Aesthetic Subcultures: Identity, Values, and Architecture

3 units

Aesthetics is about belonging. Visual codes or styles express cultural identities and values, and they can be used to create a sense of exclusivity, separating those who get it from those who do not. For some subcultures - like punk and hip-hop - being difficult to decipher has served the goal of creating an identity in opposition to a complacent or oppressive mainstream. Some aesthetic movements - like avant-garde modernism and afrofuturism - have sought to offer visions of a better world and glimpses of how this world might be designed. This course asks: What are the aesthetic subcultures that drive architectural production today? Where did they come from? What are their motivations and how are these expressed? The underlying premise throughout the semester will be the idea that subcultures construct their own cultural spheres around shared experiences - for instance, an experience of violence that demands social justice or an environmental crisis that demands a different relationship with ecological systems. To decode the meanings and motivations behind any unique style of architecture, we need first to understand how it is situated within a historically-specific social, economic, and political system. In the modern western world, consumerism and the fashion system have been key. The first part of the course begins with the architectural consequences of the consumer revolution in 18th century England before exploring the mass production of cultural objects in the 19th century, visionary modernist movements, and the cultural fragmentation of postmodernism. The second part of the course focuses on contemporary aesthetic subcultures in architecture that have formed around new technologies, protest and justice movements, explorations of new forms of collectivity, and other phenomena. Case studies in architecture will be presented alongside key theoretical texts. Assignments will ask students decode a selected aesthetic subculture through writing as well as speculative design.