Architecture and Agency

Catalog description

If buildings consume vast resources and are often embedded in extractive systems of material and labor, how can the agency of architecture be deployed to consider other forms of thinking and praxis? What tactics, strategies, manifestos, and actions can architects deploy to resist, upend, destabilize or reinvent normative mechanisms of architectural production? How do such practices seek new modes of conceiving the architectural project and its concomitant processes; radically reinvent the brief, site, program, material or tectonic capabilities? This course will consider agency simultaneously through historical and contemporary forms of praxis as well as theories that inform them. Course Website: http://soa.cmu.edu