ARC3317H S
Instructor: Robert Levit
Meeting Section: L0101
Wednesdays, 3:00 - 6:00pm

What is at stake in the symbolic regimes that shape architecture today—whether in the formal variety associated with mass customization and genetic variety; “playful” form-making strategies; or more currently in new drawing styles of graphic flatness (deriving from such games as Monument Valley and curated on such blogs as KooZA/rch), and formal elementalism. This course will combine close observation of the formal qualities of a number of current and recent practices—and what we will consider to be the social and political imaginary behind these styles.

The course will focus on the question of how individuals conceive of their relationship to each other through institutions and how this conception is projected into architectural form. At the heart of this question is a view that the ineluctable vocation of architecture is the making of institutional and collective arrangements—architecture exists to give form to institutional life. Yet, today a paradox reigns: as Frederic Jameson has written, “ . . . anything labeled as public has become irredeemably tainted, everything that smacks of the institution arouses distaste and repels in a subliminal, will-nigh Pavlovian fashion . . ..” And yet, almost all that architects build are such institutions of collective life.

Following from this thought we will examine the way in which this paradoxical sentiment that animates political and social imaginaries in an ever-widening circle has shaped the formal strategies of architects today and the rhetorical goals of their forms regardless of other theoretical claims and articulations.

The course will pair the reading of texts on political and sociological topics with close examinations and class discussions of both individual works of architecture and broader formal trends in architecture. The class will require each student to choose a work or number of works of architecture to exam and according to the themes developed in the class and resulting in a class presentation and final paper.