Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Classicism: From Theory to History
GSD 4201M1, Lecture, Fall 2008, with Erika Naginski

An in-depth consideration of selected topics of enduring relevance for the theory and practice of architecture. The course examines concepts such as wonder, knowledge, authority, progress, beauty, and meaning as these are framed in primary sources from Antiquity to the Renaissance and explores the ways in which buildings and cities have been observed and described during the same period. The specific topics vary from year to year. Readings introduce foundational ideas in the Western European intellectual tradition from Plato to Ficino relevant to design practitioners. Student participation in discussion is an integral part of the learning: the implementation of the concepts in short exercises fosters original thought and critical judgment.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Architecture and Theory
GSD 4202M2, Lecture, Fall 2008, with Erika Naginski

Explores the aims and methods of Architectural History through the paradigm of Classicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considers the relation of theory to practice, to the interpretation of primary sources, and to formal analysis, and examines questions of style in relation to historical context and function.

The Architectural Imaginary: Experimental Architecture of the 1970s
GSD 3305, Lecture, Spring

This course examines selected architecture practices and projects in the expanded decade of the 1970s — the period between 1966 and 1983. Lectures focus on the work of Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Bernard Tschumi, but others are discussed. The theoretical work of Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, and others is invoked to help us interpret this material. Readings could be intense.

The propositions of the class are these:

1. That the common vocation of the Experimental Architectures of the 1970s was the Autonomy Project.
    
2. That integral to the Autonomy Project was an undeveloped notion of City as architecture's determination and record. That while this notional City, at that time, was constructed on a linguistic model of typology, it now can be more accurately understood according to a materialist-psychoanalytic model of the Architectural Gaze or the Architectural Body without Organs.
    
3. That the Real of this Experimental Architecture was, therefore (all along), psycho-social Desire rather than form or language (as was thought).
    
4. That the Autonomy Project ended by 1983; that a certain kind of architecture itself ended. However, that always already latent in the machinery of the Experimental Architecture of the 1970s was a construction of architecture as the production of effects and affects that preceded, produced, and continues to exceed the current projective or post-critical intention.

Current Architecture as Cultural Discourse
GSD 3306, Lecture, Fall 2006

"In fact it is only the ideal soul of society, that which has authority to command and prohibit, that is expressed in architectural compositions properly speaking. Thus great monuments are erected like dikes, opposing the logic and majesty of authority against all disturbing elements: it is in the form of cathedral or palace that Church or State speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence upon them. It is in fact obvious that monuments inspire social prudence and often even real fear. The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things: it is hard to explain this crowd movement other than by the animosity of the people against the monuments that are their real master."
— George Bataille

"Most important library decades,"
(New Yorker, OMA Seattle Library);

"Most important new museum since the cold war began,"
(New York Times, Zaha Hadid Cincinnati Museum).

As participants in the cacophonous theater of current architectural practice how are we to situate such journalistic hyperbole? What are the issues, if any, that underwrite and distinguish the latest work of Alsop, OMA, Eisenman, Hadid, Gehry, Holl, ITO, Morphosis, Denari, Herzog and DeMeuron, Lynn, MVRCV, Zumthor, Coop Himmelblau, RUR, FOA, UN Studio, Office DA, Cohen, SANAA, d'Ecoi, NOX, not to mention newcomers like PLOT, Gnuform, Bow Wow, Woolston, Roche, EDGE, etc., etc., etc. In the Eye Beam competition, did Liz and Rick rip off Tom or vice versa? How does Disney Hall compare to Porto, or should the question be how does Disney Hall compare to Siza's Serpentine Pavilion or how does Disney Hall compare to Case Western Reserve? What are all those single surface buildings about and what do they have to do with blobs? Is Sejima a new minimalist or a new modernist, and is every SANAA building about the same issue? Is everything that OMA does perfect a priori? What exactly are affect, mood, atmosphere, the easy, and the post-critical; for that matter, what exactly is the critical in architecture? Is architecture a service, an art, a political tool or a purely intellectual endeavor? Can architecture support democracy? Can it increase freedom? Does it always serve instantiated power as a force of oppression or does it merely and reasonably serve the bona fide immediate interests of client, user and community and the longer term interests of society as applied technology?

The 10-lecture series offers an overview of one theorist's approach to such questions and the use of that approach as a basis discriminate among projects and buildings from the last 15 years them so as then to exercise judgment.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Architecture and Theory
GSD 4201-M1, Lecture, Fall 2006
GSD 4202-M2, Lecture, Fall 2005

This course presents a selected range of concepts developed by philosophers, historians, and theorists to explain the production and experience of architecture, and the historical background necessary to understand those concepts. While this course is part of the six-module sequence, “Buildings, Texts, and Contexts,” it is the specialized field of theory and its use in architectural discourse that is its primary subject.

The course begins with the persistent dilemma of theoretical-historical thought (represented here by concepts from Kant and Hegel): is art an autonomous form or is it determined by its historical context? The course then presents the uses and critiques of the Kantian and Hegelian systems in the formation of critical theory in the middle of the past century. The development of critical theory is traced up to the present, especially the concepts of reification, ideology, and abstraction that were formed through a contact with modernism and have continued relevance for the present day. The course reviews structuralist models of signification and the deconstructionist critique of meaning. It traces the shift from a semiotic or structuralist model of signification to notions of diagram and schizo-analysis. A typical week pairs a theoretical text with a text that uses related theoretical concepts in an architectural case. In the lectures, selected architectural cases will provide further instances of interpretive practice.

Requirements: two lectures per week plus one discussion section per week; readings, prepared discussion, and analytic notes for section meetings; one take-home, short answer examination. Basis of grade: assignments and performance in section.

SCHEDULE OF TOPICS

Week 1. Form or History
Week 2. Reification
Week 3. Reproduction
Week 4. Negative Dialectics
Week 5. Ideology
Week 6. Deconstruction
Week 7. Diagram and Schizoanalysis

Advanced Topics in Theory
GSD 3304-M3, Lecture, Spring

This course is an advanced elective course for students who wish to pursue studies in the field of twentieth century architectural theory beyond the introduction established in the required courses listed under prerequisites above. The format of the course includes one lecture per week, followed by discussion. Approximately one third of the lectures are delivered by each of the faculty members listed above, who also participate in the discussions following each of the lectures.

Advanced Topics in Theory
GSD 3304-M4, Lecture, Spring
with George Baird

This course is an advanced elective course for students who wish to pursue studies in the field of twentieth century architectural theory beyond the introduction established in the required courses listed under prerequisites above. The format of the course includes one lecture per week, followed by discussion. Approximately one third of the lectures are delivered by each of the faculty members listed above, and at least two of the three participate in the discussions following each of the lectures.

The objective of the course is to present to the student a broad view of contemporary architectural theoryits distinct modes of thought and operation, its recent history, and its relation to other spheres of cultural production.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts:
Contemporary Architecture: 1945 to the present
GSD 4205-M1, Lecture, Fall 2004
GSD 4206-M2, Lecture, Fall 2006

This six-module sequence, offered over three semesters, presents an introduction to the complex, interwoven web of conceptual issues and historical narratives in western architecture from antiquity to the present. Each module presents detailed case studies of buildings, writings, and theoretical concepts in the specific contexts of their formation. In each case study, a major architectural or urban project is presented in depth, and discussed in its social, political, and cultural contexts. Special attention is given to the interdependent relationships between architectural concepts and audiences, social institutions, aesthetic theories, and building practices. The first and last modules examine critical and theoretical issues in architecture's history (module 1) and contemporary practice (module 6); modules 2-5 cover, in chronological sequence, four of the major historical periods in the history of western architecture.

Each module may be taken independently.

GSD 4205-M1 Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Contemporary Architecture: 1945 to the present examines modernism's proliferation and transformation, focusing on such topics as internationalism and regionalism, typology, semiotics, the language of postmodernism, and the poststructuralist critique.

Proseminar in History and Theory
GSD 4500, Spring

This seminar is for students in the Ph.D. program. Participants present work toward their dissertation or toward a major research paper, emphasizing issues of interpretation. Before the first class, students should re-read Fredric Jameson, "On Interpretation," in The Political Unconscious.