T 1:00-3:30pm, 230 Anderson Hall
Small, focused, advanced-level course in discussion, workshop and/or design-based format on topics related to current research in architecture.
Omnipolitan Architecture is architecture conceived in an atmosphere of planetary urbanization. This course seeks to comprehend and evaluate the heterogeneous field of twenty-first-century architectural production as manifold engagements with the distributed material, political economic, and media ecologies of our global polis. The course is at once an effort to survey recent architecture and a critical attempt to calibrate the contemporary architectural imagination with our extant situation. This is primarily a course in architectural criticism. We will make judgments about contemporary architectural practices. Secondarily, this is a course in architectural theory. We will make critical judgments on the basis of a theoretical orientation: the asserted existence of the Omnipolis and its disciplinary and extra-disciplinary consequences. And, tertiarily, this is a course in architectural history, which pivots on the conceptual and material practices of recent architectural production as ineluctable points of leverage. Figuring our city planet, we will sketch our immediate past and draft our immediate future. Open to architecture students only, seniors and above.