ARC3325H F
Instructor: Mary Louise Lobsinger
Meeting Section: L0101
Wednesday, 6:00PM - 9:00PM

This seminar examines the concept of architecture as medium and the ways in which design participates in the making of global imaginaries. Thinking architecture as medium shifts our focus from purely formal aesthetic attributes to consider the infrastructural dynamic within which architecture participates. It asks that we set aside received histories of modernism and modernity to delve into systemic analyses that track technical, social, political and material techniques that produce local and global imaginaries. If the 19thcentury saw the idea of world system pursued through inventions, institutions and corporate entities, timetables, treaties, and territorial expansion, we now experience the geopolitics of, for example, higher education, the distribution of materials, labour, and waste, and initiatives that, then as now, align with imperialist aspirations of settlement and empire. Given this, we will be attentive to questions of land and bodies, of the techniques and infrastructures that underpin resource and labour extraction, the racialization and the making of the modern self-possessed subject.

The course seeks to engage the overlooked, the ways in which built form contributes to a complex dynamic that materializes financial capitalism and produces spatial inequalities, colonization, the enslaved and racism. We will examine various scales and types of evidence, documents, film, and built and unbuilt projects. The seminar draws upon methods of inquiry including media theory, cultural techniques analysis, globalism, and political economy. Each student will be responsible for presenting a critical explanation of one weekly reading. Each week will focus on a central question, and instructor and student group led discussions of required course materials. The deliverables include scaffolded short assignments and an enthusiastically pursued final project. Note that this seminar is similar to ARC 3325 of Fall 2020 with the addition of new topics including the infrastructure and ethics of care, petroleum and territorial planning, and the question of the local within the global. For further information contact Professor Mary Lou Lobsinger at: marylou.lobsinger@daniels.utoronto.ca