A

AIA CES Credits

AV Office

Abstract Publication

Academic Affairs

Academic Calendar, Columbia University

Academic Calendar, GSAPP

Admissions Office

Advanced Standing Waiver Form

Alumni Board

Alumni Office

Architecture Studio Lottery

Assistantships

Avery Library

Avery Review

Avery Shorts

S

STEM Designation

Satisfactory Academic Progress

Scholarships

Skill Trails

Student Affairs

Student Awards

Student Conduct

Student Council (All Programs)

Student Financial Services

Student Health Services at Columbia

Student Organization Handbook

Student Organizations

Student Services Center

Student Services Online (SSOL)

Student Work Online

Studio Culture Policy

Studio Procedures

Summer Workshops

Support GSAPP

Close
This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's usage of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice Group 6
ARCH6964-1 / Fall 2025

Information Richness: Architecture, Media, Politics

This research and representation seminar examines architectural media in an information-rich world — one in which technology is no longer new but mundane, entrenched, and resource-intensive. Today it is not out of the question to “see one billion images” or have algorithms intervene in advance of taking a photograph. Information richness is not simply a passive condition of possessing data, but points toward a highly mediated assemblage that has bearing on society’s engagements with the world.

In architecture, what constitutes drawing today may be coextensive with modeling, managing, simulating, scanning, storing, detecting, prompting, and generating information, establishing work routines and material relations from our desktops. Together, we will examine pervasive and mundane techniques of representation in architecture and its allied fields of photography, media studies, labor discourse, and philosophies of technology. We aim to question, leverage, and creatively reorient their roles (incidental or explicit) in mediating material relations, scales, and questions of accumulation.

At least since the 1960s, the technical work of representing buildings has gained unprecedented capacities for data, fidelity, speed, intelligence, and profits, and supposedly less drudgery for the worker. But things are more uncertain under the hood. Instead of establishing some determinate definition of technology or a list of tutorials to “master”, this seminar delves into concepts, techniques, conventions, and affects of architectural representation by entangling them with a systemic view of media, technology, and visual culture. Concepts such as operational images, invisuality, uncertain archives, non-human photography, mean images, playing nature, and medium design offer a rich theoretical terrain to engage technologies we use in architecture and in in everyday life, and prompts us to reassess our “given” visual, technical, labor, subjective, and environmental relations to technology.