2007–2008 Design Studies Courses
Courses in Related Disciplines
Disturbed Terrain: Environmental Design in the Twenty-First Century
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
This course investigates emerging technologies, philosophies, and practices of environmental design and management in the early twenty-first century, from the level of regional landscapes to the level of cells. What are the values, visions, and assumptions that animate contemporary developments in environmental design? What forms of technological know-how and knowledge production practices enable these developments? What ethical, aesthetic, and political implications might these shifts in the making of environments and organisms entail? The course begins with an introduction to debates on the nature of nature in conservation debates during the late 1990’s. We then turn to examine contemporary developments in environmental design in several domains including landscape architecture; cyborg technology; simulation, mediation, and virtual environments; and agriculture and biotechnology/ biowarfare. We examine the work of bioartists and engineers, landscape architects, genetic engineers working for private industry and the government, as well as the work of environmental collaboratories including the Critical Art Ensemble, Rhizome, and the New Media Caucus. Developments in contemporary environmental design, including fashion (dresses that self-illuminate in the presence of contaminants), environmental monitoring technologies, at scales ranging from the width of blood vessels to entire planets, form part of this itinerary. Attitudes toward pollution are undergoing sea changes as landscape designers remediate toxic sites using natural processes and time-scales. On a micro level, molecular biologists and nanoengineers are creating emergent forms of tissues and organisms. On the battlefield, the nature of war is rapidly changing. Monarch butterflies, funded by the Department of Defense, are being redesigned as cyber creatures, capable of flying to “hot zones” and conveying information to human screeners a half-world away from the actual battle scene. Organisms and organismic processes are being enlisted and drafted into military service. What does it mean to be human in this disturbed terrain? What might it mean to be a citizen in this changing state of nature?
Introduction to Mechanics (General Physics Without Calculus)
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
This course covers introductory classical mechanics, including dynamics, kinematics, momentum, energy, and gravity. Students considering careers in architecture or the health sciences, as well as those interested in physics for physics’ sake, should take this course or Classical Mechanics. Emphasis will be placed on scientific skills including problem solving, development of physical intuition, computational skills, scientific communication, use of technology, and development and execution of experiments. Seminars will incorporate discussion, exploratory, and problem-solving activities. In addition, the class will meet weekly to conduct laboratory work. Calculus is not required. This course or equivalent is required to take Introduction to Electromagnetism, Light, and Modern Physics (General Physics Without Calculus) in the spring. An optional course-within-a-course preparing students for the MCAT will be available for premed students and will count as part of their conference work.
Sculpture as Interdisciplinary Practice
Level: Open
Semester: Year
This course is an investigation of technical as well as conceptual and critical skills explored in the expanded field of contemporary sculpture. This course introduces the issues of space, site, interaction, process, and performance as well as the integration of larger social, political, and aesthetic concerns. We will use traditional materials and expanded media such as audio, video, and performance as a means for students to develop a language and context for creative ideas. Students will develop their work through assignments, experimentation, writing, research, and critiques. Collaborations with other areas of the arts, humanities, and sciences are encouraged. This is a studio-oriented course, but we will also investigate themes via readings, artist lectures, slides, videos, and field trips. The goal of this course is to expand notions of what sculpture is, work hard, take chances, and have fun in the process. Please bring examples of previous work to the interview.
The Art and Architecture of the Italian Renaissance
Level: Open
Semester: Year
An in-depth survey of the major monuments of Italian art and architecture from 1300 to 1550. Equal emphasis will be given to the canon of art works by artists such as Giotto, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo; to readings of major critics and historians of Italian art; and to the broader intellectual trends and social realities and movements that provide a context for our understanding the artist’s and, to a lesser extent, the critics’ creations. Thus, unified Italian churches will be juxtaposed with gender-segregated social practice, theories of genius with concepts of handicraft, pagan ideals with Christian rituals. The first semester will focus on a close reading of texts surrounding the first polemical pamphlets about art in early modern history, Alberti’s On Painting and On Architecture, and will include works by Erwin Panofsky, Michael Baxandall, and Anthony Grafton. The second semester will engage the intellectual and aesthetic debates surrounding Michelangelo as genius, model, courtier, and outcast. Class papers will deal with developing a vocabulary for compositional analysis, critical issues in Italian intellectual and social history, and varied interpretive strategies, applied to works of visual art and culture. Conference projects can engage from a variety of critical and historical viewpoints, European art and architecture from 1300 to 1800, and relevant historical and literary issues from 1400 to 1700.
Things, Situations, and ”Other“ Things
Level: Intermediate,Advanced
Semester: Year
This course will explore ideas surrounding a range of contemporary cultural practices that include architecture and design, installation, object making, performance, relational practices, and digital media. With a basic understanding of materials, technique, and process, students will be encouraged to develop work emerging from their own sensibilities and to understand the context from which their ideas emerge. Materials such as cardboard, wood, metal, latex, plaster, and digital media will be available including technical support in the use of those media. Along with studio practice, there will be assigned readings and discussion. Common concerns that are expressed in sculpture, architecture, painting, photography, video, digital/new media will be discussed, including the impact of social, political, and technological contexts on contemporary studio practice. Experimentation with a diversity of approaches and media will be encouraged. Experience in the visual, performative, industrial, and/or digital arts is helpful. For the interview, students are encouraged to bring images of work done in any of the previously mentioned practices.
World Architecture and Urban Design: 1945-Present: Postwar, Postmodern, Post-Theory
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
The theory and practice, semantics and structure of architecture and the development of cities from 1945 to the present will be studied through close reading of primary and secondary texts, slide lectures, and discussions. Initial weeks will be spent developing familiarity with the assumptions and architects of High Modernism—Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto—and the organicists—Antoni Gaudí, Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn. In the next weeks, we will cover the developing issues of monumentalities, spatialities, pop-technism, pomo-ornament, deconstructive constructionists, and sustainable symbolists. Architects studied and situated will include Louis Kahn (U.S.), Arata Isozaki (Japan), Luis Barragan (Mexico), Zaha Hadid (U.K. and Iraq), Coop Himmelblau (Austria), and others. Emphasis will be equally on individual achievements and the problematic circumstances of cultural production and modern capital. Cities to be used as case studies will be Berlin and the Cold Warriors, Toyko and the Metabolists, Los Angeles and the Critical Regionalists, Brasilia and the International Nationalists, New York and the Post-9/11 Memorialists. Group conference in the first semester will include works by Michel Foucault, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham. The second semester will focus either on readings in contemporary urbanism, analyses of student’s hometowns as urban planning, and develop- ment projects or design workshops dealing with campus or park design.