A seminar course whose focus lies within architectural and design practices emphasizing space: conceptual strategies, design principles and professional concerns. The built environment and space maintain an extensive and complex relationship. The analogies between the two are as old as history, specifically from a Western cultural perspective. In this seminar, we will survey contemporary and historical writings about space and its relationship to physical and social worlds, and we will attempt to forge an experimental approach to contemporary spatial practice. Individuals define their identities in relation to the spaces and places they inhabit, as in the case of the office worker, the student, the housewife/husband, the club-hopper, the streetwalker, and the homeless. The built environment shapes us even as we create it, in a constant conversation and exchange between interiority and exteriority — between perceptions of who we are and where we are situated. Via lectures, projects, digital/slide/video presentations, and reading assignments we will look at concepts, structures and the many ways meaning is invested into design. Throughout the semester we will consider cultural, historical and references borrowed from such fields as visual art, photography, video/cinema, information technologies, cultural studies, architecture, psychoanalysis, medicine, communications, linguistics, science and philosophy. Lectures will be arranged around primary areas of inquiry into space and will provide a framework for considering various modes of design and architecture. In recent years scholars in a number of fields bearing upon cultural history and theory have created a veritable industry of writings about spatial awareness. We can sample only a small amount of this work, but our inquiries promise to be both rewarding in their own right and illuminating of larger issues and methodologies in cultural history specific to architecture. The projects and readings are intended not to add up to some neat thesis, but rather to raise questions of interpretation and meaning. We will take note of some key primary works and also a selection of interpretive studies that address and extend issues raised by these works. All of our class materials --both primary and secondary--are materials that invite argument and demands appraisal. 
 

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