MARCH650 HT: Emerging Territories

Contemporary architects and designers must operate within a radically different world than one known twenty years ago. The world is simultaneously much more urban, industrialized, and commercialized and its economic fortunes far more integrated than ever before. Some have labeled the processes that are transforming our world "globalization," "neo-liberalism," supermodernity, "de-nationalization," or more ominously empire. In this course we examine contemporary architectural and spatial theories that respond directly to this transformed social, cultural, economic and political milieu seeking to identify the territories within which contemporary spaces and designs are and might be produced. Rather than see globalization as a processes that produces homogeneity or is purely destructive, the thinkers examined in this course identify emerging territories opened up by processes of economic and social intensification. Some of these territories present enormous opportunities for architects and designers, while others present alarming problems previously unidentified.