ARC3709H S
Instructor: Laura Miller
Meeting Section: L9101
Synchronous
Thursday, 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.

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, video image construction such as collage) and for the last assignment, the design of a material construction – in order to test out ideas from course readings and discussions.

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.

There are three projects. The first project is a critical documentation of the selected artifact, through drawing and/or photography/video. The second project is a construction of the selected artifact’s histories and contexts, through both visual and textual formats. As a means of further considering the multiple implications of an artifact as it is seen and understood within its contemporary cultural circumstances, and as a way to test out ideas and concepts from course readings and discussions, students’ third and final project for the course will be the design and, if possible, fabrication of an ‘indexical’ container, one that registers the apprehension of their selected artifact through its visual and material rhetorics. The ‘indexical’ construction will take on the pretensions of architecture, attempting to qualify, through its multiple spatial, material and descriptive agendas, an understanding of the artifact within or inferred. An alternate option for the last project is a paper of 12-15 pages, on a topic to be determined by the student and instructor.

Although listed as an architecture course, this seminar welcomes graduate students from all programs at the Daniels Faculty: architecture, landscape architecture, visual studies, and urban design.