Description
Recent events have thrown a light on the shortcomings of architecture to engage with the external world and effectively work as a change agent. Long overdue, architecture has been subject to a reckoning, a challenge to examine its complicity with regimes of power that propagate inequality and injustice, along with a degree of indifference to crises that grow progressively urgent.
An unfortunate divide has emerged between those who believe in and defend the autonomy of the discipline and those who have lost all patience for the absence of more direct action to confront problems before they become desperate. This binary opposition stands in the way of both advancing a more radical, contemporary architecture and more creative ways of addressing real problems.
This semester’s seminar, The Urgency of Discourse will seek to collapse the opposition, to reorient the relationship of architecture as a thing unto itself and as a presence in the world. We will identify and examine a range of c