The theme for the fall workshop is Site. Objectifying and describing a site is typically difficult for beginning, or even advanced students, and yet is a skill all architects must master. Site is the precondition for construction and the link between architecture and the world. With forms of human habitation rapidly changing due to urbanization, site becomes a more important consideration every day.
Seminars will address Fields, Territories, Surveys, Flows, and Inhabitations, surveying both historical and contemporary material to challenge students. As an introduction to architecture as an expanded field, students will encounter disciplines such as politics, geology, philosophy, infrastructural engineering, land art, archaeology, and landscape architecture. Buildings will illustrate responses to the topics. Some examples might include the Yokohama Terminal, the Acropolis, the Parc de la Villette, the Stockholm South Cemetery, Robin Hood Gardens, the Pyramids, and the Berlin Free University. Readings by authors such as Rem Koolhaas, Colin Rowe, Michel Foucault, St. Brendan, Guy Debord, John McPhee, John Stilgoe, Robert Smithson, and Georg Simmel will challenge students with the diverse ways by which we can describe sites.
The theme for the fall workshop is Site. Objectifying and describing a site is typically difficult for beginning, or even advanced students, and yet is a skill all architects must master. Site is the precondition for construction and the link between architecture and the world. With forms of human habitation rapidly changing due to urbanization, site becomes a more important consideration every day.
Seminars will address Fields, Territories, Surveys, Flows, and Inhabitations, surveying both historical and contemporary material to challenge students. As an introduction to architecture as an expanded field, students will encounter disciplines such as politics, geology, philosophy, infrastructural engineering, land art, archaeology, and landscape architecture. Buildings will illustrate responses to the topics. Some examples might include the Yokohama Terminal, the Acropolis, the Parc de la Villette, the Stockholm South Cemetery, Robin Hood Gardens, the Pyramids, and the Berlin Free University. Readings by authors such as Rem Koolhaas, Colin Rowe, Michel Foucault, St. Brendan, Guy Debord, John McPhee, John Stilgoe, Robert Smithson, and Georg Simmel will challenge students with the diverse ways by which we can describe sites.
We will also visit three nearby sites first-hand in order to learn how to discuss them. Afternoon workshops will focus on describing these sites.
Grading:
33.3% notebooks, attendance, participation
Students will be issued Moleskine notebooks at the start of the course. All writing is to be done in pen. At the end of the course, notebooks will collected and graded to ensure that students have been participating a course. Attendance and class participation are mandatory.
33.3% essay exam
Upon completion of the course, students will undertake an essay exam. Questions will be distributed in advance, but students will not be allowed to use notes in the exam.
33.3% final essay
An essay on a specific site from studio will be due at the end of the term.
readings:
fields
Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” OCTOBER 100, Spring 2002, pp. 175-190.
territories
Anne Querrien, “The Metropolis and the Capital,” Zone 1/2 (New York: Urzone, 1986), 219-221.
surveys
flows
John McPhee, “The Control of Nature. Atchafalaya.” The New Yorker, February 23, 1987, 39-100.
inhabitations