Objectives:
Critical study of significant architectural thought since 1750 as it has been expressed in buildings and texts (treatises, manifestos, criticisms). A specific theme will be addressed each year to allow in-depth interpretations of the material presented and discussed.

THEME FOR THE YEAR 2005:
Reading and Dwelling in Tectonics

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." Burger posited this idea as the dialectics of the boundary. Burger'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 the opportunity for its members to conceive, develop, and implement––in consultation with the instructor—one final creative project that will focus on an aspect or issue identified by the student through his/her confrontation with the ideas and texts presented in class. Each member of the seminar will submit a critical hypertext, which will serve as the interpretative basis of his/her project. This hypertext should be considered as a critical element of the final project. All of the hypertexts will be posted on the course’s website. They will also constitute the groundwork for a publication.


Evaluation:
Project: 40%
Hypertext: 30%
Class participation: 30%

Textbooks:
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Available at The Word Bookstore on Milton Street).
George Perec, Species of Spaces and other Pieces (Available at The Word Bookstore on Milton Street.)
G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (Available at Paragraph Bookstore on McGill College Street.)

RLC/Sigtexts05