INTRODUCTION: Seminar Practices
The work of French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard and writer George Perec as well as that of German novelist G. Sebald will be the the leading voices, as it were, that will guide our seminar this term. Other significant texts from various philosophers, architects, and writers will serve as complementary textual support. Among them Roland Barthes, Jose Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Mario Frascari, and Gottfried Semper.

A writing space and a space for making will hopefully emerge from the particular educational practice that we call a seminar. As Roland Barthes points out:

"In the seminar (and this is its definition), all teaching is foreclosed: no knowledge is transmitted (but a knowledge can be created), no discourse is sustained (but a text is sought): teaching is disappointed. Either someone works, seeks, produces, gathers, writes in others’ presence; or else all incite each other, call to each other, put in circulation the object to be produced, the procedure to compose, which thus passes from hand to hand, suspended from the thread of desire like the ring in round games." (1)

Barthes’ words are dear. They evoke the ideal learning experience we will try to work towards and to emulate.

Ricardo L. Castro, MRAIC
Associate Professor of Architecture
Montreal, January 2005

Note: 1 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language; translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986) p. 337.

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