The State of Emergency and its Aftermaths: Kitchen Design to Counter-History

In this class we will uncover how architecture and design have mitigated and exacerbated the human tragedy of modern industrialized war in the 20th century. Taking the First World War and its inheritances as a through line to the present-day refugee crisis, we will discover how conflicts have manifested spatially (refugee camps to military installations, villages to capital cities), how design cultures of education, care, and memory emerged from battle and conditions of scarcity, and how war often blurred the meaning of what constitutes “architecture.” Shifting the focus from trenches, monuments, and imperial building projects to the architecture of the everyday, we will think about the politics of food systems and garden design, urban (and rural) recovery and reconstruction efforts, the creation of ephemeral and ad-hoc architectures, the role of mechanization, technology, and governmentality, and the gendered implications of states of emergency. This course is part of the Public Humanities Labs Initiative administered by the Axinn Center for the Humanities.*