Teaching
Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities Expanded Practice Seminars
Atmospheric Pressures: Climate Imaginaries and Migration in the Caribbean
TAO DUFOUR + NATALIE MELAS · Fall 2019
This seminar investigates the significance of climate imaginaries for forms of urban and hinterland migration and mobility in the Caribbean as these relate to colonial and postcolonial histories, and in contemporary contexts defined by the urgencies of environmental hazards. Taking “climate” in a wider sense, the seminar situates climate imaginaries – as mediated through literature, film, landscapes, and spatial forms – as intersubjective horizons within which understandings of climate change and the experience of its effects are enmeshed. The seminar is particularly concerned to explore relations between the more tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and intersubjective experiences of climate as mediated through literary and mytho-poetic forms.
still from We Love We Self Up Here by Kannan Arunasalam, Tao DuFour and Natalie Melas
Cuba as Project: Urban, Political, and Environmental Transformations of the Island
TAO DUFOUR + TOM MCENANEY · Fall 2016
This seminar explores the symbolic and political tensions and contradictions inherent in the motif of the island, in relation to both its contrast and conflation with the theme of the urban. Cuba stands, in this regard, as an exemplary site of the modern insular project. The seminar situates the island in its archipelagic context, as both a spatial and historical category, inquiring into continuities and ruptures that implicate Cuba in a wider horizon of appropriations of islands as both concrete geographies and symbolic territories. The seminar examines how symbolic and material practices structure the social and environmental space that shape and are shaped by the activity of the natural world, the extensions of the communist state, and the experience of everyday life.
still from Havana Vignettes by Kannan Arunasalam with Tao DuFour, Tom McEnaney, and Iulia Statica
Forest Cartographies: Mapping Amazonian Urbanities and the Politics of Nature
TAO DUFOUR + BRUNO BOSTEELS · spring 2016
This seminar explores the relationship between the economies of emerging cities and the urbanization of fundamental historical ecologies. The seminar focuses on the geographical context of the Brazilian Amazon and the conditions of its urbanization. The seminar investigates the political economies that motivate urban driven forms of spatial and territorial expansion in the Amazon, and thus the orienting ontology, in contrast to indigenous ontologies, specifically, their manifest conceptions of human/non-human relations. By considering ontological plurality at the level of spatial practices and technologies, the seminar explores possibilities for conceptualizing a political economy that is at the same time a politics of ecology.
Swidden and anthropogenic forest in Amazonia. Photo by Tao DuFour
Option Studios
Architecture and the Urban Ecology of Disease
Tao DuFour · Expanded Practices Studio, Fall 2020
Architecture and the Urban Ecology of Disease explored infrastructures of care in the city of New Orleans in the contemporary context of the COVID-19 pandemic. As official institutions for health care services became overwhelmed in neighborhoods that were already underserved, the studio focused on social networks and their spatiality as “relational landscapes of care” which emerged through efforts of emergency workers.
Image by Gracie Meek, BArch
Landscapes of Extraction
Tao DuFour with mark raymond · Option Studio, Fall 2019
This studio investigated industrialized and urbanized landscapes of oil and gas extraction in the island of Trinidad in the southern Caribbean. Drawing on theories and methods across disciplines, the studio studied overlapping territories of extraction and urbanization, in order to discover and describe their complexity, and project possibilities for design in the face of the urgencies of climate change. The question of landscape imaginaries was incorporated and approached through fieldwork in Trinidad and literature.
Image by Eda Begum Birol, BArch
Urban Ecologies Beyond the Levees
Tao DuFour · Option Studio, Spring 2018
This studio considered the nature of architecture’s embeddedness in wider environmental and political-ecological horizons. The studio engaged contemporary questions of urban ecology, infrastructural fracture, population displacement, and the effects of anthropogenic climate change on coastal territories, specifically the effects of storms and sea-level rise. The site of investigation was the Southern Louisiana coastal plain, with a focus on urban and hinterland environments in the Mississippi Delta and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Image by Hanxi Wang, BArch
Expanded Practices: Havana
Tao DuFour + Lior galili · Expanded Practices Studio, Fall 2017
The Fall Semester 2017 Expanded Practices studio studied Havana, Cuba’s capital and most populous city. The studio focused on the relationship between socialist governmentality – the regulatory frameworks that determined forms of urban praxis – and the legacies of mass housing – both through the state’s appropriation of the existing urban topography and the construction of housing projects using imported and modified technologies of prefabrication.
Image by Yue Ma, MArch + Alireza Shojakhani, MArch
Havana II Projections
Tao DuFour with Georgina Díaz Olivares and Cesar Riverón Díaz · Option Studio, Spring 2017
This studio was an extension of the Havana studio of the Fall Semester 2016 – ‘Havana After Nature’ – focused on the environmental question of urban transformation in the post-Fidel era. Its subtitle, “Landscapes of Prefabrication and Nature’s Afterlife,” indicates the studio’s interest in the relationship between questions of domesticity – the city’s infrastructures of mass housing – and urban environmentality, specifically the afterlife of postindustrial landscapes of Havana’s urban hinterlands as appropriated by its citizens through practices of urban farming.
Image by Charise Tsien Foo, BArch
Havana After Nature
Tao DuFour with Georgina Díaz Olivares and Cesar Riverón Díaz · Option Studio, Fall 2016
Havana After Nature: Urban Hinterlands and Architecture as Environmental Infrastructure investigated the city of Havana, with a specific focus on the problem of housing and the environmental legacy of socialism. The studio explored how the environmental effects that arose as a consequence of socialist projects, specifically those of industry and housing, functioned to shape the urban topography.
Image by Erin Yook, BArch + Rina Kang, BArch
Frontier Urbanities / Amazonia
Tao DuFour + Paulo Tavares · Option Studio, Fall 2016
Frontier Urbanities / Amazonia: Territorial Projections and the Geopolitics of Climate Change explored the phenomenon of urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon. The studio aimed to project possibilities for transforming this process into new urban paradigms, or forms of frontier urbanities that support social, economic, and ecological complementarity between urban environments, societies, and ‘natures’.
Image by Samuel Ososanya, BArch
Origin of Steel
Tao DuFour · Option Studio, Fall 2015
The Origin of Steel: Ecological Projections on the Post-Industrial Landscapes of Pennsylvania explored the historical, economic and ecological landscapes of two former mill towns along the Monongahela River, south of Pittsburgh Mckeesport and Duquesne, in their relation to the wider horizon of the river valley itself as a geo-spatial background. The studio aimed to project onto the economic collapse embodied in decaying, post-industrial relics of the Monongahela valley’s urban fragments new possibilities for ecological and urban transformation.
Image by Takuma Johnson, BArch
Raw Nature / Cooked Nature
Tao DuFour with ANA CÉ AND RENEE NYCOLAAS · Option Studio, Spring 2015
The studio focused on the deltaic landscapes of the city of Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The programmatic basis of the studio was drawn from environmental research in the Delta of Jacuí, with the aim of critically addressing ecological and sociological themes, informed by theoretical paradigms in the anthropology of science.