MCC-UE 1030-001
Architecture as Media
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
New York University
!Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the
bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco
answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting.
Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to
me.” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Course Description
This class reads architecture and the built environment through the lenses of media,
communication, and culture. The course takes seriously the proposition that spaces
communicate meaningfully and that learning to read spatial productions leads to better
understanding how material and technological designs are in sustained conversation with the
social over time. Through analyses of a range of spaces – from Gothic Cathedrals to
suburban shopping malls to homes, factories, skyscrapers and digital cities – students will
acquire a vocabulary for relating representations and practices, symbols and structures, and
for identifying the ideological and aesthetic positions that produce settings for everyday life.
Course Texts
* All required course readings are available through Blackboard.
* If you are interested in extending your knowledge of architectural history I’d recommend
purchase of Siegfried Giedon’s Space, Time, and Architecture.
Expectations and Assessment
(1)!Readings are to be completed before class. Class meetings center on in-depth
discussion of concepts from the texts. Weekly meetings are our opportunity to work
through texts as a community and the prerequisite for high-quality discussion is that
Page 1 of 4
everyone reads material ahead of time. Come to class prepared for discussion.
(2) Engaged participation. I will be looking for knowledge-building contributions that
show not only that you are trying to understand the readings but also that help
contribute to your peers’ understandings. A pre-requisite for active and intelligent
participation in discussions is prompt and regular attendance to all classes. Notify me
in advance if you are going to miss a class.
(3) Essay writing. Writing in this course is designed as an exercise to help craft synthetic
argumentation skills through specific cases. With this in mind there will be two options
to complete work for the class, each which fulfills the negotiation of this tension.
Option one is to complete a series of four, three-page papers (dates specified below).
These papers will engage with a prompt given by me and designed to get to a place of
thinking across the specificities of the texts through unifying concepts. The second
option is to write a single twelve-page paper to be handed in at the end of the semester.
This paper will represent original work and will read an architecture as media. Details
to follow.
(4) Grading policy
Participation
60%
Papers
Four papers: paper 1 (5%), paper 2 (10%), paper 3 (10%), paper 4 (15%)
One research paper
40%
(5) As members of the NYU community you are expected to uphold the standards of
Academic Integrity http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/policies/academic_integrity . Failure to
do so will result in an automatic failure on the assignment and harsher actions, if
warranted.
(6) Students with special needs should be in contact with me at the beginning of the
semester so that we can insure accommodations. Moreover where appropriate students
should register with the Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at 212-998-4980,
240 Greene Street, http://www.nyu.edu/csd.
Class Schedule
Week 1 -- Introduction and First Example
Monday, January 23: Class Overview
Wednesday, January 25: Sennett, R. (1994). Nakedness: The citizen’s body in
Perikles’ Athens. Flesh and Stone: The body and the city in Western civilization, 31 67.
Week 2 – Architecture as Communication and Seeing Like A State
Monday, January 30: Mukerji, C. Ch 6. Naturalizing power in the new state.
Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles.
Page 2 of 4
Wednesday, February 1: Innis, H. (1951). The Bias of Communication. Toronto: Univ.
of Toronto Press, pp. 33 – 60, and Heidegger, M. (1971). Building, dwelling,
thinking. Poetry, language, thought (Trans. Albert Hofstadter), New York: Harper.
Week 3 -- Maps of the Terrain, or Empire and Imagination
Monday, February 6: Scott, J. (1998). Berman, M. (1988). “Geometry has appeared”:
The city in the swamps, and Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”: The Clerk and the Tsar.
In All that is solid melts into air. New York: Penguin, pp. 176 – 188.
Wednesday, February 8: Calvino, I. (1974). Invisible cities. New York: Harcourt, Inc.
(excerpts).
Week 4 – Immanence and Transcendence
Monday, February 13: Sturken, M. The wall, the screen, and the image. The Vietnam
Veterans Memorial.
Wednesday, February 15: Nye, D. (1994). Bridges and skyscrapers: The geometrical
sublime. In American technological sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 77 –
108. PAPER 1 DUE
Week 5 – Sacred Spaces I
Monday, February 20: UNIVERSITY HOLIDAY
Wednesday, February 22: Field Assignment 1: Sacred Spaces
Field Assignment A: The Cathedral
Field Assignment B: The Protestant Church
Week 6 – Sacred Spaces II.
Monday, February 27: Panofsky E. (1951). Gothic architecture and scholasticism.
Wednesday, February 29: Kilde, J.H. (2002). Church becomes theatre. When church
became theatre: The transformation of evangelical architecture and worship in
nineteenth-century America, 112- 145.
Week 7 – Machine Age Material Imaginaries
Monday, March 5: Scheebart, P. The gray cloth: A novel on glass architecture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (excerpt). and Loos, A. Ornament as Crime (excerpts).
Wednesday, March 7: Marinetti, F.T. (1909). The Futurist Manifesto, and Le
Corbusier Eyes which do not see: Liners, Airplanes, Automobiles. In Towards a new
architecture. pp. 85 – 129.
MARCH 12 - 18 SPRING BREAK NO CLASS
Week 8 – Urban and Pedestrian
Monday, March 19: Benjamin, W. Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century and
Barthes, R., Upon Leaving the Theater. PAPER 2 DUE
Wednesday, March 21: Field Assignment 2: Windows
Page 3 of 4
Week 9 – A View of One's Own: Windows in the Home
Page 4 of 4
Monday, March 26: Colomina, B. Window.
Wednesday, March 28: Lavin, S. (2004). The therapeutics of pleasure: Hot house, The
Orgone Box, window treatment. In Form follows libido: Architecture and Richard
Neutra in a psychoanalytic culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 68 – 87.
Week 10 – The Aesthetics of Mobility and Privatization
Monday, April 2: Venturi, R., Brown, D.S., Izenour, S. (1972). Learning from Las
Vegas: The forgotten symbolism of architectural form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
(pp. 3 – 72).
Wednesday, April 4: Spigel, L. (2008). Setting the stage at television city: Modern
architecture, TV studios, and set design. In TV by design: Modern Art and the rise of
network television. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 110 – 143 and
Jameson, F. (1991). The cultural logic of late capitalism. In Postmodernism, or the
cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1 – 54.
Week 11 – Computing, or Information Architecture
Monday, April 9: Martin, R. (2003). Edwards, Closed World (excerpt).
Wednesday, April 11: Martin, R. (2003). The organizational complex (excerpts).
Week 12 -- Interactive Occupations
Monday, April 16: Cedric Price and John Littlewood (1968). “Fun Palace”, In The
Drama Review, 12(3), 127 - 134, and Turner, F. (2009). Burning Man at Google:
Cultural infrastructure for new media production. New Media and Society, 11 (1), 73 94.
Wednesday, April 18: Kandel on #OCCUPYWALLSTREET, notes from the field.
PAPER 3 DUE
Week 13 -- Virtual Environments
Monday, April 23: Field Assignment 3: Place, Performed
Wednesday, April 25: Miller, K. (2008). “Grove Street Grimm: Grand Theft Auto and
Digital Folklore” In Journal of American Folklore, 121(481): 255-285.
Week 14 -- Future Directions in Materiality
Monday, April 30: Weiser, M. (1991). “The Computer for the 21st Century”, In
Scientific American.
Wednesday, May 2: Kemp, M. Interactive Architectures (excerpts) and Wiberg, M., &
Robles, E. (2010). “Computational compositions: Aesthetics, materials, and
interaction design”, in International Journal of Design, 4(2), 65-76.
PAPER 4/ FINAL PAPER DUE 5/7
Page 5 of 4