A42K3B Critical Studies Design Studio 4:3 12.0 credits

The application of feminist and activist methods and tools unearths a specific knowledge of sites, which complements analytical and generalized instruments for the purpose of planning with personal, subjective, and narrative accounts. Through engaging in a closer dialogue with a site and its agents participatory and collective forms of acquiring and mapping information establish. This produces material, which is informative as well as it is fictional, which has the power of opening up for new site-specific themes and discourses. Urban proposals will be developed, which consider the intimate scale of 1:1 as well as larger conceptual frameworks.

Deltagande Kartläggning / Participatory Mapping

Participatory Mapping is a research studio based on the critical design tools and methods in the course Feminist Design Tools. Its aim is twofold, first, to develop and test tools for spatial research such as methods for collecting site-specific knowledge through narrative methods that, as opposed to more analytical methods, require a participatory engagement with sites, contexts and actors. Second, to explore different modes of representation in relation to the mapping out of found processes, that may generate proposals that inspire a change of existing conditions.

Upon completion of this course, participants should be able to:
-Explore, recognize, and map a site by taking into account social and power relations.
-Develop narrative, participatory, dialogical, and subversive strategies for collecting site knowledge and for projecting possible futures.
-Develop modes of representation that adequately portrait situations, and mediate aims and aspirations of their work.
-Discuss, and present concepts and architectures from within a critical approach to power relations that questions and redefines normalizing notions, situations and practices in the built environment.

Overall goals

1. The course is part of the Critical Studies Design Studio. Through architectural projects, this Studio investigates different experiences of architecture and conceptions of space, in relation to the synthezising design process.
2. The course/project goal is to increase the student's knowledge in this area/field and skills/knowledge in the field of architecture in general. The students will enter the project with varying degrees of knowledge/skills and will subsequently end up at different levels at the end of the course/project.
 3. The individual student must show an increase in the particular skills/knowledge offered in the studio and in the field of architecture in general.

Bachelor’s Degree, or an equivalent level, within the field of Architecture.

Bachelor’s Degree, or an equivalent level, within the field of Architecture

-Jane Rendell, Barabara Penner, Ian Borden (eds.), Gender Space Architecture, London: Routledge, 2000.
-Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petresu, Jeremy Till (eds.), Architecture and Participation, London: Spon Press, 2005.
-Andrea Kahn (ed.), Drawing, Building, Text, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.
-muf, This is what we do. A muf manual, London: Ellipsis, 2001. 
-Joan Ockman (ed.), The Pragmatist Imagination. Thinking about “Things in the Making”, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000.
*Specific literature will be assigned at the beginning of the course.

If the course is discontinued, students may request to be examined during the following two academic years.

• PRO1 - Project, 9.0 credits, grading scale: P, F
• PRO2 - Project, 3.0 credits, grading scale: P, F

Based on recommendation from KTH’s coordinator for disabilities, the examiner will decide how to adapt an examination for students with documented disability.

The examiner may apply another examination format when re-examining individual students.

a) Presentation requirements
Presentation requirements will be handed out at the start of the course.

b) Examination
80% attendance. Active participation in lectures, tutorials, and seminars etc. Passed intermediate and final assessments. Compulsory attendance during the assessment reviews.
Completion: The project work shall be delivered and, if necessary, reworked within the set time limit.  See general directions.
(Overall principle: Autumn term projects must be approved during the following Spring term: Spring term projects must be approved before the start of the following Autumn term. The reworked projects must be delivered at least one week before the time limit.)
The project work is to be documented in a portfolio, including drawings, analysis and models. The work process shall be legible.

Per Fransson

• All members of a group are responsible for the group's work.
• In any assessment, every student shall honestly disclose any help received and sources used.
• In an oral assessment, every student shall be able to present and answer questions about the entire assignment and solution.