Opulence and Excess: The Architecture of Techno- Romanticism

This seminar posits that during the past decade digitally produced architecture based on geometric, mapping, and performance-based ambitions has failed to yield the intended results. Instead of relying on these architectural fictions for legitimacy, this seminar examines the emerging interest in formal aesthetics and beauty as vehicles by which architecture can seek to critically engage a new and vibrantly altered twenty-first-century cultural context. As a historic background, the seminar examines the aesthetic debates of the late eighteenth-century transition from Enlightenment to Romantic visual sensibilities. Historic and contemporary texts are used and include the writings of Herder, Berlin , Kant, Zangwill, Lavin, and Kipnis. Similar new romantic sensibilities that are emerging in motion graphics, industrial design, the automotive industry, advertising, fashion, typography, and culinary culture are enlisted to inform student work. A series of experimental formal projects are given that use both digital and material techniques of production. Limited enrollment.