ARCH 572, Section 1

In 2020, the simultaneous crisis of white supremacy, environmental collapse, and the global pandemic prompted profound changes in how we understand what architecture is and what it does. These events brought to the foreground the role of architecture in the production of wealth, racism, patriarchy, land disposession, labor struggle, and environmental disaster. In this course we will examine how architecture operates to further these processes and how it might contribute to counter them. Witnessing the overwhelming reach of the pandemic, novelist Arundhati Roy argued that the tragedy was long-coming, the result of economic, social, and environmental crisis. Roy invited us to consider our own agency in shaping the aftermath of this event by concluding: “the pandemic is a portal”. This course invites students to take ownership of the discipline they are studying, and to collaborate in producing new definitions of “architecture”: definitions that propel us through this portal and on to better futures.