PhD Debates

Marina Lathouri with visiting speakers / Term 2

 

The Debates, a joint MA History and Critical Thinking and PhD seminar, provide a venue for exchange of ideas and arguments. External speakers are invited every week, to position multiple voices and make possible a process of thinking in common, by definition a pedagogical practice different from the seminar or the lecture. The sessions are open to other students who wish to participate in the discussions.

New technologies and modes of design, and different forms of production have prompted elaborate arguments on economic policies, organisational models, environmental strategies and sustainable development patterns. There seems to be, however, a lack of reflection on the fundamental question of architecture as a composite form of knowledge with specific traits, and a distinct set of practices, yet in difficult connections with cultural economies and material configurations. Processes involved in the constitution of these multiple territories – professional, disciplinary, cultural and legal – and the negotiation of frontiers – conceptual, practical and technical – are proposed here essentially as a dispute over their proper locus.

Is it possible to proceed through a critical body of architectural references, existing or to be constituted, in order to engage existing material organisations and their institutional frameworks? Is it possible that the various regimes of the architectural project might still enable us to rethink conceptions of space, conflicts of appropriation and norms of use nearing the juridical delimitations of public and private domains? These among other questions will be discussed from different standpoints, with the visiting speakers as well as tutors and students from within and outside the school.

The series will conclude with presentation and discussion of students’ on-going research and work.

 

 

16-18 October 2.00pm EmTech Studio

The Scientific Method is an evolving set of procedures based on systematic observations and measurements, the formulation of ideas (hypotheses) and predictions from those observations that are tested by experiment, the subsequent modification of the hypotheses and further experimentation until there is no distance between the hypothesis, prediction and observed results of the experiment.

Design Research is a unique class of inquiry that may include some combination from the larger set of principles of form and behaviour, integrated knowledge from the natural or cultural sciences, a specified degree of mutability such as a relational model capable of adaptation to differing circumstances or environments, testable propositions and principles of implementation, and an expository design (conceptual, physical or computationally simulated) to be used for testing and evaluation.

Seminar presentations and discussions recommended for PhD and Graduate students, and are open to all students.

There are 6 seminars in the series, 4 in the first term and 2 in the second term.

 

1. The Scientific Method and Design Science

Hypothesis, Theory, Law, Model, Evidence (experimental/empirical),Quantitive and Qualitative and Mixed methods, Reasoning(logic and styles of arguments) – Inductive,Deductive and Adductive

2. Anatomy of a Literary Review for a Paper, Dissertation and Thesis in the Sciences
3. History of Design Science
4. A Design Science research projects (PhD level) – anatomy, methods and models

 

Next term 5 and 6. Invited guests to present a funded (design science) and completed research project and an exegesis of its documentation.

 

Dr. Michael Weinstock, RIBA, FRSA

Director Research and Development

Director Emergent Technologies and Design

Architectural Association, London

PhD Program ‘City/Architecture’

Fall Semester 2017

 

The seminar will focus on a critical history of domestic architecture from its origins to the present.

Why we live in houses? Why has this become the predominant way of living? Why has the history of housing always been a history of crisis? Why has domestic space always been a tyrannical place? Why has domestic space always been violent? Why is the real ‘state of exception’ the one that takes place within domestic space? Why does barbarism begins at home? Why within domestic space are we always in debt with something or someone? Why we will never been safe within our homes? The seminar will attempt to answer these questions.

The house as a specific mode of dwelling originates in part with a desire for stability. As many anthropologists have noted, if there is a fundamental character of the human being, it is his constant feeling of not being at home. For this reason, we can argue that the invention of the house as an architectural apparatus is motivated not only by the need for protection from a hostile territory but also by a desire to settle and to give ritual form to life. A ritual is a set of actions performed according to a prescribed order. Its function is to provide an orientation and continuity on which patterns of behavior can be established and preserved. If for early nomadic societies to live meant to confront extreme environmental conditions, the house offered a way to crystallize a routine against the chronic unpredictability of existence. For this reason, the first forms of housing were also temples where humans and gods were supposed to live together. The ritualization of life fused material existence and spiritual transcendence within the same place, making early forms of domestic space a fixed point within the open-ended space of the natural environment. Once the house became a fixed point, it also became a governmental space that defined specific gender and social roles. This practice demonstrated a desire for occupational rights and the reproduction of social relationships across generations.

As stable form the house inevitably becomes a way to occupy and claim ownership of a place, as well as a space for the care of its members. It is from these premises that the house became oikos and domus.  Both words do not refers to house as building but as form of association. The house as oikos is the place of oikonomia, or household management. According to Aristotle the household is made of three kinds of relationships: the despotic relationship between master and slave, the conjugal relationship between husband and wife, and the parental relationship between parent and child. For Aristotle, the defining relationship of the oikos is the despotic relationship between master and slave, wherein the slave’s purpose is to answer the master’s command.  What the oikos manages is the reproduction of its members by ensuring the laboring necessary laboring activities necessary to the maintenance of the family: cooking, cleaning, raising kids etc. The seminal paradox of the oikos is that although it is assumed a non-political space, clearly distinct from the political space of the polis, the polis can only exist only through the laboring of the oikos. This paradox is acknowledged by Aristotle himself who devoted the first two book of his Politics to the functioning of the oikos. Reproduction and the maintenance of biological life is thus the foundation of political life, and yet since antiquity domestic labor been hidden and downgraded in the silent and enclosed space of the oikos, excluded from the public visibility of political life.  It is precisely the artificial separation between reproduction and politics that is at the origin of the modern distinction of public and private space. With the expulsion of the workspace from the modern dwelling, the latter is rendered as the space of ‘intimate relationships’ the temple of ‘privacy’ and thus as the exclusive domain of the family. In this way reproduction is made a ‘private’ unwaged activity clearly distinct from remunerated work and politics. This phenomenology of the household had a tremendous impact on the history of domestic space, which has been seldom studied systematically in terms of architecture. Following the feminist critique of the household, in the last decade there has been a renewed interest towards the relationship between issues of gender and the architecture of domestic space. Yet this interest has often taken the form of very specific case studies and almost never of a radical reconsideration of what is the very ontological foundation of the idea of home. With this seminar we intend to open a space of radical critique of the idea of domestic space in the form of a history of its making from ancient to contemporary times.

 

1^st session / September 27

10 am

The housing and the Ritualization of Life

 

2^nd session / October 11

10 am

The house as Governmental apparatus

 

3^rd session / October 18

2.30 pm

The Oikos

 

4^th session / October 25

2.30 pm

The Domus

 

5^th session / November 1

10 am

The Invention of the Room

 

6^th session / November 8

2.30 pm

Housing and Primitive Accumulation

 

7^th session / November 15

2.30 pm

The Architecture of Well-Tempered Austerity: The Origin of Workers’ Houses

 

8^th session / November 22

2.30 pm

Domestic Labor and the Contemporary House

 

November 29, 10 am; Tutorials and rehearsals

December 6, 10 am: Final Event with Presentations with PhD students

 

Evening ‘Guest’ Seminars

25 October, 6.30 pm; Adrian Lahoud

8 November, 6.30 pm; Eric Rogers

Date TBC; Andreas Rumpfhuber

 

ALL ROOMS TBC – will be communicated as soon as we have confirmation.