MOD ARCHITECTURE IN THE WORLD

Note: Designed for but not limited to sophomores; enrollment beyond 60 is at the discretion of the instructor. Co-requisite: ARCH UN3118. 

How has architecture been “modern”? This course will introduce students to this contentious and contradictory concept emerging across the world during a time in which ideas and tools similar to ours were used for seeing and ordering constructed environments and architectural thinking. It introduces students to the history of modern architecture as an art of building as well as a discursive field, whose historical consciousness played a part in its historical development.

The course is structured chronologically and encourages experiential learning around episodes that informed the development of the built environment and the architecturally “modern.” Students will gain hands-on practice in researching and writing architectural history, theory, and criticism: skills that lie at the basis of conceptual architectural practices. While a one-semester course will not provide a full survey of buildings, events, and people associated with modern architecture, students will develop the critical tools to identify, approach, and comprehend such histories. The following areas of focus anchor the course, and students learn about each by understanding the establishment and institution of structures nourishing and supporting them, which have persisted into the present:

Architecture as made, thought, and taught—enmeshed with power and ideas, social concerns, intellectual and public debates, and diverse forms of cultural production

Makers, thinkers, and organizers of the designed or built environment

Designed constructions as the material ends and means of extraction, refinement, trade, and the labor associated with each

Sites, institutions, media, events, and practices that have come to hold meaning in architectural discourse

Concerns with both the past and the future as a basis for architectural theory

Modernization, modernism, and modernity as drivers for events, their historical narration, and the dissemination of these architectural narratives

The conceptual writing practices of history, theory, and criticism

The course is designed to accommodate multiple styles of learning. Course components include weekly lectures and discussions of assigned readings; re