Seminar: Special Topics

COURSE NUMBER

ARCH 597

CREDITS

3–6

Description

These courses provide you with opportunities to study special topics in architecture individually or in small group settings.

Winter 2021/22

Term 1

ARCH 597F

Tijana Vujosevic

“Everything is architecture,” Hans Hollein declared in Bau in 1968. Or, as Cedric Price said, “Architecture is everything architects make.” The reality might be somewhat more contingent, and certainly more contested, than either quip suggests. There are many interpretations of architecture, and its meaning changes historically and geographically.

This course introduces students to different interpretations of architecture a across space and time – in Western and non-Western cultures, today and centuries ago. A variety of precedents grouped around themes and different foci of design. Students will write, debate, and communicate, critically read drawings, diagrams, renderings and other media, and analyze how precedent projects in architecture negotiate complex economic and political contexts.

We will look at projects through a variety of lenses and scales: morphologically, culturally, aesthetically, technologically, environmentally. The kind of topics we will cover are the bodily envelope, pictorial dimensions of architecture, architecture as a choreographic device, monumentality, infrastructure, architecture and global conquest/exchange, relationship to land... Ultimately, the course will explore what constitutes the obsessions, limits, and the possibilities of architecture, within the context of the MArch curriculum and Vancouver. 

Open to the following student group: MArch year one and MArch AP 1; other graduate students may take this class as an elective