New Geographies Lab Seminar: Territorial Tropes

The New Geographies lab seminar explores new potentials for architecture at a larger territorial scale. It caters primarily to students conducting their thesis research in the lab but will be open to a limited number of students whose research interests and skills are compatible with those focused on in the lab. Hashim Sarkis should be contacted for more information on compatibility.

This fall, the seminar will be focusing on extracting new tropes out of the territories surrounding historical cities in the eastern Mediterranean and using these tropes to organize new metropolitan regions. A parallel aim is to reconsider the very categories of city, metropolis, and territory and to propose new organization categories.

The seminar will start with readings on urban territories, from historians, geographers, and urbanists and will then proceed to an in-depth examination of four historical cities and their regions, namely Cairo-Alexandria, Istanbul-Marmara, the Levantine coast, and Athens-Attica Region. The emphasis will be on developing hybrid tropes combining artifacts such as roads, viaducts, walls or canals with geographic elements such as coastlines, valleys, and hills.

The seminar meets on Fridays between 2 and 5.