This course presents you with one reading per week, to be read in your own time, then discussed in class, and then blogged about by you. You set up your own blog to do this using blogspot.com or any other provider you prefer. You can use an alias if you like.
It is important you blog on a weekly basis and not get behind with the programme, because this year we are augmenting it. Directly after each reading and a short break, I will be discussing how each critical theme might become the subject of a dissertation, using examples.
Your submission for this module will take the form of your collection of blogs, completed before Christmas, as a hard copy, and a short essay, completed over the Christmas holidays, on the critical theme of your prospective dissertation.
We will begin the course with a discussion of the essay by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books of 17th August 2017 titled 'You Are The Product' (and strap-lined 'It Zucks!') You can easily download this through the LRB website. It dwells on the consequences of social media, in particular Facebook. Whilst you may not presently think this subject has direct implications for architecture, I shall be demonstrating exactly how this might be the case in the second part of the session.
So please read this essay before our first session of 2nd (PT students) and 6th (FT students) October.
Lesson for Dissertation No 1:
You should note that after discussion of this text about the social media of the present, I used the topic to refocus on the past. I took the example of the Roman baths, and how issues of prestige, physical attraction, national or regional pride, hygiene, infrastructure, sexuality and sociality might have manifested themselves in ancient times. Thinking of architecture as a 'media' could have taken me in to the discussion of the propaganda value of a gothic cathedral, or a Nazi ruin, and certainly took us in to a discussion of the image of the architect with regard to social housing and the 'signature' trends of today.
So the first lesson is that your dissertation is not about the future, it is not a piece of science fiction. We use the opportunity of writing a dissertation to find out what was happening before in relation to what is happening now.
