Course led by Dr Ines Weizman
About the Course
The MA Architectural History, Theory and Interpretation offers an intellectual lineage between the various creative disciplines offered at The Cass. It combines the analysis and organisation of events, curating and editing with very specific case studies that investigate architecture, politics and media.
Through various forms of research and intellectual debates the course explores multiple political, cultural, economical and urban realities in order to speculate about possible forms of intervention in the city and its discourse. The course aims to critically assess forms of knowledge about the city, its various representations and mis-representations and their impact on the public realm. Nourished by change, the city and its architecture have a dynamic condition of networked intervention. As such the analysis of spatial practices, politics and media is also a relational practice in which a multiplicity of actors and disciplines operate in a multivalent cultural field: NGOs, local associations, developers, dissidents, aspiring politicians and celebrity do-gooders.
In this course we ask how to understand urban intervention beyond the professional and epistemic boundaries of architecture. We can look at those figures in history – dictators, power brokers, liars and cheaters – that have managed to induce change without drawing a line. We also know of those dissidents who retreated into the private domain of letter writing, kitchen debate and urban fantasy. To capture the wide spectrum of possibilities for such reflective practice, our expectations and questions about architectural history need to transform, archives have to be re-visited and analysed, new media and formats of observation, dialogue and intervention have to be applied.
The course also invites international students, designers, artists and urban practitioners who are interested in joining this laboratory at The Cass to advance the critique and analysis of architecture and the city through their own expertise and research interests.
Events and conferences 2012/13
Conference
ARCHITECTURE AND THE PARADOX OF DISSIDENCE
Lecture series in Vilnius, 28th Feb – 18th April 2013
DISSIDENCE THROUGH ARCHITECTURE, Conversations about the possibilities of critical spatial practice
Publication
Ines Weizman (ed.), Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, Routledge Publisher, 2013
Archives of Architecture (a second life of volumes discarded by public libraries)
JAPAN ARCHITECT 1990-2000
A research of a decade of architecture through a reading of the journals Japan Architect
Course leader: Dr Ines Weizman.
Images
Hector Arkomanis (taught module 'Cinema and the City')
Alex Catina (taught module 'Theories')
Prof. Colin Davis
Joseph Kohlmaier (taught module 'Soundscapes of Modernity')
Dr Helen Mallinson (taught module 'Histories', 'Forgetting of Air')
Diana Periton
Dr Ines Weizman (course leader, taught module 'Interpretations', 'Concepts of Space')
Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem, Pushpa Arabindoo, Maria Ärlemo, Iain Boal, Signe Sophie Boggild, Brady Burroughs, Peter Carl, Lilian Chee, Nathaniel Coleman, Wouter Davidts, Emilio Distretti, Isabelle Doucet, Jurga Dubaraite, FAS, Hélène Frichot, Jimena de Gortari, Katja Grillner, Vanessa Grossman, Luca Guido, Sarah Handelmann, Lisbet Harboe, Tahl Kaminer, Sarah Lappin, Neena Mand, Anne Markey, Adriana Laura Massidda, Malcolm Miles, Rodrigo Millan, Carolos Molina, Ivone Santoyo Oroszco, Michael J. Ostwald, Carmen Popescu, Peg Rawes, Louis Rice, Mireille Roddier, Natalia Rowinska, Valentina Rozas, Helen Runting, Carole Schmit, Dubravka Sekulic, Tijana Stevanovic, Helen Stratford, Koen Van Synghel, Maria Theodorou, François Thiry, Pawda Tjoa, Igea Troiani, Dana Vais, Samuel Vardy, Stefaan Vervoort, Stephen Walker, Ivana Wingham, Lukasz Wojciechowski, Malin Zimm. And Alexander Brodsky, David Crowley, Keller Easterling, Felicity Scott, Srdjan Jovanovich Weiss, Eyal Weizman and Jonas Žukauskas