Reassembling the Human: Autonomy, Affinity, and Play in Contemporary Architectural Discourse

"Theory is the way to describe practice through proportion" – this formula by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the first century BCE, encapsulated in the ancient principle of "we will do, and we will hear" (in both its intellectual and acoustic sense), describes precisely everything we need to develop creative, and fundamentally human, thought processes. This dual-faced human action is the bridge built across the chasm stretching between matter (Homo Faber) and spirit (Homo Sapiens), or between the concrete and the abstract. At one pole stands critical thinking, exposing the endless web of circumstances and contexts that act upon, activate, and bind the human experience. At the opposite pole stands abstract thinking, existing as a free autonomy within a closed loop. In between lies creative thinking as a third way: an ongoing, playful being, simultaneously present and absent. This course is an invitation to relearn and practice how to step into the intellectual arena and play as if our lives depended on it. Waiting on the other side, part-wrestlers and part-guides, are several contemporary figures walking in Vitruvius's footsteps. Like him, their architectural practice has led them - and will lead us - to engage, in various ways, with stable, transient, and emerging structures. Utilizing the architectural medium, we will attempt to stand on this bridge ourselves and determine whether, and to what extent, human action is the byproduct of a predetermined system, much like the probabilistic output of a chatbot, or if, within this tangled web, there lies a liberty after all.

Throughout the course, we will focus on the debate between two of the most prominent contemporary architectural thinkers, Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas, alongside their peers and students. Using them as a point of departure or an intellectual anchor, we will continue our journey toward reassembling human action, responding to contemporary reality, engaging with canonical Hebrew and Western texts, exploring archetypal frameworks, and more. We will address foundational questions regarding human agency within the spectrum of the natural, the artificial, and the sacred, exploring - each

student within their own discipline - where our play arenas are located, and what the recipes are for a good, alchemical game from which the wondrous is revealed.

The first semester will divide each session between thematic lectures and hands-on critical reading workshops. In the second semester, students will develop an independent research project centered on a figure, phenomenon, or theme of their choice, establishing a generative, rigorous, and generous interpretative dialogue. While the final deliverable is an academic text, the trajectory toward its construction will actively employ diverse mediums, utilizing maps, diagrams, collages, visual analogies, and more.