The View from the Car

The automobile has reshaped our conceptions of space and our modes of accessing and penetrating the urban and non-urban territory in multiple ways, revolutionizing how architects perceive the city and contributing significantly to the transformation of the relationship between architecture and the city. The seminar examines the architects’ automobile vision. Its main objective is to help students understand how the automobile influenced the architects’ perception of the environment and how its generalized use provoked the emergence of new theoretical concepts and eventually led to new design perspectives. It aims to untie the specificity of car travel as a new episteme of the urban landscape.

One of the main learning objectives of the seminar is to help students understand that the emergence of the generalized use of the car is related not only to a new epistemological regime, but also to a new representational regime. The new representational regime, which relies upon photography, film, new modes of visual mapping and particular diagrams, serves to capture this new epistemological regime. The seminar offers awareness to students that there is an agency and an intentionality behind this new representational regime.

This course took place during the Spring 2021 semester.