COURSE DESCRIPTION
This variable-credit seminar course is situated at the intersection of global infrastructural history and architectural world-making across the modern era. Students will explore how infrastructures—understood as the material, technical, and social systems of connectivity and relationality that establish the foundation for other forms of power to operate—are woven through space and sedimented in overlapping temporal layers. Together, we will research how infrastructures like energy grids, flood management systems, and digital communications networks facilitate place-making by connecting (or disconnecting) people and resources across vast distances. Though imagined and constructed by populations under historically specific spatial, political, and material conditions, these systems endure as powerful—if often hidden—contemporary actors shaping how designers and communities respond to present-day challenges and work toward more sustainable futures.
COURSE SCHEDULE: DESIGN HISTORIES
Week 1:
Introductions :: Architecture Between Permanence and Flow
Establishing Terms, Negotiating Methods
Week 2:
Socio-Technical Lives: The Infrastructural South and the Modern
Week 3:
Infrastructural Power and/as Landscape: Roads, Pathways, and Waterways
The Intimate Architecture of Transoceanic Anti-Blackness
Week 4:
The Colonial Railroad and Nature’s Metropolis
Infrastructural Labor: On Megaprojects, Labor, and Urban Change
Week 5:
Carbon Form and Thinking Architecture through ‘Otherwise Externalized Materials’
Extraction, Landscapes of Energy, and the Architectural Detail
Week 6:
Waste, Sanitation, Junk
Architecture and Terminal Velocity
Week 7:
Concrete and Sand
Thinking about Architecture by way of the Logistics Revolution
COURSE SCHEDULE: DESIGN FUTURES
Week 8:
Reintroductions :: What Worlds World Worlds, or, How to See What Isn’t There
Surveillance Capitalism and Silicon Valley Imperialism
Week 9:
More-Than-Carbon Form
Exclave, Enclave, and Atmospheric Architectures, or, Occupy Mars or Occupy Wall Street?
Week 10:
Fulfillmentscapes: Warehouses and Logistical Urbanism
Clouds and Other Internet Ecologies
Week 11:
The Dumb Materiality of Smartness
Building Infrastructures Otherwise
Week 12
Blockades and Chokepoints
Remediation / Reclamation / Detoxification
Week 13:
Mutual Aid / Abolition / Architectures of Care
Against the Mono-Future