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Doctoral Seminar
Methods in the History and Theory of Architecture

Doctoral Seminar (064-0004-17)
Organizer: Doctoral Program, Chair of Prof. Stalder
Lecturers: Prof. Dr. Laurent Stalder, Dr. Cameron Macdonell, Moritz Gleich
Time: Thursdays 4.45-6.30 pm
Location: HIL D 60.1

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Architecture, by necessity, is a collaborative endeavour involving aesthetics, technique, materiality, and various socio-cultural contexts. Likewise, histories and theories of architecture vary greatly in how historians and/or theoreticians position themselves within that collaborative nexus. The development of methodological frameworks to support one’s historical and/or theoretical position on architecture consequently involves an awareness of how previous perspectives differ and how they might usefully converge. In this seminar, we open up a broad spectrum of methodologies to provide a comprehensive understanding of how research projects operate within these frameworks and how one‘s own research might fruitfully develop from reflection on and discussion of key texts about architecture and other intersecting fields of study (e.g., art history, philosophy, media studies, cultural history, sociology, and the history of technology). The seminar will turn around 20 key texts of architectural theory. After three introductory lectures, the students will be asked to present one book, or parts of it and lead the discussion. Therefore the goal of the seminar will be twofold, content-wise and pedagogical: On the one side, the analysis of texts (the author, his/her work, the context of his/her work, the text itself, especially its argument, its structure, but also its historical and theoretical framework). On the other side, the practice of leading a two-hour class.