High-rise Living

This seminar investigates the pragmatics and phantasmagoria of high-rise living, be it residential or commercial. It looks at the high-rise as the intersection of several concerns, including: height (why as well as how); liminality (thresholds and transitions); the practices of every day and of occasion (use and appropriation); private and public (confusing as well as articulating those divisions). Sites of investigation include: the once heralded, then denigrated and now re-vamped social housing of the 1960s and 70s, the glass office towers of cinematic fame; the vertical cities of hotels and condos and the high-rise landscapes of new world cities and old world reclamations.

Course Instructor: Sherry McKay