Cultural Fever: Postmodern Effects in Sino-American Architecture
It is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s-80s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture’s history. This seminar will begin with an in-depth exploration of selected practices and projects of the period. Using the tools of poststructuralism together with Lacan's RSI, we will construct an interpretation of this work that is historically specific and yet sets the terms and the challenges of all subsequent architectural practice, including today's.
The seminar will expand the account of the architectural effects of poststructuralist theory from the standard Euro-American context to the special context of China’s so-called “cultural fever.” French intellectuals of the late 1960s and early 1970s viewed “China” as a prime rubric under which a new post-structuralist episteme could be developed, thanks to their sympathy for Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The half-actual, half-fictionalized “China” of the French intellectuals was accepted, adopted, and further complicated by some Chinese readers since the 1980s, including artists and architects, who added yet other layers of meaning to the concept. The result has been a multi-layered, cross-cultural misreading and misuse of poststructuralist thought and China’s historical reality, one that has nonetheless profoundly shaped the contemporary state of Chinese architecture.
Case Studies in Conservation and Adaptive Re-use
Traditional conservation practice is increasingly proving inadequate to address the cultural, economic, social and environmental challenges facing the diverse array of buildings and sites currently in need of renewal. A new focus on creative thinking is necessary to accommodate both the volume and often erratic quality of the resources under consideration, but more profoundly to acknowledge that science and scholarship address only part of the full range of values and issues that must be taken into account to ensure the relevance, quality and ultimate success of any intervention. While this approach does not circumvent the normal processes of assessment and evaluation it does recognize the essential need for a critical overlay in order to achieve a design synthesis that balances conservation and repair with appropriate future use, perception and socio-economic value.
Case Studies in Conservation and Adaptive Re-Use will build upon the philosophical and practical underpinnings of the fall semester Building Conservation and Renewal course, and though that course is not a prerequisite, some familiarity with the intellectual and regulatory framework associated with working with historic sites is useful and recommended. The course will include a series of case studies on a variety of traditional and modern resources given by the instructor and guest lecturers, who will explore contemporary theoretical, political and practical issues that attend working with existing properties.
The primary course deliverable will be student authored case studies from a curated project list that raise critical questions about conservation, interpretation, and the design of interventions. Students will work in teams – with regular critiques throughout the semester – to develop a critical analysis that identifies the material and cultural values that define each property and suggest how best to manage their conservation and guide future development. The ultimate goal will be to understand how the process of change – whether as a singular event or in multiple campaigns – has used, challenged or rejected attributes of the host structure, and the degree to which the result still embodies the design intent, meaning and quality of each building campaign. Short essays and regular discussion of course readings will also be required.
The course is a 3-hour weekly seminar with a maximum enrollment of 20 students.
Mountains and the Rise of Landscape
To ask when we started looking at mountains is by no means the same as asking when we started to see them. Rather, it is to question what sorts of aesthetic and moral responses, what kinds of creative and reflective impulses, our new-found regard for them prompted. It is evident enough that in a more or less recent geological time frame mountains have always just been there. This ineluctable thereness was famously invoked by the athletic schoolmaster George Mallory when asked why he had made repeated attempts to reach the peak of Mount Everest, the allure of which was and remains demonstrably fatal. The mountaineer’s strenuously slow “perpendicular travel” toward an upward tending horizon was “work for supermen,” the New York Times suggested in a profile of Mallory published prior to his final all-too-human attempt. He was last seen on the afternoon of June 8, 1924, near the base of Everest’s summit pyramid before disappearing into the mountain mist.
It is possible that mountains, like the sea, best provide pleasure, visual and otherwise, when experienced from a (safe) physical and psychical distance. But it might also be the case that the pleasures mountains hold in store are of a learned and acquired sort. Which is also to say that mountains, for all their unforgiving thereness, are themselves the products of unwitnessed Neptunian and Vulcanian tumults or divine judgment. For the late seventeenth-century theologian and cosmogonist Thomas Burnet, mountains were “nothing but great ruins.” A dawning appreciation of these wastelands appeared in the critical writings of John Dennis. Satirized as “Sir Tremendous Longinus” for his rehabilitation of the antique aesthetic category of the sublime, Dennis expressed the complex concept of “delightful horror.” Mountain gloom was ready to become mixed with mountain glory.
More work was still to be done on the literary and philosophical front before the Romantic breakthrough, one high vantage point being the essayist Joseph Addison’s dream of finding himself in the Alps, “astonished at the discovery of such a Paradise amidst the wildness of those cold hoary landscapes.” But a kindred innovation in seeing and feeling was called for in the formation of mountains and the rise of landscape. Mountains, among other earth forms, are both the medium and outcome of still-evolving habits of experiencing, making, and imagining. Architects and landscape architects, mutually occupied with the horizontal surface, have had a touch equally as searching as that of mountaineers and poets in sensing the terrain.
The ostensible object and subject of this seminar, appearing as isolated peaks and as ranges, chains or systems, measurable and scalable but also cloud-shrouded and remote, rising and falling, massive and imponderable, will be studied across time and place with constant and careful attention to how mountains define and defy the discourse and practice of landscape architecture and architecture. We will look at texts, images, cultural constructs, buildings (mountain-scaled and otherwise), cities, wastes, and elsewhere all in search of the meaning of mountains.
Competing Visions of Modernity in Japan
The course will trace the parallel trajectories of two of modern Japan’s most influential schools of architectural thought, represented by Kenzo Tange (1913–2005) on the one hand and Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006) on the other, and situate their contributions in the broader development of international modernism in the postwar period. Tange and his protégés in the Metabolist group dazzled the world with radical proposals for urban communities built either on the sea or elevated in the sky. Shinohara rejected this techno-rationalist stance through the slogan “A house is a work of art” and turned to the single-family house shunned by the Metabolists. The House of White by Shinohara achieves an almost oceanic spaciousness through abstraction and precision.
The course will be structured as a series of discursive narratives and debates, such as tradition, transparency, lightness, and technology, which defined architectural practice and criticism in Japan after 1945. Major figures, notably Toyo Ito, successfully overcame these differences and established new paradigms. We will also position young Japanese architects today, Ishigami, Fujimoto, and Hasegawa, in terms of these historical genealogies and the evolution of a critical discourse.
The course will make extensive use of the Kenzo Tange Collection housed at the Loeb Library. We will also engage recent exhibitions on modern Japanese architecture, including Constellations exhibition at MoMA, the Japanese House at the MAXXI and Barbican Center, and #SOSBrutalism at German Architecture Museum, and examine the framing of modern and contemporary architecture in Japan to public and professional audiences.
Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies
Infrastructures play a decisive role in urban development and the life of cities. This course will envisage this role from a historical perspective. History proves especially useful when dealing with the political dimension of urban infrastructures. From fortifications to smart technologies, infrastructures are inseparable from political intentions and consequences. This political dimension will constitute one of the threads of this lecture course. Other themes of the course will include the relation between cities and their hinterland, the progressive dematerialization of infrastructures, from walls or bridges to the invisible electronic networks that organize contemporary urban life, the rise of environmental concerns and their impact on infrastructural thoughts and practices, the need to conceive differently infrastructures when dealing with informal settlements.
'Cities, Infrastructures, and Politics: From Renaissance to Smart Technologies' would like to suggest an alternative way to read cities and their evolution. Historical analysis will systematically serve as a basis to envisage contemporary issues. Since it aims to chart new territory, the discussions following the presentations will play an important role. Apart from regular attendance and participation in the discussions that will follow the presentations, the students will be asked to produce a short end-of-the-semester paper on a topic related to the course.
Among the topics covered:
– Urban Infrastructure and Politics. A Theoretical and Empirical Challenge
– Cartography as Infrastructure
– Infrastructures for Conflicts: From Urban Fortification to electronic surveillance
– Territories, Cities and the Transportation Revolution
– The Rise of the 19th-Century Networked City
– From Nineteenth-Century Urban Parks to the High Line in New York: An Infrastructural Nature
– Technology, Infrastructure and the Urban Experience: From Electricity to the Digital
– Rationalization Doctrines, Architecture and Urban Planning from Scientific Management to System Theory
– Infrastructure and Urban Modernization in the 20th Century
– Infrastructures for Leisure and Tourism
– Smart Cities: A Self-Fulfilling Ideal
– Urban Metabolism and Infrastructure: Towards the Sustainable and Resilient City
Modern Architecture and Urbanism in China
Modernizing influences, largely from the hands of foreign powers, first forcefully entered China in the aftermath of the Opium War and signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. Since then, China endured a stormy if not tumultuous course of events before finding itself with burgeoning modern industrialization and urbanization during the contemporary era, as well as a certain ambivalence about the shape of its future identity. Against this historical backdrop, modern architecture and urbanism developed spasmodically, before emerging strongly during the past decade or so. Rather than attempting to provide a continuous and cohesive narrative of these developments, this seminar will concentrate on significant episodes during the last 150 or so years. Of particular interest will be the work of several generations of Chinese architects, planners, and public officials, as well as that of foreign architects and planners, working in China during various periods. The aim of the course will be to introduce students to this modern work and underlying attitudes, together with cultural influences, which lay behind them. Students will be expected to be prepared for seminar discussion, by undertaking prescribed readings, and to produce an article-length research paper on a pertinent topic. There are no prerequisites for this course.
Buildings, Texts, and Contexts III: MODERNISM AND ITS COUNTER-NARRATIVES
Modernism has fundamentally to do with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events and, at the same time, new conceptualizations of their appearance, of changing event structures and temporalities, and of the relationships between objects, their producers and maintainers, and their audiences and consumers. A history of modern architecture, then, must involve a robust theory of the producing, using, viewing subject as well as of the object itself—which includes buildings and projects, texts and discourses, and the contexts of their production and reception.
Specific features of the object—global capital markets and the rise of nationalism; colonial independence and lingering regimes of inequality; aspirations to universality and the entrenchment of local interests; in general, the contradictory conditions of the modern world—marked a fundamental change in the way its history could be conceived. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ideal of the universal subject of the European Enlightenment had been irrevocably fractured. Similarly, former parameters by which “proper” forms of art and architecture were evaluated no longer held. Constructing a singular historical narrative able to contain and make sense of these contradictions was no longer quite as useful, nor even possible. In other words: modernism asked us to question the very frames by which we considered the practice of architecture. The process of questioning continues today, demanding further counternarratives.
This course will use theoretical texts and historical examples to generate ways of thinking about modern architecture not as bygone era but as the inaugural frame for our own situation. Our question is not “How does modern architecture reflect the given conditions of modernity?” but rather, “How can architecture (as subject, as object, as technique) produce those very conditions?’
Histories of Landscape Architecture II: Design, Representation, and Use
Designed gardens and landscapes are cultural artifacts that encompass three main expectations: pragmatic needs, cultural significance, and aesthetic order. Although some landscape narratives often ignore needs, reduce cultural meanings to a discourse on style, and focus on order as a problem in aesthetic theory, the fact remains that, almost without exception, one or more of these three criteria—needs, meanings, or order—dominates the designed gardens and landscapes of every time and place. Moreover, because the latter are ephemeral and subject to many transformations, their practical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects are often embedded in a palimpsest of changing values.
The course is not tightly structured around landscape architectural styles. Rather, it examines a selection of topics that bring together thinkers and designers who live/have lived centuries apart. While doing so, this class unfolds several issues that have shaped the profession, such as giving form to environmental values, balancing science and art, ecology and design, reconsidering the need for the beautiful vis-à-vis the many sites challenged by pollution and abuse, the issues of reception and the study of space perception. Among the topics of discussion, this course will also take into account recent phenomena such as the late twentieth-century increase in world population and the dwindling of natural resources and consider how these have changed the reality described by the very word nature and have contributed to expand the domain of landscape architecture. The instructor’s talks will include the analysis of case studies and alternate with lectures that address the roots of contemporary ideas in earlier theoretical formulations. Within this structure the past will be presented as a way to illuminate, receive, and critique the present.
Course objectives
– To become familiar with, and be able to discuss in an informed manner, the impact of social, cultural and environmental processes upon design trends. In order to achieve this objective, completing the assigned readings ahead of class time and reflecting on how the ideas expressed in the readings relate to the case studies presented in class, is essential. It is also necessary to engage with the reading material and the arguments presented during the instructor’s talks actively, by noting in writing what one finds most relevant.
– To be able to trace the roots of contemporary design ideas in earlier theoretical formulations. This is achieved by attending all lectures for the entire scheduled time.
– To be able to think critically, enhancing synthesis and argumentation skills. In order to achieve this, attendance of all seminars/recitation sessions is necessary but not sufficient. Full and informed participation in class discussions of the ideas and issues raised in the readings and lectures is also necessary. Researching and writing a final, term paper will also contribute to attain this goal.
Course format: The course will involve talks by the instructor and weekly seminars with teaching fellows for the discussion of assigned readings.
Film Theory, Visual Thinking (at AFVS)
How do moving images transform the way we think? Introduction to film theory aimed at interpreting the visual world, and developing skills to analyze films and media images. Survey of classical and contemporary film theory goes from turn-of-the-century scientific motion studies to the virtual movements of today. Considers theories of space, time, and motion, including Eisenstein's theory of montage and architecture. Treats visual technology and sensate space, the cultural history of the cinematic apparatus, the body and physical existence, affect and gender, and screen theory. Different theoretical positions guide us in understanding and reading films.
This course is offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as AFVS181.
This course meets from 12PM to 1:30PM on Thursdays at the Carpenter Center Room B-04?
This course has an additional weekly film screening, Wednesday at 7:15 in the Carpenter Center Lecture Hall (B03).
Offered jointly with the Department of Art, FIlm, and Visual Studies as AFVS 181.
Buildings, Texts, and Contexts II
Any account of architecture’s history over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries is faced with the challenge of addressing the general rupture caused by the rise of modernity—that is, by the social, economic, technological and ideological transformations accompanying the political and industrial revolutions marking the end of the European Enlightenment. The transition of architecture to the modern world gave rise to a series of fundamental questions, which might be framed as follows: How did historical conditions place pressure on the time-honored foundations of architecture, on its origins, theories, and pedagogies? How did new conditions of scientific possibility actively reconfigure architecture’s relation to engineering? And finally, how did aesthetic conceptions and approaches, which followed an arc from Beaux-Arts eclecticism and historicism to Modernist avant-gardes, intersect with society and politics?
This course weaves these questions through topics and themes ranging from technology and utopia to ornament and nationalism. We begin with late Baroque polemics and the academic foundations of architecture as discipline. We then consider the multifaceted nature of 18th-century architectural expressions insuch examples as Rococo space, origin theories from Laugier to Piranesi, and the formulation of building typologies. The 19th century, which for us is inaugurated by a utopian imaginary (in Ledoux and Fourier), covers key episodes such as the Beaux-Arts system in Europe and America, architecture and national identity (in Schinkel and Wagner), and, finally, the dream of colossal structures and the infrastructural programs of the modern metropolis. Course requirements include attendance at lectures and sections, responses to readings, and several written assignments.