Border as Method
Border as Method
“The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”
Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Professor: Germán Pallares-Avitia
Secondary Advisors Team: Leeland McPhail (Arch), Tiago Campos (LArch)
COURSE DESCRIPTION
In this section borders are much more than research objects, but rather a methodological narrative that is used to construct a body of knowledge that motivates the connections and divisions which are at work when territories are distinguished from one another. The proposed methodology for this seminar is constructed with seminal texts from fields such as Border, Chicano, and Gender Studies, Environmental History, Architecture and Urbanism, and explores Post-colonial and De-colonial concepts that refine understandings of territories, nations, identity, and migration as they relate to the built environment. In this section, we will construct through research tools, a framework of thought where you can position your thesis project within the context of a border situation and a methodology for positioning, and continuously re-evaluate your work among the current discourse on architecture and their potential to expand beyond academia’s walls.
This section breaks down the wall of difference between theory and practice through the elimination of the dichotomy. This will allow us, as Walter Mignolo wrote, to theorize by doing, and do by thinking. In this seminar we will use tools to analyze and represent the layered, stacked, overlapped, and hybridized complexity of border situations. By using alternative practical mediums of investigation, research, analysis, and representation like mappings, diagrams, and cartographies students will be able to produce documentation to visually illustrate their thesis proposals.
Lastly the seminar will critically assess how architecture has been leveraged to facilitate state and institutional control of space; but also, how architecture and it’s projective tools can act as operative forces for alienation, segregation, division, violence and surveillance, as well as its potential for connection, communication, and collaboration. It will question the social responsibility of architecture, and the relevance of the architectural object in today’s discourse by questioning the validity of landscape/urban/spatial/architectural actions as architectural projects.
