The
Architecture Initiative groups together courses from across Bard whose shared
scope brings questions of the ways in which we inhabit the world into contact
with the political, social and historical structures that animate them.
12586 |
ARTS 105
Islands: Intensive Architecture Studio
Workshop |
Sofia Pia Belenky |
M F 10:10 am-1:10 pm |
HDRANX 106 |
PA |
PART |
(2 credits)
This intensive workshop will run from January
27 to February 21
Islands
have become associated with political separation and symbols of our changing
environmental conditions as water levels rise and plastics form archipelagos.
Islands also enable critical selectivity rather than imposed connectivity, a
rarity in an age of constant status updates and notifications. In brief,
islands constrain—they offer a condition that is the fundamental ingredient for
this design brief. In the design of our islands we will prototype typologies of
micro living and investigate the environmental conditions of an artificial
nature. The design studio workshop invites discussions around topics of
post-work society, second nature, climate change, borders and domesticity in a
micro-living/micro-nation condition. The month-long course will move across a
variety of scales; from the design of an object to bring to the island, to a
single occupancy home, to the entire island. Developing skills such as CAD
drawing, Rhino 3d modeling, casting and GIS mapping will be programmed into
this workshop. Maximum costs associated with model making and printing should
be $100. No prior experience with architecture or drawing is required. Field
trips might be arranged on an informal basis in conversation with participants’
availability.
Class
size: 12
12507 |
ARTS 135
The
Architecture of an Urbanized Planet: Designing Body and World |
Ross Adams |
T 10:10 am-1:10 pm Th 10:30 am-12:30 pm |
HDRANX |
PA |
Cross-listed:
Environmental
& Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities This course introduces architecture through a studio-seminar
hybrid. We will approach architectural design not by focusing on the production
of a particular building, but by working transversally across a number of
conceptual scales from the body to the planet. This trans-scalar approach aims
to interrogate what it means to practice architecture as a historically,
theoretically and methodologically situated field indelibly conditioned by
urbanization measured at a planetary scale. Indeed, since at least the
twentieth century, architecture’s scope of practice has widened to include
landscapes, cities, regions, territories—even the entire planet itself—while
also narrowing its focus to include the design of micro environments for and
modulations of the human body. The course will allow us not only to understand
the techniques and ideas emerging from these various scalar practices, but to
cultivate new, critical design approaches to intervene in the spaces and
processes of planetary urbanization. Each ‘scale’ we investigate will be
accompanied by a corresponding design project. Among the techniques of
architectural representation students will learn in the process are basic 2D
and 3D CAD drawing, sketching, model making and other forms of representation.
Please note studio work involves weekly assignments and, when possible, one or
two social events. Computers with required software will be provided by the
College, yet costs for model making and printing are not. No prior experience with architecture or drawing are required.
Class
size: 12
12506 |
ARTS 220
Architectural
Entanglements with Labor |
Ivonne Santoyo
Orozco |
T Th 4:40 pm-6:00 pm |
OLIN 203 |
AA |
Cross-listed:
Environmental & Urban
Studies; Experimental
Humanities; Human Rights
Architecture
is both the product of labor and the organizer of its relations, yet often
these issues remain overshadowed by aesthetic considerations and the broader
discourse of design. In shifting the question of labor in architecture to the
foreground, this course invites students to reflect on the spatio-political
role architecture has played in mediating bodies, work and capital. To do this,
we will analyze contemporary transformations to paradigmatic sites of work
(offices, factories, tech campuses), as well as the many spaces that have been
produced to feed architectural production and its endless cycles of extraction
(camps, slums, mines), and the architecture that reproduces forms of
maintenance (houses, squares, resorts). We will analyze a diverse set of
contemporary and historical architectural precedents against a heterogenous landscape of voices from Maurizio Lazzarato,
Silvia Federici, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, David Harvey,
Peggy Deamer, Mabel O. Wilson, among others. The
course will unfold in a combination of lectures and seminars. There are no
exams but students are expected to complete weekly assignments and a final
project.
Class
size: 15
12311 |
ANTH 323
The Politics
of Infrastructure |
Sophia
Stamatopoulou-Robbins |
Th 1:30 pm-3:50 pm |
HEG 201 |
SA D+J |
SSCI DIFF |
Cross-listed:
Environmental
& Urban Studies; Human Rights; Science, Technology, Society
Infrastructure is said to
be invisible until the point at which it breaks down. Drawing on ethnographic
and historical readings from a number of disparate geographical locales (e.g.
India, Egypt, South Africa, France, Ghana, Hong Kong, Mexico, the United
States, Nigeria, Palestine, Greece, Albania and the Arabian Peninsula) we will
start by asking when, and with what consequences, infrastructures become
visible or invisible. The course will be organized thematically around
different types of infrastructure present in colonial and postcolonial
contexts. These will include roads, water distribution networks, landfills,
sewage pipelines, electricity, telecommunications, nuclear energy stations and
electrification. We will explore how infrastructures become central to popular
claims to rights, how they shape senses and sensibilities and how they shape
relationships between the body and the public (the “body politic”). We will
investigate how marginalized groups may reappropriate
dominant infrastructures, for example, such that the “messages” infrastructures
convey and the material effects they produce may be transformed. Climate change
scientists increasingly have the ear of governments and multinational
corporations. We will thus also consider how climate change “adaptation” and
emissions reductions strategies through new large-scale infrastructures are
producing new discourses around environmental security and new ways of
imagining the future of human existence. “Waste Cluster”: This class will
include engagement with joint classroom and field experiences around the theme
of waste with Prof. Ellen Driscoll's Studio Arts class, Prof. Elias Dueker’s EUS class, and Prof. Susan Rogers’ Written Arts
class (all classes meet at the same time). These collaborations are supported
by the Center for Civic Engagement. Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban
Studies; Science, Technology, Society. The class counts as an upper level
seminar for STS.
Class
size: 15
12266 |
ART 206
ED Sculpture
II:Earth/Air/Water |
Ellen Driscoll |
Th 10:10
am-1:10 pm |
FISHER FOUNDATIONS RM |
PA |
PART |
Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies
We will look at air, water, and earth as
sites, subjects, and material for making sited sculptural installations with
special focus on environmental waste. We will focus locally on such sites as
the Bard Campus, local wastewater systems, the Sawkill,
the Hudson River, and New York City. We will look at the diverse range of
artists working with the elements in contemporary art practice, and look
historically at Earth Works and Land Art. Working site-specifically, students
will create a series of sculptural projects that address the research platform
of the class in fresh and poetic ways. At intervals throughout the semester we
will overlap with Professor M. Eli Dueker's class
"Waste” and
Professor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins “The Politics
of Infrastructure” for collaborative exchange across the disciplines of Art,
Biology, and Anthropology.
Class
size: 14
12236 |
ARTH 120
Romanesque/Gothic
Art & Architecture |
Katherine Boivin |
M W 1:30 pm-2:50 pm |
OLIN 102 |
AA |
AART |
Cross-listed:
French
Studies; Medieval Studies
This
survey covers the art and architecture created in Western Europe from around
1000 C.E. to 1500 C.E. Emphasis is placed on an analysis of architecture
(religious and secular), sculpture, painting, stained glass, tapestry, and
metalwork within a wider cultural context. Among the topics studied are the
aftermath of the millennium, the medieval monastery, pilgrimage and the cult of
relics, the age of the great cathedrals (Chartres, Amiens, Reims, etc.), and
late medieval visual culture up to the Reformation. The course examines thematically the changing
visual articulation of ideas about death, salvation, social status, patronage,
and the artist. Open to all
students. (AHVC distribution: Ancient,
Europe)
Class
size: 22
12237 |
ARTH 246
Medieval
Art:Mediterranean World |
Katherine Boivin |
M W 10:10
am-11:30 am |
FISHER ANNEX |
AA |
AART |
Cross-listed:
Africana
Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Medieval Studies; Middle Eastern Studies
This
course explores connections around and across the Mediterranean from the 4th
through the 13th centuries. It considers
art and architecture within dynamic contexts of cultural conflict and exchange. Designed to introduce students to art traditionally
categorized as “Early Christian,” “Byzantine,” “Romanesque,” and “Islamic,” the
course also encourages students to question critically these designations. Looking at art created by Christian, Jewish,
Muslim, and “pagan” communities, it examines the role of the Mediterranean Sea
as a boundary and a crossroad in the development of urban centers around its
periphery. Topics include the
relationship between centers and margins, secular and religious spheres, and
majority and minority cultures. Particular
focus will be placed on areas of cultural exchange such as Spain, Tunisia,
Egypt, Sicily, Constantinople (Istanbul), and Jerusalem. Coursework includes regular quizzes, Moodle
posts, and two 5-7 page papers. (AHVC distribution: Ancient, Europe)
Class
size: 22
12394 |
ARTH 275
The Global
Baroque |
Susan Merriam |
T Th 10:10 am-11:30 am |
OLIN 102 |
AA |
European art of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, often referred to as “the Baroque,” is usually studied
in isolation from the extraordinary imperial and colonial enterprises
undertaken by Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal and England during this period.
In contrast, this course examines how the Baroque came to be considered a
global style, ultimately spreading throughout Europe and then to Africa, Asia,
and the Americas. We will examine how Baroque art and architecture took on
different meanings in geographic contexts as diverse as Mexico, Brazil, and
South Africa, as well as at the role played by exploration, missionary work,
colonization, and the slave trade in transmitting art and artistic ideas.
Assigned readings will range from primary sources (inventories and contracts,
for example) to texts by post-colonial theorists. We will also examine a wide variety
of works of art and architecture including Aztec feather pieces, colonial
plantations and houses of worship, Dutch still life paintings, and Italian and
Spanish churches. (AHVC distribution: 1400-1800)
Class
size: 22
12243 |
ARTH 281
Governing the
World: An Architectural History |
Olga Touloumi |
W F 11:50
am-1:10 pm |
OLIN 102 |
AA |
AART |
Cross-listed:
Environmental
& Urban Studies; Global & International Studies; Human Rights
This
course will utilize architecture both as an anchor and lens to study the
history of world organization from the beginning of settler colonialism during
the 16th and 17th centuries to post-World War II processes of decolonization
and the emergence of a neoliberal global financial order after the collapse of
the Communist bloc. Slave ships, plantation houses, embassies,
assembly halls, banks, detention camps, embassies, urban development, housing,
as well as maps, plans, and visual culture, will provide us with focal points
in an effort to historicize the emergence of a “global space” and decipher its
architectural constructions. Readings
will include historians and scholars such as Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Hannah
Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Ulrich Beck, Mark Mazower;
as well as architectural projects and texts by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Team X,
Hannes Meyer, Paul Otlet, Buckminster Fuller, Constantinos Doxiadis
among others. Course assignments include the production of a glossary, as well
as a midterm exam and a final paper. (Art History Requirement: Modern)
Class
size: 22
12513 |
ARTH 314
Calderwood
Seminar: Public Writing and the Built Environment |
Olga Touloumi |
Th 3:10 pm-5:30 pm |
FISHER ANNEX |
AA D+J |
Cross-listed:
Environmental
& Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities; Human Rights
This
course introduces students to issues concerning architecture, the built
environment, and spatial justice through forms of public writing. In
collaboration with the instructor, each student will focus on one area or issue
such as the prison- industrial complex (as found, for example, at Rikers Island), gentrification in Newburgh, housing
inequality in Chicago, the water crisis in Flint, management of nuclear waste
in the Hudson, shrinking cities in the Rust Belt, and oil pipeline
infrastructure on tribal lands. To mobilize interested publics and address
officials, students will use Twitter; design petitions; write blog entries;
interview stakeholders; write protest letters; and prepare for a public
hearing. The goal will be to inform the public, raise awareness, and reclaim
agency over the design and planning of our environments through writing.
Combining texts from the various assignments, students will produce a final thirty-minute
podcast that will live online. (Fulfills two program requirements: Modern /
Europe + US)
Class
size: 12
12342 |
EUS\SOC 319
EUS Practicum: Hudson Valley Cities/Environmental (In)Justice |
Peter Klein |
W 10:10 am-12:30 pm |
HEG 200 |
SA D+J |
SSCI DIFF |
Cross-listed:
American
Studies; Sociology
How do urban processes of
growth, decline, and revitalization affect different groups, particularly along
dimensions of race, class, and gender? This place-based research seminar course
looks closely at this question by examining the historical, political, and
social landscape of Hudson and Kingston. We will use these nearby cities as
cases to explore theories on urban transformation and the contemporary
challenges that face small urban centers. In particular, the course will use
the lens of environmental inequality, or the ways in which some people are more
likely to be exposed to environmental hazards than others, to examine the
effects of historical processes, as well as to investigate how residents and
government officials are addressing pressing problems. The course will look
specifically at issues of food justice, pollution, access to resources, and
environmental decision-making processes. We will visit these cities as a class,
and students will develop and carry out their own research project with an
organization in one or both places. (This course fulfills the practicum
requirement for moderated EUS students.) Admission by
permission of the instructor. This course will usually meet from
10:10-12:30 on Wednesdays, but students must be available from 9:00-12:30, in
order to allow for off-campus trips. This class may be taken either on its own
or in conjunction with Anthropology 255: Anthropology of Institutions.
Class
size: 15
12347 |
HIST 129
Urban
American History |
Jeannette Estruth |
M W 1:30 pm-2:50 pm |
OLIN 202 |
HA D+J |
HIST DIFF |
Cross-listed:
American
Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies
This class will explore the
history of the urban American experience. We will ask: what makes a city? How
have people built cities, inhabited them, and lived urban lives? What drives
urban development and growth? What is the role of cities within capitalism and
within government? Together we will begin to think of cities as sets of
relationships, as well as a distinct spatial form. To that end, this course
will use cities as a lens to research the following themes in United States
history: labor and markets, wealth and inequality, ethnic identity and race,
and gender and the environment since industrialization. With these frames of
analysis, we will examine what ideas activists, architects, planners, social
scientists, literary scholars, critical theorists, and sociologists have generated
about urban America. Our tools of
exploration will include lectures, discussions, scholarly books, primary
sources, articles, blogs, and films
Class
size: 22
12419 |
HR 368
Alternative
Alliances |
Pelin Tan |
Th 10:10 am-12:30 pm |
OLIN 305 |
SA D+J |
Alternative
collectively-initiated pedagogical platforms and assemblies are emancipative
forms of solidarity, care, resistance, and knowledge production. This seminar
will focus on several examples from the realm of art and design practices, with
a focus on the methods they employ in the project of decolonization. The
seminar is divided into two parts: (1) revisiting pedagogical initiatives with
an emphasis on the difference that geography (esp. rural and urban) makes; and
(2) extensive research in pedagogical methods and decolonization. We will ask: What are the urgencies of design
and architecture pedagogies in contested territories? How can pedagogies reveal and bring about
ways of unlearning and undoing? Can
alternative approaches in education and research reach beyond established
institutional structures and through transversal and collective approaches? Do
they make a difference in transforming knowledge, and how do they shape art and
design practices of the present? (Pelin Tan is the 2019-2020 Keith Haring Fellow
in Art and Activism.)
Class
size: 15
12063 |
LIT 204C
Comparative Literature III: The City,
the Novel, and the Making of Modern Identity |
Marina van Zuylen |
T Th 1:30 pm-2:50 pm |
OLIN 201 |
LA |
ELIT |
(This course has no prerequisites
and is open to students at all levels.) This course centers on key texts from
French, German, Russian, and British literature, from Goethe’s Sorrows of Young
Werther to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. We will consider
novelists who have diagnosed the effects of urban reality on their
protagonists, prompting their readers to link the transformation of traditional
power structures, the rise of social mobility, and the increasing centrality of
science, to new literary techniques and a breakdown in self presentation.
Belief and doubt, the real and the fantastic, omniscience and fragmentation,
are at play in most of our texts. Readings will be from Balzac, Baudelaire,
Brecht, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gogol, Hoffman, Woolf, and Zola.
Class
size: 22
12070 |
LIT 2140
Domesticity
and Power |
Donna Grover |
T Th 1:30 pm-2:50 pm |
OLIN 202 |
LA D+J |
ELIT DIFF |
Cross-listed:
Africana
Studies; American Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies
Many American women writers
of the 19th and 20th centuries used the domestic novel to make insightful
critiques of American society and politics. These women who wrote of the home
and of marriage and detailed the chatter of the drawing room were not merely
recording the trivial events of what was deemed to be their “place.” The course
begins with Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s handbook of
housekeeping, The American Woman’s Home (1869). We will also read the
novels and short stories of Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, Kate Chopin,
Nella Larsen, Jessie Fausett, Edith Wharton, Willa
Cather, and others.
Class
size: 18
12143 |
PHYS 120
Global Energy |
Paul
Cadden-Zimansky |
M W 10:10
am-11:30 am F 9:30 am-11:30
am |
HEG 201 HEG 107 |
LS |
SCI |
Cross-listed:
Environmental
& Urban Studies
A laboratory-based physics class designed to
introduce non-science majors to the different types of energy (mechanical,
thermal, electromagnetic, chemical, nuclear); the methods by which modern
societies produce, transmit, and convert between these types; how different
demand sectors (electricity, heating, transportation) shape our energy
production infrastructure; the promises of future energy technology and the
insurmountable physical constraints on them; and the environmental and economic
costs associated with different types of energy production. The bulk of the
course will be an examination of each of the major contemporary means of energy
production (fossil fuels, nuclear, hydropower) and the emerging alternative
means (wind, solar, biofuels). The
course will seek to emphasize some of the subtleties behind energy production
usually glossed over in popular discussion, and will rely heavily on developing
students' abilities to perform 'back-of-the-envelope' calculations to estimate
quantities of interest on a global scale.
Class
size: 16
12502 |
WRIT 331
Space
Is the Place:
Real and Imagined Landscapes in Literature and Cartography |
Benjamin Hale |
F 11:50 am-2:10 pm |
RKC 200 |
PA |
This course will focus on space
in literature, and literature’s relationship to space. We’ll start small, reading, thinking about,
and mapping stories that take place in enclosed spaces, like Kafka’s Metamorphosis,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Sartre’s Huis
Clos. Then we’ll move outdoors, into
cities, towns, and rural areas—Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Joyce’s very real Dublin,
Raymond Chandler’s semi-fantastical Los Angeles, the picturesque Italian resort
towns where Patricia Highsmith’s characters often committed and covered up
their murders—and investigate experiments in psychogeography
(Debord, Defoe, Thomas De Quincy, Will Self, Rebecca
Solnit, among possible others). Then at
last we’ll explore the stories and maps of writers who imagined and charted
entire countries and worlds (and often languages) for their readers: J.R.R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Ursula K. Le Guin’s
Earthsea novels, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (again, among possible
others). This is, most of all, a craft
class; we will be traversing a lot of space (good walking shoes advised),
drawing our own maps, and filling them in with our writing—fiction and
nonfiction. The coursework will be two
significant writing projects, which we will read and critique over the
semester, and two maps.
Class
size: 12