New Pedagogies: An Atlas of Radical Ruralism

This seminar explores the entangled histories of architecture and agriculture, focusing on land and labor. Beginning with a historical survey from agrarian utopias (i.e. projects by Frank Lloyd Wright, Cedric Price, Andrea Branzi, MVRDV, etc.) to O.M. Ungers' "Kommunen in der Neuen Welt" (1972), the course examines how rural space has been imagined, structured, and contested through design. Central to our investigation is the study of proposed projects as repositories of architectural and agricultural thinking. These projects, whether materially realized or confined to drawings and manifestos, serve as narrative tools for collective imagining, offering students frameworks to understand how past aspirations, successes, and failures continue to shape contemporary spatial practice and collective futures.

Students engage in collective research exercises, working together to expand their precedents to land-based projects such as regenerative farms, communes, and cooperative living experiments. Through a comparative analysis of historical precedents and present-day initiatives, we trace the lineages of radical rural practice. Emphasizing collaboration over individual authorship, the course invites students to map, document, and theorize spatial practices rooted in social and environmental justice.

Weekly discussions, group readings, and shared making support the creation of a collective "atlas" of alternative rural futures, one that mines architectural and agricultural legacies to construct new narratives for communal land stewardship. Final contributions (drawings, texts, zines and models) form the basis of a public exhibition and living archive. This seminar is open to students in architecture, landscape, urbanism, and related fields invested in critical spatial practice.