Design, Labor, Materials: Modern Histories and Theories of Construction
This course investigates historical construction practices as processes of broad cultural and social significance rather than as objects of narrow technical interest. Our aim will be to develop new understandings of how construction produces novel relations among design, materials, and labor. We will dissimulate any assumptions that modern construction is somehow “rational” or “universal,” and rather seek to understand how building techniques are perennially rooted in local traditions and cultures, as well as economic and material circumstances. Students will become familiar with modern intellectual frameworks and themes of construction history such as the tectonic imagination, ornament, and structural transparency, as well as more recent ideas such as material geography, mass customization, and digital architecture. We will analyze construction sites as politically-charged territories where laboring subjects are constituted through doctrines such as Taylorist rationalization and occupational safety, and caught up in global developments like the remittance economy. We will take a close look at contemporary frameworks such as BIM and sustainability to consider how these paradigms reflect the cultural and social factors of the present day.
The course follows a roughly chronological sequence. We begin in the late 18th century with the construction of disciplinary origins and we end with sessions investigating recent developments in contemporary construction including robotic fabrication, BIM technology, and building-scale 3D printing. Throughout, we will direct our attention to the means and methods of construction as a way to understand how architecture emerges from worldly circumstances—material and social. Students will gain familiarity with historical and current construction methods and materials, and will develop a critical toolkit for interrogating why and how architects choose to build. Our objective will be to produce new historical and theoretical approaches to construction that expand our understanding of how architecture is embedded in the world.