Laurent Stalder: Catalogue data in Autumn Semester 2020

Name	Prof. Dr. Laurent Stalder
Field	Theory of Architecture
Address	I. f. Geschichte/Theorie der Arch. ETH Zürich, HIL E 64.3 Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5 8093 Zürich SWITZERLAND
Telephone	+41 44 633 76 63
E-mail	laurent.stalder@gta.arch.ethz.ch
Department	Architecture
Relationship	Full Professor

Number	Title	ECTS	Hours	Lecturers
051-0115-00L	Theory of Architecture I Only for Architecture BSc, Programme Regulations 2011.	1 credit	2V	L. Stalder
Abstract	The lecture course offers an introduction to key themes and questions of modern architectural theory over two semesters. Part one addresses formative "figures of thought" and their materialization in built and spatial structures. Part two critically examines different forms of architectural practice through the work of exemplary protagonists.
Learning objective	Understanding of the historic development of architectural theory during modernity and critical discussion of its key terms and concepts from a transdisciplinary perspective.
Content	The first part of the lecture course focuses on important themes and discourses of modern architecture, as well as its central terms and ideas. Providing a key to their understanding will be the concept of "figures of thought", which encompasses basic premises concerning the essence of things. Figures of thought are more than simply visual or linguistic metaphors; thus, they not only shape the production of the built environment, but also influence its perception and interpretation. At the same time, they operate across different cultural practices, opening architecture to related fields of knowledge, and, by doing so, allowing for its cross-disciplinary analysis; e.g., from the perspective of cultural studies or social sciences.
Lecture notes	Handouts summarizing the content of weekly lectures will be available for download from the website of the Visiting Lectureship for the Theory of Architecture.
Literature	All required readings for the lectures will be available for download from the website of the Visiting Lectureship for the Theory of Architecture. In addition to those key readings, the following monographs and anthologies are useful complementary sources for the lecture course: - Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. - Susanne Hauser, Christa Kamleithner, Roland Meyer, eds., Architekturwissen. Grundlagentexte aus den Kulturwissenschaften, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013, 2 Vols. - K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998. - Harry Francis Mallgrave, ed., Architectural Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006–2008, 2 Vols. - Ákos Moravánszky, ed., Architekturtheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine kritische Anthologie, Wien, New York: Springer, 2003. - Joan Ockman, Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology, New York: Rizzoli, 1993.
051-1213-20L	Integrated Discipline Theory of Architecture (L. Stalder)	3 credits	2U	L. Stalder
Abstract	In the bachelor program, the integration of architectural theory into the design process is only offered in cooperation with the chair of architectural design for the whole design studio. On the basis of a reading of theoretical texts the conventions of architectural practice are critically debated. The theoretical perspective will be discussed in the midterm and/or final design studio criticism.
Learning objective	A focus work offers the opportunity to deepen the knowledge gained in the field of history, criticism and theory of architecture in writing. The preparation and formulation essentially serves the following purposes: First and foremost, it is about the independent development of an architectural-theoretical or cultural-historical question and its treatment and answering in a scientific text. The core of the work and thus also decisive criteria of the assessment are the development of own points of view and arguments the basis of sources and research literature and their coherent and comprehensible presentation. The aim is to develop a corresponding scientific method of working. Relevant techniques and criteria include: research and selection of research literature and source corpus, source analysis, development, Verification and independent argumentation of one or more hypotheses based on analysis and reading, verifiability and methodical transparency of the work as well as linguistic and formal diligence.
Content	In order to gain a differentiated view of the discipline of architecture, a combination of theoretical and historical work is sought, based on an understanding of architecture as part of historically specific, culturally, socially, politically and economically conditioned conditions. The subject of this thesis is the analysis and discussion of specific architectures and their components as well as the associated models and discourses, informed by historical precursors and taking into account interdisciplinary connections. So architecture can be related to anthropological, cultural, philosophical, sociological or urbanistic issues. Basically, it makes sense to develop the work from a theme worked on in the course of the seminar History, Criticism and Theory of Architecture. Starting from the gained overview over the basic literature and the source situation and the already sketched own thesis can in the elaboration of the Work the issue will be further developed. In consultation with the professorship, however, freely chosen topics can also be dealt with, for example in the areas of theory building, criticism or the representation of architectures.
Prerequisites / Notice	The integrated design is organized and operated by both chairs engaged in close cooperation. Experience has shown that it takes about 6 months to complete the work. The individual appointments can be individually arranged and depend on the needs of the candidate and the availability of the professorship. In any case, the handover has to be done 4 weeks before the exam and has to be done 2 weeks before the final exam. For work in the autumn semester, the deadline is therefore at the beginning of January, in the spring semester at the beginning of August. Further information under https://stalder.arch.ethz.ch/download .
052-0803-00L	History and Theory of Architecture I	2 credits	2V + 2U	T. Avermaete, M. Delbeke, M. Charitonidou, L. Stalder, H. Teerds, P. Ursprung
Abstract	Introduction and overview of the history and theory of architecture from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. (Prof. Dr. M. Delbeke) Introduction in the methods and instruments of the history of art and architecture. (Prof. Dr. M. Delbeke, Prof. Dr. L. Stalder, Prof. Dr. P. Unsprung, Prof. Dr. T. Avermaete)
Learning objective	Acquiring basic knowledge of the history of architecture and architectural theory, resp. of the methods and instruments of research into architecture. Being able to identify the main architectural issues and debates of the period and geography covered in the course. Acquiring the attitudes and tools to develop a historically informed reading of the built environment. Acquiring the tools to be able to draw on historical, theoretical and critical research to nourish one's architectural culture.
Content	The course History and Theory of Architecture I offers a chronological and thematic overview of the architecture and architectural theory produced in Europe from the 15th up to 19th century. Thematic lectures about key questions at play during the period will be combined with the in-depth analysis of historical buildings. Themes will cover the emergence and development of Vitruvian design theory and practice up to the 19th century, and related issues such as the emergence of the architect; the media of architectural design and practice (drawings, models, building materials); patterns and media of dissemination and influence (micro-architecture, imagery); building types (the palazzo and the villa); questions of beauty and ornament; questions of patronage (e.g. the Roman papacy); the relation of buildings to the city (e.g. the development of European capitals); attitudes towards history (origin myths, historicism); the question of the monument. The course Fundamentals of the History and Theory of Architecture I consists of different parts, each dealing with a particular area of research into the history of art and architecture (1) Architecture and the book (M. Delbeke) (2) Architectural media (L. Stalder). (3) Architecture and art (P. Ursprung) (4) Urbanism and the Commons (T. Avermaete)
Literature	Literature and handouts will be provided over the course of the term.
Prerequisites / Notice	For the course History and Theory of Architecture I students will rely on assisted self study to acquire basic knowledge of the canonical history of architecture in Europe. The exercise is taught in the hybrid mode (Bubbles of 24 students: 1st week: Bubbles 1-5 face-to-face teaching, bubbles 6-10 and 11 - 15 online in studio G41/G61; . 2nd week: Bubbles 6-10 face-to-face teaching, bubbles 11-15 and 1 - 5 online in studio G41/G61; 3. Woche: Bubbles 11-15 face-to-face teaching, bubbles 1-5 and 6 - 10online in studioG41/G61; 4th week equal to 1st week etc.
052-0805-00L	History and Theory in Architecture III	2 credits	2V	L. Stalder
Abstract	This two-semester course is an introduction to the history of architecture from the Second Industrial Revolution in the 1850s to the Oil Crisis in the 1970s in Europe. Students will be able to identify the “things”—technical objects and ensembles—that transformed architecture, and to relate them to the technical, scientific, and cultural concerns that introduced them as key features of modernity.
Learning objective	To introduce students to the history and theory of architecture, the course has three objectives. First, students will be able to identify the “things” that transformed architecture in modernity, and the crucial events, buildings, theories, and actors that characterize their history. Second, students will be able to describe how these “things” operated at different scales, focusing less on the formal level, and naming instead the different forms of expertise that constituted them historically, as well as the processes within which they were embedded. Third, students will be able to reflect on a series of apparatuses, devices, and building parts that are in fact micro-architectures which have often been neglected, despite their pivotal role in shaping the daily lives of modern societies.
Content	The course proposes a new approach to the study of the history and theory of architecture in Europe during modernity. It focuses less on single architects or their buildings, and more on those “things” that have brought profound transformations in the built environment and daily life over the last 200 years, such as the revolving door, the clock, and the partition. The notion of “thing” includes both the concrete building parts and the concerns associated with them, such as material performance, social synchronization, and individual expression. To understand buildings as assemblages of “things,” therefore, does not mean to diminish their significance, but on the contrary to add reality to them, to understand them in terms of the complex, historically situated, and diverse concerns within which they were designed. Each lecture introduces one “thing” through a genealogy that shaped it, from patents and scientific discoveries and technological advancement, to cinema, the visual arts, and literature. A set of renowned projects as well as lesser-known buildings from all around Europe offer a variety of case studies to describe these “things,” to understand how they operated in relation with one another, and to identify the theories and tactics that architects mobilized to make sense of them.
Lecture notes	http://www.stalder.arch.ethz.ch/courses
Prerequisites / Notice	Location: 1. hour: Zoom: https://ethz.zoom.us/j/96835699990 2./3. hour: Studios
052-0813-20L	History, Criticism and Theory of Architecture: Things of the Modern	2 credits	2S	L. Stalder
Abstract	This seminar begins with the question: what new ideas emerge when the objects of study are not the heroes and pioneers of modern architecture, nor the canonical buildings, but the various network of expertise, systems, and objects that make up modern life?
Learning objective	The general aim of the course is to propose a new reading of modern architecture. In particular its objective is to impart historical and theoretical instruments for dealing with the conditions which made modern architecture possible by analysing in an exemplary way various machines, spaces, structures, materials and elements. Organised in collaboration with the Chair of History of Prof. M. Dommann (UZH), the seminar aims to challenge both the disciplines of history and history of architecture in their approach to material artefacts.
Content	We live our lives surrounded by a complex entanglement of “Things”. These “Things” have a fundamental role to play in the construction of modern life through their ability to connect and communicate, structure and organise the various activities of human existence from the city to the interiors of our apartments. Evidence of these “Things” can be found today in central Zurich: clocks and timetables that synchronise activities as diverse as education, public travel, and social interaction (the lunch hour, Zvieri); mechanised transportation devices such as elevators, the Polybahn, and the ETH Link that negate the physical distance between seemingly independent places; systems and objects such as Eduroam, internal post, and NEBIS which allow for the medial networking of individuals, groups, and institutions. Yet, to analyse these objects only from a technical perspective or see them simply as representations (of taste, desire, progress), does not allow for satisfactory analysis into the complex networks of actors involved in their development, design, or regulation. Instead, the seminar uses architectural, social, media and cultural-historical perspectives to raise new research questions about the inherited built environment of modernity. Using the social, material and spatial environments of the three university quarters in Zurich (Hönggerberg, Irchel and Zentrum) as other key examples, the seminar will focus on the overlooked "anonymous" objects of history (Sigfried Giedion) in the immediate our vicinity.
Lecture notes	http://www.stalder.arch.ethz.ch/courses
Literature	BANHAM, Reyner: The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, London: Architectural Press, 1969 VON FISCHER, Sabine: Das akustische Argument, Wissenschaft und Hörerfahrung in der Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Zürich: gta 2019. GIEDION, Sigfried: Mechanization Takes Command: A contribution to anonymous history. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948. SCHIVELBUSCH, Wolfgang: Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise: Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995 THOMPSON, Emily, The Soundscape of Modernity. Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2002.
Prerequisites / Notice	The seminar is a collaboration between the Chair of Architectural Theory of Laurent Stalder at the gta of the ETH and the Chair of Modern History at the Historical Seminar of the UZH of Monika Dommann. Therefore, each week the location of the seminar will alternate between the two university sites of Hönggerberg and Zentrum. Additionally, the seminar will be held in cooperation with the gta Archiv, the UZH Archiv, the Baugeschichtlichen Archiv of Zurich. The number of participants is limited to 28, with a maximum of 14 from each of UZH and ETH. Only MSc students will be considered for participation.
052-0817-20L	Theory of Architecture: Space is the Place. Architecture and Afrofuturism	2 credits	2S	R. Choi, L. Stalder
Abstract	This seminar considers Afrofuturism through Paul Gilroy’s conceptual framework of the Black Atlantic. Both a cultural and geographic space, the Black Atlantic links diasporic traditions of the Black radical imagination from the West coast of Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas.
Learning objective	The seminar endeavors to create a set of critical tools for "provincializing Europe" and centering Black and Indigenous voices in architectural history and theory. Students will be encouraged to: 1. Develop research questions that include central themes involving architecture and race, alternative Black futurities, creative forms of resistance, and thinking through diasporic traditions of space-making. 2. Identify objects of study as historically contingent. 3. Critically asses objects of study from critical race, Black, Black feminist, and subaltern perspectives. 5. Hone a practice of citation by synthesizing your own ideas and arguments alongside themes presented in the assigned reading sets.
Content	The course is an exercise in decolonial thinking that probes and challenges the parameters of architectural historical thought by blurring national boundaries in favor of streams of historical influence across scales and activities. Students are challenged to reorganize their atlas and assemble geographies of architectural thought that run counter to nation-state narratives. Afrofuturism, first used by author Mark Dery in 1993, draws on African-American history and lived experience to map, code and imagine alternative futures commonly through futuristic and techno-culture themes. The term maintains cultural currency in music, literature, and the visual arts, yet does not have a secure place in architecture, despite both architecture and Afrofuturism’s inherent utopian ambitions. The seminar takes the concept of diasporic imagination embodied by Afrofuturism to comprehend how architects and cultural producers create forms of resistance across geographies. Therefore, the seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach to architectural history by engaging visual art, music, film and literature alongside architecture and urban projects. Through their final essays, students are encouraged to develop new pathways for thinking through architectural history and theory that integrate positions from Black, feminist and subaltern philosophical thought.
052-0833-20L	PhD Teaching Does not take place this semester.	2 credits	2S	L. Stalder
Abstract	This course is not offered in HS20.
Learning objective	This course is not offered in HS20.
Content	This course is not offered in HS20.
052-0851-20L	Topical Questions in History and Theory of Architecture: Thinking Territory (Guest)	2 credits	2S	H. A. Kennedy, L. Stalder
Abstract	The seminar is always given by a guest lecturer at the institute gta and deals with topics ranging from the history of architecture through the history of the city to the history of the landscape from the early modern period to today. In HS20 the seminar explores the history of modern architecture and planning as a medium of territorial thought and transformation since the1880s.
Learning objective	The seminar introduces students to new topics and interdisciplinary research methodologies that are currently reshaping the field of history. One of the aims of this course is to provide students with an advanced and conceptually rich understanding of the distinctions between land, terrain, territory and territoriality, with a focus on how the latter two (territory and territoriality) have been understood and enacted in different historical and geographical contexts. The primary objective is to grasp how architectural practices have helped to produce territory, and to understand the stakes of that production.
Content	The seminar deals with topics ranging from the history of architecture to the history of the landscape through the 19th and 20th centuries around the world. This course, conducted as a research and reading seminar, will introduce the students to topics and methodologies focused on the question of 'territory' that advance our current understanding of the forces that have shaped architecture's modernity. In HS20 the research seminar explores the history of modern architecture and planning as a medium of territorial thought and transformation since the1880s, when the discipline began to encounter the question of the hinterlands as a large-scale design problem. Analyzing the institutional stakes of architecture’s shift to the global scale, framed by a set of forces that helped define architecture’s modernity, we will examine the changing relationship between architecture, resources, labor, and territory through the 19th and 20th centuries. Tracing this development across time and space, this course asks how modern nations, emerging empires, and newly independent states came to understand themselves on the planetary scale through large-scale modernization projects and territorial pacification schemes.
Prerequisites / Notice	Special requirements: For this course in HS20, students will complete a short essay with a research component. Topics for the papers will be approved by mid-October. Class meets weekly via Zoom, in seminar format. Each student is asked to make a presentation of selected readings once in the semester, and each week students will be asked to post a short comment or question on Moodle related to the readings. Presentations should identify the issues and positions that are relevant to each theme, and include a detailed formal analysis of one illustrative object/project/space/event.
063-0169-20L	Seminar Architectural Criticism (Thesis Elective)	6 credits	13A	A. Stahl, L. Stalder
Abstract	In the framework of three elective courses, students need to prepare elective works (seminar works).
Learning objective	The aim of these papers is to foster an independent engagement with the subjects of the seminar. A scientific familiarization with the respective themes is required. The extent of such a paper ranges from 20 to 30 pages.
Content	The contents of these elective studies are expected to link to the subject matter of the course architectural criticism.
Prerequisites / Notice	Self-dependent work. Further information under https://stalder.arch.ethz.ch/download.
064-0005-20L	Advanced Topics in History and Theory of Architecture For Architecture doctoral program only.	1 credit	1K	T. Avermaete, M. Delbeke, L. Stalder, P. Ursprung
Abstract	Corrective historiographies for architectural research
Learning objective	Acquiring insight into advanced research methods available to PhD-researchers in the fields of the history and theory of art and architecture.
Content	In an era of postcolonial theory and reflection, architectural historiography is faced with a series of new challenges and ambitions, concerning its subjects and its methods. This course will reflect upon three of them: the death of the author, center and meta-theory. A first point investigates how recent scholarship seems to dissociate from histories of single and all-decisive authors, to make way for perspectives that render buildings and neighborhoods as a matter of negotiation between multiple agencies. Second, this course will dwell upon the Euro-American bias of our histories, as well as its implicit center-periphery model, and look at recent attempts to tell more cross-cultural historiographies of architecture. Third, the course will discuss the strong meta-theoretical bias of postcolonial historiography (using theories of power, alterity, gender) and question if this has not resulted in disqualification of the material and formal presence of architecture in our history writing. This threefold change in architectural historiography seems to coincide with a shift in the contemporary discourses on the changing role of the architect, the cooperative character of architectural practice and the renewed interest in the craft. The course will question the productiveness of these resonances between historiography and design practice.
Lecture notes	Scans of selected texts for discussion and exercises will be provided at the beginning of HS 2020 on the course website: https://doctoral-program.gta.arch.ethz.ch/courses/advanced-methods-in-the-history-and-theory-of-architecture
Literature	Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2011. Smith, Linda T. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 2012 Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2015
Prerequisites / Notice	The seminar addresses the fellows of the Doctoral Program in History and Theory of Architecture. All other doctoral students of the Faculty of Architecture are welcome.