Description
This seminar on post-modern urban theories is centered on nine seminal books (published between 1960 and 2000) that each articulate a very specific position on the role of architecture within the contemporary city. The intention of the course is to understand and further develop the various postmodern theories that gave rise to our contemporary understanding of the relationship between architecture and the urban context. Each book can be seen as the author’s key work, typically written in the early years of their career and setting the course for their practice to follow. Therefore, each book stands as a thesis that aimed to produce new disciplinary knowledge in the aftermath of modernism. Positions covered include Marxist, Rationalist, Modernist, Semiologist, Formalist, Surrealist, Phenomenologist, Situationist, and Materialist.Our own take on this material will be philosophically grounded in speculative realism, a new ontological approach to architecture that Graham Harman has termed