Clemson University / School of Architecture College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities Arch 499 – 699 – Spring 2013 Martha Skinner, Assistant Professor marthas@clemson.edu/ office: Lee 2-311 office hours: Wed. 11:30-12:30 or per appointment
Urban
C T - s c a n : The City as Body(ies) in Movement
Arch 499/699, section 4 (3 credits)
Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe 1957 Louis Kahn 1953
Godfrey Reggio 1983
Etienne-Jules Marey 1863
Time: 9:05-11:35 Wednesdays Location: Lee 3-G08 Introduction “The experiences of space cannot be separated from the events that happen in it. It is remade continuously every time it is encountered by different people, every time it is represented through another medium, every time its surroundings change, every time new affiliations are forged” James Corner, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention in Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove.
“The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. ... whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.” Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City in The Practice of Everyday Life.
Working from a series of texts and discussions on temporality, public space and representation, this seminar/lab will use audio, video, GPS (Global Positioning Systems), and other mobile devices to explore the potential of a new kind of drawing, a mapping which is temporal and ever-changing and which looks at the body of the city in its intimate relationship to the mapping of the human body. What do calories burned, heart rate, and body mass mean as related to length and speed of travel, weather, and topography? And what does latitude and longitude of user, distance to destination, and time, and latitude mean as related to track, bearing and heart rate? Can we analyze this data of the human body and city body as interrelated and intimately connected? Can we analyze this data the way that a radiologist analyzes a CT-scan? In addition the merging of drawing (GPS) and moving image (audio/video) will be