Course Syllabus

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - GSAPP                                        Professor: Sandro Marpillero

Design Seminar: "Metropolitan Sublimes"    

ARCH A4399 - FALL 2022                                  Thursdays 9:00 - 11:00 AM / Room 411

 

Description

This seminar uses the process of formation of New York City as a metropolis in relation with the development of the Hudson River Valley, to explore the persistence of the aesthetic category of The Sublime. Through analysis of readings and art works we will trace the evolution of this notion from 18th Century philosophy to the 19th Century Hudson River School of painting, whose representation of landscape and technology played a significant role in establishing the city's rhetorical constructs, including its focus on architectural super-objects.

The seminar investigates relationships between individuals and their environment beyond the horizon of this enduring category of western thought, which has consolidated dichotomies such as that between culture and nature, subject and object. The subject constructed through this genealogy embodies juxtapositions that extend the one between nature and culture to a deeply embedded ontology. The rationalist dichotomy between subject and object is complemented by other pairings with social resonance in urban representations, such as male/female and figure/ground.

To challenge this representation of metropolis and environment, and its global resonance as a paradigm of urban hyper-development, we will explore more radical questions through anthropological references. The notion of western “naturalism” can be opened up by considering Native American's mode of engaging bodies and things in relation to their “animistic” and “totemic” ritualistic identities.

Retracing the course of the river upstream, we encounter the Empire State Plaza in Albany, an example of "Imperial Sublime" produced by an act of arrogant power. Two neighborhoods were demolished and site topography leveled to install an immense concrete plinth inaccessible to the complex’s 11,000 workers, yet furnished with fountains and sculptures by the 1960s New York School, on axis with Governor Rockefeller’s office window in the historic Capitol’s building. 

The overarching goal of this seminar is to reconceive architecture not so much for its inevitable consistency as built object, but as an environmental apparatus operating at multiple scales through the engagement of a complex circuitry of actors, which promotes reciprocal exchanges between participants in an aesthetic experience and the multiplicity of techniques structuring that experience.

As a Design Seminar, this course offers conceptual filters in support of each student's development of creative practice, with a focus on processes of making through three operations.

1. Collage

Inspiration for the collage elaboration of 19th Century's artworks is found in Max Ernst's techniques of representation, including collage, overpaint, and collage novels. Each of the artworks corresponds to the kind of material Ernst worked on: a representation from the historical reservoir of visual culture.

2. Apparatus

Architecture can productively interrogate its relationship with multi-scalar fields of environmental forces by mobilizing the notion of apparatus, as a convergence of flows that do not seamlessly integrate into machinic instrumentality, yet with the capacity to engage gestures and behaviors of living beings.

3. Moving Image

The perception of the environment through time-based techniques of representation effects a linguistic transformation in reading urban dynamics. The 1-minute video will explore strategies for inhabiting spaces of imperial sublimity with ready-made images of alternative subjectivities.

 

Consider

The three images on the top introduce key seminar references about art, nature, and technology: 1. Thomas Cole, one of the founders of the Hudson River School of painting, transferred to the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley the sublimity of the American West. 2. Andreas Feininger created images of New York City and its harbor that came to embody the modernist myth of the metropolis. 3. Art installations since the 1960s – such as the NY Waterfalls by Olafur Eliasson – have engaged extreme landscapes and urban infrastructures, reframing them in environmental terms to define a new notion of apparatus.

 

Coursework Assignment

Each class will include a short lecture by the professor synthesizing issues and concepts from the readings and artworks for the next session, which will be uploaded and made available on Canvas. Each class's first portion will consist of student-led discussions of readings with brief presentations highlighting one significant paragraph, as potential springboard for analysis and collage elaboration of a selected artwork.

The final project consists of a 1,500-word paper on one of the sessions' topics, and a 1-minute animation with voiceover (soundscape) for which the student's selected artwork forms the base material. These two deliverables need not be directly related.

The seminar requires that each student complete weekly readings, make two presentations, and submit a final paper and a video (as mp4) according to GSAPP’s final due deadline of December 10th, and follow all course requirements, including attendance policies.

 

Schedule

The following references include one main reading text and one artwork per each of the sessions to be accessed by the whole class. The professor will discuss in advance additional readings and artworks, with several options to complement this list for the students' presentations, consisting of argument and collage elaboration.

General reference for collages:

Max Ernst, The Hundred Headless Woman (1929), New York: Braziller, 1981. 

 

WEEK 1 - Introduction (September 8)

Overview and Techniques of Analysis

 

WEEK 2 - The Sublime is Now (September 15) 

Marco De Michelis, The Sublime is Now, Milano: Skira, 2008. 29-39

ART: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818); other works by William Turner.

 

WEEK 3 - Hudson River Valley (September 22)

Leo Marx, "The American Ideology of Space," in: Denatured Visions, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988. 62-78.

ART: Thomas Cole, Sunny Morning on the Hudson River (1827); other works by Asher Durand.

 

WEEK 4 - Technological Sublime (September 29)

David Nye, American Technological Sublime, Cambridge: The MIT Press: 1994. 17-43; 173-198. 

ART: John Gast, American Progress (1872); other works by Charles Sheeler.

 

WEEK 5 - Metropolis (October 6)

Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 68-109.

ART:  Thomas Hart Benton, America Today (mural, 1931); other works by Edward Hopper.

 

WEEK 6 - Nature/Culture (October 13)

Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. 232- 244.

ART: Hannah Hoch, The Sweet One (1926); other works by Marina Abramovic.

 

WEEK 7 - Apparatus (October 20)

Gilles Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?” in: Michel Foucault, Philosopher, New York, Routledge, 2008. 159-168.

ART: Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass (1915-23); other works by Francis Picabia.

 

WEEK 8 - Empire State (October 27)

Victoria Newhouse, Wallace K. Harrison, Architect, New York: Rizzoli, 1989. 244-273.

ART: David Smith, Voltri-Bolton XXI (1963), other works by Barnett Newman.

 

WEEK 9 - Fall Break (November 3)

NO CLASS

 

WEEK 10 - Storyboards (November 10)

Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram,” in: Film Form, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. 28-44

ART: Paul Strand, Manhatta, Film (1921); other works by Bill Viola.

 

WEEK 11 - Video Drafts (November 17)

 

WEEK 12 - Thanksgiving Holiday (November 24)

NO CLASS

 

WEEK 13 - Video Review and Conclusion (December 1)