Image: Border medical control building, Heidi and Peter Wenger, 1956. ACM Archive, B3.2.23
Spring 2024
Fridays, 11:15 – 12:45 SG 0211
This is a theory course on the building as a material thing—on what it means for a building to go from project to its actual place in the world. Building upon the knowledge gained in your first five semesters in history and theory, the course focuses on the process and matter of architecture. The aim of this course is to understand buildings by examining how they come into being and stay—or don’t—in place: through discourse, through the site broadly considered, through material supply chains, and through the labor of workers. In doing so, we will think of building as a process that neither begins nor ends with the construction site but rather stretched across territories and through time, linking disparate sites and agencies together.
Working with the hypothesis that the building culture we work in is the result of long and slow historical developments, this course is an introduction to building culture from 1850 to the present as a way of entering and understanding what building culture is here and now. The course is based on weekly lectures that each follow the history of a single building—canonical and non-canonical—as it has been designed, sourced, built, occupied, and renovated. Lectures about specific buildings are paired with readings that give students an overview of key disciplinary positions on construction, labor, materiality, and ethics both contemporaneous to the project in question and from later historiographic positions. In complement to the importance of the plan for typological studies, the wall section will be used as a recurrent point of entry to understand the building and the broader systems and concerns of which it is the product.
Instructor: Prof. Dr. Sarah Nichols
Assistant: Tiffanie Paré