The following themed seminars are proposals for undergraduate and graduate students.
Want to try setting down your thoughts through monthly blogs?
Architectural thoughts have been as important as built work. More than ever, students can discuss their work publicly through the venue of blogs. This seminar will work with students how to craft ideas in a blog form and have them posted publicly for world view and critiques.
An Italian way of thinking…
What role did Europe, Italy and most particularly the city of Milan, play in the development of the ideology of modernism/post modernism at the end of the twentieth century? Italian architectural journals such as Abitare, Casabella, Domus, Lotus and Rassegna were the catalyst and the emblematic expression of Italian culture that mapped the terrain of architectural theory. Casabella, in particular, played a leading role in the development of architectural criticism that had far reaching repercussion on the state of design thinking, both in academia and throughout the profession.
This course will examine the written works of architect Vittorio Gregotti in his role as Casabella’s chief editor. For over 10 years, from the early 1980’s to 1995, Gregotti used Casabella as a forum to develop his ideas “as well as an attempt to reconcile the dilemmas and shortcomings of modern orthodoxy with a renewed vision of modernism.” In this course, focus will be placed primarily on the editorial essays Gregotti wrote month after month in a sometimes Machiavellian manner, and on a series of topics including: the conceptualization of the territory of architecture; the unpleasantly conspicuous courting of architecture protagonists; architectural history and its typological project; the discourse of the European city, its territory and urbanism; the ideologies and nihilism of planning; and the democratization of architecture.
Through guest writers promoted by Casabella (Carlo Aymonino, Bernardo Secchi, Massimo Cacciari, Pierre-Alain Croset, and Gulio Carlo Argan to name a few) we will also examine how the essay was seen as an architectural form par excellence opposed to an architecture parlante in its ultimate built form.
This seminar is tailored to students in architecture who wish to learn about Italy and the culture of Italian architecture, develop an interconnectivity of knowledge between various disciplines that are key to the production of architecture, and, above all, learn how to develop an argument in the form of an essay, through personal writings on chosen topics.
Thematic history of cities
What if cities could be approaches not chronologically but thematically through conceptual ideas that give cities another identity. This seminar proposed to investigate the urban fabric by investigating select topics such as:
Cities and urban design theory (Site, Wagner, Krier…) cities and social theories (Sennett, Hollein…); cities and seminal texts and essays (Cerda, Banham and Koolhaas…); cities as celluloid (Lang, Wenders, Boon Joon-Ho…); cities and disease (London, Paris, Covid…); cities and comic book/strips (Schuiten and Peeters…); cities as political virtue (Lorenzetti good and bad government…); cities and music (Bennett, Sinatra…); cities and literature (Zola, Benjamin, Dickens, Calvino, Auster….); cities through maps (Piranesi, 1911 Commissioner’s plan for NYC, Burnham for Chicago…); cities of underground (Alphand and Haussmann, WW2 shelters…); cities in photography Marville, Steeler…); cities through paintings (Canaletto, Vermeer, Robert…); cities and philosophy (Athens, Rome…); cities and planners ( Frank Llyod Wright, Haussmann, Bacon, Cerda…); cities and defense (fortification, dikes, marshes…); cities as stigmata landscapes (grand fir, earthquake, ghettos, death (concentration camps, cemeteries) atomic bomb, allied bombing, terrorist attacks…); cities within cities (Columbia, Rockefeller Center, Olympic Villages, Vatican…); cities and religions (Jerusalem, monasteries, Benares, Vatican…); cities and politics (New Delhi, Brasilia, Canberra, Berlin (Speer project)…); cities and iconography (city atlas, panorama, Carpaccio, Bosh…); cities and minorities (Cape Town, ghettos…) cities of displacement (refugee camps, slums, shanties, favelas squatters…); cities and zoning ordinances (Paris, NYC, Jaipur, Amsterdam…); cities and infrastructures (subways, sewers urban nodes…); cities and real estate developments (architect developer…); cities and civic dimension (Venice…); cities of trade (Hanseatic-Lubeck and Hamburg; Zaehringen-Fribourg, Bern, Murten, port-Amsterdam, Venice, Hong Kong, Singapore, silk road-Samarkand…); cities of division (Istanbul, Bud-Pest, Berlin, Belfast, Jerusalem…), cities as airports (Kansai, Changi, Schiphol…); cities and tourism (Grand Tour, Monte Carlo, Lausanne…); cities of sports (Olympics…); cities of spectacle (Las Vegas…); cities of nature (Central Park, Hyde Park, Parc Monceau),; cities of critics (Jacobs, Sorkin, Betsky, Goldberger, Giovannini); cities and new urbanism (Marimont, Seaside, Celebration, Sun City); cities of utopia (Shakers, Pullman, New Harmony) etc…
An un-curated and unorthodox understanding of theory
The ambition of this graduate course is to revisit emblematic architectural projects and theories of the modern movement and to contextualize our findings within today’s architectural practice. A central preoccupation that underscores this seminar is that the notion of modernity is “An Incomplete Project”, one which has proven since the 1920s to constitute the foundations of today’s cultural legacy and conceptual framework.
To give legitimacy to this argument, your faculty proposes to approach this course through two particular lenses. First, to promote a holistic and integrative understanding of historical and theoretical concepts of high modernism (i.e., Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn) and post-modernism (i.e., Michael Graves, Aldo Rossi, and Robert Venturi). Second, to learn how to engage and interconnect seemingly disparate threads of knowledge by developing and researching connections across three key periods spanning from the international style to post-modernism and de-constructivism.
The desirable and unforeseen connections of new knowledge “as both research and the transmission of acquired learning,” will include but not be limited to: key 20th century academic pedagogies; architectural movements; aesthetics experiences in judgment and taste; biennales, international competitions and world fairs; the importance of writing through essays and manifestoes; MoMA’s exhibitions and press releases; the popularization of the architect’s role in news magazines; the importance of Pritzker prize winners on an international stage; and, the role of urbanism and regionalism.
Finally, there is a wish to understand the dynamic tensions based often on conflicting social and cultural dimensions—a lineage between heir and rebel, continuity and disruptures—thus a pedagogical approach to offset the traditional chronological learning of history and theory. This will provide multiple and simultaneous learning opportunities based on the complexity and currency of the content of each week’s session.
Is Architecture art and is Art architecture: the history of the NY MoMA
This course explores the museum as a building type, and in particular the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) as it continues to play an important role in the development of the art establishment, and in the art of avant-garde building. The selection of the MOMA was based on three reasons: it will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2024; it is engaging in its 4thexpansion; and the architects who were invited to conceptualize the museum’s expansion, were of the new generation of architects. The MOMA is also important for its beginning: guided by its first director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., a three-room exhibition gallery was transformed into a world-famous museum signaling a triumph for modern art.
During this seminar Barr’s wide-ranging taste in painting will be sketched out, but more important the focus on the different phases of the architecture of the MOMA will be the center of discussion. The seminar will be topical and will be presented through class discussion based on weekly readings.
Focus will be on the historical evolution of the museum as building type, the analysis of the architecture of the MOMA from its first permanent building by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone, through the first addition by Philip Johnson to the second addition of Cesar Pelli’s high rise construction in the early 1980’s, to end with the fourth extension recently published and to be completed by 2004. As the MoMA in the 1990’s, prepared for their next expansion by Taniguchi and later Jean Nouvel, the Museum of Modern Art is truly at the intersection of Art and Architecture.