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