Bard Architecture

This studio course will introduce students to the language of architectural representation by framing the field of architecture as an ever-changing process of social imagination and spatial, material 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. Alongside readings about 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 “ruins”. No prerequisites are necessary.

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.

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.

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

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

Architectural models are a unique medium, a visual language that references the built world through scale and abstraction. As physical objects, they represent futures (proposals), histories (sites and contexts), and current conditions (material resources, shifting societal demands), often slipping between these temporalities. Learning how to make models is as important as learning to read what they tell us about the world. In this elective design studio, students will make an architectural model as a continuous practice, utilizing a spectrum of physical and digital fabrication methods such as woodworking, casting, digital modeling, and laser cutting. In making architectural models, we will question how societal models (such as domestic routines, building regulations, political cycles, and environmental systems) can be represented in physical form. We will ask how this form of architectural translation can complicate latent biases within the built environment, making visible otherwise invisible networks of power. No prerequisites.

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

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

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

This survey covers the art and architecture created in Western Europe from around 1000 C.E. to 1500 C.E. Emphasis is placed on an analysis of architecture (religious and secular), sculpture, painting, stained glass, tapestry, and metalwork within a wider cultural context. Among the topics studied are the aftermath of the millennium, the medieval monastery, pilgrimage and the cult of relics, the age of the great cathedrals (Chartres, Amiens, Reims, etc.), and late medieval visual culture up to the Reformation. The course examines thematically the changing visual articulation of ideas about death, salvation, social status, patronage, and the artist. Open to all students. AHVC distribution: Ancient, Europe.

Through a series of carefully selected texts, this practice-based seminar focuses on building better relationships with our planet by engaging areas of discourse that actively and intimately connect us to the natural world. In architecture, our relationship to the natural world has been framed through many lenses - most familiar is perhaps through the more clinical lens of technology and performance. Little Blue Marble however, foregrounds empathy, attentiveness, and participation as ways to bring us in better communion with the earth and perhaps, this form of relation may allow for an alternative set of cultural and social practices within architecture that shift our discipline’s dominant modes of thinking and being. A few key texts that will help guide this conversation include Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Robert MacFarland’s Underland, and Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection edited by Carolyn F. Strauss. In addition to readings and discussions, Little Blue Marble will ask students to create letters to the earth throughout the term. These letters will also take on varied expressions and forms through writing and ‘open’ drawing, i.e. a range of drawing forms, from digital to analogue methods, will be welcome. The making of these letters will be opportunities for students to rethink language, representation, and storytelling as a way to help us build literacy with the more-than-human world. 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 distributions: 1800 to present/European/American. Assignments include weekly posts, presenting a case study, leading a discussion session, and a final ten-page paper on 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.

This research and design studio will focus on rural approaches to social, racial, and economic liberation. Working collaboratively, we will create a global atlas of radical farming collectives to be later published as a zine. By looking at historical, fictional, and realized case studies, students will map out a spatial taxonomy of cooperatives, intentional communities, regenerative agriculture farms, and back-to-land initiatives. What does it mean to create an infrastructure of care, and systems of resilience within a capitalist landscape of production, extraction, and exploitation? In this course, we will construct a network of political ecologies, linking case studies like Freedom Farm Cooperative, Marinaleda, and Soul Fire Farm. Through seminars and workshops, students will learn to create and analyze each project through 2D and 3D drawings alongside diagramming and multimedia collaging. Through this collective process, students will articulate notions of “land” and “labor”, and pair them with new dialogues on how the rural countryside operates as a site for radical forms of collective living. No prerequisites.

During this studio-based course, students will learn to use architectural representation techniques to create a new vocabulary for reimagining the architecture of commonly shared, everyday services. Waiting rooms, walk-in clinics, dmv offices, bank lobbies, among other spaces have become commonplace and by extension, unquestioned and underutilized. Though often taken for granted as background spaces, we will come to understand how they are part of the construction of societal norms, and their potential to host unconvential forms of public life that we will explore and reimagine through this course. Using tools of digital drafting, site analysis, physical models, and experimental image making, students will interrogate and reimagine these everyday spaces in our built environment. Through research, discussion and design proposition, each student will rewrite the role of their selected space of everyday services and propose alternatives that speak to our evolving understanding of shared resources, policies, societal tendencies, and expectations. We will think of our sites of intervention as testing grounds for new social relations to emerge, using design to reposition these everyday services as crucial elements in a larger societal transformation. The studio will conclude by imagining the proposals as a collective set of new urban elements, repositioning our conversation as a negotiation between the unquestioned past and the multiple possible futures. No prerequisites.

The relationship between humans and animals has consistently been one of power and control. Most often, the organizations of human space are imposed upon animals our next-next of kin. Any exceptions to this are typically manifested as fixed orderings where human-animal interaction can be clearly managed—think farms, zoos, slaughterhouses, etc. When nonhuman assemblies fabrics do prevail, like the field of dandelions in your front yard or the swarm of fruit flies in your kitchen, it is considered ‘out of place’. How might we design by privileging nonhuman ordering ways of being over our own? How might architecture equally consider the habitat home, ecology community, and behavior rituals of other animals? Is there a way we may honor, support, and even participate in their migration itinerant patterns rather than imposing our own? This Collective Futures design studio foregrounds these questions as guiding lights for the semester to rethink established animal-human relationships and their related thresholds. By considering animals as our fellow kin, we enter into a collective spatial life—one that opens up a practice of design by engaging notions of empathy, reciprocity, and entanglement. Throughout the term, students will work in small groups to reconsider an alternative threshold condition typically defined by human centric desires. Research and design proposals will be informed by model-making, material explorations, analog representations, and 3D modeling. Prerequisites: ARCH 111 or professor’s permission.

In this half-semester design workshop, students will create ‘domestic agents’–spatial objects which question the norms and rituals of our everyday lives through design tools and inquisitive disruption. We will begin by reorienting our expectations of domestic spaces by considering the things around us and our relationships to them. We will encounter these against a series of case studies—architectural precedents and historical places—which may allow us to understand how societal expectations of domestic design have emerged and transformed. From there, we will seek to reimagine the home towards more inclusive, provocative and liberating futures. The course will privilege new family compositions, accommodating new social configurations, rather than our inherited one. We will design our ‘domestic agents’ using experimental digital drawing techniques to create our own visual language. This class meets for the first half of the semester. No prerequisites.

This course looks to consider the relation between political struggles and spatial practices. It will do so by introducing students to a long tradition of cooperatives, collectives and communes that have formed throughout Latin America over the last 100 years in response to the growth of capitalism and the neoliberal state. These are groups of architects, artists and builders that have joined forces with activists, rebels, constituents and movements with the purpose of using spatial transformations as means of political liberation. Together, they have not only transformed their houses, shared spaces, towns and neighborhoods but, they have also confronted the state, private property and capitalist structures. Among those we will examine are: in Mexico, the hartistas (the fed-up artists), Cooperativa Palo Alto and the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipality of Oventic; in Chile, Colectivo CEDLA (Center for Architectural Studies); in Colombia Colectivo Huertopia; in Argentina Concretismo; in Venezuela the community in Torre David and; in Uruguay, FUCVAM (Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperative). The course will unfold in a combination of lectures, seminars and students presentations. The final outcome of the course will be a collective atlas that charts this history into the present. No prerequisites.

The conventional narrative of anticolonial self-determination has often been quick to dismiss radical insurgencies as merely nationalist struggles, focused primarily on nation-building. However, recent scholarship on decolonial movements across the Global South suggests that such an approach has obscured the expansive vision and ambitions of anti-colonial thinkers and statesmen who sought to both critique and reimagine the existent world order. Decolonization therefore emerges as nothing less than an attempt at global redistribution so as to transform post-imperial realities and possibilities. In this seminar, we will examine resistance and liberation struggles—in Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, and Palestine—that shaped processes of decolonization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Focus will be on the platforms that developed throughout the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Bandung and Tricontinental Conferences, as well as the formation of a range of cultural and artistic associations and publications including Lotus, Souffles, and Black Phoenix. We will consider the disciplinary and methodological stakes of producing scholarship that both engages with and participates in global solidarities. While centering on the movements originating in the mid-twentieth century, we will also reflect on contemporary movements that build on this history in their own internationalist worldmaking. All readings will be in English. This course fulfills the MES Junior Seminar. This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

More than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Thus, the study of social and political dynamics in urban centers is crucial if we are to understand and address the pressing issues of the contemporary world. This course will allow students to explore these dynamics through an introduction to urban sociology: the study of social relations, processes, and changes in the urban context. We will begin by reading perspectives on the development of cities, followed by an examination of how the city and its socio-spatial configuration affect and are affected by social interactions, particularly across gender, race, and class lines. The course will then consider the relationship between globalization and the modern city before concluding with a few examples of how citizens address the challenges in their communities. Throughout, we will explore the diverse methods that social scientists use to understand these dynamics, and students will have the opportunity to utilize some of these methods in an investigation of a local “urban community.”

It’s mine. Ownership means different things over time and among different peoples. This course charts a history from below about the lived experience of possession, spirit possession and the ownership of property—real and moveable, animal and human, intellectual and intangible—knowable through the archive of things reclaimed by the rural and urban unlettered, raced peoples, indigenous peoples, colonized peoples, and religious and political exiles. We explore challenges to the idea of property during the early modern religious upheavals and radical changes to the idea as inscribed in the late 18th-century written constitutions that made it a basic right. We will focus on France and areas of significant French contact in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas from 1400-1900. My land, my house, my history, my family, my self demarcate the changing socially, culturally, or politically configured borders between inside and outside at the affective and material intersection of belonging and belongings, property and properties, land ownership and propriety, and possession and freedom. Students will rethink narratives of settler colonialism and racial capitalism from multiple perspectives through mini-research assignments, using judicial records, fiction, visual, and ethnographic sources to explore moments of property exchange, value assessment, theft, trespass, expropriation, or other forms of dispossession when the meaning of ownership becomes most visible in the historical record. No pre-requisites.

The Border. The Ban. The Wall. Raids. Deportations. Separation of Families. Immigrant Rights. Sanctuary. Refugee Resettlement. These words – usually confined to policy, enforcement, and activism related to migrants and refugees – have recently exploded into the public view and entered into constant use. Focusing on south-north migration from these Latin American regions, this class argues that it is impossible to understand the current political situation in the US without studying the relatively lesser-known history of migrant and refugee human rights over the last three decades, including massive protests, movements for sanctuary, and attempts at reform and enforcement. The class takes into account shifting global demographics, changing reasons for migration, rapid legal and political changes, complex enforcement policies and practices, and powerful community movements for reform, which are often forgotten with the opening and closing of a given news cycle. The class also argues that migrant and refugee voices matter and are critical to understanding migration as an historical and current problem. The course includes migrant, refugee, and activist narratives, and an array of historical, legal, political, and other primary sources. Its goal is to create a more complete historical understanding of Latin American-origin migration in the contemporary US context. This course is part of the Liberal Arts Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education initiative as well as the Racial Justice Initiative.

In 1802, Janet Montgomery began to convert her 380-acre riverfront property from a “wilderness” into a “pleasure ground.” This transformation reflected prevailing ideas about the ideal aesthetic relationship between humans and nature as well as emerging notions regarding scientific agriculture. Development of the property also mirrored contemporary social and cultural conventions, as the estate was populated by indentured servants, tenants, slaves, free workers, and elites. This course approaches Montgomery Place as a laboratory for understanding social hierarchies, cultural practices, and evolving visions of nation and “place.” In Fall 2022, we will focus on Montgomery as a case study of slavery and slaveholding in the antebellum Hudson Valley.

Towering over urban expansions and secluded forests, or turning up on roadside corners and in narrow back alleys, temples occupy a crucial place in the physical and sacred landscape of South Asia. At once meeting places for diverse communities, markers of piety and power, and architectural and sculptural wonders, temples are where artistic practice, devotion, and political and social aspirations come together. This course explores the history, forms, and meanings of South Asian temples both as important works of architecture and centers of religious and social activity. Through topics such as ritual and sacred space, pilgrimage practice, representations of cosmology, and iconoclasm and appropriation, we will develop a multifaceted understanding of the temple in South Asia. The course will begin with the rock-cut cave temples of ancient India and end with contemporary temples in South Asia and beyond, including the diaspora temples in the Hudson Valley area. Coursework includes exams, a paper, and a final project. AHVC distribution: Asia

For centuries, the land on which the Bard Arboretum now sits has been inhabited and used by diverse societies and cultures. In this course, students learn to critically engage with the existing landscape and vegetation to unfold “the story” of the land now owned by Bard College. By confronting the narratives that shaped these lands from an interdisciplinary perspective, students can build skills to become informed and impactful agents of change. Particular areas of inquiry include the Hudson River Valley in art, literature, music, and film; the history of Native Americans, colonialism, and slavery in the region; horticulture, bio-diversity, and native plants of the Hudson River Valley (living collection). We will explore the past, present, and possible future of the Hudson River Valley through a series of primary and secondary sources including fiction and nonfiction works of literature, visual art, film, etc. Meetings will be held in the classroom, and outdoors at the Bard Arboretum, Montgomery Place, and Blithewood; we will observe and study the actual river, our native plants, and learn more about how our current home and what we see in it have changed over time.

Using ESRI GIS software and associated apps, students will receive formal instruction in the fundamentals of using spatial information, conducting spatial analysis, and producing high-quality cartographic products. Students will learn how GIS may be used as a tool for identifying and assessing environmental justice (EJ) issues at the local, regional and global scale. Students will apply these GIS skills and knowledge base to a team-based research project focused on an environmental justice problem. The course culminates in a presentation session, where students show their analysis and results to their peers, professors and the greater Bard community. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

This course will survey the history of New York City from its founding as a Dutch colony until the present post-industrial, post-9/11 era. We will emphasize the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the city was transformed by immigration and rose to prominence as a global economic and cultural capital. We will pay particular attention to the development and use of distinct types of urban space such as housing, parks, and skyscrapers. We will also consider New York’s evolving population, including divisions of ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic class. One recurrent theme will be the various, often controversial solutions proposed to the problems of a modern metropolis, such as the need for infrastructure (water management, transportation), social and political reform (Tammany Hall, Jacob Riis), and urban planning (Robert Moses).

Maps have been dynamic visual and conceptual inspiration for many artists. In this class, we will work with drawing and sculptural installation to investigate the translation of scale and data to abstraction inherent in the art of mapping. We will study a range of contemporary artists around the world for whom maps are central to their artistic practice. We will study the visual strategies, content, and context of maps in these artist's works. We will also look at a rich range of historical maps from Polynesian navigation charts to the soundless silk maps of World War 2. The work of Katherine Harmon, Rebecca Solnit, W.E. B. DuBois, the counter-maps of the Black Panthers, and the Indigenous Mapping Collective, among others will form foundations for our research and artistic exploration. The 1000-acre campus of Bard will be our laboratory for focused research and for generating three visual projects.

This class will explore the twentieth-century American experience through the exercise of hands-on historical research methods. We will delve into the following themes in United States history: labor and markets, wealth and inequality, ethnic identity and race, and gender and the environment. Our tools of exploration will include readings, discussions, music, journalism, poetry, scholarly articles, digital content, and films. Upon successfully completing the course, students will be able to employ the methods of historical practice to navigate present-day questions related to political and social issues affecting contemporary society. Together, we will learn how to articulate opinions, grounded in history, about the politics, culture, and economics of the global United States.

This one-month workshop will run from February 2nd to March 2nd and introduces drawing techniques to investigate the inherited conditions of our constructed environment and to speculate on its future. Throughout the workshop, students will create a full-scale perspectival drawing to reveal aspects of our environment that have come together not by intention, but by chance. With this, we will construct an alternative architectural language which measures, recomposes, and acknowledges our built environment as an accumulation of codes, patents, systems and legal frameworks, in service of proposing new opportunities. Each student will isolate an intersection of built space around campus (mechanical, structural, material, open to closed, corner, hallway, gap, etc.) and productively work to collapse its boundaries. Through readings (both from architecture and our own interpretations) and technical documents such as building codes and patents, students will name their constructed context, and draw over and around the existing site as a means to transform it. This class invites students from all backgrounds to engage with the fundamentals of architectural language. The course will conduct a series of drawing workshops and short exercises testing physical and conceptual space through digital 2D/3D modeling, drafting and image collaging. The final installation of the course will result in full scale perspective drawings and collages installed on the sites around campus.

What can we learn when we approach architecture as a ‘planetary’ practice? Aside from opening up new scales of design or shifting our focus to ecological concerns, how does this perspective fundamentally alter what it means to practice architecture?

This design studio-seminar is an effort to introduce architecture as a world-making practice by acknowledging its inherently fictional capacity to imagine not only new spaces or forms, but other ways of being—modes of existence that depart from those of our present world. Unsettling notions that have underpinned architectural thought for centuries—private property, territory, racial capitalism, terra nullius—the aim of this studio-seminar is to approach architecture from alternate sites of inquiry that reveal it to be, more than anything else, a technology that mediates our relation to the world.

Our work will be to design planetary institutions, architectural interventions that seek to instigate public imaginaries around sites of common existence—air, water, soil, forest, clouds—as a basis to exploit the narrative and fictional capacity of architecture at a moment of climatic and cultural transformation. We will develop our planetary institutions through a network of readings, films, discussions, collective design and research work, image making and invited guest lectures.


Readings and thought from Sylvia Wynter, Walter Mignolo, Jennifer Gabrys, Achile Mbembe, Richard Powers, AM Kanngieser, David Graeber and David Wengrow, Kim Stanley Robinson & others.

This class explores the theory and practice of utopia from an architectural perspective. Utopias have always been imagined through a variety of mediums like the manifesto, the blueprint, and visual and performing arts. The course investigates the manifold scales of utopian articulation and realization, from compound communities to projects designing the entire globe, and from unrealized proposals to intentional communes of co-liberation. The class will use the concept of utopia to map out the ways that men and women have sought to transform the spatial, psychic, and social landscapes they inhabited. What can we learn from the utopian imperative? What is the shape of utopia? How should we understand the relationship between thought and practice, hope and disappointment, idealism and realism? Projects presented range from early industrial colonies, socialist utopias, Christian communities, and anarchist utopias to shopping malls, factories, and afrofuturism. The projects will be discussed in conjunction with major texts by Sir Thomas More, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Karl Marx, Robert Owen, Louis Marin, to name a few. Course requirements involve short assignments, class presentations and a final paper.

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.

This course is an introduction to the history of Silicon Valley. Moving chronologically between 1945 and the present, we will study the history of this significant region, and stories about the area’s technology industry. With a focus on social justice, this class will explore race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, health and disability, immigration and labor, and diversity and inequality in technology and the modern United States. In this class, students will experience first-hand the history of the early Silicon Valley through a wealth of primary sources, such as newspaper accounts, oral histories, photographic images, government documents, corporate reports, advertisements and business journalism, and more. We will also engage an exciting and emerging secondary literature.

What makes a home? Are homes political? This course will examine the meanings, materialities, and effects of homes across cultural contexts and through time. It will seek to understand how homes are unmade and remade, and what the effects of those processes are on human relationships and on relations between humans and the nonhuman world. It will investigate the relationship between homes and wealth in different societies, and what kinds of ownership emerge out of humans’ relationships to the infrastructures of shelter. The course will explore cases when homes appear to operate as extensions of colonial, state and nationalist ideologies. And it will highlight contexts in which homes can become spaces that counter hegemonic ideologies or cultural norms, or that can preserve lifeways that such ideologies and norms seek to eradicate. It will examine the kinds of labor and attention it takes to keep a structure stable enough over time, and against erosion caused by the elements, asking what socialities are formed out of the different kinds of–often gendered–labor that go into maintaining a home? It will investigate the question of whether homes are always spaces of intimacy. And it will explore the relationship between homes and the seemingly natural division between public and private realms. Our readings will draw on works of earlier anthropologists and theorists (e.g. Bourdieu, Hurston, Arendt, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Laporte, Weiner), as well as on more contemporary ethnographies of places such as Palestine, Greece, Argentina, Vietnam, and the US.

Where is the line between a presentation of proposed use (built space) and a presentation of potential use (exhibited space)? This design studio-seminar collapses the distinction between curating and creating by designing an exhibition, as well as the objects to be exhibited. By constructing our own vocabulary of contexts, codes, systems, and details of architecture, we will examine components of built space at multiple scales through a series of evolving models. We will reframe the institutional space of the gallery as a site of intellectual and creative production itself, and collapse the boundary between specified collections and our everyday context. Through a series of experimental workshops our focus will be on ubiquitous elements of space which inhabit most projects, but whose agency is usually anonymous (fire codes, mechanical systems, utilities, for example). Over the semester, we will iterate scaled physical models and interchange their roles between gallery and architectural mock up, speculative object and utilitarian element. The semester will culminate in a built exhibition which intends to open up architecture as a future practice that can more readily accept itself as a collective/collected environment.

How do urban processes of growth, decline, and revitalization affect different groups, particularly along dimensions of race, class, and gender? This place-based research seminar course looks closely at this question by examining the historical, political, and social landscape of Kingston. We will use this nearby city as a case to explore theories on urban transformation and the contemporary challenges that face small urban centers. In particular, the course will use the lens of environmental inequality to examine the effects of historical processes, as well as to investigate how residents and government officials are addressing pressing problems. The course will look specifically at issues of food justice, pollution, access to resources, environmental decision-making processes, and housing security. We will visit Kingston as a class, and students will develop and carry out their own project with a community partner.

In this one-month long, intensive design studio running from February 7th to March 7th, students will design ‘urban creatures’—architectural artifacts that will interact in and with relevant urban conditions through their symbolism, location and monumentality. As opposed to an architecture that predetermines its uses, our proposals are meant to take on a life of their own in their context. Designing urban creatures will push us to operate beyond habit and work outside of preconceived architectural responses, experimenting instead with an architecture that dialogues with contemporary urban conditions more directly. We will begin by analyzing historical references to learn and understand the different positions and creative responses that other designers have had to concrete social, political and cultural conditions. We will then design our creatures through an iterative process working primarily through detailed hand drawings, as well as other techniques like 3D modeling and physical model making.

This seminar engages with disability studies, queer theory, architectural and design history, political ecology, and histories of radical organizing and mobilization that focus on the idea and experience of disability and sickness. In traversing these materials, this seminar aims to ask: rather than seeing disability and sickness simply as a limitation or failure to reach a "healthy" norm, what can the experience and often hidden histories of the disabled and chronically ill, as well as those who fight for their care, reveal about social structures, ideologies, and patterns of circulation that cannot be seen otherwise? What would it mean to move beyond the political and ideological centrality of the idea of health and to instead understand how it can function to normalize racialized and gendered structures of exclusion and privation? And what models of care, collectivity, flexibility, and access have been, and might be posed, against this, through the speculative work of chronic theorists and disability justice advocates and through hard-fought campaigns and daily ad hoc solutions alike? Authors considered include: Alexis Shotwell, Alondra Nelson, Liat Ben-Moshe, Aimi Hamraie, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Neil Ahuja, Georges Canguilhem, Mel Y. Chen, and Eli Clare.

Can artists and museums respond to the current refugee crisis? The 21st century has witnessed the undeniable prevalence of the refugee, the migrant, the stateless, and the politically displaced — categories produced by global capitalism’s uneven distribution of resources. Against this harsh reality, artists and curators have actively engaged with representations of the disposed, and more recently, welcomed refugees into their spaces as part of broader initiatives centered on integration. This class will consider how contemporary exhibitions and artistic projects have sought to integrate the figure of the refugee into the traditionally reified space of the museum and examine the possibilities and limitations of art to transcend cultural and political barriers to generate empathy, and even solidarity. Topics to be discussed include art programming and refugee integration, museum responses to the migrant crisis, attempts to decolonize museums, migration and repatriation, boycott and divestment efforts. This class will be a collaboration between students at Bard College and Middlebury College. Throughout the semester, students will work together to produce an online resource related to the course materials.

This course-practicum will introduce students to the l theory, history and practice of political organizing for housing justice. In the “study” portion of the course, students will begin with critical legal and cultural studies of “property,” “property rights” and the landlord-tenant relationship. We will then explore the history of public and fair housing policy in the United States from the height of the New Deal in the 1930s to the decentralization and neoliberalization of the post-Reagan era. As we turn toward the “practice” part of the course, we will engage how housing inequity manifests in small towns like Kingston, NY and urban-rural areas like Ulster County. Now two years from the start of the COVID crisis, New York state’s moratorium on evictions comes to an end in January, 2022. In collaboration with Legal Services of the Hudson valley, our class will closely track eviction proceedings in Kingston courts, as well as monitor the city’s investigation into a series of fires that have functionally evicted low-income tenants from multi-unit buildings poised for sale. Our goal is the production of an audio documentary about eviction in the immediate wake of the moratorium.

What happens when life and death are not thought of in neat opposition? What does crip time do with the built environment, or the construct of Cartesian space itself which separates mind from body while undergirding key notions for the temporal? What material resist may disability offer the formal and conceptual arrangement of space and time (art) amid the laws that organize and govern the polis (politics)? This course traces the historical and ongoing struggle for disability rights in the colonized United States, while simultaneously questioning the framework of rights-based discourse and its legislative contingencies. We will think through disability representation, rights, and the right to opacity via a survey of cultural production in Disability Arts, and highlight the resistance to the violences of Vagrancy laws, Black Codes, the Ugly Laws, Anti-touch Laws, Stop & Frisk™, and other racist-eugenic logics, including “public health”, amid the latest pandemic . Our inquiry into concepts of confinement, quarantine, curfew, incarceration, asylum, austerity and enclosure will stay with disability culture, crip love, queer and trans abundance, and the everprescenient black outdoors that remain before and before every juridical turn. We will be guided by openings made in Disability Studies, Trans Studies, Black Studies, Disability Justice, and Disability Arts that gather in the struggle for and beyond rights, toward both the onto-epistemological understanding of disability and the real lived experience of disabled people.