Books by Title Artist Semester
Books by Semester
2004 City as Image
The first Urban Books seminar was divided into three parts: City as Text,
City as Image, and City as Subject. Each section combined readings, research
and design activities. For their final projects, students selected a theme
related to the urbanization of St. Louis, how it has been imagined as a
contemporary, post-industrial metropolis, and how it has been represented
through urban images. The students books were displayed alongside the newly curated Urban Books
Collection in an exhibition at Olin Library titled, The City as Subject:
Urban Books, held December 13, 2004-February 21, 2005.
2005 Water/ Asphalt
The 2005 seminar "Water and Asphalt" was organized to specifically compliment the theme of that year’s International Istanbul Architecture Biennale. Each student selected a topic relating the general theme to the urbanization of St. Louis and explored aspects of how this metropolitan area has been influenced by two major forces: the Mississippi River and the highway system.
Final projects were displayed in Istanbul and a catalog was produced.
2006 […]scapes
“[…]scapes” was the general theme for the seminar in 2006. We looked at
landscape as a historic and social construct, starting from the term
landscape in the historic sense of visual and land-shaping as defined by
landscape painting. We further explored the ideas of the sublime and
picturesque that gained currency with Romanticism and examined contemporary
definitions culminating in anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's plural
definition of landscapes as imaged and imagined worlds under globalization.
His proposition overlaps the traditional term landscape with five social and
political dimensions ethnoscape, technoscape, finanscape, ideoscape, and
mediascape which are different modes of perception of the physical and
cultural environment. Each student related the general theme to the urbanization of St. Louis, and
presented aspects of how the metropolitan area has been imagined,
represented, and produced through images.
2007 Focus on Activism
Taking its cue from the verb to act, the seminar in 2007 focused on the
myriad ways that artists and architects act in an urban environment. It
began with a 4-week lecture series, bringing together urban activists of all
varieties in the fields of art, urbanism, landscape architecture,
architecture, design, and community work. We used the theory of the Dérive
and other Situationist writings on the city as the starting point for
creative work. Final projects had to be based on some sort of action, many
of which were interventionist in nature.
The Dérive books and the final projects were exhibited in two separate
exhibitions at the Kranzberg Art and Architecture Library.
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