[UG3] ARCH 432
PROFESSOR
Stratton Coffman
room dividers, operating hours, and other measures
The event hall is a big room where things happen. Or it is a room that drops hints about
what things might happen in it. Or it is an apparatus that supplies the means for producing
specific happenings. Or it is the convening around which a room manifests.
All in all, the event hall stages arguments about how tightly a building should fit the things that happen in it. These are also arguments about control, access, and specification, arguments with holes, openings for rebuttals, counter-events, non-events. AKA what can happen after hours?
We will begin by collecting and generating different strategies for specifying fit, from spatial and technical–free plans, modular components, adjustable assemblies–to institutional and social–use schedules, operating hours, booking protocols. Our inquiry will be nudged along by engaging with discourses on open-endedness, from the open-work theories of the 1960s to neoliberal fetishes of flux to postcolonial critiques of the open plan. Adopting, rejecting, or modifying these historical and contemporary strategies, students will take a position on fitting through the development of an event hall in Detroit. Do you adopt some of these techniques to dilate the range of use and misuse? Or do you resist open-endedness and treat the building as didactic themespace? What kinds of events is the hall able to host, or not? How much misfitting do you invite?
All in all, the event hall stages arguments about how tightly a building should fit the things that happen in it. These are also arguments about control, access, and specification, arguments with holes, openings for rebuttals, counter-events, non-events. AKA what can happen after hours?
We will begin by collecting and generating different strategies for specifying fit, from spatial and technical–free plans, modular components, adjustable assemblies–to institutional and social–use schedules, operating hours, booking protocols. Our inquiry will be nudged along by engaging with discourses on open-endedness, from the open-work theories of the 1960s to neoliberal fetishes of flux to postcolonial critiques of the open plan. Adopting, rejecting, or modifying these historical and contemporary strategies, students will take a position on fitting through the development of an event hall in Detroit. Do you adopt some of these techniques to dilate the range of use and misuse? Or do you resist open-endedness and treat the building as didactic themespace? What kinds of events is the hall able to host, or not? How much misfitting do you invite?