ARCH-680BP Cultures and Artifacts
3 Credits
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ARCH-680BP-MX1
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
9:00 am â 4:00 pm
Off Campus, CAMP
This summer elective course is the first in a sequence titled The Americas Project, a multi year program of travel to investigate the relationship between the public sphere and architecture, landscape, and urban design in our region of the globe. The Americas Project posits that architecture and its relation to the public can best be understood by looking locally. Each course in the series is charged with examining the relationship between architecture in the American hemisphere, with a particular focus on the relationship between buildings and the publics they both host and foment. Every iteration will identify a corpus of buildings that are ostensibly American, and form the core of the travel itinerary. Regardless of scale or type these will be systematically studied through a program of drawing. The drawings will argue for a relationship between the literal, concrete artifacts of design and the imaginary of an American public. They will ask, what is a buildings public? How does architecture foment and mobilize these publics? How does a building legitimate itself in the American context where legitimacy itself is an attribute must be invented instead of inherited? The product of each travel season will be a series of documentary and analytical drawings contributed to a published Atlas of a New America.