Will Davis - teaching

In my teaching I use a range of methods, empathizing with students that learn differently to typical textual academic forms, instead treating the classroom as a workshop for trying out ideas and methodologies. At the same time, I am committed to the university as a space for rigorous analysis, curiosity, and discourse around the multitudes of possibility in understanding architecture's histories. I have taught a wide variety of courses in architecture and art history departments, where teaching architecture means paying attention to visual details. I love to combine art historical methods and urban humanities approaches to global survey courses and doctoral seminars alike in teaching the arts of noticing.

I have been a UCLA Teaching Fellow (2019), and an Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms (EPIC) Mellon-Fellow (2020).

Below are a selection of courses designed and taught by myself, sometimes in collaboration with others. Please get in touch if you'd like to know more or collaborate on a syllabus.

2023

Houses Are People
National University of Singapore (AR5951D, seminar + exhibition)

This architectural history course, co-taught with curator Siddharta Perez, was organized around the idea of disappearance, traced through fragments of buildings and fragments of the biography of the architect Dorothy Pelzer. Students worked with Pelzer's archives held at the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) and put together an exhibition in collaboration with NUS Museum’s Prep Room.

This course looked at architects who worked in the region documenting and attempting to preserve traditional building cultures, mostly through photography and drawings. In Southeast Asia, the so-called Cold War was often referred to as the “hot war” due to the prevalence of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency, much of which occurred in rural landscapes where traditional building cultures exist.

Siddharta Perez with exhibition poster, November 2023

Exhibition view, prep room, NUS Museum, November 2023

Unlikely Architects in Plantation Landscapes
Princeton University (ARC 392, seminar + exhibition)

This seminar explores architecture in out-of-the-way places through the perspectives of an unlikely set of historical actors: counterinsurgency experts, guerrilla fighters, Indigenous resistance groups, government officials, religious activists. For these figures, architecture was a narrative device in understanding how landscapes were changing. The plantation is a rubric that helps frame this exploration. Both a physical and theoretical space, plantations provide a historical framework for thinking through mercantile capitalism, resource extraction, settler colonialism, and environmental degradation. Donna Haraway calls this the “plantationocene” to connect these discourses to the Anthropocene. Thinking from intellectual traditions and social movements of the South, the course explores the ways in which architecture was employed as a narrative device in twentieth century environmental movements. The course culminates in an exhibition held at Princeton's Firestone Library.

[Exhibition in collaboration with Dr. Mary Pena]

Exhibition poster, April 2023

Exhibition view, Firestone Library Special Collections Room, Princeton University, April 2023

2022

History and Theory of Architecture
National University of Singapore (AR2227, global survey)

This course is shaped around six environmental features, where each feature provides a framework for understanding how societies built in response to the landscapes, resources, and tools available to them. Covering almost two millennia of global architectural and urban history, the module travels from 500 BCE through until 1400 CE. The material is presented to encourage comparative cross-readings of architectural history between geographies, societies, climates, cultures, religions, and socio-political registers.

Studying architecture across the span of centuries provides a method for understanding diverse human responses to the environment. This module takes this idea as its core organizing principle, and these responses are examined across six environmental elements and zones, structuring the course as bi-weekly themes. For each zone, the module devotes two weeks of lecture content to unpack the range of responses to that particular environmental and ecological condition. For example, in Sand, students would examine both the flexible textile-based architecture of the Mongolian ger, alongside Potala Palace in Lhasa. Both are examples of architecture in the High Steppe, however each responds to the conditions in different ways. The overall structure of the course begins and ends with Singapore as a central geographical node, inviting students to reconsider world history from the perspectives of trade, navigation, and oceanic links.

[Course designed in collaboration with Prof. Jiat Hwee Chang]

Lomas Rishi, Barabar hills, 3rd century BCE, present day Bihar (flickr)

2021

PhD Colloquium, Research Methodologies
National University of Singapore (AR5011, seminar)

This course introduces students to methods of scholarly inquiry and knowledge production in architectural studies, broadly understood. Ideas and their potentiality; objects and their subjectivity; problems and their meaning. The three themes of the course are explored throughout the semester to take in a sweeping survey of the ways that current research methods and themes that are affecting architectural studies globally. E.g., deep learning and artificial intelligence, intersectionality, sensory ethnography, difference and futurity, diaspora studies, queering the archive, and so on.

2020

Turbines and Seashells: Architecture of the Pacific
Occidental College, Los Angeles (ARTH 257, seminar)

The Pacific Ocean, rather than representing a large gap between continents, is the glue of this class. It offers a theoretical bridge linking the built histories of a variety of geographical terrains that share centuries of interaction. The course engages transpacific thinking, it is a critical history of landscapes in which architecture and the arts provide tools to help understand them.

Decolonial thinking urges us to think outside of frameworks such as “modern” versus “traditional.” The imperial structures that provide narratives of conquest and oppression—the explorations of Captain Cook or nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands—require a critical approach to built form and its education. Architectures across the pacific ocean introduce a number of alternatives: water is the connective tissue between a multiplicity of built forms; soft materials like bamboo and palm are more environmentally sustainable and structurally resilient than concrete or steel; rising sea-levels mean that land itself is unstable, which means that architecture is a problem of sovereignty. The archipelagic worlds of Oceania, Southeast Asia and Hawai’i juxtapose architectural cultures among one another in unexpected ways. To this end, the course uses architecture as a lens for understanding the built forms of societies. Under this definition, it is a way of seeing and comprehending physical environments and how humans place themselves within them.

Nuclear waste disposal tomb, Runit, Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands

2019

A City is a World, the World is a City
Occidental College, Los Angeles (ARTH 150, urban design global survey)

This introductory course examines how cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas are designed and developed. We will explore historical episodes and actors that have influenced urban planning so that we may then consider the ways in which contemporary architects, developers, and institutions approach urban concerns related to land development, the environment, housing, and transportation. As a basis for understanding how urban places have been theorized through history, the course takes a weekly city as a case study to think through some of the theories, stories and debates that it espoused.

Michenzani Housing Project, Zanzibar (discussed in week 10)

Global History of Architecture and Urban Design
University of California, Los Angeles
AUD 10B, global survey taught in 2019 and 2020 (both regular semester and summer sessions)

Studying the built environment provides a method for interpreting world history. From the discovery of gold to the invention of flight, architectural knowledge corresponded to a dynamic set of challenges spurred by cultural, political and social transformations. Students are introduced to some of these challenges, as well as a range of methods for studying them. Organized chronologically, each week of the course is centered on a particular problem to which architecture formulated a range of responses. The material is presented in order to encourage a comparative cross-reading of architectural history across geographies, climates, cultures, religions and political registers.

Poster for UCLA Summer Sessions offering of 10B, 2020