ARI 327P, ARI 391P, ARC 327P, ARC 391P
T 3:30PM-6:30pm, WMB 5.112
Open to ARC Upper Division Undergrads and Grads, ARI Upper Division Undergrads and Grads, and LAR Grads. Open to FA Upper Division Undergrads and Grads with instructor approval.
Instructor: Clay Odom
PRODUCTIONS is a topical seminar investigating interior-oriented spatial design practices, theories, and projects that understand environment and atmosphere not as fixed contexts for design, but as active and continuously produced conditions. The course foregrounds environment, atmosphere, and ecology as both media and methods through which interior design operates. This spring, PRODUCTIONS will shift slightly from previous semesters. It will focus on how interior assemblies can be conceptualized, developed, and prototyped as interior-oriented environmental production systems. Students examine how the organization and assembly of elements produce effects across scales and temporalities, extending conventional tectonic concerns to include space, atmosphere, energy, biology, waste, behavior, and ecological exchange. Through references drawn from interior design, architecture, contemporary art, installation, film, and theater (including projects that collapse distinctions between object and environment) students explore making as both a material and conceptual process. The seminar combines interior-oriented conceptual frameworks and methods with design methodologies and techniques drawn from art and film to develop small-scale prototypes, experiments, and projects. Beginning with the proposition that interior design produces not simply objects or spaces but relations, effects, and environments, the course asks students to consider the consequences of their design processes through a contemporary extension of Buckminster Fuller’s question, “How much does your building weigh?”: What does your process produce? Through references drawn from contemporary art, interior design, architecture, spatial practice, and environmental experimentation (including work by Professor Odom/see image) students will explore making as both a material and conceptual process. Projects that explicitly collapse distinctions between object and environment—such as Mark Dion’s Neukom Vivarium, Fernando Luis Benedit’s Phytotron, Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca, and Olafur Eliasson’s Creekbed—provide models for examining how designed systems can operate simultaneously as objects, environments, instruments, infrastructures, experiments, and performances. Ultimately, PRODUCTIONS approaches how to consider the interior through the consideration of a set of relationships through which materials, objects, bodies, spaces, and environments continually affect and transform one another.
