Ten Buildings, Twenty Ways to Think About Them ARCH 338/638.01
Schedule: Tuesdays, 2:30 pm - 4:25 pm
Location: 142 East Sibley Hall
Professor: Sanford Kwinter Prerequisites: ARCH 231/232 or ARCH 531/532 or permission of instructor.
Course Overview: This course will examine 10 buildings (or building practices) of the last 20 years that can make credible claim to possess canonical status. They will be studied in relation to a wide variety of non-traditional ways of understanding meanings and means of generation.
Works to be studied will include those by: Toyo Ito, Herzog/de Meuron, Abalos & Hereros, Rem Koolhass, Sejima/Nishizawa, Wolf Prix, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Petra Blaisse, and one or two emerging practices.
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Critical Urbanism ARCH 338/638.02 / CRP 395.78/659.78
Schedule: Tuesday, 2:30 pm - 4:25 pm
Location: 144 East Sibley Hall
Professor: Milton Curry Prerequisites: ARCH 231/232 or ARCH 531/532 or permission of instructor.
Course Overview:
The contemporary city requires a new variety of design tools and theoretical understandings to formulate active consideration of current problems of urbanism – ranging from urban infrastructure, the role of the capital markets and real estate economics as determinants of urban and architectural design and landscape, and the role of demography and cultural identity as factors that shape design and programmatic decision-making. The logic of American urbanism - sharply divided between urban, suburban, and rural morphologies - has been progressively eroded and is now unreadable alongside demographic and economic changes. Contemporary urbanism - inflected by global capitalism and generic and repetitive urban design strategies - anticipates a more temporary affiliation between city dwellers (perhaps analogous to the tourist’s temporary affiliation with the native). The impact of modernism, suburbanization, shifts in income and consumerism, and public policy, will be examined alongside current movements aimed at mitigating ghettoization, gentrification, suburban and urban sprawl, and affordable houses crises. Additionally, the State’s use of eminent domain and other tools for assembling property for large redevelopment projects including publicly-funded urban and landscape infrastructure, sports stadiums, and mixed-use programming will be examined alongside counter-narratives of disinvestment and neglect. The course will examine major theoretical themes in urbanism including but not limited to cultural and political geography, ideologies of capitalism, commoditization, Marxism and neo-Marxism. Course format will include topical lectures, seminar readings and discussions, and research papers/works.
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Between Infrastructures and Objects: Ungers Revisited
ARCH 338/638.03
Schedule: Wednesdays, 7:30 - 9:30 pm
Location: Fine Arts Library Seminar Room
Introduction: August 29 Professor: André Bideau Prerequisites: Seminar limited to 15 participants, aimed at graduate and upper-level undergraduate students - basic knowledge of 20th century architecture required. Students will prepare and present papers during semester (3 credits). Contact:ab632@cornell.edu
Course Overview:
The decade following 1968 witnessed a paradigm shift in architecture discourse: While the city and contemporary urban society were escaping the socially invested narrative of planning, utopian and historical languages were set free for use as „Perfect Acts of Architecture“ (Jeffrey Kipnis). The key figure from Germany to leave his mark upon international debates in this context was O.M.Ungers.
After addressing the urban condition as an infrastructural problem through cluster, linear and grid systems in the 1960s, OMU introduced the idealised, abstract object into the urban environment. This desire for autonomy of the architectural language brought OMU full circle with modernist rigor during his Cornell tenure - stimulating Koolhaas and disturbing Rowe.
Why did the categories of artifact and infrastructure exclude each other after 1968? What does this controversy tell us about conceptual, societal, institutional, disciplinary shifts? How instrumental was OMU’s „academic exile“ from the European city? By revisiting the transatlantic setting of postmodernism / postfordism, the seminar will try to uncover some of the cultural & economic forces behind a hermetic body of work.
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Megacity Lifestyles: Leisure Urbanism
ARCH 338/638:04 / CRP 395.25/649.25 Schedule: Thursdays, 12:20 pm - 2:15 pm
Location: 142 East Sibley Hall
Professor: David Mah Prerequisites: ARCH 231/232 or ARCH 531/532 or permission of instructor.
Course Overview: Frequent quality of life indicators and city livability rankings ranging from the Economist Intelligence Unit to Monocle magazine (a der Speigel for Wallpaper readers) consistently indicate the conspicuous absence of nearly all the worlds megacities from its top 20 livability rankings. Does this indicate a failing of these cities to provide a desirable way of life or are Megacities producing an emerging lifestyle that is qualitatively different to what we know and expect?
As the quality and access to leisure has become a major barometer for measuring a city’s livability, leisure will be our focus. Forecasts and predictions that the 21st Century will be defined by the megacity, signals its ascendancy as the major setting for the lives of the global population. This points towards the need for revisions to strategies and even sensibilities in architectural and urban practice. In this seminar, we will investigate and analyze the “Hard and Soft infrastructures” that facilitate the megacity population’s leisure lifestyle.
Emerging urban and architectural types as well as trends and specific examples of deliberate and appropriated public realms will be studied. From retail led urban regeneration to informal street markets, from artificial climatically controlled environments to self organized events, novel and emerging architectural and urban environments that facilitate atmospheres for the megacity’s leisure and recreation will be analyzed and studied.
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 a report on an example of a new urban/architectural leisure type.
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D-Range: Seminar on the Theories of Computation in Design and Materiality
ARCH 338/638.05 Schedule: Wednesday, 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Location: 142 East Sibley Hall
Professor: Carla Leitao Prerequisites: ARCH 231/232 or ARCH 531/532 or permission of instructor.
Course Overview: The seminar formulates new theoretical and practice approaches that encompass a broad view of materiality including digital tectonics and urban materials.
The seminar engages the hypnotic power that materiality has and will have furthermore on the nature of space and time through its significant role in their structure and tectonics. We will critically study and discuss new landscape-materials that continue to be “invented”, “fabricated”, “sold”, and “consumed” by architects and users.
Material is not created by a static definition or substance, but is a constantly evolving, renewing entity. Contemporary materials evidence a shift of the overall definition of matter, opening more tangible physical 'absences' and showing concrete intelligent and emotional behavior.
An understanding of this shift of the definition of materials in architecture creates new possible landscapes with more variable degrees of proximity and differentiation from the human body.
It is desirable at this point for the discipline to problematize what those landscapes are and test new ways of representing their properties or their dreams, integrating them in a creative and highly informed process of design.
Future materials will be in fact dMATs – materials with deranging potential.
These materials are not neutral, but highly political, speculative, moody and actively transformative of their surroundings. Their thought is their language (code) and their behavior.
On a broader scope, architecture and cities continuously create new materials themselves that are qualifiable and quantifiable as new prime matters with which they can rebuild their problematics. If architectural space has often had a dubious political goal, materials can step forward (or definitively back) in the creation of ecologies, sustainability, social change, and cultural hybridizations.
The seminar will discuss several types of contemporary physical, virtual, political, cultural and social materials, coming out of this considered shift on materiality in architecture, and of matter in sciences. This will be done through a temporarily invented lens that is able to investigate their generative capability, their multidimensional metrics, and their continuing paradigms of sameness and difference.
We will also be working with the apparent new becoming of “sign” in architecture, not anymore on the semiotic level but that of the fusing of representation with the generative language of matter's own flesh.
Moreover, the seminar engages the fundamental question of where and what kind of intelligence do we want to assign to our environments. Artificial Intelligence continues to try to understand the role of emotions as a catalyst on the definition of intelligence practice and development in the human being. This has allowed a review of the parameters that command main interactions of this previously well delimited body with its environment.
In the same way, we will be evolving a problematic of the new set of materials and their potentials, that can be formulated with a more integrated notion of information processing and energy exchange, as main actors of the new architecture multimodal space.
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