Proseminar for the Department of Architecture

Writing is central in the construction of architectural culture. Writing is used by architects, critics, and historians in the development of the theoretical platform for action - whether through the theoretical and historical framing of architectural ideas, or in creating a critical polemic in the face of visual and material action.

The first part of the course will expose the students to different types of constitutive texts in modern architecture - manifestos, architectural critiques, meditative texts and more. We will analyze the texts to reveal the various rhetorical tools through which architectural discourse developed in the 20th century. Students will learn to analyze the (historical, cultural) connection between architectural projects and theoretical and critical texts; to analyze the way in which texts are constructed (main arguments, the position of the writer, etc.); and to judge and evaluate how the rhetorical mechanisms in texts help to form arguments.

The second part of the course will be devoted to a focused study of the ways in which architects have formulated architecture as cultural critique and how texts (verbal and visual) have been used and are used as theses for innovation on technological, social, political, and economic levels. After an introduction to this type of writing, students will be directed to search for texts and projects from the second half of the 20th century that will serve as a starting point for personal research. In this part of the course, students will be accompanied and guided in formulating the research question and in the stages of developing the written work - finding preliminary bibliography, research methods relevant to the specific work, building the structure of the written work, citation rules and references, etc.

At the end of the semester, the students will present in class the intermediate products of the study, and during the summer they will submit the paper of the seminar.