Display and Fabrication

This seminar proposes the apparatus of display as a site for architectural investigation. Beginning with a brief survey of the history of display culture—from the development of the public museum and the department store in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to more recent interest in mechanisms of vision and surveillance—the seminar examines the changing role and increased visibility of the apparatus in defining the relationships between observer and observed in various contemporary contexts of display. At the center of this discussion is the nature of the device itself and its potential to both mediate and generate content in ways particular to small-scale and temporary installations. These issues are discussed through weekly readings and case study analyses and explored at full scale through the ongoing design and critique of display prototypes. Students develop strategies of production, material effect, and interaction to identify ways in which the flexibility of digital fabrication can enable a new engagement with conditions of excess, such as decoration and affect, that would have been previously stripped away from systems of display based on standardized production. The course culminates in a final design project and presentation. Limited enrollment.