| Description |
As instruments of conquest and containment, architecture and urban planning are essential tools for the discrete ordering of bodies in space, from the individual unit of the prison cell to territorial infrastructures of apartheid and ghettoization. But what is architecture’s relationship to violence? In this course, we will study historical examples and engage with contemporary debates to contemplate the following and other questions: How has architecture produced and reflected violence, in Revolutionary Virginia, colonial Congo, or besieged Sarajevo? In what ways does architecture represent and mediate violence, from the destruction and rubble of cities as evidence of urban warfare to triumphal monuments valorizing and legitimating conflict? Given the climate crisis and architecture’s participation in ecological degradation, is the very practice of building – from digging into, extracting from, and constructing atop the earth – an act of violence?
This course investigates violence theoretically, thematically, and typologically, moving across diverse geographic and cultural contexts from the eighteenth century to the present day. Following introduction to foundational theories of violence, we will analyze violence as both embedded in architectural building types (e.g., prisons, clinics, asylums, partitions, camps, plantations, slaughterhouses) and produced in differing political, gendered, racial, and environmental conditions. Conversely, we will also consider whether architecture can combat or protect from violence in the form of shelter, care, and safe haven to contribute to the construction of more just, pacifist, and other worlds.
Requirements are active participation (max. 2 absences), contribution to course discussions, an in-class presentation (20 minutes), and a seminar paper (20,000 characters). |
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