This course will explore how we learn about the architecture and the city. At the
interface of art, architecture, urban design and landscape, between urban and
curatorial practice, the students will get acquainted with the ways how we read,
explore and interpret the architecture and the city. The major focus will be on the
physical form, through architectural and urban history, theory, typologies and
representation in art and mass media, questioning the possibilities that the display of
architecture and city opens in the creation of knowledge and urban culture. This
general education course will introduce some key ideas drawn from interdisciplinary
studies. Its core aim is to raise students’ interests in encountering and imagining urban
space through different ways. The lectures are divided into four parts: The shape of
the city. The first part introduces how cities are conceptualized and how their
historical development is understood; this is an introductory section familiarizing the
class with the issues to be covered in the course. Urban theories. In the second part,
key topics concerning urban theories, restructuring and transformation will be
discussed; we will look at some dominant factors influencing urban form and urban
culture. City representation: literature, painting, film. Mass Media. The third section
will explore the relationship between cultural productions (the visual arts, novels,
poems, essays, film, architecture and urban planning) and the context within which
they were produced. We will discuss how paintings, novels and movies express the
individual experience of urban condition, and how they in turn shape the individual’s
expectations of those experiences. The presence of architecture and city in publicity
and mass media will be analysed as a part of urban branding and destination creation.
City on display: City museums and urban curating. The fourth section concerns the
multiple ways through which we encounter and interact with the city. It takes
‘practices’ – urbanistic, artistic, curatorial, everyday - as ways of ‘reading’ and
explores the possibilities of their enhancing through the activities of city museums
and urban curating. The course will be concluded by class presentations and
discussions
- Teacher: Nataša Tabori