ARC451H1

F4 LEC0104 (Fall 2026)

Instructor: Ijlal Muzaffar 

A monster is an architectural secret, a secret of the interior, a fear at society’s heart that it must exclude, banish, revile, and suppress to present itself as moral, civilized, and human. A monster validates who possesses a sanctioned balance between inner and outer life, between the interior and exterior, and who doesn’t. The claim to this balance has formed the basis of modern personhood enshrined in constitutions. It forms the basis of modern property, rights, and law. Slaves were seen to not possess an inner life, an empathic self. This denial banished them from the world of property holders, turning them into property themselves. The colonized worlds always appeared full of monstrous natures, peoples, and practices--from parasitic plants to cannibalistic tribes--that defined the empire as modern, developed, and advanced. Architecture is a discourse of banishing monstrous relationships between inside and outside to other places and times, to validate social values and desired futures at home. We’ll look at the history of monsters and monstrosity and read them architecturally as designs of boundaries and buffers along lines of class, race, gender, capital and empire. We’ll watch films, read fiction, theory, and history, to explore how monstrosity figures as an architectural problem that the empire and capital must manage to appear sustainable.