The spring student lecture series suggests an expanded exploration of the role of craft within contemporary architectural practice.
The current attention to craft, typically associated with do-it-yourself making and digital tooling, often neglects the professionalism and mastery critical to traditional craft practices. At the same time, craft questions and transforms those practices. Today, craft is no longer a linear process of meticulous material transmutation. Contemporary making culture prioritizes the reinvention of industrial products through the reappropriation of industrial tools. We propose an investigation into how design professionals navigate the lines between artistic craft and industrial production, skilled labor and mass dissemination, digital invention and analog reception.
The series will bring artists, architects, and engineers currently engaging craft as a process, an aesthetic, a tool, a site of invention, or form of currency. Lectures will be organized around the themes of Process/Product, Implement/Instrument, and Micro/Macro. More information on speakers and dates to follow!
