Groundlessness

Undergraduate

Groundlessness offers an extra-disciplinary interrogation and analysis of histories, theories, and inventions of zoning, land use classification, property valuation, and air rights in the making and imagining of territories deemed urban and otherwise from the late nineteenth century (following Reconstruction in the United States) to the present. Working across media from policy to poetry, film to form, memoir to historiography, fiction to finance, Groundlessness troubles and complicates the grounds and grounding(s) of urban and environmental imaginaries. Attending to cultural, aesthetic, technological, legal, economic, and environmental conditions, this course asks how these factors shape the work of the racial as visually and spatially performed (and in part, contribute to disdain for housing the black and poor in tall towers; the difficulty with imagining folks racialized as black holding a position up in the sky). Groundlessness explores the many ways the work of constructing the built environment occurs well before and beyond the involvement of any architect; and ultimately seeks out the promise and freedoms of leaving the land behind (and below), living untethered from the land, on invented lands, unstable ground, off the ground, and up high. WR , HU , SO T 1:30pm-3:25pm