Construction Ecologies in the Anthropocene

How should designers understand both their complicities and their capabilities in the complex and contested present? Is it possible to reconsider our disciplinary roles and remake our processes within a climatically relevant time frame? How might we envision a world worthy of the matter and energy borrowed from it? This course navigates histories, theories, technics, and ecologies of design and construction while seeking myriad opportunities for revitalized architectural enchantment commensurate with the existential narratives of the conflicted concept Anthropocene.

The course investigates diverse perceptions of the proposed Anthropocene, spanning geological, historical, and cultural dimensions of human causality with which the neologism is primarily concerned. As scholarship reveals, scientific attributions of this causality are invariably void of political or spatial neutrality; accordingly, debates abound as to whether an acknowledgment of anthropogenic provenance ultimately inspires human change and ecological reparations or merely embodies the latest epistemic and ontological illusion of human and non-human separation that the term itself only serves to entrench.

Contemporary architectural documentation of built environments amidst anthropogenic climate change is similarly entangled by rifts between human determination and technological determinism stemming from the scale and severity of the environmental harm caused by design professions, and concurrent appeals for sustainable transformation requested of them. This entanglement of practices and pedagogies is engendered by a prevailing perception of buildings as autonomous objects whose a priori form-making obscures their terrestrial substrates of matter, energy, and labor that acts of design and construction presuppose but seldom engage.

To challenge the illusion of architectural autonomy this course provokes acts of storytelling and image-making that unearth hidden narratives of historical and contemporary case studies through a series of thematic inquiries: humans, knowledge, energy, value, motion, matter, climate, machines, culture, care, and time. Such narratives, or construction ecologies, inspired by the idea of geostory from Bruno Latour, elucidate the spatial and temporal boundaries of architectural practice and enable designers to question and perceive anew buildings and building as inherently open, socio-ecological processes. Ultimately, this course asks students to pose questions about how and why built environments appear and disappear from the world, which people and places touch and are touched by their construction practices, and how the lives of those people and the earth are changed in the process.

The course is structured as a seminar with weekly readings and lectures, during which students will participate in group discussions. Workshop assignments will explore diverse forms of research, documentation, and illustration, including access to relevant software. Case studies and guest lectures will illuminate stories and case studies of both existing built environments as well as the design of contemporary construction ecologies from architecture practices and building cultures around the world. Students, working individually or in pairs, will select their own projects to study and manifest themes from the semester.

Projects should be highly researched, graphically illuminating, and critically informed by the readings and topics discussed in class. Projects may be coupled with studio projects or other courses as long as original work is created to offer new dimensions to the components, assemblies, buildings, landscapes, and/or processes being considered. This course is open to all eligible students at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation as well as students in other schools and programs throughout Columbia University.