MARCH621 GE: Space + Nature

Nature, as we know it, is changing, and while architects, urbanists, designers and other spatial producers address these changes their strategies are often limited to the "organic" discourses of modernity and the "green" theories of late-modernity. This course offers those designers and conceptualizers of spatial realms a whole host of additional theoretical concepts cognizant of the socio-natural complexity seething in the contemporary world. Each week we examine key terms from geography, critical theory, and the philosophy of science, while exploring these terms' possible relations to architectural, urban, and design theory. We examine terms that describe complex socio-natural web-works of integration such as the milieu, "networks", and "machines"; we examine socio-natural processes of becoming such as "production", territorialization, and "metabolization"; and we examine the things that emerge from these processes and fields of interaction such as "cyborgs", "multiplicities", and "quasi-objects". In pursuing these links between space and nature we cover key works by Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Donna Harraway, Neil Smith, Antoine Picon, William Mitchell, Matthew Gandy, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw. This course is for students interested in pursuing an intellectually challenging agenda for the relation between architecture, urban design, interiors, industrial design, and nature, and it is useful for anyone interested in considering interactions between nature and space outside notions of ecological harmony and balance. Participants are required to complete weekly readings, engage in class participation and complete assignments related to the readings.

Course explores issues and ideas of architecture and its context in larger systems of culture and knowledge.