Movements [M2]
“Walking, in particular drifting, or strolling, is already – within the speed culture of our time – a kind of resistance.” – Francis Alÿs
MOVEMENTS explores the animate body as a locus of knowledge and architectural capacity. We carry personal memories, physical and emotional stimuli, and other deep ancestral knowledges within our selves. Our bodily actions and proprioception in space contain multitudes of awareness, some of which we can also articulate with words, and others that remain perceptual sensations alone. In this course, you will interrogate movement as a form of kinetic knowledge through dwelling in keen observation on the active subject in space.
Our world is experiencing a series of upheavals — climatic, social, and political — within which everyday people are running, standing, marching for what they believe. A MOVEMENT, too, is a collective action, the most outward demonstration of which is putting your body in the public realm for a cause. We will focus on the modality of walking as a body action of particular political resonance. People the world over have utilized walking as a form of resistance — walking carries legacies of hope, transformation, meditation, spirituality, opposition, ritual, and the forces of change. We center as our subject not the city’s passive grifter, the flâneur, but instead someone willing to proclaim, intervene, and continually maintain their right to exist within the city at all.
As an act of translation, architecture creates notations, marks, texts, and documents that represent something else. Like a musical score, various notes combine to form sections of experience, fragments suspended in media and time. Our documents speak most loudly and broadly when built, after the representations are interpreted and made real as 3-dimensional form. MOVEMENT, then, speaks to the division of this notational work, namely the tripartite structure of this course as we traverse from Walking to Drawing to Building. Students will be encouraged to take walks and produce artifacts (short films and drawings) that serve as remembrances of these activities. This source material will inform designs for a three-dimensional architecture developed in the latter half of the course.
Our meetings will be guided by participatory activities, guest lectures, reading discussions, and collective critique regarding the artifacts made, acknowledging that architecture is a practice in a continual state of becoming. Jennifer will be available for all class sessions, which will meet T/Th from 2-6pm EST.
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