The Distributed Site is a postdisciplinary seminar spanning critical issues in architecture, archaeology, historic preservation, and allied fields. Through discussion, theory, and experimental representation, we will consider the spatial, temporal, methodological, and political dimensions of “site.” What is a “site”? How is “site” located in space and time? How can we reckon with multiple and competing understandings of “site?” How do we practice in relation to “site?” Do our disciplines adequately represent “site?” We will explore these questions by considering the ways in which the spatial locations of seemingly discrete buildings are actually distributed across a multiplicity of disciplines, institutions, histories, and, at times, even places as well. Our exploration will focus on a site in Ann Arbor whose distribution is at once explicit and fraught: Wall Street in the Lower Town, laid out and built in the 1830s and destroyed in the late 1990s to make way for the Kellogg Eye Center. We will study four points of distribution: first, the origin sites of the houses on Wall Street; second, the collection sites where still-uncatalogued artifacts salvaged from Wall Street houses by U-M archaeologist Henry Wright are stored; third, the host sites in Ann Arbor where two Wall Street houses have been moved and preserved; and fourth, the memory sites of intergenerational knowledge, both Indigenous and colonial, around Ann Arbor’s conjoined histories of settlement and unsettlement.

Connecting, recontextualizing, and critically representing these four sets of sites, we will confront "history" not only as temporal but also as spatial: the very ground on which we design and build. As well as complicating notions of "site" in architecture, archaeology, and historic preservation, the seminar will also rethink received versions of Indigenous and colonial history and land by studying the early 19th century built environment not only as a space of colonial settlement and Indigenous displacement but also Indigenous, African-American, and settler contact and exchange. 

This class is open to students from architecture, archaeology, art history, SEAS, anthropology, information studies, history, and related disciplines.