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The special Lecture, Seminar and Laboratory courses planned for the upcoming quarter will be listed below. For information about the design studios that are offered each quarter, go to the respective year tab to the left (1st Year, 2nd Year, etc,).
Winter 2010
Arch 470: Innovative and Visionary Dwelling
Doug Jackson
"The place where you reform and revolutionize architecture is the house."
Paul Virilio1
Due both to its disciplinary investment in endurance and its dependence on a marketplace that
favors the status quo, architecture is constitutionally hampered in its ability to respond to, cultivate,
manipulate, or foster social or cultural changes. The contemporary dwelling, for the most part, is no
exception to this rule—although it has undergone some notable changes over the last century, these
changes have often significantly lagged behind the social and cultural changes that motivated them,
and have been negatively constrained or derailed by the conventional logics of the building industry
and real estate markets.
Nevertheless, the dwelling remains the site where the complex and varied nature of contemporary
social and cultural dynamics is perhaps most readily apparent—even though these dynamics are
played out in spite of or in contrast to the physical structures that contain them. In the past,
architects have occasionally employed the dwelling as a showcase for innovation or speculative
vision, offering inhabitable examples that demonstrated reciprocity between architecture and a new
“lifestyle” that responded to and helped to direct contemporaneous changes in society and culture.
Therefore, this seminar poses the following question: what would an innovative and visionary
dwelling that responded to contemporary social and cultural dynamics be like?
The seminar will begin to address this question by closely studying historical examples of visionary
dwelling in the context of the social and cultural contexts within which they were proposed.
Thereafter it will examine contemporary social and cultural conditions and ways of living that have
yet to be adequately addressed by the dwelling, identify new directions and opportunities for
reconsidering the dwelling in light of these changes, propose and discuss possible architectural
responses to these new conditions, and consider the disciplinary consequences of these
propositions.
For more information Email: Doug Jackson
1 Virilio, Paul and Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Michael Taormina, “After Architecture: A Conversation,” Grey Room, No. 3 (Spring 2001) p. 42.
