News/Events

Uprooting Histories, Outlining Agendas

Public Lecture Series
Fall 2024-Spring 2025

Tiago Patatas and Raya Leary

On Traces: Intersections, Juxtapositions, and Expanses

Public Lecture, RKC 103

Tiago Patatas is a researcher and spatial practitioner, whose work investigates forms of environmental violence and its articulation with spatial politics, including modalities of nuclear imperialism and green extractivism. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London.

Raya Leary is a researcher and writer situated within the environmental humanities, whose work attends to subjects at the intersections of temporality, territory, and material culture. She earned her Bachelors of Liberal Arts in Social Sciences, cum laude, from Harvard University.

Tiago and Raya have been collaborating since 2022, and are based in Porto, Portugal.

Fatima Naqvi

The Architecture of Illness: Vienna 1860–2020

Public Lecture, Olin 102

Fatima Naqvi is Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of German and Film & Media Studies (FMS). Chair of the Film & Media Studies program and the European Studies Council. Prof. Naqvi’s work is situated at the intersection of literature, film, and architecture.

co-sponsor with German Studies

S.E. Eisterer

Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory

Public Lecture Weis Cinema

S.E. Eisterer is an Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture at Princeton University and a founding member of Queer Space Working Group. In the year 2024-25 she is a Visiting Fellow with the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

S.E.’s research focuses on spatial histories of dissidence, feminist, queer, and trans* theory in architecture, as well as the labor of social and ecological movements. Currently, she is working on two book projects: the interdisciplinary history and translation project Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989 and the edited volume “In the Daylight of Our Existence”: Essays on Architecture, Gender, and Theory which illuminates methods and theories in writing about feminist and LGBTQIA+ spaces in architecture. S.E.’s writing has appeared in academic journals, books, and translations, among them Architectural Histories, Aggregate, Architecture Beyond Europe, Ediciones ARQ, Platform, and Log.

co-sponsor with AHVC

Brenna Bhandar

The Racial Politics of Pre-Emption: Property, Power and Deputization

Public Webinar Lecture

Brenna Bhandar’s research and teaching broadly lie within the fields of property studies and legal theory, spanning the disciplines of property law, critical theory, colonial legal history and critical race feminism. Her book Colonial Lives of Property: Law Land and Racial Regimes of Ownershipwas published in 2018 with Duke University Press, and the co-edited book (with Rafeef Ziadah) Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thoughtwas published in 2020 with Verso.

co-sponsor with CHRA

photograph of an architecural model of table and chairs in front of a silhouette of rooftops

Paula Vilaplana de Miguel

Ways of Haunting

lecture
Date/time TBA

Paula Vilaplana de Miguel is a curator, designer, and scholar based in New York. Her work focuses on exhibition spaces and cultural initiatives, with an emphasis on media, technology, and bodily practices.
She has been Assistant Director of Exhibitions at Columbia University GSAPP and The Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, a research assistant at Performa and a lecturer at The New School Parsons. She currently works as a Curatorial Assistant for contemporary architecture at The Museum of Modern Art New York (MoMA).
Paula Vilaplana has curated and developed projects for institutions such as the Shanghai Art Biennial, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Venice Architecture Biennial, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Princeton University, Triennale Milano, and Ca2M among others. Her work has been published in The New York Review of Architecture, the Invisible Culture Magazine at Rochester University, Arquine, and the Het Nieuwe Instituut and her projects have been featured in the press internationally.

image: model detail of 'HAUNTED REAL ESTATE: DOLLHOUSE OF DEATH', 2019

supported by Experimental Humanities

Bard Architecture

OTHER METHODS

PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
2023-2024

This year’s public program invites designers, curators and practitioners whose work takes methods of design as a starting point from which to shape architectural practice and pedagogy otherwise. If conventional methods in architecture have served as a relay between the practices of architecture and the institutions and structures of its materialization, then methods inherited are a means to ensure the reproduction of a certain world—a certain way of being that we've long known to be untenable. 'Other methods’ is an invitation to see how methods might offer a point from which to upend this. How can methods of design become articulations of other worlds, propositions for other ways of being that undo environmental racism and the enclosure and destruction of the natural world; that break the ongoing coloniality of human inhabitation; that thwart the organized production of surplus populations needed to fuel capital’s limitless growth? How might other methods, thought from the ground up, offer tools for insurgent practices to begin building different worlds?

Bard College Campus

Bard Architecture Fellow Stephanie Lee

Hard Labor, Soft Space: The Making of Radical Farms

Exhibition Opening, Verse Work/Shop

What does it mean to create an infrastructure of care; and systems of resilience within a capitalist landscape of production, extraction, and exploitation? "Hard Labor, Soft Space" is a research-based design investigation on the current surge of collective farms and radical food systems in and around the Hudson Valley. Against the backdrop of land distribution laws that have driven the current racial disparity in agricultural land ownership, this project reframes rurality as a site of radical reclamation. This research forms a comparative genealogy of utopian agrarian projects starting with 19th and 20th Century Abolitionist movements in the United States to the current wave of BIPOC-led radical farms in Hudson Valley. By addressing the erasure of racial history, and exploring future living strategies rooted in racial and social justice through counter-mapping, archiving and a dinner performance, this project highlights alternative agrarian settlements and renounces models of industrial farming that thrive on the extraction of labor, capital, and lands of others.

Supported by EH, CESH, CCE, EUS

axonometric drawing of a coastal city with agricultural fields, yellow clouds and blue-green water

Feifei Zhou

How Did We Get to Where We Are Now

Public Lecture

Feifei Zhou is a Chinese-born spatial and visual designer. She was a guest researcher at Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA), during which she co-edited the digital publication Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2020). Her work explores spatial, cultural, and ecological impacts of the industrialised built and natural environment. Using narrative-based spatial analysis, she collaborates intensively with social scientists to translate empirical observations and scientific research into visual representations that aim to both clarify intricate more-than-human relations and open new questions. She previously taught at Cornell AAP, Central Saint Martins, and Columbia GSAPP.

image: Drawing by Feifei Zhou

SUPPORTED BY EH, EUS AND ANTHROPOLOGY

photograph of an array color photo slides against a lightbox

Paulo Tavares

Earth Works

Public Lecture

Paulo Tavares is an architect, author, and educator. His practice dwells at the frontiers between architecture, visual cultures, and advocacy. Operating through multiple media, Tavares’s projects have been featured in various exhibitions and publications worldwide, including Oslo Architecture Triennale, Istanbul Design Biennale, São Paulo Art Biennial, and most recently the Venice Biennale 2023. He is the author of several books questioning the colonial legacies of modernity, including Des-Habitat (2019), Lucio Costa era Racista? (2022), and Derechos No-Humanos (2022). The curatorial project Terra, in collaboration with Gabriela de Matos, was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation at La Biennale di Venezia 2023. He was co-curator of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial and was part of the advisory curatorial board of Sharjah Biennial 2023. Tavares teaches at Columbia GSAPP and at the University of Brasília, and leads the spatial advocacy agency autonoma.

image: from An Architectural Botany, KoozArch, 23 May 2023

Supported by Center for Human Rights and the Arts and HRP

digital image of radio tower with cloud of smoke from explosion

Maksym Rokmaniko/Center for Spatial Technologies

A CITY WITHIN A BUILDING

public lecture

Maksym Rokmaniko is the founding director of the Center for Spatial Technologies (CST), a multidisciplinary practice based in Kyiv and Berlin – working at the intersection of architectural, investigative, anthropological, and artistic practices. With the escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine, CST has focused on war crimes and human rights violations. The Center collaborates with artistic and research institutions, grassroots initiatives, and human rights and forensic organizations.

image: 3D reconstruction of a site in Ukraine affected by the Russian invasion

In support of the Human Rights Project

photo of a wooden structure lit internally by rows of pink lights. plants rest on an elevated plane.

mireia luzárraga / TAKK

Against Nature

Public Lecture

Mireia Luzárraga is an architect and Studio Critic at Columbia GSAPP. She is also professor at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, and La Salle. Together with Alejandro Muiño, Luzárraga founded TAKK in 2010, an award-winning architecture and design studio based in Barcelona. Taking place in both the public and private spheres, their projects investigate how architecture can catalyze the development of more democratic lives through the incorporation of feminist thought, ecology, and politics into its practice.

TAKK’s work belongs to the permanent collection of the FRAC-Centre Val de Loire and has been exhibited at the Oslo Triennale, and the Venice, San Sebastián, Tallinn, Maia, and Rabat Biennales, among others. Likewise, TAKK's work has been exhibited at Matadero-Madrid, Center d'Arts Santa Mónica, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, MAK Vienna, TCDC Bangkok, or Alcova Milano.

Previously, Luzárraga has taught and lectured in institutions such as the University of Alicante, ETSAM, IED, ELISAVA, RMIT, Floating University Berlin, or ILEK Stuttgart.

image: 'In Transit', migrant-plant shelter Barcelona, 2023, courtesy of TAKK

SUPPORTED BY EH AND EUS

Wolff Architects

Tectonic Shifts: Reflections on Recent Work

Public Lecture

Founded by Ilze Wolff and Heinrich Wolff in 2012, Wolff Architects has aimed to cultivate, in its own words, "an enduring public culture around the city, space, and personhood." Informed by the colonial history of its surroundings, the Cape Town-based firm excavates sites of historic inequity and erasure, using design, research, and advocacy tools to construct what it calls an "architecture of consequence." From urban-scale infrastructure to handmade zines, its work embraces "a multiplicity of means of representation and expression, rather than accepting the constraint of speaking through buildings," as described by The Architectural Review.

image: African Mobilities: This is not a refugee camp exhibition, 2018

SUPPORTED BY EH

Curriculum

Architecture at Bard builds its pedagogy around a concern for the present, an acute attention to structural inequalities and an urgency for other futures. The curriculum frames architecture as both an art form and an argument—a situated aesthetic spatial practice whose propositions aim to reconfigure our collective present toward more just worlds. The program builds across architectural cultures, design techniques, histories and propositions to equip students with an expansive and experimental approach toward the field that simultaneously opens paths for engaging other disciplines spatially. The program teaches students that architecture is a site for transformative, insurgent spatial and material possibilities with which to imagine worlds otherwise.

Course Types

The curriculum presents architecture as a historically situated and intellectually rigorous field in which the practice of design naturally intersects with and draws from discourses outside its traditionally conceived boundaries. Structurally, the curriculum is composed of four families of courses that build upon this conception:

DSS

Design
Studio
Seminars

are conceived as a hybrid studio model that situates the practice of creative design work within a broader, transdiscursive series of lectures, readings and discussions around a given question.

OPW

Open
Practices
Workshops

are intensive, 2-credit, one-month-long studio courses that invite emerging and renowned external practitioners and thinkers to expose students to a variety of contemporary practices and modes of architectural design.

ASP

Analytical
Spatial
Practices

introduce architectural practices and techniques within a socio-political field. They harness methods of design and representations of space as analytical tools to pose challenging environmental, social, and political questions.

DS

Discourses
on Space

position architecture as a way of understanding the world beyond and below the single building. These elective seminars and lecture courses share a scope that interrogates the production of space and questions the social, material, and historical structures that animate the ways in which we inhabit the world.

Sequence

The curriculum builds a pedagogical sequence that cuts across the four groups of courses aiming, on the one hand, to encourage common points of inquiry to develop across the curriculum and, on the other, to give disciplinary and methodological progression over the duration of the program.

Planetary
Practice

Recognizing issues like climate change brings to the fore the trans-scalar relations that directly tie buildings, bodies, cities and ecosystems together. In this context, the planetary lens shifts our view of architecture from the isolated object to the structurally situated and historically entangled design practice—an art form that necessarily cuts across and interrelates multiple scales, disciplines, bodies and actors.

Constituencies

Building on an inter-scalar understanding of architecture, the second phase in the sequence grounds architectural design and discourse in the spatial concerns of specific social groups, movements and struggles. It opens a critical framework by which to develop projects alongside various groups, organizations or actors that directly address issues such as spatial justice, housing rights, gentrification, spatial inequalities of gender and race.

Collective
Futures

The final phase of the sequence mobilizes the intellectual maturity, design skills and technical agility of the students to approach architecture as a site of open experimentation in building collective futures. This phase is the most methodologically open and intellectually challenging of the three. It aims to empower students to explore the capacity of design as a means to imagine realities of collective spatial life otherwise.

Requirements

The curriculum consists of 9 courses (30 credits total) and two terms of Senior Project. In Upper College students will be able to select between a focus on Critical Cultures of Architecture or Design Studio-Seminar. Example:

Amount of required courses Required course type's shortname Required course type's name
2x/3x ASP courses in Analytical Spatial Practices
3×/2× DSS courses in Design Studio-Seminars
DS courses in Discourses on Space
1x OPW Open Practices Workshop
Terms of Senior Project

Moderation Requirements

16 credits
The Architecture Program treats moderation as an opportunity for in-depth discussion with faculty at a crucial point in students’ development; it is a moment of shared reflection and constructive speculation aimed at building toward a Senior Project. To moderate, students are required to complete the courses listed below. In addition to these requirements, in order to moderate, students must present the following:

  • the two essays required by the college reflecting on their trajectory and future intellectual development within architecture
  • a featured project that will be presented in a public moderation forum.

*Note: Students are encouraged to take both ARTH 125 and ARTH 126, but are ONLY REQUIRED TO TAKE ONE FOR MODERATION.

Required course's type Required course's name Credits Area
ARCH 111 Architecture as Media 4 ASP
ARTH 125* Modern Architecture in the Age of Colonialism 4* DS
ARTH 126* Situating Architecture 4* DS
ARCH 1-2XX Elective course on space 4 DS
ARCH 211 Architecture as Translation 4 ASP

Graduation Requirements

14 credits
After moderation, students will be required to complete 14 additional credits, for a total of 30 credits, as well as two terms of Senior Project. In their advanced courses, students will be able to focus their work on either design-based study or research-based projects, with a choice of taking either ARCH 322 or ARCH 311. Senior Projects will typically be done on an individual basis, but the program will host periodic student colloquia across each term to build shared knowledge and a collaborative ethos across the entire Program. The Senior Projects will be expected to exhibit their work in a collective annual Senior Show at the end of the academic year.

Required course's type Required course's name Credits Area
ARCH 221 Design Studio Seminar: Planetary 4 DSS
ARCH 321 Design Studio-Seminar: Constituencies 4 DSS
ARCH 311* Architecture as Research 4* ASP
ARCH 322* Design Studio-Seminar: Futures 4* DSS
ARCH 330 Open Practices Workshop 2 OPW
ARCH 405 Senior Project Colloquium 1 -
ARCH 405 Senior Project Colloquium 2 -

Courses

FALL
2024
COURSES

Photograph of a 2-story house split down the middle with left side slanting slightly awy

Chong Gu

Transient Homemaking (Architecture As Media)

This course introduces architecture as formative media in the age of instability, and design as a practice contributing to the worlding and unworlding of our late-capitalist society. Sometimes conflicting, sometimes complimentary, these dual tracks of exploration and production are fundamental to the contemporary study of architecture. The unprecedented scale and frequency of global migration and mobilization accentuates the capacity of homemaking in the sustaining of movements–bodily and political alike. Taking the homeplace as the sites of investigation, the course will simultaneously introduce students to traditions of architectural representation that often precede the building, and instruments of spatial civics that mediate our domesticity vis-à-vis the State.

image: Splitting, Gordon Matta-Clark, 1974

FALL
2024

ARCH 111
ASP (PA)

an array of six white rooms each with different furniture and inhabited by a thin white man

Michael Robinson Cohen

Architecture as Media: Spatial Subjects

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.

image: Video stills from Solutions, by Absalon, 1992

FALL
2024

ARCH 111 MC
ASP (PA)

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco

Situating Architecture: Modernities

This course introduces the students to critical themes and sites in the history of
architectural culture. The goal is to situate architectural practices and theories within
the political and social contexts that produced them, reframing and problematizing
questions of modernity, technology, industrialization, internationalism, postmodernism,
among others. During the course we will take an active approach to the writing of history, investigating the canonical history of modern architecture, but also bringing forth and examining projects marginalized by official historiographies of the modern movement. We will be asking what happened to modern architecture when the philosophical and aesthetic inquiries for an appropriately modern form of life met with the challenges of an increasingly internationalized world, post-World War II housing demands, decolonization and corporate capitalism. How did architects respond to the social and political challenges of the new world order? Which were the main theories developed around architectural responses to sociopolitical questions? Which were the programs and agendas that these theories postulated to architecture? What can we learn from them about the past and future of architecture?

image: Carrieres Centrales, 1958 (left) & in 2018 (right) photomontage by L Palacios and B Alonso

Fall
2024

ARTH 126
DS (AA)

Betsy Clifton

Architecture as Translation: At Scale

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.

Fall
2024

ARCH 211
ASP (PA)

black and white floor plan and elevations of a kitchen

Michael Robinson-Cohen

Architecture as Translation: Drawing to Demand

As abstractions, architectural drawings must paradoxically detach themselves from the material world in order to represent it. However, as representations of the built environment, drawings are excellent tools to document corporeal conditions and social relations. Drawings are distanced yet rooted in reality, making them an effective medium to critique or make demands about the structures that constitute everyday life. In this design studio, students will focus on housing and domestic space to develop a capacity of architectural drawing, digitally and by hand, that both questions the conventional socio-spatial disposition of architecture, and that can propose new ways of being. The intention is to learn methods of architectural representation not as a means of mastery, but to mobilize drawing as a mode of speculation and intervention that holds weight on the plane of the real; to create drawings that demand.

image: Frankfurter Kuche, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, 1926

Fall
2024

ARCH 211
ASP (PA)

screenshot of Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza in Cody's Coffee shop

Ross Exo Adams

Bad Architecture: On Cringe, Sleaze, and Other Archives of Architecture's Recent Past

Why does architecture look the way it does today? Why does it look so different from the architecture produced even a decade ago? This lecture-seminar course is an attempt to understand how the many experiments and explorations shaping architecture today can be conceived as a collective reckoning of a field seen as increasingly ethically, culturally and politically bankrupt. We will do so by narrating a materialist history of architecture’s recent past—reading the field through the dominant idiosyncratic figures, tendencies, buildings and discourses, as well as its scandals, sleaze and glitz that shaped it from the 1970’s through the first decade of the 21st century. Taking architects at their own words, this narrative will aim to both unsettle the many assumed truths, mythologies and cultures that the field has for so long fed on, while also giving urgency to the many experiments and expansions that have emerged in the shadow of this recent past. Through this, we will see our present moment as one of conscious experimentation in reclaiming the tools of architecture to collectively make new and more meaningful claims about what architecture’s (and the world’s) future can be. We’ll cover the scandals that have rocked the field in the last decades, as well as the more subtle yet piercing tendencies that have tied architecture to bad actors, cultivated bad habits, and tethered it to bad networks of production.

image: George Costanza as Art Vandelay, in Seinfeld

Fall
2024

ARCH 219
DS (AA)

black and white satellite image of a landscape pock marked with countless bomb craters

Farah Alkhoury

Confronting the Architecture of Occupied Ecologies

Sites of post-militarization are shaped indelibly by both the devastation of war, and the more invisible forms of toxicity embedded for decades after in the soil, water, and air. This design studio uses architectural tools of representation to analyze and confront these ‘occupied ecologies’. Students will research post-militarized sites, drawing, analyzing, and mapping them at multiple scales—from their physical manifestations to bodily processes—across supply chains, testing sites, labor practices, storage facilities, and eventually through deployment and depletion We will seek to render legible the entanglements of militarism and ecologies, marked by the proliferation of toxicity, post-conflict aesthetics, environmental diplomacy, and the residues of violence. Collectively, we will map these interconnected occupied ecologies and their shared toxic legacies, while questioning the global reach of U.S. military infrastructure.

image: Bombing Range in Vieques, 1999, USGS

Fall
2024

ARCH 221
DSS (PA)

inverted drawing of South America with a sun, moon, stars, and a colonail clipper boat and a fish

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco

Spatio-Political Alliances: Latin American Collectives & Cooperatives

This course looks to consider the relation between contemporary political struggles and spatial practices in Latin America. While studying this relation, it asks students to test the argument that any attempt to reorganize society simultaneously involves an act of spatial reorganization.

Far from providing a comprehensive survey, the course will introduce a heterogenous set of case studies of cooperatives, collectives and movements that have emerged in several Latin American contexts in response to the growth of capitalism, the encroachment of neocolonial practices and the violence of the neoliberal state. We will explore the collective action of architects, artists and builders that have joined forces with activists, rebels, constituents and social movements with the purpose of using spatial transformations as a key component of political liberation. Together, the collectives we will study have not only transformed their houses, shared spaces, streets, towns and neighborhoods but, they have also confronted the state and its protection of private property and the capitalist structures that it empowers.

image: América Invertida, Joaquín Torres García, 1943.

Fall
2024

ARCH 250
DS (AA)

Ivan Lopez Munuera

Green Guerrillas: New York City Garden of Coexistence (Constituencies)

New York City is an architectural entanglement where different forms of life coexist and mutate through constant cross-pollination. Humans, non-humans, buildings, regulations, and politics interact constantly: in some cases, taking care of each other; in others, destroying essential habitats. This course will explore the architecture of New York City through the lens of the garden in Gilles Clément’s terms: not as landscaping, but as a site of controversies and coexistence. We will work along with activist groups (Green Guerrillas), institutions (Storefront for Art and Architecture, Swiss Institute), artists and architects (Michael Wang) in order to explore how, since the 1970s, the idea of the community garden has proliferated in New York City, a time when grassroots movements emerged, reclaiming abandoned lots and transforming them into community gardens, cultural institutions, and activist locations; a period that is not confined in the past, but continues to operate today, shedding light on other possible futurities. Through readings, visits, interviews, and on-site work, students will produce visual-essays combining theory, mappings, drawings, archival materials and original investigation on a chosen site/spatial condition.

image: Green Guerrillas, NYC

Fall
2024

ARCH 321
DSS (PA)

SPRING
2024
COURSES

Jesse McCormick

Architecture as Media: Re-Tooling the Trade

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.

image: Rachel Whiteread, House, at 193 Grove Road, London E3, 1993

Spring
2024

ARCH 111 JM
ASP (PA)

Olga Touloumi

Modern Architecture in the Age of Colonialism

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.

Spring
2024

ARTH 125
DS (AA)

perspective engraving of Savannah, GA. River in fore, city plots appear amidst cleared forest

Ross Exo Adams

Urbanization and Climate Change: A Counter-History

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.

image: A View of Savannah, engraving, 1734, P. Gordon

Spring
2024

ARCH 213
DS (MBV)

Stephanie Lee

Planetary Studio: Radical Ruralism

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.

Spring
2024

ARCH 221
DSS (PA)

Olga Touloumi

The Spatial Politics of Human Rights

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)

Spring
2024

ARTH 274
DS (AA)

Ivan Lopez Munuera

Architecture as Research: More-than-Human Architecture

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.

Spring
2024

ARCH 311
ASP (PA)

a photo of a stack of multi colored wooden boards and pvc pipes in a white gallery space

Betsy Clifton

Future Tense: The Architectural Exhibition

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.

image: "Open for Maintenance". Venice Biennale '23, Summacumfemmer & Büro Juliane Greb

Spring
2024

ARCH 322
DSS (PA)

Pencil drawing of a birds-eye view of Harlem, containing 15 imagined towers to house 250,000 people

Peter L'Official

Race and Real Estate

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.

image: June Jordan and Richard Buckminster Fuller, "Skyrise for Harlem"

Spring
2024

LIT 328
DS (SA)

A ghostly diorama model of victorian architecture bathed in pink light

Paula Vilaplana

OPEN
PRACTICES
WORKSHOP:
Ghosts of Future Pasts

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.

image: Haunted Real Estate, A Feminist Revisitation of Victorian Landscapes, P. Vilaplana, 2019

Spring
2024

ARCH 330
OPW (PA)

FALL
2023
COURSES

Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee

Architecture as Media:
How to Build a Ruin

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.

image: Rachel Whiteread, Demolished, 1996

Fall
2023

ARCH 111 SL
ASP (PA)

composite image: photograph of a swamp landscape overlaid with diagrams of native animal species

Thena Tak

Architecture as Media:
After the
Object

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.

image: collage from Petrochemical America, by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff

Fall
2023

ARCH 111 TT
ASP (PA)

Betsy Clifton

Architecture
as Media:
Redesigning
Architectural
Rituals

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.

Fall
2023

ARCH 111 BC
ASP (PA)

Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee

Post-Eden: Conflicts, Coloniality and Plants

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.

image: Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II in the Crystal Palace, P.H. Delamotte, ca 1859.

Fall
2023

ARCH 214 SL
DSS (PA, D+J)

Olga Touloumi

Situating Architecture: Modernisms

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

Fall
2023

ARTH 126
DS (AA)

cartoon of a city with 5 looming towers. in front are 2 captions

Michael Cohen

Designing The Potential History of a Pathmark and One Manhattan Square

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.

image: illustration courtesy of Artists Against Displacement

FALL
2023

ARCH 321
DDS (PA)