DESIGN FUTURES: NEW YORK CITY

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.

• F 1:10 p.m.-4:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Richard T Rouhe
  Info
• 3 points

DESIGN FUTURES: NEW YORK CITY

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.

• F 1:10 p.m.-4:25 p.m.
• 3 points

DESIGN FUTURES: NEW YORK CITY

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.

• F 1:10 p.m.-4:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Andrea Johnson
  Info
• 3 points

INTRO-ARCH DESIGN/VIS CULTURE

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.

• MW 1:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
• TR 9 a.m.-10:50 a.m.
• Instructor: Madeline K Schwartzman
  CULPA: 11 Info
• 3 points

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN: SYSTEMS AND MATERI

ARCH DESIGN: SYSTMS & MTR

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.

• MW 9 a.m.-11:50 a.m.
• Instructor: Michael E Schissel
  Info
• 4.5 points

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN: ENVIRONMENTS AND M

ARCH DESIGN: ENVRNMNTS &

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.

• MW 9 a.m.-11:50 a.m.
• TR 9 a.m.-11:50 a.m.
• 4.5 points

MOD ARCHITECTURE IN THE WORLD

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.

• TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Ignacio Gonzalez Galan
  Info
• 4 points

ADVANCED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN II

ADV ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

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.

• MW 9 a.m.-11:50 a.m.
• 4.5 points

SPECIAL TOPICS IN ARCHITECTURE

SP TPC: URBAN DATASCAPES

See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department website for the course description: 
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Leah M Meisterlin
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

SPECIAL TOPICS IN ARCHITECTURE

SP TPC: CITY ON CAMERA

See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department website for the course description: 
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Clara Kraft Isono
  Info
• 3 points

SENIOR SEMINAR

SR SEM: ARCH & ENV S ASIA

See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department's website for the course description: 
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Anooradha I Siddiqi
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

SENIOR SEMINAR

SR SEM:UTOPIA & COUNTER-UTOPIA

See the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department's website for the course description: 
https://architecture.barnard.edu/architecture-department-course-descriptions

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Ralph Ghoche
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 2 Info
• 4 points

INDEPENDENT STUDY

Prerequisites: Permission of program director in the semester prior to that of independent study.

• Instructor: Kadambari Baxi
  Info
• Instructor: Karen Fairbanks
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Ralph Ghoche
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 2 Info
• Instructor: Ignacio Gonzalez Galan
  Info
• Instructor: Anooradha I Siddiqi
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 2-4 points

Partitions, Borders, Camps

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

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Anooradha I Siddiqi
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

Colonial Cities in the French Empire

Colonial Cities in French

French colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries was marked by a relentless and often oppressive pursuit of overseas territories. Colonial cities, the focal points of the French empire, were erected in the nation’s image and characterized by wide boulevards, impressive parks and squares, and monumental buildings echoing the elegance of Paris. These urban centers, scattered across Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean, often served as administrative, economic, and cultural hubs for the colonial administration.   This seminar will explore the profound impact of colonial cities as laboratories for experimenting with new ideas in city planning, infrastructure, architecture, and civic governance. Once tried and tested in the colonies, these innovative “norms and forms” were often imported back to metropolitan France, where they helped shape various aspects of its society, culture, and economy.   The seminar is chronologically structured around six French colonial cities: Cap-Français, Cairo, Algiers, Casablanca, Dakar, and Hanoi. Each city is examined through the lens of a distinct set of colonial policies and practices. Cap-Français is studied from the perspective of the universalist values of the French Enlightenment and the double standard evident in the terror of the Atlantic slave trade. Cairo, while colonized for only a brief period, ignited new passions for the East and is viewed as a repository of exotic fantasies and a site for infrastructural modernization. Algiers is studied through the policy of assimilation and the destruction of Algerian religious identity. Casablanca is considered in relation to new planning practices and colonial policies of association. Hanoi is examined through cultural and architectural forms of hybridity. Finally, Dakar is viewed through colonial theories of acclimatization and hygiene policies. As we traverse the diverse landscapes of these colonial cities, this seminar invites participants to critically reflect on the enduring echoes of French colonialism, exploring how the urban experiments of the past reverberate in the present and influence our perceptions of global cities and their histories.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Ralph Ghoche
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 2 Info
• 4-8 points

The Just City: Global Debates in Urban P

THE JUST CITY

Urbanization is inherently unequal, inscribing social, economic, environmental, and political unevenness into the spatial fabric of the city. But the distribution of such inequality is not inevitable. Urbanization is a product of the collective decisions we make (or choose not to make) in response to the shared challenges we face in our cities. And, thus, the patterns of urbanization can be changed. This is the task of urban planning and the starting point for this advanced seminar, which asks how we can reshape our cities to be more just—to alleviate inequality rather than compound it. In embarking on this effort, we face numerous “wicked” problems without clear-cut solutions. The approaches one takes in addressing urban inequality are therefore fundamentally normative—they are shaped by one’s place in the world and one’s view of it. The central challenge in addressing inequality is thus establishing a basis for collective action amongst diverse actors with differing—and sometimes conflicting—values and views. In other words, planning the just city a matter of both empathy and debate. In this course, we will endeavor to develop informed positions that can help us engage with others as a basis for taking collective action.

The course is organized into four 3-week modules, each of which addresses a dimension of the just city: equity, democracy, diversity, and sustainability. In the first week of each module, we will discuss how the issue has been understood in history and theory (with an emphasis on tradeoffs between different priorities and values); in the second week, we will apply this discussion to a global case study prepared and presented by a team of students; and in the third week, we will hold an in-class debate to determine what should be done. Specific case studies vary each year.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Nick R Smith
  h-index: None Info
• 4 points

DISABILITY AND ARCHITECTURE

This course explores the manifold relationships between architecture and disability. We will discuss how architecture mediates different bodily experiences and relationships and negotiates social norms and forms of assembly that intervene in shaping shifting understandings and performances of impairment, assistance, access, rehabilitation, and oppression that have historically framed disability.  We will explore disability as a culture, an episteme, and a politics, often negotiated by architecture.

 

We will assess the disabling effects of the built environment as well as architectural projects and designs defined to normalize, segregate, or eradicate disability. We will also study environments, artifacts, and infrastructures that have allowed disabled individuals and communities to thrive, often against expectations of integration in normative life frameworks. We will additionally explore how disability contributes to framing architecture differently and opens up space for new aesthetic experiences, different cultures of making, and diverse politics of the built environment. We will discuss how it challenges normalizing understandings of space and form, functionalist paradigms in architecture, and modern and contemporary interpretations of nature, the city, and society.  We will discuss the ideologies enacted by different projects shaping the life of disabled individuals, including their own designs and interventions in the built environment.

 

These explorations are organized thematically, with sessions engaging design and disability scholarship and providing students with a robust introduction to disability studies. In dialogue with this field, students will explore how design and architecture have operated in relation to medical, social, environmental, cultural, and political paradigms of disability. They will discuss the role that built environments play in the agendas of the disability rights and disability justice movements. Sessions engage both historical and theoretical questions.

 

Three assignments will allow students to explore the intersections of the built environment and disability in a diversity of formats. Advanced students will have the opportunity to write a research paper.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Ignacio Gonzalez Galan
  Info
• 4 points