Architecture as Media: Spatial Subjects

Professor: Michael Cohen  

Course Number: ARCH 111 MC

CRN Number: 10544

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    10:10 AM - 1:10 PM Garcia-Renart House

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities

This studio-based course introduces students to architectural tools of communication while presenting architecture as a field that is expansive—a field that engages not only with technical knowledge, but also with the making of public imaginaries, personal environments, cultural spatial aesthetics, and even the contested ground of the political, economic and social. The course is simultaneously an introduction to the techniques of representation that define the discipline of architecture and an opportunity to explore and question how architecture mediates the world. Students will learn and practice techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, mapping, 3D modeling and compositional image-making. While the focus will be on an array of forms of architectural drawing, these techniques will be carefully positioned against a survey of paradigmatic moments and themes in the history of architecture that will help situate the practice today. Throughout the term, our design work will be supplemented by readings and periodic research work, and we will situate this against regular lectures that will introduce you to the broader culture of architecture. The course will provide a foundation of concepts and skills necessary to make architecture legible and to convey a spatial argument through design. No prerequisites.

Architecture as Media: Re-Tooling the Trade

Professor: Jesse McCormick

Course Number: ARCH 111

CRN Number: 10677

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      10:10 AM - 1:10 PM Garcia-Renart House

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental Studies; Experimental Humanities

In this introductory course, the ‘tools of the trade’ (plans, sections, digital drafting, perspectives, collages, physical and digital modeling and montage) will be entry points into deciphering the politics, practices and protocols that govern our built environment. Seeking to proactively challenge certain assumptions of the field—that architecture is a practice based on production (of buildings, of assets, of products, of space, of culture, of drawings of images, of ideas…)—the aim of the course will be to reposition architecture as a method of seeing and reading space; a production of legibility. Through a series of explorations, students will learn the tools, techniques and media of spatial-visual communication used in the field of architecture while attempting to make new claims about its production and productivity, opening up new roles for architects in evolving social paradigms. Students will be asked to interrogate both lived space, representations of it, and existing precedents, as well as to engage with texts that will inform an evolving and consistent discussion throughout. No prerequisites.

Modern Architecture in the Age of Colonialism

Professor: Olga Touloumi  

Course Number: ARTH 125

CRN Number: 10087

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

  Wed  Fri   10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

AA  Analysis of Art   

Crosslists: Architecture; Environmental & Urban Studies

This course examines the history of modern architecture, examining the debates, theories, and practices that informed its many facets from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. We will be discussing the production of the built environment within the context of colonialism, focusing on the infrastructures, institutions, and building types that emerged in response to industrialization, social revolutions, and epistemic shifts. The industrialization of production, new technologies, material, and institutions, as well as growing urban cultures and changing social structures called for architects and designers to partake in the process of modernization. The course will pay particular attention to the ways in which architects responded to and participated in formal and aesthetic developments, as well as epistemic and cultural shifts that marked modernity, such as the enlightenment, Darwinism, positivism, and the rise of psychology. Covering many aspects of architecture, from buildings, drawings, exhibitions, and schools, to historical and theoretical writings and manifestos, we will investigate the wide range of modernist practices, polemics and institutions. The aim of the course is to provide a solid historical framework of the debates and practices that made architecture modern, while engaging the students in a critical discussion of the role of architecture in the production of the built environment and the forces that shape it. The course includes field trips, readings, and short assignments. (1800-present).

Architecture as Translation: At Scale

Professor: Betsy Clifton  

Course Number: ARCH 211

CRN Number: 10546

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       1:30 PM - 4:30 PM Garcia-Renart House

  Wed     1:30 PM - 3:30 PM Garcia-Renart House

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities; Human Rights

Architectural models are a unique medium, a visual language that references the built world through scale and abstraction. As physical objects, they represent futures (proposals), histories (sites and contexts), and current conditions (material resources, shifting societal demands), often slipping between these temporalities. Learning how to make models is as important as learning to read what they tell us about the world.  In this elective design studio, students will make an architectural model  as a continuous practice, utilizing a spectrum of physical and digital fabrication methods such as woodworking, casting, digital modeling, and laser cutting. In making architectural models, we will question how societal models (such as domestic routines, building regulations, political cycles, and environmental systems) can be represented in physical form. We will ask how this form of architectural translation can complicate latent biases within the built environment, making visible otherwise invisible networks of power. No prerequisites.

Urbanization and Climate Change, A Counter-Narrative

Professor: Ross Adams  

Course Number: ARCH 213

CRN Number: 10554

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Achebe Flex Space

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value

Crosslists: Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

What is urbanization and how does it relate to climate change? The link between the two locates one of the most pressing issues the world faces. Yet despite the world-historic importance of both climate change and the unprecedented pace of urbanization seen around the planet today, we tend to narrate each as matters of the immediate present, processes without histories. As a result, climate-conscious urban development often looks like a technical project of reducing ecological impacts through a palette of isolated and often costly ‘solutions’ for the effects of the climate crisis that, more often than not, exacerbate class, racial and gendered inequalities, while doing little to slow climate change. Treating history as a source for hope in the face of despair, this course will argue that neither climate change nor urbanization is inevitable. Engaging scholarly literature, magazine articles, films and media, we will develop a counter-history that sees urbanization and climate change as historically co-constituted processes, whose roots can be traced not to the origin of humanity, but to the much more recent spaces and experiences of Europe’s colonial ventures and the subsequent rise of world capitalism.  This course will be lecture-seminar hybrid and will meet twice a week. Students will have weekly reading assignments and the course will culminate in a project of creative fictional writing.

Planetary Studio: Radical Ruralism

Professor: Stephanie Lee  

Course Number: ARCH 221

CRN Number: 10555

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      1:30 PM - 4:30 PM Achebe Flex Space

Thurs    1:30 PM - 3:30 PM Achebe Flex Space

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities

How can we approach architecture beyond form-based explorations, but as a mode to re-imagine current sociopolitical, institutional, and territorial entanglements? This design studio seminar explores architecture as a network of situated relationships between built and non-built environments. Focusing on the colonial construction of rural imaginaries, students will pull apart and realign existing agricultural food systems at various scales. We will question the destructive and extractive processes of industrial agriculture, globalization and late capitalism by suggesting a para-fictional alternative: a land practice of resistance, regeneration, and mutual care based on the network of radical farms in the Hudson Valley. For the final project, students will produce a series of speculative projection drawings that read as one collective canvas with multiple scales, perspectives, and realities. This class is part of the Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Initiative. Prerequisite: ARCH 111.

Architecture as Research: More-than-Human Architecture

Professor: Ivan Lopez Munuera  

Course Number: ARCH 311

CRN Number: 10559

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     3:30 PM - 5:50 PM Achebe Flex Space

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities

In the contemporary world, the concept of the human being has transcended traditional boundaries. In the face of the climate crisis, and with the challenges made by non-normative knowledge structures, our bodies are increasingly understood as intricate ecosystems, composed of bacteria, fungi, viruses, microplastics, prosthetics, chemical regimes, and myriad other components. However, prevailing historical and theoretical narratives in architecture have remained predominantly anthropocentric, placing autonomous and zipped-up human beings at the core of their discourse.   This course offers an exploration of the complex interplay between non-human and human designs within contemporary global contexts, delving into historical examples and new imaginations. Emphasis is placed on the incorporation of what is traditionally termed "nature" into design processes, as well as the roles that the evolution of animal, vegetal, and mineral have played in design. Additionally, we will investigate non-human forms of intelligence and healing, ceremonial and repair practices in architecture, challenging the notion that design must solely serve human needs. We will work collectively in the production of an exhibition on Non-Human Architecture, and a publication that will accompany this show.

Future Tense - The Architectural Exhibition

Professor: Betsy Clifton  

Course Number: ARCH 322

CRN Number: 10573

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      1:30 PM - 4:30 PM Garcia-Renart House

   Thurs    1:30 PM - 3:30 PM Garcia-Renart House

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Experimental Humanities

Architectural exhibitions are places that take stock of a field in constant movement; a site in which global shifts and debates intersect, bringing into view consequences and openings for a future under construction. In this course we will mine the medium of the architectural exhibition to ask: How can an archive be used to revise an established canon? How can the curation of an exhibition unsettle what has become commonplace? How do we situate present practice against an uncertain future? We will discuss the ways in which architecture is produced and reproduced within the space of an exhibition, as well as how the exhibition, as a contested space, can create openings for renewed understandings of culture and politics beyond architecture.    This course will culminate in a public exhibition featuring the architectural model as a central medium to re-present contemporary and historical ideas against one another. By critically surveying contemporary practice, students will employ a range of representational techniques to enunciate questions for possible shared futures that escape the gravity of dominant cultural imaginaries. Moderation is a prerequisite.

Race and Real Estate

Professor: Peter L'Official  

Course Number: LIT 328

CRN Number: 10387

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Architecture; Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human RIghts

This seminar explores how race and racism are constructed with spatial means, and how, in turn, space can be shaped by racism. Our tools to investigate these constructions will be literary (novels, essays, poetry), theoretical (urban and architectural theory & criticism), historical (art history, urban history), and cultural (film and music). Of these works, we will ask: how have contemporary works of literature, film, architecture, and visual art captured and critiqued the built environment, and offered alternative understandings of space and place, home and work, citizenship and property? How are our spaces and structures imagined and coded in terms of proximity to whiteness and Blackness, class, gender, and ability, and how have we learned to read and internalize such codes? We will consider particular built forms, from shotgun houses to skyscrapers, and from ethnic enclaves to cities writ large. Authors and artists may include: Colson Whitehead, bell hooks, Spike Lee, June Jordan, Mat Johnson, Paule Marshall, Chester Himes, Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison. This course is a Literature Program junior seminar and fulfills the American and Indigenous Studies junior seminar requirement. This course is also part of the "Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck" Initiative.

Open Practices Workshop: Ghosts of Future Pasts: Architectural Futures of the Hudson Valley

Professor: Paula Vilaplana de Miguel

Course Number: ARCH 330

CRN Number: 10574

Class cap: 12

Credits: 2

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   10:10 AM – 1:10 PM Garcia-Renart House

and Fri   2:00 PM – 5:00 PM Garcia-Renart House

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Experimental Humanities; Studio Art

This 1-month-long, 2-credit design workshop examines past, present, and future architectural remains of the Hudson Valley in search of new tomorrows. What architectural futures that may have faltered in the past do we keep reanimating and reimagining today? Drawing from theories of hauntology and critical spectrality, this studio scrutinizes the architectural landscapes of the Hudson Valley from a non-linear perspective. Haunting, viewed as a productive linkage between past/future, territories/actors, human/environment, memory/place, serves as a guiding principle. It allows us to connect architecture with subaltern postcolonial histories, myths, and ruins, creating a rich and layered understanding of these spaces.  In groups of 2-3, students will take on the role of architectural time-travelers, collapsing different temporalities onto a specific site. We will utilize various technologies and skills to produce analytical drawings, prototypes, and construct a final structure through digital fabrication, all while experimenting with visual storytelling and video-morphing techniques. The final presentation will encompass a collective multimedia installation showcasing the student’s explorations and interpretations.  Students must be moderated in Architecture to take this course. For further information about the course please contact Ross Adams radams@bard.edu

Senior Project Colloquium

Professor: Ross Adams  

Course Number: ARCH 405

CRN Number: 10578

Class cap: 15

Credits: 0

Schedule/Location:

    Tue   5:10 PM - 7:30 PM Garcia-Renart House

Distributional Area:

None   

The Senior Project Colloquium provides a collective space to discuss senior project-related work in progress. It is a required component for students majoring in Architecture and will take place on a bi-weekly basis. Sessions may include student presentations and critiques of work in progress, screenings, collective discussions on architectural precedents, events and contemporary discourse. This course is non-credit bearing.

The Spatial Politics of Human Rights

Course Number: ARTH 274

CRN Number: 10090

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Professor:

Olga Touloumi

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    5:10 PM - 6:30 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

AA  Analysis of Art   

Crosslists:

Architecture; Human Rights

Data Analytics for Contextualizing Place and Environmental Change

Course Number: ES/EUS 210

CRN Number: 10194

Class cap: 18

Credits: 4

Professor:

Jordan Ayala

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 107

Distributional Area:

MC  Mathematics and Computing   

Crosslists:

Architecture; Human Rights

Cinema and the City: NY and LA

Course Number: FILM 212

CRN Number: 10467

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Professor:

Joshua Glick

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Avery Film Center 217

Screening:

Mon       7:00 PM - 9:00 PM Avery Film Center 117

Distributional Area:

AA  Analysis of Art   

Crosslists:

Architecture

Re-Thinking Silicon Valley

Course Number: HIST 382

CRN Number: 10316

Class cap: 16

Credits: 4

Professor:

Jeannette Estruth

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Reem Kayden Center 200

Distributional Area:

HA  Historical Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists:

American & Indigenous Studies; Architecture; Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental Studies; Human Rights

Introduction to Physics I

Course Number: PHYS 141

CRN Number: 10058

Class cap: 16

Credits: 4

Professor:

Clara Sousa-Silva Beate Liepert

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs Fri   10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Hegeman 107

 Tue      1:20 PM - 3:20 PM Hegeman 107

Distributional Area:

LS  Laboratory Science   

Crosslists:

Architecture