“…fictions focused on buildings often seem to use them as a code by which to bury their main meanings.”
– Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces
In her lecture How We Narrate Our Yesterday Determines How We Imagine The Future, Mariam Kamara describes the loss of our capacity to read architecture when we subscribe, uncritically, to totalizing histories that are disproportionately concerned with architecture’s appearance rather than the materials, conditions, and interactions that make it. The design theorist Mark Linder cites Minimalism as a point of reentry into “literalness” which he considers to be “architecture’s most salient and salacious effects.” Where might these perspectives intersect? On the one hand, Kamara’s skepticism of the hegemony of the western canon on global architectural production and, on the other, Linder’s sense that a post-war art movement that emerged in the United States might bring us, somehow, closer to something essential about the architectural discipline?
In this course we will practice various operations of the architectural profession—namely: orthographic drawing, model-making, sketching, and documenting to build on our own working definitions of architecture. To anchor our questions, we will survey, study and document an existing building shell. How does it work? How was it built? What makes it stand? What parts of it are failing? We will represent (with drawings) and replicate (with models) this existing structure, and then propose restorations, adaptations, or renovations to what is left of it through our projects.
Learning Outcomes:
Delivery Method: Fully in-person
Prerequisites:
This course is open to students who have done prior coursework in architecture or comparable work in painting, drawing, or sculpture. Technical drawing and model-making skills will be required.
Course Level: 4000-level
Credits: 4
W 8:30AM - 12:10PM (Full-term)
Maximum Enrollment: 14
Course Frequency: One time only
Categories: 4000 , All courses , Architecture , Four Credit , Fully In-Person , New Courses , Updates
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