ARCH 509, Section 4

Architecture School, Unraveled
Fall 2021
Instructors: Perry Kulper
Term: Fall 2021
Section: 4
Class Number: 509
Credits: 3
Required: No
Elective: Yes
Meets: Tue 8:30-11:30am    Class instruction mode: Online
Course Brief:

‘Arch School, Unraveled’, will contextualize architectural education, exposing the basic logics for both projecting a teaching career in architecture education. It will also set out the terms of architecture education, itself. A rough outline includes developing practical skill sets for teaching in an architecture school: structuring syllabi, preparing lecture, seminar and studio briefs, developing feedback mechanisms and critically reflecting on various kinds of produced work. The seminar will help structure interests and research into literate formats commensurate with the expectations of search committees and future faculty positions at leading architecture programs in the world.

It will consider the context of spatial education in the context of the history of ideas; practical, discursive and rhetorical skills; curricular logics; institutional and pedagogical roles of different courses; the variables of a job search; the expectations of junior faculty and your short, medium and long-term developmental trajectories, etc. It will also look to architecture education, broadly, touching on: epistemological models, or, forms of knowledge construction; disciplinary questions and positions; lineages of key thinkers; ethics, moralities and values of a school; multiple ways to structure architecture/ design school; the roles/ relationships of the variables that comprise a school (studio, history, theory, other courses/ seminars, use of language, reviews, lectures/ symposia/ conferences, post-school options, etc.); pedagogical models, in the history of arch education; design methods (appropriation, analogic, automatism, content to form, etc.); representation techniques; what kinds of roles, positions and values does each school subscribe to; and role(s) of a school in the context of other schools. Work will include the preparation of studio, course, and seminar briefs, readings, and in situ conversations.