Spring 2016

H+U+D CITY SEMINAR

Description:

The course focuses on Paris and the idea of “the future in the past.” By this we are interested in the recursive temporality of design, and its hidden laws. In this sense, Paris is the quintessentially  modernist city precisely because of the constant abutment or overlapping of the past with the present—Le Louvre’s Pyramid, the Villes Nouvelle of planned suburbs such as Les Espaces d’Abraxas with its merger of science fiction with neoclassicist traits.  Walter Benjamin wrote his in his Arcades Project book that “Each generation experiences the fashions of the one immediately preceding it as the most radical anti- aphrodisiac imaginable.”  However, a present generation may end up embracing the styles of grandparent’s or earlier forebears.  The course looks at Paris in terms of the dialectic between future and present, in that order.

Instructors: 

Jean-Michel Rabaté, English, and Ken Lum, Fine Art

Day/Time:

Wednesday, 9:00 am- 12:00 pm