How does design operate in our lives? What is our design culture? In this course, we explore the many scales of design in contemporary culture -- from graphic design to architecture to urban design to global, interactive, and digital design. The format of this course moves between lectures, discussions, collaborative design work and field trips in order to engage in the topic through texts and experiences.
Introductory design studio to introduce students to architectural design through readings and studio design projects. Intended to develop analytic skills to critique existing media and spaces. Process of analysis used as a generative tool for the students own design work. Must apply for placement in course. Priority to upperclass students. Class capped at 16.
This architectural design studio explores material assemblies, techniques of fabrication, and systems of organization. These explorations will be understood as catalysts for architectural analysis and design experimentation.
Both designed objects and the very act of making are always embedded within a culture, as they reflect changing material preferences, diverse approaches to durability and obsolescence, varied understandings of comfort, different concerns with economy and ecology. They depend on multiple resources and mobilize varied technological innovations. Consequently, we will consider that making always involves making a society, for it constitutes a response to its values and a position regarding its technical and material resources. Within this understanding, this studio will consider different cultures of making through a number of exercises rehearse design operations at different scales—from objects to infrastructures.
This architectural design studio course explores modes of visualization, technologies of mediation and environmental transformations. These explorations will be used as catalysts for architectural analysis and design experimentation.
Introducing design methodologies that allow us to see and to shape environmental interactions in new ways, the studio will focus on how architecture may operate as a mediator
– an intermediary that negotiates, alters or redirects multiple forces in our world: physical, cultural, social, technological, political etc. The semester will progress through three projects that examine unique atmospheric, spatial and urban conditions with the aid of multimedia visual techniques; and that employ design to develop creative interventions at the scales of an interface, space and city.
Prerequisites: Designed for but not limited to sophomores; enrollment beyond 60 at the discretion of the instructor.
Modern Architecture in the World is an introduction to different arenas in which architecture’s modern condition has been disputed in the last two centuries across different geographies. The course will address significant transformations in the built environment as well as the forms of practice, epistemic frameworks, and ideologies that led them. It will also attend to the forms of labor and economies that engendered new structures and organizations of space, the material resources and industries mobilized in their construction, the identities and forms of power they represented and imposed, the manifold embodiments that they hosted and shaped, the diverse socialites and politics they supported, and the ecologies they negotiated.
The course is organized around a number of key themes, with each class covering episodes spanning the whole period under consideration, up until the present. In this way, it will question the existence of a single line of development, a master narrative, or a teleological line of progress and will highlight instead the multiple, simultaneous, conflicting, and branching genealogies unfolding throughout the period. Students will gain knowledge of key buildings, artifacts, trends, and schools as they relate to those genealogies.
Each lecture will emphasize contending and shifting positions across geographies within the arenas explored, understanding hegemonic trends as well as dissenting positions. While different locations around the world will be highlighted in each class, the course positions modern architecture in the world by privileging an exploration of the cultural and material networks and hierarchies characteristic of the period—with attention to colonialism, coloniality, migration, resource extraction, and war, among others.
Prerequisite: ARCH UN3201. Advanced Architectural Design II culminates the required studio sequence in the major. Students are encouraged to consider it as a synthetic studio where they advance concepts, research methodologies and representational skills learned in all previous studios towards a semester-long design project. Field trips, lectures, and discussions are organized in relation to studio exercises.
See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department website for the course description:
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions
See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department website for the course description:
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions
See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department's website for the course description:
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions
See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department's website for the course description:
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions
Prerequisites: Permission of program director in the semester prior to that of independent study.
This seminar turns a lens on partitions, borders, and camps. Whereas these iconic forms have been studied most often through legal, policy, or social science lenses, we will consider them conceptually, aesthetically, and historically as complex practices of architectural formmaking in the long twentieth century. The partition, the border, and the camp can each be understood as a legal and territorial concept, a symbolic and aesthetic marker of violent land demarcation, a material environment, and an intersection of spatial practices. Through careful readings and discussion, we will look closely at each as an illumination of irreducible entanglements between politics and aesthetics, and sensible expressions of colonial practices that persist in the built environment.
In this course, students examine histories of partitions from Ireland to Somalia to Pakistan, and their reification as borders. Understanding partition as a
concept
and a
process
rather than a determinate end, the course examines histories of built environments that create the illusion of determinacy by reinforcing territorial markers: whether through large intentional projects, for example, the construction of a new state capital at Chandigarh in India, or unstated means, for example, the responsive humanitarian or detention architectures of camps at borders in Palestine and East Africa. The course will examine the robust discourse on the materialities of borders, thinking beyond the construction of walls to sometimes obscured forms of spatial anchoring across divides, for example, mediatic traversals, animal crossings, or the work of crowds. The course examines histories of camps, from the concentration technologies used during the Spanish American War in Cuba and the Boer War in South Africa in the nineteenth century to twenty-first century ephemeral environments enabling people to crystallize forms of dissidence, whether at Wall street in New York or Shaheen Bagh in Delhi. We analyze processes by which the refugee camp enclosure racializes, genders, sexualizes, and controls bodies, precipitating a self-partitioning by asylum seekers in the performance of vulnerability. Although the constructed environments of camps serve as repositories of power, regardless of their purpose (and regardless of their orientation toward control or care—for example, whether made to confine migrants or to shelter refugees), they are iconic for their impermanence, and it is precisely their partial persistence that establishes them as ep