CAPLA Abroad - France is open to all CAPLA students who have completed at least the third year of their undergraduate program (BArch, BLA, SBE, BADAP) or are enrolled in a graduate program. Third-year undergraduate and above (including graduate) Art students and SCCT students will also be accepted.
Faculty: CAPLA Abroad - France is led by UArizona Associate Professor Dr. Beth Weinstein, PhD, RA, the Program Chair of Object and Spatial Design within the CFA’s and CAPLA’s Design Arts and Practices program.
Dr. Weinstein entered the Paris-based office of Jean Nouvel in 1992 as a junior architect and concluded her six-plus years as project architect on several projects in France and in Austria. In 2002, she founded the interdisciplinary practice Architecture Agency in NYC, and her practice primarily operates in a space between architecture and performance. The body of work created in the context of her doctoral research examined two forms of invisibility: invisible labor (in architecture) and razed spaces of internment. One of the case study spaces, the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes, was an internment camp used during the Algerian War period (1955-62) and was located in Paris’ Bois de Vincennes. This research has greatly impacted the focus of her teaching, her ongoing research and was the instigation for her Inclusive Leadership Cohort project—to rethink design pedagogy through the lens of decolonization.
Dr. Weinstein is a dual US-French citizen with fluency in French; she also speaks Spanish and Italian.
Coursework:
Students will earn 6 units of UArizona direct credit for successful participation in this program. Each course will meet three times a week and involve classroom instruction, workshops, tours, visits, and independent work time.
ARC 471K/571K Urban Paris: performances of empire, colony, and civic agency
The growth of cities such as Paris, as specifically articulated by David Harvey in “The Right to the City,” are contingent upon surplus capital. As a city whose urban and architectural development is physically evident, through the remains of former walls, Haussmannian cuts, its extant and defunct infrastructures (Gare d’Orsay, Petite Ceinture, Abbatoires de la Villette, Les Halles, Canal de l’Ourq et St Martin), institutions (Bourse de Commerce, Ecole de Beaux Arts), and public spaces (Place de la Republique, Place de la Bastille, Place Concorde, quai Georges Pompidou/Voie sur berges), Paris offers a palimpsest and on-going work in progress to observe how a diverse society spatializes and materializes its living, working and playing together. Our goal this seminar is to understand Paris’ cultural wealth as dependent upon a colonial past/present and to situate this in relation to contemporary debates and imagination of post-colonial and resilient futures.
ARC 497B/597B Detail
This course examines the production of designed things: from fabric and furniture to garments and building components. Where do the materials, tools, technologies, and techniques come from? How are these inseparable from former colonies and at the same time integral to French cultural identity. The course schedule will include discussions of readings field trips to collections, sites of production, and design firms to explore in detail the details of their craft. The course will also include workshop time and independent work time for students to review and curate a visual essay of details, and to inform making exploratory paper assemblages that build out from the artisanally / industrially crafted details observed and documented during the course or alternative critical/creative project appropriate to students’ fields of studies and skills.
Scholarships:
Arizona International scholarships:
Departmental scholarships:
External scholarships:
