ARC3322H S
Instructor: John Harwood
Meeting Section: L0101
Wednesday 6:00PM - 9:00PM

The individual once conceived of reason exclusively as an instrument of the self. Now he experiences the reverse of this self-deification. The machine has dropped the driver; it is racing blindly into space.
—Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 1947

Technology just means information technology.
—Peter Thiel

The question of what architecture’s function may be has, since the 18th century, usually been reduced to the matter of whether or not it is capable—as a systematic application of cultural techniques—of managing something called “society.” That is, the instrumental utility of architecture has been its ability to function as a medium. Yet architecture is also regarded—in architectural history, theory and criticism—as a set of objects. Which is the primary ontological status of architecture, or is architecture a name for both states of being at once? What is a meaningful theory of architecture’s relationship to technology?

This course will introduce students to the main lines of media theory as developed in Canada, Germany, France, Brazil and the US over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, with additional attention to postcolonial strands of theory that have challenged these main lines. These now classic texts will be examined alongside careful analysis of architectural artefacts to question their status as media and/or objects.