ARCH2323 Cultural Contexts II: Nomadic Narratives of Architecture
Target Students BSSc2
Course Term 2
Course Type Required
Teacher GHELICHI, Pedram
Assistants SONG, Qiwei
Cultural Contexts II questions the relationship between architectural productions and history - how can we use the study of buildings and the way they are narrated and represented to learn about the past? How can these ideas, rooted in historical traditions, be useful for thinking about contemporary architectural productions?
This course explores the critical ideas and themes that shape our architectural heritage, with examples from around the globe, with a particular focus on the East Asian context. From design-related topics, such as architectural drawings and representation, to broader topics, like style and typology, we will attempt to understand how these themes manifested through individual and collective works of architecture and how ideas are connected across places, times, and types of works. These themes are not necessarily comprehensive, but they include history, narrative, matter, force, experiment, error, sign, representation, assembly, typology, and style. To explore these topics, a series of 11 lectures is organised, broadly divided into two main parts: first, the more theoretical and abstract topics, such as architectural historiography, narrativity, and architectural styles and typologies. The second part focuses on more tangible and concrete topics, presenting counternarratives around frequently discussed architectural themes, such as representation and media, matter and form, and structure and perception, among others.
