A photographed murder scene. A bubble for social gathering. An urban shield. These all share a fascination over the last decades with spontaneous constructions: spaces and situations created often with the help of new media and new technological innovations. But these also respond to new social problems, new ecological crises, new desires for self-governance. This seminar will examine a recent history of “abrupt architectures” and “sudden cities,” to understand our current moment’s engagement with media and building technologies in architecture and in urbanism. Modern conceptions of time-space – as they engage relativity, speed, communications, rapid prototyping – help to discuss an evolving history of architecture and situated technologies.

This history connects equally to architecture discourse (in the writings of figures such as Siegfried Giedion and Reyner Banham) to media theory (Benjamin, McLuhan) and other fields. The course will therefore draw on a wide range of readings and also video screenings from primary and secondary sources in fields including architecture, media study, art, computer science, philosophy and more. We will consider case studies in design as much for their deployment in space and time as for their physical and formal properties. The seminar will offer core texts for the study of architecture and situated technologies, but for students who enrolled in last fall’s “On Speed,” the course will accommodate with new group work to supplement repeat material.