ARC3325H F
Instructor: Mary Louise Lobsinger
Meeting Section: L0101
Thursday, 12:00pm - 3:00pm

This seminar investigates the concept of architecture as medium and the way architecture participates in the making of a global imaginary. Thinking architecture as medium specific and in relation to many media, shifts our focus from purely formal attributes to think about the multiple modes of transmission–the technical, the social, the political economic and the always material–within the infrastructural complex that architecture participates. This approach questions those histories and theories that limit architecture to form and overlook the ways architecture, as such, plays within a dynamic of globalism. The seminar will pursue various scales of investigation from gadgets, interiors and facades to pedagogy and the exporting of planning agendas across the globe. The seminar is specifically invested in looking at institutional forms and programs, such as, the university, education or means of transmission, the library or storage, the bureaucracy of the corporate office or development agency, to ask how these participate in producing material consequences of the global.

The course will introduce students to, and draw upon, various methods of inquiry including media theory, cultural techniques analysis, globalism, and political economy. We will engage various scales and types of evidence, for example, paper, electronic, built and unbuilt projects. Students will have an opportunity to pursue a term project of their choice. Within the structure of the seminar, each student will be responsible for a critical explanation of at least one weekly reading, for the preparation an annotated bibliography, and the presentation their work to seminar participants.