University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning  ARCH 660    Thesis Development Seminar (3 Credits) ‐ Fall 2017 

 Thesis, the Musical!  Architectures of Theatricality and Performance  

       Meeting Times:     Thursdays, 6:00‐9:00pm, 2108 A&AB Instructor:     John McMorrough, PhD (jdmii@umich.edu)   

       Busby Berkeley directs scene with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney on set of the film "Girl Crazy.", 1943.  

      “Thesis, the Musical!” works to develop a novel idiom of architecture that is expressive, expedient, and above all, fun. Inspired by the coordination of expression and expertise that infuses musical theater (and already parallels architecture to a surprising degree) the goal of this thesis is to find how a building itself can both facilitate and manifest the qualities of “putting on a show.” Sharing this ambition are two parallel offerings (“Architectures of Theatricality and Performance” & “Show Time”) with each functioning as a separate thesis studio with different approaches to the overall topic but collectively sharing research, resources, and reviews.         “Architectures of Theatricality and Performance” will reverse engineer stagecraft as the real consideration of imagined conditions, exploring how the nexus of a suspension of disbelief and calibrated arrangements make physical spaces of wonderment. The fall term will initially study (in seminar format) both musicals and theater as forms of design, and then in turn (workshop format) develop strategies and techniques for a “theatrical” architecture. The winter term (studio format) will be devoted to the development of the final thesis project as a building devoted to performance (i.e., a theater). The specific program and siting of their thesis building will be determined by each student individually, in consultation with the faculty advisor.  

ARCH 660_Thesis Development Seminar (3 credits)Fall 2017: Taubman College of Architecture and Urban PlanningUniversity of MichiganThursdays, 6-9 pm 2210 AAB

Instructor: Julia McMorrough (juliamcm@umich.edu)Thesis, The Musical! Showtime

“Thesis, the Musical!” looks for an idiom of practice of architecture that

is choreographic, joyous, and above all, fun. Inspired by the coordination

of expression and expertise that infuse musical theater (and already

parallels architecture to a certain degree) this thesis will seek to “put

on a show” (in the form of a building). Sharing ambition are two paralell offerings (“Showtime” and “Archi-

tectures of Theatricality and Perfor-mance”), with each functioning as a separate thesis studio with different approaches to the overall topic (but

collectively sharing materials, re-sources, and reviews).

“Showtime” will implore architec-ture to deliver a showstopping per-

formance.

The Fall term will be structured as a seminar and workshop, with research tracing the long history of the space

of the musical, and architecture’s role in it, spanning from ancient Greece, to the commedia dell’arte, the Bau-haus, Broadway, the Golden Age of Hollywood, the American industrial

musical and beyond. Design investi-gations will emerge from this working knowledge of the shared exuberance

of these disciplines.

In the Thesis studio term (winter), the final thesis projects will be explored and developed. This effort will yield

not only architectures of perfor-mance, but will also foster a staging

of the architecture’s performative qualities (i.e., we will put on a show).

Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding (1951)

Props1Roe Etheridge, Fruit, 2011

It will be the yearlong work of this thesis studio to develop nuanced positions on architecture’s status as material and as image. By taking on both, and especially the complicated translations between the two, the thesis work will seek out new forms of design authorship, as well as new subjects for architecture.

The fall semester will focus on food photography, from the history of commercial food styling to influential art practices involving food. More methodology than content,2 food photography provides a world of considerations in imaging materiality. Crisp or tender, effervescent or sizzling, over-ripe or raw—the indelible material quality of a food that is momentary and subject to environmental action—becomes visual information. Design exercises throughout the fall will draw on the techniques of staging scenes of entropic materiality and will analyze the ways in which these convey cultural messages. For Props, making distinctions between authenticity and artifice will be less productive than seeking links between the literal mechanics of image production and an authored sensibility.

Select readings, precedent studies, and discussions will help establish a disciplinary scaffolding for the experimentations with imaging materiality. By the start of winter studio, students will have acquired technical know-how in using food and still-life photography as a design tool, but they will also have developed critical apparatus with which to launch a thesis on architecture, materiality, and image.

ARCH 660 Thesis Seminar Fall 2017

Faculty: Meredith Miller

Thursdays, 6 - 9 pm

1360 A&A Building

2. Thesis projects in Props will not be “about” food. They will be about architecture.

1. Image, Material, Environment, Scene.

“Today, the status of images is greater, and different, than ever before. If ever there was a subject in need of theorization and application, images are it. Now is the time for images.”

– Mark Linder, Images and Other Stuff

IMAGE–BUILDING

Instructor: Cyrus Peñarroyo (penarc@umich.edu)Arch 660 / 662 Thesis Development Seminar / Studio

Image: Soft Baroque, Surface Service, 2016

Images are everywhere: illuminated through pixel, embedded in neuron, stored in silicon, and still ever-present in a range of photographic reproductions. As technology continues to evolve, images will occupy more of the virtual and physical space around us and will have an increased capacity to radically alter our experience of the built environment. Though the materiality of images remains conceptually elusive, images clearly have material consequences that intensify as more visual content is produced. Thus, architecture, in its ability to confront our material reality, is a uniquely appropriate medium through which to address contemporary media ecologies and to offer new ways of seeing the world. In response, how might our inevitably image-saturated future change the appearance of Architecture?

Following a broad spectrum of designers and theorists who have recently turned critical attention to the vast proliferation of images within social and cultural practices, this thesis section will explore a set of shared questions: What exactly is an image? How might images and image-making affect how we design buildings? How might a more focused examination of image culture generate new and meaningful trajectories for the discipline of Architecture?

This year-long thesis experience is divided into two parts. In the fall semester (design seminar), each student will reference critical texts and work through a series of representational experiments to construct a House of Images. This phase presents an opportunity for imagistic concerns (optics, perception, apparatus, etc.) to intermesh with architectural concerns (exteriority, interiority, site, etc). Throughout the term, students will operate on specific fragments of the house to stake a disciplinary claim and develop possible strategies to implement in their design proposals. The winter semester (studio) will be devoted to Image–Building. Students, either individually or in groups, will use their discoveries from the fall to propose architectures that engage issues of form, space, context, program, material effect, and occupation. To imagine new ways for architecture to appear in the world, this thesis section will use the building as the primary site of speculation.

We will travel to Chicago, IL on October 14–17. The trip will cost approx. $400 / student. This includes transporation, accommodation, and admissions.

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning | University of Michigan ARCH 660_xxx | Thesis Development Seminar, Fall 2017 VIOLA AGO | violaago@umich.edu Thursdays 6:00pm - 9:00pm | West Side Review

SURFACE, SURFACE, SURFACE. “The skin is the deepest” Paul Valery. COURSE DESCRIPTION The German theorist Gottfried Semper established an elemental definition of architecture in the mid 1800s. In Semper’s conception of the basic constituent units of a building, “cladding” is a site of interchange between an individual and a community; architecture’s medium of communication and exchange. Labeled variously as cladding, facade, skin, and (more recently) envelope, building surfaces have gained interest as a territory for design experimentation and has become a popular locus-point for major aesthetic and theoretical stances within the discipline. Outside of our field, the architectural surface has influenced, and has been influenced by other disciplines (art, film, media studies, engineering) and their respective movements. Accounting for the historical evolution and current status of surface in design studies can be disorienting. The architectural surface has been alternately understood as expressive and ornamental in the late nineteenth century, flat and naked in the early Modernist period, a sign-system or communicative medium in postmodernism, and as a complex mechanism engineered for the production of special effects, atmosphere and the layering of digital technologies in the early 2000s. In our present moment (within the discipline), the architectural surface is understood largely as a material construct; a privileged medium for explorations in fabrication, digital modeling and advanced visualization problems. However, the surface is also becoming the most widely circulated cultural artifact of any work of architecture; the face, brand and signature of a given office, firm, client or institution. This thesis section looks to activate the role of the surface in architecture as an interface between the hermetic and arcane tools of practice (its techniques and terminologies) and as the image of architecture in our current culture. That the success or failure of a building is predicated on the use of its surface is an unprecedented condition, it is our field’s most promising area of visual and technical research, and also, perhaps, the last element of architecture that we can effectively and efficiently leverage to assert our agency as designers and as authors of culture. In this development seminar, students will investigate contemporary surface conditions (themes, trends, arguments), guided by a thorough study of critical historical periods with the aim of identifying their interests and ultimately developing a thesis focus. The first half of the semester will be primarily focused on constructing conceptual frameworks. Students will be asked to conduct a comprehensive study of historical and theoretical texts that have been categorized into five distinct topics: Ornament, Atmosphere, Digital Surface, Material/Texture, and Flatness/Depth. Students will then construct their thesis statements based on this research. These thesis statements will serve as the point of departure for the second half of the semester, which will focus on supporting the conceptual arguments with proof of concept. The proof of concept assignment, Surface Surplus, will be illustrated and informed by enquiries into both digital and physical studies. The thesis development seminar will conclude with final presentations of Surface Surplus, which will then launch the thesis projects in the second semester. Although the design intervention of the thesis projects will be that of architectural surface, the scope of the projects (environment, landscape, facade, ceiling) will be selected by the students. The thesis surface proposals could produce a technique, a process, a facade project, a prototype, an application or something else entirely that we have not yet defined.

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning | University of Michigan ARCH 660_xxx | Thesis Development Seminar, Fall 2017 VIOLA AGO | violaago@umich.edu Thursdays 6:00pm - 9:00pm | West Side Review

SURFACE, SURFACE, SURFACE. “The skin is the deepest” Paul Valery. COURSE DESCRIPTION The German theorist Gottfried Semper established an elemental definition of architecture in the mid 1800s. In Semper’s conception of the basic constituent units of a building, “cladding” is a site of interchange between an individual and a community; architecture’s medium of communication and exchange. Labeled variously as cladding, facade, skin, and (more recently) envelope, building surfaces have gained interest as a territory for design experimentation and has become a popular locus-point for major aesthetic and theoretical stances within the discipline. Outside of our field, the architectural surface has influenced, and has been influenced by other disciplines (art, film, media studies, engineering) and their respective movements. Accounting for the historical evolution and current status of surface in design studies can be disorienting. The architectural surface has been alternately understood as expressive and ornamental in the late nineteenth century, flat and naked in the early Modernist period, a sign-system or communicative medium in postmodernism, and as a complex mechanism engineered for the production of special effects, atmosphere and the layering of digital technologies in the early 2000s. In our present moment (within the discipline), the architectural surface is understood largely as a material construct; a privileged medium for explorations in fabrication, digital modeling and advanced visualization problems. However, the surface is also becoming the most widely circulated cultural artifact of any work of architecture; the face, brand and signature of a given office, firm, client or institution. This thesis section looks to activate the role of the surface in architecture as an interface between the hermetic and arcane tools of practice (its techniques and terminologies) and as the image of architecture in our current culture. That the success or failure of a building is predicated on the use of its surface is an unprecedented condition, it is our field’s most promising area of visual and technical research, and also, perhaps, the last element of architecture that we can effectively and efficiently leverage to assert our agency as designers and as authors of culture. In this development seminar, students will investigate contemporary surface conditions (themes, trends, arguments), guided by a thorough study of critical historical periods with the aim of identifying their interests and ultimately developing a thesis focus. The first half of the semester will be primarily focused on constructing conceptual frameworks. Students will be asked to conduct a comprehensive study of historical and theoretical texts that have been categorized into five distinct topics: Ornament, Atmosphere, Digital Surface, Material/Texture, and Flatness/Depth. Students will then construct their thesis statements based on this research. These thesis statements will serve as the point of departure for the second half of the semester, which will focus on supporting the conceptual arguments with proof of concept. The proof of concept assignment, Surface Surplus, will be illustrated and informed by enquiries into both digital and physical studies. The thesis development seminar will conclude with final presentations of Surface Surplus, which will then launch the thesis projects in the second semester. Although the design intervention of the thesis projects will be that of architectural surface, the scope of the projects (environment, landscape, facade, ceiling) will be selected by the students. The thesis surface proposals could produce a technique, a process, a facade project, a prototype, an application or something else entirely that we have not yet defined.

Atelier Manferdini Morphosis Architects Zago Architecture (coursework) Tom Wiscombe Architecture