Spring 2016, M.Arch Thesis Studio, ARCH 204B – Atwood

This course took advantage of the ambiguous Power of The. To get situated, the students started with a series of reading and response exercises then followed these assignments by filling in the blank of the following equation, The + ______ = ?. What goes in that blank space was up to them. The equation  served as a starting point from which they located a thesis by identifying contemporary notions and developing contingent understandings of “The ______”. How might the coupling of a word with the English
language’s most basic element of speech be used as a discursive device? How might different forms of emphasis change our understanding of a word? What conversations might we discover?