During the spring semester, twenty students at various points in their architecture education gathered once a week for “Reading Campus,” an elective seminar that aimed to explore the condition of the contemporary university campus.

The impetus for the course was to collectively consider campus as a social, performative, and aesthetic project in concert with (or despite) certain architectural and planning tactics. We attempted to use audio-visual media techniques and site-specific actions to better grasp ongoing crises in higher education, and to fashion new angles of approach toward reading and writing the university as a design problem.

In both class and fieldwork, our chosen site and our object of scrutiny—whether the campus-at-large, the labor of school, or the space of study—were superimposed and in ongoing feedback. From this often mundane and corporatized atmosphere, we collected what might normally be shrugged off as mechanical routine, deep ritual, passing interpersonal relation, or tidbits of gossip as very much the currency and material of a certain kind of living, breathing collective body. Incidentally, students are well-positioned to comment upon this perpetually enacted environment; in the class, participants brought with them embodied forms of knowledge which became building blocks for performance acts.

Classes comprised various group activities: building/landscape tours, procedural tasks or mimetic scenarios, pop-up presentations, and body-, voice-, and memory-based exercises led by both students and I. In retrospect, these working sessions became de facto rehearsals.

During the final class, we selected twelve or so of these episodes and replayed them, in the threaded form of a “play/tour,” together with an audience of the larger school community and members of the public.

To reinforce and instantiate the nomadic tendencies of the class, the audience roamed with us through various spaces in Hayes Hall—the students’ central building of study, newly reopened after several years of renovation. Along the way, each episode shifted in tone, with students alternating lead roles and technical tasks, only to once again slip into a collective walking or oratory activity.

This loose swarm of a form strove to draw extended community members into the conversation of the class—rather than present a dramatized world—and offer an alternate picture of their shared environment. It concluded with an impromptu group photograph on the front steps of the historic building, taken by a passing bystander. The complete play/tour ran approximately one hour.