Assembling a Molecular Architecture: Handouts

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Section 4: Material Assemblies

(Click here to download this handout as a PDF)

ARC3016Y Assembling a molecular architecture

Tuesdays 9am – 1pm and 2pm-6pm; Thursdays 2pm-6pm
Adrian Blackwell
Adrian.blackwell@utoronto.ca
Office Hours: By appointment

TERM PROJECT assembling a molecular architecture

SECTION 4 Material assemblies – systems

METHODOLOGY

There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus 229.

The task of philosophy when it creates concepts, entities, is always to extract an event from things and beings, to set up the new event from things and beings, always to give them a new event: space, time, matter, thought, the possible as events.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – What is Philosophy? 33.

You are in the process of deciding what to build. You need to build a machine that is driven by the desiring assemblage of the Mount Dennis Community Kitchen, built up from its member’s disparate desires, to grow healthy food, to share meals with others, to strengthen local ecosystems, to protect local wildlife, to mentor children, to share ideas and experiences with elderly residents. At the same time you want to build an architecture that inspires and supports the desires of a wider group of residents, passersby, local shop keepers, employers, renters, home owners and school children, opening up possibilities for the constitution of new and unplanned collective assemblages. This process of assembling desire is complex and delicate; it involves very real virtual and actual forces which must be channeled into a singular artifact.

At the last meeting we decided on many of the following issues, these decisions still leave a very wide margin for design thinking and further decision making.

1. Program: HEALTHY FOOD, the project should be clearly focused around three related programs: a) preparing food, b) eating food, and c) distributing food. In this sense it complements the community gardens in three ways.
a) Preparing food requires a surface at appropriate height and depth, it also may include provisions for water hook-up and waste water, a cooking surface (a barbeque or fuel electric range or oven), garbage and recycling area and storage for tools and supplies.
b) Eating food requires a surface of appropriate height for a large but indeterminate number of people and seating for the same number of people.
c) Food distribution requires a surface of appropriate height for selling food or giving it way. It could also facilitate the transportation of food within Mount Dennis.
All three of these three programs may benefit from shelter, from rain and especially sun as well and a lighting concept. These may be different in each case.

Related assemblages: Emmett Avenue community garden, Carl’s children’s gardening project, food distribution networks such as Meals on Wheels for seniors, Foodshare’s good food box, the existing harvest festival, a possible future farmer’s market.

2. Materials: RECYCLED / DURABLE / EXPRESSIVE
a) All architecture designed in the studio should be made of materials that are recycled, or even better reused. Consider the objections raised within your experiments so far regarding the signification of recycled materials and consider the way things look.
b) It is essential that the architecture you build is durable, that the materials you use can withstand vandalism, vigorous use, and weather of four seasons: extreme heat and cold, snow, rain, sun, wind and sun.
c) Materials should be chosen for their performative characteristics. What does each material express? How does it modulate different forces?

Related assemblages: ReStore, garbage pick-up nights, salvage yards, Craig’s List.

3. Actualization: EASE OF CONSTRUCTION / EASE OF DEPLOYMENT
a) Ease of Construction requires that we consider practical solutions to construction problems. Thinking about the availability of materials, the costs involved in acquiring them, the potentials that they might be donated, and the labour hours involved in putting them together.
b) Ease of Deployment means making the structure(s) easy for a small group of people of different strengths to move while walking, riding a bicycle, or in or behind an automobile. It also needs to be easy for people of different strengths to unpack and assemble any movable structures.

Related assemblages: the studio, community kitchen, gardeners at Emmett avenue, Children at the Oxford Avenue building.

4. Siting: MOVABLE / RELATED TO SPECIFIC SITES
a) Through discussion we have decided that the primary architecture that we will build will have to be mobile, movable by one or more people on foot, bicycle and or automobile. Mobility allows the structure to animate diverse sites in the community and to help to construct situations and events in relation to the assemblage of overlapping community groups in Mount Dennis.
b) Its mobility means that the architecture must be able to engage diverse urban conditions: streets, sidewalks, parking lots, apartment buildings municipal yards, abandoned sites, small parks, large parks, community gardens. Some of these sites are already used by members of the community kitchen, others could use a temporary architecture as an anchor for an event that could help to reconceptualize their function within the neighborhood. Each of these contexts offers specific conditions to respond to and inspire new uses.

Related assemblages: Mount Dennis neighborhood, Eglinton flats, Humber river, Black Creek, Oxford Avenue Apartments, Balla School, Shortcuts, abandoned sites.

5. Affectivity: PARTICIPATORY not SPECTACULAR
According to Situationist Guy Debord a spectacle presents itself for passive contemplation, while the events that this architecture supports have to be seen as participatory, as active not contemplative. The challenge is to imagine how architecture is related to events. How it can contribute to or support the production of meals, festivals, clean-ups, art events, to momentarily involve people in their neighborhood in new ways, in the process allowing for new concepts to be generated which might inspire future events.

Related assemblages: Event Schedule, existing events, community desires.

METHOD

For the past two weeks you have been testing options for this architecture. You now have to propose a buildable architecture which plugs into different assemblages and ecologies – psychic, social and environmental. Working in groups of three (or four) produce the following:

a) A site plan following up on the green space audit, showing the potential uses and interrelationships of different elements of the neighborhood. Try to think about the relationship between our architectural intervention and the machinic assemblage of the physical site, as well as the relation between the proposal and the collective assemblages of enunciation. Who are we communicating with, and who will speak through and around it?

b) The design of a greenhouse at the Stanchester building on Oxford Avenue or elsewhere in Mount Dennis. Consider the possible sites, in relation to issues of structure, security, water, electricity, convenience in cold and warm weather, plant production and distribution. Include in this section any detailed design for that might be fixed within the site plan proposed in part a).

c) A mobile structure or structures for cooking, eating, and distributing food. For the mobile structure(s) carefully consider their use in terms of their mechanical systems. How do they move? How do they lock up or close down? Consider the duration that the device occupies different sites, and the range of ways it can interact with different sites. Consider how water circulates within the structure.

Consider carefully the affects that can be produced through these architectural designs. How do you produce new qualities with this architecture, in relation to weather, sound? How does this structure frame the city? How do these three elements constitute a singular assemblage?

SCHEDULE

Monday February 25th:
15 minute meetings with each of you to discuss the term so far.

Tuesday February 26th:
9:00 – 11:00 - Tour of Foodshare premises and a meeting with Ravenna Barker who is one of Foodshare’s urban agriculture specialists. 90 Croatia Street, just off Brock Street south of Bloor (near Dufferin subway station) see the map: http://www.foodshare.net/whoweare03.htm
1:00 – 3:00 – pin up and discussion of work over the break, constructing groups of 3 or 4
3:00 – 6:00 – Discussion: Year Zero: Faciality, 167. and 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?” 192

Thursday February 28th:
2:00 – 6:00 – Discussion of the work with small groups

Friday February 29th:
Presentation of diagrams and programs to the Community kitchen - 7-9pm meeting at Mount Dennis United Church. Each group is expected to have presentable materials for all three parts of your design to explain to the community kitchen.

Tuesday March 4th:
9:00 – 1:00 - Review for Part one – Preliminary designs
2:00 – 4:00 - decisions on a clear direction for the project and division of labour for Part 2 – detailed design.
4:00 – 6:00 - Discussion: 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity, 208

Thursday March 6th
2:00 – 6:00 – interim pin-up Draft 2

Friday March 7th
Presentation of the project to the Community kitchen - 7-9pm meeting at Mount Dennis United Church. Each student will be expected to have materials describing their section of the project for discussion.

Tuesday March 10th
9:00 – 1:00 – review of part two - Material Assemblies
2:00 – 4:00 - section 5: Assembling a molecular architecture 1:1
4:00 – 6:00 - Discussion: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible..., 232.

SECTION DUE DATE

Part one is due on Tuesday March 4th at 9:00am it should be printed on 3 sheets exactly 24 x 36” (vertical format).

Part two is due on Tuesday March 11th at 9:00am and will involve every student in the class, it should be a collectively produced as an 11 x 17 design document.

Together parts one and two are worth 15% of the term mark.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Section 3: Matters of Bodies

(Click here to download this handout as a PDF)

ARC3016Y Assembling a molecular architecture

Tuesdays 9am – 1pm and 2pm-6pm; Thursdays 2pm-6pm
Adrian Blackwell
Adrian.blackwell@utoronto.ca
Office Hours: By appointment

TERM PROJECT assembling a molecular architecture

SECTION 3 Matters of bodies - program

METHODOLOGY

Pragmatics as a whole consists in this: making a tracing of the mixed semiotics, under the generative component; making the transformational map of the regimes, with the their possibilities for translation and creation, for budding along the lines of the tracings; making the diagram of the abstract machines that are in play in each case, either as potentialities or as effective emergences; outlining the program of the assemblages that distribute everything and bring a circulation of movement with alternatives, jumps and mutations.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus, 146-147.

The problem… is to tip the most favorable assemblage from its side facing the strata to its side facing the plane of consistency or the body without organs.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus, 134.

In section one you produced a tracing and a map that described a specific regime of signs enveloping a specific geography – York South / Weston. This project is about developing an abstract machine, or diagram, for the site, which anticipates a specific program and the assemblage which will practice it. Programs are tied to specific arrangements of power. Do they constitute reversible and mobile relations of power or fixed states of domination?

Following the discussion with community members at Mount Dennis United Church you will develop a program and diagram for a molecular architecture that could engage issues of environmental sustainability, social life and creative production. What organic ecological assemblages are being imagined and constructed within the Mount Dennis neighborhood? How could an architectural plan stimulate social events and plug into this ecology? What forms of creative experimentation can this facilitate? What desires animate this diagram, how can we connect them together, so they don’t remain separated and powerless, but combine to create new compositions.

In this project you will be working in groups, each group will be responsible for opening up a conversation about one aspect of the plan, this conversation will include everyone in the studio. Here you will try to express your ideas as a collective assemblage of enunciation, as a group without separate parts, or individuals. One possible arrangement of persons is as follows:

a) Organizing territory – 2 people – 2 proposals
b) Mobile architecture - 6 people – 3 proposals
c) Garage / greenhouse – 3 people – 2 proposals
d) Docking surfaces – 2 people – 2 proposals

However other organizations are also possible, and these may be discovered through the preliminary discussions.

You will make diagrams and develop programs to discuss with the community, as the first stage of an iterative, circular and repetitive design process, in which each repetition produces new differences.

SCHEDULE
Week 5 – Matters of bodies – program

Tuesday February 5
9:00 – 10:00 – rearrange the studio
10:00 - 1:00 – discussion starting from Friday’s meeting:
2:00 – 4:00 – Discussion: D&G 587 B.C.--A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs, 111.
4:00 – 5:00 – division of labour

Wednesday February 6
7:00 – 9:00 - meeting of the Emmett Avenue Residents Association

Thursday February 7
2:00 – 4:00 – group pin-up of the elements, presentation and engagement of the group in the discussion.
4:00 – 6:00 – smaller group conversations

Week 6 – February 12, 14
Matters of bodies - diagram

Tuesday, February 12
9:00 – 1:00 –
9:00 – 1:00 – general discussion
2:00 – 4:00 – group discussions
4:00 – 6:00 - Discussion: November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs? 149.

Thursday, February 14
2:00 – 6:00 – Review: Matters of bodies

Friday February 15, presentation of diagrams and programs to the Community kitchen - 7-9pm meeting at Mount Dennis United Church

SECTION DUE DATE

Diagram and Program - due February 14 - 10% 2:00pm.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Section 2: Matters of Material

Monday, January 14, 2008

Section 1: Matters of Urbanism

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Assembling a Molectular Architecture

(Click here to download this handout as a PDF)

ARC3016Y Assembling a molecular architecture

Tuesdays 9am – 1pm and 2pm-6pm; Thursdays 2pm-6pm
Adrian Blackwell
Adrian.blackwell@utoronto.ca
Office Hours: By appointment

COURSE DESCRIPTION
Assembling a molecular architecture

no one has yet determined what the body can do…
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics

Every relationship of forces constitutes a body--whether it is chemical, biological, social, or political.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

Most older methods of communication, reflection and dialogue have dissolved in favor of an individualism and a solitude that are often synonymous with anxiety and neurosis. It is for this reason that I advocate – under the aegis of a new conjunction of environmental ecology, social ecology, and mental ecology – the invention of new collective assemblages of enunciation concerning the couple, the family, the school, the neighbourhood...
Felix Guattari, Remaking Social Practices

If bodies, individual or collective, are made through a specific combination of forces acting on formed and unformed materials, then a building is no different. In this studio we will be investigating psychological, micro-political, and environmental forces in order to consider their effects on building materials, people, and urban spaces. Our challenge is not to collapse the problem of architecture by designing a unitary organism, but rather to understand that each building operates at a non-finite number of interlinked scales from the molecular to the molar, from a grain of sand to the city. At each of these scales every piece of architecture participates in the construction of assemblages (mental, social, or ecological) which in turn produce different effects, connect to form larger compositions, or divide into parts, revealing smaller ones.

These relationships are inevitable, but what makes them function freely and what clogs them up? How can we design with these assemblages in mind and body?

In order to focus our investigations on these problems this studio will:

1. work with user-groups in the Weston / Mount Dennis neighborhood of Toronto, to develop a building which is useful to them and which reverberates with their desires, both responding to existing ones, and stimulating entirely new ones;

2. focus on essential and pleasurable programs for everyday life: a space for food production or distribution and another for music and dance;

3. build a 1:1 structure in order to experiment with possible relationships between materials, labour, and drawings;

4. read one book, A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in order to have something in common: a parallel theoretical investigation.

1. User-groups

We don't need an ethical committee of supposedly well-qualified wise men, but user-groups.
Gilles Deleuze – Control and Becoming

The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which that activity is performed.
Jacques Ranciere – The Politics of Aesthetics

This studio will follow from the investigations of the Toronto’s Urban Unconscious, a studio that I taught in 2006. This design research project focused on an area of Toronto’s urban fabric that suffers from both social and physical isolation from the rest of the city. The area that spans from Parkdale through Earlscourt and Mount Dennis, north along Weston Road and Jane, past Weston and up into Jane and Finch and Rexdale has a high concentration of low-income and new immigrant communities. We called this area the ‘western rail triangle,’ because it is roughly organized around and between two rail lines on the west side of the city and argued that this territory acts as Toronto’s ‘urban unconscious’, divided from other urban spaces by the railways, ravines, highways, and industrial fabric. Because it has not been targeted as a primary location for redevelopment, it remains largely beyond the research or proposals of urban planners and architects, and citizens who live in other neighbourhoods find few reasons to traverse it.

In the Toronto’s Urban Unconscious studio we worked with 1652 Keele Street, a local ‘community hub,’ which includes the Social Planning Council, the Community Action Resource Center, Somali and Hispanic immigrant organizations, Woman Abuse Council of Toronto and the For Youth Initative, to redesign the building they are working in, which they inherited from the city. In this studio we will work with these groups again to produce architecture that can help facilitiate their use of the exterior of the building and the surrounding urban fabric. We will collaborate to create new creative possibilities for architectural diagrams, programs and expressions. The neighbourhood sits along the historical industrial corridor of Toronto, and as a result much of the local economic base has been lost through de-industrialization. We will try to consider these changing forms of work, considering ways in which the creative power of the local residents’ new powers of creative and communicative labour can transform city space.

2. Programs

In conversation and collaboration with users in Mount Dennis and Keele / Rogers Road neighbourhoods, we will design and build one of two architectural projects:

a) Eating - You are what you eat

“Beyond Good and Evil, at least this does not mean: beyond good and bad.” The good is when a body directly compounds its relation to ours, and with all or part of its power, increases ours. A food, for example. For us, the bad is when a body decomposes our body’s relation, although it still combines with our parts, but in ways that do not correspond to our essence, as when a poison breaks down the blood. Hence good and bad have a primary, objective meaning, but one that is relative and partial: that which agrees with our nature or does not agree with it.
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

One group will develop infrastructure for the Emmett Avenue Community Gardens in Eglinton Flats. This could involve connections to and from high rise apartments and the gardens, a mobile device for transporting and sharing vegetables, or an eating area within the park. Detailed programs will be determined in collaboration with the Emmett Avenue Residents Association and other local gardeners.

b) Dancing – “How do you make yourself a body without organs?”

When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom. Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real place.
Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings

One group will design and build a mobile stage that can be used by members of the 1652 Keele Street ‘community hub,’ with special emphasis placed on the For Youth Initiative, for music and dance events. When not in use, the structure will have to be easily moved. The challenge will be to rethink the ground plane of the entire site, using the mobility of the stage as a mechanism to reorganize the parking lot and the garden on Keele Street.

3. Building 1:1

In this studio we will build full size, following experiments in architectural education, such as the Rural Studio at Auburn University initiated by Samuel Mockabee and D.K. Ruth , the design/build studio at The University of Houston, the Miami University Center for Community Engagement in Over-the-Rhine and the Cranbrook Art School architecture department. By building at full scale we work across the distanced and hierarchical relationship that architects have with construction labour, while at the same time interrogating the relationship between virtuality of drawing and materiality of construction.

The studio will be focused on experimentation with materials, as a way to rethink architecture from the molecular level outwards. We will begin by selecting appropriate materials and breaking them down, to explore their constituent elements. These experiments will inform the development of material assemblies for the structures we are designing, as well as offer possible ordering structures for architecture at other scales.

All Materials used in the studio will be reused from other sites. We will focus on the relationship of the structures we build to the ‘environmental ecology’ of the city. We will consider the interaction between the building and its environment from the point of view of its constitution and its performance, the elements and forces that combine to form it and the forces and elements it expends and returns to its surroundings.

Some materials will be donated from Restore, Habitat for Humanity’s building materials recycling store. Other used or recycled materials, should be sourced by each group and donations should be negotiated with specific suppliers to individual groups.

4. Reading

The book is finished. It is a totality that the student holds in his hand, that he can span entirely with a glance. There is nothing the schoolmaster can hide from him, and nothing he can hide from the master’s gaze. The circle forbids cheating, and above all that great cheat: incapacity. I can’t, I don’t understand. There is nothing to understand. Everything is in the book. One has only to recount it – the form of each sign, the adventures of each sentence, the lesson of each volume.
Jacques Ranciere – The Ignorant Schoolmaster

No single text has been more influential on the practice of architecture over the last twenty years than Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, volume two of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated into English by Brian Massumi in 1987. Since its North American reception there have been two major interpretations of their work within Architectural education and practice, one primarily formal, and the emphasizing other operative dimensions of architecture.

The formal line of interpretation was intensified by Tom Conley’s 1993 translation of The Fold, which deals directly with both baroque architecture and the work of young architect, Bernard Cache. This work stimulated many new formal investigations in architectural practice. A Thousand Plateaus, which had already introduced the concept of the fold to English audiences augments this concept with a much more diverse palette of forms and formal strategies.

By the early 1990s, architects and landscape architects had already taken up a more sympathetic reading of A thousand Plateaus, as a practical tool to understand architecture as operational rather than representational, or signifying. In this trajectory Deleuze forms the foundation for the call for projective practice instead of critical theory in the work of Stan Allen, James Corner, Sanford Kwinter, Alejandro Zaero-Paolo and many others. For these architects the book’s emphasis on program and diagram unlocks a set of new tools for practice.

Despite the incredible influence the text has had on architectural education and practice few students or practitioners have read past the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, and as a result few are equipped to see the shortcomings of these interpretations, which ignore, evade or downplay its critical and political dimensions. Deleuze and Guattari’s two volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia offers a devastating critique of the power networks and micro-fascisms of contemporary capitalism, while offering a new way of thinking about solidarity and collectivity in a world that appears to be fracturing into dangerous individualisms. One political reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work has been nurtured and extended through their interactions with Italian Workerists and Autonomists: Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Franco Bifo Berardi and others. This interpretation, which emphasizes the psychological and political, will be used within the studio as an important complement to the existing architectural readings of the book. The text will form an essential part of the studios ‘mental ecology.’

COURSE OBJECTIVES

This course will allow students to experience full scale construction, in order to learn about the distance between drawing and building, and to consider the relation between architecture and its environment. It will introduce students to interactions with collective users, emphasizing the importance of collaboration with them. The studio will also provide a forum for the discussion of architectural ideas in relation to important concepts in contemporary theory. Most importantly the studio will offer students tools to interrelate environmental, social and mental ecologies at multiple scales within a single material project.

SCHEDULE
Week 1 - January 8, 10
Matters of Urbanism – data collection
Thursday 2-4pm - Discussion: Introduction: Rhizome, 3.

Week 2 – January 15, 17
Matters of Urbanism – mappings
Tuesday 4-6pm - Discussion: 1914: One or Several Wolves? 26.
Thursday 2-6pm – Review: Matters of Urbanism

Week 3 – January 22, 24
Matters of material – collecting samples
Thursday 4-6pm - Discussion: 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?), 39.

Week 4 – January 29, 31
Matters of material – testing materials
Tuesday 4-6pm - Discussion: A Thousand Plateaus, November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics, 75.
Thursday 2-6pm – Review: Matters of material

Week 5 – February 5, 7
Matters of bodies - program
Thursday 4-6pm - Discussion: 587 B.C.--A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs, 111.

Week 6 – February 12, 14
Matters of bodies - diagram
Tuesday 4-6pm - Discussion: November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs? 149.
Thursday 2-6pm – Review: Matters of bodies

Reading week - February 18-22

Week 7 – February 26, 28
Material assemblies - elements
Tuesday 4-6pm - Discussion: Year Zero: Faciality, 167.
Thursday 4-6pm - Discussion: 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?” 192 .

Week 8 – March 4, 6
Material assemblies - systems
Tuesday 4-6pm - Discussion: 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity, 208
Thursday 2-6pm – Review: Material assemblies

Week 9 – March 11, 13
Assembling a molecular architecture 1:1
Thursday 2-6pm – Discussion: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible..., 232.

Week 10 – March 18, 20
Assembling a molecular architecture 1:1
Thursday 4-6pm - Discussion: 1837: Of the Refrain, 310.

Week 11 – March 25, 27
Assembling a molecular architecture 1:1
Tuesday 4-6pm – Progress Review
Thursday 4-6pm - Discussion: 1227: Treatise on Nomadology:--The War Machine, 351.

Week 12 – April 1, 3
Assembling a molecular architecture 1:1
Thursday 4-6pm - Discussion: 7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture, 424
Week 13 – April 8, 10
Assembling a molecular architecture 1:1
Tuesday 4-6pm - Discussion: 1440: The Smooth and the Striated, 474
Final Review – Date To Be Confirmed

EVALUATION
There is only one project for the term: to build a structure to accommodate a specific program, but this project will be divided into 5 sections:

Material investigations - 35% of the course grade (designated as follows):
Section 1: Matters of urbanism – due January 17 - 10%
Section 2: Matters of material due January 31 - 10%
Section 3: Matters of bodies due February 14 - 15%

Assemblages - 50% of the course grade (designated as follows):
Section 4: Material assemblies - due March 6 - 10%
Section 5: Assembling a molecular architecture - 40%

Three written presentations on readings (500 words each) - 15% of the course grade (designated as follows):
1. Discussion introduction 5%
2. Glossary of terms 5%
3. 3-5 questions, each at a different scale 5%

The studio grade includes a growth factor through the various studio projects and involvement in the studio.

Evaluation will be carried out in accordance with the Graduate Grading and Evaluation Practices Policy (and how that policy is interpreted and applied in this Faculty). The University of Toronto, School of Graduate Studies, 2007 – 2008 Calendar, pages 36 to 41 explains that policy in detail.

PLAGIARISM
University of Toronto code of Behaviour on Academic Matters states that "It shall be an offence for a student knowingly: to represent as one's own any idea or expression of an idea or work of another in any academic examination or term test or in connection with any other form of academic work, i.e., to commit plagiarism."

For accepted methods of standard documentation formats, including electronic citation of internet sources please see the U of T writing website at: http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/document.html#elec

The full Code of Behaviour regulations could be found from consulting
http://www.sgs.utoronto.ca/current/calendar/regulations16.asp

WRITING AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE

As well as the al&d writing support, please see English Language and writing support at University of Toronto: http://www.sgs.utoronto.ca/english/ and
http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/advise.html. Students have commented that they found the latter address extremely helpful for writing term papers.

The following are also useful:
Sylvan Barnett, A Short Guide to Writing About Art. 5-7th edition (New York: Harper-Collins, 1997)
William Strunk Jr., E.B. White. The Elements of Style (New York: MacMillan Publishing)

LATE WORK

All assignments are due in class at the specified time and date. Any work submitted after the due date will be penalized at a rate of 10% per week. In the case of illness or other special circumstance, notification should be given to the instructors and the Program Office as soon as possible and before the deadline in question. Late work submitted after the final day of classes, April 11, 2008 is not acceptable without prior written permission from the Program Director.

FINAL DUE DATE

The final due date for course work is at 3.00 pm on April 11, 2008.

READINGS

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)

Friday, February 29, 2008

Section 4: Material Assemblies

Friday, February 1, 2008

Section 3: Matters of Bodies

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Section 2: Matters of Material

Monday, January 14, 2008

Section 1: Matters of Urbanism

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Assembling a Molectular Architecture

ASSEMBLING A MOLECULAR ARCHITECTURE LAUNCH!

PROJECT INFORMATION

WE THANK THE SUPPORT OF:

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