LEFT: vintage typewriter image © todd mclellan motion/stills inc. RIGHT: vintage typewriter – exploded suspended view image © todd mclellan motion/stills inc.

ARC3709H F
Instructor: Laura Miller
Meeting Section: L0101
Wednesday, 3:00pm - 6:00pm

The fabricated world that surrounds us is a world that we as architects, designers, and artists simultaneously engage, and hope to alter through our own creations. This seminar will examine some of the ways that cultural significance and value are negotiated, qualified, projected, and received through the material artifact. The status of the artifact will be considered and explored through a broad range of literary, historical, and theoretical frameworks, working with both primary texts and contemporary readings. Interpretive frameworks will include: models of making; the role of representation; classification and indexing; materiality and memory; use and durability; the natural and the artificial; the original vs the forgery; the collection, seriality, and hoarding; and commodity and exchange values of the artifact.

Students will each choose a contemporary, everyday consumer artifact to examine and research, selected according to an index of cultural conditions seen to be in a state of flux and redefinition today: Beauty, Disease, Security, Hygiene, Identity, Gender, Sexuality, Taboo, Violence, Status, Truth, Permanence, Nature.

It is a fundamental assumption of this course that knowledge is deeply embedded within the act of making. Recognizing the often difficult task students face in attempting to apply theoretical concepts to studio work, this seminar will engage multiple forms of speculation – text-based (reading, writing), visual (drawing, photography, image construction) and for the last assignment, material construction – in order to test out ideas from course readings and discussions.