Cities are living monuments. They express the past, localize the present, and herald the future. Yet, more often than not, we move through them without paying attention to their material reality or how that materiality and our identities interconnect. This track invites students to explore the capital in their backyard, Washington, D.C., as critical and invested observers. Who decides what a city looks like? How does architecture shape the lives lived in it? How do the needs and dreams that people bring to it alter a city’s personality as well as its façade? In these courses, we will remap the contemporary District by exploring and documenting its built and unbuilt areas, and in the process unearth myriad ‘invisible cities’: personal sites of desire beneath the surface that embody the changing hopes and dreams of individual inhabitants. Join this track to explore the built environments we inhabit, and how they inhabit us.
