ARC 350R/386M
Economy/Value/Quality of Life

Instructor: Steve Ross
Time and Place: MWF 12-1pm, SUT 2.114

No Prerequisites

In this course, each student is asked to consider the evolution and existence of both 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' worldviews/value systems/reality systems/systems of evaluation and how each create situations where forms of individual and collective valution/evaluation are established consequently. (All while testing/evolving/discovering their own 'value hierarchy' in the process/in relation.)

From this, students are then encouraged to consider critically and analytically how this effects the intersection of architecture with economics, real estate, justice, society, culture, environment, ethics, and so on.

In the process, all students are exposed to not only the academic philosophical aspects of the above but also must embrace vernacular theory, and as well, the 'status quo' in terms of real estate, business, and neoclassical economic principles and motives.

This is a broad, wide-ranging, class which moves from theory to practice/general to specific by ending with each student creating a design and market/financial feasibility proposal and cost estimate for a small apartment complex; in which they are asked to produce alternatives that the so-called status quo would accept all while being consistent with their own evolving value hierarchy AND addressing criteria of all constituencies involved: community, user, client, local governing body, lender, investors, and so on.

In short, by requiring students to deal with the intersections as described above, each student is asked to see theory and practice not as separate and distinct, but instead as non-identical yet intersecting sets.

This course aims to create a constant feedback loop between, on the one hand, the material taught about macro and micro-economics, building economics and real estate investment and development and, on the other hand, the students' own evolving awareness of their personal value systems and epistemologies. Much time is spent asking questions, testing assumptions and preconceptions. Students will learn to respond critically to the issues through readings and discussions that are both highly critical of and wholly accepting of the status quo.

In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students and adults become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching.
--Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

Meaning, not raw facts, is what humanity seeks, and society is a collection of kits or codes for processing raw facts into meaning.
-Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature, 1991

Information is not knowledge. You can mass-produce raw data and incredible facts and figures. You cannot mass-produce knowledge, which is created by individual minds, drawing on individual experience, separating the significant from the irrelevant, making value judgements.
--Theodore Roszak, 1987

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions, themselves. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.
--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Aune, James Arnt
Selling the Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness
2001: The Guilford Press, NY,NY 1-57230-598-3

Robert D. Kaplan
The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
Paperback: Vintage Books; ISBN: 037570759X. 2001.

Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World
by Benjamin R. Barber
Ballantine Books (Trd Pap); ISBN: 0345383044; Reprint edition (August 1996)

Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth
by William Bryant Logan
Paperback (May 1996)
Riverhead Books; ISBN: 1573225460

Reenchantment of the World
by Morris Berman
Paperback - 357 pages (December 1981)
Cornell Univ Pr; ISBN: 0801492254

For the Common Good : Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future
by Herman E. Daly, John B., Jr. Cobb (Contributor), Clifford W. Cobb (Designer)
Paperback - 534 pages 2nd Up&exp edition (April 1994)
Beacon Pr; ISBN: 0807047058

The Illusion of Choice : How the Market Economy Shapes Our Destiny
(Suny Series in Environmental Public Policy)
by Andrew Bard Schmookler
Paperback (December 1993)
State Univ of New York Pr; ISBN: 0791412660

Empire
by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri
Paperback - 504 pages 1st harvar edition (August 2001)
Harvard Univ Pr; ISBN: 0674006712

The Critical Theory of Technology
by Andrew Feenberg
Paperback - 235 pages (June 1991)
Oxford University Press; ISBN: 0195068556

Landscapes of Power : From Detroit to Disney World
by Sharon Zukin
Paperback (February 1993)
University of California Press; ISBN: 0520082885

Urban Fortunes : The Political Economy of Place
by John R. Logan (Editor), Harvey L. Molotch (Editor)
Paperback Reprint edition (June 1988)
University of California Press; ISBN: 0520063414

Real Estate Investment
by John P. Wiedemer
Paperback 5 edition (March 2001)
South-Western Pub; ISBN: 0324141750