4.

130 syllabus

Fall 2013 SA+P MIT | SMArchS DESIGN

4.130 ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN THEORY AND METHODS:

THE AGENCY OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH
Researching the Export of American Architectural Research for the 2014 Venice Biennale
F, 2-5, room 5-231
Instructor: Ana Miljacki
miljacki@mit.edu

TA: Juan Jofre

jofre@mit.edu

THE AGENCY OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

Design as Research | Research as Design
Ten years ago the French historian of science and philosopher Bruno Latour proposed that our time is
characterized by a transition from the culture of science to the culture of research. Research, he said,
creates controversies, it does not resolve disputes, as science presumably did. And, in the last decade, all
reasonably good (hip) schools of architecture in the US and Europe advertise their promise of contribution
to the field and beyond by enumerating their research labs. But while lab may indeed be the popular
contemporary model of producing new knowledge, the discipline of architecture has relied on research
(exactly in terms in which it interests Latour) throughout modernity. Research that produces
controversies, and renders objects familiar through narrating them, is in part what draws Latour to
architecture, which, unlike science, never claimed to traffic in truths, but always in discursive bargains.
Establishing two different modes of instrumentality of research for the architectural discipline research
as design and design as research the class will address methodological questions that affect and
determine the entire spectrum of advanced work in architecture, from its most practical end in
construction, through operative criticism to contemporary hybrid modes of deploying architectural
knowledge to cultural and artistic ends.
The goals of this class are two-fold. On one end, the class will problematize research for architectural
design in methodological terms. On the other end, it will be the laboratory in which students will conduct
research directed toward the production of the American Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale. In order to
accomplish the latter, students will perform a form of research as design: by researching and narrating
the research conducted in the American architectural office over the last hundred years.

Archeology Of the US Architectural Office

Engaging Rem Koolhaass prompt for the 2014 Venice Biennale, an invitation to consider a certain kind of
flattening of architectural discourse and production through questioning the national contributions to that
trend viewed in terms of the last hundred years of modernization the class will focus on two key
issues: 1) the professionalization of architectural knowledge performed by the specifically American
market driven architectural office, and 2) the ingenuity and proliferation of ideas produced in the context
of that type of office.
At the turn of the twentieth century, European architects eager to appropriate the images and modalities
of modernization fueled the exportation of American architectural ingenuity. The traditional narrative of
this exchange describes specifically American novelty and optimization born of intelligent navigation of
the forces of modernization, testing and risk-taking. After the Second World War, the governmentally
sponsored Marshall plan (which included an architectural campaign alongside ideological and economic
plans), institutionalized the export process effectively subsidizing offices whose capacity and vision
expanded in tandem. This was the moment that the American architectural historian Henry Russell
Hitchcock described in terms of an attenuating divide in the architectural profession, specifically US, but

4.130 syllabus

with global implications. In 1947, he argued that historians and critics would have to find an appropriate
way to account for and evaluate bureaucratic architecture. A product of large-scale offices, bureaucratic
architecture, Hitchcock thought, worked well for large scale, complicated projects that had no need for
overt formal expression or representational dimension. On the other end of Hitchcocks binary divide,
smaller avant-garde enterprises still engaged in traditional forms of authoring specific formal solutions
for significant public institutions. But more than half a century later it would be hard to argue that these
two opposing ends are not both subject to the same forces of modernization, even though the argument
regarding their respective capacity to deal with scale and complexity of projects may still hold.
Furthermore, if at some point the scale of the office may have been a determining factor in its ability to
function internationally, the contemporary protocols of communication, construction and consumption
have ensured that every office taps into and contributes to the global flows of architectural knowledge. On
the historical scale the form of international architectural practice itselfand the body of work worldwide
that such US offices have produced over the past 100 yearsmight ultimately represent one of Americas
most significant contributions to architecture. The professionalization of architectural knowledge
fundamentally intertwines the market considerations like profitability and efficiency (both for architects
and in the service of their clients) with expertise on various scales of architectural know-how (from
organizational diagram, through brick, to the image of the city). We will research offices and their
purported expertise through specific projects, their media coverage, archival records, broadcasting,
uptake, and potential. And we will do this based on students personal interests in theoretical arguments
about practice and discourse, and personal (read: instrumental) needs for constructing lineages and
positions today.

DELIVERABLES:
Throughout the semester we will run a blog on Stellar to help us discuss our historical and theoretical
readings. Students will have assigned sessions for which they will help run the discussion. There will be
several formats for presenting research including collective maps. The final deliverable will be a visual and
written dossier presenting archival findings as well as a speculative historical narrative built upon those
findings. Some of the work will be transformed into exhibition material over the IAP and the Spring
semester.

REQUIREMENTS:
- Attendance is mandatory for all students enrolled in the workshop
(failure to attend the class will affect the final grade).
- Students need to complete the course assignments in a timely manner, need to be prepared to discuss
the assigned readings and are expected to actively participate in the workshop.
- The final requirement of the class is a research dossier or some other medium agreed upon by the
student and the instructors.

GRADING:
- 50% Participation in class discussions
- 50% Research and production
In all cases, the grading will be determined based on students command of disciplinary and cultural
material, conceptual clarity, and craft and care with which the deliverables (including arguments) are
produced.

CLASS SIZE AND ELIGIBILITY:

This class is required for Architectural Design SMArchs but it is also open to all other SMArch and SMACT
students, PhDs, MDes and DDes. It is open to advanced MArch students and undergraduate students with
permission of the instructor, but it will be capped at 12 students in order to ensure quality of teaching and
research.

4.130 syllabus

SCHEDULE:
1. September 6, The Prompt

2. September 13, Design as Research

Stanford Anderson Architectural Design as a System of Research Programs, Design Studies 5, no. 3, July
1984, pp. 146-150.
Jeremy Till, What is Architectural Research? Three Myths and One Model RIBA R+D paper, 2004
*Avital Ronell, Proving Grounds: On Nietzsche and the Test Drive Author(s) MLN, Vol. 118, No. 3, German
Issue, April 2003, pp. 653-669.
*Bruno Latour, From the World of Science to the World of Research, Science, 10 April 1998,
Vol. 280 no. 5361 pp. 208-209.
for reference:
Colin Rowe, Program versus Paradigm: Otherwise Casual Notes on the Pragmatic, the Typical and the Possible,
As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays: Texas, Pre-Texas, Cambridge (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1995), pp. 36-42.
Stephen Kieran, Research in Design: Planning Doing Monitoring Learning. JAE (September 2007), pp. 27-31.
Bruno Latour, Why has Critique Run Out of Steam, Critical Inquiry 30, Winter 2004.
Stan Allen, Practice vs. Project, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge,
2009).

3. September 20, Research as Design

Kazys Varnelis, Is there research in the Studio, JAE 2007.
David Solomon, Experimental Cultures: On the End of the Design Thesis and the Rise of the Research
Studio, JAE 2011.
Bart Lootsma, Reality Bites, Daidalos 69/70, 1998/99.
Bret Steele, Data(E)scape, Daidalos 69/70, 1998/99.
*Bruno Latour, From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public Making Things Public:
Atmospheres of Democracy (The MIT Press, 2005).
for reference:
Rem Koolhaas, Content (Taschen, 2004).
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 1972).
Crimson Architectural Historians http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9fsXXPYQD0
All issues of Volume magazine

4. September 27, Expertise in/of The American Office

WE HAVE TO RESCHEDULE THIS CLASS (either for September 26, or the following week)
But you can all come to The Storefront for Art and Architecture for a Press conference on 2014 Venice
Guest presentation by Michael Kubo: On the American Architectural Office
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius
Bernard Michael Boyle, Architectural Practice in America, 1865-1965 Ideal and Reality. Spiro Kostof
(ed.) The Architects: Chapters in the History of the Profession.
Sigfried Giedion, The Experiment of S.O.M., Bauen + Wohnen 12, April 1957.
SOM, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Volume XVIII, n. 1, 1950.

4.130 syllabus

Arthur Drexler, On Transformations, Skyline 1979.

Jacob Riedel, Gensler Interview, Perspecta 40: Monster, 2008.
*Peter Burger, Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the
Avant-Garde, New Literary Theory 2010, 41: 695715.
for reference:
Robert E Somol (ed.) Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America (The Monacelli Press
1997).
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978).

5. October 4, Archives, Maps and Lineages

*Michel Foucault, Preface, The Order of Things
*Fredric Jameson, Cognitive Mapping. In: Nelson, C./Grossberg, L. (ed). Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1990).
Kent Kleinman, Archiving Architecture, Archival Science 1: 321332, 2001.
for reference:
Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture (Penguin Books, 1987)
Beatriz Colomina (ed). Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x-197x (Actar,
2010)
Rem Koolhaas, Project Japan, Metabolism Talks (Taschen, 2011).
due: identify and present a research track

6. October 11, Export, Broadcasting and Uptake

(Possible Guest Visit)
Reyner Banham, Introduction, Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern
Architecture 1900-1925 (The MIT Press, 1986), pp. 1-21.
Jeffrey Cody, From U.S. Metropole to Latin American Peripheries, Exporting American Construction and
Planning to Russia, Exporting American Architecture 1870-2000 (Routledge, 2003), pp. 87-109.
for reference:
Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley (eds.). Clip Stamp Fold (Barcelona: Actar, 2010)
Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the
History of Architectural Theory (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001)
due: represent a potential (his)story with more material and based on previous weeks
comments

7. October 18, Timelines

*Fernand Braudel, History and the Social Sciences, The Long Duree, On History (The University of
Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 25-54.
Anderson, Stanford, Types and conventions in time: toward a history for the duration of change of
artifacts, Perspecta, The Yale Architectural Journal, 1982, pp. 109-118.
Manfredo Tafuri, There is no Criticism, Only History Design Book Review, n. 9, Spring 1986, pp. 8-11.
for reference:
Jarzombek, M. A, Prolegomena to critical historiography, JAE 52(4), 1991, pp. 197206.

4.130 syllabus

Colquhoun, Alan, Three kinds of historicism, Modernity and the Classical Tradition:
Architectural Essays, 1980-87, The MIT Press, 1991, pp. 331.
Bruno Latour, An attempt at A Compositionist Manifesto New Literary History 41, 2010.

8. October 25, The Last Century

due: Collective Timeline of the forces that shaped American Architecture in the last
century

9. November 1, Stories and Speculations

Readings will be assigned based on research directions and the discussion in the previous class.
due: presentation of individual findings

10. November 8
due: broadcasting proofs and bibliographies

11. November 15, Scales and Elements of Expertise

Readings assigned by students in consultation with instructor and based on research findings
(these will cover the realms of: technological innovation, organizational innovation, typological innovation,
professionalization, forms of collaboration, questions of avant-garde and rear-garde, think tanks etc.)

12. November 22, Genre: Manifesto

due: 2 texts
1) 200-500 word manifesto of your own interests (though you can respond to this question
by putting on the hat of your objects of research, or finding their statement in the same
genre)
2) 2000 word story describing your research (it can be historical and highly factual, or
speculative and projective, it can be half-fictional)

NO CLASS: November 29, TG

13. December 6, Dossier drafts due individual comments w/ Michael Kubo as guest critic

FINAL REVIEW: December 20

Due: the collective timeline and your own Dossiers.
The event will also include a pecha kucha format presentation, though you can do it
without projecting if your dossiers are visually strong.