CONTENT CREATION: ARCHITECTURAL TIKYTOKYS
Academic course design & teaching,
completed as an adjunct instructor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Bachelors of Design in Architecture program → half-semester studio → Spring 2024
COURSE OVERVIEW:
How do the tools we use shape what we make? What is the spatial outcome of an architecture project that begins in a social media app? What misfit results from toggling between two-dimensional flatness and three-dimensional depth; virtual space and real place?
In this course, students dissected techniques of the video-based social media application TikTok. After deconstructing rules of the medium, a project was constructed within the medium. Students co-opted the platform’s methodologies to design spatial stories within the bounds of its constraints. Then, projects suffered the consequences of shifting media. The last phase of the course pulled the concept out of TikTok, and pondered what adapts when translating from social media video to standard architectural representation. The digital artifacts of TikTok lingered and merge with the conventions of drawing and modeling.
By looking outside the discipline of architecture, to the ever-evolving landscape of social media, this course examines the way a medium informs the content we create, and more broadly examines how architectural representation informs design.
READINGS:
DialecTikTok by Sarah Edmands Martin
In Medias Res by John McMorrough
The Virtual Window: Introduction by Anne Friedberg
The Virtual Window: Chapter 5 by Anne Friedberg
Here by Richard McGuire
student work - Elise Gross
“Throughout this course I've explored my truck's perspective and my relationship with it as a vehicle for travel and a framing device. My truck is a site in motion that filters experiences and landscapes. As a travel companion, my truck can never fully reach my destinations; it captures glimpses of my world through its windows, mirrors, and doors while remaining heavily confined by its limitations. I include routine maintenance and everyday moments in a non-sequential way to reflect the cyclical nature of the truck's travel and care. While I'm capturing physical everyday life and travel, there's a sense of unresolved distance with my truck sharing (or just perceiving) my longing for a specific destination.”
- Elise Gross
student work - Isaac Siechen
“On my street, change is imminent. Here, my house stands, confronted with the apartments that seek to replace it. My bungalow has watched block after block of old houses meet their demise. Living here, I see and feel the clash of development, where tension jumps the street and into my windows. It is a tragic cycle of urbanity. The apartments now loom over my house, presenting an uncanny facade, a reflective sign of what is to come, just as what has happened to the rest of the street. This is impending doom.”
- Isaac Siechen
student work - Reese Bolze
