Factory of the Sensible and the Political* (Equipping Experience)

Architects have long experimented with altering perceptions of space in order to reconfigure experience. At stake in this course are pivotal historical and theoretical transformations in our understanding of perception and experience that are relevant to our contemporary interest in these ideas.  

Behind these transformations lie different instantiations of humanism, proximate or remote operations of technology (equipment), explosive or suppressed uses of ornamentation, lineages of the sublime, conceptions of the visual, reformations of nature and body, and the invention of the sciences of the senses: biology, psychology, cybernetics, cognitive science, neuro-science, and non-linear dynamical systems theory.

Students will read seminal texts and critique evocative architectural projects.  A presentation and two short papers will be required.

*This title is a slight riff on Jacques Rancière’s examination of aesthetics as the “distribution of the senses,” which will be part of our inquiry.