MAA02 22/23 Theory and Advanced Knowledge

The last few years have confirmed the evidence of a striking change of paradigms in the definition of our spaces of relation, interaction and sociability. These transformations are intimately associated with the embodied and accelerated growth of the technological capacity to process information, increase communication and multiply differential definitions of our environment(s). However, they are also connected with the difficulties to mitigate and even assume the progress of climate change and the inequalities in terms of gender, class, age, species and origin that it implies. Perhaps more than ever, the future is in exodus and exile.

Taking this analysis as a base camp, the seminar will investigate the new theoretical frameworks and challenges that, in the context of advanced architecture, this new decade will face. The term “investigation” comes from the Latin investigare, which derives from vestigium, meaning fingerprint. On the one hand, to investigate is equivalent to “going in pursuit of the fingerprint of something”, that is to say, “to go after the track of something” in order to discover it. On the other hand, to investigate also means to explore an uncertain epistemological domain in order to increase the field of knowledge on a certain matter.

This seminar will have two main parts. The first one will be delivered in the format of lectures, and will consist in the presentation and discussion of arguments connected to the previous analysis. This will be the base from which the second part of the seminar will depart; delivered in the format of desk crits and with the students as main protagonists, this part will consist in the invention and cultivation of a fictional dialogue involving different characters that, in light of the bibliography that is adequate to each one of the teams, debate some of the key substantial questions that populate the multidisciplinar landscape in which advanced architecture operates today.  

The course will be delivered in the format of lectures, workshops and critical discussions. However, the target does not consist in reaffirming given positions, but in constructing a critical approach towards Advanced Architecture that on the one side, enters in conversation with the interests of the students, and, on the other side, focuses on how our present conditions transcends, expands, increases, interrupts, deviates or insists on the main concepts with which our present condition can be thought.

Credits: Xenobot, 2019

Credits:  Upsala Glacier, 2020

Learning Objectives

At course completion the student will:

1. Implement and account for the complexity of the different phases of the whole process of an academic investigation;
2. Critically analyse and write  texts and documents;
3. Develop analytical thoughts, conclusions and reasoning during the investigations;
4. Know- how necessary to be aware, conduct and propose the theoretical principles that propel a design research;
5. Write and present a theoretical conversation that demands to understand various postures and the arguments that each one of them maintain with respect to a contemporary issue directly or indirectly connected to architecture.