Arch 4023
Arch 4023 is a comprehensive design studio intended to provide students with experience in the conception and detailed development of a design for a small-scaled public institution.
In order to achieve this agenda, emphasis is placed in upon three overarching concerns. First is a concern for practice as a vital realm of knowledge in itself that is neither the mere product of instrumentalizing reason nor the imperfect realization of theoretical ideals. Rather, practice is presented here as a mode of knowing through doing, what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls 'a feel for the game.' A feel for the game is the kind of tacit understanding that one only gains through direct engagement with the many variables of the game itself – in this case, design. When repeated enough, the act becomes second nature, a tacit knowledge of practice through practice. The sequence of exercises in this course endeavors to emulate (to the extent we can) – and to reflect upon – certain steps and procedures from 'normative' architectural practice as a framework for design exploration and discovery.
The second concern of this course is the role that institutions play in constituting relationships between and among individuals and society. Concurrent with this concern is the role that civil architecture can play in the constitution of a public domain within which individuals may gain agency and purpose. In the United States as elsewhere, institutions – and architecture – have often played a role more regulatory than democratic, even when claiming to symbolize and enact democratic ideals. Likewise, culture understood as an elitist indicator of social differentiation and class has often been asserted through architecturally- and institutionally-sanctioned forms. The question arises therefore as to how architecture might contribute (if at all) to the realization of a more radically democratic public domain, one accommodating to a citizenry at once more assertive of its multi-cultural identity and more questioning of (if still subject to) institutional controls. A program for a small public library in the City of Atlanta will provide the impetus for probing these and other questions of the public role of architecture at the beginning of the 21 st century.
And finally, in all of this, what will be foremost is the engagement of architecture as both a craft and a means of inquiry through which technical and expressive dimensions of space and form may be meaningfully intertwined through acts of representation and construction. Thus, intertwined with methodological issues of practice and social aspects of architectural form, is the simultaneously sensual and philosophical realm of tectonics, understood as basis of a poetics of making.
Traditions of Architectural Practice
Architectural practice is not static. Forces of economic globalization and technological innovation are actively reshaping the ground of professional practice, and the modes of practice in the coming decades will vary as much from today's practices as those do from practices of the 19 th century. Given this constant revolutionizing of architectural practice, how can architects – and students of architecture – prepare themselves for these inevitable shifts in the culture of architectural production?
Focusing upon the material culture of American architectural practice – its tools, documents, spaces, methods, divisions of labor – as a means of unearthing the embedded ideological assumptions of architectural professionalism, the course poses a critique of conventional architectural practice as we understand it today and speculates about the emergent forms of alternative practices. While not seeking to be a definitive history of the profession of architecture in the U.S., vignettes from that history are drawn in order to establish links across time to our own contemporary circumstances. In this way, a case is made for the necessity of a non-static, critical tradition in the continuing evolution and re-invention of architectural practice.
Six themes or episodes in the traditions of practice are elaborated in the course: The Discourse of Tradition and Practice; The Received Traditions of Architectural Practice; The Professionalization of American Architectural Practice; The Instrumentalization of Architectural Practice; The Changing Structure of Contemporary Practice; and Tradition and Its Interpretation Through Architectural Convention.
Architecture and the Discourse of the Everyday
In recent years, architectural discourse has embraced the rhetoric of the 'everyday.' Everyday architecture, everyday landscape, everyday urbanism, everyday practice, and everyday life are just some of the applications of this ubiquitous qualifier.
Where did this term originate, and out of what disciplinary contexts? What did it mean then and what do architects mean now when they invoke the quality of the everyday? How can a thoughtful interrogation of today's everyday contribute to the formulation of critically resistant strategies for the production of architecture?
Looking to the work of mostly European cultural theorists who, beginning in the early 20 th century, at temp ted to register and resist the numbing experience of modernity, this course opens up the relation between approaches to social description and programs of political action. In addition, the course situates the particular usages of the everyday within architectural discourse in the United States, including a range of related conceptions lodged in studies of vernacular architecture and cultural landscape. And finally, the course considers how this set of ideas might inform tactics of architectural design—or non-design—in the critical transformation of the everyday.