Paper instructions:

Assignments

Task 1: Write a CRITICAL REFLECTIONS JOURNAL that responds to materials from 7 of the 9 lectures in the course. There should be one 350 word entry (+/- 10%) for each of these 7 lectures.

You can use a variety of strategies when writing your reflections.

One strategy is to:
1. Reflect on the materials from a particular topic – the lecture, the readings, the project, the tutorial, discussions outside of class
2. Make a note of anything that stood out for you.
3. Ask what surprised you, annoyed you, challenged your assumptions, shifted your thinking, confirmed something you’d wondered about.
4. Choose one you’d like to focus on then critically analyse your response.
5. Ask what prompted it? Does it stand up to further scrutiny? Are there any interesting implications? What values underpin your reaction? How would someone with a different perspective feel
about this? And so on.
6. Select the points you think are most important and shape a
reflection from this process.
A second strategy could be to do a critical analysis of a particular text.  • What were the key arguments and how well were the arguments made? What was left out? What was assumed? And so on.  A third strategy could be to do a critical analysis of a particular project. • What claims is the architect making about her or his project? Are they convincing? Have they justified them well? Have they taken different users into account? What have they failed to pay attention to or take into account?  • Analyse the projects described in the course or use your own examples, from your own work or others that you find interesting/inspiring. Argue why a certain project helps to illuminate one of the lecture topics.
Other strategies are possible. The main aim is to produce entries that are engaging with the course material in a reflective and critically aware manner.

Task 2: Submit a 2,000 WORD ESSAY.
The essay builds on the skills developed in the creation of the journal and provides an opportunity to explore a particular issue in greater depth. A list of essay topics can be found below. Further materials that will assist in the writing of the essay will be provided on LEARN.

The output for this will address Learning Outcomes 1, 2 and 3.

1
Knowledge of contemporary design theories and the ways in which they can inform specific approaches to, and practices of architectural design1
2
Ability to demonstrate and analyse through careful argument how architectural production fits within wider philosophical, historical, social, political and economic discourses2
3
Ability to research issues in architectural theory, to critically reflect upon them, and to organise and present those reflections in the format of scholarly writing

Lecture 2: Interpretation
Last week we looked at why it might be important to engage with theory, in this lecture we will look at how the process of making sense of theory, or making sense of things with theory takes place. Preconceptions of designing, reading, writing and learning do not always take into the account the particular kind of time required to do each of these well. Rather than a linear trajectory from inspiration to finished design, reading to understanding, or understanding to written form, we will explore arguments from phenomenology and hermeneutics that suggest what is actually required is a non-linear interweaving of future and the past. We will look at Snodgrass and Coyne’s account of design in these terms and also reflect on the temporalities of our own methods of writing, reading and designing.

Essential Reading
–    Snodgrass, A. and R. Coyne (1996). “Is Designing Hermeneutical?” Architectural Theory Review 2(1): 65-97.
–    Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, SUNY Press. §32 139-144
–    http://www.muf.co.uk/portfolio/dale

Lecture 3: Origin
Seeking to understand something, we often ask the question, where did it come from? An approach to understanding architecture can usefully follow this tried method. More specifically, architectural thinking has dwelt recurrently upon the question of evolution, for building clearly represents a crucial moment in that process. The notion of civilisation itself can be couched in terms of the nature and function of architecture. How do we stand with regard to the elements of nature? How did we come into social relations? Why do we build? These are related questions. Thinkers have speculated on evolution from Homer to Darwin and have pondered the question of architecture in terms of these speculations from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier.

Essential Reading
–    Rykwert, J. (1972). On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, New York, Museum of Modern Art pp.13-28.
–    Quotes from Lecture Notes
–    http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/chamber.aspx

Lecture 4: ‘Poetics of Matter: Thinking Thick’
Material and materiality have come to carry multivalent meanings that are charged with philosophical; social; cultural; political; institutional; technological and technical; aesthetic; ecological implications, as both notions become associated with concepts such as substance; content; form; expression; perception. In this lecture, we will establish a framework for a deeper understanding of material-materiality that revisits the philosophical development of matter within the Western tradition, through an analysis and critique of hylomorphism. In architectural terms, the hylomorphic model is most evident in the low priority materials receive when compared to other design matters, such as structure, form or space. In this context, materials are primarily discussed either as superficial finishes and state of science technology or as value products of a commercial development, both of which tend to induce fetishized and superfluous understandings of material. Such false attentiveness to the form-making considerations of material does not only elicit the primacy of form over matter, but also insists on promoting the limited role material acquires as a bare representation. The lecture presents material materiality as an ongoing historicity that is thick, and in doing so it advances a critical thinking of matter that also allows for more nuanced approaches to architectural design.

Essential Reading
–    de Landa, M. (2004). Material Complexity. In Leach, N., Turnbull, D. and Williams, C. (eds).
–    Digital Tectonics. London: Wiley. 14-21. Benjamin, A. (2006). Surface Effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos. The Journal of Architecture. Vol. 1. No. 1. 1-35.
–    http://www.archdaily.com/83697/ad-classics-indian-institute-of-management-louis-kahn

Lecture 5: The everyday character of technology
The lecture examines critical thinking about technology, with particular focus on the influential views of Martin Heidegger. The lecture explores definitions of material, the substance of building, and provides an interpretation of Heidegger’s techné and poesis and Heidegger’s reconstruction of Aristotle’s four causes.

Essential Reading
–    Hubert L. Dreyfus, Charles Spinosa (2003) Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology, and the Everyday.
–    Junichiro Tanizaki (1977) In praise of shadows. Pp.17-20
–    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therme_Vals

Lecture 6: RE-POSITIONS: Bodies
In this lecture we will survey theories on the relationship between the body and architecture, starting with mythic concepts of space that implicate the body through ritual, movement, participation in the cycles and seasons, and geometry. We also examine NeoPlatonic concepts of ecstasis, and look at anthropomorphism – the belief that the measure of man reflected divine measure – depicted most famously in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of Vitruvian man, a body inscribed simultaneously within a circle and a square. We consider empiricist approaches to the body and measurement, including Le Corbusier’s Modulor. We then look at the phenomenology of the body and the embodied nature of human experience. We conclude by considering the cyborg, the Surreal, hybrid entity that some think we are all becoming.

Essential Reading
–    Le Corbusier (1968). The Modulor and Modulor 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). Preamble & Chronological Review pp 13-21, 23-68.
–    Jonathan A. Ha. Merleau-Ponty for Architects Chapter Two: Embodied Space.
–    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27habitation

Lecture 7: RE-POSITIONS: Governance
“Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burdens lightened – Economy seated… all by a simple idea in Architecture!”

Continuing a focus on space, this week’s lecture considers the question, “where is power?”.  It does so by studying a productive exchange between building design, philosophy and architectural theory, centred on Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’.  Bentham’s 1787 design for an improved penitentiary suggested a way in which building design could be employed as a passive governmental device, a means to reform its occupants.  However, for philosopher Michel Foucault, it also provided a ‘diagram’ through which to reconceive the spatiality of power, and more recently, for architectural theorists such as Sven-Olov Wallenstein, it has offered a way to engage with the subjective and subjectifying character of Modern Architecture more generally. This lecture, then, will invite students to consider power not as something located within particular people or institutions, but as a phenomena created by differentials distributed across our social space, and to consider architectural design as a practice which involves the design and construction of such differentials.

Essential Reading
–    Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” In Discipline and Punish, 1978-1979: Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979. Translated by Mr Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. pp. 195-230
–    Wallenstein, Sven-Olov. “The Hospital as Laboratory” and “Docile and Resistant Bodies” in Bio-Politics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture. 1st ed. Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. pp. 30-42
–    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Lecture 8: RE-POSITIONS: Building Gender
This lecture will look at how assumptions, about gender, both explicit and implicit, influence architectural design and the built environment more broadly. We will discuss how the seemingly selfevident contrasts between work/home, labour/rest and public/private have been challenged and complicated within feminist analyses of women’s experiences of the family home. This will be set within broader accounts of the political and personal role of ‘home’ developed by a range of feminist theorists. Throughout we will question the idea of a ‘generic’ body or user that inhabits built space and explore various attempts to become more attuned to the ways different bodies are assumed to fit, forced to fit, or simply not considered within architectural design.

Essential Reading
–    Young, I. M. (2005). ‘House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme.’ In On Female Body Experience: “Throwing like a girl” and other essays. I. M. Young. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 123-154..
–    Hayden, D. (1980). ‘What would a non-sexist city be like? Speculations on housing, urban design and human work.’
–    http://nstreetcohousing.org/
Lecture 9: Locating Nature
As discussed in our previous lecture on gender, Western systems of thought have historically been constructed around series of dualisms: theory/practice, public/private, male/female, civilisation/nature, human/animal, urban/rural. This way of thinking has come under heavy criticism from all number of sources and has led to an interest in challenging, transgressing and transforming these divides. In this lecture we will look specifically at the human/nature and human/animal dualisms, with examples of how they have been troubled within architecture and urban design. We will also look closely at philosopher Val Plumwood’s account of the features of dualistic thinking in order to have a firmer grounding in the consequences of this mode of thought, allowing an assessment of the success of attempts to challenge it.

Essential Reading
–    Wolch, J. R., K. West, et al. (1995). “Transspecies urban theory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13(6): 735-760.
–    Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York, Routledge. pp41-55
–    http://big.dk/#projects-zoo

Lecture 10: Participation
Collaborative consumption, peer-to-peer, crowd-funding, the Big Society, have all been heralded as challenges to top-down modes of producing, consuming and governing. With participation ‘in the air’, we will use our last session to reflect on the role of participation in architectural practice. We will explore the roots of modern participative praxis in the work of Paolo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher and look at the radical potential originally promised by participatory approaches. However, we will also engage with contemporary critiques, such as Jeremy Till’s, that participation has become an instrumentalist box-ticking tool, or even a new form of tyranny, and so has lost its liberatory potential.

Essential Reading
–    Till, J. (2012). ‘The Negotiation of Hope.’ in P. B. Jones, D. Petrescu and J. Till  eds. Architecture and Participation. London and New York, Routledge: 25-44.
–    Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Chapter Two (pp45-59 in Penguin edition)
–    http://www.lancastercohousing.org.uk/