GRADUATE THESIS
Guido Zuliani, Distinguished Professor Adjunct

The unfolding of the research work that will lead to the construction and the discussion of a thesis can be framed by four fundamental questions: What, Why, for Whom, and How. The first two questions, the What and the Why of a work, direct attention to the topical moment of the Beginning, the moment of the choice of a specific topic over a set of different possibilities and the evaluation of the reasons for that choice.
 
In opening his 1970 inaugural lecture to the College de France, the philosopher Michel Foucault reflected on his specific position, saying: 
 
I wish I could have slipped surreptitiously into this discourse which I must present today, and into the ones I shall have to give here, perhaps for many years to come. I should have preferred to be enveloped by speech, and carried away well beyond all possible beginnings, rather than have to begin it myself […] I should have preferred to become aware that a nameless voice was already speaking long before me, so that I should only have needed to continue the sentence it had started and lodge myself in its interstices […] Thus, there would be no beginning, and instead of being the one from whom discourse proceeded, I should be at the mercy of its chance unfolding […].
 
With these words Foucault expressed his uneasiness in occupying the presumed privileged role of the one that begins, the role of the one that inaugurates speaking from an empty space, an empty pre-social, pre-political space, a pure condition, the myth of which obscures the exclusions, prohibitions, and permissions that the powers inscribed in our languages administrate.
 
Beginnings are instead always situated, traversed, and shaped by different forces; beginnings happen already “in the midst of” what already exists, in the midst of what Edward Said called the “systems of language and cultural history.” 
 
To paraphrase the literary historian Karen LeFevre, we can assert that beginnings have their own ecologies, and it is within these surroundings that the inception of research finds itself always compromised.
 
Taking into consideration these few observations, the first part of the semester will focus on exploring these ecologies considering three different scales/contexts—three different territories with three different maps, within which are situated the beginning of each thesis, the what and why of each thesis: 
 
–   The individual, biographic context—somehow an act of self-reflection and introspection that 
      tries to place oneself at the intersection of different socio-cultural agencies.
 
–   The socio-political context, with particular attention to the urban and its exploding 
      contradictions. 
 
–   The disciplinary, understood on one side as a hinge between the subject and sociopolitical 
      reality, and on the other as an expanded field open today by necessity to diverse forms of 
      practice.
 
Starting from each of the proposed thesis programs, the first three weeks of the semester will be dedicated to these critical reflections expressed in terms of specific sets of physical materials—drawings and/or models—and during class discussions.
 
The fourth week of the semester will be dedicated to discussing and identifying the audience, and to the provisional format and media in which the project will be brought to conclusion.
 
The reflections developed by questioning in this way each student proposal intend to offer to the work of the entire class a broad conceptual backdrop necessary to articulate each research project as a critical stance within the field of contemporary architectural practices.