LudLow, Colorado

This section of ARCH 5140 explores the architectural intervention as a composite assemblage (monster?) of place, materials, and narrative. As such, we approach architecture and the research that brings it into being as a geo-tectonic story (in polemic contrast to finding the solution to a functional program). Specifically, we will begin by virtually visiting the site of the Ludlow Massacre Memorial (Links to an external site.) and remotely sharing our experience of this early 20thc. coal mining camp and its surrounds with each other. The site’s physically experiential absence from our current COVID-restricted spatio-temporal field of view (Links to an external site.) requires re-imagining what we think we have learned in architecture school: site analysis, building as object, and the solidity of the world around us. “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Berman). However, even in what has been called a “post-truth era” (B. Latour) especially in the politics of climate change, we still seek “truth-spots” (T. Gieryn). The Ludlow site will serve as an origin and locus for our exploration of the networks and circuits for the release of earth-trapped carbon into industrial processes and the atmosphere, and the resultant global consequences. To the degree that we have a “program brief” it will be for a terrestrial | territorial observatory that attempts to bring the unseen (unseeable?) into view. Can architecture help us “see” the exploitation of both humans and the environment: the near-at-hand and far-afield, past and present?

Reintegrating place, materials, and narrative has often occupied scientists, artists, and architects. Our work will draw on historic and contemporary storytellers of anthropogenic modernity (Links to an external site.) and its consequences (e.g., Arjun Appadurai, Marshall Berman, Patrick Geddes, Thomas Gieryn, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Lucy Lippard, and John McNeill, among others). Specific to the discipline of architecture we will consult the works and thoughts of such figures as Alvar Aalto, Tadao Ando, Balkrishna Doshi, Kenneth Frampton, Stephen Holl, Rafael Moneo, Glenn Murcutt, Juhani Pallasma, Antoine Predock, Hashim Sarkis, Carlo Scarpa, Denise Scott-Brown, Gottfried Semper, Alberto Siza, Vladimir Tatlin, Peter Zumthor and others.

The studio will be conducted remotely but in close collaboration. All students are expected to be fully present during studio times. Skills related to hand drawing, model-making and photographic & digital image manipulation will be critically explored. All final projects will be group constructs (probably 3 students per project). I anticipate that this section will appeal to students interested in reading and critically applying design and social theory to the very concrete and place-specific cultural work of architecture. Our design inquiry and material making is exploratory, collaborative, iterative, and appreciative of sensory experience and craft. The course will likely frustrate students who are: 1) narrowly focused on the production tools of commercial building(s) -- whether BIM, scripting or algorithmic rendering, 2) ideologically attached to any specific visual style –traditional or neo-modern, or 3) adverse to the risky interplay of doubt and hope.