Course Syllabus
Construction in its current form has been known as a growth industry reliant on extractive practices, on-demand materials, and cultures of demolition. With landfills bursting at the seams with the stuff of buildings, it is no longer enough for the work of architecture to remain insulated at the front end of the supply chain. WASTE/WORKS seeks to revalue materials differently, through digital and physical means. By reimagining architectural representation from the perspective of waste, WASTE/WORKS dreams of a post-extraction world where product is not the key economic driver, but rather practices of leftover architecture.
Robin Evans famously declared that architects draw; they do not build. What, then, are the represented and mediated conditions of waste? What is the aesthetic / technical threshold between material and discard? What practices of visibility and new relationships can drawings, animations, and models choreograph through waste? In this course, we will think waste alongside architectural theory and representation, art practices, discard studies, environmental media, and political economy. As a testing ground for broken-world design, we will question architecture’s waste histories and futures under (the exhaustion of) capitalism, and rethink the space, time, and politics of waste through acts of representation.
WASTE/WORKS seeks:
_ to challenge / subvert norms in architectural drawing, modeling, and making
_ to develop working “waste” concepts and alternate representation methods for designers
_ to challenge the way something comes to be valued or devalued as waste (systems of power)
_ to confront architecture’s separation of instructional work (design, specification, representation) from “on-the-ground work” (construction, testing, maintenance, repair)
_ to carve out a space for discussing architecture in relation to discard studies and waste studies
Course Summary:
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