ARCH 509, Section 12

This seminar will focus upon ways through which architecture converts abstract cultural notions about the world into spatial orderings. We will examine different ways that maps become territories, and explore architecture’s role in negotiating contradictions between the concepts that we use to define the physical world and the way we experience it through our senses. Throughout the semester, we will study the narrative and symbolic aspects of spatial relations (as conveyed through maps, plans, diagrams, and other representations), and question the terms and techniques with which architectural space embodies different views, values, and cultural mythologies. We will pay close attention to the relationship between the representational logic according to which space relations are determined and their translation into physical form, and experiment with techniques for making things that adhere to different types of conceptual and visual logic simultaneously.