Architecture Climate and Society

Architecture, Climate & Society is one of the central aspects of our holistic and pluralistic approach to teaching on the climate and biodiversity emergency. Taught to both BA2 and MLA1, students learned about climate justice, climate change adaptation, and the difficulties in defining ‘net zero’. We welcomed guest lectures from Dr. Barnabas Calder (University of Liverpool) which drew on his award-winning book ‘Architecture: From Pre-history to Climate Emergency’, Professor Luca Csepely-Knorr who discussed ‘Context, precedent, antithesis: the role of nature in architecture’, and Becky Sobell on ‘Is nature a human construct?’. The course draws on literature from a variety of disciplines to help students understand the importance of developing a theoretically informed position when addressing the climate emergency. Central to the course is an appreciation of the complex social, environmental, and economic contexts within which the built environment disciplines operate, and how this translates into an ethical and moral responsibility towards engaging with the climate emergency.

Tracing the City

In BA2, Humanities expands its focus to more contemporary concerns, looking at the wider responsibilities of architecture. With Tracing Cities, we expand our focus towards a pragmatic approach to architecture and the city, looking at networks (of people and things) that constitute the built environment and beyond. We do this by questioning common definitions of architecture and the urban, and by learning new ways of tracing their relations. We looked at a wide range of urban artefacts and discovered new methods of understanding their complexity. Humanities 2 addresses the professions of architecture and urban design and how it can have an impact beyond the bounds of its own sites; architecture in the city can have unexpected political, economic, environmental, and other implications, questioning the ethics of architectural practice.

Students are asked to produce a map of a city, district, or neighborhood, making use of one or more of the methods introduced in the lecture series. The task is to trace pragmatically a series of relations and urban processes, such as the ones we have discussed in class. These can be related to nature-technology, class-race-space, infrastructure-movement, nature-culture, infrastructure-space, or any other relation you may find interesting. This can be done by engaging in any of the methods introduced in the course and choosing a medium of exploration: photo essay, collage, mixed media, sequence of drawings, series of maps, etc.