IMMEASURABLE SITES What methods of spatial valuation undergird the disciplines of architecture and urban design? How are these systems of measurement entangled with discursive and material regimes of racialization, ecological degradation, and coloniality? This course considers sites and practices that travel beyond disciplinary rubrics of measurement. We will examine tactics of opacity, occlusion, and abstraction, in the visual and conceptual arts; paying special attention to nonwestern concepts and sites that are illegible to the ethnographic gaze. Thinking and working against epistemologies of measurement, classification, and bordering, requires developing transdisciplinary knowledge of black studies, decoloniality, contemporary art, and cultural geography. Each week’s readings will be split in half between practices of measurement that have been central to the discipline of architecture and extra-disciplinary concepts of immeasurability. Instructor: Emanuel Admassu Columbia University GSAPP | A4047-1 Spring 2023 114 Avery Wednesdays 11:00 a.m. — 1:00 p.m.
Schedule: 1/18 – Introduction 1/25 – Nomadic Images 2/1 – Ideas Travel 2/8 – Archives of Animism 2/15 – Who is Ordinary? 2/22 – Presentations 3/1 – Presentations 3/8, 3/15 –Kinne Week & Spring Break 3/22 – (Il)legible Form 3/29 – Algorithmic Disciplines 4/5 – Beyond Measure 4/12 – Presentations 4/19 – Presentations