STUFF

Karsten Bott, One of Each

ARC3020Y F
Instructor: Laura Miller
Meeting Section: L9103
Synchronous
Tuesdays, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

 

“At the very least, I hope to have convinced you that, if our challenge is to be met, it will not be met by considering artifacts as things. They deserve better. They deserve to be housed in our intellectual culture [and in our architectural constructions] as full-fledged social actors.

They mediate our actions? No, they are us.”

–– Bruno Latour On Technical Mediation –– Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy
 

Conceptual Framework

Artifacts are not complacent ‘things’ at all, existing only to serve us as tools or to silently assist us in the definition of our own identities. Rather, objects are, together with humans, animals and other living organisms, active agents in shaping our mutual technological and cultural condition. This shared condition is evident in the double life architecture leads, first, as a series of cultural and technical (tectonic) artifacts, and second, in its operation as a means of mediation – in its framing of artifacts and the other inhabitants it contains. The STUFF research studio will investigate the ways that architecture can better engage in such framing.

The provocation by Bruno Latour cited above inspired the central questions the STUFF studio will explore: How can architecture operate with greater generosity, inventiveness, and reciprocity in calibrating object - human relationships in the spaces we construct? We share the physical spaces we inhabit with the myriad of objects we acquire, use, store, and accumulate over time; how do these artifacts in turn shape the architecture of our lives? How do the objects we encounter prompt us to assume different roles – user, consumer, viewer, owner?

Binaries that divide objects and people into the ‘inanimate’ (stuff) and the ‘animate’ (us) do not recognize the potential of how human and ‘non-human’ actors, if considered together from the inception of the design process, could potentially inform the spaces we create in new ways. What if stuff was considered as important a ‘client’ as an individual or an institution? Would thinking this way change how or what we design?

Research Artifacts

Throughout the term, the studio will engage in a combination of collective and individual research. The studio’s inquiries will be deliberately constructed across diverse scales of architectural and artifactual investigation.

We will consider 3 Object Situations that have the potential to inspire new ways of thinking about our relationship with things:

  1. Domestic Scenes
  2. Institutional Sites
  3. Diffuse Landscapes

At the beginning of the term, each student will make a short video about an aspect of their life with objects. Students will also analyze a number of Precedents/Case Studies. Each student will examine and analyze at least one precedent/Case Study from each category of Object Situations, allowing the collective studio to become familiar with options regarding possible scales, sites, programs, issues, and other issues pertinent to the development of individual directions for research. Later, individual precedents/case studies will be chosen by each student, according to their research ideas and questions. Research will also be conducted through series of exploratory drawings/models based on the themes of the STUFF studio, pursued throughout the term. During the last portion of the term, students will develop 3 scenarios for their thesis project, choosing to work in one or more categories of Object Situations and/or scales, or focusing upon a single one. The development of scenarios will be informed by the research artifacts listed above, and fortified through writing, shared readings and discussions with the studio and with invited guests. Readings and discussions will overlap with the concurrent thesis preparation course. The semester’s work, along with the 3 Scenarios, will be compiled in a dossier of research for the STUFF studio’s final project.

A note about travel in Winter Term:
If at all possible, we hope to take a studio trip during Reading Week (February 2021). Travel during that time is an unknown at present, and will be an evolving situation over the course of the fall term. We will discuss and develop different travel itineraries based on possible scenarios as a group during the fall term, fingers crossed.