What is the Future of Architecture?

Catalog description

"What is the Future of Architecture?" explores historical visions of the future through built and unbuilt architecture. Inspired by the writer Amitav Ghosh's generative provocation that "the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination" (2016), this lecture course contextualizes architectural notions of the environment, climate, and nature and asks: What can histories of the future in architecture teach us about ongoing solutions and discourses surrounding the current climatic crisis? The course encourages students to reckon with normative conceptions of the built environment -- such as continuations of empire and colonialism, fossil capital, geoengineering, and other mitigation strategies regarding climate change -- and read "climate" and environments through agencies of infrastructure, technology, and grassroots movements. This survey assesses primary and secondary sources to contend with themes from political and architectural movements, postcolonial and decolonial critiques, and other theoretical frameworks from marginalized geographies and methods. Primary sources include land treaties, architectural manifestoes, professional statements, speculative designs, scientific reports, artistic genres, and speculative fiction.