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ARCH526 POLITICS AND SPACE

Course Objectives

The enduring conception of which architecture is an autonomous field of inquiry has long been under critical coercion for there remains a wide spectrum of ideological positions in design to overcome. Viewed from perspectives of critical social theory contemporary exertions in design now problematize architectural discourse and discursive practices within frameworks of power and social transgression. What is so peculiar in these frameworks is the mode of inquiry that no longer expels politics from the insights of architectural intelligentsia yet rather promotes “ideological mappings” to reveal the micro-histories of such discourses. The primary objective of this course, in this sense, is to consider politics, power, and social transgression as crucial spheres that are integral to design discourses and practices.

Course Content

This course explores the forms and the proponents of politics and its uncanny relationship to design fields. Investigating the changing perceptions of idea-political positions it cultivates critical standpoints in understanding how such views first struggle over design and then become instrumental on architectural discourses and discursive practices.

Course Learning Outcomes

This course aims to provide students with a theoretical knowledge and instruments necessary for understanding the space in its social and political complexities. The expected outcomes for students to deliver a critical inquiry over such questions are:

• How or not architecture represents ideologies,
• Ways to draw up diachronic micro-histories in different geographies and their representations,
• The cross-geographic influences of ideologies, and
• Western ideologies in Turkish Modernism.