Bard Architecture

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

This course 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.

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 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.