After successful completion of the course, students are able to engage in the task of writing an academic paper. Furthermore, students will attain a broader understanding of architecture, not only as a discipline aimed at the realisation of buildings (as a Baukunst), but also as a device of thinking that concerns and connects both material and ‘immaterial’ domains of production.
Can architecture save the world?
The world is coming to an end. Or so it seems. Constantly, since the beginning. Computers brings us to space, but they also spread fake news; antibiotics save lives, but they also call for increasingly stronger bacteria; globalisation brings us closer, but it also increases the possibility of conflict. Every leap forward seem to drive us closer to an ultimately impossible challenge, to the point that the human domination of the planet—the mastery of Earth as a ‘system’—is seen today as a prelude to an environmental apocalypse.
In a way or another, architecture has always been at the forefront of this ‘battle’: rather than trying to understand an ‘ultimate truth’ that would have allowed to get finally rid of any uncontrollable wilderness, architecture tried to provide means and spaces to resist to it. The garden and the temple are archetypical figures—tropes—of such friction: a sacred space, the rituals of which are dedicated to a purification in time, and an enclosure that would keep out wilderness while nevertheless cultivating its very species. Garden and Temple are neither generic nor ‘functional’ spaces; they do not provide ‘solutions’ to problems, but they are neither architectures of indifference. Both exceed our contemporary obsession for management and production. Like the entropy of a system, garden and temple ‘measure’ disorder via a negative domain, by elevating themselves upon the exchanges of economy, cultivation, and production.
The seminar will investigate the exceptionality of these archetypes, in order to understand how architecture, as a speculative practice, can help us to better address and re-articulate what at times might appear as objective and unavoidable outcomes, as givens that can only be accepted as such. Ecology, or the management of the inhabited space, will be reconsidered through the paradigm of domestication: a ‘pact’ with nature, that does not deny natural laws, but that nevertheless does not bend itself to an a-critical subjugation to the necessities that such laws seem to impose. Domestication counters the managerial paradigm of economy with the civic one of architecture, as a practice of good government.
[Picture credits: OFFICE KGDVS, Border Crossing]
The course will be structured in different components: a series of lectures focusing on the topic of the seminar will be alternated by a set of exercises based on the provided literature, followed by discussion; the last part of the course will be entirely dedicated to reviews in preparation for the delivery of the paper, eventually to be presented as in an academic symposium.
Lecturers:
Riccardo M. Villa (main lecturer), ATTP
Cris Arguelles, ATTP
Ludger Hovestadt (guest, May 26th), Prof. Digital Architectonics, ETH Zürich
The course will take place weekly on Tuesdays, from 2 pm to 4 pm, in the ATTP seminar room (Wiedner Hauptstraße 7, Stiege 2, 1st floor) or, for the time being, through dedicated on-line meetings. The course will be provided in English and so is the preferred language for all other communications.
Further informations about ATTP can be found at the following links:
www.attp.tuwien.ac.at
www.facebook.com/attp.tuwien
Please consider the plagiarism guidelines of TU Wien when writing your seminar paper:
Directive concerning the handling of plagiarism (PDF)
At the end of the seminar, participants will be asked to produce an academic paper on a topic related to the themes discussed in class. The paper will have to be written in English. Examples of previous seminar papers can be found at the following link:
http://www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/wahlseminar-architekturtheorie-ss2018
Only participants attending the course and delivering the scheduled exercises will be admitted to final evaluation. Attendance and participation is therefore mandatory.
Participants are required to possess a good knowledge of English and be able to write in such language with a sufficient degree of orthography and comprehensibility.
ATTENTION: There are NO special requirements to attend this course. In case you receive a message by TISS telling you that you don't meet the requirements, please get in touch directly with us (Email to the LVA Leiter).
