Shared and Connected by Yoon Chai. Rehearsing the Parade thesis studio, 2023-2024. 

ARC3018HF
Fall 2024 Thesis Seminar
Instructor: Miles Gertler
Meeting Section: L0105
Thursdays 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

In this course we will examine ephemeral architectures and urbanisms instrumentalized in service of narrative, performance, and persuasion. In the Fall, our thesis seminar will first establish a fluency in analysis and communication, focusing on parades and rituals and their formal logics. We will use parade events as proxies to study spatial conditions that have materialized culture, technology, and politics as built form. In the Spring semester thesis studio, students will mobilize the tactics identified in their initial research toward the production of an architectural thesis project that responds to the urgencies of this moment.

Rehearsing the Parade is interested in strategic thinking, persuasive storytelling and representation, and the construction of architectural discourse. It is geared toward students who are curious about the ways architecture interacts with other forms of media and culture in the world. We will start with what might seem at first like a niche subject matter to produce useful knowledge with broad applications for architecture and spatial practice.

After all, parades are inherently architectural: this course sees them as pragmatic tools for city-building. They organize space, transmit messages to publics, and often model prospective worlds or realities to come. We could similarly attribute these conditions to architecture, and indeed, parades are designed and behave like so many artifacts shaped by design labor. Unsurprisingly, architecture has a disciplinary history in their design. Parades and a few related typologies and artifacts, like processions, convoys, rituals, floats, monuments, and catafalques—as well as their space-making strategies—first take the focus in this thesis seminar. Students will engage in typological analysis of the ephemeral and eventually re-route their formal, communicative, and organizational tactics toward architectural situations serving daily life.

In a literal sense, parade itineraries have produced urban form in cities like Athens and Rome. Architect Matilde Cassani shows us in her work how pageants and festivals materialized images of the future, refiguring the urban fabric of cities like Palermo: permanent transformations ushered in with the assumption of supposed temporality. Phenomena like this weren’t limited to the west. Painted scrolls dating at least as far back as the 11th century show how urban life coalesced around processions and flotillas in imperial China.

Our research will examine the historical against the contemporary and accelerate rapidly to the present day. In past editions of this course, students have used parades as an entry point to study subject matter as diverse as tourism propaganda, climate data preservation, thermal comfort, debt trap diplomacy, queer kinship, underground party movements, and the helium economy. Your inquiry in this course may be similarly expansive and lead to a thesis project born of the research interests you already harbor.

Classes will be structured in a collective discussion format in which all students will contribute. These will variously feature lectures, readings, and guest interlocutors, and each week, students will be asked to bring a specific item or idea to the table to share and discuss, like an architectural reference, a discursive text, a drawing, a news article, a meme, etc. These discussions will shape our research itinerary and align with a few assignments along the way. The work of this course is to be cumulative, such that the work produced in the first assignments contributes to the content presented in the final.  

Tentative Seminar Schedule

Weeks 1-4: Assignment 1 / Analysis to Avatar

Comparative analysis of two parades

Format: Drawings, animations, presentation

Students will analyze two parade events—one historical, one contemporary—that share essential conditions and compare their performative tactics and space-making strategies. Students will use this assignment to focus their attention on a thematic avatar (for instance, water, weather, fuel, inflation, death, body, speed, attention) that will guide their research for the term.

Weeks 5-8: Assignment 2 / Situation and Application

Identifying an urgency; Testing an intervention

Format: Drawings, animations, presentation

Equipped with a thematic avatar (a guiding preoccupation), students will abstract the key programmatic performances mobilized by the ephemeral architectures studied in the first assignment and adapt them to a situation that they have chosen through the design of an ephemeral or mobile architecture. Students will use this assignment as a test case to apply their initial findings and establish a context to study further.

Weeks 9-13: Assignment 3 / Setting the Course

Defining the thesis method, stakes, and itinerary

Format: Video essay, bibliography

In the final assignment, a video essay, students will articulate the stakes that define the site for their thesis project and broadly present the tactics with which they will intervene in it. Students will communicate this alongside the results of their research from assignment 1 and the test intervention they developed in assignment 2. Students will use the video essay to lay out the discursive method and context in which they will situate their thesis project.