Graduate seminar at Columbia University (Fall 2017). Listings at GSAPP, university directory, and student courseworks.
Note: I am using Github because this syllabus will be updated regularly. Changes will be reflected in the commit logs.
Syllabus v.0.12
Why do the contemporary deities of tech pray to the pagan gods of Burning Man? Why does Elon Musk believe we are living inside of a simulation? Why does Peter Thiel hold a New Zealand passport? Why did Alex Jones think the Sandy Hook mass murder was a hoax? What does any of this have to do with architecture? To begin to formulate an answer to these questions we need to go back to the beginning.
Origin stories are the magical commodity of architecture theory: they grant legitimacy while skirting falsifiability. They command worldviews without offering proof. They are the perpetual motion machines of authority. Vitruvius understood this. So did Banham. Laugier is remembered for little more than his.
After at least two millennia of speculation, origin stories have fallen out of favor in architecture theory just as accelerationist conspiracy theorists, Evangelical pastors, alt-right meme magicians, and avant garde political technologists have employed them at scale to shift global order. But reactionaries do not have a monopoly on deep time; science has also begun to lay a new claim on pre-history. Recent discoveries in evolutionary psychology, archaeology, paleoanthropology, paleontology, paleoclimatology, anthropogeny, primatology, deep history and neuroscience, theology, indigenous studies, cave art, and the history and effects of psychedelics have shed light on what was long thought to be unknowable.
Some such discoveries are too hot for history; their implications too radical for the disposition of academia. Challenging the very foundations of our social orders, they are above the pay grade of our professional storytellers. Addressing their implications requires braving the fringe rabbit holes of conspiracy theorists, chaos magicians, seers, skeptics, self-styled Indiana Jonseses and other 'alt-archaeologists'. In this seminar we will investigate the various discoveries, theories, and hypotheses of the contemporary discourses of pre-history — credentialed and crackpot alike — to project their consequences for the archetype of the architect.
We will begin with a wake up call from tech theorist Venkatesh Rao. Put simply, he sites the Promethean fire of Silicon Valley squarely in its anti-architectural metaphysics: "Big Men" like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos determine the "critical path" of "Big History" precisely because they subvert the zero sum thinking of an architectural worldview. To find agency for architecture in this regime, we look first to Keller Easterling and Mark Wigley. Easterling suggests designing "active forms"; Wigley suggests the power of architecture is bound up in its primacy as a metaphor. Together, they get us half way. To cross the finish line, we look to chaos magician Gordon White and the Ethereum block chain.
White's Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits allows us to speculate on the pre-history of Wigley's Derridean insights by recontextualizing the origins of architecture with new perspectives on the history of psychedelics, shamanism, star lore, the occult, and other esoteric knowledge, particularly magic. Ethereum's smart contracts allow us to make and deploy active forms into the world.
Note: there were two options for deliverables. The class unanimously decided on the following...
We will build and launch a project that interacts with the Ethereum blockchain, possibly through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Each student will contribute to various aspects of the project, including: developing the concept, writing the whitepaper, writing the smart contract for the ICO, branding and graphics, building the website, and community management and hype.
We will use Colony.io to organize our collective efforts and keep track of each students contribution. This accounting will contribute 70% to each student's final grade.
... yet, in practice, this proved too ambitious. Ultimately, the class collectively developed a definition of the architect, which each student then extensively annotated to personalize, both textually and through targeted projects that ranged from lists of quotes by and about architects to alchemical treatises to an online architecture branding agency.
One of the principal lessons of the seminar is that recent discoveries of our pre-history should serve as a reminder of how little we know of our ancient history. As such, we will not be attempting definitive accounts, nor will we be genuflecting to the canonical accounts of others. Rather, we will first scour discourse indiscriminately, sifting through heterogeneous sources as if panning for gold: solid evidence valuable beyond the context of its discovery. We will ultimately hold it up to the light of critique, but not until we have indulged our own paranoia. This is an attempt to operationalize the method Koolhaas channeled from Dalí.
Foucault codified the concept of a discursive field to map the history of ideas and meaning as they mutated through different epistemological regimes. We will use a vulgar version of his method by applying it loosely to the mapping of an emerging idea space. Our objective will be to articulate connections and coincidences across ideas generated by authors of starkly different world views and domains of expertise to speculate on the contours of a new field of thinking.
The western esoteric tradition has the opportunity to (finally) do away with the High Victorian assumptions that constitute our understanding of the origins of magical culture and rebuild atop some much better data. The picture that emerges in doing so is stunning in its implications. This is not history. This is not archaeology. This is not folklore. This is a new skill. But it is also an old one. It is not the skill of organising data points into a sequential historical narrative. It is the skill of context. Of recontextualising the Western magical tradition as it has arrived in our hands here in the twenty first century, rather than seeking to replace it wholesale with each new development, as if it were last year’s smartphone. The magicians of the Renaissance or the Natural Philosophers of Charles II’s Britain gathered observations and findings from the cutting edge research of their day to build a coherent view of their Art and their world. Just as they were, we must be polyhistors. (Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits, 2016)
Disposition is the character or propensity of an organization that results from all its activity. It is the medium, not the message. It is not the pattern printed on the fabric but the way fabric floats. It is not the shape of the game piece but the way the game piece plays. It is not the text but the constantly updating software that manages the text. Not the object form, but the active form... Detecting and developing the active forms that shape disposition is an essential skill of the urbanist in infrastructure space. (Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, 2014)
We will cull readings each week from this ever-growing long list of books, manifestoes, essays, papers, reports, articles, videos, and social media posts.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent