Fall, 2017
COL 5110 Post-Capitalist Fantasy, 1-3 (Thursdays)
Every now and then we sense a world beyond the capitalist one in which we live. Maybe it is a society without punishing inequality. Or a self without anxiety. Or an ecosystem without human rapaciousness. This sense (feeling, impulse, drive) can be as banal as a quiet moment alone, or as go-for-broke as a revolutionary act together. Like death, it is something we already know and something beyond our wildest dreams. Like love, it is in us more than us. Sometimes we attempt to shake open this otherness by the sheer force of our imagination or collective will; other times we meet it without any intention, without any focused desire or recognition that we are actually engaged in such a radical act. Regardless of whether such post-capitalist worlds are possible or whether such desires are naïve or hysterical, our encounter with them—with these speculative futures—is promising. But promising of what?
EAS 448: Future, Architecture, Japan (Wednesdays)
How do we build something for the future? Wait! Who’s future? What future? What is the future? And who’s this “we” that will build something for this future that is so slippery to know? While we’re at it: to build? Must all buildings be built for them to be buildings? What about dreams? Political movements? Personal relationships? Are they buildings too? Let’s keep going: what about the unbuilt and the not-built? The act of unbuilding and not-building? In this seminar we will explore these creeping questions and examine how the future is imagined and materialized in architectural theory and practice throughout Japanese history. From the Ise Shrine of the seventh century to modernist experiments of the Metabolist movement, from contemporary works by Isozaki Arata and Atelier Bow Wow (and many others) to our own crazy experiments we will study built, unbuilt, and non-built structures as theories of the future…and significant acts of the present.
Winter, 2018
EAS 23x: The Japanese Cinemas: Film Form and the Problems of Modernity (I) (Wednesday)