Way Beyond Bigness...or Towards a Watershed Architecture

3 units

2015 marked the 10- and 20- year anniversaries of two seminal events that have challenged architects' relationships to large scale, complex societal issues: 1) the publishing of the S,M,L, XL in October 1995 that featured Rem Koolhaas' manifesto of Bigness; and, 2) the landfall of Hurricane Katrina just outside of New Orleans in August 2005 that catapulted fields of design into an unprecedented post-disaster context. Students will reconcile these two disciplinary jolts by understanding these seemingly incongruous snapshots of history as jumping off points for new modes for architectural activism and opportunism. Students will design a manifesto, in newspaper format, for a future-based discipline of architecture that sails uncharted realms that are Way Beyond Bigness. This will require the simultaneous submersion and assertion of architecture within other disciplines; the formulation of alternate modes of representations for emerging practice-based models; the blurring of academic and professional agendas in the urgency of activism; and, the integration of multiple scales, interest groups and agendas in ridiculously complex and antagonistic situations. Underpinning Bigness and Hurricane Katrina will be additional case studies, guest lectures and field trips that cover: CIAM and the emergence of urban design; Koolhaas' thesis and OMA's early practice; mega-scale urban renewal projects in St. Louis; contemporary investigations into territorial scales of design; and, multiple scales of contemporary, integrated Water-based designs, post-Katrina efforts and beyond. This course fulfills the History/Theory Case Studies elective requirement.