Assembly & Sequence

Assembly & Sequence was a ARC 500 Selected Topics seminar taught during the Spring of 2019 at the Syracuse University School of Architecture. This course is a hybrid integrating architectural design, process, theory, and representation. The course was an experiment in the methodology of disintegrated design. We embraced the idea of a building as a collection of autonomous parts and examined their integration as a whole. The course was structured around a series of exercises progressing in scale. The course consisted of three primary design exercises, each building upon the last culminating in a team architectural project. After each exercise students were required to ‘pass’ there work on to other students and were not allowed to use what they produced from the previous exercise. The course was initiated by an interest in early Dada and Surrealist ideas. Dadaism was born and created in response to the atrocities of World War I. The Dadaists believed the war was a result of the celebrated and unchecked embrace of progress and rationalism. In response, their art was to be antirational, embraced chance and happenstance. In other words, there work needed no reason or understanding. Rationale and reason has become a dominant approach to architectural design education, where students are asked to produce proofs, arguments and construct complex rationalizations of their work. This course aimed to follow the Dadaist approach by creating a pedagogy that would release students from all logical and critical defense of their work.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.118

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5