This is a vertical studio combining students in their fourth and fifth year of architectural studies. The students may choose from a diverse range of options of study proposed by different faculty members. In general the studio options are grounded in a conceptual basis that invites theoretical and/or programmatic innovation. These studio options may vary from year to year.The Monument in the 21st CenturyHow are monuments understood in architecture, art, social practice, and public space? Why is there support or resistance — collective or individual — for monuments? In this moment of the 21st century there is an ongoing public discussion of monuments from the past that dishonor large portions of citizenry, and about what to do with them. Under what range of assumptions are monuments built and for whom? How do monuments operate within the context of loss? Extinction is a significant part of our contemporary context of ecological catastrophe and change. The wide-reaching consequences of repetitive human habits and industrialized processes have, over time, normalized and made familiar a way of seeing the world that is destructive and at odds with its survival. Global trade, networks of mobility, and the conquest of natural resources have shuffled plant and animal species across continents without regard to context. Author Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “it took many millions of years to form the original Pangaea, and here we are putting the new one together in a matter of centuries. We are running geologic history backward, and at warp speed.” In the sciences, the impact of humanity has become accepted as itself a force of species extinction – this is the Anthropocene. These rapid transformations will also increasingly force us to grapple with the boundaries of our normalized built reality. Acting as designers with this change of perception in science and history requires another expansion of the imagination about what is possible: to make recognizable the representation of such a subject at a scale and temporality of transformation that seems perhaps impossible to grasp.   What would it mean to build a monument to the widespread extinction of species happening today?Students will review case studies and texts across architecture, art, and the history of science, and rethink the idea of the monument under terms that identify the high volume loss of species and the domino-effect within nature on the planet vis-a-vis human civilization. The studio will encourage strategies of seriality, narrative, and representation for the architectural design of a monument at a specific site in San Francisco. Is this a monument to lost species? To monolithic human stupidity? To living animals becoming extinct in the near future? Students must embrace the challenge of designing a monument for something whose context, scale, and quantity of life and death conveys an immeasurable, even unthinkable, dimension eclipsing the scale of the individual and perhaps even known human perception about space and time. Confronting this, in the words of Elizabeth Kolbert, “requires us not to imagine events that might happen but to look at events that have happened through different eyes—or even without eyes, since so many of our fellow-creatures lack them.” Students will need to approach how we see ourselves in relation to the world, and how other species also see, and challenge the boundaries and assumptions of representing this through the medium of architecture.

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