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74176-01 - Course: Architecture of the Everyday (3 CP)
| Semester | fall semester 2024 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers | Francesca Romana Dell'Aglio (francescaromana.dellaglio@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | Course Description: This course will look at everyday rituals as emphatic exceptions in urban life, responding to the urgent need to rethink the scale of the city and the direction of traditional historical analysis. We will begin from Georges Perec’s invitation to uncover the visible yet hidden spaces and gestures around us; to unveil the forgotten and the obvious, the mundane and the banal, by embracing the ‘endotic’ as a powerful lens through which we can learn to read, observe, and challenge the status quo of our surroundings. By understanding rituals as spatial practices that are integral to the fabric of everyday life, we will survey the form of the city of Basel as an anthropological expression, as something messy that can exist in the informal pockets of daily life. The aim is to open up new and unexplored perspectives that connect the urban fabric to its daily rituals. Structure: The course consists of a series of lectures, seminars, and practical exercises. The lectures will equip students with the theoretical and practical tools necessary for urban observation, as well as an overview of ritual theories and their applications in urban and architectural studies. The seminars provide an opportunity for students to engage closely with a variety of urban observation techniques, including the analysis of films, photographs, drawings, and written texts. These will serve as points of reference for the practical exercises, during which students will learn to identify the various forms of daily ritual activity that occur in urban environments, ranging from more intimate practices to collective actions. The exercises are of two kinds. The first begins with the banal and familiar components that frame the mundane reality of our normal, day-to-day existence: commuting to work, grocery shopping, house cleaning, etc. The second exercise will identify a local ritual performed by a subject of your choice in and around the city. This may include activities such as maintenance, cleaning, playing, policing, protesting, commuting, building, and so forth. The objective is to gain insight into how other members of society utilise and rethink the urban space around them in ways different from our own. The methods of observation and documentation adopted in each exercise are open and will be discussed together, but if the first exercise brings our own privacy to the centre of analysis, the second kind of exercises will help us understand what it means to observe and interact with a community outside of our own. Both exercises provide an opportunity to create new layers of micro-urbanism and micro-history through our recordings and observations; together these layers may ultimately contribute to reveal a different image of the city of Basel. |
| Learning objectives | Learning outcomes: • The course aims to develop a methodology that starts from a highly embodied experience of the city, in order to deeply root everyday practices in a concrete and immediate relationship with the urban environment. • The course provides an opportunity to develop and assess observational skills, enabling students to learn from and subsequently apply these skills to subsequent work. • The course additionally aims to engender an acknowledgement of the highly complex, fragmented nature of the subjects who actively occupy and reinvent the spaces they inhabit through modes of urban appropriation that resist the city and its politics. |
| Bibliography | Selected Bibliography: Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009 Bradley, Richard. “A Life Less Ordinary: The Ritualization of the Domestic Sphere in Later Prehistoric Europe”. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 13(1), 2003: 5-23 Buber, Martin. [1923] I and Thou. New York: Simon and Schuster 1970 Comaroff, Jean, Comaroff, John L. Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1993 de Certeau, Michel. The practice of everyday life. University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles (CA), London 1984 Gehl, Jan. Life between buildings. Using Public Space. Washington: Island Press 2011 Han, Byung-Chul. The disappearance of rituals: a topology of the present. Cambridge: Polity Press 2020 hooks, bell. Belonging. A culture of place. New York-London: Routledge 2009 Ingold, Tim. Life of Lines. London: Routledge 2015 Jacobs, Jane. [1961] The Death and Life of the Great American City. London-New York: Penguin Random House 1992 Jormakka, Kari. Heimlich Manœuvres. Ritual in Architectural Form. Weimar: Verso 1995 Leighton-Chase John., Crawford Margareth, Kalinski John. , Everyday Urbanism. New York: The Monacelli Press 2008 Lynch, Kevin. Good city form. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press 1984 Perec, Georges. An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press 2010 Simmel, Georg. [1908] “The Stranger”. Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1971: pp.143-50 Teyssot, Georges. A topology of everyday constellations. Cambridge (MA)-London: The MIT Press 2013 Till, Jeremy. Architecture Depends. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press 2009 Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: the human seriousness of play. New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications 1982. Venturi, Robert, Scott-Brown, Denise, Izenour, Steve. [1972] Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press 2017 Ward, Colin. The Child in the City. London: Bedford Press 1978 Wigglesworth, Sarah, Till Jeremy. The Everyday and Architecture. Architectural Design 134. 1998 |
| Comments | This course is open to Master students from other programs with a priority for Critical Urbanisms and Changing Societies Master Students. Max. capacity 35 |
| Admission requirements | Anmelden: Belegen ; Abmelden: nicht erforderlich |
| Course application | Anmelden: Belegen ; Abmelden: nicht erforderlich |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
| wöchentlich | Thursday | 10.15-12.00 | Petersplatz 14/ Hebelstrasse 3, Kleiner Hörsaal E014 |
Dates
| Modules |
Module: The Urban across Disciplines (Master's degree program: Critical Urbanisms) Module: Ways of Knowing the City (Master's degree program: Critical Urbanisms) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment details | Pass/ Fail |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Urban Studies |