Theory and criticism of contemporary architecture - A Cosmos of Criticism

The course itself will explore this more literary engagement first through lectures on the assorted identities through which criticism has historically presented itself – among them, the critic as editor, the critic as polemicist, or as journalist, satirist, essayist, even influencer. Afternoon sessions will offer a more informal seminar- or studio-like format, where students will present, respond, discuss and unpick assorted weekly readings. As the course develops, so too will these discussions, with students presenting their own writing, which will be successively edited, refined, nurtured and then ultimately aggregated into a printed publication, so that after the last session of the course we can celebrate not only the manifest improvements made to all of the students’ writing and appreciation of criticism, but the launch of our own cosmos of criticism magazine. 

This course will explore the world – or even, as its title suggests, a wider cosmos – of architecture through an understanding of its assorted models of criticism. Crucially, even if the stuff of this criticism will be largely made up of words, sentences, articles, books, publications and other readings, rather than the more obvious registers of architectural production in the form of its buildings, it will insist that such a culture (or whisper it, even such a ‘theory’) is still something fundamental to the practice of architecture. The cosmos that it presents is therefore not an alternative, parallel reality but merely the extrusion of an existing galaxy of architectural responsibilities and affections. 

In presence

Students will be assessed through their weekly attendance, class participation and presentations (50%) and by their final written assignment (50%).
Readings will be drawn from architecture’s most celebrated examples of writing, as well as from a wider canon of criticism in general. 

Final written exam.