ARCH 509, Section 9

Queer Aesthetic Categories: Mess, Excess, Nothingness
Winter 2022
Instructors: Adam Miller
Term: Winter 2022
Section: 9
Class Number: 509
Credits: 3
Required: No
Elective: Yes
Meets: Fri 1:00-4:00pm  3154 A&AB
Course Brief:

Can there be an aesthetics of refusal, of resignation, of obstruction, of optingout? For too long, the aesthetic goal of architecture has been the production and preservation of beauty, and that beauty has been predominately a straight, masculine, Western and white one. This aesthetic paradigm perpetuates real violence on bodies and buildings: preserving and promulgating if beautiful, leaving indifference, disdain, and destruction for the rest. As inevitable participants in this aesthetic paradigm, pursuing aesthetics of resistance and refusal are necessary for survival. This seminar will locate alternate aesthetic expressions which better suit our politics. Students will contribute original thinking through the investigation of aesthetic expressions outside the beautiful/ugly binary, with a particular interest in hybrid and nonbinary logics.  

Beyond positing a recuperation of the ugly, as Venturi, Scott Brown, & Izenour pursued, the seminar seeds the field in-between the major aesthetic categories of beautiful and ugly, refusing their attendant polarizing value systems of good/ bad. Via minor aesthetics like mess, excess, nothingness, and more, students will pursue new frameworks of value—wrenching an opening for queer aesthetics in the context of architecture its politics.