Cedric Price once said that “architecture is everything architects make.” Sure, we could dismiss this as an unhelpful, overly empirical and even tautological statement. But instead, we will take it as a form of reinforcement for this class’s aim, we will take it to mean that architecture manifests itself in buildings, certainly, but also in drawings, in writing, in broadcasts, postures, experiments, social and professional organizations and modes of practice. In fact, it is the discursive, cultural, personal, historical, technological circumstances that give architecture its value, not by following some simple—one, two, base, superstructure—principle of causality, but often far more entangled routes of relation. It is far easier, of course, for an established and wise (and humorous) architect, to look back and say “architecture is everything architects make,” than it is for someone beginning in the field of architecture to feel reassured by that same statement. In this class we will not aim to fortify or fix that youthful uncertainty, but rather find ways to navigate it productively, by engaging in conversations around the objects and texts that momentarily occupy our collective attention—learning thus from one another.

In Positions, we will be open to various definitions of architecture and of criticality (others’ and our own), in order to “light up” possible paths through the discipline and the profession, both taken and previously unthinkable. To that end in this class we will acquaint ourselves with the characters, language and concerns that greet us upon entering the field in the year 2021. Their appearance in the class is not, or at least not always due to their canonical status. Sometimes they are precisely offering a counterpoint to the canon, or useful adversary, or a project that may yet prove a viable alternative to the status quo. Everything that we examine we will examine dialogically and critically, and always in order to articulate positions in relation to it.

The key objective of this seminar then, is to collectively develop languages and tools that will help us navigate a map of contemporary architectural practices— through formal reading, understanding of popular culture and politics, and by using our general grasp of the recent history of architectural thinking. Historical events that unfold around us as we go about this semester as well as your personal life experiences and knowledge are welcome participants in our conversations.

We will start by landing in the contemporary moment, and over the course of the semester we will address a series of topics traversing multiple times a timeline from the late 1970s to 2021 (the period we will think of as the contemporary even though some of it is well before your time). Each of the topics we will consider has had its related pair or triple of related concerns since the 70s, and we will define emphasis on these topics together. In order to set up each topic we consider a combination of texts and architectural work (following Price’s definition of work). As the course unfolds and as our terms/themes accumulate a map of contemporary practices and discourses emerges, allowing us to consider certain works through a variety of lenses and forcing us to invent lenses to accommodate new relationships that will inevitably emerge from our discussions.