So Extraterritorial

Architects always construct ‘the site’ in advance of ‘the project’. Often they are building out of general information and comprehensions and biases. If you do not adopt the notion of constructing (reconstructing, continuously) the site then you are consuming it as an artefact already pre-packaged for you.

So this semester is about critical methods for the (de)construction of site before project and design work. This involves the recasting of ‘edges’, reassembling ‘territory’, and reconfiguring the ‘unimaginable.’

This requires wide reading of current discourses around site, territory, and worlding - and we will draw from architectural, cognate, and antagonistic disciplines. It also involves a critical approach to the tools used to form sites, both analogue + digital; model-making, physical/geodetic survey approaches, GIS/visualisation and suggests manners in which these can be subverted in the context of other projects.

Finally it tests the critical production (register, image, language, criticality) that sits in the practice of (re)reading and (re)producing site.

Deliverables

  • Lively discussion of texts & critical reflection on these engagements = reading / thinking / talking
  • Physical experiments in making collective territories = mediating / making / modelling
  • Exploration & documentation of the construction of specific sites = sourcing / collating / revising
  • Speculative mapping production = reassembling / refining / writing