This seminar looks at the extractive landscapes of California from the nineteenth-century to the present, with particular focus on settler colonialism, electrification, resource extraction, and the financialization of property relations. Each of these topics will be explored historically with an eye toward reparative justice in the present, culminating in group presentations at the end of the first month. The remaining weeks will build on these sessions with theoretical readings that situate architecture within economies of extraction—the buildings, infrastructures, logistical networks, and landscapes that have driven resource consumption and fossil capitalism. Across the semester, we will be attending to the connections between the fields of architecture, geology, political economy, law, and ecological thought. How might things like atmospheric data, zoning laws and building codes, labor struggles, resource geology, racial capitalism, and financial globalization be read through architectural sites and landscapes? And how might an abolitionist approach to these various modes of extraction help us rethink architecture? Our collective research this fall will focus on the town of Greenville in northern California. The seminar is open to any interested students, though we also will have moments of collaboration with Janette Kim’s “Property in Crisis” studio as well as Brendon Levitt’s “Regenerative Building Performance” seminar.

Visit Workday to view this information.