Architecture
Overview
Architecture at Bard builds its pedagogy around a concern for the present, an acute attention to structural inequalities, and a longing for other futures. The curriculum frames architecture as an art form and an argument—a situated aesthetic spatial practice whose propositions aim to reconfigure our collective present toward more just futures. The program builds across architectural cultures, design techniques, histories, and propositions to equip students with an expansive and experimental approach toward the field that simultaneously opens paths for engaging other disciplines spatially. The program teaches students that architecture is a site for transformative, insurgent spatial and material possibilities with which to imagine worlds otherwise.
Requirements
To moderate in Architecture, students must complete two Analytical Spatial Practices courses (Architecture 111 and Architecture 211, a new course); and two Discourses on Space courses (Art History and Visual Culture 125 or 126, and an Architecture elective). Additionally, they must present a portfolio of work to date, a brief essay that reflects on the work in the portfolio and speculates on the student’s future intellectual development within architecture, and a representative work from an elective course on space. Graduation requirements include a choice of either a total of two Analytical Spatial Practices courses and three Design Studio-Seminars (design-focused path), or three Analytical Spatial Practices courses and two Design Studio-Seminars (research-focused path); two Discourses on Space courses; one Open Practices Workshop; and the Senior Project.
Course Clusters
Structurally, the curriculum is composed of four families of courses that build upon this concept.
- Analytical Spatial Practices (ASP) courses introduce architectural practices and techniques within a socio-political field. They harness methods of design and representations of space as analytical tools to pose challenging environmental, social, and political questions.
- Design Studio-Seminars (DSS) are conceived as a hybrid studio model that situates the practice of creative design work within a broader, transdiscursive series of lectures, readings and discussions around a given question.
- Discourses on Space (DS) position architecture as a way of understanding the world beyond and below the single building. These elective seminars and lecture courses share a scope that interrogates the production of space and questions the social, material, and historical structures that animate the ways in which we inhabit the world.
- Open Practices Workshops (OPW) are intensive, 2-credit, one-month-long studio courses that invite emerging and renowned external practitioners and thinkers to expose students to a variety of contemporary practices and modes of architectural design.
The curriculum builds a pedagogical sequence that cuts across the four course clusters to encourage common points of inquiry and give disciplinary and methodological progression over the duration of the program.
- Planetary Practice: Recognizing issues like climate change brings to the fore the trans-scalar relations that directly tie buildings, bodies, cities and ecosystems together. In this context, the planetary lens shifts our view of architecture from the isolated object to the structurally situated and historically entangled design practice—an art form that necessarily cuts across and interrelates multiple scales, disciplines, bodies and actors.
- Constituencies: Building on an inter-scalar understanding of architecture, the second phase in the sequence grounds architectural design and discourse in the spatial concerns of specific social groups, movements and struggles. It opens a critical framework by which to develop projects alongside various groups, organizations or actors that directly address issues such as spatial justice, housing rights, gentrification, spatial inequalities of gender and race.
- Collective Futures: The final phase of the sequence mobilizes the intellectual maturity, design skills and technical agility of the students to approach architecture as a site of open experimentation in building collective futures. This phase is the most methodologically open and intellectually challenging of the three. It aims to empower students to explore the capacity of design as a means to imagine realities of collective spatial life otherwise.
Note: The Architecture Program does not offer an accredited professional degree. Students who wish to proceed to a professional graduate degree program are encouraged to take Calculus I (MATH 141) and Introduction to Physics I (PHYS 141). They are also encouraged to discuss entry requirements for graduate programs with their advisers.
Program Website:
https://arch.bard.eduFaculty:
Ross Exo AdamsBetsy Clifton
Michael Robinson Cohen
Peter L'Official
Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee
Ivan L. Munuera
Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco
Olga Touloumi