ARTH 400 Advanced Seminar in Art Historical Methods: Space, Experience, Architecture
- Thursdays, 15:00-17:30
- EV-3-760
- Instructor: Dr. Cynthia Hammond
What is space, and how do we create (within) it? What does space make of us? Most humans (and many animals) live the majority of their lives within a built environment. This means that architecture and urban planning are a fundamental part of embodiment, that is, daily, corporeal experience. This course seeks to consider the different kinds of relationships we can have with the buildings, urban landscapes, and cities we inhabit. Our goal will be to approach architecture and designed environments as agents that act upon us. At the same time, we will ask how we too can engage, transform, or subvert buildings, places, and their dominant narratives, whether these are design principles, social ideals, or philosophical stances.
There is a philosophy behind every suburb, and a master narrative underpinning every shopping mall. There are many ways of engaging with architecture, and urban space. That engagement may be profoundly determined by what our bodies can and cannot do, where our strengths and talents lie. But occupying space differently is a way of intervening in space. So is a parade, a protest, graffiti, sleeping on a park bench, dressing "inappropriately", or simply performing unusual actions within a given location.
In this course, every student will be asked to do three things. First, you will work with your fellow students to choose a specific architectural site to which all members in this class have easy access. Second, you will learn about this site’s design history, its controversies, and its uses, past or present. Third, you will develop a project by which you "intervene" in this site by curating some kind of gesture, transformation, action, set of objects, relations, etc.
The purpose of the intervention is to help us to discuss how experience in space is not just something imposed upon us from above, or from the past, but is also something that we can shape daily in our own lives, or in concert with the specificities of the built environment.