Greater Than the Sum of its Parts: A Shared History of Collaboration

Faculty Thomas de Monchaux delivers the presentation Greater Than the Sum of its Parts: A Shared History of Collaboration.

Why do we teach architecture in a studio? Imagine if poets-in-training were told to report, like scientists to their lab, to be alone together. Design education often emphasizes uncommon individual authorship physically produced from a shared spatial commons. Design practice is often necessarily a complex collaboration between diverse specialists and generalists, through ever more socialized media and networked tools. This presentation offers critical readings of shared design: on the one hand, of self-described collectives like The Architects Collaborative and Archigram; and on the other, of intensely collective projects like World Expositions and Architectural Biennials, or the highly-coded landscapes of Megastructure and New Urbanism. We will consider architecture as micro-urbanism; big buildings as little cities; the mathematics and ethics of part-to-whole relationships; and the cooperation and complication that may be created between municipal and computational codes.

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Summer workshops and programs are open to the GSAPP Community. Students and faculty can access a direct link to this program in the most recent GSAPP Newsletter or by contacting the GSAPP Events Office. A recording of the event will be posted on this page following this event.

Image Credit: Collective Drawing by New York Paris Program Participants, Spring 2020