ARC3016Y S
Instructor: Jeannie Kim
Meeting Section: L0110
Tuesday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

This semester’s theme, “Amplification,” explores the potential for architecture to make a relevant contribution in an era of crisis fatigue and unmotivated lethargy. In an article from the halcyon days of John F. Kennedy’s early presidency (“What to See in America,” The New Yorker, September 9, 1961), the recently established United States Travel Service within the Department of Commerce is tasked with establishing a list of sightseeing destinations to promote foreign tourism. Somewhat stumped after the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls, and Grand Canyon, the agency contacted each state capital, yielding the following:

The only river in the world that rises and runs its entire course along a mountaintop (Little River, atop Lookout Mountain, Alabama).
The world’s only three-ring sea circus (Los Angeles, California).
The world’s largest handle factory (Diboll, Texas).
World’s only Roto-lator, where cows are milked, fed, washed, and dried automatically (Plainsboro, New Jersey).
World’s oldest and largest factory devoted exclusively to the manufacture of golf balls (Elyria, Ohio).
World’s largest underground mountain (Wyandotte, Indiana).
World’s largest manufacturer of Chinese food, producing more Chinese food that any other place on earth, including China (Archbold, Ohio).
 

Architecture is alien in this context, and yet these spaces exist everywhere. Of course, our disciplinary lack of concern for such sites may also reflect the accepted ‘fact’ that the totalizing narrative of modernity has also ceased to exist. We no longer trade in superlatives, in other words, whether unambiguous or qualified, and recent events such as the economic downturn and subsequent housing bubble have further removed meaning and resolve from a discipline that used to demonstrate social agency and conviction. Our current culture of hype has rendered superlatives impotent (“This country is a disaster.” “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse.” “Tariffs are the greatest!” “My supporters are the smartest, strongest, most hard working and most loyal that we have seen in our countries history.”) but the design disciplines have arguably not held a place at the table for the important debates that get elided in 140- character prose for quite some time. What initiatives can architects take to make architecture relevant today? How can we amplify architecture’s contribution to issues that are encountered as shocking news stories that gradually lose their potency through circulation in tweets and dead superlatives? How can architecture again become a catalyst for debate and create opportunities that others may not see?