Bachelorhood is at the center of diverse forms of architectural programs, assuming massive connotations and demographic significance. It has shaped much of what we know about dormitories, boardinghouses, hostels, studios, garçonnières, penthouse apartments and minimum housing experiments. Despite its pivotal role in the history of domestic architecture, it has been neglected as an exceptional or temporary status. The seminar explores multiple meanings of singleness and its typological responses as a key for understanding and rethinking modern household paradigms, housing policies and residential design in Latin America and elsewhere.

This seminar is a topic-based investigation of contemporary concerns situated at the intersection of architectural history, theory and design. Exploring how architectural technics have been brought to bear on matters of broad socio-cultural salience, particular emphasis is given to establishing relations between architecture and other knowledge domains, close readings of architectural structures, settings and media but also to identifying ways of engaging with the endless work of expanding the field. Final projects range from research papers to collaboratively produced exhibitions to experimental and project-based formats.

This seminar investigates how feminism and gender theory (from eco-feminism and intersectional feminism to queer and trans theory) can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, and cities, as well as the human alliances within them. We study forms of organizing around women's and LGBTQ+ rights in cities, from the efforts of informal activist groups to those of institution building, and highlight these efforts as main sites for creative, architectural, and urban intervention in challenging heteronormative forms of living and instead providing spaces of care and kinship making.

Part of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological theories and architectural practices in the 19th and 20th c., this course focuses on the entanglement of architectural historiography with the historicization of design technology. It examines the historical treatment of buildings as prosthetic or organic tools and the reinvention of building practices as biological processes and anthropological techniques. Seminars probe the periodization of historical time in terms of progress and obsolescence informing early histories of modern architecture and design.

What is media's role in shaping the materiality and definition of modern warfare? From image-making machines, drones to algorithms, and satellite mapping to artificial intelligence, war is the inventor of new visual and sensory regimes that give shape to the post/human environments we inhabit. This seminar considers classic French and German media theory on war in a new light, by focusing on Asia (Vietnams, Koreas, Chinas) as the primary site of sensory warfare, and the new inventor of experimental technologies of control. We probe the history of militarized aesthetics and unpack the operations of war machines.

This seminar explores turns to psychoanalysis in the history, theory, and criticism of art and literature. In reading psychoanalytic writings by Freud, Lacan, Klein, Laplanche, and others, paths and detours lead to problems of terminology, translation, mediation. In addressing works of art and literature, questions arise about how some might be understood as instances of psychoanalytic criticism and/or critiques of psychoanalysis. A need for critical reflection on the meaningfulness of psychoanalytic theories for current scholarship in the humanities is a guiding concern of this seminar. Seminar guests include practicing psychoanalysts.

In the wake of a series of recent events "Havana syndrome," acoustic devices for suppressing protests, etc.--the weaponization of the acoustic has gained widespread public attention. But these dystopic accounts obscure the fact that sound has always been intimately connected to the political. This seminar explores the many political dimensions of the acoustic: from tonality as a colonizing force to the algorithmization of listening; from acoustic regimes of urban space to the ecological dimensions of audio technologies; from questions of noise and sonic pleasure to the deployment of sound both for protest and as a mechanism of control.