Carnegie Mellon SoA - Urban Traces, Seminar Elective F21
Instructor: Tommy Yang
The Urban Traces Seminar weaves history, ethnography, storytelling, and the delayering of the built environment through fieldwork to examine and counter-map the representation of the city. Countermapping is resistance rendering visible and legitimizing lived forms of knowledge that differ from mainstream narratives, and, as a result, gives us glimpses of worldmaking beyond architects and designers. Throughout the semester the seminar explored the tensions between how the city is made through collective architectural expression, and how individual buildings are informed by the architecture of the city itself and social practices. Students in collaboration with community stewards unpacked Pittsburgh through and produce a series of experimental multi-media illustrations around rituals of care, memory, and resistance. The course was woven through rhythms of lectures, seminar family-led reading discussions, drawing, and modeling assignment pin-ups culminating in three public forums.
Food Landscapes of Squirrel Hill, 2021 by Rebecca Cunningham
