Research Seminar and Studio
For Walter Benjamin, writing in the early twentieth century, the urban historian was part archaeologist, part collector, and part detective, and the object of study was the modern metropolis in its monumental as well as its everyday aspects. Benjamin's methodology took inspiration from the writings of Honoré Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allen Poe, and the photographer Eugène Atget, and sought to reveal the larger tendencies of an already-historical metropolis: 19th-century Paris. Benjamin looked at the traces of material and immaterial culture embedded the urban fabric; he regarded architecture as the most important testimony to the mythology of the city, and the Paris shopping 'arcades' as the most revealing architectural form of the nineteenth century. For him, “as the principal site of commodity consumption, Paris is the quintessential modern metropolis, the home of myth.” Benjamin’s was not a banal pursuit of historical facts; rather, he sought to discover a means of engaging and analyzing the contemporary urban condition through the traces of the past.
Los Angeles is taken as the example in view of its uniquely hybrid edge conditions, situated at the western frontier of the United States, the brink of the Pacific Rim, and the bridge to Latin America. The seminar identifies the dominant forms of architecture and urbanism that characterize this relatively young city, where the competing demands of a heterogeneous and mobile population enter into dynamic interactions with the existing urban fabric. Debates about the future of Downtown—not to mention downtown districts of various municipalities throughout the greater metropolitan area—have become the focus of preservation and redevelopment efforts, while at the same time, the relative merits of sprawling suburbs which have nearly closed the gaps between San Francisco to the north and San Diego to the South are debated in the public domain.
This research seminar will explore visual and textual media to expose the sources of myth, the layers of memory, and the allegorical images that continually transform the physical fabric of the city. Like Benjamin's Paris, Los Angeles is as much the product of the social imaginary as it is a matter of urban morphology, architecture, infrastructure, scale, and image. Above all, the media has contributed to the construction of the mythology that orders the maelstrom of metropolitan Los Angeles. Participants will be encouraged to approach the urban domain through a series of often contradictory 'cross-sections', a method intended to produce a comprehensive image of the global city as a complex and irreducible entity. Applying Benjamin's useful reflections on the relation between the states of dreaming and waking, the course will focus on 'real' sites as well as those generated by literature, photography, film, and new media.
This seminar will also address the problem of generating modes of analysis--research methodologies--that are relevant to the study of the MEGALOPOLIS Los Angeles at the beginning of the 21st century. What are the most telling architectural and urban forms in our own time? What kind of urban life is being invented and cultivated in this polycentric city, where a continuous built domain may ultimately extend from the northern to the southern limits of this megalopolis?
Visits from architects and urban planners working in and around Paris will be combined with assigned readings, seminar discussions, and film screenings on Los Angeles. Students will be expected to select an a research topic from the list that will focus their research and analysis for the STUDIO NON-LIEU directed by Philippe Barriere and Eddie Can. A midterm project review is tentatively scheduled for May 7th. Final presentations of student projects are scheduled in conjunction with Jurys d’Ateliers.
No comments:
Post a Comment