School of Architecture. McGill University
Seminar on Architectural Criticism
Course ARCH524. Winter 2006
Professor Ricardo L. Castro, MRAIC
School of Architecture. McGill University
Seminar on Architectural Criticism
Course ARCH524. Winter 2006
Professor Ricardo L. Castro, MRAIC
Objectives:
The development and current role of architectural criticism with particular reference to its affinities with art and literary criticism. A specific theme will be addressed each year to allow in-depth interpretations of the material presented and discussed.
THEME FOR THE YEAR 2006:
Liminal Space:
Montage as a critical tool
In a significant article written in 1990, entitled "Aporias of Modern Aesthetics," Professor Peter Bürger argued that "Borders such as those between art and non-art, or fiction and reality, do not disappear as easily as the theorists of the postmodern suppose. They exist, instead, constantly under the sign of their own disappearance." Bürger posited this idea as the dialectics of the boundary. Bürger's enlightening article was part of a series of critical texts, written since the 1960s, in which the place of art, the placement of the artwork, as it were, has been problematized permitting artists to expand their options to intervene in larger conceptual and physical contexts. This tradition has questioned scale, temporality, inhabitation, and it is represented by a plurality of practices, which, it seems, will continue nourishing the artistic discourse of the new century.
Meeting Place and Time:
Room 205, Mcdonald-Harrington Bldg. Thursday. 1:30-3:30.
Projects:
This seminar should be considered as an opportunity for its members to conceive, develop, and implement--in consultation with the instructor—one final critical writing project, developed in three stages, that will focus on an aspect or issue identified by the student through his/her confrontation with the ideas and works presented in class. Each member of the seminar will also present a report on an assigned reading, which will be discussed in class. All of the projects will be posted on the course website.
Evaluation:
Project: 60%
Report: 30%
Class participation: 10%
Textbooks:
David Leatherbarrow, Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture
Kate Nesbitt (Editor), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995
(Available at Paragraph Bookstore).