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.

Architecture narrates worlds. It tells its stories not with words, but with its walls, floors, surfaces and sites. 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.

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 architectural history course, we will interrogate the role of architecture not only as a set of aesthetic attributes but also as tools and products of the process of colonization. We will investigate how the development, dissemination and, at times, even emergence of certain architectural practices and discussions are intrinsically fused to histories of colonial incursion. We will narrate this history by studying a heterogeneous set of situated case studies that will illuminate structural and systemic tendencies in architecture. Among the case studies we will examine is the emergence of Gothic Revival as an important tool for the establishment of British Imperial power; the ‘invention’ of Belgian Art Nouveau and its entanglement with colonial violence in Congo; the appropriation of Renaissance typologies in colonial plantations and the role of architecture in systematizing racial supremacy; and, among others, the modernization of Algiers in relation to the shifting phases of French colonial power. These examples will help us unpack the deeper histories of architecture’s entanglement with extractive logics, climatic injustice and infrastructural inequalities that prevails to this day. This course offers a critical opening survey into the forces, concepts and debates that configure and reconfigure the relation between architecture and colonialism. The course includes lectures, readings, student presentations, and assignments. 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

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.

Architecture is both the product of labor and the organizer of its relations, yet often these issues remain overshadowed by aesthetic considerations and the broader discourse of design. In shifting the question of labor in architecture to the foreground, this course invites students to reflect on the spatio-political role architecture has played in mediating bodies, work and capital. To do this, we will analyze contemporary transformations to paradigmatic sites of work (offices, factories, tech campuses), as well as the many spaces that have been produced to feed architectural production and its endless cycles of extraction (camps, slums, mines), or the architecture that reproduces forms of maintenance (houses, squares, resorts). We will analyze a diverse set of contemporary and historical architectural precedents against a heterogenous landscape of voices from Maurizio Lazzarato, Silvia Federici, Mierle Laderman Ukeless, David Harvey, Peggy Deamer, Mabel O. Wilson, among others. The course will unfold in a combination of lectures and seminars. There are no exams but students are expected to complete weekly assignments, a midterm and a final project.

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.

What makes a home? Are homes political? What is the difference between a home, property, and real estate, and when do those distinctions matter? What do anthropologists think they can learn from homes? This course examines the meanings, materialities, and effects of the infrastructures of human shelter sometimes referred to as “homes.” It seeks to understand how homes become, and are unmade, and what the relationship is of those processes to human and nonhuman relationships. By drawing on ethnographic and theoretical works from specific cultural and historic contexts, it investigates how homes shape and are shaped by particular understandings, for example of ownership, kinship, hospitality, gender, language, and ability/disability.

In this Constituencies Design Studio Seminar, students will work concurrently between architectural design and policies that dictate its visibility. The course will expand the notion of “constituents” of architectural work as both an opportunity for public engagement and a set of constraints (political, financial, material). As a studio, the course will be in conversation with students and faculty from Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) Bronx to design, fabricate, and install a micro-architectural prototype installation in service of bringing a community space for students, faculty and staff. The site of BHSEC Bronx is located at an intersection of three public high schools, with their own school regulations, functions and security needs limiting public gathering. This reality will push the limits of design not only through a design intervention but also through understanding how the socio-political world beyond BHSEC-Bronx affects its policies and material conditions. Students will work together as an architectural collective to research and propose design solutions, resulting in a presentation to the constituents of BHSEC Bronx. Throughout the semester, the course will expand our understanding of the intersection of architecture and policy within and beyond BHSEC through a scalar study. Pending budget approval, this studio may involve fieldtrips to BHSEC Bronx. Prerequisites: ARCH 111 and ARCH 211, and availability to enroll in a 1-credit intensive studio course starting the week before Fall classes (Aug 25-29).

This studio course positions radical design as a speculative architectural practice that interrogates the present through the lens of the future: What is needed? Who is demanding it? How can architecture become an agent of transformation? Acknowledging our dependencies on colonial infrastructures, this approach resists technocratic solutions and instead proposes a technosocial model—one that understands design as deeply entangled with histories of dispossession, while calling for collective action toward alternative futures. Structured as an advanced design studio, students will engage with a specific site, and how it operates beyond its immediate boundaries, radically reimagining it through experimental materials, aesthetics, and spatial narratives. Students will collectivize and reimagine both the future and this site in a project set up in pieces. They will explore design as an active force—not a noun, but a verb in motion—shaping new modes of inhabitation, assembly, collectivity, and interaction. Concepts such as dwelling, commuting, composting, harvesting, digesting, petting, and assembling will serve as strategies for architectural speculation. Through specific workshops on radical representational techniques—including drawings, 3D models, mappings, video, and photography—students will push the boundaries of architectural storytelling, culminating in a collective exhibition that showcases speculative futures as a means to redesign the now.

Architecture narrates worlds. It tells its stories not with words, but with its walls, floors, surfaces and sites. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Formal education in architecture, particularly in the United States, has a relatively short history – the first classes in architecture were offered at MIT in 1868. Changes in architectural education reflect, and in turn influence, larger currents in the field; the class will consider questions of pedagogy parallel to a disciplinary history. This is a focused seminar that looks back on past ways of teaching architecture and endeavors to imagine alternatives. The approach is loosely chronological, examining a series of case studies: less as historical episodes and more as lessons for the present. Parallel to the seminar sessions, there will be a series of workshops that offer a window into the design process for Bard’s new architecture space. Students will be required to write one short essay (a critical response to one of the case studies) and design a curriculum. This is a two-credit seminar, meeting for eight weeks beginning March 25. No prerequisites.

In times of war, what architectures are subject to erasure, and why? How are war ecologies concealed, transformed, or repurposed? And to what extent does the toxic legacy of war spread? This course explores the proliferation of toxicity across territories like Puerto Rico and Iraq as a lens to understand the architecture of toxic flows and forms of control that render multiple territories as contingency sites. Students will research sites, buildings, and critical infrastructures subject to erasure through occupation, militarization, colonialism, and toxic contamination. Through drawing, analysis, and mapping at multiple scales and temporalities, students will investigate spatial subjects, focusing on the architectures in which occupation and violence are enacted, and examining how altered environments are experienced by those most vulnerable to climate change. Architecture and design will be understood as tools for decolonial practice and design activism. Through design transitions, we will seek to render legible the entanglements of militarism and ecologies, marked by the proliferation of toxicity, environmental diplomacy, and the residues of violence. Methodologies include 3D modeling, data mining, cartographic representation, geolocation, mapping, renderings, and visual and audio compositions. The course culminates in the creation of a video essay that synthesizes these explorations, employing architectural representation as means for advocacy and public dissemination. This course fulfills the Environmental Studies Practicum requirement.

Nightclubs are commonly perceived as dark, autonomous interiors filled with purely hedonistic sounds, but they are spaces where bodies, technologies, spaces, and politics are discussed. From their creation in the 1960s until nowadays, nightclubs contain, shape, and propagate a very specific architecture: discotecture, the architecture of the disco, the creation of a space that enacts the politics and social constructions of the period. Discotecture is a continuous performance and a collection of assemblages that render visible the construction of bodies, technologies, media, and environmental ideas. In the interaction among designers and citizens, DJs and dancers, and technologies and regulations, discotecture plays a fundamental role in creating a space that welcomes unexpected kinships. This research seminar will explore the architecture of nightclubs all around the world, looking at the wide-ranging ramifications throughout the built environment, generating instability, emancipation, and dissidence. A weekly series of readings and discussions, featuring expert guests to deepen the debates, will explore the history of nightclubs and their impact on architectural discourse. Students will engage with specific case studies, analyzing their design, technologies, interaction with bodies, and environmental aspects through historical documents, in-person interviews, soundscapes, and innovative methodologies. Drawing from these elements, students will produce podcasts tracing nightclub histories.

This half-semester elective introduces spaces around sex work of the 21st century, tracing them both as sites of criminalization and of rehabilitation alike. These contested sites—both sanctuaries for the survival of sex worker communities and/or infrastructures of entrapment by law enforcement agents—are examined through architectural scholarships, ethnographies, documentaries, and oral histories. Through a series of seminars and guided case study exercises, students will analyze a heterogenous set of buildings and sites throughout the U.S. to confront this debate, ranging from migrant reception centers and anti-trafficking rehabs to massage parlors and hostess bars, among others. The course includes readings by Kamala Kempadoo, Elena Shih, Anooradha Siddiqi, Eva Hayward, and analyses of architectural sites by Ersela Kripa & Stephen Mueller, Jingru Cheng, Canal Street Research Association. In addressing the multiple voices that often conflate choice and coercion through the lens of architecture, the course aims to recontextualize sex work criminalization as a complex urban predicament affecting a multi-racial, multi-gendered, and multi-generational coexistence. Over the course of half a semester, students will accumulate the case study exercises into a qualitative survey with both written and visual components on the architecture and the transient inhabitation of sex work. This is a two-credit seminar, meeting for eight weeks beginning the first week of classes. No prerequisites.

Architecture as Witness is a seminar that will survey research-based architectural practices centered on developing mediums of witnessing, formulating accountability, fostering solidarity, and imagining alternative futures. The course focuses particularly on contexts overwhelmed by material extraction, militarism, and the exploitation of Indigenous lands. Students will research spatial design practices that center on developing methods for activism and resistance against environmental and spatial violence. Through these research practices, we will challenge the notion that research is neutral, recognizing that it is often shaped by biases and perspectives, which have the potential to either magnify or mute lived experiences. We will ask: Can architecture act as a witness, bearing testimony to events, injustices, and transformations. This involves exploring how architectural spaces can document, reveal, and communicate experiences of violence and resistance. The course explores an understanding of architecture not just as a physical construct but as a medium capable of producing new forms of evidence and acting as a witness to societal and environmental violations. By engaging with methodologies such as field notes, listening, and interviews, students will probe the multifaceted modes of observation and analysis, culminating in a multi-medium research dossier.

In this Constituencies Design Studio Seminar, students will investigate architecture’s capacity to manifest collective identities, amplify grassroots voices, and facilitate mutual aid services. Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York has long been a contested urban arena between marginalized communities’ grassroots survival on informal economies—including sex work, street vending, deliveries—and the affluent residents’ solicitation of regulatory policing deployed by the city. Learning from community stakeholders operating on the ground today—Centro Corona, Red Canary Song, and DRUM—students will document Roosevelt Avenue as an architectural scene, a complex space whose gridlock spatial and political dynamics, shifting transient demographics, existing urban policies, and law enforcement models can be narrated architecturally. Working in groups with an interdisciplinary approach to hand model-making, this course will culminate with students developing design proposals for community centers for respective organizations. Prerequisite: ARCH 211

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 of large-scale architectural models 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 and work to investigate the commonplace as a place for intersectional interrogation. The course will run concurrently with an exhibition to be mounted at Citygroup NYC, and we will follow the exhibition process in real time as a reference and case study. Our semester will include a field trip to New York City where we will meet architectural model makers, exhibition designers, and attend contemporary exhibitions. ARCH 211 is a prerequisite.

This course explores the relationship between architecture and curatorship, focusing on how exhibitions shape and redefine the discipline of architecture on a global stage. We will examine architectural exhibitions as sites of experimentation and debate, tracing their evolution from historical international exhibitions that replicated and shaped the colonial enterprise, to contemporary platforms that address urgent issues in architecture, such as gender disparities, ableism, and extractivist models. Students will analyze how exhibitions, fairs, publications, and pedagogical platforms serve as mediators for architectural ideas, transforming the discipline’s priorities and public engagement. While exhibitions can foster innovation and knowledge-sharing, they have also been platforms for classification, segregation, and exclusion of certain geographies, communities, and styles. By studying these dynamics, we will uncover both their potential and limitations. The course includes weekly lectures on the history of curatorial platforms, focusing on selected case studies: from the nineteenth century International Fairs to the proliferation of Biennials and Triennials in the Twentieth and Twenty First centuries; from alternative and activist spaces and their varied formats to institutional exhibitions. This course is jointly offered by the Center for Curatorial Studies.

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 seven-day workshop invites participants to explore new ways of inhabiting domestic space, challenging traditional conventions surrounding privacy, gender, pleasure, and multiespecies coexistence. Through a collective experiment, participants will design, build, and inhabit various spaces within a domestic environment, such as the kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and bathroom, questioning both the designs and the uses conventionally associated with these spaces. Participants will confront fundamental questions such as: How does the design of care spaces influence the creation of feminist architecture? Can bedrooms be conceived as communal spaces, both from a climatic and psychological perspective? Is it possible to rethink bathrooms as meeting spaces that challenge traditional privacy norms?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.