Seminar Overview:

Provisional Assemblages: Matters of Planetary Crisis is a graduate-level design research seminar investigating the relationship between temporary material systems and contemporary social and environmental crises. Defining provisional as “arranged or existing for the present, with the possibility to be changed later,” what role do provisional artifacts, objects, shelters, and settlements play in a world defined by human and non-human “disasters” of increasing frequency, severity, and complexity? The seminar takes the position that there is no such thing as “natural” disaster, only planning, policy, and design disasters resulting from the limited human ideas. Substituting a discourse about architecture with discussions of “assemblage,” the course is interested in how materials come together (and come apart) through social forces at multiple scales to define our built environment.

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The collective design research outcome will be a two-part project, tentatively titled An Incomplete Atlas of Provisional Assemblages. Part 1: Case Studies will be a .pdf publication featuring photographs, maps, drawings, and other forms of visual representation that systematically document contemporary examples of Provisional Assemblages from outside of North America and Europe. These case studies will be formatted into a provided course production template and presented alongside aphorisms extracted from a series of advanced critical spatial discourse readings. These texts, selected from authors engaging topics in Asia, Africa, South America, and Oceania, will provide the historical and theoretical lens (the lexicon, the vocabulary, the conceptual frameworks) of our material analyses. In Part 2: Interventions, students will be asked to interfere with a contemporary crisis through the speculative deployment of a Provisional Assemblage. The primary deliverable will be a narrative of an alternative future history, a story told from the perspective of our descendants, in which students demonstrate how their Provisional Assemblage intervention impacted, re-directed, or modified the unfolding of a crisis. Emphasizing the interconnected dynamics of micro and macro material conditions, students will articulate temporal and spatial phenomena at multiple scales.

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While the precise method of representation of Part 2: Interventions will be variable and defined by student’s preferred mode of expression (an essay, a graphic novel, a sequence of images, an animated model, and moving collage, or more), the project must be delivered in a .mp4 format (video and audio) with a duration of less than 5 mins to be presented at the 2024 Venice Biennale Sessions from May 11 – May 13, 2025.

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Methods and Format:

The seminar will meet Wednesdays from 08:20a – 10:50a in Room 130. Each session will consist to two halves, approximately 75 mins each. The first half will be dedicated to reading discussions and the second to research project development. For the reading discussion component, students are expected to arrive prepared with selected quotes and corresponding notes with which they can contribute to the collective discourse. For the research development component, students are expected to bring their laptops for both research production and presentation.

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Readings:

Foucault, Michel “Of Other Spaces” 1986

Said, Edward “Reflections on Exile” 1984

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty “The Rani of Sirmur” 1985

Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne “Decolonization is not a metaphor” 2012

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera, A Ch’ixi World is Possible, 2018

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics” 2003

Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa Decolonizing the Mind, 1986

Henni, Samia, Architecture of Counterrevolution, 2017

Required readings will be shared with the class in advance on CyBox in .pdf format.

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Learning Objectives:

1. the growth of each student’s ability to engage in contemporary discourse on the built environment outside of Europe and North America

2. the development of each student’s capacity to perform research from multiple perspectives, with an emphasis on highlighting the nuanced and complex political and economic conditions that drive design’s relationship to social and environmental crisis.

3. the improvement of each student’s ability to articulate the historical and theoretical relationships between architecture, global cultures, geography, landscape, and urban planning through succinct and poignant narrative storytelling.

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Course Catalog Description:

A Research seminar which considers a topic within contemporary discourses on the built environment outside of Europe and North America. The topic will be studied from multiple perspectives highlighting the historical and theoretical relationships between architecture, global cultures, geography, landscape, and urban planning. Credit counts toward fulfillment History, Theory, Culture requirements.