Precedents in critical practice

Seminar sessions: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

The objective of this seminar is to produce a map of contemporary architectural practice and to develop tools for scrutinizing that map through formal reading, an understanding of (and speculations on) popular culture and politics, and by using our general grasp of the recent history of architectural thinking.

The seminar will open by examining several collective attempts at theorizing the current situation in architectural discourse published recently in Hunch, Log, the last issue of Assemblage, and in the Harvard Design Magazine. Drawing out the most salient themes from these, the course will be structured in terms of 6 headings, or rather, 6 coupled themes:

These will each be examined in terms of the recent history of the coupled subjects – as topics that are in the process of definition, rather than as strictly defined themes. Although part of the proposition of the course will be that each of the headings features two topics that are in a historical relationship of sorts, they are not seen here as entirely opposed to each other. Similarly, even though the coupled themes partial genealogical relationship would suggest that the second theme in each heading has more contemporary currency than its predecessor, it would be wrong to think that we will be discussing examples of absolute evolution, where one theme is also more advanced as a result of its novelty, or for that matter that it has completely replaced the theme that in some way anticipated and prefigured it.

In order to set up each topic we will consider a combination of texts and recent architectural work. A map of contemporary practice and discourse will emerge as the course unfolds and as our terms/themes accumulate, allowing us to consider certain works through a variety of lenses and forcing us to invent new lenses to accommodate relationships that will inevitably emerge from the course. We will dedicate a large portion of our time to situating projects within a disciplinary and cultural context, which will directly involve formal reading of buildings in conjunction with the reading of relevant texts.

Each of the six themes for the course will be developed over a period of two weeks. Each class will begin with a lecture/presentation by the instructor of the contemporary writings outlining the topic of the debate (and some of its earlier variations) and a presentation of architectural work. The second portion of the class will be devoted to student presentations assigned for that meeting, followed by an open discussion intended to question the issues and topics introduced in that session.

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