Buildings are messy—they weather, age, and accumulate traces of inhabitation over time. They require maintenance and adaptation as materials fall apart, technologies become obsolete, and ways of living change. This workshop embraces messiness as a methodology: not as disorder, but as an accumulation of change and layered temporalities—an incomplete condition that invites improvisation, making-do, and continuous editing of what already exists.

Imagining a not-so-distant future shaped by energy and resource crises, each student will depart from a contemporary domestic system or appliance—cooling, heating, plumbing, refrigeration, leisure, or storage—and speculate on its failure or obsolescence. What happens when these mechanical systems disappear, and architecture must absorb and reclaim their functions? Beginning with fragment models of an ordinary existing home, students will alter, edit, and add to them throughout the semester. As story- and time-telling devices, these models will accumulate infills, extensions, appendages, and prosthetics that support existing domestic rituals while making room for new ones.

Undergraduates welcome.

4.346 UG | 4.347 G

Students explore the complexities of avant-garde cinematic practices through crafting short videos. By studying the conceptual, technical, and social dimensions of avant-garde cinema, participants develop innovative storytelling approaches that challenge mainstream conventions. Students engage in film screenings and discussions that trace the history of moving images from their origins to the contemporary era, with a specific focus on avant-garde practices. Introduces practical knowledge of video capturing, audio recording, lighting, and editing, while emphasizing aesthetic strategies for individual concept development. Specific project topics may vary each term, allowing for the opportunity to repeat for credit. 

Note: this is an H1 Half Term subject

This Workshop accompanies Building Situations: Studio by studying situations and their histories across time and space. Over the longue durée, modernity’s peculiar predilection for novelty emerges as something of an aberration. It was normal, in the preindustrial age, to continuously refit buildings to the fugitive imperatives of time. By studying spoliation, renovation, preservation, adaptive reuse, and similar such practices, we will discover how people in various historical circumstances confronted the challenge of inhabiting the already-built. Rather than merely recovering these approaches as models, our ambition is to develop a grammar of responses adequate to the situations in which we find ourselves, and to develop alternatives to the largely calcified orthodoxies imposed by market logics and regulatory regimes.

4.352 UG | 4.353 G

Advanced video production, installation, and exhibition design introduces advanced image and sound design strategies from both a technical and conceptual perspective. Storytelling is the linchpin that unites these seemingly disparate forms. Visual semiotics and media analysis, alongside installation and exhibition design, offer a perspective from which to consider how meaning is constructed when you engage across different forms of art production such as within individual artworks, media installations, and the design of exhibitions. Each of these forms implies a different spatial configuration and it is the relationship between the artwork and the space where it is displayed that determines how the work is understood by a viewer.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. 

This is a seminar about the material making of architectural discourse, specifically in the form of print publication. We will begin from a familiar argument—that the media through which discourse takes place inflect the architecture that emerges. We will consider this problem historically, with visits to friends in various rare books rooms, where we will see a range of books, pamphlets, posters, prints, newspapers, zines, and building graphics that help us understand the changing technologies of the architectural book and changing political economies of print circulation. We will read a substantial amount of media theory and book history, and we will analyze many precedents. Our aim is to take stock of the landscape of architectural publication today, print and digital, conceptually and materially, and to experiment with how we might intervene in it at a range of scales. We will take some printing workshops together (which may or may not work their way into your projects); we will host editors, designers, and scholars with distinct perspectives on publication; and we will put a lot of things on the table. You’ll make a small (or not-small) book.

This seminar will focus on the problems associated with what is now called ‘pre-history.’ If that is not a valid term, then how does one approach early human history if one also wants to avoid a civilization-centric bias. The seminar will study the issues from a historiographic point of view and also hope to suggest some alternative to current practices.

Art and Science are pursuits divided by modernity. As Aristophanes once theorized the sexes, the two domains act like divided halves of a once unified soul—in this case, we might call that prior soul philosophy. This course investigates the long history of “the Art/Science thing,” examining its chosen love objects and subject positions. We look at the production of “fine” arts and investigations of natural phenomena as twinned Liberal Arts in the Renaissance, the artist as “natural philosopher” during the Enlightenment, the production of subjectivity/objectivity with the Scientific Method and the “science” of aesthetics, the division of science from “the liberal arts” in the industrial age, the creation of the two culture debate in the 20th century, the attempt to make a science of art (perception) in mid-century. With examples from contemporary art in each week’s discussions, we examine the compelling history of image-making in both regimes, and the raiding of each others’ epistemic toolkits beginning in the late 20th century. We place particular emphasis on the emergence of new hybrid domains (such as “bio-art”) in the 21st century.

“Scientists” was a name chosen in emulation of “artists” — a generalized professional category that could include multiple modes of empirical, proof-based activity just as “artist” included media as diverse as sculpture, painting, drawing, and print-making. Increasingly, art becomes a field in which scientific concepts can be brought into public discourse with more than “illustration” in mind. Biofiction, critical fabulation, loyal opposition, and skeptical love are contemporary characteristics of the art-science thing.

Explores how human-water interactions have given shape to the built environment in the era before industrialization, focusing on architectures, infrastructures, and landscapes of water supply, irrigation, transport, energy, ritual, health, sanitation, and flood mitigation, among other functions. Introduces examples from across the globe, with an emphasis on the Mediterranean world and Europe during the Middle Ages and early modern period (ca. 1000?1750). Considers continuity and change in historical water management over the longue duree and its effects on contemporary cities, landscapes, and political and economic systems.

Undergraduates welcome.

An in-depth introduction to shape grammars and their applications in architecture and related areas of design. Shapes in the algebras Ui j, in the algebras Vi j and Wi j incorporating labels and weights, and in algebras formed as composites of these. Rules and computations, shape and structure, designs.

4.356 U / 4.357 G

Explores ideas and contexts behind moving images through a multifaceted look at cinema's transmutations, emergence on local and national levels, and global migrations. Examines the transformation caused by online video, television, spatial installations, performances, dance, and many formats and portable devices, as well as the theory and context of film's categorization, dissemination, and analysis. Presentations, screenings, field trips, readings, visiting artists, and experimental transdisciplinary projects broaden the perception of present cinema. Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.