Course Syllabus
In this introductory architecture studio, we will question architecture as a way of knowing and engaging with the world. Working within, through, and against the frames we’ve been given, we will begin to see “Broadway Stories,” and this syllabus, as an apparatus that constructs possible worlds. Beginning on our site, we will read and craft images of the city, considering whose histories have been rendered legible or illegible, and the ways those histories have been read as fact or fiction; we will examine our own tendencies to believe or disbelieve, in the process questioning the types of aesthetics we associate with credibility or lack thereof. Drawing will serve as a primary site of investigation: we will draw to better see architecture as material-discursive practice and as instituting force and engage with representational tools as they shape the way we see, understand and operate in the world.
The area of Manhattan we will work within--only four blocks from West to East at its narrowest--is a space informed by institutions operating at vastly different scales: here and elsewhere, gender, family, health and nationhood are projects crafted between registers as abstract and wide-reaching as international law and as intimate as individual gestures. The wave of a hand, the scanning of an ID, a wink or a nod mediate access and shape our realities just as much as pipes, bridges, and whatever else might be considered architecture’s primary media.
Examining institutional operations carried out at specified site locations, we will begin drawing and diagramming exchanges of power at two scales: that of the body and the city. Between these scales, we will question the production of subjectivity and seek to identify and define sites of resistance. In exercise two, we will examine these same dynamics at the scale of the building, seeking to explicate relationships between actors, protocols, and material supports. The third exercise will provide an opportunity to use model-making as a means of questioning and defining “site”-- as a geographical, ecological, or legal conceit-- culminating in a final designed intervention. What comes into the site of the project in order to be questioned, responded to, or designed against? What is left out? Throughout, we will ask: what does it mean to “practice architecture”? What are the stakes of architectural interventions?
Course Summary:
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