Architecture_Thinking MSc3 Theory

Program Coordinator: Deborah Hauptmann

General Program description
Arguably, in the past decade a shift has taken place within disciplines which rely on such designations  as theory and practice.  The Architecture_Thinking  courses will investigate these changes, first with respect to what has commonly been referred to as an ‘end’ or an ‘after’ of theory echoes of which began to be heard in the 1990’s with the general pronouncements of a new problematic coming full force in the first few years of the 21st century.  The courses approach the current condition of architecture and urban theory with a ‘radical openness’ with regards to thinking within specific disciplinarities. Deleuze, his ‘concepts’ and ‘thought models will provide for significant  areas of investigation. For instance, what he refers to as Expérience /  Experimentation;  in Deleuzian parlance: experimentation does not ‘interpret’, does not look for ‘significations’ or ‘meanings’ (of a drawing, a text, an idea, a desire, or a force); but seeks to discover how things work or function by  disclosing an order of causes, the affective relations between parts of an assemblage, the structures, the flows, associations and connections, the resulting understanding of tendencies over strictly traceable causalities.  Clearly, architecture - not what it is, but how it acts - with regards its geo-poetic / geo-politic realities; works within radically open structures and systems. Experimentation allows us to investigate, to analyze ways in which we can attempt to explain how assemblages come to be composed, to analyze the links between compounds or composites in order to understand how they might produce their effects; resulting in our ability to map new forms of empirical trajectories. Developing new means of both seeing and acting within design and theory, this we hold under the general frame referred to as ‘Architecture Thinking’.

New Urban Questions or ‘minor infractions’

Lecture series (course code: AR3DSD060 – 3 ECTS) 
Course Coordinator: Heidi Sohn
Lecturers: This series will consists of  lectures offered by DSD  & Dept. of Urbanism faculty and research staff (H. Sohn, A. Graafland, D. Hauptmann,  S. Read, among others) and special invited guests.
Required: for Urban Asymmetries students.

Overview
Since the publication of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity of 1990, many of the processes identified by Harvey and others have manifested themselves upon our contemporary human world: from the over-urbanization of the world’s population, rapidly changing geopolitical configurations and shifting relations between State and civil society, the poignant environmental questions that plague us incessantly, to the encroachment of the media in our daily lives, the last decades of the 20th century appear to have functioned as a catalyst to capitalism in its advanced stages, rather than as a vehicle for emancipation, socio-economic improvement or general positive change. The transition from modernity into postmodernity has been everything but straightforward, or unproblematic. One thing has become clear: under the logic of flexible accumulation, endorsed by the slogan of modernization, progress, and globalization, capitalism has managed to mutate once again into what appears to be an all-encompassing economic system that, backed by parallel transformations in all realms of human endeavor, has transformed not only our imaginaries and desires, but also our lifestyles, subjectivities and practices.
The logic of neo-liberalism claims to be based on values and ideals that cannot be sustained in reality: instead of balance, it produces deafening homogeneity and uniformity; instead of “difference” and variety, it thrusts informality. Troubled by a natural tendency to conflict and contradiction, neo-liberalism and its many practices are (re-)producing extreme conditions of socio-economic polarization, environmental devastation, and more generally, differential conditions that generate degrees of unprecedented uneven development and asymmetries in all domains and scales. These changes necessarily manifest themselves upon the built environment, producing changed relationships within localities, cities and entire regions, posing new urban questions for the 21st century. What are the new urban conditions brought about by the liberalization of the global economy? Where has “the public” gone? Can we still speak of public spaces in the conventional sense under conditions of extreme commercialism and the dissolution of the political? What are the implications for the city? What is occurring in regions in which the transition into neo-liberalism has occurred in partial occlusion, or invisibility? How are architects and urban designers reacting to these changes?
As entire cities rise from scratch in what was previously desert, and the peripheries of urban giants in the Third World consolidate into hyperslums, the role of architects and urbanist is called into question. Are we responding to the new urban problems and questions from a critical perspective, or are we perpetuating with our practice the “minor infractions” that will shape the contradictive cities of the 21st century?
In this weekly lecture series we will explore the new urban questions that surround -or spring from- contemporary debates on architecture, urbanism, and the spatial disciplines. We will also deal with issues that critically question the contemporary situation of the spatial disciplines as the locust of epistemologies of space, reversing the focus to an inquiry into disciplines beyond or outside the spatial ones in an attempt to relate these to the "minor infractions" committed by architects and urbanist in developing regions, such as Asia, Africa, the U.A.E., Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Trans_Thinking Practices and Perspectives

Lecture series (course code: AR3DSD050 – 3 ECTS)
Course Coordinator: Deborah Hauptmann
Lecturers: This series will consists of  lectures offered by DSD faculty and research staff (D. Hauptmann, A. Graafland, R. van Toorn, T. Kaminer, among others) and special invited guests.  It is also connected to the Trans_Thinking the City DSD Platform (PhD), two- day colloquia series .
Required: For The Why Factory Architecture Degree Track Students.

Overview
Transdisciplinarity (a term introduced in 1970 by Jean Piaget) aims at an understanding of the present world. In Architecture transdisciplinary discourse attempts to bridge the sciences and humanities, it thinks within and between art, technology, science and philosophy. As the title of this series indicates, the notion of the ‘transdicisciplinary’ will be substituted with that of ‘Trans_Thinking’.  As the prefix "trans" indicates that which is at once between, across, and even beyond individual disciplines. Transdisciplinarity (a term introduced in 1970 by Jean Piaget) aims at an understanding of the present world. In Architecture, it was Marcos Novak who first saw clearly the potential of working through what we will call Trans_Thinking.   Transdisciplinary discourse attempts to bridge the sciences and humanities, it thinks within and between art, technology, science and philosophy. According to Basarab Nicolescu transdisciplinarity can be outlined with three postulates: the existence of levels of Reality, the logic of the included middle, and complexity.
Bruno Latour, in his now much cited paper ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’ (2004), puts forward a criticism of the sciences, leveled at two fronts: one, the dangers of sciences that seek certainties in the construction of facts - ‘disguised as bad ideological biases!’; and two the tendency within scientific thinking to exaggerate its retort to linguistically based arguments perceived as reveling in the ambiguities of ‘interpretation’.  Latour calls for a shift from ‘matters of fact to matters of concern’, in this he refers to William James. Here citing James, ‘… the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a  stubbornly realist attitude’. In Latour’s paper,  ‘matters of fact’ have not been abandoned, they have simply shifted away from their presupposed relation to ‘reality’, in other words, away from the Kantian givens in experience. The argument here, put simply, rest on the assertion that the examination of details, no matter how numerous or complex, will never plausibly lead to ‘social explanations’. In short, the relation of study to object  is in need of radical reassessment. This series will bring together specialist from many fields (economy, geography, sociology, neuroscience, philosophy, the arts, architecture and urbanism) to interrogate both the content and the methods of research within so called empirical and speculative sciences and philosophy.

The Agency of Mapping

Seminar (course code: AR3DSD060 – 6 ECTS)
Course coordinator: Heidi Sohn
Course Instructor:  Tahl Kaminer or Heidi Sohn
Required:  for ALL DSD Urban Track Students and Urban Asymmetries Architecture Track students.

Overview
In recent times a great deal of architectural discourse has shifted its attention from discussions on architectural representation and more conventional forms of epistemological production, towards a field traditionally reserved to the cartographer, the geographer, the engineer, or the planner: “mapping the city”. Debates on the role of the architect in this domain of the urban –a dimension that encompasses many additional elements and complexities to the ones commonly addressed by the architect- implies a shifting of scale, of position, of range, and of epistemology (knowledge), not always grasped and comprehended in depth by the architect. In an attempt to adapt to what could be seen as the “urbanization of architectural theory”, the architect has begun to explore and experiment with techniques and practices reserved for other disciplines: the script, the score, the diagram, and finally, the map. After decades of ‘playing’ with the first three techniques, architects are beginning to find in the map –and in the practice of mapping- many interesting possibilities. Not a new discovery, many would argue, the issues of mapping, however, are becoming pervasive in architectural production, and thus require a more in-depth understanding of the origins, and applications of mapping, as well as the difficult questions of subjectivity, action (agency), and the implications of mapping upon material reality. Maps, as instruments to diverse ideologies, encompass dimensions that are not innocent or neutral. In fact, in their instrumentality, maps hold the potential to not only represent what is, but also, and especially, to change existing conditions. Envisioning new worlds, generating new environments, producing or facilitating new relationships among elements: these are all ‘projective’ qualities of mapping, which need critical assessment before they transcend into reality.
In this weekly seminar we will introduce, analyze and discuss a series of theories that, as a result of rapidly changing perceptions of space-time, emerged during the 20th century, largely influencing the way we understand and represent the built environment. We will analyze the relationships of these theories to the spatial disciplines, in particular to present-day urban design and architectural production, theorizing them, and exploring the diverse forms of mapping and projective methods that these may have when implemented in actual urban and architectural projects. More than formal changes or innovations, we will focus on concepts such as "process", "change",  "agency" and the practice of mapping: What is the role of agency? What are the effects and material consequences of these changes? Can we think beyond a representational system without falling into the common trap of self-reflexivity or over-formalism?

Course outline

• Introduction to Mapping
• The Geopolitics of Mapping
• The Agency of Mapping: Identity, Subjectivity & Action
• Architecture and the City: Mapping as a Creative Practice
• Beyond Mapping? Towards an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm.

The Public Role of the Architect as Specific Intellectual

Seminar (course code: AR3DSD070 – 6 ECTS)
Course coordinator: Deborah Hauptmann
Course instructors: Roemer van Toorn & Deborah Hauptmann
Required: For The Why Factory Architecture Degree Track Students.

Overview
Architecture and Urban theory finds itself lodged in the city, in ‘concrete’ practice. It turns empirical material through multiple perspectives thus advancing new questions, ones not yet made visible in the subject matter itself. ‘Specific theory is lodged in an expanded present, a present in which it is simultaneously possible to ask philosophical, social, cultural and political questions that open up empirical work and to pose critical historical questions about the categories deployed by our philosophy’ (P. Galison). We can also add, categories deployed by our sciences as well. Furthermore, it must be clear that architecture specific theory must resist two opposing dangers: erroneous pretenses to thinking that it can stand outside of time and space, and the dubious belief that its relevance can emerge entirely from its object of study. Thus, it seems that for the new critical thinker, lodged in what some have termed a ‘post critical’ age,  that both architecture and urbanism,  are perhaps, finally most ideally  situated to ask questions which are necessary both within and beyond  the community of the academe. 

This Seminar will theoretically situate architecture and urban – design practice –  along two primary trajectories:

1. within  Foucault’s notion of  ‘the Specific Intellectual’ and further posit the framework for what Hauptmann refers to as Architecture Specific Theory.
2. within questions relating to Edward Said’s work on the role of the ‘Public Intellectual’ and further posit the framework of what van Toorn refers to in his work on Neoliberal Urbanization.

Following this the seminar will survey multiple approaches to the object through investigations ranging from in depth historical studies - dealing with both a physically (material) and socio-culturally (immaterial) constructed past; theoretical considerations – interrogating both the specific and the general conditions by which objects and subjects are reflexively produced and, at times, spontaneously emerge; to urban and architecture research – investigating both case study objects and over arching methodologies by which the very modes of thinking and producing the city and its objects become possible. What they hold in common is the demand for  a reassessment of traditional models and a readiness to grasp  the emerging ‘condition’ of architectural knowledge in both an academic context and professional practice. Equally, what has been indubitably evidenced is that disciplinary exclusivity between the above approaches (historical, theoretical, practical) has not only become inadequate, but can be seen as counter-productive with regard to state of the art advances in the sciences and humanities; both areas of which research in architecture and urban fields are responsible to address.

Architecture Thinking: Architecture & Urban Thesis

Seminar (course code: AR3DSD030 – 6 ECTS)
Course coordinator: Deborah Hauptmann
Course instructors:  Andrej Radman & Deborah Hauptmann
Required: For all DSD & The Why Factory MSc3 Students.

The DSD requires that a Master of Architecture Candidate approach their thesis year graduation project as a comprehensive research & design driven work.
The Thesis is understood as research based section of a students master’s design thesis. Each student, with the guidance of the theory faculty and staff, will select an independent research topic in correspondence with their thesis project aims and ambitions. The work will result in an extended essay (+/- 10,000 words) which evinces the student’s academic research and writing abilities, resulting in a worthy Architecture or Urban thesis in design.

Additionally, the course offers two research seminars to be given by Professor Arie Graafland.