McLain Clutter
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January 22, 2006
Yale SOA MED
Greetings from the Yale SOA MED program, where I am now in my second semester of what is perhaps one of the most unusual graduate programs in architecture in the country. Situated somewhere between a research-based MArchII program, an MS in architecture, and a PhD., the MED has attracted a range of students in its thirty-year history. My class of five includes three architects, including myself, a woman with a long history in interactive design and German urban history, and a guy with both a law degree and an MS in Urban Planning from UCLA. The deal is that along with the normal application materials for graduate school, you submit a project proposal. There are only two required courses in the two year program, the rest of the course work is selected by the student to align with his/her research interests. So, the whole of Yale University is at our disposal. I have taken courses in Film Studies, Comparative Literature, Art History, and Fabrication. Perhaps the most rewarding part of the program is engaging graduate students in other schools.
As advertised, the program requires a research thesis of an indeterminate format. While this is technically the case, I've found in my first semester that most professors involved in the MED program know precisely what they think the format should be. Usually this is a lengthy written piece of scholarship accompanied by visual supporting material. I aspire to have more of a balance between visual analysis and written work. It's going to be a battle.
Below is a prospectus of my research goals as they now stand:
This project endeavors to map, analyze, and draw conclusions from the relationship between New York City film shoot locations and urban development within those locales. Through a parallel reading of film shoots and urban development I hope to illuminate new and specific understandings about the relationship between the material city and its mythical counterpart of the silver screen. Further, I hope to identify ways in which the filmic and material city engage one another in a symbiotic, mutually prefiguring, relationship: perpetuating an inextricably intertwined system of parallel image and urban production. I believe that such an investigation may yield new design strategies for viable urban development within a culture where the material reality of urbanism is increasingly supplanted by its own image.
For decades a range of theorists and architects from Lewis Mumford to Guy Debord to Paul Virilio have perpetuated a discussion of the loss of formal urbanism in the face of a society with an increasing propensity for image consumption. As theorized in these accounts, this ephemeralization of the material city appears as our culture becomes increasingly image associative and withdrawn from the directly lived environment of material urbanism. New York, quite unlike most American cities, seems immune to this loss of the material. At least on the surface, formally realized urbanism is alive and well in New York. However, my suspicion is that this immunity is superficial at best. This research endeavors to reveal that New York's material resilience is indebted to its accidental manifestation of the devices of urban ephemeralization into a system of urban production that has a symbiotic relationship to its ephemeral counterpart.
This research will attempt to engage both discourses on the syntactic link between the urban subject and cinema, and the epistemological nature of the image. It is my hope that these discourses may be synthesized: yielding an understanding of the link between cinematic image epistemology, urban subjectivity, and subsequent urban development.
At the end of the first semester, we are assigned research advisors. I'm working with Peggy Deamer from the School of Architecture and Noa Steimatsky from Film Studies. Both are incredible resources, so I'm pretty excited.
Posted by mclutter at January 22, 2006 10:20 PM
Comments
Sounds interesting Clutter. Since NY is such an icon it embodies an immateriality that is reflected in the constant consumption of its product, which is culture. My first impression is that defining capital U 'Urbanism' as the fulcrum about which your investigation takes place may be difficult. This conceptual platform needs to be pretty well defined in terms of 21st century diluted globalism.
NY has disturbingly slid to 23rd or 27th or somewhere around there on the list of most expensive cities. The mythology of NY is its unattainable nature, its image as ideal - the real world depreciation of this image implies the degradation of the reality of its immateriality - by becoming attainable at a global level the city is becoming increasingly... real. Better write that thesis quick. Be that as it may, I'm interested in seeing what you develop. Keep us posted.
Posted by: Mike at February 3, 2006 12:03 AM
Thanks for the comments, Mike. Interesting...
To be honest, sometimes I find the majority of hand-waving over globablization theories a little myopic. For the purposes of this project, I'm staying close to people like Saskia Sassen and Arjun Appadurai who write about the appropriation of globalization tendencies by the local...or, in this project, by capital 'U' Urbanism.
That said, it looks like my project is going to focus on the 70's and 80's...so it will be less of an issue. The research faculty here are surprisingly conservative...so it becomes a necessity to have some history in theoretical theses. So it goes.
Posted by: mclain at March 4, 2006 10:10 AM
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