Course Number: ARCH 3370

Department: Architecture (ARCH)

Focus will be on “Extraction Landscapes” that historicizes the extraction capital from the eighteenth century to the present. The class would look at commodities (oil, sugar, gold, etc.) and examine their extraction and refinement methods, systems of exchange, and waste streams. A significant focus from a social justice standpoint would be labor politics of extraction, geopolitics of exchange, and environmental pollutants. The class will be a combination of reading seminar looking at scholarship on resource histories, and a design-research seminar (where groups of students research a specific commodity and produce visual data regarding extraction, refinement, and waste), or some combination.