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 investigates discourses and techniques of environmental governance addressed to the so-called "Third World," those seeking to regulate not only economic production but spatial arrangements, social reproduction, and forms of subjectivity in the decades after World War II. It does so by interrogating the intersection and co-constitutive realms of architecture, media, and development aid. To this end, an important task of the course is to ask how to identify, recognize, and attend to the many techno-social forms of designing and managing environments, with their distinctly northern epistemologies and imperial dispositions.

Histories of architecture often interpret Alberti's "window onto nature" as the medial interface between the denaturalizing abstraction of linear perspective and another more elemental nature exterior to architecture itself. This plane, however, is often marked by a range of material disturbances, from momentary obfuscations of passing clouds, to irregularities in glass to the invisible risks of fire and finance. By reconceptualizing immaterial representations as actions made through elemental media, students address the long chains of material and technical transfers that architectural techniques assemble into "windows onto nature."

Part of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological and architectural practices from the 18th c. to the present, this course focuses on recent ecological and environmental discourses through the writings of anthropologists, sociologists, material and environmental scientists, as well as architectural and literary critics. The seminar focuses on the effects of the diminishing distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic as well as the human and the non-human in the creation of living habitats and recreation of inequities within an environmentally challenged planet.

Foucault argued that, starting at the end of 18th century, the object of power becomes biological life; politics becomes "biopolitics." He claimed that statistics plays a major role in that change. We explore those arguments, while testing a third: biopolitics takes as its object not so much real as probable lives. Starting with Pascal's "wager" on the afterlife and Leibniz's "palace of destinies," we discuss modern demographics, statistics as a political science, and later developments, from theories of civil safety to techniques for valuing (and devaluing) lives, exploring the ethical and political questions they raise.

What is the "racial" in racial capitalism? The question is posed by abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and we take it up by exploring how literature, media, & art supply an analytic on capitalism's racial logics. It's easy to read texts for descriptions of racial capitalism. The difficult task resides in reading for the mediation between race and capital that the form of the texts enacts. To do this, we learn from Black, Asian American, Indigenous studies; Marxist aesthetic theory; and feminist, anticolonial, environmental critiques of capitalism.

Frantz Fanon is among the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century whose writings are critical in rethinking our world. In this course we will read all of Fanon's major writings: Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, and The Wretched of the Earth, as well as essays in Alienation and Freedom. Students must acquire and read David Macey's biography, Frantz Fanon: A Life, before the seminar begins.

According to the diagnosis associated with the term Anthropocene, humans are the decisive geological force responsible for various recent ecological changes and crises. Although there are alternative concepts and narratives to account for the current situation, 'Anthropocene' has installed itself as the privileged designation for the rethinking of the relationship between nature and culture. The seminar discusses the challenges this task poses for art and aesthetics. We explore terms like the sublime, the uncanny, the spectral, the ironic, the melancholic, the grotesque, the monstrous, and the (post-)apocalyptic in this context.

The media of literature, art, science and knowledge formation in general depend on a constant supply of so-called 'natural resources' such as fibers, metals, wax, vinyl and rare earths. This seminar combines discourse-analytical approaches from literary and media studies and the history of science with new methods of media ecology, critical infrastructure analysis and environmental studies to critically analyze these medial resource dependencies at different scales, both local and global, interrogating the normative, epistemic, aesthetic, geopolitical and economic frameworks that have co-constituted modern media.