Course Catalogue

LJMU Partner Taught

To facilitate knowledge of interior design and its theories with focus upon contemporary architectural practice. To engage in analysis of 20th & 21st century architectural designs and relate them to contemporary philosophical ideas and social phenomena.

Outline Syllabus:By the 1960s, critiques of modernism and what by then had become its conformist compromises, fomented dispute as to its social mission. Divided by consumerism, architecture seemed split between critique and technique. Both led, via the fantasy of mega-structure, to neo-vanguard provocations; one was positive and utopian, the other subversive and anarchic. Another line, however, was pursued by those who, revaluing architecture's 'autonomous' basis in form and type, moved towards the 'linguistic turn' that announced the polemic of 'postmodernism'. The most radical 60s politico-cultural critique, Situationism, still informs the site specific interventions of architectural practices such as CoOp Himmelblau and Bernard Tschumi, who were also involved with architectural deconstruction. Deconstruction arose as an internal critique of architecture's own formal autonomy, and in some ways was the ultimate reference by architecture to the radical modernism of early 20thC art and music. Since the 1988 MoMA exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture', the formal collisions that filled it have, through the influence of Gilles Deleuze on the Baroque and the supermanipulative power of CAD, contorted into the 'folded' turboformalism of 'datascapes' and 'hypersurfaces' that filled the 2004 Venice Biennale, 'Metamorph'. The critic Manfredo Tafuri, although recognizing the virtuosity of such 'architecture in the boudoir' noted its marginality to economic realities of the kind exposed by the 2006 Venice Biennale on 'Global Cities'. Diane Ghirardo's book "Architecture After Modernism" has shown how the mega-demands of global capital have (despite Rem Koolhaas) taken the mass of building beyond the control of architects. In this regime of spectacle and control in public space, described in Mike Davis's book "City of Quartz" an art practice such as that of Dan Graham may be more capable to insert playful, but acute, subversions.

Additional Information:The module will explore significant architectural theories and buildings from the 1960's to the present day thematically within their institutional and cultural contexts, leading towards students developing their own conceptual position, with the outcome of an illustrated report.