Student reference material

TECHNOLOGY
ARCH 7000-T30 | Wednesdays, 12:30 PM - 5:15 PM
All the Buildings Along the Pembina Highway: an urban design study
Brian Rex

Some architecture is bigger than a building.  Some architecture isn’t primarily made of building stuff.  How do we make sense of large scale infrastructural architectures?
 
One way to understand the urban fabric of Winnipeg is by defining its infrastructures (components) across time and how they’ve come together (assembly) in different times.  Using the vernacular traces, lines, lanes, paths, promenades, bounds, properties, lots, spaces, intersections, easements, blocks, fields, swaths, bands, parks, zones, infrastructures, neighbourhoods, and geometries evident in our studies of the city, we get a sense of both how Winnipeg is and how Winnipeg seems to have gotten this way.
 
We are going to perform an architectural analysis on a vernacular place larger than a building by drawing on historical records, by documenting the place as it is, and by building maps from contemporary data.  All this is edited together into a taxonometric model that reveals underlying systems and orders defining the place across time.
 
20th Century Practices of Looking at the Vernacular Landscape
Ed Ruscha
Hilla & Bernd Becher
Robert Smithson
Denise Scott Brown & Robert Venturi
 
Pembina Highway, and all the Winnipeg river roads (such as Portage and St-Mary’s roads), are an urban device quite unique to this city. Winnipeg river roads and their enclosing river lot systems have grown into the dominant block and street geometries of the city.  At its core, it is not a cartesian city like so many of its prairie neighbours.  In Winnipeg the river, river lots, river road, and railroad form an intricate weave and irregularly cross-sectional dance wherever we look.  There’s both some Montréal and St-Louis in the river lot genetics.  Pembina Highway is a monumentally common experience.  Its exactly the kind of space that Jane Jacobs feared, that Scott Brown & Venturi learned from, Ed Ruscha deadpan documented, the Bechers photographed head-on, and Robert Smithson mythologized.  We will pick up their lenses to look at this place as well and we will look to an amazing spate of recent architectural urban design publications as models of production.
 
Contemporary Studies of Vernacular Urban Fabric
Robert Somol, Alex Lehnerer, & Jayne Kelley’s The Western Town from 2014
Jallon, Napolitano, & Boutté’s Paris Hausmann: A Model’s Relevance from 2017
Keith Krumweide’s Atlas of Another America from 2017
Joan Busquets & Dingliang Yan’s Urban Grids from 2019
 
Pembina Highway seems to be free of meaning.  It is never the same cross section in any two places yet its still all the same when we drive down it.  Its specifically generic.  Everything along it seems to exist in graduated ranges of type rather than discrete zones.  In this five week tech topics course we will find the morphogenesis of this artifact of the city and we’ll break it down into a system of constituent parts as a way of telling its story and giving it meaning.

HISTORY & THEORY
ARCH 7030-T19 | Wednesdays, 8:30 AM to 12:15 PM
Theory of Biomimetic Design
Mercedes Garcia-Holguera

This is an introductory level course where students will explore the principles of biomimetic design and their application to architectural products. Students will learn about biologically inspired projects and materials, and will study current methods and tools used in academic and professional venues. Participants in this course will have the opportunity to apply the lessons learned in a self-directed biomimetic project.

Overview: This course introduces students to the importance and influence of cinema in constructing and comprehending urban environments. Addressing cities in an international context (Europe, Latin and North America, Asia, and North Africa) this seminar will provide a structured and historical overview of seminal filmic representations of urban pasts, presents, and futures. ‘Cinematic’ cities address films in which the city serves not just as background, but in which the city plays an active role in narrative construction. The course provides students with the knowledge of ‘seeing’ cinema as both an interpretive art form and an investigative tool. Cinematic cities are ‘framed’ as spaces of hope, desire, danger, transgression, conflict, or reconciliation. These ‘frames’ are reflections of power, gender relations, social justice or injustice; generational, national or racial conflict; center and margin, ‘light’ and ‘dark’, ‘above’ and ‘below’. Deployed in relation to various social and political agendas, these constitute an ‘urban imaginary’ ranging from ‘Sex and the City’, to ambiguous and fluid sites of a racialized or sexualized ‘other’, to contested sites of contagion, crime and combat. These perceptual ‘soft factors’ embody and expand on design intentions across urban, architectural, interior, and landscape narratives; narratives intersecting individual, social and cultural fears and aspirations spanning from the dystopian to the utopian.

Deliverables: Attendance, film screenings, a weekly one-page review of a selected scene of the viewed film, discussion participation and a term paper constitute the course requirements. The paper will focus on either one film of significance and its intersection with an urban environment, or it may be a comparative study of two films. Individual topics will be developed in consultation with Prof. Stern. Students with an interest in urban photography are also welcomed.

Questions: Are always welcome, please don’t be shy. For students having any pertinent enquiries, please feel free to contact me at my email address: ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

Instructor: Ralph Stern has taught on cinematic representation at the Technical University Berlin, the University of the Arts Berlin, Columbia University, Yale University, M.I.T., the Cities Program at the London School of Economics, and the University of Manitoba among others. He has published on cinematic representation in the AA Files and Cinema Journal among other publications. His own photographic work has been exhibited and published in numerous venues in Europe and North America.
 

As you know, most of what the architect has by tradition been known to provide probably can be provided today by others more efficiently and to the point. What has always interested me is not what the architect can provide that others can also provide (which is a sort of parallelism), but that which only the architect can provide. And I believe strongly now, more than ever, that only the architect can provide that which can affect the spirit. Spirit is a huge, amorphic word, but anything less, or any pursuit or study or investigation that doesn’t move to that central issue—I was going to say irrelevant—but it’s not architecture. ― John Hejduk in Architectuur en Verbeelding

Design is all about desire, but strangely this desire seems almost subject-less today, or at least lack-less; that is, design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority - an apotheosis of the subject that is also its disappearance. Poor little rich man: he is 'precluded from all future living and striving, developing and desiring' in the neo-Art Nouveau world of total design and Internet plenitude.
― Hal Foster in Design and Crime

There is no architecture without spirit and imagination. There are many overlapping factors that make up the associations between art & architecture. Artists often have a great interest in architecture (Piet Mondrian, Dan Graham, Tadashi Kawamata), while architects practice as artists as well (Le Corbusier, Will Alsop, Diller & Scofidio). Critic Hal Foster calls this short-circuit the “Art-Architecture Complex.” Foster uses terms like “encounter” and “connection” to describe the recent relationship between art and architecture to designate the many ensembles where art and architecture are juxtaposed and/or combined, sometimes with art in (what was once considered) the space of architecture, sometimes with architecture in (what was once considered) the place of art. Such ensembles might be the rule in traditions in the West and elsewhere, and the modernist moment of a relative separation of the arts the exception. By using the term “complex” Foster indicates how the capitalist subsumption of the culture into the economy often prompts the repurposing of such art-architecture combinations as points of attraction and/or sites of display, hence public art, installation art, etc.   

While historically architecture has been associated with other grand artforms (music, painting, and sculpture), after the second world war architecture gradually distanced itself from this tradition to become more of a service provider to the construction industry, defaulting to a more consumeristic role. In this process architecture lost its connection to art, phenomenology, and poetry. The integral relationship between art & architecture has been for the past four decades experiencing a new renaissance of recovering architecture’s intrinsic quality as an art form, and a result not only of an individual’s or a collective’s pragmatic needs, but to reclaim the role of architecture as a poetic act, resulting from one’s imagination, and reaching people’s spirit. This topics course will discuss the relationship art-architecture through projects and texts, providing a critical forum to guide anyone to establish personal design strategies to bring imagination and spirit back into the project. The course will include a tour to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, where one of the classes will take place in “Tapume”.

Overview: This course introduces students to the importance and influence of cinema in constructing and comprehending urban environments. Addressing cities in an international context (Europe, Latin and North America, Asia, and North Africa) this seminar will provide a structured and historical overview of seminal filmic representations of urban pasts, presents, and futures. ‘Cinematic’ cities address films in which the city serves not just as background, but in which the city plays an active role in narrative construction. The course provides students with the knowledge of ‘seeing’ cinema as both an interpretive art form and an investigative tool. Cinematic cities are ‘framed’ as spaces of hope, desire, danger, transgression, conflict, or reconciliation. These ‘frames’ are reflections of power, gender relations, social justice or injustice; generational, national or racial conflict; center and margin, ‘light’ and ‘dark’, ‘above’ and ‘below’. Deployed in relation to various social and political agendas, these constitute an ‘urban imaginary’ ranging from ‘Sex and the City’, to ambiguous and fluid sites of a racialized or sexualized ‘other’, to contested sites of contagion, crime and combat. These perceptual ‘soft factors’ embody and expand on design intentions across urban, architectural, interior, and landscape narratives; narratives intersecting individual, social and cultural fears and aspirations spanning from the dystopian to the utopian.

Deliverables: Attendance, film screenings, a weekly one-page review of a selected scene of the viewed film, discussion participation and a term paper constitute the course requirements. The paper will focus on either one film of significance and its intersection with an urban environment, or it may be a comparative study of two films. Individual topics will be developed in consultation with Prof. Stern. Students with an interest in urban photography are also welcomed.

Questions: Are always welcome, please don’t be shy. For students having any pertinent enquiries, please feel free to contact me at my email address: ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

Instructor: Ralph Stern has taught on cinematic representation at the Technical University Berlin, the University of the Arts Berlin, Columbia University, Yale University, M.I.T., the Cities Program at the London School of Economics, and the University of Manitoba among others. He has published on cinematic representation in the AA Files and Cinema Journal among other publications. His own photographic work has been exhibited and published in numerous venues in Europe and North America.
 

Overview: This course introduces students to the importance and influence of cinema in constructing and comprehending urban environments. Addressing cities in an international context (Europe, Latin and North America, Asia, and North Africa) this seminar will provide a structured and historical overview of seminal filmic representations of urban pasts, presents, and futures. ‘Cinematic’ cities address films in which the city serves not just as background, but in which the city plays an active role in narrative construction. The course provides students with the knowledge of ‘seeing’ cinema as both an interpretive art form and an investigative tool. Cinematic cities are ‘framed’ as spaces of hope, desire, danger, transgression, conflict, or reconciliation. These ‘frames’ are reflections of power, gender relations, social justice or injustice; generational, national or racial conflict; center and margin, ‘light’ and ‘dark’, ‘above’ and ‘below’. Deployed in relation to various social and political agendas, these constitute an ‘urban imaginary’ ranging from ‘Sex and the City’, to ambiguous and fluid sites of a racialized or sexualized ‘other’, to contested sites of contagion, crime and combat. These perceptual ‘soft factors’ embody and expand on design intentions across urban, architectural, interior, and landscape narratives; narratives intersecting individual, social and cultural fears and aspirations spanning from the dystopian to the utopian.

Deliverables: Attendance, film screenings, a weekly one-page review of a selected scene of the viewed film, discussion participation and a term paper constitute the course requirements. The paper will focus on either one film of significance and its intersection with an urban environment, or it may be a comparative study of two films. Individual topics will be developed in consultation with Prof. Stern. Students with an interest in urban photography are also welcomed.

Questions: Are always welcome, please don’t be shy. For students having any pertinent enquiries, please feel free to contact me at my email address: ralph.stern@umanitoba.ca

Instructor: Ralph Stern has taught on cinematic representation at the Technical University Berlin, the University of the Arts Berlin, Columbia University, Yale University, M.I.T., the Cities Program at the London School of Economics, and the University of Manitoba among others. He has published on cinematic representation in the AA Files and Cinema Journal among other publications. His own photographic work has been exhibited and published in numerous venues in Europe and North America.
 

HISTORY/THEORY
ARCH 7030 | Wednesday
Theatres of Architectural Imagination
Lisa Landrum

This course explores spaces and agencies of architectural imagination through research and theatrical experimentation. Students will study spatial practices of contemporary architects and theatre artists and learn about influences of performing arts on architectural history, theory and design. Through collaborative improvisation, students will invent stories, staged as multi-media micro-events and framed by questions. In what ways is architecture a performing art? How are architectural and theatrical representation interrelated? Research extends themes from the recent Theatres of Architectural Imagination Symposium and Archimagination events for the 2021 Venice Biennale.

TECHNOLOGY
ARCH 7010 | Wednesday, 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM
Bending Active: Exploring Dynamic Assemblies in Flexible Structures
Lancelot Coar

This course will dive into the dynamic world of Bending Active structures, assemblies of axial elements that self-organize in a reciprocal dance between the actions of the builder and the reactions of the elastic linear elements being shaped. While the traditions of these building systems are based in physical and empirical experimentation the recent rise in digital and parametric design tools now allows us to examine these structures with greater dexterity and more open-ended assembly explorations.

By incorporating a balance of both digital* and physical experimentation, students in this course will create their own bending active structures at a range of scales. We will work in partnership with the FABLab to use new customized digital tools they have developed using Rhinoceros and Grasshopper and 3D printed connection details to assemble these speculative systems in the material world.

*No previous experience is needed using Rhinoceros or Grasshopper to take this course.

HISTORY/THEORY
ARCH 7020-T20 | Wednesday, 8:30 AM to 12:15 PM
Decolonizing Design: Technology and Indigenous Knowledge Part A
Honoure Black

Students will research how Indigenous knowledge, art, and technique impact contemporary architectural methods.  The aim is to introduce Indigenous ways of knowing through a land-focused lens, introducing connections to architectural technology and processes.  The design research will be directed by lectures, workshops, and individual and group discussions.  Each student will entangle their investigation(s) and tease out a thoughtful design reaction.  Students will be encouraged to accelerate the boundaries of analogue and digital methods as they create interventions by blending Western and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Image: Birch Bark Canoe Detail - https://canoemuseum.ca/2016-12-2-looking-closely-treatment-of-a-birch-bark-canoe-part-one/

HISTORY/THEORY
Wednesday, 1:30 PM to 5:15 PM, 216, Arch2
Drawing on the Modern
Terri Fuglem

This seminar/workshop course will examine the non-objective, abstract, and visionary drawings made by architects in the modern era as a corollary to practice. Students will study historic and contemporary examples of drawings through research and graphical analysis/emulation. The major assignment will be either a series of drawings relating to the students’ studio (or thesis) project or an essay investigating the work of an architect of the student’s choosing.

TECHNOLOGY
Wednesday, 1:30 PM to 5:15 PM
Hands on Masonry
Ted Landrum

This course covers the awe-inspiring history and future of masonry, together with wide-ranging  principles, precedents and concerns. Coursework includes a hands-on masonry workshop and a field trip to a stone quarry shop. Students meet industry experts; lay bricks; inspect full scale mock-ups and materials; and review detailed shop drawings produced by master masons. Students present a variety of readings on masonry traditions and innovations, and assemble their individual research in a final booklet.

TECHNOLOGY
ARCH 7010-T34 | Wednesday, 8:30 AM to 12:15 PM
Decolonizing Design: Technology and Indigenous Knowledge (Part B)
Shawn Bailey

Students will research how Indigenous knowledge, art, and technique impact contemporary architectural methods.  The aim is to introduce Indigenous ways of knowing through a land-focused lens, introducing connections to architectural technology and processes.  The design research will be directed by lectures, workshops, and individual and group discussions.  Each student will entangle their investigation(s) and tease out a thoughtful design reaction.  Students will be encouraged to accelerate the boundaries of analogue and digital methods as they create interventions by blending Western and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Image: Birch Bark Canoe Detail - https://canoemuseum.ca/2016-12-2-looking-closely-treatment-of-a-birch-bark-canoe-part-one/

In this interdisciplinary design course, architecture and engineering students will be able to participate in a simulated building development process based on a real site and potential actual project. The course is framed around a practical non-idealized real life situation. Since every building design is unique and renovation projects are especially unique and complex the course will demand solutions that don’t rely on default solutions from textbooks and websites.
Additionally, the course will focus on working cooperatively and in a manner integrated with other related professionals. Integrated design processes and integrated project delivery are increasingly become very common methods by which buildings are designed, constructed and commissioned. Real life practical opportunities are rare in the university context.