Architectures Anticipations
The historicity of the future is
embedded in the built environment and enacted through different forms
of spatial practice. Understood as a complex array of material and
social relations, the architecture defining the conditions of
everyday life holds the promise of what is not yet but yet could
become. Undergirding this course is a question about what connections
may exist between the history and practice of architecture and what
new forms of spatial design, organisation, and experience may emerge
from the material conditions of the present. The concept of
anticipation is used throughout the course as an analytical lens to
examine a number of theoretical and practical issues related to the
production and representation of space. We take an expanded view of
architecture and the built environment. Throughout the course we
engage with canonical works of modern architecture and theory. We put
these historical and contemporary precedents into constructive
dialogue with interdisciplinary critiques of space. Several themes
orient our work, including urbanisms and the everyday, dwelling,
matter and materiality, land and landscape, building technology and
the virtual.
This course begins by asking two
questions: What does architecture anticipate? What are anticipatory
architectures? Lectures, readings, discussions and workshops will
prepare students to develop their own research and speculative
propositions related to these questions. In addition to the art
historical and architectural focus, students wanting to learn about
interdisciplinary research methods, speculative futurities, and
critical spatial practice may find this course to be of interest.
City in the Space circulation diagram by Ricardo Bofill, 1970.