Media and Modernity
- ARC 571/ART 581/MOD 573: Research in Architecture: Architecture in the Age of PandemicsArchitecture and medicine have always been tightly interlinked. Every age has its signature afflictions and each affliction has its architecture. The age of bacterial diseases gave birth to modern architecture. The twenty-first century is the age of neurological disorders: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorders, burnout syndrome and allergies-the 'environmentally hypersensitive' unable to live in the modern world. With COVID-19, a virus is completely reshaping architecture and urbanism and once again disease exposes the structural inequities of race, class and gender. Will architectural discourse likewise reshape itself?
- ARC 577/MOD 577: Topics in Contemporary Architectural Theory: Atmospheric PerspectivesConventions of architectural representation typically rely on trees, mountains and clouds to countermand the denaturing effects of drawing in plan, section and elevation. This seminar argues instead that the landscape settings included in a wide range of representational genres are not only signs of nature or techniques for producing naturalistic space, but exactly what they appear to be; neglected components of as yet to be written environmental histories of architecture. With attention to historical events, we examine how trees, mountains and clouds were represented and redesigned as architects sought to cultivate the natural world.
- ARC 594/MOD 504/HUM 593/ART 584: Topics in Architecture: Building Life: Space, Field, TerritoryPart 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 processes of spatialization, territorialization, and colonization of natural and metropolitan environments on a global scale. Topics include the techniques of fieldwork, mapping, measurement, and classification along the study of building typologies in institutions ranging from natural history and anthropology museums, biological stations, laboratories, zoos and aquariums, to libraries, universities, and prisons.
- GER 523/MOD 523: Topics in Media StudiesThis seminar offers a critical survey of recent trends in media theory with an eye to their relevance to questions of aesthetic form and of representation in general. We focus specifically on six approaches around which work in media theory has coalesced in the last two decades: cultural techniques, disability studies, media archaeology, elemental media, network theory, and assemblage theory.