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ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN 101A : FALL SEMESTER 2005
Design With Language: Short Compositions
Raymond Lifchez
2-4 units
The intention of the class is to encourage students, interested in the built environment and the objects that furnish it, to work with words and narrative, so that their understanding of objects, buildings and spaces will not be limited to physical characteristics, but can embrace a given building and its furnishings as active characters in the events of a human life.
ED 101A is conducted as a workshop. Weekly writing assignments of 1,000 words a week are read, edited, and discussed by the group. Weekly, students will read selections from literature as models of creativewriting which are either in content or of style, meant to encourage a creative response to the given assignment (see weekly prompts, below). Assignments are linked through promising ideas that emerge from what is written and the responses they provoke. Photographs will be used to augment texts.
ED 101A and ED 101B are qualified for English Department Credit
REQUIREMENTS:
English 1A and B or the equivalent tworeading and comprehension courses.
Enrollment with the Instructor’s Permission.
Tuesday, 6-9pm
108 Wurster Hall
Professor Raymond Lifchez
lifchez@ berkeley.edu
Office Hours, Fall Semester, TBA
WEEKLY ASSIGNMENTS: THE PROMPTS AND READINGS (subject to changes)
OBJECTS and their CONTEXT
Week 1: 30 August -- Transitional Object
Robert Olen Butler, Mr. Green in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Week 2: 6 September -- Object of Desire
Nick Hornby, Otherwise Pandemonium in McSweenys, v10
Week 3: 13 September -- Object & Memory
Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory
Week 4: 20 September -- Object & Self
To be assigned
Week 5: 27 September -- Object & The Other
Robert Olen Butler, Hotel Touraine in Had a Good Time
DOMESTIC SPACE and OCCASION
Week 6: 4 October –The Threshold
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
Week 7: 11 October -- The Door
Raymond Lifchez, The Author as Architect in Architect's People
Week 8: 18 October -- The Window
To be assigned
Week 9: 25 October -- The Stair
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Week 10: 1 November -- The Room: 4 A.M.
Ian McEwan, Dead As They Come
James Joyce, The Dead
THE CITY and IDENTITY
Week 11: 8 November -- Dreaming the City
Italo Calvino, InvisibleCities
Week 12: 15 November -- Roaming the City: The Flâneur
Philippe Soupault, Last Nights of Paris
Week 13: 22 November -- Assignation
Justin Tussing, The Laser Age in TheNew Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2005
Andre Aciman, False Papers
Week 14: 29 November -- Alienation
Week 15: 6 December -- At Home in the City
Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher