This seminar is offered to students interested in the relationships between architectural history, theory, and design. More specifically, this course will critically investigate the terms of legibility and representation in architecture through historical and formal analyses, contemporary design techniques, and methods of integration into practice. We can begin by saying that legibility in architecture requires both visual clarity of a building’s appearance such that its formal, spatial, and material compositions can be comprehended, as well as a certain clarity of its social, cultural, and political histories. While the term legibility carries a connotation of conclusiveness or objective qualifications, legibility in the context of architecture is most often inconclusive and unresolved. We can also say, or perhaps debate, that representation is at the core of what architects do, and therefore we must go beyond the understanding of representation as merely the production of drawings, models, and renderings for the purposes of depicting your idea. Thus, the interrelations between legibility and representation are crucial to forming a critical practice of engaged architecture, yet they are fraught with ambiguity; ambiguity that is ripe with critical and creative possibilities in architectural history, theory, and design. This course will primarily consist of faculty led lectures and discussions, complimented by some readings, videos, short student presentations, and the production of a series of images and/or models. Less of a note-taking class and more of a routinized, weekly social encounter, the primary, mandatory, unwavering prerequisite is that each student must come prepared to actively engage in discourse, debate, and dialogue – And must also carry this ethos over to your other classes and divisional culture at CCA. 
 

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