venice, many façade issues can be addressed without usurping more famous buildings to be used by the students later in their oral presentations and papers.)
In the seminar portion of the course, the students are required to choose a subject building of group of buildings for their topic paper for the semester. They make an oral presentation, which is thoroughly discussed, and they write a final paper for the course. Grades are based upon the quality of the oral presentations and the final paper.
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Contact Zones: "Colonial & Post Colonial Cities as Dialectical Landscapes of Transfer" ARCH 338/638.01 / CRP 619
Schedule: Thursdays. 10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: 142 East Sibley Hall
Professor: Jeremy Foster Prerequisites: The course is open to graduate students in city & regional planning, architecture, landscape architecture, as well as upper-level undergraduates in the same fields. Class size will be limited to 16 students.
Course Overview:
“The local and global are not set apart but seen as soliciting each other. The double geography of the global/local is not simply a matter of the global reaching into the local, but it is also a matter of the local needing that which is not local to constitute itself. The quest for a sense of identity is not simply a return to an autochthonous essence, it is always also about an ‘experience of division’”. –Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire
If the ‘landscape idea’ epitomizes the Western gaze that distances, objectifies, and attempts to control peoples or territories perceived to be in some way ‘other’, and urbanism is based on the persuasive use of rational analysis, planning and design, then the urban landscape could be seen as one of the prime theatres in which European imperialism has been enacted, projected and naturalized. This class explores this proposition by looking at the spatial design and cultural use of ‘colonial cities’. Rather than focusing on the asymmetries of power that created these cities, the course will consider them as a ‘contact zones’ – productive spaces in which subjects previously separated by geographical or historical circumstances are brought into spatial and temporal co-presence with each other, and in which subjects and groups are constituted in and by their relation to each other; it stresses co-presence, interaction, interlocking relations of power, and the dialectical construction of places, identities, and ideologies. This ‘contact’ perspective has recently come to the fore in debates about globalization, but it has been implicit ever since the inauguration of overseas trade and travel through which western Europe constructed its political, cultural and economic authority. Thus, although geographically removed from the centers of power, colonial cities played an important role in the strategic development of European modernity, as well as the tactical emergence of self-consciously “non-European” societies and cultures. Urban forms produced by this interaction helped symbolically and materially mediate ideas about nature, identity, health, gender, race, and social order, not just in colonial locations, cantonments, ports-of-call, hill stations and administrative centers, but also in imperial capitals, industrial metropolises and trading entrepots.
This course uses a ‘contact’ perspective to explore how the colonial city – its overall configuration, buildings, infrastructures, public open spaces and monuments -- helped mediate this mutual cultural and ideological construction, in both the center and periphery. We begin with an overview of geographical discourses that shaped Western colonialism, and the urbanistic consequences of this, by comparing the articulation of metropole and colony in two different ‘empires’, drawing on examples from ‘grand narrative’ 19th C. imperialism as well utopian 20th C modernist internationalism. The class will then turn to the legacy of this center-periphery articulation today, when the geographical flow of people and ideas has become stronger and more omnidirectional, and international patterns of trade, travel, and consumption intersect with the politics of migration and diasporic identity. Using texts and visual imagery, we will explore the inventive, combinative forms and practices that emerge in cities subject to transnational exchange of money, ideas and practices, the use of urban and architectural design as a vehicle of ‘decolonization’, and how émigré communities are transforming the cities of the metropole. Finally, we will consider how, under the neo-colonial order of globalization, the increasingly-differentiated privatized city of the global North is finding its counterpart in cities of the global South, where multi-national and non-resident enclaves co-exist with informal settlements and other ‘zones of indistinction’. Our discussions will range from cities in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australasia & South America, to those in Europe and elsewhere that have been reciprocally shaped by this colonial encounter.
Requirements: Students will be expected to read, and discuss about, 40 - 50 pp. of reading each week. In addition they will need to submit a carefully-researched and critically-informed ca. 3,500 word research paper on a particular urban condition or formation in a specific city (or pair of cities) whose culture and identity have been/are currently being shaped by exchanges of resources, people and/or ideas. There will be interim presentations to allow discussion and review of research in class.
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arch.games
ARCH 338/638.02
Schedule: Tuesdays. 3:00 - 4:25 pm
Professor: Arch Mackenzie Prerequisites: ARCH 231/232 or ARCH 531/532 or permission of instructor.
Course Overview:
The course, which considers designing by network, consists of internet dialogues and occasional lectures. The six to eight students will correspond weekly via “postcards” exchanged through the course website. East would be a player in an architectural game that envisions a near future “Hanging City.” Working in isolation, each player sees only that portion of an emerging city design that he/she may reveal by negotiating with similarly hidden players. Players hypothesize about the full extent of the city and speculate about the form it is taking. In the endgame, the players put their visions on the table for all to see and compare. Lectures and seminars address the topics of games and networks in the evolving theory and practice of architecture. Weekly web assignments and dialogues.
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The City as a Site of Consumption
ARCH 338/638.03 Schedule: Fridays. 10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: Fine Arts Library Classroom
Professor: André Bideau Prerequisites: Course limited to 15 upper-level and graduate students with basic knowledge of 20th century architecture history.
Course Overview:
Now we are left in a world without urbanism, only architecture. The neatness of architecture is its seduction; it defines, excludes, limits, separates from the „rest“.
Rem Koolhaas, Whatever happened to Urbanism? (1994)
Urban development is inscribed in economic cycles. The history of the city can be read not only in terms of these cycles, but also through the subjectivities that capitalism has produced: Ever since the inception of metropolitan culture, narratives of chaos, crisis and loss have been projected onto the city. The architectural object registers these „shocks“, as does the architectural profession.
Modernism attempted to systematize the urban condition by embracing the logics of classic Taylorization and by locating architectural discourse in a political, economic and technological infrastructure. In advanced capitalism, however, urban development, modes of production and patterns of consumption eschew the logic of planning. This has led recent practises to search for adequate conceptual responses by registering the fluid dynamics of postfordist accumulation.
Straddling concepts of “modern” and “postmodern” space, this seminar addresses the relationships between urbanity, consumption and architectural objects. Architectural production will be discussed within a framework of urban growth, hypertrophy and dysfunctionality. The focus of The City as a Site of Consumption are case studies and theoretical-critical readings (Foster, Hardt/Negri, Harvey, Jameson, Koolhaas, Lash, Tafuri, Urry, Zukin etc.). We will investigate the fascination, opportunism, love-hate relationships developed by architectural avantgardes toward political, institutional and corporate forces that reshape cities. And we will ask how far avantgarde rhetoric has itself become a commodity in an urban condition where cultural and economic spheres have merged.
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Organizing Effects - Part to Whole Relationships
ARCH 338/638.05 Schedule: Tuesdays. 2:30 pm - 4:25 pm
Location: 144 East Sibley Hall
Professors: Leyre Asensio Villoria and
David Syn Chee Mah Prerequisites: ARCH 231/232 or ARCH 531/532 or permission of instructor.
Images – Work and drawings from Andrea Palladio, Leone Battista Alberti, Rudolf Wittkower, Francesco Borromini, Foreign Office Architects, Neutlings and Riedjik, Zaha Hadid Architects, Herzog and deMeuron, Frank Gehry and Gottfried Semper.
Course Overview: The recourse towards architectural effects achieved through the organization/composition of part to whole relationships in architectural construction will be the focus of the course. This will unfold through the study of a number of readings and exemplary projects as a means to illuminate a number of disciplinarily significant as well as contemporary processes of architectural production. The course will study organizational techniques in relation to their emerging and/or consequent effects (inspired by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzsky’s Transparency: an architectural effect borne out of organization rather than that of inherent material qualities). The aim of the course will be to expand the study of an arsenal of architectural effects towards an understanding of part to whole relationships in architectural formation that also produce multiple effects in function, performance and the current interest in the production of new sensibilities.
The procedures for organizing part to whole relationships will be studied, from compositional rules through to the formation of performative material organizations and the contemporary interests in affect and percept.
Course requirements: This course should be understood as a semester long investigation with two equally important parts:
1. Seminars
This includes group presentations and readings. Students will be expected to read a number of texts provided in the seminar reading list and actively participate in weekly class discussions.
2. Research Project
Students will be expected to devote the semester to the development of a theory paper to be submitted at the end of the term.
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Patternology ARCH 459/659.03 Course Schedule: Wednesdays. 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Location: 144 East Sibley Hall
Prerequisites: ARCH 151/152 or ARCH 551/552 or permission of instructor. Enrollment will be limited and permission of instructor required.
Professor: Paul Anderson and
David Salomon Studies from Light and Color Course (MIT), Gyorgy Kepes, 1965.
Course Overview: From the structure of the universe to the print on your grandmother’s couch, patterns describe a vast array of conceptual and physical phenomena. For architecture, something that so easily traffics between scientific rigor and personal taste demands attention, which partly explains their revival. While traditionally marginalized as frivolous decoration or overly deterministic principles, recent advances in digital and materials technology have helped produce a new generation of patterns with protean vitality and multifarious intelligence. These current versions are imbued with properties of elasticity, aperiodicity, opulence, variegation, and idiosyncrasy – qualities that enable them to simultaneously engage numerous operative and material domains. Their newly developed capacity to link seemingly disparate intellectual and cultural categories – such as organization and sensation, graphics and behavior, and process and content – provides an opportunity for a more precise and expansive role for patterns in architecture.
The course will cover a selected history of the pattern in design and speculate about future initiatives through a series of seminars and graphic workshops. The seminars will compare a variety of theoretical definitions of the pattern – including ones elaborated by Frank Lloyd Wright, Norbert Weiner, Gyorgy Kepes, Herbert Simon, Christopher Alexander, and Gregory Bateson – and link them to contemporary architectural debates. Workshops will document patterns from design movements that were contemporaneous with those theories and trace their evolution to today’s versions.
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History of American Landscape Architecture
ARCH 399/LANAR 525 Course Schedule: Tuesdays and Thursdays. 12:20 pm - 1:10 pm
Location: 461 Kennedy Hall
Prerequisites: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Leonard Mirin
Course Overview:
This course examines the development of landscape architecture as a distinctive expression of the American experience from the time of Thomas Jefferson to the present. The course traces the influences of the physical landscape, the cultural attitudes and assumptions of democracy, technology and Capitalism, and the immigrant baggage of memory on the form of urban parks, private and corporate estates, campuses, suburban and public housing, transportation planning, recreation grounds and other aspects of open space design in which landscape architects have made significant contributions.
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Foundations of the Discipline
ARCH 681 Course Schedule: Wednesdays. 11:15 am - 1:10 pm
Location: 208 West Sibley
Prerequisites: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Christian Otto
Course Overview: Explorations of seminal positions that established the disciplinary praxis of architecture history and urbanism, based on case studies.
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Architects as Theorists/Theorists as Architects
ARCH 699
Course Schedule: Fridays. 10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: 142 East Sibley Hall
Prerequisites: A
RCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Dan Sherer Course Overview: The aim of this seminar is to examine what is at stake, critically and epistemologically, when architects write theoretical texts and philosophers, critics and theorists who are not architects write about architecture. When did the architect take on the cultural role of theorist and its attendant intellectual challenges? Under what historical circumstances did the architect find it necessary to theorize or criticize the assumptions of the discipline? How does criticism enter into the practice of architecture, and how does architecture position itself in relations to the critical premises of other fields of knowledge? Can theory provide an epistemological foundation for architecture, or does it simply shed light on the limits inherent in such an attempt? Is there a theoretical-critical discourse specific to architecture, or does the specificity of its discursive structures reside in their capacity to effect exchanges between architecture and other fields? Emphasizing key episodes in the architecture/theory relationship, we will try to answer these questions by emphasizing continuities, ruptures, and tensions inherent in the dialectic between these distinct, yet related domains. We will address the architect as author of built as well as written texts, and hence also as initiator of theories regarding form, function, structure, tectonics and materials; the relation of architecture to society and to the other arts; the articulation of norms both internal and external to the discipline by architects and non-architects; the pragmatic demands of operatively vs. the epistemological imperatives of theory; the strategies of legitimation that arise when architects try to wield theoretical discourse as a weapon, or promotional device, and the resistances that theory can offer to such efforts at instrumentalization; the epistemological anxieties that come to light when practitioners search for stable corpus of norms; the problematic of the “provisionality” of foundations and theoretical horizons in contemporary architectural discourse; the oscillation between operatively and detachment implicit in architectural criticism; the rise of new venues of architectural publication, strategies of dissemination, and the multiple practice of writing and reading that came to be associated with them from illustrated treatise in the Renaissance, through the privileged modernist genres of the manifesto and the critical essay; the demands placed upon a discipline that increasingly come to occupy a contested region of claims put forward by architects who act as theorists and theorists who, though they are not architects, are vitally concerned with the discipline (e.g., Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault); the peculiar status of utopian discourse and its “dark” variants, heterotopia and dystopia, both as textual formations and as recurrent features of architectural theory, and its engagement of new genres located between literary fiction, political theory, and urban thought. The course will be organized around “dyads”, pairs of seminal thinkers and architects whose critical concerns will be assessed in terms of the impact that their theories have had upon specific historical situations, and in terms of parameters of criticism that their dialog elaborated, defining specific eras in the history of architecture and thought.
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