[PROPOSITIONS] ARCH 562 + MUD 722

PROFESSOR

What is an architecture of and for the limp, floppy, soft, wobbly, delicate, exhausted, tender, wasted, weak, and forceless? This is but a lump of othered aesthetics. This studio will make no potent forms, no grand claims, erect no more heroes. Architecture has enough manifestos and manly buildings. Strong architecture makes totalizing claims for beauty, but the beautiful has historically been constructed as public, masculine, straight, and white, thus leaving many out of the equation, silenced, or subjected. While the connection between masculinity and beauty may not seem immediately obvious, it is clearer when considering the post-industrial aesthetics of Modernism, its glorification of sleek masculine monumentality—and the repudiation of the ornamental, curvaceous, and non-Western aesthetics coded as feminine, weak, inferior, with Modernism here racialized white. We have seen where that hard logic of total control has taken us, and it isn’t pretty. This studio will recuperate the power of weakness, and the strength of softness. What is the architecture of a tender masculinity? What are the politics of a soft-bodied architecture?

This studio will work on the politics of aesthetics, considering the gendered and metaphorical relationship between bodies and buildings, and seek to challenge past humanist constructions. Students will develop their own hybrid aesthetics starting from their own aesthetic category and melding it with softness, hardness, masc, fem, etc. Students will work with soft materiality across various scales. Soft body physics modelers such as Blender will be used, and students will learn how to make inflatables. Students will design clothing, furniture, and a building.