PT Room Relocation

For the session beginning for Part Time Students next week 1st October, there is a change of room to K604, same 9am start.

Further Texts

Here's a list of the further texts you will be studying on this course. You may wish to prepare yourself in advance by seeking out cheap copies via ABEbooks, Amazon, E-Bay and so on, or even asking your friends in final year. This is the most basic of reading lists.

Dave Hickey: Air Guitar, Mike Davis: Evil Paradises, Terry Eagleton: After Theory, William Burroughs: The Job, Allen Ginsberg; Howl, Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space, Marshall Berman: All That's Solid Melts in to Air, Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall, Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead, Oswald Spengler: Decline of the West, John Doss Passos: USA,

Session 1

Jonathan Meades text on Zaha, and Alain Badiou's text 'This Crisis is the Spectacle, Where is the Real?' are both easily downloadable for free. Juxtaposing them is a good way to start and that's how we begin the first session. Make sure you read both texts before the first session and write your first blog after the first session.
I was thinking of dropping Meades, but since the publication of Museum Without Walls (his collection on architecture) to considerable acclaim only very recently, we are going to look at him carefully some more.

Welcome

This is the unofficial blog for the Critical Readings we make as the first component of your H&T module on the first year of your PGDip in Architecture at LSBU. If you are enrolled on this course please join this site as a follower and use it for advice weekly as you set up your own blog (with blogspot.com) and make posts on each of the texts set. It is also imperative that you get in to the habit of making your own posts on your own blog week by week, since this is a process orientated submission made over time. I will be reading your blogs as we go along.

You will find you get over any shyness quite quickly. The blogosphere is huge, and it is unlikely you will pick up much traffic from elsewhere, even if you do, who cares? Blogging will help you get in to the habit of writing without the stress of trying to construct an academic essay, yet usefully constructing smaller, more discrete arguments all the same. The task is as much craft as anything. At the end of the course, you simply write a concluding blog and print it all out and submit it.

PLEASE NOTE: It is important not to be pretentious, to throw out any jargon and write straightforwardly. That is your primary task to begin with, that and reading carefully. It is not easy to write well if you do not read well. All the texts have been selected as good pieces of writing as well as pertaining to the search for truth that is theoretical investigation.