Course Syllabus

Extreme Design: Bacterial Architectures

Tuesday 11-1, 412 Avery 

This seminar will challenge the generic idea that the human is the client of architecture. More precisely, it will try to undo the interlaced concepts of human and architecture by exploring the multitude of organisms that construct, inhabit, and sustain both bodies and buildings. What if architecture is, almost always, really a matter of microbes?

We will explore the latest research into the microbiome of buildings and the extended history of the attempts to exclude microbes in the name of architecture by architects, doctors, and governments in both times of crisis and supposed normality—and the role of these imagined exclusions in the ongoing constructions of race, gender, class, and sexual identity.

Architectural discourse about comfort, security, integrity, whiteness, stability, cleanliness, health, smoothness, purity, clarity and norm is classically mobilized against disintegration, contamination, contagion, infection, blackness, dirt, disease, porosity, confusion, and exception but this inevitably violent mobilization is undone by the interactions of the countless unseen organisms that might be the real clients of architecture—continuously making and unmaking every line that is drawn. Or, to say it differently, what are the architectures and anarchitectures that microbes make?

The extended 10,000 year history of architecture can be understood as a form of sustained hostility to bacteria that unwittingly incubates specific bacterial communities that co-evolve with humans. The seminar will study the inequitably distributed threat that architecture’s antibacterial campaign poses to the human, the new ways in which bacteria are already being embraced in bioconstruction, biomaintenance, bioconservation, and bioremediation, and the possible future collaborations with microbes.

After some introductory sessions, students will make presentations on selected topics and a final paper.