This seminar is preoccupied with what fell by the wayside of a specific historical narrative — the professionalization of the role of the architect. While there is general agreement that professionalization has constituted a historical narrowing of the role of the architect, there is a lack of discourse on what was eschewed. Elephant in the Room seeks to be attuned to these silences in the historical record that progressively narrowed the role of the architect over time.

When professions constrict and narrow, their emergent discourses often identify what is perceived to be lost, so the contemporary discourse around spatial ‘practices of care’ and architectural design ‘after comfort’ serve as contemporary clues or traces, indicative of such omissions from architecture’s historical record. To surface these, this seminar will explore domestic typologies through the lens of a single room. Selected specifically for its double sense of occupation — both as intellectual curiosity and as habitation — the domestic is the locus for countless permutations of live-work typologies. Additionally, domestic spatial typologies are historically imbricated with the qualitative values of comfort, care, taste, and conviviality. To be clear, the single room that we will use as a vehicle for exploration in this seminar is not a room found in a house, but rather a spatial typology rooted in the domestic. Specifically, we will explore domestic typologies associated with aesthetic creation — the architect’s or artist’s studio, the chef’s professional kitchen, the fashion designer’s atelier, the writer’s or artist’s salon, the diplomat’s embassy — and technical production — the bureaucrat’s office, the scholar’s library, the scientist’s laboratory. Whether aesthetic or technical in their orientation, these typologies embody the double sense of occupation, from initial domestic inhabitation through to the intellectual curiosity of the professions they ultimately engender.

The seminar will be structured in three parts. Part one, Work the Room, will involve an in-depth visual analysis of a room selected by each student. Part two, Read the Room, requires each student to identify the relevant literature related to their room and to create an annotated bibliography that begins to map their historical theorization of the space. Part three, Room for Doubt, consists of crafting a polemical essay identifying the silences and omissions in the historical narrative of your selected room. Students are encouraged to select a room that might help to expand the context and thinking of a studio project or anticipate a future thesis inquiry. The Elephant in the Room is not a rhetorical exercise in helping students to become more attuned to the silences in architecture’s historical record, although this will be one of the benefits; rather in identifying what has fallen by the wayside in the process of the professionalization of the architect, it aspires to unsettle historical legacies in the service of designing innovative, fulsome, and hybrid modalities of practice.