After successful completion of the course, students are able to critically reflect the role of housing as a key topic in the practice of architecture and planning. Students gain knowledge about the contextual forces that have shaped housing and the particular role, (urban) housing has taken on in the development and planning of the city.
Participants gain basic knowledge in the field of (modern) architectural history, housign studies and urbanism and a basic repertoir of concepts from cotemporary architectural critique and critical urban studies, particularly in the context of political economy and gouvernemtality.
Function and program concern two key-terms alon which architecture and planning hae developed over the course of modernism. the quest for adequate residential conditions of the masses has been in close relation to this developments. yet what function, what program characterizes "housing" and how does it relate to other urban programs.
Housing has been a central ingredient in planning and ordering the city, particularly in modern urban planning. The lecture series adresses the function of housing in Europe as a governmental device and the role of functionalist thought for architecture over the course of the 19th, the 20th and the early 21st century.
Housing is, as this course will show, far more than the mere provision of shelter. It is what Michel Foucault called an „apparatus“: a heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discursive and non-discursive aspects that served as a device to implement different programs – from hygienics to national policies, from social rights to strategies of exclusion.
While housing concerns a prior need and therefore has been thought of as a social right it is currently above all considered as a tradable commodity. The course introduces into this antagonism and how it was taken up in political thought – in the emerging welfare state, in the socialist systems of Eastern Europe and in the neoliberal conception, which predominates the contemporary political practice in Europe.
Methodically, the lecture seminar approaches its topic through a genealogy of housing and residential living along the axis of function and program: how does the term „function“ (which derives in its modern understanding from the discipline of mathematics) establish itself within architecture, taking on a leading role in the methodological development of the discipline – particularly in reflection of the housing question. What function is adressed to housing in the development of the modern city; how does the self-conception of the planning disicplines reflect the organisation of housing. and what function is attributed to housing today.
in order to participate, you need to register for the TUWEL course.
Dates: mondays 2.00-4.00 pm starting with April 17th
