Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 Lectures and Events in the DoA

Beyond: Architecture & Its Outsides

Public Program 2016-17

For much of the twentieth century, architecture has built itself around a certain confidence that comes when perceiving the discipline as a self-contained realm of expert knowledge and its material application. Perhaps a product of modernist forms of knowledge, the professionalization and institutionalization of the discipline or the mechanics of capitalist development, this confidence has, on the one hand, allowed architecture to indulge in fantasies like ‘autonomy’ or, on the other, limited its more exploratory experiments to exercises in ‘learning from’ neighboring disciplines. Today the discipline has moved beyond this and other false oppositions. We seem to no longer harbor any lasting anxieties about what we may mean when we say ‘architecture’, while not losing the precision of the discipline we’ve inherited.

This series brings together thinkers, practitioners and educators whose work begins from turning the question of architecture inside out: how can we engage architecture from the network of relations, spaces, scales, materialities and systems that lie beyond the object of the building: architecture perceived from its many outsides?