Bard Architecture

This studio-based course introduces students to architectural tools of communication while presenting architecture as a field that is expansive—a field that engages not only with technical knowledge, but also with the making of public imaginaries, personal environments, cultural spatial aesthetics, and even the contested ground of the political, economic and social. The course is simultaneously an introduction to the techniques of representation that define the discipline of architecture and an opportunity to explore and question how architecture mediates the world. Students will learn and practice techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, mapping, 3D modeling and compositional image-making. While the focus will be on an array of forms of architectural drawing, these techniques will be carefully positioned against a survey of paradigmatic moments and themes in the history of architecture that will help situate the practice today. Throughout the term, our design work will be supplemented by readings and periodic research work, and we will situate this against regular lectures that will introduce you to the broader culture of architecture. The course will provide a foundation of concepts and skills necessary to make architecture legible and to convey a spatial argument through design. No prerequisites.

In this introductory course, the ‘tools of the trade’ (plans, sections, digital drafting, perspectives, collages, physical and digital modeling and montage) will be entry points into deciphering the politics, practices and protocols that govern our built environment.

Seeking to proactively challenge certain assumptions of the field—that architecture is a practice based on production (of buildings, of assets, of products, of space, of culture, of drawings of images, of ideas…)—the aim of the course will be to reposition architecture as a method of seeing and reading space; a production of legibility. Through a series of explorations, students will learn the tools, techniques and media of spatial-visual communication used in the field of architecture while attempting to make new claims about its production and productivity, opening up new roles for architects in evolving social paradigms. Students will be asked to interrogate both lived space, representations of it, and existing precedents, as well as to engage with texts that will inform an evolving and consistent discussion throughout. No Pre-requisites.

This course examines the history of modern architecture, examining the debates, theories, and practices that informed its many facets from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. We will be discussing the production of the built environment within the context of colonialism, focusing on the infrastructures, institutions, and building types that emerged in response to industrialization, social revolutions, and epistemic shifts. The industrialization of production, new technologies, material, and institutions, as well as growing urban cultures and changing social structures called for architects and designers to partake in the process of modernization. The course will pay particular attention to the ways in which architects responded to and participated in formal and aesthetic developments, as well as epistemic and cultural shifts that marked modernity, such as the enlightenment, Darwinism, positivism, and the rise of psychology. Covering many aspects of architecture, from buildings, drawings, exhibitions, and schools, to historical and theoretical writings and manifestos, we will investigate the wide range of modernist practices, polemics and institutions. The aim of the course is to provide a solid historical framework of the debates and practices that made architecture modern, while engaging the students in a critical discussion of the role of architecture in the production of the built environment and the forces that shape it. The course includes field trips, readings, and short assignments. AHVC distribution: Modern.

Architectural models are a unique medium, a visual language that references the built world through scale and abstraction. As physical objects, they represent futures (proposals), histories (sites and contexts), and current conditions (material resources, shifting societal demands), often slipping between these temporalities. Learning how to make models is as important as learning to read what they tell us about the world. In this elective design studio, students will make an architectural model as a continuous practice, utilizing a spectrum of physical and digital fabrication methods such as woodworking, casting, digital modeling, and laser cutting. In making architectural models, we will question how societal models (such as domestic routines, building regulations, political cycles, and environmental systems) can be represented in physical form. We will ask how this form of architectural translation can complicate latent biases within the built environment, making visible otherwise invisible networks of power. Prerequisites: ARCH111 or permission of professor.

What is urbanization and how does it relate to climate change? The link between the two locates one of the most pressing issues the world faces. Yet despite the world-historic importance of both climate change and the unprecedented pace of urbanization seen around the planet today, we tend to narrate each as matters of the immediate present, processes without histories. As a result, climate-conscious urban development often appears as a palette of isolated and costly ‘solutions’ for the effects of the climate crisis that tend to exacerbate class, racial and gendered inequalities, while doing little to slow climate change. Treating history as a source for hope in the face of despair, this course will argue that neither climate change nor urbanization is inevitable. Engaging scholarly literature, magazine articles, films and media, we will develop a counter-history that sees urbanization and climate change as historically co-constituted processes, whose roots can be traced to the spaces and experiences of Europe’s colonial ventures and the subsequent rise of world capitalism. This course will be lecture-seminar hybrid and will meet twice a week. Students will have weekly reading assignments and the course will culminate in a project of creative fictional writing.

How can we approach architecture beyond form-based explorations, but as a mode to re-imagine current sociopolitical, institutional, and territorial entanglements? This design studio seminar explores architecture as a network of situated relationships between built and non-built environments. Focusing on the colonial construction of rural imaginaries, students will pull apart and realign existing agricultural food systems at various scales. We will question the destructive and extractive processes of industrial agriculture, globalization and late capitalism by suggesting a para-fictional alternative: a land practice of resistance, regeneration, and mutual care based on the network of radical farms in the Hudson Valley. For the final project, students will produce a series of speculative projection drawings that read as one collective canvas with multiple scales, perspectives, and realities. This class is part of the Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Initiative. Prerequisite: ARCH 111.

During the twentieth century there was an international effort to set in place a global human rights system. International institutions and civic organizations invited architects, planners, illustrators and designers to participate in this new system of human rights in diagnostic operations, surveys, but also in practical ways on the ground. This course will investigate how architecture and human rights intersected during those efforts to establish a larger system of human rights, as well as the spatial politics that these intersections produced and enabled. Students will engage in the study of the discourse on human settlements, the ideologies of development, architectures of humanitarian aid, population exchanges and legal frameworks, border building and peacekeeping operations, but also structures of solidarity, networks of nonalignment, and critiques of the concept of human rights and their implied anthropocentrism vis-à-vis calls for climate commons and care infrastructures. We will be reading Samuel Moyn, Eyal Weisman, David Crowe, Felicity Scott, Nancy Fraser, Hannah Arendt, Andrew Herscher, Chantal Mouffe, Quinn Slobodian, among others. The course requires readings, short forum assignments, and a final research paper. (Human Rights Core Course)

In the contemporary world, the concept of the human being has transcended traditional boundaries. In the face of the climate crisis, and with the challenges made by non-normative knowledge structures, our bodies are increasingly understood as intricate ecosystems, composed of bacteria, fungi, viruses, microplastics, prosthetics, chemical regimes, and myriad other components. However, prevailing historical and theoretical narratives in architecture have remained predominantly anthropocentric, placing autonomous and zipped-up human beings at the core of their discourse. This course offers an exploration of the complex interplay between non-human and human designs within contemporary global contexts, delving into historical examples and new imaginations. Emphasis is placed on the incorporation of what is traditionally termed "nature" into design processes, as well as the roles that the evolution of animal, vegetal, and mineral have played in design. Additionally, we will investigate non-human forms of intelligence and healing, ceremonial and repair practices in architecture, challenging the notion that design must solely serve human needs. We will work collectively in the production of an exhibition on Non-Human Architecture, and a publication that will accompany this show.

Architectural exhibitions are places that take stock of a field in constant movement; a site in which global shifts and debates intersect, bringing into view consequences and openings for a future under construction. In this course we will mine the medium of the architectural exhibition to ask: How can an archive be used to revise an established canon? How can the curation of an exhibition unsettle what has become commonplace? How do we situate present practice against an uncertain future? We will discuss the ways in which architecture is produced and reproduced within the space of an exhibition, as well as how the exhibition, as a contested space, can create openings for renewed understandings of culture and politics beyond architecture. This course will culminate in a public exhibition featuring the architectural model as a central medium to re-present contemporary and historical ideas against one another. By critically surveying contemporary practice, students will employ a range of representational techniques to enunciate questions for possible shared futures that escape the gravity of dominant cultural imaginaries. Moderation is a prerequisite.

This seminar explores how race and racism are constructed with spatial means, and how, in turn, space can be shaped by racism. Our tools to investigate these constructions will be literary (novels, essays, poetry), theoretical (urban and architectural theory & criticism), historical (art history, urban history), and cultural (film and music). Of these works, we will ask: how have contemporary works of literature, film, architecture, and visual art captured and critiqued the built environment, and offered alternative understandings of space and place, home and work, citizenship and property? How are our spaces and structures imagined and coded in terms of proximity to whiteness and Blackness, class, gender, and ability, and how have we learned to read and internalize such codes? We will consider particular built forms, from shotgun houses to skyscrapers, and from ethnic enclaves to cities writ large. Authors and artists may include: Colson Whitehead, bell hooks, Spike Lee, June Jordan, Mat Johnson, Paule Marshall, Chester Himes, Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison. This course is a junior seminar and fulfills the American and Indigenous Studies junior seminar requirement, and the Architecture Program's "Discourses on Space" elective requirement. This course is also part of the "Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck" Initiative.

This 1-month-long, 2-credit design workshop examines past, present, and future architectural remains of the Hudson Valley in search of new tomorrows. What architectural futures that may have faltered in the past do we keep reanimating and reimagining today? Drawing from theories of hauntology and critical spectrality, this studio scrutinizes the architectural landscapes of the Hudson Valley from a non-linear perspective. Haunting, viewed as a productive linkage between past/future, territories/actors, human/environment, memory/place, serves as a guiding principle. It allows us to connect architecture with subaltern postcolonial histories, myths, and ruins, creating a rich and layered understanding of these spaces.

In groups of 2-3, students will take on the role of architectural time-travelers, collapsing different temporalities onto a specific site. We will utilize various technologies and skills to produce analytical drawings, prototypes, and construct a final structure through digital fabrication, all while experimenting with visual storytelling and video-morphing techniques. The final presentation will encompass a collective multimedia installation showcasing the student’s explorations and interpretations.

Students must be moderated in Architecture to take this course. Please note: as an intensive course this class will meet once a week for 6-hr sessions with a lunch break in between.

This studio course will introduce students to the language of architectural representation by framing the field of architecture as an everchanging process of social imagination and spatial deterioration. We will aim to understand design practice as an inherent mediation between changes in natural and cultural forces on buildings and environments. Engaging with ideas of decay, disrepair, and decrepitude, we will create fictional histories of dying industries situated in rural and suburban environments such as malls, farms, bank branches, and gas stations. Researching the legacies of capitalism and socio-economic crises, students will utilize techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, physical modeling, and compositional image-making to explore regenerative design processes and the emergence of new spatial possibilities for rural “ruins”. No prerequisites.

This introductory studio course to architecture foregrounds the discipline as a practice of entanglements. Rather than privileging object-based thinking, the course considers architecture through a more alchemic approach: one that focuses on relationships, transformations, and ritual-making. The emphasis on relational-architecture, as opposed to object-architecture, will be explored through precedent analysis, critique, and transformation. The detrimental consequences of dominant western colonial tendencies to fragment, singularize, and flatten complex planetary stories and entanglements will be challenged through the examination of representation as a verbal, visual, and sonic language. Students will be asked to investigate these spatial relationships through representations that focus on illustrating time with basic animation techniques using digital softwares including Rhino, Illustrator, and Photoshop. No prerequisites. All spaces are reserved for incoming first year students. Registration for this class will take place in August.

This studio course is an introduction to architecture through a close examination of the societal norms and rituals embedded in ordinary spaces. How do these spaces breed indifference, passivity and alienation? How might they afford moments of repose, performance or joy? What potentials do these spaces hold for collective, creative revolutionary transformation? Students in this course will closely examine how routines of everyday life, both public and domestic, are spatialized in architecture. We will unpack and revise our common understandings of places we use habitually; gas stations, ATM vestibules, waiting rooms, awnings, bus stops, janitor closets, among many others. Using (and misusing) architectural representational methods, such as digital drafting, conceptual analysis, physical models, and experimental image-making, as well as readings and discussions on contemporary theorists and practitioners, students will propose new spatial strategies that suggest alternative everyday rituals. We will treat our design material as propaganda. As such, we will compile our work in the form of a graphic manual that at once looks to unsettle the relation between space and ritual, while at the same reimagining them. No prerequisites.

How might botanical worlds carry notions of extractive economies, settler colonialism and legacies of racial capitalism? This elective design studio seminar will focus on the interconnectedness of property, plants and bodies from the past to present. While understanding the role of architecture and landscape in agri-capitalism, we will expose matters of resiliency, reform and recovery through case studies such as the Yedikule Gardens, Victory gardens, the Millennium Seed Bank, Crystal Palace, Orangeries, biopiracy and others. Focusing on the role of “floor plans” as an architectural device, we will situate these complex entanglements by collaborating on a toolkit of care for humans, land and everything in between. For the second half of the studio, we will work with the Bard Horticulture and Arboretum Department to design a land-based intervention for the campus. Students will have weekly assignments, and learn techniques of digital drafting, model making, compositional image-making through Adobe Creative Programs and Rhino 3D. No prerequisites.

This course offers a survey of modern architecture through architectural and urban design practices and theories. As a survey the course covers major 20th century architectural movements, such as brutalism, functionalism, megastructures, corporate architecture, phenomenology, postmodernism, and deconstruction. At the same time, the course interrogates the social and political function of the built environment, addressing social housing, third-world development, and urbanism. Major figures discussed include Henry Van de Velde, Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Alison and Peter Smithson, Eero Saarinen, Yona Friedman, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Aldo Rossi, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman. Assignments include visual analysis projects, a final paper, and a midterm and final exam. AHVC distribution: Modern/Europe/America

One Manhattan Square is the massive glass luxury tower that looms over the Manhattan Bridge in New York City. The building is a harrowing symbol of real-estate power and despite the fact that many of its market-rate units remain uninhabited, four additional towers are under construction on the same block. A Pathmark grocery store formerly occupied the site where One Manhattan Square now stands. Despite being a chain store, the Pathmark was an important source of affordable fresh food and was particularly valuable resource for the elderly population in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Demolition of the grocery was therefore vehemently protested. In this studio course, students will imagine an alternative history, where the erasure of this critical community site never took place and the land in the area remained protected from profit-drive development. Design proposals will be developed within the context of the Chinatown Working Group Plan a community written zoning plan that aims to curb displacement in downtown Manhattan. The intent of the studio is to assert architecture’s capacity to intervene on behalf of a constituency and act as an activist practice.

Site analysis in architecture has become a rather routine practice, perhaps even performative. Given that architecture is a practice very much entangled with place, how might we expand our anthropocentric conventions of how a ‘site’ is considered and represented? How do we form invitations to a place that engage its deep time? How do we greet its varied, and continuously forming biographies? And can 'site analysis' even be approached as a deeper form of land acknowledgement? In this 5 week-long, intensive workshop, students will be asked to rethink ‘site analysis’ through the design and making of plaster core samples that reflect an expanded understanding of place - where trees, soil, and fossils are acknowledged as both witnesses and makers of memory, mineral, and myth. Each core sample becomes a vessel of specific temporal, material, and spatial meditations of a given place. From the making of these, students will then draw and represent their core samples digitally using Rhino and Adobe Suite software. No prerequisites. This intensive workshop will run only during the first 5 weeks of the term.

How can we approach architecture beyond form-based explorations, but as a mode of reimagining current sociopolitical, institutional, and territorial entanglements? This design studio seminar explores architecture as a network of situated relationships between built and non-built environments. We will practice design research from a planetary dimension by zooming in, pulling apart, and realigning various forms of rural, agricultural, and food systems. Through the appropriation of fact and fiction, and by using speculative drawings, modeling and experimental mapping, students will explore the Hudson Valley region as a site of 'radical ruralism'. We will question the destructive and extractive processes of industrial agriculture, globalization and late capitalism, by carefully suggesting a parafictional alternative: a land practice of resistance, regeneration, and mutual care. Operating as a collaborative studio-seminar, we will produce a series of drawings that reads as one collective canvas with multiple scales, perspectives, and realities. In addition to design workshops, we will discuss readings from Monica White, Dolores Hayden, bell hooks, Adrienne Brown, Lydia Kallipoliti, Jenny Odell, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Leah Penniman, Saidiya Hartman and Kathryn Yusoff – among others. Prerequisites: ARCH 111 or professor’s permission.

Architectural models are a unique medium, a visual language that references the built world through scale and abstraction. As physical objects, they represent futures (proposals), histories (sites and contexts), and current conditions (material resources, shifting societal demands), often slipping between these temporalities. Learning how to make models is as important as learning to read what they tell us about the world. In this elective design studio, students will make an architectural model as a continuous practice, utilizing a spectrum of physical and digital fabrication methods such as woodworking, casting, digital modeling, and laser cutting. In making architectural models, we will question how societal models (such as domestic routines, building regulations, political cycles, and environmental systems) can be represented in physical form. We will ask how this form of architectural translation can complicate latent biases within the built environment, making visible otherwise invisible networks of power. Prerequisite: ARCH 111.

This course asks students to engage the history of an activist community organization as a scaffold for advancing alternative practices of architectural design. Between 1978 to 2001, the collective CHARAS organized educational, arts, and social programming that primarily served the growing Puerto Rican community in what was known as Loisaida. Occupying several spaces on 9th street, the group operated out of the vacated Public School 64 building which they renamed “El Bohio,” or the hut. Today, PS 64 sits vacant and is directly adjacent to “Anarchy Row,” an encampment of unhoused people that has resisted multiple efforts to clear the settlement. In support of this unhoused population and the broader community of the East Village, students will imagine the adaptive reuse of the vacant school building and the appropriation of other sites on the block. Student’s will develop their design proposals through a reading of the multiple histories of the site and the adjacent context, with a particular focus on the CHARAS. Informed by Ariella Azoulay’s theory of “potential history,” we will construct narratives that imagine futures for communities outside frameworks of domination. Critical texts related to participatory design will be read and our deliverables will double as representational devices and advocacy tools. A field trip will be made to New York City, where we will visit the site, observe materials in the archive of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space and possibly meet former members of CHARAS. Prerequisites: ARCH 111 or professor’s permission.

Gatherings have been an essential tool of political activism and for the discussion of gender. The spaces in which these gatherings are taking part are entanglements of bodies, infrastructures, ecosystems, cultural norms, and regulations. From the domestic realm to public restrooms, from social media to parliaments, gender and space are contested notions that are shaped by and, in turn, shape the ways bodies and communities come together. In all these cases, gatherings have been the focus of forms of resistance, achieving general visibility and representation, creating an overall spatial entanglement that has helped redefine gender. This course will explore the spatial and bodily practices of contemporary gatherings drawing on architectural and artistic theories since the 1960s in conversation with an intersectional view (from feminism to eco-queer, and trans theory). An inquiry into how spaces, technologies, bodies, and their interactions create alternative forms of political action and representation will shift the category of gender far from binary positions. At the same time, the course will explore the environmental, social, and economic implications of these infrastructures pushing for an intersectional queer ecology, with special attention to the material impact of the digital world on a global scale. Case studies within the course include: the domestic realm; hospitals; nightclubs; restrooms, saunas, bathhouses; public spaces and demonstrations; parliaments and borders; social media and video games; universities; exhibitions and museums.

What can we learn about the built environment and its politics from someone’s biography? What kind of evidence and stories lie within the personal? Building on Saidiya Hartman’s experiments with speculative histories for “minor figures”, this course foregrounds intersectional and feminist methodologies in the study of women’s lives and their role in architecture. We will use the life of Afro-French architect Christine Benglia (1936-2020) as a lens to examine the role that biography and personal narratives can play in recovering marginalized voices and positionalities in the production of space. Students will engage in work with primary sources – Benglia’s personal papers, oral history records, correspondence, sketches – in order to uncover the perspective of a black, middle-class woman from France learning, teaching, and working as an architect in the United States during the post-World War II period. The goal will be to extrapolate the larger framework and questions around gender, race, and class that shaped postwar American architecture and art from Benglia’s personal and intimate world of objects and words. To help us in this exploration, we will be using as our lens theoretical texts by Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michel Foucault, Saidiya Hartman, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. The course will culminate in the collaborative design of a website and an exhibition, involving also independent research and writing. Art History and Visual Culture Requirements: Modern, Americas.