​This book investigates the global hub airport as an exemplar of cosmopolitan culture and space. A machine made for movement, itself perched at the crossroads of the world’s incessant mobility, the airport is both a symbol of and stage for the ways in which we construct and inhabit the world today. Taking an ethnographically-inflected approach, this study brings together knowledge of the moving body from dance and performance and the study of systems of mobility within cultural and mobilities studies, in order to call attention to the kinaesthetic experience of global space. What is the choreography of the global airport? How does it perform on us. How do we perform within it? Extending thinking about contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity, and the performativity of places and identities, this book is essential reading for those interested in cultural debates around globalisation, the innovative application of performance theory towards everyday experience, and interdisciplinary methodologies. --- “This is more than an original exploration of the choreographed spatiality of airports. It is for all those interested by the way one moves in and is moved by space in the era of transnational mobility. What’s more, the text itself is a well choreographed festival of intelligently deployed theory speaking to acutely observed ethnographic material traversed by sharp socio-political observations that make it a pleasure to read.” (Ghassan Hage, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia) “Choreographing the Airport is a deeply-grounded study of hubs of contemporary global circulation — of bodies, affects, and cultures. No longer imaginable as the sole province of a transnational elite class, airports now function as critical arteries for the movement of refugees, migrants, transnational families, and others. As Shih Pearson’s nuanced examination demonstrates, airports bear a complex relationship to their geographic locations as well as their cosmopolitan functions — a relationship made all the more complex when considered from the perspective of the kinesthetic/somatic experience of its temporary inhabitants. Employing a kinesthetic auto-ethnographic method and combining performance and dance/movement theory, and postcolonial critique, Shih Pearson goes beyond a purely architectural analysis and asks us to attend to how and where we occupy those spaces, either in concert with or occasionally indifferent to global capitalism’s imperatives, asking us to consider the urgently relevant question, “what is it to move in this space?’” (Karen Shimakawa, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, USA)

The automobile has reshaped our conceptions of space and our modes of accessing and penetrating the urban and non-urban territory, revolutionizing how architects perceive the city and contributing significantly to the transformation of the relationship between architecture and urban space. The seminar examines architects’ automobile vision. Objectives of the seminar The main objective of the seminar is to help students understand how the automobile influenced architects’ perception of the environment and how its generalized use provoked the emergence of new theoretical concepts and eventually led to new design perspectives. It aims to untie the specificity of car traveemergence of the generalised use of the car is related not only to a new epistemological regime, but also to a new representational regime. The latter, which relies upon photography, film, new modes of visual mapping and particular diagrams, serves to capture this new epistemological regime. The seminar will make students aware that there is an agency and an intentionality behind this new representational regime. The themes addressed will be grouped per means of visualization including three sections: “Drawing and the View from the Car”, “Film and the View from the Car”, and “Photography and the View from the Car”. A fourth section will concern “Cross-Fertilization between the View from the Car and Design Strategies”. The structure of the seminar is organized in clusters of architects that were interested in similar questions related to the emergence of the new perceptual regime due to the generalized use of the car. This seminar will help students understand the difference between capturing and interpreting reality when one films or photographs during a car trip. It will help students realize that each of these modes of representation is based on a different way of retrieving an experience later on. By the end of the course, the students will be able to argue why, when we decide to represent an experience of the city and more specifically a trajectory which is based on the sequential experience of landscape in a specific way, we make choices about what we extract from reality. These choices are based on what we consider to be the most important features of an urban landscape and depends on our own values and methods regarding not only the interpretation of architecture but also the strategies of intervention on a given site. By the end of the seminar, the students will acquire the skill of achieving the best possible alignment between what they consider to be the most important characteristics and the means for representing them. In parallel, by the end of the teaching process, the students will be able to explain why the choice of specific fragments of reality and the ways in which we relate them goes hand in hand with the taxonomies we wish to build while narrating an experience of driving through a landscape. They will also be expected to understand that there is a tension between stimulation and documentation and that the quick change of views while driving though a landscape promotes a ‘snapshot aesthetics’ and connects to memory in a different way based on the superimposition and juxtaposition of visual impressions. The objective is to help students realise that even if we intend to focus on the same features of reality each mode of representation is characterised by a capacity to focus on certain aspects of reality. Focusing of the analysis of the different modes of representation, the seminar will help students become aware that when one chooses a means of representation over another, one is setting priorities. Content of the seminar An important component of the course will be the exploration of the interconnection between theory and architectural design practice. In parallel, the analysis of the connections between epistemological regimes and representational regimes will help them become aware of the intentionality characterizing the use of specific modes of representation. The seminar will also aim to help students understand how to choose the mode of representation that most efficiently promotes their architectural and urban design objectives. Special attention will be paid to the improvement of their skills in elaborating concepts coming from the history and theory of architecture and urban design for self-analysing their design processes, and to the enhancement of interactive learning through the organisation of several sessions of peer feedback on the texts, drawings and photographs produced by the students. Telling regarding the understanding of car travel as a new episteme is Reyner Banham’s following remark, in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies: “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, [Banham had to learn] […] to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original”. During the second half of the 20th century, architects became increasingly aware of the impact of the car. Particular emphasis will be placed on the fact that the new perceptual regime related to its generalised use became more apparent within the American context. Some seminal books in which this becomes evident are Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John Myer’s The View from the Road (1964), Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972). For instance, in the latter, it becomes evident that one cannot make sense of Las Vegas by walking. Special attention will be paid to the analysis of cases that demonstrate that the view from the car as a new perceptual regime, instead of functioning simply as a tool serving to document visual impressions during travel, plays an important role in shaping the architects’ own architectural and urban design strategies. Throughout the seminar the students will work collaboratively in order to contribute to the production of an exhibition entitled “The View from the Car: Autopia as a New Perceptual Regime”, which will be displayed at the gta exhibitions foyer space. An ensemble of exercises that will be held every two sessions will help students get familiarized with the theoretical concepts and the modes of representation analysed in the seminar. A booklet published at the end of the seminar will bring together the outcomes of these different exercises. The final presentation of the seminar will take place within the exhibition space and will be accompanied by the feedback of a jury consisting of different professors from the school. Structure of the seminar 1. Drawing and the view from the car 1.1. Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard and John Myer’s Mapping Strategies: Cognitive Maps, 25.02.2021 1.2. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Diagrams: The Specificity of the American Urban and the View from the Car, 04.03.2021 1.3. Ian Nairn and Gordon Cullen’s “serial vision”, Outrage and subtopia, 11.03.2021 2. The film and the view from the car 2.1. Kevin Lynch’s movie “View from The Road", 18.03.2021 2.2. Reyner Banham’s movie “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles”, 01.04.2021 2.3. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s “Deadpan” film, 15.04.2021 3. Photography and the view from the car 3.1. John Lautner’s residences as equivalents of cameras: The ‘autophotographic grasp’, 22.04.2021 3.2. The “as found” and the act of capturing very materiality of the artefacts through street photography, 29.04.2021 3.3. Aldo Rossi’s act of taking photographs from the car: Shaping mental maps of the cities, 06.05.2021 3.4. The cross-fertilization between the view from the car and the design strategies, 20.05.2021

This thesis interrogates the growing practice of exhibiting art in airports through frameworks of border and surveillance studies, as well as contemporary critical theory in art. It looks at several case studies and analyzes each on one aesthetically and ideologically. An online archive was developed to catalog visual material, indexing artworks the way surveillance methodologies index individuals inside the airport. Five key intersecting themes are identified as framing exhibition practices inside airports: 1) “National Heritage,” exhibitions that bolster national sentiments through the presentation of historical and cultural heritage, signaling that the airport is an important national border soaked with ideology; 2) “Good Intent,” exhibitions that operate by dressing up de-politicized content founded on normative social values as political awareness projects, offsetting the constant threat of “malintent” present inside the airport; 3) “Building Sociality,” exhibitions that contribute to affect management strategies inside the airport through the use of interactive art to foster positive social interactions for the the kinetic elite; 4) “Flow and Mobility,” exhibitions that valorize movement and travel through abstract gestures; and 5) “Future Cities,” exhibitions that tie the airport to future-oriented socio-economic projects such as aerotropoli and creative cities.