Contemporary Perspectives on Environmental Histories of Architecture

Over the last two centuries, the way architecture related to nature/the environment has drastically changed regarding how nature, or the natural world has been not only imagined by humans, but also used and abused. This elective focuses on the origin of environmental issues, both the shiny utopias and the dark sides, through a transdisciplinary perspective, on issues which have emerged since industrialization, imperialism and colonialism and are currently becoming problematic.

In times of climate change and global heating, architecture’s historical relationship to nature/the environment, in all its complexities and contradictions, are seen as contested and conflictual, with the environment not only being a passive backdrop, but an actor in its own right. Starting from the hypothesis that architecture and related disciplines and professions, by creating environments, are extracting knowledge from and exerting power upon nature, the course highlights certain episodes, beginnings and ends, alongside ruptures. In this context, architecture’s relation to nature/the environment has been transformed, having become seen as part of the problem, yet presenting itself as contributing to a solution, too.

Housing

This course focuses on one building type - housing. Concentrating on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this course takes a wide definition of housing to investigate broader themes such as communities, ethics, emotions and memory. Throughout all the sessions, we look at how race, gender and class intersect and impact on housing. This course encourages students to think critically about ideas associated with housing such as ‘streets in the sky’ and ‘sink estates’. The course also focuses on the cultural and social significance of housing, council housing in particular, and how this is represented within culture and, crucially, questions whose voices are represented.

User-centred Design

In our modern, capitalist society, architects rarely have the opportunity to engage with those who will occupy their buildings. Architects’ clients are often building contractors, speculative developers or public bodies, rather than individuals who will inhabit the completed buildings. This can make it difficult for architects to understand building users’ needs and aspirations.

This elective lecture course takes a critical look at the term ‘user’ as employed within architecture and explores a range of strategies for understanding the needs and aspirations of building users. The various strategies are set in historical context, and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach are examined. The difficulties of designing buildings for unknown users, who might differ from the architect in terms of age, gender, class and ethnicity, are discussed along with the risks of reducing potential users to stereotypes. The course explores how these strategies for understanding users’ needs and aspirations can be applied in architectural practice.

Queer[ing] Architecture

This BA3 Elective offers an exploration into architectural and urban relationships with queerness. Both an introduction to queer architectural historiography and theory, and reflections on queer design practice, the course interrogates two provocations: what makes a space queer? And, beyond this, what role does built and urban space play in constructing and sustaining queer identities?

Since the 1990s, architectural historians and theorists have been uncovering ways that queer people throughout history have formed and adapted architectural and urban spaces, and how we can, as a result, read buildings and urban ensembles as ‘queer.’ Reciprocally, queer theorists have become increasingly interested in the architectural and spatial metaphors that bound queer experience: ‘Out of the closet and into the streets’ was a rallying cry of mid-20th-century gay liberation movements, and as a result, the closet, as a spatial locus of queerness, has been subject to intense theorising (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1990). More recently, in a time of reversals of queer rights and acceptance, questions of spatial inclusion and exclusion have taken on new urgencies. The trans historian and activist Susan Stryker and the architect Joel Sanders have noted a pressing need to ‘explore the architectural implications of gender variance,’ to unpick how hetero-norms underpin design practices, and how these can be productively challenged during the process of design (Sanders and Stryker, 2016: 782).

Architecture in the Age of Acceleration

This course considers the systemic challenges posed by the continued climate crisis, rapid urbanization, and globalization, as well as the threat of collapsing eco-systems as the starting point for theoretical reflection on architectural design today. But, instead of searching for answers outside the discipline, it stays as close as possible to architecture itself. In other words, an underlying point of this course is the conviction that the discipline already offers a rich field of knowledge on which to build possible answers to the current crises.

After an introduction on the theme of Acceleration, the course proposes to investigate five strategies – Commons, Participation, Critical Regionalism, Transformation, and Resilience - looking at their historical roots in the postmodern period and projecting their applicability all the way into our contemporary era, allowing students to uncover both historical continuities and new possible directions. Each strategy will be anchored in a key text of the period (1961-1992) and will testify to the political and social contexts in which architects have started to challenge their role under the conditions of modernity.

The changed perspective on fundamental aspects of technology and culture which is the result of a growing acknowledgment of the finite nature of global resources is also reflected in the rediscovery and rereading of authors. These texts will be analysed, situated, and most importantly debated with the students, in relation to current architectural practices. Therefore, going beyond mere critical re-readings of the recent past, this course proposes to open a discussion on the relevance of these strategies for today’s practice vis-à-vis conditions of acceleration.

Watery Archives

This elective focuses on architectural and urban relationships to oceans, seas, rivers and various other bodies of water. Drawing on the wider framework of oceanic humanities, in this course we ask how centring seas, oceans, estuaries and rivers, among other bodies of water, might open up new approaches, questions and perspectives on how we study, understand and ultimately design. Oceanic viewpoints ask us to look beyond points of origin, drawing on Edouard Glissant, to archipelagic and entangled relationships across time and space, surface and depth. Movement across water has been key to trade and commerce, resulting in risky, fruitful and dangerous encounters: from the oceanic catastrophes of the Atlantic slave trade to early global empires in the Swahili seas. Urban waterways have been tools of extraction and sites of leisure. Managing floodplains, land reclamation initiatives, and the construction of dams, ports and canals have been central to modernisation and development projects globally. In our current context, thinking with water raises urgent questions around devastating floods, creeping sea-level rise, and the increasing vulnerability of coastal communities.

This elective looks at a range of urban and architectural sites globally including the port cities of Cape Town, Mumbai, Zanzibar, Buenaventura, Dakar, Liverpool, Hong Kong, and New Orleans and associated archival imaginaries, which centre watery perspectives. We ask how design builds, adapts and responds to watery bodies. We question ways and means of representing and writing histories of and with water, and engage with the work of designers, writers, activists and filmmakers who strive to tell deep and near oceanic and watery futures of the built environment.

Monument

This elective uses public buildings, monuments, and institutions to explore architecture in the long nineteenth century (1789–1914). Although focused on the history of Greater Manchester, this spatial setting allows us to examine broader themes across wider geographies including industrial capitalism, energy, politics, and global trade. The ultimate aim of this elective is to use the built environment to examine the major changes to technology and society that took place over the course of the nineteenth century.